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Black feminist discourse through and beyond Beyonce

One of the first things I read this morning was this blog about bell hooks calling Beyonce a terrorist by “Crunk Feminist Collective” founder and acclaimed black intellectual Dr. Brittany Cooper better known on the Crunk Feminist Collective site as “Crunktastic”. Dr. Cooper’s response was to this op ed piece by Rev. Osagyefo Sekou. While both are worthy pieces by worthy voices of black intellectual scholarship, I admit to reading Dr. Cooper’s piece and waiting for the punchline. I expected as I often do when reading a piece by a respected intellectual that the light would go off and I would if not agree at least my disagreement would be of the intellectual variety and not of the emotional “come the hell on” variety. No such luck this morning.

As a writer and occasional radio host, I do my best to avoid Beyonce, because I find it overdone and I maintain that there are often better and more relevant topics in feminism and most especially in black feminism and culture discussions. I think our media focuses too deeply on Beyonce, and the best way I know how to combat that is by not doing so, by not making her the end all be all of the conversations, be they about, race, class, success, feminism or beauty standards in our society. This admittedly can be difficult when she hits all those topics ...