Black Panthers in Oakland, CA (1969)
Photo Credit: Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch | Long Shot Factory
by President Heidi R. Lewis
February 3, 2025
I write this blog from Colorado Springs, CO. Stolen land—the unceded territory of the Ute Peoples, to be precise—developed with stolen and exploited labor. I do so, because as Sandra Guzmán points out, land acknowledgements “recognize and respect Indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of their lands and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous peoples and their traditional territories.”
“Their names exist almost like family photos relegated to a wall we rarely touch. We know they are important. We memorialize them with honored places on the walls of our offices and libraries and in the histories we write. . . . But then we shelve them, as though preservation is the most apt way to show respect for their critical intellectual labor.”
—Brittney Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)
By now, you probably know I have deep appreciation for memory. In the call for proposals for this year’s annual conference, that’s why I asked, “What might become possible when we remember who we are and who we’ve been? What can we (re)learn by remembering the places and spaces from where we come, the places and spaces who made us who we are? What might become possible when we remember the people and communities who taught us how to resist?”
You probably also know I have deep appreciation for Black feminism, as well as the Black women who co-created that intellectual world even before we understood ourselves and our work in those terms. So today, I’m sharing some of them and some of me—some of us. In doing so, I’m trying to remember (or un-forget, as Cooper argues for in the above quote) and relearn. I’m trying to remember (or un-forget) who I come from, who I was, who I am, where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what I came to do.
Some Random Saturday
Because you were such a huge part of the reason I learned to love intellect, I wanted so badly for you to take me to college and move me into my dorm room for the first time. You didn’t, and I never got an explanation. I can’t exactly remember how long it was before we spoke again, but it was at least a year. I know that much, because I was a sophomore by then. Loneliness is loud, just like me. So, I try to see clearly across difference. I do most of my work there. I’ve convinced myself that’s where I’m needed and wanted.
While most states in the U.S. South were adopting black codes, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was in New York City at the 11th National Woman’s Rights Conventions giving a speech entitled “We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866): “I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man’s hand against me.”
I bet I spend this whole day in bed. I’m behind on binging anyway.
On a Cold, Snowy Tuesday
For whatever reasons, you chose not to hear me when I said I was hurting, when I said you were hurting me, that he was hurting me, when I said you weren’t hearing me. You still don’t or you don’t enough to actually do anything differently. Now, I’ve been everywhere. Still am. Bold as usual. Trying to love. Constantly chasing a love I’m positive I had and don’t have, a love I’m certain I have and won’t ever have. Is that one reason I teach?
Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy v Ferguson, Mary Church Terrell was with the National American Woman Suffrage Association giving an address entitled “The Progress of Colored Women” (1898): “And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition were long. With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future large with promise and hope.”
It ain’t gon’ take me nothin’ but a couple or few hours to grade these papers. I don’t feel like it, but I want to. I’m excited about a few of them. Let me go ‘head and do it before I get way behind.
A Monday after that Cold, Snowy Tuesday
Sometimes, I’m honestly not sure who I was, who I am, where I’ve been, where I’m headed, or what I came to do. Sometimes, I don’t even want to know. And sometimes, I’m not sure why that is.
In 1931, the Scottsboro Boys were arrested, eventually convicted, and sentenced to death. The following year, the Tuskegee Experiment began. In 1935, two years before four of the Scottsboro Boys were released, years before the other five escaped or were paroled from prison, and decades before the Tuskegee Experiment was shut down, Mary McLeod Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women. In her last will and testament, she wrote: “I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you respect for the uses of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. I leave you a desire to live harmoniously with your fellow men. I leave you finally a responsibility to our young people.”
Mission statement? Check. Vision statement? Check. Timeline? Check. To-Do List? Check. Calendar reminders? Check. I’m so ready, I almost don’t care who ain’t.
Friday, August 10, 2018
Nana used to tell me I ain’t have no patience. I didn’t then and don’t now. Well, I got more now than I did then—a lot, in fact. Too much at times. I’M STILL SO INSECURE! How is it possible to feel or even be so isolated? Is that why I seek joy on Black authored pages?
When Claudia Jones published “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” (1949), it had only been six years since the end of the race riots in Detroit: “The American bourgeoisie, we must remember, is aware of the present and even greater potential role of the masses of Negro women, and is therefore not loathe to throw plums to Negroes who betray their people and do the bidding of imperialism. Faced with the exposure of their callous attitude to Negro women, faced with the growing protests against unpunished lynchings and the legal lynchings ‘Northern style,’ Wall Street is giving a few token positions to Negro women.”
