Becoming a Writer Out of Necessity (with Jenn M. Jackson, PhD)

In this episode, we are joined by scholar Dr. Jenn M. Jackson to discuss the profound impact of Black feminist scholarship. We explore Dr. Jenn’s journey from an early love of writing to becoming an influential voice in Black feminism, the necessity of storytelling, and the ongoing fight for recognition in academic spaces. Dr. Jenn also shares insights from their book 'Black Women Taught Us' and highlights the importance of centering Black women’s experiences. The conversation delves into personal and communal resilience, the erasure of Black women from historical narratives, and the importance of community in sustaining activism. Tune in to learn more about the vital role of Black feminist thought in shaping the future.

00:00 Welcome to Liberation is Lit Podcast

00:37 Introducing Dr. Jenn M Jackson

01:06 Dr. Jenn's Journey to Writing and Scholarship

04:45 The Importance of Black Feminist Scholarship

09:17 Highlighting Black Feminist Figures

15:07 Staying Grounded in Academia

20:47 Upcoming Projects and Writing Tips

25:08 Advice for Making a Positive Impact

28:41 Closing Remarks and Where to Find More

Books By Jenn M. Jackson

Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism by Jenn M. Jackson

Books Mentioned in This Episode

Sula by Toni Morrison

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Love Jones Cohort by Kris Marsh

Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

Writing Groups

Black Writers Workspace

Torch Writing Circle

The Writing Circle

Where to Find Dr. Jenn

https://jennmjackson.com/

Instagram

Threads

Substack

Thank you for being part of the Liberation is Lit podcast! If you have stories to share, want to suggest topics, or just want to connect, find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok @liberationislit or visit our website at liberationislit.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a review! Remember, your voice matters, and together, through the lens of stories, we're making a difference in the world.

