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The contemporary era of black intellectual thought 1975 to the present is characterized by a growth in black feminist thought, an expansion of rainbow coalitions by prominent black leaders, an explosion of the black middle class and a black bourgeoisie, and an extension of black political, social, and cultural ideas by influential scholars and academics. In opposition to the New Left Movement, there was a significant rise in conservatism not just in America but throughout the globe. This led to a drastic decrease in liberal welfare programs as well as a decrease in the practical reliance on socialism: Booker T. Washington's ideology specifically concerning education became the norm in the contemporary era. This period also witnessed the rise of the New Jim Crow: a system of mass incarceration and control of millions of primarily poor black and brown people as evidenced by millions of dollars governmental investment in for-profit prisons throughout America. The eventual election of President Barack Obama was not only a call to transcend the partisan bickering of Washington, but his presidency stood as a symbol of black excellence against traditional social hierarchies of white supremacy. The feminist Barbara Smith at the 1980 Combahee River Collective argues that world changing revolution don't have to just redistribute resources, but they also must be pro-feminist and antiracist to be comprehensive enough to include the most historically marginalized people in the modern era, black women. Many feminist and male freedom fighters such as the black panthers, were political prisoners who have garnered immense support for freedom in the modern era. Furthermore, the seminal first black mayor of Chicago Harold Washington through his reform of the segregated city revealed its racist structure and sought to undermine it. Intellectual feminists such as Audre Lorde indicated the necessity of identifying the elements of the oppressor in the oppressed, while Dr. Bell Hooks sought to illustrate the hierarchies of race, class, and gender and how we can overcome them. This era also saw massive opposition to the South African Apartheid state that lasted for four decades by such black icons such as Randall Robinson and Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson's rainbow coalition from his run for presidency in the mid 1980s would foreshadow the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, 20 years later. However, education perspectives would transform more than politics. Academic scholars would shift the consciousness of minority student towards a greater appreciation of education by moving away from Eurocentric models of learning. What scholars like Dr. West and politicians like President Obama would recognize is that political advancement is more seated in understanding the need for hope, meaning, and purpose rather than identifying elements of subjugation against black America. These ideas would be drawn from many black figures of the past such as academics like W.E.B. Du Bois and social reformers like Dr. King and President Abraham Lincoln.
Care More Be Better: Social Impact, Sustainability + Regeneration Now
DEI programs are being shut down left and right, and the toxic culture of white supremacy is becoming more rampant. This has led to more and more people making white privilege a norm in their own workplace cultures. Davey Shlasko, founder of Think Again Training, leads the revolution in shaping inclusive, diverse, and anti-racist leaders. Joining Corinna Bellizzi, he shares how to build the right leadership that addresses bias, discrimination, perfectionism, and an unfair focus on hierarchy. He also discusses how the worsening perspectives on DEI adversely impact the state of economy, minimum wage, business hiring practices, and a person's choice of pronouns.About Guest:Davey is the founder and director of Think Again Training & Consulting, a collaborative consulting practice that supports organizations to integrate equity, inclusion and social justice into their long-term planning and everyday practices. Davey co-created the Antiracist Development Group for white managers, an 8-week cohort program based in frameworks of intersectional social justice and challenging white supremacy culture that prepares white people in leadership roles to bring antiracist practices into their management, supervision, planning and everything about their leadership.Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/90517341Guest Website: https://www.thinkagaintraining.com/blog/whyantiracismskillsGuest Social: https://www.instagram.com/thinkagain_tc/https://www.youtube.com/@shlaskohttps://www.facebook.com/thinkagaintrainingAnti-Racist / DEI Reading ListOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century by Timothy SnyderHow We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta TaylorEmergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree BrownPleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree BrownHow to be an Anti-racist by Ibram X KendiHow to be a (Young) Anti-racist by Ibram X Kendi Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. SaadWhite Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun and Kenneth JonesThe Anthropology of White Supremacy: A Reader Edited by Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Jemima Pierre, Junaid Rana The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee TaylorThe Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jorene Freeman, 1972Beware the Tyranny of StructurelessnessAnti-Racist / DEI Podcasts to Listen To:Code Switch 1619 Octavia's Parables Seeing White Mother Country Radicals Show Notes: Final audioJOIN OUR CIRCLE. BUILD A GREENER FUTURE:
Barbara Smith is a Movement legend— the kind of courageous activist, powerful thinker, persistent organizer and whole-hearted doer who keeps the Movement moving. She is co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and co-author of the acclaimed 1977 statement that has been one of the most influential Black feminist documents of the twentieth century—“Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work.” She's been a freedom fighter for over half a century—a long time in the life of a person, but, as she knows, the blink of an eye in the life of a struggle, and so she is neither nostalgic for a ship that's already left the shore nor interested in burnishing a legacy. Rather, she is leaning forward—on the move and in the mix—still fighting for peace and freedom and joy and justice, still asking the most insistent and burning questions: How do we name this political moment? Where do we go from here? What does the known demand of us now? Here is Barbara Smith in conversation with Bill Ayers on December 5, 2024 at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York.
Care More Be Better: Social Impact, Sustainability + Regeneration Now
President Trump has just started his second term, and a lot of things have been changing – but sadly, not for the better. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is one of the most adversely impacted subjects, making discrimination, stereotyping, and inequality much more rampant. In this episode, Corinna Bellizzi is joined by DEI coach and consultant Rachel Siegel to discuss how to overcome the United States' current crisis with systemic racism, classicism, and authoritarianism. They explain why DEI should never lead to social division but bring people together in peace and harmony. Rachel also explains how to be more critical when consuming different kinds of media and how to cultivate the right mindset to stop yourself from following leaders blindly.About Guest:Rachel Siegel is a white, queer, Jewish mother, artist, organizer, and educator on Abenaki land in Vermont. She was ED of Peace & Justice Center and a City Councilor before founding Toward Liberation. She cofounded Vermont Access to Reproductive Freedom and ONE Mutual Aid, serves on the grant committee for Haymarket People's Fund, and volunteers for Center City Little League. Rachel is an intersectional feminist. She recognizes her eating disorder healing as part of resisting patriarchy, racism and capitalism. She is committed to body liberation. Hiking, dancing, and being with friends give Rachel joy. She is a recovering alcoholic and practices spirituality through many modalities. Rachel's political education includes Catalyst Collective, White Awake, self-study, and People's Institute for Survival and Beyond.Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-siegel-829b38a0/ Guest Website: https://www.towardliberation.net/ Guest Social: https://www.facebook.com/rachel.f.siegel/ https://www.instagram.com/rachel.f.siegel/ Anti-Racist / DEI Reading ListOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century by Timothy SnyderHow We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta TaylorEmergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree BrownPleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree BrownHow to be an Anti-racist by Ibram X KendiHow to be a (Young) Anti-racist by Ibram X Kendi Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. SaadWhite Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun and Kenneth JonesThe Anthropology of White Supremacy: A Reader Edited by Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Jemima Pierre, Junaid Rana The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee TaylorAnti-Racist / DEI Podcasts to Listen To:Code Switch 1619 Octavia's Parables Seeing White Mother Country Radicals Show Notes: Final audioIntroducing Intersectional Feminist Rachel Siegel - 03:27How Did We Get To Dehumanizing People - 12:59The Caste System Of The United States - 16:54Not Obeying In Advance And Improving Media Consumption - 23:08Black Feminism, Emergent Strategy, And Pleasure Activism - 27:35Lessons From A Starling's Murmuration - 33:53How To Be An Antiracist - 36:36White Supremacy Culture And The Body is Not an Apology - 39:35Solving Current Issues Through Multigenerational Alliances - 44:41All About Think Again And Toward Liberation - 48:02Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words - 54:57JOIN OUR CIRCLE. BUILD A GREENER FUTURE:
Barbara Smith is an award winning author, scholar, and activist. She is most well-known for co-authoring the Combahee River Collective Statement with two other queer Black women - her twin sister Beverly, and friend Demita Frazier. Barbara joins us to unpack the personal history that informed her groundbreaking Black Feminist politics. We discuss her multi-generational upbringing, growing up in Cleveland during the Civil Rights Movement, lesbian nightmares, and what she really meant when coining the phrase "identity politics." Thank you for listening to Cruising Podcast! -Reviews help other listeners find Cruising! If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave us a 5-star review! -For more Cruising adventures, follow us @cruisingpod on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook Follow Barbara on instagram @thebarbarasmith46 on Instagram Learn more about her work at her website. -Support Cruising here! Cruising is an independent podcast. That means we're entirely funded by sponsors and listeners like you! -Cruising is reported and produced by a small but mighty team of three: Sarah Gabrielli (host/story producer/audio engineer), Rachel Karp (story producer/social media manager), and Jen McGinity (line producer/resident road-trip driver). Theme song is by Joey Freeman. Cover art is by Nikki Ligos. Logo is by Finley Martin. Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With questions and concerns swirling around the upcoming inauguration of a second term for President Donald Trump, Hudson Mohawk Magazine's Moses Nagel turned to Barbara Smith, a long time activist, feminist, scholar and civil rights leader who formerly served on the Albany Common Council. She was a member of the Combahee River Collective, which is credited with coining the term ‘intersectionality' as well of the author of books including ‘Home Girls' and ‘The Truth Never Hurts'.
When Freedom is the Question… was published on September 10, and we had a book launch that night at our home-away-from-home, Pilsen Community Books, in conversation with Eve Ewing. We traveled to Women and Children First, Seminary Coop, The Wooden Shoe in Philadelphia, Book and Puppet in Easton, PA, Riff Raff in Providence, Firestorm in Asheville, NC, Red Emma's in Baltimore, Busboys and Poets in DC, the PIT (Property is Theft!!) in Brooklyn, and more. I read at public libraries, coffee shops, and Movement venues like Haymarket House, Hasta Muerte, and The James Connelly Social Club. A couple of the events were taped, one at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY where I was in conversation with the legendary thinker and activist Barbara Smith, co-author of the Combahee River Collective statement, and one at La Pena in Oakland where I was in conversation with Cat Brooks, organizer, activist, and KPFA radio host---Under the Tree will drop those spicy conversations in the future. I was honored and often awed to be in conversation with several other powerful comrades and dazzling friends: Lisa Lee, Danaka Katovich, Alice Kim, Damon Williams, Jacqui Lyden, Daniel Kisslinger, Martha Biondi, Adam Bush, James Michael MacDonald, Jeff Jones, Martha Swan, and more.
