Gender, Race, and Generations: A Roundtable Discussion

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As we looked at the organizing by Black Lives Matter against police violence and other forms of racist oppression, we at Women’s Review of Books began thinking about the intersectional politics of the new movement, and its similarities and differences, in politics and strategies, from previous organizing. We decided to bring together (virtually, through email) several older and younger black women activists to talk about their experiences and ideas. These are our panelists:

Demita Frazier, JD, is a lifelong political activist, beginning at age fourteen, when she became an avid anti-Vietnam War protester once she learned the impact of the war on black people and other people of color. She was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, a radical black feminist organization that convened from 1975 - 1981. She has remained, through several decades of community organizing in coalition with other radical and progressive groups, an unrepentant black feminist. She teaches in the Bridges Program at Bunker Hill Community College, and has taught and lectured at colleges and universities around New England.

Stacey Patton, PhD, is an award-winning journalist,historian, and child advocate. She is the author of the memoir That Mean Old Yesterday (2008) and the study Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won't Save black America (2017).

Barbara Smith is a black feminist author and activist who has played a groundbreaking role in opening up a national cultural and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She has been politically active in many movements for social justice since the 1960s.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is assistant professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she is completing a manuscript, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, which explores gender, sexuality, and poetic form in global black women’s literary cultures. She is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015). Her fiction and essays have been published widely.

WRB: How do you define yourself politically—feminist, black feminist, womanist, radical feminist, none of the above, all of the above?

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: I use the term “black queer feminism” to describe my political visions and alignments. I see black queer feminism as closely related—and at times encompassed—by each of the terms you mention. For me, the debates around feminist languages of identification that we see emerging from the 1970s through the current moment center on a drive toward both breadth and specificity. For me, “black queer feminist” comes close to achieving that broad political reach and theoretical precision.

There’s a lot in a name, for feminists. Each of the languages black feminists have developed over the past several decades—and, arguably, as long as women’s self-naming practices have existed—gets at a deeper nuance of black women’s experience. “Black feminism” insists on centering blackness in an anti-oppressive gender analysis, which is crucial. I also appreciate the ways in which womanism, in Alice Walker’s original conceptualization, highlights black women’s sensual experience and creative expression as part of its politics. I think each of these stances is, or can be, radical.

But for me, “black queer feminism” speaks to each of these priorities. It insists on a critique that is explicitly antiracist, antimisogynist, and antiheterosexist at once, and makes direct claims about sexual desire and subversive modes of voicing as part of its anti-oppressive politics. For me, black queer feminism articulates the range of identifications and political priorities we see in the many modes of political self-naming we see from black LGBTQ figures like Audre Lorde, the poetics of which are fascinating. When Lorde identifies, at different times, as “a black lesbian feminist warrior poet come to do [her] work,” “a forty-nine-year-old black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple,” and as someone who has grown up “fat, black, nearly blind and ambidextrous in a West Indian household” (among many other self-descriptions), she gives us a vision of black feminist politics that refuses to subordinate or excise particular aspects of her difference, or to focus on what she calls single-issue politics. For me, this is what black queer feminism aims at—a vision of anti-oppressive thinking and action that centers race, sex, gender, sexuality, and class simultaneously, and also articulates a broadly queer and antinormative stance. I see black queer feminism as intersectional feminism with an explicit emphasis on antinormativity, difference, and the erotic.

I do think it’s important to say, though, that I see this work as black feminist work. As Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, and their Combahee River Collective collaborators declare, black feminism is the work of any useful feminism—whether white feminists acknowledge that or not. The fight for black women’s freedom is crucial to any effective vision of anti-oppression. That’s just as true for younger feminists today—in this time of continued state-sanctioned murder and sexual violence against black women, rampant disregard for black women’s health and reproductive autonomy, and widespread cultural exploitation and policing of black women’s bodies, voices, cultures and ideas—as it was in the past. Any feminism—or any anti-oppressive stance more broadly—that does not acknowledge that is not doing its job.

Stacey Patton: I don’t subscribe to labels. I don’t feel that I need to be a self-proclaimed feminist to want to fight for girls and women’s rights and other intersectional movements. Abstaining from a label does not mean I am against the views of others that subscribe to various forms of feminism. But I am troubled by the historical roots of feminism, with its focus on middle-class white women and its dismissal of the concerns of women of color, the poor, and women with disabilities and of different sexual orientations. Although there’s the more inclusive “womanism,” a term adopted by many women of color, I’m concerned about helping to create a more just society for children, regardless of their sex. I’m also concerned about the erasure of women’s complicity in the violence against children.