Transcript

0:07

Hey y'all. Welcome to the Liberation is Lit Podcast where the power of storytelling meets the force of social change. I'm your host, Tayler Simon, and in this podcast we believe in the profound impact of stories, and I am super excited to be here with one of my Black femme scholar I don't know. I've just been following for a long time, and of course I read Black Women Taught Us and really resonated with this. So I'm excited to be here with Dr. Jenn m Jackson to talk about their book as well as just the role of Black women in scholarships. So, hey, how are you doing, Dr. Jenn? Thank you for me. I have also been following you for a long time, so thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be here and have this conversation. I love the work that you do. Thank you, and I love the work that you do. Look at Black women and femmes coming together and just being like, yes. Mm-hmm. to start the conversation, can you tell us a little bit about yourself as a writer and a scholar? Yeah. You know, it's interesting 'cause the scholar part is, is is for me, right. I, I'm, I was born in Oakland, California and I've been writing since I was a small child. I think a lot of us have our diaries and our journals and. You know, we scribble here and there and we never think anything of it when we're kids. But, you know, I've always had a writing praxies, you know, I grew up reading books. I wasn't supposed to be reading way too early. Right. I was reading Ula in like the third grade, you know? And I, Toni Morrison has been one of my favorite authors for the longest time, Zora Neale Hurston, wrote the book that changed my life. Their eyes were watching God, and it was after reading those books. At a very young age that I thought to myself, well, maybe I'll be a writer one day. But nobody really encourages young Black people to write their own stories. And so I went off to college, and majored in engineering and did all that stuff. And every time something catastrophic would happen in my life, I found myself going back to writing. You know, like I would start writing poetry again. I would, I would go back to the same books again. And when I went to get my PhD , I went to do political science because I had been in engineering and I, I endured all this racism and sexism and homophobia, and I was like, know this, there's gotta be words for this, right? There has to be something about this that I can read to help me understand. And I turned immediately back to Black feminism. And so my relationship to writing a scholarship really happened organically as, as I grew up in these dynamics and situations where. couldn't really put words to it. I, I, I was like, I don't know what this is, what is misogynoir right? What is Black feminism? What does it mean to be disabled and move to these spaces, but also in a Black female body, right? And so I became a writer, I like to say, out of necessity, Stories like mine written but not quite like mine, my scholarship is the same thing. I will never forget getting to graduate school and talking about police and jails having people not know what I was talking about. Then I'm like, y'all ain't got no cousins that been to jail? Like y'all ain't, y'all ain't never been arrested by the police. And they was like, no. I'm like, Then how are y'all gonna tell anybody else about science, political science? Like how are you studying power and you've never been under threat? Of power, you know? And so a lot of my work around writing and scholarship is, you know, that question of those intersections, right? Who these women are and were, and how they ended up pushing against the, the state and pushing up against a government that was trying to kill them. And they wrote about it because they had to, because it helped them stay alive. They wrote about it because they wanted us to stay alive. They want, they wrote about it because they wanted us to be here, right? And so all of my work. about that is about a deep and enduring love of Black people and believing as an afrofuturist as I am, that we exist in the future and we exist in that future outside of boxes and graves and prisons. And I love about, I love how you talked about this concept of writing out of necessity and, you talked about the scholarship part of your life being new. But I, I think that kind of what you were saying and as you were telling your story, it's that Black women doing these writings and these musings out of necessity. It's not always seen as scholarship. That's And so why do you believe highlighting and citing Black women scholarship, whatever it looks like, whether or not the powers that be deem it scholarship. Why do you think centering that work is important? Oh gosh. I love this, right? I, I think you know. The first Black feminist teachers I ever had were like my mother and my grandmothers and my aunties, right? These are women who do not have college degrees, you know? You know, they spent a lot of time in church and a lot of time in community, and a lot of their lessons came from their life experiences. And unfortunately that is not seen as expertise, right? They always say that whatever we do in academia is me search. I will never forget. Listen, I, I always start a story about, I'll never forget, I'm a true Black person. Okay? First day at grad school at U Chicago, I was walking in the hallway with a friend of mine. She's a very petite Black woman, fairer skin. She's from New Orleans. And it was me and her and this white man, very senior professor, very senior professor came out. And he stood over her and he put his hand on the wall and leaned over her into her face and said, why are all of you studying Black politics? now me being a Black person open, I was triggered. I was like, oh, we finna fight. This is finna be a fight. So I slide in and I was like, well, why are all them white kids studying Russia and Germany? You asking him and them up too? he immediately backed up and was like, and he, and he was in, he was entertained by it. really said something to me about how flippant he was about us wanting to understand ourselves, right? About how dismissive he was, about how important it is for us to understand our own history. And I would argue it's the most important for us because it's been so intentionally erased, right? We've been so intentionally and strategically kept from it, right? And so to answer the question, like that's why. I wanted to write this book, right? I, I've never taken a Black feminist class at all. Black feminist politics. Black feminist theory, not because I didn't want to, but because when I went through the course catalogs at these elite universities, these PWIs, there were no courses. If there were, I would've enrolled immediately. Right? What does it say when you're at these elite universities that are supposed to be a pinnacle of, of education and intellect in the country? And they don't even have us on the syllabus. They don't even have us on the