Description
"Freeing Black Girls explores Tamura Lomax's journey through girlhood, as she contends with religio-cultural scripts of morality within the Black Christian church, and her path to becoming a feminist adult and mother. The author investigates, through a Black feminist lens, what it means to mother Black children in the twenty-first century. Lomax identifies key problems in the way Black womanhood is formed and policed in the US, including the hyper-visibility and sexual vulnerability of Black girls, cultural norms of "virtuous" femininity, and suffocating demands for purity placed on Black sexuality by the church. In response to this theological and cultural misogynoir, Lomax presents the book as a love letter to her younger self and to other Black girls that stages an intervention into the politics of Black mothering by way of both the author's experience and theoretical analysis. Lomax issues a challenge to find new ways of mothering the next generation of Black girls. This revolutionary Black feminist mothering must stand boldly against empire, white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, and aspirational Black patriarchy. It will demand deep and thick structural change of all sexual and gender and racial and class and ability hierarchies that deny people the freedom to thrive emotionally, intellectually, and bodily. Forging this new mothering is a sacred goal and will be at the heart of a new egalitarianism"-- Provided by publisher.
