Berkeley Talks: J Finley on how Black women use sass to claim their humanity

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Ula Taylor: Good afternoon, everyone. Yes, I’m going to put sass here. Yes. I am super excited this afternoon to introduce you to one of our own. Whoo, whoo! That is J graduated from our Ph.D. program and I had the distinct honor to serve as her dissertation chair. While a student here, J was already on academic fire and helped to create the sixth floor culture, one steeped with intellectual curiosity, creative art practices, and a deep commitment to explore all angles of an idea.

To say that I am proud of J is an understatement, but I just don’t have the words to fully express my heartfelt happiness because J is most deserving of all of their professional and personal riches. Now, if you didn’t know, Dr. J Finley is a critical interdisciplinary scholar who studies Black women’s history, performance, and cultural expression. Her current research focuses on the performative and political efficacies of Black women’s humor and comedy.

Finley is one of the co-founders of the Critical Human Studies Association, an international network of scholars, comedian practitioners and activists dedicated to engaging key issues pertaining to the productive and destructive power of humor. In February 2025, her exhibition, Black Ecologies in Contemporary Art, co-curated by Dr. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. Did I pronounce it name right? OK. Opened at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College.

Finley’s book Sass, which is right before you, Black Women’s Humor and Humanity, was published in 2024. And J also has a number of journals and academic journals. Before I turn the podium over to J, I want to remind all of you that the Department of African American Studies recognizes that UC, Berkeley sits on the site of the Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Mamaku Ohlone tribe and other familiars, descendants, of the Verona band. Please join me in welcoming Dr. J Finley.

J Finley: Well, thank you so much Ula, for that wonderful introduction and good afternoon to everybody. Come on. It is? Listen. OK. Welcome. Good afternoon everybody, and Savannah. How wonderful it is to be here today back on the sixth floor. This is really where it truly started for me, and I will always consider this place my intellectual home, my very first one in fact. You could all say it started in this very room. This is the room where I was in a class with Professor Lee Rayford, where we were doing, 201A is what we called it, interdisciplinary research methods. That was the first class that I took when I was a graduate student here in 2006. Believe it or not, that’s when I started.

And so thank you so much Ula, my cherished OG over there for that wonderful introduction and much appreciation to the Department of African American and African Diaspora studies, of course. What a privilege. I once called you all my esteemed professors. I see a couple of them sitting here, and now I can call you my colleagues and that’s amazing. Not everybody gets to have a full circle moment in their life and so I want to take a minute to appreciate that it’s crazy how it feels like a full circle moment and I’m humbled. I really am humbled to the core. And so I want to say thank you to Barbara. Where’s Barbara?

Barbara Montano back there for doing all the work to make sure everything has been taken care of with my visit, arranging it, advertising the event. Thank you also to Lindsey Villarreal. From day one, my A1 day one, always looking out for me and making sure that I feel held, seen and cared for so thank you. And thank you all also for joining me this afternoon. I know you all could have been a million places, but here you are. It’s almost spring break.

I’m coming here today of course to share my work, work that began when I was a doctoral student in African diaspora studies right here, and hopefully to inspire some critical reflection on the political force of Black women’s humor and Black women’s joy in these trying times in which we find ourselves, times that Black folks have seen before, no doubt, in different iterations, maybe what VèVè Clark might’ve called repeating patterns in paradigms. If you know you know. When individual and institutional forces are trying to bury Black people in our deep and beautiful and pained history, the knowledge that we have gifted the world trying to break our commitment and our resolve to create the just and equitable world in which we want to live, our very presence is the symbol of the ripening fruit of America’s freedom tree. And this is not a time for silence or capitulation, this is a time to become even more conscious of our capacities as we perennially must in times of crisis.

My research engages with questions about race, gender, sexuality, and how Black women use humor to play with and many times undercut the boundaries of those categories. And so as a scholar and practitioner of Black feminist comedy, from the page to the stage, I think through the promises and the challenges of humor as a tool that enables the subversion of cultural and social norms. Interestingly, norms that function to define humor in the first place.

My book, Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity, argues that we can and we must codify the particularity of Black women’s humor. I’d like to begin this afternoon with the cover image of my book. It’s a work called Famous Statue by the artist Lorna Simpson. And so at the center of a photographic collage stands a statue of a nude woman barefoot on a pedestal. She’s draped in flowing fabric and the subject’s feminine figure is relaxed with a bend in the knee, a slight curve in her hip marks her as a figure at ease. The statue bears the head of a smiling Black woman, head cocked left, mouth agape in a playful laugh. Her eyes veer off, not quite vacant though. They appear to be looking toward an object. The figure is ornamented with a flourish of white paint. The bust indicated by unmet Xs on each corner emphasizing the seams of this trans-historical figure.

Zhenru Zhang discussed the satirical humor of an earlier Lorna Simpson photographic text, it’s called Twenty Questions (A Sampler), and so they argue that some of the humor and the artwork comes from the composition of the image that troubles the field of visuality in which Black women’s bodies have traditionally been portrayed distorted, stereotypically troped by white people. Instead by portraying the Black woman from behind so that the viewer can only see the back of her head and shoulders, Zhang argues, “Simpson creates what is in effect an anti-portrait.” Curator, Lauri Firstenberg further elucidates the anti-portrait posture of Simpson’s representation of the Black woman’s body in Twenty Questions. And she says, “The negating gesture of depicting an inaccessible body pictured in parts upsets the task of the portrait, which traditionally has been to offer access to personality, or in the case of the archival document to identify and to classify.”

I want to bring Zhang and Firstenberg’s analyses of Simpson’s anti-portraiture to bear on Famous Statue because of the way that it highlights how the humor of incongruity. In the cover image between the traditional … Hey, what’s up, Allegra? Excuse me, the traditional female figure embodied in the statue and Simpson’s anti-portrait of a Black woman’s laughing head, how that creates an expression of Black woman’s sass on multiple levels. You see it first in the conspicuous hand of the artist who has created the subversively funny stitched subject and in the laughing figure herself. The subject laughs, she speaks back to a long history that needs Black woman’s bodies but refuses to honor our humanity. Ideological assumptions about the racialized and gendered notions of classical beauty are troubled in this Frankenstein-esque rendering. Simpson’s work, as Dean Baquet puts it in a recent piece in The New York Times, “Is about a lot of big topics, race, gender, identity, language. But perhaps above all it is about who gets to be the storyteller.”

The politics of representation resound in Simpson’s own description of Famous Statue, the question of who gets to be a historical subject, who is entitled to inhabit the position of the speaker?

