In 1990, when the first edition of Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought¹ was published, I was a ten-year-old biracial black and white “blackgirl”² whose white mother had recently fled her violent white boyfriend who regularly screamed at and about her “nigger baby” in an alcohol- and drug-induced haze. That same year I found myself resentfully attending Alateen meetings while my mom attended Al-Anon³; ashamedly wetting the bed during nightmares; indignantly tolerating our etched-on-Michigan's-highways transience between my uncle's in Melvindale, grandmother's in Detroit, and school in Redford; and stubbornly expressing the worst attitude I could conjure up as a fifth-grader. My little blackgirl self was wounded, fearful, angry, and assured by the self-righteousness of youth that life would always hurt as much as it did right then; I felt blackgirl broken. Aside from my mom's steadfast routine of working-two-jobs-for-money-but-really-four-jobs as a single parent and my chauffer to and from school from wherever we were living, 1990 was chaotic and scary.

Fourteen years later, shaken to the core but not shattered by the remnants of familial dysfunction—an absentee father, childhood domestic violence, and teenage rape alongside always being one of the first, few, and/or only blackgirls in my class from kindergarten through a master's degree—I was at the University of Denver as a first-year doctoral student when a faculty member of color recommended that I read bell hooks. In response to his suggestion, I thought, “bell who?” A voracious reader, I engaged with …