Baby Mama

This chapter uses the ubiquitous “baby mama” to discuss what Lindon Barrett calls “bla(n)ckness”—a concept that radically calls into question traditional discourses by exposing the violence that often sets those discourses into motion and by revealing alternative discourses that resist the dichotomization upon which dominance, and dominate discourses, often rely. It argues that not only have social scientists found the link between poverty and unwed pregnancy that has long structured national debates about single black mothers to have been fatefully misinterpreted, but that young black mothers themselves evince the faulty logic upon which these debates so heavily rely.

Getting Happy

This chapter takes up the position of the prototypically moral good Christian girl-cum-woman. It considers what the correspondence between morality and immorality reveals about the constraints under which sexuality is often put in the black Christian church by way of, first, an interview conducted between former gospel artist Tonéx and Christian talk show host Lexi Allen in which Tonéx effectively outed himself, and, second, “No More Sheets,” a recorded sermon of popular televangelist Juanita Bynum.

Afterword

The conclusion ends with a personal narrative that is tied to the narrative that opens the book. It contends that “home” is an inaugural space of black feminist practice, and that because of the significance of home, which extends beyond the immediate and relational to the extended and communal, as a site of analysis, reckoning with it is an important endeavor in theorizing blackness and black social life.

In the Life

This chapter discusses the case of eight black women who were the victims of a serial murderer between July 2003 and October 2004 in Peoria, Illinois. It begins with an analysis of the Don Imus incident of 2007, in which the “shock jock” referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” in order to foreground the unwitting alliance between discrimination and liberalism at the level of representational discourse, and to suggest how black women in the life expose the limitations of a social order conditioned by value.

On Anger

This chapter takes up the position of the infamous “angry black woman” by avoiding righteous, revisionist, or reactionary arguments about black women and anger and instead considering black women’s anger as critical posture. The argument neither begins nor ends with the stereotype, but with the supposition that representational discourse has been largely unable to account for anger as an aspect of black female subjectivity. The case is therefore made that anger is inherently bound up with the notion of claim for black women, and accounting for this interaction requires an interrogation into the most intimate of black female spaces. The chapter ultimately turns to a discussion of reality television, Claudia Rankine’s discussion of Serena Williams, and a brief analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula.

The Way It Is

This chapter examines the trope of the strong black woman by way of the “superwoman” of R&B musical parlance, particularly as expressed by R&B artist Karyn White in her 1988 hit song “Superwoman.” It extends this discussion to a consideration of the reality television series Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is in order to document the complex enactments of black female social intimacy and to say something about how black women collectively navigate trauma and pain by way of their music, as well as through their interactions with each other.

Introduction

The introduction makes the case for black feminist practice as a study of black sociality by way of a personal narrative that explores the terrain of meaning between thought and practice, feminism and feminist practice, and social life and social death. It consequently outlines the parameters of the book’s primary argument that the logics of representation, which are typically coded by terms such as value, visibility, citizenship, diversity, respectability and responsibility, largely fails to account for the reality of lived black experience. As such, there is a need to consider black social life from the perspective of those who are most closely attuned to and identified with the indicia of blackness.