In a 2016 interview by Alison Hurst, Simpson describes her work thus, she says, “The image in Famous Statue is an AP photo of a female figure from a museum exhibition that’s been altered for cropping. Basically part of the image has been indicated by a squiggle. I added this head, which is from a wig ad in Ebony magazine, but of this hybrid figure, the Famous Statue is what gets commemorated or remembered. The superimposed head becomes a symbol for what’s forgotten, what’s ignored. The Black woman’s perfectly placed head with a playful laughing face brings the focus away from the body as the primary site of contemplation. Its stark imposition, a subversive act of redress. The beauty and elegance of Black women that Ebony magazine worked so hard to uplift is foregrounded and displaces the traditional white woman’s nude body as the focal point of the gaze. The visible seam is subtle, it’s satirical and humorous. And the spliced subject invites questions about history, race, gender, the body, power, performance, and representation.” The same kinds of questions that I attend to in my book.

Now, let me both step back and step forward here to offer a bit of context. The 21st century has seen an explosion of Black women’s comedy across genres of popular culture. Numerous stand-up comedy specials appear on Comedy Central. You got them on Netflix, HBO. Other platforms are recognizing and appreciating the unique and varied expressions of Black women’s humor. There are more Black women humorous who are professionally thriving than ever before. Black women are in the house.

Shonda Rhimes, Issa Rae, Gina Yashere, all successful showrunners and actresses, well, not Shonda Rhimes, actresses in their own right. Countless Black women such as Naomi Ekperigin, Ashley Nicole Black, Azie Mira Dungey are working in writers rooms for award-winning film and television shows. Amber Ruffin and Sam Jay have hosted popular late night television shows. Quinta Brunson, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Janelle James are each leading characters in the primetime comedic Emmy award-winning mockumentary sitcom, Abbott Elementary. And this is all to say that now more than ever across genres, Black women’s comedic talents are being taken seriously and with big payoffs. Financially for the artists and representationally in terms of expanding the pool of who and what gets recognized as both Black and superlative.

This representational sea change exists amid some other facts that speak to Black women’s experiences in the United States in not so glowing a light. Since early 2020 more than 30 US states, and probably even more now since things seem to be getting bleaker by the day on this front, have advanced attacks on the writing via book bans and on the critical intellectual strains of thought that challenge systems of power that constrain, devalue and oppress Black people and other minoritized groups. The legislative struggles over the inclusion of critical race theory across school curricula have unleashed a spate of book banning that have significantly affected Black women.

In 2023 scholars, Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Khalil Gibran Muhammad penned an open letter spotlighting the erasure of the intellectual histories and political work of Black women and Black queer people in Black studies they maintained, they said, “Their campaign has not only targeted and demonized anti-racist work, but they broadened their attacks to discredit frameworks that Black women and queer people have produced in order to explain, to describe and to transform the conditions of their lives.” Ironically, but not surprisingly, Black women’s intellectual and cultural production, especially when we take critical positions, seem to be more likely to be taken seriously when articulated in unserious settings like the arts and entertainment.

Black women continue to experience joy and take pleasure in its expression even without some broad sweeping ideal of political hope in which all inequities are erased, in which all the institutional and discursive structures that exclude and vilify Black women, seemingly at every turn, are exposed and subverted. Black women’s experiences of anti-Blackness, misogynoir, structural economic inequity and disempowerment are often followed by feelings of pain, of cynicism, hopelessness even. After all, “What can hope mean,” Jill Dolan asks, “In a world of terror?” And more to the point of this exploration today, what can performers do politically against those overwhelming odds? Amidst these affective states, even hopelessness, how has Black women sass become central to the humor of contemporary Black women? And what’s that got to do with the politics of joy? Well, even hopelessness can be a source of joy and pleasure if you’re laughing at it.

Today I would like to briefly think about the ways that Black women’s humor asks us to think about Black joy in the possibility of the present. That is, what might it mean to focus on the Black joy of illuminating the historically framed now? After all, as Kelly Carter Jackson notes, “Black joy is the ultimate expression of Black humanity, the joy of laughter, food, dress, adornment, rhetoric, play, art can be employed to dispel and destroy whiteness as supreme, aspirational, norm. Black joy makes room for hope that better conditions. More livable lives will ultimately prevail, but as a fleeting emotional state, the kind of Black joy the women under investigation here expressed is fundamentally oriented toward the present.”

And this is the story, Sass tells the story of Black women’s humor rooted in the racist, patriarchal, many times degrading, conditions from which it developed as a unique tactic of speaking back to power. An embodied expression of resilience at the moment of crisis that has come to be the hallmark of Black women’s humor. Facing dehumanization at every turn, yet at every turn we say otherwise. We lay claim to our humanity and in the process we might make you laugh.

My book offers a comprehensive study of the personal, the poetic, and the political dimensions of Black women’s humor from the period of chattel slavery to the contemporary moment. And essentially I see my book as making three primary contributions. First, thinking about sass as behavior rather than a fixed trait. That is sass is something that Black women do rather than an essentialized way of being. Secondly, thinking about sass as a response to the structural presence of racism and misogyny. That is the exigencies that necessitate sass are connected to systemic structures of oppression. And last that sass is embodied. And so what I mean by that is although it can be verbal and gestural, the bodies that produce sass are centered in my theory in the book. And so this is just an overview, I’m not going to go over it. This is just the chapter titles. You can get a book and check them out. She needs the money. Come on now.

Rather than presenting a complete history, Sass offers a genealogical sketch of Black women’s humor. And I outline its comedic elements and aesthetics and place them in broader sociopolitical context, especially the context of American popular culture. Each of the chapter offers a thematic examination and most with ethnographic analysis. If you knew me while I was a student here, I was going around to comedy clubs, I was performing comedy, I learned how to perform stand-up comedy. One of the chapters I talk explicitly about my own experience performing as a stand-up comic. I still teach stand-up comedy, and I still do it for the purposes of research, mercifully not to make money. I situate all of that within the context of my theory of sass as a genre of discourse.

Now, I selected for inclusion in this study, Black women whose work demonstrates the particularity and also the limited continuity of Black women’s humor, even across gulfs as wide as the Middle Passage. To use Saidiya Hartman’s poignant words, “The collective movement points toward what awaits us, what has yet to come into view, what they anticipate. The time and place better than here, a glimpse of the earth not owned by anyone. Inside the circle it is clear that every song is really the same song, but crooned in infinite variety, every story altered and unchanging. How can I live? I want to be free. Hold on.”

The Black woman in my book sing the same song, crooned in infinite variety. It is a song that reaches toward freedom, and with sass we hang on. Because see, sass moves people, it jolts people, it awakens from comfort zones affecting social relations and igniting embodied sensations, be it terror, pleasure, relief, or release. Infused in Black woman’s humor, sass can make you laugh and it can help you live. In its primal scene, sass is first and foremost for the subject of sass, she who deploys it.

And so I invite us to think about sass as a range of possibilities within conditions of constraint. Subtle or explicit in these conditions and trust, many times one will need to look closely and critically to acknowledge them. These conditions are necessary for deployments of sass to be intelligible as such. Sass is the thing that makes Black woman’s humor legible, that’s how we know what it is. When a Black woman is speaking back to power intentionally within conditions of constraint, and it elicits laughter, what’s underneath that humor is always going to be a critique of power from the perspective of the subject of sass, the Black woman who needed to make use of it within those conditions in that moment.

And so now I want to take us to a chapter. This is from the first chapter of my book. It’s called “Never to Be Conquered Sass: Subjection and Black Women Self-Possessed.” And so this chapter focuses on the historical backdrop of the development of sass within the conditions of chattel slavery, right?

So, specifically, within the context of the master-slave dialectic that produced the necessity for sass to develop as a strategic tool for speaking back to power as a means of claiming one’s humanity. And so, what I want to do is I want to read a little excerpt from my book. And I think this is a moment that I think people will find surprising in sass, is the story that begins my first chapter. And so, this is a story that begins with the American freedom fighter, the American treasure, Fannie Lou Hamer. And who thought that Fannie Lou Hamer was going to make it into a book theorizing Black women’s humor? So, let me bring you to where I am, to where I was when I wrote this. There’s this moment where I talk about her speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 when they refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party, OK? And so, in that speech, she is recounting her experience of trying to register folks to vote in Mississippi where she is. And so, she’s on a bus.

And she’s on a bus, and the police stop her and they detain all the people in the bus. And so, they take them to a jailhouse in rural Mississippi. And so, she’s recounting this story at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, OK? And so, let me just read a little snatch from the book. OK? And so, she’s talking about her beating. So, she experienced a beating while she was in jail that day, a beating, in fact, that disabled her for the rest of her life. And so, before the beating commenced, Hamer endured an excruciating wait. And she said, “After I was placed in the cell, I began to hear sounds of licks and screams. I could hear the sounds of licks and horrible screams.” Being forced to listen to others brutalized instilled fear and terror, yet what Hamer heard, in addition to the sounds of blows and cries, was a chilling interaction between the police and Annell Ponder, a Southern Christian leadership conference activist who had also been arrested that day. This interaction was surely familiar to Hamer, reminiscent of the antebellum master slave dialectic that still characterized Southern life in the mid 20th century.

“And I could hear somebody say, “Can you say, ‘Yes, sir,’ nigger? Can you say, ‘Yes, sir’?” And they would say other horrible names.” The woman’s response, or response that inverted that very same dialectic no doubt had an overwhelming effect on Hamer, enraging and frightening her, but also strengthening her resolve to endure in the face of such torturous brutality. She would say, “Yes, I can say it. Yes, sir.” “So well, say it.” She said, “I don’t know you well enough.” They beat her, I don’t know how long, and after a while she began to pray and ask God to have mercy on those people. Hamer heard a powerful inversion, a sense of topsy-turvy that may have struck in her terror or laughter, perhaps some combination. When the officer demanded to hear, “Yes, sir,” from Ponder, Hamer heard sass in her response. “I don’t know you well enough.”

For the transgression of talking back, for daring to undermine the authority of white supremacy, this woman suffered a relentless beating all the while, Ponder maintained consciousness of herself as a human being empowered with the agency, even in her absolutely prone position, to speak back to those who would assume they had authority over her. Ponder sassed to the officer, who saw himself as her master, was an active assertion of her sense of her humanity to herself, and to the object of her sass, those beating her, and to Hamer too. It demonstrated that some other forms of relations were possible outside of the Black-white interactions that characterized mid 20th century Southern life. When Hamer narrated the story at the DNC, Ponder’s sass was not merely a seasoning to the story, but it was the apex, the central feature that revealed Black women’s resolve to be free. Ponder’s response to power was clearly important to Hamer, who included it not only in her narrative of the event at the DNC, but also for a widely heard radio interview with Radio Pacifica in 1965 when she was discussing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s political platform.

The sass Hamer related in the narrative served a critically important role in her own story because it demonstrated to those listening how inspiring and influential it was to others when Black women owned themselves in such a deep, fundamental way. So much so that they were willing to performatively exact it at the risk of dismemberment and death in the cause of freedom. Liberation was an empowered agentive state of consciousness that sometimes preceded a physical state of freedom for those enslaved, or for women like Ponder and Hamer who were subjected to the institutions and conditions precipitated by the afterlife of slavery. (Light applause) Thank you.

Fannie Lou Hamer wasn’t meaning for that moment to be funny and neither was Annell Ponder. But in that moment, and you see this playing out, if you understood the conditions in which Ponder would dare to do that, you might’ve thought it was funny. Her act of self-possession may have manifested in you a feeling or a sense of joy, in the darkest yet brightest possible ways. And so, to put some closure on that, one source says that when Ponder received a visitor after her beating in Mississippi, her face was so swollen and battered that she could hardly speak. But she managed to eke out a single whisper, “Freedom.”

Ponder surely did not mean for her sassy act to be amusing, yet it forces us to think about Black women’s humor outside of its usual frames, the way it can unmask and subvert relations of power in moments when Black women must lay claim to themselves as human beings by bearing their interiority, a momentary shattering of expectations that potentially evokes laughter. By the end of the chapter from Fannie Lou Hamer, I look at Harriet Jacobs to a close reading of a speech by Nicole Hannah Jones, which she gave at Middlebury College in 2020. We see sass not as a personality trait, but informed, intentional behavior, in the moment, that happens within the historical context of necessity. So, while it may seem dark to find humor in the horrors of enslavement and the relations of power it inaugurated, Black women’s irreverence within those conditions can be funny.

The lowly object speaks back emerging as the subject, revealing for her audience, even if that audience is herself, the truth about the thing, that Black people are human beings. So, let me take us now on a journey through some pop-cultural moments that sass can help us understand and also hopefully make us laugh. Now, this first one I’m going to show, the Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. This is a moment that you all probably remember from last summer, July of 2024, at a congressional hearing. So let me just play this moment for us right here.

(Plays a video clip)

Jasmine Crockett: Do you know what we’re here for? You know we’re here …

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I don’t think you know what you’re here for.

Jasmine Crockett: Well, you the one talking about …

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I think your fake eyelashes are messing up.

Jasmine Crockett: … ain’t nothing …

Speaker 1: Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. (Gavel sounds ) Order. Mr. Chairman.

Speaker 2: That’s beneath [inaudible] regain order of your committee.

Speaker 1: Order.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I do have a point of order and I would like to move to take down Ms. Greene’s words. That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the-

Speaker 1: Meeting will suspend. Meeting will suspend.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: … physical appearance of another person.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Are your feelings hurt?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Put her words down.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Aw.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Oh, girl, baby girl.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Oh, really?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Don’t even play.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Baby girl? I don’t think so.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We are going to move and we’re going to take your words down. Thank you.

Speaker 2: I second that motion.

Speaker 1: So, do you agree to strike your words?

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Yeah. I’ll agree.

Speaker 1: OK. Ms. Greene agrees to strike her words.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I believe she should apologize. No. No. No.

Speaker 1: … Hold on. Then, after Mr. Perry’s will be recognized, then Ms. Greene …

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I’m not apologizing.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well then, you’re not striking your words.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I am not apologizing.

Speaker 1: Let’s stop. Come on, guys.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: It’s me.

Speaker 1: Ms. Crockett?

Jasmine Crockett: I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach blonde, bad-built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities. Correct?

Speaker 1: I thought, what now?

Speaker 3: Chairman, I make a motion to strike those words.

Speaker 1: I don’t think that the …

Jasmine Crockett: I’m trying to find clarification on what …

Speaker 3: Chairman, motion. We’re not …

Speaker 1: Order, order.

Jasmine Crockett: I’m trying to get clarification.

Speaker 3: OK, calm down.

Speaker 1: OK.

J Finley: Oh. Wait, wait, wait. Whoa. Yeah, no, you’re going to get yours in a second. Pause. All right. So, in the first interaction, we can clearly see Jasmine Crockett enacting sass as a response in the moment to the insult that was hurled from Marjorie Taylor Greene about her eyelashes. And so, where do we see sass specifically? Well, you see it in her language, right? The B6, the bleached blonde, bad-built butch body. Yeah. You see it in her gesture as the camera cuts to her. You can see it in her, the style in which she delivered it. And you can especially and most importantly see it in her intent, why she needed to deploy it at that particular moment.

So, Crockett is talking back to someone who fashions themselves a superior. And in the context of this brazen slight about Crockett’s physical appearance, this attempt to take her down a notch, Jasmine Crockett lays claim to her humanity for herself in the moment.

And this claim within this context in which she deploys it is what distinguishes her clap back as sass. It made her laugh. You could see her laughing on there. It made Jamie Raskin laugh. It made y’all laugh, right? But what it did is it laid bare the relations of power in which it occurred in that moment. And so, there’s been joy that has emerged from this moment of sass that was first and foremost, and that was for herself. She didn’t do that for our benefit. She did that for herself. And so, she found joy, but other people have found joy in it as well. And so, of course there have emerged a spate of remixes to the B6, and we got to play a little bit of those, too.

(Plays audio of a song remix using Jasmine Crockett’s words: “Bad-built butch body.”)

Now, let me play something else for you. So, after this moment goes viral, there is another moment that happens, right? So, Saturday Night Live. You know have arrived when Saturday Night Live comes to do a parody of you, right? And so, on September 28th, Saturday Night Live featured a sketch with the character of Jasmine Crockett. Now, let me play this for you.

(Plays another  video clip)

Speaker 4: C-SPAN. Please welcome Tex ass Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Charlie. Would you say I’m the most brat congresswoman?

Speaker 4: I think it’s a tie between you and Lauren Boba, after she got her jubbly squeezed the beetle juice.

Speaker 2: That’s fair.

Speaker 4: Now, I have a song on my album called Mean Girls. And you went viral this summer for what you called Marjorie Taylor Greene. What was it?

Speaker 2: Bleach Blonde, bad-built butch body.

Speaker 4: Love that. I want to hear you pop up on everything. So, this is Jasmine Crockett’s mean girl cam. Jay-Jay Barnes.

Speaker 2: Smoky eyes, sofa sexual, can’t order donuts, but has donut body.

Speaker 4: Yes. Matt Gaetz.

Speaker 2: Punchable pig, puppy pervert, face card always declines.

Speaker 4: What? Cherry non-drain.

Speaker 2: Crazy shape crooked bitch. Why is that county shaped like a tapeworm with a hat on?

Speaker 4: Amazing. Thank you, Jasmine. Troy, what do we do now?

Speaker 2: It’s 200 [inaudible] …

J Finley: So, in this sketch on Saturday Night Live, you can see that the writers of Saturday Night Live have availed themselves of the trope of the sassy Black woman, right? They’ve turned her sass into the sassy Black woman for popular consumption. And what’s important here is that the context matters. In the sketch, sass is flavor. In the congressional hearings, it’s a powerful critique in that moment. The issue is that the writers of Saturday Night Live took this moment and made it stand in for Crockett, the so-called bad girl of C-SPAN. And so, the sketch is literally how parody strips sass of its functional power to disarm in the moment, to deploy it in a way that lays claim to a Black woman’s humanity. And so, in this parody, the writers sit Crockett beside herself, transforming her into the sassy Black woman. Sass is just a reading, as the kids say, for the purpose of entertaining.

Yes, there is critique of power, but it’s not in the moment. There appears to be a more generalized critique of the political right by way of Crockett’s hot takes. But I don’t love it. I do love this though. I do get an ounce of joy from the next one that I’m going to show you, OK? Now, here’s who you see. This is Senator Angela Alsobrooks. And so she’s the new senator from Maryland, and this is her. She’s speaking, she’s questioning Robert F. Kennedy at his hearing for the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. So, here’s this one.

Angela Alsobrooks: I have a … You said to … You were on a show on Feb. 26, 2021, an interview with Dr. Judy Mikovits where you said the following. And I quote, “We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.” Can you please explain what you wrote?

Robert F. Kennedy: There’s a series of studies, I think most of them by Poland, that show that to particular antigens that Blacks have a much stronger reaction. There’s differences in reaction to different products by different races.

Angela Alsobrooks: So I have 17 seconds left. Let me just ask you then. So, what different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received? What different vaccine schedule should I have received?

Robert F. Kennedy: Well, I mean, the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens than …

Angela Alsobrooks: This is so dangerous.

Robert F. Kennedy: … the same measles vaccine.

Angela Alsobrooks: Mr. Kennedy, with all due respect, that is so dangerous. Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to. That is so dangerous. I will be voting against your nomination because your views are dangerous to our state and to our country.

Robert F. Kennedy: I mean, do you think science is dangerous, Senator?

Angela Alsobrooks: I have a …

J Finley: Right. So, in this clip, it’s easy to Ms. Alsobrooks’s very subtle deployment of sass. It’s very easy to miss it, but she does deploy it, right, because she’s talking about someone who is a vaccine skeptic, right? Who is going to absolutely harm Black people with his ideological positions and the policies he’s going to enact on the back of it, right?

But what she does is she puts her own body on the line, herself on the line when she says, when she asks them that question and she tips her glasses, right? “What vaccine schedule should I receive.” Right? So, this is a moment that might not strike you as funny, but if you are literate in sass, right, in the conditions that create the need for Black women to speak back to power in that moment, that might tickle you a little bit. That might make you laugh.

