“Simone Biles’s plight felt to me like both metaphor and matterphor for Black ascension—a kind of disorientation that attends to Black excellence, the discomfiture that comes in those fleeting moments, where having pulled off something great, you feel like you are on top of the world, and yet, curiously, terrifyingly, you also have no idea where you are in the air.”
Author: Brittney Cooper
Brittney Cooper is co-founder along with Dr. Susana Morris of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a feminist of color scholar-activist group that runs a highly successful blog. Three members of the CFC were recently profiled in Essence Magazine’s list of Young, Black, and Amazing women under age 35 (August 2012 issue). The CFC blog was also named as one of the top 25 Black blogs to watch in 2012 by The Root.com and one of the top “Lady Blogs” by New York Magazine in November 2011. The Collective also does speaking tours, conducts workshops, and engages in a range of activist causes related to women’s issues. Professor Cooper blogs for the CFC as “Crunktastic.” She has also contributed to Ms. in both print and online.
Is Juneteenth for Everybody?
“We are grateful for Texas, for Galveston—but what happened in Texas didn’t only happen there. Freedom was eventual but it was not an event. It was episodic, but not confined to one episode. Juneteenth is for everybody Black. It is but the enduring Black freedom celebration in a range of Emancipation Day celebrations that Black people have used to mark belated freedom.”
Hacking the Black/White Binary
Reprinted with permission from Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. Read the original here. We began discussions of this special issue on “Hacking the Black/White Binary,” less […]
At the Risk of Sounding Angry: On Melissa Harris-Perry’s Eloquent Rage
The Internets were all abuzz over the weekend sharing clips of our collective Black feminist shero Melissa Harris-Perry’s Saturday morning show. During the show, she lost her cool with panelist […]
White Women’s Rage: Five Reasons Jan Brewer Should Keep Her Fingers to Herself
When we do think of white rage, usually we think of it in masculine terms. Gender stereotypes condition us not to see white women as being capable of this kind of dangerous emotional output. But unchecked white rage has always been dangerous for Brown and Black folk in America.