catalog. Right. so I got to the point in graduate school where I was like, I'm, I'm actually tired of that. Like I'm tired of bringing all these books where. is like one section or one chapter. Black women get one, one piece of the story. When this has been my entire life, right? Like I would physically not be sitting here right now to speak to you it were not for Black women always showing up. I'm sitting in, lemme just be honest with you, completely on, I'm sitting in my friend's house right now. name is Kris Marsh. She wrote the Love Jones Court. I'm in her house right now. letting me and my family, my three children and my puppy in her home I'm in the process of moving into my home. Black women show up, right? That is the reason why Black people are still here, because of Black women. so for me, it was important for me that my first book. Tell the truth about who Black women are, were and continue to be right. I'm tired of reading books about us being villains who just angry and, you know, want to fight all day. Or, you know, baby mamas with no depth and no history and no story and no. You know, I'm tired of being rendered in these disgusting and deplorable ways. Tyler Perry and got us looking like, who knows what, whatever is in his imagination. When the truth of the matter is that Black women stand in the gap for everyone, And so for me it was like, well, the least I can do, The least I can do tell the truth about that. And that shouldn't be radical. Right. That shouldn't be that exciting, right? That should be what we are all doing every day. I love how you said telling the truth shouldn't be radical. And it is when so many of our truths are actively being erased, like you were saying. And so I know you talk a lot about a lot of Black feminist scholars that we know and we love, but some who we don't give their flowers to enough. And so can you tell us a little bit about, the Black feminist that you featured in your book? Black Women Taught us. And that was something I thought was really interesting. When I wrote the book, I wasn't really thinking about who anyone knew or didn't know, because to be frank with you, this is about the journey that I took. At a time when I didn't know any of these women, right? I, I discovered a lot of these women, later in life, twenties, thirties, you know. And so I think people know Angela Davis because she's still here. She walks the earth and we are so grateful for her life and her breath. Most folks know who Bell Hooks is. People know who Shirley Chisholm is because they know she ran for president. But the people I've been surprised by when I'm on the book tour, they say, I didn't know who this was. I had someone tell me they had no idea who Fannie Lou Hamer was. And it made me so sad because in doing the research for the book. That, that was kind of apparent to me. I had a research assistant and so for about a year or two before the book, we just sort of just scoured the internet, scoured the archives, looking for anything we hadn't seen and read. Because, you know, a lot of these women, their work will be kind of, synthesized is just one factoid or one quote, or they'll say, Harriet Tubman free the slaves, and they'll leave out the whole story about her being a whole Commander General. Right. And so Fannie is often associated with, nobody's free until everybody's free. But I didn't know about her, Mississippi appendectomy until I did my own research that she had a forced hysterectomy, and that that was one of the things that catalyzed her activism. You know, I didn't understand how much of her work was rooted in the fact that she grew up very, very poor and destitute. I did not know that she died at 59 years old, and on her death certificate, they called her a housekeeper. Right. These were things I had to actively in my twenties and thirties work to learn, right? And so I, I always empathize with people who say. I didn't know anything about this person, right? Harriet Jacobs actually starts the book and almost no one, knows who Harriet Jacobs is. But people will say, well, why didn't you start with Phyllis Wheatly Because that's the one we were all taught about, right? Like, saw Phyllis Wheatly sitting at the table, right? She's in all these museums, but where's Harriet Jacobs? rarely do we see or hear about Harriet Jacobs, and while folks now know who Zora Hurston is because of Alice Walker's work to ensure her legacy. Many people had no idea that she died destitute and that she died and was buried in an unmarked grave, right? And so some of this is like, what I'm learning is that, people may know of, right? These Black feminist foremothers elders and ancestors, but they don't know us. They don't really know us. And that's a form of ignorance and intention as well, right? That's a systemic thing as well, right? To water down and I don't know, kind of, anti radicalize the narratives women's stories, even with Audre Lorde. People associate her with the quote that self-care as an act revolution, but have no idea wrote that quote in the context of a cancer diagnosis. And there's a whole book called the Cancer Journals. Where she's talking about, actually, y'all killed me. Right? That's what the book's actually about. Her self-care was a reaction to the way she had been exploited and extorted by academia, by Black men, you know, by folks in community, right? And so what I'm finding is that people may know some this, narrative. They may know something, a few things about these women, but we're never encouraged to actually think of them as human being. Right. We're encouraged to think of them as, memes, you know, something we just share a year on their birthday, you know, and that's what I want us to move beyond, right? I want us to start seeing Black women as more than props and ornaments for our, performative radicalism, instead as strugglers co strugglers comrades, who, if not for them, even sit here and be this lazy. And it feels like we kind of reduce them to this one dimension. Aspect, and again, what you, we could do a whole episode on Tyler Perry, but again, it's not just white people who are reducing No. Black women to these one, this single dimension and how we don't realize that the context of the world that they were living in, the world that we are currently living in. Is what helps us do the work to move things forward. That's. that is just such a disservice to the ancestors who are no longer with us, but also the people who still are here and future generations to come. And so I, I was having a conversation on another episode of the podcast, with a historian talking about how it's. To get proximate to, our historical everyday people in the archives because if they're not deemed important enough to record their stories, we don't know anything about them and how that is of structure of power. And I know that is a lot. That happens a lot in. Academia and in scholarships. So it can be, it can feel very dehumanizing and that's why I said I was