The Echoing Ida Collection

Cynthia R. Greenlee, Kemi Alabi, Janna A. Zinzi, Cynthia R. Greenlee, Kemi Alabi, Janna A. Zinzi

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781558612839
• eBook ISBN: 9781558612846
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Ensayos literarios

Rooted in reproductive justice, Echoing Ida harnesses the power of media for social justice—amplifying the struggles and successes of contemporary freedom movements in the US.

Founded in 2012, Echoing Ida is a writing collective of Black women and nonbinary writers who—like their foremother Ida B. Wells-Barnett—believe the "way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Their community reporting spans a wide variety of topics: reproductive justice and abortion politics; new and necessary definitions of family; trans visibility; stigma against Black motherhood; Black mental health; and more.

This anthology collects the best of Echoing Ida for the first time, and features a foreword by Michelle Duster, activist and great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Imagining a gender-expansive and liberated future, these essays affirm the powerful combination of #BlackGirlMagic and the hard, unceasing labor of Black people to reimagine the world in which we live.

FOR THE KULCHA

Introduction

Janna A. Zinzi

Culture: The customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. What you’ll see in history textbooks or on Wikipedia.

Kulcha: The funk, flavor, and ferocity that Black folks create as an expression of pride and celebration of our brilliance. It’s for us, by us.

If we weren’t dope as fuck, cultural appropriation wouldn’t exist. And the world would be hella bland. Our flavor transcends generations and borders.

Who keeps Twitter relevant and remotely interesting? Black folks. (And don’t fuck with Black Twitter CSI!)

Who broke the internet and keeps breaking it? Beyoncé, a Black woman from Houston.

What is the best-selling genre of music? Hip-hop, created by Black folks in the projects of the Bronx.

It’s undeniable. It’s irrefutable. Black America makes shit hot.

It’s also what unites us. It’s a shared understanding and through line despite our diverse geographies, ethnicities, languages, and food preferences (#TeamSaltyGrits all day!).

While culture includes what music is popular or what Netflix show to binge, it also provides a snapshot of an era reflecting our values and priorities. Sometimes it represents a collective experience often grounded in anti-Blackness that can be as painful as it is transformative. Think about the big business of cannabis consumption and legalization. We’ve been criminalized and imprisoned for trying to survive, and now white men are making millions and blocking our access to the industry. Think about the memes and art inspired by the uprisings that followed George Floyd’s murder during a global pandemic. They help us find joy in the horror and assert our humanity. Kulcha can be tangible, yet also a state of being.

Culture shapes history and defines who we are as Americans in a country that was designed to exploit us. While popular culture is fluid and our tastes change, Black women and nonbinary people are consistently responding to and subverting the white supremacist context that stifles us. It’s how we process a world that sees us as disposable. Kulcha is where we make our own rules. It is where we can find our liberation, represent our truths, center our experiences; it’s our outlet for freedom of expression.

We are creators on a global scale. People who have never met a Black American know our music, television shows, movies, and fashion. Our culture is our country’s greatest export, shaping how the world views the United States no matter what the political landscape looks like. When we are not in control of our images, the world gets fed stereotypes about us. But social media gives us power and a voice. Because of it, “Black Lives Matter” became a global rallying cry, showing the realities of our lives in America beyond the NBA superstars, syndicated reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or Rihanna’s latest Instagram post.

People all over the world want our style, our vernacular, our bodies (hello, lip injections and butt implants), our cultural capital. You know those folks who post “Black Lives Matter” on social media but then will try to touch your hair IRL. Blackface has made a comeback with white women online using dark foundation to look ambiguously Black, like Rachel Dolezal in complete denial of her Eurocentric ethnicity (ahem, she’s white). It’s all fun and games when you’re not being targeted by police, jailed for having a joint, or paid less for everything you do.

Enough about them: Back to us and our legends. We love our Whitney, Prince, Big Poppa, our Queen Bey. The folks who represent us to the world. They show us what’s possible. They demonstrate freedom, thriving over surviving, and courageous creative expression. Through them, we see and love our Blackness. They put themselves and their truths on the line (like the writers of this section do), all for the kulcha.

How Prince Helped Me Be Black and Genderqueer in America’s Bible Capital

Jordan Scruggs

I still remember when Prince sang on Muppets Tonight in 1997. I was seven years old in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was a few years after he started using a symbol instead of his name, which the Muppets played up for laughs. I remember him wearing overalls in one scene for a farm skit and a ridiculous chartreuse turtleneck for a music video in the next. Even the Muppet-ified Prince had a pompadour.

I watched him sing about Cynthia, a Muppet who didn’t care what people thought about her: “If you set your mind free, baby, you’d understand.” After that, I wanted more.

I looked for Prince in music stores and online. I’ll never forget seeing the cover of his 1988 album, Lovesexy. Here was this naked Black man on the cover of his album with flowers behind him. And people loved him.

So did I. “Purple Rain” helped me to understand the turmoil I was going through when a relationship ended differently than I’d hoped. “Little Red Corvette” was there to remind me to take time with my life. But it’s the opening line from “I Would Die 4 U” that knocked me out. It struck me so hard and stayed with me because it was my life. And when I heard it, I realized it was okay to feel that way:

I’m not a woman

I’m not a man

I am something that you’ll never understand

As I went deeper into the catalog, I found Prince in similar poses with the same aura of pride as on Lovesexy. Prince had a magical blend of masculinity and femininity that I was searching for but couldn’t find within my own community or anywhere, really. You see, Chattanooga is a very religious city. I went to church nearly every Sunday for about twenty years. We have more churches than schools. In fact, in 2016, the American Bible Society named my hometown the most “Bible-minded” city in America.¹

My family encouraged me to be proud of being Black, proud of where I come from, and proud of the space I take up in this world. But I never felt as confident as other family members when it came to their identities. My parents surrounded me with people who are the definitions of strength.

But not like Prince.

I was at work when I heard the news. I checked Twitter offhandedly and saw a tweet about a death at Prince’s studio. I gasped and stepped back from the computer. I refreshed Twitter over and over again, looking for a source other than TMZ. When the Associated Press confirmed the news, I screamed and sank to the floor. My white coworkers didn’t understand how real I was being when I said my gut was torn and my heart was racing. I couldn’t accept it. He had been such a big part of my childhood and adolescence.

Prince let me see a person who wore makeup and whatever clothes he wanted, not caring whether his choices fit the gender binary.

The only conversation about sexuality I heard growing up was about abstinence. There was no talk of gender identity or being queer. There was no place I could reach out to for more information besides the public library because I didn’t have internet access at home. I didn’t know how my family felt about anything beyond the heterosexual world where I was raised. They never shamed or spoke badly about people; they just didn’t discuss it. So it wasn’t until I got older that I was able to put a description of genderqueer on myself. I could see and understand this concept of not being a man or a woman in Prince. But I didn’t understand what it was called.

I rarely felt comfortable in my own physical body. I felt isolated. I still feel isolated, even though I’m surrounded by love and support. Family and friends can support me in every way, but they’ll never really understand my gender identity, which makes me feel apart.

Prince understood. He was what I was missing. He was unapologetic. Sexy. Proud. Genderless. It’s what I’m still working on right now. Even as I got older, there was no one out there who was as confident about their beyond-the-gender-binary persona. There was no music I could connect to as much as I connected to Prince’s.

I found a North Star in Prince because he showed me the power of my genderqueer body. Prince let me see a person who wore makeup and whatever clothes he wanted, not caring whether his choices were gendered. Prince created both transcendent music and his own identity and did neither for anyone’s approval nor opinion. That’s brave as hell.

He continued to inspire me when he joined Janelle Monáe on her second album, The Electric Lady. It was a perfect match. Like Prince, one of her musical forebears, Monáe is unapologetic about her Blackness and sexual identity. She too is a pocket-sized revolution who is changing the game in a creative and bold way—from the way she composes her album interludes to her dedication to her family’s labor history in her outfits.

I was standing in the exact same place at my exact same job and on Twitter yet again when I read the tweet about Janelle’s sexuality. It was two years and five days after the day that Prince died. But unlike before when I felt a sense of loss, I felt a sense of peace. I felt borderline euphoric. For years I had watched every Janelle Monáe interview where she talked around her personal life. I was satisfied without being able to explain it when she would say she was an android … that was into other androids. I couldn’t explain to myself for years why I felt drawn to someone who didn’t place a gender on who they were dating. But as soon as I read the first paragraph of her Rolling Stone interview, I understood.

