Brittney Cooper

Black Feminist Waymaking Under Fascism

On the very first day of the spring semester of 2026, I called our department administrator to check in. I needed her help with something, but I also wanted to know what was going on at the physical location where we teach. Though campus had been open since early January, the office staff, who usually return to campus weeks before students and faculty return, had been working remotely. The department chair directed them to work remotely because I had received a series of threats via email and departmental voicemail, filled with racist and sexist slurs; the threats included a stated intention to find me on campus. The precipitating event was a five-year-old interview in which I named Black collective rage at the continued machinations of white supremacy, as the kind of recalcitrant problem that could produce fantastical ideas of violent solutions. My less-than-ten-second foray into a racial revenge fantasy has been edited, over these five years to within an inch of the life of my words, and it is cyclically reposted by a range of right-wing figures (among them Charlie Kirk and Chris Rufo), right-wing social media accounts, and right-wing media outlets. Predictably, each year, a new round of people encountering this material for the first time feels emboldened to express their outrage in the most violent terms, despite my clear rejection of violence as the solution to white supremacy. This most recent incident is not the first, second, or even third time such a thing has happened. It has become part of the disruptive baseline that sets the tone for my work. The threats were concerning enough to warrant increased campus police patrols to our part of campus. When I spoke with the office administrator, a Black woman, she told me that things were calm at our building, except for the fact, she said, that “ICE is on our street.” They had detained someone as she came to work that morning. The detained person did not appear to be a student, but these kinds of conditions are the ones students, staff, and faculty on our campuses, and in women’s and gender studies, are facing as they head to school and work each day.

The very next day, one of the leaders of the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA tagged me in an Instagram story of an interview she gave to a digital news outlet, alongside another Rutgers Turning Point member, asking that the federal government consider withholding up to $530 million dollars in federal research support, making it contingent on some unspecified action by the University administration that might sanction and silence my public commentary and scholarship regarding white supremacy.

I share this bit of personal testimony as a way to document the material conditions that shape some arenas of Black feminist knowledge production in this moment, particularly at the nexus of both the university and the use of social media. Here I aim to consider what the stakes are of continuing to center the university in the project of Black feminism, at a moment in which — despite the considerable headway women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as a field and Black feminism as a site of inquiry have made — nothing feels sure. It never did feel sure, but to use an analogy from my working-class childhood, there is a difference between the precarity of a “paycheck-to-paycheck” existence and the precarity of an eviction notice being placed on the door. The latter feels like the looming threat of this hour.

The American university has always been a site of contention over US race and gender futures. The deployment of police and US military to campuses to control Black student protests happened in 1968, during the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State University, when three students were killed; and in 1970, at Jackson State University when two students were killed. Two springs ago, when we were collectively forced to watch the police pepper spray, tear gas, and assault pro-Palestinian protestors on campuses across the United States, some failed to make the connection that these incidents were part of a long-standing set of partnerships between law enforcement and universities to quell campus protests. It is, thus, critically important that we properly historicize the moment.

The university under neoliberalism has engaged an ostensibly liberal sleight of hand by, on the one hand, voraciously incorporating disciplines such as women’s and gender studies and Black studies as evidence of institutional progress and national progress, while, on the other hand, subjecting these disciplines to regimes of institutionalization, under the banner of inclusion, that worked to effectively enervate their radical potential.¹ The neoliberal university also used gender studies and Black studies, and the humanities more generally, as places to practice the logic of austerity, before imposing it on disciplines across many other areas of study. Saddling faculty in these departments with ever-shrinking budgets and ever-increasing demands to demonstrate “value,” the demand to be “entrepreneurial” has acted as a shorthand for figuring out how to extract non-existent wealth from vulnerable Black and Brown, and often first-generation, students and women of color.

