Black Women Teach Us with Dr. Jenn M. Jackson

[00:00:00] What's good? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black & Published, bringing you the journeys of writers,

[00:00:20] poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. Today's guest is Dr. Jen M. Jackson,

[00:00:28] author of the book Black Women Taught Us, An Intimate History of Black Feminism.

[00:00:35] Weaving together memoir and critical analysis to examine the lives of Black feminists through

[00:00:40] the ages from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to Angela Davis and Bell Hooks,

[00:00:46] Jen says this book allowed them to pay homage and give tribute to foremothers and ancestors

[00:00:53] who often go unacknowledged and unseen. People who meet me will tell you Jen loves Black people.

[00:00:59] Jen loves Black people and amongst Black people, Jen loves Black women. I love Black women and she

[00:01:09] was giving me an opportunity to publish a book about Black women at Penguin Random House.

[00:01:14] An engineer turned academic, Jen readily admits they have never taken a Black feminist

[00:01:20] politics class, although they teach one now. Why they say it's thankless work writing and

[00:01:27] centering the lives and lived experiences of Black women, plus how they define liberation

[00:01:34] and why it's not the same as freedom, and how they have the courage to write themselves seen

[00:01:41] after living most of their life being told to stay small. Class is in session when Black

[00:01:48] and Published continues. So Dr. Jackson, yes, when did you know that you were a writer?

[00:02:00] Oh my gosh is that the first question out the gate? Yes.

[00:02:07] Oh no. So this is a very interesting question because I think people will be surprised by

[00:02:12] the answer. I was writing for a very long time before I really identified as a writer.

[00:02:18] I come from a background, I was raised by narcissistic parents and I've been socialized

[00:02:25] not to necessarily give myself credit for the work that I do and I really didn't feel like

[00:02:31] a writer frankly until this book was done and that's the truth. That's the truth. It wasn't

[00:02:36] until I finished this book that I really felt like I had written something I was truly proud

[00:02:42] of. There's so much to unpack there. I can understand being conditioned and raised to not

[00:02:50] take credit for your work. I think that's something that Black girls are conditioned to do

[00:02:56] very young no matter who your parents are and they want you to be proud but then they also

[00:03:01] want you to be humble and so it's like it's an inner pride but don't tell nobody.

[00:03:07] That's right. But in reading your book and seeing your long list of resume and accolades,

[00:03:14] did you feel like even though you were writing to identify as such was still aspirational?

[00:03:23] I started writing publicly in 2008. I got my first byline at Ebony magazine and I was so

[00:03:29] proud of myself but there's something that's very thankless when you're writing about the

[00:03:34] things that I write about. I write about Black women, I write about policing of Black bodies

[00:03:42] in public spaces, I write about racial threat and trauma. I spent five years in graduate school

[00:03:49] trying to convince predominantly White conservative political scientists that studying

[00:03:56] Black people was politics and that it was worth studying. So I think that it is not that calling

[00:04:04] myself a writer was aspirational, it's that it was something that I was always fighting against

[00:04:09] an institution or a system or a set of actors to reclaim. As a child, I remember writing all the

[00:04:19] time. As a child, people would say, what do you want to be when you grow up? A journalist?

[00:04:22] I was like, no, I'm gonna be an engineer and I do have an engineering degree.

[00:04:26] But I wrote in journals constantly. I would write little screenplays, little short stories

[00:04:32] all the time and I would never call myself a writer because it wasn't something that was

[00:04:37] legible and it was something that was always denied me. It was like my writing wasn't

[00:04:43] significant, it wasn't good enough and I'm also a Virgo. Perfectionism be what it is.

[00:04:49] I never thought I deserved the title. I grew up reading Toni Morrison, reading Alice Walker,

[00:04:56] reading Thorne O'Hurston and I said these women are writers. And I think it was in writing

[00:05:01] this book and really doing the work of thinking through their lives and histories and digging

[00:05:06] through all of this unpublished stuff, right? Thinking through how hard it was with my

[00:05:12] research assistants to find narrative from Fannie Lou from Ella Baker, how hard that was.

[00:05:18] And I realized, oh, they're just like me. I revere them and I look at their work now

[00:05:26] and I go these women were writers but in their time people were denying them too.

[00:05:32] I had no idea how hard it was for Thorne O'Hurston to get her words out into the world

[00:05:38] until I started really thinking through her life. I had to not just read her books,

[00:05:42] I had to think through her actual lived experiences and I think it was through

[00:05:47] this process where I said, oh, I know who I am. Like this book was a recognition for me too.

[00:05:53] And just listening to you these couple minutes and having read the book and

[00:05:57] knowing the history that you lay out but then also before the history of some other

[00:06:02] Black writers that you say the work is thankless in centering Black women

[00:06:07] stories and their experiences and knowing the African American woman's literary canon,

[00:06:14] which is the Zoras, the Allises, the Tonys, the Tony Cable and all of that kind of work.

[00:06:20] Those writers, you, myself, and I think all Black women writers are writing ourselves seen

[00:06:28] whether access and entry into the publishing world and thereby the marketplace for others

[00:06:34] to read is denotus or not. We've always been doing this work and reclaiming that notion

[00:06:41] for yourself. How do you feel? Now, I feel incredibly powerful.

[00:06:49] I have to admit, like when I got done with this book and I went and I read it the last

[00:06:55] time before I sent it to the publisher and I remember I told my girlfriend at the time

[00:07:01] and I said this book is incredible. And I realized that it was the book of my dreams.

[00:07:07] It was literally the book I intended to write. It was the book I had intended from the beginning

[00:07:15] back when I didn't know I had a book in my body. This was the book I was going to write.

