Our world is built with stories.

Sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other.

The liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart.

Hey everybody, welcome to liturgist podcast. This is Michael Gunger.

Today's show is on womanism and Dr. Hiller McBride and William Matthews and I are talking to Nikki Black,

who is a radical womanist, an intersectional feminist, creative mother writer and scholar.

And I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode.

We're in the last few episodes of season 6 here and I can't wait to tell you about what's going to be happening next season.

It's the biggest most ambitious thing I've certainly ever been a part of and I can't wait to tell you more.

But this season we're wrapping up these last few episodes and I'm so happy that Nikki Black can be part of this closing of this season because she brings the fire and I hope that whether you know anything about womanism or not, you'll give this a listen and let it into your heart.

It's a lot of good stuff in here. Okay, hope you're all well. Enjoy today's episode.

I remember being in First-Year University and encountering feminism in a new way.

I had heard the mutterings of it around my home. My dad was deeply involved in feminist psychology and the intersection between mental health and the oppression of women.

And it was in my first-Year University that I started reading feminist writers, reading about feminist thought and really starting to develop my own relationship with the movement.

And I came across the work, of course, of the second wave feminists who were advocating largely for women's right to work outside the home and it was thrilled about this idea that perhaps floored by it that it hadn't always been that way, really starting to wake up to inequality.

And I remember having a conversation with my professor, one of my professors who said, don't you understand the limitation of that facet of the movement?

Don't you understand that class and employment and race and socioeconomic status are all deeply woven into each other?

That disability can't be separated, that race can't be separated from this push for employment for women.

And I remember feeling perhaps struck that I'd missed this and this professor went on to say, you're missing something important about the work of equality.

If you're missing that a community, an entire community of people, particularly black women, were not advocating to work outside the home, they had been forced to for generations in slavery.

And that day and their ancestors had been exploited. And so there's a discrepancy between the feminist movement and this call to examine culture as it intersects with gender.

And that really blew open this identity for me of a more complex way of understanding the person and oppression, understand the privilege that I have in having to learn about that in a higher education context and what the limitations of that are for me and not having learned about it sooner.

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