It is precisely this phenomenon of black women’s political, intellectual, and social illegibility that Brittney C. Cooper takes up in Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, published last May. Cooper begins her critical intellectual history of black women thinkers and activists from the turn of the century through the 1970s by making the stakes of her study quite clear. She is not interested in charting only the biographies of the core figures in her work: Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauli Murray. Instead, Cooper moves beyond biography to call for and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of literary production, philosophies, and direct political actions of these public intellectual “race women” and the women with whom they built robust proto-black-feminist discourses, frameworks, and blueprints.
Cooper reminds her readers that the balance of critical black history has sidestepped deeper critical engagement with these and other black women thinkers, in favor of focusing on black male intellectual production and the physical lives of women. Instead, she embeds herself in the particular black feminine legacy of cultural and scholarly thinking that begins with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), organized in 1896 “as a site for Black female knowledge production.”
Bookended by Anna Julia Cooper’s 19th-century critical methodology and the founding of #BlackLivesMatter, by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, Beyond Respectability analyzes the “embodied discourse” of the “NACW school of thought.” Brittney C. Cooper examines the writings and speeches of Williams, Terrell, and Murray to identify the ways that each theorizes the black feminine body as a site of black liberatory possibility through, among other practices, a nuanced respectability politics.
Juxtaposed with current popular and academic claims that respectability politics is purely patriarchal and oppressive, the intellectual production of the NACW school of thought harnessed notions of respectability to support black women’s safety in the wake of historical sexual vulnerability (Williams). It also impressed upon the economically middle class the responsibility for “dignified agitation” in the quest for racial equality (Terrell). Furthermore, the NACW school challenged heteronormative racio-sexual oppression, also known as “Jane Crow,” the double-bind of sexism within predominantly black spaces and racism within feminist spaces (Murray). Cooper outlines these theories of political agitation as black feminine embodiment, not only in how Williams, Terrell, and Murray circulated through the socio-intellectual world of race politics but also in how they theorized the precarity of the black feminine body.