[00:07:19] And now that it exists and that I exerted myself because there's some people who are very

[00:07:26] frustrated with this book. You read some of the reviews, they're like this is supposed

[00:07:29] to be a history book and this person has put their life in it. And I think that is the funniest

[00:07:34] shit I've ever heard in my life, right? As if we are not living history as if our bodies

[00:07:40] are not archives, right? As if the 40 years I have been walking this earth have not been

[00:07:45] years of written survival, right? And so I put myself in this book because that's how I

[00:07:51] came to the works. And I tell the stories of these women through the lenses of why they were so

[00:08:01] important for me and why they were so helpful for me to get to where I am today. The book is

[00:08:07] an evolutionary journey. And by the time you reach the end, I'm actually going to read the

[00:08:11] last chapter today because it's the one that changed me the most, I believe. So I've been

[00:08:15] doing this work. I've been doing this work, engaging with these writers and looking through

[00:08:21] the narrative and the histories and the awful ways that these women were treated in their lives,

[00:08:26] learning that when Fannie Lou died, they say that she was a domestic worker on her

[00:08:32] desert island. Like the ways that we are diminished and diminished. I feel so powerful

[00:08:38] because I interjected. I haven't been socialized to do that. Young Black girls are not

[00:08:42] socialized to be loud and to take up space. And I said, nah, I'm proud of that.

[00:08:51] So then in being able to reclaim yourself and insert yourself and take up space in that way,

[00:08:59] what gave you the courage to even embark on this journey of writing this book when you

[00:09:05] didn't? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but when it seems as if you didn't have

[00:09:10] the confidence that you could. So it's interesting because I've always thought about this question of

[00:09:15] confidence. I've always wondered about my confidence, right? Because growing up in the

[00:09:20] way that I did with the particular traumas that I did growing up in Oakland, a very tall Black

[00:09:25] girl in a six foot orange body, I was this tall when I was 12. So I could never blend in.

[00:09:32] I couldn't and I was always very masculine. I had a deeper voice and I was gender fluid.

[00:09:38] So for me, I didn't feel like a girl. I didn't feel a gender at all, but I was told to be a

[00:09:44] girl. I was told to be small and have a higher pitched voice. I went through a phase of trying

[00:09:51] to talk like this because I thought that was how I was supposed to talk. It was weird.

[00:09:55] It was weird. Yeah, I did all those things trying to assimilate into certain ways of

[00:09:59] expressing gender and trying to be heteronormative when I was very queer

[00:10:05] and trying to be monogamous when I was very polyamorous. I was trying to fit into so many

[00:10:09] boxes. And so that taught me to be small. That taught me to shrink. And even in this big body

[00:10:17] with this big voice, it was all these words and all these stories to tell. I learned how to

[00:10:25] shy away from that. But I always had courage and I think I had that courage because

[00:10:31] I grew up in Oakland. We kind of made that way. That's Oakland, shit. And you got to have

[00:10:38] courage to survive there. And I think my city taught me a lot of that. I think my family,

[00:10:44] despite the traumas and them having limited tools to take care of a girl at the intersections

[00:10:51] of where I was, they empowered me in a lot of really important ways. The Black women in

[00:10:58] my life are the women I wrote this book for. I wrote this book for a mother who I am not able

[00:11:06] to speak to right now because of the trauma she's inflicted in my life. I wrote this book for

[00:11:11] my grandmothers, who really were the Northern stars in my life. I wrote this book for so

[00:11:16] many women. So I think that's where the courage comes from. And I don't necessarily

[00:11:20] see the courage and confidence as connected because for me, my confidence was constantly

[00:11:28] torn down because of the ways that these narratives about Black people, Black girls,

[00:11:33] queer people, trans people, how they were constantly pumped into my body and my sphere.

[00:11:40] I will never forget the grown men who came to me to tear me down as a child. Even in my

[00:11:46] acknowledgments, the very last part of my acknowledgments is about them. It's like, hey,

[00:11:50] here I am and there you are. Right? I thank them for what they did to me when I was 11,

[00:11:57] what they did to me when I was 15, coming to me at church to tell me I would never be anything.

[00:12:04] And I think about that because that's where my confidence was harmed. Right? It didn't come from

[00:12:09] me. The voices that I hear in my head, they're not mine. Right? They're from people who were

[00:12:16] small, people who accepted these white ways of being, people who accepted these stories

[00:12:23] about Black women and then saw this girl. And instead of embracing that child and

[00:12:31] wanting to see that child succeed, they thought let's throw this child away.

[00:12:35] So for me, the courage came from the same place that the beat down of my confidence came from

[00:12:41] the same community. And that's why I always tell people I'm not about throwing away Black

[00:12:45] people. I come from Black people and we are not homogenous. I've had some beautiful experiences

[00:12:53] growing up in a very hard place. And I respect those experiences and I will never let those

[00:12:59] experiences be diminished by the ones that hurt. And taking the sum of all of those

[00:13:07] experiences, when was or what was the moment that you knew you had to put those experiences

[00:13:14] on paper in conversation with the four mothers that you write about and put that in a book

[00:13:20] proposal and say we're going to enter this world of publishing and talk about this out loud for real?

[00:13:28] I love that question because again, I didn't know. My fantastic, amazing editor at Penguin

[00:13:36] Random House, Marie, she knew. And I'm being completely honest about this. This is part of

[00:13:42] growing up in the way that I did, like I said, learning to be small first. Some kids are encouraged

[00:13:47] to be big. But I'm going to be honest, my mother was nervous about that growing up in a place where

[00:13:52] street violence is rampant. Being big is not safe. I got into a lot of fights growing up

[00:13:58] and they were all with boys because of my size. I have a heart condition. One hit incorrectly

[00:14:04] and I'm gone. And that was something she was always afraid of. So rather than teaching me

[00:14:10] how to be in my body and still be safe, she just kept me inside. And I'm grateful to her for that

[00:14:16] because that was the tool she had. She was a single mother. But it also just taught me to

[00:14:21] be really afraid. It taught me to be really afraid and not just afraid of outside but afraid

[00:14:27] of myself. So I really have had to in my adult life, I'm looking at 40 this year,

[00:14:32] I'm really getting honest about that fact. So this book proposal came together because

[00:14:37] I was doing both pieces, right? I was 15, 16, 17 years old when I started writing a memoir.