Ein Vortrag des Erziehungswissenschaftlers Markus Rieger-LadichModeration: Katja Weber **********"Ich als alter weißer Mann..." - diese Aussage signalisiert: Ich bin auf der Höhe der Zeit, ich kenne die gängigen Diskurse. Aber als ritualisierte Beichte bringt diese Erkenntnis gar nichts, meint der Erziehungswissenschaftler Markus Rieger-Ladich.Markus Rieger-Ladich ist Professor für Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft an der Universität Tübingen. 2022 erschien sein Band "Das Privileg. Kampfvokabel und Erkenntnisinstrument". Seinen Vortrag mit dem Titel "Was heißt hier Privileg? - Privilegienkritik neu gedacht" hat er auf Einladung des Hörsaals am 11. Oktober 2024 anlässlich des Pocast-Festivals Beats & Bones gehalten. **********Schlagworte: +++ Freiheitsrechte +++ Menschenrechte +++ Feminismus +++ Klassismus +++ Status +++ Soziologie +++ Erziehungswissenschaftler +++ Tradition +++**********Ihr hört in diesem Hörsaal:00:02:20 - Gespräch vor dem Vortrag und was Rieger-Ladichs Oma damit zu tun hat00:08:04 - Beginn Vortrag: Einleitung, These und Überblick00:10:33 - Privileg aus rechtstheoretischer Perspektive00:16:41 - Der Begriff Privileg in der Bildungssoziologie der 1960er und 1970er Jahre00:17:49 - Privilegienkritik als Kampfbegriff in emanzipatorischen Bewegungen00:38:30 - Herausforderungen für einen Neustart der Debatte00: 42:32 - Publikumsfragen nach dem Vortrag**********Empfehlungen aus der Folge:Mohamed Amjahid. Unter Weißen. Was es heißt, privilegiert zu sein. München: Hanser Berlin 2017.Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte: Privilegien. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung 2024.Rolf Becker/Wolfgang Lauterbach (Hrsg.): Bildung als Privileg. Erklärungen und Befunde zu den Ursachen der Bildungsungleichheit. 5., erweitere Auflage. Wiesbaden: SpringerVS 2016.Pierre Bourdieu/Jean-Claude Passeron. Die Illusion der Chancengleichheit: Untersuchungen zur Sozio-logie des Bildungswesens am Beispiel Frankreichs. Stuttgart: Klett 1971.Pierre Bourdieu. Bildung. Aus dem Französischen von Barbara Picht u.a. Mit einem Nachwort von Markus Rieger-Ladich. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2018.Esme Choonara/Yuri Prasad. Der Irrweg der Privilegientheorie. In: International Socialism 142 (2020), S. 83-110.Combahee River Collective. Ein Schwarzes feministisches Statement (1977). In: Natascha A. Kelly (Hrsg.): Schwarzer Feminismus. Grundlagentexte. Münster: Unrast 2019, S. 47-60.Didier Eribon. Betrachtungen zur Schwulenfrage. Aus dem Französischen von Bernd Schwibs und Achim Russer. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2019.Roxane Gay. Fragwürdige Privilegien. In: Dies.: Bad Feminist. Essays. München: btb 2019, S. 31-36.Michael S. Kimmel/Abby L. Ferber (Hrsg.): Privilege. A Reader. New York: Routledge 2017.Maria-Sibylla Lotter. Ich bin schuldig, weil ich bin (weiß, männlich und bürgerlich). Politik als Läuterungsdiskurs. In: Herwig Grimm/Stephan Schleissig (Hrsg.): Moral und Schuld. Exkulpationsnarrative in Ethikdebatten. Baden-Baden: Nomos 2019, S. 67-86.Peggy McIntosh. Weißsein als Privileg. Die Privilege Papers. Nachwort von Markus Rieger-Ladich. Ditzingen: Reclam 2024.Walter Benn Michaels. Der Trubel um Diversität. Wie wir lernten, Identitäten zu lieben und Ungleichheiten zu ignorieren. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Christoph Hesse. Berlin: Tiamat 2021.Linda Martín Alcoff. Das Problem, für andere zu sprechen. Ditzingen: Reclam 2023.Charles W. Mills. Weißes Nichtwissen. In: Kristina Lepold/Marina Martinez Mateo (Hrsg.): Critical Philosophy of Race. Ein Reader. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2021, S. 180-216,Heinz Mohnhaupt. Privilegien als Sonderrechte in europäischen Rechtsordnungen vom Mittelalter bis heute. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann 2024.Heinz Mohnhaupt/Barbara Dölemeyer (Hrsg.): Das Privileg im europäischen Vergleich. 2 Bände. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann 1997/1999.Toni Morrison. Die Herkunft der Anderen. Über Rasse, Rassismus und Literatur. Mit einem Vorwort von Ta-Nehisi Coates. Aus dem Englischen von Thomas Piltz. Reinbek: Rowohlt 2018.Markus Rieger-Ladich. Identitätsdebatte oder: Das Comeback des Privilegs. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 66 (2021), S. 97-104.Markus Rieger-Ladich. Das Privileg. Kampfvokabel und Erkenntnisinstrument. Ditzingen: Reclam 2022.Markus Rieger-Ladich. Privilegien. In: Merkur 77 (2023), Heft 889, S. 71-80.Markus Rieger-Ladich. Neustart der Privilegienkritik. Ein Plädoyer. In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 21 (2024), S. 4-10.Jörg Scheller. (Un)Check Your Privilege. Wie die Debatte um Privilegien Gerechtigkeit verhindert. Stuttgart: Hirzel 2022.Steffen Vogel. Das Erbe von 68: Identitätspolitik als Kulturrevolution. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 66 (2021), S. 97-104.Katharina Walgenbach. Bildungsprivilegien im 21. Jahrhundert. In: Meike Sophia Baader/Tatjana Freytag (Hrsg.): Bildung und Ungleichheit in Deutschland. Wiesbaden: VS 2017, S. 513-536. **********Mehr zum Thema bei Deutschlandfunk Nova:Soziologie: Freundschaften hängen auch vom Geldbeutel abSoziologie: Warum die Klimakrise polarisiertSoziologie: Geld als Kriegsmittel - Wie effektiv das ist**********Den Artikel zum Stück findet ihr hier.**********Ihr könnt uns auch auf diesen Kanälen folgen: TikTok auf&ab , TikTok wie_geht und Instagram .
In this episode we're exploring the role of voting in our movements through an intergenerational conversation between elder and younger organizers based in Georgia and New York. In this conversation National Council of Elders members and younger organizers dig into questions such as: Where do elections fit in our concept of real democracy? How important is our vote? How close are we to tyranny in this country, as most clearly outlined in Donald Trump's Project 2025 vision, and how much is that tyranny already here? What are the paradoxes that we must grapple with as we face another election cycle in the U.S.? This episode is hosted by Frances Reid (she/her) based in Oakland, California. Frances is a member of the National Council of Elders and a veteran of 40 years of activist documentary filmmaking. Joining Frances in this conversation are: Loretta Ross (she/her) based in Northampton, Massachussetts and Atlanta, Georgia. Loretta is a long time activist and scholar who teaches at Smith College, was a Director at the first rape crisis center in the country in the 1970s, and whose latest book is Calling in the Calling Out Culture. Barbara Smith (she/her) based in Albany, New York. Barbara is an activist and author, who played a groundbreaking role in opening up the dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender. She's a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and served two terms as a member of the Albany Common Council from 2006 to 2013. Nautica Jenkins (she/her) based in Atlanta, Georgia. Nautica is an organizer and Youth Programs MultiMedia Specialist at Project South. Her role is to assist young people in creatively communicating their stories and messages through various forms of media. Hannah Krull (she/any) based in Buffalo, New York. Hannah has been in the streets and engaging in popular education in her home region of Northern Appalachia for nearly a decade. She has worked on a number of local and national campaigns, and in recent years has organized on her university campus against sexist oppression, queerphobia, and for a Free Palestine. Hannah is a knowledge worker who grounds her work in hyperlocality and pushing back against structures of power and dominance.