It was another Black person existing and loving in this mysterious haze of purple in a world of red and blue. I felt represented. I felt pride. I could confidently tell people, “Yeah, queer as in Janelle Monáe, free ass motherfucker.” Because it felt that way. It felt freeing. It felt like seeing Prince in the worst shade of yellow dancing with Muppets all over again. Something new yet familiar. It felt personal. It felt like me.

Her third album, Dirty Computer, was released the day after she released this statement, and I was thrown back into the comfort of what it’s like for music to truly mean something in your life. I needed Prince when I was seven and curious about myself just like I needed Janelle Monáe, when I was twenty-eight, on the cover of Rolling Stone talking about being a proud queer and pansexual Black woman. I was already out and proud. But now I was out, proud, and loudly screaming that it was #20Gayteen.

I’ve been fed the music of Prince, Whitney Houston, and Michael Jackson since I was young. They have all helped me translate the emotions I was feeling when I couldn’t find the words. People in my life know how much I adore Whitney Houston in particular. Her music is a huge part of my soul. What I don’t state enough is that Prince was the person who gave me the attitude and the confidence to fully be that soul.

It’s more than music for me. Living in a state where LGBTQ people are constantly attacked is draining. It’s vital to me to have this connection to music created by these artists. They remind me of my power, beauty, and the possibility of the future we dream up together.

Notes

1. “America’s Most Bible-Minded Cities: 2016,” American Bible Society, accessed May 6, 2019, https://www.americanbible.org/features/americas-most-bible-minded-cities.

Originally published on Splinter (formerly Fusion.net) on April 22, 2016.

30 Years Later, 7 Ways A Different World Was Woke AF

Brittany Brathwaite

A Different World was an American sitcom that aired for six seasons beginning in September 1987, making it thirty this year (2017). The show focused on students attending the fictional historically Black college Hillman, the Virginia alma mater of Clair and Cliff Huxtable of The Cosby Show.

While the show has been cited as a large motivation for many in the eighties and nineties who wanted to attend college, mainly historically Black colleges and universities, it also played a major role in bringing difficult and contemporary topics to the fore, placing real historical, social, political, and economic issues within the context of young Black people’s lives, especially Black women and femmes, and connecting to their gender, bodies, sexuality, and community.

The sitcom explored pertinent reproductive justice issues for Black women, including stereotypical imagery, like mammy; intimate partner violence; sexual harassment and assault; misogynoir; contraception and condom use; and young-adult pregnancy. A Different World was way ahead of its time in creating and shifting narratives about Black college life specifically and Black life in general.

1. HIV/AIDS was a reality for young people growing up in the nineties.

A Different World was one of the first television shows in the United States to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. A 1991 episode¹ starring Tisha Campbell and Whoopi Goldberg spotlights Josie Webb (Campbell), a Hillman college student who discloses her HIV-positive status in her public speaking class when given an assignment to write her own obituary. In the aftermath of her sharing, some of her classmates don’t want to be served by her at the Pit, the campus dining spot, or wear handkerchiefs over their faces to avoid contact with her. The episode dealt with HIV and AIDS very deftly by depicting how the personal affected the public sphere and the stigma surrounding AIDS.

First, the show made information available about how HIV was transmitted (some folks weren’t quite sure if you could get HIV from kissing at that time) and dispelled outright myths about the disease. Second, A Different World portrayed how to treat folks through Mr. Gaines (Lou Myers), who was Josie’s boss at the Pit. When Josie thinks that she needs to hide her status from Mr. Gaines out of fear that he would fire her if he knew, he shows her care and compassion. Though employment discrimination was and remains illegal, it is still a very real thing for many folks living with HIV.

Josie’s disclosure causes her classmates to think about their sexual activity and consistent use of protection during sex but also dispells myths about what an HIV-positive person “looks” like. This episode was groundbreaking, not only because it was one of the first but because the writers chose to tell the story through the experiences of a Black woman, Josie, during a time when women’s groups, AIDS Coaliti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Origin Story
• The Structure and the Struggle
• Birth Justice … and yes, that includes Abortion
• Family Matters
• Naked Power
• Beauty Breaks
• For the Kulcha
• Black Love and Black Futures
• Onward
• Contributor Biographies
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• Also Available from the Feminist Press
• About the Feminist Press
• More Activist Anthologies from the Feminist Press