What In The Hell Is Wrong With This Country?: April 19, 2022 Edition

In today's edition of "What In the Hell Is Wrong With This Country?", we find ourselves in the world of non-fiction books where a white cis female theologian who is known for writing about Quakers received grant money and secured a publishing deal for her book about trap feminism.

You read that right.

A white woman wrote a book about trap feminism.

And she's mad that Black women are angry about this nonsense she wrote, to the point where she's blocking Black women on social media and deleting their reviews of her toxic piece of watered-down literature.

You can't make this stuff up, y'all, even if you wanted to. And if you're going to? You should probably seek some counseling.

Before we dive into this hot mess, we need to take a moment to address the elephant in the room for some of the folx reading this: what is Trap Feminism?

For those who don't know what Trap Feminism is, I will give you a rough definition and then share a bunch of links to supporting and purchasing the works of Black women who can give you a much better window into the nuances of it all. Ready? OK.

Trap Feminism is a subset of Black feminist theory and stems from the concepts of Hip-Hop Feminism, a subset of ideas and lived experiences connected to hip hop culture and its influences pioneered by Joan Morgan. Trap Feminism centers on feminist theory with intersections and insights into how hip-hop, trap, and hood culture impact the experiences and empowerment of Black women and girls. In short, to use the words of Sesali Brown, the creator of the subset and its concepts, Trap Feminism is a contemporary feminist framework centering on the experiences of Black women and girls from the hood and a feminist examination of trap culture.

That's about as OK of a definition I can muster up. I am not an expert; I'm a novice at best in my lifelong commitment to learning about and applying Black Feminist Theory, Hip-Hop Feminism, and Trap Feminism to my life and work. And that's why I said I'm going to throw a lot of links in here.

Sesali Brown, the creator of the phrase and concepts of Trap Feminism, offers a great deal of insight on Trap Feminism via this video from her Youtube channel, Bad Fat Black Girl.

I also highly recommend purchasing the following books about Trap Feminism to deepen your learning and understanding:

When Chickenheads Come Home To Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, by Joan Morgan

Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist, by Sesali Brown

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, by Morgan Jerkins

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, by Mikki Kendall

Please note that these books are just a starting point. There's much more for us all to read, digest, learn from, and apply to our lives and thoughts around how segregated feminist theory can be through a lens of whiteness. Check out the extensive book list I've compiled for more deep learning opportunities concerning Black Feminist Theory and intersectionality.

OK. Now that we've done some defining and what-not let's get back to the fact that a white woman wrote a book about Trap Feminism.

The white woman in question is Jennifer Buck.

Image description: A white woman is staring at the viewer smiling. She is wearing a blouse and a women’s suit jacket. She has long brown hair that cascades past her shoulders.

Jennifer is an Associate Professor of Practical Theology at Azusa Pacific University with a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion and Theology and an MDiv from Fuller Theology Seminary. Jennifer is also a licensed minister in the Quaker church. Jennifer's most notable work consists of contributions to a book about Quakers, social justice, and social work that dropped in 2020. That's something she's somewhat legitimately qualified to write about. Before this, though, Jennifer gave the world a window into how misguided her whiteness can be.

In 2016, Jennifer wrote a problematic book called "Reframing the House." In this book, she called herself taking "women's voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to serve as a critique of Evangelical theology of the church in the West (her words, not mine)." I don't need to construct the narrative as to why a white cis woman "amplifying" the voices of Global Majority women for little to no money and taking their views to offer "guidance" to white evangelicals for money is an issue; do I? Because I'm not going to get into those waters. Not today, Satan. In many respects, "Reframing the House" was the precursor to the white Western intellectual world co-signing Jennifer's belief that she should and could write books about people of color. They quietly told her she should write about people of culture, their experiences, and what she perceives are their views based on her white lens. This is the exact kind of book that feeds into white intellectualism and not real deep learning; the deep learning needed to dismantle belief sets and be a better global citizen.

Most of the glowing reviews for "Reframing the House" were written by white theologians. The others were written by theologians of color with privilege and positionality entrenched in white religious and collegiate ideology.

Fast forward to February 2022, when Jennifer released her new book, "Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theology."

Yes, you read the title right.

Yes, she named her book after a Migos song.

Yes, it's as problematic as the title sounds and feels. More, actually. The synopsis, for your reading pleasure:

This book engages with the overlap of black experience, hip-hop music, ethics, and feminism to focus on a subsection known as "trap feminism" and construct a Trap Feminist Theology. Interacting with concepts of moral agency, resistance, and imagination, Trap Feminist Theology seeks to build an intersectional theology emphasizing women's agency in their bodies and sexuality while also remaining faithful to the "trap" context from which they are socially located. Such a project will redefine the "trap" context from one of marginalization to one of joy and flourishing within black feminist theology. This theology overlaps with black ethics in subversive empowerment that forms a new normative ethic and family system within a subsect of the black community. Trap feminism emerges out of trap culture, where the black woman is creating a space outside of the barriers of poverty harnessing autonomy, employment, and agency to allow for a reinvention of self-identity while remaining faithful to social location.

It makes you want to punch the air.

I'm not going to dive down the deep wormhole of how problematic this all is, especially when you factor in that all of this was written by a white cis suburban woman full of religious dogma. Still, I'm going to offer a few bullet points to scratch the surface, to peel back some things for white folx reading this to consider.

• Reading the above blurb, you can instantly see she doesn't know the history or nuances of Trap Feminism or Black Feminist Theory. If she did, she wouldn't have written this damn book. The blurb is so tone-deaf, devoid of care for Black women, Black Feminist Theory, and an understanding of the Black experience beyond surface stereotypes that it's marginally laughable. And I say "marginally" because it's way more dangerous to Black women and Black Feminism than it is amusing. This book goes out of its way to position Black women and their experiences as commodities, as something to view from afar with white curiosity. This whole blurb is dehumanizing as hell. It whittles the Black experience, the experience of Black women in this country, into definitions and surface allegories. Even the way Black is written in lowercase, missing the respect of the capitalization at the beginning of the word, dehumanizes Black women.