This is the first of our two-part finale to our Season of Pleasure, a season throughout which we have sought to understand our relationship with pleasure while simultaneously witnessing and confronting genocide across our world. With poet and activist June Jordan's words, “What shall we do, we who did not die?” in our minds and spirits, we hear from Zeina and Fatma, two mothers living in London who organize with Parents for Palestine, a group of parents who organize marches, actions, and teach-ins that include young children calling for the end of the genocide and occupation in Palestine. How do we talk about genocide with our youngest children? How do our personal rest and pleasure principles sustain collective liberation and education as the practice of freedom? Share your thoughts with us at us@dancingondesks.org, leave an audio message, or slide into our DMs on IG @dancingondesks. Transcript Available Aug. 2 INTELLECTUAL INHERITANCE -Follow Parents for Palestine on Instagram @parentsforpalestine - Ghassan Kanafani, The Land of Sad Oranges (1962) -adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism (2019) -Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (2022) -June Jordan, “Some of Us Did Not Die” (2001) -The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) -”50 Years of Combahee”, Black Women Radicals (2024) — A special thank you to Jaimee Smith, founder and executive director of Black Women Radicals, for allowing us to use an excerpt from her May 22, conversation with Combahee River Collective co-founders Barbara Smith and Demita Frazier. -bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) -“Lineages of Deviant Caretaking”, Dancing on Desks (2024) MUSIC -Our Dancing on Desks Theme Song is composed and arranged by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes -“Arabic Oud” prod. @aldisjaminii_ -“Jamila” prod. @montymusic311 -"I'll Be Free" prod. @Rhamzandays -“Joyful & Upbeat Background Nasheed” vocal only prod. Quran Lofi -"Calming Background Nasheed" vocal only prod. Quran Lofi -“Soulful Nasheed” without music promoted by @ncnasheeds -“Small Talk” prod. yogic beats -“Relaxing & Calming Nasheed” vocals only provided by NoCopyrightNasheeds -“Haven” prod. rémdolla -“Stunt” prod. rémdolla -“Burst” prod. rémdolla-“Don't Save Me” prod. sadcg --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dancingondesks/message
“My invitation is just to let ourselves feel the pain. That we don't have to have the shame on top of it. It's painful to know that I have contributed to the harm of another person and that I had no idea. I don't have to hold shame about it. I can grieve that.”Check out the episode page for the transcript and the full list of the resources mentioned in this episode: https://widerroots.com/9 In this conversation, Andréa Ranae and I explore some juicy questions: How has the coaching industry's engagement with social justice evolved over the past 8 years? What does it look like for coaches to recognize our collective power to shape the industry?Andréa shares stories of the breakthroughs and challenges she's witnessed as her students become politicized. We discuss the importance of taking collective responsibility as coaches and healers. We also dig into the role of shame, and how it can serve as a wake-up call but shouldn't keep us stuck.Andréa Ranae is a coach, facilitator, and singer-songwriter who has dedicated her life to exploring how we can live, work, and relate in ways that contribute to impactful social change.⭐ In this episodeHow has the coaching industry evolved in its engagement with social justice over the last eight years?What were some of the key concepts and frameworks Andréa needed to introduce to coaches who were new to social justice?What breakthroughs have coaches experienced as they became more politicized through her teachings?How can coaches use their collective power to shape the industry and create systemic change?What questions can politicized coaches ask themselves to work toward collective liberation?How can shame serve as an indicator of change, and what role does it play in keeping systems of domination in place?
“We think that we're crooked … but it is that the room is crooked.” Those words from Melissa Harris-Perry's Sister Citizen are what sent Dr. Jenn Jackson on their path to becoming a political scientist. Those words also describe what it often feels like as a Black woman, walking into a room full of stereotypes about your body, your work ethic, your attitude … everything. As a queer genderflux androgynous Black woman, Dr. Jackson has experienced all this. They share with Jeanne how and why Black feminism is different from white feminism; why they thought working for Disney was a way to survive; why it was important for them to tell a story of self-love and self-care in their new book, Black Women Taught Us; how they finally discovered who they truly were; and why it's important to find the people you love and love them back. Jenn M. Jackson (they/them) is a genderflux androgynous Black woman, a lesbian, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson's primary research is in Black Politics with a focus on racial threat and trauma, gender and sexuality, political behavior, and social movements. Jackson also holds affiliate positions in African American Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and LGBT Studies. They are a Senior Research Associate at The Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, as well. Jackson is the author of the book Black Women Taught Us (Random House Press, 2024). The book is an intimate intellectual and political history of Black women's activism, movement organizing, and philosophical work that explores how women from Harriet Jacobs to Audre Lorde to the members of the Combahee River Collective, among others, have for centuries taught us how to fight for justice and radically reimagine a more just world for us all. FB: /jennmjacksonphd IG: @jennmjacksonphd TT: jennmjacksonphd
Tempted to avert our gaze from the mention of “evil spirit” or “demon”, instead Pastor Megan chooses to hold this story's gaze and look for what may be true… then and now. What is true? What binds humans is indeed legion. What liberates humans is indeed Jesus. Who liberates humans is indeed us. Whew. Buckle up as we explore what makes demons tremble.Sermon begins at minute marker 5:05Mark 5.1-20ResourcesIntersectionality: In the sermon, I credit the origin of intersectionality to the women of the Combahee River Collective. In fact, Kimberlé Crenshaw should be credited with the origination of the term, in a pair of essays from 1989 and 1991. The work of the Combahee River Collective, particularly their work on ‘simultaneity' in the 1970s, laid a foundation for Crenshaw's development of the concept of ‘intersectionality'. But credit for coining the term and more fully developing the concept of ‘intersectionality' belongs to Crenshaw!BibleWorm podcast: Episode 521 – Making the Demons Tremble, Amy Robertson and Robert Williamson, Jr.Frank Peretti wrote a series of fiction books depicting demons, angels, and ‘spiritual warfare' for a largely Pentecostal and more conservative evangelical Christian audience through the 1980s and beyond. I'm still recovering from the images his terrifying books emblazoned on my young impressionable brain.Ruth C. Duck hymn text published in Voices Together 642, “Healing River of the Spirit” verse 3: “Living stream that heals the nations, make us channels of your power. All the world is torn by conflict; wars are raging at this hour. Saving Spirit, move among us; guide our winding human course, till we find our way together, flower homeward to our Source.”Image: Photo by Tony Rojas on UnsplashHymn: VT 285 - Cast out, O Christ. Text: Mary Louise Bringle (USA), 2002, © 2006 GIA Publications, Inc. Music: William Tans'ur (England), Harmony of Zion 1734 Permission to podcast the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-726929. All rights reserved.
This is part 1 of a 2-part conversation on Michael Hardt's recent book The Subversive Seventies. Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is co-director with Sandro Mezzadra of The Social Movements Lab. A couple of things I need to say up front. This conversation was recorded in September and initially would have been released in October, but obviously our programming took a quick turn to solidarity work on the Palestinian struggle in light of those events. As I mentioned in the intro to our most recent episode we will continue to do that solidarity work primarily though not exclusively through our YouTube page for a while just so that we can get some of these other conversations out on the podcast feed. Nonetheless, this conversation and the book and the problems it poses I think are as interesting and relevant today as they were in September. I mostly note it's recording date for two reasons, one it will be glaring that we don't talk at all about events in Palestine in the conversation. The second reason I mention the date is that in the intervening months Michael Hardt's long-time collaborator Antonio Negri passed away. Negri was of course a very serious and renowned political philosopher, militant organizer, and a political prisoner, coming out of some of the very movements that Michael Hardt discusses in this book. May he rest in peace and our condolences to Michael for the loss of his friend and collaborator. This discussion is about Michael Hardt's book The Subversive Seventies which was one of the more interesting books we read last year on the podcast. And we would definitely recommend it both for its value as a historical text as well as for the theoretical work Hardt is engaged in in the text. As is laid out quite well I think on the publisher's website, it is a book that attempts to reconstruct the history of revolutionary politics in the 1970's, to systematically approach political movements of the seventies within a global framework of analysis, and to bring together a wide range of political movements from the decade highlighting the ways movements in different countries resonated with and were inspired by one another. Part 2 of the conversation will be released this coming week. I would also be remiss if I didn't say rest in power to Sekou Odinga who passed away earlier this week. We hope to be able to do more in honor of him and as a tribute to his legacy in the coming weeks and years. If you appreciate the work we do, our work is only possible through the support of our patrons. You can support our show for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism
Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today. This event took place on July 19, 2023. Since its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it. Most recently, legislatures across the country have moved to ban Black Studies from curricula, while the right mobilizes outrage against librarians and educators. These attacks come in the context of a backlash against the popular 2020 uprising against racism and police violence, and are being amplified in the halls of power from Congress to the Supreme Court. Join Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Robin D.G. Kelley, co-editors with Colin Kaepernick of the new book Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, for a wide-ranging conversation about perspectives for fighting back against racism today, from the classroom to the streets. Speakers: Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/K6MLtFeZcak Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
On this Tuesday topical show, Crystal welcomes Jaelynn Scott, Executive Director of Lavender Rights Project, for a conversation about their intersectional work to protect Black trans femmes (and thereby all trans people) by focusing on housing justice, economic justice, and violence prevention. Though our lawmakers have passed some protective legislation in what many consider a progressive state, Crystal and Jaelynn discuss how much more needs to be done to ensure the safety of Black trans people here in Washington. To that end, Jaelynn describes a King County Housing First initiative Lavender Rights Project is undertaking in conjunction with Chief Seattle Club to provide permanent supportive housing for trans people who don't feel safe in shelter offered by traditional housing services agencies - the hope is to become a model for how similar support can be provided to other vulnerable communities across the country. Crystal then notes the remarkable success of pilot after pilot of guaranteed income programs, and Jaelynn details the small program Lavender Rights Project has run over the last two years and its positive impact on participants. Finally, the two give a rundown of how to listen, step up, and take action - whether you're a state legislator, a county or city official, or a concerned community member - to push back against anti-trans sentiment, hate, and fascism. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii and find Jaelynn Scott and the Lavender Rights Project at @lavrights. Resources Lavender Rights Project The Combahee River Collective Statement “Introducing our New Mission: thoughts from Executive Director, Jaelynn Scott” | Lavender Rights Project “BREAKING: Lavender Rights Project and Chief Seattle Club opening permanent housing for QT2BIPOC in Fall 2023” | Lavender Rights Project “Here's why the Lavender Rights Project, county officials, and Seattle's mayor think this Capitol Hill apartment building is the right place to start a new approach to creating supportive housing and putting a real dent in the homelessness crisis” by Justin Carder from Capitol Hill Seattle Blog “Seattle's new 'Health through Housing' property to serve QT2BIPOC residents” by Erica Zucco from King5 “This organization's plan to provide housing for Black trans people in Seattle offers a much-needed glimmer of hope” by Naomi Ishisaka from The Seattle Times Seattle Solidarity Budget: Basic Income Guarantee Solidarity Budget presents: Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) panel discussion Washington State Basic Income Feasibility Study | WA Department of Social and Health Services Welcoming Cities Resolution | Seattle City Council “Seattle City Council reaffirms support for immigrants, refugees” by Daniel Beekman from The Seattle Times “Seattle ‘Welcoming City' resolution includes plan for push back on federal orders” by Agatha Pacheco from The Seattle Globalist Impact of Gender Affirming Care Bans On LGBTQ+ Adults | Human Rights Campaign “Majority of LGBTQ adults feel safety threatened by gender-affirming care bans: poll” by Brooke Migdon from The Hill “‘Kids Online Safety Act' will ‘protect' children from trans content, senator Marsha Blackburn admits” by Emily Chudy from Pink News We are family, too — A love letter to the Black community from your trans family | Lavender Rights Project Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review show and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Well, today I am excited to be joined by Jaelynn Scott, the Executive Director of Lavender Rights Project. Welcome to the show. [00:01:02] Jaelynn Scott: Good to be with you. [00:01:04] Crystal Fincher: Well, I'm excited to have this conversation - your reputation precedes you, Lavender Rights' reputation has been talked about. We just had a guest bring you up on the show the other day talking about what wonderful work you do - that was Dr. Ben Danielson. What is Lavender Rights Project and what brought you to this work? [00:01:22] Jaelynn Scott: Oh my goodness, I love Dr. Danielson - I'm so glad he brought us up. So Lavender Rights Project is a Black trans-led organization. We're based in Seattle, we serve all of Washington, and we also do national policy work as well. And we're primarily focused on protecting Black trans people. Honestly, we're in the business of protecting all trans people from violence, period - but we use a lens of Black trans feminism to do that work. And what I mean by that - oftentimes I need to clarify - is we really believe in intersectionality, and as a praxis, and not in the way that people casually use. Like, you know, my mother's from Italy and my father's from whatever, and it's intersectional - nah. In the original term that was meant by the Combahee River Collective - when they brought it up and as others who have coined intersectionality - thinking about what are those pieces, those intersectional pieces that need to be put in place to protect the most vulnerable in our community. That, in 1977 - with the collective, right - was Black women. And I think we have more clarity on gender diversity, so we say Black trans women, Black trans femmes even to be specific. And it really is a praxis, right? It's a strategy to look at - we're not only concerned about Black trans femmes and Black trans women but we know, as the Combahee River Collective said, that if we can really protect Black trans women, Black women - if we can do that, it means all of the systems of destruction and oppression will dismantle because we have taken care of that core group that are affected by each of those intersections. So that's the work that we do, but doing trans work from that lens in particular - in three quick areas, I'll let you know quickly. So housing justice, economic justice, and really getting in the meat of violence prevention, also - those three. [00:03:19] Crystal Fincher: Well, and a lot of work is in that portfolio - a lot needs to be done. You talk about protecting the entire trans community from violence, particularly with the lens of Black trans femmes, which is critical. We're in Washington state, which is in a better position than several other states - true, and we've done some positive work on positive legislation. But there are still challenges here despite the fact that this is a blue state, a progressive area. What do you say to people who feel like - Hey, we're in Washington, it's all good. We don't need to worry about this here. We're all progressive. [00:03:56] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, I mean, the fact is, is that it is not safe anywhere in this country and frankly in the world for trans people - not completely - and especially for Black trans people. For me personally, I'm Black first, and so we start there, right? That there is still police violence against Black communities in Washington state, that we have dismal outcomes in terms of health and housing - even here in progressive states, in Washington state. All of the progressive legislation that exists isn't quite reaching our community because of systemic oppression and because of systems that really need to be looked at and anti-Blackness. And then we add transgender to that lens. I mean, it is just the fact that - anecdotally, when I go to a grocery store, that it is hard to feel safe even there because of - my hair might not be in the right place, my makeup might not be right, and I might catch the wrong light. And it is a constant stare or a calling out of who I am and what people are projecting onto me as a trans woman. And that's the case with all of us who are visibly trans, and those of us who may be a little bit more stealth and can navigate safely. The fact is that many of us in Washington state live in fear. And so is there a modicum amount of protections in terms of legislation? Yeah, it's a bit better in terms of our access, but those freedoms aren't necessarily reaching us in the way that they need to, those protections aren't reaching us in the way that they need to protect - particularly Black trans people. And socially, it's still a mess. We are not that different - I'm from Mississippi - culturally, it's not that different than it is in Mississippi in terms of my ability to navigate socially, social spaces in Washington state. And in many ways, it's safer in Black community in the South because at least there are more of us there, and I'm able to navigate Blackness a little bit easier when there's more Black people here. So you're faced with this sort of double thing - you got us who are a smaller amount of people navigating a mostly white community, and also the general transphobia and transmisogynoir that exists across the country. And if there is a slight degree of - very, very slight degree - of it being socially more acceptable, it's not enough to secure our protection and safety. And it is still dismal. [00:06:23] Crystal Fincher: Now, you talked about the areas that you're practicing in, where you're focusing on - housing being one of them. Why is housing so important? [00:06:33] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, so we had conversations with community, with our community members - and across the nation and also in Washington state - to really get to what are we being asked of as an organization to focus on, to really think about in the protection of Black trans people. And we determined both from research and also from those conversations, three particular areas that are absolutely necessary to guarantee our protection. And the first of those is housing. We believe in Housing First as a disruption and violence against Black trans people. We need to be able to know that our housing - and really food security - but housing is secure and we don't have to depend on others for our security. And we don't have to negotiate our livelihood, right - and our wellbeing so that we can have a place to stay at night. And so the research shows that when people are housed that the outcomes are a lot better in terms of their own security and safety. And it is absolutely critical that we focus in. It's a strange thing - we started as a legal services organization, I think seven years ago now, and we never were in housing and housing justice. But as you know, in Washington state, especially Seattle, and across the country - there's a housing crisis. And no one was actually standing up to do this work. Outcomes for trans people in general - for public housing services - is absolutely terrible. We were finding that our clients and our people, that our family - were not feeling safe in shelters, were not feeling safe by the traditional housing services agencies. And it was unacceptable, so somebody actually needed to step in. So our project is small, it's tiny - 30, maybe 32 housing units for individuals here in the Seattle area. It is permanent supportive housing - ongoing in perpetuity - they leave when they want to leave and they have ongoing supports for their health. It's open to all folks, but we'll primarily be focused on the people that we serve with our specialty. But it really is a model - and that's how I'm looking at it - it's a good model to work across the City of Seattle, King County, Washington state, nonprofits. We're partnering with a Urban Native organization, Chief Seattle Club - who actually owns, right, the land whose land this really is - and they have a lot more competency in the area. So they're providing a lot of support for us as we learn housing. And so there's this beautiful model happening - if it works, and I pray that it does, that we can then replicate across the country with other partners and other people who are interested in getting secure and well-funded housing for trans folk to protect them from violence. And I really think this model is not exclusive to Black trans community, but I think it really could be used for trans community - trans exclusive housing that is well supported by the government and well supported by community is what's needed in this moment to reduce the crisis of violence in our community. [00:09:33] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely - to reduce the crisis of violence, to help people stabilize and find housing security, which is necessary to address so many other challenges that people find in life. Now you talked about this being a model, which I think is important - and permanent supportive housing is, as you said, what research is showing to be most effective in keeping people safe and stable. How did this partnership come about? [00:10:00] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, so initially there was a client of ours who - and a friend, a community member who we were advocating for - who had experienced some really lack of cultural competency with King County, I'll just name it. And they hired her for an event and she was targeted by right-wing media and doxxed because of how she showed up - she did a burlesque performance and they ran with it. And I think King County was really just regretful about that experience - they were hoping to empower trans folk and really show Black trans visibility. And there needed to be some healing. And they asked her - What do you need? We'll do whatever is needed to repair this. And she said - We need housing for my community. And to their credit, King County jumped on it. And so we found the right model with King County - they contacted us because we were the only Black trans-led organization in the state that was doing this work and especially in King County. They contacted us and we began discussions - how could we get into this work and find the right model that worked for Black trans folk? We identified the right program, we found the right partners - we knew we wanted to partner with either a Black or Native org, right? - to help us get this rolling and get going. And it just moved on and progressed from there. [00:11:21] Crystal Fincher: So where is this at in the process currently? Will this be opening soon? [00:11:25] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, and by the way, I do want to name - her name was Beyoncé Black St. James - she's a fantastic community leader out of Spokane who does amazing advocacy work, but also is just a powerful and beautiful and fantastic performer. But we are in the process - we were awarded the facility, it was announced. And we are now waiting on some minor repairs that need to happen in this new building. And so we're sort of caught up in really - King County's working on getting things through their processes and government processes so that we can actually get this minor repair done and open our house. We're delayed in the opening about a year. So we really need our community to continue to encourage the county to move quickly to get this facility open, because we're just wasting money at this point with open rooms - and we have residents lined up and ready to move into the facility. [00:12:20] Crystal Fincher: Now, when you say permanent supportive housing, what does that mean for the people who will eventually be moving in? What does that look like and how will they be served? [00:12:28] Jaelynn Scott: So Ebo Barton, who's our Director of Housing Services has worked really hard to build out a network of support for our residents. So on the first half, King County will provide ongoing social services support as they do for any of their agencies. There also will be security - and we don't look at that security on-site as protecting anyone else but our residents. So there will be 24 hour security on-site to protect them from the outside and make sure that they are safe, as well as ongoing support groups for - I believe there's support for gender affirming care, and healthcare, and counseling services to heal from just the trauma of being Black and the trauma of being trans in this community - as well as getting them career support and moving on career support. There's a number of, I believe, 9 or 10 agencies who are committed to supporting our particular facility in addition to King County's ongoing services. [00:13:28] Crystal Fincher: So is most of the focus on this facility, are there any plans for others, or is it working on getting this model straight and then evaluating after? [00:13:37] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, so we aren't a housing services org, right? So I think we see ourselves as a policy shop and really our direct services really informs what we're doing to push forward in policies. I mean, we equally do criminal legal services and we