but some of us are brave

an intro decolonial Black feminist reading list

Black feminism focuses on the connected realities of race, gender, sex, class, and beyond — and emerges from our life experiences. It looks at how these connected realities take shape and form in the lives of Black women, girls, femmes, and gender non-conforming people.

This “but some of us are brave” reading list is titled from the work of Barbara Smith, Akasha Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott’s All the Women are white, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. 

Black feminism is best practiced in the everyday and this space recognizes that the “best” form of Black feminism is one that’s rooted in radical politics, decoloniality, abolition, ending carceral systems (think prisons, surveillance places, gender, etc.) and destabilizing neoimperialism + neocapitalism. 

It’s a committed struggle against fascism, towards liberation and freedom, towards the destruction of class, race, gender, and cisheterosexual / patriarchal oppression, committed to the accessibility and presence of reproductive justice, and creating beneficial conditions of our lives. 

This decolonial Black feminism holds the importance of Black liberation globally and is best exemplified and practiced in local, grassroots, political organizations that center the same values, and not, what Khadijah Anabah Diskin calls a “white liberal feminism in Black faces.”¹

From this reading list, to what’s practiced everyday, a Black feminism that’s not centered on representation politics (voting for/endorsing people just because they’re Black/woman/etc.) or reformism/fortifying the status quo, and is concerned with the political and economic position of Black people, women, femmes, gender-expansive folks, and girls — globally, are good markers to keep in mind.

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Pillars 

• Black Feminist Thought - Patricia Hill Collins²

• Ar’n’t I a woman: Females Slaves in the Plantation South - Deborah Grey White³

• The Combahee River Collective Statement - The Combahee River Collective⁴

• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book - Hortense J. Spillers⁵

• Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality - Jennifer C. Nash⁶

• All the Women are white, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies - Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith⁷   

• The Black Feminist Reader - Joy James, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting⁸ 

• The Black Woman: An Anthology - Toni Cade Bambara⁹

• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement - Barbara Ransby

  

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Novels & Biographies

• Beloved - Toni Morrison 

• Sula - Toni Morrison 

• The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

• The Salt Eaters - Toni Cade Bambara 

• Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler 

• Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston 

• Assata Shakur  

• The Color Purple - Alice Walker 

• Our Sister Killjoy - Ama Ata Aidoo  

• Left of Karl Marx - Carole Boyce Davies

  

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Theory & Thought 

• The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery - Alys Eve Weinbaum 

• Sisters of the Yam - bell hooks 

• Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance - Moya Bailey 

• The Black Woman: An Anthology - Toni Cade Bambara 

• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments - Saidiya Hartman 

• The Invention of Women - Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

• Black Trans Feminism - Marquis Bey 

• Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism - bell hooks

• Decolonization and Afro-Feminism -  Sylvia Tamale

• Male Daughters, Female Husbands - Ifi Amadiume

• How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  

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*this reading list is living. with time, some books may be added, changed, or removed. consider this introductory and a helpful starting point to engaging through reading, Black feminism.*

Footnotes

1. Chapter 13, Troubling Black Feminisms - In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities: Joy James

2. https://negrasoulblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/patricia-hill-collins-black-feminist-thought.pdf

3. https://archive.org/details/arntiwoman00debo

4. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/

5. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Spillers_Mamas_Baby.pdf

6. https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-0059-4_601.pdf

7. https://ia800908.us.archive.org/24/items/AllTheWomenAreWhiteAllTheBlacksAreMenButSomeOfUsAreBrave/All%20the%20Women%20are%20White%2C%20All%20the%20Blacks%20are%20Men%2C%20But%20Some%20Of%20Us%20Are%20Brave.pdf

8. https://sites.williams.edu/jjames/files/2019/06/BlackFeministReader-1-compressed.pdf

9. https://archive.org/details/blackwoman00toni