When 21-year-old Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging from a tree on Mississippi’s Delta State University campus in September, the pained public outcry was immediate. The black-and-white image of the “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” flag, which the NAACP had displayed outside its national headquarters in the 1920s and ’30s, filled my social media feeds. Rumors swirled online that the young Black man had been found with broken limbs, proof there was no way he could have died by suicide as official reports suggested. The thought of white supremacists lynching a student while the White House implemented its punishing policy goals at the federal level was too much to stomach. I heeded the advice of a trusted, Mississippi-based movement elder who urged her online community to avoid jumping to conclusions, wait for more information, and join Reed’s family in mourning this tragic loss of life.

Having studied the mental-health crisis among Black youth for the past year, I’ve seen how the public will become more outraged by the possibility of foul play than by the possibility that a young person has found life too heavy a burden to bear and wants out. Whether or not the latter is what happened to Reed, it is a devastating trend. (As of publication time, the results of an independent autopsy had not been released.) Deaths by suicide are increasing for all young people—but at a faster rate for Black children and young adults than for any other racial or ethnic group. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Black youth ages 15 to 24. Even elementary-school-age kids are flailing. Black children 12 and younger are twice as likely to die by suicide as their white peers. This phenomenon predates the first half of this decade, when the Covid pandemic increased isolation and race-based gaps in learning. A 2023 report found that from 2007 to 2020, the suicide rate among Black youth between the ages of 10 and 17 increased by 144 percent.

The person with the largest megaphone in the current debate on the emotional and mental health of American youth is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and NYU business school professor. His book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has become a guidebook for parents who worry that social media—and, by extension, cell phones—have colonized their children’s inner lives. But what I’ve gathered from conversations with therapists, youth development workers, families, and scholars of Black youth mental health is that Haidt’s narrow focus on screens and a bygone era of outdoor play doesn’t appropriately address what’s happening in the lives of Black adolescents.

And it’s not just Haidt. Articles appearing in mainstream news outlets tend to focus on this idea of a one-size-fits-all solution to the youth mental-health crisis, ignoring broader cultural, political, and economic forces. Young people are experiencing traumatic events that rattle their psyches and alter the shape of their lives. What’s worse, they too often feel that they have to navigate these forces alone, or that their perspectives are ignored when they do seek out help. “There’s been a lot of times growing up when I’ve been told what my needs are,” Robby Harris, a recent graduate of Ohio’s Central State University, told those of us gathered at a Black youth suicide-prevention summit in Columbus last summer. Over months of reporting, I heard repeatedly from young people and the grownups who work with them that they lack trusted adults and safe spaces where they can create and feel a sense of belonging.

Iwanted to know what was happening in Cincinnati, where I am raising a Black tween and where I know we are facing a mental-health crisis that mirrors the rest of the country’s. The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center reported in 2023 that “the number of children and adolescents presenting to our pediatric emergency services in mental health crisis doubled” between 2011 and 2017. Cincinnati’s population is about 50 percent white and 38 percent Black, and that ballooning in admissions is driven in part by Black children. The hospital’s main emergency department sits just northeast of downtown in Avondale, a neighborhood that’s been solidly Black since the mid-20th century and was an epicenter of civil-rights and Black Power organizing and uprisings in the late 1960s.

The national data suggests gender, not just race, is a risk factor: Black boys 19 and younger are more than twice as likely as Black girls to die by suicide. That’s not to say girls are immune to the crisis: Between 2003 and 2017, Black girls’ suicide rate increased nearly 7 percent each year, more than twice the increase for boys. And Black youth who identify as queer, transgender, or gender-nonconforming are among those who are suffering. According to a recent Trevor Project survey, half of Black LGBTQ+ youth had considered suicide and 20 percent had attempted it in the previous year.

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Being poor is another risk factor. “A lot of their stressors have to do with the impact of poverty. We’ve got kids rolling in here who haven’t had proper food, clothing, shelter,” longtime educator and activist Howard Fuller told me by phone. Fuller is the founder of the Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, a Milwaukee charter school that serves middle and high school students, most of whom are Black. “Those are really important stress points in their lives.”

To better understand what’s happening in my city, I spoke with Tynisha Worthy, who cofounded and codirects a Cincinnati youth development program called Youth at the Center. When I asked Worthy what’s weighing on the minds of the Black adolescents and young adults she works with, “violence” was her first response. They’re concerned about losing access to their cell phones—and, by extension, contact with parents and the outside world—during the school day. (In the fall of 2024, Cincinnati Public Schools, like many districts nationwide, began requiring students in grades seven through 12 to lock their devices in a magnetic pouch while at school. Some students have raised concerns about not being able to access their phone during a school shooting or other emergency.) Students are also worried about the prevalence of vape pens and marijuana among their peers, Worthy said. “One of the things that caused [young people] stress…was ‘my family,’ ‘my mother,’” she continued, reflecting on the responses from participants in the workshops she’d conducted in the preceding months. (A therapist who works in local schools echoed this, citing family conflict, being saddled with adult responsibilities, and even estrangement from the family as common among her adolescent clients.) “The other stressor was school”—academic pressures—and “needing a job.”

Improving family relationships or job opportunities is outside a young person’s control, but the youth that Worthy works with are identifying what they need to feel better. Access to safe adults, therapists they can relate to, and third spaces—places to gather other than home or school—top their list.

But instead of meeting those needs, Worthy says, schools, mental-health systems, and other aspects of the city’s infrastructure are all contributing to the chronic hopelessness and feelings of being overwhelmed that are driving spikes in adolescent anxiety and depression. “We are diagnosing it as ‘The children are the problem.’ We’re saying the parents aren’t doing their part, but the larger ‘we’ are not doing our job,” she told me. What’s needed is a genuine collective effort to give Black youth a sense of joyful possibility.

The day after the 2024 presidential election, I visited Youth at the Center for the first time. The organization is located just northeast of downtown Cincinnati in the Pendleton neighborhood, an unexpected place for a program whose teen clientele is largely Black and working-class. The area is filled with the 19th-century Italianate architecture that has lured high-end developers in recent decades. Average home prices hover around $400,000 and have long been out of reach for low-income Black Cincinnatians and their Appalachian counterparts who used to populate the area.

On that early November evening, a dozen or so young people from all over the city and northern Kentucky sat at tables eating pizza and chatting before the facilitated activities began. I signed in and put on a name tag. Shawn Jeffers, the organization’s other cofounder and codirector, took a break from cheerily greeting arrivals by name and gave me a tour of the space, which is used to host and provide trainings for a range of programs, including a youth mental- health initiative called HEY!, short for Hopeful Empowered Youth, that develops strategies to improve mental health among young people in the community. White butcher paper from previous gatherings hung from the walls in the main meeting room. At the top of one piece of paper was a prompt for young people to list the issues affecting their neighborhoods and communities. Beneath were answers they had generated. Just as Worthy had told me, one theme appeared repeatedly: “shootings,” “violence,” “gun violence.”

Twice the number of teens were shot in 2023 in Cincinnati than in any other year in the previous decade. In 2022, just over a fifth of the 64 people killed in city shootings were children, and five of those victims were age 9 or younger. The local numbers reflect a national phenomenon. A 2022 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that Black youth between the ages of 5 and 17 “experienced the highest prepandemic levels of exposure and the largest increase in exposure to firearm violence during the pandemic.” For these children, “exposure to community violence can manifest as collective feelings of hopelessness, disorganized social networks, and altered social norms that can promote further violence,” the research found.

Sonali Rajan, an author of the study and a professor of health education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has argued that exposure to firearm violence should be categorized as an adverse childhood experience (ACE), a traumatic occurrence that disrupts a child’s brain development and can change the trajectory of their life. The more ACEs a person experiences, the more likely they are to suffer a range of mental-health problems. Providing resources such as grief counseling or other forms of therapy can mitigate the long-term harm. “It’s much more effective to intervene right then and there,” Rajan told me. “This country has not invested in the resources to do that.”

Instead, when national figures weigh in on violence in Cincinnati, it’s typically to criminalize Black communities. A late-night fight in July was recorded and went viral on the right-wing account Libs of TikTok, where the blows sustained by a white man and woman were highlighted and framed as evidence of Black lawlessness. Other videos of events leading up to the melee capture the white man slapping a Black man in the face and another white man shouting racial slurs into the crowd. What’s come to be known locally as “the brawl” became fodder for national Republican figures, including Vice President JD Vance, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, and Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, to grandstand and race-bait. This doesn’t come as a surprise given how Vance, an Ohio native and former senator, spent the campaign season stoking racial anxieties alongside President Donald Trump, making the false claim that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets.

But when Black people are victims of state or vigilante violence (as opposed to the alleged perpetrators), these same figures are mum or distort the facts. In early May, police shot and killed 18-year-old Ryan Hinton as he and three friends fled on foot from the scene of a car chase. Days later, his father, Rodney Hinton, was accused of running a car into a Hamilton County sheriff’s deputy who was directing traffic outside a commencement ceremony. Hinton, then 38, had earlier that day viewed police footage of his son’s fatal shooting, during which the teen was shot multiple times as he fled from police. And just several months before Ryan’s death, masked neo-Nazis had descended on Lincoln Heights, a historically significant Black neighborhood, carrying guns and banners emblazoned with swastikas. The agitators hung a sign on an overpass in the community that read “America for the white man” before being escorted away (but not arrested) by police.

You might assume that a young person rattled by news of a peer’s death, the presence of gun-toting Nazis in their neighborhood, or the stress of responsibilities at home can find someone trained to give them support at school. But on average, schools have one counselor for every 408 students (the recommended ratio is one per 250) and one psychologist for every 1,127 students (the standard is one per 500), according to The Washington Post. Cincinnati Public Schools—whose enrollment is 84 percent Black—places a mental-health provider in every school, according to a 2024 report from a local public-health foundation. But that’s typically not enough.

Karisma Hazel is the CEO of Poppy’s Therapeutic Corner, a Black-owned mental-health clinic that operates in half a dozen schools in the Cincinnati area. Poppy’s staff provides therapy, working with the schools’ social workers and guidance counselors, who offer more basic interventions. There’s a long-standing assumption that Black people are suspicious of therapy and steer clear of it, but the demand for her team’s services is high, Hazel told me. “They find it as a benefit,” she said of the students, and described what her staffers hear when they walk the hallways to retrieve clients from class for a session: “‘Hey, can you come get me too? Can I be next?’”

Teenagers are eager for help, though counseling may be stigmatized in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. During an online workshop offered by the Black Emotional & Mental Health Collective (BEAM), I learned what has happened historically in America to make many leery of trusting professionals with our stories and symptoms. In the mid-19th century, the medical director of Virginia’s Eastern Lunatic Asylum declared that enslaved Black people were immune to mental illness, because of the relative simplicity of their lives. Around the same time, the diagnosis “drapetomania” emerged as a label for the illness that was said to afflict any enslaved person who tried to escape captivity. And well into the 20th century, highly educated and celebrated white researchers and clinicians debated the size and complexity of Black people’s brains.

Today, many Black youth want a good therapist but don’t know how to access culturally responsive care, said Qeiara Manuel-Fuller, a program manager at HEY! Outside of a school setting, there’s the question of cost, and whether a session is covered by Medicaid or another form of insurance or by a family member who can pay out of pocket. The wait times are often long, and some young people can’t find a counselor who sees and supports their racial or gender identity or sexual orientation. “‘This therapist does not understand my lived experience, my culture,’” Manuel-Fuller said she hears from the youth she works with, as part of a broad coalition that includes more than 300 educators, policymakers, and healthcare providers focused on adolescent mental well-being in 12 Ohio and Kentucky counties. “‘I don’t feel connected. This person is cold. They want me to open up and tell them all these things, but they won’t tell me what their favorite color is.’”

Having a therapist who shares one’s racial background, or who at least has worked hard to understand it, is good for Black youth. So is having access to friends and classmates who are Black. It may seem counterintuitive that having class privilege can undermine well-being, but while reporting this story, I spoke with families who felt that their Black children suffered in part because they attended predominantly white schools in tony suburbs and felt racially isolated. A 2020 study on the mental health of Black youth in Ohio found that children in families with incomes greater than 400 percent of the federal poverty level were more than twice as likely as lower-income youth to experience racial discrimination. A strong relationship exists between young people’s reports of racial discrimination and their experience of mental distress.

Relatedly, there’s some evidence that students who attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities are faring better in terms of mental health. A 2025 study from the UNCF (United Negro College Fund) Institute for Capacity Building found that 45 percent of Black students who attend HBCUs report “flourishing” mental health, compared with 38 percent of those who attend predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Of those who attend HBCUs, 83 percent report feeling a sense of belonging, compared with 72 percent for Black students at PWIs. The HBCU students face significant financial stress and struggle to access mental-health services more than their counterparts at PWIs, according to the study. But on their campuses, they find a stronger sense of community and culturally relevant offerings in which they can take pride.

These findings echo the work of Jasmin Brooks Stephens, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on protective factors, practices that promote self-acceptance and combat traumatic stress in Black youth. In June, I drove to Columbus to see her address a statewide conference on Black youth suicide prevention. She shared research findings on interventions that help young people take pride in their culture and persist in the face of discrimination. Black youth need to know not just how to identify oppression but how to resist it, she said. They need opportunities to tell their own stories and weave narratives to counter the distortions that too often appear in media outlets.

Brooks Stephens talked about Sawubona Healing Circles, an initiative created by the Association of Black Psychologists in which Black people come together in a group setting to process grief and trauma related to their experiences. The BEAM workshop I attended also emphasized the importance of culturally rooted practices and of understanding mental health as something that’s pursued and achieved with help from others. Facilitators shared what they called a peer-support and village-care tool, which offers tips such as cooking for one another and texting reminders to take medications. The organization’s LAPIS peer-support model offers specific guidance on how someone who is not a mental-health professional can partner with a friend or loved one who is suffering to help ease their feelings of being overwhelmed. One guideline reads: “Listen to see if they are a danger to themselves or to you. If they have made a plan to hurt themselves or someone else, call an emergency hotline, your local mental health crisis unit, or trusted community members for support immediately.”

I thought of Nkosi Watts as I listened to Brooks Stephens speak about the resilience and self-acceptance that characterize Black youth who are able to maintain mental and emotional well-being or regain equilibrium after stressful periods. When I met Watts at Youth at the Center, he was 17 and part of the HEY! Initiative. The program’s participants were diverse: More than 80 percent identified as Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC). More than 40 percent identified as LGBTQ+, and nearly 25 percent had experience with the foster-care system. I was struck by how self-assured Watts was as he told me about his struggles with social anxiety and previous missteps using cannabis. I later learned that he plans to study business and psychology once he gets to college, and he’d like to do that overseas. Eventually he wants to open a Philly cheesesteak franchise here in Cincinnati, then buy a fleet of semitrucks and employ formerly incarcerated people to drive them. He’s confident and has a clear vision for his future. But life’s not perfect: He manages ADHD and sometimes struggles academically. He remembers his middle school years, at the height of the pandemic, as a time when he “got big, played video games, [and] got depressed.”

Watts has attended a highly regarded, predominantly white suburban Catholic school for boys since his freshman year and plays rugby there. That environment can be disorienting for Black students, he told me. He sees the toll it takes on some of his peers. He’s had Black classmates who can’t get comfortable there but who also can’t quite articulate why they hate the environment as much as they do. Watts thinks he knows what it is. “Something is rupturing his soul,” he said of a classmate who wanted desperately to leave and enroll elsewhere. “They act like they bring you in, but they really don’t,” he said of the school. “They use you, like as a token. It’s hard.” Watts speaks poetically of soul rupture, a phrase akin to the “spirit murder” that legal scholar Patricia Williams coined more than three decades ago to describe encounters that undermine the Black psyche and obliterate a positive sense of self.

Watts credits his relationships with his family, particularly his connection to his mother, Rashida Pearson-Watts, for keeping him on track and teaching him to be self-assured. In addition to her parenting experience, Pearson-Watts has professional training. For more than two decades, she has supported the mental-health needs of young people between the ages of 16 and 24. She takes her trauma-informed approach into churches, community organizations, and schools, including Cincinnati Public Schools’ out-of-school suspension and expulsion program. Over the years, she’s worked on HIV/AIDS education and overdose prevention and learned that hard-line, abstinence-only messages typically don’t work. So she takes a harm-reduction approach when it comes to raising Watts as well. “You’ve got to learn how to meet these kids where they are,” she told me. “They’ve seen too much. We didn’t have this phone. So to say no when the whole world is at their fingertips is not effective.”

Instead, she’s direct and moves with confidence and authority. When she noticed that her son was getting curious about girls, she left condoms on his desk, and then she and his dad followed up to see what questions he had. She said she doesn’t understand how parents can be unaware that their kids possess guns. “Where are you?” she said, exasperation in her voice. “I’ll shake Nkosi’s room up in a minute. I mean, you pay the bills!”

This level of involvement may seem heavy-handed, but many adolescents crave more guidance and guardrails, said Hazel of Poppy’s Therapeutic Corner. “You will hear a lot of them feeling that they can’t come to their parents, or they [themselves] are the adults,” she said. “I think you would be surprised by a lot of the independence that they have and a lot of the decisions that they have to make.” Pearson-Watts’s communication style may not work for every parent, but she’s on to something. Former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy and others who tend to young people in crisis say having a relationship with at least one trusted adult can shore up and protect adolescent mental health.

At Youth at the Center, I saw another one of those pieces of white butcher paper filled with visual representations of what makes for a safe adult. Cofounder Shawn Jeffers explained the images young people had drawn over the simple outline of a body: The mic in one hand meant this person amplifies youth voices. A pom-pom in the other hand meant they’re a cheerleader for youth. The bulletproof vest encasing the silhouette’s trunk signified that the adult makes young people feel safe, not by being “strict or controlling,” he said, but by offering protection.

Jeffers also told me that the youth he works with lack access to safe and welcoming places outside of home and school, or “third spaces.” As the academic year began in 2024, fights among youth had broken out at downtown’s Government Square and other city transit hubs where students transfer on their bus commutes to and from school. The police chief then appeared before the city’s school board to express alarm over the arrests of 30 youth that had taken place around transit centers since the start of the school year weeks earlier. One cause for the spike was the lack of engaging, positive after-school options for teenagers, Jeffers told me. Stores around the transit centers often posted signs in the windows barring anyone born after a certain date or limiting how many teens can enter at once. Libraries and schools don’t offer enough free, varied activities, and the city’s recreation centers often bar adolescents from their gyms and other spaces until early evening, before which the programming is geared toward elementary-school-age kids, Jeffers said.

In separate interviews, Jeffers and Tynisha Worthy echoed each other in demanding answers from the city’s leadership and institutions that claim to support the city’s teens: “Where are they supposed to go?” When Haidt urges parents to give their kids a “play-based childhood,” he seems unaware that safe outdoor spaces aren’t accessible to everyone. Or that, like most other intractable problems, the youth mental-health crisis can’t be solved by simply getting kids off screens while denying their families’ realities or what’s going on in the communities where they live.

When asked, young Black Cincinnatians regularly say they want safe and accessible places to gather, more contact with adults who will listen to and support them, and jobs. But structural barriers to well-being remain. “We know what young people have told us that they need, and we continue to give $2 million to BLINK or to fund a stadium,” Worthy told me, pointing to massive recent public expenditures for a sprawling arts festival and a soccer arena.

I thought of Worthy’s call for collective responsibility as I watched psychologist Brooks Stephens’s keynote presentation on Black youth suicide prevention last summer. One slide in particular emphasized the need for structural change in solving this crisis. It read: “In order to create a world where Black youth no longer desire to die, we need to give Black youth a reason to live.”

Jen Perez knows what it’s like to grow up in what she calls “a very typical Midwest, religious, Republican family.” Talking critically about politics, hashing out issues, and asking probing questions were frowned on, and she voted Republican once she came of age simply because the party’s values were in line with the way she’d been raised. After college, she worked for two decades as an engineer in corporate America, then left her job in May 2022, just before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 had sparked in her an interest in politics, but it wasn’t until Roe was overturned that she knew she needed to make a big change. Perez, now 42, who lives in a suburb of Cincinnati, looked at her then-7-year-old child and thought, “My daughter now has less rights at her age than I did.”

Perez is now the state program director for Red Wine & Blue, a national organization that, with a sly nod to the stereotype that suburban moms are too busy sipping merlot to pay attention to politics, has set out to mobilize women who support progressive policies but are underestimated and untapped by legacy left-leaning organizations. In Ohio, RWB became part of a coalition of groups with a huge goal: to pass a ballot initiative, called Issue 1, that would enshrine the right to abortion, as well as the rights to miscarriage care, contraception, and IVF treatment, in the state’s Constitution. On November 7, the coalition succeeded: Voters resoundingly passed Issue 1, 57 to 43 percent, making Ohio the seventh consecutive state since Dobbs in which voters have protected abortion access.

Until recently, Ohio was considered a battleground state, but Trump’s back-to-back wins have eroded Democrats’ confidence. The state has one Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, who was first elected in 2006 and is up for reelection next year. Its freshman senator is Republican J.D. Vance, a former Never Trumper whose win in 2022 can be credited in part to his sycophantic relationship with the former president. Republican supermajorities in the state House and Senate and in its US congressional delegation have come as a result of the party’s power to draw district lines.

Such a political landscape might inspire total capitulation on the part of progressives, but the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe lit a fire under reproductive health, rights, and justice advocates in Ohio. Local anti-choice activists have been trying to outlaw abortion for decades; with Roe gone, they’ve nearly gotten their way. In 2019, the state Legislature had passed the so-called “heartbeat ban,” which prohibited abortion after six weeks. It was blocked by a federal judge, but then the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision. The ban went into effect the next day, immediately halting scheduled abortions and throwing the state’s clinics into chaos. “We were just not anticipating a total loss within a matter of hours,” Jordyn Close, the deputy director of the Ohio Women’s Alliance, said on the What’s Good Ohio?! podcast in June.

Planned Parenthood and the ACLU quickly sued to lift the six-week ban, and a judge in Hamilton County issued an injunction late last year, putting enforcement of the ban on hold until the case could be decided by the state Supreme Court. The court’s stay put the gestational limit on abortion at 22 weeks. But during the 82 days when abortion was essentially illegal, Ohioans seeking the procedure were forced to either carry to term or flee the state to find care. In one well-publicized case, a 10-year-old rape survivor had to go to Indiana for an abortion. She was not the only minor who had to travel: Ohio’s six-week ban makes no exception for rape or incest. In another case, an expectant couple was devastated to learn of a fetal abnormality at 18 weeks and had to leave the state to terminate the pregnancy.

Stories like these galvanized reproductive health advocates in the state, including doctors. In the wake of Dobbs, a group of physicians founded Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights. In February of this year, the newly organized doctors and other advocates announced they would come together under the umbrella of Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights (OURR) to push the initiative in 2023. Issue 1, as it would come to be known, enshrines an “individual right to one’s own reproductive medical treatment” in the state Constitution. Red Wine & Blue, Planned Parenthood, Ohio’s ACLU, and Pro-Choice Ohio are in the coalition, as are the Ohio Women’s Alliance and New Voices for Reproductive Justice, both of which work primarily in Black, brown, young, and queer communities. OURR’s first step was to collect signatures to get the amendment on the ballot; they far surpassed the required 413,000 signatures, gathering more than 700,000. Jordyn Close, who lives in the Columbus area, had a well-practiced pitch prepared but often didn’t need to use it. As she told the What’s Good Ohio?! hosts, people would see her abortion rights T-shirt and approach her, asking to sign. It was clear that Ohioans were ready to vote on abortion in 2023.

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While Ohio was the only state with an abortion-related ballot initiative this year, it would join six others where voters have been asked to weigh in at the polls since Roe’s reversal. In 2022, voters in Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana rejected efforts to further restrict abortion access, while in California, Michigan, and Vermont, voters approved measures to protect the right to abortion in their state constitutions. Ohio’s measure resulted in expanding access after it had been taken away. But the state has little in common culturally or politically with California or Vermont, and it is also more conservative than Michigan, where Democrats currently control both the statehouse and the governorship. “Unlike some of the other swing states where they had those blue waves [in 2022], we didn’t see that in Ohio,” Rhiannon Carnes, the executive director of the Ohio Women’s Alliance, told me.

Still, she and other abortion rights advocates in the state took a cue from those midterm wins. “We knew that the majority of Ohioans support access to reproductive freedom,” Close told me. Statewide, support for abortion access has consistently polled at nearly 60 percent since the fall of Roe. “Ohio is full of hardworking families and hardworking people,” Carnes said when asked how she’d characterize the state’s voters. This framing was my introduction to the campaign’s messaging, which seemed intended to appeal to a broad swath of voters, including self-identified moderates and centrists and even those Republicans who feel that government interference and Christian fundamentalism have an outsize influence in policymaking.

As of mid-October, OURR reported having knocked on more than 200,000 doors and made more than 700,000 phone calls to voters. The state’s AFL-CIO had come out in support of the abortion rights amendment, arguing that abortion access is essential to women controlling their economic futures. The musician John Legend, an Ohio native, urged a “yes” vote on Issue 1, as did the actors Kathryn Hahn and Busy Philipps. OURR released a steady stream of ads featuring a range of stakeholders: a faith leader; a couple forced to flee the state for an abortion when the six-week ban was in effect; a middle-aged white dad who grew up in the church and had been anti-choice but then had a change of heart. The results of a Baldwin Wallace University poll released in mid-October revealed that 58 percent of likely voters supported the constitutional amendment, including 89 percent of Democrats, 39 percent of Republicans, and 51 percent of independents. At the polls, Ohioans would also be voting on a measure to legalize marijuana for recreational use. (That measure passed with 57 percent of the vote.) Election observers anticipated a kind of synergy between the two issues, with voters who want less government interference in reproductive health decisions also preferring that politicians stay out of adults’ decision-making around cannabis use.

Throughout the campaign, polling suggested that abortion rights advocates had the majority of the state on their side, but thanks to anti-democratic maneuvering by Republicans at all levels in the state, the campaign was fighting an uphill battle.

After having watched abortion win at the polls in 2022, the anti-abortion forces in Ohio were nervous. OURR was planning to put an initiative on the November 2023 ballot to add the right to an abortion in the state Constitution. Republicans responded by proposing their own initiative, which would be put before voters in an August special election—known to have historically low turnout—that would raise the threshold for passing a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent. In 2022, Republicans in the statehouse had voted to eliminate almost all special elections held in August, but later reinstated an August special election when they realized that it might be the only way to defeat the initiative on abortion rights. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose was caught on video telling the party faithful that changing the threshold was “100 percent about keeping a radical, pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”

Many of the groups opposed to the amendment rallied in support of raising the threshold, including the Catholic Church and anti-abortion groups such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Abortion rights advocates and other progressive groups lined up to oppose the measure—also called Issue 1—but so did moderates and Republicans who were concerned about the potential erosion of democracy. A bipartisan group of former governors came out against the change. On August 8, Ohioans soundly rejected Issue 1, with 57 percent of voters casting a “no” ballot to keep the threshold at a simple majority. Fifteen counties that voted for Trump in 2020 voted “no” on the proposal.

There were also consistent efforts by anti-abortion groups to mislead voters. For example, the meaning of a “yes” or “no” vote switched between the August and November elections. In the summer, a “no” victory on Issue 1 meant that abortion rights would stand a greater chance of winning in November. In November, a “yes” victory on Issue 1 would enshrine the right to abortion in the state Constitution. LaRose’s office could have changed the name of the abortion-rights initiative but didn’t. Abortion opponents took advantage of the potential for confusion and designed their “No” signs for the November vote to look nearly identical to the “No” signs that were omnipresent over the summer.

Beulah Osueke, the interim executive director at New Voices for Reproductive Justice, said she’d witnessed uncertainty even among people who had followed the issues closely. “I spoke to someone in Columbus [who] was organizing her friends for the special election in August,” Osueke told me. “She said, ‘At times I’m confused—so now you’re saying to vote “yes” in November?’” A meme shared on the Moms for Ohio Instagram account used a hit song by Destiny’s Child to set the record straight. The pro-choice group posted a video of the pop group singing, “No, no, no, no, no, when it’s really yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” The caption read, “We voted NO in August and we’re voting YES in November.”

In late September, I tagged along with Paul Schaeffer, a volunteer with Planned Parenthood’s canvassing effort, as he knocked on doors in Wyoming, a suburb north of Cincinnati. Schaeffer is a professor of biology at nearby Miami University in Oxford, and he spent many of his weekends this fall working in Planned Parenthood’s field operation. I listened in as he spoke with people on a largely Black block of the quaint suburb. Edith Hardy, an elderly Black woman, was sitting on her porch with a middle-aged visitor, Fred Thomas. Hardy, a retired educator, told us she was regularly active in local elections and sometimes worked at the polls. But when asked what she thought about Issue 1, she hesitated, asking Schaeffer to refresh her memory. “So that vote in August, that was just to get it on the ballot?” Thomas said. Then he expressed exasperation: “I tell young people, ‘Y’all really need to pay attention to what these Republicans are doing.’”

The use of deceptive language was rampant in the anti-abortion campaign. In October, the Ohio Debate Commission partnered with local news organizations to host a debate on Issue 1. Mehek Cooke, a Columbus-area attorney and GOP operative, repeated the phrases “late-term abortion” and “partial-birth abortion” again and again. In fact, Ohio’s amendment allows the state to limit abortion after fetal viability (about 24 weeks), though the procedure could be performed after that point if a doctor deems it necessary for the pregnant person’s health. But Cooke’s talking points showed that including a viability limit doesn’t stop anti-choice activists from invoking the specter of an epidemic of later abortions. At the polls, voters read a summary of the amendment, written by the state’s GOP-controlled ballot board, that referred to an “unborn child” rather than “fetus” throughout.

In addition to lifting the design of their “No” signs from the August election, the initiative’s opponents started including the phrase “Protect Children” or “Protect Parents’ Rights” at the bottom of their signs. Anti-abortion advocates claimed that the amendment would take away the need for parents to consent to their children’s reproductive healthcare. Opponents argued that if those who crafted the amendment had intended only to protect adults’ access to reproductive healthcare, they would have used the word “woman” rather than “individual.” They also claimed that the constitutional amendment would open the door to “cross-hormone therapy, transgender surgeries, painful surgeries that we don’t want our children to go through,” all without the consent of a parent, as Cooke argued during the debate. The attacks were baseless, and even Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, acknowledged in a legal analysis that the amendment did not address parental consent, though he added that the use of the word “individual” would expose parental consent and notification laws to legal challenges.

Yet the right-wing disinformation caught on. “We are having conversations every single day with so many women on the ground, and we hear what they’re hearing,” Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine & Blue and an Ohio resident, said prior to the election. Someone canvassing with the Issue 1 campaign might not have been able to effectively intervene in the spread of such disinformation, but friends of those caught in the loops of lies and distortions can. That’s why Red Wine & Blue has embraced a “relational organizing” model, in which ordinary people equip themselves with facts and then have conversations about politics with their friends and family members. “It’s just common sense. Your friends trust you. They believe in you,” Julie Womack, head of organizing at RWB, told the grid of about two dozen faces attending a Zoom training session on how to stop state and local abortion bans one evening in early October. “We are reaching people that campaigns may never try to reach,” she added.

While suburbanites breaking free from conservative dogma might need one approach, voters in the state’s cities—particularly Black voters—need something else, Petee Talley told me. Talley is the founder and executive director of the Ohio Unity Coalition, an organization that focuses on educating and turning out low-propensity voters. OUC works to demystify the voting process, making sure people know about early voting, how to get an absentee ballot, and how to find their polling place. In the aftermath of the August special election, Talley wrote a blog post challenging the idea that voters’ rejection of the effort to raise the threshold had solely been about abortion rights. In urging a “no” vote that summer, Talley had talked with Ohioans about raising the minimum wage and preventing police violence. They would have been limited in their ability to weigh in on those issues too if Republicans succeeded in making it more difficult to pass ballot initiatives amending the Constitution, she explained. While Black Ohioans’ opinions about abortion vary, their broad commitment to protecting progressive values is consistent. “Black voters will show up to [ensure] that all rights are protected,” Talley told me.

In pivoting to a focus on November, Talley’s group defined reproductive freedom as being about abortion, yes, but also about power and control. Their talking points included the fact that Black women are disproportionately affected by abortion bans, and their choices could be criminalized as a result. The messaging worked: 83 percent of Black voters supported the amendment, according to a Washington Post exit poll, compared with 73 percent of Latino and 53 percent of white voters. Osueke of New Voices for Reproductive Justice agreed that the outreach done by many of the more mainstream progressive and reproductive rights organizations didn’t resonate with the Black, brown, queer, and young voters her organization works with. She and others in the reproductive justice movement found ways to make Issue 1 feel relevant to voters’ lived experience. That meant “talking about liberating ourselves from government control and interference,” Osueke told me. Her organization is also committed to identifying community leaders, developing their skills, and engaging people in mutual aid projects. “This election is a tool that’s available to us,” Osueke told me. “It’s not the end-all, be-all.”

Progressive groups are now looking to 2024, when redistricting will likely be on the ballot. If the anti-gerrymandering amendment passes and a new citizen-led commission redraws districts fairly, Republicans could lose their hold on the statehouse. Senator Sherrod Brown is up for reelection next year as well. His Republican challengers, including Secretary of State LaRose, have all said they would support a national abortion ban if elected. Meanwhile, the state’s GOP has promised to try to neuter the abortion rights victory and has floated the idea of stripping courts of their ability to implement the amendment. Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman has called the November 7 win “just the beginning of a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace Issue 1.”

“I would think we’re on the verge of actually coming back to a place where Ohio will once again be viewed as a competitive state,” Talley said. “But the shift has to start internally.” That means Ohio’s network of progressive groups will have to make sure they’re effectively reaching people with messaging tailored specifically to Black voters, rural voters, and other constituencies, she added. In late October, I spoke with Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, who was in Cincinnati to canvass with Issue 1 supporters. She told me she’d toured a Planned Parenthood health center that provides abortions and asked a staffer there where the patients were traveling from. “I expected to hear Kentucky, Oklahoma; I expected to hear people in this region,” she told me. “[The staffer] said Florida and Montana. It’s 900 miles. It just blows your mind, the swath of the country that is without access.” But thanks to voters, Ohio will remain a safe haven for reproductive care in a post-Dobbs nation.

Last summer, editor Jen Parker reached out to the tenant activist group KC Tenants with an invitation. Would the group write for the inaugural issue of a new publication on Black politics and culture that she and the historian and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor were launching? KC Tenants’ remarkable successes preventing evictions and winning protections for tenants in Kansas City had come up when Parker and her team brainstormed organizing victories they wanted to highlight, and she wanted to give the group the floor to report on their wins and analyze their challenges. Parker offered the group plenty of space to tell their story and told them to write for an audience of activists passionate about racial justice.

The KC Tenants activists got to work. First, nearly two dozen leaders in the Kansas City tenant union had to approve the request for a story. (Members are serious about steering any narrative about their work and prefer a collective storytelling approach over having one person’s perspective or byline represent the whole group.) Then two organizers who had been particularly active pulled together the elements they would need to write a draft: a timeline of events beginning with the organization’s 2019 founding, relevant social media posts, reflections gathered from others who’d joined the struggle. Finally, the writers worked with Parker and other editors to shape the piece into something digestible for a national audience.

The finished product ran beneath the headline “Could We End Evictions?” and was published mid-February as part of the inaugural issue of Hammer & Hope. Chronicling the group’s Zero Eviction January campaign, during which it blocked more than 900 evictions across Jackson County, the article has elicited an emotional response from those at the center of the story. People have teared up reading it, said Tara Raghuveer, one of the authors. It’s brought a deep sense of pride and a rush of intense memories, both happy and disturbing. It’s also offered a bird’s-eye view of a momentous campaign that drew attention nationwide. “We all had our seat on the bus, but we didn’t get out of the bus to see the whole thing,” Raghuveer said. “It was such a gift to be asked to really dig deep about what we learned from Zero Eviction January and how it shaped our union today.”

In launching Hammer & Hope and assigning stories such as this one, Taylor and Parker intend to give organizers on the left a platform to reflect and share strategies, insights, and questions across movements. An editorial bloc suggests writers, reviews pitches and comments on drafts as they come in. This team of advisers includes writer Derecka Purnell, philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, filmmaker Astra Taylor, and law professor Amna Akbar. A broader community of leading left thinkers is on call to add their perspectives on pieces as needed, Parker said. Sarah Fan edits stories, and Nia T. Evans was an integral part of the team before leaving in April for another opportunity. Contributors include academics and journalists, as well as poets and artists who work in various mediums. The day after Valentine’s Day, smack dab in the middle of Black History Month, Hammer & Hope offered the Internet a love song to Black people the world over. An introductory essay establishes the magazine’s scope as reaching “from Brooklyn to Bahia to Botswana.”

If the need for such a space hadn’t already been obvious, the past three years have brought a new urgency. Months into the pandemic, George Floyd was killed, and millions of people responded by flooding the streets to demand change. After that period of mass protest quieted, the question became “how to not have the totality of the political energy that had been generated just thrust into the Biden presidential election and then the Georgia [US] Senate races,” said Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a contributing writer at The New Yorker and former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Ideally, organizations would have developed easy-to-access on-ramps so that those who mobilized through direct action could find political homes and stay engaged, she said. “We didn’t see that develop.”

So she and Parker created their own institution—a digital magazine that seeks to educate and inspire people on the left, the newly radicalized as well as those with decades of movement-building experience. Its name is inspired by Hammer and Hoe, the 1990 book by historian Robin D.G. Kelley that chronicles the Alabama sharecroppers and laborers who made up the state’s Communist Party in the 1930s and ’40s and challenged both Jim Crow and capitalist exploitation. As its name suggests, the magazine is an intellectual space committed to exploring both historical context and contemporary struggle. That’s an especially important mandate now, given state and local governments’ attacks on Black radical thought by banning books and gutting curricula that teach about systemic racism and other forms of discrimination embedded in American society. Taylor, who is also a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, is among the scholars whose work has been removed from the College Board’s curriculum for Advanced Placement African American Studies. The removal of her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation came after Florida’s Department of Education, with the support of Governor Ron DeSantis, blocked the teaching of the course in that state.

At a time when the right wing has set out to undermine honest presentations of US history by seeking to ban the teaching of what opponents call “critical race theory” and the proliferation of ideas compiled by The New York Times’ 1619 Project, another Black publication might take a defensive or corrective stance. Not Hammer & Hope. Instead, the magazine presumes that its readers understand that such attacks are baseless, so writers are liberated to advance the conversation in ways that feel fresh and imaginative. “We’re not interested in debate for debate’s sake,” Taylor said. “We see this as, at its best, an effort to develop, educate, organize a new generation of radicalized people.”

he cofounders’ professional experiences have shown them just how much the public discourse needs an unapologetically left perspective. Before launching this project, Parker edited opinion pieces at The New York Times. She recalls a 2020 essay published in the op-ed section in which Senator Tom Cotton called for the federal government to send troops to cities where protesters (Cotton called them “lawbreakers”) demanded accountability after Floyd was murdered by police. Outrage over the piece—including from staffers at the Times—was immediate, and the paper eventually acknowledged that the editorial process had been rushed.

The Cotton incident was just one of many times she felt out of sync with the ethos of the Times, Parker said. “It’s like an alternate reality,” she says of her former employer. “My perception is they think left politics are unreasonable.” Still, while there she was able to publish provocative essays from abolitionist and organizer Mariame Kaba, poet Caroline Randall Williams, and Kenya Slaughter, a Louisiana mother who continued to show up for work at retail giant Dollar General in the early days of the pandemic. “I was successful,” Parker says of her tenure at the Times. “But it’s different when it’s a battle to get the pieces through versus [working with] an institution that already agrees with the values and politics that you’re bringing.”

Parker went to the Times after working in communications at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she’d been involved in the campaign to end the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program, which targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers and was found unconstitutional in 2013. In some ways, Hammer & Hope aligns more with a tradition of storytelling Parker had continued while advocating an end to racial profiling than with her work at the paper of record. Organizers on the American left who aimed to transform politics and culture or critique capitalism have always had their own communications vehicles. Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827 as the country’s first Black-owned and operated newspaper, advocated the abolition of slavery. Taylor also points to Freedomways, the journal of African-American politics and culture that featured and was led by some members of the Communist Party and chronicled the civil rights movement and other Black radical efforts in the mid-20th century. In their introduction to the magazine, Taylor and Parker write that they are indebted to the Black Panther Party’s newspaper, which had a wide circulation nationwide in the late 1960s and into the ’70s. The cofounders quote a Panther who documented this part of the group’s history: “‘We feel that information is the raw material for new ideas,’ their de facto archivist Billy X Jennings told a reporter in 2019, adding, ‘We sought to find solutions to problems instead of just reporting the news.’”