also do policy advocacy around criminal law and this intersection with trans people. And we do economic justice - we're really pushing for a guaranteed income as a sort of third pillar of support for all trans people in Washington State, quite similar to the guaranteed income in San Francisco. So we aren't a housing services organization and I don't think we're immediately planning on expanding those services. It is our hope that - King County has promised that those properties will move over and shift into the ownership of organizations. I think we just wanna stay there - continue to work in supporting that property and maybe even have those residents, if they want to, participate in the movement building and policy work that happens with our organization. So we're not seeing them as this sort of dual client versus people providing services - that they are a part of our community and they're part of the movement building effort. So I think we wanna stay there and it's a good size for us at the moment, but we do and we have been talking nationally with other Black trans community members and organizations who are hoping to do projects similarly. So we hope other people will take on the banner - and even in Seattle, we need a lot more than 32 units to take care of trans community in general. I know, and I don't wanna get ahead of the county, but there was at least a request for proposals for transitional housing services for veterans - for LGBTQ veterans focusing on trans communities - that King County is also doing, that we hope another agency will take up the banner and continue to provide for those expanded services. I know Chief Seattle Club is hoping to serve more Two-Spirit people - we will also be serving some of those folks in our facility. And so there's a number of places that we can start moving in. And really this is the right response right now to what is happening across the country. If we can take anything from these coordinated political attacks - and let me tell you that they are coming after us, not because they actually care that much about the issues - they are coming after us because they wanna get elected, because they need a boogeyman and they think that this is gonna score them political points. But what they don't know is it's drawing more attention to the issue of the crisis that is happening in trans community. And it's really bringing more support from the majority of Americans who actually have love in their heart and care for their community, and believe in the diversity of the American society, and really support LGBTQ community. And so that's - right now, it is our opportunity to in response to them, not necessarily be put on the defensive, but let's finally secure and build trans protections, trans security, trans safety in response to their disgusting actions. [00:16:31] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely, I love that. And focus on support and building, as opposed to centering the people who are just pushing fascism and hate. [00:16:42] Jaelynn Scott: Fascism, period. Period. [00:16:44] Crystal Fincher: So you said you are a policy shop and you have a lot of experience in policy. One, I'm excited to hear about the talking about a guaranteed income - every single pilot, and there have been many now, for guaranteed income has just been successful and shown that it's helped. Turns out when you give people money and let them spend it on what they need the most, that's the most effective intervention that we see. Is this something that you're advocating for locally, and in our city or state? Is this something that looks like might be possible here in Seattle? [00:17:20] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, so there is two areas - well, a few areas. So we're doing our own very, very small - a sort of a pilot just for our community to get a sense of how this is actually serving us. We started thinking about guaranteed income because in the summer of 2020, we were doing mutual aid and we were finding that people - $50, $100, $500, every once in a while - they were becoming more dependent on that. And we didn't like the positionality of us looking like sort of the saviors of individuals instead of empowering them to have economic security. And what we found now is that there were a few, right - that were return. And so we had enough money to do about five folks - it's over the last two years - a $1,000 a month, every single month, for those people. And they, we're watching just the results - both from our surveys and our conversations with them - their economic security, their housing security, how they're thriving in their own careers. Month after month after month, we're just seeing so much improvements and they are needing less to do the GoFundMes and less seeking mutual aid - that is declining - and support in the community. And so that's sort of our - that's the piece where I say we do the support so to inform how we approach it. So we do - there's basic income, right - which is a kind of a guarantee for all. And then there's sort of guaranteed income, which I think in our understanding is really focused on particular populations that are most in need. There's a basic income approach in Washington state that, I think, there was even a bill pushed through that didn't actually make it through - I don't think it made it out of committee and it failed, and I think that will continue to come up. And we do support that, but we really do believe - that you have to start looking at who are the people who are most in need and you have to consider gender and race, economic status, pregnancy status, as well as a number of items in order to get this right. And I believe the state version was kind of a lottery system that we weren't feeling secure about. So we've been in conversation with the Transgender Cultural District in San Francisco, and they launched a - worked with the City of San Francisco as well as other agencies and nonprofits - to get a guaranteed income for trans people in the City of San Francisco. And that is, you know, there's been some lawsuits and et cetera, but that is getting launched there if it hasn't started already. But that program follows on the heels of other guaranteed income for people who are pregnant, guaranteed income for other particular populations in San Francisco that have proven effective - and at least $1,000 a month in an ongoing way. And that's what we wanna push in the City of Seattle. We're currently, I believe, and the people who are doing a Solidarity Budget are also looking at how they can do guaranteed income for particular populations. And so we're in conversation with them as well as pushing on our own for a guaranteed income for trans people. And hopefully using some of the data from the support that we provided - our organization - to prove that this is a proven method to protect your Washington and Seattle populations. [00:20:21] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. What other policy is really important right now, or what is at the top of the list for you that you're advocating for? [00:20:29] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, so I think right now it's guaranteed income. We use policy in a number of different ways - like the capital P, which is like the legislation - but the lowercase policy, which includes how King County is operating in relationship to providing housing to trans people. Like we see all that as a sort of movement building policy where different aspects depending on who's involved. But right now, we're really concerned about what's happening nationally. As you may know, Washington state really has a suite - what I've been calling a suite - of trans protections that have passed over the years, including an expansion of Medicare to include gender affirming care. As well as recent legislative session, there was the SHIELD law, which protects people who are seeking refuge here from extradition to other states and penalty and persecution from other states for what they do in Washington state. And finally, there is a youth gender affirming care access for people who end up in shelters who are runaways and making sure that they have access to this data and aren't turned back to dangerous living situations for seeking affirmations in their gender. And all of those are good bills - they're all at different levels of acceptance and there's lawsuits and all kinds of things happening, being pushed from outside parties who are trying to push legislation here. But they don't necessarily really address the needs of trans communities of color because they are mostly written in legislative corners, sessions with white folk who are in the legislative game. They really haven't, didn't sit down - because they're on the defensive, right? It's a quick thing. You gotta get this stuff going 'cause you're seeing like all of the sort of outlawing gender affirming care in Alabama and Georgia and et cetera, and criminalizing seeking care outside of the state - both for abortion and gender affirming care. And so to their credit - that they needed to, and they felt like they needed to respond. And I do think there needed to be a response. But there wasn't enough time to actually doing the organizing, the movement building, the conversations with communities of color to say - actually, you never had access to gender affirming care in the way that white communities have. You've never had that access, especially not in the US South. So what is it that we can do now to correct the original sin, right? So that you never find yourself there and none of our communities will find ourselves there. But what we're doing now is putting a band-aid on an issue and making sure that those people of privilege who have already had access to care, don't lose that access. So one of the ways they could have done it, right? is to say - Okay, we want to protect people seeking gender affirming care here from Texas, for example. And we wanna have this legislation up so that they can't be extradited to other states and et cetera. Okay - build a budget line item in the state budget that provides support for them, to fly them in to seek care, to make sure they have access to medical care, to make sure they have recovery services and et cetera. In addition to that, if you had really talked to communities, you would have known that none of the people who are most at risk in Texas can afford to get here to seek that care and to actually benefit from that bill. And so there was additional conversations needed. If not that, at least put out some funding and support for communities of color here to gather and come up with legislative priorities on our own that they can take the lead from instead of us following on the tail end of whatever they decided in their corners. [00:23:57] Crystal Fincher: So for people who may be legislators or policy makers listening right now, where can they start with that? How do they start with that? [00:24:06] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, I think right now capacity building funding is absolutely necessary. So for those organizations who are trusted - there's POCAAN and PCAF and our organization, Lavender Rights Project. There is Gender Justice League. There's a number of queer and trans organizations - Creative Justice - who serve Black trans and queer people, who are brilliant and who have policymakers and movement builders and do amazing work, but they aren't as well funded as the big box nonprofits. And so we need the ability to actually hold policy - to have the staffing for it, to organize for it, to fund our people to do that work - so that when the legislative session comes up, we have the policy recommendations necessary, that we actually have boots on the ground. We're learning from other community members about what those priorities are, but we are behind the game here. We're behind the ball here. We are years and years and years behind the ball. So that capacity building around the ability to do both organizing and policy making - that's needed, critically needed - including lobbying, the ability for us to fund our own lobbyists. We need it and we need it like 30 years ago in this state. [00:25:24] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely, and makes a lot of sense. Now we're thinking about legislatively, do you think - for local leaders, city council members, mayors - locally, that they need to embark upon the same path or are there additional suggestions that you would have for them? [00:25:41] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, I haven't - we've been thinking a lot about the State Legislature. And locally we've been thinking more around sort of some of the direct support initiatives like guaranteed income and et cetera. But I do think it's worth local politicians, councils - to figure out how can they build out a sanctuary county, city for trans people - what policies are in their power to make, what protections are in their power to make to ensure security and safety for Washington residents and others who seek care here. And let me tell you, it will work because I - the majority of the Black trans people that work in my organization come from the US South, they come from the East Coast. They come from other places where they may have felt less safe and they sought refuge here because of the promise of progressiveness of Washington state. Now that promise has mostly been empty, but they can work really hard to make sure that promise is fulfilled - because we are already starting to see that there will be a flood of refugees from other places around this country as this ball continues to drop on attacks against us and the rise of fascism in this country. So there are protections that are in the power of King County - to make sure that folks have income, to make sure they have access to employment, to make sure they have access to housing, to ensure that their laws protect them safely within their city jurisdictions - that people need to be looking at on their own and