Black feminist struggles and resistance to racial capitalism are intersectional – racial capitalism structures racialized and gendered oppression

The hearth of the US racial empire, maintained by Black women’s racialized, classed, and gendered labor, is embroiled in a history of struggle. In the efforts of enslaved women who “judged the plantation a viable site from which to wage war and engage in the process of emancipation” (Glymph, 2013: 492), and in the organizing campaigns of waged household workers (Nadasen, 2015), we trace a lineage of racialized oppression and resistance that calls for repoliticizing the domestic. For Black women, exploited to reproduce empire, the domestic signifies a parallel space of struggle, that of nurturing their own homes, families, and communities amidst the violence of internal colonialism (Davis, 1972). In the early 20th century, following mass migration to the North, Black women’s clubs organized neighborhood campaigns to address unsafe living conditions in overcrowded cities (Mann, 2011). This eco-feminist lineage persists in contemporary environmental justice, concerned with “the survivability of individual bodies, particular communities, national cultures, and the earth itself” (Di Chiro, 2008: 280). In sustaining sociality and personhood in excess of the demands of imperial reproduction, Black women have ensured the persistence of “remaindered life,” that is, “subaltern pathways of social and self-formation that remain beneath the threshold of visibility of raced subjects” (Tadiar, 2015: 156). Roberta’s history of fighting racial capitalism are a starting point to consider how feminist political geography and environmental justice scholarship might be strengthened by engaging with Black feminist theorizations of the domestic. We argue that Black social reproductive practices constitute an embodied form of geopolitical praxis, an unacknowledged engagement with the imperial state’s necropolitical governance of Black life (Smith, 2016). We identify three categories of labor as strategies of domestic geopolitics. The labor of keeping wake refers to practices of caring for, attending to, and registering deaths in the community, a secular ritual of valuing lives in death that are sacrificed in life (Sharpe, 2016). The labor of tactical expertise addresses how racialized people, living with double consciousness (Du Bois, 2008; Fanon, 2008/1967), must translate the lived experience of racial violence into scientific and legal discourses legible to the state. The labor of revolutionary mothering (Gumbs et al., 2016; James, 1997) describes the responsibility of nurturing communal life in the face of persistent death as a creative force of worldmaking. In the next sections, we describe the context of everyday life in Badin and Flint, abandoned as surplus populations by a state intent on facilitating racial capitalism, followed with a discussion of the labors that constitute domestic geopolitics’ challenge to the racial state.