Mikki Kendall was born in 1976 in Chicago and grew up in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood, which she identifies as “the hood.” She later attended the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and DePaul University and is a US Army veteran. An author, activist, and cultural critic, Kendall has been published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Time, and elsewhere and has appeared on programs including Good Morning America, The Daily Show, and BBC’s Woman’s Hour. Kendall is a prominent member of Black Twitter, and this book is inspired in part by a hashtag she created, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which points out the racism in the feminist movement.

Although Hood Feminism is primarily a cultural and political critique of contemporary feminism, the framework that grounds Kendall’s feminism is deeply rooted in Kendall’s life experiences as a Black woman. Her growth from child to teen to woman is central to her articulation of hood feminism. Over the course of the book, Kendall makes it clear that her formative experiences as a Black woman and a feminist occurred in the midst of life, rather than in a formal, academic setting. She describes her early struggles with respectable gender norms imposed on her by her grandmother, surviving molestation by a caregiver, getting into trouble at school, and moving among a host of family members who stepped in as her parents were not able to rear her.