The intentions are similar across the decades. But unlike the Panthers’ effort, Hammer & Hope was not created to raise the profile of any one organization. While that KC Tenants essay on Zero Evictions January has successfully held a mirror up to the activists who made it happen, its editors also hoped it would teach something significant to readers nationwide. “To really get people to talk about organizing in ways that are not canned and made palatable for a reporter is something we want to do, because it’s a source of useful, actionable, practical information that another tenant organization could read and learn a lot from,” Parker said. “We want to see these struggles strengthened. We want organizers to collaborate with each other.” She points out that the campaigns in which people achieve their practical goals are often “hyper-local struggles.” Hammer & Hope intends to play a role in putting the leaders of such struggles in communication with one another.

Sometimes those accounts leave the reader feeling energized and hopeful, such as when KC Tenants explains why it leads with pragmatism: “Others organize around ideology; we organize around mutual interests. We have unionized trailer-park residents and yuppies, Trump voters and anarchists, Black tenants and white tenants, young people renting their first apartments, and seniors with decades of gripes with the landowning class.” But in addition to inspiration, Hammer & Hope seeks to publish honest evaluations of activist efforts. Elsewhere in the essay, the writers tell of trying to stop an eviction using a new-to-them tactic: blocking a tenant’s doors to keep the sheriff’s deputies from entering. Things don’t go as planned. “They called the cops for reinforcement; two of our leaders were handcuffed, and we couldn’t stop the landlord from changing the locks. It was completely botched. The tenant lost her home.” From the failure comes important insights that the authors aren’t afraid to share with readers: “This experiment had been doomed from the start because we lacked a pre-existing relationship with the tenant, we had mismanaged her expectations of the action (and our own), and we didn’t have a plan for the scenario that played out. Sloppy. More than that, harmful.”

Readers can learn from these missteps, but also from what KC Tenants did next: “We could have stopped there,” Raghuveer told me. Instead, she and others in the organization decided to go back to disrupting the virtual meetings held at housing court, a tactic that had already generated the desired result of stopping evictions. “That persistence, that relentless is a theme in the story and ultimately paid off in huge ways.”

onifa and Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele, two longtime organizers with the Malcolm X Grassroots Project (MXGM), write elsewhere in the magazine’s first issue with a similar vulnerability. Their piece, titled “Why We Work to Free Political Prisoners of the Black Power Era,” outlines how that movement’s tactics have changed over the years. The Akinwole-Bandeles are ideal messengers for the story. They are themselves children of Black activists who were involved in the Black Panther Party and the East, a Brooklyn-based Pan-Africanist organization. “We were born in the 1970s and came of age alongside children separated from their activist parents. We saw their pain up close,” they write. They joined MXGM’s New York chapter in the mid-1990s, and at that time the movement’s goal was to raise awareness. They created outreach materials, placed articles in sympathetic media outlets, and hosted hip-hop benefit shows with star-studded lineups, all to educate the public that US prisons housed Black people whom the state had targeted for arrest and prosecution in the 1970s and early ’80s because of their participation in radical political activities. The goal was to make sure people knew the names and stories of Mumia Abu Jamal, Mutulu Shakur and other incarcerated Black activists.

Engaging artists including dead prez, Erykah Badu, and Talib Kweli helped shift public consciousness, but that approach didn’t bring the aging incarcerated activists home. “So we co-founded a task force with a handful of skilled litigators, policy experts, and organizers, working closely with allied elected officials,” the Akinwole-Bandeles write of the strategic pivot. “We changed our approach from an awareness campaign to freedom campaigns, focusing on clemency and litigation to challenge convictions. We recognized that parole was an avenue for those who met the criteria.”

The organizers knew this new magazine was the right place to publish an insider’s view of how and why this transition happened over the decades. “The people who look to Hammer & Hope for their information are looking for how to get engaged, how to inform the areas of movement that they’re already active in,” Monifa Akinwole-Bandele said. “This is about mobilizing the base on this issue.” In the weeks after the article was published, she’s seen an increase in the number of people participating in campaign calls and letter writing to support 69-year-old Kamau Sadiki, a Black Panther Party veteran who has significant health problems and is incarcerated in Georgia. “Mostly it’s been people who already knew [about the efforts], but seeing the piece helped them to get reengaged,” Monifa Akinwole-Bandele said. “When people see that things are moving, then they get moving too.”

Akinwole-Bandele credited Parker and the magazine’s editorial team with making the piece accessible by nudging the writers toward language and structure that would grab and keep readers’ attention. In addition to this editorial steering, Parker and Taylor are busy shaping the business side of their project. A print magazine might accompany the digital version at some point, but they’re not yet sure. Parker said she expects that Hammer & Hope will publish four times a year, and she has plans to bring on paid staff soon. Hammer & Hope has the backing of foundations including Marguerite Casey and Libra, and gaining additional grants and individual donations will remain a critical part of the work, Parker said. Taylor said making sure the magazine remains free to readers is a priority. “We believe as part of our politics that you can’t build a movement behind a paywall,” she said.

To many, the cover is recognizable even at a distance: The lower half of a youthful, feminine face is darkened on one side by a purple shadow. The other cheek and jawline are lit up in neon pink. We don’t see the woman’s eyes, but her lips are pursed and painted red. They’re seductive—the focal point—but still more subtly set than any performative facial expression we see on social media these days. Those who have read and reread The Coldest Winter Ever know that this partly obscured face beckons readers into the story of Winter Santiaga, the teenage daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin and the character at the heart of Sister Souljah’s 1999 novel, a runaway success that would dramatize the hard-knock lives of New Yorkers immersed in the city’s drug culture for readers all over the world.

The book was published in April of that year with an initial print run of 30,000 copies, an optimistic bet on a debut novel from a Black author. But Souljah’s foray into fiction—she’d written a memoir in 1994—was an immediate success. The Black-owned bookstores, street vendors, and Barnes & Noble outposts where people flocked to buy their copies couldn’t keep up with the demand. My aunt, then an administrator at a Cincinnati social service agency, gave me a copy with her strong endorsement. The book was all the rage among her group of friends, other middle-aged, middle- and working-class Black women. More than two decades later, The Coldest Winter Ever has sold more than 1 million copies—and it’s easy to see why. The book is soapy and sexy, bringing readers deep into Winter’s world, carrying them along on her descent from pampered princess to inmate, yet another casualty of the War on Drugs. Mixed in with the trashy plot twists is a good dose of social and emotional realism. Readers get every designer brand and luxury car (down to the make and model) that Winter believes is her birthright. But we also get a critique of mandatory minimum sentencing, foster care, and the various institutions the girl must navigate once she’s forced to fend for herself.

Coldest is a cautionary tale about hustling, a novel that Black readers—particularly Black women and girls—hailed as an instant classic and propelled to the top of bestseller lists. It tells the story of a family at the top of the hierarchy in the Brooklyn projects where Winter’s parents, Ricky and Lana Santiaga, are raising the teenager and her three younger sisters. Ricky moves the family to the suburbs in an effort to stay safe and hide their considerable wealth from the hungry up-and-coming gangsters who aspire to take his place. But a series of tragedies soon befalls the family, beginning with a violent attack on Lana and Ricky’s subsequent arrest and prosecution for drug-related crimes.

Souljah describes Winter’s physical beauty and sexual prowess in detail. The desire she elicits in the boys and men around her becomes Winter’s primary tool to get what she wants and, eventually, as her family falls apart, what she needs. Midnight, a rising star in her father’s organization, is the man Winter hopes to marry someday, but he is repelled by her immaturity and selfishness. The push and pull in their relationship—the imbalance between Winter’s narcissism and shortsightedness and Midnight’s commitment to strategy and foresight—provide much of the novel’s tension. By the book’s end, Winter has been convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

But beyond the engaging story line is the matter of the book’s author. Seven years before the publication of Coldest, Sister Souljah made headlines for her comments about the uprisings following the brutal beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and the verdict that cleared them of wrongdoing. At the time, Souljah was an activist and hip-hop artist who’d made a name for herself as a youth leader through her anti-apartheid organizing and her efforts in support of unhoused families. She was a member of Public Enemy, the rap group whose political commentary was a soundtrack to the late ’80s and early ’90s. Her solo album 360 Degrees of Power was released in the spring of 1992, just months before the events that would make her a household name. After her comments about the LA riots were blasted by Bill Clinton, who was seeking to distance himself from Black radicalism as he campaigned for the presidency, Souljah was on television screens and magazine covers nationwide. Then, following a period of relative quiet, she burst back onto the scene with Coldest.

In the novel, she appears as herself, a minor character who offers commentary on the greed and consumerism that permeate Winter’s world and fuel her reckless actions. As a character, Souljah is a foil to Winter, a public figure whose rhetoric the teenager intermittently encounters and rejects. In a 2021 interview with the writer Demetria L. Lucas, Souljah said of writing herself into the novel, “The reason why The Coldest Winter Ever started off with Winter Santiaga saying she hates Sister Souljah was so that I could distinguish her voice, her life, her experiences, from my own. I thought that that was a metaphor for real life anyway, because the popular people are like pop culture, they’re like mainstream. And then the activist person is like, somebody who either gets ignored or who aggravates people because she reminds them of what we all should be responsible for.”

Today, Coldest is among the 100 “most-loved” books featured as part of PBS’s The Great American Read series and “a Bible for a generation of Black women,” said Joan Morgan, the program director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at NYU’s Institute of African American Affairs. At the time it was published, Morgan said, books that realistically portrayed the lives of members of the hip-hop generation were “being dismissed as street lit.” Traditionally, the publishing world had used this phrase to describe popular fiction from Black authors who wrote about crime, drugs, and violence. The first major success in this category was Iceberg Slim’s 1967 novel Pimp. But those books rarely had the focus on values and profound questions of morality that were central to Souljah’s work. With Coldest, Morgan said, “Souljah gave an elevated version [of that genre] on a legitimate press. It’s become part of the Black girl canon for the 1990s.”

By the time Coldest came out, the country had a decade’s worth of experience with hip-hop as a mainstream cultural force. The genre had cemented itself as the primary way Black and brown youth communicated their politics and perspectives to the wider world. Throughout much of the 1980s, white liberals and the Democratic establishment had largely turned a blind eye to incisive, leftist political critique from young Black messengers. By the early 1990s, with hip-hop moving into heavy rotation on radio and television (Yo! MTV Raps debuted in 1988), this had become impossible. Groups such as Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy addressed the ways that crack cocaine was ravaging Black communities and took up the pressing and infuriating issues of the day: In 1989, five Black and Latino teenagers had been convicted of raping a white woman while she jogged in Central Park. (All would later be exonerated after it was revealed that the police had forced them to make false confessions.) That same year, an unarmed Black 16-year-old named Yusuf Hawkins was killed in Brooklyn by a white mob. In 1991, a Korean shop owner shot and killed 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in South Central LA over a bottle of juice and, though convicted of the crime, served no jail time. Hip-hop became “Black America’s CNN,” as Public Enemy front man Chuck D put it, and artists quoted and sampled the voices of Black activists and thinkers like Frances Cress Welsing, Dick Gregory, Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson in their songs. The message often called for self-reliance (Black separatism in the eyes of critics), indicted structural racism rather than focusing on white Americans’ stated good intentions, and represented a departure from the assimilationist goals of an earlier era. Major civil rights legislation had passed three decades earlier, and yet access to good schools, good jobs, and full democratic participation still felt out of reach for many Black people. And hip-hop had something to say about it.

Few people at the time had Souljah’s rhetorical skills, but in 1992, after she found herself in the crosshairs of Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas and the Democratic Party’s rising star, she looked to new avenues of intellectual expression that would enable her to avoid censure and reach her intended audiences. The biography she includes on her website indicates the urgency she felt: “Before the political shutdown and attack on American 1st amendment rights, she was the young voice in NY radio that spoke to the hip-hop audience about politics, culture, business, and social organization. Many people attempt to silence, isolate, interrupt or alter Sister Souljah’s powerful voice.” After Clinton made an example of her to advance his political career, Souljah gave the world Coldest as well as five subsequent novels built around the first book’s cast of characters. But the highly sought-after political commentator who had so unsettled the Democratic mainstream in the early ’90s had been sidelined.

he woman who became Sister Souljah was born Lisa Williamson in the Bronx in 1964, to parents who divorced when she was a child. In her 1994 memoir No Disrespect, she writes of moving to the projects with her mother and siblings and having to navigate a world filled with drugs, sexual harassment and assault, joblessness, and returning Vietnam veterans who struggled with mental health crises. The family eventually moved to Teaneck, N.J., where Souljah showed extraordinary academic talent. In high school, she excelled in “the skillful running of [her] mouth,” she writes. She was identified as gifted and attended a preparatory program at Cornell University before enrolling at Rutgers, where she earned a bachelor’s degree. Her organizing work put her in front of crowds, delivering keynotes at community groups’ events and offering analyses of education, police brutality, and Black—or “African,” as she would say—culture.

In May 1992, Souljah was quoted in The Washington Post describing the mentality of the people who rioted in LA: “I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton, then campaigning in the Democratic primaries, seized on these words (which Souljah said had been taken out of context) during a speech at an event hosted by the Rainbow Coalition, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s civil rights organization, which had featured Souljah as a speaker at an earlier event. Attempting to distance himself from a liberatory Black politics that he felt might endanger him at the polls, Clinton compared her to David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. With this false equivalence, Clinton helped propel himself to victory as a centrist by attempting to throw the 28-year-old Souljah into the dustbin of history.

By the time Souljah and her agent began looking for a home for her novel, something was shifting in the publishing industry. Prior to this period, writers of Black popular fiction either self-published or joined the roster at an independent Black-owned press. But the ’90s marked the first time that four Black women appeared on the New York Times bestseller list at once, when Terry McMillan, the author of the enormously successful Waiting to Exhale and other romance novels, joined Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou on the list. “Trade publishers jumped on the bandwagon and attempted to publish into this niche,” the industry veteran Tracy Sherrod wrote in a recent article in Publishers Weekly. Sherrod was an editor at Henry Holt & Company in 1998 when Souljah brought her an early draft of The Coldest Winter Ever. “The first time I read the manuscript, it made my heart race and the hairs on my body stand up,” Sherrod remembers. “The voice was so incredibly honest.” Sherrod wanted to acquire the book, but she immediately ran into problems.

Herself a young Black woman near the start of her career, Sherrod would witness the lasting effects of what came to be known as the “Sister Souljah moment.” “My publisher wouldn’t read the manuscript, because the head of publicity said that Souljah was racist. Apparently she believed that because of what Bill Clinton had done,” Sherrod told me. In response, she resigned and let the higher-ups know exactly why. “I felt like the only people who were being called ‘racist’ at that time were people of color, and I found that problematic.” Sherrod took a job at Pocket Books, then an imprint of Simon & Schuster, where editor Emily Bestler had recently acquired Souljah’s novel. There, she got to see The Coldest Winter Ever become the sensation she’d expected.

“Souljah changed the landscape of Black women’s fiction, because the characters that she put on the page were people that city centers were definitely starting to see, and households were experiencing the repercussions of the drug culture,” Sherrod said. “Souljah took us right into the mentality, the consumerism, [straight through] to incarceration and how this culture was destroying our families.”

hile some readers focused on Coldest’s value as a cautionary tale, others reveled in the pleasure of reading about a complex Black girl antihero, a relatable protagonist who prioritizes her own pleasure and isn’t afraid to seduce and scheme, as Mia and Shawna of the HBO series Rap Sh!t would put it today.

The year Coldest was published, Simon & Schuster put out another book that would become an essential read of the late ’90s and early aughts: Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, a collection of essays in which Morgan explores gender, race, and the culture in which she came of age. Explaining why Coldest affected her deeply, Morgan echoes what many Black women say about their devotion to the novel: “There’s a lot of Winter Santiaga in a lot of us.” She credits Souljah with creating a high-stakes world that felt to many readers like real life and creating a protagonist of great complexity and vulnerability. “I have known and loved many a dude who is a drug dealer. I have loved many a dude who has done time,” Morgan said of the parallels between her life and the protagonist’s. “What [Souljah] captures really well in the book is what the seductions of that life are and why you might choose it even if you might have other options.”

Morgan remembers sitting on panels with Souljah in the ’90s, each sharing her take on what it was like to be a young Black woman and part of the hip-hop generation, and she witnessed Souljah’s transition from political firebrand to novelist. “This person who has been talking about structural racism and is so incredibly versed in American capitalism and these systems of oppression also had this very observant, artistic eye,” she said. That commitment to interrogating oppressive social forces remained consistent from Souljah’s early ’90s message to her debut novel later in the decade, but at least one thing had changed. Because she’d built Coldest around a young Black woman, and because the experiences of other Black women and girls are central to the book, Souljah was now seen as part of the canon of contemporary Black feminist thought. Previously, she had often been the sole woman in a sea of men advancing Black nationalist and Afrocentric ideas. She had indicated a change in her focus in her 1994 memoir. “I am especially concerned with the African female in America, the ghetto girl whom nobody ever tells the definition of womanhood, or manhood for that matter,” she writes in No Disrespect. “So she slips in and out of relationships, getting chopped up psychologically, spiritually, and sometimes even physically.”

In 2010, the scholar Salamishah Tillet taught The Coldest Winter Ever as part of an English course at the University of Pennsylvania called “The Black Woman: Post–Civil Rights African-American Women’s Literature.” Souljah’s novel appeared on the syllabus alongside work by Black feminist writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and Audre Lorde. More than a decade after the book’s publication, Tillet’s students recognized Winter. Coldest offers a Black girl’s coming-of-age story that puts Winter in the same category as Celie in Walker’s The Color Purple or Pecola Breedlove in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, but whether Souljah’s novel is a feminist text is debatable, Tillet said. Winter is shallow, fickle, and brash and pays serious consequences for the choices she makes. Souljah doesn’t celebrate her character’s desire for sexual freedom and exploration. Instead, the author holds Winter up against a standard of respectability and illustrates all the ways she’s fallen short.

Like all the Black women I spoke to for this story, Tillet came to know of Sister Souljah before Coldest was published. She remembers the steady stream of events that put race and gender in the headlines during her senior year in high school: In October 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee after Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court. In the spring of 1992, Los Angeles residents rebelled after a jury acquitted the officers who’d attacked Rodney King. In June, Clinton would pillory Souljah and then go on to win the presidency. The following year, he would nominate Lani Guinier, a Black University of Pennsylvania law professor, to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, only to withdraw his support when her scholarship drew criticism from the right.

“Sister Souljah and Lani Guinier were both Black women who were sacrificed for him to put forth a more centrist, more moderate Democratic political agenda,” Tillet told me. “I remember thinking of these two figures in tandem, even though we know their legacies and politics are really quite different. They both represented a politicized Black womanhood that was a threat to a centrist position.”

Clinton and other liberal Democrats were distancing themselves from Black radical politics at the very moment that Souljah’s contemporaries—especially other young people in and around New York City—were building strong activist networks to fight for racial justice. Rosa Clemente entered SUNY Albany in 1990 and was a leader in the campus’s Black Student Union. Among the adults Clemente and other Black youth looked to for leadership were Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael); Leonard Jeffries, then the chair of the Black studies department at the City College of New York; and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. Souljah was also a sought-after speaker. Like these men, she refused to appeal to Black liberal leadership and disavowed the idea that white America would ever accept Black people as equals. And like many young Black activists of the time, Souljah had a relationship with the Nation of Islam. In the late ’80s, she had hired the Fruit of Islam, the Nation’s security force, to handle crowd control at a hip-hop show she produced at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. In a reader’s guide to Coldest, she describes the FOI as “an army of big, beautiful, strong black men respected by and respectful of the black community…. They were under the direction of Farrakhan…who was on fire in the ’80s, and I knew that they respected me as well and would hold me down, making sure that everything was at peace.” The Nation was known by many in Black communities as a champion “of the black underclass: black people, especially men, who have been written off or abandoned by white society,” as Adam Serwer wrote in a 2018 Atlantic article about the organization’s complex legacy. In the ’90s, Farrakhan was denounced after making anti-Semitic comments, as were Ture and Jeffries. Souljah also had to answer to accusations of negatively characterizing Jewish people after she was reported to have used two stereotypically Jewish last names as a shorthand for her white critics during a 1990 talk at Columbia. Leaders whose organizing efforts were steeped in messages of Black self-reliance and Afrocentrism frequently faced accusations, sometimes valid, of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. However, unlike Farrakhan or Jeffries, the 1990 incident was the only such accusation I found aimed at Souljah.

Like Sherrod, Clemente saw a pattern in who got called “racist” by mainstream institutions. For her, Souljah was a truth teller who was not inclined to mince words. When Clemente, now a PhD candidate in Afro-American studies at UMass Amherst, read Souljah’s notorious quote in The Washington Post, she heard her asking a different question altogether: “Why do we keep dealing with the symptom and not what created the symptom?” Clemente asked rhetorically when we spoke. “That’s what she was saying. Some of us were saying it.”

In 1992, Clemente had been disgusted by a sunglasses-clad Clinton playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show and by the media’s breathlessness over his popularity with Black voters. By 1996, she was well aware of the 1994 crime bill Clinton had signed into law and had no interest in supporting his reelection. “He said that shit about Sister Souljah,” she told me, describing her thought process at the time. “I’m not voting ever for the Democrats [for president].” In 2008, Clemente became Cynthia McKinney’s running mate on the Green Party ticket.

Of course, Barack Obama would be elected president that year, and his campaign would usher in a vision of the United States that many would label “post-racial” for its attempt to paint a picture of this country’s history in which people who do bad things are only ever misguided, not malicious. Souljah spoke of structural racism and white supremacy long before the 21st century’s Movement for Black Lives made such phrases part of the common culture, and yet it feels as though the directness with which she communicated belongs to the period in which she had the most visibility. It’s hard to imagine where Souljah would fit into the discourse these days. Although she responded to my e-mail requesting an interview, she didn’t make herself available. I imagine this reflects a desire to put certain parts of the past behind her. In a March 2021 interview in The Atlantic, she expressed a need to move on from Clinton’s misrepresentation of her position. “If you obsess over that…you’re losing your ability to build, to connect and do things with other people,” she said. “I try not to live my life…in reaction to racism.” But people I interviewed expressed nostalgia for the ’90s icon’s presence in public life. “I miss her grace. I miss her strength. I miss her passion. I miss that commanding-ass voice,” Joan Morgan said. “I just miss her.”

ister Souljah is no longer the incisive orator who had Americans glued to their TV screens 30 years ago, but she hasn’t disappeared. She’s been writing a series of books related to Coldest at a steady pace since 1999. In 2021, she published Life After Death, her sixth novel, which picks up Winter’s story as her prison sentence comes to a close.

Kierna Mayo, executive editor at One World, an imprint of Random House, understands the yearning that many who experienced Souljah in the early ’90s still feel. Mayo’s own introduction to Souljah came in the late 1980s, when she attended a Harlem event where the activist was a featured speaker. “I don’t recall a time before and maybe not since seeing a young girl take to a podium and shut shit down,” Mayo said. “I get goose bumps even now thinking about it.” Souljah would have been in her 20s at the time. “With that baby face and the ponytail and the perfect skin and the total hip-hop gear, she was giving Black youth all day,” Mayo recalled. But it wasn’t just the look that was captivating. Souljah’s demand for Black self-determination energized the crowd. Mayo remembers the event being at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which meant that Souljah’s presence as a young woman on the dais was even more unusual. In so many Black institutions, women were not often the ones on the mic. But there, even Black men and elders who were standard-bearers of the old guard honored her wisdom. Souljah spoke truth not just to power, Mayo told me, “but to us.”

When Clinton came for Souljah in 1992, Mayo rushed to her defense. For the new hip-hop magazine The Source, she wrote an editorial emphasizing Souljah’s ardent love for Black people and arguing that Clinton had tried to turn a legitimate grassroots leader into a bogeyman. “Clinton was looking for his moment, so he really Willie Hortoned her,” Mayo said. She remembers being incensed that mainstream America would come to know Souljah through Clinton’s misrepresentation of her ideas. Mayo felt a similar disconnect in 1999, when Coldest hit the shelves to rave reviews. Even the complex world Souljah had created around Winter wasn’t a sufficient stand-in for the righteous anger the author herself had displayed just years before. “It was hard for me to make space for what I saw as two Souljahs,” Mayo said, noting that this was in a time before the framework of intersectionality had fully seeped into the consciousness of Gen-X women, allowing them to claim all aspects of their identities. “It felt not right that this is the way you’re coming to know her, just through Coldest Winter. It was still a fraction of the full.”

The organization National Advocates for Pregnant Women has defended the rights of pregnant and parenting people for more than two decades, providing legal services for individuals who have been criminalized as a result of pregnancy, including for a stillbirth, miscarriage, or abortion. Typically, the nonprofit’s clients are women who are disproportionately targeted by surveillance—women who are low-income, of color, and those who use drugs or alcohol. On June 23, NAPW released a toolkit titled “Confronting Pregnancy Criminalization,” a guide for law enforcement officials, defense attorneys, medical examiners, hospital staff, and legislators—all professionals who make decisions that can lead to a criminal investigation—on how to minimize this harm. The next day, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Dobbs, revoking the constitutional right to abortion. With Roe overturned, there will be even more opportunities for the state to scrutinize pregnancy outcomes. Afsha Malik, NAPW’s research and program associate, is a coauthor of the report.1

—Dani McClain2

DM: Why did NAPW create this guide now? 3

AM: In 2013, we published a report that documented that from 1973 [the year Roe was decided] to 2005, there were 413 cases where pregnancy was an element of a crime. This last year, we found that from 2006 to 2020, there have been 1,300-plus cases related to pregnancy criminalization. So, in less than half the time, there has been triple the amount of arrests based on one’s pregnancy status.4

We know that we’re going to see more examples of pregnant people being criminalized for behavior that may be [seen as] justified for the general public, like using substances. [Other] cases that we’ve seen are going to accelerate, like [investigations for] falling down the stairs, having a home birth, not seeking prenatal care, having HIV, having a self-induced abortion, and experiencing a pregnancy loss.5

DM: People are showing more interest in learning how to induce their own abortion outside of a medical setting. Will self-managed abortion increase people’s exposure to law enforcement? 6

AM: Even with Roe on the books, there have been cases of criminalization based on self-managed abortion. Three states have unconstitutional laws prohibiting self-managed abortions: Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Nevada. Miscarriage is typically medically indistinguishable from a self-managed abortion, so miscarriages will become even more suspect in the eye of the state, especially when they’re experienced by members of heavily surveilled communities. While a person may be grieving their loss, they can get pulled into jail because of suspicion that they may have attempted to self-manage an abortion. Saying “I’m experiencing a miscarriage” won’t always protect a pregnant person, but it can be a start.7

DM: What are some specific pieces of advice that you offer professionals? 8

AM: With medical examiners, one of the biggest takeaways is to understand that fetal death reports may be used against bereaved mothers to criminalize pregnancy loss. A postmortem report listing maternal substance use as a cause or contributing factor in a fetal death could be used against a mother in a criminal prosecution. They should take extra care in drafting a report and applying the highest standard of evidence. It’s important that everyone knows that medical research does not support a finding of a direct causal relationship between prenatal exposure to criminalized drugs and miscarriage or stillbirth.9

A lot of the guidance we give is to recognize the deep systemic biases associated with substance use in pregnancy and to counter those biases.10

DM: Do you worry that women will be less likely to seek out medical care if talking with a medical professional could put them at risk of arrest? 11

AM: People are already afraid of what they can say to their medical provider because it can be used against them. That creates distrust, and that also creates an increased level of risk to the health of that person. The medical setting and these professionals will increasingly become arms of the state.12

NAPW trainings are available on YouTube.13

In late February, I listened to New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. warn about the threat posed by the coronavirus on the podcast The Daily. Hearing McNeil’s warnings shook me. I started buying more food and supplies than usual at the grocery store. I started stressing out and strategizing on my group chats. I started imagining how canceled preschool would isolate my only child, who’s 3.

But one thing I didn’t consider when I became aware of the threat of Covid-19: How will my family, stretched across several households, handle this? Here in Cincinnati, we’re headed into our fourth week of self-imposed quarantine. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced a mandatory stay-at-home order on March 22. As we’ve settled into our new routine, it’s become clear to me that public-health messaging around the pandemic assumes that everyone, but particularly parents, can simply retreat into a home, be self-sufficient, and survive the weeks or months that this intervention will last. But many of us, myself included, are unpartnered parents who live alone and receive necessary support from our children’s grandparents, noncustodial parents, and others who provide essential care. Fewer than one in five households in the United States contain married parents and their children living together, Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist and author of How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century told me via e-mail.

The point of quarantine, of course, is to starve the virus of opportunities to jump from host to host, and I know that pathogens don’t care about our politics, preferences, or custodial agreements. I also know that there are many of us who have the virus but are asymptomatic, and I have agonized over the possibility that my toddler or I could unknowingly infect her grandparents, all of whom are over 60 and so vulnerable. But I also need help. As someone who wants desperately for as many people as possible to survive this pandemic, I need more guidance on how to create a protective bubble around a family that doesn’t live in the same home. I need to know how to make the agreements and take the precautions necessary given the reality of my life.

Trina Greene Brown, who lives in southern California, is asking herself the same questions. She and her husband have two children at home. A total of six co-parents are connected in what she calls a “constellation.” Her 11-year-old son is on an every-other-day schedule: one day with her, the other days with either his paternal grandparents or father. He made the decision to forgo those visits and will stay put for the duration of the quarantine. But after a week and a half in with Greene Brown, her teenage daughter (Greene Brown doesn’t refer to her as a stepdaughter) left to go to her mother’s home to help her celebrate her birthday and then quarantine there. The girl’s biological mother works at a hospital and must continue to go to work. Now Greene Brown wrestles with the question: If her daughter at some point wants to return to their home, will that be OK? None of it is easy. Greene Brown’s husband risks exposure to the virus as well. His work keeping grocery stores stocked is considered essential. “I’m the privileged one out of all the co-parents,” she said. Her work has always been flexible. “I stay at home.”

Greene Brown directs Parenting for Liberation, a national community of black parents that hosts workshops, a podcast, and other outreach efforts. She started the organization in 2016 in response to a flood of news about police and vigilante violence targeting black people. At the time, she realized that she had been making decisions about parenting her young son that were rooted in anxiety—particularly the fear that as a black boy he was not safe. She worried that he would be punished harshly for the innocent mistakes that all children make. “Shelter, limit, hunker down,” she said, describing her instincts in the days before she started organizing with other black parents. “That’s been the goal, to move beyond that.” Now the threat of Covid-19 has brought back that defensive mindset she’d been working to shed.

For now, Greene Brown is trying to observe public health guidance as strictly as possible, but she’s thinking about how to welcome her daughter back with open arms if need be. “If she wanted to come home, what do we need to do to ensure her return as safely as possible? What would the process of her return be? How can we have honest conversations about, ‘Who all was over there?’”

That would be a good question to start with, said Whitney R. Robinson, an epidemiologist based at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, when I told her about Greene Brown’s predicament. Robinson suggested urging the teenager to start tightening her circle to include fewer and fewer people with a goal of returning home within an agreed-upon number of days that takes the virus’s incubation period into account. There’s no silver bullet, just a willingness to have hard conversations. “Talk about what your rules are going to be,” Robinson said. “Ideally, people would form closed networks. That takes a lot of communication.”

It also takes a willingness to make adjustments as circumstances change. Maybe one core caregiver had been engaging in riskier behavior but is now taking precautions that inspire more trust. “This is going to be a long haul,” Robinson said. “It’s okay to initiate really strict rules even if you worry it’s not going to be sustainable. You can make decisions on a day-to-day basis.”

everal states’ stay-at-home orders do acknowledge the realities faced by families like Greene Brown’s and mine. In Ohio, as of Monday there were just over 1,200 hospitalizations and 142 deaths due to the virus. The state’s stay-home order includes in its list of essential activities for which a person is allowed to leave her home “to care for a family member, friend, or pet in another household.” The country’s first shelter-in-place order, which went into effect March 17 in six Bay Area counties, had similar language. Some might strictly interpret these words to mean that if a loved one in another household were ill, we can leave home to care for them. I’m choosing to understand them more broadly. My mother cares for my daughter in her home, and I continue to take her there. To mitigate the risk, my mother (who lives alone) and I have agreed that we will not be in physical contact with anyone else during this time. We’re vigilant about following the tips for staying safe: washing hands and disinfecting surfaces, staying six feet away from people outside and in the grocery store. There’s trust between us, and it feels like a closed circuit for now. My daughter sees her father regularly, too, so we’re making similar agreements.

Those of us who are trying to make such agreements have been left to figure them out on our own. The social distancing how-to guides, in which public health experts tell us that quarantine isn’t a time for playdates or in-person dinner parties, haven’t listed the questions co-parenting family members should be asking each other before connecting in person. There’s no template for coronavirus-era vows between households or a checklist of what to do when we move our children from home to home.

Instead, members of non-nuclear families are looking to each other for advice. Sometimes we find compassionate models that are relevant to our situations. Other times we’re met with judgment. Posting a question to social media can be risky. Even some of us in the most socially progressive circles, who would never in pre-coronavirus times have considered shaming someone who co-parents or depends on a grandparent, can be quick with the “that’s not doing it right!” finger-waving now. In these tense exchanges, at least one person inevitably urges the strictest possible interpretation of the public health orders, and those whose children depend on outside support argue that a family member’s being cut out of the mix is simply not an option.

People who can withdraw into their homes should remember the impact of the role they’re playing. “The public health message is not just to protect yourself but also to isolate for the people who can’t isolate,” Robinson, the UNC epidemiologist, said. “You are trying to break a chain” and, in doing so, reduce risk for essential workers and others who still need to have contact with the outside world.

Those who are low-income, black, or Latinx are most likely to need to find a way to adapt self-quarantine guidelines to their own situations. A recent Washington Post report makes clear whose labor is considered nonessential now: Twenty percent of black and 16 percent of Latinx employees have the ability to work from home, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. That’s compared to 37 percent of Asian American and 30 percent of white workers. Only 4 percent of people who didn’t graduate from high school can work remotely, compared to nearly 52 percent of those with a college degree or higher.

Many of those who continue to leave home to work in food service, sanitation, health care, child care and other jobs currently deemed essential are women of color, said Dr. Jamila Taylor, director of health care reform and senior fellow with the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “These shelter-in-place orders are impacting single, head of household, primary breadwinners who have to show up to work right now,” Taylor said. “They’re definitely going to need that support from their family members” and child care providers.

work from home even when we’re not in the midst of a global pandemic, so, like Greene Brown, I’m in a privileged position. My work life hasn’t changed much. But I do feel stigmatized in a way I’m not used to. I’ve always balked at the phrase “single mother.” I don’t identify as such, because I haven’t felt “single” as a parent, even if my relationship status suggests otherwise. I’m raising my child as part of a community of family and friends. In recent weeks, I’ve had to wrestle with these critically important public health messages and decide whether I’ll let them chase my daughter and me into our home and lock the door behind us. I’ve had to resist becoming a literal single mother, cut off from my supports and destined for near-immediate overwork and exhaustion. Without more tailored messaging from the public health community, physical distancing as a method of containing the virus can begin to feel like a socially conservative scold, privileging those adults engaged in functional cohabitation.

Parents, who in these times are called upon to keep their kids meaningfully engaged while also working, simply can’t do this on their own for weeks or months with no relief. Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) recently shared that she was unable to follow a doctor’s orders when she began showing worrying symptoms, because those orders depended on having another adult in the house to care for her three school-aged children. “They told me to isolate in my room,” she told an interviewer. “And I said, ‘Well, I can’t do that. I’m a single mom. There’s no one to get the food [for me]. There’s no one.’ And the nurse was great. She’s like, ‘OK, then what we’re going to do is we’re going to pretend your children all have symptoms too,’ and so the whole household is self-quarantined.” Like Porter, we need to push back when the advice offered doesn’t work for us. And like that nurse, experts should be quick to offer workarounds.

In March, Professor Yolonda Wilson, a philosopher who focuses on bioethics and race, posted a series of tweets about how Albany, Georgia, her hometown, became a hot spot, and the challenge of convincing people to stop attending church in person. One tweet reads, “For those of us who think seriously about #publichealth and #bioethics, it is often difficult to balance respect for cultural practices that form the fabric of who people are with impressing upon them the reality that those cultural practices are killing them.”

When I asked whether she could suggest advice that might better speak to those of us who are struggling to give up more communal aspects of our lives—whether church or daily connection to extended family—she said an ideal message would confirm the seriousness of the virus “without being dismissive and without making people look crazy for being stubborn about it. We all make choices, and our choices reflect our values.”

On a muggy evening in mid-September, I drove from my home in Cincinnati to a rally 15 minutes west at a Planned Parenthood health center that was slated to close. Earlier that week, news broke that because of a reduction in funding, Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio would shut down two of its nine clinics in the state. In August the organization was forced to withdraw from the federal Title X family planning program after an unprecedented Trump administration rule prohibited those funds from going to facilities that provide abortions or refer patients to abortions elsewhere. Title X subsidizes birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and other medical care for 4 million low-income patients. The soon-to-be-shuttered clinics, both of them in Cincinnati, served over 6,000 patients a year, with services including pregnancy testing and birth control. Neither location provided abortions. But staffers there acknowledged that abortion is a legal, legitimate form of health care that clients could pursue elsewhere. For that, these clinics and others like them across the country lost their access to federal funds.

I parked my car on a residential street called Prosperity Place and walked the few blocks to the health center, a squat, cream-colored building near a gas station. The center’s manager addressed a crowd of about 200 and listed the types of people who regularly came through the doors: LGBTQ patients who appreciated staffers using their preferred gender pronouns, a 17-year-old facing a positive HIV test, students from nearby Western Hills High School stopping in for free condoms. The testimony was moving, but the outlook was grim. A couple of days earlier, I asked Kersha Deibel, the CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, where the people served by these clinics might turn after they’re closed. Those with transportation could go to other Planned Parenthood locations, Deibel said, but “they shouldn’t have to go anywhere else.”

In the national narrative about the places where abortion rights are under greatest threat, media attention has focused on the South, particularly on the abortion bans passed in Georgia and Alabama. But this year Ohio passed a ban after the sixth week of pregnancy, which was signed into law in April. (In July a federal judge blocked it.) A ban on abortion after 20 weeks has been in effect since 2017. This year’s Title X rule change was a blow, but something similar had already happened on the state level. In 2016 then–Republican Governor John Kasich signed a bill barring the state from funding health programs that cover sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, cancer screenings, and infant mortality and sexual violence prevention if those programs are provided by clinics that also provide abortions. That law was tied up in court until March, when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it. In his eight years in office, Kasich enacted 21 restrictions on abortion. During his tenure, half the clinics providing abortions in Ohio closed. “It’s one thing after another after another after another,” said Jaime Miracle, the deputy director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio. “When all this stuff happens in the South, it’s ‘Bam! It’s happening.’ Here it’s been death by a thousand cuts.”

In 2014 one of Toledo’s two clinics closed. That year the number of abortions in Lucas County, which includes the city, declined. But Miracle said people crossed state lines to go to clinics in Detroit, which is closer to Toledo than Columbus or Cleveland. The flood of restrictions has also pushed more Ohioans past the 20-week mark, at which point they have to leave the state to terminate their pregnancies. A 24-hour waiting period for abortion that requires patients to visit clinics twice to have the procedure, parental consent laws, and the prevalence of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) can slow down the process, pushing women later into pregnancy before they can get the procedure.

ith Planned Parenthood clinics closing, more women in Ohio will find their way to CPCs, establishments that provide pregnancy tests, pressure women not to have abortions, and offer medically inaccurate information, such as telling women seeking abortions that they’re past the gestational limit. “For people who don’t necessarily have phone access, they go to whatever’s closest to them, and it’s probably a CPC,” said Stephanie Sherwood, the executive director of Women Have Options, the state’s abortion fund.

Sherwood said that at CPCs, people are often shamed for being honest about the services they want. One woman seeking an abortion was told that the procedure is dangerous. The woman’s reaction, according to Sherwood: “‘I can’t die, because I have kids to take care of.’ Then later [she] realized they were lying to her.”

The misinformation that people receive at CPCs can sow confusion and delay their access to abortion. “We will have people show us printed-out ultrasounds that definitely aren’t theirs,” Sherwood said.

CPCs are ubiquitous in the state. In 2013, Republican state legislators created the Ohio Parenting and Pregnancy Program, a funding mechanism that pours millions of dollars from the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant—which is intended for poverty alleviation—into these deceptive centers. (Programs that provide evidence-based information on abortion are ineligible for funds except in a medical emergency.) As of 2016, Ohio was one of seven states that funded CPCs using welfare dollars. The Trump administration recently awarded a Title X grant to a pregnancy center network. Responding to the news, Dr. Krishna Upadhya, a member of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine and a senior medical adviser at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, wrote in a statement, “It is particularly harmful that the Trump administration is giving funding from the nation’s family planning program to CPCs that refuse to provide evidence-based sexual and reproductive health care, such as condoms and the full range of birth control methods, but instead offer misleading or inaccurate health information.”

Walking from my parked car to the September rally, I stopped to talk with the people I encountered. Teresa Brown, 36, sat on her porch as her two toddlers played nearby and her 6-week-old son slept inside. She told me she’d read on social media about the clinic closing and had mixed feelings about it, saying that she went there twice for tests when she needed proof of pregnancy to apply for Medicaid and that her sister got a referral there for an abortion, which she later regretted. “I wish I could talk to some of those girls before they go and get abortions,” said Brown, who was raised Catholic. “There’s so many families out there that want a child.”

The three children with her now are her youngest. She had five other children while in a violent relationship with someone who abused drugs, and those kids were now with adoptive families in Florida and Wisconsin, she said. Brown said she got pregnant three times despite being on the pill or Depo-Provera, and there’s a chance she’ll need a pregnancy test again. If so, now that the Planned Parenthood is closed, her nearest option will be Pregnancy Center West, a nearby CPC, which is where she goes to get car seats and other things for her kids. She watches videos, some of which are Christian, answers questions about them, and then gets Baby Bucks (what many CPCs call the cash substitutes they provide in exchange for participation in their programs), which she can use to buy what she needs. Brown said she is happy for the support but recognizes Pregnancy Center West’s limitations, namely that it doesn’t offer contraception. “I hope they put something there to help,” she said of the Planned Parenthood clinic, which has since been closed. “Because people need birth control.”

n Ohio, the Catholic Church is a political force. The Catholic Conference of Ohio has been active at abortion bill hearings in Columbus, the state capital, and has submitted written testimony in support of restrictive policies. In Dayton and Toledo, the church has mobilized to keep hospitals from signing transfer agreements that would allow clinics to move patients if they need to be admitted for emergency care. But many deeply religious Ohioans support abortion rights. Progressive faith leaders organized by the Ohio Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice speak at the statehouse, conduct clinic blessings, and show up at rallies. The organization also works to meet people’s more immediate needs. It offers counseling to pregnant women considering their options and in December began working with congregations around the state to assemble care packages for people before, during, and after their abortions. “I don’t think there’s a way forward in Ohio without engaging faith communities when it comes to abortion,” said Elaina Ramsey, the organization’s executive director.

Growing up in Chillicothe, Ramsey was a conservative fundamentalist Christian. Her politics shifted after she was introduced to community organizing while working as a youth minister in the South Bronx in New York City. She lived on the East Coast for more than a decade before returning to Ohio two years ago to lead the coalition of progressive faith leaders.

Her work is just one example of the new approaches to organizing taking hold in the state. Like Ramsey, Cleveland-based reproductive justice advocate Jasmine Burnett recently moved back to the Midwest after years on the East Coast. The Indiana native lived in Brooklyn and then in Philadelphia, where she worked with the organization New Voices for Reproductive Justice. In 2015 she established the group’s office in Cleveland. At the time, she said, there weren’t many groups doing policy, advocacy, and organizing work using the reproductive justice framework, which emphasizes the relationship between the right not to have a child and the right to have a child and to parent in safe and healthy communities.

When Ohio Right to Life put up inflammatory, misleading billboards in Cleveland’s majority-black neighborhoods that summer, New Voices wrote an open letter calling for them to be taken down. It was unsuccessful, but the work attracted new allies. The group joined forces with NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, Preterm (a local abortion clinic), and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio to form a united front in the run-up to that fall’s gubernatorial election. With Kasich reelected and Republicans in control of the legislature, the groups put out a joint statement declaring, “[This] coalition will remain vigilant during the lame duck legislative session and will combine efforts for increased advocacy and awareness in the new legislative year.”

The new coalition had to learn how to work together. New Voices was the only black-led, black community-based organization in the network, Burnett said, and she wanted to highlight the existing power dynamics, introduce New Voices’ work as being rooted in human rights and racial justice, and establish lines of communication with the other reproductive rights organizations. She described this as “leading with the relationship over the work” and emphasized the importance of the organizers getting to know and trust one another.

The groups paid a lot of attention to understanding one another’s values and getting clear on the differences between reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. “It birthed a lot of really beautiful organizing and collaboration that didn’t come without its share of challenges,” Burnett said. “We talked about how we would address these challenges, [which] makes our relationships stronger to this day.”

Reproductive justice organizing is part of the effort opposing abortion restrictions, but the messaging is different from what you hear from groups more narrowly focused on the right not to have a child. A key focus for reproductive justice groups is the state’s mortality rate for infants born to black women, which is one of the worst in the country. Black babies in Ohio die before their first birthday at two to three times the rate of white babies.

“We don’t consider anything that’s along the reproductive health care spectrum in a silo,” said Jessica Roach, the CEO and cofounder of the Columbus-based reproductive justice organization Restoring Our Own Through Transformation (ROOTT), which provides perinatal-support doula services as a way to strengthen birthing families and improve black maternal and infant health outcomes. A nurse with a master’s degree in public health, Roach testified against the six-week abortion ban before the Ohio Senate Health Committee last spring. She said the efforts to restrict abortion make deaths among black infants more likely. “It’s not about it being an ‘abortion clinic,’” she explained. “It’s a health care facility that provides abortions. People go there for [sexually transmitted disease] treatment. They go there for pelvic exams. They find out that they’re pregnant, and they get their initial prenatal care there while they’re being referred to a practitioner.” But the state “keeps shutting down clinics because of one service that doesn’t morally feel good to them.”

In September, the pharmaceutical giant Merck announced that ROOTT would be one of the nine projects it will fund as part of its Safer Childbirth Cities Initiative. To some, it might not be immediately obvious how doula care for black families is part of the fight for abortion access, but to Roach, the connection is clear. “Our voices need to be dictating the care we wish to receive,” she said. “It is inappropriate for a white-male-dominated political system to tell any black woman or family what they’re going to do with their reproductive health care decisions.”

Burnett is no longer with New Voices Cleveland, but its work is still going strong. The organization encourages conversations around the ways bodily autonomy can be compromised and how to fight back. It is mobilizing its members around the issues of black maternal health, abortion access, and mass incarceration. In October it partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio to host a discussion on Cuyahoga County’s bail system and the experiences of black girls in the juvenile justice system. Educational events like this are typically followed by a smaller gathering with a focus on healing, said New Voices community organizer Alana Garrett-Ferguson. It’s in these conversation-based groups that the real work happens, she continued. During one gathering, a participant who’d had an abortion was able to unpack the experience of being forced to wait for the procedure under the state’s mandatory 24-hour waiting period. In this more intimate format, other participants were able to show compassion and validate her experience. Organizers can explain how abortion doulas support a woman going through the procedure. In addition to its advocacy and public-facing events, the organization is committed to “giving black women and femmes a chance to be vulnerable,” Garrett-Ferguson said. “Educating the community is also listening to their concerns.”

Access to more health care may be the obvious goal for some in the abortion rights movement, but reproductive justice activists say that’s often not enough. Several times, Garrett-Ferguson made the point that “it’s not just about access but accountability.” Asked what she meant, she reiterated that abortion is another form of health care. Many of the people she works with distrust health care institutions for reasons both historical and rooted in their own experiences, so abortion clinics—like any doctor’s office—can feel alienating and discriminatory. Because of these nuances, Garrett-Ferguson has found that safe spaces, healing work, and opportunities to acknowledge stigma and traumatic experiences, including with abortion, have been just as important as rallies and lobbying. These types of engagement are sometimes linked. Once someone has worked through the stigma and shame alongside people she trusts, she’s more likely to want to testify about her experience in front of legislators.

Across the state, reproductive justice formations are fighting to preserve access to abortion on their terms. Last summer, New Voices Cleveland created the hashtag #ThisBlackBody to educate its members about the six-week ban. But these advocates are also focused on the slow work of supporting black families to have healthy pregnancies and births. Meanwhile, CPCs, flush with state dollars, are able to provide Ohioans with postpartum services in a way that abortion rights advocates—who are locked in a constant fight just to keep the clinics open—cannot. “I’m hoping that at some point, our movement can provide parenting resources, because our values are there. Organizations like ROOTT and New Voices are helping us focus on the right to parent in safe conditions when you want to,” said Sherwood of Women Have Options. Anti-choice activists and legislators are “going to continue to try to shut down clinics, and we’re going to continue to fight that. But we’ve got to make sure that we’re there” to meet people’s other reproductive needs.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, my mother would put on Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” every day before we left home for school and work, and we sang along from start to finish. Standing in the living room moments before we shrugged on our coats, we belted out lyrics about self-reliance and persistence, finding a kind of armor through song. We wrapped ourselves in the richness and power of Whitney’s voice, reaching for the high notes right along with her. I can’t remember how long this lasted, but I consider it a defining ritual of my childhood. She’s too young now, but I plan to do something similar with my daughter, Isobel, who is 2. Black children and their families need this. We need a kind of anthem, a melodic reminder to ourselves and each other that we are not who the wider world too often tells us we are: criminal, disposable, lazy, undeserving of health or peace or laughter.1

Black mothers like me know that motherhood is deeply political. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than women of any other race. My own mother, who has never married and who worked full-time throughout my childhood, is a model for my own parenting, but culture-war messages from the left and the right tell us she fell short of maternal ideals. My grandmother, great-grandmother, aunts, and elders in the community supported my mother as she raised me. Their investment in me and in other children—some their blood relations, some not—demonstrated an ethic that we can all learn from. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has called this “other-mothering,” a system of care through which black mothers are accountable to and work on behalf of all black children in a particular community. “I tell my daughter all the time: We don’t live for the ‘I.’ We live for the ‘we,’” Cat Brooks, an organizer in Oakland, told me.2

In addition to serving as other-mothers, we’ve had to fight for our right to be mothers. Prior to Emancipation, the child of an enslaved woman was someone else’s property. Slave owners routinely destabilized enslaved people’s lives, severing kinship structures rooted in marriage and blood ties; family as a concept became elastic and inclusive.3

Because of this history, black women have had to inhabit a different understanding of motherhood in order to navigate American life. If we merely accepted the status quo and failed to challenge the forces that have kept black people and women oppressed, then we participated in our own and our children’s destruction. In recent years, this has become especially evident, as dozens of black women and men have had to stand before television cameras reminding the world that their recently slain children were in fact human beings, were loved and sources of joy. The mothers of those killed by police or vigilante violence embody every black mother’s deepest fears: that we will not be able to adequately protect our children from or prepare them for a world that has to be convinced of their worth. Many parents speak of feeling more fear and anxiety once they take responsibility for keeping another human alive and well. But black women especially know fear—how to live despite it and how to metabolize it for our children so that they’re not consumed by it.4

In the fever dream that has been life in the United States since Donald Trump came to power, some of black women’s deepest fears have become more comprehensible to the broader society. No one has ever been able to guarantee safe passage into adulthood for their children, but nonblack parents with money, citizenship, and class status had a leg up on the rest of us. Now, even for many of them, the threats and uncertainty seem to multiply by the day. The Trump era has given those who may have previously felt invulnerable to the shifting tides of human fortune a wake-up call.5

Family is often the first social institution to shape how we understand our identities and our politics. At a time when “Resist!” has for some become a national battle cry in response to the norms-trampling Trump administration, it’s critical to look at the messages communicated within our families and address hypocrisies or inconsistencies head on. Research suggests that white parents in particular need help seeing family as a source of political education, especially when it comes to passing on anti-racist values. A 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that out of 17,000 families with kindergartners, parents of color are about three times more likely to discuss race than their white counterparts. Seventy-five percent of the white parents in the study never or almost never talked about race. According to research highlighted in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s 2009 book, NurtureShock, white parents communicate messages that skin color doesn’t matter and that everyone is equal—messages that children know to be lies based on their own experiences even as early as infancy. When pressed, these parents often admit that they don’t know how to talk about race. Black mothers, on the other hand, are scared not of talk of race, but of the impact of racist oppression. We’re scared because we have no choice but to release our beloved creations into environments—doctors’ offices, hospitals, day-care facilities, playgrounds, schools—where white supremacy is often woven into the fabric of the institution, and is both consciously and unwittingly practiced by the people acting in loco parentis. Black mothers haven’t had the luxury of sticking our heads in the sand and hoping that our children learn about race and power as they go. Instead, we must act as a buffer and translator between them and the world, beginning from their earliest days.6

am the daughter of an unmarried black woman. I am now an unmarried black woman raising a girl. I didn’t grow up with my father at home. As has been the case since soon after her first birthday, my daughter isn’t either. I didn’t meet my father until I was in my early 20s. Our meeting was healing, but his absence hadn’t mattered in the ways that some people assumed it would. I grew up in a house in the suburbs, the same house where my mom and her sisters and their dad before them had grown up. My maternal grandmother had grown up around the corner. We had a big in-ground pool in the backyard, where I’d swim with my cousins and other neighborhood kids. I grew up playing soccer and riding horses and skiing, and on the few occasions that I was referred to jokingly as a “Cosby kid,” I knew what that meant: I was privileged, maybe even a little spoiled.7

I always had a kind of unvarnished pride in my upbringing. None of the assumptions people seemed to have about families headed by “single mothers” applied to my life. As an only child, I was the focus of my mom’s attention and resources. That investment in my success and happiness was supplemented by the love, time, and money of other adults in our family, especially my maternal aunt, Pam, who lived with my mom and me from the time I was 7. Extended family was everything, and while the word “family” seemed to mean a mom and dad and siblings to some, to me it’s always meant aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and the neighborhood elders who watched you grow up.8

Like me, my daughter is growing up without a dad at home, but the similarities in our experiences end there. My father lived across the country—he’d moved west before I was born to pursue a graduate degree—and we had no contact until I sought him out and initiated a conversation that led to us staying in touch for a few years. My daughter’s dad also lives in a different city, but he was by my side during her birth and cared for her daily during the first year of her life, while we were still together romantically, and before he relocated for a job. He visits her often and video-chats with her daily, and they have a relationship that I support and that brings us all joy. Our family is not unique in this. In 2013, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention corrected the misconception that black men disproportionately shirk their fatherly duties. Instead, black men are generally more likely than men of other races to read to, feed, bathe, and play with their young children on a daily basis, whether they live in the same home as the child or not. Relying on nonmarital birthrates to tell a story about parental involvement has built a false narrative. Just because a father isn’t married to his child’s mother doesn’t mean he’s an absent dad.9

For my daughter’s dad and me, it’s not easy, but we work at it. For about six months after our breakup, we were in therapy to learn how to parent together despite our separation. I feel proud of us when I read a line from a 2008 study on co-parenting outside of marriage: “We conclude that parents’ ability to work together in rearing their common child across households helps keep nonresident fathers connected to their children and that programs aimed at improving parents’ ability to communicate may have benefits for children irrespective of whether the parents’ romantic relationship remains intact.” We created our own program with the coaching of a black woman who talked us through some painful periods and helped us put our goals and commitments on paper. Now here we are—making the road by walking.10

My father and my daughter’s father are college-educated black men from middle-class families. They both grew up with their dads at home. At the time of their children’s births, they were gainfully employed or training to advance in a profession. They were not ripped away by death or by the criminal-justice system or by the Pull of the Streets™. But not all black single moms have such a benign family backstory. For every 100 black women in communities around the country, there are just 83 black men. “The remaining men—1.5 million of them—are, in a sense, missing,” The New York Times reported in April 2015, and incarceration and early death are to blame. There’s no comparable gender gap for white people. For every 100 white women, there are 99 white men. But nearly one in 12 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are behind bars, a rate that’s five times that of nonblack men that age. The imbalance between free, living black boys and free, living black girls starts during their teen years and peaks in their 30s. (To be clear, black women are disproportionately incarcerated as well: One in 200 black women are behind bars, compared with one in 500 nonblack women.) These data help clarify why 30 percent of black families are headed by unmarried women, compared with 13 percent of American households overall.11

G. Rosaline Preudhomme, a 73-year-old grandmother and organizer, helped pass Washington, DC’s Initiative 71, which legalized marijuana. Preudhomme’s work seeks to address the systemic reasons for these “missing” black men. Fifty thousand people were behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses in 1980. By 1997, that number had jumped to more than 400,000, close to where it remains today. A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the incarceration of parents takes a serious toll on their children; children of incarcerated parents suffer from more physical and mental health problems than those whose parents aren’t behind bars. Still, Preudhomme notes, despite the tremendous pressure that punitive drug policies have put on black communities in the past 40 years, our families persist. That’s in part because black Americans have had a structure for organizing family life that predates the drug war and accommodates the absence or intermittent presence of parents. “It’s the resilient spirit of black women that has gotten us through these past 400 years of our family life always being disrupted,” Preudhomme says.12

In taking a village-oriented approach to child-rearing, black Americans may be out of step with mainstream white, middle-class American culture, which became more centered on the nuclear family at the middle of the last century with the advent of mass suburbanization. But we’re fully in step with how the rest of the world has functioned throughout most of history. A body of research has determined that Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries, with their focus on the nuclear family, bring up children in what anthropologist David Lancy has called “a departure from all other human culture.” Most humans across time and space are “cooperative breeders” and depend on adult women and older children in the extended family and community to care for the young.13

hen I think about my own childhood growing up with my mom and my maternal aunt, the first words that come to mind are “calm” and “even-keeled.” In the decade before I left home for college, when the three of us lived together, I can remember only one or two times when there were raised voices or heavy silences. This is not to suggest that only men struggle with their tempers. But men are more often socialized to believe that explosive anger and a pouty retreat into themselves are appropriate ways to communicate. I grew up never threatened with “wait till your father gets home,” never seeing one adult’s needs prioritized over another’s. I saw two adults treating each other with love, respect, and humor. I saw that it was possible to be a whole, healthy adult without marriage and, in my aunt’s case, without biological children of one’s own. Throughout my 30s, I was sympathetic, but somewhat baffled, as I watched some of my women friends struggle to make peace with their unmarried, unpartnered status. Many of them seemed to feel that kids were unlikely, since no partner was in sight, but their predicaments just looked to me like another way to do life. Because of my own upbringing, I felt liberated from the assumption that marriage and mothering must go together. Mainstream culture’s glorification of marriage leaves so many people feeling unnecessarily deflated and out of options when that type of union doesn’t materialize.14

Last Father’s Day, I felt a swell of recognition when I saw black feminist writer Amber J. Phillips tweeting about her own father: “Because he opted out of being [a] parent, I was raised with the radical idea that I don’t actually need a patriarch in my home or life to be happy or feel a false sense of success.” In her 1987 essay, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships,” Patricia Hill Collins writes that growing up in a household like mine, in which working mothers and extended-family support are common, creates a kind of domino effect. Generation after generation, black women reject ideas that the patriarchal family—and, by extension, patriarchy in the broader society—is normal. Collins suggests that slavery and the economic realities of Jim Crow made it hard for black families to create the separate, gender-based spheres of influence (father as economic provider and head of household, mother as nurturer and subordinate) that white America lauded as the ideal organization of family life. Instead, black girls grow up with a sense of empowerment and possibility that girls of other races don’t necessarily see modeled at home or in their communities. “Since Black mothers have a distinctive relationship to white patriarchy, they may be less likely to socialize their daughters into their proscribed roles as subordinates,” Collins writes.15

Black families have developed a tradition of passing onto our children a culture that repels the forces of white supremacy and creates ample opportunities to question patriarchy. But unmarried black mothers and their daughters aren’t lauded for holding the keys to resisting patriarchal oppression. Our reliance on extended family networks and collective approaches to childcare, our rejection of the nuclear family as the only way to organize our lives, has been consistently derided throughout history. The dominant narrative is that we’re poor, draining public coffers, and so a blight on society. The safety zones that black parents have created, with leadership from black mothers, the places where we learn that we are not who the world tells us we are, have been criticized by everyone from Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s to the American Enterprise Institute’s W. Bradford Wilcox today.16

Those who promote marriage as social policy want us to believe that getting married will automatically lift poor people out of poverty. But poor plus poor does not somehow equal middle class. It means two poor adults raising poor kids and trying to figure out how to survive. Lost in the conversation is the impact that low-wage work has on black families. The question shouldn’t be whether we can put together two measly paychecks, but whether we as individuals can get paid a fair wage for the work that we do. In 2016, nearly 40 percent of black, female-headed households with children lived in poverty—meaning over 60 percent did not. Why don’t we talk about how that 60 percent is often doing just fine, or why that 40 percent is actually impoverished?17

Governments aren’t equipped to understand all the pressures that low-income couples face, and they shouldn’t presume to meddle in romantic relationships. What governments are equipped to do is address poverty head on, by acknowledging and supporting people’s economic and social rights. Social policies such as paid parental leave, universal child care, and universal health care would go a long way to alleviate the financial pressures that unmarried moms face. This kind of government intervention is why a single mother and her child in Denmark are no more likely to be poor than a married mother and her child.18

But the complex story of family formation and black mothering isn’t only about beating back stigma and correcting falsehoods; the psychic and emotional impact of leading households on our own is often ignored. I’ve been guilty of this myself. In writing about black women and marriage in the past, I’ve failed to acknowledge that some of us actually aspire to the narratives of being chosen, of living happily ever after. Yes, it’s important that we can and do successfully raise children without steady, committed romantic partners. But can we also note how depressing it is that we so often have to? There’s a reason some black women were excited when finally, after 12 seasons of the franchise, there was a black Bachelorette. Some of us want love, marriage, and a baby carriage in exactly that order, and preferably with black men. It’s important to acknowledge how it feels when those desires are often out of reach for us in a way they’re just not for other women.19

Add to the existential angst the day-to-day responsibility of being in charge. Even with family help and enough money to pay for childcare, it’s exhausting to be the sole adult responsible for cooking, bathing, reading, playing, and cleaning on those days or in those stretches of hours when you’re going it alone. I never take it for granted that I was 100 percent certain I wanted to be a mother when I had my daughter. I can’t imagine giving mothering the energy it demands and deserves if I had come into this reluctantly, especially now that it’s often just the two of us. I enjoy the work of mothering and don’t often feel like I’m going through the motions or putting on a brave face, but there have been times when my spirit has flagged under the weight. I’m reminded of those times, the moments I’ve blinked back tears, when I read asha bandele’s memoir, Something Like Beautiful, about raising her daughter while her husband was incarcerated and then deported. She writes: “I told myself if I cried I was setting a bad example for my daughter. Others told me the very same thing. Told me never to be a victim, Black women are not victims and we are not weak…. In the post-welfare-reform days of the alpha mom, I was clear that being a victim, showing any weakness, was punishable by complete isolation and total loss of respect. I was a mother, a single mother, a single Black mother. I was part of a tradition of women who do not bend and who do not break. This is what I said, this is how I now defined myself. As someone with no room for error.”20

I see little room for error in my own life. I have to guard against letting parenting become one more place I practice perfectionism. There are so many reasons to try to do it as close to perfectly as possible, since the mainstream conversation tells me that as both an unmarried mom and the child of an unmarried mom, I’m incapable of being or raising a successful, well-adjusted person. Even though I have known since childhood how mean-spirited and hollow that conversation is, I’m still affected by the stigma. As I get older, I can also see the danger in being too defensive, in disproving others’ assumptions before I honestly explore my own nuanced truths. In 2007, artist Meshell Ndegeocello released an album called The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams. That album’s title reminds me that learning to navigate an often-inhospitable world on one’s own and with the help of relatives and friends can make us into our own rock-solid protectors. Partnership with a man can begin to feel unnecessary: nice when it comes along, but not a must for survival or happiness. This strength can be a source of pride, but it can also be reason to grieve when one starts to think about all the structural and historical reasons that black women have had to be so independent, and black men have often been unavailable or unwilling to offer meaningful help.21

It’s a February day, and Is and I are at the playground. I push her on the swing and notice that she can’t take her eyes off the next swing over, where a dad is pushing his daughter. I think to myself: I know that feeling. That “Why don’t I have that?” feeling. That “Where’s my dad?” feeling. That “I want bigger, messier, gruffer, rougher, and sillier than Mom” feeling. But the truth is that I’m projecting. My child is a watcher; she’s super-nosy and could be thinking anything. She actually gets playground time with her dad, though not daily. But my mind goes there because I am still, at 39, processing my own feelings around abandonment and loss. I don’t want that for my daughter. I don’t want her to know that sense of longing. If she does, I want her to know that she can express it, put it out in the open. In my experience, the silence around an absence can do more harm than the absence itself. For Is and for me, the challenge is to find—to make—space where we can be vulnerable and acknowledge hurt without giving into the narrative that we are of and in a “broken family.” As we are, our family is perfectly whole.22

It’s been just over a year since the explosion of #MeToo revelations and demands for accountability, and Tarana Burke, who is credited with being the founder of the movement—she began to popularize the phrase as early as 2006, as a rallying cry for her online and offline work with survivors—wants to make sure we haven’t missed the point. The movement’s true mission, as Burke sees it, is making sure that survivors of sexual violence have the resources they need to heal, as she explained recently in The New York Times. But during this year of reckoning, most news coverage focused on the Hollywood moguls, top-tier comedians, publishing luminaries and others accused of sexual violence who work at the highest levels of media, politics, and entertainment. The well-being of survivors, especially those whose assaults weren’t perpetrated by famous men, has become an afterthought.

Burke, a longtime warrior for gender justice and against sexual violence, has lead workshops primarily for women and girls of color in Selma, New York City, Philadelphia, and beyond. (This Chicago Tribune article describes the years of organizing she did before #MeToo exploded, and Burke’s own recollections movingly recount what motivated her to do this work.) This past year has taken her from those intimate conversations to our television screens and the pages of glossy magazines, and in the past month it seems she’s everywhere.

In addition to that Times interview, she guest-edited a recent #MeToo story package for Essence. But it was a video for The Cut that grabbed me like no other coverage of the movement has. In it, we hear from Celeste Faison, a black-liberation organizer who at 13 met and worked with Burke in one of those early workshops. “The way that you showed up for me makes me want to be forever in service to you and to your work, because it’s transformational,” Faison tells Burke. “I’m a testament to that. There’s a lot of Celestes.”

We also meet Burke’s daughter, Kaia Naadira, a 21-year-old college student who talks in the video about how Burke created a safe space for Naadira to open up about a sexual assault that had happened years before. “Part of it was going to the workshops with her and watching her talk to other people my age and seeing the way she was interacting with them and understanding that she could hold whatever I had to give her,” Naadira explains. I’m a relatively new mother, and the conversation between Naadira and Burke was a revelation. I needed to learn more from Burke about how adults can teach the children in their lives to feel safe in their bodies. Just days after the midterm elections, I had the chance to do so when I interviewed her at Facing Race, a biannual conference hosted by the organization Race Forward. This year, 3,500 social-justice advocates and organizers gathered in Detroit to make sense of the ever-shifting conditions in which we find ourselves. After Burke’s keynote, I asked her what message she has for parents and how she has helped her own child on a path toward healing. The interview that follows is edited for clarity and length.

Dani McClain: How did you decide to bring your daughter’s experiences as a survivor into the #MeToo conversation? Was that the first time you’d talked publicly about that experience?

Tarana Burke:It was the second time. The first time was accidental. The first time was the first week #MeToo went viral and they were with me—my daughter’s pronouns are “they”—just going around to do interviews, and I did a video for Mic. [The producers] asked them to come at the end, like, “Come in and talk with your mom,” and it just came up organically. Neither of us was planning it and I don’t think my daughter was ready for the response that they got. But it was good. Some of the response was from young people reaching out to them and saying, “Thank you for talking about it. It helped me talk to my mom.” Then they felt like they wanted to share more. So the second [opportunity] came around.

We talk about it all the time, as mother and daughter. The story of how we got to the point where my child could talk about it is important, because it was a lesson for me. That moment changed how I talk to parents.

DMcC: How so?

TB: My daughter was sexually assaulted at 5. I knew in my body when it happened. I could sense it. I felt it, and I saw a shift in their behavior. And I was doing this work, so it was familiar. From 5 until 11, I kept asking the wrong questions: “Has anybody every touched you? Has anybody ever put their hands on you?” Just over and over again. But meanwhile I was doing this work with my kids [in workshops] that was really compassionate, that was about helping them come to terms with whatever happened to them without talking about [the details]. The way that I was working with the young girls in my program was through writing exercises and these really intimate chats. But I wasn’t utilizing that at home, and it made me realize a bunch of things.

One, I was putting that thing on my child that so many of us do to black girls, that says that they’re stronger than they are, that they don’t need that same kind of compassion. It needed a different kind of approach. The most important thing that came out of that for me was I shifted the way I asked the question.

Black mothers, women of color, I think even women from low-wealth communities—we’re so protective of our children, and we ask the questions out of sheer love and protection and just ignorance of what’s the best practice. You can stop almost any woman and talk to her about how her parents or elders in the community or family talked to her about her own safety. You get the ground rules: Don’t sit on anybody’s lap. Don’t walk away with strangers. Don’t let anybody touch your private parts. We get those drilled into our heads from a very young age. I think we fail to add the caveat that if any of those rules are broken, that it’s not your fault. It’s never the child’s fault.

At the same time we’re drilling [those rules] into their heads, in many cases, they’re in violent situations with us. We’re spanking them. We’re beating them, which teaches them to lower their inhibitions around violence. We’re also not doubling down to say, “If any of those rules [around safety] are broken, it’s not your fault.” Our children so desperately don’t want to get in trouble, that they end up feeling complicit in their own abuse. It’s what happened to me, and it’s what happened to my daughter.

I kept asking them directly, “Has anybody ever touched you? Did anybody bother you?” My daughter consistently said “No,” because she thought if she said “Yes,” then it would also reveal that she broke a rule. She went off with a stranger. She let a stranger touch her private parts. She didn’t see it as abuse or assault or a violation. She saw it as her breaking a rule, on top of knowing that the feeling of it wasn’t good.

This is the thing I talk to parents about: These are small children who are holding all these things that adults can’t even handle. They’re holding the shame of what actually happened to them, and then the fear of getting in trouble, being ostracized, all these things that children should not have to deal with. I talk to parents about what empathy looks like for your child.

[When Naadira was 11] I was doing my baby’s hair, and it came up for me again. It would just come up in my spirit sometimes to ask, and whenever it came up, I would ask. This time I said, “You know, there is nothing that you could do to separate you from my love. Nothing.” I said, “I need you to know that. There’s nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you. So if there’s anything you ever have to tell me, you can tell me. I would never stop loving you. If you think you’re going to get in trouble, don’t worry about it.” I just kept priming them like that. Then I said, “If it’s hard”—and this is exactly what I do with my kids [in workshops]—“If it’s hard, you can write it down.” I left them with a paper and pen. When I came back, they wrote that story down. My heart was broken, because I felt like I’d wasted six years, racing around trying to get it out, knowing that something had happened but not being able to connect to it and driving myself crazy. I was thinking about myself and not the best way to talk to my daughter. It changed everything for me. I redid my whole parent workshop. Before that, I was always talking to parents about protective measures. I shifted from that framework to a framework that talked about protecting our children and teaching them vigilance but not fear.

DMcC: Instilling “vigilance but not fear…” It’s such a delicate balance. I have a 2-year-old, and I don’t know how to do that.

TB: Because it’s difficult. My daughter went through a period of being frightened of black men. We would walk down the street past the basketball court, and there’d be brothers playing ball and they would tense up and get behind me. I was like, “I can’t have you walk through the world scared of black men. But I need you to be vigilant because these men who look like this could also be your attacker.” [Editor’s Note: Most sexual violence is intraracial, according to data from the US Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women. The exception is crimes committed against Native women. Eighty percent of those assaults and rapes involve white perpetrators.]

So it was a lot of conversation. I would find examples in our lived experience of ways that you can be careful and not walk around with fear. Sometimes we would go to the basketball court and I’d say, “We can watch the game, but if somebody comes over and starts talking to you, just be mindful of your safety. You can still have the conversation.” It took a lot of trial and error, but it’s possible.

DMcC: We can’t be with our children all the time. How did you made sure that others in your daughters’ life reinforced the values you wanted them to have?

TB: When I was raising my daughter, I would hear a lot of time, “You’re so strict.” And I wasn’t strict with them, I was strict about the things they could be exposed to. We stopped doing Disney when my daughter was 8. When I started sitting and watching the shows I was like, “This is awful.” My child said to me at like 8 or 9 that they wanted Hannah Montana’s nose. And I was like, “That’s it!” These are hard decisions and they’re not popular with other people, so in terms of advice I would say that you have to be prepared to not be popular. But I’m so happy with who I’ve raised, the human being that I have responsibility for is big-hearted and free, and I learn from them. My daughter’s turning 21 and is a junior in college and is queer and open and non-binary and just all kinds of things that I learn from on a regular basis. I didn’t give those things to them. That’s who they are. But I gave them the opportunity to grow into them freely.

DMcC: How do we talk to our children about sexual violence, but also help them understand they can find pleasure and joy in their bodies?

TB: This was a hard one, and I struggled with it all through my daughter’s preteen years. Honestly, what made it easier in my situation was because they told me about the sexual violence at 11. They came out at 13. When they came out, it gave me an opportunity to talk about sex and sexuality. And in terms of their therapy around healing around the sexual violence, I could incorporate that into the conversation. That’s a thing you don’t want to happen, obviously, but it did give me an entry point to talk about [the assault] specifically and juxtapose it to, “You can’t build a life around this trauma. Your life can be this way.”

I think nonsexual pleasure is one of the entry points to talk about it, too: Nonsexual pleasure in your body. We talk about joy a lot in our family, because it’s central to my work. I think one of the methods for parents is that you don’t have to deal with the sexual part of it necessarily, if you deal with teaching your child to curate joy in their life very early.

We celebrate everything. I didn’t do the tooth fairy or Santa, but we had substitutes. When my daughter lost a tooth, we had a big-girl surprise. We would have mommy-daughter days, and we would just do a lot of joyful things. And every little thing that happened that made them feel good, we would talk about it. And so that was my practice of making sure my daughter could identify joy in their life in ways that I couldn’t when I was young. They were a dancer, so if they figured out how to stand en pointe, or whatever that thing was, we would celebrate that. “How did that make you feel?!” It just would be a lot of, not necessarily the action that had happened, but the feeling it gave them, so they could really get in touch with that feeling. I think as they get older, it’ll help them connect with these other feelings. You can have pleasure in your body. You can live a life that’s joyful, even if it has trauma in it or in spite of how people tell you you have to live.

On June 1, the right-wing blogger and avowed white supremacist Jason Kessler and other alt-right activists met for dinner on the patio of Miller’s Downtown, a popular burger joint in Charlottesville, Virginia. The dinner was two weeks after white nationalists had gathered in the city’s Lee Park, wielding torches as a kind of dress rehearsal for the mid-August “Unite the Right” rally that left counterprotester Heather Heyer dead and dozens more injured. According to local reports, members of the white-led group Showing Up for Racial Justice surrounded Kessler’s party that night at Miller’s, recording the gathering on their phones and shouting, “Nazi, go home!” At a nearby table sat University of Virginia professor Jalane Schmidt, who at the time was trying to establish a Black Lives Matter chapter in Charlottesville. As black passersby stopped and showed interest in the confrontation, participants in the SURJ action directed them to Schmidt’s table. She considers that night to be her group’s first real meeting. Schmidt knew that many BLM chapters were founded in response to police shootings. “It begins in a crisis,” she told me. “In our case, it was the crisis of the alt-right organizing in our town.”1

Despite reports to the contrary, the national constellation of racial-justice organizations loosely referred to as the Black Lives Matter movement is alive and well. It would be easy to think otherwise: BLM appears less frequently in the news than it did between 2013 and last year, when the movement responded forcefully in the streets and online to a string of black deaths at the hands of police. Now, when BLM is mentioned at all, it’s often because a member of the Trump administration is issuing a dog whistle to the president’s supporters, as was the case last month when Trump’s personal attorney forwarded an e-mail to conservative journalists characterizing BLM as “totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.” But even in more sympathetic portrayals, BLM is said to have lost or squandered the power it began building in July 2013 following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. According to a recent BuzzFeed article, BLM is beset by debilitating internal rifts over direction and funding, preventing the movement from doing much at all to accomplish its aims.2

But conversations with just over a dozen people in the movement suggest otherwise. BLM organizers are still in the streets in places like Charlottesville and Boston, where white supremacists mobilized this summer. From St. Louis, Missouri, to Lansing, Michigan, they’re engaging with electoral politics in new ways. And they’re taking the time to reflect on and develop new strategies for moving forward given the changed political terrain.3

rump’s election, like his campaign, brought a new fervor to efforts to crush black organizing and roll back the gains made during the Obama administration. Since last year, so-called “Blue Lives Matter” bills, which increase the penalties for offenses against police officers and in some cases designate them as hate crimes, have proliferated in state legislatures. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in late August that President Trump would sign an executive order again allowing local police departments to procure military gear like bayonets and grenade launchers. As president, Barack Obama had banned the transfer of such equipment after protesters and police clashed in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting. State legislatures are also considering laws that make nonviolent public protest costly and, in some cases, deadly: Lawmakers have tried to pass legislation that limits civil liability for motorists who hit protesters with their vehicles, as well as other legislation that puts protesters on the hook financially for any police presence their demonstrations require. “We haven’t seen comparable policies and practices since the McCarthy era,” said Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, when I asked her whether the Trump era demands a new approach to black organizing. “So, yes, our tactics do have to change.”4

The tactics may be evolving, but the organizers I spoke with reminded me that in a “leader-full” movement such as this one—that is, one that prizes collaborative and decentralized leadership—no one individual or group is in a position to decide for everyone else what tactics to prioritize over others. Still, it was clear from my conversations that activists in leadership positions within BLM-affiliated groups were expressing much more interest in electoral politics than I’d heard in the past. “In the early stages of the movement, people were talking mostly about the criminal-justice system and a system of criminalization,” said Jessica Byrd, who runs Three Point Strategies, a consulting firm that she refers to as “the electoral political firm of the movement.” These days, black organizers are turning their attention to the electoral system as yet another social structure that places black people at a disadvantage. This means a new level of engagement in electoral politics as well as the interrogation of a system that diminishes black voters’ power through the antiquated Electoral College, voter-suppression measures, and laws that disenfranchise people with felony convictions. “As much as we need to change the people, we need to change the process,” said Angela Waters Austin of Black Lives Matter Lansing, whose chapter is coordinating a statewide get-out-the-vote and political-education campaign called Election 20XX. “What are the policies that continue to make a Donald Trump possible? If he did not get a majority of the popular vote, then why is he the president?”5

As the 2016 presidential campaign unfolded, BLM activists gained a reputation for using disruption as a way to push the movement’s key issues. At the Netroots Nation conference that took place during the primaries, black activists famously interrupted the candidates’ forum with chants and heckles. At one point, Tia Oso of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (the organization headed by Opal Tometi, one of BLM’s three founders), took the stage. Soon after, Democratic candidate and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley stumbled with a tone-deaf proclamation that “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” Once Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders had the floor, “he talked over the protesters, got defensive about his racial-justice bona fides, and stuck to his [stump speech],” Joe Dinkin wrote on The Nation.com. After trying and failing to disrupt a New Hampshire campaign appearance by Hillary Clinton, a BLM Boston member asked her a halting, long-winded question that did the favor of making her response—“I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws”—come off as refreshingly sensible.6

At the time, some progressives criticized these moves, blaming BLM for undermining Democratic candidates when the obvious threat, in their eyes, came from the Republicans. But to many black organizers, these disruptions were a principled way to hold candidates who claimed to represent their interests accountable. When I asked her whether she wished that Black Lives Matter had endorsed Hillary Clinton in the general election, Garza pivoted away from Clinton entirely and talked about how the Democratic candidates had bungled their BLM moment at Netroots. “When he was pressed, I wish that Bernie had said, ‘Of course black lives matter, and here’s what that means for me,’” she offered. Had Sanders discussed how “we function under a gendered and racialized economy” and done more to build relationships in communities of color, his run for president would have received more support, she added. The problem, in other words, is with candidates who alienate black voters, not with BLM’s refusal to play nice.7

As the midterm elections draw near, organizers are laying the groundwork for two new initiatives—the Electoral Justice Project and the Black Futures Lab—that they say will address this alienation and transform the ways that black communities participate in the 2018 elections and beyond. And for Byrd and Garza, each of whom is behind one of these efforts, it is not the ascendance of Donald Trump that demands a new kind of black political power. (After all, despite the pressure that BLM activists put on Democratic candidates during the campaign season, 94 percent of black women voters backed Hil-
lary Clinton, as did 82 percent of black men. Black turnout “did come down,” Kayla Reed, a movement organizer in St. Louis, acknowledged. “But Democrats are not investing in areas where they have a base.”) Instead, organizers told me, to understand the movement’s new energy around elections, you have to understand Tishaura Jones’s failed campaign for mayor of St. Louis.8

In March, Jones—then treasurer of this largely Democratic city—narrowly lost the party’s mayoral primary, 30 to 32 percent. Just six weeks earlier, she’d been polling at 8 percent in a field of seven Democrats. The winner was the only white candidate in the pack with a sizable following. That Jones came from behind to lose by just 888 votes suggested that she’d been underestimated by the mainstream media and more established politicians. But the young black St. Louis residents who’d been energized by the protests in nearby Ferguson weren’t surprised by her near-win: They had been working hard for Jones behind the scenes, sensing support for her in black communities citywide and finding ways to build on it.9

