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WORK TITLE: Unapologetic
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1985
WEBSITE: https://www.charlenecarruthers.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1985, in Chicago, IL.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University; Washington University, St. Louis, MO, M.S.W.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and activist; founding national director, BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), 2012–.
AWARDS:“Top 10 Most Influential African Americans” citation, The Root 100; “Woke 100” citation, Ebony; “Emerging Power Player,” Chicago Magazine; Dr. Dorothy I. Height Award, YWCA, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Roxanne Riley, The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 2018. Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Al Jazeera, BBC News, Ebony, Huffington Post, Nation, NBC News, New Yorker, USA Today, and Washington Post.
SIDELIGHTS
“Charlene A. Carruthers,” wrote a contributor to the Charlene Carruthers website, “is a Black, queer feminist community organizer and writer with over ten years of experience in racial justice, feminist and youth leadership development movement work.” A social worker with a master’s degree from Washington University of St. Louis, she has worked primarily in communities on the South Side of Chicago, where she was born. She is the author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Our Movement. In Unapologetic, wrote Booklist reviewer June Sawyers, Carruthers “confronts structural racism and white privilege, toxic masculinity, and gendered violence, among many other topics, head-on.”
Carruthers is perhaps best known as the organizer and driving force behind Black Youth Project 100. “BYP100,” Carruthers told Salim Muwakkil in an interview for the In These Times website, “is committed to training this generation and future generations of young Black activists to organize and mobilize in order to create transformative change for all Black people.” “Carruthers rose to national prominence in the current Black liberation movement. Unapologetic cements her position as an important thought leader,” said Susana Morris in the Women’s Review of Books. “Nevertheless, she repeatedly rejects the notion of a singular, charismatic leader in favor of highlighting the significance of relationships and interconnectedness. Indeed, while many of Unapologetic‘s peers lean heavily on memoir to inform their social commentary, her book reads less as a single story of Carruthers’ experience and more like a text that should be used in consciousness-raising sessions, community organizing trainings, and in classrooms outlining the history of Black social movements.” “There is little doubt that the Black Lives Matter era of protests will be branded as a millennial moment,” stated Salim Muwakkil in his introduction to the interview in In These Times. “But Black women are so prominent in the movement’s leadership, the era might also be characterized as a matriarchal moment. For example, in the outrage following the release of the Laquan McDonald video depicting a 17-year old being shot by a Chicago cop sixteen times, four of the most prominent groups that spoke out—Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), We Charge Genocide and Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY)— were led by Black women.”
Carruthers builds the thesis of Unapologetic partly on her own life story, but also on a philosophy of inclusiveness. “Black liberation,” Jessica Spears asserted in Xpress Reviews, “must be anticapitalist, antiliberal, and pro-Palestinian as well as antiracist and profeminist.” “In writing this book,” Carruthers told Nermeen Shaikh and Amy Goodman in an interview appearing in Democracy Now, “I wanted to make sure that I provided both a good amount of history, because I’m a history buff—I’ve loved it since I was in high school, I’m one of those people—and practice, like real practice from my own experience and practical guidance or practical tools for us to like improve as activists and organizers.” “The Black, queer, feminist lens allows people to view the world in a way that accounts for multiple modes of resistance and multiple experiences of oppression,” Carruthers told an interviewer for the Beacon Broadside. “Organizing is not inherently radical. It’s important for young people to take up clear political commitments that are based in the … notion that none of us will be free until all of us are free.” “I know what young activists are against, but I want to know what they’re for. And I wanted to write a book to articulate a lot of what we are actually for, the kind of world that we vision,” Carruthers told Shaikh and Goodman, “one where a person can walk down the street without fear of being criminalized because of what they look like, because of their perceived or actual gender, because of their class status, because they have any sort of disability, perceived or actual disability…. I wrote this book for people who are curious about and committed to collective liberation.”
Critics found Unapologetic to be a powerful statement in favor of a central role for Black queer feminism in the struggle against oppression. “This new era of black liberation is still struggling to find its voice, regarded with suspicion by older activists,” said Salim Muwakkil in a review of the book found in In These Times, and “… criticized by others for a lack of pragmatism in its demands (which include reparations, defunding police and a guaranteed income). These new leaders must still convince a skeptical black community that the time is right to sing a new song. Carruthers is an unapologetic member of that choir.” “Time and again,” Morris stated, “Carruthers returns to the importance of storytelling in organizing work, asserting, ‘Stories draw out emotions. They allow us to see, taste, and feel moments. If the stories we tell about Black people’s experiences of resistance and resilience are incomplete, our movements to transform them, to enact them will be insufficient and ineffective.’ Carruthers practices what she preaches and uses Unapologetic to reframe what we think we know about Black resistance.” “This electrifying debut by Carruthers,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “… is part testimony and part activist’s toolbox with snippets of Carruthers’s personal history sprinkled throughout.” “Timely and important,” concluded a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “Carruthers’ book is a strong testament to the resilience of the radical black liberation movement as well as an impassioned appeal to continue the fight for social justice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2018, June Sawyers, review of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, p. 14.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2018, review of Unapologetic.
Publishers Weekly, May 21, 2018, review of Unapologetic, p. 62.
Women’s Review of Books, September-October, 2018, Susana Morris, “Identity and Action: Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A. Carruthers,” p. 28.
Xpress Reviews, August 17, 2018, Jessica Spears, review of Unapologetic.
ONLINE
Beacon Broadside, http://www.beaconbroadside.com/ (June 28, 2018), “None of Us Are Free until All of Us Are Free: A Black, Queer, Feminist Mandate.”
Charlene Carruthers website, https://www.charlenecarruthers.com (October 17, 2018), author profile.
Democracy Now, https://www.democracynow.org/ (September 5, 2018), Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, “‘Unapologetic’: Charlene Carruthers on Her Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.”
