Family of origin. Beloved community. Fictive kin. Blood relations. Othermothers. Play cousins. Queer kin. Chosen family. There are perhaps as many ways to describe family and community as there are to describe people themselves, despite the fact that we’ve been sold the mythic ideal of family for decades: two adults (a man and a woman, of course), two-point-five kids, and a dog named Spot living behind a white picket fence. The reality is that the so-called perfect nuclear family is a bill of goods that is impossible to reach for most and far from perfect for all. Truth is, people of color survive and thrive with families and communities as diverse as we are. And so, over the years, the CFC has written about families and communities of color in ways that seek to honor all of the ways in which we connect with one another, and not just those that are socially approved.
We also recognize that, for so many people of color, family and community have been colored, influenced, and, in some cases, even haunted by legacies of imperialism and slavery. The recurring debates concerning Black families—for example, the claim that slavery permanently marred the nuclear Black family—underscore the complicated ways family units are understood. On the one hand, the Black family is recognized as a site of love, strength, and support, while at other times, in both popular discourse and in some academic scholarship as well, Black family life is shrouded in myths of pathology and identified as “broken” and “dysfunctional” when it is not led by a strong patriarch; ideally a cisgender, heterosexual man is the “head” of the household, literally and figuratively. “The Black family,” then, is often a sad monolith that exists at the nexus of many often contradictory and competing meanings in popular culture and even some scholarship. It is a concept that is often the scourge that whips Black women’s backs into submission. As crunk feminists, we reject narrow understandings of family and community that are simply longings for heteropatriarchal power dressed up in Black- or Brownface.
The CFC has its own origin story. In the beginning, there was the Collective. Before the CFC was a blog it was a community and a family. Back in the early 2000s, when Brittney Cooper, Susana Morris, and Crunkista were graduate students at Emory University, they and a group of friends began calling themselves “crunk feminists” as a way to describe their unique way of moving through the world and supporting each other in the face of racism, sexism, homophobia, and every other social ill. These newly dubbed crunk feminists were a crew, a squad that rolled deep. They took classes together, got crunk in the club, threw house parties, cooked for each other, talked politics, went to movies and talks, taking up an entire row. They laughed and cried together through everything from relationships to dissertations to deaths in the family. They were each other’s lifelines, community, and close kin during the years they labored in what was often a very hostile White space.
The original CFC lasted several years, but when folks began to graduate and move away, the friendships remained while the more formal parts of the Collective faded away.
So when Brittney and Susana began talking about reviving the CFC and creating a blog, the idea that the CFC would be first and foremost a collective outside of the blog was key. Their idea was that the Collective would be a place to be in both conversation and community. During this time Brittney and Susana were living on the opposite ends of Alabama, working as junior professors in small Southern college towns. Feminist community was scarce and fun even scarcer. They realized they would have to build it themselves. They wondered, wouldn’t it be great if we could gather a group of dope-ass feminists? We could be like a twenty-first-century Combahee River Collective—supporting each other, having fun, sharing our stories, and speaking truth to power.
But unlike before when the original CFC all lived in the same city, this newer version of the Collective was scattered across the East Coast. That meant that we, the new CFC, had to be more nimble and more intentional about building and sustaining our community. So we made use of lots of different types of technology—email, phone, the Internet, Google Hangouts—and arranged to meet one another at conferences and retreats to spend time together and connect. This new CFC became not unlike its predecessor. We were often each other’s lifelines, community, and close kin.
We believe that the CFC has lasted as long as it has because we are more than a group of strangers coming together to write blog posts. We have supported each other through graduate school, relationships, job searches, job losses, births, deaths, and any number of other life changes. We have laughed, cried, argued with, and held each other down. The Collective itself has even gone through changes, good and bad, and weathered storms, emerging stronger and more unified. Building and maintaining community and family is far from easy, but it is gratifying, sustaining, and very necessary.
Because of our roots as a collective, it is probably no surprise that so much of our writing has been about family and community. Over the years we’ve covered the gamut on family and community issues, from praising the joy and resiliency that we see every day in our communities to calling out the soul-crushing practices that destroy love, trust, and solidarity. We also grapple with what it means to create and sustain family and community in a society where Black and Brown bodies are often under surveillance and harshly disciplined. Our work answers the call from our feminist foremothers and continues to call out patriarchal power structures for not being accountable to the most vulnerable members of our communities. We reject the secrets and lies that often dwell in families of origin, delving deep into the pain of family secrets and fragmented bonds. While it has often been difficult and certainly scary to be vulnerable about some of the most intimate parts of our lives, or to brazenly expose familial and cultural taboos such as abandonment, abuse, infertility, mental illness, homophobia, and violence, it has also been liberating. Our work at the CFC has meant actively rejecting the dissemblance that respectability politics requires. We have vowed through our writing not to be shamed or silenced because of our pasts or our truths.
Once we found our voices, it was easy to call out all we saw that was wrong. But digging deeper for our truths also asked us to lift up what was right. And so, to that end, we have also (re)imagined community through the lens of crunk feminism, celebrating all the ingenious ways people of color have etched our own spaces of love, caring, support, and just plain old fun. And because so many of us work in academia, a large part of our work highlights how we create feminist classroom communities built on respect and accountability. Being intentional about celebrating feminist family and community has been healing work and an act of resistance in a world that thrives on women of color burning ourselves out to care for others.
Whether or not the community is beloved or the family is chosen, it is clear that we need each other not only to survive but also to thrive.