[00:14:43] I still have the memoir I started as a teenager and it will be a memoir. It's called Black

[00:14:47] Girl in the Future. This is the first place you heard it. I love that. Yeah. And I used to dream

[00:14:54] about myself as a child because I didn't know if I would make it to 15, 16. And I would

[00:15:00] just keep dreaming about what the next age would be. And I would just make up these

[00:15:04] fantasies because once I got diagnosed with a heart condition at 13, I was really depressed.

[00:15:10] I was scared. And so I'm sitting here like, okay, I'm gonna die. And I'm 6'4". I had been

[00:15:17] playing basketball. That's how I was going to go to college. So my teens were very fraught,

[00:15:23] in addition to the trauma of growing up in an unsafe place. I ended up homeless in high

[00:15:30] school. I was sex trafficked in high school. So by the time I get to college as an undergrad,

[00:15:38] I'm a mess. So here I am now coming up to 40 and I'm just in a lot of ways coming out of

[00:15:45] survival tactics that I had to learn during that time. And I'm talking about it and I'm

[00:15:51] writing about it. And Marie, she reached out to me and she said, have you ever thought

[00:15:55] about writing a book? And at the time she was working at LiveWrite Publishing. And this is 2018.

[00:16:02] And I was like, I mean, sure, I guess so. I'm in graduate school. And she was like,

[00:16:06] I think you're incredible. I've been reading your work for a very long time. I'm reading

[00:16:10] your Teen Vogue column. My very first pub in Marie Claire was about my first sexual

[00:16:17] experience with a man, which was asexual assault in high school, which led to sexual

[00:16:21] trafficking. She had read all of these experiences that I had been writing over these years. And

[00:16:25] she was like, why aren't you putting this stuff in a book? And I said, I thought nobody was

[00:16:30] listening. And she said, I want you to come out to New York and we're going to talk about

[00:16:34] what a book line looks like. And that changed everything. First of all, you saw you just took

[00:16:39] my breath away when you said I thought nobody was listening because I think for so much,

[00:16:44] writing does feel like writing into a void, especially in the age of the internet. So to

[00:16:48] have an editor go directly to you, no agent, no middleman, it was like, hey,

[00:16:54] no nothing. We can do this. That's right. What did she say to you to have you get big on the page?

[00:17:03] She, we went out to lunch and we connected. She was from the Bay Area. We had all these

[00:17:09] things in common. I told her I was terrified. I have deep social anxiety. So like being

[00:17:14] outside in public is a lot for me. People touch me and they think I'm a basketball player. So I'm

[00:17:19] always like, please go away. And I went to the city and I navigated the city by myself. I had

[00:17:23] a fantastic time and we just talked about all these stories and they just started coming out

[00:17:29] of me. And I told her about the book I started writing when I was a kid. And she said, how

[00:17:33] about this? She said, I want you to start putting down some ideas on the page and I'm

[00:17:37] going to send you a couple of agents who I think would be fantastic for you. You need to get

[00:17:42] agented and we're going to get a book proposal together. I think we can do some really good

[00:17:46] work together. At the time she was at Live Write and I said, let's go do it. And I started

[00:17:51] doing the research and I found that if you already have a publisher, like you pretty much

[00:17:54] in there like somewhere. So I was like, cool. So I started looking for agents and I had this

[00:18:00] really awful idea. It was thinking about my life experience and it was more memoir,

[00:18:05] but it was really in a way angled toward white people. And I was like, that's not the

[00:18:09] book I want to write. But agents was fucking with me and I got like four or five folks who

[00:18:14] wanted to represent me. And I chose the one who looked at me. I saw her face. I said,

[00:18:19] she going to give me a really big deal. I said that white woman right there,

[00:18:25] she going to give me a big deal. Listen. And she did. And at the time Marie moved to Penguin

[00:18:36] and I was like, oh, you're one of the top five publishers in the world. All right,

[00:18:40] let's just go ahead. And I remember meeting with Marie and I'm so close to her. I have a really

[00:18:45] good relationship with her. And this is something I recommend for all folks who want to write

[00:18:48] is really making sure that everybody in the process got your back, like, because it matters.

[00:18:54] And we talked one day and I said, Marie, this is not the book I want to write. She said,

[00:18:58] what else do you have? And I said, I have so many things. She said, what are you teaching

[00:19:02] right now? I said, I'm teaching this amazing class called Blackness Politics. She's like,

[00:19:07] I would love to take this class. I said, yeah, during COVID, I've been having people come in

[00:19:12] and it's like accessible. So people who are enrolled, they can come take it. I'm just

[00:19:16] sitting there gushing. She's like, why don't you make it a book? And I was like, what

[00:19:20] do you mean? She was like, you want it to be accessible? Make it a book. And I was like,

[00:19:25] oh, that's brilliant. That's brilliant because I knew it would pour out of me because

[00:19:30] I love these women. People who meet me will tell you, this is something that's consistent

[00:19:34] about me. People will say, if they describe me as anything, it's like, Jen loves Black people.

