In Freeing Black Girls, Tamura Lomax offers an insurgent feminist love letter to Black girls, women, mothers, and othermothers. Exploring what it means to mother Black children in the twenty-first century, Lomax shares her journey from her traditionalist Black girlhood to finding the path to revolutionary Black motherhood. Along the way, she shows how all Black people are endangered by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal dominance and emphasizes the power of looking and talking back. Lomax insists on Black feminist ways of living that value and nourish whole persons, sketching a radical dream that will allow Black women and girls to survive America while being able to love themselves, others, and collective Black freedom. Ultimately, Lomax declares that Black women and girls are emphatically not defective, second-class, or immanent nurturers; they are sacred and revolutionary beings who deserve to live a life free of predation, patriarchy, misrecognition, misogynoir, and violence.
Tamura Lomax is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University and author of Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture, also published by Duke University Press.
Author's Note ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. Toxic Literacies: Good Black Mothers, Endangered Black Boys, and Invisible Black Girls 1 1. Black Girls Matter: Letter to My Fourteen-Year-Old Self 25 2."F*ck Y'all Feminism": Black Girls, P-Valley, Rape Culture, and Erotic Power 37 3. "Break My Soul": Precarity and Resurrection in Evangelical Heteropatriarchal Antiblack America 63 4. Emancipating Proverbs 31: Liberating Rough, Nasty, and Aggressive Black Girls to Women 91 5. Ordinary or Insurgent? From Toxic Femininity to Revolutionary Mothering 119 Coda. Toward Sanctuary (and Loving Black Boys): Black Feminist Mothering, an Alternative Literacy, Philosophy, and Practice 145 Notes 157 Bibliography 207 Index 211
"Freeing Black Girls is an honest reckoning with one of our most sacred institutions-motherhood. Tamura Lomax's book raises critical questions about the emotional experiences and lives of Black girls, women, mothers, and othermothers in a society that is both antiblack and deeply invested in heteropatriarchy. Lomax provides readers with a fresh and nuanced perspective on how Black feminism can free us from the political and spiritual prisons of misogyny and racial animus." - Kaila Adia Story, author of (The Rainbow Ain't Never Been Enuf: On the Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity) "I love this book. Tamura Lomax's gorgeous voice pulls you toward her as she shares herself in all her rich variety. Her struggle is righteous and rebellious and subversive. She starts as an obedient Black church girl and emerges a revolutionary Black mother dismantling toxic masculinity and femininity along the way. Read and emerge with her. She is thinking about each of us as she helps you see and know her. She shows us that it is possible to make a new antiracist feminist world. This intimate personal telling is also inclusively specifically universal, which is an amazing feat." - Zillah Eisenstein, author of (Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution)