not gonna be in academia. But what keeps you grounded in this work? You know. Ooh, I've been thinking about that a lot. I just relocated from upstate New York to Maryland and I'm in the process of getting ready for a, a, my second open heart surgery in my life. And so I have, I'm being grounded is something I'm like, woo. You know, it's like you have to really work on it. And, groundedness for me has always been about, sure I feel safe, and making sure I feel well academia is not made. For Black women to feel safe or well, we simply do not belong there. We are marooned there. and so being marooned in those spaces means that we are always fighting. We're always fighting. Every day is a fight. And it's something that I've noticed. In my life as I've developed healthier boundaries about what I'm willing to do and what I'm not willing to do, I've noticed how we as Black women, will often allow certain violations of our boundaries if it means that the community will be okay, or if it means we can have access for others or, know, and what has grounded me lately saying, fuck that. I ain't doing that no more. What has grounded me lately is what I call a radical state of refusal. It's the story I tell about Toni Morrison all the time where when she was off, on a sabbatical writing minding her Black business, and Oprah Winfrey called, and she said, Oprah, how did you get my number? that is the most iconic state of radical refusal to me ever. Right. Most people, if Oprah called, they gonna drop everything they like. I don't call. Right? And most people is me. I'm most people. If Oprah calls, you want me to do? Oprah? Yeah. I have a surgery. But you do. You need me somewhere, right? Toni said, how did you get my number? And I think that's honestly how we have to move, right? Like, I relocated from upstate New York to Maryland because this is where I want to be. This is where I want to live. These are the people who I want to be around. This is the food that I want to eat. This is the culture I wanna be in. and I don't want to be marooned in a place where every day I have to fight to be a Black woman, to be a queer person, to be a disabled person, where people disrespect me in my face every single day. I don't have to do that. I can live in a different way, and I think groundedness being a com combination of being safe and well means that we have to focus yes on the safe part, but we really have to focus on the well part. think sometimes we think that if we feel safe, we'll also feel well, and that's not true. Right. I'm from California. I grew up in a place where I get to go outside every day and I can go to the beach and I can get sun and I can touch grass and I can, and in the last 10 years I've lived in Chicago and Syracuse where I can't do that, right? I've lived in places where it's snowing nine months out the year, right? And where that's also not the culture. while I felt very safe in Chicago, I didn't feel well. feel well, right? And so I think something I really want Black women to do, and another reason why I wrote the book, I wrote it for me too, right? To hold myself accountable to a, a, a form of care and love for myself, right? Because I can't say I love and care for Black people if I'm not willing to show up and care and love for myself. And to stay grounded, I have to have a deep and enduring love to say, hey. You shouldn't be doing that, friend, Right? The same thing I would say to a best friend who's like, I'm gonna go do this. You know, take this job somewhere where I'm gonna be lonely and sad and not eat none of the food I want, and have people disrespect me. I would look at her and go, so when you planning on leaving? Right? The same thing I would say to her, I have to say to myself. That's what this book was, a reminder that Black women have already been showing me the way to do that. That's why Black women struggle against the state because they're saying, I actually believe that this can be better. It's a form of accountability. It's a form of saying we deserve better and here's, here's what better looks like. And so what I'm doing to stay grounded in this moment trying to remind myself. I deserve to have a life that I curate for myself, that I feel joy in, that I feel safe in that I feel well in that, that I will, I, I, I wake up and I go, I'm gonna go outside today just because, right? And I'm not gonna feel guilty that. No one's gonna shame me for having a house where I can sit on the porch and smoke a joint and look outside and enjoy the land. No one's gonna make me feel bad about that because I deserve it, right? And so I think. What I want people to take from this book in, in with respect to your question is that Black women have been fighting for that for so, so long, and we have a right to demand that, right? It's our birthright, Yes, it definitely is. And. By definition, when we get free, we all get free. So this work is selfish, but also it benefits everyone. That's right. And I know you're in a huge transition moving and about to get open heart surgery, and I always hate that I ask this question about upcoming projects because rest is very, needed. But. Talk your shit. Talk yourself up if, do you have anything that you wanna promote right now? I mean, I'm also a Virgo, so of course I have like 75 projects. Of course I'm doing like 90 things. Yeah, I have a lot actually. So my next book. I think will come out next is called Policing Blackness. It's based on my research. This is a book that really centers the idea of threat and un under and understanding what threat means to Black people. Too often when we say, oh, that's a threat, this is a threat. It's used in such an empty and useless way. so what I wanted to do with this book is to say, white people walk around feeling threatened all the time, and yet nothing is happening to them. Black people, when we say we are threatened, we have an empirical world. We have a whole world out there that shows us what the consequences of those threats are, so we can't even use those terms in the same way when police roll up on a Black person, it's a whole different experience. Whether they're at a sandwich shop, at a, at a local lake, if they're sitting in their car, minding their business. Right. And so many other folks will never understand that. And so this book is really working to, to paint an entire comprehensive picture what that looks like for Black people. the book that I think will probably come out next after that I realized is not one book, but now I think it's two books. and so I've been writing a memoir for about 20 years. And when I first started writing it, I called it the first 20 years because I had my last open heart surgery when I was 20 and I'm now 40. And something hit me the other day and I said, I'm having heart surgery 20 years apart. I said, there's a book in there too, right? There's something, happening in here. And so what I realized is that. You know, there's two books there. And so I have a, a memoir