[00:19:39] Jen loves Black people and amongst Black people, Jen loves Black women. Jen loves

[00:19:44] Black women. I love Black women. And she was giving me an opportunity to publish a book

[00:19:50] about Black women at Penguin Random House. I was like, okay, sure. I wrote that proposal

[00:19:56] so quick, sold it so quick. Got that six figure deal so quick and it just went. That

[00:20:02] first draft went. And what was wild about it was that first draft was awful. And I almost

[00:20:08] do that on purpose because I need feedback. My second drafts are like, usually my second

[00:20:13] drafts of books are like almost the final draft. And what got me on the book to really get to

[00:20:19] where it is now, really she pushed me. Marie pushed me every step of the way. And she kept

[00:20:26] saying, I want you to write this to the people you intend to write it to. She said,

[00:20:33] write the story you want to tell and write it exactly how it comes out of you and take

[00:20:39] your time. I lost over a dozen family members. A lot of them were Black women. And that

[00:20:47] shaped the texture of the book. And I lost my grandmother at the time as I was writing the

[00:20:54] book. She passed away around the same time as Toni Morrison and Bell Hooks. And that

[00:21:00] shaped the texture of the book. And Marie said, you take as much time as you need

[00:21:04] to put in the book what you need to put. And that last chapter was not there. And it

[00:21:08] wasn't until all that happened I said, I have to add one more chapter. And she held up

[00:21:13] everything so I could put that chapter in. That's how I got it in there because I had

[00:21:18] a champion. I had a real advocate. You had a comrade. I had a comrade. You've been reading

[00:21:25] the book. I read the whole book. I love it. I had a comrade. I'm not ever going to meet

[00:21:32] that person that will come out and say, oh, I did this myself. And I had everything I needed.

[00:21:37] People need people. I am surrounded by people. And I'm going to tell you right now,

[00:21:42] I would not be sitting here right now without my people. And she's one of my people.

[00:21:48] Then please give us something from Black Women Taught Us.

[00:21:53] Dr. Jen M. Jackson's Black Women Taught Us, An Intimate History of Black Feminism

[00:21:58] fuses the story of Jen's life growing up in Oakland with the lives of Black women

[00:22:03] luminaries such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Shirley Chisholm to ask and answer

[00:22:10] what it means to love, why it's better to be unrespectable and how to get free. Here's Jen.

[00:22:18] So I'm going to start at the end of the last chapter from Bell Hooks,

[00:22:23] A Reflection on Loving the Dying and the Dead. I started writing this book as my maternal

[00:22:28] grandmother Lucille was dying. I finished it a few months after she passed away in January 2021.

[00:22:36] She was a beautiful and loving Black woman whose presence in my life had grown to feel permanent,

[00:22:42] even though I knew it was temporary. She was a North Star in my life that I had tried to never

[00:22:48] take for granted. I tried to call her often, send money to help with her medical bills,

[00:22:54] visit as frequently as graduate school and child rearing would allow, and buy groceries on occasion.

[00:23:02] But as the distance between me and my North Star continued to grow, with me moving first to Los

[00:23:07] Angeles, then to Chicago, and then to Syracuse, I felt a deep disconnectedness from a critical

[00:23:14] anchor in my life. When my ancestors and spirits spoke to me in summer 2020, they told

[00:23:22] me it was time to head home and visit my grandmother for her birthday. They told me

[00:23:27] it would likely be my last time seeing her. I was afraid to travel during the COVID crisis.

[00:23:34] I hadn't been on a plane at all, but I knew what was being spoken into my heart.

[00:23:39] So in October 2020, I pushed past my jitter, boarded a plane, and went to see my grandma

[00:23:46] in Oakland, California one last time. It was the last time I saw her earthside.

[00:23:52] I took her to a beautiful restaurant on the water, treated her like a queen,

[00:23:56] and escorted her like she was born on the River Nile, because to me, she was. That day,

[00:24:02] I shared with my grandma that I was queer and polyamorous. I explained that I dated other

[00:24:07] people outside of my 15-year marriage, a marriage she had presided over herself. She looked

[00:24:13] at me and said, are you happy? I smiled at her, my eyes becoming wet, and said,

[00:24:18] yes, that's all that matters, sweetheart, she told me. We ate fried chicken with my mother

[00:24:24] and my then partner. We shared cake and laughs on a beautiful fall day in my hometown.

[00:24:30] My mother and grandmother looked over the water, and in that moment,

[00:24:34] I felt a deep lightness and peace. My grandmother said it was the best birthday

[00:24:38] of her life. That was the last time I touched my grandmother's soft hands. It was the last time

[00:24:44] I carried that oversized leather purse and helped her pick out a meal on a menu. That day was

[00:24:50] the last time I smelled my grandmother's perfume or saw her crooked smile. Just a few months later,

[00:24:57] one of my tethers to the earth was cut. I felt like I was billowing in the wind,

[00:25:01] lost for the gusts. My grandmother had spent months stuck in her home during COVID-19. She

[00:25:07] was relatively immobile, and her little legs moved much slower than they had in the years before. She

[00:25:11] required a cane for most of her walking, but was working on building strength by climbing a short

[00:25:16] hill outside of her apartment every day. She was living in section 8 housing that could only

[00:25:22] be described as overfull. Her hoarding tendencies had only worsened over the years,

[00:25:27] leaving the two-bedroom first floor unit looking like a messy gift shop. At times,

[00:25:32] the place was so full of things like excess toilet paper, stuffed animals, wigs,

[00:25:38] butterfly figurines, etc. that she was too ashamed to let anyone besides me or my mother in. If they

[00:25:44] had come in, they likely wouldn't have been able to navigate the space without turning sideways

[00:25:49] or stepping over objects on the floor. My grandmother struggled with poverty her whole life,

[00:25:55] and her final days here were likely harsh reminders of her childhood. Faced income

[00:25:59] constraints and medical emergencies were the norm. I, the grandchild she lovingly called her baby,

[00:26:06] was across the country where I couldn't take care of her. Perhaps that was why this last

[00:26:11] trip home was so important to me. For years before that trip, I had sensed that my time

[00:26:15] with her was slowly ending, that she was slowly dying, leaving me in a world without her. For

[00:26:22] years, I warned my immediate family that we needed to start planning for the end-of-life

[00:26:26] care, sounding an alarm in an empty parking lot where no one could hear me, screaming in a

[00:26:32] crowded room in a language no one could decipher. When the end came, I wasn't surprised.

