Kendall opens her book by grounding her politics in her grandmother’s example. Kendall’s grandmother refused to identify as feminist because the feminism of her time was explicitly racist and classist. She nevertheless taught Kendall to protect and support her family and community. Outside of the respectable bubble Kendall’s grandmother created, Kendall learned that being bad, mean, loud, and willing to go her own way despite the disapproval of others was her path to survival. This was feminism grounded in experience and practice rather than theory, one in which “[f]eminism is the work that you do, and the people you do it for who matter more than anything else” (xiii).

The mainstream feminism Kendall observed from the vantage point of her working-class neighborhood next to the University of Chicago never understood the lessons Kendall learned the hard way. The university instead kept up the gates between the neighborhood and the university.

Kendall finally learned academic feminism at the University of Illinois, but even then, this feminism wrote Black, working-class women and other women of color into texts as objects to analyzed. These voices were and are largely absent from the discourse. Hood Feminism aims to change that.