Treva B Lindsey. Souls. Volume 19, Issue 3. 2017.
“Negro women may be dangerous.” These words accompanied the image of Harriet Tubman on a “Wanted” poster in the 1850s. Freedom fighter, military strategist, and armed resister, Tubman was an enemy of the state. She was a terrorist, whose every liberatory act posed a distinct threat to U.S. chattel slavery and the robust economy of anti-Blackness. Tubman evaded capture and continued her freedom work until Emancipation. Post-Emancipation, she remained committed to social justice. Tubman planned, embarked on, and successfully executed numerous journeys back into the trenches of the slave-holding South to guide and lead fugitive Black people to freedom. On numerous occasions, she put her own life on the line for the freedom of others.
It is therefore unsurprising that a radical Black feminist collective would name themselves after one of Tubman’s most harrowing liberatory acts, the raid at Combahee River. This military operation led to the freeing of over 750 enslaved people in the South Carolina Low Country. Tubman’s courage, knowledge of the area, and effective tactics for evading capture were tremendous assets for the Union Army. Whereas her work on the Underground Railroad required anonymity, secrecy, and strategic stealth in the face of grave danger, the raid at Combahee River was one of Tubman’s more public, spectacular, and highly visible acts of resistance. Her more covert work, however, established her as a powerful force in the war to end slavery.
Over 100 years after one of the most successful domestic military operations in U.S. history, the founding members of the Combahee River Collective chose a name that inextricably linked them to a herstory of Black women’s radical activism. In the Combahee River Collective Statement, primary authors Demetria Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith began the document with powerful statements about the origins of contemporary Black Feminism. They stated that, “we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation.” Frazer, Smith, and Smith named Tubman as one of the thousands of Black women activists whose work connected to being part of “two oppressed racial and sexual castes.” The Statement, and more importantly, the Combahee River Collective, unapologetically conjoined themselves to generations of Black women freedom fighters.
In naming their Collective after Tubman, these Black women activists illuminated the significance of Tubman beyond mythology or even hagiography—they identified Tubman as a historical exemplar of “personal sacrifice and militancy.” The Collective pinpointed militancy as a key thread in the genealogy of Black women’s activism, as well as its costs. This genealogy encompasses the rebellious and revolutionary acts of Black women in the United States against the practices and historically contingent technologies of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.
The combination of personal sacrifice and militancy in Black women’s activism is insurgency. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, “insurgent” has emerged as a politicized and pejorative term—often used interchangeably with “terrorist.” Although not explicitly racialized, the term insurgent conjures the image of a person of Middle Eastern descent who commits a violent mass attack. It is rarely used to describe white men committing mass murders or plotting to kill a substantial number of people of color. In the current moment, insurgent also implicitly signals anti-American-ness. Within the logics of American-ness versus Anti-American-ness, insurgents pose grave danger to U.S. democratic ideals, the “American way of life,” and to national security. Consequently, for those invested in American-ness and U.S. exceptionalism, insurgents must be neutralized by any and all means necessary.
Insurgency, however, has been and is a Black feminist standpoint within the genealogy of Black women’s radical activism. This activism peaks in terms of visibility in particular moments of heightened anti-Black, heteropatriarchal, imperialist, and/or capitalistic violence and subjection. Danger has been and is ubiquitous, but Black women’s activism provides a distinct space for Black women to reckon with systems of oppression. This tradition of reckoning informs how Black women continue to mobilize and organize in the 21st century.
This article explores recent Black women’s activism through the lens of insurgency. Black women freedom fighters of the 21st century consistently engage tactics rooted in personal sacrifice and militancy. Contemporary Black women’s radical activism (loosely identified as #BlackLivesMatter-era activism) builds on a genealogy of “Negro Women May Be Dangerous.” Indebted to Black women activists named in the Combahee River Collective Statement such as Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Frances E.W. Harper as well as Black women freedom fighters such as Maria Stewart, Septima Clark, Rosa Parks, Lucy Diggs Slowe, Claudia Jones, Florence Kennedy, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Barbara Smith, and Ramona Africa, Black women organizers in the #BlackLivesMatter Era carry the torch of Black women’s insurgency. They also inhabit the liberatory struggles of enslaved women poisoning their slave owners or setting their plantations on fire, freedwomen in sewing circles organized to free enslaved people, Black women plotting to free political prisoners, and Black women arming themselves in defense of their homes and communities. Black women engaged in freedom struggles have a unique understanding of the many fronts on which full liberation must be fought for and achieved.