starting to work on. [00:27:14] Crystal Fincher: Now for people who aren't policy makers - they're just looking around and feeling very troubled by what they're seeing by the rise of hate and fascism, anti-trans violence. What advice would you give for how they can meaningfully help? [00:27:32] Jaelynn Scott: People, we need the voices of everyone at this moment. And the first thing is to continue to love on your LGBTQ family that's around you. And really lean into care for them in this moment - because whether or not we're saying it, a lot of us are feeling deeply traumatized, targeted and attacked at this moment. And there was a poll that was recently released - I can't remember, but I found it through the HRC, National HRC - that more and more of us are feeling less safe across the country because of what's happening. And so what can you do to extend your love and care to people. Also, as people start seeking refuge here and refuge from other states, be thinking about what can you give up? You know, we might be at the place that we were during the crisis of immigration, especially in the Trump administration, where people were starting to open up their homes to - as refugee assistance. And I think it's time to start planning that. What can we do to prepare our space for people who might need care and safety here? And I think the third thing I will say is look at and lean into Black queer and trans communities of color, Native and Indigenous Two-Spirit communities - and see the organizing that they're doing right now. Follow their lead. When they say - Hey, we need you to speak out against the Kids Online Safety Act - that's currently moving through Congress right now. And that promises to silence trans communities nationally in social media, that will almost destroy the social media and the publicity of nonprofits who do this work. And really will remove the ability of trans youth to find affirming media, to find affirming care, services, information, education, sexual health on social media. It will be destructive, and yet it has bipartisan support. Speak out, right - whenever we say this bill is being pushed in this state that's not quite working - and take the lead from communities of color, trans and queer communities of color in their legislative efforts. It's pretty easy. Follow them on social media, right? Give when they say give, take action when they say take action. Many people are often calling and saying - I want to volunteer. I want to be on the ground. I want to whatever. But when we post - Hey, we need you to call your Congressperson on this - no one calls. It's so much easier than you think. Follow, support, and listen. [00:29:56] Crystal Fincher: It does. And it makes a difference when you call and when you reach out, especially when it's to your Congressperson. They pay attention, they listen, and it is very important to do that. I appreciate that. As we move to close this interview, is there just anything that you would urge people to reflect on, or act on, or do as we move forward? [00:30:18] Jaelynn Scott: Yeah, so Black trans community, Black trans people, Black trans women, trans folk have always been here. And I think - speaking specifically to Black community at this moment - we have always been a part of culture. There have been moments when we have been silenced, where colonization has forced our history around gender diversity on the continent to be erased. And we need to have a conversation. We need to have a conversation about how much trans communities have supported who we are as a people - our role in the civil rights movement, our role in the Black Lives Matter movement - how we have always been there for Black community. And we need Black community to stand up for us in this moment too - that we are much more beautiful because of our diversity and that violence against any Black person is violence against the entire Black community. And so, yeah, we need to have conversations. But I also want us to take care to not take the lead from white right-wing neo-fascists who are concerned about the destruction of trans folk, the oppression of women, and who really cannot stand your Black skin - to let them lead the conversation, to let them take your voice, and you to be taking talking points from them. Let's have a conversation as community as we are - deeply from the place of the value for human rights, civil rights, and our value for our love ethic that we all share as Black folk. Let's sit down around that and let's sit down around gender and have a convo. And so I think that right now is what's at the top of my heart in speaking and speaking to the community that is closest to my heart. [00:32:02] Crystal Fincher: Very well said, absolutely necessary to be said. I sincerely appreciate you sharing with us on the program today - all the work that you're doing as part of the Lavender Rights Project. And thank you so much for your time today. [00:32:17] Jaelynn Scott: Thank you, Crystal. And thank you so much for this platform. This is - it's a critical moment - and this may seem small on a podcast and a brief conversation, but every single one of these matter at this moment. [00:32:28] Crystal Fincher: Thank you. Thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks, which is produced by Shannon Cheng. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on every podcast service and app - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 117 Intersectionality is a Woke standard, but what is it? Where does it come from? The history of the concept isn't that hard to trace, and where it leads us is back to some of the worst regimes in history. Kim Crenshaw tends to be credited with Intersectionality, but she got it from the radicals in the Combahee River Collective. They put the idea together, in their turn, from the advocacy and activism of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was copying Mao, who was completing ideas laid down by Stalin for completing the perfect Soviet Union. In this provocative episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads and expands upon his recent essay (https://newdiscourses.com/2023/05/intersectionality-is-american-maoism/), summarizing his remarks given at Northwestern University at the start of May 2023 explaining the Maoist nature of Woke intersectionality. He also delivers a powerful warning to the Woke youth who have taken up with the movement. Get James Lindsay's new book, The Marxification of Education: https://amzn.to/3RYZ0tY Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2023 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #maoism
1970s black feminists like Toni Cade Bambara, the Combahee River Collective, and Awa Thiam critique white feminist and black nationalist failures to recognize the unique struggle of the black woman.
Grace Anderson is a dreamer, a builder, and a Black queer feminist who writes and imagines futures where choice is a human right. In this conversation we discuss why she loves to giggle and fly downhills on her bike, solo adventures in the outdoors, the importance of journaling, and learning that it's important to build what you're for and not what you're against. Faith and Grace also talk a lot about their identity as Black women, their journeys to develop and exude a strong pride specifically in that identity, and why it feels so important to them to continue to center Black women in so much of the work. This episode includes a pretty incredible reading list too by the end, so make sure to check out the related links. Connect with Grace via Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/amaze_me_grace/ ALL THE LINKS: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Dr. Carolyn Finney The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection by Dorceta E. Taylor How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariama Kaba The Nap MinistryMapping Our Social Change roles in Times of Crisis by Deepa IyerMORE LINKS FROM THE DEBRIEF, COMING SOON! Billie Holiday sings Strange Fruithttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHGAMjwr_j8 The Tragic Story Behind Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"https://www.biography.com/musicians/billie-holiday-strange-fruit How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people, The Guardian (trigger warning: graphic images and stories)https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-memorial-us-south-montgomery-alabama Jim Crow Lawshttps://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws Harriet Tubman, an Unsung Naturalist, Used Owl Calls as a Signal on the Underground Railroadhttps://www.audubon.org/news/harriet-tubman-unsung-naturalist-used-owl-calls-signal-underground-railroad 1921 Tulsa Race Massacrehttps://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/ Emmett Tillhttps://www.history.com/topics/black-history/emmett-till-1 Historical Database of Sundown Townshttps://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown-towns-database/state-map/ Sundown Town research specific to Oregon, where Faith liveshttps://blogs.oregonstate.edu/oregonmulticulturalarchives/2019/06/05/sundown-towns-2019/ The Jim Crow Roots of Loitering Lawshttps://the-ard.com/2022/05/31/the-jim-crow-roots-of-loitering-laws/ A Visual History of Loitering Lawshttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-21/what-is-loitering-really AMERICA RECKONS WITH RACIAL INJUSTICELaw Professor On Misdemeanor Offenses And Racism In The Criminal SystemHeard on All Things Considered, 2020https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/12/876221163/law-professor-on-how-misdemeanors-sweep-blacks-into-the-criminal-system Sharecropping: Slavery By Another Namehttps://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/
The next episode of our Best of ITT series is from July 2019, and it gets into the significance of Black feminism. Maria and Julio talk with writer and activist Feminista Jones about her book, “Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World From the Tweets to the Streets.” They also discuss the influence of hip-hop on women's sexual liberation, the importance of mental and spiritual health, and Black women speaking out on their experiences with sexual abuse in the #MeToo era. ITT Staff Picks: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes about the Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective and the divisions within the feminist movement, in this article for The New Yorker. “Dorothy Pitman Hughes passed away at the age of 84 after a long, active life spent advocating for equality and human rights for all people. Known as a pioneering feminist activist, Hughes devoted her time and resources to serving people with the greatest needs,” writes Feminista Jones in this article for InStyle. Kaitlyn Greenidge writes about the Sisterhood, a 1970s Black women's writing group that rose from the Black power and women's movement and focused on creating work for each other rather than the white mainstream, in this piece for Harper's Bazaar.
Join us as we talk about the Combahee River Collective! Dr. Dara Nix-Stevenson is an educator and found of the the Instagram account Since Combahee (@sincecombahee)
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The second discussion features Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars. Speakers: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning scholar and public intellectual. Taylor is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2021. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Taylor's scholarship examines racism and public policy, inequality, Black politics, radical politics and social movements in the United States, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Taylor is working on two projects, one that look at the dynamics of race, class and politics in the first generation after the Black social movements of the 1960s and a book that examines the Black radical tradition mediated through the life and politics of Angela Y. Davis. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation and Jacobin, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. Taylor has been named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians. For eight years, Taylor was a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement. Join the upcoming events in the Freedom Dreams Series: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/freedom-dreams-with-robin-dg-kelley-1288129 Watch the live event recording: youtu.be/BBoQI9HU1rk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: @haymarketbooks
What is identity politics? Recent definitions have strayed some distance from the ideas laid out by the Black radical feminists of the Combahee River Collective. In their original 1977 statement, the Boston collective established a simple but undeniable truth: what you know depends on who you are. The problem, as American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò […]
And we're back to our regularly non-holiday-sponsored programming! This week, Rachel tells us about the Black, queer, feminist collective, the Combahee River Collective! ✸ Content Warnings: This episode contains adult themes and explicit language, such as racism, antisemitism, misogyny, brief references to enslaved peoples, and talk about going #2... Sources: (1977) THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE STATEMENT via Black Past The Global Social Theory's Page for the Combahee River Collective “If Black Women Were Free”: An Oral History of the Combahee River Collective" by Marian Jones "Black History Boston: Combahee River Collective" from the City of Boston "Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free" by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor ✎ Make sure to send in your personal listener stories to historicallyreallygoodfriends@gmail.com to be read on the podcast! ✦ Feel free to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen. ☻ Give us a follow on Instagram @historicallyreally to see photos from today's episode!