And it’s one of my favorite moments, in fact, because I love the way, the glasses, where she put her glasses down, because that’s how you know, this is how you understand that she is that she is talking back in that particular moment. So, I want to, how much time do I have? I have time? Am I good on my time?

OK, good. So, these are high profile examples, stand-ins we might say, for the kinds of everyday experiences of ridicule, mockery, and dismissal of Black women who are trained in seasoned leaders across a variety of fields and experiences all over the world. Black women are in a constant state of negotiating context of constraint, disrespect, and deep hostility. And our humor has been a powerful tool that has enabled us to speak back, to assert our humanity and impede outright objection. And those moments can be a source of joy.

And so, I want to finish up on this, and this is a chapter that is, the third chapter of my book is called “Butch Lives Matter: Sass, Masculinity and Failure.” And so, this chapter focuses on Black women stand-ups who have masculine presentations of self, and what might first strike you as a reader as a non-obvious or surprising place to look for Black women sass is in the stand-up comedy of Black butch women. And so, while Black butches, myself included, often do not perform the gestures that typically come to mind with the trope of the sassy Black woman, a notion that my book unpacks and seeks to hopefully disabuse the readership of, my theory of sass encompasses Black butches too. In sass, you’ll find some conceptual and political framework for thinking about how even the proximity to injury often faced by Black queer people holds the potential for resistance and even liberation.

And so, while sass exists as a discourse of genre because of its origination in the structures of chattel slavery and its afterlives, it has evolved to confront and tear down other systems of oppression as well. And so, in this chapter, I discuss a concept that I develop called butch sass, when Black women make use of the stories about our lives as being masculine women, but at the very same time we embrace our womanhood. And so, the last reading I’ll do is a bit that is by the comic Sam Jay that spotlights this issue in her special, 3 In The Morning. And I think it gives some clarity on butch sass as a concept. So, I’ll just read here for a second. This is a section in the book called, “I Got the Real Dick.”

So, riffing on the universal experience of bickering with one significant other in public, Sam Jay tells the story of being at the airport with her girlfriend who has brought too many bags, when a man comes in to offer help.

OK, I’m going to try to do my Sam Jay, OK? When men see a masculine woman, that’s their favorite shit. They try to come in, “I got the real dick, groupie fucks. I got the real dick. Where you want the dick? What bag my dick got to pick up?” Sam Jay slightly chuckles to herself. And then he jacks up the bag and looks at me like, “Now what? Like, nigga, get mine, too. You getting bags? Get all the bitch’s bags. The fuck do you think? I’m a lady, carry my shit. Be a fucking gentleman.”

Sam Jay leans into failure, enlivening it, and forcing spectators to contend with the interconnections between fear, discipline of hegemonic power. This sets up a liberatory collision between their ideas about Black womanhood. What is the role of failure in Black butch women standup and how do they strategically use its dialectical relationship with freedom as a pathway toward an otherwise world, where at the very-

Pathway toward an otherwise world, where at the very least there is an alternative to the disciplinary norms of gender. And so there’s a dual audience for butch bass, I argue. The world as a whole who read Black butch women as not quite, but want to be men, and straight men specifically who refuse to see us as anything other than women, or more specifically, a walking pair of tits and ass. As I continue to reiterate throughout the book, sass is first and foremost for the self. The humor of butch sass comes from the inversion of seeing the butch body, recognizing it, and then hearing her talk about her body in very specific ways. That saying is a doing, it is a performative, which does something in the world in terms of producing what a Black woman is and who she can be.

So this explosion of norms that happens is an expansion of femininity to include the butch body in person, and that becomes a site of humor. It’s funny because it’s true. Oh yeah, someone who looks like this can be and is in fact a woman. That duality, that living on the edge. The refusal to accept legibility is a particular comedic trope for Black butch comics on the stage.

So sass might be enacted like Adele Givens joked on Def Comedy Jam in 1993. She said, “If I can suck your dick, then damn it, I can talk about it, but I’m still a human being and you’re going to respect me as such.” Well butch sass be like, “I might dress like a man, strap it on, talk about football, basketball, chop it up with dudes at the bar, rock a fade, whatever. But still, I’m a woman. I might dig masculinity, but still, I’m a woman and I demand that you recognize that about me. I will not be defeminized, even though I present myself with masculine style and sensibilities. I want you to accept that I accept myself as a woman. I don’t see myself as a contradiction, and you won’t either.”

In that radical acceptance, therein lies the possibility for experiencing a deep sense of joy in the present. In some cases, enacting sass, speaking back to authority that tries to contain and discipline me, doing so with style and intention, that can facilitate a moment of joy in the present. Also and importantly, let me emphasize the politics of that joy today. The deep down spirit of self-possession that this kind of joy brings. This is the seed and the soul of the kind of consciousness without which true liberation is impossible. Thank you.

(Applause)

Ula Taylor: Thank you so much, J. We have some time for a few questions.

Audience 1: My name is [inaudible]. I arrived late, but I’m just delighted to be here.

J Finley: Thank you.

Audience 1: And this is all clap back, Black 50 month, Black women’s month. We have to do this every day, all day, and I’m thrilled about your presentation, but when you’re giving examples of political individuals, and please note ladies, it says Kamala right here. Who you got?

J Finley: Oh, Kamala on there. Uh-huh.

Audience 1: Yeah, when she was having her dialogue with whichever one, and she kept saying, “I’m speaking,” I said, “That’s it.”

J Finley: Absolutely. Now listen, so Kamala was in a different iteration of this presentation, but so was funky ass Donald Trump, and I didn’t want to do that today. I didn’t want to do that today. I didn’t want to bring that and that was in a different version of this presentation that does not focus on the politics of joy, even though it could. But absolutely, the moments when Kamala Harris, when she’s at the debate, I believe that she’s debating, is that the one where she’s debating with Donald Trump and she says, “I’m speaking.”

Kamala Harris has many moments where she enacts sass right in the moment and in very powerful ways. But that is a classic, very specific one that a couple of my aunties sent me when it came out. And they were like, “Yeah, this is it.” That’s how you know it’s working, is when your aunties get you up and say, “Yeah.”

Audience 2: First of all, come on, I just want to honor how powerful this work is. I was just looking, we were in a writing group in 2010.

J Finley: 2010, a long time ago.

Audience 2: It’s just so cool to see how much this is. The project’s incredible and I just want to just witness that. It was dope then, but I had no idea that we’d get … It’s incredible. I have a question actually, very much built on the same thing you said about sass and Kamala, because it’s interesting. I don’t need those moments as sass if only because for me, the origin, the impetus of sass is the interaction between a Black daughter and Black mother.

J Finley: Yes, absolutely.