My work is centered on how whiteness destroys children and people of color, as it categorizes black communities as “children” to export the violence to them. Then black communities import it in the perpetuation of violence against their own children. Except for bell hooks, few feminists have talked about how white supremacy and patriarchy have compelled black women to violence. If we are to understand the subordination of black women in our society, we must examine the connections between state and familial violence against children and how that violence against children perpetuates whiteness. We need to do something about the creation of racists, sexists, and homophobes during childhood. Because once created, they are rarely, if ever, converted.

Don’t get me wrong, black feminist work has, rightly so, become the cornerstone of thinking for a whole host of radical emancipatory work—yet these disciplines have inherited the structural erasure of violence against children. White feminists have tried to depict white women as victims who were never complicit in any kind of oppression, and many black feminists done something similar. So the rubric in a lot of black feminist scholarship is that women are innocent and not perpetrators of violence—which means that producing empirical studies of black women in relation to violence in their communities is out! black feminists often write and speak about the black woman’s body as the nexus point of oppression, a sort of intersectional convergence of everything whiteness desires to stand over and against. I agree with that view. Yet in order to make this case, black children, against whom whiteness also understands itself in violent opposition, are erased.

Some black feminists see a focus on female-perpetrated violence against children as detracting from the violence experienced by black women. The logic is that black women have to stand alone rather than in relation to black men and children, whose misogyny or violence or developmentally appropriate misbehaviors are described as “innate” dysfunctions or preludes to criminality. But if we study black women in relation, then they are not only victims, but also, sometimes, perpetrators. As such, things like intimate partner violence, homicide, and rape by women can’t be ignored, given their traumatic effects.

We have to make the very real case that black women are historically targeted by whiteness, and continue to be—but we should not erase our children and ignore the pain and trauma of black men to bring our own truths into focus. From an ideological standpoint, this is one of the core reasons why I don’t embrace the feminist label.

Mecca: I really appreciate this, Stacey. In some ways, what you’re saying gets to the heart of how feminism can end up undermining its own stated goals, perpetuating the very kinds of violence it claims to critique. I think this is especially dangerous when feminism is used as a label, rather than as a language for articulating a set of political and intellectual commitments that require constant practice and work. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the differences between labels and language. If we think of feminism (or womanism, or black feminism) as a language for describing how we do what we do—rather than who we are—it makes different demands of us, right? It requires us to take the throughlines of violence seriously enough to think of the violence we ourselves may be perpetuating. This is a logic that is all over foundational black feminist work, and yet it often gets lost in translation.

Barbara Smith: I define myself as a black feminist, by which I mean someone who is committed to black feminism as a political movement. When I say I am a black feminist, I am not saying that I am a feminist who is black. black is not an adjective modifying feminist in this phrase. Black feminist defines a particular political ideology that centers black women and at the same time is committed to eradicating all forms of oppression. I am anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and a member of the left.

Mecca: Yes! It’s so important to think about how language works in this conversation—how “black feminist” may be a noun, but it signals a set of active verbs that involve working against multiple power structures at once. I’m concerned that our students sometimes miss this point in their eagerness to move past what they understand as limiting labels. It’s often not until they actually read black feminist literature deeply that this clicks for them.

Demita Frazier: I too continue to describe myself as a black feminist, with a radical perspective on late-stage capitalism—democratic socialist is currently the most useful description of my perspective on economic inequality. Embedded in my black feminist philosophy is an unalloyed commitment to the complete destruction of white supremacy.

WRB: What’s your experience of working and interacting across generations? What do you wish the younger generation would learn from the older generation? What do you wish the older generation would learn from the younger one?

Mecca: I’ve been fortunate to have had engaged, thoughtful, and generous, mentors at various stages of my intellectual and creative life. Those relationships have shown me the value of talking and thinking across generations. The phenomenal black feminist poet and scholar Cheryl Clarke and the iconic writer Ntozake Shange have been incredibly generous mentors for me. My conversations with each of them have energized, informed, and inspired me, and I hope that sense is mutual. I’m beyond grateful to have the chance to both think and work and collaborate with both of them. I grow each time I talk with them.

We are in a moment when there are rich and interesting conversations about feminism happening in several cultural spaces—including pop cultural and artistic spaces (perhaps most iconically in collaborations like those between Beyoncé and the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), as well as among undergraduates and young people not on college campuses. These conversations include important emerging critiques of black feminism, as well. This is the time to bring emerging dialogues on black feminism into contact with foundational black feminist voices, and to begin to collaborate on visions for the work we hope to do in the future.

As far as what I wish the generations would learn from each other, I think that remains to be seen, and that’s exciting. For now, I hope we co-conspire to create more opportunities to have intergenerational contact, culling our institutional, economic, intellectual, and other resources to create spaces to continue to engage in sustainable ways.

I think that heteropatriarchal definitions of the family shape how we understand who “elders” are, what they look like, and how that role fits into political life. This is what we see in the constant descriptions of black Lives Matter (BLM) as a “leaderless movement.” It’s a term that is invoked both critically and in celebration, but I think it’s a bit inaccurate on both counts. Characterizing BLM as a leaderless phenomenon that emerges organically out of an imagined democratic social media field allows us to ignore the fact that the movement was founded by three young black queer women—women who have both energy and wisdom, and who have been in deep conversation with black feminists before them.

Stacey: My experience of cross-generational work includes teaching at the undergraduate and graduate college levels, working in multigenerational professional environments, and being a speaker and consultant to groups of professionals who work with children and families.

What I wish the older generation would learn from the younger generation is tolerance of difference and empathy for young people coming of age. It seems that each generation, as it gets older, loses patience with and tolerance for some of the ways in which younger generations are unlike them, and the way that those differences shape the growth and evolution of those who are coming of age in a different era with new challenges and stresses on families.

Take the issue of sagging pants, for example. Each generation of teens seems guaranteed to come up with fashion choices that their elders find annoying or even intolerable. Many elders seem to focus on how unappealing and symbolically problematic the sagging pants are. Some have even expressed support for making sagging against the law.

Now, I find sagging irritating and unappealing too, but I also see the bigger picture—first, of youth individuating themselves from their elders by doing something they know will drive them crazy; and second, of young black and Latino men who started the trend against a backdrop of the looming threat of incarceration in a society that simultaneously ignores and demonizes them simply for existing. These young men know that there are fewer educational and professional opportunities for them than any other group. They know that simply living to adulthood is far too often a miracle, regardless of their economic status. And I believe they are trying to convey a message about the complexities and contradictions of finding their way as young men of color in this gauntlet of a society that seems stacked against them.

I’d like for older generations to look at them and rather than getting caught up in “tsk-tsking” the fashion statement, talk with and listen to some of the young men who are trying to get their attention.

More than anything, I would like to see the elders recognize and be open to learning from the wisdom of the young so that rather than seeing things only through the lens of nostalgia, and deeming anything different as bad and disrespectful, they would look for and emphasize commonalities, and forge paths towards solidarity and community so that the wisdom and energy could flow in both directions.

Barbara: I have had the experience of working across generations from both sides of the continuum. One of the original members of the Combahee River Collective, Sharon Bourke, was in her forties when most of us were in our twenties or early thirties. She played a key role in shaping the collective’s politics because of her extensive experience in black liberation movements and in anticapitalist and anti-imperialist organizing.

Audre Lorde participated in the political retreats that the Combahee River Collective organized and was a co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. I remember that on at least one occasion she told us we were ageist. I am not sure what prompted her comment, but I never forgot that she said it. I think at the time I was mystified by her criticism. I did not fully grasp how our attitudes and behavior might be oppressive to her as an older woman.

Now that I am an elder I have had many years of experience working with people younger than myself. I have always appreciated working with younger people and have the impression that they appreciate working across the generations as well. One of the things I like to share with younger people is that the majority of my age peers in the 1960s, ̓70s, and beyond were not politically active. Throughout history it often has been a relatively small number of committed activists who have been responsible for making profound political and social change.

I would like to have more opportunity to engage in dialogue about “respectability politics.” Once I saw a young man on Melissa Harris Perry’s show who said words to the effect that “This is not your mother’s civil rights movement,” unfavorably comparing the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. That really bothered me. I wondered if he had any clue about what the civil rights movement actually entailed, and what it was like to do organizing during the pervasive terrorism of Jim Crow. I thought it was telling that he said “your mother’s” instead of “your father’s” civil rights movement. It felt like he was being especially dismissive of the unsung black women who held down the movement and who made the options he took for granted in his life possible.

