Black Feminist Politics

This book offers a rigorous and historically grounded analysis of Black women’s political thought, activism, and institutional engagement across six decades. This book begins with 1965—a pivotal year in which the Voting Rights Act fundamentally transformed political participation for African Americans and, notably, the year Kamala Harris was born. This temporal convergence serves as the book’s organizing framework, illustrating how the expansion of voting rights and the evolution of Black feminist politics created the conditions that made Harris’s Vice Presidency possible. Drawing on political science, history, gender studies, and Black feminist theory, the chapters trace major developments in U.S. political life from 1965 to 2025. Topics include the interventions of Michelle Wallace, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker, as well as the implications of the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings for understanding gendered political vulnerability. The analysis also engages the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, showing how contemporary movements—including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the resistance to book bans—extend a longer tradition of Black feminist political critique. The text foregrounds key analytical concepts such as linked fate and Black feminist epistemology, making it an essential resource for scholars and students of American politics, African American studies, and feminist theory. By situating Kamala Harris’s Vice Presidency within a broader historical trajectory, the book demonstrates that Black feminist political behavior is indispensable to understanding the development of modern U.S. democracy.

With each edition of Black Feminist Politics, Duchess Harris solidifies its position as an essential and enduring text that affirms the vital importance of using a Black Feminist analysis to interpret US politics, society, and culture.

Crystal M. Moten, author of Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee