Professor Crunk on SCOTUS, white women, and more
Our weekly news podcast UNDISTRACTED is back! And so are abortion bans, the white women’s vote, and a whole Greek alphabet of viruses. Host Brittany Packnett Cunningham knew exactly who she wanted to unpack it all with: Dr. Brittney Cooper, professor and truth-teller. In the launch episode of Season 2, they get into why white women keep upholding white patriarchy (hint: it’s about motherhood) and the “nightmarish” rollbacks to all of our rights.
Dr. Cooper (a.k.a. @ProfessorCrunk) is associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University and co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. The author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, she also has a new YA book out, Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood.
New to our newsletter? UNDISTRACTED is our weekly podcast, where activist, TV analyst, and founding member of The Meteor Brittany Packnett Cunningham breaks down the news through an intersectional feminist lens. (Find her @mspackyetti, and subscribe here.)
“WE ARE NOT THE FIRST GENERATION TO LIVE THROUGH A MASSIVE GAINING OF RIGHTS AND THEN LOSS OF RIGHTS.”
Highlights of the episode include:
Dr. Cooper on the conversation we need to have about white women and motherhood: “When we wonder why white women keep on voting for Republicans, they are doing that because they understand that their caretaking role in their community is to pass down a world in which white men get to be on top. That’s not just their husbands, but it’s also their sons. That’s emotionally what they are voting for and what they are doing.”
Dr. Cooper on the right wing attacks against Black women: “The de-platforming of outspoken Black women is as much a part of our journey as any feminism we could imagine.…. So this is also a part of white supremacy that we should be naming. It is not just the sort of targeting and murdering of Black men, but it is literally threatening to silence Black women who are doing the job that we’re always doing…. White, conservative, racist apparatuses come for us to silence us and shut us down.”
Dr. Cooper on SCOTUS and what a post-Roe landscape could look like: “It will be one of the most devastating Supreme Court decisions of a few generations, quite frankly. And I think that what we also know, at the point that the Supreme Court makes that decision, is that people who need to terminate pregnancies will not stop terminating pregnancies…. How are we going to build community apparatuses, fugitive spaces for folks to get the healthcare and services that they need?”
“We are not the first generation of people to live through a massive gaining of rights and then loss of rights…. Ida B. Wells was born in 1862. So she lived through the gains of Reconstruction and then the losses of Jim Crow. Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper. All of those women that I write about in my work, one of the reasons that they continue to be my muse is because they saw the country lean towards its better angels and then become nightmarish in the span of a lifetime.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
WATCH OUR ABORTION ACCESS BRIEFING
This week, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments on what stands to be the most consequential abortion case in a generation. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, 26 states are likely to ban abortion. At The Meteor’s recent event Roe on the Line: An Abortion Access Briefing, held in partnership with the United State of Women, we heard from legal experts and grassroots organizers about the road ahead, including:
- Michelle Colón, co-founder and executive director, SHERo Mississippi
- Julie F. Kay, human rights attorney and co-author of Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom
- Mini Timmaraju, president, NARAL Pro-Choice America
- Moderator Susie Banikarim, founding member of The Meteor and award-winning journalist, director, and producer
Watch the briefing to learn what the fight for reproductive freedom will look like in 2022 and beyond.
This briefing was produced by The Meteor and is supported by The Meteor Fund, an affiliated charitable project of The Meteor. The Meteor Fund is fiscally-sponsored by New Venture Fund, a 501(c)(3) public charity.