Mecca: I agree! I’ve also had this thought about the popular message t-shirts we’ve seen lately that read “Dear Racism, I am not my grandparents. Sincerely, These Hands.” I appreciate and understand the sentiment—it’s a declaration of a kind of radicalism and a willingness to fight, which I think is a hugely important popular outgrowth of the blackLivesMatter movement. But it’s also troubling to think that some younger folks have misread earlier black political struggles as somehow passive and less radical. This is a failure of education, really.

Stacey: OMG, Mecca! Those tee shirts and the broader generational rifts over today’s activist movements have really irked me. On one side we’ve go folks in the elder generation spitting on Black Lives Matter, calling us “slaves,” and hating on us because they fail to do research to see what's being done at the national and grassroots levels. Then there’s the younger generation’s historical illiteracy and generalizing suggestion that our grandparents were all submissive. We’ve got black Panthers still in jail today.

The problem is that far too many of us have brought into the one-sided master narrative of nonviolent praying, singing, cheek-turning forgiveness in the face of racist evil. Many of us have no idea about the kinds of traumas that our elders endured. Our elders sometimes try to shield us from the atrocities they faced and the very hard decisions they had to make to stay alive and to keep their families alive. It breaks my heart when I see these generalizing statements. It is a sign that some younger folks have allowed television, music, film, toxic masculinity, and a lack of academic interest to weave into their subconscious a perpetual visual of black submission to white oppression.

Today’s activists and young people need to trace their generational steps carefully, investigate, research, and learn what their elders had to endure for the freedoms and self-awareness we enjoy today. Young and older folks who indulge this generational divide had better seal the breach because this is the kind of division that our oppressors crave.

Demita: Rather than answer the question as posed, here’s what I dream of: deep listening across the generations, both to what we find easy to say, and to that with which we struggle mightily. I’ve worked effectively with younger people on LGBTQIA issues, on issues of urban agriculture and food insecurity, and on domestic violence and its impact on all people. Organizing for political change is hard work, particularly in coalition, and core issues—the ability to deeply listen, to tolerate ambiguity and paradox, to demonstrate respect in the ways that are most meaningful when working across and through difference—takes a kind of discipline that takes leadership and time to develop.

Mecca: I agree. This kind of coalition building takes time and also resources, which are at such a premium, particularly for black women and black queer people. We need spaces where we can learn to listen across difference and examine the multiple workings of power, while also supporting ourselves economically and having our labor valued.

WRB: What issues are most important to you right now? Can you share an example of a success in making change around one of these issues?

Mecca: There are so many, of course. Too many to list. This past year, in particular, has brought conversations about state violence, the prison industrial complex, reproductive justice and sexual autonomy, and transphobic violence and transmisogyny to the center of many black feminist conversations. Part of the intellectual challenge of an effective black feminism is for us to see how each of these issues is connected, and how they link with other systems and structures that may not immediately register as “important.”

This has led to some interesting and useful critiques of black feminism, and has brought up important questions: how are we defining the subject(s) of black feminism? How do we think about difference and power in ways that call us to interrogate not only the structures that constrain us but also those we benefit from, participate in, and perpetuate, willingly and consciously—or not?

This is where a black queer feminist perspective is particularly helpful, in the sense that reading and thinking for queerness (not simply as same-sex desire, but also as a political orientation shaped around difference) requires us to focus on multiple forms of non-normativity and the many ways in which difference is mobilized to deny power. This throws issues of classism, xenophobia, transphobia, religious oppression, fatphobia, ableism, mental health, and more into relief, and places them at the center of our analysis.

It also requires that we look at the institutionalization of black feminism—particularly within academic programs and departments—and think about who and what is left out of black feminist discourses that are limited to academic spaces, journals, presses, etc. The emergence of vibrant conversations about black feminism in literary and pop culture suggests rich opportunities for collaboration between black feminists within the academy and outside of it. Yet I don’t know that we have seen those collaborations happen as frequently as we might hope.

And this year’s election throws these concerns into crisis. For me, the election highlights this need, as well as the need to take intersectionality seriously, in the academy and beyond. Seeing how effective rhetorics of domination and oppression have been in this election—and the sway they have had for so many people in this country—should signal how deep the mutual imbrications of racism, classism, heterosexism, and xenophobia are in this country, and how national narratives of whiteness, masculinity, and economic mobility both support and obfuscate those systems. For many of us, this is not at all new. And yet, this is still a level of crisis that we may not feel prepared for. We are shocked but not surprised.