In These Times, http://inthesetimes.com/ (February 8, 2016), Salim Muwakkil, “Not Your Grandfather’s Black Freedom Movement: An Interview with BYP100’s Charlene Carruthers”; (August 21, 2018), Salim Muwakkil, “How Young Black Radicals Put the World on Notice.”
About
FULL BIOGRAPHY
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
SPEECH INTRO
Full Biography
Charlene A. Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer and writer with over 10 years of experience in racial justice, feminist and youth leadership development movement work. As the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organization of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. Her passion for developing young leaders to build capacity within marginalized communities has led her to work on immigrant rights, economic justice and civil rights campaigns nationwide. She has led grassroots and digital strategy campaigns for national organizations including the Center for Community Change, the Women's Media Center, ColorOfChange.org and National People's Action, as well as being a member of a historic delegation of young activists in Palestine in 2015 to build solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation movements.
Her work has been covered in several publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Reader, The Nation, Ebony and Essence Magazines. She has appeared on CNN, Democracy Now!, BBC and MSNBC. Charlene has also written for theRoot.com, Colorlines and the Boston Review. Charlene's essay, "Remnants of Survival: Black Women and Legacies of Defiance" will be published in the forthcoming book "The Burden" by award winning journalist Rochelle Riley.
She is recognized as one of the top 10 most influential African Americans by The Root 100, one of Ebony Magazine's "Woke 100," an Emerging Power Player in Chicago Magazine and is the 2017 recipient of the YWCA's Dr. Dorothy I. Height Award.
A believer in telling more complete stories about the Black Radical Tradition, Charlene provides critical analysis, political education and leadership development training for activists across the globe. Charlene has served as a featured speaker at various institutions including Wellesley College, Shaw University, Princeton University, Northwestern University and her alma mater Illinois Wesleyan University. Charlene also received a Master of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.
Charlene was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago where she currently resides and continues to lead and partake in social justice movements. Her inspirations include a range of Black women, including her mother, Ella Baker, Cathy Cohen, Marsha P. Johnson and Barbara Ransby. In her free time, Charlene loves to cook and believes the best way to learn about people is through their food.
Charlene is author of the bestselling debut book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
FEATURES » FEBRUARY 8, 2016
Not Your Grandfather’s Black Freedom Movement: An Interview with BYP100’s Charlene Carruthers
The 30-year-old radical black queer feminist who’s Rahm Emanuel’s worst nightmare
BY SALIM MUWAKKIL
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There is little doubt that the Black Lives Matter era of protests will be branded as a millennial moment. But Black women are so prominent in the movement’s leadership, the era might also be characterized as a matriarchal moment. For example, in the outrage following the release of the Laquan McDonald video depicting a 17-year old being shot by a Chicago cop 16 times, four of the most prominent groups that spoke out—Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), We Charge Genocide and Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY)— were led by Black women.
This gender alignment marks a stark deviation from a deep tradition of patriarchal leadership. This is not your grandfather’s black freedom movement.
Charlene Carruthers, the 30-year-old national director of BYP100, makes clear that this female ascendancy, as it were, has scholarly roots in the sterling work of feminist public intellectuals such as Cathy Cohen of the University of Chicago and Barbara Ransby of the University of Illinois at Chicago. BYP100, for example, is an offshoot of the Black Youth Project, a venture launched by Cohen in 2004. A well-known theorist of Black queer feminism, Cohen’s views have strongly shaped the agenda of BYP100.
In These Times sat down with Carruthers to talk about the role of BYP100 in Chicago’s anti−police-violence movement and why the group thinks it’s crucial to “fully incorporate” a Black queer feminist perspective.
How did BYP100 begin?
In 2012, a group of young Black people who were part of an advisory council for the Black Youth Project said to Cathy Cohen, “We want to have a national convening with other Black activists from across the country.” And so Cohen secured the resources, and 100 young Black folk were invited to attend a convening called the “Beyond November Movement” in 2013. What we intended was to discuss movement-building for Black liberation beyond electoral politics, in the aftermath of the election of President Barack Obama. That Saturday night, the George Zimmerman verdict was announced. We gathered in the circle and listened. There were all kinds of reactions to the “not guilty” verdict: Some people cried, some people screamed, some people left the room. And we stood in a circle processing that moment.
But you had gathered for something completely different.
Right. And I fully believe if we were not gathered that particular weekend, on that particular night, BYP100 wouldn’t exist. There were many things that happened immediately, but we all committed to going to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, in Washington, D.C. It was there that we actually drafted a mission and core value statement and began to think of ourselves as an organization.
So the Zimmerman verdict is what shaped BYP100’s focus on institutional violence and mass criminalization of Black youth?
Folks who attended that initial convening come from various parts of movements: There were artists, elected officials, folks who did LGBTQ rights organizing, gender justice organizers, folks from labor unions—all kinds of folks were in that room. It was out of that moment that we decided to focus on mass criminalization and, really at the core of it, looking at anti-Blackness and its role in the oppression of Black folks, particularly in this country, but also worldwide.
You said “anti-Blackness.” Was that an attempt to be more specific than the general term “white supremacy”?
We weren’t doing that level of analysis collectively at that particular moment. But we named anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia as the things that we needed to fight against, and recognized that many of those things contributed to the killing of Trayvon Martin.
You mention homophobia; that’s a new dimension to the Black freedom struggle. Was there any resistance?
Well, Cathy [Cohen] is known for her scholarship in both queer studies and Black feminism. And so at any convening that she was involved in, people came with that consciousness.
So Cathy’s ideological perspective is really BYP100’s guiding light.
I would say that it guides what we do in significant ways. Cathy, and other Black women and feminists, too, like Barbara Ransby, Barbara Smith, the late poet Audre Lorde, the late Ella Baker.
How are older, more established groups responding to your efforts?
There have been mixed responses. Our membership is 18 to 35, but our organizing work has always been intergenerational. We are under no perception that we can do this alone. We do believe young people’s leadership should be valued—and in many ways, prioritized—in movement building and organizing, in order to ensure that it persists. I’ve also found that many of the disagreements are along the lines of ideology and not necessarily age.
