In The Possible Form of an Interlocution, Nahum Dimitri Chandler examines the correspondence between W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber in 1904 and 1905. Chandler provides an epistemological and theoretical elaboration of their interlocution that took place under the heading of Du Bois’s famous formulation “the problem of the color line.” Chandler concisely presents Du Bois’s thought of “the problem of the color line” as a general formulation for understanding African American matters within modern historicity on a worldwide scale before examining Weber’s earliest writings to understand in just what way “the ‘color-line’ problem” served as a problematization for Weber. Sandro Mezzadra, Professor of Political Theory in the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, writes, “Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s insightful archival readings make outstanding contributions to the literature on W. E. B. Du Bois and Max Weber, illuminating their interlocution beyond the untenable but widespread idea of a ‘tutelary relation’ of the latter to the former. This book does not merely promise to make an original contribution to the study of the emergence of the modern sociological paradigm; it also helps to construct the historical genealogy of a set of problems lively discussed in contemporary social and political theory.”
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
In Archival Irruptions, Katharine Gerbner traces how British authorities in Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a practice that was variously seen as a healing method, an Africana religion, a science, and a form of witchcraft. Drawing on Moravian missionary archives, Gerbner’s search for archival irruptions, moments when Africana epistemologies break the narrative of a European-authored archival document, not only creates an opportunity to write an alternative narration about Obeah; it provides a new methodology for all those conducting archival research. Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War writes, “This vital story captures the spirit of colonial Christianity. Reading through the selective observations and strategies of racial suppression employed to silence Africana religion, Katharine Gerbner’s engrossing narrative reveals how Black ways of knowing left indelible marks on the archive of Atlantic slavery. More than anything else I can remember, this book expands the way we must think about how authority, recognition, and disavowal shapes religious transformations.”
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Minnesota. Learn more at the TOME website.
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
Robyn Maynard’s bestselling Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present offers a comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization, and punishment of Black lives in Canada. We are now pleased to bring out a revised and expanded edition, in which Maynard exposes Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance to document how half a century of police reforms have expanded the scope and scale of policing and undermined Black freedom struggles in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020. “We are so fortunate to have this new edition!” says Ruth Wilson Gilmore. “Robyn Maynard’s clear, compelling book is a must read for organizations, households, and anyone who fights for social justice.” In this Q&A Maynard discusses some of the new content of the book and explains how it is relevant for students, scholars, and activists throughout the world and not just in Canada.
Policing Black Lives focuses on the realities of anti-Black racism and state violence in Canada, a nation many Americans view as a liberal and nonracist haven. In peeling off the veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, how does your book speak to the afterlives of slavery and racial violence endemic within—and beyond—American political and social culture?
Anti-Blackness has no borders. The afterlives of slavery and colonialism have left nowhere untouched, and in every part of the world today there are Black folks facing conditions that are brutal and murderous. Canada is no exception. Despite highly effective P.R. by leading political figures in the country lauding Canada as a safe haven from anti-Black or vigilante brutality, Canada has never been safe for Black folks: from slavery to segregation to the rampant surveillance, arrests, incarceration, police killings, child-removal, and the school-to-prison pipeline, Black people’s lives have continually been endangered by state violence and remain so to this day.
Black folks the world over have been persistently identified as criminal, dangerous, and sub-human, and treated as such by the state. While my book focuses most specifically on Canada, it situates Canada firmly within a transnational network of settler colonial and imperial states that function together to maintain a global politic of imperial domination, marked by the subjugation and exploitation of the global south and the global Black world, as well as the domestic repression of Black and Indigenous people as ‘domestic enemies.’ While Canadians often laud Canada as distinct from and superior to the United States in terms of so-called race relations, Policing Black Lives documents how so-called national practices of state-violence in Canada—the War on Drugs, and racial profiling more broadly, are often derived from US policing practices. The complicities and collaborations between the US and Canada extend to the lives of Black folks beyond North America. This is readily apparent today, as Haitians are challenging the brutal policing regime that was installed by Western governance bodies following the coup-d’etat of Haiti’s elected government in 2004 that was orchestrated by Canada, the US. and France.
Just as importantly, particularly for US readers, is that Canada does not only operate in the shadow of the US-empire and its outsized footprint in terms of colonial wreckage the world over. In fact, Canada plays an important role in the global politics of imperialism, playing a central role as a hub in the extractive industries. With 75% of global mining companies based or centrally traded in Canada, this country’s footprint in resource pillaging and environmental devastation across the global Black world, from Tanzania to the Democratic Republic of Congo, cannot be understated.
