According to Manoucheka Celeste, what is a Wailing Woman

We learn as much from each other as we do from the texts that we read. Therefore, participation is the foundation to this course. For your weekly discussion posts, engaging thoroughly with the texts we read, summarizing their arguments, and responding thoughtfully is crucial to your success in the course. What did you like? What weren’t you vibing with? What did it encourage you to think about? How can we apply what we read to our everyday lives? These are all just suggestions as prompts but feel free to address them directly.

For full credit, I expect a 500-700 word summary of the articles, 200 or so words about your reflections of the readings, and two questions that came up for you during the readings. I encourage you be specific and thoughtful in your questions, as they will be useful for your final project.

Then, respond thoughtfully to at least two of your peers. “I agree” statements will not receive full credit, so I encourage you to engage with that in mind.

Specifically for this week, consider the following:

According to Manoucheka Celeste, what is a Wailing Woman?

Why does Jennifer C. Nash consider self love as a practice of freedom?

What does Rapp et al. name as the “challenge of Black feminist activism”?

Requirements: 200

Feminist Criminology5(3) 244 –262© The Author(s) 2010Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1557085110371634http://fc.sagepub.comThe Internet as a Tool for Black Feminist Activism: Lessons From an Online Antirape ProtestLaura Rapp1, Deeanna M Button1, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner1, and Ruth Fleury-Steiner1AbstractThis article explores how the Internet is a tool for Black women to challenge violence against women of color. It highlights online protest in response to the actions of civil rights organizations’ narrow focus on the treatment of Black male offenders while overlooking the civil rights of Black female victims. Specifically, the article examines a protest focusing on the reactions of racial justice leaders to a brutal gang rape in a Palm Beach housing project known as Dunbar Village. Drawing from the literature on collective action frames, this article illustrates how the Dunbar Village protest evolved from an online dialogue to social protest.KeywordsBlack feminism; activism; internet; sexual assaultRacial Differences: Boca Raton and Dunbar Village Rape CasesOn June 18, 2007 a gang-style rape occurred in Dunbar Village, an impoverished, predominantly Black housing project in West Palm Beach, Florida. On this date, at least four1 Black male assailants knocked on a Black Haitian woman’s door stating that her car had a flat tire. Once outside, the woman and her young son were con-fronted at gun point. Forced back in their home, the woman was beaten, raped, sodomized, and forced to have oral sex with her son. Both of them were then tortured 1University of DelawareCorresponding Author:Laura Rapp, University of Delaware, Sociology and Criminal Justice, 322 Smith Hall, Newark, DE 19716Email: [email protected]

Rapp et al. 245by having household cleaning products poured in their eyes and the son is now blind. Although the neighbors in the Dunbar Village reported hearing the mother and son scream for help, no one called the authorities. The suspects also stole money and jew-elry before leaving. The mother and son then walked to the nearest hospital. Over the next few months, three juveniles, Avion Lawson, 14, Nathan Walker, 16, Jakaris Taylor, 16, and an adult, Tommy L. Pointdexter,19, were arrested by Florida police and held without bail on suspicion of armed sexual battery by multiple perpetrators, armed home invasion, and aggravated battery. After their arrest, the Black juveniles charged with the crime were denied bail.About 6 months later, on December 31, 2007, 5 White males (4 out of 5 were juve-niles) and 2 White girls, aged 13 and 14, were drinking vodka to celebrate New Year’s Eve at a lake in Pelican Cay, an affluent neighborhood just west of Boca Raton, Florida. When the girls were too drunk to protest, the 5 males took turns sexually assaulting and raping them. A neighbor called 911 after one of the girls began to scream. The assailants ran away, leaving the girls helpless on the ground. On January 22, 2008, 4 of the juve-niles were charged as adults for two counts of rape, Blake Carter, 14, Alex Perriello, 16, Eddie Otaegui, 17, and Ryan Lafferty, 14. William Long Jr., 18, was charged as an adult at the time of his arrest. Unlike the Black offenders charged in the Dunbar Village case, bail was set for the White defendants from US$40,000 to US$75,000.Involvement of National Civil Rights OrganizationsThe difference in the judicial response to the crimes drew the ire of national civil rights organizations. National Action Network2 (NAN) leader Reverend Al Sharpton and the Florida chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People3 (NAACP) staged a protest in which Sharpton stated “You cannot have one set of rules for acts that are wrong and horrific in Boca and another set in Dunbar Village” (Spencer-Wendell, 2008). On March 11, 2008 in response to what they deemed as explicit racial biases in bail practices in Florida, NAN and the NAACP took to the streets of the Dunbar Village housing project. It was here that the local chapter of the NAACP dis-tributed fliers with pictures of two of the four juveniles charged in the case with the words “Voice, Vulnerable, Victims!” printed in bold font. Beneath the pictures were the words: “Young African American Males . . . AN ENDANGERED SPECIES!!”4In the hours after the NAACP and NAN protest, Gina McCauley (2008b), a promi-nent figure in the emerging Black feminist blogosphere posted to her What About Our Daughters (WAOD) blog the entry, “Al Sharpton Wants Rapists and Torturers Roam-ing Around Your Neighborhood—NAACP and Sharpton Get Into It At Press Confer-ence.” Clearly outraged over what she perceived as a grievous neglect of the Dunbar Village victims by local and national racial justice elites, McCauley (2008b) wrote:So I guess their MISSION as it relates to Black on Black crime is to offer uncon-ditional support to the Black criminal while the Black victims of crime aren’t worth the trouble. Um, maybe your kids are incarcerated without bond because they are amoral, without a conscience and an extreme danger to the community.

246 Feminist Criminology 5(3)Let’s be clear. Al Sharpton and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people want the State of Florida to release violent torturers and rap-ists back into the community. MaCauley (2008b, np) The Issue: Black Feminists ProtestThe discontent voiced by the NAACP and NAN is justified in terms of the organiza-tion’s shared imperatives; the lack of bail for the Dunbar offenders is an example of the racist double-standards in the American criminal justice process. In one instance, three poor, young, Black juveniles are denied bail and held in pretrial detention. In contrast, the five affluent, White, predominantly juvenile males are given the opportu-nity to post bond and be freed to their families. Although there appears to be no explicit intent to devalue the lives of Black women victims on the part of the NAACP and NAN, when the offender is a Black male and the victim is a Black female these orga-nizations avoid taking a public position.Until the Boca Raton incident, mainstream racial justice organizations were not forthcoming on the Dunbar Village rape case. Their longstanding conception of anti-racist practice as equal justice for Black male offenders in the absence of recognizing Black female victims would prove to be the catalyst for an immediate and widespread backlash on the Internet. Black women would charge what they termed as “immorally indifferent” (McCauley, 2008a) civil rights leaders with a callously insensitive and out of touch response to the horrifying events that transpired at Dunbar Village.Situating Black Feminist Resistance OnlineThere is a small but growing body of scholarship on “cyberactivism” (McCaughey & Ayers, 2003); however, in our review we have found no study of Black feminist pro-test online. There are case studies of the internet as a tool for activism and social protest in other contexts (e.g., see Gurak & Logie, 2003). In contrast, rather than orga-nizing protests, studies of online feminist communities find that feminist dialogue without organized action dominates the activities of participants (Kendall, 1998). In a recent Study of The National Organization of Women’s (NOW) website, Ayers (2003) concluded that online participants “did not seem politically or socially motivated out-side of the confines of their computer screen” (Ayers, 2003, p. 162). Alternatively, some websites make it their mission to enable women to engage in direct action, including HollaBackNYC.com, which provide a space for victims of sexual harass-ment to upload pictures and descriptions of their assailants. This article is, at least to our knowledge, the first to focus on online feminist protest.Theoretical ExpectationsAlthough the Internet is a new tool for social protest, the issues raised by participants involved in the Dunbar Village antirape campaign are not. There is a rich literature on Black women’s resistance to a longstanding, male-centered, common sense of racial

Rapp et al. 247justice (e.g., Collins, 1998, 2000, 2004; Crenshaw, 1991). Our objective is to illustrate how the Internet may be used by Black women to have their experiences and voices heard. Online activism differs in other obvious ways from the offline context. The Internet is a massive global forum that creates significant challenges for having one’s grievances heard. Recent research demonstrates how well-funded online organiza-tions serve as gate keepers for deciding what is and is not an important social problem (Maratea, 2008). Lacking the resources to use sophisticated technologies for connect-ing with literally millions of users almost instantaneously, most issue-oriented websites are easily overlooked compared to the corporate-funded online media campaigns. Despite these limitations, the Black women presented here used the Internet as a tool for explicitly challenging the dominant, Black male-centered racial injustice story emp-loyed by nationally known organizations such as NAN and the NAACP.Violence Against Women of Color and the Politics of Racial JusticeBlack women have historically been caught in a political catch-22 that makes their experiences largely invisible in dominant White-female centered feminist and Black-male centered antiracist law and politics (Collins, 2000, 2004). Crenshaw (1991) argues that the invisibility of Black women in the larger racial justice movement highlights what she refers to as political intersectionality:Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242).Despite evidence of effective Black feminist antirape campaigns that date back many decades, the observation that Black women have been and continue to be silenced in the contemporary racial justice movement is widely demonstrated in the literature. Even with a remarkably robust program of antirape education and activism launched by Black Feminist activists in the early 1980s (Mathews, 1989), Black women who are victims of rape remain largely undervalued and even vilified in the Black community (Collins, 2000, 2004).Crenshaw’s (1991) work on the failure of antirape law and politics in the broader contemporary racial justice movement is particularly instructive. A protracted history of White supremacist violence against historically well-known Black men such as Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys, and numerous others create a pervasive masculine politics of racial injustice that have come to define the broader movement. Crenshaw demonstrated that even in recent cases involving Black-on-Black rapes, the word of the Black male rapist is privileged over his Black female accuser. Celebrity boxer

248 Feminist Criminology 5(3)Mike Tyson and the rape of Desiree Washington represents an example of misguided protectionism:Some defended the support given to Tyson on the grounds that all African Americans can readily imagine their sons, fathers, brothers, or uncles being accused wrongly of rape. Yet daughters, mothers, sisters, and aunts also deserve at least similar concern, because statistics show that Black women are more likely to be raped than Black men are to be falsely accused of it. Given the mag-nitude of Black women’s vulnerability to sexual violence, it is not unreasonable to expect as much concern for Black women who are raped as is expressed for the men who are accused of raping them (Crenshaw, 1991, pp. 1240-1241).Crenshaw further shows how Washington was largely demonized as an opp ortunistic “ho” in the Black community. Indeed, the silencing of Black women’s victimization and attack on their identity gives way to hypersexualized cultural archetypes (Collins, 1998, 2004). Stereotypes dehumanizing Black women as “welfare queens,” lascivious “bitches,” and “hos” (Collins, 1998; Davis, 1983; Roberts, 2002) is an entrenched part of Draconian legal reforms such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which takes an employment-oriented app-roach to lowering poverty rates (Neubeck & Cazenave, 2001). The PRWORA takes an employment-oriented approach to lowering poverty rates but instead of addressing the complexity of poverty issues that many low-income Black women face, it emphasizes obtaining low paying jobs that they do not allow individuals to escape the poverty status. For example, this employment-oriented philosophy, as it is proposed by the PRWORA, does not address the issue that many low-income women are unable to obtain steady employment because they lack specific education and training (Reese, 2005). Popular culture, especially in Black genre cinema and hip-hop (Dyson, 2007) as well as in the racist-sexist tirades of nationally syndicated public radio shock jocks, such as Don Imus and his recent description of the Black members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s,” reveal that a potent anti-Black woman ideology pervades contemporary dis-course in the United States.The Challenge of Black Feminist ActivismHistorically, when attention is paid to sexual violence against Black women, the national focus in mainstream media and political discourse invariably reproduces existing sys-tems of oppression. Indeed, both ends of the political spectrum advance a narrative of an immoral Black community through a masculine-centered framework. On the politi-cal Right, violence against women of color is largely framed as symptomatic of broken family life and other markers of a perceived deviant Black group (Brown et al., 2005). Right Wing pundits remain invariably silent on actual incidents of violence against

Rapp et al. 249women of color, but aggressively respond to misogynistic, offensive entertainment involving Black (i.e., hip-hop) artists and rarely focus on White artists (i.e., misogy-nistic comedians; Crenshaw, 1991). Mainstream liberal commentators have framed violence against women as a problem rooted in a subculture of violent Black mascu-linity (Goodnough, 2007). Mainstream narratives are rarely written by, nor do they give voice to, the experiences of Black women who are survivors of sexual violence (Collins, 2000).5Black feminist advocates in the struggle for equality, however, developed methods to authenticate their voices. One such strategy is to create “safe spaces” (Collins, 2000, p.98) that allow Black feminists to resist and transcend the intersecting oppres-sions of race and gender. Such “safe spaces” have emerged in informal collectives, such as book clubs, neighborhood gatherings, and organized educational events where Black feminists are able to contest the ideologies that perpetuate the objectification and oppression of Black women (Collins, 2000; White, 1999). Previous research on Black feminist protests demonstrates how activists adapt “safe spaces” for voicing grievances and building solidarity into “racialized, gendered, and class-based mobiliz-ing strategies in a collective action against rape” (White, 1999, p.79). White’s (1999) study of the Tyson case demonstrates how an informal group of Black feminists orga-nized a sophisticated, community-based anti-rape campaign. After a petition of hun-dreds of Black women and men condemned the public insensitivity toward the victim as well as the sexual abuse of Black women and girls in general, a rape prevention speaker’s bureau and a coalition of Black community members concerned about sex-ual violence against women and Black feminism was created and maintained for sev-eral years. The efforts put forth by White (1999)—who was also an active participant in the Tyson-driven antirape protest and awareness campaign—and her fellow Black feminists demonstrates how organizing against racial and gendered oppression of Black women can result in significant positive outcomes.Analytical Approach: Framing the Issues OnlineIn approaching the blog entries and other online materials (i.e., NAACP policy state-ments), we were interested in learning if an online antirape protest of a much lower profile event evolved in a similar manner as the Tyson protest documented in White’s (1999) work. Specifically, we focused on how the online (see Appendix B for a dis-cussion of methodological considerations involving the retrieval of online content) antirape protests evolved in terms of the construction of collective action frames:Collective action frames are constructed in part as movement adherents negoti-ate a shared understanding of some problematic condition or situation they define as in need change, make attributions regarding who or what is to blame, articulate an alternative set of arrangements, and urge others to act in concert to affect change (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 615).

