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Black Twitter is fuming after learning a white woman had the audacity to write a book about Black feminism and deem it Trap Feminist Theology. Jennifer Buck, a professor at Azusa Pacific University, is getting slammed for privileging her whiteness and writing a whole book, Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theologyabout the intersectionality of the Black woman’s experience.

The description reads:

This book engages with the overlap of black experience, hip-hop music, ethics, and feminism to focus on a subsection known as “trap feminism” and construct a Trap Feminist Theology. Interacting with concepts of moral agency, resistance, and imagination, Trap Feminist Theology seeks to build an intersectional theology emphasizing women’s agency in their bodies and sexuality while also remaining faithful to the “trap” context from which they are socially located. Such a project will redefine the “trap” context from one of marginalization to one of joy and flourishing within black feminist theology. This theology overlaps with black ethics in subversive empowerment that forms a new normative ethic and family system within a subsect of the black community. Trap feminism emerges out of trap culture, where the black woman is creating a space outside of the barriers of poverty harnessing autonomy, employment, and agency to allow for a reinvention of self-identity while remaining faithful to social location.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s Black with a capital B! Secondly, White women do not know anything about “Black ethics,” the trap or trap culture or any aspect of the Black women’s experience, identity or how the two insect. White women are not experts on the Black experience.

It turns out that Buck is a fan of Black girl magic. In the book, she said her days as a culture vulture started during her teenage years when she was a hip-hop dance teacher. Her love for hip-hop and “trap sub-genre” grew from there. She acknowledged that hasn’t had the experiences of a “trap queen” but feels like she can touch on feminism because “it’s for everybody.”

“I am a straight, privileged, white woman and I am aware that I have not lived the embodied experiences of a trap queen. However, I strongly believe that feminism is for everybody.”

How brass of a white woman to articulate that while she is not about that life she has the right to educate the masses about it and “redefine” what it is. She acknowledged that she had zero qualifications but still met the criteria for the job. It’s the white privilege for me.

Buck, who has been “teaching” about trap feminism since 2017, was also given $10,000 from Yale University to go forth with her audacious endeavor which was surely validating. This was a grant that could’ve went to an actual Black feminist/womanist for an accurate body of work. How dare they provide the funds for a white woman to take up Black women’s space and allow a spectator to “school” the world on bad bitches and trap queens.

Furthermore, Trap Feminism was coined by author and journalist Sesali Bowen in 2014, and Buck wrote a book about it as if she was a pioneering voice on the theory. Bowen confronted Buck and while unapologetic, she did inform Bowen that she credited her in the footnotes of her book. Further, Buck wasn’t even familiar with the groundwork Bowen had done until her research assistant told her. If you’re a colonizer just say that. The cultural appropriation is getting out of hand.

The publishers of the book, Wipf and Stock, told Soujourners that they have “initiated the removal [of] the book from publication and distribution.” If you want to read about the Black woman’s experience from thee actual Black trap feminist, then purchase Bowen’s Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes From A Trap Feminist here.

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