America, Goddam
Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022, Kirkus Reviews
"A righteous indictment of racism and misogyny."—Publishers Weekly
A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in the United States and their fight for liberation.
Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.
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. 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. America, Goddam allows readers to understand How Black women—who have been both victims of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants—are rarely the focus of Black freedom movements. How 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. How across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led to Black liberation through organizing and radical politics. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this fiery debut, Lindsey, a women's studies professor at Ohio State University, decries historical and contemporary injustices against Black women in America. Interweaving her own harrowing experiences with astute cultural and political analysis, Lindsey sheds light on how police mistreatment, medical racism, poverty, intracommunal violence, and other social ills place Black women in a condition of "unlivable living." Harrowing examples of cruelty and indifference litter the book, as Lindsey details the normalization of sexual violence against enslaved women; the branding of Black feminists as "race traitors"; the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and others; and disproportionately higher rates of maternal morbidity and death from breast cancer among Black women. Amid the catalog of injustices, Lindsey spotlights Black women who organized for change—including Harriet Tubman, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer—and spotlights the leadership role African American women have played in #BlackLivesMatter and other social justice movements. Carefully researched and sharply argued, this is a righteous indictment of racism and misogyny.
