An Intimate History of Black Feminism Featuring Dr. Jenn M. Jackson

This episode features our conversation with Dr. Jenn M. Jackson, which was live-streamed on January 23, 2026.

Jenn M. Jackson (they/them) is a queer, androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson’s research is in Black Politics with a focus on Black Feminist movements, racial threat and trauma, gender and sexuality, policing, and political behavior. They are the author of BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US: AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF BLACK FEMINISM (Penguin Random House, 2024) and POLICING BLACKNESS (expected in 2026). Jackson has written peer-reviewed articles at Public Culture, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. Jackson received their doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2019 where they also received a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Jackson teaches courses on Gender and Politics, Black Feminism, Black Politics, and the Politics of Racial Threat.

During this episode, we chatted about their book, Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism, which celebrated its two-year anniversary and the release of the paperback version of the book. 

A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism, repositions Black women’s intellectual and political work at the center of today’s liberation movements. For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Us serves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.

Learn more about Dr. Jenn M. Jackson and their work by visiting their website: https://jennmjackson.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Click here to watch Dr. Jackson's talk on Politics and Prose

Watch episodes of Season 8 of That Black Couple here; Watch past episodes of That Black Couple (Seasons 1-7) here

Watch episodes of We Published, Beloved here

Find Dr. Jackson on Instagram: @jennmjacksonphd

Find Black Writers Read on Instagram: @blackwritersread

Find Black Writers Read online: https://blackwritersread.com/

Support Black Writers Read on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/blackwritersread

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

I wrote the book from that place, from a place of knowledge, from experience, right? From from knowing what that's like, and then from feeling this deep sense of mourning for these black women who frequently are only recognized after they pass on, right? Once they pass away, all of a sudden everyone's like, oh, I should read their stuff. And I'm always asking, why is it that black women have to be dead or AI for folks to go, well, this is some good stuff. Why, why does it why does it have to be that way? Right? What is it about the fact that we are living, breathing, complex human beings? Right? We have to now we have this whole dialogue. People are saying Tony Morrison wasn't nice. Oh, wait! Why is the what? You know, the post-humous personality, you know, measurements and you know that people are doing. They've done it to Zora, you know, they've done it to Belle, they're doing it to Tony. And we don't do it to anyone else. No one has said, you know what, I really wonder if Abe Lincoln was a nice guy. Right? I haven't heard it. I haven't heard it, right? And that's what concerns me. And that's why, that's why I wrote the book, is just to say, I want it is a place, it is meant to be for self-reflection. I wrote it to black women to in some way say, I see you, I see us, I know what it's like. And then for other folks who pick it up, it's to say, I hope you see, I hope you see what's happening too. Like I hope, I hope you can see, right, how these systems are actively working to push us out of the archive and only have us enter when it's through the lens of someone else.

SPEAKER_04 2:03

Hello and welcome to Black Writers Read. My name is Nicole Young Martin, and I'm the founder, producer, and host of this podcast. Thank you for tuning in for episode 16 of season six of the series. Launched on Juneteenth, 2020, Black Writers Read was created as a platform to showcase, celebrate, and honor the words, work, and traditions of Black Writers from across the country, across genres, across experiences, and across the African diaspora. Black Writers Read is a behind-the-scenes conversation into the crowd and what it means to create as a black author in today's society. So starting the series during the summer 2020, we've hosted almost 100 authors representing 15 plus genres from six countries and 26 states. This episode features our conversation with Dr. Jen M. Jackson, which was live streamed on January 23rd, 2026. Jen M. Jackson is a queer, androgynous black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all black people, and an assistant professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson's research is in black politics with a focus on black feminist movements, racial threat, and trauma, gender and sexuality, policing and political behavior. They are the author of Black Women Taught Us, published by Penguin Random House in 2024, and Policing Blackness, which is expected to come out in 2026. Jackson has written peer-reviewed articles at Public Culture, Politics Groups and Identities, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Women Politics and Policy. Jackson received their doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2019, where they also received a graduate certificate in gender and sexuality studies. Jackson teaches courses on gender and politics, black feminism, black politics, and the politics of racial threat. During this episode, we talked about their book, Black Women Taught Us An Intimate History of Black Feminism, which celebrated its two-year anniversary and the release of the paperback version of the book. A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, Black Women Taught Us an Intimate History of Black Feminism repositions black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movement. Across 11 original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders, from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audrey Lorde, Jackson sets the record straight about black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements, despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, black women taught us serves as a reminder that black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone. To learn more about Dr. Jackson, please visit their website at JmJackson.com. It is J-E-M-O and J O K.com. I'll leave y'all with this because I want to get deep into the episode as it is very healthy. I fangirl. I fangirl, Dr. Jackson. I don't care in the episode, and I hope that you'll pick up on it. I've been a fan of theirs for a very long time. I've followed their podcast. I've like followed them on social media for a very long time. I hope that Dr. Jackson continues getting boku, boku amounts of flowers throughout their career, as they are brilliant. And thank you so much for loving your people in the way that you do. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode, and I hope that you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

SPEAKER_03 6:03

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

That was so good and so professional. I was sitting here like, oh my gosh, I'm like learning from you as you're introducing me. Go ahead now. I'm listening.

SPEAKER_04 6:15

But also, you've you've done you've done this, which y'all, y'all know me, my Black Reddit's read community. I give like gardens of flowers to my people. So this, what I love about this book, I get a sense that it was probably published as your first book in academia, which that's a whole other conversation. But what I love about this book, and I have a question about it, is not only I feel like can it serve as a textbook across disciplines, this is a book for like book clubs. I feel like too, and how you wrote this in the personal reflection, I feel too that people can use this as a model of self-reflecting on the black women in their lives and how they impacted their identity formation and all of that. So I love that this book straddles so many worlds. Like, I hope that you know that you are brilliant.

SPEAKER_03 7:17

I hope you know that.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Listen, it's hard being, it's hard being a black neurodivergent woman. Okay, like it's it is so confusing, right? The dissonance that we face, especially for those of us who are navigating traditional publishing that is very white-centered and white-coated. Those of us who are in academia, you know, where our work is just not valued or seen. And so I want you to know that your words and your wisdom just thus far has been so like such a bomb for me right now in this moment, because it's hard to remember, right, who we are when we frequently face so many spaces that try to silence us and erase us and push us out, right? So I wrote the book from that place, from a place of knowledge, from experience, right? From from knowing what that's like. And then from feeling this deep sense of mourning for these black women who frequently are only recognized on, right? Once they pass away, all of a sudden, everyone's like, oh, I should read their stuff. And I'm always asking, why is it that black women have to be dead or AI for folks to go, well, this is some good stuff. Why don't why does it why does it have to be that way, right? What is it about the fact that we are living, breathing, complex human beings? Right? We have to now we have this whole dialogue, people are saying Tony Morrison wasn't nice. Oh, wait! Why is this what you know the post-humous personality, you know, measurements and you know that people are doing, they've done it to Zora, you know, they've done it to Belle, they're doing it to Tony, and we don't do it to anyone else. No one has has said, you know what, I really wonder if Abe Lincoln was a nice guy. Right? I haven't heard it. I haven't heard it, right? And that's what concerns me, and that's why that's why I wrote the book, is just to say, I want it is a place, it is meant to be for self-reflection. I wrote it to black women to to in some way say, I see you, I see us, I know what it's like. And then for other folks who pick it up, is to say, I hope you see, I hope you see what's happening too. Like I hope, I hope you can see, right? How these systems are actively working to push us out of the archive and only have us enter when it's through the lens of someone else.

SPEAKER_04 10:04

Yes, and speaking of, and thank you for calling attention to the Tony Morrison conversation that's happening right now. But I remember I think it was on threads or something like that, where somebody commented about that and said, Well, I was a student of Nikki Giovanni's and I asked about a summer class, and she says she wasn't available. And I'm like, y'all, first off, I'm like, in order for these folks to have produced the can't the individual canons that each of them have done, they need their time. Like we we don't, we need the we need the material, we need their wisdom, they need their rest, they need their solitude. I was like, what? And I'm like, why is this a conversation after they've died? Like, I was just like, what is happening?

