I meant to read When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) along with Tricia Rose’s work. But the book was back-ordered, so I was unable to dive into Joan Morgan‘s manifesto until more recently.
This is the quote that first brought Chickenheads to my attention:
Any feminism that fails to acknowledge that black folks in 90’s America are living and trying to love in a war zone is useless to our struggle against sexism.
Though it’s often portrayed as part of the problem, rap music is essential to that struggle because it takes us straight to the battlefield. […]
Yeah, sistas are hurt when we hear brothers calling us bitches and hos. But the real crime isn’t the name-calling, it’s their failure to love us – to be our brothers in the way that we commit ourselves to being their sistas.
But recognize: Any man who doesn’t truly love himself is incapable of loving us in the healthy way we need to be loved. It’s extremely telling that men who can only refer to us as “bitches” and “hos” refer to themselves only as “niggas.”
It’s fairly exemplary of Morgan’s style–insightful, conversational, rooted both in common language and uncompromising analysis.
Chickenheads is, as a whole, much more focused on issues around being an African-American women in America (among them the complicated relationship between activist, perhaps even “woke,” thought and the term feminism) than it is about hip hop, specifically. That’s not a critique, not by a far shot, although it was a surprise.
There is something dated about the book–it is fantastic as a set of insights grounded in the 1990s and early 2000s, but its lack of attention to issues of globalization, LBQTx thought and issues, and its overall heteronormativity, make it clearly a product of a certain moment.
Still, it’s a compelling read, perhaps most of all in its embrace of ambiguity: Morgan is willing to stare into the mirror and accept that her desires are, in fact, sometimes contradictory, and that the need to critique behavior does not remove the demand to love and support individuals through their own struggles.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
I think the way Morgan mixes academic, psuedo-academic, and common language is incredibly effective. It almost never hits the ear as forced or unusual, and it simultaneously increases the readability and credibility of her work.