To my newly forming black radical mind, women—more specifically, black women—had a way of existing without being present. It’s a natural result of consuming history and culture through the fables of masculine triumph. The centuries-long battle against American racism had been handed to me inside the framework of black male defiance. Douglass’s bravery, Du Bois’s genius, Malcolm’s eloquence, Tupac’s rage. The heroic women existed largely in service of ending racist oppression of the men (Ida B. Wells’s research on lynching) or as a catalyst for a man’s ascendance to greatness (Rosa Parks
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