Abstract
The United States of America, since its conception, has been built on violence and genocidal tactics fueled by colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and a gamut of additional forces of oppression. Lindsey's first book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C., detailed a dense geocultural journey of struggle and triumphs. Colored No More explored the intersectional challenges of race, class, gender, sexuality, the collective vision of freedom, equality, and the work of African American women in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In this book, America, Goddam, which Lindsey builts upon the spirit of Nina Simone's self-proclaimed first civil rights song. The author answers a deeper call to build an analysis that thoroughly explores the systematic impact of systems of oppression against Black women and girls. The book is grounded in the use of personal accounts, history, and theoretical analysis. In this rich assessment of historical, present-day, and future accounts of induced violence, Lindsey offers a genuflection to the legacies of countless Black women and girls and their fight for not only for themselves, but also for their families, communities, and the greater society. Black women and girls have refused to remain silent throughout history and have been the backbone for a multitude of Black liberation movements. African American women have rarely received due credit for this crucial labor. The force of misogynoir, a term coined by the scholar, Dr. Moya Bailey, situates this book as critical to the analysis of gender-based and anti-Black violence.
The book opens with personal reflections and a comparative analysis of public attention paid to police violence against Black men (e.g. Rodney King) v. Black women (e.g. Breonna Taylor) in suggesting the deaths of Black men at the hands of police are more “public” and the deaths of Black women are more “private.” The history of policing in the United States is explored, exposing its roots in sustaining Black chattel slavery and protecting White wealth. The foundation of policing in the United States served and maintained the interests of White owners of land and businesses by surveilling, criminalizing, and subjugating enslaved people in order to maintain the White supremacist and capitalist order of chattel slavery. In other words, U.S. policing, according to Lindsey, enforced racial capitalism.
Various forms of racial oppression produced a social order that embraced the criminalization and policing of Black people. Capitalism's survival relied on and continues to rely on the exploitation and unequal differentiation of human value. Slavery in the Americas epitomized the unjust and inequitable treatment of Black and Indigenous people for the purpose of extracting valuable economic value. Black women and girls had value for slave owners because of their work and their ability to reproduce the workforce supply chain needed to perpetuate racialized capitalism. Yet, the modern-day survival of Black women and children is precarious, at best, in a nation where anti-blackness and misogyny significantly contribute to the maternal and infant mortality and morbidity crises in the Black community.
America Goddam explains that, for Black women and girls, unlivable living is most emphatically felt at the intersection of poverty and economic deprivation—a dynamic of multisystem harm dependent upon state-sanctioned violence. Three questions drive this book: (1) What are the particular forms of violence we’ve historically endured; (2) How does that legacy play out in more recent decades; and (3) What historical events and predominating ideas about Black womanhood and girlhood situate Black women and girls as distinctly vulnerable to multiple forms of violence? These guiding questions are delineated clearly for the reader to explore.
However, the book was not as expansive in addressing the deep, intersectional, and complex forms of multisystem harm that perpetuate the various forms of physical, emotional, spiritual, and economic damage done to Black women and girls. One such example is the lack of emphasis on the role of the child welfare system, which played a pivotal role, for example, in the murder of Ma’Khia Bryant at the hands of law enforcement in Columbus, Ohio.
Lindsey concludes with the personal and professional promise to keep fighting for Black liberation and equity and the promotion of hope in the liberatory now and the liberatory future. This book is an excellent addition and can be used as a tool of analysis and reflexivity for social work scholars and practitioners across micro, mezzo, macro settings who are attempting to reimagine a world where Black women and girls are cared for, protected, and respected.