Because antiBlackness knows no borders, our freedom struggles are connected. Black movements in Canada are uniquely diasporic, with Black people hailing from the Caribbean, the African continent, as well as communities descended from Black Americans who fled the US during the Underground Railroad and in the early 20th century. Black folks who arrived here brought their traditions of radicalism along with them. In fact, as my book makes clear, Black freedom struggles have often consciously rejected the imposed national borders between the US and Canada: Harriet Tubman, Mary Ann Shad Cary, and other lesser-known abolitionists mounted cross-border organizing networks, created newspapers, founded and ran schools, and waged guerilla warfare against slavery in a manner that challenged and transcended national boundaries. In the Black Power era, Black Panthers and other Black radicals traversed the artificially imposed US-Canada border, sharing and cross-pollinating ideas, practices, and modes of resistance. This was understood by the US police, who worked in tandem with Canadian policie in the suppression of Black liberation movements on both sides of the border, including FBI agents collaborating with Canadian police to entrap and incarcerate young Black people. These solidarities continue into the present day
Black struggle against state violence has never been confined to one geographic location. Today, the logics and technologies of anti-Black social and economic control are being contested, challenged and undermined well beyond the US and Canada: in the UK, France, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria, movements against policing and prisons have often coalesced under the radical demand and vision of abolition. As generations of Black freedom struggle have recognized, without a global vision for understanding anti-Black violence and the politics of Black liberation, we will be unable to meaningfully challenge this state of affairs.
You write routinely about borders, both in terms of the history of black migration and the borderlessness of anti-Black violence and resistance movements. This edition is coming out at what feels like a critical moment in US history concerning immigration policy and violence at, and of, the border. What is the relationship between the policing of Black life and the policing of the border, and why must we insist on thinking about these issues together?
In Canada, border regimes have long been understood as a central form of state violence against Black people. Black communities have been mobilizing against anti-Black border policies for well over a century. Some early iterations of these struggles, in the 19th century were led by Black folks originating in the US, who were resisting the forced return (or kidnapping) of Black folks to the hands of their enslavers on the US side of the border. In the same era, Black folks relocated from the US into Nova Scotia, on the east coast of Canada, resisted the state’s plans to deport them to Trinidad. There are important lessons to learn from Black communities’ resistance to border regimes in Canada. This spans from the role of Vigilance Committees organizing against the encroachment of US slave catchers seeking to return their “property” to the United States to the radical practices of the Toronto Black Women’s Collective –– who played a central role in organizing against police brutality in Toronto in the 1980s––in encouraging Black folks to “protect our Black undocumented sisters.” More recently, we are able to witness Black Lives Matter Toronto’s organizing against Black peoples’ deportations, as well as cross country migrant organizing against the “new slavery” baked into Canada’s temporary agricultural workers programs, which relies heavily on the exploited labor of Black men and women from the Caribbean.
In short, the diasporic nature of Black life in Canada means that detention and deportation have been central forms of racist state violence ––alongside and in concert with the criminal (in)justice system. In Policing Black Lives, I make clear that both policing of borders and policing through the criminal justice system, if holding unique characteristics, are nonetheless means of controlling Black people’s freedom of movement, justifying the surveillance, confinement, and in the case of borders, the removal of Black folks. This makes it readily apparent that the urgency of working against borders is central to the project of abolition, and of Black liberation more broadly. As the US is ramping up its attacks on Black communities ––particularly Haitians and Africans –– the centrality of the border apparatus in disenfranchising Black communities is becoming an increasingly apparent, and urgent, life-or-death issue for those who are concerned with Black lives and Black safety.
One of the new chapters seeks to dispel the false promises of police reform. Why does police reform not only fail to address the radical demands that transformational movements make, but also further entrench us within violent systems that criminalize and brutalize Black lives?