Black women activists in the #BlackLivesMatter era exist within a history of Black freedom struggles, and more specifically within a tradition of Black women constituting a significant portion of those organizing for justice. Similar to their Black feminist, womanist, and radical foremothers, contemporary activist networks such as the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) challenge a prevailing model of organizing Black communities that idealizes Black men’s charismatic leadership. Despite concerns and questions about the lack of “formal leadership,” M4BL, for example, pushes back against messianic leadership models as well as the privileging of cisgender, heterosexual Black men as movement leaders. In the fight for Black liberation, the M4BL firmly asserts the necessity of centering those on the margins.
Using specific examples of Black women protesting, mobilizing, and organizing under the broad call to action “#BlackLivesMatter,” I strive to re-appropriate and reinvigorate insurgency as a distinct Black feminist approach to Black freedom struggles. This work builds on the growing body of work on Black women’s radical activism by scholars such as Dayo Gore, Sherie Randolph, Barbara Ransby, Erik McDuffie, Jeanne Theoharris, Danielle McGuire, Tracye Matthews, Ashley Farmer, and Tanisha Ford. Recent scholarship on Black women’s radical activism compels us to rethink our historical and contemporary understandings of Black women as symbols, soldiers, and strategists in social movements. I offer insurgency as a conceptual framework that accounts for how Black women activists combine various forms of personal sacrifice with varying modes of militancy.
Insurgency
In Barbara Ransby’s comprehensive biography of Ella Baker, Ransby describes Baker as an “insurgent intellectual.” This description accounts for both the toll of Baker’s intensive activist schedule on her own well-being as well as her incessant commitment to developing new activists and ideas. Insurgent also encapsulates Baker’s militancy and dedication to ending anti-Black racism. Baker’s belief in the possibility of a radical democracy did not prevent her from calling out pervasive anti-democratic practices in the United States. It also made her openly critical of the sexism of Black male activists and the patriarchal structures and strictures of organizations within the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Her insurgency and the thousands she directly organized with countered the relentlessness of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism.
In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja powerfully asserts the importance of insurgent political action, including armed resistance in the Southern freedom struggles of the mid-20th century. Umoja reclaims insurgency as a useful province for southern Black political actors who combated the realities of white supremacy, anti-Black racial terror, disenfranchisement, and segregation. Although regionally specific, Umoja’s usage of insurgency to describe a form of Black radical activism opens a space for questions about gender-specific forms of insurgent political action. To understand the contemporary era of Black women activists, it is important that we re-conceptualize insurgency to comprehend the range of ways Black women struck and strike back against U.S. empire.
Insurgency captures the urgency, tenacity, creativity, resiliency, and potency of Black women’s radical quotidian and mid- to large-scale activism. It “rescues” Rosa Parks from her status as the symbolic “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” solely remembered for her role in a distinct moment of historical significance by reminding us of her role as an anti-rape activist and a seasoned and life-long crusader for justice. It scoffs at recent attempts to erase the history of Black men’s sexist opposition to Shirley Chisholm during her presidential campaign. It recuperates Tubman as an enemy of an unjust state, not as a flattened or comfortable American hero. Identifying Black women radical activists as insurgents provides an expansive framework for engaging Black women mobilizing and organizing in the era of #BlackLivesMatter. Through close readings of a range of recent insurgent acts orchestrated and participated in by Black women, I identify a continuation of a tradition that extends from captive African women to Tubman’s raid at the Combahee River to the founding of the Combahee River Collective. Recent acts of Black women’s radical activism exist within a herstory of insurgency in which freedom dreams are inclusive, incisive, and imaginative.
Pole Work
Although Black women confront daily indignities and the harsh systemic realities of multiple forms of oppression, particular moments of Black women’s insurgency stand out in the Black radical imagination. These moments, while often spectacularized and vilified in mainstream mass media, involve Black women disrupting, disorienting, decrying, and demanding. Those railing against contemporary Black women insurgents deploy sanitized and ahistorical images of and narratives about historical figures such as Tubman and Parks and of unnamed Civil Rights era protestors to argue for the value of less provocative and disruptive forms of protest. Tubman and Parks’ militancy and the violence Black women protestors encountered in past Black freedom struggles fall out of these ahistoric and thinly politicized recollections of African American women’s activism. It is Tubman’s lantern and not her rifle celebrated and commemorated via doodles on Google, postal stamps, and potentially, the U.S. $20 bill. Black women in the era #BlackLivesMatter operate from and build on a different and more precise herstory of Black women’s insurgent activism. Tubman’s legacy cannot be reduced to the lantern or the gun—her legacy encompasses a multitude of tools, strategies, and sacrifices.
