Every semester, one of my students references or presents one of the following two poems by Maya Angelou: “Still I Rise” or “Phenomenal Woman.” I think back to the first time I heard those two poems and I remember their stunning impact on me too. Nevertheless, I get nervous now that Angelou’s work, especially these two poems, are completely commodified and co-opted such that any radical representation of black women in her writing is gone. Of course, nothing I am saying here is new. I have especially liked Cheryl Higashida’s discussion of Angelou in her book, Black Internationalist Feminism, where Higashida reads Angelou’s autobiographies as the legacy of black women’s work in the post-World War II anti-colonialist Black Left. Higashida achieves a nice balance: she acknowledges Angelou’s presence as a Pan African radical; she criticizes the ways that Angelou oftentimes undoes the collective action and consciousness of the Black Left by celebrating individualist (and, thus, capitalist/neoliberalist) triumph and achievement. These two poles do not have to be opposing though. Like I already showed just with black women’s scarf wrapping styles, you can be a bold and emboldened individual and part of a collective too: it just depends on the ideologies you use to situate that individuality. Black women are often co-opted by mainstream audiences who, in turn, force Angelou’s revolutionary politics into the background by only celebrating the notion of a rise of phenomenal individuals. Higashida gives me a way to resuscitate Angelou’s fierce Black Feminist Left/Internationalism since, more often than not, that is deliberately erased from view in public celebrations of her work, including those celebrations by mainstream black academics and popular black celebrities. This ain’t no surprise though now is it? Put a black woman’s words in the mouths of misogynistic men, undercover-racist white folk who just want folk of color to join the mainstream, or bougsie/wanna-be-rich-and-famous black folk and the message will surely lose its meaning. Hardly a coincidence.
This semester was a bit of a switch with the video below that one student asked us to watch in my class. This video features an interview with Maya Angelou after shock jock, Don Imus, authorized himself to call black women on the Rutgers Basketball team out of their names. In that interview, Angelou calls out black men who publicly call black women b**ches but who would never do such a thing with white women in power, giving the then president’s wife, Laura Bush, as an example. I found her most compelling when she responds to Russell Simmon’s comments (at 1:32):
In the beginning of the interview, Angelou erases racial and gendered specificity by calling all vulgarity the same and marking all speakers the same— that’s just not historically accurate as any rhetorician would tell you. But then the FIRE comes, you can even feel a palpable difference in her speech and vibe. As she states, if black men called white women in power B-words, they would see how powerful they are: “see how long you will live. There wouldn’t be enough rope to hang your butts.” This is Angelou at her finest: a poetic way to basically call these men cowards and coons. Angelou goes on to remind us that black women “are last on the totem pole” which means that “everybody has the chance to take a chance on us.” Again, Angelou at her finest: another poetic way to show that the deliberate degradation of black women by black men for public consumption (while being too scared to do the same with non-black women) only makes you a stupid fool and sell-out. This is the Maya Angelou that mainstream America doesn’t readily present to us: one who locates words and experiences in the unique bodies and historical experiences of black women. Like she says, there is a reason black men and white men feel so free and comfortable to call women of African descent B-words and no other group. She leaves it up to imagination and drops off a powerful suggestion at the end, at least this is how I hear it: keeping taking your chance by taking a chance on us and see how we handle your stupid butts!
What Angelou teaches me (and I would say that the same thing is now happening with Ntozake Shange and For Colored Girls) is that I must teach how and why black women’s writings get co-opted… and participate in uncomfortable conversations of how we ourselves participate in this. It ain’t just the rap video vixens who are out here shaking their behinds for public consumption and pseudo-access to white male power. It’s an important lesson for understanding capitalism, black women, and black women’s rhetoric.