This new chapter, playing with Stuart Shrader’s words, is called “Against the Romance of Police Reform: Expanding police power while undermining Black Liberation.” The chapter acts as fundamental challenge to liberal frameworks that position police reform as a means of enacting racial progress. As I make clear, generations of police reform have accomplished just the opposite. This chapter undertakes a historic analysis of police reform in Canada, putting this history in conversation with scholarship critical of reform emerging from the United States and the United Kingdom, advanced by brilliant scholars like Tony Platt, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Dylan Rodriguez. It makes clear that “reform” has served transnationally as a means of undercutting the more dramatic and revolutionary changes required to create meaningful safety for Black communities the world over, while allowing the state to appear to be “doing something” about the egregious and systemic violence of policing. This chapter provides original research into the history of police reform in Canada, detailing the ways in which reform has been used as a means of managing Black unrest in moments of popular revolt and mass organizing against police killings of Black community members. I illustrate how from the 1960s onward, police reform has been taken up as a central means of pacifying Black liberation movements, while intensifying the reach, scale and funding of police across Canadian cities. More specifically, I demonstrate that demands for transformative change levelled by Black communities in moments of egregious state violence ––including the deaths of Buddy Evans and Albert Johnson in the 1970s, right up to the killings of Regis Korchinski-Paquet and Sheffield Matthews in 2020 ––were instead used to advance practices that did the opposite of curbing police power and the violence of policing. This includes the implementation of community and neighborhood policing, the hiring of Black and minoritized officers, the creation and implementation of race-relations and de-escalation trainings and civilian oversight bodies. Continually promoted as novel, these reform practices, refined over nearly 70 years, facilitated an expansion of police powers, while creating conditions that have been increasingly violent for Black, Indigenous, and other vulnerable communities.
In the conclusion, you make a powerful case for “broadening the horizon of struggle” in order to imagine liberated Black futures. What does this vision look like, and how does it connect to other resistance movements in Canada and across the globe? What helps you to see “liberatory possibilities articulated in the present moment” amidst the ubiquitous violence and pain?
I make the case that a radical re-orientation toward ending harm ––including structural and state violence ––is the only human response to an inhumane world. This includes the need to envision and work to build futures beyond police and policing, which I detail extensively in the final chapter, “Futures Beyond Policing: Making Policing Obsolete” In that final chapter, I advance a detailed blueprint for rethinking crime, harm, and safety, and bringing an end to the multiple wars waged against Black life that are enabled through the criminal justice system. However, as I argue in the conclusion, envisioning more liberatory futures also requires us to conceive of liberation more expansively. This includes the need to work to build futures in solidarity with Indigenous freedom struggles for Land Back and decolonization, identifying that policing, while a central form of repression of Black freedom, is also a central mechanism of land theft and a tool of settler colonialism against Indigenous land defense. I argue, as well, that to be truly ethical, our movements toward divestment must necessarily take aim not only at the need to divest from policing inside of the settler state, but divestment from militarism, extractivism, and occupation. This includes but is not limited to the significant role that Canada and the US play in upholding repressive police forces across the global south, particularly in poor Black nations.
Today, the movements to end tyranny of domestic repression “at home” are bound up within global movements to end genocide, apartheid and occupation in Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and well beyond. Understanding the links between policing, imperialism, and militarism is crucial, as is holding transnational abolitionist visions for futures beyond all organized harm and violence. This wide-spanning understanding of emancipatory struggle allows us to maintain liberatory visions for the future, however far off these may feel in the present moment.
Contributors to this volume examine how the liberal democracies of the West recognize and include racial others through technologies of state power that promise but rarely grant sanctuary and refuge. Contributors cover a diverse range of places and subjects while analyzing colonial-racial logics of humanitarian reason and its carceral geographies of camps and crossings. Michele Lancione, author of For a Liberatory Politics of Home writes, “Beyond Sanctuary is a wonderful read that presents unparalleled contributions around the impossible possibility of sanctuary. The essays come together in a generous, incisive way, carefully tracing the ethical and political demands of migrant movements. This is a book that will stay with us for a long time: it offers key insights and asks powerful questions that grant new points of reference for students, scholars, and organizers working on asylum regimes and politics across the Atlantic.”
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
Summer heat got you down? Enjoy the cool indoors with one of our exciting new titles out this July!
Dana Murphy examines the importance of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley as a foundational figure for Black feminist criticism in Foremother Love.
In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines how ordinary Okinawans have struggled to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism and how they experience and remember sacrifice.
In Diaspora Without Displacement, Celina de Sá tells the story of the Afro-Brazilian combat game of capoeira as it “returns” to the African continent through the creative initiatives of young urban professionals in Senegal.
Contending that contemporary study of the environment can often reproduce the violence it means to address, Fear of a Dead White Planet, by Joseph Masco, Tim Choy, Jake Kosek, and M. Murphy of the More Worlds Collective, proposes a methodological shift that is place-based and allows for the conjuring of alternate worlds.
