Black cultural studies is intersectionality

What is cultural studies?

What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues.

Like so many communities around the United States in the spring and summer of 2020, on 27 June, local Black women leaders in Seattle, Washington hosted a “#SayHerName Protect Black Women” rally and march in order to center Black women’s voices in the Black Lives Matter movement. #SayHerName Seattle kicked off with a rally that included speeches by a Black Muslim Somali woman connecting her experiences of anti-Black racism with her experiences of incarceration and immigration detention. Next, a Black transwoman activist testified to her allegiance to the Black Lives Matter movement while pleading for her Black cisgender sisters and brothers to stand up for her life in the same way she stood up for theirs. After a first round of speeches the multiracial group marched through the streets of the diverse south end of Seattle to embark upon a second round of speeches in front of the Seattle Police Department’s South Precinct. The Black women leaders of the event called out, “Whose lives matter?,” to resounding responses of “Black Women’s Lives Matter!”

In the second round of speeches, traditional talks, in content or style, were not typical. Nineteen-year-old college student Chardonnay Beavers began her speech ¹ by beautifully crooning out the lyrics to Marvin Gaye’s 1971 anthem “What’s Going On,” but flipping it masterfully, singing, “mother mother, there’s too many of you dying.” She told the crowd, “see how I did the lyrics backwards because our mothers are dying today?” She continued:

Ida B. Wells once said that in order to right wrongs you have to turn the light of truth upon them, and so today my agenda is not to be seen. My agenda is not to be praised. My agenda is to speak of truth.

Similarly blending the spirit of Black soul music and Black politics, a drill team of pre-adolescents stomped the stage while they shouted out their demands to be seen as “queens.” The youngest performer of the day was an 8-year-old rapping-singing-dancing girl, who spun a tale of being bored and “home with the ’rona.” The event ended with a Black, mixed-race transwoman and DJ, first testifying to the vital importance of including Black trans issues at the center of the BLM movement, the bookend issue of the day, and then leading the protest out to the sounds of Beyoncé’s new song “Black Parade,” that was released just a week earlier on Juneteenth.

Black protest has always been animated by a combination of Black culture, Black politics, and Black intellectual traditions. Black cultural studies weaves together Black theories and practices in concordance with Black scholarship, both inside and outside of hallowed academic walls; Black cultural studies practitioners march on streets, sing protest ballads, and write books. In our moment of dual pandemics – Covid-19, and the acknowledgement of the racial disproportionality that accompanies this virus – and the racialized violence that continues to overtake our country, never has our world more deeply needed the theory in practice – the praxis – that Black cultural studies affords. Black cultural studies, as defined by Baker et al. in their classic anthology, Black British Cultural Studies, brings about “black re-vision,” or the “narratives that retell histories of blackness . . . from new vantage points . . . includ[ing] the narration of stories previously excluded from the national public sphere” (Baker et al., 1996: 6). Our Black British comrades from so many decades past describe the ways in which Black cultural studies can be differentiated across the pond by “theorists” (Hall, Gilroy, Mercer as luminaries) versus the US-based practitioners of Black arts and Black politics (Baraka, King, X, as stand-outs) (Baker et al., 1996: 10). Of course, in the almost twenty-five years that have passed, U.S. Black cultural studies has grown as a vibrant field that boasts scholars with all forms of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and post-structural allegiances, who unabashedly wed theory, art and politics. Such is the norm, in fact, in US Black cultural studies today, that in a very recent collection, Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-first Century, the editors, Simone C. Drake and Dwan K. Henderson, name how Black cultural studies lays out the ways in which “the disruptive trope of blackness in the twenty-first century often weds resistance to pleasure” (Drake and Henderson, 2020: 6). #SayHerNameSeattle illustrates a site of Black cultural studies where Black intersectional activism disrupts expected norms of Blackness – as male, cisgender, older, straight – and does so in an exceedingly pleasurable way alongside Black cultural production.

Black cultural studies allows us to examine the recent protests using an intersectional approach. Although used colloquially (and often incorrectly) to mean the mixture of all forms of identity, the term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Black feminist critical race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 to define how the multilayered forms of discrimination that Black women face failed to be captured within the traditional boundaries of race or gender jurisprudence. Where the law – reflecting hegemonic beliefs – saw such race/gender boundaries as separately experienced, the intersection of racism and sexism in Black women’s lives could not be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately (Crenshaw, 1991: 1244). Importantly, before the term itself was coined, Black women scholars/activists such as Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper had utilized an intersectional approach in earlier moments.

