America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice

by Treva B. Lindsey

Overview

One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022, Kirkus Reviews
"A righteous indictment of racism and misogyny."—Publishers Weekly

A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in the United States and their fight for liberation.

Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.

America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today.

Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. America, Goddam allows readers to understand

• How Black women—who have been both victims of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants—are rarely the focus of Black freedom movements.
• How Black women have led movements demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Toyin Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless other Black women and girls whose lives have been curtailed by numerous forms of violence.
• How across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led to Black liberation through organizing and radical politics.

America, Goddam powerfully demonstrates that the struggle for justice begins with reckoning with the pervasiveness of violence against Black women and girls in the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520384491
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	342
Sales rank:	977,066
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Treva B. Lindsey is Professor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Ohio State University and founder of the Transformative Black Feminism(s) Initiative in Columbus, Ohio.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Goddam, Goddam, Goddam
1 Say Her Name: Policing Is Violence
2 The Caged Bird Sings: The Criminal Punishment System
3 Up against the Wind: Intracommunal Violence
4 Violability Is a Preexisting Condition: Dying in the Medical Industrial Complex
5 Unlivable: The Deadly Consequences of Poverty
6 They Say I'm Hopeless
7 We Were Not Meant to Survive
Epilogue. A Letter to Ma'Khia Bryant

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index 

Editorial Reviews

01/10/2022

In this fiery debut, Lindsey, a women’s studies professor at Ohio State University, decries historical and contemporary injustices against Black women in America. Interweaving her own harrowing experiences with astute cultural and political analysis, Lindsey sheds light on how police mistreatment, medical racism, poverty, intracommunal violence, and other social ills place Black women in a condition of “unlivable living.” Harrowing examples of cruelty and indifference litter the book, as Lindsey details the normalization of sexual violence against enslaved women; the branding of Black feminists as “race traitors”; the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and others; and disproportionately higher rates of maternal morbidity and death from breast cancer among Black women. Amid the catalog of injustices, Lindsey spotlights Black women who organized for change—including Harriet Tubman, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer—and spotlights the leadership role African American women have played in #BlackLivesMatter and other social justice movements. Carefully researched and sharply argued, this is a righteous indictment of racism and misogyny. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2022-03-15
A searing investigation of the violent oppression experienced by Black women and girls in America.

Lindsey, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State, takes her title from Nina Simone’s scathing civil rights anthem, “Mississippi Goddam.” Explaining anti-Black racism as a matter of life or death, Lindsey takes an intersectional approach, showing how multiple forms of subjugation, including misogynoir, poverty, ableism, and transphobia, overlap and embolden one another. In each chapter, the author examines a specific form of contemporary violence causing irreparable harm. “You can’t support policing and affirm that Black lives matter,” writes Lindsey before delineating ways in which U.S. policing is rooted in the enslavement of captive Africans, slave patrols, and the protection of White wealth. The author references innumerable sociological studies in addition to the works of scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Davis, and Saidiya Hartman. She points to the deaths of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, for instance, not as exceptional but rather illustrative of a larger underlying issue. “Criminalizing Black women and girls’ survival is a distinct form of devaluing Black life,” writes Lindsey, “as well as a unique form of racial and gender terror.” She recounts her own sexual assault by a police officer at 17 to underscore and personalize her argument that Black women and girls historically and contemporarily are relegated to systemic abuses—and then told to “silently endure.” As the author clearly shows, patriarchy, in conjunction with capitalism and White supremacy, has harmed Black women and girls for hundreds of years. “It is imperative to me as a Black feminist,” she writes, “to attempt to talk about all victims in life-affirming ways.” The epilogue is a letter to Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old fatally shot by a Columbus, Ohio, police officer in 2021: “I understand there’s no such thing as justice for you. I can, however, struggle for the abolition of these death-dealing systems with the hope that you know your beautiful life is a propelling force.”

Required reading for all Americans.

Kirkus Reviews

"This book quickly creates space for the reader to ponder and grow without feeling ashamed of their starting point in the discussion. . . . The debate and exchange between the reader and the author does not call for a change in beliefs, unless desired by the reader, but a realization of the alternative harsh reality that exists for Black girls and women."

Ethnic and Racial Studies