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July is a quiet month, but there are a few chances to catch our authors at events.
July 11, 6:30 pm EDT: Nnenna Freelon previews her October book Beneath the Skin of Sorrow at a concert and talk at Charlotte’s Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. Tickets are $30.59. 551 South Tryon Street Charlotte, North Carolina
July 17, 7:30 pm EDT: Therí Alyce Pickens, author of What Had Happened Was, reads from her book in a hybrid open-mic night sponsored by Charis Books & More. 184 S Candler Street, Decatur, Georgia
July 27, 2 pm EDT: The North Carolina Poetry Society sponsors an in-person reading featuring Crystal Simone Smith, author of Runagate, along with Han VanderHart and Pat Riviere-Seel at McIntyre’s Books. 220 Market Street, Fearrington Village, Pittsboro, North Carolina
Today we share a guest post by Executive Editor Courtney Berger, about touring the new Metropolitan Museum of Art show Superfine.
2006. I’m a new-ish acquisitions editor, and I receive a proposal from an up-and-coming scholar, Monica Miller, for a book on the cultural and literary history of the Black dandy. I knew straight away that this was a story that needed to be told—and I wasn’t alone. The manuscript received glowing peer reviews, and Monica did the hard work of revising and polishing the manuscript.
Courtney Berger and Monica Miller at the Superfine exhibit.
Jump to May 2024. I receive an email from Monica with top secret news. She’s guest curating an exhibit at the Met Costume Institute. It’s based on her book. Oh, and it’ll be tied to the 2025 Met Gala. This is huge! It’ll be a new life for the book, a public platform for Monica’s research, and an opportunity to shine a light on the cultural and political importance of Black fashion and expressive culture. Still, I had no idea how big it would be.
May 2025. A few weeks after the Gala, a friend and I meet Monica outside the Met before the museum opens. We’re some of the lucky few who get to enter early, and we head down to the exhibit. I’m feeling a bit choked up when I see the exhibit shop with copies of Slaves to Fashion piled up next to the exhibit catalog. I take a photo of Monica at the entrance, and she says that she’s getting used to having her picture taken. There has been so much publicity around the gala and the exhibit. So many events and interviews. Monica seems to be taking it all in stride.
Monica starts the tour. It’s a new ‘script’ that she’s trying out for the first time. She’s being called upon to give regular tours of the exhibit, especially to museum donors, celebrities, and other VIPs. It’s not often that an academic book editor gets to be a VIP, but I’m not complaining.
Superfine, Monica explains, is the book come to life in a different form. Where Slaves to Fashion was rooted in literary history, Superfine takes material form—from the livery outfits that Black men wore in the 18th and 19th centuries (older styles that distinguished them from the wealthy families they served) to contemporary fashion designs. She explains the decision making that went into the exhibit—the themes, the origins of the mannequins, the distribution of historical outfits and high fashion, and the long debates over lighting. The exhibit was created from whole cloth (pun intended). Much of what’s on display was acquired or borrowed just for this exhibit, and through it, we can see the power that fashion has as both a mode of self-expression and a mode of resistance to the experiences and legacies of enslavement and racism.
For the Black dandy, Monica explains, style—and the careful attention to crafting how one appears to the world—can be a way to command respect in a world that is often reluctant to give it. It is also a means of self-protection. All of this is on full display in the exhibit. We see it in André Leon Talley’s majestic military-inspired cape, in the figures of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery by disguising themselves as a white man (Ellen) and his servant (William), and in Frederick Douglass’s iconic suit and glasses. The Black dandy’s style might be deliberate and self-conscious, but it can also be irreverent and gender-bending, and it’s a delight to see Prince’s flounced shirt, Grace Jones’s tux, and an array of conventionally ‘feminine’ fabrics and colors. Frills, flowers, and sequins abound.
Frederick Douglass’s coatGrace Jones’s tuxedoAndre Leon Talley’s military cape
As the exhibit starts to fill up with museum goers, Monica is getting recognized. We’ve got some folks surreptitiously following us, eager to hear her insights. As we reach the end of the exhibit, people start to come up and ask her questions. Someone brings a copy of Slaves to Fashion and asks her to sign it. Folks come up to tell Monica how much the exhibit means to them, how much it matters to have Black fashion and culture in the spotlight, how important it is to be seen.