As mass protests continue throughout the world following the media-recorded murder of George Floyd and many others, one message remains persistent: in order to fully comprehend and change the systemic violence that plagues Black lives today, the experiences and traumas surrounding Black women and LGBTQ+ people must be given the same validity as those experienced by Black men. In many cases, the deaths of Black women, trans men and women gain attention only in light of the murder of Black men. For example, just two days after police murdered 46-year-old George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 27 May 2020, in Tallahassee, Florida, police also murdered Tony McDade, a 38-year-old Black trans man; two months earlier police murdered 26-year-old Black cis woman Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky (Wortham, 2020: 3). Black cultural studies scholars fight to ensure that media representations of Black women and Black LGBTQ+ folks, such as McDade and Taylor, become the main story and not the footnote.

#Blacklivesmatter, coined by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometti, and #Sayhername, coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, are brainchildren of Black women organizers and intellectuals who demonstrate that an intersectional approach can create a “movement with teeth” while addressing the complex ways in which media representations of Black male disenfranchisement disregards that of Black cisgender women and LGBTQ+ people. In the rest of this article we will give the example of how intersectionality and #SayHerName founder Crenshaw not only captured this in her naming of “intersectionality” but also, paradoxically, in her defense of the 1980s rap group 2 Live Crew. Using her intersectional approach in “Beyond racism and misogyny: Black feminism and 2 Live Crew” (1997) as a case study, we will demonstrate the ways in which Crenshaw’s argumentation can be understood as a classic Black cultural studies praxis which weds theory, politics, activism, and cultural production in the service of intersectionality.

In Crenshaw’s powerful and insightful articulation, she chooses to view the 2 Live Crew obscenity case through the lens of “Black feminist sensibilities.” To give a quick history on the case: the mid-1980s “Obscenity Wars” were led by a group of concerned parents called the Parents Musical Resource Center (PMRC), which successfully lobbied for Parental Advisory labels on albums they deemed “obscene.” This label, however, wasn’t enough to sate PMRC critics of Miami-based hip hop group 2 Live Crew. The group’s album As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989) became the target of Florida anti-obscenity activists, then politicians around the country. In 1990 a Lee County, Florida, judge deemed that there was “probable cause to believe” that Nasty was obscene. This judgment spurred judges in additional counties in Florida, as well as in counties in other states such as Wisconsin, Texas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Alabama, to create similar verdicts. In the aftermath of these obscenity rulings, members of the group were arrested in Miami for performing songs from the album and a record store owner in Fort Lauderdale, Florida was arrested for selling the album (Schwarz, 2015).

Crenshaw reads this case through a Black feminist lens, an analysis previously absent from legal or media coverage of the event. This in turn, allowed her to view the charges launched by the federal judges and prosecuting attorney as interchangeable and intersectional. Meaning, through the lens of Black feminism, Crenshaw could view the racialized and gendered similarities through which the courts and media attacked 2 Live Crew. Put differently, Crenshaw could view how the references to 2 Live Crew’s “obscene” work reflected stereotypes of Black men but also utilized tropes of Black women to argue their case against the group. Crenshaw contends: As Nasty As They Wanna Be is misogynist, and a Black feminist response to the case against 2 Live Crew must start from a full acknowledgment of that misogyny. But such a response must also consider whether an exclusive focus on issues of gender risks overlooking aspects of the prosecution of 2 Live Crew that raise serious questions of racism (Crenshaw, 1997: 255).