Stacey: First and foremost, the issues that are most important to me are related to and revolve around creating a movement to recognize the humanity, bodily agency, and rights of black children to grow up without being subjected to violence against their persons. My main focus is grounded in building a movement to give the parents and caregivers of black children the information to consider positive, effective alternatives to corporal punishment. My work with Spare the Kids includes a website (www.sparethekids.com); a book, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save black America (2017); and related speaking engagements, workshops, seminars, and media content and appearances.

I was adopted into a family that believed in beating children. That experience drove me to better understand why black families and communities have such a strong belief in and attachment to spanking as a pillar of good responsible parenting.

The other issues that are of high importance to me are related to my work with Spare the Kids: reducing child abuse cases in black families and communities; reducing the flow of black bodies into the foster care and juvenile and adult prison pipelines; and educating parents about the dynamics of early child development to encourage them to consider alternatives to physical punishment.

I am committed to working tirelessly for positive change and progress in these areas. Operating on the premise that “when we know better, we do better,” I am determined to move the needle on how black children are regarded and treated in their families, their communities, and the nation as a whole.

Mecca: This is so important, Stacey. Thank you for this work. I’m eager to read your thoughts on how experiences of corporal punishment become a mode of bonding and community for some black folks. It seems almost as if that shared experience of violence (and sometimes even trauma) is read not only an individual right of passage, but as a way of solidifying blackness and creating belonging. And what does black belonging mean when it’s inaugurated by pain?

Stacey: Mecca, such important questions! One way you see corporal punishment being deployed as a mode of bonding in black communities is through humor. I saw this play out recently on Twitter when thousands of people shared a hashtag called #ReasonsblackKidsGetWhoopins. Folks told heartbreaking stories about all the various petty reasons why they were hit by their parents. The humor becomes a way to normalize the violence and becomes part of an ecosystem that nurtures violence and devaluation of black children. Unfortunately, far too many of our people have unconsciously co-signed a longstanding racist narrative—that the only way to make us strong people, civilized people, law-abiding, and moral people is to process the black body through pain. Deep sigh.

Barbara: I am currently involved in several organizations: Albany for Educational Justice; the Parole Justice Committee of Capital Area Against Mass Incarceration; and the Capital District Coalition Against Islamophobia. From time to time I work with other groups including Planned Parenthood and the Fight for $15.

What is most important to me right now is the impact of the impending presidency. The election of a racist, xenophobic, misogynist demagogue promises to have unprecedented and frightening consequences for the majority of people in the United States and for people all over the world. The rights, policies, and practices that we have worked for in all of our movements for more than sixty years may be overturned in the first sixty days of his administration. Targeted communities are terrified, especially Muslims and immigrants. The Southern Poverty Law Center continues to document a huge spike in hate crimes. Trump’s top advisor, Steve Bannon, is a white nationalist affiliated with a recognized hate group.

The Capital District Coalition Against Islamophobia, founded in 2015, organized two large and spirited rallies on November 19 and December 3. The December rally focused upon the slogan, “No KKK Presidency,” because of Trump’s support from David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, and other far right hate groups. The rally was specifically planned to protest a Ku Klux Klan-sponsored Trump victory parade on December 3 in North Carolina. Our rally and march featured speakers from the Muslim community, the LGBTQ community, recent immigrants from Syria, a survivor of the Holocaust, a Japanese American who spoke about the internment camps during World War II, a peace activist, a representative from labor, and a member of the faith community. In my speech I spoke about the history of the Ku Klux Klan and domestic terrorism. I said that a Trump presidency is what we get in a nation that has never acknowledged, examined, or sought to eradicate white supremacy.

Hundreds of people came out on a cold December day, some of whom had never attended a demonstration before. Both the November and December rallies embodied solidarity, connected people to each other, and helped build hope and courage for the struggle ahead. We were excited to find out later in the day that there were also several anti-KKK rallies in North Carolina. I believe that we are working to build a higher level of unity among our movements which is so critical in this perilous time. We will not merely resist this regime, we will defy it.

WRB: Who or what are your influences and inspirations? How do you keep going?