As soon as that “meeting” started, I noticed the peculiar way the chair and her 
These women of color on my first campus as a tenure track professor were phenomenal and though I knew they were dope when I was there, I never fully realized that having a set of sistafriends on your campus to lift your head is a sho-nuff RARITY! Notice that I said: women of color who are sistafriends. That is NOT the same as having women of color on campus. I am not talking about the kinds of women of color who come talk to you in closed offices but never speak up in public settings, a strategy often learned early on because it is so handsomely rewarded in graduate school. These women might say they keep quiet because no one is listening to them but, more often, they choke their words to not lose favor with those in power, not ruffle white feathers, not take any risks, or not lose their token status (and many times go home to wealthy, breadwinning, and/or white husbands). They are, in sum, passing for white. I ain’t talking about THEM women of color. I am talking about the sistas who read their environments openly and will read the institution out loud with you and, especially, when the time is right. Quite honestly, I assumed that I would find a sistacypher like this everywhere, that institutional racism would inevitably mean as much, but I have learned otherwise. What I have missed most about these sistafriends is the way they read institutional racism AND patriarchy. You see, that’s that rare gem right there. Talking up institutional racism does not always come with talking up patriarchy and misogynoir and I mean something more than talking about public spectacles from the likes of fools like Rick Ross. I mean talking about the day-to-day workings of men in our workplaces— white men and men of color— all of their immediate articulations of societal structures, social hierarchies, and violence: we didn’t just co-sign our misogynistic black men colleagues who were actin the fool (dropping their “seed” anywhere, taking women students out for drinks, text-messaging/calling/visiting/closing-the-door with women students, etc); nor did we leave our feminism at the door and blindly support the campus’s white patriarchs and their violence. Like I said, I have learned the value and rarity of these kinds of sistas in these past years. You see, these were women who read men AND nations. 
This semester, I wanted to really think about the reverberating references to black women that have occurred across multiple semesters of my teaching. Part of me is responding to a tendency of mostly white teachers to describe mostly white students who reference a litany of white authors and novels in the course of classroom discussions. This gets marked as intelligent and well-read . However, within the scope of these parameters, I have never heard any black student be referenced in the same way for knowledge of black cultural history and persons (and what passes as KNOWLEDGE of people of African descent, even at the graduate level, is often so dismal that I am utterly embarrassed for all parties involved). At best, when undergraduate students of African descent reference black cultural histories, these are treated as personal connections, not literate connections (as if white students describing white authors is NOT also about personal connection). Alternatively, black students might be seen as activating their prior knowledge which is admirable and tolerated but that is not the same as regarding these moments as sophisticated analyses. 
I suspect the weight of this song rather than Eve’s person will become even more pronounced in the future since Eve has eclipsed any awareness of racism now that she is a celebrity …AND pregnant by her white millionaire British boyfriend— the race car driver, Maximillion Cooper. 
When I was teaching at a small college in Brooklyn, I learned the importance of the last day though. Students in an African American children’s literature class inspired me. My plan was simple: let’s eat together on the last day and share what we have done for final projects. That’s it. Nice and simple. Well, they turnt it up and out. They brought in trays, and I mean TRAYYYYS of food. Their kids came too and told us what they liked about the literature (this was a Friday evening class of 39 women and 2 men, all of whom were thirty years old and above.) And my favorite part, of course, was the special corner, far away from the kids, that was for grown-ups only: a maxi-bar that featured a bottle of rum from what seemed like every country in the Caribbean. I made many trips to that special corner. That’s a class that I remember fondly, I can still see each face in my mind’s eyes. It’s the same for the students who did the assembly/performance with their families attending or the students with their curriculum showcases when I was a teacher educator. You can’t really predict this though. Sometimes students are as dull and dry as wheat thins; other times, they are PURE FIRE. My point is that the last class should do something, you should feel the weight of the time that you spent together, you should feel like you have been somewhere together. I no longer assume I can achieve that; students have to do that for and with one another.
Today, however, I thought I would be compelling and close the semester with my favorite thank you speech. I would use black women’s audacity when even saying thank you to thank my class, as if it were me talking to them. I am talking about En Vogue. Instead of walking up to the stage at the 1990 Billboard Awards, all fake-surprised and theatrically-shocked that they won for their single, “Hold On,” these sistas knew they had this award and so they performed an acceptance speech that blew away the crowd– in the very style of the song that was being awarded. I don’t mean to suggest that I deserve the award En Vogue received, but I do feel like the semester was my own sort of award. I must admit that I was little impressed with myself. I had finally found a good-bye lesson plan… but then my little stuff got showed up real fast.
Today, Caroline gave us a process. First, there was a collection of black women’s poems where black women discuss sexuality, their bodies; their right to love, live, and own themselves (the first image on this page). It is called “For Colored Girls!” There was an accompanying poster, now gifted to me, soon to be framed in my office (the second image on this page). The process continued with a red velvet cake with chocolate on the outside (the third image on this page). The cake was in the shape of a black woman’s torso, fully naked, demonized dark nipples in full tow, wrapped in chains (