[00:26:38] I was deeply saddened, hurt to my absolute core, but I was not surprised. In early 2021,

[00:26:45] I fell into a deep depression after the loss of Grandma Lucille. Hours felt like days,

[00:26:50] days like months, and months like the years we hoped to forget. It felt like one of the

[00:26:55] longest years of my life. Losing my grandmother left me without words for myself and for the

[00:27:00] people I had grown to love. I spent months, maybe even a year, looking for myself,

[00:27:07] chatting with her at my altar, asking her to be with me because I just missed her so much.

[00:27:12] I talked to her about her last birthday. I laughed with her about my relationship drama

[00:27:18] since she now knew I'm completely gay and poly. And later on, she started visiting me

[00:27:24] in my dreams. She hugged me, she giggled with me, and on special occasions,

[00:27:29] she flashed that crooked smile. It took me months to face her being gone.

[00:27:34] Even as I write this, I can't control the emotions. Tears are all that welcome me.

[00:27:39] I've only been able to go on because I know what love is and what it does. I believe we

[00:27:44] are still connected and that our love is expansive enough to transcend time, space,

[00:27:50] and even death. I believe that our love can never dissipate and that it just turns into a new

[00:27:56] energy between she and I because we love each other and we always will. The same energy

[00:28:02] exists between Lauren and me, while I sometimes worry that I failed them both.

[00:28:07] Lauren with my unresponsiveness and grandma with my moving away.

[00:28:12] I hold tightly to the energy that endures. It's the same energy every loving Black woman

[00:28:17] has with her comrades and kin. I have to believe this is true. I know it.

[00:28:23] These words would not exist if it weren't. Thank you.

[00:28:28] Thank you. You're welcome. In this book,

[00:28:32] in that section that you read, the first one about Black Girls Rock, I think I made a note

[00:28:37] and I said, this book is a love letter to Black women. And then I saw the Essence article

[00:28:40] go live today. This says, this book is a love letter to Black women. That's right.

[00:28:45] Right. And I think what strikes me about that is because as much as you're writing yourself

[00:28:51] whole and yourself seen and yourself safe and trying to make space for all Black women to

[00:28:56] feel and get to those things, you spend time detailing how Black women are sites of

[00:29:05] objectification and extractive capitalism and the harm that we then internalize and project

[00:29:14] within our own community onto each other. That's right.

[00:29:18] Trying to find some semblance of safety in a world that puts us closest to harm.

[00:29:23] That's right. Why was it this particular group of women that you've coalesced here,

[00:29:30] Harriet Tubman on through to Bell Hooks? Why were they the ones who stood out to you?

[00:29:37] So it's really interesting. I love this question because really this book comes from

[00:29:42] my course, right? Because I'm always thinking pedagogy. And Harriet Tubman,

[00:29:46] I do talk about her at the very beginning of the book that she was a general and that she

[00:29:50] had strategy, right? They always made it seem like Harriet Tubman was just making it up as

[00:29:55] she was going along. And it was, it obfuscated her intellect. But I talk about, to talk about

[00:30:01] freedom, I talk about Harriet Jacobs who was an enslaved Black girl. And most people don't

[00:30:07] know about Harriet Jacobs and I was most people. So when I designed my class, I said,

[00:30:13] who are all the people I wish I had known about? What are all the stories? And I spent so much

[00:30:19] time just reading and I had all these light bulbs going off and it was all this aha moments.

[00:30:25] And it was a beautiful time for me. It was in graduate school and it was my first opportunity

[00:30:30] to teach about Black women. And my students would come to me and say, have you read this?

[00:30:34] Have you read that? And my peers would say, have you read this? And it was so much. So actually

[00:30:40] these women I selected who are in the book, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Noherson, Ida B. Wells,

[00:30:46] Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisel, Ella Baker, the Combahee River Collectives.

[00:30:52] We haven't talked about Toni Morrison and why she's in a book that's really a political book.

[00:30:56] R.G. Lord, Angela Davis has to be in there and Del Hook. These folks I selected,

[00:31:01] I selected them partly because I'm teaching them. But folks like Zora, she changed my life.

[00:31:09] I picked Zora because I picked up their Eyes Were Watching God when I was 11 years old.

[00:31:14] And I read that book and I said, oh, these are Black people.

[00:31:19] It was a book in my library and I said, oh, we can write about Black people

[00:31:24] in Black dialect? It was so interesting when I first read that book because

[00:31:30] at 11, I didn't know that there was this whole literary debate about writing in dialect.

[00:31:38] And as I got older and I learned more about Zora and I learned the story of her death

[00:31:43] and I learned that Alice Walker, who I had also read at the foot of my mother's bed,

[00:31:48] went and found her grave. It never left my body. It never left my body.

[00:31:54] And when I went out to find my grandmother's grave, that's the first thing that went through

[00:31:57] my mind. That's why she's in the book, because it's not just about what happens in these

[00:32:03] classrooms. I think people don't seem to understand that Black feminism is happening.

[00:32:06] It's happening everywhere around us all the time. This politics,

[00:32:09] this insurgency, this resistance framing our lives all the time.

[00:32:13] I was thinking about Moses Harris Perry's Cricut Room Theory before I knew that word.

[00:32:18] I do feel like I'm bent over and I'm punching myself into it.

[00:32:22] I said, oh, that's what it's called. I put the people in this book who helped me to understand

[00:32:28] myself, who when I picked it up, I went, that's what I've been doing. And there were so many I

[00:32:34] could not fit here. But I tried to include the ones that were deeply pivotal on the journey

[00:32:40] I had so far. What do you make of the fact that Black women and their contributions,

[00:32:47] as you talked about Fannie Lou Hamer being labeled as a domestic on her death certificate,

[00:32:51] are so easily pushed into obscurity unless we love ourselves enough to go

[00:32:58] resurrect the legacies and the contributions of our foremothers and our ancestors.