SPEAKER_01 10:48

You know why it's a conversation? Because there is this expect expectation that black women belong to the folks who consume them, right? Like this is the thing, right? We've seen this on social media. Well, oh, I don't like this black woman. So everybody, let's band together and not buy this black woman's books because I don't like this black woman, right? It's it's this idea that for black women to be supported, we have to earn, right? We have to earn people's, you know, admiration. We have to, we have to be likable to everyone. Otherwise, it's scorched earth, right? And what I hear a lot when I hear that, oh, that black woman was mean, right? I've written about this on my substack, this idea that black women are just so mean. It's often because a black woman erected a healthy boundary around her time. That she protected herself so that she wouldn't get used up, right? So she said, she said no. She said, no, I'm not available. And then that makes her mean because the expectation is that we will always say yes, we will run ourselves into the ground, and we will die for people who would not even remember our names, yeah, were it not for somebody else bringing us back to life, right? Alice Walker brought Zorna Hurston back into the zeitgeist, yeah, right? They let her, they let her die in an unmarked grave.

SPEAKER_04 12:12

Yeah, I was just talking about that with my students yesterday because I teach their eyes were watching God, and my students, because they all know Zorna Hurston as a prolific writer, and I also I told them that story. I also told them like how much she struggled with black male authors at that time. And they were, and these are my white students, they were shocked. They were like, I know Zorana Hurston is this prolific, important writer, and Janie May Crawford is so important. And I was like, Y'all don't know how much she struggled. Like, y'all don't know how much she struggled.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Even with her own family, yeah, you know, and I just I want us to take stock of that, yeah, and I want us to really sit with that. I I don't have an answer, right? I don't have a solution, but I do think it's worth naming and being clear about. And that's why I talk about it in the book with Ida B. Wells and how she was pushed out of black community circles, the NAACP wrote her name out, you know. And these are folks who who are our most prolific leaders, WEB Du Bois, right? Folks who we respect. And when they saw her being a an unrespectable, unrespectable, radical black woman, they said, oh no, too much. And they decided to leave her out completely. So she fell out of the archive completely, you know? Yeah. There's so much danger in that kind of harm where you are saying to someone, history will not even get to remember that you were here.

SPEAKER_03 13:44

You know?

SPEAKER_01 13:51

That's why I wrote the book. These women deserve to be remembered on their own terms, right? In their own words.

SPEAKER_04 13:57

Yeah. And I also love, too, that it's we can launch into the questions. I have a feeling we could be here all night. Um, and I love that it's such an amazing so for folks, just to give you a sense of the folks that Dr. Jackson captures in the book Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Zora No Hurston, Ella Baker, who was rarely talked about, Jamie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, who I absolutely love, Tony Morrison, the Combahee River Collective, which I work, I live in Connecticut. I'm originally from Detroit. I have to always assert that. But I when I tell people I've lived in New England for like almost 20 years, they're like, oh, because it's hyper white. But I live in Connecticut and I work in Western Massachusetts, and I just learned recently, and I've taught the Combahee River Collective statement multiple times. I did not realize it started at a conference at Mahole College, which was I was like, what? Um Audrey Laure, which quickly our Audrey Laure connection. Um so I want to get a tattoo of one of her stanzas on my arm. I saw in an interview that you have that, yes, folks, like I do a lot of research on my people because I have them on my, I also have a Sankofa tattoo as well. But um, but Audrey Lord Audrey Lorde, I did not find out about her until I moved to New England and I was working on my second master's degree. And this was my film professor who recently passed away. She was like, You're a poet. I want you to write a paper on this documentary, um, A Litany for Survival by Audrey Lorde. And Audrey Lorde, for me, like Audrey Laure and James Baldwin are my my Bibles now. Like I like Audrey Lorde, I was like, I was a kid when she was alive. I wish I could have been introduced to her work right when I was a child. And then lastly, um, Angela Davis and Bell Hooks. And I love that you end the book with Bell Hooks. And I know in other interviews, which we don't have to get into it here, but other interviews folks watch on YouTube and other podcasts, you talk about why you ended with Belle Hooks, and it was such a I like I didn't realize the timing of your book, and this can go into the questions, but I didn't realize the timing of the book was written around the time Bell Hooks died. I was like, That's right.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

That's right. As I was writing the book, um, early in the drafting of the book, Tony Morrison passed away. Oh, yep. And then two years later, Bell Hooks passed away. So it was like bookends as I was writing the book. And this was, remember, this book ended those early years of COVID-19 as well. Right. And so this was a period of grief. I mean grief, right? Because Mother Morrison passes away, and then we're all experiencing these, these, these deaths in our family due to COVID-19. And for me, it was a lot of older black women, women who, you know, had been some who had been diagnosed with cancer and other ailments and things like that, but couldn't get to the hospital because of the the overwhelm that staff were having, and hospitals just didn't have the space and capacity. Um, you know, folks were passing away just from neglect, right? We didn't even actually know what COVID-19 was for some time. And so I I was writing this book as these folks, these black women, my aunts, the women who I start the book with, two of them are gone. Oh, but wow. Yeah, my auntie Barbara passed away during that time, and my auntie Deborah passed away during that time. And then the year, the the year that Bill Hooks passed away, my grandmother passed away. Right? And so all of these kind of like critical black women who had raised me, who I who had, you know, you always know, you know that that there's a time when this is gonna happen, right? But there's something really um it makes you pause, right? When it happens that close together because you don't actually have time to grieve, right? And so I wrote that last chapter. The book was done. I had sent it off to my editor, and then Bell Hooks passed away, and I spiraled into this state of grief, and I and I kept, I couldn't figure out why I felt this deep connection because I obviously had read everything that Bell Hooks had written and you know loved her and her work and had followed her career, and I felt so bad I never got to meet her, right? Because all of my friends had gone to meet her and all these things. But then I realized that that wasn't the thing that was making me sad. What was making me sad was that I hadn't included a chapter about her. And I had to sit with why I did that, and I realized that the reason why I did that was because she seemed so alive, and I don't know how to explain it any other way, but to say that I was engaging in the same form of neglect and oversight that I had written the whole book about, right? I had written this whole book about recognizing black women while they're here, and I thought, oh, well, Bill Bella Hooks has written so many books of her own, and other people talk about her so much. So who am I? Right? Why do who am I to write? And then afterward, I was like, wow, what a terrible, what a terrible way to engage in this work, right? Like if I'm gonna model this pedagogical and philosophical commitment, right? Of teaching and citing and learning from and through, I can't then reproduce the same harms in the work, you know? And so I wrote that chapter from a place of a deep sense of loss, and then sitting with myself and saying, well, what does love look like? Because love can't look like neglect, right? Love can't look like I'll check on you, but only when you seem like you're like you need help, right? This is the concept of the squeaky wheel gets the oil, and I'm always the wheel that's not squeaking, right? And so people don't check for me, people don't look for me, right? But that's what happens to so many black women. We don't we don't look needy enough until we're gone. And then everyone's like, oh wow, uh, wish I had done more, but why don't we do more now?