250 Feminist Criminology 5(3)Negotiating a Shared Understanding of the ProblemWhite (1999) shows how the Tyson antirape protesters engaged in preliminary trans-formation work that involved diagnosing the conventional wisdom of rape in the Black community which was the basis of an extensive antirape educational program:We diagnosed the problem as a misunderstanding of the seriousness of rape in the African-American community. This problem is due to an oversimplified analysis of oppression (racism as primary), the acceptance of rape myths, and other forms of sexism that silence rape survivors (White, 1999, p. 85).In contrast to a broad assessment of rape myths in the African American community reified by mainstream racial justice leaders defending a well-known Black male celebrity such as Tyson, the Dunbar Village protesters framed their early efforts in terms of the lack of response to a far lesser known Black-on-Black rape case by national racial justice organizations. Indeed, for approximately 9 months between the arrests of the Dunbar Village rapists in June of 2007 and NAN and the NAACP’s first involvement in the case in March of 2008, What About Our Daughters (WAOD) and a growing online network of Black women conducted an aggressive Dunbar Village awareness campaign focused on the plight of the Black female victim and her son (see Appendix A for a detailed timeline of events). The online network compiled thousands of e-mail addresses, sent letters and made phone calls to other Black activist organizations and mainstream news outlets across the United States.In contrast to the Tyson protesters who engaged in a more deliberate negotiation process that focused on using the notoriety of the Tyson case to build a broad based community antirape coalition, the Dunbar Village protesters focused almost exclu-sively on the details of the crime and the lack of response on behalf of mainstream racial justice organizations. The initial failure of NAN and the NAACP to respond to the Dunbar Village case resulted in aggressive online challenges such as a blog entry by McCauley that included a “League of the Immorally Indifferent” that had Reverend Sharpton at the top of the list (McCauley, 2008a). These kinds of counter-claims were extremely important for keeping the issues alive and for framing their challenge to NAN and the NAACP’s eventual involvement in the case.Despite the growing concern among Black women as to how NAN and the NAACP would eventually respond, WAOD reached out to these national organiza-tions. WAOD owner McCauley contacted the NAACP about providing financial assistance to the victims of the Dunbar Village case. In a blog entry titled, “NAACP Contacts WAOD—National Office Won’t Be Speaking Out on Dunbar Village—Addressing Hate Crimes Against Black Women Not ‘Mission,’” McCauley recounts her reactions to learning the NAACP’s policy on Black-on-Black crime in a phone conversation with a representative from the organization’s national office in Baltimore:

Rapp et al. 251NAACP does not get involved in Black-on-Black crime at the national level because it is not the result of racism—the local Florida branch will be going to West Palm Beach on Monday . . . So it looks like we know which side they are on in the War on Black Women. The answer is NOT OURS! That is very good to know (McCauley, 2007a).The responses to McCauley’s post are useful in that they show how aggressive consciousness raising tactics around the Dunbar Village case were well underway and continued to engage dozens of concerned Black women online. Many res ponders to this post thanked McCauley for shedding light on the case and NAACP’s national policy. However, it was an incendiary response to the above blog entry by an antagonistic, self-described Black male who referred to the members of the WAOD community as a “front for lesbians and Black men haters; emotionally unbalanced at best and traitors at worst” (McCauley, 2007a) that inspired the most heated replies:BRING IT! This train is moving on, you either get on board or step aside because if you get in the way you will be plowed over. The days of Black women apolo-gizing for engaging in self defense are over! If that threatens you, then YOU have a problem not us (McCauley, 2007a).Homophobic epitaphs are used to silence and discredit behaviors and actions that do not align with appropriate definitions of gender and race (Nagel, 2003; Pascoe, 2007). The Black male antifeminist quoted above is drawing on the historical discourse that Black women are expected to remain silent about abuse and violence perpetrated by Black men in an effort to protect men from institutional racism. However, Black women, through the Internet, are challenging the idea that Black women must choose their race over their own protection from gendered violence (Crenshaw, 1991; McNair & Neville, 1996; Potter, 2006; Richie, 1996). Through such resistance, the protesters are refusing to be dismissed.“Stop Al Sharpton and the NAACP”: Black Women Take to the WebPerhaps the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was a letter obtained by McCauley (2008c) that detailed the rationale for why the NAACP participated in the protest along with Sharpton and NAN. Apparently the letter first sent by Maude Ford Lee, the President of the West Palm Beach Branch of the NAACP to Beverly Neal, the Director of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, quoted from a policy state-ment of the national NAACP:The West Palm Beach Branch’s participation in this call for fair and just treat-ment of Blacks is based on the NAACP’s Criminal Justice Goals—Targeted

252 Feminist Criminology 5(3)Areas which call for “Ensuring fair and equitable trials and sentences . . . Equity in arrest, interrogation, pre-sentencing, jury selection, discovery, trial, and appeal phases.”6On March 28, 2008, 6 days after NAN and the NAACP’s protest at Dunbar Village, a “viral e-mail”7 entitled “Stop Al Sharpton and the NAACP from Endangering Black Women” was reported by McCauley (2008c) on WAOD. As a result, the offices of NAN and the national and Florida chapters of the NAACP received thousands of angry phone calls and e-mails. The initial response to NAN and the NAACP’s protest in defense of what became known as the “Dunbar 4”8 was one of outrage. WAOD proprietor, Gina McCauley, and the online coalition of Black feminist bloggers waited approximately 1 week before releasing their first official response.Having assembled a formidable list of contacts across the country from prior pro-tests that gained national attention,9 McCauley arranged for the first blog entry to be posted by a well-known syndicated Black female journalist, Tonyaa Weathersbee of www.BlackAmericaWeb.com. BlackAmericaWeb.com is a popular site whose founder Tom Joyner’s morning drive show “is heard by more than 8 million people in more than 115 markets.”10 Weathersbee’s post “Why Would Al Sharpton Come to the Aid of the Teens in Florida’s Notorious Project Rape Case?” elicited a clear response to what responders viewed as the callously indifferent actions of Sharpton and the NAACP:I hate that Sharpton allowed himself to be drawn into hairsplitting over this kind of heinousness. Most of all, I hate the message that this sends to Black women. Black women make up a majority of rape victims. And scores of Black women are silent about rape because of the kind of thing that Sharpton did. They believe they won’t be listened to; that no one will care. Sharpton bills himself as a spokesman for the voiceless. Too bad this time he decided to lend his voice to the ones who needed it the least—and guaranteed that more raped Black women will continue to suffer in silence (Weathersbee, 2008).On the same day, McCauley (2008c) also posted her own “Open letter regarding NAACP, Sharpton, and Dunbar Village atrocity” on WAOD. In addition to echoing Weathersbee’s profound anger and disappointment with the response of the Reverend Al Sharpton and the NAACP, McCauley also called attention to the context and the need for action:We want both the NAACP and the National Action Network to cease downgrad-ing the gang rape/torture/atrocity of the Dunbar Village by comparing it to an unrelated gang rape, in which guns, maiming, and forced incest were not involved. We want to see genuine victim advocacy in the form of financial support for the relocation, medical expenses, and mental therapy for the true victims in this case (McCauley, 2008c).

Rapp et al. 253The efforts of the Dunbar protesters quickly drew attention and responses from national organizations. Just over a week after the viral e-mail campaign started, Tonyaa Weathersbee and another Black feminist blogger, Arlene Fenton11, were invited onto the nationally syndicated radio program, “The Al Sharpton Show.” On the air, Sharpton agreed to retract his initial statement and agreed that the decision to revoke bail in the Dunbar Village case was just. In a remarkable turnaround, indeed in less than a month after taking the side of the “Dunbar 4,” he retracted his original defense and offered a statement in full support of the victims. He candidly admitted on air, “If the suspects were White, I would have been there sooner.” As evidence of the obvious impact of the protests was a formal apology offered by the Adora Obi Nweze, president of the Florida State Conference NAACP:The branch of the NAACP has and will always be concerned about the victims. We have and continue to this day apologize for any statement that we make that led anyone to think that we were not concerned about the victims and for that we offer a deep apology (Burdi & Othn, 2008, p. A1).The Dunbar Village protest focused on the specific public objective of gaining the NAACP and Sharpton’s support. This goal was easier to obtain once the Internet was flooded with the viral e-mail and Weathersbee post. The protesters learned what they suspected all along: If the Dunbar Village rapists had been White then Sharpton would have taken up the victim’s cause from the outset. However, because the offense involved a Black-on-Black offense where juvenile suspects were denied bail, it was only useful to Sharpton and NAN in the context of protesting the Boca Raton rape case involving a White-on-White case where all suspects received bail. Nevertheless, it appears that the protest provided a national figure in the contemporary racial justice movement with insight into the widespread concerns of women of color. At least in this instance, it is clear that both the NAACP and Sharpton recognized the problem of violence against women of color as one that must be taken seriously by racial justice activists, irrespective of the offender’s race.Solidarity among the Dunbar Village ProtestersIn wake of the apology, the Dunbar Village protesters seemed emboldened. In a recap of the protest, McCauley (2008c) argued that the growing presence of Black women online reveals the diminishing influence of Al Sharpton and other civil rights elites on the Black vote, unless the rights of Black women are given more serious attention. Indeed, many bloggers posted links to this post on their sites.12 Other bloggers such as “Symphony,” a Black woman who self-identifies as living near Dunbar Village, posted on her blog “Don’t Believe the Lies: Al Sharpton’s Backpedal.” Her message was directed at both racial jus-tice and Black political elites that she saw as neglecting the experiences of Black women:You can dismiss bloggers as inaccurate and unreliable. However, that, sir, will be to your detriment. But bloggers specifically and grassroots activists in

254 Feminist Criminology 5(3)general are the coattails you ride into town on . . . . Let this be the alarm for any man, woman, or organization that decides to align itself with those who harm Black women and children—today is a new day. Today is the day you realize we are an omnipresent force to be reckoned with and respected (Symphony, 2008).Importantly, several prominent Black male bloggers also posted entries in solidarity with the Dunbar Village protesters. Consider “Where are the Preachers?” posted by Sherman Haywood Cox on his popular religious blog Soul Preaching:The original sin of sexism is still strong in our community. When a Black woman is sexually assaulted in her home for hours and her son is beaten by a group of Black men and the law enforcement drags their feet brining these men to justice and then our leaders defend the perpetrators. Today, we as preachers have to raise the bar because if we are not careful. Lord help us, for our sexism, our blindness, and our silence (Cox, 2008).“Aaron” from A Political Season, a blog focused on Black politics, posted his own “Open Letter to Al Sharpton and the NAACP,” that expressed an outrage similar to “Symphony” and other Black women protesters:You are championing rapists while deliberately, purposefully ignoring the vicious gang rape and torture of a black woman. Your actions make clear that neither you Al Sharpton as a black man, nor the NAACP, value the dignity, safety and well being of Black women. Your actions make clear that the rape and violation of black women is okay depending on the race of the violator. You will protest the rape of Black women by white men, but you will say nothing about the rape of Black women by Black men and in fact will defend the Black rapists of African-American women. It is a second violation of this woman and indeed of all Black women as vile as the first (Aaron, 2008).In one of the few national news articles to cover the online protest, Chicago Tribune journalist Howard Witt quoted WAOD founder Gina McCaluey:We’ve lost our way in the civil rights movement…. In every case, no matter what an African-American is in custody for, we automatically start screaming about unfairness—even when they are in custody to protect the Black commu-nity from them (Witt, 2008).In the wake of this response, McCauley reported on WAOD (2008c) that NAN and the NAACP initially brushed aside the online campaign as a distortion of their longstanding commitment to equal protection of the laws for Black citizens.The growing online presence of Black women anti-rape activists, as exemplified by the Dunbar Village case, points to a new online-focused civil rights movement (Witt, 2008). The use of the Internet as a location for activism is exemplified by organizations

Rapp et al. 255such as colorofchange.org, which was one of the first groups to question NAN and the NAACP’s involvement in the Dunbar Village rape case. As group spokesman Mervyn Marcano told the Chicago Tribune:I question whether this is the case we want to be standing up for . . . .At the end of the day, when we choose to fight for equal justice, we have to be aware of who’s being affected. A lot of people think no one was speaking for the victims of this terrible crime (Witt, 2008).In addition, colorofchange.org’s hundreds of thousands of supporters were instrumental in organizing relief efforts for survivors of Hurricane Katrina, played a large role in organizing the “Jena Six” protests, and have actively participated in numerous other web-initiated actions.DiscussionIn her classic book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and Empow-erment, Collins (2000) called for the need to establish “safe spaces” for Black women to have their subjugated beliefs and perspectives heard by dominant groups. If the energized response to the Dunbar Village rape protest is at all indicative, then the Internet offers this potential. In the present case, Black women responders did not hesitate to challenge the longstanding failures of mainstream racial justice groups to take the victimization of Black women seriously, irrespective of the offender’s race. When viewed in the broader context of the history of Black feminist antirape activism, the retraction and apology by both the Reverend Al Sharpton and the NAACP is con-structed as a demonstration of the power of online technologies to disseminate contesting views to many people in a short time period. Indeed, it is striking how quickly the events unfolded after Reverend Sharpton’s and the NAACP’s initial inter-vention on behalf of the “Dunbar 4.”The online antirape campaign created more than just a safe space for Black women to voice grievances. In the aftermath of the Dunbar Village antirape protest, Black women were clearly heard by racial justice elites and national attention was brought to a horrifying event that otherwise may never have received the significant attention it deserved. It is crucial to document any substantive changes in reaction to the perpetra-tion of crimes against Black women (Potter, 2006). Beyond consciousness raising the Dunbar Village case provides some support for direct action as the result of an online protest. Indeed, the protest led to the creation of a “Dunbar Victim’s Assistance Fund” to offset the victims’ medical expenses.13Other remarkable changes have taken place as well. In June of 2008, the site of the brutal rape and 13 other buildings at Dunbar Village were approved for demolition by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.14 In a formal statement, Paula Blunt, Deputy Assistant Secretary for HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Hous-ing made specific reference to the rape as a primary reason for this momentous decision: “While demolishing this housing will not erase the horrible act that took place in this

256 Feminist Criminology 5(3)community, we hope it illustrates the housing authority and HUD’s commitment to redevelop affordable housing in a safe neighborhood for families.”15 Most recently, a financial settlement had been reached between the victims and the West Palm Beach Housing Authority (Diaz, 2009).16Although the online antirape protest at Dunbar Village illustrates the utility of the web as a useful site for building “informal social movement communities” (White, 1999, p. 79) that enable Black women to frame grievances and influence change on the ground, one issue of obvious concern for the future of online advocacy involves Inter-net access. Members of impoverished communities, such as Dunbar Village, may have critical information that would be useful in terms of impacting change, but they often lack Internet access. Recent empirical research documents that members of poor communities of color have significantly less access to online technologies (Martin & Robinson, 2007), a situation some have called the “digital divide” (Compaine, 2000). This reality poses a significant challenge to the future of online protest on behalf of poor women of color. The Dunbar antirape protest may prove to be an exceptional case rather than indicative of an accessible new tool for Black feminist activism that cuts across class inequalities. However, as more low income citizens gain access to the web,17 then it is expected that the Internet will become an ever more popular space for consciousness raising and social protest. Given the level of misinformation and dis-torted myths surrounding violence against women in general and regarding the rape of Black women in particular, an active Black feminist online community holds impor-tant possibilities. Indeed, with recent evidence of a shrinking “digital divide” (Martin & Robinson, 2007) and as access to more sophisticated Internet communications tech-nologies become ever more available, opportunities for consciousness raising activi-ties and protest only have the potential to grow.An online antirape protest highlights the potential of the Internet as a tool for Black feminist activism. For example, while the Tyson antirape protesters effectively used a high profile event to mobilize a broad based antirape education campaign (White, 1999), the Dunbar Village protesters were able to use the Internet to call rapid atten-tion to a much less publicized case. By honing in on a national civil rights movement that they felt profoundly alienated from, Black feminist protesters channeled their outrage of institutionalized indifference about the sexual torture of a Black woman and her son into an online protest. As such, Internet protests may be a useful tool for Black women to augment traditional approaches to advocacy and activism, allowing them to have an explicit public presence with the opportunity to influence local law enforcement practices, while also raising awareness at the local and national level. Our case study demonstrates a growing community of Black women who use the web to protest and build social networks that extend far beyond their computer screens. We believe that the success of the Dunbar Village antirape protest suggests that there is reason to believe that Black feminist activism may very well be experiencing a renais-sance of sort.18 The Internet presents a unique site for studying the utility of the web for disrupting hegemonic understandings of violence against women and racial minorities for transforming the way historically marginalized groups are treated in their com-munities and by the criminal justice system.