called A Black Girl in the Future, it's about the first 20 years of my life leading up to my first heart surgery. And then I have a book called The Tall One, which is about my heart condition. It's called Marfan Syndrome. So it's a Marfan memoir and it's the period between my first heart surgery and my second heart surgery. I have two other books, that are a little bit further off, but one is a fiction book that I'm writing with my co-parent who's a, he's a brilliant author and incredible writer. And it is a science fiction, book about a young Black girl who essentially begins discovering that she has powers and they're related to her ancestral, kinship to her, Black grandmother. So it's a really interesting story set in Chicago. And then I have one more book based on my research, which I will be, hopefully pitching out next year, which is about, Black social movement organizations in the 20th century and how they were the kind of catalyst and underlying, frameworks for the movie for Black Lives, movie for Black Lives that we saw erupt in 2014. That's it. Every time I'm just like, lemme get to writing because I'm, I need to keep going. I know I commented on your thread the other day, like, I wanna be like you, like, Listen. Can I plug something real quick? I will say yes. Writing groups have saved my life. Whenever I see a writing group, I jump in. There's something on Instagram called a Black Writer's Workspace. They just meet on Mondays and they just write together quietly. I tend attend that pretty regularly. Torch Literary Arts has it ongoing writer's group. I'm in there pretty frequently, like. You know, I, I don't ever wanna say like, oh, I'll just be writing, and I just, no, it, I have to be in community. I have to remind myself I have, I have accountability partners, so I do wanna encourage folks. Like, if you want to get to writing, you have to build, it's a muscle. You have to build the practice just like reading. Right? And if you build it, it will absolutely work for you. It's not, nobody is extra special because they can write a thousand words in a day. They just have been doing it for a long time. Yes. And I go to Torch and I actually host a, writing circle, monthly writing circle with the city of Columbia's poet Laureate, Jennnifer Bartell Boykin. We have the writing circle where we meet. I think can, I can never remember if it's second or third Tuesdays, but it's all on the Instagram. I wanna. Yes, yes. And so my last question that I ask everybody is what advice would you offer listeners who wanna make a positive impact in their communities? I love that and I do love that about your work. Liberation is lit is so important to me, and so I think, I think right now, in this moment where, folks are not really reading, and when they do read, it's like short form or it's not necessarily informative. think in this moment, I, I, again, from being from Oakland, I'm a very Black Panthers person. I'm on the radical side. I think one of the best things we've ever learned, to take with us that we can carry with us at all times is the central ethos behind Black August. Black August, they tell us that we have to, train, we have to fast, we have to study, and we have to fight. Right? These are the four premises of Black August and. Studying to me is one of the most important parts of that, right? Reading. A lot of reading, reading, reading, reading, reading, reading. And I think one of the best ways we can make an impact on our communities is to start by reading and to understand what our ancestors and elders have already been doing. Right. It's not because we don't know it on our own. It's not because we're not experts, it's because there's a genealogy. Everything has a genealogy. Historians know this, and this is why I love talking to historians. They will tell you about that time in 1946 when so and so Moss from so and so city, says so and so, and it's incredible, right? And so I really want folks to. In this moment, in a moment where everything is kind of building off of miscommunication and misinformation, to go and read, read deeply and widely. Octavia Butler Kennedy Ryan, Brittany Cooper. Kiese Layman, right? I just finished reading Sebo Campbell's Sky Full of Elephants, and I felt so that last line. I reread the last two chapters four times. I just wanted to hear it again, you know, and so. That. And the other part of that is train. and fasting is also important, but people often think that fasting is about not eating something, but fasting is off of anything that is not helpful towards your goals. So if it's maybe you on social media too much, right? Or, maybe you're in toxic relationships, so people need to fast from some of that, right? But training is so important and the way we train is in community. These are the two things I really want people to do. and study up, and then go into community with other folks who are like you, who wanna affect community, who wanna change our literacy rates, who wanna keep bookstores alive, who want to see Black people thriving, right? Go be with other people who are doing that and build together, right? Nothing worth doing is done in isolation and, and individually alone, right? Everything worth doing is done in community. I could not be here. Without my community. And so I just hope that people will, see your podcast and pick up these books. Right? And then go out and find people who are like, oh yeah, me too. Right? Find them.'cause they're all out there and we need to be together in this moment. And people always ask me how do you stay so hopeful during these times? And I'm like literally being in community with people and building together because I, nobody's coming to save us. We gotta save ourselves. And seeing people do the work and having a group to do the work with is what keeps me hopeful. Same. So this was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Where can people keep up with you and find your work? I am everywhere. I need to sit my butt down. But, anywhere on the internet. At J-E-N-N-M Jackson PhD, I'm on Threads Blue Sky. Instagram, my substack. I would really love for people to be on my substack. I really do share a lot more of my deeper thoughts there, and it's kind of my writing home right now, but Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, anywhere on the internet, you'll find me. A little jingle. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah, because, because you're a poet at heart Of course. Well, thank you so much again, and thank you listeners for being a part of the Liberation is Lit Podcast. If you have stories you wanna share, wanna suggest any topics or just wanna connect finds on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok at Liberationist Lit, or visit our website, liberationist lit.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving the review. And remember, your voice matters and together through the lens of stories, we're gonna make a difference. Until next time.