Audience 2: One iteration I generation would love to hear. I guess my question is how Black girlhood studies Black girl’s experiences and sass. So for me, and this is as a non-sass expert, but yet a sass expert, the sass is on the daughter side of the diet, the sass is the response to the Black mothers. When I hear Kamala saying, “I’m speaking,” it’s not the daughter, it’s the mom. For me, when I hear, when I hear that tone, it’s a different orientation.

And maybe those are both sides of sass. There’s something around Black girlhood in particular, the orientation around interfacing with a Black mother, and that might be part of the continuity around all kinds of genders of Black people and all these different genders of Black people who engage in that. Sass is a deeply trained behavior and deeply laconic experts because of their orientation of Black mothers. So question about daughtering, mothering, sass, and does that speak to both sides of the power of dynamic between Black mothers and daughters?

J Finley: Yes. Thank you Savannah, for that question. I think, OK, so I want to talk about the origin. The way that this project, what happened, how sass is a thing, is because when I was writing my dissertation, I was focused on Black women standup comedy from 1968 to the present. And there was this one moment in my dissertation where I talk about sass. I think the scholar, Daryl Cumber Dance composed this anthology of Black women’s humor. And there was this one moment where she talks about sass as so central to Black women’s humor. And it was about that moment. It was about the speaking back in that particular relationship, the what does it mean for a child to talk back to their parent. Because this is how it was understood, but she was talking about how Black women have developed that particular expressive tool, but essentially …

So that was a very undeveloped idea in my dissertation. And what I really wanted to know was what is so particular about Black women’s humor How might we theorize it? And so, what I actually found when I was doing the research was that people have been talking about Black women’s sass historians, literary scholars have been talking about Black women sass in particular in that relationship. So Harriet Jacobs, for example, as an enslaved person, she’s one of the people who use sass in the context of slavery. So when people talk about people getting sassy, it’s like usually you sass your parents. So that was where it started.

So thinking about … Somebody, in fact, one of the scholars argued that sass was an expression of mother tongue, that it was about this way that Black women have developed an oral tradition that Black women have developed. Now, fast-forward then I got a book that was called Smart and Sassy, and this was in the Black girlhood story. Joyce West Stevens wrote this book. And so that book is about how young Black girls develop sass as an expressive tactic within the context of childhood in order to protect themselves as sort of a weapon of the weak.

And I think that one of the things that I have found about sass, so it’s not necessarily about that relationship. I don’t necessarily think that it’s always a reflection of the child speaking back, but it’s about speaking back to someone who is in an assumed superior, so in whatever kind of condition. So this is why you can find Kamala Harris talking back to Donald Trump, even Joe Biden, because she has been positioned within the context of the power relations that slavery inaugurated and that still live with us today. She is always going to be positioned as someone who is in a position, but within that particular context of the debate, she’s going to be positioned as someone who needs to talk back. And so I think I don’t necessarily see her as the mother figure in that relationship because society has wrought her as someone who, Black women, as perpetually on the bottom. You know what I’m saying? So I don’t know if that was a long-winded way of answering your question.

Audience 3: Hi, thank you so much for sharing your work.

J Finley: Of course.

Audience 3: I’m intrigued by the anti-essentialism in the way that you’re talking about says, the moving away from sass as a bodily trait and toward the other intentional performed behavior. And then part of why that intrigues me is I’m curious about how we might extrapolate the way you talk about sass as a theory of culture.

One of the things that strikes me about the Black humor is that in some ways anti-Blackness is the Blackness of Black humor. The reason why that humor is Black is because of anti-Blackness. And that makes me curious about how might we speculate, what would Black humor be in the otherwise world to come? What would be Black about it? And is there anything else that’s Black or is there anything else that’s Black woman about sass or about Black humor?

J Finley: It’s a good question. He must be a grad student.

Ula Taylor: My new colleague.

J Finley: Oh, colleague? Not a grad student? Well, it’s just because you look young, so you look fresh. OK, my bad. But no, no, that’s a good question. Which points me to something that I really wanted to say about the idea of sass and how it can help us think about what is Black womanhood, because this is the argument that I’m making, is that sass gives us some insight into what Black women’s humor is. That’s how we can really understand it. That’s how it is legible. But if there’s something called Black woman’s humor, then you know what else there’s such a thing as? Black womanhood. Black womanhood.

And if we have to recognize that there’s Black womanhood, then we have to recognize how the Black woman was, how she came to be. How do we know that? And so in this otherwise world that we are talking about, what does Blackness become beyond the historical context of our emergence as subjects as such?

But if we recognize that sass is a thing and Black women’s humor is a thing, then we recognize that what it means to be a Black woman means something and it means something specific that we must attend to all the time. But I’m thinking about is the soul of your question about what is Blackness beyond anti-Blackness, which feels like an Afro pessimistic question at heart, am I wrong?

Audience 3: Well, I guess I’m curious about, it really is a question that’s about cultural form, because I think I’m interested in what is it about … I am interested in the Blackness of Black expression in culture, in part because I am committed to an idea of Black tradition. And so I’m curious about what’s Black about Black culture, more than I am interested … I guess that’s more in the heart of the question.

J Finley: I got you. Yeah. So thinking about thinking about what Blackness is beyond a response to the conditions that created Blackness

Audience 3: And Black cultural production specifically.

J Finley: Yes. I’m also intrigued by that question as well, but I don’t have the answer today. But that’s a good one though. Yeah.

Audience 4: I was thinking of the moment from finding the humor … was this thing she’d [inaudible] and I was thinking about how it [inaudible] argument about ungendering. And one of the ways in which it happened during the Middle Passage or during enslavement is in fact forms of torture that did not recognize gender. And I’m thinking in that very moment, the sass becomes a way of claiming gender.

So in particular, what is Black womanhood, and how that gets made visible, pulled into existence really performatively, sass, for this moment. I’m also interested thinking about this earlier question of how do we learn …

I’m not positioning myself as a Black girl subject here, certainly, but I’m thinking about how is it learned? How is sass learned as a kind of performative cultural tool or form of production? And in that maybe there’s something to maybe think about not just a mother-daughter relationship, but what are these communal relationships through which one sees and learns that and that [inaudible] riff on it, or in a moment?

J Finley: Yeah, I think about that a lot. I think one of the humor theories that circulates is about the ludic functions of humor. So the play, how humor functions as a way, for example, like kids on the playground, how they learn to interact with one another, how they learn what power means and how to distribute it amongst themselves. And so I think that that’s probably one of the primary places where all young people really learn those tactics and tools. But if you live in particular kinds of conditions within specific cultures, I think then it becomes infused with the gestural repertoire that is associated. So for example, sass is really infused with particular kinds of gestures that have been appropriated and made use of in different entertainment industries.