Members of the St. Louis Action Council, which was formed in the wake of the Ferguson protests, had started teaching themselves the ins and outs of voter organizing a year earlier, when they’d gotten involved in the race for St. Louis circuit attorney, the city’s top prosecutor job. They asked the candidates their positions on issues like cash bail, juvenile detention, and marijuana decriminalization, and decided to endorse State Representative Kim Gardner. Today, they claim some credit for getting Gardner into office, thereby helping to elect the city’s first black circuit attorney. “From Kim’s campaign to Tishaura’s campaign, we grew,” said Reed, who directs the St. Louis Action Council. “People trusted us more.”10

In advance of the Democratic mayoral primary, Reed’s group partnered with other local community organizations to hold a January debate, during which they quizzed the candidates on issues like economic development and displacement, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the relationship between the police and black communities. According to Reed, some of the questions were an effort to determine how the candidates’ goals aligned with “A Vision for Black Lives,” the detailed policy statement that the Movement for Black Lives released in August of last year. (Reed also leads the Movement for Black Lives’ electoral organizing committee. The Black Lives Matter Global Network is one of more than 50 allied organizations that comprise M4BL.) For the young black organizers, Jones stood out: Her platform included a plan to place social workers inside police departments, and she rejected calls to hire additional officers. To Reed and others, Jones was embracing a “divest framework” that echoed “A Vision for Black Lives,” which calls for pulling resources out of “exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations” and investing those same resources in “the education, health and safety of black people.”11

The debate that Reed’s group co-hosted drew a crowd of 1,500, and 33 percent of those who participated in an exit poll indicated that they supported Jones, Reed said. So the St. Louis Action Council paid little heed to the 8 percent that Jones had polled just days earlier. “What we knew was that polls often do not speak to what’s actually happening in communities that are not [made up of] regular voters,” Reed told me. By this point, she added, she could feel the energy around Jones’s campaign in the communities where she works. But she knew that the campaign was doomed unless one of the other leading black candidates agreed to drop out of the race.12

Once the St. Louis Action Council endorsed Jones, it threw its weight behind her for the next month, canvassing, getting out the vote, and partnering with the national civil-rights organization Color of Change to tell 20,000 St. Louis residents via text messaging that Jones was its endorsed candidate. In the end, it wasn’t enough. None of the other black candidates—all of whom were men, organizers point out—yielded to Jones, so the black vote was split and a white alderwoman named Lyda Krewson became the next mayor in a city in which black people comprise a slim plurality (49 percent), and in a region rocked by police shootings that have pushed questions of systemic racism to the fore.13

ones’s loss was a wake-up call to the movement’s leading organizers, and it made many of them prioritize bringing the power they’d built over the past four years into the electoral realm. “We should play out each one of those races not as a local race, but as a national race,” Garza told me. “Nationally, we didn’t mobilize for Tishaura. Tishaura should’ve been our Bernie. Stacey Abrams [a progressive black woman vying to become Georgia’s next governor] should be our Bernie.” That means offering hands-on, on-the-ground support, she said. “All of us should have been sending caravans of people to St. Louis to knock on doors if they wanted that.” Jones and Abrams aren’t the only candidates that Garza thinks the movement can support. Chokwe Lumumba, the black progressive who was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, in June, is another; so are Pamela Price, running for district attorney in Oakland’s Alameda County, and Andrew Gillum, running for governor in Florida.14

Identifying exciting candidates like these and deploying national resources to campaigns where they’re needed is just one part of an electoral game plan, Byrd told me. In November, she and Reed will launch the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project, an effort to educate and mobilize black voters that will kick off with town-hall gatherings in cities throughout the South and in what Reed calls “migration cities”: Midwestern cities with sizable populations of black Americans who moved north during the Great Migration. Voter education will be essential to these efforts. “We don’t understand what the [Justice Department] is doing, or what this executive order signed by Trump actually means,” Reed said. “We want to find a space to spark a continued conversation with a hope of getting more people to these midterm elections.”15

Garza is launching her own electoral organizing project, called Black Futures Lab, this year as well. The
$3 million initiative involves creating an institute where participants will learn how to craft and advocate for policy change, as well as recruiting and training candidates and campaign staff. “If we’re not making decisions about policy and about representation, if we are not creating our own independent, progressive political force to counter what is a potent backlash to our very existence, we’ll be gone,” Garza said, citing the imprisonment and exile that black-liberation organizers have faced throughout history. “Our ability to operate aboveground will be severely compromised.”16

For BLM activists, the key to success is keeping these electoral efforts independent. “We’re not going to build a black-voter mobilization project because one candidate deserves it or the Democratic Party needs it,” Byrd said of the Electoral Justice Project. “Black people deserve it.”17

None of this means that organizers will be stepping away from the tactics they used earlier in the movement. Last summer, after five Dallas police officers were shot dead after a protest and conservative commentators laid the blame at the feet of Black Lives Matter, BLM groups didn’t go quiet in an attempt to tamp down accusations that their actions led to the ambush. Instead, activists from Black Youth Project 100, Million Hoodies NYC, the #LetUsBreathe Collective, and elsewhere doubled down on direct action in the following weeks. They showed up at the police-union headquarters in lower Manhattan, at the Oakland Police Department, and in Chicago’s Homan Square, the location of a warehouse where police detained and interrogated thousands of people who had no proper legal representation. “For us, it was about telling a certain narrative,” said Charlene Carruthers of Black Youth Project 100. “Our movement has a clear vision that doesn’t center itself around individual police officers. Our groups were being blamed, without critical questioning of what we’d been doing for the past several years.” (The Chicago group’s activities should allay any doubts that black organizers can walk and chew gum at the same time: Earlier in 2016, BYP100 participated in the successful citywide campaign to oust State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.)18

There have been fewer street protests calling for police accountability in 2017—partly because, in the wake of Trump’s ascent to power, there have been protests about so much else. The anti-Trump resistance has no doubt borrowed from the massive antiwar marches of the early 2000s and the Tea Party protests in the first years of the Obama presidency, but BLM also provided a crucial blueprint, according to several of the organizers I interviewed. BLM normalized confrontation and direct action, and recognized the underlying issues at stake. “Black Lives Matter begins this moment talking about state violence, about militarization, fascism, authoritarianism,” said Dream Hampton, an informal adviser to some movement organizers. “We had all this analysis and framing that was absolutely correct.” And the fact that those “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts, yard signs, and chants continue to be seen and heard everywhere is further proof of the movement’s enduring impact. “‘Black Lives Matter is only rivaled by ‘Make America Great Again,’” Hampton observed. “Don’t act like the phrase itself isn’t worth its weight in gold.”19

n Charlottesville, the phrase itself didn’t move Jalane Schmidt much at first. “A hashtag does not a movement make,” she remembers thinking. But once the “Vision for Black Lives” policy platform came out, she was impressed. Schmidt had felt frustrated as she followed the debates among local organizations regarding the city’s Confederate monuments over the past year and a half, with conservative preachers and a quiet, careful chapter of the NAACP serving as the official voice of black Charlottesville. The city was becoming a focal point of white-supremacist organizing, but the church leadership and legacy civil-rights organizations had suggested ignoring their meetings and torch rallies. So Schmidt decided that it was time to start a BLM chapter. “We saw a need to have another vehicle for black mobilization in town, given the situation that we had,” she said. At 48, Schmidt is older than the typical BLM activist; but as a queer black woman, she appreciated the role that other queer black women had played as the movement’s founders. Black Lives Matter was also the organization that was most consistent and outspoken in its claims to be unapologetically black. Schmidt thought she’d found a good fit.20

At that first unexpected chapter meeting in Miller’s Downtown, held “right under the noses of the white supremacists,” Schmidt collected the names and contact information of local people interested in getting involved. As she and other core members learned about more alt-right and neo-Nazi rallies planned in their community, they reached out to national BLM organizers for guidance and support. David Vaughn Straughn, another core member of the Charlottesville group, remembered his frustration as he tried e-mail address after e-mail address listed on the BLM website—for organizers in New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver, and Washington DC, and on and on—and received no response. Eventually he made contact, and the fledgling chapter got on a call with Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a BLM Global Network co-founder, and Nikita Mitchell, BLM’s organizing director. But the conversations around strategy never clicked. “Organizing in a small Southern town is different from organizing in a big city,” Schmidt said. “In a big city, you can use these big, disruptive tactics and then fade back into the woodwork of 3 million people. Here, the people we might piss off—we’re going to have to work with them next week.”21

There was also the question of whether their group would be allowed to carry a BLM banner during the “Unite the Right” counterprotests. Though the BLM Global Network doesn’t require local groups to clear their decisions about actions or tactics with the national group, it does require new groups wishing to organize under the Black Lives Matter mantle to go through a series of conversations and trainings before officially using the phrase in their name. According to Schmidt, she asked Khan-Cullors: “There are going to be all these white people there wearing ‘Black Lives Matter’ T-shirts, but we’re not allowed to [call ourselves a BLM chapter or march under a BLM banner]?” The national group at first said no, then reversed itself a few days before the events that would garner national attention for the eruption of violence and the displays of white-supremacist hatred. The Charlottesville group is still not an official chapter, but the BLM Global Network amplified its call to action on the national organization’s social-media channels just before the weekend of August 12. “Had that amplification been given sooner, I think we would have had more individuals coming down and helping us defend our city,” Straughn said. “I just wish I had more of a personal connection with somebody who could’ve got the ball rolling a little bit quicker.”22

Khan-Cullors is open about her regrets. “It’s really unfortunate that we took too long” to respond to the black activists in Charlottesville, she told me. “It’s always hard to tell what needs a rapid response.” In my conversation with her, what at first might sound like bureaucratic pettiness came across instead as an expression of the difficulties that any national organization faces as it goes through the pains of rapid growth. The BLM Global Network has reason to tread carefully when it comes to authorizing new groups: It is now the target of two lawsuits brought by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who claim that BLM has created an unsafe environment for law enforcement. Groups calling themselves BLM chapters, but lacking the training that Khan-Cullors and Mitchell offer, have engaged in actions—such as inflammatory chants picked up and broadcast by the media—that provide fuel for such legal claims. “You need to know what you’re getting yourself into once you start calling yourself a BLM chapter,” Khan-Cullors said of the responsibility she bears. “You’re going to get a lot of publicity. The right’s going to come after you. You’re going to need security.”23

A highly visible four-year-old movement and the national organization that emerged from it are bound to stumble when it comes to providing resources, training, and support to places across the country faced with crisis. Nowadays, that feels like everywhere, and black organizers are meeting the challenge with a spirit of experimentation. Rather than creating chaos, they’re looking for a way out of it. “We are reflective of the needs of hundreds of thousands of people in this country who have been feeling that the government cannot and will not do its job,” said Shanelle Matthews, the communications director for the BLM Global Network. Electoral organizing, street protests, disrupting Democratic events, and crafting new and visionary policies are all ways to begin to meet the challenge, Matthews added. “However nimble we need to be to approach that, that’s what we’re going to do.”24

In 1994, a dozen black women at a pro-choice conference in Chicago came up with the concept of reproductive justice. The activist Loretta J. Ross was among them. Near the beginning of Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, her new book, co-authored with the historian Rickie Solinger and published by University of California Press, Ross puts the reader in the room with the founding mothers of the reproductive-justice movement and explains how they moved from a critique of the Clinton administration’s health-care proposal (silent on the topic of reproductive health, they argued) to the articulation of a new intellectual framework. “We placed ourselves in the center of our analysis and made the case that while abortion was a crucial resource for us, we also needed health care, education, jobs, day care, and the right to motherhood,” Ross writes.

She and Solinger spend the rest of the book unpacking this claim and explaining how race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender expression, immigration status, and other aspects of identity shape a person’s ability to be healthy and have the family she desires. It makes for an inspiring read that calls for upending assumptions at the heart of more traditional mainstream reproductive-rights organizing. But visionary demands—particularly the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments—can feel like a pipe dream in today’s reactionary political climate. The Trump administration is openly hostile toward abortion rights and contraception access, and the response to police killings of black children such as 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland and 15-year-old Jordan Edwards in Dallas prove that too many Americans treat black parents’ worst nightmare as a private ordeal rather than a structural problem in need of a solution.

I asked Ross whether the reproductive-justice framework loses some of its power during political dark ages when activists must focus on preserving victories rather than playing offense. “At times like these, it’s always been times like these,” she said, crediting the phrase to Alabama-based abortion provider Dr. Willie Parker. This country’s laws privilege the well-resourced individual seeking protection from an overreaching government, the book argues, so women in the margins have been left unprotected even when the reproductive-rights movement has claimed a win.

Take, for instance, Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court’s decision that legalized birth control for married couples. According to Ross and Solinger:

Achieving this privacy right—having what amounted to the “negative right” to be left alone—was not likely to help women without those resources. If you didn’t have a private doctor, if you were poor, if you were African American, Mexican American, or Puerto Rican and the target of various forms of racism including population-control measures, then reproductive rights required much more clearly defined guarantees or “positive rights,” beginning with a safe and healthy place to live with your family in a community free of the impacts of chronic racism, a living-wage job, and access to comprehensive public health services, including, if you chose, contraception.

Since the US legal system has been insufficient, the reproductive-justice movement must instead turn to international human-rights standards. “I never thought that we would win through the democratic process alone those things that are our human rights,” Ross said. “We knew we had to go beyond the Constitution.”

The Senate has ratified just three out of dozens of human-rights treaties it’s reviewed in the past 60 years, the book tells us, but Ross said that shouldn’t deter anyone. Instead, Americans should lay claim to the universality of human rights, even if they don’t have the force of law here. “Teach people what their human rights are,” she said, emphasizing the importance of education as a first step. “You can’t fight for rights that you don’t know you have.”

The book opens with a history that details population-control policies. “American history needs to be told through a reproductive-justice lens,” Ross told me, and she and Solinger do exactly that. They explain the 17th-century Virginia Colony law that ensured the growth of a slave population by declaring that a child would be free or enslaved based on the status of the mother, not the father, as had been the norm. They outline the laws that kept nonwhite immigrant women from coming to the United States alongside their male counterparts recruited to work on the railroads and in the fields. And they document the pressure placed on white women to birth “all the white children necessary for populating the white nation.” The authors paint a more complex picture of the country some imagine when they talk about making America great again.

This history will be new and useful reading to some people long connected to reproductive-rights struggles, but Ross said she and Solinger wrote Reproductive Justice primarily as a teaching tool for high-school and college students. “So much of feminist theory is presented in such abstract language you can’t even begin to understand it even if you’ve got a PhD in women studies,” she said. “I took pains to make sure we could talk about complex concepts but in a way that someone with good reading skills could understand.” They also let reproductive-justice movement leaders speak for themselves. The epilogue is made up of contributions from the leaders of organizations, including New Voices for Reproductive Justice, Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR), and Native Youth Sexual Health Network. These reports from the front lines offer a look inside campaigns to defeat a state’s personhood initiative, expand access to an HIV prevention drug, and win Medicaid coverage for birthing women who want the support of a doula. These campaigns show what reproductive justice looks like in practice.

“When we created reproductive justice in 1994, it was for this political moment,” Ross said. There’s a common thread, she explained, that connects that caucus in Chicago more than two decades ago to last year’s presidential election, in which black women were the least likely of any group to support Trump. (Ninety-four percent of black women voted for Clinton.) “If America were capable of listening to black women, we wouldn’t be in this mess that we’re in now.”

The Rev. William Barber II announced last week that he will step down as president of the North Carolina NAACP and lead a new national initiative that aims to end poverty and begin what Barber calls “a national moral revival.” This new Poor People’s Campaign will pick up where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. left off 50 years ago when he turned his focus to uniting poor people across lines of race and geography and pushing their priorities onto the federal agenda.

The campaign, which launches in partnership the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, will bring together organizations with a longstanding commitment to confronting poverty and inequality—local and national groups such as Picture the Homeless in New York and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization. Barber said a task force made up of poor people and economists, theologians, and other experts will in September release a report called “The Souls of Poor Folks” that will lay out the campaign’s agenda.

Much of the action will kick off next year, when the campaign plans to stage nonviolent direct action in 25 state capitols and Washington, DC, Barber said Monday at an event at the Davie Street Presbyterian Church in Raleigh. The states chosen represent the worst of the nation’s current political climate: Their governors refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Their legislatures have passed voter-suppression laws in recent years. They lack living-wage laws and employment and housing protections for LGBTQ people.

“Extremism is at work in other states and has gained power in all three branches of our federal government, much as it did here four years ago,” Barber said Monday in North Carolina. “We know that the way to change the nation is to nationalize state movements. We have to do it with a state-up model.”

Barber came to national attention in the spring of 2013, when the Moral Mondays movement emerged under his leadership and brought a summer of effective civil disobedience to North Carolina’s statehouse. That effort came in response to a tide of reactionary legislation passed after the legislature and governorship were taken over by Republicans intent on undoing North Carolina’s longstanding reputation as a politically moderate Southern state. More than 900 Moral Mondays protesters were arrested during that spring and summer, and Republican Governor Pat McCrory’s poll numbers plummeted as the actions gained steam.

It was Moral Mondays protesters, for example, who put their bodies on the line to challenge the state’s racially discriminatory voting law, which the Supreme Court effectively overturned this week by declining to hear an appeal on a lower court’s ruling. When this breaking news was announced in the Raleigh church where Barber spoke Monday, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause. Many of the people packed into the sanctuary had been on the front lines of the fight.

Barber knows the power of direct action, and he’s had success organizing across lines of race and party. Under his leadership, North Carolina’s NAACP has fostered the growth of five majority-white branches in the western, Appalachian and primarily Republican part of the state, field organizer Laurel Ashton said Monday. Barber had promised such changes to the organization when he successfully ran for president in 2006 with a promise to move the state conference “from banquets to battle.” During his tenure, these battles have included a campaign to organize black and Latino workers at a Smithfield Foods meat processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, and a school-desegregation battle in Wake County.

At hearing news that Barber will leave the NAACP to advance the Poor People’s Campaign, the chair of the state GOP told The News & Observer, “I think it would have helped him and his causes had he been more of a negotiator than an agitator.” Responding to this characterization Monday, the Rev. Nancy Petty, a colleague and supporter of Barber argued that his approach had worked in the state and said, “Reverend Barber, we’re sending you into the world to be an agitator.”

Barber roots his agitation in moral rather than political terms. Making health care accessible and affordable, addressing criminal justice disparities, protecting and expanding voting rights, creating good jobs — these are moral issues rather than fodder for partisan debate in his eyes. “This is not about left versus right,” he said Monday in Raleigh. “There are certain things that are not left, right, but they are the center of authentic moral values—like love, like justice, like mercy, like caring for the least of these.”

Barber made the same argument last summer when he issued a call for “a moral revolution of values” at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

“I’m worried by the way faith is cynically used by some to serve hate, fear, racism and greed,” he told the crowd. Instead, it was the low-wage workers on the front lines of the Fight for $15 protests, those advocates fighting to preserve and expand quality public education, those confronting hypocrisy and discrimination who were, as he put it, “reviving the heart of our democracy.” The Poor People’s Campaign is an effort to operationalize the vision he outlined at the DNC.

“This is not a commemoration,” Barber said Monday of his continuation of King’s work, which launched in 1967. “This is a commencement of building a long-term movement to begin shifting our national moral narrative.”

This week, black women in more than a dozen jails across the country will receive a Mother’s Day gift from the Black Lives Matter movement: their freedom. These women are among the 62 percent of people in jail who are there not because they’ve been convicted of a crime but because they can’t pay to get back to their lives as they await trial. Organizers with Southerners on New Ground (SONG), the Movement for Black Lives, ColorOfChange, and other groups have reached their goal of raising more than $250,000 for what they’re calling National Mama’s Bail Out Day, and are continuing to raise more. These groups will pay for the release of women whose pretrial detention illustrates much of what’s wrong with the criminal justice system. Many of the women who will be freed are in jail for low-level offenses such as loitering or small-scale drug possession. Nationwide, nearly a third of all women in jail have serious mental health issues, and the racial disparity is clear: Black women make up 44 percent of women in jails.

The idea for the Mother’s Day bailout, which will free at least 30 women in Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and other cities nationwide, came out of a January gathering of representatives from 25 black-led organizations that wanted to collaborate on bail reform. The groups wondered how they might begin to put into action the vision outlined in the Movement for Black Lives policy platform released last summer. Mary Hooks, co-director of the Atlanta-based LGBTQ organizing project SONG, offered an idea she’d been developing with other activists who had noticed the disparate impact that money bail and jail-related fines and fees has on LGBTQ communities. Hooks’s campaign idea—what she describes as “using our collective resources to buy each others’ freedom”—was welcomed by the larger group. And because event organizers emphasize the ways race, class, and gender identity all play a role in criminalization, they have an expansive understanding of who qualifies as a mother. “When we talk about black mamas, we know that mothering happens in a variety of ways,” Hooks said. “Whether it’s the mothers in the clubs who teach the young kids how to vogue, or the church mothers who took care of me.” Women who are birth mothers and chosen mothers are eligible to be bailed out.

Mother’s Day, with its idealized notions of family and womanhood, is the right moment to force an examination of women in jails, said Arissa Hall, a national Mama’s Bail Out Day organizer and project manager at the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund. “All mothers are not celebrated,” she said, adding that this is especially true of women who struggle with poverty, addiction, and mental-health issues—in other words, the women who fill our jails. “Black moms especially have not been granted that title of motherhood,” she added, going on to describe how slavery shredded kinship bonds. Black women, too, she noted, have historically taken on caretaker roles that have put them in charge of other people’s children and away from their own.

History guided event organizers in other ways as they pieced together their strategy. They studied the incremental steps toward abolition that enslaved people made in centuries past. “From putting ourselves in cardboard boxes and mailing ourselves to freedom, to using the Underground Railroad,” black people didn’t wait for an Emancipation Proclamation or the end of the Civil War to act on their own behalf, Hooks told me. Instead, they sometimes bought their own and each other’s freedom, and in doing so left a blueprint for how to directly challenge mass criminalization today, even as policy battles are in progress. Marbre Stahly-Butts helps lead the Movement for Black Lives policy table and is partnership director at Law for Black Lives. She and others who advocate for criminal-justice reform and prison abolition are engaged in the long fight of pressuring district attorneys, judges and local and state officials to change their policies and practices. “We have to be doing that,” she told me. “But we also can be collecting our resources to make a direct impact on the material conditions of our people who are in cages right now.”

This is the work bail funds across the country engage in every day, which is why Hall’s expertise has been critical. She’s been researching the specifics of how bail operates in the cities and counties where this week’s actions will take place, building relationships with sympathetic public defenders and otherwise demystifying the process for organizers. “It’s a myth that folks don’t come back to court” when released on their own recognizance, she told me, explaining that upwards of 95 percent of people helped by bail funds return to court for their scheduled appearances. “People will come back to court regardless of whether or not bail is set.” In her experience, what it takes to get people to their court dates is phone-call reminders and bus or train fare.

Providing the social services people need can help, too, which is why in Atlanta there will be a homecoming celebration on Mother’s Day where the women bailed out of Fulton County and Atlanta city jails can gather for a barbecue and more information about subsequent campaigns to end cash bail, Hooks said. In addition to learning about the national effort they’re a part of, the women will be able to have photos with their families taken and get access to resources for housing, jobs, health services, and rides back to court.

Recently, the stories of Kalief Browder in New York City and Sandra Bland in Texas’s Waller County—people who were jailed and then met related tragic deaths—have brought public attention to how torturous the experience of jail can be. Desperation to get out of that environment can force people to do whatever it takes to go home, including taking plea deals even when they’re innocent, organizers said. Bail corrupts the concept of justice, in that people who can’t pay to get out of jail will eventually resolve their cases through a plea, said Hall. “We don’t force our court system to do what it’s actually supposed to do, which is give people a fair trial.”

Black girls in Mississippi know that the world too often sees them as angry, man-hungry, uneducated baby mamas. Their perceived value can depend on how light their skin is, how thin their bodies are, and how loosely their hair curls. They sometimes withstand sexual assault and depression, and a culture of secrecy makes it difficult to talk about trauma.

Young women of color in New Mexico are often so busy taking care of family members in the context of intergenerational addiction that they lack the time or support to make their own plans or pursue their own dreams. They live in the shadow of a potential border wall and long for “a world where there is healthy masculinity.”

These are some findings from a year-long, nationwide listening tour undertaken by the New York–based NoVo Foundation, which this month announced it will invest $90 million in efforts to serve girls of color over the next seven years—the largest commitment to that demographic by a private foundation to date. Hosting listening sessions, which were attended and summarized by cultural anthropologist Aimee Cox, was a critical step in the foundation’s process of determining how and where to distribute its funds.

For Autumn Billie, a 23-year-old indigenous feminist and activist who talked with the foundation last year about her sex-education work with Native American students in rural northern New Mexico, the experience was unique. “Wow, someone is coming in and actually valuing the authentic mission and the authentic programming and organizing that we actually want to do, instead of [asking us to] fit in a kind of cookie cutter,” she said, reflecting on the conversation. 

Giving girls of color and their advocates this sense of being in the driver’s seat was precisely what NoVo intended with its approach to developing its grant-making strategy. “We listen deeply because we know foundations are not the experts,” Jody Myrum, who directs the foundation’s Initiative to Advance Adolescent Girls’ Rights, told me. “Really, girls and movement leaders are the experts.” Based on feedback from those experts, NoVo is taking a three-pronged approach:

• It will invest in local organizations around the country that work directly with teenage girls of color on issues such as “ending sexual violence, confronting anti-black racism, building solidarity across communities, intergenerational healing, or directly supporting girls’ ideas,” according to the foundation’s application for community-based groups.
• It will begin by placing special priority on the South—where the foundation says 40 percent of the nation’s girls of color live—and seek out a regional partner who can help strengthen efforts there. “There’s not a lack of leadership or progressive infrastructure [in the South], but a lack of philanthropic investment,” Myrum said.
• Finally, NoVo will continue its support of national groups that work to improve the lives of girls of color.

In recent years, organizers and scholars have pushed to make sure that the needs of girls and women of color—and the clear ways these needs are distinct from boys and men of color as well as from white girls and women—receive appropriate attention and resources. Their efforts have gained newfound support and recognition, including from officials during the Obama administration. The statistics that drive the focus on this demographic are stark: According to federal data, black female students are suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or ethnicity and at higher rates than white boys. Black girls represent nearly a third of the girls who are detained in and committed to juvenile justice facilities. Native American girls are only 1 percent of the population, but 3.5 percent of the girls in those facilities. A 2015 report titled “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline” found that girls in the juvenile justice system are disproportionately victims of sexual violence, and end up criminalized because their trauma isn’t often identified or treated. 

The organizing, consciousness raising, and healing work that NoVo wants to fund already exists, though it may not currently have the benefit of big-foundation money. Tynesha McHarris, a fellow with the NoVo initiative, said the past year’s listening tour allowed her to hear from girls of color and the women who are their allies. She said they’re hard at work helping each other stay safe and combat violence at school, in their homes, and in their wider communities, but “they are doing things oftentimes on their own time and their own dime. The movement is vibrant but incredibly under-resourced.”

It’s not just that women of color don’t apply for funding to keep their work afloat. It’s that their work is seen as a risky investment, which creates a vicious cycle, Myrum explained. “You’re not funded, so then you’re not fundable. People don’t want to take risks on women of color often.” NoVo’s strategy seeks to disrupt that cycle and partner with efforts that have been starved of philanthropic dollars in the past.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in July, and I’m lying on my bed trying to calm down. The month’s rapid-fire events are hitting me square in the gut. Today, someone agitated by police shootings of black men ambushed police in Baton Rouge. Already, commentators are pointing a finger at black organizers. Just over a week ago, a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas ended with a sniper targeting police there; in return, the police circulated an image of an innocent protester as a suspect before using a robot to kill the perpetrator. Two days before the Dallas shooting, Baton Rouge police killed Alton Sterling while he was pinned to the ground, and the next day Philando Castile was shot dead by police during a traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, while his girlfriend and her daughter sit inches away.

For the past three years, my job has been to report on black-led organizing and the police violence that fuels it, and, until recently, I’ve been able to read and process related news with the detachment that my journalism training has instilled in me. But now, what I see online and on TV simply makes me afraid. I am seven months pregnant, and these days, tragic events hit me in a way that I can’t neatly tuck away. I’m learning that in moments like these, it’s critical that I step away from the screen and stop crying, that I figure out how to return my breathing to normal. My health and my fetus’s health depend on it.

Black women, after all, are almost four times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than our white counterparts, and black babies are twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday. I worry that I’ll have a baby that’s too small to thrive, or that I’ll be treated so negligently by the hospital staff during delivery that I will end up seriously injured, or dead.

You might think that I don’t need to worry: I eat a healthy diet; I don’t have high blood pressure or diabetes. I am not poor; I have private insurance and a master’s degree. I started prenatal appointments at 10 weeks and haven’t missed one. But I’m under no illusion that my class privilege will save me. Research suggests that it’s the stress caused by racial discrimination experienced over a lifetime that leads to black American women’s troubling birth outcomes, not the individual choices those women make or how much money or education they have.

sat slack-jawed as I read the work of public-health researcher Arline Geronimus, who has found that the average black woman might be less healthy at 25 than she was at 15, and that African-American women at 35 have the rates of disability of white Americans who are 55. There’s something about the American experience that tears away at the black body. I was 38 years old, and so daily slights and structural racism had had plenty of time to take their toll.

Thus my decision, made during the long summer of my third trimester, to take a break from the news, which serves as a constant reminder of two disturbing realities: One, that in carrying a black child, I was carrying a potential Sterling or Castile or Rekia Boyd or Tamir Rice. And two, that my health and that of my child-to-be were largely in the hands of people who, like me, have been watching events unfold in Baton Rouge or Dallas or Ferguson or Chicago—but may have a completely different understanding than me of how race works in this country.

When I walked into my ob-gyn’s office in Dayton, Ohio, or into the offices of the various specialists I saw over the course of my pregnancy, I suspected that the all-white teams of receptionists, nurses, and doctors (OK, there’s a black receptionist at the office where I got my ultrasounds) first see a black woman, not an Ivy League graduate or someone whose job includes researching reproductive health—or any of the other characteristics that some may think would shield me from substandard care. An Institute of Medicine report found that people of color “are less likely to receive needed services” even when their insurance and income are the same as white people’s. So I tried to leverage every bit of privilege I could to stave off any assumptions that my health-care providers might have made. I wasn’t married and rarely wore my engagement ring, but I made sure to put it on before every prenatal appointment. When I showed up to an appointment with cornrows or an Afro, I wondered if I’d be treated differently from the times I’d come with my hair flat-ironed.

These concerns may seem far-fetched, but during my pregnancy they were very real to me. A 2016 study by the University of Virginia found that about half of the white medical students and residents surveyed held at least one false belief about biological differences between black and white people: that black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s, for instance. Those implicit biases affected the students’ abilities to make appropriate decisions about treating black patients. Dr. Norman Oliver, the study’s co-author, told me that while the so-called social determinants of health—access to safe housing, jobs, education, health insurance—are largely responsible for health inequities, bias in clinical treatment also plays a role. A 1999 study of cardiovascular health found that black women are at a particular disadvantage.

Speaking to Oliver made me think of the minutes before my daughter’s birth late this summer, when the nurse in charge of administering the anesthetic introduced himself to me just prior to my C-section. He was a white man, friendly, willing to answer all of my questions. When he finished explaining the process we were about to begin, I looked him in the eyes and made him promise me that I wouldn’t feel anything, as if personal obligation rather than his training would get me the appropriate care. I didn’t need to read Oliver’s research to fear that I might feel my obstetrician slice into my abdomen due to racist ideas about pain and blackness.

This same distrust caused me to be skeptical that I actually needed the C-section I was told was necessary at 14 weeks. That’s when a white doctor reviewed my ultrasound and told me that not only did I have fibroids, but also that the largest one—the size of a grapefruit—was blocking the birth canal, making vaginal birth impossible. That doctor had also been warm and responsive, but the encounter—especially her warning that the fibroids put me at increased risk for hemorrhage and hysterectomy during surgery—set me on edge. I hadn’t known prior to the ultrasound that I had fibroids, but I had many friends and family members who did; black women are up to four times more likely than white women to have them. I knew that the C-section rate in the United States—32 percent—is more than double what’s recommended by the World Health Organization. The C-section rate here is slightly higher for black women than for white women, even for black women who are low-risk. Was I being steered by a provider with unconscious racial bias toward becoming another statistic? I held on to the possibility that she and my white obstetrician, who confirmed her findings, were wrong, that they couldn’t imagine the same options for me that they might for a white patient. It wasn’t until I’d gotten a second opinion from a black female ob-gyn that I accepted that a C-section was the right choice. I felt more confident that she’d been able to see me as a human being, just like her.

Linda Jones has been a birth and postpartum doula in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly 30 years. Jones, who is black, says her clients of color are treated differently by medical staff. White couples are assumed to be married; other couples are not. A standard question about drug and alcohol use is often glossed over for white couples. Part of Jones’s job is to prepare her clients for what to expect while at doctor’s appointments or during a hospital birth, arming them with questions for providers. “They need someone to help empower them to have the birth that they want,” Jones said. “If we can get women of color doulas and women of color midwives, the trauma will lessen,” she told me. “Maybe we’ll stop dying and maybe we’ll stop having all these C-sections that seem to be our lot.”

I have no problem asking doctors questions, even to the point of making a nuisance of myself. Still, I considered hiring a doula for the birth. I would have preferred a black woman, but I couldn’t find one in southwestern Ohio. Black women in particular have an unmet need for birth assistance, according to a 2016 Choices in Childbirth report. Thirty-nine percent of the black women surveyed wanted but did not have access to the services of a doula, compared with 30 percent of Latinas and 22 percent of white women. I interviewed a white woman for the job and liked her well enough, but her services cost $900, and my partner and I didn’t want to pay that much; we were already paying $200 for a birth-education course through a local hospital.

In addition to offering general information on labor and birth, the course, called Hypnobirthing, emphasizes a relaxation method that involves positive visualizations. I was less interested in that than in being part of a community of first-time parents who, like my partner and me, had questions about everything from the best positions for labor to what an epidural does. Out of about a dozen couples in the class, we were one of two black couples. There was also a Latino couple, and the rest appeared to be white. The teacher was a white woman, and so were all the guest speakers she brought in. During some of the sessions, the instructor showed a lack of sensitivity to the issues that mattered to me. A handout on the reasons one might have a surgical birth omitted fibroids but included high blood pressure, breech positioning, and herpes. When I brought up fibroids, I was met with a roomful of blank stares. We were told that the number-one reason for pre-term birth is dehydration. Thirteen percent of black women deliver babies before they’re full-term—and that’s simply because we’re thirsty?

hen I checked in with a half-dozen black midwives, doulas, and obstetricians across the country, they all pointed to something like an improved version of this class—a circle of support that’s culturally competent—as critical to improving the birth outcomes for black American women. Since 2016, midwife Jennie Joseph has run a clinic in an African-American neighborhood that includes one of Orlando’s worst zip codes for perinatal health. Her clinic has attracted national attention for her work addressing health disparities. In 2006 and 2007, Joseph conducted a study with the Health Council of East Central Florida that enrolled 100 women who would go on to have hospital births. None of the African-American or Latina women had a low-weight or preterm baby. Joseph told me it’s what happens in her clinic, from the front desk to the examination room, that erases racial disparities. Too often, the humiliation that poor women experience keeps them from getting care. “What we do is operate the front desk as a triage desk,” Joseph said. “It’s financial, it’s social, it’s ‘What’s your problem, honey? We’ll fix it. We’re going to listen to your baby right now.’”

Once a woman knows that she won’t be turned away, she’s more likely to trust her provider, open up, and comply with any instructions she’s given. “When a woman feels connected, she can then connect to her child,” Joseph said. If a woman is afraid that she can’t keep her child-to-be safe, she needs help managing her anxieties. Just like me on the bed that July afternoon, she needs help calming down.

My own pregnancy and birth were made easier by all those who sheltered me from the stressors of the world. Our families freely offered their time and care. A dear friend drove from Detroit to be our doula. And despite my initial misgivings, my white male obstetrician showed me real kindness and made good on his promise that no matter what time I went into labor, he’d be there. He was part of the team that made me believe I could have a safe pregnancy and birth, no matter what the statistics said or how the news made me feel—before I had sense enough to temporarily turn away.

Thousands marched Saturday in the Sister March in Cincinnati, one of the few Democratic strongholds in a state that Trump carried with 51.3 percent of the vote. Estimates put the crowd that gathered in Over-the-Rhine’s Washington Park at 7,000, an impressive showing in this metro area of just over 2 million people. Speakers at a rally prior to the march addressed the crowd on behalf of Planned Parenthood, a local organization supporting survivors of gender-based violence, and the Islamic Center of Cincinnati and Black Lives Matter Cincinnati, among other groups. The event attracted participants who were concerned about a variety of issues, from preserving the Affordable Care Act to combating police violence and preserving a science-based approach to climate change at the federal level.

In the crowd I met Debbie Sims, who sat on a bench holding a sign that read “Hands Off My American Dream.” It featured a simple drawing of a house and a seal identifying her as a member of Communities United for Action, a local organizing project that focuses on abuses in foreclosures and payday loans. Sims said she’s worried that a Trump presidency will take us back a decade to the dark days of the last financial crisis. “I know a lot of people who, during the Bush administration, lost their homes, lost their jobs,” she told me. Sims is concerned about the concentration of power on the right, particularly as a resident of a state with a Republican governor. “With the Republicans taking over, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” she said, explaining what had drawn her to the march. “We have to fight. We can’t just let the poor not have a voice.”

The effects of reactionary federal policies may not have hit this city yet, but the cultural impact of the Trump victory has. This weekend, swastikas and racist and homophobic graffiti were painted around the campus of Withrow University High School, where the student body is 97 percent young people of color. The phrase “Fuck Niggers and Faggots” was painted on sidewalks, and other slurs and swastikas were painted on signs and benches alongside the president’s name. Earlier this month, a vandal painted a swastika on the sign of a local Jewish seminary, Hebrew Union College.

In Hamilton County, 52.7 percent of voters supported Hillary Clinton. It’s a slim margin that means most of those voters have neighbors and coworkers who support Trump. The counties that surround Cincinnati all went red: Clermont, Butler, and Warren County all went for Trump by more than 60 percent. Fran Carr and Pate Hutson live in Columbus but came to Cincinnati to march on Saturday with family. They are using Indivisible, an online resource compiled by former congressional staffers that explains how to best pressure elected officials, to figure out how to best organize with like-minded people. Carr also receives the Daily Action text, and said she makes a related phone call to legislators every day. But she said that of the many ways she commits herself to fighting the Trump administration, the hardest thing is engaging with friends who support him. “One of my friends believes there’s no such thing as white privilege. All of the examples I give, the ways that we enjoy white privilege, he just denies,” Carr said. “I keep finding a way for us to listen to each other. It’s exhausting, it’s nauseating and it’s necessary.”

Jasmine Grant, who is black, attended the noon rally, but as late as 11 am she was debating whether or not to show up. Grant was aware of the national conversation about whether the issues of women of color were being sidelined in the marches or else addressed hastily in a last-minute effort to respond to criticism. In the end, Grant opted to participate. “I equally share in the frustration that when we have these conversations [about feminism], sometimes it seems like women of color are missing from those conversations,” she told me. “But in order to have a voice, I need to be here.”

The question remains whether the energy displayed Saturday will carry over into other ongoing local struggles. For example, will the thousands who poured into downtown Cincinnati’s streets show up for issues that matter to those who care about police violence? Will they show up for the retrial of Ray Tensing, a white former University of Cincinnati police officer who killed Sam Dubose, an unarmed black man, during a traffic stop? That’s the question members of Black Lives Matter Cincinnati raised when I asked how the march connected to their work. The first trial ended in November in a hung jury.

“The event was politically amorphous,” Brian Taylor of BLM said of Saturday’s rally, at which fellow BLM organizer Ashley Harrington spoke. “The sentiment of the event is anti-Trump, but what people are for is yet to be seen.”

Photos by Dani McClain except where otherwise noted.

If the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of his appointees to date are any indication, it’s unlikely that President-elect Donald Trump will extend the current administration’s work in support of women and girls of color. But at a White House gathering Friday, a group of government officials—all women of color themselves—reflected on their efforts to address challenges facing this demographic and encouraged a room full of advocates, academics, and funders to keep pushing for change at the federal level.

Several years ago, the Obama administration was criticized for ignoring the needs of girls and women from marginalized communities even after it launched an initiative on behalf of boys and men of color. But the White House Council of Women and Girls responded to pressure in recent years, inviting sustained collaboration with community-based organizations and individuals whose work addresses race- and gender-based disparities in health, education, employment, and criminal justice. On Friday, participants celebrated that collaboration and acknowledged their fears and uncertainty around what comes next. After all, many of the appointees Trump has tapped for high-level positions so far are likely to be more comfortable ignoring or vilifying racial- and gender-justice organizers than partnering with them.

But all is not lost, Karol Mason told the room Friday. Mason is assistant attorney general in the Office of Justice Programs at the US Department of Justice. “We only lose that progress if you just sit back and let it happen,” she said. Progress in recent years has included federal agencies’ efforts to collect new data and make it public, acknowledge disparities, and measure whether policy changes are closing the gaps. Access to more information has validated communities’ concerns and given them new tools to advocate for change. For example, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights began to collect and release more specific data on school discipline disaggregated by race, gender, and disability and easily searchable by school or district. The USDOE saw a 20 percent reduction in incidents of school discipline over two years, Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary of the its Office for Civil Rights, said Friday.