Contemporary Black women activists recognize the power of optics of Black women’s insurgency in this era of anti-Black racial terror, particularly through digital mass media. They use their visibility, bodies, and strategizing to fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, Islamophobia, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy. They embody the spirit of Combahee through their understanding of a “very definite revolutionary task to perform.” This task requires a multitude of approaches—among them direct and visceral challenges to systems and symbols of oppression.
Bree Newsome, a Black women activist, scaled a flagpole to remove the Confederate Flag at the statehouse in South Carolina after the anti-Black terrorist attack at Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. This insurgent act both literally and figuratively challenged white supremacy. The action, collectively planned by ten people including Newsome occurred just ten days after Dylann Roof brutally murdered nine Black people at Mother Emmanuel. Images of the removal of such a powerful symbol from a seat of state power and authority flooded social and mainstream mass media. Footage from this courageous act of civil disobedience captured Newsome reciting the Lord’s Prayer as she removed the flag and descended down the pole. Police officers awaited Newsome and one of her co-conspirators, James Ian Tyson, at the bottom of the flagpole. They immediately arrested both activists for daring to discard one of the most explicit symbols of U.S. white supremacy. It is worth noting that in the immediate aftermath of the Charleston white supremacist terrorist attack, sales of Confederate flags skyrocketed.
Reflecting upon her insurgent act a year later, Newsome stated in an interview with Black feminist scholar and Elle online editor, Melissa Harris-Perry that,
I knew it would not be permanent, but this was an important act of civil disobedience … That flag has not been flying continuously since the Civil War. The state of South Carolina raised it in 1961 as a specific statement of opposition to the Civil Rights movement and a symbol against black people gaining equality. I had strong feelings about the flag for a long time, but last summer it became intolerable.
Newsome’s framing of her action as civil disobedience is important to note. Civil disobedience in the face of potential arrest, incarceration, loss of job security, police brutality, and even death should not be undervalued as an insurgent act. Black women die in police custody. Newsome expecting to be arrested does not lessen the significance of her risking her body and livelihood for striking back against white supremacy. She and her co-conspirators prepared for a range of police responses to the removal of the confederate flag. This preparation, however, could not fully protect them from the array of possible consequences Black people face when they challenge state authority. Outside of state violence, Newsome faced internet harassment and other kinds of violent threats for removing this symbol of treason and chattel slavery from the South Carolina statehouse.
The images of Newsome removing the confederate flag convey defiance and conviction. The act as well as the circulation of video footage and images of Newsome scaling the flagpole at the statehouse in Charleston, South Carolina reignited an important conversation about the terror represented by the flag, particularly the flag’s presence at the seat of state power. Ultimately, this heated and polarizing debate led to the permanent removal of the confederate flag from the state house. A symbol that invoked chattel slavery, anti-Black racial terror, and racial segregation no longer had a state-sponsored home in the same state in which Tubman led a raid against the Confederacy over one hundred years prior.
To dismiss this brave act as merely symbolic misses the significance of white supremacist iconography in the pervasiveness of anti-Black racial terror. After the violent uprising of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017 ended with an anti-white supremacy protestor killed and several other anti-racist protestors injured, confederate flag sales soared. As the push to remove symbols of anti-Black racial terror gains greater traction in the United States, the virulent backlash to the potential removal of white supremacist iconography intensifies. Donald Trump and his administration further embolden those invested in white supremacist symbolism, iconography, and material culture through rhetoric and praxes that are either in support of or complicit in white supremacist and anti-Black, racist ideologies. While the removal of the flag does not eradicate anti-Black racism, it does strike a blow at the ubiquity of white supremacist symbolism. People embolden because of cultural symbols.