SPEAKER_04 20:42

Yeah, because that actually happened next week, and definitely um, this is gonna be such an it's already an amazing conversation. That actually is what happened because both of my parents um passed in the 2010s. That's what happened to my mom. My mom was someone who gave her everything. She was the mom of everybody in the neighborhood. We like there were times when like folks were displaced. My mom took them in, they lived with us, and she was the mom at the school that's because she worked at the school I went to that took care of, and she she suffered from severe mental illness. And as her last year happened, her friends started disappearing. And the thing that really pisses me off now, and she died almost 11 years ago, is the funeral because my parents were still together. The funeral was packed over fun, but it was all people from my dad. None of my mom's friends showed up. And I was just like, what is happening? And I'm like, and she gave so much to all of you, and none of you could not come. And she died young at 57. I'm like, y'all cannot be here for I was like, I can't, I and And people, and sometimes, and I was just reflecting about this the other night because I'm someone I've been so transient, like I've moved a lot, and I'm like, and even in this, and even in the space now, I've been here almost 20 years. My friends' circles have changed over time a lot. And that's something that has happened to me throughout my entire life. And I'm like, am I the bad one in that because I'm not keeping up with people and checking for one moment? And I'm like, no, it's this, it's the other way too. Like, y'all can check in with me too. And this is the first time I'm saying this aloud. Like, I've been reflecting, I do a lot of journaling and all these other things, and I'm like, why am I no longer connected to these people? And I'm like, it's not my responsibility to do that.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

No, it's not. And it's weird when you sit back and you realize if I don't call, text, email, send a you know, carrier pigeon, these people are not gonna know what's happening in my life, right? Yeah, and there's something to me that's deeply unsettling about that with regards to black women, especially in moments like right now of crises, right? When the data is suggesting it's somewhere between 600 and 700,000 black women are being pushed out of the employment sector altogether, right? We know that this is a moment that is specifically targeted at making it harder to be a black woman in public, right? And to pay for your basic necessities to survive. How is it possible that that we are still unable to build meaningful community with one another, right? How is it possible that we are not able to bridge that divide? And I listen, I have lots of theories around it, right? But the book is is seeking to kind of break through all of that, to suggest that if we look to our ancestors and our elders and the lives that they lived, we can move forward and be otherwise. We don't have to repeat those same mistakes, right? We don't have to shun people because they are unrespectable, right? We don't have to dispose of people because uh they believe that trans folks deserve to live beyond the age of 35, right?

SPEAKER_04 24:12

Just the fact that they should exist, period.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Right? Like we can actually build a world where we can love one another without these conditions that actually don't come from our communities, right? These are not of us. That's not even this is not even our cultural aspiration to be this exclusionary to other black folk, especially not to other black women. And it's not the ways that I was raised in the church. I always talk about the candy lady at church. So candy lady who would dig down in her purse and she'd pull out that little strawberry candy or that butterscotch candy. It's only two candies in there, right? And we all know that lady, right? We all know that lady. And she didn't have a lot of money, right? But she always had candy for us, right? And I'm just like, how is it that we can look to these folks, our aunts and our our ancestors and elders, folks, our foremothers, right? Who have done so much labor for us and we don't, and we don't feel feel compelled, right? To to to to behave and to move through the world the same way. I I feel that. I feel as a matter of justice because these black women have kept me alive. It is incumbent upon me to move in the same ways. It's just so infrequent that I'm able to find community where that is the sentiment, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_04 25:24

Yeah, and when you mentioned the candies and other interviews, I was like, yes, I remember back in church, and we and I went to like the Southern Baptist Church and churches of Detroit, and we were there all day. All day, every day. All day, yes, and memories of like taking out the butterscotch and it got everything on the paper clips and been in their purse all day.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Come on at the bottom of the purse with the paper clips.

SPEAKER_04 25:51

Come on, yes, and I was which I was mentioning to someone recently because I live in a very hyper white space, but then I work in because this region is predominantly immigrant communities, and so the African-American experience is missing. And I was just like, I was like, one day, I was like, I literally was just I was watching some MLK program the other day, and I was like, dang, I miss my people.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

I was just like, Yeah, yeah. And that's what it is too. Like I grew up, you know, here in Oakland, where I am visiting now in a very, you know, poor working class community. And honestly, I feel like that's where I learned this, right? That's where I learned comradeship. I'm I'm blessed to be from a place that is rooted in black, you know, feminist and queer principles that is the home, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party for self-defense, right? I I grew up in that, right? And so there is a part of my foundation where it is kind of the expectation, right, that that is how black folk will commune and fellowship with one another. But then you, you know, you get out into the world and we're not incentivized to do that. We're just not, right? Instead, we are incentivized to compete with one another, to diminish one another, to cancel one another, to dispose of one another. And I don't feel comfortable, frankly. I don't feel comfortable moving in that way. It doesn't feel good for me. And people have told me, oh, you're too gullible, you're too naive, or whatever. Like, you know, you give people too many chances. But I'm gonna be honest, like, I'm grateful for the chances folks have given me. Right? Like, if it weren't for the chances that I've had, I don't I would not be here. And so it's just it, it would be hypocritical for me to not see black folk as inherently worth chances, inherently worth forgiveness, inherently worth grace. You know what I'm saying? Because that's what was offered to me when I was a wayward young person on these streets in Oakland, right? Like people looked at me and said, actually, no, I'm not giving up on you, right? And I I I I wrote the I wrote Black Women Taught Us and I I picked these women because I just believed when I when we would think about like Angela Davis, right? Um, who is an oxygenarian, who has been fighting for us her entire life. This woman was imprisoned. And when you read her autobiography and you hear the conditions that she faced, right? And she still puts on her tennis shoes and walks these streets to fight for us. And that to me, I'm like, well, if she can do it, I let me stop complaining, right? Like this woman, Asada Shakur, right? Yeah, reading her words in her in her own words and what she went through, Fannie Lou Hamer and her experience of being in prison and beaten in prison and being forcibly sterilized, right? These women did those things for us. So who are we to say that we are just we're just too good? I I'm not too good. I'm not too good. I'm willing to work for us. I am, I am.

SPEAKER_04 29:07

Yes. So let's launch into the question. I have so many other things to talk. I'm like, y'all, I'm telling y'all watching, I have no idea how much I've wanted them on the podcast. So I would love to know, given especially that you've written such a prolific book. And this is like you've been writing for a minute, but this is your like first book. Yeah. When did you discover your voice as a writer?

SPEAKER_01 29:33

Oh, this question is so hard. Oh, it's hard because I listen, I'm honest to a fault, so I gotta tell you the ugly truth, right? And the ugly truth of the matter is that I was not raised to listen to myself. I was not raised to hear my voice. Um, I was not raised to honor myself. I was raised to mask, right, as a neurodivergent person and to perform my gender and my race and my class in ways that would be acceptable to an anti-black world. And so part of what happened with this book was I had to start listening to other people so that I could peel away all of the socialization that had told me that I wasn't worth a damn. Right. Um, I get to this a little bit in the opening chapter in the introduction, right? Of just me being out in the world and being like, I need to understand who I am. I need to understand what black feminism is. And I actually don't know because I hadn't taken any classes, you know, I had looked for them. They weren't around, they weren't allowed at my school. Like I'm saying they weren't allowed because I'm just I assume they weren't, because they wasn't there. Um, but there was no one there to teach me. There were black women there and they weren't teaching black feminism, right? And when you brought it up, it was a taboo thing. It was like black feminism was like dangerous, right? Even in African American studies departments, they treated black feminism like it was anti-black. And so for me, finding my voice really was through like fight and fiat, right? It was, I was walking around the world and I felt untethered. I felt wayward, right? I would see these horrible atrocities happen to black people. And I didn't have language, right? And I knew something was connecting me to the folks that this was happening to and to the folks who were also in mourning, right? So when Trayvon Martin was killed, I felt this deep grief. And it reminded me so much of when Oscar Grant was killed. Oscar Grant was killed right here, right? At Fruitville Station, where I would ride in Bart to go see my grandmother across the street from my nail shop. Oscar Grant went to my high school, right? So these things were happening, and I was like, what is this connection that I'm seeing? And when I got to the place where I felt comfortable enough to start blogging and writing, it was other people who were like, hey, Jen, like, I need you to understand this is something you need to keep doing. There are things that you are saying that are resonating with other folks' experiences, and you might not quite understand it, but you have to keep going. And I needed that external support because I didn't believe in myself, if I'm being honest, right? I saw myself as just some black girl from Oakland who really didn't have the parental support, right? And it really hadn't been told that I was smart enough or good enough, right? And when I met my editor, she she had been reading my work at Teen Vogue. And she was like, hey Jen, listen. She was like, I don't know if anyone has said this yet, but I want to be the editor for your first book. And this was 2018. I was still finishing up graduate school. Um, I had another year or so left, and I was shocked. I was shocked. I was like, is that how this happens? I I've never heard of this before. I don't I'm I don't I don't know what to do with this, right? It was my first trip to New York City. I was like in awe of all the lights. And she was like, let's go to lunch, and I want you to tell me what ideas you have for a book. And it just came pouring out of me. I just came pouring out. I just told her all these ideas. And it's really funny because before I did, I told her, I said, I don't know, I don't think I can write a book. She was like, You're not gonna sit here and tell me you don't have no ideas. And then I was like, Well, and I just and I told her, and this was the book, this was the one where I was like, I just want to write about black women. I just, I just, I was like, I love black women, I love black people, but I really love black women and I want to write about black women. She said, Well, then you should write about black women. If that's what you love, that's what you should write. And I found my voice because frankly, there were people who affirmed me and people who believed in me. And sometimes you need that before you get to that place, right? Sometimes you might not have it. I'll be honest, I didn't have it. I had the tools, I had the knowledge, I had the intellect, but I didn't have the self-worth and the self-belief. And that came from my team.

