Magnanimous and Brilliant Sister Dr. Katie

In order to succinctly reflect on Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon's work and life, I must force myself to accept the reality of her death. This is excruciatingly hard. For it is the magnitude of Katie Cannon's generosity that so indelibly marks my memory of her life and work as well as the gift of friendship she gave to me. The untimely, permanent loss of that Katie Cannon magnanimity seems impossible to accept, or at the very least, incomprehensible to my mind and spirit. Academia can be a place of unrelenting, enervating competition where stinginess seems the only language available. Methodologically, Katie Cannon's black woman-centered analyses of white supremacy constitute one of the many aspects of her intellectual legacy that I deeply admire and must name as a crucial framework on which I rely in my own work. In her analytical approach, one finds a sharp conceptualization of both the strength and vulnerability of black women especially evident in their collisions with white supremacy.