How did BYP100 get so deeply involved in this current struggle against the Chicago Police Department in response to cases like the killings of Rekia Boyd and Laquan McDonald?
The analysis that we have—our worldview, as a collective—and folks’ understanding of what’s at stake this particular moment: not just the lives of some hypothetical person, but our lives. The struggle against CPD is one aspect of the long-term struggle of abolishing anti-Blackness. Taking up the struggle for the sake of accountability in the killing of Black people like Laquan and Rekia is essential.
Do you have particular goals? For example, do you want the resignation of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel or Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who are accused of suppressing the Laquan McDonald video?
We’re calling for the resignation of both. We do not believe that they have the capacity to be in positions where they have decision-making power over so many lives. They’ve demonstrated over and over again that they are not effective at making good decisions when it comes to our lives. We also want the Chicago Police Department, which receives nearly 40 percent of the city’s budget for public services, to be defunded, and for those dollars to be invested in quality public schools, affordable housing and job creation. And we see that happening through a participatory budgeting process.
What about electoral politics?
Electoral and civic participation is the third rung of our overall theory of social change—part of the set of tools we have to create transformative change. The other two rungs are direct action organizing and public policy advocacy.
Many of us older activists have been waiting a long time for something like this. What fired up your passion for this kind of engagement?
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. My family could be best described as working-class. Some of my earliest experiences with power and beginning to understand the kind of world we live in were at the welfare office with my mother, or hearing my father tell stories about people he’d trained receiving promotions over him. I first got involved in activism in a real way when I went to college at Illinois Wesleyan University. At the end of my very first year I had the opportunity to go study politics in South Africa. We were there 10 years after the end of apartheid. Going to South Africa was perhaps the closest I could get to what it could look like if I was around in America in 1978. I was 18 and coming from a city that is still very segregated. That trip expanded my consciousness around what it meant to be Black on a global level or outside of Chicago, really, and got me interested in politics. I didn’t decide to be an organizer until after I finished graduate school, in 2008.
What’s next for BYP100?
BYP100 is committed to training this generation and future generations of young Black activists to organize and mobilize in order to create transformative change for all Black people. We do this work through what we call a “Black queer feminist lens” because we believe that in order to achieve liberation for all Black folks we have to be radically inclusive—not just in our analysis, but also in our practice, in how we go about leadership. We believe that a Black Freedom Movement in our lifetime is possible.
Carruthers, Charlene. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Jessica Spears
Xpress Reviews. (Aug. 17, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Carruthers, Charlene. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Beacon. Aug. 2018. 240p. notes. index. ISBN 9780807019412. $22.95. SOC SCI
Community organizer Carruthers (founder, Black Youth Project 100) makes an argument for why the movement for black liberation must be anticapitalist, antiliberal, and pro-Palestinian as well as antiracist and profeminist. As the subtitle suggests, the author places particular emphasis on the benefits to women and queer and trans people in the movement. The book is very carefully worded to be inclusive and inspirational, but this also means that the meanings are often vague. The words liberation, leadership, and healing convey different things to different people, and their connotations shift dependent on the situation. Because of the stress on the emotional aspects of community leadership, the book does not offer much practical advice about building, structuring, or running community organizations. Carruthers also mentions that because community leaders are held to high standards among their constituents, the dilemmas that their organizations face may be difficult to solve because of competing interests.
VERDICT An emotional examination of the goals of behind the black liberation movement.--Jessica Spears, Brooklyn P.L.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spears, Jessica. "Carruthers, Charlene. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements." Xpress Reviews, 17 Aug. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A551168202/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f516cb9d. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Print Marked Items
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and
Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
June Sawyers
Booklist.
115.1 (Sept. 1, 2018): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
By Charlene A. Carruthers.
Sept. 2018. 176p. Beacon, $22.95 (9780807019412). 305.
This short but powerful handbook to the contemporary black liberation movement, including Black Lives
Matter, is an important addition to the social-injustice bookshelf. As its title indicates, it is indeed
"unapologetic," as first-time author Carruthers, a community organizer, founding national director of the
Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), and self-described "Black lesbian leftist," confronts structural racism
and white privilege, toxic masculinity, and gendered violence, among many other topics, head-on. She
discusses such concepts as anti-blackness ("a system of beliefs and practices that destroy, erode, and dictate
the humanity of Black people"); the black radical tradition; and radical black feminism. She makes a strong
case for reimagining the black radical tradition while making specific demands, including reparations for
"chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration"; living wages and freedom from discrimination; and
investments in the black community. She also shares her own personal story as the daughter of two parents
from the South who was raised in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. A bracing
and provocative report from the front line.--June Sawyers
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sawyers, June. "Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements." Booklist, 1
Sept. 2018, p. 14. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A554041050/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4c31233b. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and
Feminist Mandate for Our Movement
Publishers Weekly.
265.21 (May 21, 2018): p62+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Our Movement
Charlene A. Carruthers. Beacon, $22.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-8070-1941-2
This electrifying debut by Carruthers, founding director of Black Youth Project 100, is part testimony and
part activist's toolbox with snippets of Carruthers's personal history sprinkled throughout. Carruthers makes
an urgent case for organizing movements and reexamining history through a black queer feminist lens to
better equip activists in a "principled struggle" to end racism, ableism, homophobia, patriarchy, and
ingrained prejudice. She outlines strategies on how to prioritize issues, build strong leaders, and adopt
healing justice to bring about radical change. She devotes an entire chapter to the Chicago model of
activism, which dates to the antieviction protests of the 1930s when "communist-inspired organizing ... is
said to have mobilize[d] five thousand people in less than 30 minutes to stop an eviction." Carruthers, who
grew up on the South Side of Chicago and remains active in the community, points to the more recent
success of the "Reparations now!" campaign, which, in 2016 after decades of work, won $5.5 million in
reparations for victims of racist police violence in Chicago. Incantatory without being incendiary, strong but
not strident, Carruthers argues for "a world in which everyone is able to live with dignity and in right
relationship with the land we inhabit." This handbook for the revolution is a rousing call for collective
liberation. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Our Movement." Publishers Weekly, 21 May
2018, p. 62+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012648/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd10cc2b. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Carruthers, Charlene:
UNAPOLOGETIC
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Carruthers, Charlene UNAPOLOGETIC Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $22.95 8, 28 ISBN: 978-0-8070-1941-
2
A black lesbian activist offers insight into forging a radical black liberation movement through the lens of
her experience as a community organizer in Chicago.
Frederick Douglass once wrote that "power concedes nothing without a demand." Carruthers, who is best
known as the founding national director of the Black Youth Project 100, revises her predecessor's
observation to highlight that it is "organized demand" that wins revolutionary struggles. Drawing on her
experience as a reader, thinker, and grass-roots activist, the author illuminates the past, present, and future
of black radicalism. She opens by first addressing recent "calls to end identity politics." Carruthers argues
that what is needed instead is to "end liberalism." The intersectionalist approaches of black queer feminists
are what will give (white) democratic progressives the tools to combat the intertwined ills of patriarchy and
capitalism. A crucial part of the movement also involves reviving--or reimagining--the black radical
tradition. Only by remembering the collective past can activists resist social erasure and see a clear way
forward. In the fight to end liberalism, writes the author, focusing on such issues as "leadership
development [and] healing justice" is also key. Moreover, activists must be self-reflective at all times and
ask themselves and each other questions about who they are, where they came from, what they want and
want to build, and whether they are "ready to win." The author concludes with a discussion of the "Chicago
Model" of community organizing and a mandate to continue the struggle. Though imperfect, the Chicago
Model still managed to bring together "multiple institutions with varying political alignment" to fight police
brutality and oust racist and corrupt political officials. Timely and important, Carruthers' book is a strong
testament to the resilience of the radical black liberation movement as well as an impassioned appeal to
continue the fight for social justice in a political environment characterized by increasing hostility to
equality and difference.
Powerful, potent reading.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Carruthers, Charlene: UNAPOLOGETIC." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544637856/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=70da9de4.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Identity and Action: Unapologetic: A
Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for
Radical Movements By Charlene A.
Carruthers
Susana Morris
The Women's Review of Books.
35.5 (September-October 2018): p28+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements By Charlene A. Carruthers
Boston, MA; Beacon Press, 2018, 184 pp., $22.95, paperback
This has been a banner year for Black feminist nonfiction. From Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele's
When They Call You a Terrorist, to Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her
Superpower, to Darnell Moore's No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, just to
name a few, there is a plethora of Black feminist writing that seeks to document political action, shape
dialogues, and challenge thinking. Charlene A. Carruthers's Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist
Mandate for Radical Movements joins an already dynamic conversation with a distinct and necessary
contribution.
As the founding national director of The Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), Carruthers rose to national
prominence in the current Black liberation movement. Unapologetic cements her position as an important
thought leader. Nevertheless, she repeatedly rejects the notion of a singular, charismatic leader in favor of
highlighting the significance of relationships and interconnectedness. Indeed, while many of Unapologetic's
peers lean heavily on memoir to inform their social commentary, her book reads less as a single story of
Carruthers' experience and more like a text that should be used in consciousness-raising sessions,
community organizing trainings, and in classrooms outlining the history of Black social movements.
Although Carruthers often downplays her own life in favor of outlining both the history of the movement
and the mandate the movement needs as it moves forward, her identification as a Black lesbian feminist
informs her perspectives throughout the book. Indeed, the book's subtitle --A Black, Queer, and Feminist
Mandate for Radical Movements--exemplifies the ways in which the personal is explicitly political and
intersectional. Carruthers reclaims the often-maligned term of "identity politics," highlighting the
Combahee River Collection's coinage of the term in 1977. In an era where those on the left have been
chastised for leaning "too heavily" on marginalized identities, Carruthers argues that "identity politics are
not inherently or necessarily divisive." Instead, she underscores that the charge against identity politics
often surfaces when marginalized peoples seek power and justice and make no apologies for this. To that
end, Unapologetic is just that; it does not waver in its commitment to telling hard truths or demanding
justice.
Unapologetic is a short but powerful text, geared towards "all people who are curious about and committed
to the struggle for Black liberation." Carruthers's lucid and accessible prose guides us throughout a series of
complex and challenging histories, scenarios, and challenges. The book opens with definitions for terms
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such as "Black radical tradition," "Radical Black Feminisms," and "Reparations" and a preface that outlines
Carruthers's journey to activism. Thereafter, the text is divided into six succinct chapters and a forwardlooking
conclusion. The chapters are strong enough to be read individually but form a cohesive story when
read together. Indeed, time and again, Carruthers returns to the importance of storytelling in organizing
work, asserting, "Stories draw out emotions. They allow us to see, taste, and feel moments. If the stories we
tell about Black people's experiences of resistance and resilience are incomplete, our movements to
transform them, to enact them will be insufficient and ineffective." Carruthers practices what she preaches
and uses Unapologetic to reframe what we think we know about Black resistance and movement-making.
In chapter one, "All of Us or None of Us," Carruthers focuses on what is possible when we center a Black
queer feminist (BQF) critical lens, which she defines as a "political praxis (practice and theory) based in
Black feminist and LGBTQ traditions and knowledge, through which people and groups see to bring their
full selves into the process of dismantling all systems of oppression." As an example, Carruthers tells a
difficult story of community organizing through a Black queer feminist lens: a situation that involves a
movement leader and sexual assault. She outlines what transformative justice and accountability looked like
for BYP100 and how their actions reflect new possibilities for preventing and intervening when someone in
the community perpetuates or experiences harm.