SPEAKER_04 34:39

Okay, so I I hope it's okay that I do this because to hear that, I'm like, so folks, typically we have our authors read an excerpt from the book. We thought to launch straight into I'm gonna read the first page. And the reason why is because this, and I I've been an artist all of my life. This is written by a writer. And that's the gift that you have with narrative. So this is the introduction. Every Wednesday, as I grew up, our tiny two-bedroom house became a concert hall for a majestic group of gospel singers. Auntie Donna Faye, no blood relation to me, a tall woman with a perfect asymmetrical bob, long curved fingernails, and a no-nonsense glare, was the alto who always rested right in the vocal pocket. Auntie Barbara, also no blood relation, who was the oldest of the group, but would never share her actual age, always wore a big curly wig and bright red lipstick. She was a soprano from another generation of black singers. Sharon was a quiet, um, sarcastic woman whose baritone voice could rumble the whole house when she mumbled, um, murmured and mm-mm along to each song. Sometimes I would tiptoe into the living room during rehearsal just to hear Sharon's mm-hmms and sneak back out before my mom noticed. My mother's sister, Deborah, was one of the greatest voices I had ever heard, a soprano whose vibrato made you feel like you were lying in a blanket fresh out of the dryer. I also thought that she was the different world actress, Jasmine Guy, for most of my childhood because she resembled the attrict so closely. Cassandra, the group's pianist and vocal arranger, would glide into the room with her deep voice and thick rimmed glasses every week. She was such a quietly powerful presence. Okay.

unknown 36:35

Dr.

SPEAKER_04 36:35

Nicole Young Martin's about to come out. So, because I'm like the of close readings. So this illustrates so well like the power of how writing is observant and can bear witness. And also, too, like what it's setting us up for in the text. It is literally setting us up for how these black women around you informed where you are now and why they are so important to acknowledge. And also just too, just being cognizant of how you learn. Sometimes you engage passively, like just watching other people. But this, and also too, I just remembered a lot of the women that you talk about in the book, many of them have worked together before. So it's like because there's like even the famous picture of Angela Davis and Tony Morrison with the lovely big afro walking through City Town. So I love the way that your book opens because it really prepares us to have this very, and this leads into my next question, very intimate conversation. And I love the title, Black Women Taught Us, an intimate history of black feminism. And one of the other reasons why I love the title so much, Black Women Taught Us, is a cut is a couple of things. One, these are women who were not formal educators. Like we're always teaching one another. And then lastly, and I still want to do, even if someone hasn't done this already, explore, like, as I've noticed, because my doctorate is in education, but it's like as educators, black women particularly, that's one of the first disciplines that calls us. And I'm like, why? So this book, y'all, it's yes, it does so much. So for me, reading Black Women Who Taught Us and many others who have interviewed you, and which for folks, if you can find the politics and prose interview, which I'll post in the show notes after. I love the interview because you revisit some of the questions from your tour. Um say that this book is its own genre, combining it with history, memoir, and deep personal reflection. And it's rich with sort, like source material. Yo, like this brought me back to working on my dissertation. I was like, oh.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

Listen, I don't play about citational ethics. I don't.

SPEAKER_04 39:23

Yes. And you talk about black women who came from various backgrounds, experiences, and disciplines themselves. Can you talk? And the reason why I'm asking this question is because not only do you use deep personal reflection and memoir type writing, the I lost count of the citations in this book. Then you also have a syllabus in here.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

That's right.

SPEAKER_04 39:51

Can you talk about the writing process and what were some beautiful moments for you while writing, and what were some challenging moments for you?

SPEAKER_01 40:01

Oh my goodness. Well, I love the opening, and I will say to you, that opening came to me after the entire book was done. I had written an opening and I did not like it, and my editor did not like it, and I said, I'm gonna sit it down. I'm very big on sitting the project down and walking away from it and living my life and then coming back to it. And I had I went to sleep and I had a dream. And in the dream, I was I was a child again, and I was in that living room, and I was listening to my mother and Majesty, the name of the group, singing. And I thought to myself, those women, those women taught me so much. My Auntie Donna Fay taught me so much about lipstick and earrings and fingernails and hair. And my Auntie Barbara to this day, I'm like, when I check chicken, it's it's Auntie Barbara I hear telling me to post that chicken and make sure no blood comes out that chicken, right? Auntie Barbara always, her lipstick was always crooked because she was always eating chicken. Okay, like and it was lipstick on the chicken. And we'd be like, Auntie Barbara, I don't know if that's blood or lipstick. We think it might be lipstick, and she'd be like, that's blood, right? Like, and these are these are interesting moments for me thinking now, right? Because in the moment, they're very quote and they're very just day-to-day, they're very commonplace, they're things that you're experiencing as a black person. But when I wrote this book, I wanted to make sure that it was clear that I didn't want to write some book that just said that all these elite women, these women with, you know, books and and uh Ivy League educations or you know, who we celebrate each month for for or each year for Black History Month, right? I didn't want to just write about them. I wanted to write about everyday black women, right? I think about all the time. Uh last year I was in an airport and I have lots of disabilities. And so one of the byproducts of my um heart condition is I can get very faint. If I stand up too quickly, I get very, very faint. And I can I can I can faint, but I can also I also start sweating sometimes, and the room gets kind of, you know, I get dizzy. I don't know what this looks like to other people. I just know how it feels on the inside. And so I was in the airport last year, and I stood up to get on a plane, and they called me up, and it was happening. I could feel it happening. I started sweating, and I and I was like, oh no, I'm here alone. I'm here by myself. And this black woman, I don't even know where she came from. She's a little petite black woman, runs up to me, grabs me, sits me down, and she was like, You don't look well, you don't look okay. She got her boyfriend to get me some water. She started fanning me, and I'm crying, right? Because I'm scared. And she took care of me. She took care of me so that I could get on that plane and get home. You see what I'm saying? And so for me, the writing process was about recalling all the ways that black women show up for one another, even when they're not gonna get anything for it, right? I don't know that woman's name. I would have loved to send her a flower, an edible arrangement. I don't know her, right? And I'm just so grateful for her being there that day because she probably saved my life, right? So I I the intimate history thing. So just to be clear, uh, my incredible editor, uh Marie Panda at uh Pink Random House, she came up with the term intimate history. We were going back and forth, and I was like, it's intimate, it's intimate. I kept saying it's intimate, it's an intimate exploration. And she said, Jen, I think you're just saying intimate history. And I was like, dang, you're so smart. That's exactly that's right. Um and I and I was saying, I said, you know, just reminded me of Zami and this idea of a biomithography. And I was saying all these, I was describing it. And the reason why it was so important to bring intimacy into the book and to have this kind of memoir alongside this traditional kind of pedagogical academic history telling. Is because Black feminism is intimate. I don't understand how we can navigate a Black feminist philosophy or ethic without it being an intimate praxis, right? We are so vulnerable as Black feminists. We have to be, right? We have to show up in community and we have to bear our souls, right? Even the concept of intersectionality is a very vulnerable concept. The idea that we are closer to harm, right? And further from power, what does that mean for us, right? The ways we have to often expose our trauma to the world, right? Even if we don't mean to or want to. And so in writing to answer the next part of your question about the beautiful moments and the hard moments, I will say the hardest part of writing the book was the intimacy, right? Was deciding how much of me do I want to put into this work? And like I said, honest to a fault. So I was like, well, I have to tell the truth, right? That's why I had the Idol B. Wells chapter say, y'all, we got to tell the truth. And so I said, I'm gonna start this book off real quick with Harriet Jacobs to begin to start thinking high-level about freedom. And then I'm gonna launch right into what does it look like for us to tell the truth about what freedom is and what it's not. And in that chapter, I had to really sit with the lies that I've been I've told and the lies I've been told, right? The the ways I hid my gender, the ways I hid my sexuality, the ways I thought I was closeted. The closet I was in was made of glass. Okay. Everyone could see through it. They knew, they all knew I was queer as hell. I did not know they could see into it's like, you know, I couldn't see out, but they could see in, you know? So I joke all the time about how my truth telling is really about telling the truth to myself. And that's what this book to me is is asking us to do. It's asking us to hold ourselves accountable to the philosophical commitments that we say we espouse. And that's hard work. It's hard work because none of us is perfect. We're gonna fail. We're gonna get it wrong, and we have to be okay with being held accountable. That's the Shirley Chisholm chapter, right? What does accountability even look like? What does it feel like? It does not feel good, it doesn't feel good, but it's necessary to be in community with one another. I will say, um, probably the most beautiful part of writing the book, right? Um was I I hate gassing up Penguin Random House. I don't like doing it because you know, it's a publisher and it's a corporation, right? But my team has enveloped me in love and care from the start of this process. When I tell you, like, I would be bubble snot crying, like, I can't write right now. I'm in a you know, like it was bad, right? When my grandmother passed away, I had writer's block. I couldn't, I couldn't make words, I couldn't even talk about it, let alone write about it. And it took me three months to get back to writing. And I told Marie, I said, Marie, I I need some time. And she said, take all the time you need. That was it. All she said, take all the time you need. And so even though the moment was trying and I was struggling, I will say there's something about having a team of folks around you who fundamentally believe in you and support you unconditionally that makes those difficult times so much easier. That's probably one of the most beautiful parts of this whole process. Even now, as I'm releasing the paperback, my team has held me down. And I I I am grateful for the folks who have worked with me on this project.