“What I’d really like to see is the Trump administration also commit to the same level of accessibility and transparency with the data,” Fatima Goss Graves, a senior vice president at the National Women’s Law Center, told me. Graves’s organization has been in conversation with the White House in recent years about the need for such accountability measures. “Having that information has been an extraordinarily powerful tool for communities, for families, for parents and for advocates,” she said.

Graves listed some ways that those who care about progress for women and girls from marginalized communities can stay vigilant in the opening weeks and months of the Trump administration. This will mean making sure that Betsy DeVos, the nominee for education secretary, and other officials who are slated to play a key role in civil-rights enforcement, are asked tough and relevant questions during confirmation hearings. It means tracking the policies and guidance documents created during the Obama years to see how and whether they’re used in the next administration. Graves is confident that groups nationwide are ready to meet this challenge. “There’s a serious movement that is outside of any government, that is clear in its mandate to do better by women and girls of color, and that is powerful,” she said.

Friday’s event was an opportunity for the Obama administration to highlight its own work in these final weeks before Trump’s inauguration. It was also a chance for two related groups that launched last year at the White House—one a collection of women’s foundations in 23 states and Washington, DC, the other a nationwide collaborative of research institutions—to report on what they’ve accomplished in 2016. The Collaborative to Advance Equity Through Research (of which The Nation is a member) has grown from 24 members and a commitment of $18 million over five years to 55 members committing more than $75 million toward research and data collection on the lives of women and girls of color. Prosperity Together’s 29 members have pledged a collective $100 million investment in the economic security of low-income women. In 2016, the foundations put $29 million toward the initiative, directly supporting nearly 1,000 nonprofit organizations and more than 4 million women and girls, according to a report obtained from the Ms. Foundation for Women, an original partner in the funding initiative.

One commonly asked question about this moment in black-led organizing—what some broadly refer to as the Black Lives Matter movement—is what its participants want. What are BLM’s goals, and why, some critics ask, is the movement so reactive, so vocal and visible, only in response to police violence against black people?

Now, anyone with such questions can refer to “A Vision for Black Lives,” which lays out six demands and 40 corresponding policy recommendations to paint a picture of what today’s black activists are fighting for. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 organizations representing black people nationwide, made the policy platform and accompanying website public on August 1. Among the demands are calls for “an end to the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people” and “independent Black political power and Black self-determination in all areas of society.”

At both the Democratic and Republican conventions last month, there were plenty of indications that conversations strengthened and sustained by the current movement to end antiblack racism have made it to the national stage. The “Mothers of the Movement”—women whose children were killed by police or vigilantes or who died while in police custody—shared their stories at the Democratic National Convention, making the case that their fight for justice would be in good hands with a Clinton presidency. The previous week, Milwaukee County’s Sheriff David Clarke Jr., a black man, tried to calm the nerves of the largely white audience at the Republican National Convention, assuring them that Donald Trump could restore law and order and put an end to the “anarchy” that BLM inspires.

“A Vision for Black Lives” emphasizes the movement’s independence from party politics and its desire to prioritize solutions that address root causes over the incremental or bipartisan proposals more likely to win a presidential candidate’s support or move through an obstructionist Congress. For example, the nearly 40 policy recommendations include the following (as listed in the group’s August 1 press release):

“Demilitarize law enforcement, end money bail, end deportations, and end the systematic attack against Black youth, and Black trans, gender non-conforming and queer folks.”

“Immediately pass state and federal legislation that requires the U.S. to acknowledge the lasting impacts 
of slavery, and establish and execute a plan to address those impacts.”

“Democrats and Republicans are offering anemic solutions to the problems that our communities face,” said Marbre Stahly-Butts, a member of the eight-person Movement for Black Lives policy leadership team that steered the collaborative research and writing process over a yearlong period. “We are seeking transformation, not just tweaks.”

Recommendations like those cited earlier may strike some people as too broad, too pie-in-the-sky. But the BLM vision statement offers greater depth for readers who want to know how to translate the words into grassroots action. The extended policy brief on the demilitarization of law enforcement, for example, includes information on bills in New Jersey and New Hampshire that could serve as model legislation in other states. There’s also advice on how to use an executive order issued by President Obama last year to demand that local elected officials reject military-grade equipment for police departments and that university presidents do the same for campus police. What may seem at first glance like sweeping rhetoric that lacks the specific teeth to ensure real change is actually a tool kit for anyone ready to do the long-term work of running local, state, or national advocacy campaigns.

Some of these campaigns are already active but unknown to people new to organizing and activism. The BLM vision statement seeks to change that by highlighting existing campaigns powered by online petitions alongside the policy platform. Among these is the campaign to replace County Attorney John Choi with an independent prosecutor in the shooting death of Philando Castile, who was killed by a police officer in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights last month.

More than two dozen black-led organizations—
including the Black Youth Project 100, the BlackOut Collective, the Center for Media Justice, the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, and Southerners on New Ground—created the vision statement together, said Stahly-Butts, who is also a policy advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy. “Those of us who have been inside this movement have seen there’s work happening across the country,” she continued. Together, they set out to answer the question: “How do we amplify what’s already happening?”

Authors of the BLM statement say that policy development is just one of many necessary tactics. Protest, direct action, and advancing conversations that critique norms around race, gender, and sexuality are all part of the movement’s work as well, said Thenjiwe McHarris, another member of the eight-person policy leadership team. But articulating a set of demands and then advocating for those demands to be met are critical, too. Throughout their collaboration, the coauthors referred to earlier policy statements, such as the Black Radical Congress’s “Freedom Agenda” and the Black Panther Party’s “10-Point Program,” in an effort to better understand the black-led policy efforts that have come before.

“It builds on the legacy of the black radical tradition,” McHarris said of today’s “Vision for Black Lives.”

In February, Illinois lawmakers introduced a bill that would bar a woman from receiving state aid for her child if she refused to list the father or another financially responsible family member on the birth certificate. Unless she agreed to this intrusion into her family’s privacy, she’d be denied both public assistance and a birth certificate for her child.

News reports such as the one that brought this legislation to national attention often describe the problems mothers on the margins face, but it’s rare that we hear women who fall outside idealized notions of motherhood speak for themselves. The book Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, published earlier this year by PM Press, sets out to change that. It showcases the parenting experiences of people in poverty, teenagers, women with children in the court system, unmarried women, women committed to radical politics, and others too often overlooked in public discourse on parenting. The contributors to the anthology, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams, are not victims acted upon by policies or pushed into ill-fitting categories by politicians. Instead, they are experts on their own lives, presenting solutions for the challenges they face and stories of the transformations they’ve experienced through mothering or being mothered.

The focus throughout the book is on the verb rather than the noun. While we may make assumptions about the sex and gender of someone called a mother, the activity of mothering is less limiting. Early on, Gumbs describes it as “the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting life.” In an effort to separate notions of mothering from traditional ideas about who does it, Gumbs writes: “The practice of mothering that inspired us to create this book is older than feminism; it is older and more futuristic than the category ‘woman.’”

Still, the book is firmly in the tradition of earlier feminist works that presented the testimonies of women of color. In her preface, Loretta J. Ross, co-founder of the reproductive-justice organization SisterSong, describes how in the 1970s and ’80s Cherríe Moraga, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and others articulated an evolving feminism that was relevant to and led by women of color. Ross writes of feeling as if books such as Moraga and Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back and hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman spoke directly to her as a black feminist in her 20s. Revolutionary Mothering attempts to do something similar for a new generation grappling with how race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other aspects of identity affect the way they love.

In the book, Mai’a Wiliams addresses the stigma attached to midwifery, particularly among members of the black middle class who consider out-of-hospital birth backward, a remnant of the Jim Crow days when the medical establishment left black women to fend for themselves during pregnancy and childbirth. Her short essay highlights the absence of black midwives, particularly the granny midwives that Williams writes were historically central to black communities, from today’s boom in the use of largely white midwives and doulas.

Claire Barrera writes about parenting with chronic pain and points out how the current fascination with so-called natural or attachment parenting can be exclusive. “One is expected to breastfeed, babywear, make all your baby food from scratch, unschool AND work, etc. etc. with a smile on one’s face,” Barrera writes. “I find this discouraging, not radical at all, and I don’t see myself, as a mama with a disability, reflected in that reality.”

Norma Angelica Marrun describes being 12 years old and separated from her mother by immigration policies that allowed her to stay in the United States but forced her mother to return to Mexico. Victoria Law explains in detail how she learned to mother while maintaining and deepening her commitments to organizing and activism. Lisa Factora-Borchers tells the story of giving birth, as she puts it, “to two things: a 9 lb. 7 oz. son and a new feminism.” While healing from a cesarean section, she decides that there are two kinds of feminism, what she calls “the feminism of issues and the feminism of our lives.” The former is concerned with whether people call themselves feminists and whether feminism is dying. The latter is concerned with whether women themselves are dying and the complexities of their experiences while they live.

The testimonies in Revolutionary Mothering offer readers a deep dive into the feminism of its contributors’ lives. The book is a necessary reminder that beyond the headlines, position papers, and generalizations made about mothers are voices from the front lines that we all need to hear.

Today’s movement for black lives is the latest chapter in a struggle against racist oppression that has occupied black Americans since the country’s founding. In this issue, Dani McClain explores how social media shapes perceptions of leadership in the movement. Below, she recommends five books about organizing the struggle, yesterday and today.

HAMMER AND HOE
Alabama Communists During the Great 
Depression

by Robin D.G. Kelley


University of North Carolina Press, 2015

Buy this book

Robin D.G. Kelley’s account of Alabama sharecroppers in the 1930s and 1940s describes the Communist Party’s vision for the United States, revealing a left political program that transcends the Cold War rhetoric with which many of us heard it described as kids. Kelley brings Hosea Hudson and his comrades alive to show how black rural Southern workers organized themselves to fight for access to fair work, civil rights, and equal treatment under the law.

ASSATA
An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur


Lawrence Hill Books, 2001

Buy this book

This memoir tells the story of Assata Shakur, formerly JoAnne Chesimard, a onetime member of the Black Panther Party who escaped from a federal prison in 1979 and has since been living in Cuba under political asylum. Assata offers the reader a look at the conditions that would lead a black woman living in mid-20th-century America to join a black-nationalist organization. And it considers the inner workings of the Panthers as they faced ceaseless manipulations by Hoover’s FBI and other reactionary forces determined to destroy black revolutionary leadership.

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn


Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2015

Buy this book

This classic work of revisionist history corrects the lies and distortions many of us learned in US history and government classes. Zinn’s work challenges the notion that great men—founding fathers, presidents, wealthy industrialists—are the engines of history, determining the direction of this country from the top down. Instead, Zinn tells the stories of the people who have organized to make a place for themselves at a table that was initially set for just a few.

ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL
The World the 
Slaves Made

by Eugene Genovese


Vintage Books, 1976

Buy this book

A must-read for anyone who still believes the Emancipation Proclamation—or any policy pronouncement from Lincoln—freed the slaves. Roll, Jordan, Roll offers a history of enslaved people that details the many ways they worked to preserve their family lives, souls, and daily routines against the crushing institution of slavery. Genovese’s history offers a crucial reminder of the humanity, strong networks, and areas of resistance that enslaved people maintained in this country despite every effort to break them.

TALKING THE WALK
A Communications Guide for Racial Justice

by Hunter Cutting and Makani Themba-Nixon


AK Press, 2006

Buy this book

Looking back at it now, Talking the Walk reads like a case study in why Twitter and other social-media platforms are necessary. Without the ability to broadcast their own realities, those assumed to be powerless are too often at the mercy of mainstream and corporate media outlets that rely on stereotypes and generalities. Despite the explosion of social media since the time this book was published, Cutting and Themba-Nixon’s guide remains an essential tool for understanding how social-justice organizations might plan their communications strategies and disrupt dishonest media narratives.

In March 2012, nearly a month after George Zimmerman killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, hundreds of high-school students in Miami-Dade and Broward counties staged walkouts to protest the fact that Zimmerman hadn’t been arrested on any charges. A group of current and former Florida college activists knew that they had to do something too. During a series of conference calls, Umi Selah (then known as Phillip Agnew) and others in the group planned a 40-mile march from Daytona Beach to the headquarters of the Sanford Police Department—40 miles symbolizing the 40 days that Zimmerman had remained free. On Good Friday, 50 people set off for Sanford. The march culminated in a five-hour blockade of the Sanford PD’s doors on Easter Monday. The marchers demanded Zimmerman’s arrest and the police chief’s firing. Within two days, both demands had been met.

A little over a year later, a jury found Zimmerman not guilty on charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter. Undeterred by the legal setback, the activists—calling themselves the Dream Defenders—showed up in Tallahassee and occupied the Florida statehouse for four weeks in an effort to push Republican Governor Rick Scott to call a special legislative session to review the state’s “stand your ground” law, racial profiling, and school push-out policies, all of which the organization linked to Martin’s death. Fueled in part by participants sharing updates on Twitter, the occupation became a national story, and Selah fielded a flood of requests from media and progressive organizations. Some wanted to give an award to the Dream Defenders; others wanted to add Selah to lists proclaiming the arrival of a new generation of civil-rights heroes. (One writer said he embodied the spirit of Nelson Mandela.) Others wanted his perspective on the burgeoning racial-justice movement. After a while, Selah wanted none of it.

The breaking point came when a major news outlet profiled him without first conducting an interview. The result, he says, was an account that credited him with successes in social-justice movements he wasn’t even involved in. “If I was a person in the [immigrants’-rights] movement, I would look at this article and think, ‘Who the hell is this dude?’” he told me. “I really panicked. I imagined somebody saying, ‘Why is this dude telling Time magazine that he’s been in the forefront of these movements, and we’ve never seen him here?’”

Selah’s response was to pull himself out of the spotlight. He started declining media requests and posting less often to social media. When he did accept an invitation to speak, his goals were to disavow any hero label thrust on him by others and to demystify the Dream Defenders’ work.

Selah is an organizer, not a media personality, and so the trade-off made sense for him. But for others, that might not be the case. Twitter personality and trailing Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay Mckesson was described in a recent New York Times profile as “the best-known face of the Black Lives Matter movement” and BLM’s “biggest star.” Now followed by more than 300,000 Twitter users, Mckesson began building his following by live-tweeting the protests in Ferguson in August 2014 after driving there from Minneapolis, where he lived at the time. More than a million mentions and retweets on the social-networking platform made him the protagonist of the Times magazine’s cover story on Black Lives Matter and earned him a spot on Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders list. But is he an organizer? The historian Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, says she defines organizing as “bringing people together for sustained, coordinated, strategic action for change.” Mckesson, who wisely calls himself a “protester,” is doing something else entirely. The problem is that too many of us don’t know to look for the difference.

* * *

Today’s racial-justice movement demands an end to the disproportionate killing of black people by law-enforcement officials and vigilantes, and seeks to root out white supremacy wherever it lives. Social media has allowed its members to share documentary evidence of police abuse, spread activist messages, and forge a collective meaning out of heartrending news. At certain key moments, Twitter in particular has reflected and reinforced the power of this movement. On November 24, 2014, when the St. Louis County prosecutor announced that a grand jury had decided not to bring charges against the officer who killed an unarmed Michael Brown, Twitter users fired off 3.4 million tweets regarding the police killings of black people and racial-justice organizing, with the vast majority coming from movement supporters and news outlets, according to a recent report by American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact. Weeks later, when the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death in New York City was also not indicted, 4.4 million tweets over a period of seven days kept the nation’s attention focused on the fight for police accountability. Hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, #HandsUpDontShoot and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown gave users—including those not yet involved in activism—a way to contribute to conversations they cared about.

But while social media turns the microphone over to activists and organizers who are often far from the center of the media’s attention, its power doesn’t come without pitfalls. In August, a nasty Twitter fight erupted after Mckesson initiated a meeting with Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Writer and activist dream hampton posted a tweet that read: “While a meeting with @deray might be a blast, I would expect @BernieSanders to meet with actual BLM folks, those who forced this platform.” At the heart of the criticism was the claim that Mckesson was not in a position to speak to a presidential candidate on behalf of the Black Lives Matter network—an organization with chapters that grew out of the hashtag created and popularized by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors.

That distinction was lost on many of Mckesson’s followers. For them, he was a reliable voice: at times a source of first-person accounts of the protests, at others a consistent and inspiring source of commentary on the issues they cared about. The difference between an organization called Black Lives Matter and a movement that had come to be known by the same name was, to many, negligible and a distraction from the real story: a young black man who was saying the right things on Twitter would be meeting with a presidential candidate.

But for someone like hampton or Selah, the stakes were much higher. “The people who the liberal media and social media have elevated to the position of national leader or spokesperson do not share the values of the movement,” Selah told me. “The ideas that they put forth, the platforms that they put forth, are neoliberal and do not come from a rooting in movement, don’t come from a liberation framework, from an abolition framework.” (Mckesson declined repeated requests for an interview for this story.)

So what are the values of the movement? Who is spreading them—and how? Charlene Carruthers, national director of Black Youth Project 100, has been engaged with those questions for more than a decade. While an undergraduate at Illinois Wesleyan University, she was active in the Black Student Union. She worked on campaigns in support of young black candidates while getting her master’s degree in social work in St. Louis. After she graduated, she joined the staff at an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation in Virginia and managed online campaigns at the civil-rights organization ColorofChange. (Full disclosure: She and I were colleagues there.)

Since July 2013, when Zimmerman was acquitted, Carruthers has helped build BYP 100, a youth-led organization made up of people between the ages of 18 and 35. BYP 100 has developed a democratic decision-making process and operates from what Carruthers calls a “young black queer feminist” perspective. The group now has an estimated 300 members nationwide and chapters in Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Oakland, and Washington, DC. Its work in Chicago has drawn the most attention: In response to the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald and the killing of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd by an off-duty officer, BYP 100 organized protests and marches that played a key role in the firing of Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in late 2015. A recent Chicago magazine article declared the chapter “the most vocal and arguably most effective activist group in town.” How did they get there? Carruthers explains: “We recruit. We do trainings. We do campaign work. That’s the slow, hard work of organizing. Building a base is what we do.”

Writing in Truthout, organizer Ejeris Dixon, who has worked with the New York City Anti-Violence Project and the Audre Lorde Project, describes base-building as, at heart, relationship-building: “a series of activities designed to introduce, engage, and keep people involved in our movements. That means meeting individuals where they are and building forward from that place—the barbershop, the salon, the laundromat, the doorway—where we come together as people and have a conversation.” The Movement for Black Lives policy table, which grew out of a national gathering of activists at Cleveland State University last summer, recently set out to do just that. In January, the policy table announced the start of a six-month process to develop a national agenda. Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a regional organizer with Project South, is a participant. She says she feels the pressure of developing a vision and creating infrastructure while responding to the seemingly endless killings of black people by police: “We’re building the bicycle while riding it and being shot at.”

Henderson’s background, like Carruthers’s, shows deep connections to earlier iterations of the black-liberation movement in the United States. “My mom is an original Black Panther Party member, and my father was very big in the Black Arts Movement in Tennessee and also in the black radio scene,” Henderson says. When a 66-year-old black man named Wadie Suttles died in custody at the Chattanooga jail in 1983, her father took the bold step of naming the police officer suspected of the fatal beating on the air. In 2004, Henderson met veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when she took a monthlong bus ride with other young activists to register voters and commemorate Freedom Summer.

Among the current organizers, evidence of such long-standing commitment to racial justice is common, notes Barbara Ransby. Many leaders are taking the skills developed in labor or prison or community organizing and applying them to new collaborations. “Oftentimes we don’t do that genealogy, and a new organization feels like it came out of the blue,” she said. “There were new formations, but they were not newly formed organizers.”

* * *

What is new, at least for many, is the space for explicitly black organizing undertaken by activists tied to black communities. Makani Themba, a longtime organizer and founding director of the Praxis Project, explains that in the 1960s, the leaders of the movement were the heads of black institutions with sizable bases—think Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael. That changed in ’70s and ’80s, as black leadership came to mean “the most deeply penetrated black person in white or mainstream institutions,” Themba adds. As civil-rights organizations began to depend more on corporate contributions than member donations, and as Reagan-era cuts decimated organizations serving the black poor, black activists who wanted organizing and advocacy jobs turned to the institutions that had the resources to pay and retain them—often unions and economic-justice organizations that operated outside any explicitly black cultural context.

That pattern has shifted in recent years. The phrase “unapologetically black” appears on T-shirts and hoodies worn by movement activists, and a dedication to using messages appealing to black audiences dominates today’s approach to racial-justice organizing. New groups like BYP 100, the Dream Defenders, and Black Lives Matter have blossomed in the wake of Zimmerman’s acquittal. Denise Perry directs Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity, whose stated mission is to “help rebuild Black social justice infrastructure…and re-center Black leadership in the US social justice movement.” BOLD launched in 2011 and graduated its first class of trainees the following year. Perry says that the focus on black organizing was new for a majority of participants. “Many of them were organizing in multiracial, multiethnic organizations. That work is important; we’re not going to win on our own. But the space to have conversations about what we need to work on was new for 98 percent of the people in the room.”

* * *

After the Dream Defenders’ successful occupation of the Florida statehouse in 2013, its members were tempted to focus on actions that would satisfy a Twitter following that had jumped from about 4,000 to more than 30,000 in a month’s time. But the work of organizing “has to be done,” says Rachel Gilmer, 28, who joined the group last summer, “and it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to 140 characters that are going to get retweeted thousands of times.”

In the end, the commitment to building local campaigns won out over the lure of high visibility. The organization, which has eight chapters in Florida, is now in the midst of a yearlong effort to determine its long-term strategy, regardless of the ebbs and flows created by social-media buzz. Last fall, the group put a three-month moratorium on social media, which strengthened relationships and built trust among colleagues, Gilmer says. “It was an opportunity for us to take a break from all the noise in order to get back connected with one another.”

It also forced a reality check about relationships in the movement. “We’re like ‘Hey, fam!’ [online], but people don’t really know each other,” Gilmer says. “There’s no substitute for human interaction.”

Twitter feeds constantly updated with smart observations about the latest cause for outrage are a lot more visible than the painstaking meetings that precede a transit-system shutdown, a citywide protest, or a collaboratively written 40-page policy agenda. But understanding the distinction between organizers and amplifiers matters; otherwise, we’ll overrate those who excel at amplifying the passion of a movement and undervalue the organizers, who make concrete change happen. Or as Henderson puts it: “The press doesn’t tell me who the leaders of particular movements are—communities do.”

A recent New York Times op-ed reported that last year there were 700,000 Google searches for how to self-induce abortion. Compare this number to the 1 million legal abortions estimated to take place each year.

The connection between the attack on abortion rights and a spike in the number of people turning to the Internet for answers is clear: The state with the highest rate of searches was Mississippi, which has one remaining clinic as the result of laws passed in the state to limit access to abortion. In 2011, online searches for how to accomplish a do-it-yourself abortion jumped 40 percent, according to the Times. That same year, 92 provisions restricting access were enacted nationwide.

Last week, a group of legal experts who have spent the last year reviewing the legal landscape of self-induced abortion in the United States hosted a webinar to share what they’ve learned about the risks and opportunities associated with abortions that happen outside the healthcare system. It’s a topic that has been in the news a lot in recent years, including the case of Purvi Patel, the Indiana woman who was convicted of feticide in connection with an alleged self-induced abortion and is now serving 20 years in prison. Last year, Kenlissia Jones in Georgia was arrested and charged with murder for her use of the drug misoprostol to terminate her pregnancy. The charge was eventually dropped, but a misdemeanor charge of possession of a dangerous drug was not. There have been 17 known arrests or convictions connected to at-home abortions, according to the newly launched Self-Induced Abortion (SIA) Legal Team. The team has identified 40 laws nationwide—including fetal homicide, chemical endangerment, accomplice liability—that are potentially broken when someone terminates a pregnancy with help from a doula, babysitter, or someone else in a support role.

The newly formed team is made up of self-described movement lawyers from Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law, Reproductive Health Technologies Project, Law Students for Reproductive Justice, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and other organizations. The group sees stopping the criminalization of self-induced abortion as one of its goals and said this week that it will represent those in legal trouble or connect those in need with a trusted attorney. In a brochure announcing its launch, the team defines self-induced abortion as “the practice of self-administering pharmaceutical pills, traditional herbs, or other means” and describes the practice as “the only available or acceptable method of abortion to growing numbers of people.” 

It is illegal to buy misoprostol online without a prescription in the US, and yet—as the trend in Google searches shows—it’s a risk an increasing number of people are willing to consider if not take. It’s also possible to buy misoprostol over the counter in many Latin American countries, including Mexico, which may help explain why the practice of self-induced abortion appears to be more common in Texas than in the rest of the country. A study released late last year found that between 100,000 and 240,000 of the 5.9 million Texas women ages 18 to 49 have tried to end a pregnancy on their own without medical assistance. A number of recent reports out of the state—where the enforcement of House Bill 2 could leave just 10 clinics open, pending a Supreme Court ruling—have explored what obtaining pills in this way means for those who make that choice.

Finding ways to support those who choose to self-induce abortion does not mean abandoning the fight to preserve access in healthcare settings, according to members of the legal team. “We envision a world in which pregnant people have legal and actual access to the full panoply of abortion care options,” Jill E. Adams of U.C. Berkeley’s Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice said on last week’s call.

Instead, the SIA Legal Team will continue to investigate how public health advocates, midwives, and others who find themselves in a support role can legally share information about how abortion pills can be used at home. For example, how can someone give advice on where to get the pills and stay within the law? What’s the best way to create a website, smart phone app, or pamphlet that describes the pills’ chemical makeup, side effects, and risks? How can advocates word the information they share so that it’s protected by the First Amendment?

Developing law and policy tools to answer questions such as these, expanding access to reliable information about self-induced abortion, shifting the culture so that the practice loses its stigma, and bringing an end to the prosecutions and arrests of people like Patel and Jones are all part of the work the team plans to take up. “In order to fully protect people currently and to move toward this vision of a different legal future, we needed to move forward on all four prongs of the strategy at the same time,” Adams said.

On Monday night, the documentary No Más Bebés premiered on PBS (it’s streaming free online until mid-February). The film tells the little-known history of Mexican immigrant women who were sterilized without their informed consent while giving birth at Los Angeles County hospital in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many spoke no or limited English and were asked while in labor or in the frantic moments before emergency C-sections to sign documents agreeing to have their tubes tied, thus ensuring that this birth would be their last. (For a reflection on the film by the journalist who broke the original story in 1975, read Claudia Dreifus’s January 27 article, “A Group of Mexican Immigrant Women Were Sterilized Without Their Consent. Can a New Film Bring Justice?”)

One woman recalls a nurse grabbing her hand and forcing a scrawled signature on the page. A medical resident training at the hospital at the time recalls seeing a colleague hold a syringe filled with pain meds in front of a suffering woman’s face: “You want this shot? Sign.” The women often did not know until years later that they’d been sterilized. Many were in the dark until approached by attorneys who, armed with hospital records provided by a whistle-blower, urged the women to join a class-action suit charging that the hospital had violated their civil rights.

The film weaves together interviews with the women and their families, doctors involved in the tubal ligations, and the attorneys, advocates, and academics who contributed to the class-action suit, Madgrigal v. Quilligan, which was heard in federal court and decided in 1978. In a display of victim blaming at its finest, the judge presiding over the case zeroed in on the testimony of a UCLA anthropologist who had interviewed the women and found them to be deeply traumatized as a result of the forced sterilizations. These women had placed a high value on childbearing, and many had emigrated from rural areas where large families were the norm. But instead of eliciting empathy, this context was used against the plaintiffs. “The cultural background of these particular women has contributed to the problem,” the judge wrote in his ruling.

Despite the blow of a legal loss, the case yielded some positive results in the form of regulatory change. There would be no remedy for the affected women, but the federal government would provide consent forms in English and Spanish. The state would make bilingual counselors available at county hospitals. And now, nearly 40 years later, the film itself is proving to be another type of victory for the women, their families and those who advocated on their behalf. The film uncovers this hidden history, and provides today’s reproductive justice advocates with a tool that helps explain what their work is and why it matters.

Staffers of the organization California Latinas for Reproductive Justice have participated in half a dozen screenings across the state in the past year, including on college campuses, at the California Endowment, and at a conference for promotores, people who work in Latino communities to connect individuals with heathcare and social services. Laura Jimenez, CLRJ’s executive director, said that because these sterilizations occurred so recently, the film is quite personal for many who’ve watched. “We’re talking to people who are from the surrounding neighborhoods, or their parents or grandparents were raised in that area [served by LA County hospital]. So then they start asking themselves, ‘Could this have been my family?’” Jimenez added that in every screening in which she’s participated, someone has said that either they or someone they know has been asked while in labor if they would like a tubal ligation at the time of the birth. In the film, Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, the whistle-blower who decades ago shared what he was seeing at LA County hospital with attorneys and activists, says no doctor at a private hospital would do such a thing.

No Más Bebés has also given advocates a way to draw connections between population control efforts then and now, and to enables reproductive-justice organizers to show how crucial their perspective is for real reproductive freedom. Last summer, CLRJ hosted a screening for legislative staff in Sacramento. A recent investigative report found that doctors were performing sterilizations in California’s women’s prisons without prisoners’ informed consent as recently as 2010. Other state policies deserve to be viewed through the lens of this history as well, said Susy Chávez Herrera, CLRJ’s communications manager.

The organization has been involved in the years-long fight to repeal the state’s maximum family grant, which caps the number of people in a family who can receive cash benefits through the state’s welfare program. Helping people who are generally fired up about preserving reproductive rights see why efforts to limit poor women’s fertility should be of equal concern isn’t easy, Chávez Herrera said. “You can be in the liberal camp or you can be a feminist but just not see the connection between [the history outlined in the film and] the policies that we pass when it comes to poor women of color,” she said.

Across the country in Pittsburgh, La’Tasha D. Mayes is planning to screen the film later this month as part of the annual Women of Color HERstory Month events produced by the organization she directs. That group, New Voices for Reproductive Justice, primarily serves black women and girls in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Mayes says issues the film raises are relevant in the communities she works. “It’s so clear that reproductive oppression is based on race, class, and gender,” Mayes said. “The specific experiences might be different, but the underlying root cause is all the same.”

Mayes points to a moment in the film when advocate Gloria Molina of Comisión Femenil, a Chicana empowerment organization, recalls that she and fellow activists during the period of the lawsuit created their own demands and mobilized around them. “We wanted to create a waiting period for sterilization. Why? Because we wanted to make sure everyone had truly informed consent,” Molina says in the film. “This was totally offensive to white feminists. The feminists wanted sterilization upon demand. They basically opposed our waiting period. They weren’t really taking into account that if you’re Spanish speaking or if you don’t speak English how you were being denied a right totally.”

Mayes said this segment of the film spoke to her, given that while her organization works to preserve access to abortion and contraception, she also finds herself in the presence of women who want to know, as Mayes said, “How do I parent the children that I do have? What kind of birth am I going to have? How will my children be treated?”

“The same things we’re fighting for today were fought for in the generation that preceded us,” Mayes said of the film and the discussions it’s kicked off in her circles. “But they didn’t have a reproductive-justice movement, and I think that’s what will make a difference for our generation.”

First, police killed the 12-year-old black boy at a park, barely bringing the car to a halt before jumping out to open fire. Then, minutes later, they pinned his 14-year-old sister to the ground after she ran up to see about her wounded sibling. Next, a media outlet dragged his parents’ names through the mud, implying that their unrelated brushes with the law made them at least somewhat culpable for their child’s death. And on Monday, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office announced that Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who killed Tamir Rice last year, would face no state criminal charges.

It is the end to—or at least a turning point in—a story that is both heartbreaking and stomach-turning: An onlooker calls 911 to report that he sees someone pointing a gun at people in a park. Two critical caveats the caller passes on to 911—that the gun is probably a fake and that the person holding it is probably a juvenile—never make it from the 911 call center to the police who rush onto the scene. (It was and he was.) A New York Times report from early this year explains what happened next:

Within two seconds of the car’s arrival, Officer Loehmann shot Tamir in the abdomen from point-blank range, raising doubts that he could have warned the boy three times to raise his hands, as the police later claimed. And when Tamir’s 14-year-old sister came running up minutes later, the officers, who are white, tackled her to the ground and put her in handcuffs, intensifying later public outrage about the boy’s death. When his distraught mother arrived, the officers also threatened to arrest her unless she calmed down, the mother, Samaria Rice, said.

They shot the boy within two seconds of arriving. What could they have possibly surmised in those two seconds? What might actual police work have looked like, and what were the steps that would have allowed Rice, newly in possession of a toy gun, to have lived through this encounter?

As we know from media reports out of Cleveland, there was no reason to expect that Loemann would or could take appropriate action in that moment. In 2012, the police department that he worked for in Independence, Ohio, noted that he was “distracted” and “weepy” during firearms training. The deputy chief of police there reported that Loehmann “could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal.” That same supervisor wrote, “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct the deficiencies.” Loehmann resigned after six months on that force, but went on in March of 2014 to join the Cleveland Police Department, which did not review his file from Independence. He scored the new position after failing to secure a job with police departments in Akron, Euclid, and Parma Heights or with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department.

Loehmann’s shortcomings bring to mind the Barney Fife fumblings of the McKinney, Texas, officer whom video showed to be clearly out of his depths—somersaulting needlessly outside a pool party and waving his gun at teenagers before sitting on a bikini-clad girl’s back. They bring to mind the cowardice of Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina, who took aim at the back of a running Walter Scott.

Loehmann wasn’t the only officer present at the scene. He opened fire after stepping out of a car driven by Officer Frank Garmback, who was accused of using excessive force against a 39-year-old black woman in 2010. Cleveland eventually paid the woman $100,000 to settle. According to The New York Times, after shooting Tamir Rice, the officers stood around for approximately four minutes. Neither of them checked his vital signs or gave him first aid.

How do people such as these get and keep their jobs? And what is to be done when, after the deaths of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Rice, evidence suggests that prosecutors can’t be trusted to hold police accountable? In Cleveland, concerns about Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty surfaced early and often. As of mid-October, nearly a year after Rice’s death, McGinty still had not begun presenting a case to the grand jury. In October, attorneys representing the Rice family sent a letter to McGinty asking that he recuse himself so that a special prosecutor who might actually try to secure an indictment could be appointed. More than 200,000 people then signed a petition circulated by the civil-rights organization ColorOfChange.org echoing the call for McGinty to step down.

Pressure came from within the establishment as well. Last summer, a municipal judge in Cleveland decided that there was probable cause to charge Loehmann and Garmback on multiple counts. The judge, responding to affidavits filed by members of the Cleveland community who sought charges against the officers, wrote an administrative order, advising that Loehmann be charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter, and reckless homicide and that Garmback be charged with negligent homicide. The order was purely advisory and apparently did little to inform McGinty’s actions.

But the issue at hand is bigger than one Ohio prosecutor’s failing to aggressively seek an indictment. LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, a retired judge and independent police auditor, has consistently made the bold call for an abolition of the grand-jury system altogether. In these proceedings, which are closed to the public, the prosecutor runs the show, presenting evidence to jurors and instructing them on the law. With their outdated reasons for existing and the inordinate power given to prosecutors, the grand jury system itself appears to be part of the problem in a case like Rice’s (and Bland’s and Garner’s and so many other deaths at or alleged to be at the hands of police). Writing late last year after it was determined that the officers who killed Brown and Garner would face no charges, Cordell explained:

In high-profile, controversial cases, where officers use lethal force, prosecutors face a dilemma. If they don’t file charges against officers, they risk the wrath of the community; if they do file charges, they risk the wrath of the police and their powerful unions. By opting for secret grand jury proceedings, prosecutors pass the buck, using grand jurors as pawns for political cover. The Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases are examples of how prosecutors manipulate the grand jury process.…

We will never know why there was no indictment because what the prosecutors said, how they said it, what evidence they presented, and what they asked the witnesses will forever remain secret, unless the transcript is opened to the public by court order.

By convening grand juries, the prosecutors in Missouri and New York ensured that there would be no justice for Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Sadly, these two men are gone. But if we abolish criminal grand juries, at least their deaths will not have been in vain.

It’s difficult to imagine that any reform could make the family of 12-year-old Rice feel as though he did not die in vain. But perhaps a serious effort to abolish grand juries is an appropriate step toward ending this pattern of watching police walk free after needlessly killing those who are black and unarmed. One such effort is underway in California, where lawmakers this summer banned the use of secret grand juries in police shootings.

Around 7 percent of reproductive-age women in the United States currently use an IUD or hormonal implant, but around a quarter of women could be expected to use these long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC) if existing barriers such as cost were removed. That’s according to more than 100 LARC experts who responded to a voluntary survey about the highly effective form of birth control that is stirring debate on the ethics of birth-control counseling and the history of reproductive coercion in the United States. An article reporting the findings of the survey appears in this month’s issue of the peer-reviewed medical journal Contraception.

Programs and initiatives promoting the use of LARC have been successful in places such as Colorado and St. Louis. In the St. Louis Choice Project, which counseled girls and women on their options beginning with the most effective methods and made all contraception available free of charge, three-fourths of participants chose an IUD or implant. But while pilot programs may have produced a high rate of LARC adoption, most of the survey’s respondents don’t expect that trend to continue outside of controlled settings. Even if the devices were made more affordable and if education about LARC and training of providers improved, those surveyed largely anticipate that women in the United States would use these devices at rates similar to women in France and Norway, where between 25 percent and 29 percent of women use them.

It will take time and the involvement of community leaders who can help “improve the reputation of LARC,” explained respondents who chose to write in longer responses. Feedback from 104 researchers with clinical or social science expertise—“thought leaders in LARC delivery,” as the report calls them—suggests that an uptake in LARC use alone cannot be counted on to reduce unintended pregnancy. Instead, other advances in contraception access should be pursued as well, such as providing over-the-counter access to the pill, dispensing one-year supplies of birth control, and developing new methods.

As I reported in a recent article, reproductive-justice advocates have drawn attention to the potential for coercion in efforts to expand LARC use. Some have expressed fears that health care providers, driven by conscious or unconscious bias, will disproportionately recommend the provider-controlled birth control method to women of color and poor women. The authors of the Contraception article asked the survey respondents—37 percent of whom are clinicians who regularly provide implants or IUDs to patients—their thoughts on incentivizing providers for placing LARC and incentivizing women for agreeing to use them. Among their findings:

• 98 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with this statement: “Public assistance programs should be able to restrict benefits if a woman does not use a LARC method.”
• 92 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with this statement: “Corrections agencies should be able to offer reduced jail time if a woman uses a LARC method.”
• 91 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with this statement: “Women receiving public assistance should have access to free LARC methods but not to less effective methods for free.”

In addition to this broad condemnation of coercive tactics, one respondent mentioned reproductive justice explicitly, writing, “We need a reproductive justice approach to LARC that starts with a woman’s right to decide what’s best for them and right to science-based, unbiased information about all contraceptive methods. We need to engage women of color who are leaders in reproductive justice work and community partners.”

But respondents were split on whether to incentivize doctors and nurses to provide LARC to patients. One respondent likened the practice to other areas of medicine, writing, “We know from providers and their interactions with pharma[ceutical] companies that something as small as a free pen does influence them to dispense medication that may not be in line with the patient’s best interests. Doing this with LARC will have the same effect and will turn women off of LARC and us.” There was a clear gender divide here. Two-thirds of men surveyed supported the idea of health plans and funding agencies setting higher LARC placement goals, compared to 30 percent of women surveyed. Similarly, 43 percent of men, but just 16 percent of women, supported the use of financial incentives for providers to place LARC. Throughout the article, no conclusions are drawn about how opinions differed by experts’ race or ethnicity, as 86 percent of those surveyed were white. There were too few participants of any one non-white racial or ethnic group to make meaningful comparisons between groups.

Another key finding: 97 percent of those surveyed agreed that women receiving public assistance should have access to all forms of birth control for free. One clinician who regularly works with patients who choose to use LARC clarified his or her response with a comment: “I agree that women receiving public assistance should have access to all methods of contraception for free because I think all women should have access to all methods for free. These women are no different.”

Survey respondents were invited to participate because they’ve authored peer-reviewed articles on LARC, so they’re more knowledgeable about these devices and not representative of the larger community of healthcare providers. Still, their sensitivity to the possibility of coercion and their measured approach to setting expectations around more people choosing LARC is promising. Hopefully the results of the survey ripple out to and influence a broader pool of providers.

On Thursday, former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was found guilty of rape and sexual-assault charges, including sexual battery and forcible oral sodomy. Holtzclaw, who is Asian American and white, was accused of attacking 13 black women over the course of his three years on the police force. An all-white jury has recommended that he be sentenced to 263 years in prison.