Rapp et al. 257Appendix AChronology of the Online Rape ProtestTimeline of EventsJune 2007Dunbar Village rapeJuly 2007Four attackers of Dunbar Village case arrested. Bail was refusedAugust 2007NAACP informs What About Our Daughters that they won’t be speaking out on behalf of the Black female victimDecember 2007Boca Raton rapeJanuary 2008Five attackers of Boca Raton case arrested. Bail was setMarch 2008Creation of Dunbar Victim’s Assistance FundNAN and NAACP protested about racial bias in bail practices in FloridaBloggers requested an explanation and clarification of remarks made by NAN and NAACPWAOD report of a viral e-mail campaign “Stop Al Sharpton and the NAACP from endangering Black women”Weathersbee criticized Sharpton on BlackAmericaWeb.com for his reaction to the Dunbar Village rapeBlack feminist bloggers posted open letters to NAN and NAACPEncouraged readers to disseminate the letter and contact NAN and NAACPBloggers’ protest is picked up by major media outlets and local newspapersNAACP issued a press release regarding the bloggers protestApril 2008NAACP agreed to work with prosecutors assigned to Dunbar Village rape case to ensure justice for the victimsPresident of Florida chapter of NAACP offered a formal apologyJune 2008Citing the rape as the primary reason for its actions to redevelop and make Dunbar Village safer, HUD approves the demolition of the site of the rape and 13 other buildingsJune 2009A financial settlement is reported in the Palm Beach Post as being reached between the victim and the West Palm Beach Housing AuthorityAppendix BMethodological Considerations and Retrieval of Blogs PostingsAn important methodological consideration in this study involves the acknowledgment of a new and growing means for organizing like-minded people in virtual reality. Study-ing online organized protest differs in obvious ways from the analysis of traditional protests and activism. In the online context, participants may only have learned about the protest after reading a single blog post and thus may act quickly (i.e., call to file a com-plaint with the NAACP office) without ever narrating their experiences in a blog or other online forums. Second, the Internet is a massive global forum that creates significant (continued)

258 Feminist Criminology 5(3)challenges to having ones grievances heard. Although recent research of social problems in the blogosphere (e.g., Maratea, 2008) demonstrates how well-funded online organiza-tions have the resources to use sophisticated technologies for connecting literally millions of users almost instantaneously, most issue-oriented blogs are easily over-looked in a vast ocean of corporate-funded online media campaigns (e.g., Lovink, 2008).We first became aware of the Dunbar Village rape case and protest from the biweekly published electronic newsletter of the Women of Color Network (WOCN). The April 3, 2008 WOCN update included a Palm Beach Post article “Women Not Tolerating Sharpton’s Rape Rant” written by staff writer Frank Cerabino on March 30, 2008. The article discussed details about the protest, including key players in the orga-nization of the initial mobilization. To understand how rights discourses and the con-tours of the protest developed over time we conducted research using Google’s blog search engine. The WOCN newsletter mentioned the viral e-mail campaign and Tanya Weathersbee’s criticism of Sharpton on Black America Web.Narrowing our search terms based on this knowledge of the origins of the protest, our initial Google blog search retrieved 189 results. The vast majority of these, how-ever, were repostings of the Weathersbee blog and/or the text of the viral e-mail. How-ever, we did discover that some blogs posted additional detailed commentary, including the Dunbar Village blogspot which included approximately 15 new postings and updates. The most active blog site with more than 30 new postings that offered extensive com-mentary and a podcast that focused specifically on the Dunbar Village case was Gina McCauley’s increasingly popular high What About Our Daughers (WAOD). Unlike any other site we discovered, WAOD was the most aggressive and explicit in linking the Dunbar Village protest to the beginning of a “new” civil rights movement with the objective of building an imposing coalition of Black feminist protesters.Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.FundingThe author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.Notes 1. The number of assailants is unknown. The victims’ state that there were about seven assail-ants but only 4 were arrested. 2. The National Action Network was founded in 1991 by Reverend Al Sharpton. The NAN is one of the leading civil rights organizations in the United States and works to promote social justice and civil rights. 3. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and works to ensure the rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and discrimination.Appendix B (continued)

Rapp et al. 259 4. The fliers can be viewed online here: http://bp0.blogger.com/_74rY8itG7SE/R-5BtSxX7iI/AAAAAAAAARY/14wX3GPe8mo/s1600-h/dvflier1.jpg http://bp2.blogger.com/_74rY8itG7SE/R-5B5yxX7jI/AAAAAAAAARg/bg864cZeyfw/s320/dvflier2.jpg 5. There is an extensive Black feminist literature that persuasively demonstrates how dehuman-izing rape narratives of Black women have and continue to be constructed in popular culture (e.g., Collins, 1998; Davis, 1983; Hine, 1989; Projansky, 2001; Smith, 1990; Somerville, 1995; Wiegman, 1993). 6. http://www.blackwomensnetwork.tv/naacpresponse.pdf 7. “Viral” e-mailing is most widely used in the context of Internet commerce. A recent vol-ume on “e-commerce” describes viral e-mail as an e-mail “that resonates so effectively with readers that they share it with many others quickly, something like the way a virus spreads” (Mullen & Daniels, 2009, p. 34). 8. The “Dunbar 4” refers to the four men that were charged with the assault of the mother and son who lived in the Dunbar Village housing project. 9. What About Our Daughters had received national attention for a successful protest of Black Entertainment Television’s (BET) controversial “Hot Ghetto Mess.” The protest resulted in two of the shows major sponsors pulling out (McCauley, 2007b).10. http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/misc/aboutus.11. www.blackwomenvote.com12. Black feminist bloggers from numerous sites used these and similar phrases to describe the success of the Dunbar Village protest. Some of these blogs included <http://www .dunbarvillage.blogspot.com/>, <http://adifferentstory.wordpress.com/>, <http://anonymissblog.blogspot.com/>, <http://electronicvillage.blogspot.com/, http://episcopalienne.blogspot.com/>, <http://mynewblog-ravenelvenlady.blogspot.com/>, <http://politicalseason.blogspot.com/>, <http://tributetoblackwomen.com/news>, <http://web.mac.com/roslynholcomb/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html>, <http://whataboutourdaughters.com/>, <http://whattamisaid.blogspot.com/> http://www.blacksapience.blogspot.com/>, <http://yanmommasaid.blogspot.com/>13. An address for where to send donations to the fund was originally set up here: http://www .wpbf.com/news/13671540/detail.html14. It is important to note that the tearing down of the apartment complex may be a mixed accomplishment. Tearing down housing projects is a limited response to urban poverty because typically the newer buildings are privately controlled and thus more expensive and less inclusive of the previous tenants. Therefore, many families are displaced and put into unstable housing situations (Podagroise & Vojnovic, 2008).15. http://webclipper.handsnet.org/2008/06/hud-approves-de.php16. The Palm Beach Post reported that a term of the settlement was that no financial amount was to be disclosed (Diaz, 2009).17. A recent empirical study of Internet access using U.S. Census Bureau finds substantial increases in access to the Internet among the lowest income Americans between 1993 and 2007 (Martin & Robinson, 2007)

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262 Feminist Criminology 5(3)Reese, E. (2005). Backlash against welfare mothers: past and present. Berkeley: University of California Press.Richie, B. E. (1996). Compelled to crime: The gender entrapment of battered women. New York: Routledge.Roberts, D. (2002). Shattered bonds: The color of child welfare. New York: Basic Books.Smith, V. (1990). Split affinities: The case of interracial rape. In M. Hirsch & E. F. Keller (Eds.), Conflicts in feminism (pp. 271-287). New York: Routledge Press.Somerville, D. (1995). The rape myth in the old South reconsidered. Journal of Southern His-tory, 61, 481-518.Spencer-Wendel, S. (2008, June 24). Three charged in Dunbar Village rape ordered to get fin-gerprinted and palmprinted. Palm Beach Post.Symphony. (2008). Don’t believe the lies: Al Sharpton’s backpedal. Dunbar Village, March 28, 2008. Retrieved April 22, 2010, from http://dunbarvillage.blogspot.com/2008/03/dont-believe-lies-al- sharptons.htmlWeathersbee, T. (2008, March 18). Why would Al Sharpton come to the aid of the teens in Florida’s notorious project rape case? Black America Web. Retrieved April 22, 2010, from http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/sayitloud/weathersbee319White, A. M. (1999). Talking feminist, Talking Black: Micromobilization processes in a collec-tive protest against rape. Gender & Society, 13(1), 77-100.Wiegman, R. (1993). The anatomy of lynching. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3, 445-467.Witt, H. (2008, March 20). Case puts civil right blocs at odds with Web-based activists, old guard leadership not seeing eye to eye on Florida assaults. Chicago Tribune.BiosLaura A. Rapp is a PhD student at the University of Delaware in the Sociology Department. Her research examines the interconnections of race and gender with a focus on sexual violence. Deeanna M. Button recently completed her M.A. in Sociology at Old Dominion University. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Criminology at the University of Delaware. Her pri-mary area of interest is violence and victimization, particularly within the family. Her research includes the causes and consequences of violence among women, children, sexual minorities, and female offenders.Benjamin Fleury-Steiner is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. His latest work is Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison (University of Michigan Press, 2008) a book that documents the struggle against Amer-ica’s carceral health catastrophe by prisoner rights activists across the U.S.Ruth Fleury-Steiner is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Delaware. Her current work focuses on a multi-site, longitudinal study of bat-tered women’s experiences within the criminal legal system and their long-term safety.

JENNIFER C. NASH Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality Abstract This article examines the consolidation of love into a black feminist politics during second­wavefeminism. By reading love-politics as both a practice of the self and a nonidentitarian strategy for constructing political communities, I argue that black feminism’s love-politics suggests a way of doing politics that transcends the pitfalls of identity politics, particularly intersectionality. “I often talk about lave as one of the few places where people actually admitthey want to become dtlfmnt.” 1 -Lauren Berlant By the summer of 1972, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s eponymous album had already produced two Billboard hits. But it was the album’s third single, “Where Is the Love?” that was its biggest success. Flack and Hathaway’s harmonies earned them comparisons to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and the song’s catchy chorus-“where is the love you said [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2013, vol. n, no. 2, pp. 1-24] © 2013 by Smith College. All rights reserved. 1 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

2 was mine, all mine, to the end of the time, was it just a lie? Where is the love?”-helped make “Where is the Love?” one of the summer’s most memorable hits. Six years later, June Jordan delivered her “Where is the Love?” speech at Howard University’s National Black Writers Conference. Jordan said, “It is here, in this extreme, inviolable coincidence of my status as a Black feminist, my status as someone twice stigmatized, my status as a Black woman who is twice kin to the despised majority of all the human life that there is, … it is here, in this extremity, that I ask, of myself, and of anyone who would call me sister. Where is the love?” (Jordan 2003, 270-71; italics in original). In the years to come, her plea for love would become widely anthologized, included in Gloria Anzaldua’s edited collection Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, and re-published in Essence Magazine. Jordan’s “where is the love?” refrain-like the chorus of a catchy song-was instantly popular in black feminist circles. This paper uses Jordan’s query-where is the love?-as a window into a much longer, and largely unanalyzed, black feminist tradition oflove-politics, a tradition marked by transforming love from the personal (epitomized by Flack and Hathaway’s song about romantic love gone wrong) into a theory of justice. Of course, Jordan was not the first to put love at the center of her black feminist project; a few years earlier, the Combahee River Collective State­ment noted that its proto-intersectional politics “evolve[s] from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work” (Combahee River Collective 1983, 267). Nor has black feminist love-politics been confined to “second-wave” black feminist organizing; in fact, it remains a political and rhetorical trope even in contemporary black feminist scholarship. 2 Joan Morgan asserts that “black-on-black love” is the centerpiece of her hip-hop feminism (Morgan 1995, 152), Gwendolyn Pough argues that the labor of contemporary black feminism should be articulating a “message ofself..love” (Pough 2003, 241), and bell hooks reminds us that “all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic” (hooks 2000, xvii). Although black feminist love-politics has been expressed in distinctive ways in different periods, this paper focuses on a “second-wave”3 black moment when pleas for love were consolidated into a sustained call for a black feminist love-politics, a moment that set the stage for later women of MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

color feminist scholarship-including work by hooks, Traci West, Chela Sandoval, and Patricia Hill Collins-grappling with love. This particular moment has long been celebrated for its advocacy oflove as a resistant ethic of self-care. If “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a meta­physical dilemma”-to borrow Ntozake Shange’s oft-quoted lines-then black feminism’s insistence on love, particularly self-love, might be read as a practice of self-valuation (Shange 1977, 45). Collins captures this reading of black self-love, arguing that, “Loving Black people … in a society that is so dependent on hating Blackness constitutes a highly rebellious act” (Collins 2004, 250). According to this scholarly tradition, love is a politics of claiming, embracing, and restoring the wounded black female sel£ My interest in black feminist love-politics departs from interpretations of love as simply a practice of self-valuation. Instead, I analyze “second-wave” black feminism’s pleas for love as a significant call for ordering the self and transcending the self, a strategy for remaking the self and for moving beyond the limitations of selfhood. Moreover, this paper reads black feminist love-politics’ insistence on transcending the self and producing new forms of political communities as a kind ofaffective politics. My use of the term affective politics draws on work by scholars including Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Jose Mufioz, and Ann Cvetkovich, who invite us to ask: “how do emotions work to align some subjects with some others and against other others? How do emotions move between bodies?” (Ahmed 2004, u8). I use the term affective politics to describe how bodies are organized around intensities, longings, desires, temporalities, repulsions, curiosities, fatigues, optimism, and how these affects produce political movements (or some­times inertias). I am particularly interested in reading black feminism’s affective love politics as a departure from the kind of political work that black feminism is often associated with: identity politics. Reading black feminist love-politics as an affective project serves three important purposes. First, this paper intervenes in scholarly conversations advocating the emergence of a “politics oflove” by highlighting black feminism’s long labor oflove-politics. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, bemoan a culturally narrow view oflove, and advocate the dawning of a political era marked by public love. They argue, “The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustro­phobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception oflove” JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

4 (Hardt and Negri 2004, 351). Yet their plea for a “generous and more unre­strained conception oflove” ignores the long history of black feminism’s love-politics, a politics marked by a broad activist conception oflove. My work asks how a consideration of black feminism’s love-politics might enable us to rethink the very contours of a “generous” love-politics. Second, this paper endeavors to center black feminism in affect theory’s intellectual genealogy. The “affective turn”4 in critical theory (Staiger, Cvetkovich, and Reynolds 2010, 5) has produced a rich body of scholarship invested in “public feelings,” in the ways that “global politics and history manifest themselves at the level oflived affective experience” (Cvetkovich 2007, 461). This work problematizes the boundaries between private and public, and draws intimate connections between the subjective and the social, between the emotional and the political. This scholarly tradition generally roots itselfin queer theory. Ann Cvetkovich’s description of the Public Feelings project-a group of scholars working at the intersections of academia, political action, and performance-is emblematic of this genealogical work. She notes: It’s impossible to imagine the Public Feelings project without the inspira­tion of queer work. Our interest in everyday life, in how global politics and history manifest themselves at the level oflived affective experience, is bolstered by the role that queer theory has played in calling attention to the integral role of sexuality within public life. Moreover, our interest in negative affects draws inspiration from the depathologizing work of queer studies, which has made it possible to document and revalue non-normative ways ofliving. (Cvetkovich 2007, 461) Cvetkovich goes on to argue that affect theory helps to make queer studies “intersectional” (462), and notes the importance of work emerging from African American Studies, particularly on the violent trauma of the Atlantic slave trade, to affect studies (465). Her work, then, gestures to the intimate relationship between affect studies and African American studies. My article continues the labor she begins: locating affect theory within black feminist studies. Finally, and most important, my paper reveals that black feminism has long engaged in political work that transcends-or, at the very least, circumvents-identity politics and its at-times problematic elisions and lapses into essentialism (Brown 1995). In a moment in which black MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

feminism is increasingly imagined as synonymous with intersectionality, and in which intersectionality is increasingly scrutinized, underscoring black feminism’s nonidentitarian political labor is particularly significant (Kwan 1997; Ehrenreich 2002; Puar 2005). Indeed, in this post-identitar­ian-or at least identity-skeptical-theoretical milieu, feminists regularly craft narratives about feminist history that relegate black feminism to the past (Lee 2000; Hemmings 2010) precisely because ofits imagined attach­ment to identity-work, an attachment that has been “vilified by feminists of many different persuasions” (Hekman 2000, 289). My investment in tracing black feminism’s non-identitarian work is animated by a commit­ment to underscoring the myriad political traditions that have long been part of black feminism, but that are often ignored because of the extent of intersectionality’s institutionalization. To be clear, I am not indicting intersectionality and celebrating love­politics; instead, I am interested in heeding Munoz’s call to “imagine a position or narrative of being and becoming that can resist the pull of identitarian models of relationality” (Mufioz 2006, 677), and in fore­grounding black feminist work that imagines “relationality” outside of the elisions ofidentity politics. Moreover, I am not suggesting that intersec­tional labor is inherently opposed to affective work, particularly in a moment in which intersectionality is practiced across the humanities and social sciences, and is inflected differently by each intersectionality practitioner. Instead, this paper is undergirded by the belief that the task of tracing black feminism’s multiple and heterogeneous political traditions is of the utmost importance in a moment in which black feminist labor is increasingly reduced to the status of a relic because ofits affiliation with intersectionality’s identitarian work. What do I mean when I describe intersectionality as an identitarian project? In this article, I argue that intersectionality is inextricably linked to the production and maintenance ofidentity categories. Its primary intervention, I argue, is to add complexity to existing identity categories, not to jettison identity categories altogether. As Robyn Wiegman notes, intersectionality “promises … a critical practice that gives difference to identity in order to discern identity’s multiple and proliferating intensities, inequities, and political agencies” (Wiegman 2012, 240). That is, the “promise” ofintersectionality, a theoretical innovation that is now regularly championed as “the most important theoretical contribution that JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 5 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