• Whiteness loves intellectualizing the experiences and struggles of melanated folx. This book is just another example of that. Terms like "moral agency" when used to talk about Black folx? Especially in this case? It's to minimize and remove the factors of white supremacy that impact Black women in this country, Black women growing up and living in poverty and oppressive environments, and pass intellectual judgment while positing whiteness and its decisions as moral and just. This is evident in how ethics and agency are addressed in this blurb. Note the constant quotation marks around the word trap. Look at how Black women's bodies are discussed in the blurb. It is all from a space of intellectual curiosity, not genuine interest and concern around systemic oppression and its weight on the mental, physical, and emotional state of Black women in a country that harms them. It's all written through a white lens that aims to detach white people from sitting with the discomfort of being comfortable with white supremacy and oppressive states that they perpetuate and benefit from.

• Whiteness loves believing it's qualified to write about non-white struggles and experiences and justified in making money while doing it. No matter how much "research" Jennifer did to write this book, a white cis suburban woman like Jennifer should've never thought she was qualified to write this dissertation on Black Feminist Theory and Trap Feminism. Other than the white supremacist belief that white folx are qualified to write about and appropriate everything just because they read something about it, how can a woman with Jennifer's background do the topic of Black Feminism justice? How can Jennifer believe she should even write something like this and get paid to do so? Who is she to think that she deserves to make money off of a book she claims will redefine the "trap" context from one of marginalization to one of joy and flourishing within black feminist theology"? Why does Jennifer think Black women aren't embracing joy and empowerment through Black Feminism and Trap Feminism? Why does she think it's her job to write the guidebook for how Black women should be active feminists?
  
  The answer is that Jennifer is white. And whiteness believes it's the authority on everything, so it should be writing books on everything while making money off of the experiences of non-white people.
  
  Multiple institutions paid Jennifer thousands to write this book. Yale Divinity School gave Jennifer $10,000. She got a publishing deal after pitching this book. Jennifer made thousands off the backs of Black women. Why?
  
  Because Jennifer is white, and her "educated whiteness" somehow makes her more of an authority on Black Feminist Theory than a Black woman in the eyes of white publishing houses and institutions of higher education.

• This book was not written for Black audiences. I'm not sure what audience it was written for outside of the white intellectual crowd, but this book was not written for Black folx. There's no way it was written for Black audiences. And if it was, it was written either consciously or unconsciously to belittle the experiences of and talk down to Black women. It was written to "school" Black women on their experiences. The audacity of a white woman to write a book telling Black women how they should be Black feminists is the audacity of whiteness.

• I guess Jennifer wrote this book about Black women and Black Feminism all by herself like she was the creator and innovator of Black Feminist Theory and Trap Feminism. Why do I say this? Jennifer did not cite hardly any of the works of the Black women who pioneered Black Feminist Theory or Trap Feminism in her book. She didn't amplify the Black feminists who put in the work that created the foundation of her already problematic book but she got paid off their labor.

• The book's cover shows a Black woman looking toward the reader. Jennifer's face is nowhere to be seen in the book. Not the back cover, the author bio, or a brief spot on the inner back cover. Jennifer's face is nowhere to be found. Jennifer and her publisher both knew that they couldn't throw her face on this book. They knew what they were doing.

Image description - Image 1: A book cover. A young Black woman can be seen looking at the viewer at a 3/4 angle. She is wearing a black top. Her beautiful natural hair fills in the top of the frame. The words “Bad and Boujee” are displayed on the cover, interspersed in the young woman’s hair.

• The book's first chapter opens with, "A trap queen is a woman who is down for the cause. She was born in the ghetto, raised in the ghetto, but she ain't that ghetto." In her introduction to "Bad and Boujee," Jennifer briefly acknowledges that as "a straight, privileged, white woman," she has "not lived the embodied experiences of a trap queen" but was drawn to the subject because of her love of hip-hop.
  
  Whew, chile. Appropriation and commodification are real, y'all. I'm going to let y'all unpack that at your leisure.

I could keep going, but I'll leave it there.

Jennifer has been getting dragged for writing this book, to the point where the book's publisher, Wipf and Stock Publishers, decided last Wednesday to pull the title from circulation. Jennifer has been defiant in her belief that her book was the right thing for her to write, of course. She has blocked Black women, reported Black women for calling her out on social media and refused to say anything about why she thought writing "Bad and Boujee" was OK. I'm sure Jennifer will never go toward any form of public atonement for the horrible decision to write this book. On top of all of this, white folx and theologians are adamantly defending her, calling the pulling of her book unjust and pushing the narrative that anyone should be able to write about anything. But see, that's the problem. White folx, white institutions of higher education, believe that a white person being posited as an expert on non-white experiences trumps supporting and paying a Black woman to be the expert of their own experience. Why have Black women who have amplified and evolved the concepts of Black Feminist Theory and Trap Feminism write books on their experiences? Why should Black women receive funding and get publishing deals when you can have a white cis woman named Jennifer do it?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should, white people.

Everything is not yours, white people. Every experience is not yours to be the "expert" on. You will never be an expert on Black Feminist Theory or Trap Feminism. And you will never be an expert on what it means to be Black in the United States. The fact that you think you can be and should be shows how much work you need to do to dismantle your connections to and perpetuation of white supremacy.

Guess no one ever told Jennifer that.

Or she decided to block them when they did.

Sounds about white.