SPEAKER_04 48:02

Nice, and I'm so for folks, because the purpose of the show is to talk about craft and a little bit of the business. I also want to refer folks to Black and Publish, which talks about um like the publishing business and also your podcast, we publish Beloved. And I love in all of our podcasts, and it's sad, but we expose some of the dirt and the harm that happens within the industry. And when I heard in other interviews that your relationship with um Penguin Random House was so beautiful, which for folks they're one of the top five, and the top five are very, very hard to get with. And the other thing too, I want to say in the release of the paperback, not all books go into paperback. That's right. And so this I think speaks very highly of the support that in and I applauded so because I've heard horror stories of folks who like I had I I'll say this because I don't want to expose, but it's like, and it's not my story to tell, but I have like someone in my life who the publisher didn't deliver in the ways that they needed to. And the book may lose its shelf life. And I'm just like, I who and I and also too, like I'm because I haven't published my first book yet. And I'm like, just the stories that I'm hearing from all of you. I'm like, I hope I know the end because it's white supremacy, I know the industry is not gonna change by the time I'm ready to publish, but I do hope that I have as beautiful of an experience that you have had. And so I understand what not why a lot of people choose to self-publish. And also, two, a lot of trad people who have done trad publishing now are going back to self-publishing.

SPEAKER_01 50:05

Yeah, yeah. And I will say, like, I had a goal, like when I learned about Tony Morrison's relationship with Pink Random House, I was like, I think this might be the place for me. And I, and although I've struggled with listening to myself and hearing my voice, this was a place where I said I refuse to cut corners. And so when it came to my book, I was like, I'm gonna put my foot down, I want, I want input on everything, the cover, the in the flap on the inside, the little headers at the top. I wanted, I wanted input on every single thing because for me, this was for black women, right? And so it had to be right. And I will I will say, like, there for folks who want to publish, right? This is your book, this is your work, and you need to have a team that believes in you, but also in your vision for what happens after it's written, right? Like from start to finish. And I made sure if somebody was not with the program, I was like, I don't want them over here. Like, I don't want, they can't work with me, right? And and and it's a blessing to be able to do that. So I know that I am in a place of privilege being able to do that. I also want to encourage folks when you can, where you can, to fight for your work. Fight, fight for your books, right? Fight for your story, especially in this, in this market, in this publishing world, where those of us, black folk, queer folk, brown folk, trans folk, disabled folk, right, they're trying to water everything down that we write, assimilate everything into something that is digestible for a mainstream white audience, right? This is the time to say no, actually, the bees capitalize in black, right? Like, no, actually, we're talking about white supremacy, right? This is the time to do that.

SPEAKER_04 51:52

Yeah, and thank you for talking about Tony Morrison. Like, I aspire to be like her. I want to be a publisher, I want to be, and this is what started the podcast. Like, I want to be one who chisels through, and I still have not figured out who came up with this term, the concrete ceiling, which for folks that are not familiar, it's like like there's the glass ceiling where you can see the opportunities, but whereas the concrete ceiling, you don't even know you don't even know it's up there. That's right. Right. And then I also want to write, like I'm all about getting my people out there. And I, which I still, because I bought it and I still have to read it, um, Tony at random.

SPEAKER_01 52:32

Yeah, I have it as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:35

Um, let's see. Impact again, because I can hold you here all night and I don't want to do that because I'm like, you got your own life. And speaking of Penguin Random House, in past interviews, you mentioned a bit about the business behind creating and publishing Black Women taught us and shared some of the beautiful experiences you had during the process, especially, I love that you shouted out your editor. Um, can you talk about the relationship you have with your editor? How did you collaborate on the process a little bit more? Because you talk a little bit about it already. And how did you make sure? Because you talked about like the book cover and all of that, but the actual words process make sure that your voice would remain so prominent in every step of the process.