Yet, these same groups have creatively and indefatigably persisted, only to have our perseverance — our making a way out of no way — met with more contempt and derision. A hard truth about neoliberalism for marginalized people is that we have become so habituated to building in an underresourced world, in the face of persisting forms of privation, that it has taught us how to survive, often in ways that, unfortunately, reinforce the idea that we don’t need more. I have watched Black feminists, in particular, build disciplines, departments, conference spaces, and more out of whole cloth, stretching themselves to mentor students, advocate for more students of color to be admitted, lobby institutions for money to support graduate and undergraduate students, serve on endless diversity and inclusion committees, all while producing ground-breaking, field-defining scholarship.²

The university under a fascist regime, however, is a different project entirely, one that openly, defiantly makes light work of the rule of law, laughs in the face of liberal rights discourse, and brazenly defunds any university project that does not align with American state propaganda. Academic freedom has no chance in a fascist regime. Fascism is predicated not on mere ahistoricization of contemporary struggle (the blunt instrument of neoliberalism), but the anti-historicization of it. Fascism works to upend the university as a site of knowledge production and remake it as a machine of state propaganda, one that violently represses epistemic dissent. We do ourselves and our students a disservice when we act as though it has always been this way, that there is no difference between what was and what is now. A fascist result was not an inevitability. The end of slavery was not inevitable. Civil rights were not inevitable. The admission of women and Black folks to historically white universities was not inevitable. The rise of an identifiable class of tenured scholars in women’s studies and Black feminism was not inevitable. All of these historical wins were the result of pushback, protest, and organizing. Ahistoricization can be effectively countered through more organization and education. Anti-historicization is a different problem entirely, and it requires full-scale protest, dissent, legislation, and a re-ordering and refashioning of the world as we know it — because its goal is to make us disbelieve the world as we know it. Anti-historicization, the predictable effect of a post-truth regime, requires the instilling of a very different set of epistemic conditions, but it demands this at the same moment that the university, as one site of radical epistemic contestation, be violently dismantled.

As the Black feminist project in the university is concerned, I have increasingly come to believe that now is the time for us to remember that Black feminism was not born in the university. It is time to decenter the university in Black feminist knowledge production. The framework that we today understand as Black feminist theory was the epistemic, political, and social result of more than a century of Black women thinking aloud in public and in print about the plight of Black women and girls and about what it would take to free them. Moreover, Black feminism as a framework for thinking has been, as a core matter, inextricably linked to praxis, to real-world measures of impact for Black women and girls, for poor people, for queer people, and increasingly for trans people. Thus, we tend to tell a history of Black feminism through Black feminist organizations and formations such as the Combahee River Collective, Third World Women’s Alliance, the National Black Feminist Organization, and the National Alliance of Black Feminists.³ Going back further, we talk about the National Association of Colored Women and the National Council of Negro Women. In the contemporary moment, organizations such as Black Feminist Future, SisterSong, and SisterReach, are the most prominent of many Black feminist organizations that center their work in communities rather than in the university.

I point to this history to remind us that Black feminism was not born in the academy, and it will not die there either. Being clear about Black feminism’s origin story decenters the university as the primary place from which Black feminist thinking must come. Instead, remembering that Black women have arrived collectively over and over again, long before they had access to the university, to an analysis of gender and patriarchy as part and parcel of their freedom project, repositions the university as but one nodal point in a broad nexus of places in which Black feminist thought takes place. It also can release the pressure valve on academic Black feminists to try to save the entirety of this worldmaking project, by being reminded that there are many spaces invested in doing this work.

For example, because of the work and rise of primarily digital Black feminist thinkers, Black feminism has enjoyed a renewed life outside of academic spaces.⁴ Thus, this is a moment to critically reimagine the horizon of possibility for post-academic Black feminism. By post-academic, I seek to signal, not necessarily an inevitable dissolution of the academic, but rather an engagement with what the shape, sound, texture, and feel of Black feminism as an analytic framework and a body of thought is, after a nearly fifty-year formal sojourn in the academy. I have questions about how the set of critical practices that have shaped the rise of Black feminist theory is affecting and will affect the future and forward trajectory of how Black feminism lives outside of and beyond the academy.

For instance, I am interested in figuring out whether critical theory will continue to be the primary mode of doing and thinking Black feminism in a world where the academy has less power. The wholehearted embrace of critical theory as the primary framework through which to produce Black feminist theory was a function of Black feminism being housed in the academy in the aftermath of the repression of radical movements of the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.⁵ In this regard, we have produced far too many folks who equate radical resistance with the production of critical theory. Critique, however, cannot continue to be the only, or even the primary, tool in a Black feminist’s toolbox.⁶

I am not a scholar who believes in the abolition of the university. I know what access to college spaces has meant for many first-generation college graduates like me, who have been able to shore up economic futures not only for myself but also for members of my family. Moreover, the disproportionate level at which Black women pursue higher education in Black communities suggests that college is a meaningful space for them. Black feminism has to stay analytically close to its primary subjects of inquiry, attending to the things that concern Black women. Sometimes those who believe in the abolition of the university fail to acknowledge that historically Black colleges and universities exist. I am the graduate of one, and I have attended two of them. These places are institutionally and affectively different in whom they value and how they understand their educational mission. I’m not suggesting that HBCUs will save us or that they are particularly progressive as gender politics and theory go.⁷ In my experience, with the exception of Spelman College, they are not. But they remind me that white institutions are never the whole story and that Black institutions are always offering alternative modes of being and value that are worth considering in radical left conversations about all the things that need to be dismantled.