In this episode we are joined by Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley to discuss their new work 'Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics,' published with Pluto Press. You can order the book online here: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745346588/fractured/ A lively and fun conversation, covering the possibilities of universalist approaches, the value of using 'revolutionary time' as an analytical concept, and the paucity of arguments from both right and left which tell us to ignore the material realities of identity. You can access the archives of Michael and Alex's previous work for The Occupied Times here: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/ and Base Publication here: http://www.basepublication.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- You can keep in touch with the podcast via email: abcwithdannyandjim@gmail.com, and Facebook, Twitter and Instragram, all @abcdannyandjim. You can subscribe to our newsletter here: https://abcwithdannyandjim.substack.com/ The podcast music is Stealing Orchestra & Rafael Dionísio, 'Gente da minha terra (que me mete um nojo do caralho).' Reproduced from the Free Music Archive under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License, available here: https://bit.ly/35ToW4W The podcast logo is an adapted version of the Left Book Club logo (1936-48), reproduced, edited and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence. Original available here: https://bit.ly/35Nd6cv The image in this episode is a photograph of the The Combahee River Collective.
Dr. Moya Bailey is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on marginalized groups' use of digital media to promote social justice and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021). Visit her website: https://www.moyabailey.com/
Sam and Emma host Olufemi O. Taiwo, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, to discuss his recent book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). First, Sam touches on the successful passage of “Build Back– a bit” in the House, effective abortion bans in Idaho and Louisiana, Arizona's attempts to finish Trump's wall, and Brittany Griner's appeal in Russia, before discussing Donald Trump's magical declassification fingers and why that actually doesn't matter when it comes to the espionage act. Then, he is joined by Professor Olufemi Taiwo as they first define what identity politics is, birthed from the work of the Combahee River Collective as a way to do politics starting from an understanding of one's own place in the social world, before walking through the various critiques of IdPol across the spectrum, from the far right's investment in the status quo and the center's focus on [difference]-blind perspectives to a class reductionist's particularism when it comes to social hierarchies. After parsing through how these critiques have developed across the spectrum, Professor Taiwo dives into his concept of “Deference Politics,” the understanding of how identity politics discourse in a capitalist society is then appropriated by and filtered through the ideologies of the elites at the top of various social hierarchies (be they production, military, or media) and thus slowly become a defining stance of the industry through deference to capital power. Next, Professor Taiwo walks through his critique of identity politics, exploring why a class reductionist understanding of how capitalism operates can still be aligned with understanding the systems (racism, transphobia, etc.) that capitalism props up, and why the latter element can often be necessary to inspire solidarity around the former's movement. After a discussion on “targeted universalism” as a way to unify these two elements, Sam and Professor Taiwo wrap up the interview with a conversation on the breathtaking achievement of the US elites in shaping the “cancel culture” debate. And in the Fun Half: Sam dives into the Right Wing's excuses constantly collapsing in on themselves, as Kash Patel cries about Donald Trump's declassification magic, Tulsi Gabbard asks why the FBI and IRS, now that they've gone after the elite (Donald Trump) who says they won't punish those who don't have any power… which of course never has happened before, and Rudi Giuliani ponders the dangers of criticizing bad people. Dr. Oz complains about the price of crudités under Joe Biden, Marjorie Taylor Greene rants about appliances and the Green New Deal, and Richard from California suggests some conversations on demographic changes. Kowalski expresses his disappointment with the USDA, Bro Flamingo discusses the state of the GOP as defined by voters, and Stephen from North Carolina discusses teaching at a Charter School. Plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Olufemi's book here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-capture Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: LiquidIV: Cooler weather makes it easier to miss signs of dehydration like overheating or perspiration, which means it's even more important to keep your body properly hydrated. Liquid I.V. contains 5 essential vitamins—more Vitamin C than an orange and as much potassium as a banana. Healthier than sugary sports drinks, there are no artificial flavors or preservatives and less sugar than an apple. Grab your favorite Liquid I.V. flavors nationwide at Walmart or you can get 25% off when you go to https://www.liquid-iv.com/ and use code MAJORITYREP at checkout. That's 25% off ANYTHING you order when you get better hydration today using promo code MAJORITYREP at https://www.liquid-iv.com/. Aura: Protect yourself from America's fastest-growing crime. Try Aura for 14 days for free: https://aura.com/majority Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO READ ALONG WITH THE SHOW, YOU CAN ACCESS THIS EPISODES TRANSCRIPTION BY CLICKING THIS LINK: . https://docs.google.com/document/d/11xcAJ18bhK9CdWPtzc5LEprMV4GuZ-br_KK7_pFArCA/edit . . Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The Collective argued that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as women and, more specifically, as Black lesbians founded by Barbara Smith. . . Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American Civil Rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues. . . Reproductive justice is a critical, theoretical framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. It is “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities,” according to SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the first organization founded to build a reproductive justice movement. www.sistersong.net . . High risk pregnancy is one where a birthing person or the fetus has an increased risk of adverse outcomes compared to uncomplicated pregnancies. . . Preeclampsia is a pregnancy complication where high blood pressure and high levels of protein in urine indicate kidney damage. There can also be weight gain and swelling in the legs due to water retention. It can be managed with oral or IV medications and requires weighing the risks of early delivery versus the risk of continued symptoms. . . Medicaid in the U.S. is a federal and state program that helps with healthcare costs for some people with limited income and resources. Medicaid also offers benefits not normally covered by Medicare, including nursing home care and personal care. www.medicaid.gov . . WIC is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children is a federal assistance program of the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for healthcare and nutrition of low-income pregnant people, chestfeeding, and children under the age of five. . . The Bradley Method of natural childbirth is a method of natural childbirth developed in 1947 by Robert A. Bradley, M.D and popularized by his book, “Husband-Coached Childbirth” first published in 1965. The Bradley Method emphasizes that birth is a natural process. Mothers are encouraged to trust their body, and focus on diet and exercise throughout pregnancy; and it teaches couples to manage labor through deep breathing and the support of a partner or labor coach. . . NICU is a neonatal intensive care unit, also known as an intensive care nursery, is an intensive care unit specializing in the care of ill or premature newborn infants. Neonatal refers to the first 28 days of life. . . Richmond Doula Project is a collective of full spectrum doulas in Richmond, Virginia offering support and education to people through all pregnancy outcomes, centering POC, LGBTQIA, and other underserved communities. www.doulaprojectrva.org . . Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project is Virginia's grassroots abortion fund and seeks to further reproductive justice by providing practical and financial support for abortion services in Virgina and surrounding communities. RRFP strives to be a resource to the community by engaging in grassroots advocacy for the full spectrum of reproductive rights. www.rrfp.net . . Ancient Song Doula Services is an international doula certifying organization founded in the fall of 2008 in Brooklyn, New York with the goal to offer quality doula services to women of color and low income families who otherwise would not be able to afford doula care and training a workforce of full spectrum doula to address health inequities within the communities they want to serve. www.ancientsongdoulaservices.com . . Maven Clinic is a privately held New York, NY company that offers a telemedicine-based virtual clinic for women's and family health. www.mavenclinic.com . . Gofundme is an American for profit crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money for events ranging from life events such as celebrations and graduations to challenging circumstances like accidents and illnesses. www.gofundme.com . . Chestfeeding is feeding your baby milk from your chest. It's often used as away for transgender and nonbinary parents to describe how they feed and nurture their babies. . . Lactation Happens is the first genderless chestfeeding class in Virginia created and taught by Aye J. . . The Afiya Center was established in response to the increasing disparities between HIV incidences worldwide and the extraordinary prevalence of HIV among Black womxn and girls in Texas. TAC is transforming the lives, health, and overall wellbeing of Black womxn and girls by providing refuge, education, and resources to ignite the communal voices of Black womxn resulting in our full achievement of reproductive freedom. www.theafiyacenter.org . . Sister Song is a national activist organization dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color. www.sistersong.net . . Black Mamas Matter Alliance is a Black women-led cross-sectoral alliance that centers Black mama and birthing people to advocate, drive research, build power, and shift culture for Black maternal health, rights, and justice. www.blackmamasmatter.org . . Find more of Aye J, find them at @the_do_you_doula on Instagram . . www.queerdoulanetwork.com . . www.spajourneys.com Journeyspa_ on Instagram . . Original Podcast Beat Produced Mixed & Engineered By: Info Black Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoblack_ Twitter: https://twitter.com/infoblack_ . . DONATIONS: . Patreon.com/symbaluna Paypal: journeyspa12@gmail.com Cashapp: $symbaluna Venmo: @symbaluna
Dr. Jenn M. Jackson (who uses the pronouns they/them) is a queer genderflux, androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson's primary research is on Black Politics with a focus on group threat, gender and sexuality, political behavior, and social movements. Jackson also holds affiliate positions in African American Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and LGBT Studies. Jackson is the author of the forthcoming book Black Women Taught Us (Random House Press 2022). The book is an intellectual and political history of Black women's activism, movement organizing, and philosophical work. It explores how women from Harriet Jacobs to Audre Lorde and the members of the Combahee River Collective (among others) have taught us how to fight for justice and radically reimagine a more just world for us all. In this episode, Christen Smith and Jackson dive into what it means to be queer and Black. We police our bodies and genders in ways that hinder our goals of dismantling systems of gender/sexuality/race oppression. In this podcast, dr. Jackson articulates the ways in which blackness is inherently queer and how queerness gives us the vocabulary to speak our truth. Genderflux embodies what it means to love the people who are deviant, wayward, and criminal. Jackson's articulation of abolition is intertwined with their definition of genderflux. As they articulate, “how we move in our bodies and how we choose to show up, matters just as much as how we fight for folk in our communities.” Black people's sensation of threat and fear is a deeply rooted lived experience. Jackson is currently completing two book projects: Black Women Taught Us, (Random House, 2022) and Policing Blackness: How Intersectional Threat Shapes Politics ( 2023).
“Identity politics” polarizes discourse about virtually every aspect of contemporary political life. But what exactly is it, and what role does “elite capture” play in how it has come to be understood? Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is a philosopher, assistant professor at Georgetown University and author of several books, including “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)” and “Reconsidering Reparations,” both of which were published in 2022. He joins WITHpod to discuss the origins of identity politics, the problems with what he calls deference politics, and how elites have co-opted the language of social justice to their own ends.
