INTRODUCTION
The inspiration for this essay was born out of a conversation I had in Dr. Andrea White’s Introduction to Systematic Theology class. I was feeling a yearning nostalgia for something I felt was lost in society after reading Dr. James H. Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. In the first chapter of his book, Cone wrote how, in the early 20th century, southern rural Black folks turned to music and juke joints (and religion) as a form of resistance. The genre of the blues offered a space for “liberating catharsis” for Black people and was a source of hope and humanization in the shadow of the white man’s world. With the blues as the catalyst, juke joints were the physical locale where Black people could release every emotion and envelope themselves in erotic pleasure. A century later, I longed for the blues. I longed for the blues because it was easy to fall into apathy when contending with modern-day forms of Black resistance in the public square. From being met with “All Lives Matter” sentiments to misappropriations of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public discourse.
I brought my desires to my small group discussion at the end of class. Luckily, I was put in a group with two women (shoutout to Destinee and Karissa) who reminded me that perhaps I wasn’t as far away from the liberating catharsis of the blues as I thought. “I feel a sense of catharsis from current mainstream female rappers?” Karissa pointed out. I immediately realized the error in my logic. Her point instantly resurfaced a memory of catharsis that I almost forgot. It was a bright sunny day during the summer of 2022, and I was crossing the street at a red light. Only one car was waiting at the light, and it was blasting GloRilla’s song “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” through the car speakers. Immediately, I was taken over by the effervescence of the song, and I began singing along to the lyrics alongside the Black women behind the wheel. We connected and started dancing in the middle of the street. Months later, after taking another course from Dr. White, Womanist Theology and Critical Race Theory, I found myself thinking about the same sentiments, but now with a new framework to articulate them: Black feminist theories of representation.
Centralizing my analysis around the “liberating catharsis” of GloRilla’s “F.N.F,” in this essay, I first will explore how black feminist theories of representation provide good insights for combating misappropriations of race in the public square. From this, I contend that female rappers (rap queens) ought to be in dialogue with feminist scholars and the public, and ultimately argue that “F.N.F,” though intended as a work of art, offers an updated theory of representation that should be included in the canon Black feminist of theories of representation.
Then, using far-right conservative critiques of Critical Race Theory as a case study, I will also show how this new theory, which I will term FNFism, can provide a new framework for contending with misconstructions of Critical Race Theory in the public square. I will closely read the lyrics of F.N.F accompanied by interviews with GloRilla to get to the heart of FNF’s message. I will then contrast its sentiments with public statements on Critical Race Theory taken from interviews, news segments, and commentaries. Ultimately, I hope this essay will affirm the liberating cathartic power of “F.N.F,” not only as a summer anthem but also as a hermeneutic for combating racism.
THE MISEDUCATION OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY (CRT)
According to Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a foundational Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholar, CRT is a way of looking at race and patterns of inequality, especially as these inequalities endure after the emancipation of the enslaved Black people and the 20th century Civil Rights Movement. CRT is a legal tool that speaks to how law and jurisprudence contribute to the subordination of racial minorities and tasks those who are both affected and enforce the law to consider stories through the lens of intersectionality and systemic racism. It is a tool to help understand social problems, a political consciousness such that one can devise remedies for oppression from this source.
With this goal of remedying the oppression of Black people and racial minorities in mind, it becomes disheartening to see CRT be vehemently challenged in public discourse. In fact, not only has CRT been challenged, but people also aim to “wage war” against it, or rather what has been called “Critical Race Theory.” The ACLU reports that as of April 14, 2022, 27 state legislatures and 165 national and local organizations made efforts to restrict education on racism, citing CRT as the reason for these restrictions. They report that these restrictions have resulted in school board members being ousted and educators having to resign over the death threats, social media bullying, and harassment.
Dr. Crenshaw further addresses these political attacks against CRT with political commentator Joy Reid and explains how CRT has been used as a “call to arms” by GOP opponents. Far-right conservatives liken CRT to a new Marxism that uses identity politics. They quote former Vice President Mike Pence, who at the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference explained that Critical Race Theory is “racism plain and simple and should be rejected by every American of every race.” At the same conference, Texas Senator Ted Cruz mentioned how Critical Race theory is “bigoted, is a lie, and every bit as racist as [the Ku Klux Klan].” So, how can a theory meant to expose and remedy the oppression of Black people be as racist as the KKK?
Reid explains how a main concern from conservative opponents is that White families fear that their kids are being taught that they are racist in schools. They argue that kids will be made to feel inferior and give them false notions of the “truth” of the United States. Yet Reid points out that the real lie is that this isn’t happening at all in schools and is not even what the work that the theory aims to do. What is termed “Critical Race Theory'' in these spaces is what Crenshaw calls a “backlash effort to reverse the racial reckoning…they found a strange sounding theory that they could put all their grievances and resentments into to mobilize people around this bogeyman.”