6 women’s studies … has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1775), is “particular­ity, specifically through the critical location attributed to both black women and black feminism, and in such a way that no configuration of identity as a constructed social relation of power and subordination is thought to be beyond its analytical reach” (Wiegman 2012, 240). lntersec­tionality’s investment in “particularity” is evident in its investment in using black women’s experience to problematize the rigid distinction between race and gender while maintaining a fundamental faith in both categories as meaningful, legible, and coherent. My reading ofintersectionality as an identitarian project underscores that it emerged both as juridical intervention and as a restoration of identity politics crafted in a moment-not unlike the one we inhabit now-when identity politics was increasingly critiqued for eliding intragroup difference. As a juridical intervention, intersectionality problematizes an antidiscrimination regime that always presumes the mutual exclusiveness of race and gender. By recognizing as cognizable (and legally actionable) only discrimination claims that are either race-based or gender-based, antidiscrimination law often, though not always, ignores black women’s injuries because: Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men …. [O]ften they experience double-discrimination-the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as Black women-not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black women. (Crenshaw 1989, 149) Kimberle Crenshaw’s intervention reveals that the architecture of antidis­crimination doctrine, with its insistent or formation-race-or-gender-ig­nores the “and” that captures many black women’s experiences. Cren­shaw’s juridical intervention, then, was not to abandon antidiscrimination law’s reliance on categories both for redressing injuries and for granting relief. Rather, she sought to reveal the injuries that antidiscrimination’s logic necessarily elides or ignores, and to show the necessity of judicial attention to injuries that occur “in the intersection” of race and gender. Ifintersectionality emerged as a legal intervention, it also sought to rehabilitate identity politics. Crenshaw’s point of departure is that identity politics “frequently conflates or ignores intragroup difference” (Crenshaw MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

1991, 1242), and that intersectionality can restore complexity to identity politics by insisting on a recognition that race and gender are heteroge­neous categories.S To say it another way, Crenshaw seeks to dismantle the logic that Barbara Smith, Gloria T. Hull, and Patricia Bell Scott called attention to with their aptly titled anthology All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982). Crenshaw notes, “the intersectional experiences of women of color marginalized in prevailing conceptions ofidentity politics does not require that we give up attempts to organize as communities of color. Rather, intersectionality provides a basis for reconceptualizing race as a coalition between men and women of color …. Recognizing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all” (Crenshaw 1991, 1299). For Crenshaw, intersectionality allows for identity­politics practitioners to perform identity work with a new attention to the heterogeneity of the categories they labor with. This is not to say that intersectionality neglects the contextuality and contingency ofidentity. At times, intersectionality has usefully analyzed how one’s experience of subjectivity or domination depends on location and moment. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s now-canonical work on the “metalanguage of race,” for example, recognizes that race “lends meaning” to gender, sexuality, and class in historically specific ways, effectively “impregnat[ing] the simplest meanings we take for granted. It makes hair ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ speech patterns ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect”‘ (Higginbotham 1992, 255). Higginbotham’s intervention reveals that race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect-to borrow Crenshaw’s vocabulary-in context-specific ways. My interest, though, is in how categories remain fixed, legible, and knowable, even as scholars attend to how context shifts our experiences of our selves and the structures of domination that constrain us. This paper begins by arguing that black feminism’s recurring interest in love can be interpreted as an advocacy of a particular kind of self-work, one that encourages the black feminist subject to transcend the self. The paper then asks how this politics so focused on a labor of the self might also be the vanguard of a promising form of nonidentitarian black feminist politics, one that we might fruitfully consider “postintersectional” (Kwan 1997; Hutchinson 2001; Chang and Culp 2002). Prefixes like post are always misleading temporally and politically; the labor of “postintersectionality,” JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 7 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

8 at least as I use the term, is not to suggest that intersectionality is no longer useful. Instead, I use “postintersectionality” as an invitation to problematize the interdisciplinary fetishization ofintersectionality’s “complexity” (Nash 2010; Wiegman 2012), as part of a larger endeavor to uncouple black feminism and intersectionality (Nash 20n), and as a move toward recognizing black feminism’s other political traditions. In suggest­ing that love-politics might help us think about black feminist politics outside of-or beyond-intersectionality, I hope to show that black feminism’s political tradition is rich and heterogeneous, that it has reflected and unleashed myriad “freedom dreams” (Kelley 2003). Self-Love as a Practice of Freedom In 1983, Alice Walker began In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens with a two-page definition of womanism (Walker 1983). In the years that followed its publication, Walker’s definition would become the subject of vibrant interdisciplinary debate as scholars routinely asked: what is womanism? How is it different from feminism, and from black feminism? What is the value of a new name for black feminism? Does womanism contain a viable and distinctive politics?6 Walker’s “feminist, Afrocentric, healing, embod­ied, and spiritual” (Razak 2006, 100) definition is at times quite specific­referring to “a black feminist or feminist of color”-and at times it defines womanism “associatively” by connecting the womanist subject to a set of practices and beliefs (Torfs 2007, 20). Though the definition moves from the specific to the general, from the material to the spiritual, it emphati­cally stakes out womanism as a political project separate from feminism. For Walker, womanism is distinct from mainstream feminism because it emerges from an imagined black woman’s standpoint, from the collec­tive and particular experience of black women’s gendered and racialized oppression. As such, womanism is imagined to “describe black women’s historical responses” to conditions of patriarchy and white dominance (Collins 1996, 16). Although Walker documents the social and historical context from which womanism emerges, she also differentiates woman­ism from mainstream feminism: if womanism is serious, grounded, universal, and purposeful, feminism is its opposite, somehow trivial, diminished, selective, silly. Where womanism is a vibrant, deep “purple,” feminism is a quiet, muted “lavender.” MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

Yet Walker’s definition does far more than distinguish a womanist practice from a mainstream feminist practice; it crafts an episteme from black women’s imagined experiences. Walker’s womanism amplifies the centrality oflove to black feminist politics. Although love had long been foundational to black feminist thought-from members of the black women’s club movement advocating the “power oflove” (Fannie Barrier Williams, quoted in Hendricks 1998, 19) to Audre Lorde’s claim that “what was native has been stolen from us, the love ofBlack women for each other” (Lorde 1984, 175)­Walker’s womanism is both one of the clearest black feminist attempts to stake out a particular black feminist politics and one of the clearest articula­tions oflove as black feminist politics. Love is central to the very definition of the womanist subject who feels love for other women (“loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually”), for humanity (“committed to survival and wholeness of entire people”), for the spiritual world (“Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit’) for celebration (“loves music. Loves dance …. Loves love and food and roundness”), and, most important, for her self. Scholars have long noted the importance oflove to womanism’s “ethical or ideal vision,” but have tended to celebrate certain loves that Walker champi­ons, and to downplay others (Collins 1996, 16). Walker’s universalistic appeal, her call for a love “that embraces everyone for the purposes of healing, change, and liberation,” is often a celebrated portion of womanism (Sanders et al. 2006, 152). In its broad humanistic appeal, the grounded, “serious” black womanist subject is “traditionally universalist.” Walker writes, “As in: ‘Mama, why are we brown, pink and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?’ Ans: ‘Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.”‘ Walker’s womanist subject is invested in the preservation (and representation) of”every color flower,” a gesture that shows that the political project of womanism is a radical investment in difference. For Walker, womanism’s universality is rooted in black women’s particular experiences. She notes, “Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors” (Bradley 1984, quoting Walker). The embrace of difference becomes a way of connecting womanism to black women’s imagined experiences and traditions.? Yet I am particularly interested in what I read as the most novel, under­analyzed, and transgressive portion ofWalker’s definition: her call for the JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 9 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

10 womanist subject’s unwavering self-love. Walker’s womanist subject “loves herself. Re9ardless.” The italicized “re9ardless” reveals that self-love is abso­lutely essential, that it persists in spite of everything else. Although Walker’s call to self-love is certainly an “artful advocacy of unconditional love that starts with our acceptance of ourselves as divinely and humanly lovable,” it is also far more (Sanders et al. 2006, 152). With “regardless” modifying “loves herself,” Walker suggests that self-love stands at the heart of the womanist project, and functions as a prerequisite for the other kinds of humanistic, sensual, erotic, and spiritual loves that the womanist embodies. Self-love, it seems, is the only love that must always exist; it is the love that enables the other loves Walker’s womanist embodies, engenders, and relishes. It is also the love that allows for the pleasures the womanist subject enjoys-the pleasure in the Folk, in the moon, in roundness, in music and dance. At its broadest, Walker’s plea for self-love articulates a relationship between self and politics, revealing that womanist politics requires a particular orientation of self, and that ethical management of the self might even preji9ure the political and creative projects that the womanist subject engages in. 8 But what does this arrangement of the selflook like? If, as Elizabeth Povinelli argues, love is a “political event,” what kind of “political event” is the womanist call for self-love? (Povinelli 2006, 175). For Walker, love is a strategy of orienting the self away from the frivolous, from the insignificant, and toward what she describes simply as the “seri­ous.” Walker asserts that the womanist subject wants “to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one. Interested in grown up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up …. Responsible. In charge. Serious.” The womanist subject is “grown,” she orients her self toward “grown up doings,” toward “know[ing] more,” toward a kind of social engagement that transcends the self. Being grown describes a self prepared to move beyond itself, a self that recognizes the limitations of selfhood, a self prepared for a certain kind of radical curiosity about the social world. The politics of womanism is an active working on the self, preparing it for the labor of social engagement, and for the task of advocating for the “survival and wholeness of entire people.” To put it another way: womanist politics requires subjects to work on their selves in order to transcend their selves; it is, then, a radical articulation of the political limitations of selfhood. Walker’s “serious” womanist subject orders her self to transcend her self; other black feminists have suggested that a commitment to love means MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

training the self in other ways, in ways that extend and challenge the self. For some black feminists, love-politics has been amplified as a call to orient the self toward difference, even in the face offear or anxiety. Lorde writes, “I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices” (Lorde 1984, n3). For Lorde, black feminist love-politics requires turning the self away from “terror and loathing,” from a fear of”any difference that lives there.” Indeed, Lorde implies that all subjects have a “deep place of knowledge” where fear abides; this is the place that has to be “touch[ed]” to realize the feminist goal of allowing “the personal as the political … to illuminate all our choices.” Though the labor of training the self might be taxing, the result is productive: black feminists can learn to “value recognition within each other’s eyes as well as within our own, and seek a balance between these visions” (173). Lorde, then, is making an implicit claim about the untrained self (that it “fears” difference) and urging her black feminist subjects to embrace a politics that names that fear, and actively labors to topple it. Like Lorde, Jordan treats love as a configuration of the self that labors to transcend the fear of difference. She asks, “Ifl am a Black feminist serious in undertaking self-love, it seems to me that I should gain and gain and gain in strength so that I may without fear be able and willing to love and respect, for example, women who are not feminists, not professionals, not as old or as young as I am, women who have neither job nor income, women who are not Black” (Jordan 2003, 271). For Jordan, the political act of “undertaking self-love” is the process of embracing difference, of becoming more expan­sive in one’s conception of political community. Both Lorde and Jordan suggest that the labor of crafting a collectivity constructed around difference requires a “serious … undertaking,” the task of working on-or perhaps even against-the self. The selfis then able to recognize the possibility of a politics organized not around the elisions (and illusions) of sameness, but around the vibrancy and complexity of difference. What Walker, Lorde, and Jordan share is a fundamental conception that love is a labor of actively reorienting the self, pushing the self to be config­ured in new ways that might be challenging or difficult. The three also explicitly resist rooting love-politics in romantic love, something that some contemporary hip-hop feminists have not been able to avoid. Hip-hop JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 11 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

12 feminist Joan Morgan, for example, imagines hip-hop feminism as a response to the peculiarly contemporary problem ofblack lovelessness.9 For Morgan, the tasks of hip-hop feminism are to treat hip-hop as a productive archive that records and amplifies black male pain, and to answer black male pain with an unwavering-though not self-destructive-love. Morgan argues, “As black women, we’ve got to do what any rational, survivalist­minded person would do after finding herselfin a relationship with some­one whose pain makes him abusive. We must continue to give up the love but from a distance that’s safe” (Morgan 1995, 155; italics in original). For Morgan, love is not a strategy of self-labor or a transformative practice of reorienting the self; instead, it is something that is “given up” for the preservation of an imagined black community. More than that, Morgan suggests that black women should “give up the love” to avoid loneliness. She ends her piece with a haunting warning: “At the end of the day, I’d prefer the love to the empty victory ofbeing right and alone anyway. Wouldn’t you?” (157). By evoking the specter of black female loneliness, Morgan reveals that her concept oflove is not about the transformation of self but instead about romance. Although Morgan’s call for love wears the guise of a radical politics, it is actually a departure from the long labor of black feminist love-politics consolidated during the “second wave.” In fact, black feminist love-politics practitioners rejected the notion that the political call to love is simply a call to love others. Although scholar-activists like Walker carved out space within their conception oflove-politics for loving others (Walker, for example, notes that the womanist might “love other women sexually and/ or nonsexually …. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually”), the political thrust of their notion oflove is that it is a labor of the self, not a romantic attachment to an Other. Part of what makes the work of second-wave love-practitioners so radical is a fundamental investment in love as a practice of self-work. Love and Politics/Loving Politics If black feminism’s commitment to love has been amplified as an interest in a transformative labor of the self, it has also manifested itself through an advocacy of the formation of affective political communities. My analysis focuses on two aspects oflove-politics that render it a distinctive, nonidenti­tarian political tradition: first, black feminist love-politics stakes out a radical MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

conception of the public sphere; second, black feminist love-politics maintains a new relationship to temporality generally, and to futurity specifically. In both regards, black feminist love-politics offers a sharp departure from the identitarian labor ofintersectionality revealing the existence-indeed, vibrancy-of multiple black feminist political traditions. My investment in locating a distinctive, affective, black feminist politics emerges, in part, in response to strong-and important-critiques of intersectionality amplified by a host of scholars, most notably Jasbir Puar. For Puar, intersectionality-at least as it is currently practiced-is too easily adapted into liberal regimes ofinclusivity, too easily works as a strategy of”difference management,” and too often gets taken up as “a tool of diversity management, and a mantra ofliberal multicultural-ism … [which] colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state-cen­sus, demography, racial profiling, surveillance-in that ‘difference’ is encased within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid” (Puar 2005, 128). In place ofintersectional­ity, Puar advocates theorizing “assemblage,” which “underscores feeling, tactility, ontology, affect, and information” (Puar 2007, 215). Puar treats assemblage as opposed to intersectionality (though later she would note they are not opposed but “rather frictional”); ifintersectionality can be a technology ofliberalism invested in inclusion and diversity, assemblage is invested in movement, futurity, and affect. Puar’s intervention is signifi­cant because, I argue, black feminist love-politics constitutes a black feminist tradition deeply invested in “feeling, tactility … [and] affect,” and in crafting political communities constituted by heterogeneity and variety, rather than homogeneity and fixity. So how might we read black feminist love-politics as performing precisely the kind of work that Puar suggests is opposed (or “frictional”) to intersectionality, a kind of affective politics that transcends the pitfalls of visibility, inclusion, and liberalism associ­ated with intersectionality? What is the affective political work that black feminism’s call to love performs, and how is it different from the identitar­ian work of intersectionality? First, black feminism’s love-politics offers a powerful reconception of the public sphere. My understanding of the public is indebted to Cvetkovich, who suggests that we keep the definition of”public culture” expansive to make space for “forms of affective life that have not solidified into institu­tions, organizations, or identities” (Cvetkovich 2003, 9), and to Lauren JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 13 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

