African American Vernacular English is an American lingua franca that is mostly used by the Black American working class, bi-dialectal Black Americans middle class and most recently - multicultural youth from various parts of the world. The roots of the language were established in the rural south, while its development and rave is linked to prominent use in non southern urban cities.

At an event held in honour of Malcolm X in 1982, Audre Lorde delivered an address titled “Learning from the 60s”, during which she says, “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s differences with respect.” ( Lorde, 1982 ) Through this Lorde tells us that revolution is a never ending circle, it’s multi-layered, multi-faceted and belongs to everyone and no one simultaneously.

In Black Church Culture and Community Action, Sandra Barnes explains how prayer serves as a unified activist approach when asking for protection, needs, wants and more within the black community. “The Black person, therefore, needs the traditional strength of Black prayers to provide meaning from the past, affirmation for the present, and hope for the future. The creative prayer meeting can still fulfill this need when its power is released in songs, words, prayers, and testimonies” (Barnes, 2005, 975)

It has long been assumed that the roots of the concept of womanhood are archaic and redundant, without understanding the violence of gender coloniality and how imperialism has forced a gendered gaze into various cultures, specifically that of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The foundation of womanhood rests on the concept of settler colonialism, the way it has limited and erased the fluidity embedded in many cultures and forced it to be very masculine or very feminine. Judith Butler writes that “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow, rather gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”

We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings.􏰁 (Freire, 26). Bell Hooks contextualizes this quote in a conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry “Black female voices - Who is listening?” In which they discuss race, black womanhood, politics, media and the imperialist-white-supremacist-patriarchal worlds response to it.

Within our society, femininity is conceptualized from an Eurocentric and androcentric vantage point. While white and black women experience some same feminine expectations, black women have a distinct racial and gender socialized experience.

The New Negro movement was an African American cultural movement that happened in the early twentieth century. From politics to art to self-determination militancy, it was a conscious effort to shape the way the world looked at African Americans.