A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in
the United States and their fight for liberation.
America, Goddam
explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy,
and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United
States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis,
Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms
and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as
their demands for justice for themselves and their communities.
America, Goddam powerfully demonstrates that the struggle for
justice begins with reckoning with the pervasiveness of violence
against Black women and girls in the United States.
Combining history,
theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender
dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a
unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the
circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and
understudied. Lindsey also shows that the sanctity of life and
liberty for Black men has been a galvanizing rallying cry within
Black freedom movements. But Black women—who have been both victims
of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants in it, and
quite often architects of these freedom movements—are rarely the
focus. Black women have led movements demanding justice for Breonna
Taylor, Sandra Bland, Toyin Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones,
and countless other Black women and girls whose lives have been
curtailed by numerous forms of violence. Across generations and
centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them
led many to envisioning and building toward Black liberation through
organizing and radical politics. Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's
searing protest song that inspired the title, America, Goddam
is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.