Going back to the true aims of CRT, In her 1988 essay Race Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law (1988) that set the foundation for her use of CRT in legal studies, Crenshaw advances that “for Blacks, the task at hand is to devise ways to wage ideological and political struggle while minimizing the costs of engaging in an inherently legitimating discourse. A clearer understanding of the space we occupy in the American political consciousness is a prerequisite to developing pragmatic strategies for political and economic survival.” CRT is thus by and for Black people. It is the tool that provides a clear understanding of the spaces Black people occupy in political consciousness. What CRT aims to do is to provide pragmatic strategies for survival. Unfortunately, CRT has been co-opted by attacks from the far right. Luckily, CRT is not the only place that Black people can turn to for this work. In fact, this has been the field of inquiry for Black feminist scholars. This is affirmed by Monica A. Coleman, who states that Black feminists are associated with advocacy of the economic, political, marital, and health rights of women around the globe. Under this agenda is the subcategory of the Black feminist theory of representation.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION: BLACK FEMINIST THEORIES OF REPRESENTATION
In academia, the act of crafting theories of representation of Black women is a practice that aims to make meaning of the black female body. With this meaning, scholars aim to expand the moral imaginaries of Black people (namely Black Americans) and equip them with the frameworks needed to aid their political consciousness. For gender studies scholar, Jennifer C. Nash, crafting theories of representation is a racialized practice that consistently makes demands on Black women to expose their imagined differences due to how visual technologies make imagined racial and sexual differences visible.
These practices are deeply intertwined and even inextricable from visual culture. Historically, this act rested on the notion that representation does more harm than good for black women and that it inflicts violence on Black bodies. Yet, as the archive of Black feminist inquiry on representation expanded, so did its interpretative strands. As such, Nash outlines interpretive stands in the canon, representation as pedagogy, temporal practice, metonymy, and a site of recovery. In this essay, I invoke Black feminist theories of representation as a site of recovery work for Black people in resistance efforts against misappropriation, misconstruction, and oppression. Recovery work in theories of representation attempts to salvage the black female body from the violence of the visual field. From this, recovery work affirms the necessity of theories of representation. These theories are vitally important because, at their core, they help expand Black people's imagination. What we get from visual culture, and thus representations (emphasis on the plural) of Blackness, are ways to expand our Black imaginary domains. It allows Black people to understand that Blackness is not monolithic. As one aims to recover the evil of cultural production, one can also uncover the multiplicities of life that allow Black people to imagine greater than their current situations. From this, The various theories of representation are almost as diverse as black women themselves.
For example, in her chapter “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” Black feminist scholar Saidiya V. Hartman writes a speculative history of women where she describes “the wayward,” Her history focuses on the life of Esther Brown. It narrates the open rebellion and beautiful experiment produced by young women in the emergent ghetto, and this gives an exposition on the role of vagrancy laws and women’s incarceration in the lives and expressions of resistance of Black women. For Hartman, waywardness is the act of having wild thoughts, reckless dreams, interminable protests, spontaneous strikes, non-participation, willfulness, and bold-faced refusal; Riotous, queer, disposed to extravagance and wanton living. Following scholars like James H. Cone, she also includes Black music as an expression of waywardness. For Hartman, Jazz is black noise that is raw, energetic, and exciting. A desire for social disorder and free love is embedded in jazz rather than composition or improvisation. In this theory of waywardness as a representation of the Black female body, Hartman affirms that to be wayward is to engage in a “revolution in a minor key.” It is a revolution that was driven not by uplift or the struggle for recognition or citizenship but by the vision of a world that would guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
Another example I look to is hooks’s theory of representation anchors on responses to the absence of black female representation in film, negative portrayals of black women, and the lack of acknowledgment of blackness and black women’s experience in film criticism. hooks argues that many black women, like herself, have adopted an “oppositional gaze” and become Black female spectators as a form of resistance. This allows Black women to have a particularized, subversive viewing experience and a type of “looking relations” (viewing/gazing relationship) within a cinematic context where the cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation. It is the act of being ‘on guard’ at the movies and resistance towards white supremacy and the foregrounding of male, typically white male, perspective and experience as a form of domination and an expression of power.
Or take the beginning of Jennifer Nash’s Black Body in Ecstasy where Nash argues in favor of a new methodology of analyzing racialized pornography called racial iconography that seeks to investigate the role of ecstasy, pleasure, and subversion of racist representations of black women in pornography outside of its history (especially in black feminist thought) of viewing pornography as purely a tool of subordination and racism. As such she develops yet another theory of representation within the Black feminist canon. Her theory, racialized iconography, is a critical hermeneutic that shifts from a preoccupation with the injuries that racialized visual culture to an investigation of the ecstasy that racialized visual culture can unleash.
Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Sharpe proposes a theoretical framework of Black life that revolves around five guiding metaphors: the ship, the hold, the weather, and most prominently the wake. These metaphors directly correlate with the imagery of Middle Passage African chattel slavery, which Dr. Sharpe argues still manifests in the Black every day. These phenomena exist “in the wake”, and it is here where Black people can choose how to proceed in their “wake work.” The wake is the realities of Blackness that all in the African diaspora are intimately familiar with. It is a life with the psychological, genetic, and cultural memory of the atrocities of modern capitalism born out of chattel slavery. It is the subsequent, lived knowledge of how to navigate society while being Black through and in the forces of destruction and quotidian disaster. Wake work is the creative function that manifests from this experience for Black people through art, community-building, protest, etc.
Hartman, hooks, Nash, and Sharpe represent a small fraction of this expansive dialogue within the Black feminist canon. Yet, a voice that is not commonly engaged in this conversation is the contributions of Black female rappers. It is time to critically consider how contemporary rappers who are women aid this conversation of representation and contribute to visual culture. This is because just as Cone and Hartman centralize Black music as a source and expression of Black political consciousness, it would be incomplete to engage with the contemporary discussions on race without mentioning hip-hop/rap. Rap is the contemporary version of the blues, it is the realm of liberating catharsis, and as such may be able to respond to debates in the public square on Race that can speak more precisely to the souls of Black folks.
RAP QUEENS ENTERING THE CHAT
Spearheaded by rappers like Cardi B, Megan thee Stallion, and the City Girls, female-identifying rappers have been on top in mainstream hip-hop circles since the late 2010s. For a genre that has historically been defined by hetero-patriarchy and the black male gaze, the popularity of women in the field that was once a rarity is now a common occurrence. Coming into 2022, this new wave of “Rap Queens' ' was the environment of hip-hop when GloRilla entered the scene. Gloria Hallelujah Woods, known by her artist name GloRilla, is a 23-year-old gangster rapper from Memphis, Tennessee. Taking influences from crunk and trap music, “Big Glo'' rose to prominence after the release of her song “F.N.F (Let’s Go).” The song quickly went viral on social media, especially on TikTok, and was acclaimed for its catchy, chantlike hook.
Four months later, the song was remixed twice with features from other prominent female-identifying rappers like Latto, JT of the City Girls, and Saweetie. From this, the song was be nominated for two BET Hip Hop Awards and is now for the Best Rap Performance Grammy. As of the time of writing this, the accompanying music video for “F.N.F” has received 58 million views on YouTube only 8 months after its release. After breaking into the Billboard charts, “F.N.F” was recognized by NPR as the #1 Best Song of 2022 and ranked 3rd and 4th Best Song of 2022 on Pitchfork and Time Magazine music lists respectively. Now, GloRilla attracts over 6.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify catering to majority Black audiences. Additionally, “F.N.F” has been streamed over 36 million times on the platform. All in all, F.N.F. made a major impact after its release. I believe that part of the success of the song was due to its message and how it specifically resonated with Black women through being an updated Black feminist theory of representation.
FNFism
There is a wealth of wisdom that can be derived from the lyrics of “F.N.F.” From the first line of the chorus, which introduces the song, the listeners are explicitly aware that the song is about freedom. In the chorus, GloRilla raps,
“I’m F-R-E-E f**k n***a free/That mean I ain’t gotta worry ‘bout no f**k n***a cheating/and I S-I-N-G-L-E again/Outside handing out the window with my ratchet ass friends (LET’S GO!)”
To understand the depths of this vibrant self-proclamation of freedom, it is crucial to locate exactly who/what a f**k n***a (FN) is. GloRilla defines a FN as a dude “that be cheating, lying, and just being toxic.” She further expounds on this by saying how “If you in a relationship and you are not happy with your dude that means they a f**k n***a because why is he not making you happy?” One can reasonably extrapolate from this notion to other phenomena in society that do the same work as a f**k n***a.
When it comes to relationships of violence against Black women, black feminists like Beth E. Richie remind us that violence against Black women exists in a matrix that spans not just intimate households or interpersonal relationships, but also comes from the respective community and the state. Community violence can look like physical assaults by community members, rape, sexual harassment, and sexual aggression towards Black women from their community writ large. It can also look like emotional manipulation of black women and the creation of a hostile social environment in their communities. Similarly, state violence towards black women may look like direct physical assault by state agencies and public policy, sexual exploitation and aggression towards black women who are in state custody and by public policy, and state authority and policy that enables emotional manipulation and the creation of a social environment that is hostile towards Black women. Therefore, the community and the state can also be FNs as they too are sources of lying, cheating, and unhappiness for Black women.
