The essay “Black Feminist Collectivity in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” didn’t resonate with me until I got to the 7th paragraph which begins with:”Black women often provide the supplemental, ghostly, and unappreciated labor necessary to maintain the nation-state as an ideal and lived reality.”
The full impact of that line still didn’t hit me until the author talked about the way Beyonce, in singing the national anthem a cappella after being thrown down by press for lip synching it at the presidential inauguration, “reinforced the notion that the black women must pay a national bevy and therefore owe the populace an explanation for the deployment of their bodies.”
WoW.