A Passing Thought

I've just begun reading Joan Morgan's When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life As a Hip-Hop Feminist (Simon and Schuster, 1999).  Morgan's writing first got my attention in 1992 when she wrote a powerful analysis of race and sexism in the Mike Tyson rape case for the Village Voice.  Not only was it smart, the writing was brilliant.  I realized as I was reading part of it to a friend on the phone that it had been written to be declaimed, not just scanned with the eyes.

Later, though, Morgan wrote an article for Vibe magazine (October 1993) that took a lot of heat for its defense (masked as "understanding") of Buju Banton's antigay bigotry.  But I'm reading Chickenheads anyway.

And I'm writing now about a curious cluelessness in Morgan's attack on the white feminists she met in college, a bunch of raging dykes who

used made-up words like "womyn," "femynists," and threw mad shade if you asked them direction to the "Ladies' Room" [35].

This struck me odd, coming as it does from a writer who affects made-up words like "sista" and "nigga."  Just sayin'.