Newsome attacked one of the most racially charged symbols in U.S. history, which remained state-protected for over fifty years. On a day-to-day basis and at the local level, Black people in Columbia, South Carolina no longer have to see a symbol intimately tied to a history of racial violence and the commodification of Black bodies on top of the statehouse. On a national, and even global level, Newsome’s insurgent act empowers and inspires other people to rail against symbolic, representational, and material forms of anti-Blackness. Black women’s insurgency, as exemplified by Newsome, connects the symbolic to the material. Symbols directly and indirectly affect material realities; therefore, Black women’s insurgent acts do and must account for debunking the logics of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Removing of the confederate flag in Charleston contributed to de-legitimizing logics of anti-Blackness.
The image of Newsome removing the flag also added to the robust archive of iconography of Black women’s insurgency. Justice-work entails both effective and affective labor. From an affective standpoint, the image of a Black woman scaling a flagpole to remove a piece of white supremacist material culture powerfully resonates. The act of removal by a Black woman creates space to critically consider the unique history of Black women’s role in fighting against white supremacy. One of the most widely circulated images of civil disobedience in the 21st century thus far is of a Black woman pushing the limits of her own physicality to oppose the ravages of anti-Blackness.
Newsome tapped into a lineage of Black women herstory-makers. While she will always be linked to this particular, spectacular act of insurgency, her involvement with Moral Mondays in North Carolina and sit-ins to protest racist North Carolina Voter ID laws reflects a commitment to the often invisible justice-labor Black women perform. Newsome’s dedication to the “revolutionary task” did not commence or cease on June 27, 2015. Her performative, brave, and symbolic act became part of a still-unfolding story of how Black women’s insurgent acts can affect change.
Unchained
Radical Black women activists frequently use their bodies as sites of insurgent protest. The usage of their own bodies in service of justice-centered activism counters a history in which the U.S. profits from the productive and reproductive labor of Black women’s bodies. Using the same bodies that have been exploited, demonized, and devalued throughout this nation’s history, Black women insurgents reclaim the power of Black women’s bodies to defeat the inhumanity of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Neither as sexual object or exploited laborer, Black women putting forth their bodies to combat interlocking forms of oppression has a long and dynamic herstory. This ranges from Black women on the Middle Passage jumping off slave ships bound for the Americas to Black women placing their bodies in front of armed and militarized agents of the state.
Organizations like Assata’s Daughters build upon this legacy of Black women’s bodies being sites of insurgent activism. Named after freedom fighter Assata Shakur, this Chicago-based organization cultivates and supports a new generation of young Black women activists organizing for transformative justice. Their tactics are often intentionally disruptive, highly visible, and creatively spectacular in their deployment. They embody unapologetic Blackness as praxis without being narrow or essentialist in their conceptualization of Blackness. The deliberate centering of Black women purposefully creates space for Black women and femmes to explore the possibilities of a movement devoid of masculinist or heteropatriarchal models of leadership. This organization incorporates the strategies, theories, and tactics of their foremothers. They tap into the annals of Black women’s intellectual insurgency. Assata’s Daughters align themselves with a model leadership that resembles the participatory democratic models advocated by Ella Baker.
Defining themselves as a “grassroots intergenerational collective of radical Black women,” Assata’s Daughters firmly locate themselves within the Movement for Black Lives. Although a relatively young organization, this collective created a distinct space for Black women-identified people in Chicago to organize around the demand for abolition and to learn from and train within a Black feminist radical tradition. Similar to the Combahee River Collective naming themselves after the location of a radical Black woman’s insurgent act, Assata’s Daughters derived its name from Black radical activist, Assata Shakur. Through their naming, they establish a Black feminist political continuity and a radical kinship practice that refuses to discard or disavow the work of Black feminist foremothers in struggles against U.S. empire. Linking themselves to a distinct herstory of activism rooted in substantive, mobilizing and organizing approaches, they think critically about Black radical women’s reservoir of intellectual insurgency, which includes the conceptualization and theorization of intersectionality, multiple jeopardy, interlocking forms of oppression, and advanced marginalization.
For Assata’s Daughters and many of the Black women organizing in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, Black women’s radical activism is inextricably tied to an intellectual insurgency rooted in critical understandings of the interconnectedness of multiple forms of oppression. Black women’s fight for liberation, therefore, cannot exist on a single register—racism, sexism, capitalism, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism manifest as mutually constituted forms of dehumanization and marginalization. Black women’s radical activism accounts for multiple operating systems of oppression and how those systems interact in the lives of those on the margins, specifically Black women. This kind of liberatory work requires an insurgency in imagination, acumen, disposition, and strategy.
