On October 11, 1991, in hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Supreme Court Justice nominee, Clarence Thomas, stated that the accusations of sexual harassment brought against him by the African American attorney and law professor Anita Hill were nothing more than a “high-tech lynching.” This rhetorical move swiftly obscured the abuse Hill had endured, thrusting into the foreground a discourse far more prominent in the white American racial lexicon: lynching in particular, masculinist violence in general. Unsurprisingly, Hill’s testimony failed to persuade the chastened and overwhelmingly white US Senate either of the credibility of her account or the punishability of his offense.
Hill’s lived experience of black feminine embodiment sits at the intersection of extraordinary and everyday power, violence, and social control, which Shatema Threadcraft’s excellent book, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, seeks to redress. Threadcraft disrupts dominant narratives that define the US racial landscape in accordance with discourses of black masculinity. That Thomas could draw on the image of lynching to sidestep questions regarding his conduct is an effect of the way this ruthlessly violent practice attempted to quell the capacities of black bodies to control their political and material environments, capacities that Threadcraft notes are highly masculine. On this, Threadcraft insightfully states, “The dominance of lynching is linked to and reinforced by the prominence of these capacities of the black body in the high tide of racial violence and to the association of sexual violence with what turn out to be lower-order capacities and concerns” (p. 85).
Intimate Justice decenters masculinist forms of racial power and exclusion and instead attends to the principal sources of injustice central to the embodied subjecthood of black women, namely their intimate capacities, which include sexuality, reproduction, and care. The aims of Threadcraft’s book are ambitious and well realized. She documents the history of black women’s struggle for freedom from the antebellum period through the long civil rights movement, by way of the simultaneously external and internal realm of the intimate; she considers strategies for survival, including insurgent acts of violence perpetrated by black women that are not commonly interpreted as resistance; she critically examines systemic forms of aggression and control targeting black female bodies in an effort to uphold post-emancipation racial hierarchies; finally, she asks how black women’s struggles might speak to political theory more broadly and, by proposing alternative theories of freedom and corrective justice, how political theory might speak to them. Above all, she seeks to elevate the political and intellectual status of black feminine intimacy to the levels masculinist speech and action currently occupy. All this she accomplishes masterfully.
At this moment, academic political theory is more attuned than ever to black political thought. Alex Zamalin’s Struggle on Their Minds (2017), Nick Bromell’s The Time Is Always Now (2013), and Nikil Pal Singh’s Black Is a Country (2005) all deal in some way with black political resistance and its myriad contributions to democratic politics and contemporary political theory. Some of these rich works do engage with black feminine subjecthood, but tend to leave intact masculinist conceptions of power and freedom. For example, Zamalin and Bromell lionize Frederick Douglass with little mention of enslaved women intellectuals and political actors. Intimate Justice is a corrective to these tendencies, as Threadcraft invites her readers to rethink gendered constructs of freedom and equality by spotlighting black feminine subject positions. The insurgent act of infanticide of the enslaved mother Margaret Garner often goes unrecognized, whereas the gunshots fired by her husband in the direction of slave patrollers, what Threadcraft calls “racial violence coded as male,” are considered legitimate resistance to slavery. In what was for me the most intellectually illuminating moment in her book, Threadcraft examines the narrative of Douglass in parallel with that of Harriet Jacobs, identifying the ways Douglass’s experience of liberation foregrounds the male body’s capacity for speech and action, whereas at the center for Jacobs is freedom from sexual assault and exploitation. For Threadcraft, these narratives are microcosms of broader disconnects between black masculinist and black feminine accounts of freedom.
Sadiya Hartman’s recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019), which hybridizes historical and narrative nonfiction genres, also does a deep dive into the intimate realm of black women’s lives. Although the points of overlap between the two books are many, Hartman considers one dimension of black women’s intimate lives that Threadcraft barely touches: desire. I wonder about Threadcraft’s omission of an entire conceptual category that is so closely associated with the intimate. Does opening up a discussion of black women’s desire detract from the critical heft of Threadcraft’s argument by orienting the reader toward black women’s agency rather than subjection? The answer is not altogether clear in the text.
The closest Threadcraft comes to addressing desire is through her allusions to the ability of black women to choose their own romantic partners, which for freedwomen marked a crucial distinction between slavery and emancipation. This raises another critical question about the text: the status of liberalism and particularly its position in the project of “corrective justice” that Threadcraft calls for in the final chapter. On the one hand, Threadcraft wholly castigates the American state, which she claims is unequivocally responsible for the systemic violation and destruction of black women’s bodies throughout history: “Who is ultimately responsible for the disproportionate violence to which black women have been subject historically and continue to experience today? Who is ultimately responsible for the higher incidence of rape, the greater brutality of those assaults and the lower likelihood of punishment for those violations? I hold that it is the American state and those so long empowered to define the meaning of black womanhood, of a black woman as she who could not be raped, as she who was the proper target of violence and that state must be held accountable” (p. 67). On the other hand, her argument draws considerably from some of liberalism’s foundational political philosophies. Choice, liberty, equality, and rights all make prominent appearances in Intimate Justice, even as Threadcraft derides the state, the judiciary, and the patriarchal gendered systems that have simultaneously enacted racial terror and turned a blind eye to it.
In the closing chapter, Threadcraft uses the capabilities approach of the liberal feminist Martha Nussbaum to articulate a theory of corrective justice that can address the embodied needs of black feminine subjects regarding care, reproduction, and sexuality. She writes, “In order to better account for all the ways in which blacks have been disadvantaged, to be ‘embodied’ in a way that better meets the needs of contemporary blacks, corrective racial justice should be guided by the approach Nussbaum advances and the understanding that the full range of the body’s capacities need to be enhanced within political communities” (p. 145). This deployment of liberal feminism exists in tense relation to Threadcraft’s earlier criticisms. Classical iterations of liberalism supported, sustained, and even authored dominant regimes of racial power in the modern world, including European colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and chattel slavery, whereas others frame Threadcraft’s visions of intimate justice itself. Given that a theory of corrective justice is the core promise of the book, it is curious that the reader is ultimately directed toward a solution derived from the discourse (liberalism) that is widely regarded as responsible for the inception and maintenance of systems of racial control. In this way, Threadcraft’s diagnosis of intimate injustice is richer than her remedy for it, perhaps setting the stage for future inquiries that might elaborate on whether liberalism is cause or cure for the crucial problem she identifies.