Holtzclaw’s victims ranged in age from 17 to 57. The eldest victim, a 57-year-old grandmother whom Holtzclaw assaulted during a traffic stop, reported the offense, which kicked off a broader investigation. As The Washington Post reports, several characteristics set this woman, now identified in the media as Janie Liggins, apart from the rest: “She was not from the mostly low-income neighborhood where he patrolled. She had no criminal record. She was in a position to believe that if she went to police, something would be done.”

Many of the other women Holtzclaw assaulted had histories of contact with law enforcement—a detail that his defense attorney played up during the trial in an effort to destroy their credibility. Holtzclaw had figured these women, including a 17-year-old girl, wouldn’t have credibility in the first place and used their outstanding warrants and unpaid tickets to coerce them into sex acts. When asked, those victimized said they never considered contacting police about the attacks for an obvious reason: Holtzclaw was the police. “I didn’t call them,” one woman is reported to have said during a preliminary hearing last year. “I didn’t think anyone would believe the allegations that I was making.”

As an Associated Press investigation published last month found, Holtzclaw’s crimes are not isolated incidents. A review of records from 41 states and related research revealed that sexual misconduct is one of the most common complaints brought against police. According to the investigation, between 2009 and 2014, “550 officers were decertified for sexual assault, including rape and sodomy, sexual shakedowns in which citizens were extorted into performing favors to avoid arrest, or gratuitous pat-downs. Some 440 officers lost their badges for other sex offenses, such as possessing child pornography, or for sexual misconduct that included being a peeping Tom, sexting juveniles or having on-duty intercourse.”

Efforts to play on stereotypes about who is likely to engage in criminal behavior and who is credible were on display during the Holtzclaw trial. A reporter for Ebony pointed out that, while Holtzclaw was allowed to come to court dressed in street clothes, the accusers, who were at the time of the trial being held in police custody for various offenses, “appeared in court wearing orange jailhouse scrubs, handcuffs and leg irons.” In a move reminiscent of the skewering of Rachel Jeantel by George Zimmerman’s attorney, Holtzclaw’s lawyer “used the women’s lack of language skills against them, such as using the wrong verb tense, to suggest they were not telling the truth instead of simply not knowing the correct tense to use when trying to pin them down on specific dates, [Grace] Franklin [of OKC Artists for Justice] says…. ‘A rape case is always difficult. A survivor is always on trial. When you add race, poverty and lack of education and contact with the system, it’s an even more brutal assault to watch.’”

Some observers suggested that members of the media added insult to injury by failing to cover the trial with the attention that they would have given a case involving non-black women victims. “Where is the uproar?” asked Cosmopolitan’s Treva Lindsay. But as the AP report makes clear, there are unfortunately many opportunities for media to cover the targeting and assault of marginalized women by law enforcement. And perhaps there’s more story to follow in Oklahoma City. As the father of one of the victims reportedly said today, there’s a need to look into the role that Holtzclaw’s colleagues on the police force played. “I don’t understand how this officer could operate without this going noticed by someone above him,” he said. “We are not being rocked to sleep because of this verdict.”

The day after Thanksgiving last year, 14 black activists shut down Bay Area Rapid Transit—the San Francisco Bay Area’s public transit system—for more than two hours. They did so by chaining themselves to each other and to both east- and westbound trains just after 11 am on the busiest shopping day of the year. They did so because they wanted to draw attention to the wave of police killings of black people that had by then gripped the public consciousness, but not only to that: also to the displacement of longtime and largely black residents from the neighborhood surrounding the train station where they chose to stage their action, and to the specific role that BART’s police force played in abusing black Bay Area residents, from Oscar Grant to Nubia Bowe.

The Black Friday 14, as they’ve come to be known, were eventually arrested once police and firefighters could figure out how to disentangle them from one another and the train and take them into custody. Those who carried out the action and their supporters have been fighting ever since to have the penalties they face dropped. Those penalties—misdemeanor charges and $70,000 in restitution to BART—were unjust, they argue, when compared with what happened to those who similarly used their bodies to disrupt business as usual. If you recall, late 2014 was a time when the rallying cry “Shut it down!” was everywhere, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Boston highways to the Mall of America to the BART train. Students and community members who shut down a section of the I-80 in Berkeley interstate faced no charges. White and Asian-American activists who blockaded the police headquarters in downtown Oakland were largely cited and released.

This disparate treatment is unsurprising, Chinyere Tutashinda told me this week. Tutashinda is a member of Black Lives Matter and a co-founder of the Blackout Collective, a group that specializes in direct action and led the Black Friday protest in collaboration with Bay Area BLM. “They’re selectively prosecuting us in the same way that they selectively prosecute black people all over the country,” Tutashinda said. “This is an opportunity to show the racial bias in the judicial system.”

Cat Brooks, one of the 14 arrested, made a similar argument earlier this year in the San Francisco Chronicle: “As we see our white and other allies get slap-on-the-wrist citations and walk away, shame on BART for choosing this all-black organized action to make an example out of.”

The call for Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley to drop the charges against the Black Friday 14 has reached a fever pitch in the days leading up to the anniversary of the action. Earlier this month, on the Fight for $15 national day of action, local labor leaders gathered at O’Malley’s office to make the demand. The “fight for the economic equality can’t be separated from racism,” one such labor leader is reported to have said. “[It’s] time for labor to understand that our fight isn’t just against economic inequality but also against racism.” That labor has become a vocal advocate for the Black Friday 14 is important, as BART board members have repeatedly tried to portray those victimized by the action as workers, people who depend on BART for transportation to their jobs, rather than as shoppers out to find Black Friday deals.

Other coalitions have sprung up to show their support. A group of religious and spiritual leaders calling itself the Interfaith Committee in Support of the Black Friday 14 is scheduled to rally outside the Alameda County Courthouse Wednesday. It’s coalition building like this that helped those arrested achieve one victory they’ve had to date. In February, after months of hearing from the group and its supporters, BART’s board of directors agreed to end its call for $70,000 in restitution for business lost during the shut down. Whether the District Attorney’s office will change its position on the charges remains to be seen. The group is due back in court on December 10. “It’s a big day,” Tutashinda said. “They’re trying to get everyone to plea.” But the group remains focused on the larger meaning of its case. “It’s bigger than the charges. It’s bigger than the one action itself,” she said. “It’s really around calling attention to the war on black lives.”

It may seem from recent weeks that organizing in support of the movement for black lives has largely moved from the streets to campuses such as the University of Missouri, Yale, and Princeton. But that’s an oversimplification. From recent news out of Minneapolis—where five people protesting the police killing of Jamar Clark were shot by agitators Monday night—to protests in Chicago, to the Black Friday 14’s unfinished business in Oakland, the fight is still everywhere.

On Friday, the White House announced its involvement with a new initiative to support the lives of women and girls of color. The phrase “My Brother’s Keeper” wasn’t uttered once by those who spoke as part of the daylong launch, but Friday’s announcement was a victory for the many who have critiqued the president’s initiative targeting men and boys of color since it was announced in February of last year. After nearly two years of pointing out that any racial justice initiative with the administration’s support must be also be responsive to the needs of girls and women, advocates and intellectuals concerned with the education, health, safety, and economic well-being of communities of color more broadly saw the White House respond.

The Obama administration, specifically the White House Council on Women and Girls, is not acting alone. As with My Brother’s Keeper (MBK), the initiative announced last week relies on funds from the philanthropic community. Whereas MBK began with a $200 million commitment from foundations and grew to include additional funds and in-kind donations from corporations, this new effort is fueled in part by $100 million from 20 public women’s foundations. According to the collaborative of funders, this money will go toward supporting job training programs and childcare access for low-income women. Academic and research institutions, led by the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University, have pledged an additional $18 million toward research and data collection on women and girls of color. (Full disclosure: The Nation is among the public-interest institutions signed on to the research efforts, and one of its contributing editors, Melissa Harris-Perry, is the director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center.)

Obama did not address the group gathered Friday, but Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president was a presence throughout the day. “You’re right, it should be a billion dollars,” Jarrett said at one point, responding to a comment that the scope of the problem requires a greater financial investment. “What we want is to make sure that we build sufficient momentum,” she continued. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Cecilia Muñoz, assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council, also addressed the White House gathering.

The administration’s evolution has been evident over time. Most notably, President Obama devoted much of his speech at an event hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus in September to recognizing the contributions of and challenges facing black women. “Black women have been a part of every great movement in American history, even if they weren’t always given a voice,” he said at the time. Discussing the devastation wrought by incarceration, he acknowledged, “Although in these discussions a lot of my focus has been on African-American men and the work we’re doing with My Brother’s Keeper, we can’t forget the impact that the system has on women, as well. The incarceration rate for black women is twice as high as the rate for white women.”

In addition to Obama’s nods toward the organizing pushing him toward including women and girls, there have been quieter efforts afoot within his administration. Last November, the White House Council on Women and Girls released a report, titled “Women and Girls of Color: Addressing Challenges and Expanding Opportunities,” that outlined what the administration had done to date that could be seen as positively affecting the lives of women and girls of color, such as passing the Affordable Care Act and establishing a campus sexual-assault task force. The report released Friday reads much in the same way, as a kind of summary of existing interventions: Last month, the US DOJ released a guidance on girls in the juvenile justice system. In July, the Office of Adolescent Health awarded 81 new grants to combat teen pregnancy. But this latest report also points to new efforts, most notably the commitment to releasing education and juvenile justice data that’s disaggregated by race, gender, disability status, and other variables. Organizers responding to MBK had been adamant in their demand for federal data that gives a fuller picture of the lives of women and girls of color.

Advocates have also taken the past two years to build examples of what a more inclusive approach might look like. Last month, New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito launched the Young Women’s Initiative, a counterpart to the Young Men’s Initiative that Mayor Michael Bloomberg started in 2011 to benefit black and Latino boys and men.

Joanne N. Smith, executive director of the Brooklyn-based Girls for Gender Equity and a co-chair of the new local initiative told me Friday, “We’re providing a replicable model for the White House Council on Women and Girls with the Young Women’s Initiative.” National organizing was important, Smith said, and so was going deep locally. For Smith and other advocates, this has meant hosting town-hall meetings in New York City and a national listening session at which women and girls of color have discussed their experiences in schools, in juvenile justice facilities and elsewhere to make the case that their needs are just as pressing as boys’. Much of the youth testimony pointed toward the need for interventions that address gender-based violence. The national listening session included participation from Kimberlyn Leary of the White House Council on Women and Girls, philanthropic partners, Speaker Mark-Viverto, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, and City Council member Laurie Cumbo, Smith said.

Author Kiese Laymon participated in a number of organizing efforts over the course of the past two years, most notably as an organizer of a sign-on letter that challenged the administration to expand the mandate of My Brother’s Keeper. Laymon, who worked with a group called the African-American Policy Forum (AAPF) to advocate for change, expressed cautious support for Friday’s announcement and emphasized the efforts of AAPF in helping the administration see the light. “Our initial conflict with the White House was that MBK didn’t focus enough on institutional forms of discrimination and structural violence directed at our children, and that implicit in the MBK initiative was the assumption that black girls could wait,” Laymon told me via e-mail. “I hope the new initiative focuses on institutional forms of discrimination, not this so-called culture of poverty argument that gets right-wingers who hate both President Obama and our children to the table.”

The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who directs AAPF and who coined the word “intersectionality”—a word repeated often at Friday’s White House event—also counted her group’s advocacy as contributing greatly to recent developments. “This is essentially what we have been agitating for. Listening to the lives of women and girls of color provides an understanding of what they face,” Crenshaw told me. Still, there are gaps between what her group called for and what is unfolding now, she said. For example, MBK was launched with a presidential memorandum directing top federal officials to review and assess how federal policies affect boys and young men of color and to report back within six months. No such directive from on high accompanied Friday’s launch. Dozens of cities have signed onto a My Brother’s Keeper Community Challenge. It’s unclear whether or how those efforts will intersect with the project launched last week.

Speaking truth to power is risky business, especially when doing so means arguing that the first black president has a blind spot on race. But Friday was proof positive that taking that risk can have significant payoffs.

Long-acting reversible contraceptives, known as LARCs, are revolutionizing American birth control. Pilot programs in St. Louis, Missouri, and in Colorado, where healthcare providers and researchers have made the IUD and hormonal implants available at low or no cost and educated potential users about their nearly foolproof effectiveness, have shown astounding results. In Colorado, the teen birth rate and teen abortion rate both dropped 48 percent over five years. At the start of the study, half the women in the poorest parts of the state gave birth before the age of 21. Five years later, half the women in the same group were over the age of 24 when first giving birth. And in St. Louis, pregnancy and abortion rates among sexually active teens studied dropped to less than a quarter of the rates for their peers nationwide.

Statistics like these, along with new recommendations from major medical organizations, suggest that it’s time for American women to recognize what Europeans have known for years: that IUDs and implants—birth-control devices that, once inserted, are 99 percent effective for three to 10 years—are the most reliable way to prevent unintended pregnancies. Recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended that long-acting contraception be considered a safe and effective option for adolescents, and new programs have made IUDs and implants available to teenagers as young as 14. Unlike the pill, which must be taken daily, and shorter-term birth-control methods such as the Depo-Provera shot, which lasts a few months, LARCs are considered a “set it and forget it” method—something that’s particularly important for teenagers, who tend to be less conscientious in their use of any contraceptive method that they control.

But not everyone is receptive to this message. When considering long-acting methods, many women remember or hear stories about the Dalkon Shield, an early version of the IUD that caused infections and infertility and was linked to more than a dozen fatalities before it was pulled off the market in 1974. Since the mid-1980s, new and improved IUDs have been released, but the cost of these devices—upward of $800 apiece—put them out of reach for all but the well-off or well-insured. The Affordable Care Act requires that new insurance plans cover all FDA-approved birth-control methods without a co-payment, but the National Women’s Law Center, which operates a hotline to advise women on birth-control coverage, has received complaints from every state in the country that plans are refusing to comply. And teenagers may not feel comfortable using a parent’s plan to access contraception, even if it does cover long-acting methods. So philanthropists have stepped in, including the Omaha-based Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which has given hundreds of millions of dollars per year to organizations working on reproductive health. A recent Bloomberg investigation found that the foundation has anonymously pledged at least $200 million to promote the use of LARCs in the United States; it has also funded both the St. Louis and Colorado programs. According to the Bloomberg report, the foundation hoped that an infusion of dollars into public-health clinics would “change the perception of IUDs and build political support for the devices,” ultimately convincing state and local legislators to fund LARC programs themselves.

If your sole concern is curbing unintended pregnancies, then it’s hard to argue with the data on implants and IUDs, which are more reliable than the pill (91 percent effective) or condoms (82 percent). For champions of the Buffet-funded programs, that was a major selling point. In Colorado, Governor John Hickenlooper boasted that between 2008 and 2013, the LARC initiative had reduced the infant caseload of the state’s Women, Infants, and Children program by nearly 25 percent. Republican State Representative Don Coram, co-sponsor of the bill to provide state funding to Colorado’s LARC program, told National Journal that “policywise, [the LARC program] may be the best piece of legislation I’ve ever worked on,” in part because “80 percent of teen mothers that become pregnant will be on welfare within a year.” But some reproductive-justice advocates have urged caution: They’re worried that the excitement over LARCs has obscured the fact that efficacy is not the only reason why women choose a birth-control method. And they warn that, from the misuse of Norplant in the 1990s to forced sterilizations in California’s women’s prisons as recently as 2010, contraception has often been used to reduce the fertility of poor African-­American and Latina women, often without their consent.

That’s why it’s not surprising that some people, particularly women of color, think the new embrace of LARCs—especially for use by teenagers—deserves closer scrutiny. They point out that if you’re poor, a college degree and a high-paying career will not magically appear simply because you hold off on having a child for a while. In 2013, Jennifer B. Kane and a team of researchers reviewed 40 years of studies on the impact of teen parenting and found that a woman who has a child before age 18 is likely to have from eight months’ to two years’ less education than a woman who waits until she’s older. “Promoting LARC as a way of increasing opportunities for low-income young women ignores the fact that the lack of opportunity is not because of their childbearing decisions,” says University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts, author of the groundbreaking book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. “It comes perilously close to saying that the reason there are high rates of poverty in some communities is because of the childbearing decisions of women in those communities—which comes perilously close to a eugenicist argument.”

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Nine years ago, at the age of 15, Gloria Malone, now a reproductive-justice advocate in New York City, gave birth to her daughter. A couple of weeks later, she paid a visit to her ob-gyn, and her doctor told her that she had an appointment to have an IUD inserted. Malone, who is black and Latina, had heard her older sisters talk about the Depo shot, and she’d heard about condoms in a sex-ed class, but she’d never heard of the IUD, and she didn’t learn much more about it from her doctor. “There was no ‘These are your options. Go home and see what you think about it.’ There was no ‘This is going to be the appointment where we talk about birth control,’” Malone recounted. “It was all telling me what was going to happen.”

Malone says she was told that the IUD was expensive and that, at 15 years old, she was lucky to be getting one. (The Mirena, a T-shaped device that releases pregnancy-preventing hormones and lasts for five years, typically runs upward of $500. Both the device and the insertion were free, covered by Medicaid.) But seven years later, after a series of related health complications and a difficult time finding a provider who would remove it, Malone didn’t feel so lucky. “I wasn’t given a choice—I was just given an IUD,” Malone, now 25, says. “That’s a problem, and it needs to be spoken about.”

Malone was steered toward an IUD, perhaps because she was a teen mother. But until recently, doctors tended to use an “informed choice” approach to counseling women about birth control, offering a menu of options with no real hierarchy to it. In 2012, the CDC presented research on use of the “tiered effectiveness” approach among teen patients, in which a provider begins by suggesting what’s most effective in preventing pregnancy. The American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed tiered-effectiveness counseling in 2014. While this approach gives a patient the clear guidance of a medical professional (in fact, one health researcher told me that a common criticism of tiered counseling is that the guidance isn’t directed enough), it can also leave a patient feeling like considerations other than efficacy are less valid. She may go into an appointment wanting a method she can stop using anytime, or one that doesn’t have any side effects, and come out convinced that an IUD or implant is the best or only real option, regardless of her personal preference. “If [tiered effectiveness] is the cornerstone of counseling, that’s not actually centering what the patient wants,” says Anu Manchikanti Gomez, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. Gomez is co-author of a widely circulated paper published last year, “Women or LARC First? Reproductive Autonomy and the Promotion of Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptive Methods.” In it, Gomez, Liza Fuentes, and Amy Allina advocate “a woman-centered framework” in which providers tailor their counseling script to support a patient’s own family-planning and health priorities.

Providers’ preferences can creep into the conversation even when they’re not using tiered-effectiveness counseling. In her research on young women’s perspectives on IUDs, Gomez talked with a woman who’d discussed birth control with her provider at a six-week postnatal appointment. “Her provider said, ‘Here’s the ring, here’s the pill—and here’s the IUD!’” Gomez recounted, her voice filling with enthusiasm at the final option. The provider offered a lot of information on the IUD and not much on other methods, so the patient did additional research on her own.

But when I asked Daniel Grossman, an ob-gyn and professor at the University of California at San Francisco, whether providers were overly aggressive in promoting LARCs, he directed me to a recent study of 800 women who’d recently given birth in Austin and El Paso, Texas, and who said that they didn’t want to have another child for at least two years. Six months after delivery, they were asked what form of birth control they were using; 34 percent of the women said they’d like to use a long-acting reversible method, but only 13 percent were doing so. “We’re finding that there are many more women who are interested in this method than are able to get it,” says Grossman, who co-authored the study. Cost, lack of insurance coverage, and the inability to find a provider trained in LARC insertion accounted for the gap between women who had an IUD or hormonal implant and those who wanted one. And the cost barrier was significant: Women with household incomes greater than $75,000 per year were almost 11 times more likely to use LARCs than those whose household incomes were less than $10,000.

The Texas study looked at women between the ages of 18 and 44, but the St. Louis and Colorado programs also found high demand among young people. In St. Louis, where counselors used a LARC-first counseling approach and offered all forms of birth control without cost, 72 percent of the 1,404 teenagers participating in the study chose an IUD or implant. (Nationally, about 5 percent of teenagers use long-acting contraceptives.)

Stephanie Teal, medical director for the family-planning program at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said positive experiences and word of mouth have driven the demand for LARCs among young people, both during the statewide pilot and, since the legislature declined to appropriate $5 million to keep that program running last year, in the scaled-down LARC program that continues to run out of family-planning clinics in the state. Teal directs a clinic, located blocks from Aurora Central High School, that serves a racially and ethnically diverse population: 36 percent of her patients are Hispanic, and 11 percent are African American. “We did not do a lot of marketing per se,” she said. “What happened in Colorado, especially among communities of color, was a slow initial uptake. Then, as more young women saw their friends and key opinion leaders showing off their implants and saying, ‘Yeah, I don’t even have to worry about that anymore,’ we would get more people coming in. More in the early years, but even now, people are brought into our clinic by their friends or by their sisters.”

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Do adolescents truly understand the pros and cons of using IUDs and implants, as opposed to a barrier method of contraception? Unlike a condom, which protects against both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, a long-acting method leaves its users exposed to possible STIs. That’s of particular concern for young people—in the United States, those between the ages of 15 and 24 account for half of all STIs acquired each year, despite making up just a quarter of the population. In black communities, the situation is even more dire: The chlamydia rate for young black women is five times that of their white counterparts, while young black men contract the disease at nearly 10 times the rate of young white men. Among people between the ages of 13 and 24, black youth account for 57 percent of all new HIV infections. Regarding the success of LARCs in bringing down the teen birth rate—already at a record low—“we have to be really careful not to say, ‘Problem solved,’” explains Melissa Gilliam, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics and head of the Division of Family Planning at the University of Chicago. “One of the greatest causes of infertility is STIs. That’s where the public-health alarm needs to be.”

Teal says that research she’s conducted suggests that teens with IUDs use condoms less frequently than those on the pill. She and her colleagues compared two groups of young women—the first using LARCs, the second using other methods—and found that the members of both groups were just as likely to have a different sexual partner six months after the study began, but that those using a short-acting method such as the pill were more likely to have used a condom during that period. Even so, Teal adds, “our recommendation based on that data is not to give people crappier birth control; it’s to tell people that when you put in an IUD, this does not protect you from STIs.”

The laser focus on reducing births, rather than a comprehensive approach aimed at keeping those same teens safe and healthy, troubles Dorothy Roberts. “That is the history of birth control in America,” she says. “It’s been used as a way of increasing people’s reproductive freedom, and as a way of reducing populations that weren’t valued.” At least 30 states had government-run eugenics programs until the 1970s, many of which focused on black and brown girls and women. In 1990, days after the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of Norplant (a hormonal implant in capsule form that was inserted beneath the skin of a woman’s arm), a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial suggested that poor women could be incentivized to use it in order to “reduce the underclass.” States including Kansas, Connecticut, and Louisiana considered legislation making the receipt of welfare benefits conditional on Norplant insertion. Baltimore started a program that encouraged teen girls considered at risk of getting pregnant to have Norplant inserted on the state’s dime. Meanwhile, women complained of terrible side effects, including excessive bleeding, pain, and infection after the capsules were inserted. As recently as 2010, nearly 150 people in women’s prisons in California were sterilized at the urging of doctors who didn’t have informed consent from their patients. The state paid $147,460 to doctors to perform the surgeries, leading one such doctor to comment: “That isn’t a huge amount of money, compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children.” As Roberts notes, “The idea that we’ve gone past eugenicist thinking, past racist thinking, past population-control ideology, is just false.”

Loretta Ross, co-founder of the Atlanta-based reproductive-justice organization SisterSong, has a particularly chilling story. She told an interviewer that in the early ’70s, her doctor misdiagnosed symptoms from a pelvic inflammatory disease related to her Dalkon Shield as sexually transmitted infections; that assumption came easily because she was a black woman, Ross has said. His failure to remove the IUD over the course of six months left her infertile at 23. The company that made the Dalkon Shield would eventually face $12 billion in lawsuits and discontinue its production.

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When it comes to evaluating ways to make effective but costly birth-control methods affordable to low-income women and girls, raising the history of coercion in state-sponsored birth-control programs can sound paranoid to some clinicians and reproductive-health advocates. But disregarding the impact of such stories, which are often passed down from one generation to the next, leaves LARC proponents unprepared to effectively engage with patients who have taken family members’ advice to heart, says Aimee Thorne-Thomsen, vice president for strategic partnerships at Advocates for Youth. Her organization trains healthcare providers in long-acting forms of contraception, letting them know that young people can be good candidates if IUDs or implants are their preference. Her group also educates communities about various forms of contraception. “Some of our colleagues don’t fully understand that the conversation around LARCs is much more complicated than simply a public-health message or a contraception-access message,” says Thorne-Thomsen, who is Latina. “There is a context that already exists in many communities of color and low-income communities around the country, and some of that is medical mistrust based on real, lived experiences.”

When Elizabeth Dawes Gay, a reproductive-justice advocate who works in public health, talked to friends and family about her decision to get an IUD, she found that anxieties about the quality of care offered to women of color persist. At 24, Gay decided after extensive research that the ParaGard, a hormone-free copper IUD, was right for her. She’d been taking the pill but needed to stop after learning that its mix of hormones put migraine sufferers like her at an increased risk of stroke. Gay, who is black, read up on the IUD’s potential side effects, corrected friends who warned that it would cause infertility, and met with a provider at Planned Parenthood, where she had the device inserted. She felt good about her choice and still does now, five years later. But an older relative was initially worried for her. “Somehow it came up that the nurse practitioner that inserted it was a white lady,” Gay said. “She said, ‘How do you know that she did it right or that she didn’t do something to hurt you?’”

The fears of Gay’s relative were unfounded, but some healthcare providers can be insensitive to patients, often unintentionally. Natasha Vianna was given DepoProvera two weeks after she gave birth at age 17. The nurse who’d suggested the shot pointed out that Vianna had conceived her daughter while on the pill, which the nurse offered as proof that the teen couldn’t use that method responsibly. Vianna said the nurse encouraged her to get back on birth control that day rather than wait until her six-week appointment. She doesn’t remember the nurse asking her about her preferences or telling her what side effects to expect from the injection. A decade later, Vianna describes their short exchange as awkward and uncomfortable. Still, she stayed on Depo for more than a year; it never occurred to her that she could stop using it. “After someone basically told me that I was irresponsible with birth-control pills, I didn’t feel I could walk back in there and say, ‘You guys are wrong,’” she said. “I didn’t feel confident enough to do that.”

Vianna, now a reproductive-justice activist who spent five years with the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy, remembers the demographics at the clinic clearly: People who were there for pre- or postnatal services were young women of color, like her. The doctors and nurse practitioners were white. “I look back and wonder: Do these people have such unconscious biases that they were making assumptions about young Latinas?” Vianna says.

Research suggests that bias, including the unconscious kind, is at work when providers recommend birth-control methods to patients. In 2010, Christine Dehlendorf, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, conducted a study that found that providers were more likely to recommend the IUD to low-income black and Latina patients than to low-income white patients with comparable reproductive-health histories. A 2007 study came to a similar conclusion, this time from the patients’ perspective: It found that during conversations with their healthcare providers, low-income black and Latina women felt more pressure to limit their family size than middle-class white women did. That’s why the doctors and public-health researchers I spoke with stressed the importance of including information about the history of medical coercion, as well as what Gomez at Berkeley called the social determinants of health, in medical education: Clinicians need to better understand the context in which they’re providing care. “Race matters in contraceptive recommendations,” Dehlendorf says, “and specifically in recommendations around IUDs. And it shouldn’t matter.”

One way to overcome latent bias, Dehlendorf adds, is to use a counseling model that explicitly focuses on a woman’s preferences. That approach positions the healthcare provider to offer decision support—something that many people say they want when choosing a method. It’s one way to encourage providers to respect everyone’s right to determine her own reproductive destiny. It may also be a way to teach healthcare professionals how to offer the kind of care that Vianna said she was looking for 10 years ago, when she was a young mother in need of information about birth control. “I didn’t ever want people to look at me like I was data,” Vianna says. “Look at me like a person, and talk to me like a person.”

Earlier this month, a group of organizations including Black Youth Project and the Dream Defenders—both leaders in the movement for black lives—released a video that seeks to highlight similarities between black Americans’ and Palestinians’ struggles against state violence. “When I see them, I see us,” various Palestinian and black activists and artists say as still images of people who have been killed at the hands of police or other armed forces fill the screen. “We are not statistics. We are not collateral damage. We have names and faces.”

In explaining the intent of the video, one of the its creators told Al Jazeera America, “Here were two groups of people dealing with completely different historical trajectories, but both which resulted in a process of dehumanization that criminalized them and that subject their bodies as expendable.” Another person behind the video’s production said that Israel and the United States “strengthen their state power by convincing much of the public that uprisings in Ferguson and Gaza are signs of pathological criminality, as opposed to critical actions of resistance against state powers that actively engage in historical genocide.”

Talk of solidarity between human-rights struggles happening in different parts of the world may appear as mostly symbolic—the province of consciousness-raising online campaigns like the video, sign-on letters, and statements of support from celebrities with high profiles. But the same day that the video launched online, one of the women it features was in the midst of her own struggle and surrounded by a showing of black-Palestinian solidarity. On Wednesday, October 14, Rasmea Odeh stood outside a courthouse in Cincinnati after her attorney argued before the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that she had not received a fair trial in federal court in Detroit late last year and is being denied her right to remain in this country as a naturalized citizen. Rallying around her were about 100 people, including representatives from black organizing circles in Chicago and members of Cincinnati’s Black Lives Matter contingent, who stood shoulder to shoulder with members of Chicago’s Arab immigrant and Arab-American communities.

Odeh is a 68-year-old woman who in October 2013 was arrested at her home in suburban Chicago and charged with lying to obtain her citizenship. The federal government claims that she had deceived immigration officials during her application process in 2004 because when asked whether she had ever been incarcerated, Odeh replied that she had not. In fact, Odeh had spent 10 years in prison after being sentenced to life by an Israeli military court for her alleged involvement in the bombings and for her involvement in a Palestinian organization Israel deemed illegal. She was released after a decade as part of a prisoner exchange and moved to Jordan, where she lived until immigrating to the United States in 1995. During this incarceration, Odeh says she endured various forms of torture, including rape, and that she gave a false confession as a result. According to her supporters, Odeh is one of the first Palestinian women to speak about the Israeli military’s use of rape as a form of torture.

“I support this case because I know this story,” said Brian Taylor, an organizer with Cincinnati Black Lives Matter. Taylor said that while he had learned the specifics of Odeh’s case only days before the appeal hearing, he immediately connected the racially based targeting Odeh’s supporters say that she and other Palestinians face to police violence that victimizes black Cincinnatians, such as the recent killings of 43-year-old Sam DuBose by University of Cincinnati police and 22-year-old QuanDavier Hicks by Cincinnati police.

“Your struggle against oppression is my struggle against oppression, whether it’s in the West Bank or in downtown Cincinnati or four hours away in Chicago,” Taylor said on the courthouse steps. A busload of people inspired by Odeh’s story and by her decades of organizing in the United States and the Middle East had come to pack the courthouse to support her fight against what they say is a politically motivated attempt to have her deported.

The reason Odeh failed to mention her previous incarceration, her legal team argues, is that she lives with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that causes her to suppress memories related to that period of detainment and torture. “When she answered the questions, there was a blockage,” Odeh’s attorney, Michael Deutsch, told the panel of three judges during the appeal hearing. As a result of her condition, she dissociates and blocks out events, he said. Judge John M. Rogers seemed to understand the point Deutsch was making. “She’s not saying that she didn’t know the truth. Her mind changed the nature of the question,” Rogers said, rephrasing Odeh’s team’s argument. In keeping with this logic, her response to immigration official’s question might be seen as “analogous to a translation error,” he said.

According to Odeh’s legal team, she was not allowed to testify during the Detroit trial about her incarceration, which resulted from Israel’s accusation that she had participated in a bombing in 1969 Jerusalem that left two dead and others injured. And an expert who could have testified as to Odeh’s PTSD and its relationship to that immigration interview was also barred from testifying. During this month’s appeal, Odeh’s legal team asked that that this expert be allowed to testify and a new trial be granted. “You need the expert to explain her [Odeh’s] testimony,” Deutsch told the judges. The court will either do just that or affirm Odeh’s conviction, which would mean 18 months in prison followed by deportation.

Odeh’s supporters maintain that charges that she misled immigration officials are politically motivated. Why? First, they come a decade after she became a citizen. Then, there’s the fact that federal prosecutors failed to get charges to stick after the FBI’s raids in 2010 on a group that’s come to be known as the Midwest 23, activists in Minneapolis and Chicago allegedly linked to terrorist organizations—or,as others argue, involved in solidarity activities with Palestinian and Colombian organizers. One of the Midwest 23 is Hatem Abudayyeh, Odeh’s colleague at the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) in Chicago. Because they couldn’t get the charges to stick, federal prosecutors have gone after Odeh as a consolation prize, her supporters say.

The government’s efforts to deport Odeh have sent shock waves through communities in the United States and abroad that have been affected by her work, particularly in the Chicago neighborhoods where she launched a women’s arm of AAAN, growing the Arab Women’s Committee to a membership of 600 women who work together on political education and have “lobbied around immigration and public benefit policies,” according to one report on Odeh’s work.

Nesreen Hasan, 28, is one Palestinian-American who took the bus from Chicago to support Odeh during the Cincinnati hearing. She told me that Odeh is a Palestinian feminist icon and that it’s Odeh who drew her to activism around Palestinian issues. “They disregard the work she’s done with women for 40 years,” Hasan said of the attacks on Odeh. “There’s this American stereotype that Arab women are backwards, and here they are prosecuting a woman who empowers other women.”

Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, plays into our worst stereotypes about the South. Her intransigence in the face of June’s Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide places her in a legacy of Southerners who have refused to follow the law of the land, instead using the power of their office to keep progress at bay.

But LGBTQ communities in the South face challenges beyond Kim Davis’s bigoted claims in the name of religious freedom. Since 1993, the organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG) has worked to address some of those challenges, specifically the criminalization and police violence that affect its 3,000 members across the region. SONG takes on local fights, such as its current campaign in Durham, North Carolina, to pass an ordinance to stop police profiling of the city’s LGBTQ, black, immigrant and youth residents. The Atlanta-based organization also collaborates nationally with Black Lives Matter and the Not1More organizing, strengthening the role that LGBTQ activists play in movements to end deportations and anti-black racism.

Later this year, SONG will change leadership: co-director Caitlin Breedlove will step down, and Mary Hooks will join Paulina Helm-Hernandez in leading the organization. I interviewed Hooks via e-mail about how the Supreme Court ruling on marriage affects her work and the role of religion in Southern organizing. The exchange that follows has been edited for clarity and length.

DMcC: In a recent published conversation between SONG’s current co-directors, Helm-Hernandez says, “This was never just a job to us; this was a place for our political dreams.” What is a pressing political dream you have right now, and why is SONG the place to pursue it?

MH: I dream about rigorous, bold, courageous leadership that can work across movements to take on key fights of our time. Our communities were criminalized and targeted by the war on drugs, and we grew up in that warfare. We refuse to let that war shape our lives anymore. I’m excited about winning LGBTQ-led anti-criminalization campaigns that change the real day-to-day state of our lives.

The LGBTQ movement emerged from a century of liberation fights that were based on identity. Now we are seeing the strategic necessity of our communities to work together not just around identity, but also around the giant forces creating these problems and the solutions that we want to collectively create.

DMcC: You’re moving into the role of co-director after working with SONG for four years as both Alabama field organizer and regional campaign coordinator. What’s a key lesson about LGBTQ organizing that you intend to carry with you into this new leadership position?

MH: We have to listen and talk with people about what is really going on in their lives, because that is different from what we are told is happening with black, LGBTQ and rural people, immigrants and people of color.

Many people, including those in the White House, were saying that police body cameras were going to intervene on police violence and that we should direct our efforts toward getting them in every police department. But we saw the videos of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Sandra Bland. We knew that cameras were not going to change our material conditions. When we listened to our members’ stories, we heard over and over again about daily interactions with the police that the presence of body cams isn’t going to sever. We have to think more broadly and look at systems that support this type of violent engagement in our communities. It isn’t about just one or two bad-apple cops.

DMcC: Is there a new national LGBTQ rights movement emerging now that same-sex marriage has been upheld as the law of the land? How could a new movement meet the needs of communities you work with?

MH: Of course, it’s not just middle-class white gay men that have benefited from marriage, but marriage is not the end-all solution for parts of the LGBTQ community that are living in crisis. There’s still a need to access affordable, comprehensive, and dignified healthcare. To be able to walk down the street without fear of being harassed by the police or found dead the next day for embodying our genders.

There have always been the rest of us in the queer and LGBT liberation movement. We have been doing the hard work of fighting racism, addressing HIV criminalization, supporting sex workers, providing jail and prison support. What I think is happening now is that many of the most privileged in LGBTQ communities have gotten marriage licenses and many of them will now step aside. There are people who are just going to throw rice and cut the cake, but won’t address issues of police violence, the murdering of trans black women, or mass incarceration. We are calling on those who are here to stay by our side and who won’t stand in our way as we continue to prioritize the struggles of the working-class LGBTQ community.

DMcC: When you came out as a teenager, you were rejected by the Pentecostal church. At the Movement for Black Lives gathering in Cleveland, you and an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement co-facilitated a workshop called, “The Black Church: We Need You Now More Than Ever!” What role do faith and religion play in your work?

MH: Church missionaries and mothers taught me how to organize. I sat and learned from elders and I saw interdependence demonstrated. I felt affirmed by the intergenerational community of the black church. But when I made the decision to live out loud as a lesbian, all hell broke loose. The very community I found refuge in condemned and shamed me. I had been willing to sacrifice some expression of myself in order to play by the rules of that community.

I believe that many black queer and trans folks long for those spaces, long for that sense of spiritual connection, and enjoy the culture of the black church. We long for those things despite the ridiculous, abusive and oppressive power dynamics that play out. I often joke and say, “I’m going to have to get saved in order to organize in the South,” because Christianity is so woven into the culture here. I think there is a lot that the black LGBTQ community and the black church can do together that can collectively build power, transform those dynamics and teach each other.

DMcC: Why is cultivating diverse and inclusive leadership especially important in LGBTQ organizing right now?

MH: LGBTQ people of color have always been in liberation movements across the world and over time. Circumstances of history have dictated whether or not we’ve been “out,” but we have always been there. Today, we see LGBTQ leaders and organizers embedded in both the LGBTQ movement and in non-LGBTQ specific movements. There are queer and trans folks doing work inside the black liberation, immigrant rights and reproductive justice movements. And leaders from these communities and movements are working within the LGBTQ movement.

We need each other to survive the crises of our times and to dream about what we can build together. SONG was founded based on this belief, and we have worked over the past two decades to build the type of multi-racial organizing that can achieve great changes for our communities. It is especially important to foster inclusive leadership not just for diversity’s sake, but because our movements won’t win without it.

This week, anyone who hadn’t already been following the latest attacks on Planned Parenthood was jolted to attention as the organization’s president, Cecile Richards, went before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Over the course of Tuesday’s five-hour hearing, far-right committee members continued their dishonest and illogical claims about the organization in an effort to bolster their case that the federal government should “defund” Planned Parenthood, or stop the $500 million in Medicaid reimbursements that the organization currently receives for health services such as testing for sexually transmitted infections and providing birth control.

On Tuesday, there was an outpouring of support for the organization, which serves 2.7 million people nationwide. Supporters turned their social media profiles pink and a coalition of activists and patients delivered more than 2.4 million “I stand with Planned Parenthood” petition signatures to congressional leaders. Nearly 300 rallies and events were held nationwide. The sea of pink featured in news reports confirmed the message that Republican hardliners refuse to hear: The American public is not falling for the lies or the narrative that the deceptive, highly edited videos that started this mess seek to portray. Sixty percent of those polled this week believe that any federal budget agreement must maintain funding for Planned Parenthood.

So what now? What beyond that highly successful “pink out” and the hashtags? Here are four ways to stay engaged.

1. Correct the rampant misinformation floating around.

Outright lies underpin this witch hunt. From Carly Fiorina boldly lying to viewers of the last Republican presidential debate about the sting videos, to members of Congress pretending that the Hyde Amendment (which for four decades has banned the use of federal funds for abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when a pregnancy puts a person’s life at risk) doesn’t exist, hardliners are counting on the power of misinformation. To me, it’s never made much sense to engage in back-and-forths with willfully ignorant ideologues, but there are plenty of people—our friends, our family members—who just don’t know the facts and so are especially vulnerable at times like this. Stay informed and share with them what you know.

2. Organize to preserve and expand abortion access.

If anti-choicers want to pretend that the Hyde Amendment doesn’t exist, now seems as good a time as any to repeal it. An activist coalition called All* Above All has been working nationwide to get Congress to lift bans on abortion coverage. Specifically, they’re trying to pass the EACH Woman Act, which would repeal the restrictions enshrined in Hyde.

Bianca Campbell is a co-founder of Access Reproductive Care Southeast (ARC-Southeast), an abortion fund and advocacy organization based in Atlanta, and a writer with the reproductive justice collective Echoing Ida. She stressed the importance of the bill via e-mail: “Fund volunteers have been doing in-district meetings with their state reps to talk about repealing Hyde and making private insurance cover abortion care as well. Doing that is one way to help Planned Parenthood and the broader access conversation.”