GloRilla was also wise to not simply refer to patriarchy (i.e., f**k boy), but use racialized, historically charged, words like the N-word, as a site of both recovery work, but also as metonymy to allude to the Black women’s association with phallocentric violence. Though GloRilla was alluding to a toxic romantic relationship, one can locate toxic relationships outside of just the romantic, and thus can find FNs there also. It is these relationships that are at stake when GloRilla calls for freedom.
GloRilla’s FN is inextricable from Sharpe’s “wake” or hook’s “phallocentric gaze” or even Towne’s hegemonic cultural productions of evil. Yet, GloRilla’s statements diverge a bit from the traditional takeaways from the Black Feminist canon. For example, hooks advocates in light of the phallocentric gaze in cinema that Black women adopt an oppositional gaze as a defense to the powers in representations of Black women that aim to diminish them. Black feminist scholars propose theories that help Black women cope with oppression (oppositional gaze, wake work), or even how to embrace their alterity through a new lens (waywardness, racial iconography). GloRilla poses something new: total agency, a total agency that I will refer to as FNFism.
FNFism is a radical new lease on life. It is both S-I-N-G-L-E but also experienced collectively through sisterly solidarity (“with my ratchet a** friends”). Like waywardness, it embraces its ratchetness. What makes FNFism differ from the Black Feminist canon is its insistence (1) that one doesn’t have to worry about the sources of oppression (2) that “anyways, life’s great, p**** still good (but they knew that)”, and (3) on letting go! This means that in the face of a FN that may try to manipulate her with its gaze, lie, gaslight her, take advantage of her, or cheat on social norms, she can just be! She can let go. She is defiant about the goodness of her life and celebrates it. She has fun! She can persist with her femininity intact by simply not playing the games of the FN. With this agency, she not only “hop[s] out at red lights” but also “twerk[s] on headlights.” If this “red light” represents hegemonic forces or conventions aimed to stifle, she should respond with a physical joy that defies the hegemony. Overall, this is the ethos of the mainstream, female-led, rap movement writ large as GloRilla herself identifies as a City Girl.
According to NPR, “GloRilla can deal mentorship in the form of an acronym, can teach you that sacrifice for love can be a mistake, that the liberty from the baggage that you don't have to carry any longer is a lightness you should treasure. It feels meaningful that you can memorize the lyrics in seconds, like a prayer.” This prayer-like chat is the heart of FNFism – to leave a FN to “play with their d**k” and choose to be free.
FNs, CRT, AND LIBERATING CATHARSIS
We can thus grapple with opponents of CRT in light of FNFism. Far-right GOP conservatives who co-opt CRT rhetoric, lie on its behalf and cheat out policy initiatives that could advance racial equity are FNs. In fact, anti-CRT crusaders acknowledge this. In the now infamous tweet by outspoken Fox News correspondent Christopher Rufo, who has become the face of the anti-CRT contingent, Rufo writes that “We have successfully frozen their brand-"critical race theory" into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” They acknowledge this. toxic. In this way, Rufo acknowledges that the intention is to create a toxic relationship with those supporting CRT.
Yet this essay is not about the ways in which the far right-conservatives are toxic, this essay aims to apply the wisdom of GloRilla for those looking for strategies to contend with their toxicity. With misappropriations of critical race theory in the public square and find possible redress. In the face of the Ted Cruzes, Mike Pences, and Christopher Rufos of the world, FNFism will tell us to seek freedom (period). FNFism tells us to defy respectability in situations like this. To pursue a waywardness. To believe that despite the crusade that may never end that “anyways, life’s great.”
It is not on Black women like Joy Reid and Kimberlé Crenshaw to construe CRT in a way that white conservatives can understand because CRT isn’t for them. In fact, the only goal in the public sphere should be that Black women, and people most affected by the intersectional powers of oppression, know that they can use CRT as a tool to expand their political consciousness and imaginary domains.
The debates around CRT in the public square are riddled with liars and cheaters, and frankly, how to navigate this situation is to be free from them and focus on uplifting Black representations. This freedom is possible through the liberating catharsis of Black noise.
Black people must do what we’ve done since antiquity, either at the juke joint, the rural South, or the big city. Let’s gooooooooooo.
CONCLUSION
In this essay I have explored how black feminist theories of representation provide good insights for combating misappropriations of race in the public square. I provided a short overview of Black feminist theories of representation from bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Nash, and Christina Sharpe. From this, I proposed that female rappers (rap queens) ought to be in dialogues with feminist scholars and the public, and ultimately argued that “F.N.F”, though intended as a work of art, offers an updated theory of representation that should be included in the canon Black feminist of theories of representation. Then, using far-right conservative critiques of Critical Race Theory as a case study, I will also show how FNFism, provides a new framework for Black women contending with misconstructions of Critical Race Theory as a hermeneutic for combating racism.
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