As I took a second, solo stroll through the tour, I saw how many people had dressed up for the exhibit, strutting their own style, reminding us that Black dandyism is still very much alive and well. At this moment, when scholars and scholarship are under attack, this exhibit feels vital, necessary, and perilous. And I’m grateful for the reminder of how scholarship can wend its way, often unexpectedly, into a broader public and shape how we know and think about the world. Thank you, Monica and to all the people who made this exhibit happen.
You can get a virtual tour of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style on the Met’s website. The exhibit is open through October 26. You can purchase Slaves to Fashion on our website for 30% off with coupon SAVE30, or you can buy it at the museum gift shop, or wherever books are sold.
You describe this book as a “an insurgent black feminist love letter to myself, Black girls, women, mothers, and othermothers,” and it’s also, in many ways, a personal biography. How did your experiences in the Black Church and in life bring you to writing a book in this form?
To be honest, I didn’t want to write Freeing Black Girls. I resisted this book with everything within me. As scholars, we’re instructed to maintain objectivity and create distance between us and our research. I was told on more than one occasion that anything less would be interpreted as unscholarly. Similarly, as a Black woman, I learned very early in life to maintain a hard line between my private and professional worlds as a protective mechanism. “Don’t let them (the world) see your weak spots or else they’ll use them against you.” “Weak spots” meant vulnerability. Both viewpoints highlight diminishing returns. Namely, the idea that an increase in “the personal” leads to a decrease in respect.
Yet, the only way to write Freeing Black Girls was with me (the personal, which is political) at the center—as the Black girl needing to be and fighting to be free. So, I had to go back and get the eleven-year-old Black girl that I left in the prolegomenon of Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion andCulture (2018) and tell her story—but in a fuller and very different way. In Jezebel Unhinged, I use my story about being sexualized in the Black Church by an elder church member (then getting in trouble for his pedophilic pornotropic gaze) at eleven years old to set the stage for a scholarly study on biblical Jezebel and the racialized jezebel trope, circulated in history, religion, and culture since (at least) the medieval period. That story merely sets the scene then fades into the backdrop while the research on the jezebelian figure moves into the spotlight. In opposition, I’m the nucleus in Freeing Black Girls.
Meaning that, while Freeing Black Girls is very much a sacred testament that merges scholarly analysis with historical and collective narratives, it’s extremely personal. It’s like disrobing. And to be clear, I never intended to give such vulnerability to the world. That’s incredibly frightening. But it was also immensely rewarding and empowering while writing. It’s like standing naked and looking directly into the mirror and seeing not only myself but also the world—and facing everything. It was really difficult to write. I had to go deep into myself and call forth some of my experiences—in the church, because of the church, in the world, and otherwise—that had haunted me. What kept me going was knowing I wasn’t alone, and that my experiences weren’t necessarily unique. And it’s really because of that that I insisted on writing in a more familiar way to a much larger audience. I’m talking to Black girls and women who may never enter a classroom but have been rewritten by theological and cultural misogynoir.
You also refer to the book as a “bible,” doing so while noting that Black Church attendance is decreasing, especially for younger people, and that religion has served as a vehicle for the dissemination of anti-Black, cisheteropatriarchal ideas. What is your motivation for keeping this term, and keeping it with the dissonance it may entail?
Black folks are still largely Christian, and the Bible remains significant. However, while the Bible was used to substantiate slavery and other forms of oppression, including white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, it was also deployed to support the enslaved ancestors’ right to freedom; for literacy; to create music; to tell stories; to name oppressions, liberative ethics, and people; to plot; and otherwise. Freeing Black Girls stands within the black liberative tradition.
It also understands that previous trends reveal that younger generations are moving away from the Black Church due to social issues such as heteropatriarchy, heterosexism, homophobia, classism, and otherwise. In chorus, it recognizes the long-standing necessity of the Black Church as a vital black communal institution, especially in heightened times of despair and turmoil. Thus, at present, I imagine there’s movement back towards the Black Church. Feral white supremacy has a way of pushing us back toward black spiritual spaces and brush harbors, including the Black Church, for community, revolution, information, and more. If nothing else, the spirit world and its powers become especially important when you don’t have laws on your side. The ancestors taught us that.