[00:33:03] It angers me so deeply, right? Set at the very center of my soul in what animates my work,

[00:33:09] but also I'm a deeply aligned person. This is what I live to fight against,

[00:33:14] right? I think about my grandmothers, my mother, my chosen mother, my mother-in-law.

[00:33:20] I think about the work that they do tirelessly and the idea that someone would want to

[00:33:25] wash them away. The systems are built to erase them. It angers me. This work has always been

[00:33:31] about my ancestors, like whatever I can do on this journey to make sure that nobody ever

[00:33:38] forgets. And the thing about it being easy was so pernicious about that is that it's actually

[00:33:44] not easy to move an entire country, to erase a whole subset of knowledge. And that's what

[00:33:53] they're doing right now. They're sending books away from children, right? It's a

[00:33:59] generational problem because there's gonna be a whole group of young people who have no idea

[00:34:05] what life is like for queer, immigrant, trans, Black, Brown, disabled people,

[00:34:10] because their books are being covered with the paper bags. And that angers me so much

[00:34:17] as a human being, right? As an educator, a parent with this work that I can show people,

[00:34:25] I can model, right? Because I don't trust nobody, but I really don't trust none of these

[00:34:30] academics, right? And so you can't just talk about it, right? So my hope is that this

[00:34:37] shows people you can have the courage. You can have the courage. Do it, right? Like I wrote a gay,

[00:34:47] trans disabled book. Like I talk about Audre Lorde and I talk about the fact that she's

[00:34:52] blind. I am blind. Every semester I have to tell my students, please write your name tag,

[00:34:57] I'm low vision, make them big. Okay, people are low vision in the world. Let's work through

[00:35:02] it. The rule needs to be accessible for me. And these are things we need to talk about.

[00:35:08] People hold these things in their body and it takes so much work for y'all to erase us.

[00:35:12] And I refuse to be erased. I refuse. I feel you on that. You mentioned a little earlier

[00:35:21] that Toni Morrison is in a book, and it's a book about politics and that needs to be

[00:35:25] discussed. You have the floor. Okay. I'm a political scientist by trade and it's a very

[00:35:34] conservative discipline. There are rules about what academics can write and what they should

[00:35:39] not be writing and what air quotes counts towards tenure and things like that. This is a book

[00:35:46] that is based on my course that I teach at a university in a political science department.

[00:35:50] However, when I teach this course, Zora and Toni are not on my syllabus at school.

[00:35:55] And they are not seen even though Zora is an anthropologist and Toni was teaching

[00:36:02] at universities across the Northeast. Same thing with the hoods. There are lots of academics,

[00:36:07] white male conservative academics who do not view these women as academically rigorous.

[00:36:14] There are plenty of academics who don't view Audrey L'Aure as academically rigorous.

[00:36:19] There is an air of respectability around what counts as political. And me talking about them

[00:36:28] not being on my syllabus is not me selling out, right? I designed the syllabus well

[00:36:32] before I wrote the book. The syllabus is densely packed with tons of black women,

[00:36:37] political scientists, right? There's a lot of Darlene Clark-Kind. There's a lot of

[00:36:41] Evelyn Higginbotham. There's a lot of folks who are talking explicitly about politics.

[00:36:46] But I do want us to think about what does it mean that the academy has a completely different

[00:36:52] definition of what is political than young people in the real world who are living political

[00:36:59] lives. I think that in a women engineer studies department, this would be a very

[00:37:04] political book. I think it's interesting that in the policy department they probably wouldn't

[00:37:07] use it. So my favorite chapter that had me sit all the way up was chapter six.

[00:37:15] Really?

[00:37:15] It's chapter six where it says Shirley Chisholm taught me the whole whiteness accountable.

[00:37:19] And specifically, the story you tell about being in your class and the white bearded professor,

[00:37:26] if white people had a culture what would it be if he answered his own question

[00:37:31] and said if white people had a culture it would be genocide.

[00:37:34] And I said what?

[00:37:35] She showed his state. I had the same reaction. I said oh.

[00:37:39] Right. I had that reaction as I was reading it. I was like oh,

[00:37:43] allow me. He said that. Allow me.

[00:37:44] He sure did at USC child, University of Southern California.

[00:37:49] And I know we are having a lot of conversations about genocide because of what is happening in

[00:37:56] Israel and Gaza to a lesser extent what's happening in Ukraine and Russia to a greater

[00:38:01] extent what's happening in the Congo and in Sudan and Africa. But I think keeping on the

[00:38:08] same thread about how difficult it is to erase a whole subset of people and their books and the

[00:38:13] book bands. By the way, I'm from Chicago. I'm based in Florida so doing all of those things.

[00:38:18] Yeah.

[00:38:19] It is a kind of genocide. And now the genocide is taking different forms. For some countries

[00:38:25] it is. We're literally going to come in and we're going to kill all of the people so that

[00:38:29] you cannot tell the story. But now I think in America it's the erasure of thought and

[00:38:36] of how pressing and pernicious it is. It's more than just a rash. I think it is actually a genocide.

[00:38:42] And yet you have written this book. You teach in the academy and yet you understand

[00:38:47] the limitations of it. Do you have plans to teach your own book or and to offer it as

[00:38:55] a curriculum? Because as you said, your editor wanted to take this class.

[00:38:59] So that is no yes. The hope is that this book will be you pick it up and this becomes

[00:39:05] the course or like a significant part of the course. I wrote it such that young people in

[00:39:12] particular, college students can discover black feminism in a way that is not laden with the

[00:39:19] hype. There's so much hype right now. So in the book I'm also destigmatizing. I'm also

[00:39:26] saying, hey, I'm just saying I was a young person at one time and this is how it worked

[00:39:31] for me. I'm an organizer and this is how it works for me. And I think what's interesting

[00:39:36] is that all of these institutions, these white conservatives who are coming out don't realize

[00:39:40] that they mad for me and young people don't relate to them. So I'm always going to teach

[00:39:46] what my students need. I wrote this book for black women who are like, I don't really know

[00:39:52] where my body fits. But I wrote this book for all these black women who are still trying

[00:39:58] to find these answers about what's happening to me in this moment. Absolutely. We are working

[00:40:05] to get this book picked up in multiple universities to be the book you read when you come into

[00:40:10] school and they pop it in your hand. We try to get this to all the college students. Yes.