Mecca: I’m inspired and sustained by many of the people I’ve mentioned—Cheryl Clarke and Ntozake Shange—as well as the brilliant participants in this roundtable. I count them among the black women writers and theorists who have transformed my work. These include June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and many others. I’m also fortunate enough to have a wide network of peers and friends who hold me down, challenge me, and push my thinking forward. My crew of black feminist thinkers is crucial for me: my good friend C. Riley Snorton, my collaborators at TheFeministWire.com, my UMass colleagues, and many others have been indispensible for me. I also have a close crew of writer friends, as well as those not involved in academic or writing spaces. They help me keep my perspective broad and keep me questioning, which, for me, is crucial to a full intellectual and political life.

Like many black women writers, my mother is also a major influence for me. She is a social worker who deeply values literature and the arts, which meant that she raised my brother and me to think carefully about social power and to read widely and deeply. It wasn’t until adolescence that I came to understand that not everyone was raised around black feminist literature and ideology. We lived in Harlem, which also meant very early access to the thinkers and spaces that have shaped my work. My mother took me to Audre Lorde’s memorial service when I was in the fifth grade. We lived on the same block Lorde grew up on, and attended the church where she went to Catholic school, which was where the memorial was held.

My mother also took me to birthday celebration for Gwendolyn Brooks held at Barnard College, which was not far from our home. Getting to talk with Ms. Brooks and announce myself to her as a poet was a profound moment for me, even then. My mother also took me to my first pride parade when I was eleven (well before I came out); we marched as allies with Black AIDS Mobilization (BAM!) and African American Women in Defense of Ourselves (AAWIDO). I remember her preparing me for that experience, explaining that people might throw things at us as we walked down the avenue, and making a plan for what we would do in the event of violence or separation.

As much as my mentors—formal and informal, older and younger—have shaped my work, these early, intimate experiences with black feminism gave me a vision of work I wanted to do in the world, and the language and courage to do it.

Stacey: I am guided and inspired by historical figures like Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. DuBois. Wells was a journalist and antilynching crusader who risked her safety to expose the truths about why black men and boys were lynched. I love her fearlessness even when her life was threatened.

I love how DuBois centered children in his activism and journalistic work, which revealed the mean-spirited treatment of black children. He understood how childhood was foundational to white supremacy but also critical for black liberation.

There are current journalists who I greatly admire, including Charles Blow, Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, Pamela Newkirk and other truth tellers who use social media to call out and challenge racism and other isms. Their work reminds me that my goals are attainable, and that working for change is really not an option, but the imperative that drives my entire life.

How do I keep going? I remind myself that I am here because someone in my lineage survived the Middle Passage, the plantation, and the horrors of Jim Crow so that I could be here doing this work today. My spiritual advisor reminds me that I made a contract with the ancestors to do the work that I do. I take that contract very seriously, and remembering the ancestral connection helps to recharge my batteries when they are running low, and to lift my spirits when I become discouraged or frustrated. Understanding my spiritual mission in this lifetime is a powerful source of fuel for my soul.

The other things that keep me inspired when the way is hard and the hurdles high: meeting and hearing from black children of all ages when they share their stories of what being spanked and beaten by their parents feels like. Their stories break my heart, but I see myself in them, and I work hard so that they can view my life as an example of the possibilities that await them.

One of my greatest inspirations is when the parents of black children who have routinely relied upon corporal punishment as the main way of disciplining their child(ren) tell me that, as a result of what they’ve learned from my work, they have changed their minds about the value of spanking their children. They express profound remorse and regret for having spanked their children, and promise me that they will change their ways and stop using violence as a parenting tool. There is nothing that compares to the joy that I feel when I receive one of these messages—because I know that I am impacting people in a way that makes them feel empowered and able to make the very tough decision to move away form the crowd to find a better way.

Barbara: I am most influenced by my family. I am also inspired by them. Despite the fact that they came of age in an era when black people were universally dehumanized and lived with the constant threat of pervasive, state-sanctioned violence, they did not seem bitter and operated with a kind of optimism, especially in relationship to what they encouraged my sister and me to do. Whatever I may have accomplished, I owe directly to them. I am also inspired by African Americans’ centuries of defiance to oppression starting with chattel slavery, the worst system of enslavement the world has ever known.

I keep going because I find the alternative intolerable. I am not able to let injustice go unchallenged and fortunately over a lifetime I have found many others who feel the same way.

Demita: I am unwilling to give up this fight for freedom, for all people, especially black people, and I am inspired by the many humans I share this planet with who are committed to that struggle. So many quietly brave, unwavering people have shared the struggle for freedom. I am allied with that energy.

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