Freeing Black Girls uses bible in the title because it’s essential reading and because it notes the radical use of the Bible by Black people as a source of powerful rewriting, self-recreation, and joint advancement. Enslaved ancestors didn’t read the Bible like slavers. Similarly, Freeing Black Girls doesn’t use bible as the slave owning class might use it. As a bible with a lower-case b, Freeing Black Girls sets out to redeem Black girls and women from profaned ideologies, theologies, and representations as well as rethink how Blacks folks see and treat one another. This is holy work. Notwithstanding, some readers may find my deployment of bible blasphemous while others may see it as a deterrent, especially in these times where America is using the Bible to force us into white Christian nationhood. Be very clear: Freeing Black Girls is emphatically not that. It’s a sacred form of literacy, not a command, final authority, or script for heteropatriarchal dominance. It’s a testament of freedom rooted in love.
Can you elaborate on the figure of the “good” black mother, specifically as it’s tied to (Black) Christianity and the histories of colonialism, slavery, and systemic racism? What harm does this figure perpetuate?
Imagine being told that your job as a Black woman is to mother but you’ll never be good at it because black womanhood is so scarred by internalized stereotypes on immorality and depravity. Imagine being told that you’re bad and/or not up to par again and again from religion, to culture, to politics, and otherwise, and that false narrative operating as both a whip and truth. Imagine having a history that lacked not only bodily autonomy but rights over your reproductive capacities and that being used against you. Imagine the slave trade being maintained through your body and the demonic violations that required. Imagine heteropatriarchal notions of motherhood, purity, domesticity, and submission being the pinnacle of womanhood in culture and being told by Black men, the Black Church, and black culture that you’re holding back racial progress, harming Black children, and communities because of the aforementioned. Now imagine experiencing centuries of race, gender, and class oppression and being blamed for the state of Black boys and men.
Black women and girls spend our lives clawing ourselves free from these imaginings and trying to prove that we are good/enough. The bad black mother trope begins in slavery along with several other racial stereotypes. As I write in both Jezebel Unhinged and Freeing Black Girls, stereotyping Black women, girls, mothers, and othermothers as bad is an American pastime. While the Black Church is wonderful for a lot of reasons, it may also participate in maintaining the script on bad black mothers, motherhood, and mothering. For example, Freeing Black Girls begins with a Mother’s Day sermon that does this explicitly. Sadly, the messaging wasn’t novel in my experience.
The Black Church hoped to rescue Black women and girls from the terrible stereotypes projected onto them during slavery. Namely, that we are unscrupulous, immoral, hypersexualized jezebels. Of course, these stereotypes were used to draw attention away from the barbaric plantation sexual politics and the normalization of rape culture. Instead of unapologetically critiquing, resisting, and rejecting this, the Black Church (along with black culture and black communities) helped mass mediate racialized and gendered stereotypes on bad black womanhood and mothering in order to bolster an oppositional script on good Black girls, women, and mothers.
Freeing Black Girls calls out how both scripts, each of which are informed by colonization, slavery, antiblackness, and heteropatriarchy, are harmful. It posits that the oppositional script on good black womanhood/motherhood is a prison as it negates self-definition, difference, complex identities, and autonomy. Freeing Black Girls asserts that any notion of good Black girls, women, mothers, and/or othermothers must center autonomy, community, and love. We are good because we love ourselves and others. Good black mothering, specifically, teaches Black children, amongst many things, self-love, mutuality, and to resist racist, heterosexist, heteropatriarchal, classist, and imperialist oppression everywhere. More, it argues that mothering is neither destiny nor duty. Some of us choose to mother. Some of us choose not to mother. However, mothering is not a mandate. Nor does it make us. Furthermore, it looks different. For me, it looks political and black feminist.
What is “revolutionary mothering and othermothering”? How do these practices impact the lives of Black people and open towards new, liberated futures?
Black mothering is unbound by gender and/or blood ties. Historically, Black folks have had to make meaning, identities, family, households, bonds, and community in nontraditional ways. We become family because we say so. Additionally, there was a time when whole Black communities mothered and/or parented Black children. Othermothering notes these chosen bonds and how people in respective communities have stood in as mothers to children and adults who weren’t their birth children. For example, in Freeing Black Girls I discuss the significance of “Uncle Clifford,” played by Nicco Annan in P-Valley, as a chosen othermother to the dancers at The Pynk. “Uncle Clifford” loves and othermothers the discarded. This is revolutionary.
