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America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. America, Goddam powerfully demonstrates that the struggle for justice begins with reckoning with the pervasiveness of violence against Black women and girls in the United States.
Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. Lindsey also shows that the sanctity of life and liberty for Black men has been a galvanizing rallying cry within Black freedom movements. But Black women—who have been both victims of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants in it, and quite often architects of these freedom movements—are rarely the focus. Black women have led movements demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Toyin Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless other Black women and girls whose lives have been curtailed by numerous forms of violence. Across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led many to envisioning and building toward Black liberation through organizing and radical politics. Echoing the energy of Nina Simone’s searing protest song that inspired the title, America, Goddam is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.
Dr. Treva B. Lindsey is a Professor at The Ohio State University, co-founder of Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House and founder of the Transformative Black Feminisms Initiative at OSU. Her research and teaching interests include African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics. Her most recent book, America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice (University of California Press) received a starred review from Kirkus Books and was described as “required reading for all Americans.” Her first book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C was a Choice 2017 “Outstanding Academic Title.” She has published in The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Souls, African and Black Diaspora, the Journal of African American Studies, African American Review, The Journal of African American History, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Urban Education, The Black Scholar, Feminist Studies, and Signs.
She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was a 2020-2021 ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellow. She was the inaugural Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellow at Harvard University (2016-2017). In 2022, she received the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Mid-Career Faculty Excellence Award. Professor Lindsey also writes for and contributes to outlets such as Time, CNN, Al Jazeera, NBC, BET, Complex, Vox, The Root, Huffington Post, PopSugar, Billboard, Bustle, Teen Vogue, Grazia UK, The Grio, The Washington Post, Women’s Media Center, Zora, and Cosmopolitan.
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