Black 'Feminisms' and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan's Negro Family

This article reads Kay Lindsey's (1970) "The Black Woman as Woman," and Hortense Spillers' (1987) "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," as abolitionist responses to The Moynihan Report's pathologization of the Black family and it's naturalization of the family as the ordering episteme of social life. Lindsey's and Spillers' critique of the family exposes the violence that creates its conditions of possibility and paints a horizon where the family is beyond redemption. Refusing redemption, I gesture toward modes of Black life akin to Hartman's (1997) fugitives without genealogy and the character Precious from Sapphires's (1996) novel Push who create new Black relations.