People avail themselves, for example, of the snap or the neck popping, but that really extracts it from its original use at the time, which these things happen, capitalism happens, but also Black women enter the cultural marketplace at a specific time when people were asking those kinds of questions of how do you make Black womanhood visible in ways that are legible?

Like for example, in the late 19th, early 20th century one of those ways that they make it legible is thinking about, “OK, Black women have always needed to speak back to power. So what does that look like?” And so when you take it away, like you see Jasmine Crockett on Saturday Night Live, this is really a contemporary way that you can really see that happening. And it’s interesting, and it’s funny because we have that cultural moment to reference.

We have that hearing where she’s actually talking back to Marjorie Taylor Green. But what happens when it gets compressed and turned into a two-dimensional object so that we can then laugh at it, right? It’s not necessarily the same thing. And so I can’t say that they don’t learn it, young Black girls don’t learn it from popular culture but I think relationally speaking, I think that is probably the primary source where it does its most powerful work. Well, Savannah, we’ll come back to you. How about, we’ll go around the horn this way?

Audience 5: Oh, sure. Thank you so much for this book. I’m so excited to read it.

J Finley: Yay.

Audience 5: And I guess I’m curious because something that I’ve been interested in with sass is how it might be seen as a good tool to reveal some of these absurdities that an anti-Black world can impose, like the Black culture. Per [inaudible] question, how that can be a space where the incongruities of how the anti-Black world expects Black women to respond could be meant as more legible, like their little breaths where that can be a source of really a fertile throughline through the history of the Transatlantic slave trade.

But what I was really curious, especially about your note of performance and audience, is how some of the subjects that you’ve chosen deploy sass for themselves. I guess I was wondering if you could elaborate more a little bit on how that performance for self and then how that performance for us all can maybe be a way of making clear what the violence that the anti-Black global goes on, a way of responding to that, a way of making that … I’m losing my thread, but …

J Finley: OK, well, I’ll go to the question I feel like is at the heart of it, which is …

Audience 5: Personal.

J Finley: Yeah. So the idea of what does it mean that sass is for yourself? Without that idea, there’s really no sass, there’s no theory of sass. Because there was a scholar, he was a scholar of genre, and essentially one thing that he said was he was like, “The genre of speech, of talk back, of talking back,” he was like, “That’s not really a genre. That’s not really a genre. That might be a sub-genre of speech, but that’s not really a genre.

And so my main thing was when I read that, I was like, “No, because we actually have that, and that is indeed a full on genre.” There are possibilities, there is a menu of possibilities of Black women speaking back.

But the sort of main thrust of my argument hinges on this idea that first and foremost, sass is for you. So that means when you bring off the gesture, let’s say you got to be bleach blonde, let’s take that bleach blonde, bad-built butch body, she had to understand in that moment what was happening, that Marjorie Taylor Green was trying to take her down a notch.

And so she understood in herself, and she had this desire to be like, “No, I’m not just going to let that stand. I’m not just going to let you dehumanize me like that. I’m not just going to let you do me that way.” And so inside of herself, she had evaluated that she needed to clap back. And so that was inside, that was where the sass began. It did not begin with bleach blonde, bad-built butch body. So let’s say bleach blonde, bad-built butch body is a roll of your eyes, or you sucking in your teeth, most people believe that that’s where sass starts. Most people believe that that is what the sass is.

But what I’m arguing is that sass, that is interiority expressed gesturally, vocally. So that’s where you bring … And so once you have done that, you have evaluated yourself as someone who is worthy, who can speak back to power in that moment because you are always speaking back to power when it comes to sass.

That’s why I’m calling it a genre of discourse, is because you are speaking back to power. So at that moment, when somebody sees that, for example, that was for you. It might have made somebody laugh, it might have made you laugh, but when you laugh, it’s because you recognize, you understand, and you understand that … If you understand that somebody is talking back to someone, then that means that you got to understand that there was a relationship between those people or a relationship between you and that person.

That’s what it means to recognize power, if you don’t have consciousness of yourself, also argument hinges on this, if you don’t understand yourself as a person in power, if you are a Black woman and you don’t understand yourself as empowered to have the agency to speak back within those relations, in what world can you be free?

And if somebody else understands that, this is why I use the powerful example of Fannie Lou Hamer, because that moment of Anelle Ponder speaking back, of doing that in that jail cell where she’s got multiple people beating her, if she understands that that’s happening right now, then she understands that something else is possible. Sometimes it’s hard to conceptualize, but sometimes you have to take it to one of the most violent moments. Marjorie Taylor Greene, this was a flip moment. It’s going viral, but Fannie Lou Hamer, that was a moment of intensity, of intense violence that we saw in that moment. Does that make sense?

Audience 5: Totally, yep.

J Finley: Yeah.

Audience 5: Thank you.

J Finley: I feel like Nicole had a question. I know you had a question for me.

Audience 6: Like everyone, thank you so very, very much.

J Finley: Of course.

Audience 6: I just had an ah-ha moment about my childhood and what brought the question.

J Finley: Nice.

Audience 6: I wasn’t told I was sassy, I was told I was getting smart. And I remember, and I said this to Black children, “Do not say this to your minister, you will be in so much trouble.” I don’t know what happened before then. All I know is the minister said, “You’re getting smart.” And I said, “I sure is not getting dumb.” And I got in so much trouble with my mama. I should be darker and melanated, I got beat so bad.

But then I lost my voice. I got it now because I’m 48 and I pay my own bills and I pay my own taxes. But how do Black girls get that agency back? Because all of our lives, “don’t get smart, don’t get sassy, don’t do this, don’t talk back.” And I feel like in a culture that’s trying to keep us safe, we’re suppressed and comedy is safe, but I’m not funny. I mean, I’m funny in the moment, but I can’t write this stuff down and be like my favorite comedians. And so it’s like how do Black child become this sassy Black woman again after having to be suppressed for so long?

J Finley: Yes. I love that. Oh, I didn’t get dumb. That’s one of the questions that I really get a lot about the book, “Is sass always funny?”, right? And the answer is absolutely not. Absolutely not. I gave you all an example that wasn’t funny, but if the conditions are right, you might find it to be funny. In fact, I heard laughter when I …

Audience 6: It was funny when I tell it. It wasn’t funny when I was feeling it.

J Finley: It wasn’t funny in the moment. But there was a quote that I read. I just pulled my phone. I usually don’t pull my phone out, but I saw it and I said “I needed to find a way to work this.” Assata Shakur she said “and when I think back to some of those kids who were labeled troublemakers and problem students, I realized that many of them were unsung heroes who fought to maintain some sense of dignity and self-worth.”

So perhaps that was you, even though you said that you became silenced after that moment. Listen, it’s hard to extinguish that flame. It can be done, it can be done. But I think even sometimes that one experience that … You remember it for a reason, you remember it today right now for a reason, but that thing wasn’t buried, that wasn’t so deeply buried. I think it might be infused in there. And it’s not about being a comedian or being humorous, right?