Reviving the Black radical imagination and reimagining the Black radical tradition are the focus of chapters
two and three, respectively. She defines the Black radical tradition as "cultural and intellectual work aimed
at disrupting oppressive political, economic, and social norms, and its roots are in anticolonial and
antislavery efforts of centuries past" and cites antecedents from among the Haitian Revolution to SNCC to
Maroon communities and other revolutionary movements and groups. Speaking directly to the current
movement that has come of out the Obama era and beyond, Carruthers charges readers with the following:
"The Black radical tradition requires an ongoing and persistent cultivation of the Black radical imagination.
It is within the spaces of imagination, the dream spaces, that liberatory practices are born and grow, leading
to the space to act and to transform." Carruthers challenges movement leaders to "deepen our collective
political education work, to take the lead in generating public thought and discussion" and not to wait on
"academics and journalists to investigate our work and dictate our next steps."
To that end, Carruthers invites us to consider what would shift in our understanding if we discussed the
Black radical tradition from different points of entry. Using the stories of Recy Taylor and Bayard Rustin,
among others, as examples, Carruthers posits that, "understandings of the Black radical tradition would be
more complete, and our movement would better understand how to craft effective liberatory strategies for
all." Taylor was kidnapped and raped by a gang of white men and boys in Alabama in 1944. Although
Taylor is only now becoming enshrined as a part of the civil rights movement, her case garnered
international attention and sparked a worldwide anti-sexual violence movement in its day. Indeed, activist
Rosa Parks was part of this action more than a decade before the Montgomery bus boycott that would make
her famous. Yet, as Carruthers suggests, "the campaign went beyond [Taylor] and took on a new life with
little regard for her well-being or security." Carruthers uses Recy Taylor's story as both visionary and
cautionary tale; at once it outlines that we have succeeded at intersectional movements that consider
multiple systems of oppression and that we have failed in prioritizing the safety and healing of victims and
survivors. Likewise, Carruthers wonders how our understanding of the Black radical tradition would shift if
we centered the life, story, and contributions of Bayard Rustin, an openly gay Black man who was the
architect of many actions during the Civil Rights Movement, including the 1963 March on Washington.
Carruthers insists that it is our duty to reclaim radical history accurately and expansively as we move
forward towards collective liberation.
Carruthers outlines what she identifies as three key collective commitments for movement building and
regeneration in chapter four. They are:
1. Building many strong leaders
2. Adopting healing justice as a core organizing value and practice
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3. Combating liberalism with principled struggle.
Each commitment is key to sustaining any social movement; taken together, they constitute a powerful
force for change. Carruthers advises movements to build strong leaders as "community organizing toward
liberation requires people in ongoing and substantive public relationships with each other, people with
shared interests, to work toward shared goals." She again rebukes the notion of the singular leader in favor
of a cadre of capable, interconnected leaderships. Her call for adopting healing justice is an invitation to
"invest time and money in healers at least as much as we invest in field organizing" as way to make the
work of organizing sustaining and truly transformative. Carruthers identifies healers as "not only those who
work in medicine but also those in generative somatics, psychotherapies, and religious and spiritual fields."
The commitment to combating liberalism through principled struggle might seem anomalous with the other
cornerstones of movement building Carruthers outlines. However, Carruthers identifies liberalism as "one
of the greatest threats to movement building," further noting that "at face value, liberalism is a general
philosophy in which liberty and equality are inherent. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, liberalism
requires no specific commitment to collective work, justice, or transformation." In other words, radical
movements and liberal politics are fundamentally at odds with one other.
After outlining the three cornerstones of movement building, Carruthers poses five questions that make up
chapter five. These questions get at the heart of what is at stake in contemporary organizing. They are
directly related to the realties of today's movement, rather than nostalgic opining about the Civil Rights or
Black Power movements, yet they are connected to previous movements in the shared desire to achieve
collective liberation. Carruthers argues, "everyone invested in collective liberation must answer the
following questions critical to determining the health and success of our movements: Who am I? Who are
my people? What do we want? What are building? Are we ready to win?" Taken together, the answers to
these questions form the core of a self-determining movement. They seek to clarify who we are connected
to, our purpose, and our fervor.
In chapter six, "The Chicago Model," Carruthers takes her hometown as an example, asserting that, "if we
drew a map of the creation story of the Black radical tradition, Chicago and its people would appear at
nearly every critical point in time." More specifically, she highlights successful organizing campaigns that
underscore the Chicago Model, such as the reparations won against the Chicago Police Department in 2015
and the fight to oust former Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez in the wake of the murder of
Laquan McDonald. Carruthers notes that the Chicago model is "intergenerational, with a strong history of
community building... it continues to be shaped through agitation and high-impact work by leaders from
feminist and queer threads in the Black radical tradition. Third, Chicago organizing is historically local,
national, and global. Last, it requires the involvement of multiple institutions with varying political
alignment." She notes that the Chicago model is not a one-size-fits-all organizing model, but rather one of
many possibility models for organizing.
Carruthers closes the book with a mandate for activists, organizers, and movement leaders. Citing Mary
Hooks of Southerners on New Ground, the mandate calls for Black folk:
To avenge the suffering of our ancestors
To earn the respect of future generations
To be willing to be transformed in the service
of the work.
Undoubtedly, interesting questions, conversations, and debates will be prompted by the provocative
questions and answers Carruthers offers us.
Reviewed by Susana Morris
Susana Morris is an associate professor of literature, media, and communication at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. She is the co-editor, with Brittney Cooper and Robin Boylorn, of The Crunk Feminist
Collection (Feminist Press, 2017).
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Morris, Susana. "Identity and Action: Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical
Movements By Charlene A. Carruthers." The Women's Review of Books, Sept.-Oct. 2018, p. 28+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A555775465/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=072a7407. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A555775465
None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free: A Black, Queer, Feminist Mandate
June 28, 2018
A Q&A with Charlene Carruthers
BYP100
Photo credit: BYP100/YouTube
“We are fighting for our lives—and the lives of our people against formidable opponents/enemies. We are optimistic and steadfast in the idea that we can learn to treat each other better. We are participants and practitioners in various projects of abolition. We are practicing and theorizing as we go. We are seeking to eradicate systems in the world while being in, of and outside of the world. And it is worth it.”
