Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism
A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like-from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue.

“Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.”-Imani Perry, author of South to America

This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us.

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers' lessons?

A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements.

Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders-from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde-Jackson sets the record straight about Black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.

For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.
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Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism
A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like-from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue.

“Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.”-Imani Perry, author of South to America

This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us.

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers' lessons?

A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements.

Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders-from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde-Jackson sets the record straight about Black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.

For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.
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Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism

Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism

by Jenn M. Jackson

Narrated by Jenn M. Jackson

Unabridged — 9 hours, 55 minutes

Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism

Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism

by Jenn M. Jackson

Narrated by Jenn M. Jackson

Unabridged — 9 hours, 55 minutes

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Overview

A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like-from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue.

“Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.”-Imani Perry, author of South to America

This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us.

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers' lessons?

A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements.

Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders-from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde-Jackson sets the record straight about Black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.

For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation.”—Imani Perry, author of South to America

“Jackson’s love letter to Black women and girls, past, present, and future, is a balm for weary souls, a reclamation, a psalm, a grounding, centering, deeply erudite book that uses the intellectual legacy of Black feminists to remind us of the stuff we are made of. In a world deeply committed to ignoring, mishearing, and disregarding Black women, to forgetting them, this book will not let us forget. It demands we remember. And it buoys us, reminding us that in our quest for freedom, Black feminists have always known the way, or made one.”—Brittney Cooper, author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

“With their clear, deliberate prose, Jackson takes everything that makes their Teen Vogue column and academic writing special and elevates it to new heights. Each chapter is a coming-of-age vignette that offers a vital lesson in Black feminist theory.”—Evette Dionne, author of Lifting as We Climb

Black Women Taught Us is a powerful and hopeful love letter to the Black feminist thinkers, writers, activists, and organizers who have fought for our liberation. It is an essential, life affirming text.”—George M. Johnson, author of All Boys Aren’t Blue

“In their enlightening new book, Black Women Taught Us, Jenn M. Jackson celebrates the iconic Black feminists who built a movement, and also shares their own personal story of growing and learning with these brilliant canonical thinkers. It is intimate and essential reading, a beautiful bridge connecting ancestral and contemporary Black women activists.”—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Kirkus Reviews

2023-09-19
The meaning of Black women’s transformational teachings.

Jackson, a political science professor and columnist for Teen Vogue, presents these 11 essays as “love letters” to influential Black women “who built our movements and taught us how to love ourselves whole.” The author links their personal history with a vital tradition of intellectualism and activism spanning nearly two centuries. Jackson considers celebrated figures such as Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, but they also examine less well-known ones, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and members of the Combahee River Collective. In each case, Jackson explores the experiences and achievements of influential Black feminists as a means of charting historical continuities in an ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. The orienting insights provided by Black women’s storytelling is a consistent point of emphasis. As Jackson notes the impact of Toni Morrison’s writing on their own self-understanding, “There was a sense of inner knowing and outer recognition of being Black and of living Blackly without regard for a white world that would no doubt want to co-opt, water down, and erase our stories.” The author’s historical summaries provided are perceptive and engaging, as are the analyses of current battlegrounds over so-called “identity politics.” Jackson offers intriguing, if occasionally underdeveloped, commentary on the significance of intersectionality in understanding systemic oppression, the dynamics of respectability politics, and the dimensions of the prison industrial complex. Also suggestive is the author’s take on the motivations behind conservatives’ outrage over critical race theory and the stakes involved in debates over how American history is taught. Overall, this “intimate history” ably highlights the longstanding importance and contemporary relevance of Black feminism, as well as the challenges that remain in having its voices heard and acted upon properly.

Galvanizing appraisals of Black women’s enduring search for freedom.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940160058719
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication date: 01/23/2024
Edition description: Unabridged
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