Book Review: “Hood Feminism” by Mikki Kendall

[Editor’s note: This post is the first in our weekly Black History Month series, which will appear on Thursdays in February in addition to our normal Tuesday and Saturday blogs. Check back weekly for more, and please share!]

Even though Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot has been in my “To Be Read pile” since its release, it took me a while to open it. I carried it around and talked about how I was excited to read it with other feminists, but I didn’t open it for a few months. When I look deep, I know why: it was a hard thing to read. Not because Kendall’s writing was challenging—the opposite is true. Every time I opened the book, I was so glad it was accessible and conversational. It was a hard read because even though I could read it with ease, I wanted to let each chapter sit. 

As a white Catholic feminist, reading Hood Feminism was not only a practice in humility, but also in spirituality and social justice. Kendall reminds her readers, as prophets do, that our liberation is wrapped up in the liberation of others. Almost every chapter has an example from Kendall’s own experience as a woman of color, contextualized with accompanying social analysis. The analytical pieces read as narrative, and Kendall packs so much information into these short chapters that I found myself going back over the details and statistics again and again. 

Though Kendall is not Catholic, Hood Feminism is an exercise in Catholic Social Teaching, as Kendall clearly identifies the problem for her readers, judges the state of the systems and social structures that are causing the issues, and then suggests action. Kendall is writing directly to feminist and justice-rooted organizations that are largely missing the voices of missing the voices of BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) women. Hood Feminism is a call to action for feminists and feminist organizations—like WOC—to step up and do work that helps liberate all women from oppression. 

Kendall writes, “Imagining a new and less problematic future for marginalized communities means letting go of every aspect of white supremacy. It means embracing Blackness in all its forms and doing the hard work of rooting out the classist narratives around it. It means doing the listening and the learning that each one of us needs in order to be accountable. We have to stop maintaining the status quo and toxic hierarchies of respectability. We must understand that our involvement in this structure is a problem, whether we are conscious of it or not in the past; we know now and we need to be willing to change our standards and expectations.” (94) Though Kendall doesn’t have a chapter specifically on religion, the whole text was applicable to my ministry as a member of WOC and as a teacher. As a feminist and as a Catholic, it is my responsibility to work for those most marginalized by the church, and by society.