America, Goddam Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice

"America, Goddam is an impeccably researched and intensely told history of the terror, of the violence, of the dehumanization Black women and girls have faced, battled, and resisted. It gripped me, shocked me, angered me, enlightened me, moved me, transformed me. We are better because of this book."—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

"America, Goddam is the book we have been waiting for. A trenchant examination of the history and consequence of the particular overlap of anti-Blackness and misogyny—misogynoir—that has worked to undermine the life chances of all working-class and poor Black women. Unraveling easy narratives about progress and change in American history, America, Goddam's focus on twenty-first-century iterations of the oppression and exploitation of Black women highlights both continuity and change. Treva Lindsey provides the historical and analytical tools necessary to make sense of the endless media and scholastic narratives of abuse and neglect in the coverage of Black women's stories. With extraordinary insight and elemental passion, America, Goddam is a critical contribution to the evolving cannon of Black feminist texts and scholarship."—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

"This is not a memoir, but it's personal. This is not journalism, but it reports. This is not fiction, but you'll wonder how it can be true. This is not a bedtime story, but it will leave you tired. America, Goddam details the particular violence and specific cruelties Black women and girls endure in the United States. Lindsey maps the policies, practices, and deeply held beliefs that strip Black girls and women of their homes, their health, their freedom, their futures, and their lives. Refusing to maintain scholarly neutrality, Lindsey pours out the spiritual agony of bearing witness (and withness) to the destruction of Black girlhood. She dares her readers to stay present intellectually and emotionally even as she performs a bloody, historical autopsy of American misogynoir, which forces Black women to live the unlivable and compels them to specialize in the wholly impossible. It is not an easy book, but it's necessary. And in the end Lindsey challenges you to choose hope."—Melissa Harris-Perry, Maya Angelou Presidential Chair at Wake Forest University, media host, and author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America

"America, Goddam is a brilliant and powerful book. With scholarly rigor and refreshing clarity, Treva B. Lindsey breaks down the various forms of violence that Black women and girls have been forced to negotiate in the United States. While theoretically rich and historically grounded, this book is also a deeply personal and beautifully vulnerable testimony. Everyone who reads this text will be informed, challenged, inspired, and energized."—Tarana Burke, author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

"America, Goddam is far more profoundly singular than any so-called intervention. It is more dynamic than any of our literary monuments. Lindsey manages to recast racial terror by finding the rhythm created by Black women tasked with outrunning and resisting racialized gendered terror in the United States. America, Goddam should make all of us who purport to write through racial gendered terror and liberation revise everything we thought. I'm gutted by its brilliance."—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

"Written with insight, care, and verve, American, Goddam provides piercing insight into present-day movements including #BlackLives Matter, #SayHer Name, and #MeToo. Lindsey's voice orients us to the book's concerns through the lens of her own life experiences, making clear that America, Goddam achieves its effect through a brilliant and unbounded sense of how we can and should arrive at understandings about the origins, forces, and possibilities for resisting violence."—Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022, Kirkus Reviews
"A righteous indictment of racism and misogyny."—Publishers Weekly

A powerful account of violence against Black women and girls in the United States and their fight for liberation.

Echoing the energy of Nina Simone's searing protest song that inspired the title, this book is a call to action in our collective journey toward just futures.

America, Goddam explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today.

Through personal accounts and hard-hitting analysis, Black feminist historian Treva B. Lindsey starkly assesses the forms and legacies of violence against Black women and girls, as well as their demands for justice for themselves and their communities. Combining history, theory, and memoir, America, Goddam renders visible the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence. Black women and girls occupy a unique status of vulnerability to harm and death, while the circumstances and traumas of this violence go underreported and understudied. America, Goddam allows readers to understand

• How Black women—who have been both victims of anti-Black violence as well as frontline participants—are rarely the focus of Black freedom movements.
• How Black women have led movements demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Toyin Salau, Riah Milton, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless other Black women and girls whose lives have been curtailed by numerous forms of violence.
• How across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led to Black liberation through organizing and radical politics.

America, Goddam powerfully demonstrates that the struggle for justice begins with reckoning with the pervasiveness of violence against Black women and girls in the United States.