In a World of Karens Like Carrie Underwood, Be a Michelle Obama
Listen to and Learn from Black Women. Social Black Feminist Patricia Hill Collins Asserts They Have Something Most Don't -- Wisdom.
Black women are beautiful.
Their physical beauty goes without saying. But more striking than their physical beauty is the beauty they hold within. An internal beauty that burns despite oppressors, fools and tyrants working together to extinguish their flames. The joke is on those slack-jawed persecutors though. Those attempts to extinguish only stoke their fires, making them shine brighter in the darkness caused by white supremacy and misogyny.
The light from the fires within Black feminists like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw break not only the suffocating darkness of patriarchy and racism but the unjust and harmful systems that sustain and empower both. The Combahee River Collective wrote that “no one is free until Black women are free”.
This should be easy to understand, but understanding this would mean the end of the system that benefits white privilege and capitalism. This is the “wokeness” that makes people in the Mump-Nazi Reich like the Convicted-Felon-In-Chief, his toady J.D. Vance, Ron DeSantis, the U.S.’s actual President Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Tucker Carlson, Bari Weiss and even the self-proclaimed liberal, “feminist” and Islamophobe Sam Harris apoplectic. This is why these systems continue. And in the end, we all suffer.
These systems have resulted in the Convicted-Felon-in-Chief, a subpar white male insurrectionist whose savage stupidity killed over a million Americans in the Covid Pandemic (my brother-in-law's father and uncle among them), being installed as an illegitimate U.S. President at noon on Monday. White Supremacy along with savage stupidity from half of the United States’ electorate have brought us here.
After President Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic Presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris ran in his place, I wrote and published a post that night that if we lost our Constitutional democratic republic, it would be because of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, whiteness and misogynoir.
Not surprising that those outraged that former first lady Michelle Obama is not showing up to Monday’s inauguration and didn’t attend President Jimmy Carter’s funeral openly display their racism and misogynoir.
has pointed out the reasons why Michelle Obama will not and did not attend in two posts from her Substack We Need a Black Woman in Charge.For Michelle Obama to be anywhere near the Convicted Felon-in-Chief not only further normalizes his abnormal presidency but it goes against her self-respect, the respect of other Black women, who voted 92% for Kamala Harris compared to the 47% of my fellow white women, and her respect for a country that still needs to live up to its ideals as noted in The Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
Stevens quoted Michelle Obama from The Light podcast where she revealed how difficult it was for her to attend the Convicted Felon-in-Chief’s first Inauguration (he lost his first presidency’s popular vote to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton): "There were tears, there was that emotion. But then to sit on that stage and watch the opposite of what we represented on display - there was no diversity, there was no color on that stage, there was no reflection of the broader sense of America."
We and especially white Americans in particular can learn from Michelle Obama and other Black Women. In her essay “Black Feminist Epistemologies.” Patricia Hill Collins testified that Black women have something human beings from other races and other genders don’t — wisdom. Malcolm X pointed out that Black women are the most disrespected, ignored and unprotected women in the United States. Beyoncé sampled Malcolm X’s speech in her video for “Don’t Hurt Yourself.”
The Convicted Felon-in-Chief is an abomination. He and his administration will harm individual Americans — the marginalized and the privileged— and immigrants. The city he first plans to target for his mass deportations is my city of Chicago on Tuesday. Most of all, he and his unqualified sycophants put the United States at risk to our foreign adversaries. Vice President Harris noted this in her Democratic Convention acceptance speech that’s always worth another watch and listen.
Instead of white and white-adjacent people responding to Black women with what anti-racism scholar and anti-racist activist Tema Okun termed privileged resistance in her book The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching about Race and Racism to People Who Don't Want to Know, we must listen to Black women, read their work, internalize their lessons and put them into praxis.
Some good articles and books to start with to educate and empower ourselves are:
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
“The Combahee River Collective Statement” by The Combahee River Collective
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” and “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Class: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” by Kimberlé Crenshaw
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
Saint Ignatius of Loyola said, “Go set the world on fire,” and Black women like Michelle Obama certainly do. People from other races and genders can light their torches from their wisdom and work in coalition to rebel against fascism from the Mump-Nazi Reich that is certainly working in coalition as well to achieve their perverted and evil agenda.
Note: I will not watch The Inauguration or be on any media next week. My posts for next week have already been written and are set to go on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday.
But wait. There's more.
1.) Bust a move with me on Bluesky and Spoutible.
2.) Donate to The Carter Center.
3.) Paid supporters can leave a comment below. If you like what you read, please consider becoming a paid supporter. All paid support goes toward my daughter’s post-high-school education.
4.) I read Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America after his novel arrived in 2004 and watched the HBO limited series adaptation in 2020. I know the scene below from the HBO series, which people can watch on Max, will play out with a lot of family and friends who voted for the convicted felon and the adjudicated rapist once Hell’s swirling flames their vote unleashed incinerates the country, them, their friends and their family.
Indeed. Evelyn is a stupid person.
5.) Join Malcolm Nance’s American FAFO — Focused Action, Focused Objectives— opposition movement. Read about and implement his peaceful and creative plans for Inauguration Day rebellion. Among his proposed actions are playing “The Imperial March” on a kazoo then sharing a video or audio of you doing so on your favorite social media platform before, during and after the Inauguration.
6.) Listen to an inspirational and galvanizing song by John Lennon.