In Freeing Black Girls, Tamura Lomax offers an insurgent feminist love letter to Black girls, women, mothers, and othermothers. Exploring what it means to mother Black children in the twenty-first century, Lomax shares her journey from her traditionalist Black girlhood to finding the path to revolutionary Black motherhood. Along the way, she shows how all Black people are endangered by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal dominance and emphasizes the power of looking and talking back. Lomax insists on Black feminist ways of living that value and nourish whole persons, sketching a radical dream that will allow Black women and girls to survive America while being able to love themselves, others, and collective Black freedom. Ultimately, Lomax declares that Black women and girls are emphatically not defective, second-class, or immanent nurturers; they are sacred and revolutionary beings who deserve to live a life free of predation, patriarchy, misrecognition, misogynoir, and violence.

Tamura Lomax is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University and author of Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture, also published by Duke University Press.

Author’s Note  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction. Toxic Literacies: Good Black Mothers, Endangered Black Boys, and Invisible Black Girls  1
1. Black Girls Matter: Letter to My Fourteen-Year-Old Self  25
2.“F*ck Y’all Feminism”: Black Girls, P-Valley, Rape Culture, and Erotic Power  37
3. “Break My Soul”: Precarity and Resurrection in Evangelical Heteropatriarchal Antiblack America  63
4. Emancipating Proverbs 31: Liberating Rough, Nasty, and Aggressive Black Girls to Women  91
5. Ordinary or Insurgent? From Toxic Femininity to Revolutionary Mothering  119
Coda. Toward Sanctuary (and Loving Black Boys): Black Feminist Mothering, an Alternative Literacy, Philosophy, and Practice  145
Notes  157
Bibliography  207
Index  211