This is just one legislative battle underway, and there are plenty more on the state level. If you want to do something more explicitly focused on Planned Parenthood, call your local affiliate and ask how to get plugged in as a volunteer.

3. Donate to an abortion fund.

In the wake of reports that children’s author Lemony Snicket and his wife have donated $1 million to Planned Parenthood, it’s easy to feel like your $5 or $10 donation is too small. Wrong. There’s still a great need.

“People should be donating to abortion funds,” Campbell of ARC-Southeast and Echoing Ida told me via e-mail. “Planned Parenthood Southeast has the Women In Need Fund, there’s ARC and so many others. It’s important to continue the radical ways we have been circumventing the system for years.”

This means providing a way for people who need an abortion but can’t afford one to get the services they need. Cost is often an issue in part because of widespread clinic closures and mandated waiting periods that force women to travel long distances and pay for transportation and hotels. Check out the National Network of Abortion Funds to learn more.

4. Become a clinic escort.

For those willing to stand between people visiting a clinic and anti-choice protesters, becoming an escort is a way to get on the front lines. Elyse Hughes is a volunteer who serves as the Health Center Escort Program Co-chair at Planned Parenthood of New York City. She volunteers once a month at clinics in Manhattan and Brooklyn and also coordinates escorts who show up rain or shine every Saturday morning, which is when protesters who want to dissuade patients from entering are most likely to be there. Hughes said being an escort means helping patients find the entrance amidst all the people and being a smiling face in the crowd. “We’re just there for support and to normalize the process of legal, safe health care as much as possible,” she told me.

Hughes has volunteered as an escort for the past five years and said that in recent months as the attack on Planned Parenthood has ramped up, she’s gotten a flood of outreach from friends who want to know more about what she does and how they, too, can get involved. “Whenever you’re under attack it also gets your volunteers excited,” she said. “The show of support has made me feel like we’re going to be okay. We’re banding together.”

Shamika Wilson-Johnson’s husband is serving a life sentence in a Southern California prison. He is 54 years old and has been incarcerated for nearly 30 years. He has thyroid cancer and fused vertebrae that confine him to a wheelchair for long periods, Wilson-Johnson told me. Earlier this month he was denied parole for the fourth time since 2006. Despite his disability, the parole board deemed him at moderate risk for violent behavior. So Wilson-Johnson, who is 35 and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, will continue to scrape together the funds—as much as $1,000—for car rental and a hotel stay so that she and her two children, ages 4 and 7, can travel the 10 hours south to visit him.

“We were all so hopeful,” Wilson-Johnson said of the recent parole hearing. “It’s very depressing, not only for him but for the family.”

Wilson-Johnson is one of nearly 1,100 people interviewed for a report released this week about the long-term financial and emotional costs of incarceration. Unlike most discussions of the costs of prisons, which tend to frame the issue in terms of the burden to taxpayers, this latest effort surveyed formerly incarcerated people and family members of those serving time to better understand how prison impoverishes families that are often already on the edge. It’s the result of collaboration involving two dozen organizations around the country that respond to the effects of mass incarceration and challenge the policies that have created the current crisis.

The report, called Who Pays?: The True Cost of Incarceration on Families, happens to have dropped the same week as the latest Atlantic cover story from writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. The exhaustive, nine-chapter article focuses on what Coates calls “the gray wastes,” the prisons and jails where Wilson-Johnson’s husband and 2.2 million other Americans are warehoused and banished, as he writes, “beyond the promises and protections the government grants to its other citizens.” Those who eventually get out find it hard to reintegrate into society. Barriers to employment, affordable housing, education and public benefits such as food stamps are everywhere, as the report details:

• 79 percent of those surveyed reported being ineligible for or denied housing because of their own or a loved one’s record.
• Two-thirds of those interviewed said they wanted to return to school once released, but fewer than a third were able to continue with education or training.
• Three-fourths said their experience trying to find work was very difficult or nearly impossible. A quarter was employed five years after release, and just 40 percent were employed full-time five years after release.
• More than one in five respondents said they were denied public assistance such as welfare benefits or food stamps post-release.

Reading the report and the article side by side offers both statistics and intricate storytelling about human suffering, both the history that got us into this mess and suggestions—incremental as well as visionary— about how to get out of it. Coates’ reporting places a story like Wilson-Johnson’s in a national context. In one section, he travels to Maryland, where 15 percent of the state’s lifers—the largest percentage in the country — committed their crimes as juveniles. There, the average age of lifers who have been recommended for but denied release is 60. He writes, “These men and women are past the age of ‘criminal menopause,’ as some put it, and most pose no threat to their community.”

But the goal of incarceration isn’t to keep communities safe, a point that prison abolitionists have been arguing for years. Its true goal is to make invisible those who would be better served by programs that directly address their mental illness, illiteracy, addiction or poverty. Even opportunities for self-improvement that once existed in prison, such as Pell grants that allowed incarcerated people to take college courses, have vanished. In 1994, Congress voted to end prisoners’ eligibility, though they’d only made up 1 percent of the grant’s recipients, according to the report.

Coates makes the case that punishment replaced rehabilitation as the primary goal of incarceration sometime in the 1970s, but that the groundwork for convincing the American public that black people are inherently criminal and deserving of unrelenting, harsh punishment was laid in the 18th century and strengthened after the Civil War, when those who had benefited from slavery lost any incentive to protect black bodies and the labor they produced. (Kali Akuno writing for Counterpunch argued something similar recently.) To write about mass incarceration– the web of policies and cultural forces that have allowed the US prison and jail population to increase sevenfold from 1970 to today despite ups and downs in crime rates—is to write about the contemporary black experience, Coates explains: “The Gray Wastes draw from the most socioeconomically unfortunate among us, and thus take particular interest in those who are black.” And later, when explaining the role of structural racism and the “compounded deprivation” that black Americans face, he writes:

“The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities that have been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and continue to be imperiled today. Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues.”

This idea of generational peril is familiar to Wilson-Johnson, whose husband is incarcerated and who is profiled in the report. “We have incarceration throughout the family: My grandfather, my great-grandfather, my father, uncles, cousins. It’s generational,” she told me. “If society is not going to give you the resources to do better, typically you won’t do better. It’s just a cycle.”

Women like Wilson-Johnson bear both the emotional and financial costs of overincarceration. According to the report, two in five black women are related to someone who’s locked up. From the time a loved one goes into the system until the time they get out and beyond, these women disproportionately shoulder the costs of incarceration. Eighty-three percent of those responsible for court-related costs such as attorney’s fees, bail and restitution to victims are women, according to the Who Pays? report. Women also overwhelmingly cover the cost of maintaining contact once someone’s sent away, such as paying for phone calls and visits. Of the family members surveyed who covered such costs, 87 percent were women.

Thankfully, Coates doesn’t reinforce the commonly held idea that men serve time while women suffer a kind of collateral damage, affected by mass incarceration as family members but not themselves sent to the gray wastes. He talks to a woman in Detroit named Tonya who served 18 years for a gun and murder charge. Her story illustrates the isolation those in prison often endure while locked up, regardless of sex. She tells Coates, “First I would get one [visit] like every four months. And then I wouldn’t get none for like maybe a year. You know, because it was too far away. And I started to have losses. I lost my mom, my brothers.… So it was hard, you know, for me to get visits.”

Some may take Coates’ article and the report released by a coalition of social justice non-profits as simply the latest additions to a large body of literature that lays out what many of us already know: that government officials have long used prisons a way to disappear poor and black people. That rather than being “broken,” the system is working just as it was intended to—as a method of social control and as a lazy and dehumanizing way to avoid addressing longstanding social problems. But one thing about the current moment could ensure that these offerings outlast this week’s news cycle: the upcoming presidential election.

As Coates points out, Democrats have been as much to blame for promoting policies that led to overincarceration as Republicans. We may credit Nixon and the Southern Strategy with exploiting beliefs about inherent black criminality into the latter part of the 20th century, but Democrats such as Joe Biden, Ann Richards and Mario Cuomo proudly supported “tough on crime” and drug war policies in the 1990s. Coates makes the case that very little of this was based on naïveté or ignorance. He writes, “Many Democrats knew exactly what they were doing—playing on fear for political gain—and did it anyway.”

Black Lives Matter organizers have already identified this as a weak spot for the party many assume is closely aligned with black communities’ interests. During an August campaign stop in New Hampshire, activists questioned Hillary Clinton about her role in passing the 1994 crime bill. In July, Black Lives Matter activists at Netroots Nation questioned Martin O’Malley, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Maryland governor who consistently refused to grant parole to eligible lifers recommended for early release. After Black Lives Matter protestors shut down his campaign appearance in Seattle, Bernie Sanders within days released a racial justice platform that largely speaks to the failings of the criminal justice system. Perhaps now’s the time to demand that Democrats pay for past sins.

Yes, there is a growing bipartisan interest in reducing prison populations, which Coates mentions. But much of the associated rhetoric focuses on the role of prisons in ballooning state budgets and frustrating fiscal conservatives. Coates and the authors of Who Pays? argue that the human costs should be enough on their own to motivate us toward a solution.

During a campaign stop in New Hampshire last month, presidential hopeful John Kasich was confronted by a libertarian voter who said he wants to support a fiscally conservative candidate who’s “not a threat to a woman’s right to control her own body.” In response, Ohio’s Republican governor said of access to abortion, “Obviously, it’s the law of the land now, and we live with the law of the land.”

Despite that evenhanded answer, Kasich is no moderate when it comes to abortion rights. Back home in Ohio, he has consistently supported his Republican colleagues in the state legislature as they chip away at Roe. In the past two years, the number of clinics providing surgical abortions in Ohio has dropped from 14 to nine. If an antichoice measure included in a budget bill passed this summer is allowed to stand, that number could dwindle even further, to just seven clinics by the end of the year. Last week, Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio and Women’s Med Group in Dayton filed a lawsuit in an effort to keep that from happening.

Between them, the two clinics provide an estimated 5,800 abortions per year and a range of other reproductive-health services. The suit filed Tuesday asks a federal court to declare recent laws limiting access to abortion in Ohio unconstitutional. At issue is a state law requiring clinics to have written transfer agreements with local hospitals. (Like the admitting-privileges requirements that have popped up in Alabama, Texas, and other states, the transfer agreement is a regulation meant to force abortion providers into shutting their doors.) In 2013, Ohio’s legislature banned public hospitals from entering into such agreements. Private hospitals, which are often Catholic institutions, have a track record of rejecting or ignoring clinics’ requests, according to the complaint. The state health department, run by a Kasich appointee who lacks any medical or public-health background, has the discretion to grant a clinic what’s called a variance, a kind of waiver of the transfer agreement requirement that must be annually renewed.

As if that’s not enough of a bureaucratic mess for providers to navigate, the state legislature recently made it even harder for the staff at clinics to do their jobs. On June 30, Kasich signed into law a budget bill that includes yet another abortion restriction. The health department is now required to approve an application for a variance within 60 days. If the application is rejected or if the clock runs out, that clinic loses its license immediately and has no right to appeal. According to a recent editorial in the Toledo Blade, “The variances often take months to approve and are deliberately ignored by Ohio’s anti-choice health department.”

The two remaining providers in the southwestern part of the state know this waiting game well. A Planned Parenthood clinic in Cincinnati and the Women’s Med clinic in Dayton have been granted variances, or exceptions, and depend on timely renewals to keep their doors open past this fall. If the Planned Parenthood clinic closes, Cincinnati will be the largest metropolitan area in the country without a surgical abortion provider. And those among the 2.1 million people who live in the metro area and who want an abortion will then have to clear all the usual and intended roadblocks: They will have to travel 220 miles roundtrip to a clinic in Columbus. They will need to make multiple trips or pay for a hotel room, because state law requires counseling and an ultrasound and a 24-hour wait between that appointment and the procedure itself. Patients who are more than 16 weeks pregnant will need to travel even further, a 502 miles roundtrip to Cleveland.

Proponents of TRAP laws such as those at work in Ohio portray them as an effort to simply make sure that clinics are being appropriately regulated. But if there was any question about the true goal of these labyrinthine requirements, one local antichoice activist last week cleared up any confusion. Paula Westwood, director of Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati, told WCPO that providers shouldn’t be granted variances because abortions are “physically, emotionally and psychologically damaging to women, and terminal for their unborn babies.”

Unfortunately, we can’t expect as much honesty from candidate Kasich, who will likely keep trying to sanitize his image for the national stage.

Soon after Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans’s failed levees displaced 400,000 of the city’s residents, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) made a move that would dramatically reduce the availability of public housing in the city. The plan, announced in early 2006, involved the demolition of the city’s four major public housing complexes, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, Lafitte, and St. Bernard, known collectively as the Big Four.

The hurricane hadn’t rendered the brick buildings uninhabitable. HUD determined that they were structurally sound and would be fine after a good cleaning. But the forced removal of residents caused by the storm coincided with a desire on the part of the agencies and local business interests to replace the projects with mixed-income development. Of the just more than 4,500 units that were demolished beginning in 2008, only 700 public housing apartments are included in the mixed-income redevelopment.

Barred from their pre-Katrina homes, where did the rest of those families go? A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research attempts to find out. It argues that black women bore the brunt of this aspect of the disaster, since the vast majority of lease holders in public housing are women. In the four projects, upwards of 75 percent of families had female heads of households with children under 18. The report, called “Get to the Bricks: the Experiences of Black Women from New Orleans Public Housing after Hurricane Katrina,” also argues that these women’s experiences and demands have largely been left out of the rebuilding process. It tries to correct the record by gathering their stories.

Over the course of two years, from 2008 to 2010, researchers interviewed 184 black women who had lived in the Big Four at the time of the hurricane. They were now in Baton Rouge, Houston, or back in New Orleans. Taken together, their words paint a picture of the horrors and disruptions that these women and their families have experienced. After managing to survive the rising floodwaters in their homes, days-long waits for help, and chaotic conditions in the Superdome, they were bused to unfamiliar places where they had to determine how, when, and whether to go home.

The report describes the effect of displacement on these women’s economic conditions. At the time of the hurricane, 53 of the 184 interviewed were unemployed and not in school. But at the time of the interviews, that number had doubled. Three years after the disaster, 105 were neither in jobs nor enrolled in school. About half of the interviewees said they were less concerned about getting back into public housing than they were about finding an income. But the barriers to securing work after the storm were many.

Some of those interviewed speak of the outright discrimination they face from employers in their new cities, where the way they speak and their French-sounding surnames mark them as New Orleanians. A woman in Houston says, “When I open my mouth [and they hear my dialect] or if I give them my résumé, see where I worked, [they say] ‘filled the position.’” Another woman, also in Houston, says, “They say our last name even make it seem like we’re from somewhere else.”

The lack of reliable public transit also keeps jobs out of reach for these survivors. Only 12 of the 184 interviewed owned a car in 2005, but they all speak of the pressure to have one both in the cities to which they were relocated and in the redesigned New Orleans to which some have returned. Ads for jobs demanded that applicants have their own reliable form of transportation, and everyday tasks like getting to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment became time-consuming and arduous. One woman, reminiscing about her city’s good public transit prior to the storm, tells an interviewer, “I didn’t have to spend no gas money [in New Orleans] because I could use my feet.”

Most of the women interviewed said they wanted to return home to New Orleans, and many either had or were in the process of doing so over the course of the study. But poor and confusing communication from HANO made those moves more difficult, according to the report. Many of the women complained of a lack of help from housing authority officials as they struggled to understand their options and the resources available. Officials established an expanded system of housing vouchers in New Orleans — a move they said would de-concentrate poverty — moving former public housing residents into units where vouchers are accepted. The problem then became finding landlords who didn’t discriminate against Section 8 voucher holders. When in public housing, residents’ rent included utilities. Under the new system, voucher holders had to pay these additional costs on top of rent, and often a solid credit score was a condition of getting approved for a rental.

Those who wanted to return to New Orleans and navigate the new systems faced a housing shortage. Rents increased by 35 percent in the first year following the hurricane. One retiree interviewed in 2008 commented on how expensive everything had become. “They want to make you feel bad [for coming back]…. the price of food has risen twice as much as it was before Katrina,” she said. “Everything has gone up triple, except for our benefits.”

Women who remained in the cities to which they’d been displaced didn’t fare much better. Houston housing authority officials told a disabled retiree to move into a homeless shelter after her housing voucher was stolen and the authority refused to replace it. Barred by shelter rules from staying there during the day, the woman turned again to the housing authority and was advised to spend her days in the city’s parks. About enduring such unstable living conditions, the 59-year-old woman told her interviewer through tears, “I feel like a bag of snacks at a Super Bowl party. I just get passed ’round and ’round.”

The report’s authors recommend that those who shape anti-poverty, housing and disaster recovery policy should improve communication among service providers as a way to guard against the occurrence of such nightmares, one of many recounted in “Get to the Bricks.” It also recommends that the construction of mixed-income housing not be prioritized over housing that will remain permanently affordable for low-income residents.

In August 1964, a Mississippi sharecropper and civil-rights organizer named Fannie Lou Hamer famously told a gathering at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City that she was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Her televised testimony about conditions in the rural South packed such a punch that LBJ reportedly announced an impromptu press conference in the middle of it in an effort to divert attention.

Southern politicians have no less reason to be embarrassed 51 years later. As a new report that focuses on Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia shows, the lives of black women and girls in the rural South are still too often marked by illness and exhaustion. A quarter of residents in the areas studied reported being in poor or fair health, compared to a tenth of residents in each of the states’ major metropolitan counties. One Alabama county had a black infant mortality rate of 29 deaths per 1,000 births, nearly five times the national rate of 6.2 per 1,000. In two Mississippi counties studied, the teen birth rates were 89 and 95 births per 1,000 young women between the ages of 15 and 19. Compare this to the state’s teen birth rate of 59 births per 1,000 and the national rate of 26.5 births per 1,000.

The report, titled “The State of Black Women and Families in the Rural South,” helps fill a gap in recent efforts to include black women and girls in national conversations about structural racism, much of which has focused on police violence and school push-out in urban areas. “The South, particularly the rural South, tends to get less attention,” said Dr. C. Nicole Mason, the report’s author and executive director of the Center and Policy in the Public Interest at the New York Women’s Foundation.

Mason partnered with the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative to produce the report, which analyzes data culled from the Census and state agencies as well as stories shared during listening groups with more than 200 women and girls. The nine counties studied were defined as persistently poor by the US Department of Agriculture, meaning that at least 20 percent of population has lived in poverty for more than five consecutive years. Among the key findings about these counties:

• In Alabama’s Lowndes County, 96 percent of black women live in poverty compared to 3.6 percent of white women. In Mississippi’s Sharkey County, 95 percent of black women live in poverty compared to 5 percent of white women. Nationwide, a quarter of black women live in poverty, and the female poverty rate overall is 15 percent.
• A third of black women lacked a high school diploma or its equivalent, compared to between 8 and 17 percent of white women in these counties. Black women were 20 percent less likely than white women to have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• A quarter of individuals lacked health insurance. Of those who had it, 40 percent or more relied on Medicaid or another form of public health insurance.

The health outcomes reported are particularly distressing: Mississippi leads the nation in gonorrhea infections. The three rural counties studied in Georgia have a teen pregnancy rate more than double the state’s. Policy solutions such as the adoption of comprehensive sex education or the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act—which all of these states’ Republican governors have refused—are unlikely to be embraced by elected officials anytime soon. “These women are really vulnerable because of the leadership in these states,” Mason said. She added that if successful, efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and prevent its affiliates from providing testing, treatment and preventive care to low-income women would further disadvantage a population that’s already struggling to stay healthy. Fewer than half of women in the areas studied live within a 30-minute drive to a hospital or clinic. “It presents a particular danger for women in these counties because of the lack of access to quality healthcare,” Mason said.

According to news out of Georgia and Alabama last week, this particular resource is safe for now. In both states, efforts to defund Planned Parenthood hit roadblocks despite the now month-long anti-choice campaign to convince the country that the provider illegally sells fetal tissue for profit. The Georgia Department of Public Health investigated the states’ affiliates and announced that it found no wrongdoing. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley announced earlier this month that the state’s Medicaid recipients could no longer receive health services through Planned Parenthood. Last week, the US Department of Health and Human Services warned that barring a qualified provider could put the state in violation of federal law.

In the dash-cam video of the arrest of Sandra Bland, Officer Brian Encinia can be heard telling Bland that he’s made the stop because she changed lanes without using her turn signal. Soon after, when asked why she’s so irritated, Bland points out that the stop seems unnecessary and unfair: She changed lanes in an effort to get out of the officer’s way because he’d been tailing her so closely.

We know that Bland was soon tackled by police on the side of the road and found dead in her jail cell three days later. Authorities deemed the cause of death self-inflicted asphyxiation. Bland’s family insists that she was not depressed or suicidal. After sustained public outcry, the FBI, Texas Rangers, and Waller County officials launched an investigation into her death.

On Friday, we learned that Bland had had “at least 10 encounters” with police in Illinois and Texas. The majority of these encounters were the same sort that would eventually precede Bland’s death: traffic stops. According to an NBC Chicago news report, Bland owed more than $7,000 in court fines resulting from five traffic stops and had been cited for failing to pay those fines. The NBC piece falls into the tradition of the “no angel” narrative we’ve seen elsewhere. The faults of other black Americans who have died at the hands of police or vigilantes or while in state custody are well known: Michael Brown smoked weed. Trayvon Martin had been suspended from school. Walter Scott hadn’t paid his child support. The implication is that the person who’s dead had it coming, and that the perpetrator is less culpable because of the victim’s past.

Racial disparities in police stops are well documented. The Washington Post reported last year that, based on Justice Department statistics, “A black driver is about 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than a white driver, or about 23 percent more likely than a Hispanic driver.” You have to be pulled over in the first place for an officer to find out that you’re driving without insurance, under the influence, or in possession of marijuana. (And about the charges for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia in Bland’s past and her alleged use while in custody, legalization in places such as Colorado and Oregon have made it clearer than ever that using marijuana is just fine as long as you’re not black or brown. Unfortunately, Bland’s use won’t be characterized as quirky and hip the way it increasingly is with other users.)

Last year, when the Justice Department took a close look at how the criminal justice system works in Ferguson, its findings were telling: “A black motorist who is pulled over is twice as likely to be searched as a white motorist, even though searches of white drivers are more likely to turn up drugs or other contraband, the report found. Minor, largely discretionary offenses such as disturbing the peace and jaywalking were brought almost exclusively against blacks. When whites were charged with these crimes, they were 68 percent more likely to have their cases dismissed.” An earlier report out of Missouri found that Ferguson was cashing in on poverty crimes to keep the city running. Court fines and fees were the city’s second-biggest source of revenue.

Bland’s response upon being stopped, the irritation that the officer picked up on and that some have called arrogance, should be viewed through this lens. If the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson was, as The New York Times put it, “simply the spark that ignited years of pent-up tension and animosity in the area,” then Bland’s response upon being stopped came from a similar place of pent-up tension. She didn’t bow and scrape and defer to the increasingly aggressive officer, as some are suggesting she should have. Sometimes a person or a people have just had enough.

In 2004, I was part of a group of earnest young Cincinnatians who were determined to get George W. Bush out of office. We weren’t seasoned in much of anything, let alone electoral politics, but we figured our days of campus and community organizing and our social justice nonprofit jobs had prepared us to significantly increase voter turnout in the upcoming presidential election. We were a group of friends and acquaintances who’d formed a local chapter of a national effort called the League of Pissed Off Voters. In the months leading up to November, we set out with clipboards, registration cards and the voter guides we’d put together to mobilize Hamilton County voters—particularly the 43 percent of Cincinnati residents who were black. None of us were excited about John Kerry. But we lived in a swing state, and we’d lived through the first Bush administration, and feigning enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate and agenda seemed like our best bet at making change.

We created a youthful, multiracial conversation about progressive politics where there hadn’t been one, but I’ve often wondered how we could have more effectively built power. I got my answer after watching events unfold in Phoenix on Saturday. Netroots Nation attendees with connections to the #BlackLivesMatter movement took over the candidates’ forum at the progressive gathering, demanding to know what steps Democratic presidential candidates Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley would take, if elected, to dismantle structural racism. Both candidates fumbled, with O’Malley shifting the focus away from protestors’ specific concerns about black lives and Sanders dismissively referencing his civil rights work as proof that he already gets it.

The action kicked off a necessary conversation about the Democratic candidates’ reluctance to address racism directly, the problem with saying “all lives matter,” and why economic populism devoid of a race and gender analysis will neither satisfy nor mobilize a sizeable chunk of progressive voters. By forcing the candidates to respond, these activists have changed the tone for the 2016 election season, putting Democrats on notice that they cannot expect the support of black voters—particularly young black voters—without speaking directly and meaningfully to issues of race and state power currently gripping the country.

But #BlackLivesMatter organizers aren’t just sending a message to party operatives. They’re also speaking to those of us who, during pre-Obama election cycles, sold ourselves short. We bought into the idea that we simply needed to amplify the existing progressive message in order to win, no matter how much it ignored our lived experiences. They are offering a new model to those of us who believed that people weren’t coming to the polls because they didn’t understand what was at stake, because they didn’t understand the importance of rallying behind the lesser of two evils. This naive and condescending belief led my fellow Leaguers and me to try to organize anywhere we expected a critical mass of young people of color, including the club. I still cringe at our awkward, well-intentioned attempts to chat people up about voting as they tried to dance to Lil Jon and Petey Pablo. We were culturally tone deaf. We were half-heartedly selling a lackluster candidate who hadn’t done much to be in conversation with black voters. As a result, we were largely irrelevant. Saturday’s protesters got in on the action early, more than a year before the election, and demanded that Democratic candidates come up with a platform that voter organizers can in good conscience sell in black communities.

In the wake of the Netroots protest, some conference attendees and observers are saying that the action wasn’t strategic, that the activists were rude and unnecessarily disruptive at an event that they could have influenced at a more opportune time and in a less aggressive way. This has not been the only response, but it’s been a particularly loud one. These critics have yet to understand the rejection of respectability politics that lies at the heart of much of the current organizing. As writer Jamilah Lemieux explained in a recent essay on the topic, “We cannot make white people love us by being ‘good’ and mannerable in our resistance to oppression.” The tactics voter organizers like me used during the Bush years were good and mannerable. They didn’t work. They were the kind of tactics you use when you don’t really believe you can set your own agenda and win.

Zandria Robinson started tweeting because she lost a bet. Several years ago, a student told the sociologist that she should try her style of engaging analysis on Twitter, where ideas about race, gender, and class were bandied about by academics, media makers and incisive thinkers of all stripes. Robinson, author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South, calls herself a late adopter of social media, but she made a good-natured wager: She’d try it if the student was accepted into a graduate program she’d applied for. The student got into UCLA, and Robinson got on Twitter.

Fast-forward three years, and Robinson’s Twitter and Facebook feeds and her personal blog have landed her in the midst of a national controversy. Critics seized on comments she made publicly while employed at the University of Memphis—including those about the Confederate flag, capitalism, and the challenges students of color face in applying to graduate school—to build a case that she is unfit to teach, especially at a public university. One Daily Caller headline puts the descriptor “taxpayer-funded” in all caps.

Reports of Robinson’s comments bubbled up from the corners of the conservative blogosphere—from sites called SoCawlege.com and Campus Reform to Fox News and Memphis’s daily paper. So when the University of Memphis posted a tweet on June 30 that read, “Zandria Robinson is no longer employed by the University of Memphis,” it appeared that administrators had caved to the pressure.

Sound familiar? As my colleague Michelle Goldberg reported recently, attacks on academic freedom are at a fever pitch these days, with professors being sanctioned and, in some cases, ousted for making comments that an individual student or an organized group finds offensive. In fact, Robinson accepted a position at another university, and hadn’t been fired—but as outcry mounted, the University of Memphis failed to mention this. A letter that began circulating last week in support of Robinson and signed by more than 100 black intellectuals, argues that black scholars are at particular risk right now, when campuses are rife with heightened surveillance by disgruntled students and administrators unwilling or unable to go to bat for faculty. Beyond the specifics of Robinson’s situation, the pattern of attacks on black scholars deserves attention, the signatories attest.

Efforts to damage Robinson’s career follow closely on the heels of a similar attack on another young black woman sociologist. This spring, Saida Grundy’s tweets were mined for the most potentially inflammatory content, which then ricocheted around the conservative echo chamber until they reached mainstream news and Boston University, where Grundy had recently been hired as an assistant professor. Grundy eventually expressed regret over her comments, and Boston University’s president released a statement distancing the university from her tweets but stating that she would join the faculty there as planned.

Aimee Meredith Cox, a cultural anthropologist who teaches in the African and African-American Studies department at Fordham University, said the letter in support of Robinson is intended to highlight what it calls a “fire that threatens to engulf the entire academic industry.”

“We are not going to allow this to become about one individual,” Cox said. “This is a larger attack on black intellectual life and through that, an attack on black lives in general.”

A July 1 Inside Higher Ed post goes a step further, stating that these attacks are not only raced but also gendered, and that we’re in the midst of “a culture war going on about the online comments of black women in academe, and specifically in sociology.” Black people in tenure-track positions are scarce on campuses nationwide. In 2011, black professors held 5 percent of tenure-track jobs (those with the titles of assistant, associate, or full professor), according to National Center for Education Statistics data. Black women held 2.6 percent of those jobs, while white women held 30 percent and white men held 45.6 percent. Clearly, students at predominately white institutions are often not used to having black teachers or professors. Some appreciate the new experience, and others are challenged by it. Cox of Fordham, who describes herself as a dark-skinned black woman who reads as younger than her years, says she’s experienced this first-hand. “It makes people angry before you open your mouth,” she said. “There’s a resistance when you just come in a classroom before you’ve even said anything.”

Robinson said the critical responses she’s received online have an undercurrent of both racism and sexism, with people questioning her intelligence and qualifications and skewering her looks. In a recent blog post responding to the controversy, Robinson asserts that she’s a legacy alumna of the University of Memphis, where she received both her undergraduate and master’s degrees. Her PhD is from Northwestern. “When they’re trolling a white guy, no one says ‘How did you get this job?’ It’s not this ‘taxpayer funded’ [language],” she said. Some attacks are specific to her gender as well. “People aren’t often trolling men about their appearance.”

So why do scholars set themselves up to get trolled on social media in the first place? Why not stick to communicating ideas through academic writing and the classroom? Because, as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has explained, industry pressures have put an end to the days of the cloistered, dignified but obscure academic, particularly for those who work in a discipline that’s focused on contemporary culture and politics.

Shana L. Redmond, a signer of the letter in support of Robinson and an associate professor of American studies and ethnicity at University of Southern California, spoke of a “push toward a more Melissa Harris-Perry model of scholarship in which you’re constantly on television, you’re on the radio, you’re on social media. You have a public profile.” In an effort to build a brand and engage with a like-minded audience, many up and coming academics in the social sciences and humanities go online. Employers’ encouragement to do just that can be explicit. “That is the language that I heard while I was being recruited,” Redmond said. “This language of ‘entrepreneurship.’”

#BlackLivesMatter organizing has captured the public imagination in the past year, and many black intellectuals who study and offer frameworks for understanding contemporary black life are caught between a rock and a hard place. They want and perhaps even need to engage with an audience outside the ivory tower—people who aren’t reading the academic journals where they’re published, but who are on the front lines of the issues they research. But these public conversations leave them open to attacks from those who want to undermine the activism and any scholarship that helps fuel it.

Cox of Fordham said while many of these attacks can be traced to the conservative blogosphere, they indicate a larger trend she’s seen on campuses—expressions of resentment from, say, the pre-med or engineering student required to take an ethnic-studies course, or students’ general discomfort when asked to think about race, class, or gender in ways they’ve never encountered before. “I have these students who are mad that they are being asked to think through a different paradigm,” Cox said. “They are especially angry because they can point to the symbolism of a black president.”

A deep anti-intellectualism runs through critics’ posts on Robinson. For example, one post takes issue with a word she used in a tweet about the Confederate flag. It reads in part:

The $20-dollar word “heteropatriarchal” used by the fourth- or fifth-tier public school professor means a combination of male and heterosexual power “essentially describing the severe sex and gender bias prevalent among the elite ruling classes of nation-states,” according to the Collins English Dictionary. However, this fancypants definition is currently “pending investigation.”

The implication here is that Robinson has no business using a big word that readers of the Daily Caller may need to have defined for them. It also points to an argument that signers of the letter make—that scholars who are merely having honest, rigorous conversations about how identity and power work in the United States are the ones coming under attack. “When people name things as they are, they become targets,” Cox said. “We can’t dumb stuff down or misname it or sanitize it or make it sound good so people don’t get offended.”

No, Robinson was not fired from her position—despite her critics’ best efforts. Still, the University of Memphis’s decision to tweet that it was no longer her employer shows a reluctance to defend the very behaviors—crossover appeal, socially engaged scholarship, success as a public intellectual—that an institution might brag about under different circumstances. Zandria Robinson is any indication, there’s a thin line between prestige and infamy in the eyes of the academy.

I asked Shana Redmond of USC what advice she would give to a young black woman PhD just starting her career, given these cases of scholars’ speech in public spaces being used against them. “They have to find that unique balance of not losing who they are while still doing the work that will get them where they want to be,” she said. “I would never advise anyone to make themselves small in order to fit into this industry.”

Just before 2 AM on an August morning in 2006, seven gay black women were harassed as they walked down a street in New York City’s West Village. A man seated on a fire hydrant outside a movie theater called them “dyke bitches,” according to one of the women. He told them, “I’ll fuck you straight.” Dissatisfied by their response, he spit at them and threw a cigarette.

What happened next, a confrontation which led to four of the women being convicted on felony charges and spending years in prison, is the subject of Out in the Night, a documentary streaming online until July 23 and which premiered on PBS and Logo TV last week.

In short, the man—who was discovered to have commented online that “women should welcome your advances because that’s how the race should propagate itself” and that “80 percent of serial killers are homosexual”—sustained stab wounds after one of the women pulled a knife in the midst of the melee that followed. The women, who had traveled to the Village from New Jersey that night, suffered among them a bruised eye and busted lip, a fistful of dreadlocks pulled from the scalp, and choke marks on the neck, among other injuries. The women maintain that their harasser swung first, and that his aggression eventually drew the attention and involvement of onlookers.

But in the eyes of many of the corporate media outlets that reported on the incident, the women were the savage and bloodthirsty aggressors. A New York Post headline called the incident “Attack of the Killer Lesbians.” Other headlines read: “The Case of the Lesbian Beatdown,” “Gal’s Growl: Hear me Roar,” and “Girls Gone Wilding.” Even the staid New York Times ran a headline that implied that a benign encounter had gone wrong because some woman couldn’t lighten up: “Man is stabbed in attack after admiring a stranger.”

It wasn’t just the media that treated the women harshly, the film argues: the criminal justice system did as well. They faced felony charges, including gang assault (simply on account of the size of their group), attempted murder, and criminal possession of a weapon. Three of them were, as an attorney interviewed puts it, “coerced by circumstance” and pled guilty. Presumably the risk of doing serious time behind bars was too much. The women who went to trial—Venice Brown, Renata Hill, Patreese Johnson, and Terrain Dandridge—became known as the New Jersey Four.

In the June issue of the The Journal of American History, University of Texas at Austin professor Kali Nicole Gross offers context that helps explain why those dehumanizing headlines made it past New York City’s copy desks and why the courts handled the incident as a gang case. In an essay about the historical experiences of black women and incarceration, she writes of late-19th- and early-20th-century architects of criminology: “Criminal anthropologists assessed female deviance, in part, by subjects’ proximity to, or distance from, Western ideals of femininity, morality, and virtue—standards against which black women failed to measure up. Proponents…masculinized black women, claiming that their physical ‘correspondence with the male is very strong’—an aberration reputedly indicative of congenital criminality.”

But, of course, it wasn’t just their gender and race that brought the hammer of public opinion down hard on the New Jersey Four. It was their sexuality and the challenge that some of the women’s appearance posed to traditional gender norms. In the film, Terrain Dandridge’s mother says she was apprehensive going into the trial, given what her daughter and her friends would represent to the judge and jury: “Of course you being a woman, then being black, and then the nerve of you to be gay.”

The film also explores the question of black people’s—particularly black women’s—right to self-defense. It’s a topic that’s received necessary attention in recent years, particularly as a common thread between the cases of Marissa Alexander, CeCe McDonald, and the one profiled in Out in the Night. In an interview in the film, Patreese Johnson—who wielded the knife and served more than seven years of her 11-year sentence before having it reduced on appeal—says, “Yes, I did pull my knife out and I did because…” She takes a deep breath before continuing, “You couldn’t tell me my best friend wasn’t about to die.”

Again, Gross’s recent essay is helpful, as it points out that long before Alexander, McDonald, and the New Jersey Four, many black women felt that staying safe was squarely their own responsibility. Gross writes: “Exclusionary notions of protection have created a need for black women to trade in extralegal violence for personal security. Historical accounts are replete with examples of otherwise-law-abiding black women found carrying small knives and other weapons to guard against daily assaults and violations at home and in the workplace—behaviors gesturing toward their often-overlooked vulnerability.”

Out in the Night is critical viewing, especially in the wake of May’s #SayHerName protests, and at a moment when groundbreaking reports on prison conditions and visionary policy change are drawing attention to the lives of women in the criminal-justice system. The second half of the film focuses on the women’s experiences in prison and immediately after—the hallucinations while inside that eventually result in a PTSD diagnosis, the twists and turns of the appeals process, the fight to regain custody of a child after years locked away. In telling the stories, the film puts a face on issues that are too often talked about in the abstract.

It helped make another issue less abstract for me as well, one that had been nagging me ever since Friday’s historic Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. I had mostly skipped over any celebration and gone straight to reading up on the critical fights LGBTQ organizers can focus on in the wake of this victory, particularly efforts to end discrimination in housing and employment. I had been thinking about the rampant street violence and street harassment that LGBTQ people, particularly those who are black and brown, still face daily. I had been nodding along with arguments about marriage being a fundamentally conservative institution, and about how exclusionary and melodramatic the last paragraph of Kennedy’s opinion is. (No union is more profound than marriage? Those who don’t marry are “condemned to live in loneliness”? No.)

But the cynic in me was stopped cold by Renata Hill’s words near the end of this film, after she’s served more than two years in prison and been freed through a retrial, after she’s regained custody of her son and fallen in love with a woman named Marilyn. “We’re building a family together, working on a home,” Hill tells the filmmaker, pride and hopefulness clear in her voice. “And one day, I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

Before opening fire in a Charleston, South Carolina, church last night, Dylann Storm Roof reportedly sat for an hour alongside those whose lives he would soon snuff out. News reports haven’t gone into great depth about what happened in the church prior to the shooting, but imagine the scene: smiles and nods in his direction from the older black women, Bibles in their laps. Picture those gathered accepting this young white man into their midst and offering commonly uttered phrases like, “Welcome, brother” and “Glad you can be with us tonight.” According to NBC News, Roof told police that he “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him.” It seems the man who would soon kill nine people was accepted without fanfare as just another person called to pray on a Wednesday night.

So how abruptly the mood in that sanctuary must have changed when 21-year-old Roof told those who had assumed best intentions, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you are taking over our country.” How many of them blamed themselves while pleading for their lives (they had time to—the gunman is reported to have reloaded his clip five times)? How many of them reflected on whether they could have anticipated such hatred, whether they should have been more skeptical of this young man who turned out to be eaten up by white supremacy and delusion?

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church victims were mowed down in part because they allowed any boundary surrounding their place of worship to be porous. They trusted Roof to be respectful and humane. (Compare this with the McKinney, Texas, residents who were so intent on keeping presumed Section 8 dwellers away from their neighborhood that they involved police in an adolescent pool party.) The parishioners who were terrorized last night were not naive in their willingness to sit alongside the man who would soon kill six women and three men. Instead, they were engaged in a survival tactic as old as the black American experience: a refusal to let one’s heart harden or one’s joy fade in the face of the irrational, deadly actions that white supremacy can generate. Neither the daily reports of black people all over the country experiencing violence and discrimination at the hands of white authority figures nor whatever attacks these individuals had personally sustained kept them from welcoming a young white man into a church with deep roots in the black community generally and the black liberation project specifically.

Unfortunately, this orientation toward accepting at face value those who are in fact duplicitous is getting black folks in trouble these days. This past week, as the Rachel Dolezal story unfolded (and unfolded… and unfolded…) several observers pointed out that the Washington woman had taken advantage of an open-door policy to blackness ensured by the enduring relevance of the ‘one-drop rule.’ Dolezal was able to carry out her deception in part because black Americans aren’t typically in the business of policing others’ racial identity. If someone says they’re black, they’re black, and to push too hard for proof is a sign of not understanding how race has historically worked in this country. One drop of “black blood”—the kind spilled in that Charleston church, presumably—a black person made under the logic of slavery and Jim Crow. That logic continues in many communities today.