14 Berlant and Michael Warner, who “support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to mem­ory, and sustained through collective activity” (Berlant and Warner 1998, 562). My understanding of”public culture” is also indebted to the interdisci­plinary work on the “black public sphere,” which treats an expansive archive-from “street talk and new musics, radio shows and church voices”-as part of a “wider sphere of critical practice and visionary politics” (Black Public Sphere Collective 1995, 3).10 I draw on this interdisciplinary body of scholarship to ask how black feminist love-politics engenders new publics, new forms of relationality, even if tenuous and fleeting, marked by forms of collective sentiment rather than by identity. If”communal affect” constitutes the “ties that bind utopian communi­ties,” then black feminism’s love-politics creates a public culture based on a collective “public feeling” oflove, or what Jordan calls “a steady-state deep caring and respect for every other human being, a love that can only derive from a secure and positive self-love” (Jordan 2003, 272). Love, then, is a practice of self, a labor of the self, that forms the basis of political communi­ties rooted in a radical ethic of care. In her “Where is the Love?” speech, Jordan asserts, “I am entering my soul into a struggle that will most cer­tainly transform the experience of all the peoples of the earth, as no other movement can, in fact, hope to claim: because the movement into self-love, self-respect, and self-determination is the movement now galvanizing the true, the unarguable majority of human beings everywhere” (270). Jordan’s claim-that she is participating in a struggle oflike-minded subjects, an “unarguable majority”-reveals that the public sphere she wants to create is one rooted in a shared commitment to “self-love, self-respect, and self-deter­mination.” What her “unarguable majority” shares is a commitment to a utopian vision, a commitment to “transform[ing] the experience of all the peoples of the earth.” Jordan’s political community is not based on the elisions ofidentity or a shared (imagined) sameness, but on a conception of the public rooted in affiliation and a shared set of feelings. It is this affilia­tion-however tenuous, however momentary, however fragmentary-that allows Jordan to shift from a minoritarian politics to a conversation about an “unarguable majority.” This is not, of course, to argue that Jordan does not recognize profound social inequalities and how they are allocated in ways that coincide with race, gender, class, and sexuality. Indeed, Jordan is one of the great theorists MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

of racial and gendered violence and their effects on the material, social, and psychic lives of those who are subjected to brutality. Instead, I am interested in how a radical ethic of care, rather than an assertion of shared injury (when, of course, the great insight of black feminist theory has been to showcase that injury is never really shared; identity-work always requires elisions), can form the basis of a public. By jettisoning identity as the foundation of her public sphere, Jordan’s plea for love transcends the “logic of pain” that Wendy Brown identifies as lying at the heart of many calls for identity politics (Brown 1995, 64). Brown argues that a conception ofinjury is central to identity politics because “politicized identities generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies, insofar as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as well as their exclusion from it, for their own perpetuity as identities” (408). But for Jordan, the public is not a site for articulating-or displaying-wounded black flesh; instead, it is the site where selves laboring to love-to orient their selves toward difference, toward transcending the self-join in a form of relationality. In so doing, black feminist love-politics “shed[s] new light on the possibilities of the public sphere,” imagining the public sphere as a site organized around a shared utopian vision rather than around a wounded, shared identity that demands recognition of the wound (Pough 2004, 166). Black feminist love-politics also reshapes the public sphere by offering a distinctive conception of remedy. Rather than looking to the state for remedy-as intersectional projects often do in their sometimes ambivalent call for doctrinal remedy”-black feminist love-politics asks how affective communities can themselves be a site of redress. This is not to say that naming injury isn’t important or that minoritarian subjects do not need the state to redress harm; instead, I read this turning away from the state as a critique of the state’s shortcomings, particularly its unwillingness to adequately name and redress black women’s injuries. By insistently looking away from the state, love-politics practitioners perform frustra­tion, revealing their understandings of the limitations of a regime that is not committed to redressing their harms. For example, Jordan asks, “Where is the love? How is my own lifework serving to end these tyrannies, these corrosions of sacred possibility? How do the strong, the powerful, treat children? How do we treat the aged among us? How do the strong and the powerful treat so-called minority members of the body politic? How do the powerful regard women? How do they treat us?” (Jordan 2003, 270). JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 15 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

16 Jordan’s queries suggest that although the “unarguable majority” cannot undo “tyranny,” the “majority” can critically analyze its role in the per­petuation ofinjustice, and labor to unlock itselffrom the hold of hege­mony. More than that, affective communities can consider the “sacred possibilities” they can unlock even under conditions of patriarchy and white-dominance. By insisting on analyzing both how the powerful “treat so-called minority members of the body politic” and how political com­munities can organize around unlocking the connections between subjects, Jordan argues that the labor of unlocking the “sacred possibility” among us comes from examining our own engagement with power, and locating ways to remove ourselves from its seductive hold. By focusing on how the public sphere can be a site of redressing the “spirit-murder” of racism and sexism-through conventional activism and through practices that reveal that “customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better” (Cvetkovich 2007, 460)-black feminist love-politics implicitly offers a critique of the state and its capacity (or incapacity) to ever adequately remedy injuries. Although love-politics reformulates public culture and organizes it around affect and new conceptions of redress, love-politics also orients public culture toward a different sense oftemporality, one that Jordan gestures to in her call for a recognition of”sacred possibility.” Recent years have been filled with interdisciplinary calls toward thinking about the possible, from Munoz’s conceptualization of queerness as an embrace of “futurity,” (Mufioz 2009) to Robin D. G. Kelley’s celebratory belief that “the map to a new world is in the imagination” (Kelley 2002, 2) to Wendy Brown’s plea to move toward “claims which, rather than dispensing blame for an unlivable present, inhabited the necessarily agonistic theater of discursively forging an alternative future” (Brown 1995, 408) to Kathi Weeks’s interest in “a horizon of utopian possibility” (Weeks 20n, 30). Indeed, critical theory’s recent preoccupation with temporality-particularly queer theory’s interest in conceptualizing queerness as a critique of normative time-has led some scholars to champion a “politics of the open end” (Puar 2007, 215). Black feminist love-politics, though, has long been invested in the “open end,” in radical possibility, orienting itself toward a yet-unknown future. Black feminist love-politics constantly evokes what “has yet to be known, seen, or heard” (Puar 2007, 216) or what Kelley calls the labor of”talk[ing] MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

openly of revolution and dream[ing] of a new society, sometimes creating cultural works that enable communities to envision what’s possible with collective action, personal self transformation, and will” (Kelley 2002, 7). To put it another way, black feminist love-politics is staunchly utopian; rather than the presentism of a visibility politics like intersectionality, which calls for legibility and recognition in “the here and now,” black feminist love-politics, like Munoz’s reading of queerness, chooses “the future” as its “domain” (Mufioz 2009, 1). The traces of the what-might-be are present in Lorde’s rumination on “the future of our earth” that “may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference” (Lorde 1984, 123) and in her description of the virtues of anger, where she notes “we are moving on. With or without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for destruction” (123). Lorde’s project is, at its simplest, world-making, it is “moving on” toward a future that is not yet here but is unfolding; her interest is in what Mufioz would call the “could.” It is a project strategically disinvested in remedying the present (or the possibility that the present could be remedied), and wholeheartedly invested in the future as a locus of possibility. This orientation toward the “could” echoes what Mufioz terms “feeling revolutionary,” a sentiment he describes as a “feeling that our current situation is not enough, that something is indeed missing and we cannot live without it. Feeling revolutionary opens up the space to imagine a collective escape, an exodus, a ‘going-off script’ together …. Practicing educated hope is the enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing the way things ou,ght to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be” (Mufioz and Duggan 2009, 278). It is the interest in “collective escape,” in the visionary dreaming about “going off script” that distinguishes black feminist love-politics’ utopian impulse from the presentism ofidentitarian politics like intersectionality. In describing intersectionality as present-oriented, I do not mean to deny intersectionality’s commitment to a just social world, which is, of course, a visionary project, or to discount its normative project: reconfiguring legal doctrine, insisting on the inherent value of black women’s experiences, JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 17 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

18 reformulating feminist and antiracist theory. What I mean, though, is that intersectionality relies on an attachment-perhaps even a cruel attach­ment12-to the present in two ways: first, it insists that redress can be crafted within the con.fines of the social moment as it now exists. Legal doctrine can be reformed to make cognizable race-and-gender-based discrimination claims; feminism can be recrafted to “include” black women’s experiences; antira­cist work can be transformed to take seriously black women’s injuries. Second, intersectionality’s very conception ofidentity, which treats race and gender as fixed, coherent, and legible, “presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or, perhaps more accurately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever” (Puar 2005, 216). Although intersection­ality fixes identity, presuming that race and gender are stable categories that interact in particular and knowable ways, it also aspires to make visible those identities and their intersections in the “here-and-now.” Black feminist love-politics suspends this attachment to the present, recognizing that changing the grammar of our contemporary political moment will not remove us from the script that is always already in place. Instead, love-politics practitioners dream of a yet unwritten future; they imagine a world ordered by love, by a radical embrace of difference, by a set of subjects who work on/against themselves to work for each other. This dreaming, of course, does not suspend labor; black feminist love-politics practitioners have always been attached to the idea that the radical future requires certain kinds of very hard work, pushing beyond our investments in selfhood and sameness, and reaching toward collectivities and possi­bilities. Nor does this vision neglect the host of ways that power and structures of domination work on and against bodies in quotidian and spectacular ways. It is a critical response to the violence of the ordinary and the persistence ofinequality that insists on a politics of the visionary. Ultimately, black feminist love-politics proposes a departure from the identitarian political work that is so often associated with black feminism. Where proto-intersectional groups like the Combahee River Collective insisted that “we believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity” (Combahee River Collective 1983, 16), a sentiment that Crenshaw would share a decade later when she coined the term “intersectionality,” black feminist love-politics responds with its own “radical politics.” Black feminist love-politics crafts a political community that eschews the wounded subject that lies at the MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

heart ofidentity politics. In its place, it crafts a collectivity marked by “communal affect,” a utopian, visionary, future-oriented community held together by affiliation and “public feeling” rather than an imagined-or enforced-sameness. Thinking Love, Doing Love Kelley argues, “Freedom and love may be the most revolutionary ideas available to us, and yet as intellectuals, we have failed miserably to grapple with their political and analytical importance” (Kelley 2002, u-12). My paper takes up Kelley’s challenge and examines how black feminists have treated love as a “revolutionary idea.” Indeed, this paper has endeavored to show that black feminism’s long tradition oflove-politics-particularly as it was consolidated during the “second wave”-has effectively amplified a “material and political” conception oflove (Hardt and Negri 2004, 352). For the scholar-activists at the center of my analysis-Alice Walker, June Jordan, Audre Lorde-love acted as a doing, a call for a labor of the self, an appeal for transcending the self, a strategy for remaking the public sphere, a plea to unleash the radical imagination, and a critique of the state’s blindness to the violence it inflicts and enables. Love, of course, is not wholly unproblematic political terrain: it can be deployed to shore up heteronormativity, to re-energize dominant narra­tives of romance, and to advance claims to power. Sara Ahmed’s work, for example, invites scholars to examine how the claim to be acting in or through love can enable the exertion of particular kinds of power. She asks, “How has politics become a struggle over who has the right to name themselves as acting out oflove? What does it mean to stand for love by standing alongside some others and against other others?” (Ahmed 2003). Her work reveals that the “language oflove” operates, at least at times, by concealing animus and renaming it love. Though it is important to consider how claims to acting in love are often claims to power as well, this paper celebrates black feminist love-politics as producing a number of critical shifts: first, studying black feminism’s long labor oflove-politics reveals an under-studied black feminist political tradition, and underscores the importance of not reducing black feminist work exclusively to intersectional work. In so doing, the paper aspires to counter a larger trend in feminist theory to relegate black feminism to the JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 19 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

20 category offeminisms-past, feminisms problematically (and anachronisti­cally) attached to identity. Second, reading black feminism’s long-standing interest in affect exposes that the roots of the “affective turn” are far more varied than often theorized. Although affect theory and queer theory are inextricably intertwined, the labor of constructing political communities around “public feelings” and “communal affect” has been a black feminist investment for decades. Finally, reading black feminism’s love-politics takes up the challenge that Hardt and Negri advocate when they champion a “politics oflove.” Indeed, black feminism’s visionary love-politics effectively and hopefully uses a refrain like “where is the love?” and transforms it from a personal question about romantic love into a political call for transcending the self and transforming the public sphere. NOTES Thanks to Amber Musser and Libby Anker for thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts, and to Amin Ahmad, always. 1. See Berlant and Hardt 20n. 2. I use the term “second-wave black feminism” with analytical suspicion, mindful of the host of critiques of wave metaphors. See, for example, Springer 2002; Henry 2004; Snyder 2008. 3. This is not to say that all second-wave black feminist politics was love-politics; indeed, second-wave black politics was a moment that was also marked by a proliferation ofidentity politics. Rather, I am interested in how calls for love-politics were amplified and organized in this moment. 4. Jasbir Puar parses the “affective turn” more finely, suggesting that we might think ofit in two particular strains; the first are a set of scholars “who deploy affect as a particular reflection of or attachment to ‘structures of being’ or feeling that otherwise remains unarticulateable. In many cases affect in these works is situated in a continuum or becomes interchangeable with emotion, feeling, expressive sentiment.” The other is, she argues, part of a “Deleuzian frame whereby affect is a physiological and biological phenomenon, signaling why bodily matter matters, what escapes or remains outside of the discursively structured and thus commodity forms of emotion, of feeling” (Puar 2007, 207). 5. Crenshaw echoes this in her article “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law” when she asserts, “History has shown that the most valuable political asset of the Black community has been its ability to assert a collective identity and to name this collective political reality” (Crenshaw 1988, 1336). 6. For examples of some of this debate, see Collins 1996, 9-17; Coleman 2006, 85-89; and Phillips 2006. MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

7. Less celebrated, and less analyzed, is Walker’s interest in black women’s love for each other-an imagined spiritual and sexual connection between black women. Although other scholar-activists have theorized psychic and erotic connections between women, including Adrienne Rich’s lesbian continuum and Audre Lorde’s plea for resurrecting and celebrating the erotic, Walker’s explicit investment in the sexual and nonsexual love between women is explicitly racialized. Although Walker “gives a primacy to the sexual love between women,” she also “gives a primacy” to the sexual love between black women (Coleman 2006, 86). And yet the sexual love portion ofWalker’s womanism continues to be under-theorized. 8. Walker’s definition gestures to much earlier philosophical traditions, including Plato’s Republic, which argues that the soul-consisting of rational, appetitive, and spirited portions-has to be correctly ordered for an individual to be oriented toward justice (Plato 1992). The just subject, according to Plato, is the one governed by rationality; the rational self tempers both the appetitive and spirited facets of the self, ensuring that the selfis governed fairly. It is only when the self is fully balanced-governed by rationality-that it can act virtuously. 9. Sociologist Orlando Patterson echoes these claims, arguing “the simple, sad truth is that Afro-Americans are today the loneliest of all Americans-lonely and isolated as a group; lonely and isolated in their neighborhoods, through which they are often too terrified to walk; lonely as households headed by women sick and tired of being ‘the strong black woman’; lonely as single men fearful of commitment; lonely as single women wary of a ‘love and trouble’ tradition that has always been more trouble than love” (Patterson 1998, xii). 10. My interest in publics is informed by work like Houston Baker’s, which is critical ofJiirgen Habermas’s work on the “bourgeois public sphere.” Accord­ing to Baker, “Habermas [is] eager to enter a time machine and return to the good old days ofLondon coffee houses and literary societies: things long ago and far away” (Baker 1995, 11). 11. Intersectionality practitioners, although invested in seeking redress from the state in the present, also noted that state redress was not their ultimate goal. Crenshaw writes, “the civil rights constituency cannot afford to view antidis­crimination doctrine as a permanent pronouncement of society’s commitment to ending racial subordination. Rather, antidiscrimination law represents an ongoing ideological struggle in which the occasional winners harbor the moral, coercive, consensual power oflaw. Nonetheless, the victories it offers can be ephemeral and the risks of engagement substantial” (Crenshaw 1988, 1335). 12. Here I am referencing Berlant 2011. JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 21 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

22 WORKS CITED: Ahmed, Sara. 2003. “In the Name of Love.” Borderlands E-Journal 2, no. 3. http:// www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no3_2oo3/ahmed_love.htm (accessed December 4, 2012). –. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Baker, Houston A. 1995. “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere.” In The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, edited by the Black Public Sphere Collective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berlant, Lauren. 20n. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Hardt. 20n. “No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt.” Amour No. 18 http:// nomorepotlucks.org/article/amour-no-18/no-one-sovereign-love-conversation­between-lauren-berlant-and-michael-hardt (accessed August 25, 2012). Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. 1998. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2: 547-66. Black Public Sphere Collective. 1995. The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bradley, David. 1984. “Novelist Alice Walker Telling the Black Woman’s Story.” New York Times. January 8. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chang, Jerome, and Robert Culp. 2002. “After Intersectionality.” University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review 71: 485-91. Coleman, Monica. 2006. “Must I be a Womanist?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 1: 85-96. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1996. “What’s In a Name: Womanism, Black Feminism and Beyond.” Black Scholar 26, no. 1: 9-17. —. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Combahee River Collective. 1983. In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table Press. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1988. “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law.” Harvard Law Review 101, no. 7: 1331-87. —. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Law Forum: 139-68. –. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 46, no. 3: 1241-99. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. 2007. “Public Feelings.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3: 459-68. MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