Yeah, I got nothin’.
Another Tuesday
I’ve always been bold. When I was little, there weren’t many questions I wouldn’t ask, even when most thought I shouldn’t. I loved when grownups would take me and my curiosity seriously. I loved seeing contemplation in their facial expressions and hearing it in their voices as they also pursued answers. I was never overwhelmed or frustrated when they gave more than one. I was never disappointed, let alone angry, when they admitted they didn’t have any. I always knew when they were pretending. I became confident once I stopped pretending with them. That took a long time. Too long. Way too long. Once I stopped pretending with them, my writing got a lot better, too. I was so lost. I’m still healing.
Two years after Emmett Till’s murder ignited a movement in 1955, including the year long Montgomery bus boycott, Lorraine Hansberry contributed two letters to The Ladder, the magazine published by the Daughters of Bilitis: “I feel that women, without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race. Women, like other oppressed groups of one kind or another, have particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment that the second class status imposed on us for centuries, created and sustained.”
Many know the seeds that grew to become “intersectionality” and “matrix domination” were planted long before those terms were coined by Crenshaw and Collins. But do as many folks know Black women and feminists were also thinking critically about hierarchical binaries a long time ago, too?
What day is it again?
Still mean. More focused. Still nowhere. More at peace. Still certain about love but sometimes unsure how it's done.
Shortly after police killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the York race riots in 1969 and right around the time Dickie Marrow was murdered and police killed two Jackson State University students (and injured 12), Linda La Rue published “The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation” (1970): “If we are realistically candid with ourselves, and accept the fact that despite our beloved rhetoric of Pan-Africanism, our vision of third world liberation, and perhaps our dreams of a world state of multi-racial humanism, most blacks and a good many who generally exempt themselves from categories, still want the proverbial ‘piece of cake.’”
I want it, and I don’t. I’m nothin’ like them and everything like them. I’m smarter, better. I’m dumber and nowhere near as good. Somethin' like both-and. But who even cares? Better yet, no matter who do or don’t, why do I? I want to, and I don’t.
Yesterday
In my Feminist Theory survey this term, I’m typically teaching two texts per day that are anchored in select frameworks comprising our units, such as Black feminism, Socialist feminism, Xicanisma, and Ecofeminism. Of course, our work often spans these and other categories. So, one of the texts is old and the other is new, which enables us to historicize feminist theory and think about and discuss it across time. In addition to encouraging students to understand feminist theory as a multivocal, heterogeneous intellectual project grounded in shifting geopolitical conjunctures, this approach also gives me the opportunity to challenge students’ propensity for trafficking in linear ideals about “progress.”
Last week, I taught The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977) for the millionth time and “Citational Desires: On Black Feminism's Institutional Longings” (2020) by Jennifer C. Nash for the first. In addition to reminding readers about Cooper’s concept of “un-forgetting” and making other, critical—sometimes dizzying!—theoretical moves, Nash asks, “What might it mean that in the name of Black feminism, Black women become symbols only of conceptual excellence rather than ‘complex personhood,’ when Black women’s work becomes the intellectual universe’s history rather than unfolding present?” For over a decade, Nash has been one of few scholars who pushes my thinking way beyond my comfort zones, especially concerning relationships between the political and the emotional, the theoretical and the embodied. Her attention to Black women’s “complex personhood” is congruent with Combahee's insistence that to “be recognized as human, levelly human.” Other Black feminists like Michele Wallace have also examined the ways Black women are dehumanized, even when those who dehumanize us would swear they’re honoring us.
What’s distinct—and powerful!—about Nash’s suggestion is its catalyst, Black feminists themselves and/or those who work with(in) Black feminist traditions. That would be me. So once I read “Citational Desires” about a year after it was first published, I committed to thinking routinely about the ways I have also defensively positioned Black women as “symbols only of conceptual excellence rather than ‘complex personhood,’” including me.
This blog is another part of that brilliant, beautiful, messy, confusing journey—Black feminism, personal and political; Black feminism, familiar and strange; Black feminism, complex; Black feminism, human, levelly human.
Per my strategic plan, “Reconnect, Repair, Restore: A More Thoughtful, Transparent, and Trustworthy NWSA,” these blogs are meant, in part, to give members a chance to get to me. This blog is mostly that, even though you can best believe Black feminism will be taking center stage at this year’s annual conference, my last as your President.