My inclination with the Dolezal story was to turn away from the spectacle and maybe send her some information on John Brown, Viola Liuzzo, Jack Greenberg, and other white Americans throughout history who committed themselves to black liberation without feeling the need to create a ridiculous persona to carry it out. But news of the Charleston shootings has made me take a second look at that recent flashpoint in ongoing conversations about blackness and its meanings. Many black Americans—the kind who welcomed both Roof and Dolezal into their midst—maintain a commitment, even unconsciously, to assuming best intentions and refusing to let bitterness and cynicism get the best of them.

It’s a shame that these recent betrayals, from yesterday’s attack on black lives to the relatively insignificant sham exposed last week, have taken advantage of those who see the benefit in welcoming strangers, valuing inclusion and accepting people on the basis of who they say they are.

With two news events occurring within days of each other, Texas is showing the rest of the country what happens when unchecked state power tramples the bodies of women and girls. Both those committed to preserving access to legal abortion and those committed to eradicating police abuse have their eyes trained on the state.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court upheld part of House Bill 2, a 2013 state law that requires abortion clinics to conform to hospital-like standards that providers and advocates say are costly and unnecessary. In the wake of the ruling, only eight clinics will remain open, with people in the western half of the state forced to travel long distances to access services. Prior to the passage of HB 2, Texas had 40 operating licensed clinics. The closures mean that hundreds of thousands of women of reproductive age now live more than 200 miles away from an abortion provider. Prior to the law’s passage, no Texan lived outside that range.

As a concession to the needs of communities in south Texas, the court ruling will allow the last clinic in the Rio Grande Valley, which does not meet these ambulatory surgical center (ASC) standards, to remain open for the time being. According to a statement from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, this is an outcome “offering limited consolation to women struggling to access care.” The statement continues: “While we are proud of the role our testimony played in keeping the McAllen clinic open for now, the overall impact of HB 2 will be devastating for Texas Latinas.”

The Texas state legislature, through its passage of HB 2 and other attacks on reproductive health services, is steadily dismantling the ability of women and girls to control and feel safe in their own bodies. This week we’ve seen what this abuse of power looks like on a smaller scale. By now everyone with access to a screen (and the ability to bear witness) has seen video of Officer Eric Casebolt throwing 15-year-old Dajerria Becton onto the ground following a pool party in a Dallas suburb. Observers have analyzed the vitriolic language and extreme physical force he uses while pushing her face into the ground and kneeling on her back. Casebolt can be seen doing other inexcusable and confounding things in the video, such as waving his gun at unarmed onlookers. But the most disturbing part of the encounter is the officer’s handling of the bikini-clad teenage girl, the way he yanks her braids and twists her arm behind her back, the way he leans his weight into her body as she cries and asks someone, anyone, to call her mother.

Seeing an adult man—a white police officer at that—overpower a young black girl a fraction of his size causes a visceral response in many of us, especially those of us who have tracked the many instances of police abuse of black Americans that have garnered national attention in the past year. Casebolt’s attack highlights the vulnerability too many black women and girls experience at the hands of police—even when they’re doing something as innocuous as enjoying themselves at a pool party. That outrage may build upon hearing that this same officer has been accused of racially profiling a black driver and probing the man’s “private areas” in public view during a roadside search in 2007. And frustration over this latest incident remains for many, even though Casebolt has resigned from the McKinney Police Department. He has yet to be charged with a crime.

For women and girls in Texas—especially for those who are black, Latina or poor—it must feel like the power of the state is rarely on your side these days. In McKinney, we saw a representative of the state show complete disregard for a black girl’s right to bodily integrity. It’s less of an immediate, dramatic blow, but HB 2 reflects a similar disregard. With both the McKinney pool fiasco and the unrelenting attack on access to abortion, the state has overstepped its bounds. As a result, women and girls are less safe.

Fifty years ago, as Nina Simone put it, everybody knew about Mississippi, Goddam. Now it seems Texas is the place to watch with righteous indignation and a heavy heart.

Women in Texas—including many older women well past reproductive age—just fell victim to anti-choice legislators’ obsession with restricting access to abortion. Last week, lawmakers there passed a budget that excludes the state’s Planned Parenthood clinics from providing screenings for breast and cervical cancer. The logic of the budget provision’s supporters goes something like this: One of the things Planned Parenthood does is help people terminate unwanted pregnancies. Terminating unwanted pregnancies is bad. Therefore, Planned Parenthood should be financially strangled and denied state funds that allow it to provide a range of other women’s healthcare services.

It’s simple: “Don’t perform abortions and you get the money,” state Senator Jane Nelson, chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, has said about the plan.

The Texas legislature applied this same reasoning back in 2011, when it excluded Planned Parenthood from taking part as a qualified family planning provider under the Medicaid Women’s Health Program. Back then, the state showed that it was willing to give up $36 million in matching federal funds (and serve 30,000 fewer women) in order to maintain its commitment to reactionary reproductive-health policy. But this time around, the attack on Planned Parenthood isn’t even related to birth control or treating sexually transmitted infections. Instead, it’s an attack on Planned Parenthood’s ability to provide mammograms, pap tests, and biopsies. It’s an attack on Planned Parenthood as the place where an uninsured woman can turn when she feels a lump in her breast or has abnormal bleeding but hasn’t seen a doctor in years.

Texans are at especially high risk of developing certain reproductive cancers, according to a report from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) and the Center for Reproductive Rights. The incidence of cervical cancer there is 17 percent higher than the national average, according to the report. Latinas in Texas are the most likely to be diagnosed with it, and Latinas living along the border are 31 percent more likely to die of cervical cancer, compared to women living in non-border communities, Ana Rodriguez DeFrates, Texas policy director of NLIRH, told me. These high mortality rates are associated with the difficulty immigrant women face in getting regular screenings—exactly what Planned Parenthood has been able to offer as a provider through its participation in the Breast and Cervical Cancer Services (BCCS) program. According to news reports, last year the screening program served 33,599 Texans, 57 percent of whom were Latina.

Under the current BCCS program, Planned Parenthood provides 10 percent of screenings statewide. Proponents of the budget change argue that women who need screenings will simply need to look to other clinics in the program. But Rodriguez DeFrates of NLIRH, who testified before the state Senate budget committee on the issue, said that’s not so easy. “Latinas we talk to view Planned Parenthood as a trusted provider,” Rodriguez DeFrates said. It’s a hard-won trust the organization has gained over time, in part by employing promotoras, health workers focused on the kind of community outreach that builds lasting relationships. “To have that provider eliminated from a program that is designed to address the disproportionate deaths from very preventable forms of cancer that occur in black and brown communities.… It’s mind boggling.”

Tanene Allison, Planned Parenthood Texas Votes’ communications director, emphasized the importance of name recognition. She said she hears a similar story from many low-income and uninsured women who have had life saving interventions due to early cancer detection at one of Planned Parenthood’s health centers: They find a lump. They agonize over where to turn, since they don’t have a regular healthcare provider. Finally, someone they know says, ‘What about Planned Parenthood?’

“Once they remember Planned Parenthood, it’s an entry point to the BCCS program. These women likely don’t know BCCS as a program. They are not able to research providers in a program they’ve never heard of,” Allison said. “It’s hard to gauge how challenging it will now be for these women to figure out where to go.”

If the 2011 attack on Planned Parenthood is any indication, many women will just go without care, Rodriguez DeFrates of NLIRH said. She pointed me to a clinic in the Rio Grande Valley that’s now called Access Esperanza. It used to be a Planned Parenthood, but was forced to disaffiliate and change its name in order to survive those earlier funding cuts. When that clinic reopened its doors, it was clear that families in the community hadn’t gone elsewhere for services. According to a letter from the CEO on the clinic’s website:

When we reopened our clinic doors in Mission last September, we learned how much our patients relied on us for basic health care. Within the first eight weeks of reopening, we saw many more people with serious health problems, including cancers, as we usually treated in a year the closure. Patient after patient said that when our clinic closed, they could not find affordable care elsewhere and had received no medical care since the closure.

More than 15,000 Texans signed onto a petition urging the legislature to reject the provision, to no avail. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, could use his line-item-veto power in the coming weeks, though no one expects that he will. In the absence of additional challenges, Planned Parenthood will be able to continue providing cancer screenings through September. Then Texans will have to brainstorm harder and research longer when they find themselves in the midst of a health scare.

“The legislature is literally gambling with women’s lives,” Rodriguez DeFrates said. “It’s just infuriating.”

A new front in #BlackLivesMatter organizing is advancing today as concerned people nationwide gather to draw attention to black women and girls harmed or killed by police violence. According to organizers with Black Youth Project 100, rallies and vigils in more than 20 cities—including Baltimore, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles—will demand that onlookers, the media, and the public at large #SayHerName. Participants argue that a truly inclusive movement challenging police misconduct and state violence would make sure the names Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusseax, and Tarika Wilson—all black women killed by police—are remembered and used as motivating rallying cries alongside the names of their male counterparts.

Black boys and men are victimized by police violence more often than the girls and women in their communities. But a report out this week that offers the stories of girls and women—both cis- and transgender—whose names are not as well known in the mainstream argues that fewer numbers is no excuse for erasure. According to “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women”: “The erasure of Black women is not purely a matter of missing facts. Even where women and girls are present in the data, narratives framing police profiling and lethal force as exclusively male experiences lead researchers, the media and advocates to exclude them.” Disproportionate police contact puts black women at risk for violence, and the researchers point out that in New York City—a site of ongoing organizing against stop and frisk policies—black men and women make up the lion’s share of those targeted. In 2013, black men made up 55.7 percent of all men stopped by NYPD, while black women made up 53.4 percent of all women stopped. Yet stop-and-frisk and “driving while black” are consistently framed as male problems.

In an effort to explain why it’s so easy for black women to go missing from the narrative, Tamara Winfrey Harris explained the historical roots of the problem earlier this month: “Black women were believed unbreakable long before Kimmy Schmidt came along. Our assumed lack of fragility made our enslavement, overwork, torture and sexual exploitation conscionable in an era when ‘real’ (read: white, middle-class) women were thought in need of white men’s protection.”

The “Say Her Name” report indicates that many of these same perceptions are at work today among law enforcement. For example, no period of time confers on women a kind of protected status more than pregnancy and motherhood, but the report highlights the cases of half a dozen pregnant women and women with children present who were killed or subjected to excessive force by police. There’s Rosan Miller, the Brooklyn woman who, at 7 months pregnant, was put into what appeared to be a prohibited chokehold by NYPD after an officer approached her for grilling on a public sidewalk. There’s also the case of Danette Daniels, a 31-year-old pregnant woman who was fatally shot in the head by a Newark, New Jersey, police officer in 1997. The officer was later cleared of criminal charges. To be fair, hundreds of people marched to protest the shooting at the time. But Daniels’s name is rarely if ever heard among those of others brutalized or killed by police during that same time period, such as Anthony Baez, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo.

Recent events in Baltimore have also drawn attention to incidents of pregnant black women’s abuse at the hands of police. Last year’s Baltimore Sun investigation, “Undue Force,” about more than 100 city residents who won judgments or settlements related to police brutality, highlighted the case of Starr Brown. Brown, who in 2009 witnessed a fight in her neighborhood, was detained by police after she encouraged them to pursue the fleeing attackers. According to the Sun, when an officer lunged at her, “She said she screamed that she was pregnant, but Galletti responded, ‘[We] hear it all the time.’… ‘They slammed me down on my face,’ Brown added, her voice cracking. ‘The skin was gone on my face.… I was tossed like a rag doll. He had his knee on my back and neck. She [the other officer] had her knee on my back trying to put handcuffs on me.’” Brown eventually delivered a healthy baby and was acquitted of all charges, including obstruction, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. She won a settlement from the city of $125,000.

Pregnancy is no shield against police violence, and neither is motherhood or childhood, according to the “Say Her Name” report. It tells the story of Tarika Wilson, a 26-year-old Ohio resident killed by police when they raided her house in search of her boyfriend, who was allegedly involved in the drug trade. In the process, they killed Wilson, who wasn’t a suspect, and injured her 14-month-old son. Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, was killed under similar circumstances in 2010. The officer who fatally shot her during a raid on her grandmother’s home has been cleared of all charges.

Miriam Carey. Meagan Hockaday. Sonji Taylor. Denise Stewart. These are the names of other women who, like Tarika Wilson, were killed or abused by law enforcement in the presence of their children. For those who concern themselves with reproductive health, rights, and justice, it’s especially important to learn their stories and say their names.

Memphis, Tennessee, leads the nation in rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea infection. But as another academic year draws to a close, the schools in Tennessee’s most populous city aren’t doing anything to teach sexually active students how to be safe. Three years ago, state legislators passed a sex-education policy that doubles down on the requirement that teachers stress abstinence until marriage and allows lawsuits to be brought against teachers who distribute contraception or do anything that could be perceived as encouraging experimentation. At the time, there was a national outcry, with critics demanding to know what was meant by the “gateway sexual activity” legislators had decided couldn’t be mentioned in the classroom.

A new report from the Memphis-based reproductive justice organization SisterReach argues that Tennessee’s sex-ed policy is particularly damaging to black youth. In Memphis, 71 percent of children are black, and girls of all races between the ages of 15 and 19 experience the highest rates of chlamydia in the county. Black residents make up more than 90 percent of Shelby County’s reported cases of chlamydia and 95 percent of gonorrhea cases. But if a student in recently consolidated Shelby County schools is depending on adults at school to teach them how to stay healthy, they’re out of luck. According to small focus groups of black teens, parents, and teachers convened by SisterReach—the first effort in Tennessee to gather and the views of people of color on comprehensive sex education—more than 90 percent of the youth interviewed said they weren’t given adequate information to fully understand their bodies or how to make the right decisions about sex.

Despite the common argument from proponents of abstinence-based sex ed that additional learning should take place at home, parents interviewed said they’re not able to make up for the incomplete and misleading content their young people get in the classroom. Just 30 percent of parents said they felt comfortable talking about sex with their children, and more than 70 percent of them said they didn’t feel well informed about their own sexual health. Given that Tennessee is one of 37 states that don’t require that sex-ed curriculum be deemed accurate by medical or sexual health organizations, students there face obstacle after obstacle when it comes to learning how to negotiate contraception, prevent infection, or avoid abusive relationships.

Cherisse Scott, founder and CEO of SisterReach, said the report tells a necessary story not only about Tennessee but also about the region as a whole. “This is the Deep South where we talk about ‘fornication,’ but we won’t talk about healthy relationships,” Scott said. “Folks don’t want to talk about sex because this is the Bible Belt.”

Even beyond the religiosity of the region, other factors put low-income black youth’s health at risk. Scott points out that at pharmacies in communities of color in Memphis, getting access to contraception is especially tough. Condoms are locked up, requiring that a young person ask for assistance if they want to make a purchase, and options are limited. “There are no female condoms,” Scott said. “You have to go into different areas that have a higher income.”

She said her organization is using the report to start a conversation with the Shelby County school board. Scott’s hope is that the board will join SisterReach and other concerned Tennesseans in lobbying the state legislature to change the law during the next legislative session.

“On the local level, they’ve got to say, ‘This isn’t working,’” she said.

A new report out today asks why black women—who are overrepresented in low-wage sectors of the economy that have produced recent organizing successes, including in retail and fast food—aren’t a stronger presence in labor movement leadership. The report, called “And Still I Rise” and published by the Institute for Policy Studies, asks what it will take for these women to lead the movement and change the public perception of who a union boss is.

There’s a reason black women, who lead all women in labor force participation, readily join unions, the report argues. They face significant discrimination and wage inequality in the workplace, earning 64 cents on a white man’s dollar. They’re also three times more likely than white women to be single heads of households with children, so when it comes to finding good work and getting paid what they deserve, the stakes are even higher.

“You have this perfect storm of conditions that make black women particularly receptive to organizing,” Kimberly Freeman Brown, one of the report’s authors told me. That they are receptive is born out by data that looks more broadly at non-white women. When women of color make up the majority of the workplace, and they’re being organized by women of color, the union election win rate is 90 percent—the highest for any group.

“When women of color are organized by other women of color, we win,” Brown said. The problem is getting these women—and as “And Still I Rise” argues, specifically black women—into that role of organizer or more senior positions in general, so that they can help shape the direction of the movement. Right now, the numbers don’t look good. The report includes findings from a national survey of more than 450 black women who are rank-and-file union members, organizers and worker’s rights activists. According to the survey:

• 65 percent said they aspire to become a union leader
• Less than 3 percent reported having held elected positions, and less than 5 percent had served as president of a union or labor organization
• Less than 20 percent reported having held senior staff positions at director level or higher
• 70 percent said unions had invested in their leadership development, but almost 50 percent said that they felt impeded in using their leadership potential because of a glass ceiling

“And Still I Rise,” which borrows its title from the refrain of a Maya Angelou poem, goes beyond the numbers and includes rich narratives drawn from interviews with more than two dozen black women active in organizing for workers’ rights. Their stories point a way toward the answers to the questions that the survey data raise.

Once women are engaged in the movement and want to advance, mentorship is key, several of the women interviewed report. “It was always men who helped to mentor me from one spot to the next,” Clayola Brown, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute—a wing of the AFL-CIO focused on racial justice—tells the interviewers. “And in the beginning it was mostly white men in trade union organizations who came from similar family backgrounds as mine.”

The report’s authors say they hope that stories such as Brown’s will help leaders in the labor movement and the broader progressive community learn how to replicate models that have worked in cultivating leadership.

Something’s working in Los Angeles, where the staff of the Black Workers Center is predominately made up of women and chaired by Lola Smallwood Cuevas. She’s one of the 27 women whose narratives and beautifully photographed portraits are included in the report.

To her, there’s nothing new about black women’s leadership, especially when she looks at the history of worker mobilization in Los Angeles. There, vibrant organizing among home care and hospital workers are often associated with non-black immigrant communities. Smallwood Cuevas points to black women such as Ophelia McFadden who helped pave the way.

“When you see the early photographs, they were black women,” Smallwood Cuevas said of the roots of these more recent efforts. “The idea that these could be good jobs started in the souls of black women.”

Freeman Brown said the labor movement can make sure histories like these aren’t lost by consistently lifting up the women featured in the report as spokespeople and acknowledging them as the key strategists they are. The report should also be used to stimulate conversation between labor and women’s rights movement organizations, she said, so they can jointly decide “what a women’s economic agenda looks like that’s fashioned through not just gender but also race.”

Last week, Michael Eric Dyson’s New Republic essay taking Cornel West to task for various perceived missteps, including West’s harsh critique of Obama, raised questions, for me and many others, about the role of the black public intellectual. Just days after that article’s publication, as spirited responses continued whizzing around the Internet, news broke that another esteemed black academic was embroiled in a controversy involving actor Ben Affleck. Henry Louis Gates was accused of scrubbing evidence of Affleck’s slave-owning ancestry from an episode of his celebrity genealogy show on PBS. Affleck had requested the storyline be left out.

All of this left me wondering, do these highly publicized but narrowly focused events tell us anything about the state of black public discourse? At a moment when the killing of black people by police officers and vigilantes is finally at the center of mainstream conversation, who are the black academics demanding that we dig beneath pat explanations? And do you have to be a man and over the age of 50 to be among their ranks?

So I reached out to some black scholars who have sizable followings outside the academy. I asked what conversations are vital to black American communities right now. This is a purely subjective sampling; there are a great many more thinkers to note, but these are some of my own favorites. Some responded in conversation, others via e-mail. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Cathy Cohen
Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
Founder of the Black Youth Project, a national organization that amplifies the voices of young black activists

When I asked Cohen what conversation black people need to be engaged in now, she said, “It’s hard to say anything other than Baltimore. In many ways, Baltimore is representative of what many people have called the neoliberal city.” She defined this as a city that has adopted policies that prioritize “privatization, disinvestment from poor communities and communities of color, disinvestment from the welfare state and reinvestment in the carceral state.

“How do we begin to think about the larger context in which the killing of Michael Brown or Tamir Rice continues to happen? These aren’t isolated incidents. This is about how we invest in cities, how we humanize black people, the segregation of white people.… Whites are probably the most segregated group in the country. That allows for the dehumanization of young black people, in that you get police officers who really do believe that they fear for their lives when they encounter young black men, because they are only privy to pop cultural representations.

“We also want to pay attention to the type of resistance and mobilization that we’re seeing from young black people in this moment. We’re in the process of reimagining what black politics is going to look like.” Cohen points to Millennials’ use of online social networks for organizing, as well as their efforts to build movements that explicitly reject sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. “Those of us in the academy, we have an opportunity to help amplify the voices of young black activists who are really reframing what black politics might be in the 21st century. We have an opportunity and a responsibility to empower them.”

Find her work here and follow her @cathyjcohen.

Kiese Laymon
Associate Professor of English, Vassar College
Author and contributing editor at Gawker, where he runs weekly “True Stories” essays by young writers exploring race, class, sexuality, and gender

Laymon makes it a point to take his work off campus and off the page. “Outside of writing,” he said via e-mail, “I’ve given six workshops and listening sessions at high schools, detention centers, colleges and community centers in the last two weeks.

“I want to use whatever position I have to provide young folks of color with space to write and read.… As much as possible, we need to hear young people assessing their positions in their communities and imagining ways to make our communities better.… And without being heavy-handed, I’m trying to show young folks regardless of sexuality or gender that there are models of awe-inspiring humanness in folks like Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer and probably their own grandmothers. We’ve got to show young people what other wonderfully flawed black folk did and let them know that it’s more than okay to find models of superb humanity in folks other than Martin King or Malcolm X.”

“I also think that every critique made of what our people aren’t doing needs to be complemented by the writer or critic talking about how they too have failed to meet a specific standard. At the end of the day, we just have to be more honest. Transformation from one state to another is impossible if we aren’t honest about who we are and what we’ve done.”

Follow him @KieseLaymon and note this recent conversation on emotional justice with radio talk show host Esther Armah.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Provost, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, which Gumbs describes as “a very tiny but intergalactic black feminist university”

“My intellectual work [asks] how can we channel the experiences, the mistakes, the visions, the insight of our revolutionary ancestors into the present? How can we be present with them? Because it’s absolutely relevant and necessary for everything we’re facing.… It is the job of the storytellers, the intellectuals, the keepers of these stories to come back and say, ‘Remember this, remember this, remember this.’

“Folks are thinking about what’s happening in Baltimore. I think it’s great that people have been quoting Frederick Douglass, who lived in Baltimore for some time. Harriet Tubman was from Eastern Shore, Maryland. [She is] an ancestor who specifically broke the law because she believed in black freedom and was targeted by all the resources that the state could mobilize. But now she’s a national hero… [laughs] Nobody’s saying these kids are our next Harriet Tubman, but are they not?”

I asked Gumbs, who has a PhD in English, black studies, and women and gender studies from Duke, about her decision to work in the community rather than at a university.

“There have always been community-accountable black intellectuals doing their intellectual work in a variety of spaces.… There’s a difference between producing work that is valuable to some large institution and foundation…and what it takes to think about what’s useful to these kids in my community and their grandparents, who are on my porch saying, ‘We need to talk about this.’ They’re saying, ‘Alexis, we trust you to call up the sacred text. What’s the sacred text for this moment?’”

Find her work here and follow her at @alexispauline.

Kai Green
Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University, Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN) and African-American Studies

“I teach classes on blackness and queerness from a black feminist perspective. In the classroom I try to help my students…understand the strategies that black queer folk used for survival in a hostile world. I talk about the necessity of abolitionist art, and encourage my students to be courageous to make it, which is difficult at times, when students are so afraid to talk about race for fear of being called racist. I encourage my students to take risks.… I teach them how freedom dreams and the black radical imagination is a tool necessary for now.

“We should be talking about Baltimore, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago, Ferguson.… We should be talking about strategies for building local and global movements that target white supremacy and capitalism.… We should be talking about HIV/AIDS. We need people to reiterate #allblacklivesmatter, ’cause if all of a sudden black men stopped being murdered by vigilantes and cops, would black women then be safe too? Would black queer folk be safe?… With all that’s going on in the world, we still need to pay attention to our bodies, our mental states, and our personal relationships. Self-care is also necessary for now. Holding people accountable is also necessary for now. We should be talking, but also understand that more important perhaps is that we become more fluent in the language of the unheard and listen.”

Follow his work at @Kai_MG.

Salamishah Tillet
Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Co-founder, A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national non-profit that mobilizes young people to end violence against girls and women

“If you want the most sustainable and transformative change, you start with the ones who are most vulnerable.… When we’re thinking about who’s the most vulnerable within the rubric of blackness, it’s working class women and girls, children, trans people.… It’s amazing to me, no one really sees [black girls]…. As a former black girl, as the mother of a black girl and as an American citizen, it’s just disheartening.”

Tillet told me she’s interested in “the relationship between state violence and private violence, the ways these two things feed off each other, and seeing not just state violence as a racial justice [issue] but these other forms of violence as racial justice [issues].… Why don’t we consider rampant sexual assault of black women as a form of state violence? Either we take it seriously as what it is, or we broaden our definition of what we take seriously.”

“I see myself as primarily an academic…and as someone who wants to learn how to be a better activist. What does that entail and what kinds of communities do you have to be a part of?… For me, the writing, the teaching, the talking are all spaces, and organizing is a kind of fourth space. In my case, they mutually feed off each other and support each other.”

Find her work here and follow her at @salamishah.

Robin D. G. Kelley
Gary B. Nash Professor of US History and Black Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

“I don’t play pundit because I’m not interested in ‘influencing popular opinion’ if it means sacrificing analytical rigor. Our job as intellectuals is to ask the hard questions, interrogate inherited categories, take nothing as self-evident, and go to the root of the problem. That includes the work of addressing contemporary social crises. I’m concerned that if we persist in conflating relevance with popular, the form, or rather the forum, will become our main concern.

“I resist putting limits on black public discourse because our concern should be the world—on resisting neoliberal policies that render precarious not only black lives but the lives of most people on the planet; on state violence, not just in our country but in Israel/Palestine, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Hong Kong, to name a few; on war, femicide, debt, continued indigenous dispossession—all of it.… Even when it comes to the issues deemed most urgent, we still exhibit incredible tunnel vision. For example, the discourse on police violence rarely acknowledges black women and transgender victims despite the best efforts by #BlackLivesMatter founders. And the epidemic of sexual and intimate violence hardly registers in ‘black public discourse.’ We still tend to limit our analysis to US borders, and we are too quick to regard the federal government as a natural ally against racist localities. The exception are the young activists leading groups such as We Charge Genocide, Black Youth Project 100, Dream Defenders, Million Hoodies, Hands Up United, #BlackLivesMatter, the Community Rights Campaign, Southerners on New Ground, among others. They bring much needed intellectual ferment, and a politics attentive to class, gender, sexuality, and internationalism. This is why I prefer an hour with these young organizers than a primetime TV slot.”

Follow his work at @RobinDGKelley.

Last week, The New York Times published a much-discussed analysis of Census data under a headline claiming that 1.5 million black men are “missing” from daily life in America. Because of punitive and racially targeted criminal justice policies and factors leading to premature death (including declining but high homicide rates), huge swaths of black men are tucked away in prison cells or early graves. The study found that for every 100 black women in the United States who are not in jail, there are 83 black men in the same category. Among white Americans there’s barely a gap, with just one missing man for every 100 women.

The Times’ graphics and reporting are fascinating, but analysis veered off into shallow and well-trod territory, concluding that a primary outcome of these “disappeared” men is that black families are set up for dysfunction because too few men are around to be husbands and fathers. Through this lens, the systemic assault on black lives hurts black women because they’re left alone in to raise families on their own.

Last Monday, we got a glimpse of why a focus on black women as secondary casualties of policies and practices that fuel the mass disappearance is short-sighted. That’s the day a Cook County judge dismissed the charges facing the Chicago officer who, while off-duty, killed an unarmed 22-year-old black woman named Rekia Boyd in 2012. The reasoning the judge gave for the acquittal is particularly galling: The killing was obviously intentional, so only a murder charge — as opposed to the lesser involuntary manslaughter charges the DA brought—could have stuck, the judge said. The officer killed Boyd after he approached a group of people she was standing with because they were talking too loud for his taste. He maintains that killing her was an accident.

Boyd is one of few black women whose names are sometimes listed alongside other recent victims of police use of excessive force. But mobilization in the wake of her killing hasn’t measured up to public responses after black men die at the hands of police, argued writer and activist Darnell Moore last week. According to Moore:

…Most people don’t know Boyd’s name. They don’t know names like Shantel Davis (killed at age 23), Aiyana Stanley-Jones (killed at age 7) and Kendra James (killed at 21), either. When black men are killed, slogans like “hands up, don’t shoot” or “I can’t breathe” echo across the country. When black girls and women like Boyd are killed, there is comparative silence.

Yes, black men are more often the victims in these cases of police abuse. But that doesn’t explain why the outrage tends to be less loud when a black woman or girl is killed. About 30 protesters gathered Monday after the acquittal was announced, according to news reports out of Chicago. One report on a New York City rally held in Boyd’s memory this week lamented the size of the crowd that showed up, which was made up of fewer than 100 people.

It’s against this backdrop that the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) continues to host gatherings across the country to give black women and girls an opportunity to speak for themselves about the challenges they face. The town-hall meetings began last year in Los Angeles as part of an effort to influence the national conversation around President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative to improve the lives of boys of color. AAPF held a similar gathering in New York City to inform the debate around Mayor Bill de Blasio’s local initiative, which has the same focus as the president’s. Last week, the organization hosted a meeting in Washington DC, where the implementation of a $20 million plan to improve test scores and graduation rates for black and Latino boys is underway. Critics, including AAPF, argue that such plans play into the misguided belief that from the classroom to the street corner, boys of color are struggling, while the girls who are their peers are generally fine.

“Pretty much across the board, black girls are doing just as bad as black boys,” Rachel Gilmer, AAPF’s associate director told me. She points to a recent Institute for Women’s Policy Research report that finds that much of the data used in making a case for My Brother’s Keeper—78 percent of statements in a recent MBK interim report issued by the administration, for example—refers to the dire situation of youth of color in general, not specifically boys and young men.

But why keep waging this battle when it seems the My Brother’s Keeper initiative and those modeled after it at the local level are already being adopted, and when headlines like the one in the Times this week seem to confirm what many people already believe? “Some of it’s a rhetorical fight,” Gilmer told me. “We have to push back on patriarchy we’ve seen in racial justice organizing for a long time.”

The relative quiet in response to the acquittal in the Boyd case speaks to much of what AAPF has been trying to bring to light over the course of the past year. When it comes to getting black women and girls included in the developing narrative about a general disregard for black lives, they continue to have their work cut out for them. AAPF plans to host additional town hall meetings in Philadelphia and Miami.

After Hillary Clinton announced earlier this week that she will seek the Democratic nomination for president, an image that’s periodically made the rounds in recent years resurfaced. It’s a photo, perhaps PhotoShopped, of Clinton engaged in what appears to be a good-natured laugh while a little black girl standing next to her gives the pol a perfected side eye. One friend, a black woman, texted me the image—no words, just the image—Monday morning. A Facebook friend, also a black woman, made it her profile picture soon after the announcement.

The deep cynicism and obvious exasperation of the little girl, or of whoever thought to create this now-viral mash up, speaks volumes about a hurdle Clinton will need to clear as she courts black voters—particularly black women voters—this election cycle. As I’ve noted before, black women are often called the most reliable progressive voting bloc, with their participation in 2012 contributing to a higher turnout rate for black voters than for those who are white for the first time ever. If Clinton’s efforts at a more family- and woman-friendly campaign fall on deaf ears in black communities, that spells trouble for her.

Clinton has a history of using dog-whistle politics when it suits her, and it’s painful to remember the ways that she wielded her whiteness as a weapon during the 2008 primaries. There was that interview with USA Today when she, in an effort to explain why she still expected to win the nomination despite recent defeats in Indiana and North Carolina, said the following:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in the interview, citing an article by The Associated Press. It “found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.… There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

The audio from that interview was especially upsetting, because of the way it sounded as if Clinton were saying that “hard-working Americans” and “white Americans” are synonymous. That earlier slip makes it easy to meet her current repeated promise to champion the interests of “everyday Americans” with one of those side eyes. Who does she mean this time around? On Sunday, the multiracially cast video that Team Clinton released to announce her candidacy hits a lot of the right notes in terms of communicating inclusivity. There’s the glowing black couple preparing for the birth of their son, the adorable black child talking about dressing up as a fish for an upcoming play. But beyond the symbols, Clinton will need to make sure she avoids galling missteps this time around.

I’m thinking also of her insistence during one 2008 debate that Obama reject—not “denounce” but “reject,” she was adamant about the language—any forthcoming support from the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. Sure, it’s understandable that Clinton would scramble for whatever points this might win her from a segment of the American public, those “hard-working Americans” she would later claim to have in the bag. But by acting as if the Nation of Islam were the one-dimensional bogeyman it’s made out to be in the mainstream, as opposed to a more complex purveyor of a brand of black self-reliance that’s an indisputable part of this country’s history, Clinton showed she was willing to stoke irrational fears. At that time, the Clinton Foundation office had chosen 125th St. in Harlem as its home and was situated not even a block from a street named after Malcolm X. But Obama had to not just denounce but reject the Nation, or else risk his blackness becoming even more of a liability? Yes, because it could have been a way for Clinton to get the edge she so desperately needed.

These are just two examples of Clinton hitting a sour note when it comes to communicating—even subtly and inadvertently—with the black electorate as a presidential candidate. The policy positions she’s taken over the course of her career have been outlined at length elsewhere. To some, progressives’ ability to influence policy in a Clinton administration and how much is at stake in the upcoming election far outweigh rhetorical choices Clinton made when her back was against the wall in a tough primary. But those small choices go a long way toward helping us understand why some black voters feel alienated, why dog-whistle politics are never a good idea and why that image of the side eye has gone viral.

Since its founding in 1865, The Nation has been a home for writers instigating, reporting on and arguing about struggles for social and economic justice. We have held fast to our “Nation Ideals”— from racial justice to feminism, from a fair economy to civil liberties, from environmental sustainability to peace and disarmament—throughout our 150-year history. During our anniversary year, TheNation.com will highlight one Nation Ideal every month or two. We’ll celebrate by asking prominent contemporary Nation voices to read and respond to important pieces from our archive. Below, Dani McClain reflects on a 1989 Nation special issue on “Scapegoating the Black Family.” Learn more about our 150th anniversary events and special content here.

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In February, Jeb Bush’s all-but-declared presidential campaign hit a minor speed bump. His chief technology officer, Ethan Czahor, was fired after Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post brought to light offensive comments and tweets the tech whiz had made over the years, mostly as a college student. Most were nonsensical musings, including advice to rappers to pull up their pants and present themselves more like Martin Luther King Jr. The news item was just what you’d expect as campaign season heats up and candidates scour opposition staffers’ backgrounds for anything that could offend the typical voter. But one item on the list of Czahor’s offenses stood out. As a college radio host in 2008, HuffPost reported, he’d said that “black parents need to get their s@#t together,” arguing that “the majority of newborn black babies belong to single-parent households.”

That this sentiment was cited as a reason the Bush campaign ousted Czahor surprised me. After all, there’s not much controversial about attacking the structure of black families, of which 30 percent are headed by unmarried women, compared to 13 percent of American households overall. Bush and others in the Republican field will likely make similar comments during the primary season, even if more subtly; maybe they’ll take a page from Mitt Romney, who in 2012 said promoting two-parent families could counteract gun violence. Democratic candidates will probably do the same, though they tend to be better at finessing the message. On Father’s Day in 2008, candidate Obama reminded a primarily black congregation in Chicago about the importance of having a father in the home. “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison,” he said, suggesting that two-parent families are a kind of talisman capable of protecting children from tough lives.

One problem with such claims—from Czahor’s to Romney’s to Obama’s—is a stubborn and unsubstantiated insistence that what’s at play is causation rather than correlation. The assumption is that fatherlessness causes a host of problems, but the reality is much more complex. Research shows that it’s primarily well-educated, financially secure individuals who choose to marry in the first place these days. (And surprise! They tend to marry each other, so class jumping via partnership isn’t much of an option here.) So is it marriage or money that improves quality of life? In 2011, Pew found that 64 percent of Americans with a college degree were married, but fewer than 48 percent of people who’d had some college or less had tied the knot. This class gap didn’t exist in 1960, when 72 percent of US households were headed by a married couple, a historic high. Unfortunately, mainstream discussion of the issue is stuck in that decade. Locating the causes of poverty, low educational attainment and criminal behavior in black families’ inherent dysfunction has been the norm across party lines since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his 1965 Department of Labor report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” characterizing the black family as exhibiting a “tangle of pathology.” Through a shared desire to balance a critique of structural racism with a call for personal responsibility, liberals and conservatives have been united in looking with exasperation at the black family, which dares to persist even where male breadwinners and wedding vows are in short supply.

Another problem with these adamant claims about what black families need to do to better themselves is that they’re mostly made by men. In the summer of 1989,The Nation tried to interrupt this pattern by turning over the reins to a team of black women for a special issue called Scapegoating the Black Family. The previous year, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) had been tweaked to emphasize work requirements for those receiving aid, a major step along the path to Bill Clinton’s sweeping welfare “reforms” of 1996. The Cosby Show was in its fifth season of showing viewers that enviable two-parent wealthy black families exist, and Kate & Allie was ending its five-year run convincing Americans that straight white divorcees with kids were nothing to fear. But no similar cultural effort had humanized or demystified the black single mother. She continued to live in the public imagination primarily as the welfare queen, the scheming and immoral woman who couldn’t keep her legs closed or her hands out of the public coffers.

Part of the reason why representations of the black family were so limited and so negative, the guest editors of that issue argued, is that discussions on the topic were dominated by people who had never been in one, whatever its configuration. In fact, wrote Jewell Handy Gresham in her essay “The Politics of Family in America,” white men were overwhelmingly seen as the experts—from Moynihan, who’d written his report while an official in LBJ’s Labor Department, to Bill Moyers, whose sensational 1986 prime-time CBS Special Report, “The Vanishing Black Family—Crisis in Black America,” took viewers inside a Newark, New Jersey, housing project and was seen by many as a definitive portrait of black life, eventually winning a DuPont Award for excellence in broadcast journalism.

White male social scientists and commentators, such as the American Enterprise Institute’s W. Bradford Wilcox and New York Times columnist Russ Douthat, continue to dominate the public dialogue about marriage and family. Today, they often seem to be trying to figure out how what was once a decidedly black problem—low marriage rates and a prevalence of female-headed households–has come to plague the country as a whole. A June 2013 daylong conversation on family hosted by the New American Foundation is just one example of present day agenda-setting gatherings where black perspectives are nowhere to be found. A panel titled “Will single motherhood become the norm?” lacked any black or non-white representation, and writer Katie Roiphe, a white single mother, provided the sole voice of reason amidst claims that children want and need a father in the home. “We’re bringing some Eisenhower-era assumptions to the table here,” Roiphe told her fellow panelists, a staff writer for the Times and a senior writer with Pew. “What I think children want is to live in a secure environment in which they are loved.”

In the 1989 special issue of The Nation, it was Dorothy Height, longtime leader of the National Council of Negro Women, who drove home this point and situated it in a specifically black understanding of family, writing:

Some social analysts…define a “family” as a social/economic/political unit with a man at its head, and they continue to insist on this definition even at a time when divorce rates and serial marriages, resulting in merged families and increasing numbers of female-headed households, reveal how archaic it is. For black people, this definition has never applied.… Blacks have never said to a child, “Unless you have a mother, father, sister, brother, you don’t have a family.” I think that the wrongheaded emphasis on the nuclear family has led to the demoralization of young people, both white and black. Because of it, a child who is not part of a nuclear family–or whose family does not behave in the manner of the model—may well say, “I’m nobody.”

Until today’s shapers of policy and culture make serious efforts to change the narrative, the moralizing about family structure that’s aimed particularly at black and low-income families will continue as it has for decades. Already we’ve seen President Obama bring ideas he hinted at in that Father’s Day speech into the implementation of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which is focused on the advancement of boys and men of color—in part, to make them more marriageable. Elite think tanks and publications will continue to report data on marriage and parenting in a way that supports their particular ideological bent. It can get boring after a while, to be honest, particularly for someone like me who was raised in a so-called single-parent home, surrounded by loving, supportive family members. My lived experience tells me that it’s resources—relational and financial–not two parents that create stable, happy childhoods. Wilcox, Douthat and their ilk will never convince me otherwise.

But what does interest me as marriage rates plummet across racial groups, is who will have the platform to tell a broad audience what non-nuclear families look and feel like on the inside? Whose voices will be acknowledged and sought out to usher Americans’ collective understanding of family into the twenty-first century? There is certainly a place for the Katie Roiphes and the growing numbers of upwardly mobile, non-black American women having children on their own to tell their stories. But my hope is that their experiences, often framed in the media as courageous and proof that feminism has set us all free, don’t eclipse those of black and low-income women who have long been figuring out how to lead functional families, whatever their makeup.

Next, read Michelle Chen on the 1926 campaign for ”Wages for Wives.” And learn about the key moments in the fight for gender quality in our timeline: Radical Histories: Feminism, Sex & Gender. Learn more about all our 150th events and special content here.