But it’s about that will to own yourself. Right? That’s why I called this chapter that I started … the Fannie Lou … I was talking about Black women self-possessed. Because ultimately that’s really what sass is about, is about acts of self-possession. When you are deploying sass, you are showing the world that you own yourself at the very core. So that’s why it’s really first and foremost, it is for you.

Audience 6: Thank you. 

J Finley: Yes. I’m coming over here and then I’ll come back to you.

Audience 7: Hi. Thank you so much. It was really, really interesting. I really enjoyed it.

J Finley: Thank you.

Audience 7: I have a question. It might be way off-topic, but have you looked at the humor of Black women in other countries that had slaves like Haiti or Brazil and also in some countries within the African continent? And do you see the same trend like sass or do you see other elements?

J Finley: OK, yeah, good question. Also, let me go back to that book chapter, the title because yes is the answer to your question. So in that last chapter, “Irreverence Rules, Sass and Diaspora Culture.” So this is the chapter that I really attend to that question. And that’s based on some field work that I did in South Africa.

But I wouldn’t have that if I didn’t have the very first part of my theory of sass, which comes from the introduction, which is called “Cut Eye and Suck Teeth.” Now that title is riffing on an article, a 1976 article by John and Angela Rickford, they did this study and they did a study of Black women in countries in the Caribbean, the United States, and some nations in West Africa. And what they wanted to know was they wanted to know about these particular gestures of cut eye and suck tea, rolling eyes. Somebody give me a cut eye and suck teeth. Yeah, I heard some suck teeth in there. Yeah. And so they were looking … They wanted to know who in those particular locales did they have understanding or how did they understand what cut eye and suck teeth were.

And so they found across those that it was Black women and all of those that they understood what those gestures were and what they conveyed, which is, “that I don’t respect you,” that whatever you said, it’s a way of essentially indicating talking back to a superior, but just really speaking. And so they found that it was Black women in all of those places who were the most competent at bringing off the gestures and actually understanding what it was. And it was all very similar. The meaning was similar across them.

And so that had me thinking, OK, why is rolling your eyes and sucking your teeth such a specific gestural component of expressing sass? And it’s because of what I call, well not what I call, but what scholars call Diaspora culture. So it’s not just that the Middle Passage sort of changed what it meant to be so-called African, but it was about the transformation of particular kinds of discourse.

And so cut-eye suck teeth are the gestures that are around the Diaspora, even on the continent. They share very similar understanding and features. But I didn’t look anywhere in Haiti. But what I did look at was South Africa and the reason that I looked at South Africa, what took me originally South Africa was something different. So listen, because I was always interested in what might sass look like if Black women …

Stand-up comedy is relatively new in South Africa, only since apartheid has ended have Black people been performing stand-up comedy in South Africa or even other cultures in South Africa. It hasn’t really been big, but Black people were absolutely not engaged in that particular genre. And then when you did have it, what I found when I went over there and was doing my field work was I would find a lot of interesting relationships between the way that Black women speak back in the US context in South Africa.

So I wanted to investigate it. So that’s what this chapter is about. And the reason why is because the particular conditions of white supremacy was really what helped me to solidify that as a site. How did white supremacy shape how Black women speak back to power in South Africa and here, and what did it look like? So what I’m thinking about is how is it that Black women stand-ups in South Africa, how is it that they make use of the particular discursive registers, gestures of sass as I understand them in the U.S. context, but how do they remix them and make use of it for their particular locale, their particular conditions? And I found a lot of similarities, but there were also, of course ways in which they diverge. Long-winded answer to say yes.

Ula Taylor: Do you have time for one more question?

J Finley: One more question. [Inaudible] I’m going to hit you back.

Audience 8: OK. So I get …

J Finley: Of course, yeah, you get to drop the mic on us.

Audience 8: There is an episode or scene in Orange is the New Black, in which a group of Black girls is brought to the prison for the purpose of discouraging them from acting, misbehaving. And the protagonist, especially in the first seasons or whatever, is white college, highly educated person.

So one member of that group that’s visiting is a young teenage girl who uses a wheelchair. So I have a disability or I’ve been disabled since I was … My entire life. And it’s been visible. It’s a visible one. That scene sort of resonated with me, so it was an example of sass, but I think because a couple other people brought up the Black child and girls … I wasn’t sure if I would bring this up, but are you familiar at all with what I’m talking about?

J Finley: Orange is the New Black?

Audience 8: Yeah.

J Finley: I am familiar with the show. Now that episode I cannot say is coming to mind right now.

Audience 8: I still haven’t really said what it is that resonated with me. But so the girls, most of them are scared. It’s not scared, discouraged, but basically there’s one left who says, “oh, they said I couldn’t do this, that they said I couldn’t do that,” because they’re assuming that a disability will keep her docile and unable to act out, but she’s proving them wrong. It was just her motivation did … I liked that, but also it was so overtly explain it. And she’s not a full character. She’s just some little part of a scene. I guess this is, if you can comment on that or maybe it’s hard. I’m coming from a place, the intersection with disability and race. So that’s the scene that I remember.

J Finley: Is she a Black girl?

Audience 8: Yeah, she’s a Black girl who uses a wheelchair. And so College, what they call the white protagonist is tasked with scaring her because she won’t … And so she tries to give this grand speech or whatever to say about how her life could be. And that doesn’t persuade her either. But then we don’t really … Does anybody else know what I’m talking about?

J Finley: I wish I knew what scene you were talking about and then I would be able to …

Audience 8: I’m not sure if I should bring it up. Or maybe this is another way to put it more broadly. So when sass as a subversive strategy is made, or portrayed in mainstream media, like in Orange is the New Black, what are the implications, problems there?

J Finley: There you go. Yeah, no, no. That’s a great question and a good one to end on. I think that one of the problems is that that’s the risk that you run when sass is used as in any popular media, is that it’s immediacy. It’s ephemerality. There is no ephemerality because it remains. And so my theory of sass is that, it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes. And if one deploys sass in the moment, it’s done. But the problem is when it remains is this is how we get the image of in the trope of the sassy Black woman. And so I think that’s one of the risks. Even while that character may have been deploying sass in that moment, be like, ‘You all didn’t think I could do this.” Right? You all didn’t think that what happens is when the audience is not attuned to the context of what sass means. I think it runs the risks of sort of reifying this idea of the sassy Black woman.

Audience 8: Today’s packaged in this little box.

J Finley: Yes.

Audience 8: To me. Yeah. Thank you.

J Finley: Yes, thank you so much. And thank you all very much.

Ula Taylor: Show some love for J Finley.

(Applause)

J Finley: Thank you. Thank you so much.

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)