Join Lux and Haymarket for a discussion about feminist internationalism in the face of war. How do we practice feminist internationalism? The question has never been more urgent than today, as war rages in Ukraine. This is a problem feminists have faced many times before. Remember when Laura Bush tried to sell the war in Afghanistan as women's liberation? At the time, the left was hampered by thin relationships with our feminist counterparts in these countries, leaving the anti-war movement vulnerable to claims that women there really did want the help of the US military. Today, we're committed to strengthening those relationships through conversations like this one. The spring 2022 issue of Lux features several explorations of US empire from a feminist perspective. We talk with the women of the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association about the US withdrawal, profile National Book Award-finalist poet Solmaz Sharif whose work confronts the War on Terror and her own exile from Iran, report on Okinawa's multigenerational anti-US-base movement, and pay tribute to Puerto Rican radical Luisa Capetillo. This event will take on the special role that feminism continues to play in anti-imperalist struggles, from the Middle East to East Asia to Latin America, connecting these struggles, and activists, across borders. ----------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at New York Times Magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center. Her writing covers the War on Terror, Islamophobia, and the Middle East and South Asia. She was previously on the staff of The New Yorker and The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. She is currently working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States. Margo Okazawa-Rey is a professor emerita at San Francisco State University and a transnational feminist activist. She works on militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women in the US and around the world. She is a founding member of the International Women's Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, and was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective. Her recent publications include “‘Nation-izing' Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Anti-militarist Feminists,” and Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (Oxford, 2020). Sophie Pinkham is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. She has written about Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics for The New York Review of Books, The New Left Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and many other publications. She produced the short documentary Balka, on women, drugs, and HIV in Ukraine. Sarah Leonard (moderator) is editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. She is contributing editor to Dissent and The Nation. (@sarahrlnrd) This event is sponsored by Lux magazine and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/vRuCwaSiHyg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket, 2022) both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
In this episode we welcome back Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò. Táíwò is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Earlier this year we interviewed him to talk about his book Reconsidering Reparations. In this episode we talk about his latest book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) which hits book stores this week. In this conversation we talk about elite capture as a concept. We talk about how elite capture has morphed dominant understandings of what folks mean by the term “identity politics” in stark contrast to the version of it put forth in the Combahee River Collective Statement back in 1977. Femi dispels notions that the ways elites have captured and reappropriated this term are unique to identity politics, and argues persuasively that in fact elite capture is a system behavior that shows up in all kinds of places and ways within our social systems, and that social movements and our radical ideas are not immune to this process. We also talk about some other examples and versions of elite capture big and small that are occurring all the time, and talk about how we might best fight back against this phenomenon. In addition we get some discussion of what Táíwò refers to as deference politics, as well as politics that are based around trauma. Including some of the things that he thinks these approaches get right, and some of the things that they get wrong and ways we might differently engage the problems they seek to address. And we also get into some discussions around the attention economy and Femi touches on privilege discourse as well. We've continued to take some hits to our patronage for the show lately. We just want to say that we know times are tough for everyone financially right now and we just really want to give a shout-out to everyone who is continuing to give what they can to support the show. If you haven't become a patron yet, it's the best way you can support our ability to bring these conversations week after week. You can do that at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism for as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year. Now here is our conversation with Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò on Elite Capture Elite Capture from Haymarket Books Elite Capture from Pluto Press Other items referenced in the show: How We Get Free by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor The conversation between Asad Haider and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on socialism and identity politics. Our own discussions with Barbara Smith of the Combahee River Collective
The Combahee River Collective was created in 1974 by Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith. The Collective's name refers to a resistance action by Harriet Tubman in 1863 in South Carolina, the Combahee River Raid. Tubman freed more that 750 slaves in this unique military campaign, the only one in U.S. history conceived and directed by a woman. They experienced much disillusionment with the second wave of American feminism from the 1960s along with the civil rights, black nationalism, and Black Panther movements. Thus they wanted their new platform to include struggles against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression. Equally dismayed by the direction of the feminist movement, which they believed to be dominated by middle-class white women, and the suffocating masculinity in Black-nationalist organizations, they set out to formulate their own politics and strategies in response to their distinct experiences as Black women. The Collective believed that if Black women were successful in their struggles and movements, they would have an impact far beyond their immediate demands. As they put it, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Listen, learn then activate!
The Combahee River Collective was created in 1974 by Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith. The Collective's name refers to a resistance action by Harriet Tubman in 1863 in South Carolina, the Combahee River Raid. Tubman freed more that 750 slaves in this unique military campaign, the only one in U.S. history conceived and directed by a woman. They experienced much disillusionment with the second wave of American feminism from the 1960s along with the civil rights, black nationalism, and Black Panther movements. Thus they wanted their new platform to include struggles against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression. Equally dismayed by the direction of the feminist movement, which they believed to be dominated by middle-class white women, and the suffocating masculinity in Black-nationalist organizations, they set out to formulate their own politics and strategies in response to their distinct experiences as Black women. The Collective believed that if Black women were successful in their struggles and movements, they would have an impact far beyond their immediate demands. As they put it, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Listen, learn then activate!
It's April 3rd. This day in 1979, community organizations in Boston such as the Combahee River Collective are raising the alarm about a string of murders targeting Black women. The CRC looked to highlight the way in which race, gender, and class all intersected in the conditions that led to the murders and the city's reaction. Jody, Niki, and Kellie discuss the Roxbury murders and the identity politics that emerged from the community's response. Sign up for our newsletter! Find out more at thisdaypod.com And don't forget about Oprahdemics, hosted by Kellie, coming soon from Radiotopia. This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories. If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Our website is thisdaypod.com Follow us on social @thisdaypod Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Julie Shapiro and Audrey Mardavich, Executive Producers at Radiotopia
You didn't think the story of Black feminism ended at the Voting Rights Act, did you? Turns out there were several influential Black feminist organizations in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. No one ever told me about the Third World Women's Alliance, the National Black Feminist Organization, the National Alliance of Black Feminists, The Combahee River Collective, or Black Women Organized for Action. So, this episode, I discuss them with so Professor Kimberly Springer author of Living for the Revolution Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Though they no longer exist, these organizations lend us valuable present insight. Music Credit PeaceLoveSoul by Jeris (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/35859 Ft: KungFu (KungFuFrijters)
Brother Jones answers the following questions in Session #3 of "Q&A with Brother Jones."Can you share more about why the Combahee River Collective believed that focusing on Black women would help everyone? I've heard this echoed by modern day Black feminists but want to know more about A) Why you think it might be true? And B) Is it still true today as it was then?What specifically is it about the NFL that creates racial bias towards Black head coaches compared to the NBA, which has several Black coaches?Brian Flores: Is the NFL Anti-black?https://eric-t-jones.medium.com/brian-flores-is-the-nfl-anti-black-ba05a574a82aInstagramhttps://www.instagram.com/take5withbrotherjones/Emailfiveminuteswithbrotherjones@gmail.com
What is “identity politics” and where does this term come from? In this episode, Crystal and Krystal go deeper into the work of the Combahee River Collective and examine its impactful 1977 statement outlining the key elements of Black feminist thought. We hear more from Black Feminism foremother Barbara Smith on how the statement was written and guests Drs. Brittney Cooper, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Duchess Harris on the meaning of identity politics as the Combahee River Collective articulated it. Find more information at s.si.edu/collected.
What is a collective and how is that type of group important to Black feminist organizing? In this episode, Crystal and Krystal discuss the meaning of the term “collective” and hear from Black feminist luminary Barbara Smith about the history she and others made with formation of the landmark Combahee River Collective. Guests Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Feminista Jones, Dr. Brittney Cooper, Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Dr. Courtney Marshall help us understand the power of collectivity and the legacy of Combahee. Find more information at s.si.edu/collected.
The personal is political when it comes to the experiences of and fight for liberation for Black women. Listen as Aaron and Damien discuss How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and what we can learn from the Combahee River Collective's vision for Black feminism and Black women's liberation to apply to today's struggles and our fight for social justice. Follow us on social media and visit our website! Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Website, Leave us a message, Merch store
Read and introduced by Beverly Smith, one of the original members of the Combahee River Collective. For the fifth episode, we sat down with Beverly Smith, one of three co-writers of the 1977 statement. Renowned for its description of oppressions as “interlocking,” the statement serves as both an update on the “triple oppression” that Claudia Jones laid out in 1949, and as an inspiration for Kimberlé W. Crenshaw's coining of the term “intersectionality” a decade later. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in How We Get Free: “It is difficult to quantify the enormity of the political contribution made by the women in the collective, because so much of their analysis is taken for granted in feminist politics today—especially their description of oppressions as happening ‘simultaneously,' thus creating new measures of oppression and inequality. In other words, Black women could not quantify their oppression only in terms of sexism or racism, or of homophobia experienced by Black lesbians. They were not ever a single category, but it was the merging or enmeshment of those identities that compounded how Black women experienced oppression.”
In this week's episode, Morgan introduces the Black History Month segment by talking about the Combahee River Collective and reflects on her Dry January experience. Follow the podcast on IG @pluralizepodcast Send comments, questions, and suggestions to pluralizepodcast@gmail.com Things Mentioned: - Young, Gifted, and Black Playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7qQyKjtCKZb4uvgG5cv0Xx?si=hM1z1RF3SZW67nOIJXgsSA - Combahee River Collective Statement (I said this was a "long" read, but I really meant it's longer than 5 minutes lol) https://www.reed.edu/cres/assets/Combahee-River-Collective,-Black-Feminist-Statement,-How-We-Get-Free---Taylor.pdf - Combahee River Collective Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfaNJ7ktIqA - This Naked Mind by Annie Grace - Sober IG accounts: @funshitblog, @boozelissbliss, @1000hoursdry Editing & Music: Ben O'Donnell Cover Art: Ash Najarian