SPEAKER_01 53:19

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I will say, like, it's important. So my editor is not a black woman, right? Um, I've had people I've talked to who are like, yeah, I had to work with a black woman. I'm like, that's dope, that's amazing. Um, I I had an editor approach me. I had a great relationship with her. I really liked her deep knowledge of the work, and I liked who she had worked with before. I had seen some of the books she had edited, and that was good enough for me. I think that folks who choose to work with black editors, that's very smart, right? I have a good friends who work with black women, and I'm like, that's smart, that's a good way to go, right? But what I'll say is that my editor is also deeply introspective. So she was always thinking about her positionality as well. And so when I was writing, she'd be like, hey, this is not my area. I think we should get a sensitivity reader. And I'm like, yes, let's do that, right? Um, when I wrote my first draft, I sent it out to folks I trusted. I sent out individual chapters to people who were experts on those writers, scholars, and thinkers, and organizers. And I got their feedback and I gave them gifts, you know, for supporting my early drafts, right? This was something she encouraged me to do. So I will say that, you know, writing has to be collaborative. It should be a collaborative environment where your editor is suggesting ways for you to get outside feedback, and agents do this too, right? I'm working on my current book and my agent is helping with, you know, outside readers and all of that. What I will also say about in terms of the actual words on the page, um, I am very protective of my writing. I'm very protective of my voice, right? I didn't want this to be published and to sound like somebody else. That was one of my deepest fears. Um, and so I will say I remember this one conversation with Marie, and I had written this draft, and I was writing an academic voice, and she was like, Jen, um, ooh, I don't love it. And I was like, girl, me either. I was like, what's wrong with it? She said, I think that you're writing to an academic audience. She said, and you're straddling between writing to academics and then dumbing things down. She was like, I don't want you to do either one of those things. She said, just talk, speak, say it into a recorder and then type what you say. She was like, take the words that are coming out of your mouth, right? And then use that to help generate this book. She's like, you need to make sure that this is your voice. Like it needs to be who you are. This is what people love about you. This is why people love your column at Team Bo. This is why people are interested in what you have to say in your podcast. She's like, so if you write this book and you don't adhere to that, it's not gonna do well. But not only that, it's not gonna be honest. It's not gonna be what you want it to be. And I was like, dang, that's bars, right? Like, I'm like, God, come on, right? Um, and so that helped me a lot, just realizing that this was a person who wanted me to speak in my own voice, who wanted this book to be something that came directly from me. So I will say, um, in terms of the actual writing process with my editor, it was a lot of back and forth. There were a lot of drafts. There was a point where we were writing a chapter, and then I would send it and she would edit it, and we would, you know, one chapter at a time, thinking about voice, thinking about continuity. It was a long process. So I got the first conversation we had was in 2018. I got the book deal, I believe, in 2019-ish. Um, and I started writing the book in earnest that year, but really in 2020. So I wrote the book for about two straight years. And it was a lot of, a lot of kind of massaging and working through and zoom calls, you know? Um, and that final, final draft was a larger conversation with the entire team where we actually just talked out loud, like, what do we want to happen here? How do we see this working? How do we, where do we want this to be placed? What bookstores we want this to go to? Who are we in conversation with? And I and it helped me to realize like, oh, wait, this is a part of a larger ecosystem, right? A larger kind of publishing conversation. And it took the nebulous kind of work that I was doing with my editor and my agent and brought it out into this larger kind of genre. And it was really, I don't know, it was beautiful because I told him, I said, I don't, I don't care about genre. I don't care. I don't care if they think it's memoir, if they think it's a textbook, you know, I don't care what they think it is. This is what I want to write. And they were like, cool, just tell us how you want us to situate it. Just tell us where you want it to be, just tell us where you want to go, just tell us what conversations you want to be in, and we will get you there. And I will, and I have to admit, like, I have also heard horror stories, right? Where that wasn't the case for people. But this was a place where I was un, I was unmovable, right? I was not budging on that. And thankfully my editor and I had built such a rapport in those conversations where she was literally in the weeds with me in those early drafts that she already had the vision. And everyone on my team, to be clear, they all had read the book cover to cover, and they all love the book. That's part of it too. You can't work with a team who's not willing to engage with your work, right? The marketing folks, the publicity folks, everyone had read the book. Everyone.

SPEAKER_04 58:29

Yeah, and thank you for affirming the importance of having people on your team because they need, in order to get the book that you want, even though there's the business of selling and all that stuff, it is your your name. Your name is don't it ain't Billy Joe Bob on the front. It is Jan M. Jackson PhD on front. So that's right.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

That's right.

SPEAKER_04 58:56

Yes. And this question, so for folks, I'm about to go. Like when I was writing this question, I was like, this is a question you were posed in an academic conference. But I, yeah, but me, so my a little bit about me, my background is in theater performance studies in English. And I, whoo, which English is a very dangerous. I cannot believe I have a degree in English and I teach English now. Wow. But I teach at community colleges. I do that because I was like, I don't want to go research one Tinger track. So I give kudos to all of y'all who are doing the traditional Tinker Track. So I was like, that's a whole other business. And this leads so well into this question. Um, the reason why I really wanted to ask this question is because of the performative nature of the first book for academics. And what has to show up first. And I'm glad that you mentioned that your editor is like, where's your voice? Where's your voice? Because typically, the first academic book, for those who are at research ones, want to go tenure track, and it is typically very third person. Your subjectivity is completely erased in all these things. And also, too, my the other reason why I want to pose this question, also too, my naivete about this particular discipline, political science. And from where I sit, my and I took a couple of political science classes in college, but it wasn't enough to say I'm knowledgeable of the because I know with English, whenever we write the I, people are like, oh my God. Or because I was I can't, it may have been something you posted or someone else about the universality, the universality of like literature and like why people of color, like people of color, only can write from the personal experience of this. Like, here we go. So, given the nature of this particular book, your academic background is in political science. Yeah, how does it inform your particular mode of inquiry as a writer whose work has the ability to engage a diverse audience of scholars, students, avid readers, and beyond the ivory tower? And why I wanted to ask this question too is typically academics' first book does not straddle all of these worlds.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:25

You know, I'm gonna be honest with you, I've gotten some heat for this book being my first book. There are a lot of academics, especially in Polysci, which is very conservative and very white-centered, where they're like, Why'd you do that? This is not what we do. You're supposed to write a book about your dissertation. You go to a traditional academic publisher, it's supposed to be out in the world in a certain amount of time, and then nobody reads it, and it goes up on a shelf, and that's what you do. And frankly, that's just not the tradition that I come from, right? Like, that's just not black feminist tradition. And so I was like, that's cool if that's what you all want to do with your philosophical commitments and how you move. That's just not, that's just not me, right? And so when I look back at the genealogy, the history of black feminists and what I come from, right? That's black feminists have always had to write publicly. It has always had to be accessible. That's just the work that we've had to do. Anna Julie Cooper was not gonna write some academic book that was just gonna sit in some cavern somewhere and never be touched, right? Like Boys from the South, we needed this work. This was work that was present, right? These pamphlets, Ivy Wells writing pamphlets about lynching and handing them out on the street, right? Because people needed to know. And so I will say that my book does not comport with the traditional academic route. And there are risks to that, right? There, there's the risk of folks not quite understanding how you fit in academia, what field you should be in, what discipline you should be in. I've gotten a lot of folks who are just like, I don't know what to do with this. Like, I don't, it's is it peer-reviewed? Is it what is does this count as as academic work? Does this count as, is it rigorous, right? We love the word rigor. They love the word rigor, right? Um, and there's always this idea that if it's not quantitative or empirical in the ways that they're used to, that it's not, it's not rigorous, right? So I've come up against a lot of that. And frankly, I just don't care. I just don't care. It was important to me to write a book that my family members could pick up and see themselves reflected back in. It was important for me to have these kind of conversations. It was important for me to hand my book to young, queer folks who were like, I'm so glad that I see myself reflected. And here you are, someone with a PhD, and you survived and you and you're thriving. And look, maybe I can too. That was so much more important to me than meeting these superficial milestones and standards of the academy that is so fickle, that isn't made for us, doesn't even want us there anyway. You know, I'm like, I'm not gonna model my entire life and and my politics around people who actually don't give a shit about me. Like, I'm just that just seems so counterintuitive. And so I will say, like, wow, wow, there are folks who are just not happy that I did that. I just, I could not care less.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:17

Yeah, and speaking of the discipline, like my quickly, and I have like just a couple more questions for you. Like, that was originally like my my P my PhD journey was very trauma-inducing as well. Like, I I had and I had so many black women academics who told me they were like, your language is too colloquial, your subject matter is too colloquial, and all these other things. Maybe you should not do the degree. I applied to programs. People are like, we don't literally tell me we don't know what to do with you. And my research interest, I'm interested in like the connection between consumerism and like the things that folks gravitate to when it comes to like music, theater, film, and all these things, and why it's so important for black people is because these are areas where we've been told that we don't belong. Right. And I and I'm still and I I ended up, and I it's so funny because I did my doctorate, I did an EDD instead of a PhD. And somehow or another, while everybody else was doing like research along the lines of like enrollment management, student affairs, and all these other things, I and and and and this is why I say to folks, you find your people. You don't like, I can only just work with black people. My dissertation chair was white. And I remember she was like, Nicole, you are a writer. You love like supporting people through writing processes. Let's do your dissertation. It was so meta. My dissertation was literally on supporting um ways to support doctoral students. Through their dissertation ready process. And so I'm so glad that I found my lane. But academia can be such a dangerous field. But what's ironic is we are still needed there. But they try really hard to make sure that we can't be present.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:21