This mission statement comes from Charlene Carruthers’s forthcoming Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. It’s also the mission of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), a Black youth organization founded in 2013 to empower the next generation of Black activism. Carruthers, a Black, queer, feminist community organizer, is the founding national director of BYP100. As Pride Month draws to a close, we caught up with her to ask about the work BYP100 is doing for the LGBTQ movement, police presence at Pride parades, and why it’s important to organize through a Black, queer, feminist lens.
Beacon Press: How involved is BYP100 in today’s LGBTQ movement and what are some of your plans going forward?
Charlene Carruthers: Our national and local work focuses on various issues that impact Black LGBTQ people. For example, our Washington, DC chapter is leading a campaign, within a coalition, to end the criminalization of sex work. This issue disproportionately impacts Black trans women (whether they engage in sex work or not), queer people, and gender-nonconforming people. We have always done our work in the tradition of radical Black feminist and LGBTQ movements.
BP: BYP100’s mission is to help advocate and organize through a Black, queer, feminist lens. Why would you say this is an important lens for young people to operate through when it comes to activism?
CC: The Black, queer, feminist lens allows people to view the world in a way that accounts for multiple modes of resistance and multiple experiences of oppression. Organizing is not inherently radical. It's important for young people to take up clear political commitments that are based in the basic notion that none of us will be free until all of us are free.
BP: Is there one specific instance that really pushed you to be a voice for your community and your cause as a whole?
CC: No, there’s not one specific instance. Traveling to South Africa when I was eighteen years old changed my life and made me more curious about the conditions in Black communities across the diaspora. However, I've always been the type of person who took action when someone I cared about was harmed our hurt. It may be because I’m the oldest of three siblings.
BP: There is contention involving police presence at Pride events. What is your stance on this? Do you think they should be involved, or do you think, regardless of intention—safety and enjoyment for LGBTQ law enforcers—there shouldn’t be a police presence?
CC: Pride began because of a riot against the police. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera didn’t resist so that the police could continue to harass our communities. I am an abolitionist, and I don’t believe that the police keep our people safe. This year at pride in Chicago, people were beaten and harassed by cops. It happens every single year. We should build our own safety teams to serve at Pride events. I know it’s possible.
BP: One final question: What is something most people don’t know about you?
CC: Most people don’t know that I’m an introvert who goes to the grocery store for fun. I believe that food is the best way to connect with other people. It’s also how I connect with myself.
About Charlene Carruthers
Charlene CarruthersOne of America’s most influential activists, Charlene A. Carruthers has spent over a decade developing leaders as an effective strategist, community organizer, and educator. She is a Black lesbian feminist and founding national director of the BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), a leading organization of young activists in the movement for Black liberation. Her work has been featured in outlets including the Nation, NBC News, BBC News, Huffington Post, the New Yorker, Al Jazeera, Ebony, USA Today, and the Washington Post. Carruthers was born, raised, and still resides on the South Side of Chicago. Follow her on Twitter at @CharleneCac and visit her website.
Posted at 03:20 PM in Charlene Carruthers, Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality, Queer Perspectives, Race and Ethnicity in America, Unapologetic | Permalink | Comments (0)
“We live in a time when young Black people in the United States have once again shifted the center of gravity in politics,” writes Charlene Carruthers in her new book, Unapologetic. (Photo courtesy of Beacon Press)
CULTURE » AUGUST 21, 2018
How Young Black Radicals Put the World on Notice
Charlene Carruthers’ new book, Unapologetic, showcases a queer women-led black liberation movement that’s upending past paradigms.
BY SALIM MUWAKKIL
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“Our work revisits the boundaries of gender and blackness and challenges binaries of male or female, lesbian/gay/ bisexual/queer or straight, and transgender or cisgender.”
As a member of the baby-booming ’60s generation, I’ve been nostalgic for the days when America’s youth filled the streets with protest—and not just for nostalgia’s sake. Society has only made incremental alterations to the status quo that provoked our protests. There have since been occasional explosions of civil disobedience, but the impulse toward social protest that energized the black movements of the past has seemed lacking. Perhaps that energy was siphoned off by black America’s embrace of electoral activism and channeled into campaigns like those of Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama.
But that changed sometime in the late 2000s. Charlene A. Carruthers, one of this new movement’s precipitators, tries to sketch its trajectory in her new book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
Did it start in 2007, with the Jena Six protests? Or with Troy Davis in 2011? Trayvon Martin in 2012? Mike Brown in 2014? Regardless of when, “we must come to terms with the context in which it exists,” Carruthers writes. “It is a period when black people are living under the heels of a neoliberal state, a global crisis of capitalism, and further entrenchment of anti-blackness through policy and culture alike. It is a time of unprecedented levels of state surveillance, unequal and questionable definitions of terrorism, and an obscene expansion of the militaryindustrial complex.”
Alongside the memoir When They Call You a Terrorist by Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Unapologetic helps flesh out this movement’s context. The slim, passionate volume chronicles Carruthers’ political evolution and features important lessons learned through an education in Saul Alinsky-informed community organizing, providing concrete tools for a new generation (though the lessons sometimes distract from the book’s narrative pull).
Carruthers offers kudos to mentors like Cathy Cohen, Barbara Ransby, Joy James, Beth Richie and others, but makes note of the significant generational change going down, writing that “uprisings of young Blacks have put the world on notice that something is shifting in the United States.”
