Berkeley Talks

When J Finley arrived at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in 2006, she planned on studying reparations and the legacy of slavery. But after a fellowship in South Africa, where she studied the Zulu language and culture, Finley says she realized Black people were never going to get reparations. Switching gears, she started thinking: “How else do Black people make do? Well, we laugh.”In Berkeley Talks episode 223, Finley, an associate professor of Africana studies at Pomona College who earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2008 and 2012, discusses her 2024 book Sass: Black Women’s Humor and Humanity. During the talk, Finley shares how Black women have used and continue to use humor and, more specifically, sass, to speak back to power and assert their own humanity. Black women’s humor, she contends, is “rooted in the racist, patriarchal and, many times, degrading conditions from which it developed” and is “an embodied expression of resilience at the moment of crisis that has come to be th