Ehrenreich, Nancy. 2002. “Subordination and Symbiosis: Mechanisms of Mutual Support between Subordinating Systems.” University of Missouri Kansas City Law Review 71: 252-310. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Hekman, Susan. 2000. “Beyond Identity: Feminism, Identity, and Identity Politics.” Feminist Theory 1, no. 3: 289-308. Hemmings, Clare. 2010. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hendricks, Wanda. 1998. Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Henry, Astrid. 2004. Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1992. “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguge of Race.” Signs 17, no. 2: 251-74. hooks, bell. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. 1982. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. New York: Feminist Press. Hutchinson, Darren L. 2001. “Identity Crisis: ‘lntersectionality,’ ‘Multidimension­ality,’ and the Development of an Adequate Theory of Subordination.” Michigan Journal of Race and the Law 6, no. 2: 285-317. Jordan, June. 2003. Some of Us Did Not Die. New York: Basic Books. Kelley, Robin D. G. 2003. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press. Kwan, Peter. 1997. “Intersections ofRace, Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories.” Hastings Law Journal 48: 1257-92. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Lee, Rachel. 2000. “Notes from the (non)Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color.” Meridians 1, no. 1: 85-109. McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity oflntersectionality.” Signs: Journal ofWomen in Culture and Society 30, no. 3: 1771-1800. Morgan, Joan. 1995. “Fly-Girls, Bitches, and Hoes: Notes of A Hip-Hop Feminist.” Social Text 45: 151-57. Mufioz, Jose. 2006. “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativ­ity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” Signs 31, no. 3: 675-88. –. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Mufioz, Jose, and Lisa Duggan. 2009. “Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue.” Women & Performance: AJournal ofFeministTheory 19, no. 2: 275-83. JENNIFER C. NASH • PRACTICING LOVE 23 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

24 Nash, Jennifer C. 2010. “On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor.” Scholar & Feminist Online. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/nash_o1.htm (accessed December n, 2012) –. 20n. “‘Hometruths’ on Intersectionality.” Yale Journal ofLaw and Feminism 23, no. 2: 445-70. Patterson, Orlando. 1998. Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Phillips, Layli. 2006. “Womanism on its Own.” In The Womanist Reader: The First Quarter Century ofWomanistThou.’)ht, edited by Layli Phillips. New York: Routledge. Plato. (380 BCE) 1992. Republic. Indianapolis: Hackett. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2006. Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealo.’)y, and Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pough, Gwendolyn D. 2003. “Do The Ladies Run This? Some Thoughts on Hip Hop Feminism.” In Catchin.£1 a Wave: Reclaimin.’) Feminism for the 21″ Century, edited by Rory Dicker and Alison Peipmeier. Boston: Northeastern University Press. –. 2004. Check it While I Wreck It : Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Puar, Jasbir. 2005. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 23, nos. 3-4: 121-39. —. 2007. Terrorist Assembla.’)es: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Razak, Arisika. 2006. “Response.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Reli.’)ion 22, no. 1: 99-107. Sanders, Cheryl, et al. 2006. “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective.” In The Womanist Reader: The First Quarter Century ofWomanist Thou.’)ht , edited by Layli Phillips. New York: Routledge. Shange, Ntozake. 1977. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow is Enuf A Choreopoem. New York: MacMillan. Snyder, R. Claire. 2008. “What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Si.’)ns 34, no. 1: 175-96. Springer, Kimberly. 2002. “Third Wave Black Feminism?” Si.’)ns 27, no. 4: 1059-82. Staiger, Janet, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds. 2010. “Introduction: Political Emotions and Public Feelings.” In Political Emotions, edited by Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds. New York: Routledge. Torfs, Elisabeth. 2007. “Alice Walker’s Womanism: Theory and Practice” (M.A. Thesis, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace. Weeks, Kathi. 20n. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Ima.’)inaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MERIDIANS 11:2 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/article-pdf/11/2/1/1566496/1nash.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI user on 09 July 2023

“What Now?”: The Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and DifferenceAuthor(s): Manoucheka CelesteSource: Black Camera, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2018), pp. 110-131Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/blackcamera.9.2.08 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/blackcamera.9.2.08?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsIndiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Black CameraThis content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste, “Close-Up: Black Images Matter: “What Now?”: The Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 9, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 110–131, doi: 10.2979/blackcamera.9.2.08Close-Up: Black Images Matter “What Now?”: The Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and DifferenceManoucheka CelesteAbstractIn her hit song Rihanna belts out, “And I just wanna scream, What Now? I just can’t figure it out.” She announces the oncoming scream that expresses frustration and anguish; lamenting her precarity. Many diasporic black women similarly scream in this “post” moment and throughout history as we navigate a precarious relationship with the state and society. I pursue the anguish-filled question of “what now” via the trope I call the wailing black woman to analyze the representational trajectory of black mothers mourning publically to bring attention to injustices and black women’s public grief in reality television show The First 48. This article responds to sociologist Herman Gray’s call for critical scholars to consider the affective labor of media images, or what he describes as the “gatherings of sentiment, feelings, and intensities around media images and coverage of people of color.”1 Thus, I ask: 1) How does the deployment of wailing black women relate to hegemonic narratives of black death, criminality, and citizenship? and 2) What are potential interventions of her affective labor? I consider the affective labor of black women’s presence both as a cautionary tale on The First 48 and as a potential oppositional figure on the show and in other spheres.In her hit song Rhianna belts out, “And I just wanna scream, What now? I just can’t figure it out.” She announces the oncoming shout that expresses anguish and frustration; lamenting her precarity. Many diasporic black women similarly scream or wail in this contemporary moment2 as we navigate our precarious relationships with the state and society at large. Black women wail throughout history. In this paper, I explore media repre-sentations of black women’s public grief, specifically in a reality television show, The First 48, via the trope I call “the wailing black woman.”A criminal procedure themed reality television show, The First 48 follows law enforcement personnel (detectives) for the first forty-eight hours of a homicide case as they try to solve it. The theme is complete with This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference111a ticking clock on the screen to count down the time. Each episode features one or two cases from a handful of cities including Memphis, Miami, and Cincinnati, from the perspective of the law enforcement personnel. Produced by Kirkstall Road Entertainment, the cable show on A&E also offers tidbits about the law enforcement personnel, from how long they have been in the police force to how they like their coffee, their fashion choices, and their spousal responses to their jobs. The First 48 stands out as one of the few sites in the contemporary television landscape where working class, poor, marginalized communities are present. Incidentally the show marks this presence with themes of criminality, pathology, and death. Notably, the show began filming in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2013, entering an already contested site where mainstream news media years earlier during hurricane coverage fortified tropes linking blackness to poverty with exces-sive coverage of black death.3 The First 48’s presence eight years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina further highlights media’s linking of crim-inality to blackness and poverty.I enter this conversation through the representational trajectory of women, mothers, and black mothers who mourn publically, bring attention to injustices, and participate in community healing. This article responds to sociologist Herman Gray’s call for critical scholars to consider the affective labor of media images, or what he describes as the “gatherings of sentiment, feelings, and intensities around media images and coverage of people of color.”4 Thus, I ask: 1) How does the deployment of wailing black women relate to hegemonic narratives of black death, criminality, and citizenship? 2) What are potential interventions of her affective labor? I consider the affective labor of black women’s presence both as a cautionary tale on The First 48 and as a potential oppositional figure on the show versus in other spheres.My identification of this figure began with my watching this show as a casual viewer noticing her presence, much like other tropes of black women on reality television. The wailing black woman seemed familiar, and that familiarity is partially due to the increasing number of black women shown in pain on television, news, and social media. My analysis of The First 48 and the figure of the wailing black woman is not an attempt to measure the veracity of the character or identify stereotypes in the show. Instead, I am inter-ested in why this figure is familiar and what ideological, political, economic, and citizenship work her presence does. Informed by cultural studies meth-odology, I conduct textual analysis of The First 48 to discuss representa-tions of black women mourning. This analysis includes the twenty-three episodes of season seven, which marks the middle of the show’s fourteen-season run as of 2015. In this textual analysis I pay attention to the ways in which black women enter stories on The First 48, often as distant characters This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

112 BLACK CAMERA 9:2who appear at the beginning and/or end of the show. I offer a reading of her counterhegemonic potential, where her presence also requires us to ques-tion the cause of her agony, i.e. the “New Jim Crow”5 justice system, racial, economic, and educational injustices that leave her in pain, without her father, her son, or her partner.The wailing black woman, does not belong to The First 48, but appears across the media scape, from local to international news, on television, in movies and social media. Before discussing her presence in a particular media text, I highlight the ubiquitous nature of black death on television and social media, and black death presented as entertainment. The analysis builds on the histories about black women, and more broadly, women mourning. I discuss the presence of black women in historical and contem-porary news coverage of the death of young black people. I consider the ways that her wailing serves as a liberatory and activist act, a nuance that is over-looked in this and similar shows where black women are represented merely as victims or as irrational subjects being controlled by their emotions. Thus, I argue that despite the ways The First 48 mitigates the liberatory potential of the wailing black woman due its nature as a serial show with a short time and its framing of black women as victims, the wailing black woman outside of this show, specifically those mothers from highly publicized cases like Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, intervene with a different level of agency and effectiveness.The First 48: The Clock TicksMore than a decade since its debut, The First 48 remains a popular cable reality-TV show, on A&E. The show’s long run, its status as the highest rated nonfiction justice series on cable, and its having more than 2.3 million viewers on a channel that reaches more than 100 million subscribers indicate its popularity.6 Although presented as a documentary, The First 48 follows a stringent formula as it repeatedly tells the story of death, crime, and punish-ment, and aligns itself within the entertainment law and order genre (police procedural).7 The First 48 joined an already well-established genre that includes long running and popular shows. This includes COPS, first aired in 1989, the oldest contemporary iterations of reality television show. It also includes the fictional Law & Order, which ended after twenty years—the longest-running crime drama on prime-time television—as well as a number of similar shows such as Dragnet, CSI and NCIS franchises.Each episode of The First 48 begins with a crime, always a homicide. Also, each episode of The First 48 typically begins with detectives getting a call or the replay of 911 calls reporting an incident. The detectives arrive at the This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference113scene during which viewers get a glimpse of the crime scene and the victims of the homicide. At times the show blurs the entire body, while in others it blurs the face of the deceased. Despite the occasional blurring, The First 48 puts the dead black body on display as a part of its regular sequence. In most episodes, law enforcement notifies families and cameras record their imme-diate reactions. From there, law enforcement personnel look for suspects. The episode often ends with arrests, with the law enforcement personnel reflecting on the incident; or occasionally they are still in search of a suspect. The First 48 and its popularity demonstrate how black death and black pain are entertaining and profitable, perhaps even pleasurable.The demographics of the people who appear on this show, particularly as homicide victims, are salient in assessing the potential impact of the show. The show films in a handful of major cities. This season included the homi-cide of 27 adults, one teenager, and four children. Of the 27 adults, 13 are black men. The teenager is a black male and the four children are black. Black people accounted for 21 of the 32 (65 percent) homicides. Additionally, people of color accounted for 84 percent, 26 of 32, of the people killed in just one season. This includes five Latino men, three black women, and one Asian man. Much like the demographics of the prison population, the over-representation of people of color dying by homicide is staggering on this show. The show lacks geographic diversity (cities, non-cities) and does not offer perspective for who they represent as victim and suspect. According to the FBI Crime in the US 2015 report, “Of the murder victims for whom race was known, 53.1 percent were Black or African American, 44.2 percent were White, and 2.8 percent were of other races.”8 Most homicides are intraracial and are usually committed by people who know the victims. Additionally, homicide rates are higher in urban areas (cities) where there is a higher of concentration of people in a given space, than in suburban neighborhoods. The show primarily focuses on black people and on a handful of cities without giving any background into factors that impact life chances and experience of the population they record. On The First 48, what the people have in common, with few exceptions, is that they live in relatively poor communi-ties, some described in the show as “violent” or dangerous parts of town. In fact, the show often features panoramic views of the neighborhoods to show poverty and urban decay.In most episodes, the family notifications while brief, offer crucial moments of introduction to the victims and to wailing black women. The figure appears on this show with regularity, if not predictability. The women are mothers, girlfriends, wives, partners, and they are all relatively young. Again, the people killed are overwhelmingly young, black and male, which reflects recent news coverage and statistics about the death of young black men. The wailing black woman’s presence serves a few functions. Primarily This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023u, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

114 BLACK CAMERA 9:2the episodes frame her as a part of the problem, even when she is not specifically tied to a case. She is required to account for the victim, but also held responsible for suspects’ whereabouts, or threatened by law enforce-ment if she does not cooperate in an investigation. So, in either case, she is implicated for those who are suspects, her delinquent children,9 partner, family member doing the wrong thing or for victims for their being at the wrong place.Reality TV and Black Death. . . we take idea of media as a viable site through which to track the everyday materiality of race where the affective experience race and racism operate through the quotidian “practices” of inequality.10One consistent theme that runs throughout the episodes of The First 48 is the continual presence of murdered black bodies. Corpses, blurred or otherwise bloodied body parts, in body bags appear with high frequency, much in the way that they appear on scripted crime dramas like Law & Order or CSI. For example, in episode 13 (“Frenzy/Hard Truth”), the recently killed man is shown lying on the street, with only his head blurred. As I have argued else-where, these types of images reserve dignity in death for some, namely those we would not dare show dead or dying.11 The number of black people shown dead on the streets underscores perceptions about the value about black lives; where black bodies are shown literally strewn on the streets and law enforce-ment come clean them up. This “habitual repetition,” as Gray argues, “works to reinforce the normative ideals of white middle class circumstance rather than produce points of identification and empathy.”12 The First 48 narratives instead center around the law enforcement personnel who have to deal with these deaths.Gray’s call for scholars to account for “matters of concern”–and “trace exactly how media organize and circulate powerfully affective means of gath-ering and assembling sentiment, attachment, and (dis)identification to public policies, bodies, histories, and cultures”13 is instructive here and encourages scholars’ asking about the relationship between the growth of the prison industrial complex and consistent stream of media representations of the “prison population.” Media does the work of legitimizing the system,14 while cultivating a feeling of distance or disidentification for viewers who can rest knowing they are safe in their homes away from those who are in Locked Up, or in some iteration of these shows. The spectacle of otherness exacerbates conditions for people who are legally, socially, and economically deemed non-citizens or exist on the fringes.15This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference115There exists a growing body of critical scholarship on black death that predates the reality-TV genre. It ranges from fiction to feminist theory to theorization on necropolitics.16 Author James Baldwin regularly wrote black death into his literary works.17 Feminist scholar Grace K. Hong connects Baldwin to black feminist theory in writing about the death of prominent black feminist scholars in the neoliberal university.18 Hong follows Baldwin’s trajectory in evoking his call to “bring out your dead,” to identify the circum-stances of their death and as a form of critique. Hong writes:To bring out your dead is to remember what must be forgotten, to find the “evidence of things not seen”: that the notion of American equality in the pro-tection of life is a fallacy, that life is not protected if you are raced and gendered, and that you are raced and gendered if your life is not protected. To bring out your dead is to say that these deaths are not unimportant or forgotten, or, worse, coincidental. It is to say that these deaths are systemic, structural. To bring out your dead is not a memorial, but a challenge, not an act of grief, but of defiance, not a register of mortality and decline, but of the possibility of struggle and survival. . . .19Baldwin’s and Hong’s interventions highlight the important political role of mourners, those who call out and remember. Mourning and identifying systemic and structural deaths, serve as forms of protest.Baldwin and Hong also point to the connections between these deaths, the state and capital. The rise of the popularity of reality TV, specifically class and color coded “crime and punishment” themed TV shows, such Cops and The First 48, occurred in parallel to the televised normalization of black death and blackness as criminal.20 For example, nightly news featured the L.A. riots prominently, live, and on repeat. Viewers can see black death in the count-less released recordings on social media and on broadcast news, sometimes with a warning of disturbing footage.The increasing number of shows in this genre is in spite of a twenty-five-year decline in reported crime statistics.21 The increase also happens in parallel with the effects of 1980s social policy from policing, drug laws, and immigration policies that exponentially increased the number of people of color in the prison industrial complex. These numbers are disproportionate to the makeup of the country’s populations, with disparities in how people are charged, and application of laws affecting people of color more adversely.22 Immigrants (men, women, children), and women of color make up the fastest growing demographic of the prison industrial complex.23 “Crime and punish-ment”–themed shows gain popularity as more and more people of color and poor white people are absorbed by the prison system, an increasingly private enterprise under neoliberalism.This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

116 BLACK CAMERA 9:2Political and economic forces are also linked to images of black women in media and in the popular imagination. These controlling images of U.S. black women as jezebels, matriarchs, welfare queens, and mammies, used to justify oppression and exploitation prevailed in the U.S. imaginary and popular culture before and after this pseudo social science of the “Moynihan Report.”24 The publishing of the report officially titled, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action claimed the black family does not socialize like white families and frames black families as antisocial and delinquent. The report, which has since been repeatedly challenged, identifies black women as the source of all that ails U.S. society, the family, the black family by not adhering to racialized gender norms—solidified the controlling images of black women as emasculating, sexuality excessive, and bad mothers. Today controlling images of black women are repackaged with a facade of prog-ress.25 For example, the presence of African American detectives on The First 48, including women, does not negate the fact that they work for the state. It is therefore essential to analyze representations of black women in these kinds of media texts and ask questions such as: What stories do these shows tell about black families and black women? Is she represented as the cause of crimes or deaths, directly or indirectly? Does her presence on the show warn others of the consequences of threatening white patri-archy? In other words, is this show a more entertaining version of the Moynihan Report?Surveillance and ConsentThe First 48 shares a function with other reality television shows that take on governmental, policy, and policing functions, such as Judge Judy.26 Laurie Ouellette marks this as a neoliberal turn in saying, “Reality program-ming is one site where neoliberal approaches to citizenship have in fact mate-rialized on television.”27 She adds that with shows such as Big Brother and Survivor, “neoliberal constructions of ‘good citizenship’ have cut across much popular reality television.”28 The First 48 and similar shows also contribute to neoliberal the constructions of “bad citizenship,” as many of the people featured on the show are removed from society by death, imprisonment, or isolated by poverty.James Hay argues that such programming is a means of state control, a mechanism for governing at a distance,29 by inspiring self-disciplining.30 Popular television may be the ideal means disseminating “cultural govern-mentality.”31 And as Anna McCarthy writes, “to see reality television as merely trivial entertainment is to avoid recognizing the degree to which This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference117the genre is preoccupied with the government of the self, and how, in that capacity, it demarcates a zone for the production of everyday discourses of citizenship.”32 The First 48, like Judge Judy, presents people as “self-made victims who create their own misfortune by making the ‘wrong’ choices and failing to manage their lives properly.”33 Ouellette adds that it is the “imagined viewer” who benefits as they learn from other people’s failings or mistakes. Presenting consequences experienced by those deemed as failing to adhere to norms reinforces those norms. In the case of The First 48, middle-class white-ness eludes many of the subjects, thus their suffering reinforces middle-class whiteness as the norm or as an identity to achieve to avoid the suffering seen on TV. And while audience members decode the program in a myriad of ways, the cautionary tale is one of them.The complex nature of criminal law with its presumption of innocence as a human rights principle, impact how the show collects images and audio of suspects, victims, and families for these episodes. The videography on The First 48 incorporates a variety of technologies, electronic and legal to obtain their footage. First, they work with the consent of cities and their cor-responding police departments.34 Second, they navigate privacy laws across varying states. Generally, journalists and other media professionals can record in public spaces, and can record whatever is in public view. Although it is unclear if people sign consent forms that allow the show to air what occurs in private spaces, some of this show’s footage comes from public spaces or what is in public view.Unlike Big Brother, The Real Housewives franchise or similar lifestyle reality shows, the people who appear on The First 48 do not have lucra-tive contracts that accompany giving consent to record. In some cases, it is not clear that participants fully consent to recordings on the show. This is evident when the show blurs people’s faces and changes their voices, and record from the street, or generally in or from public domain. Some of the filming occurs through cracks of doors and/or windows, which heightens this sense of invasion of privacy. In one episode, law enforcement personnel tell the family of a suspect they will get no sleep and they will keep coming back. The scene begins with the officer ordering the family members to “come out” of the house. This order, to which they comply, brings the family, two women and one pre-teenage girl, to their porch in their sleeping clothes, and in full view of the camera. In not following this order, they risk being penalized or escalated violence by law enforcement personnel, but following the order brought them out in public where they can be filmed. In another shot, the camera shows a blurred figure, the mother, through a window, wearing baby blue pajamas in the dark. The voyeuristic nature of this moment and of similar scenes throughout the show display the accessibility of private This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

118 BLACK CAMERA 9:2aspects of particular groups of people’s lives. This voyeurism is justified by police activities in the name of justice. But it also serves to substantiate state harassment and the violation of the right to privacy, marking this group as non-citizens and “other.” Through door and window cracks, The First 48 offers unprecedented views of other people’s lives, available with paid cable subscriptions.In addition to the question of consent to be video recorded, people on this show in some instances experience double surveillance. For example, some episodes show records law enforcement personnel watching victims, witnesses, and suspects on screens as they are being recorded and watched. Cameras capture people as they wail, mourn, and reflect on the last moment of their loved ones’ lives. These moments on The First 48, like some exercises on Judge Judy, “mirrors and extends the surveillance of the poor and working class carried out by welfare offices, unemployment centers, and other social services.”35 The double surveillance also doubles the distance between the show’s subjects and viewers. It has the potential to create an illusion of safety for the viewer; they do not have to worry about surveilling other people who are already under surveillance.The people on the show, with the exception of law enforcement per-sonnel, implicitly and explicitly carry the blame for the deaths, and the kill-ings. For example, a black male lieutenant speaks to a young black man, who was falsely accused of a homicide and cleared, about his future. The lieutenant urges him to make better decisions or end up in the prison next door that is already filled with black men. On the surface, it appears as a mentoring moment. But, the lieutenant works for the state. According to the lieutenant the men are only in prison because of their bad choices. Why is the prison filled with black men? What are this young man’s options for avoiding this fate? The lieutenant lays the responsibility solely on this young man for over-coming all of the trappings that many others could not escape. The conver-sation positions the young man as the sole party responsible for his success or failure.In “Selective Activation and Disengagement of Moral Control,” Albert Bandura speaks to shifting blame to victim or environment, which “can serve self-exonerating purposes.”36 Victims are posited as “not entirely faultless.” Thus, they can “be blamed for bringing suffering on themselves,” as observers can conclude victim liability from misfortune.37 Shifting focus enables media discourse and legal discourse to hold a victim and survivor “responsible for not being sufficiently cautious to avoid events that ultimately caused her death.”38 When blame is convincingly ascribed to victims, they may even-tually come to believe the degrading characterizations of themselves; that justification potentially has more devastating consequences than acknowl-edged cruelty.39This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference119Women Wailing Across Time and SpaceWomen have a long-standing and well-documented relationship with wailing and public mourning. The wailing woman is a powerful figure. In many cul-tures across the globe and across time, she plays an important part of commu-nity mourning and healing. Feminist religion scholar L. Juliana M. Claassens traces these mourners to biblical times, describing wailing women known as keeners as, “a powerful symbol of survival to injured people seeking to come to terms with tragedy,”40 She points to their presence in a bible, as God speaks:Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Consider ye, and call for the mourning women, that they may come; and send for cunning women, that they may come: and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters. For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, how are we spoiled! we are greatly confounded, because we have for-saken the land, because our dwellings have cast us out.Yet hear the word of the Lord, O ye women, and let your ear receive the word of his mouth, and teach your daughters wailing, and every one her neigh-bor lamentation. (Jeremiah 9: 17–20, KJV)Claassens argues that community mourners were trained and called upon to help the community respond to trauma.Mourners play a public role in social justice in that they shed tears and, “women’s tears have been visual signs of the pain and injustice around the world,” as L. Juliana Claassens argues.41 Kwok Pui-lan writes about the impact of mourners on others, stating that mourners’ “passion makes them identify with the exploited—motivates them and empowers them to rectify the wrong, to fight for justice.”42 Across cultures, wailing women have insisted that those in power be held responsible for suffering.43 Their role extends beyond holding those in power accountable for injustice. It also includes ensuring that victims are not forgotten as they fight for justice. As Claassens writes, “Without the wailing woman’s witness, victims of violent attacks will fall into oblivion.”44 Wailing women are keepers of public memory.Mothers are especially visible in mourning the losses that injustice has wrought them. Many use their personal pain as public protest. Like the earlier mourners of biblical times, some mothers bridge between personal and community pain. For example, Argentinian mothers’ search for their missing or “disappeared” children garnered national and international attention and has evolved into ongoing protest of injustice.45 Madres de Plaza de Mayo began with the mothers meeting to exchange information and then orga-nizing to demand answers for what happened to their children during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Valeria Fabj suggests that these This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

120 BLACK CAMERA 9:2women used the rhetoric from the private realm of motherhood to speak in the public realm.46 She writes, “These women gave voice to the anguish of losing their children at the hands of military dictators and demanded to know their whereabouts.”47 This group grew to become a social and political force to remind others to never forget.The First 48: The Sirens WailSirens wail throughout The First 48, be it from law enforcement vehicles or black women in mourning. The presence of black women grieving also reflects the realities of what is happening working class, poor, and broadly communities of color across the United States. As the show scans the cityscape, the cameras provide evidence of abandoned businesses and industry, lack of safe green spaces, and unkempt public spaces, including schools, revealing communities neglected by the state in distress. Moreover, the presence of the victim’s children and family, while it may garner empathy for some, also func-tions as a reminder that when a case is solved, their material conditions do not change. The First 48 displays black women’s pain, which has the power to facilitate a connection with viewers and humanize their loved ones. But the show then moves on to the next tragic story, negating the power of her pres-ence and intervention. Below I offer four mothers’ stories as examples of the wailing black woman and then highlight themes that emerged from the show: consent and surveillance; normalization of dead black bodies; blaming the victim. I selected these four women as their appearances most clearly speak to these themes, particularly surveillance.These black women disrupt narratives that normalize black death and poverty. In the moments when their loved ones could be anonymous to viewers, they offer humanizing counternarratives. McCarthy writes of reality television show Random 1, arguing, “Neoliberalism’s theater of suffering, Random 1 tells us, is at once both utterly banal, its mise-en-scène composed of strip malls, car interiors, parking lots, and generic highways, and preg-nant with possibility. At any moment, you might lose a job, or a leg, or a grip” [my emphasis].48 These mothers, and wailing black women, potentially push viewers to break out of the banality with which The First 48 depicts black death.The show includes the raw responses of mothers who lost their children. In one case, episode 13 (“Deal Breaker/Gunplay”), a black teenage boy is killed by a schoolmate in Tucson. His unnamed mother, wearing long braids and a purple bathrobe, is met by detectives and cameras outside of her home to get the news. She stands next to her taller husband, who appears to be white. She leans onto a silver SUV and begins to cry when detectives tell her This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference121what happened to her son. The mother reveals more of her story and her regret when she says, “Where? Why didn’t I go pick him up?”–and leans back onto the car. At the end of this scene she walks back into her house silently. Called outside of her house, this mother processes her grief aloud, assigns blame to herself, not in the privacy of her home but in her driveway.Anita, another mother, young woman, witnesses the killing of her boyfriend and the father of her children in Miami. Cameras pan the streets, filming a group of onlookers, who appear to be mostly black. A “suspected” drug dealer is charged with killing this young man. A white male detective, comments on the crime scene with the young man’s body lying on the street, saying, “this is ridiculous—overkill—they wanted this guy dead, I mean badly.” His comment points to extent of violence exercised on the victim, and also lends to the question of what did this young man do to not only get killed, but overkilled. His girlfriend’s account in contrast shifts from the law enforcement personnel’s pointing the “overkill”—to thinking about his life. She appears in an interrogation room where she shares the details of their last moment together as they interviewed her. The young woman initially speaks calmly to detectives as she says, “I told him don’t go, I love him, and he had two kids to live for. . .” [she starts to cry and places her hand on her chin] “and don’t do this.” She conveys that he is more than just another body on the street. It is not until the girlfriend enters the story that the storyline adds dimension to the young man. By identifying the people who will also suffer from his death (his family), she offers the moment that this corpse becomes a person. Her intervention is her presence, and her words allow for an alter-native reading of this young man’s life and death. She moves him from a dead body on the street with curious strangers hovering, like predatory birds fly over other animal corpses on the road, to a person over which this young woman cries. While the show’s narrative is based on continuous black death, Anita provides language and a counternarrative through which to under-stand this young man’s life.Another young woman, Dominique, speaking through her tears similarly individualizes and humanizes her partner in Cincinnati. She also witnesses the killing of her boyfriend, while they are both out with their child. On the scene, the camera scans to show figures, again with black bystanders near the deceased man. One woman is kneeling. A bloody white sheet covers the body of the nineteen-year old. The camera, scanning at the scene, lingers on an unidentified group of onlookers and a storefront for “Cash for America,” a payday loan business that is a part of an industry under scrutiny for predatory lending. This camera angle gives the viewer the vantage of the bystander; looking to catch a peek of this anonymous dead person. Three minutes later, his girlfriend appears talking to detectives. She looks ahead, then her eyes look down. The camera films her close up from the side as she says,This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

122 BLACK CAMERA 9:2I grabbed my baby because I seen she had blood on her and thought she shot my baby. But that was from my baby daddy pushing her out of the way. That was when I realized my baby daddy was on the ground [she cries] and I just got on the ground crying, asking him not to leave me. And he told me he loved me. And he closed his eyes and I knew he was dead.At this point she puts both hands along with the tissue she is holding over her eyes and face, as she cries and labors to breathe. He is killed by another young black man that he met while incarcerated. That he was killed by another young man, who was also a part of the prison industrial complex is a condem-nation of this system.Even more spectacular than one homicide, The First 48 shows a case with multiple homicides, in episode 17 (“Lester Street”). This unnamed mother experiences a catastrophic loss with the death of two generations of her family killed by a family member. The First 48 highlights that this case garnered national attention. The arc of the story centers on the moments of grief and forgiveness that came from a woman who lost her son and grand-children in one incident. In Memphis, the bloody scene is filmed from the windows of the house where four adults and two children were found dead. Two other children are in critical condition at a local hospital. The episode also includes television news coverage.A long investigation follows, beginning with searching for gang and drug connections, a common course on this show and in police dramas. The family appears on the local television news, with the mother of the victims saying. “I lost my baby and my grandbabies. And they’re gone. For what? And I don’t know why.” At the end of the episode, one of the surviving children points to an unlikely suspect, his uncle. The uncle, who recently finished a prison sentence breaks down in tears and confesses to killing the people in the house, but says he was aiming for his brother. When asked about the children, while crying he says, “I tried to get rid of the kids.” He says that he went to kill the brother, but also attempted to kill everyone who was there as to not leave any witnesses.The First 48 records this confession with the mother present, and gets her response. She hugs him. She holds his hands as she fights back tears, “I love you ok. . . . Don’t cry.” In the moments after losing one son (and grand-children) at the hand of another son, this woman’s story pointedly signals the fate of many. Their life circumstances brought one son to a gang and the other to prison. While one can ask about personal agency and respon-sibility, this interaction makes visible the social, economic, and structures issues that the shaped the lives of the mother, son, and grandchildren. And in the end, the living son said he did not feel like the family supported him while he was incarcerated and isolated from society. The mother’s expressed This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference123need to forgive this son is an indictment of the justice system, the educational system, the caste system, all informed by race, which work together to cause her pain. Unable to escape cameras, these women live and relive their anguish in front of an audience.The black women in these episodes provide pain for others to consume and/or find pleasure. Black death and pain has long entertained some Americans as evidence by postcards of lynching49 and lynching picnics, along with countless examples of this throughout US history. Today’s particular iteration is aided by rapidly evolving technology, the ability to share mate-rials instantaneously on social media, for different reasons. While scholars look back on lynching as spectacle, today’s black murder may be theorized as ritual. One can partake in it as a regularly scheduled program or “binge” watch.The affective and political power of the black woman wailing lies in both acknowledging the cruelty and turning the lens outward to the many issues that lead to her pain. The vibrations of black women wailing, calling out racialized, classes and gendered injustices, raises and reraises this nation’s consciousness, particularly this decade. Unlike in The First 48, an hour show that promises more of the same in the next episode, the wail of a few black women reverberates for months, years, and decades. The wailing black woman has a long legacy of consciousness-raising. She has had many occa-sions to do so. For example, in the United States, an earlier recognizable figure of these grieving mothers is Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, turned her personal grief over her son’s brutal racially charged murder into a national call for change. On August 28, 1955, teenage Emmett Till was tortured and then murdered. His mother mourned and wailed publically. Scholars, including Fred Moten and Rebecca Mark cite Till-Mobley’s words that reflect on her loss:50I looked up, saw that box, and I just screamed, “Oh, God. Oh, God. My only boy.” And I kept screaming as the cameras kept flashing, in one long explosive moment that would be captured for the morning edition. It was as if every-thing was pouring out all at once. . . . At that moment, there was nothing in the world but that giant crate. Death to me was so much larger than life. It was over-powering. It was terrifying. It seemed that if I could scream loudly enough, I could get that feeling out of me.51Till-Mobley’s open casket funeral for her son was a deliberate decision, according to scholars. Moten argues that Till-Mobley sought to ignite “the passion of a seeing that is involuntary and uncontrollable, a seeing that redoubles itself as sound, a passion that is the redoubling of Emmett Till’s passion, of whatever passion would redeem, crucifixion, lynching, This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