If there is any single quality that differentiates this new era, it’s the role of sexual orientation and, to a lesser extent, gender. Both Khan-Cullors and Carruthers describe themselves as queer, and Carruthers writes, “Our work revisits the boundaries of gender and blackness and challenges binaries of male or female, lesbian/gay/ bisexual/queer o r straight, and transgender or cisgender.” By contrast, the black liberation movement of the ’60s was thoroughly enthralled with patriarchal leadership, leaving the important contributions of women largely unacknowledged. Heterosexual rigidity, too, was considered a “black thing,” another legacy of the emasculation of black men under slavery.
Kindred groups and movements like Assata’s Daughters and #SayHerName also challenge patriarchy and gender binaries, highlighting state-sanctioned violence against women and girls, including transgender women.
Unapologetic also lays out the specific struggle for justice being mounted in Chicago, renowned for troubled cop-citizen relations. The intense reaction to the horrific 2014 police killing of black teenager Laquan McDonald exemplifies what Carruthers calls the Chicago Model. It is distinguished by its intergenerationality rooted in a “strong history of community building” alongside “agitation and high-impact work by leaders from feminist and queer threads in the Black radical tradition,” a hybrid local-national-global lens, and alliances between “multiple institutions with varying political alignment.”
This new era of black liberation is still struggling to find its voice, regarded with suspicion by older activists uncomfortable with its heavily female leadership and LGBTQ friendliness, criticized by others for a lack of pragmatism in its demands (which include reparations, defunding police and a guaranteed income). These new leaders must still convince a skeptical black community that the time is right to sing a new song. Carruthers is an unapologetic member of that choir.
Special Offer: For a limited time, we're offering readers the chance to try out the print edition of IN THESE TIMES MAGAZINE for just $1 a month. Find out more here.
SALIM MUWAKKIL
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is the host of The Salim Muwakkil show on WVON, Chicago's historic black radio station, and he wrote the text for the book HAROLD: Photographs from the Harold Washington Years.
“Unapologetic”: Charlene Carruthers on Her Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Web Exclusive
SEPTEMBER 05, 2018
GUESTS
Charlene Carruthers
national director of the Black Youth Project 100. Her new book is titled Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100, joins us for a wide-ranging discussion upon the publication of her timely new book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. She reflects on electoral versus grassroots organizing, the Chicago model of activism, the Haitian revolution, healing justice, the importance of leadership development and more.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re joined here in our New York studio by Charlene Carruthers, the national director of the Black Youth Project 100.
AMY GOODMAN: Her book is just out. It’s titled Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
Charlene, it’s great to have you with us for Part 2 of our conversation, Part 1 talking about electoral politics. But you’ve talked about your book, Unapologetic, as the handbook you wanted when you got your start in activism.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, explain why you write it and why you called it Unapologetic.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: So, Unapologetic, for me, like you said, is the book I wish I had when I was 18 years old and I got started in activism, and then, later, community organizing. I was a student. I remember my very first rally that I ever attended was about the DREAM Act. I was a college student. Someone told me that there were certain students, because of their legal status, that they weren’t able to go to college. And I was like, “That’s wrong. I’m going to show up to this action.” And actually, it was the first action I ever spoke at, on an issue that I cared about. And so, over the years—it’s been about 14 years now since I’ve been doing immigrant justice, racial justice, LGBTQ gender justice, racial justice, all kinds of stuff.
And I titled this book Unapologetic because the work that we’ve been doing in the past five years in BYP100 has made a huge intervention in how people think about black organizing. It was actually one of our leaders—her name is Fresco Steez, who’s also from Chicago—who really popularized the political message of unapologetically black. And it looks great on T-shirts, and people say it in chants, but really it’s a framework that demands and declares that as black radical feminists, as black radical LGBTQ folks, that we actually can take up space, we actually have expertise, and we actually have strategic leadership that’s valuable and necessary for collective liberation.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you talk a little bit more about that, about the changing nature of black organizing and when you think it originated?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes. So, when I talk about that black radical tradition, I place it in context of work for liberation as a result of colonialism both on the continent of Africa, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and I talk about the movements, the work, the revolution, be it the Haitian revolution or other places, that are as a result of chattel slavery or the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and all the work that has happened since then. And so that includes all types of black folks, from multiple ideologies. And when we look at black organizing, there have always been women in leadership, in some way—right?—be it the UNIA with Amy Garvey, or be it Rosa Parks in her campaign for equal justice for Recy Taylor, and there have always been black LGBTQ folks, like Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, all those people. At the same time, there are some people who should actually be more firmly situated in how we understand black organizing, like Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. Johnson, along with Sylvia Rivera, was one—started one of the very first known transgender rights organizations in the world and also helped spark the Stonewall rebellion here in New York City.
And so, black organizing is so much about—and why I wrote this book—is so much about telling a more complete story about the role of organizations, about the role of various groups of people. And in telling a more complete story, I believe they were able to craft more complete solutions. And so, when we tell incomplete stories about the civil rights movement that leave out the role of Rosa Parks and other folks who fought to end sexual assault and violence against black women, we then are building these movements today talking about #SayHerName without even like full knowledge of how they built an international coalition—right?—that almost brought the governor of Alabama to his knees and involved the military, all kinds of things. And so, that’s why I wrote this book, because I wanted to tell a more complete story about our work.
AMY GOODMAN: And you lay out the five questions that every organizer should ask themself or that organizers should be asked.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes, yes. So, in writing this book, I wanted to make sure that I provided both a good amount of history, because I’m a history buff—I’ve loved it since I was in high school, I’m one of those people—and practice, like real practice from my own experience and practical guidance or practical tools for us to like improve as activists and organizers.
And so, the five questions begin with the question of “Who am I?” because if you don’t know who you are, what your self-interest is and what your best position to do, you can’t be as effective of an organizer as you could be.
The second question is Ella Baker’s question. Prolific organizer, Ella Baker would ask people the question, when she met them, “Who are your people?” And the answer to that question has so much to do with the work that you do, why you do it and why you show up.