[00:40:15] Fashaw, so my last question about the book. We started with the bell hooks chapter,

[00:40:20] which is the final chapter in the book and talking about love and how this book is a love

[00:40:24] letter to black women. But your very first chapter is Harriet Jacobs and what she taught

[00:40:31] you about freedom. And you go deep into how she found freedom in captivity and choosing to

[00:40:40] escape, but then having to stay in a small cramped attic for so many years before she

[00:40:44] was able to really lead in freedom and that because it was a choice even though she was

[00:40:49] still bodily contained. That's right. And you can't talk about love without talking about

[00:40:55] freedom and ultimately that is liberation. So what is your relation to you? So that,

[00:41:00] that chapter is actually based 100% on my class. I've debated it a lot with my students over

[00:41:05] the last seven to 10 years about liberation and freedom and what it means. They're

[00:41:09] different obviously, right? And I say this in the book that freedom, freedom from and

[00:41:13] freedom to, and when I talk about the attic, when I talk about Jacob's being trapped in that

[00:41:18] way, she had freedom from this enslave her. She had freedom from this constant surveillance

[00:41:22] and abuse and the anxiety of this person trying to sexually violate her. She had freedom to run.

[00:41:28] She didn't have the freedom to use her body. I think liberation is that thing we imagine,

[00:41:34] right? And freedom is not that, right? Freedom is the process, the journey, the challenge.

[00:41:39] We are constantly struggling for freedom. It's like, oh my gosh, I'm in this trial

[00:41:44] and I've been liberated from it. But we get liberated all the time. And I don't think we

[00:41:49] honor all the ways that we liberate ourselves from things. Like when I shaved my head

[00:41:53] and I liberated myself from the drag of having to look heteronormative and performing

[00:41:57] gender in ways that were not honoring my body, that was a liberation. Like there are

[00:42:02] ways I think that we move into liberation in these small incremental ways and we don't honor

[00:42:07] it because it doesn't look like totality. It doesn't look like total liberation.

[00:42:11] Doesn't look like the end point we wanted. So yeah, I think liberation is something we

[00:42:16] undervalue and take for granted, but something we achieve quite a bit if we are

[00:42:21] constantly struggling for freedom. I think we have these moments where we've liberated ourselves,

[00:42:26] but it doesn't always have to be land of milk and honey and it may not be.

[00:42:34] And we have to accept that too. Thank you. So I want to move to a speed ran in a game

[00:42:39] before I let you go for what's becoming the afternoon. What is your favorite book?

[00:42:44] It's always been a tie between Beloved and The Eyes Were Watching God. Probably because

[00:42:49] The Eyes Were Watching God is like my favorite book of all time. It changed my life. It

[00:42:52] changed my writer life and my just way of thinking of myself as a Black person.

[00:42:56] But Beloved, I think, is the best piece of writing I've ever encountered in my whole

[00:43:01] life. Who was your favorite author?

[00:43:03] Same answer. I think Toni Morrison is her and Zora are neck and neck. I just,

[00:43:08] I really got to say Toni Morrison just really ain't never seen nobody write like that one.

[00:43:13] Who was your favorite poet?

[00:43:15] My favorite poem is by Audrey, Black and New Foreign. I love Nikki Giovanni though

[00:43:19] and I love Claudia Rankin, but it's probably Audrey. Audrey Lord.

[00:43:24] Aside from the people in your book, name another Black woman-themed gender-fluid luminary

[00:43:32] that not enough people know and who doesn't get enough credit.

[00:43:36] Only one?

[00:43:37] Give me five.

[00:43:42] So June Jordan, I've been really trying to dig more into June Jordan recently.

[00:43:47] Pauli Murray is just incredible in contemporary sense. I love Janet Mock.

[00:43:52] Janet Mock's first book, Redefining Realness, was cataclysmic for me.

[00:43:57] I got so much courage after reading that book. I think that Brittany Cooper is majorly

[00:44:02] swept on. Brittany Cooper has a piece in the Oxford Journal called Intersectionality

[00:44:08] and it is probably one of the best things I've ever read to help explain to people what it

[00:44:14] is and what it is not. And then who's really been rocking me to my core recently?

[00:44:19] Octavia Butler. I think that Octavia Butler was, she was awesome.

[00:44:25] She was from the future.

[00:44:26] She was from the future, yeah.

[00:44:29] Whose biopic or documentary do you want to see next?

[00:44:34] I'm so glad that Shirley Chisholm is coming and I'm so glad it's with Juneteenth.

[00:44:37] I'm like, I cannot wait. Who would I like to see next?

[00:44:40] I'm not gonna lie. We gotta give Zora her due.

[00:44:44] I think that Zora lived a very difficult life and we don't know enough about it.

[00:44:49] I feel like I would love to see a Zora know her same biopic.

[00:44:54] If money were no object, where would you go, where would you live, and what would you do?

[00:44:58] So I love horses. I think I would probably go live in Cannes or somewhere in Germany

[00:45:06] on a horse ranch where I could grow hella cannabis and wear a moolah and smoke weed all day

[00:45:13] and yeah, live my best life. I would still be riding

[00:45:16] and I would come back and do the work that I need to do but I would live over there.

[00:45:22] I love this for you. Name three things on your bucket list.

[00:45:26] You know what's funny? I had always planned to have two books by the time I was 40 and I do now.

[00:45:30] I finished another book this past Monday and it's my first academic book and it's Fire,

[00:45:35] Plain Seed Blackness. So that was on my bucket list. Oh gosh, on my bucket list.

