Making All Black Lives Matter by Barbara Ransby

Author:Barbara Ransby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520292703
Publisher: University of California Press

BLACK FEMINIST INFLUENCES

This generation of activists has been profoundly influenced directly and indirectly by the radical Black Feminist tradition that emerged in the 1970s, transmitted through books, poetry, images, personal relationships, and shared political spaces. This tradition, holistic, intersectional, radical, and inclusive, recognizes that the personal is political, and the political is profoundly personal.

Black feminist politics, language, and sensibilities are palpable throughout BLMM/M4BL movement circles. Some of these activists were feminists well before they became part of this phase of struggle, and others were exposed to new ideas, finding old ways of thinking challenged by the processes of struggle. “Assata Taught Us,” a popular slogan on T-shirts worn by BLMM/M4BL organizers, refers to Black Liberation Army leader, former political prisoner, and political exile Assata Shakur, a strong woman who defied gender conventions in her leadership role in the Black Liberation Army in the 1970s. In a media interview, protest leader Ashley Yates recalls coming up with the idea to use the term while sitting in a coffee shop in Ferguson and thinking about ways to capture the spirit of the uprising.15 What better symbol than a militant Black woman who defied the odds to free herself from prison, as Shakur did before seeking exile in Cuba.

When asked which authors most impacted their evolving political edification, many leaders of BLMM/M4BL cited bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Paula Giddings, Barbara Smith, Beth Richie, Cathy Cohen, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, myself (my book on Ella Baker), and finally fiction writer Toni Morrison, because of her creation of complex and self-determining female characters.16 These were the intellectual building blocks of their collective consciousness, augmented by their own lived experiences and the wisdom of grandmothers, mothers, and aunties, who never wrote books but whose understanding of the complicated world ensured survival and inspired critical resistance.

How do these Black feminist politics show up in practice? The first line of Dream Defenders’ vision statement reads as follows: “We believe that our liberation necessitates the destruction of the political and economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism as well as Patriarchy.” One of BYP100’s fundamental principles is that they organize through “a black queer feminist lens,” and are fighting for a “black queer feminist future.” Similarly, BLMGN’s work is informed by Black feminist politics and a dedication to the inclusion of LGBTQIA folk. And M4BL’s tour de force policy document, the “Vision for Black Lives,” highlights gender, class, citizenship, settler colonialism, sexuality, and environment, echoing the ethos of radical Black feminists’ radically holistic politics on every page.17

The feminist organizers who launched and have led the BLMM/M4BL campaigns for the past four years have also wrestled with an obvious dilemma: the most highly publicized victims of police violence during this time, and in terms of dominant narratives, have been male. That is not because Black women have somehow been sheltered or exempted from such violence, as Andrea Ritchie’s 2017 book, Invisible No More, graphically illustrates.18 So Black feminist organizers have focused on the cases of women like Marissa Alexander, Sandra Bland,

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