Can a White Woman write about “Trap Feminist Theology”?

Jennifer Buck is having a hell of a week. Her book Bad and Boujee: Toward a Trap Feminist Theology, released this past March, is being dragged through the proverbial mud across the internet.

But not without reason.

You see, Jennifer is White. Her book is about a subset of Black Feminism called Trap Feminism.

If you are confused, you are not alone.

Some of you may ask can a White woman talk about Black feminism? Sure. Talk. Yes. I don’t know what she is going to say outside of either amplifying Black Women or steal from them. But sure, she can talk about it.

Write a book on the topic? Well, as we have seen, no one is stopping her, including the publisher of of this book, Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. No one is stopping institutions like Yale Divinity School from awarding her $10,000 for this project, a grant that could have went to a Black woman writer. That is the problem, no one is stopping people like Jennifer Buck, a theologian who formerly wrote about Quakers, from writing about an experience that is very obviously not her own. No one is saying to folks like Jennifer “Just because you physically can write this book doesn’t mean that you should.”

This is only further illustrated by the description of the book, which reads: