Our Story
In November 2017, I started the Cite Black Women campaign—a movement that engages with social media and aesthetic representation (t-shirts) in order to push people to critically rethink the politics of knowledge production by engaging in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production. The campaign began with selling simple t-shirts that just say "Cite Black Women." at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Meeting in Baltimore. The shirts were a provocation for a good cause: to help raise money to support the Winnie Mandela School in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Beyond the fundraising aspect there was the question of politics. Our shirts used a simple phrase, "Cite Black Women.” to provoke public conversation. The goal was and still is to “interrupt” academic conference spaces by pushing people to think about reflexively and dialogically about their citational practices.
On the surface, "Cite Black Women." is a very simple phrase. However, our simplicity is deliberate and calculated: we use one simple phrase with no ifs, ands, buts, qualifiers, euphemisms or informalities to require all of us to be unwavering and unequivocal in our politics of citation. It's simple: Cite. Black. Women.
By December 2017, Cite Black Women's t-shirts were a raging success, selling out at both NWSA and the American Anthropological Association Meetings (AAA). Inspired by this outpouring of support, I decided to expand onto social media by creating a virtual space (on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) for discussing the gendered racial politics of citation and its consequences. We started with a few simple tweets and then launched our Cite Black Women Resolutions in January 2018: 1) Read Black Women's Work; 2) Integrate Black women into the CORE of your syllabus; 3) Acknowledge Black women's intellectual production; 4) Make space for Black women to speak; and 5) Give Black women the space and time to breathe. Our resolutions became our guiding principles and our online community soon led to the creation of our and our syllabus hiveminds and the establishment of the hashtags #CiteBlackWomen and #CiteBlackWomenSunday. Now, each Sunday the project calls on people across social media platforms to engage in a collective call and response citation-circle, posting quotes from black women’s work, from poetry to music and academic articles.
On the surface, "Cite Black Women." is a very simple phrase. However, our simplicity is deliberate and calculated: we use one simple phrase with no ifs, ands, buts, qualifiers, euphemisms or informalities to require all of us to be unwavering and unequivocal in our politics of citation. It's simple: Cite. Black. Women.
By December 2017, Cite Black Women's t-shirts were a raging success, selling out at both NWSA and the American Anthropological Association Meetings (AAA). Inspired by this outpouring of support, I decided to expand onto social media by creating a virtual space (on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook) for discussing the gendered racial politics of citation and its consequences. We started with a few simple tweets and then launched our Cite Black Women Resolutions in January 2018: 1) Read Black Women's Work; 2) Integrate Black women into the CORE of your syllabus; 3) Acknowledge Black women's intellectual production; 4) Make space for Black women to speak; and 5) Give Black women the space and time to breathe. Our resolutions became our guiding principles and our online community soon led to the creation of our and our syllabus hiveminds and the establishment of the hashtags #CiteBlackWomen and #CiteBlackWomenSunday. Now, each Sunday the project calls on people across social media platforms to engage in a collective call and response citation-circle, posting quotes from black women’s work, from poetry to music and academic articles.
Ever since this project began it has grown in beautiful ways I could never imagine thanks to of all you who are listening and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. In January 2018 The Times Higher Education of London did a feature story on Cite Black Women and in April 2018 Essence Magazine featured us as one of its Top 10 Issues.
One year after we began we launched our website, blog and podcast. We have grown thanks to our wonderful community and we are looking forward to continuing to grow with you. The future looks bright. Cite Black Women. - Christen A. Smith (2018) |