Crenshaw takes issue with the prosecution’s racialized biases in categorizing what qualifies or does not qualify as obscene. For example, the adult cabaret in which 2 Live Crew performed their songs, or Madonna’s highly sexualized acts on stage masturbating in front of a large audience, or comedian Andrew Dice Clay’s violent and raunchy lines depicting women in extreme sexual acts that never met the same criteria. Crenshaw draws attention to a Newsweek article written by journalist George Will condemning 2 Live Crew’s disregard for Black women; in the article Will conjures images of the Central Park Jogger and concerns about smoking cigarettes receiving more attention than 2 Live Crew’s lewd lyrics about Black women. This sleight of hand, Crenshaw suggests, removes Black women from view and replaces them with images of the Central Park Jogger, a white woman. It is with this move that the stereotype of the Black hyper-sexualized and violent “super predator,” which poses a threat to society as a whole, emerges. Crenshaw highlights, “In Will’s display of concern, Black women appear to function as a stand-in for white women. The focus on sexual violence played out on Black women’s bodies seems to reflect concerns about the threat of Black male violence against the security of the white community” (Crenshaw, 1997: 258–9). In the end, Crenshaw determines that the obscenity case against 2 Live Crew was never about being sexually explicit, but about being Black. By excavating stereotypes of Black male sexuality, the obscenity charges against 2 Live Crew told an untrue but familiar story.

Just as in Crenshaw’s argumentation from decades past, in the contemporary moment we continue to see that the driving force behind Black cultural studies is a Black feminist’s vision. Black feminism grounds Black cultural studies far beyond a theoretical framing, on the embodied sacrifices of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaigns (1890s); Harriet Tubman’s successful military activism at the Combahee River (1863); Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech (1851), which contested dominant beliefs of racial and gendered subservience and disparity by implementing a courageous intersectional framework; Fannie Lou Hamer’s gripping and heartfelt testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention after being beaten severely by police officers. What we see in the work of Black cultural studies is a continuation of these founding mothers through Crenshaw’s construction of intersectionality (1988), Stuart Hall’s work on representation (1993), Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought (1990), bell hooks’ Outlaw Culture (1994), and Barbara Smith’s Black lesbian intervention with the Combahee River Collective Organization (1986), just to name a few. Today, the #SayHerName collaboration between the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) creates a movement and scholarly force in response to the often invisible names and narratives of Black women and girls who have been murdered or have been victims of police brutality. Whether in moments of crisis or in moments of calm, Black women’s contributions to cultural studies have always been, continue to be, present. To put it plainly: Black cultural studies is intersectionality.

This article is not just an acknowledgment of the contributions of Black women to the development of Black cultural studies but, more significantly, a call to action. Just as our #SayHerName sisters in summer 2020 rallies across the country have shouted into megaphones, we call Black cisgender women and men to become accomplices in the continued fight for Black women and Black LGBTQ+ people’s lives and visibility. This is a call for understanding that Black cisgender male privilege can easily become an ally to the White heteronormative oppression of Black women and Black LGBTQ+ communities. As Stuart Hall contends in “What’s the Black in Black popular culture?,” Black cultural studies:

is not simply to appreciate the historical and experiential differences within and between communities, regions, country and city, across national cultures, between diasporas, but also to recognize the other kinds of difference that place, position, and locate Black people. The point is not simply that, since our racial differences do not constitute all of us, we are always different, negotiating different kinds of differences of gender, of sexuality, of class. It is also that these antagonisms refuse to be neatly aligned; they are simply not reducible to one another; they refuse to coalesce around a single axis of differentiation. We are always in negotiation, not with a single set of oppositions that place us always in the same relation to others, but with a series of different positionalities. Each has for us its point of profound subjectiveness. (Hall, 1993: 112)

Hall provides a startling and powerful antidote, and note of caution to what happens when we fail to see the complexity of our Black communities. In his untangling of proliferation and antagonisms, Hall contends that the complex layers which make up one’s positionality and array of identities function as mechanisms which cancel out one another.

In this text, we examine the transformational influence that Black feminist theory has had on cultural studies; from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s defense of 2 Live Crew, to the #SayHerNameSeattle and Protect Black Women rally and march, we contend that #Blacklivesmatter is just as much about centering the experiences and voices of Black women and Black LGBTQ+ communities as it is about recognizing systemic violence against Black men. The #SayHerNameSeattle protesters answered the question posed by Stuart Hall – the father of not just Black cultural studies but cultural studies itself – and that remains the guiding question for Black cultural studies, “What is the Black in Black popular culture?” We answer: Black cultural studies is anti-racist, unapologetically Black, queer, young, feminist, trans, female, dancing, singing, and marching.