And I will say, like that what you're describing is very similar to publishing, right? Like they really want to fit you into a particular box. They're thinking about, you know, disciplines and genres and tradition and ceremony and all these things. But for a lot of black folk, especially black women, black queer folk, we don't fit. And we don't have to. Like I want folks to understand, we don't have to fit into their boxes. Like we and this whole, oh, they didn't bring me a seat at the table. I brought my own seat to sit at their table. I don't want to sit at their table. I don't want to be in their room. I I don't want to go to their cook ins. I'm I don't think they're cookouts. I don't know what those things are. Like, I don't want to be there. I don't want to be there, right? Like, I am totally fine creating my own lane and my own path. And it needs to be a lane and path that is leading to some form of liberation. It cannot be that we are just reproducing and recreating the same processes and the same systems that have all of us oppressed and down and downtrodden and burnt out, right? That's not even sustainable. So I refuse to participate in my own demise. I'm not going to help them kill me.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:34

I love what you said in that whole the seat at the table. I'm like, I don't want to be at your funky ass table. I don't want to come. Yeah, so it's like, I don't want to be at your funky ass table.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:45

I don't want that with stuff with the raisins in it. I don't know what y'all are serving at that table. Y'all can keep that nasty table. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:53

Or better yet, I'm like, and you said the cooking. I'm like, I and I, and I'm the one to talk because we have a lot of pets, but I'm like, I don't know if a cat walks.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:03

Mm-hmm. I'm good. I'm good. No, Rosha Green's right. I don't want to come.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:16

Keep it.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:18

Yes. And and it's also, and then um I have two more questions. It is also beautiful to build your own table because you're not replicating hard.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:31

That's right. And you're not beholden, right, to those standards and ideals, right? When you build your I think a lot about sinners in in this moment, right? And how Brian Kugler, who is again also from Oakland, Zinzi Kugler, his wife, and I went to high school together, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:50

Marie Claire just wrote a really nice article about her.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:53

Zinzi's one of the sweetest people I've ever met in my life. She's been like that since high school. Probably one of the most gentle, kindest people in high school that ever. I remember her like it was yesterday. And so I'm happy to see them win. But also what makes me really happy is that this creativity of doing something different and something new is being rewarded, right? There is something special about black creativity. We are, we are unique in that respect. That people continue to try and co-opt and recreate and steal from us, but yet we continue to have more, right? We continue to have new ideas. And so I refuse to be to to to settle, right? To become a part of the larger machine that seeks to just kind of make the same things over and over and over again. Because A, it's boring. But B, it's to me, it's not part of the black libertarian radical tradition. It's just not.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:44

Yeah, and thank you so much for shouting out Sinners and Ryan Coogler and his wife because of just like just, oh my God, the powerfulness of his work. Like I remember reading interviews about him and the cast of Black Panther 2 when Chadwick Bolsman passed away. And people are like, why don't you again? It's that whole commodity commodification and the consumerism and the capitalism. Why don't you just cast somebody else's Black Panther? That is a deep loss. And I love that the cast and Ryan Coogler took the time to do that funeral ceremony they did in the oh, it is beautiful. I'm like, those are our traditions. We unlike some, I know some white folks, they're like, you just die and we bury you and move on. We honor our folks because of what they gave us. And I like I and I usually I cr I boo-hoo cried at that funeral. It felt like connection. And sinners, I especially since I'm now getting really deeply invested in the southern Gothic is a lot. Because as like my family pass on, I I so I'm originally from Detroit, and like we are so Detroit, great migration, everyone from the south, and all the other stuff. And I'm now digging into like because I didn't appreciate like my grandma having dreams and like got her little numbers books and like numerology. And I'm so glad that centers exist now in terms of the southern gothic and like all of these like connections to spiritualism and things like that that the African-American community has. However, I still haven't seen it yet.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:35

I need to nothing.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:38

I'm not gonna judge you right now. This has been going so well. I don't wanna let me just take that out, take my ears off and put them in my pocket. I didn't hear that. I didn't hear that.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:49

I didn't, I didn't hear that.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:52

I think the reason the reason is because I know centers is gonna be very transformational for me, and I need to be ready for it. Like that, like that, because even like I even had an opportunity to see an opening night on stuff, free ticket, blah, blah, blah. Something came up. Like I think I had to work or something. And I'm like, I, and especially now, since not trying to justify a reason for me to watch it, now see, and I love my God, I love Dell Warrior Lindo. He's only been an Oscar. I'm not like, yep, 73. Yes. Yep, I think on this, because um we're um, I don't know if this the storm is passing where your family is, but um in Upper New England, we're like the snow is gonna get so bad they've already closed schools and stuff on Monday. So I was like, I think I'm gonna watch centers on Monday.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:37

Okay, yes, and then report back, please. Report back.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:40

Yes, Dr.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:41

Jackson. Yeah, a little bit of judgment. It's a little bit of judgment. It's a little bit of judgment.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:51

A little bit, a little bit, it's a sprinkle of judgment.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:57

Yes. So I just have two more questions for you. So prior to having our guests on Black Writers Read, we asked each of them why they write. Here's what you offered. And this is so beautifully written. I write because my heart needs to tell stories. My body was made to produce words. I have been writing since I was a small child. I believe that black folks and queer folks are the preeminent storytellers. It's ancestral. In this moment, I have found that speaking our truths is more important than ever. When we are being silenced, it is because there are forces that are terrified of us, which I want to insert. I'm queer, I'm an artist, I'm weird as hell, and I scare people off. And I'm like, oh well, it wasn't meant for you to be in my life. But anyway, I have just been thinking about June. Oh my God, I love June Jordan. June Jordan's poem, I must become a menace to my enemies. It's important that I and other black, brown, queer, trans, and disabled people share this work in this way because we seldom enter the official mainstream archive except through the lens of our trauma. The overwhelmingly white-centered and white-coated publishing industry does not love us. So we have to love ourselves real bad. So the questions is what did you learn about yourself during both the writing process and as black women taught us given now today, which I totally forgot. And I hope this isn't like copyright, happy birthday, black report. Happy birthday! I meant to do that earlier. Um, since it's the the second year anniversary, yeah. Yeah, continues to reach out to others in the world. What would you tell a younger version of yourself on how to prepare for this journey?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:53

Oh my gosh. It's so funny you asked that. I just wrote my memoir and it's been really, really wearing me down, um, wearing me out. And at the end of my memoir, this is the first time I'm telling one of this, but at the end of the memoir, I wrote a letter to myself. Um it's a it's a dear little me letter. And in the letter, um I tell little me, you know, you're brilliant, you're amazing. I know that nobody has told you, but um, you know, all of your intellect and all of the things that you are journaling about and everything that you've been wanting to do, you're actually gonna do it. And then I apologize to little me for not reaching out sooner um and for not having the courage to uh show up for for them. And I think that's kind of what I would say to a past version of myself, even the one from just before writing this, because when I tell you my anxiety was through the roof, right? Um, and I just really struggled with self-esteem and with believing in myself. And um, you know, although those those issues were not mine, right? They they didn't come from me, they came from a traumatic childhood and history. You know, I carried them in my body until I was in my 30s. And so a lot of what I want to say to to pass me, but also to like other writers who are struggling with questions like, do I have a story to tell? Is this is this valuable enough? Uh, does does anyone care? Right? A lot of our writing is actually for us, right? A lot of what we're writing is actually so that we can see ourselves mirrored back sometimes for the first time, right? So that we can validate our own feelings and affirm ourselves to say, well, yeah, when that happened to me, that wasn't okay. And and how I was treated wasn't okay. Or, you know, my feelings around this are valid. How I choose to navigate the world is valid, right? And so for me, writing is um not just like a therapeutic thing, but it's been a site of like catharsis of my becoming, right? And I really hope that for a lot of young people that they turn to writing, they turn to their creative juices, right? Whether it's sculpting or making music or you know, zines or whatever, to find those parts of themselves that are still tender, um, that maybe they haven't visited because it's too hard and they weren't ready yet. But to keep trying, right? Because at some point you will be ready. I will say, like, at some point, all the things that you've been repressing or that you've been running away from or that were too scary or too hard, right? They will actually get easier. We will be ready to handle it. It takes time um and a lot of practice, but you can actually you can actually work through it. And that's the only way to it is through it, you know? It's it's it sucks. It's some of the hardest work I've ever done. Um, but it's like the most rewarding work I've ever done, you know.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:07