[00:45:39] I have not been to Europe yet. I need to go to Europe. It's not really been great

[00:45:44] in the last few years to do that so I'm trying to figure out how to do that and have

[00:45:47] it not be like problematic or unsafe but I really want to go over there and eat tiny food

[00:45:52] and step on grapes. I feel like I deserve a step on a grape. I really want to, now that the books

[00:45:58] are done, I really want to shift my focus on really building a different type of community

[00:46:05] around me. I think COVID caused a lot of isolation and it hit my academic and intellectual

[00:46:10] community and I want to build something. I want to build something in terms of community

[00:46:15] and I want to build an institution. One of my lifetime goals is to build this

[00:46:20] institution, a center for the study of intersectionality, policing and trauma

[00:46:26] and I want to do that. It's important to me to do that. I want that to be my legacy

[00:46:31] and I don't know if it'll be attached to a university or not but I want to

[00:46:34] be clear about how we talk about trauma and the legacy of policing in the United States

[00:46:40] and not that it only affects black men. What brings you joy? My children. My daughter is 12

[00:46:49] and she is 6 too. Yeah, my puppy. I have so much joy in my life. I have been married to

[00:46:56] June, my spouse for, this would be our, this is two thousand and twenty-four.

[00:47:01] Shoot, we got married, I'm bad at this, 18 years I think. You get to a point where you

[00:47:05] be like, ooh, we've been married for a long time and we have a wonderful family and I'm

[00:47:09] a polyamorous lesbian and drossimus person. He is an asexual monogamous person and we

[00:47:16] have a beautiful life together. We have a stunningly beautiful incredible life together

[00:47:20] and that brings me so much joy and also just my people, like my community is

[00:47:26] wildly incredible. Like doing the work brings me joy. This book brings me joy. I get to do

[00:47:32] what I love. And what brings you peace? I'm a very spiritual person and I grew up in a

[00:47:39] Christian faith. My family, my grandmother who passed away in 2021, she was a pastor.

[00:47:44] It's called a pastor grandma. But I grew up a very deeply Christian and I still have that

[00:47:50] deep spirituality and although I no longer deal with religiosity in terms of the institution

[00:47:55] of church because I can't find a place that's safe for a queer, trans, polyamorous black

[00:48:01] woman. I still have my altars around my house. I have my grandmother's ashes on the

[00:48:05] altar downstairs. My father passed away in 2014. This is the 10 year anniversary this year of

[00:48:10] his passing away. And I have my ancestors present in my house and I feel them. My

[00:48:15] ancestors are, they've always been very loud. They've always been like, hey don't do that.

[00:48:20] And I'm like what this? They're like I said so I have, I'm lucky to be protected in that

[00:48:25] way and they bring me so much peace. Again, my friends, I have a beautiful community of

[00:48:32] best friends. They are like my siblings who cover me and protect me and I feel so at

[00:48:38] peace knowing that these are the people who are looking out for me. I'm never really afraid

[00:48:43] of who I have looking out for me. Our game is called Rewriting the Classics. Classic

[00:48:47] is however you define it. Name one book you wish you would have written. I'm gonna say

[00:48:54] Sula. I love Sula. I think it's so good and I remember when I wrote an essay about it when

[00:48:59] I was a kid and my teacher said, you made this up. You didn't read this. I was like,

[00:49:02] I did. I know I shouldn't but I did anyway. Name one book where you want to change the ending

[00:49:08] and how would you do it? Oh okay this is weird. Coldest winter ever. The ending was so sad.

[00:49:15] It was. She just basically ended up alone and all of her friends was gone. She got beat up,

[00:49:21] cut, her eye was all slit. Like I would have changed that. And then name one book that you

[00:49:28] think is overrated or overtaught. Why are you putting me in this situation? Okay.

[00:49:34] Because you have opinions. You're right. Catcher in the Rye. I can't stand that damn book.

[00:49:40] I can't stand that book. I swear I've said this so many times but you're like the 15th person

[00:49:46] that I've interviewed this season that has been like Catcher in the Rye fam. It's not

[00:49:50] for me. In between that one and The Great Gatsby they both for me I'd be like okay but

[00:49:55] Catcher in the Rye I just wow Jesus. So my final question for you today.

[00:50:05] When you are dead and gone and among the ancestors what would you like someone to write

[00:50:10] about the legacy of words and work that you've left behind? You know my answer?

[00:50:16] Jen loved Black people. Jen spent their life loving and protecting and caring for

[00:50:24] all Black people. Every single one of them even the ones that weren't popular even the ones

[00:50:30] that were considered deviant or disposable. Jen loved all the Black people. Big thank you to Dr.

[00:50:36] Jen M. Jackson for being here today on Black and Published. Make sure you check out Dr.

[00:50:42] M. Jackson's book Black Women Taught Us An Intimate History of Black Feminism out now from

[00:50:48] Random House and if you're not following Dr. Jen check them out on the socials. They're at

[00:50:54] Jen M. Jackson PhD on Instagram and Twitter and Jen has two N's. That's our show for the week.

[00:51:04] If you like this episode and want more Black and Published head to our Instagram page. It's

[00:51:11] at Black and Published and that's B-L-K and Published. There I've posted a bonus clip for

[00:51:18] my interview with Dr. Jackson about how she created a safe space to write such a vulnerable

[00:51:23] book. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

[00:51:28] I'll holler at y'all next week when our guest will be Maya Golden author of the memoir

[00:51:34] The Return Trip. I sat down and I started writing this book and three weeks in I started

[00:51:40] having nightmares and then it wasn't long after the nightmares that I started having panic attacks

[00:51:46] so I had to ultimately go see a cardiologist just to make sure that my ticker was okay because

[00:51:52] we were concerned that it might be a heart issue and he actually said no it's

[00:51:58] it's you writing this book. That's next week on Black and Published.

[00:52:03] I'll talk to you then. Peace.