Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture

Edited Transcription

I’m honored to have this rare opportunity to be in conversation with the brilliant Terri Lyne Carrington and all of you. There is simply no institution, on any university campus, like the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. The idea of gender and jazz justice is something that we all have to rally around and embrace. It’s not for exclusive groups—it’s for the globe.

I’m not the first or the last to make what should be an obvious point: that Black Feminist Thought is an interrogation into all forms of oppression and possibility. I say this not only because of Black women’s unique subject position, not just because Black women experience racism, gender, and class oppression and exclusion. Black Feminist Thought is not merely a reaction to oppression but an accumulation of lessons we as a people carried with us in order to survive and move forward. It was often left to women, femmes—particularly working-class Black women and femmes—who, at the grassroots level, had to figure out ways to survive and create a different future for all of us. It is not an accident that the established radical Black feminist organizations have embraced an anti-capitalist vision of the world, one that rejects all forms of gendered discrimination, exclusion, exclusivity, and the narrowing of possibility—including the narrowing of sexuality. This is not to say that Black feminism hasn’t struggled with its own contradictions, including the marginalization of lesbian, queer, and nonbinary communities, say, fifty years ago. Black feminism is also always in motion, and an abiding commitment to interrogate, address, and resolve contradictions and difficult challenges is its strength.

But let’s return to the larger point—that Black feminism’s radical vision sought to create a different future of all of us. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) recognized that the emancipation of all humankind was made [End Page 62] possible by ending all forms of oppressions that affect Black women—around health care, the economy, violence—whether it’s gendered violence, intimate partner violence, or state violence. Their statement was not a call to grant Black women greater access to the existing system, or for race- and gender-integrated social democracy. Rather, they demanded a deeper disordering of racist, capitalist heteropatriarchy that required a remaking of the whole of life—production, reproduction, safety, pleasure, the right to bodily autonomy, everything. It argued that a nonracist, nonsexist society could not be created under capitalism, nor could socialism alone dismantle the structures of racial, gender, and sexual domination. The struggle wasn’t just the public fight in the streets or the public fight for representation, nor was it just socialism defined as providing resources in a very public way—decent jobs, collective labor.¹

Put differently, the most expansive expressions of abolition come from Black feminists and feminists of color, because they have always had to think about all the ways that oppression limits their lives. So it stands to reason that there is no category of people excluded from a framework that is basically a Black feminist framework. This comes through clearly in Abolition. Feminism. Now., the new book by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth E. Richie, and Erica R. Meiners. They develop the concept of abolition feminism, based not just around the oppressions we deal with intersectionally but around a reimagining of what freedom looks like. And what freedom looks like for Black women is the best freedom of all. It is a freedom that can allow us to have free, great health care, no police, no prisons, an earth that can survive, and the end of the violence that all of us have to deal with differentially. In the arts, you’re dealing with racism, class oppression, and patriarchy.² It’s always there. To eliminate patriarchy, structural racism, and class oppression is to create the possibility of new arts, a new flowering of the arts.

To answer your question, Terri, I have to address the reason why faculty members and others can’t remember the...