Yeah, and thank you for that reminder. Because I'm working, I've been working with a book coach now for about a year to get my my first book done. And I the writing is a struggle. And it's because of that whole, do I have a story to tell? Do I have a story to tell? And I'm just like, but what if my book coach, she's a black woman. She's like, literally, she's like, but once you get it on the page, that's the important part. It might just be catharsis for you and healing. Like, and I'm like, okay, I that I need to get out out of my head and just write the damn thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:41

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:44

Yeah. And so, Dr. Jackson, what is next for you and how can a Black Writers read community support you on this journey?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:52

Yes. Well, I mean, there is the memoir, right? So the memoir is drafted, it's in my agent's hands. We will see what happens with that. Um, I thought it was gonna be a different memoir, but it ended up being about my mother. Um, and you and I were talking about this off camera. Um, but you know, it's about growing up with a parent who doesn't necessarily love you in the ways that you need, and um navigating the the process of unlearning and learning to love yourself properly, um, which is is is isolating work, right? It's lonely work, um, but deeply rewarding work because at some point you look up and you realize I'm not sad anymore, right? This thing is not weighing me down anymore. Um, so there's that, and I'm looking forward to hearing from my agent when she reads this draft. The first draft was real crunchy, okay? The first draft was not cute. I wrote that one in October and she was like, take it back to the drawing board.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:55

And I was like, you're right.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:57

Um, so revision is so important. And then the other thing that's um in the in the percolator right now is my uh first official academic book. That's what an academic press, um, policing blackness, which has been kind of in the works for a few years now because academic presses are just so incredibly slow. Just, I mean, goodness gracious, snail's pace. Okay. Um, but we're getting closer, and so I'm looking forward to being able to announce the next steps on both of those projects, hopefully in the next couple of months.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:29

I'm so excited for that book and also for your memoir, especially given that you do start exploring the relationship with your, which I want to state your the the mother who gave birth to you, because in your acknowledgments, you acknowledge another mother that was important to you.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:48

That's right. My mother-in-law. Yeah. Yeah, my mother-in-law has been mothering me since I was 17. Um, I met her when I was my first year of college, when I met my spouse, who at the time was just my best friend. We were luckily, I'm married to my best friend, and so our relationship has shifted and changed over the years. At one point it was romantic, but it's been mostly platonic. And so um, when I met my mother-in-law, she was just my best friend's mom. Um, and she has nursed me after every heart surgery. You know, she has been there for me after every baby, you know. Um, and she is my mother. She is my mother. There's a person who gave birth to me, and then there's my mother.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:29

Oh, and thank you for making this, folks. I would love for y'all to check out that black couple, the podcast, because I love how you and your spouse model other ways of building a family and building love. Because y'all and I said this off camera, like it's clear, like your little, like at the very beginning, hi, hi. Like, I was like, there is such deep love y'all have for one another. It's so cute.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:55

I really do adore that guy. I really do adore him. I really do. I'm such a lesbian, I'm so gay. But this guy, that dude, I mean, 25 years. It's like you know, we're coming from our 20-year anniversary of marriage. And so, oh yeah, I've known him since I was 17. And I just, he's irreplaceable. He is literally, I describe him as my bone marrow. He is he is in my bones, and I'm so grateful for him and his light. He's a wonderful person. Darren is a wonderful human being, and I'm so grateful that the ancestors saw fit for me to find him when he when I did.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:29

And speaking of that, though, I just finished listening to the last episode of this season where y'all talked about the 40s and things like that. And it sounds like he's writing his own stuff right now, too.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:39

He is, and his book is right now under review. So I have an announcement for that too.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:45

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:48

Well, Darren, wherever you are, I got a spot for you here too.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:53

I'm gonna send him right to you. I'm gonna send him to you. He's coming. I'm trying to tell this man, like, your book is coming out. I keep telling him, I'm like, you're gonna be, you know, the young father version of Percival Everett. That's my in my mind. That's you're gonna be the young daddy with the with the beard, Percival Everett. That's what I'm trying to get. And I'll be the the queer, tall, big booty dancy tonight. I don't know. That's whatever. We'll figure it out.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:21

But I'm telling you, y'all are just so cute, and I just love like how y'all model, like literally, you don't need the romantic love to build a family. Like, I just all I admire y'all so much. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:39

No, I I appreciate that because I I do think that people think that you're supposed to build a household on romance. And I just have watched a lot of women in my life do that, and I've just not seen it go very well in a lot of instances. And so growing up, I just knew that I I knew that if I was gonna do this marriage thing, it was gonna be one time and it was gonna be with somebody who wanted to build a life with me outside of my body, outside of what I could provide for them physically. And I'm just so grateful that I found that person who wanted the same thing.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:11

Yeah, I love it, I love it. Which question about that black couple when are y'all back for season nine?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:18

So season nine actually will start recording next month. So that should be back um in March. Nice, because I I love I love that podcast. Come on, yes, and we publish Beloved will be back in May. So you're gonna have two things to watch.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:33

Yes, yes, and we publish beloved, just also too, like the care, the care that you have for your guests and just how you celebrate their moment because publishing is hard, hard as hell, okay?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:49

It's hard, it's hard. And I'm just I think that we don't do enough of celebrating of one another. It takes nothing. I don't know what this whole scarcity thing is, where it's like I can't celebrate you because that takes for me. That's weird. That's that's weird. I like celebrating my friends. I'm like, oh, you did it, girl. Ooh, good job, oh like I love celebrating people, it brings me so much joy. So that podcast was born out of me really wanting to be like, my friend wrote a book, guys. Like, I that's like I get to say, hey everyone, here's my friend's book. Like that's pure joy, pure joy.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:22

I love it, but this is lit, this is literally how we thrive more than survive, taking care of one another, celebrating these moments. So thank you for doing that work.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:34

And thank you for doing it too. That's what you're doing here, and I appreciate that too.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:38

Yeah, thank you. Like this platform is definitely a labor of love, and I I love, I love doing it. Like, I just because also too, sometimes I'm just like, I didn't have anyone listen, you know, to the audio package, but also just the things that I'm learning as a writer, and like like I treat this as people are listening in on a conversation that I'm having with somebody else. Because I've learned so much from all of you that have been that is like I feel so fed after every, especially now. I'm like, I guess I have to take a nap before this because this morning was a little hectic. And I feel so fed after talking with you. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:20

I'm muted, I'm over here talking to you. I said, same. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:25

I'm sitting here like, why am I not? Like, my mouth is moving, but I ain't coming out.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:31

I I really appreciate you having me here. I will come back whenever you want. Any book? Yeah. Let me write another book so I can come back on.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:36

Yeah, please do. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Blackwriters Read. Black Riders Read is available on all platforms. Please be sure to subscribe to Blackwriters Read wherever you listen to your podcasts to receive each new episode once they are released. And after you listen to this episode and subscribe to the podcast, I would appreciate so very much if you could also leave a review as your feedback helps me to curate the series and it helps others to find us. I hope that you are so moved and encouraged to take your support of Black Riders Read one step further and join us on Patreon. Thank you for championing this work and helping to sustain this award winning, independently produced virtual platform. To learn more, please visit us at BlackRiddersree.com. Thanks again for your support and for ensuring that Black Writers continue to matter.