Jennifer Nash has provocatively interrogated “black feminism’s ongoing attachment to the university,” pointing out both the ways that we have “captured the violence of the university” while retaining “a continued faith in the university as a space that can be reformed and reimagined to do justice to black women’s intellectual labor.”⁸ I don’t so much believe in the ability of the university to “do justice” as I believe it provides a physical space for the gathering together of Black feminist scholars and thinkers with communities of students in a quest toward ideas. I believe in the university in the most pragmatic sense, that is, I believe that schools are public goods and one of the originary institutions that free and freed Black people fought for and built. I do not believe, as Tressie McMillan Cottom and Alexis Pauline Gumbs have argued, that the university can love us. It doesn’t have to; and no job wrought under the dictates of capitalism can. But I do join Nash and other scholars who have asked, “Can Black feminism survive the academy?” My answer is that it can, provided that its practitioners do not mistakenly believe or act as if the academy is the only place that Black feminism can live or the only place it has to go.

The university will survive this moment, but its form will be different. It is up to us to decide whether that form will be better. Whatever good may be done here in the afterlife of the current moment will very much be predicated on the systems and structures that we build outside of the university, because the fields and disciplines of women’s studies and Black studies were forged in the streets and pushed by force and protest into the halls of academe. The future will depend on the reclamation of the university as a space for educating all of the people, not just the chosen few. It will require the university to cease being an agent of displacement, gentrification, and extraction. It will require a swinging open of the gates and a credible plan for free college for all. And, yes, it will require Black feminist faith, which is to say, a belief in forms of the possible, forms of the not yet, that make the thriving and liberation of Black women and girls possible yes, but also plausible.

When I look at the professorial legacies of feminist luminaries such as June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara, I believe that these forms of reimagining what the university can be are rooted in Black feminist ethics of access, care, and love.⁹ And if we follow suit, whatever may come, “we gon’ be alright.” And when I say “alright,” I say it not presumptively, not with assuredness, but with faith, the faith that my grandmothers and my mother and elders offered to me. When faced with impossible exigencies of being poor and working-class rural folks, they would simply remind me, “baby, it’s gon’ be alright.” And somehow, it always was. The truth of the matter is that the horrors of fascism are not necessarily the worst thing some of us have ever been through. There are too many survivors of intimate violence among us for us to believe that. When I think of the various forms of violence and privation and death and destruction that other folks who grew up Black and working class have witnessed, I am reminded, that for so many of us, none of this is the worst thing we have ever personally been through. And yet, somehow we made it to these places that were not meant for us. And we watched our people, those who reared us, who were often less resourced than us, make ways out of no way. That is certainly true for me. This is why I pull up several times a week to a parking lot where folks threaten to show up to do harm to me, why I show up to teach students knowing the threat we may face in a classroom together, why I show up to protests on a campus that has tried to outlaw them. Because I have been taught that my ability to be alright cannot be outsourced to the imaginations of others, but that I must retain some agency in that project for myself. In this I hope I am channeling a modicum of the defiance of our enslaved ancestors, the ones who were fugitives, the ones who were truants, the ones who did what they had to do anyhow. The university might not be alright. The country might not choose the better path. Thus far, it has not. But I believe in the possibility of being alright because I have an almost religious faith in the irrepressibility of Black women’s collective freedom imagining. It has given us the rich body of scholarship that is Black feminist thought. It has saved my life more times than I can count. And while I do not wish for Black women to save anybody but themselves and their collective kin, I do trust that if enough Black women are on the freedom side, which is the side of antiracism, antipatriarchy, and anticapitalism; if these women are on the side that is pro-ho, pro-queer, pro-trans, pro-hood, and pro-Palestine, we will be, in fact, alright.