Specifically, revolutionary mothering is mothering toward freedom and against racial, gender, sexual, socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and otherwise oppression. It’s mothering children (including adult children) to rebegin the world in the most emancipatory ways possible. It’s raising them with a strong sense of self as well as ethical care for others. It’s instilling a sense of black radical love in them, which is necessarily inclusive, safe, and resistant toward inter- and intracommunal maltreatment and injustice. It holds that there’s a fight “out there” as well as “in here” amongst Black folks and that to survive and create new and more emancipatory worlds, we’d better learn how to love better. The latter will aid us in fighting better.
Focusing on mothering/motherhood means also focusing on children. What is the importance of children in this book?
Freeing Black Girls was really birthed by and written in concert with my book, Loving Black Boys: A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering (Duke University Press, 2026). I started writing Loving Black Boys, initially titled Parenting against the Patriarchy: Raising Non-toxic Sons in White Supremacist America, first. I was writing in response to the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. I wanted to write a book that named what was happening to Black boys but that also resisted the urge to use heteropatriarchy to empower them. I wanted to argue that the response to white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal violence and dominance isn’t a counter black heteropatriarchy. In fact, the latter was harmful to our intracommunal relations, families, communities, institutions, and social movement.
It’s imperative to note that I’d been in this experiment—of what I refer to as black feminist mothering—long before the books. I became a black feminist around the same time that I became a mother, and the birth of my sons inspired me to insist on a better and more loving world. I wanted to prove that 1) Black mothers matter in the formation of all Black children but particularly Black boys (because society and films kept saying we couldn’t raise Black boys to men), 2) if race, sex, and gender biases are learned then black feminist politics and radical black love ethics could also be learned as a counter, and 3) black feminist mothering would make more radically and inclusive loving children and thus a more emancipatory world. However, America seemed to be steadily ratcheting up its violent hunt for Black boys. What’s radical love when being hunted? While Parenting against the Patriarchy initially intended to share my top black feminist lessons for mothering, Loving Black Boys forced me to widen my gaze.
I really labored through how to love them better and how to teach them to love Black people more radically—amid so much ugliness. I wanted them to do and be better than some of the Black boys and men I experienced, discussed throughout Freeing Black Girls. And I wanted them to know that they don’t have to hate anyone or any part of themselves to thrive. Nevertheless, as I was writing Loving Black Boys, I realized that something was missing and that was my story and why mothering this way was so important. I was in fact raising them against something and it wasn’t solely white supremacy. I also had to talk back to those Black boys and men that caused me harm. So, I paused Loving Black Boys and turned to my experiences and the world and people I needed and/or wish I had and encountered growing up. It was a Sankofa moment. I had to go back and retrieve my childhood in Freeing Black Girls in order to help my sons remake the world I was imagining in Loving Black Boys. As June Jordan states, children are the ways the world begins again and again. And how they rebegin it matters.
In the book, you deftly move between popular Black culture and religious tradition, theorizing, for example, from Beyoncé’s Renaissance, Katori Hall’s P-Valley, and the Book of Proverbs. How do you see these aspects of the culture in dialogue, and how do you negotiate their tensions?
I’m a religio-cultural theorist, a term I coined in my dissertation. My work moves between Black religion and culture. I lay this out in Jezebel Unhinged, which is an academic text. And as academic works go, I begin with a lot of definitions and frameworks. The first of which is how I understand culture. Namely, culture, in the broadest sense, highlights a matrix of ideologically loaded signifying systems through which a social order, meanings, pleasures, interests, and otherwise are communicated, reproduced, experienced, explored, lived, negotiated, and more. Religion, in its broadest sense, is an innately plural signifying system and interpretive concept that is an aspect of culture. Black religion refers to a range of black cultural forms, inspirations, articulations, motivations, and encounters deemed “religious” by Black folks making sense of their lives.
That said, religion, for me, is irreducible to organizations, institutions, etc. Additionally, as an aspect of culture, black religion is always in dialogue with black culture. All that said, from that view, I can see where Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Katori Hall’s P-Valley do spiritual work, especially if we understand that religion is vast and plural, the black body is sacred, and if we agree that both Beyoncé and Katori may at times be working toward a kind of freedom and against oppression. Of course, if a person’s view of religion is limited to Christianity and/or institutions, institutional beliefs, and institutional practices, then these connections may be missed or interpreted as obscene. Namely, because the religious is limited by certain precepts: sitting in church, sermons on purity, prayer, rigidity, respectability, and so forth.