Recognizing a connection between the defunding of public institutions and an increasing militarization of law enforcement, on April 30, 2016, Assata’s Daughters, Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY), and Black Lives Matter Chicago shut down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and caused notable disruption for NFL Draft Town Saturday. Demanding permanent funding for Chicago State University and the firing of Chicago police detective Dante Servin for the 2012 killing of Rekia Boyd, protestors chain-linked themselves together and obstructed traffic until police forcibly removed their chains and detained the protestors. The protest strove to disrupt NFL Draft Town and to call attention to police murders of Black women and the dire effects of defunding a public institution of higher learning serving primarily marginalized communities.
The image of young Black women in all black with red berets chained together chanting and obstructing traffic circulated across various social media platforms. They proposed that money used to fund the police be redirected towards saving Chicago State University. They connected the divestment in public education to state investment in over-policing and brutalizing marginalized communities. These young Black women and femmes mobilized around interconnected forms of oppression and marginalization. This group of young Black activists shed light upon the state’s complicity in the murder of a Black woman and in the diminishing of opportunities for higher education for underserved communities.
Although the act did not cause the firing of Dante Servin or cease the ongoing defunding of Chicago State University, their insurgent act reignited conversations about police killings of Black women and girls and about the necessity of affordable, quality higher education for low-income and predominantly Black and Brown people. By blocking traffic, these 17 young Black women asserted that no one gets to their destination insofar as injustice remains the status quo. More pointedly, their act pivoted around the belief that inconvenience pales in comparison to the unrelenting assaults on poor, Black, Brown, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA), indigenous, and indigent communities. Their militant standpoint affirmed that the inconvenience of traffic delays is necessary to confront the inhumanity of state and state sanctioned violence against Black women, girls, and femmes. Their act of defiance compelled those stuck on Lake Shore Drive to sacrifice hours of their day to help build awareness of police violence against Black women and of the detrimental effects of defunding public institutions such as Chicago State University.
The obstruction of traffic using their bodies and chains mirrored the visible and invisible barriers Black women and girls confront on a daily basis. Obstructing traffic emerged as one of the more militant protest actions engaged by activists, especially Black women and femme activists in the era of #BlackLivesMatter. Human chain highway/major thoroughfare protests have occurred in cities throughout the United States, including one of the most visible cities/metropolitan areas in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, Ferguson/St. Louis, Missouri. The appropriation of chains, a technology of bondage used in the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, convict leasing, and in the criminal justice system as a recuperated technology of insurgent protest is viscerally powerful. On April 30, 2016 in Chicago, Black women protestors embodied the Marxist-inspired, Assata Shakur–authored affirmation: “we have nothing to lose but our chains.”
Bare It All
The physicality of contemporary Black women’s activism extends a tradition of Black women sacrificing their bodies for liberatory causes. One of the most creative and visually arresting acts of contemporary Black women’s insurgency was the #SayHerName protest in San Francisco in May 2015. Coming on the heels of the publication of the #SayHerName report authored by the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), the Bay Area protest in conjunction with protests occurring in many cities across the United States homed in on police violence against Black women and girls. The report did not just add Black girls and women’s names to the horrifically long list of Black people killed by the police—it detailed how policing affected Black women and girls. The AAPF report and protestors gathering around the country to demand an end to police violence against ALL Black people challenged a Black male-dominated narrative of police brutality.
What made the San Francisco/Bay Area protest stand out from the other rallies was that many of the protestors were topless. These audacious Black women tapped into a herstory of Black women throughout the African diaspora using “body activism” to rail against oppressive forces. The baring of breasts also emphasized the hypocritical and heinous treatment of Black women’s bodies throughout history. Exploited for their productive and reproductive labor, hyper-sexualized in popular media, invisibilized in discussions about gender and sexual violence, and violated in both state and intimate/domestic encounters, people rarely read Black women’s bodies as sites of insurgency, creativity, and political dynamism.
