America, Goddam

January 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.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
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.

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