However, both Renaissance and P-Valley critique oppression, and if we take Luke 4:18, where Jesus says he’s come to liberate the oppressed, seriously, then we’ll explore these texts differently. To be sure, some aspects aren’t holy per se, for example, murder, drug usage, sexual exploitation, victim blaming, racism, white supremacist capitalist predation, etc. Some of these themes are also found in the Bible. But that isn’t my point. My point is that cultural texts like Renaissance and P-Valley have significant value and can teach lessons on meaning making, resilience, ethical care, self-definition, love, resistance, and otherwise, that I find holy.
Invoking the tradition of call-and-response that W. E. B. Du Bois defined as “a distinguishing marker” of the Black church, you note that it is only a form of radical engagement if there is talking back. If Freeing Black Girls is the call, what do you imagine as the response?
In a word—sanctuary. I expect there to be a lot of talking back—good and bad, supportive and against. But the goal for Freeing Black Girls and Loving Black Boys is sanctuary. In Freeing Black Girls I write, “we don’t need to be surviving each other while also having to survive pervasive white supremacist harassment, discrimination, terror, and genocide. We need sanctuary/ies—emancipatory literacies, philosophies, relations, and safe places…” I define sanctuary as a reservoir of hope, mode of community, strategy, philosophy, and practice, which reimagines space as opportunities for revival, rest, connection, critical self-reflection, healing, and growth. It’s where Black folks see and value ourselves and one another as ends rather than means to ends, embrace difference, interrogate belonging, and make mutuality and accountability non-negotiable; where we refuse that which harms us, our connections, and our communities, for example, heteropatriarchy, misogynoir, antiblackness, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, and capitalist individualism; and where we insist on a world where all Black people matter. Sanctuary creates a context for intraracial and intracommunal allegiances, ethics, and care, which enables a much fuller resistance.
The new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, opens Saturday, May 10. The exhibition is inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, and Miller is the guest curator of the show. The exhibition features over 200 items from the eighteenth-century to the present, including garments, paintings, photographs, and more from artists such as Torkwase Dyson, Tanda Francis, André Grenard Matswa, and Tyler Mitchell.
The press preview of the exhibition is being held today, followed tonight by the annual Met Gala with the theme “Tailored for You,” inspired by the exhibition’s focus on menswear and dandyism.
In an interview last month with the New York Times, Monica Miller said, “Dandyism is a practice that’s not just about clothing, dress, accessories. It’s often about the strategic use of those things in particular political moments, around particular cultural nodes.” Miller told The Guardian that the exhibition is especially important now because dandyism is “a sartorial style that asks questions about identity, representation, mobility—race, class, gender, sexuality and power. . . . It’s about understanding that the present moment is always informed by both history and our aspirations.”
Slaves to Fashion, a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York, is available at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s bookstore, on our own website, and wherever books are sold. Since the announcement of the exhibition last fall, the book has stayed on our bestseller list, and we hope many more readers will see the exhibition and want to delve more deeply into the history behind it. The exhibition is open through October 26, 2025.
Our fourth and final Poem of the Week comes from Crystal Simone Smith’s new collection Runagate. The first section of the book presents haiku sequences written in response to advertisements from slaveholders and jailers. In the ads, slave owners provide descriptions of runaway slaves written from the point of view of the slaveholders and offer rewards for their return. Jailers announce the capture of runaway slaves and ask owners to retrieve them. Left-side pages contain a single ad facing right-side pages presenting one of Smith’s haiku sequences written in the persona of the person described in the ad. Below we share the ad and poem “Sam.”
Ten Dollars Reward. RUN AWAY from the Sub- scriber, in Edgecomb County, on Friday the 9th in- stant, about 13 miles above Tarborough, 4 miles south of Tar River, my NEGRO FELLOW SAM. He is about forty years old, very black, and of tolerable size. One of his up- per fore teeth split, which makes them rather stand apart. He took with him a new homespun shirt and trowsers, two blankets, and sundry other cloaths not recollected. He pretend[s] to be a doctor, and it is probable he may attempt to pass for a free man. I know not what course he may go. I will give the above reward, if delivered to me, or confined in any jail, so that I get him again.
when Mistress’s fever would not break I fetched wild roots
dressed her bed and spooned her the remedy tea
nearing death she promised my freedom in exchange for living
fever released— to her promise she laid no claim
the laws of slavery making all masters human demons
I escaped at night prayers answered— light of a Negro cabin
a woman gave me water and bread in the name of a disciple
Crystal Simone Smith is Instructor of the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and author of Dark Testament: Blackout Poems. Receive 30% off when you order Runagatethrough our website with the coupon code E25CSSMT.
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