Hood Feminism Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot - Mikki Kendall Page 0,1
for those who value being seen as that middle-class model of respectable with no inconvenient rough edges. I’ve never found my way there, so I won’t pretend to be able to detail the value, or to judge those who can fit into that mold. I’ve just accepted that I never will, that I’ll probably never even want to cut away the parts of me that protrude in the wrong directions. I like not living up to the expectations of people who don’t like me. I enjoy knowing that my choices won’t be acceptable to everyone. My feminism doesn’t center on those who are comfortable with the status quo because ultimately that road can never lead to equity for girls like me.
When I was a kid I thought there must be some way I could perform being good, perform being ladylike to the point of being safe from sexism, racism, and other violence. After all, my grandmother was so determined to make it stick, it had to mean something. What I discovered was that it offered me absolutely no protection, that people took it as a sign of weakness, and that if I wanted to do more than survive, I had to be able to fight back. Good girls were dainty and quiet and never got their clothes dirty, while bad girls yelled, fought, and could make someone regret hurting them even if they couldn’t always stop it. Trying to be good was boring, frustrating, and at times actively hurtful to my own well-being.
Learning to defend myself, to be willing to take the risks of being a bad girl, was a process with a steep learning curve. But like with so many other things, I learned how to stand up even when other people were certain I should be content to sit down. Being good at being bad has been scary, fun, rewarding, and ultimately probably the only path that I was ever meant to walk. I learned that being a problem child meant I could be an adult who went her own way and got things done, because I am not so focused on pleasing other people at my own expense. My grandmother was wise for her time, but not necessarily the best judge of what I needed to do. She embraced middle-class ideas of being ladylike because for her that was a path to relative safety. For me, it just left me unprepared, and I had to learn on the fly from my community how to navigate the world outside the bubble she tried to create for me. I am not ashamed of where I came from; the hood taught me that feminism isn’t just academic theory. It isn’t a matter of saying the right words at the right time. Feminism is the work that you do, and the people you do it for who matter more than anything else.
Critiques of mainstream feminism tend to get more attention when they come from outside, but the reality is that the internal conflicts are how feminism grows and becomes more effective. One of the biggest issues with mainstream feminist writing has been the way the idea of what constitutes a feminist issue is framed. We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met.
As with most, if not all, marginalized women who function as feminist actors in their community even when they don’t use the terminology, my feminism is rooted in an awareness of how race and gender and class all affect my ability to be educated, receive medical care, gain and keep employment, as well as how those things can sway authority figures in their treatment of me. Whether it’s a memory of the white summer camp teacher who refused to believe that my vocabulary allowed me to know words like sentient or the microaggressions that I experience in my day-to-day life, I know that being a Black girl from the South Side of Chicago makes people assume certain things about me. The same is true of anyone who exists