124 BLACK CAMERA 9:2middle passion, passage.”52 Mark writes that “Emmett’s mother’s courage, outrageous performance of grief, the need to show her murdered son to the world, turned one woman’s unfathomable loss into a nation’s activism and change—brought living energy and power where there was only hatred and death.”53 Till-Mobley remains an icon and example of black mothers using their personal loss to impact public consciousness.This past decade black mothers have many instances to wail and protest, declare that Black Lives Matter, and demand that we Say Her Name. On February 26, 2012, teenage Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida. Months later on November 2, 2013, teenage Renisha McBride was shot and killed in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. On August 9, 2014, teenage Michael Brown was shot and killed by a law enforcement officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Their mothers mourned and wailed publi-cally. The Martin case sparked outrage and protest, and prompted dialogues about racism in the U.S. Martin’s death, became a part of a series of kill-ings, which reinvigorated the civil rights movements and ushered in a new generation of social justice activists and strategies. Yet, the cries of their mothers, particularly Michael Brown’s mother moments after he was shot, seemingly brought a city to its knees and many of those watching around the world to their feet in protest. Michael’s mother’s voice joined a chorus of black women who had, and continue to publically mourn and call for justice, and communities responded.The public broadcasting of Michael’s funeral offered a similar moment to that of Emmett’s, allowing viewers access to his mother’s grief. His mother, Figure 1. Screenshot taken July 7, 2017: Lesley McSpadden is interviewed shortly after the August 9, 2014, killing of her son Michael Brown.This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference125Lesley McSpadden, joined Emmett’s mother in allowing the world to see their pain as their sons too were taken by racially-charged deaths (fig. 1). But before the funeral, it was photographs of McSpadden in the moments and days after law enforcement personnel shot her unarmed teenager that circulated. She was later photographed at her son’s funeral. In one photo, she sits at the church pew next to her husband. Wearing a red dress, defying the funeral tradition, her shoes are off and hand in her lap as she cries. She shares, like Till-Mobley this private moment of grieving in front of cameras. These wailing black mothers dare viewers to imagine their pain.ConclusionWhile most television shows defend their content by saying it is just entertainment, the creators and producers of The First 48 proclaim they are doing a public service. In an article about the discontinuation of the show filming in Miami, cocreator and producer John Kim “stressed the show is the only one on television that chronicles the real suffering of families and the ongoing violence in African American communities. “This is the face of urban violence,” Kim said. “Keeping it out there in the public conscious-ness is important. It’s so easy to forget what’s happening.”54 That one of the people who created and produces the show expresses a clear intent of rep-resenting violence in African American communities, although the show also features Latinos and working class and poor white people, and pre-senting violence as a characteristic of African American community, offers important information for making sense of the fact that almost half of the adults killed in only one season were black. That he explicitly identifies black people as both “urban” and as the face of violence also facilitates our understanding of why the producer focuses on cities and urban centers. In stating that he wants to keep this particular narrative in the public consciousness, it is Kim’s own words that confirm the need to go beyond asking for more representations and better representations of people of color, as Gray points out. The First 48 technically has “positive” represen-tations with black law enforcement personnel as the “good guys.” But as we take seriously the question of what kind of feelings the show cultivates and how it positions some people as distant outsiders and possible neighbors, the show’s power becomes more visible.The First 48 and Kim’s comments keep violence, death, and blackness intertwined in the public consciousness. Kim explicitly contributes to hege-monic representations of black people as violent; perpetuating a fear of blackness and preventing identification and empathy. Black women wailing on this show at times interrupt Kim’s narrative and reveal the face of state This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

126 BLACK CAMERA 9:2control, state neglect, effects of deindustrialization, failing school systems, neighborhoods that are overly under surveillance, and prisons that absorb entire households. These moments of disruption, however, can be fleeting with this fast paced show. When Dominique cries and recalls her dying boyfriend on the street, “asking him not to leave me. And he told me he loved me,” and Anita says, “I told him don’t go, I love him, and he had two kids to live for. . .,” the women have the potential to touch on parts of our shared humanity (the desire for love, family, and safety). Through their tears they tell the stories of these young black men who were fathers, partners, and loved by others. Yet, if as some media theorists have argued, that repeated exposure over time desensitizes viewers to these moments and sentiments, what becomes of our own humanity? The wailing black woman challenges Kim’s assertions about blackness and compels us to ask about the sources of the suffering. Still, the show truncates her political power.While the wailing black woman’s political power appears on The First 48, the show offers an opportunity to think about the politically powerful ways black women in other settings deploy wailing and mourning. The wailing black woman is like a siren, once she is heard her voice lingers and haunts. Even though show producer Kim focuses on the narrative of hyper black-on-black violence, many young black people were killed by the state or those who felt protected by the state before and after Emmett Till, and after Michael Brown; their names that did not make news. There exist many black women whose cries we did not hear. But as the lyrics of Sweet Honey of the Rock’s song state, “it doesn’t matter where you’re living, the women gather, crying tears that fill a million oceans.”55 Their tears collectively gather and create waves that move people to action.Wailing black women express sadness, but also anger and frustration. They speak of today’s issues, while connecting them to historical moments. Michael Brown’s mother, like Emmett Till’s mother, shed tears as the world watched her bury her son on CNN and in other live coverage of the funeral. But as her community heard her initial screams and stood by her, saying that they too had enough. On June 16, 2017, Valerie Castile joined them, speaking at a press conference after the law enforcement personnel who killed her son while he was in his car with his girlfriend and child is found not guilty on charges (fig. 2). Traditional news and social media outlets use a sound bite of her presumably speaking in anger, marking her as different than other mothers who recently lost their children in a similar fashion. Yet the content of her speech and her call for political action align her with the other highly visible black women mentioned above. She says she had enough: enough black death, enough racism, and enough class oppression. “People have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving. We’re going back down to 1969. Damn. What is it going to take? I’m mad as hell This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference127right now, yes I am.” Castile identifies the systemic reasons for her pain and anger and sends a warning in saying, “The system continues to fail black people, and it will continue to fail you all. Like I said, because this happened with Philando, when they get done with us, they coming for you. . . . “Y’all are next, and you will be standing up here fighting for justice just as well as I am.” She names the state and its citizens as the responsible parties for her son’s death; a city that she says her son loved. While the state of Minnesota did not literally kill her son, her statements point to the media culture and society that frames black people as a threat and the votes of a jury of fellow citizens who returned a “not guilty” verdict. Castile indicts all involved, in addition to the person who actually shot her son, thus marking racism and classism as systemic and deadly. And beyond death, the racism and classism are activated in assessing the value of one’s life via who is at fault for their own death. Castile warns that although it is black people who are getting killed now, but “you are next.” Castile’s words ring56 the alarm much in the way that Martin Niemöller’s famous quotations, “First They Came for The Socialists. . .” warned of systematic elimination of vulnerable populations and the cost of complicit silence by neighbors. In the past few years (2012–2017) with increasing frequency the cries of black women fill the air, as the numbers death of black boys, girls, transgendered individuals, women and men grows. The women gather, crying.57I end this article by returning to the question of “what now,” which I introduced at the onset. Although I offer no singular or definitive answer, I offer three tools or ideas for further meditations of black women’s expressions Figure 2. Screenshot taken July 7, 2017: Valerie Castile speaks at press conference after “not-guilty verdict” on June 16, 2017.This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

128 BLACK CAMERA 9:2of grief, angst, and anger. First, one of the most haunting lines of the Rhianna song in this article’s introduction speaks to the very reason why analysis of shows like The First 48 are necessary, as technology continues to make sur-veillance more facile and prevalent, particularly surveillance of already mar-ginalized communities. Before saying she just wants to scream, Rhianna sings, “Whatever it is, it feels like it’s laughing at me through the glass of a two-sided mirror/Whatever it is, it’s just laughing at me.” This surveillance scene plays out regularly in The First 48. A variety of people and organiza-tions are pushing for law enforcement personnel to wear body cameras as the way to decrease the likeliness of their abusing the public. We may benefit from considering the lack of effectiveness of such recordings in preventing killings or impacting verdicts, as the Castile case demonstrates, and to con-sider that body cameras offer the same vantage point as the camera in a show like The First 48. If viewers are already desensitized to black death, what ideo-logical functions do the images serve? What impact can Valerie Castile’s words have? She discursively moves us toward identifying that “whatever it is” that Rhianna sings of, or the source of the issues rather than assuming that there is a singular way to end what is a part of centuries of systemic vio-lence against people of color. Second, despite the proliferation of images of black death, wailing black women do and will likely continue to implore us to deal with the source of these “hard” deaths as articulated in the novel The Mothers, “A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or we’ll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle.” The lack of a supernatural or spiritual narrative justification leave open the possibilities for asking difficult questions about why the deaths occurred and how communities can respond to them. Third, Sweet Honey in the Rock sing that there is no rest for those who believe in freedom, adding, “Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons/Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons.” They continue with saying that, “I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny,” and “That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives.” Wailing black women make it clear that it is not enough to console her. They do more than cry; many mobilize, resist, and make evident that their loss is not individual but community-wide. They do what Audre Lorde calls us to do, which is to turn anger into action.58Manoucheka Celeste is an assistant professor at the University of Florida with a joint appointment at the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research and the African American Studies Program. Her research centers on representational constructions of race, gender, class, and nation, and processes of identity forma-tion, with a specific emphasis on citizenship narratives surrounding This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference129immigration, tourism, immigrants, and black women. Her regional focus is the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. Her most recent publi-cations include her first book Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African Diaspora: Travelling Blackness (Routledge, 2017) and the article “Entertaining Mobility: The Racialized and Gendered Nation in House Hunters International,” Feminist Media Studies (2016). She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies from the University of Washington.Notes1. Herman Gray, “Race, Media, and the Cultivation of Concern,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, nos. 2–3 (July 18, 2013): 253–58.2. The period immediately after the reign of postrace and postfeminist ideologies as the dominant frameworks for race and gender in popular culture.3. Barbara Ransby, “Katrina, Black Women, and the Deadly Discourse on Black Poverty in America,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3, no. 1 (2006): 215–22; Henry A. Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature 33, no. 3 (2006): 171–96.4. Gray, “Race, Media, and the Cultivation of Concern,” 253–58.5. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. (New York: The New Press, 2012)6. Claire Borders, A & E Networks—Life Is Entertaining, http://www.aenetworks .com/Article/aes-First-48-Moves-New-Night-Debuts-Latest-City.7. The show and its producers (executive producers, Elaine Frontain Bryant, Laura Fleury, John X. Kim, Alexis Robie and Peter Tarshis; co-executive producers, Joey Grossfield and Maija Norris) were nominees for the International Documentary Association’s 2016 IDA Documentary Awards for the Best Episodic Series Award.8. FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program 2015.9. Heyang Julie Kae, “Juvenile States: A Genealogy of Race, Gender, and Delinquency in U.S. Culture” (Phd diss., University of Washington, 2014).10. Gray, “Race, Media, and the Cultivation of Concern,” 5.11. Manoucheka Celeste, Race, Gender, And Citizenship in The African Diaspora: Travelling Blackness (New York: Routledge, 2017).12. Gray, “Race, Media, and the Cultivation of Concern,” 4.13. Ibid., 2.14. Ibid.15. Felony convictions impact one’s ability to carry out legal citizenship via voting and accessing state resources.16. Christen A. Smith, “Blackness, Citizenship, and The Transnational Vertigo of Violence in The Americas,” American Anthropologist 117, no. 2 (2015): 384–87; J.A. Mbembe “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40; Aisha Durham, “__While Black: Millennial Race Play and The Post-Hip-Hop Generation,” Cultural Studies? Critical Methodologies 15, no. 4 (2015): 253.17. James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 39.This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

130 BLACK CAMERA 9:218. Kyungwon Grace Hong, “‘The Future of Our Worlds’: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in The University Under Globalization,” Meridians 8, no. 2 (2008): 95–115.19. Ibid., 97.20. Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Celeste, Race, Gender, And Citizenship.21. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/21/5-facts-about-crime-in-the-U-S/.22. Angela Davis and Cassandra Shaylor, “Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex: California and Beyond,” In Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 2001); Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012).23. Ibid.24. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2002).25. bell hooks, Aint I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2015); Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).26. Laurie Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself’: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray (New York: New York University Press, 2004).27. Ibid., 224.28. Ibid., 240.29. J. Hay, “Unaided Virtues: The (Neo-)Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere,” Television & New Media 1, no. 1 (2000).30. Hay, “Unaided Virtues”; Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself.’”31. Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself,’” 226.32. Anna McCarthy, “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering,” Social Text 25, no. 4 (93) (2007), 17.33. Ibid., 227.34. David Ovalle, “Miami Police Parts Ways with Popular,” Miami Herald, http://Www .miamiherald.com/entertainment/article1951671.Html.35. Ouellette, “‘Take Responsibility for Yourself,’” 229.36. Albert Bandura, “Selective Activation and Disengagement of Moral Control,” Journal of Social Issues 46, no. 1 (1990).37. Ibid., 41.38. Noralis Rodríguez Coss, “Feminist Street Performances in Puerto Rico Alternative Imaginaries Shifting the Ideal(ized) National Body” (Phd diss., University of Washington, 2016).39. P. P. Hallie, “Justification and Rebellion,” in Sanctions for Evil, ed. N. Sanford and C. Comstock (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1971), 42.40. L. Juliana M. Claassens, “Calling the Keeners: The Image of the Wailing Woman as Symbol of Survival in a Traumatized World,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26, no. 1 (2010).41. Ibid., 76.42. Kwok Pui-lan, “God Keeps with Our Pain,” in New Eyes for Reading: Biblical and Theological Reflections by Women of the Third World, ed. John S. Pobee (Oak Park, IL: Meyer Stone, 1987), 94.This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Manoucheka Celeste / Wailing Black Woman, Grief, and Difference13143. Claassens, “Calling The Keeners.”44. Ibid., 72.45. Valeria Fabj, “Motherhood as Political Voice: The Rhetoric of the Mothers of Plaza De Mayo,” Communication Studies 44, no. 1 (1993).46. Ibid.47. Ibid., 1.48. McCarthy, “Neoliberal,” 34.49. Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).50. Fred Moten, “Black Mo‘nin’,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California, 2003); Rebecca Mark, “Mourning Emmett: One Long Expansive Moment,” The Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 2 (2008).51. Mamie Till-Mobley and Chris Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003).52. Moten, “Black Mo’nin’,” 65.53. Mark, “Mourning Emmett,” 134.54. Ovalle, “Miami Police Parts Ways.”55. Sweet Honey in The Rock, The Women Gather, 2003, CD.56. Daphne A. Brooks, “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8, no. 1 (2007): 180–204.57. Ibid.58. Britt Bennett, The Mothers: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016); Sweet Honey in The Rock, “Ella’s Song,” We All. . .Everyone Of Us, 1983; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 124–33.This content downloaded from 129.137.96.9 on Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:31:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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