The baring of their breasts connoted vulnerability and resilience, tenacity and fatigue, pain and possibility. Holding the names of Black women and girls killed by police, the mainly topless protestors blocked a major route to the financial district of Silicon Valley. Their partially naked bodies provided a point of entry for grappling with a history of Black women’s bodies and the production of U.S. wealth. The abuse and mistreatment of Black women and girls throughout U.S. history paved the way for Silicon Valley and other modern entities of white wealth to exist. But at what cost? San Francisco/Bay Area #SayHerName protestors compelled those unable to cross their embodied picket line and all who saw images of them of social media to reckon with a collective unwillingness to see the depths of damage caused by white heteropatriarchal supremacy and capitalism.
By tapping into an African diasporic herstory of topless protests, these Black women and femmes embodied insurgency as a viable form of resistance. Their refusal to remain silent about police murders as well as the murders of Black trans* women was a profound declaration. The images of their bodies conveyed a conviction to rendering visible and, more importantly, legible the dire effects of policing and anti-Black racial terror on Black women and girls. Their willingness to sacrifice their bodies for #SayHerName resonated with a herstory of Black women mobilizing in defense of themselves against the horrors of multiple and interlocking forms of oppression. They also tapped into contested histories of Black women’s bodily autonomy from slavery to the present. Despite attempts to control, regulate, police, and devalue the bodies of Black women and girls, this act of embodied Black women’s insurgency offered a counter-punch to anti-Blackness and anti-femmeness. These Black women and femmes bared themselves to bear withness and witness to an inglorious history and contemporaneous, pernicious reality of anti-Black racial terror.
Too often Black women remain marginalized in conversations about historical and contemporary anti-Black racial terror. Protests such as this one demand that people not only remember the names of Black women, girls, and femmes like Miriam Carey, Korryn Gaines, Mya Hall, Aiyana Stanley Jones, and Deborah Danner, but also ask why these women were killed and why their deaths do not spark the same outrage and racial justice furor in Black communities. These questions necessitate intellectual insurgency like that modeled by Baker, by Tubman, by Frazier, Smith and Smith, and now, by contemporary Black women radical activists. The Bay-Area #SayHerName protestors understood “the struggle before us,” and creatively used their targeted bodies to demand substantive and life-affirming responses to the query, will people #SayHerName?
Conclusion
Each of these examples of Black women’s insurgent activism pivot around singular spectacular acts in the #BlackLivesMatter era. These acts happen alongside the unseen and quotidian work of Black women and girls surviving, living, and thriving, as well as fighting against systems of oppression. Black women’s radical activism relies upon insurgency as a mobilizing force. In 2017, the Black Mama Bail Out Action, spearheaded by Mary Hooks of Southerners On New Ground and led and organized by Black women and femmes in numerous cities across the United States called upon people to give their money and time to supporting efforts to release Black women held on bail in jail. This action combined sacrifice and militancy through its disruption of mass incarceration and its ability to highlight the injustice attached to the U.S. bail system. Although not a long-term solution for ending mass incarceration or moving towards prison abolition, this act returned Black women to their loved ones, their livelihoods, and to their communities and provided them with a better opportunity to successfully defend themselves in their respective cases.
There are insurgent possibilities in the range of ways Black women and girls respond to white heteropatriarchal supremacy. The more visible moments of defiance and resistance, however, warrant our critical consideration because of their audacity and their ability to inform, incite, and inspire. In a historical moment in which social and digital media function as viable, though imperfect tools for mobilizing and organizing, these insurgent acts affectively and effectively embody an insurgent tradition. The social justice labor of Black women is too often unheralded and undervalued. It is Black women’s labor from Tubman to the Combahee River Collective, to those organizing in the era of #BlackLivesMatter that provide roadmaps to and glimpses of justice and liberation. Black women activists engage in insurgent imagining because the realities of multiple jeopardy require unbossed and unbound liberatory praxes.
Insurgency, for some, may resound as an unwarranted, violent force against law and order and state authority. This framing disavows the violence enacted by systems of oppression on the bodies and lives of Black women and girls. Spectacular acts of Black women’s insurgency remind us that disenfranchisement, marginalization, dispossession, and devaluation were and are harmful processes to which Black women resisted and continue to resist. Each generation of Black women insurgents traverse paths to full abolition from white heteropatriarchal supremacy. In the era of #BlackLivesMatter, herstory is being made every day by Black women through their liberatory praxes. Contemporary Black women insurgents moving within the tradition of Tubman and the Combahee River Collective proclaim that they are “ready for a lifetime of work.”