The third is “What do we want?” We have to be clear about what we’re actually fighting for. Are we fighting for healthcare reform, or are we fighting for universal access to healthcare? And I believe that we have to actually make transformational demands, right? And universal healthcare just run by the state, in and of itself, isn’t transformational. I want to live in a world where people actually have, and communities have, self-determination over their lives.
The fourth question is “What are we building?” Are we building a 40-year strategy? Which we need. Are we building a year-long strategy? Are we engaged in electoral politics? Are we doing not—are we doing direct action, civil disobedience? All those things are necessary, but are we clear about what we’re building towards.
And the last question is “Are we ready to win?” And that question, to me, is one of the toughest ones, because what happens when we live in a world, which I believe is possible, without prisons and police, where safety goes beyond prisons and policing, and it’s in the hands, the hearts and the work of everyday people? Are we ready to win that? Are we doing the work that when we actually are able to govern ourselves and our communities, to provide healthcare, mental healthcare, deliver basic needs like food? And so, when I think about the work that we need to do—and I talk about it in the book—I’m really interested in how are we getting down on a 40-, 50-, 75-year strategy, and what are the things that we’re going to do along the way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And who is your intended audience for the book?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Oh, my gosh. So, of course, it’s my former 18-year-old self, and thinking about all the young folks, who—and 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, who are coming into movement in this particular moment. And it’s also for the people that I get to work alongside who’ve been doing this work for decades, who may have questions about what—as Robin D.G. Kelley asked, you know, I know—in his book Freedom Dreams, I know what young activists are against, but I want to know what they’re for. And I wanted to write a book to articulate a lot of what we are actually for, the kind of world that we vision, one where a person can walk down the street without fear of being criminalized because of what they look like, because of their perceived or actual gender, because of their class status, because they have any sort of disability, perceived or actual disability. And so, I want this—I wrote this book for people who are curious about and committed to collective liberation. And that means that’s a lot of people. And I’m writing—I wrote this book for people who aren’t afraid to be uncomfortable. If I did my job right as an organizer, people will be agitated and uncomfortable in reading this book. And so, I want folks to ask—
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Explain why. Explain why you think that is.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Because I talk about some stuff in this book that isn’t necessarily—it’s not at all liberal. At least that’s not my aim or my intention. I share a bunch of Marxist ideas, black radical feminist ideas, socialist ideas, abolitionist, abolition of the prison-industrial complex ideas—ones that say we actually shouldn’t move a race-first or a race-only strategy, and that, as black folks, we’ve never been able to just be one thing. You might be black and immigrant, black and undocumented, black and disabled, black and currently incarcerated. And so that makes some people uncomfortable, when we—when folks aren’t liberal about just laying it out there and being honest about what it is that I actually believe in. And I’m not the only person who believes in this stuff. I just had the opportunity and want more people even to write. I need more people who have their eyes towards collective liberation, who organize with people—right?—committed to leadership development, aren’t just single leaders, to write their own books, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have a number of groups that were incubating and formed right around the killing of Trayvon Martin.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: You have the Dream Defenders. In 2012, Trayvon Martin was killed. Your group, BYP100, when the verdict came down exonerating George Zimmerman—you know, legally, within the legal system.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: I don’t think most people see him in any way as exonerated. Dream Defenders, BYP100, Black Lives Matter. Let’s talk about grassroots organizing and electoral politics—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —because you’ve got your feet in both. You know some of the people who are now rising through the ranks. For example, in Part 1 of our discussion, you talked about Andrew Gillum—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —who you worked with years ago, who could be the first black governor of Florida—huge upset, Bernie Sanders supporter.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talks about politics in a number of the ways you do. You have Stacey Abrams in Georgia could be the first black governor of Georgia. You’ve got Ben Jealous in Maryland. So, where do you see electoral politics in the whole—within social change?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: So, I talk quite a bit about the Haitian revolution in the book. And the reason why is because there’s so many lessons for us to learn about when black folks contend for power, we win; we have political power and even a certain level of economic power in various societies; and the lessons to be learned. And while that I see—I’ve seen a lot of articles that say he’s going to be the first black governor, the first African-American governor. He clenched his victory because he’s black, he’s African-American. What matters most is the person’s platform, their agenda. And so, for me, when I think about these electoral politics—and what we do in BYP100, what we do in multiple organizations across the Movement for Black Lives, is we focus on issues, not candidates. And if the candidate is not about the business of the platform that we need to move for our people, then we’re not going to support that candidate. And, you know, people often credit this to Saul Alinsky, but I’m pretty sure he got it from somebody else. Who knows? That, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: Wait a second. You have to say who Saul Alinsky is, for the younger set.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Oh, yeah. So—
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, you’re Chicago. You know. But—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah, so, Saul Alinsky actually grew up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. And I had no idea about Saul Alinsky when I was growing up. I didn’t know who he was or about the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. And people—and he wrote Rules for Radicals. And people often credit him with this statement of “no permanent friends, no permanent enemies” or “no permanent allies, no permanent enemies.”
And when I think about elected officials, that, yes, Gillum is running on a platform that we can believe in, that we can organize around and that will change the material conditions of our people. And I know—I’m going to assume that he knows—that the folks who are rallying and to organize to get him elected will also be there to hold him accountable. Because he actually can’t do everything, even as governor, right? There’s a whole Florida state Legislature. There are entire municipal governments, all kinds of folks. Now, of course, as the governor, he has a certain high level of power and influence. I’m excited about when we can use electoral politics to build the type of grassroots power we need to create alternatives in our communities. And for me, electoral politics is not the final destination. It’s a way along. My good friend Jessica Byrd talks about the various stops on the Underground Railroad and that electoral politics, that these these victories that we have, are stops along the journey that we need to go on, and that they’re not the final destination. And at the same time, they’re necessary stops to make.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, how do you think Trump’s victory has affected grassroots organizing and also the fact that these progressive, left-progressive candidates are coming up in the moment of Trump’s presidency?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes, yes. So, we’re living in a moment right now. Dr. Barbara Ransby, I listen to her a lot when it comes to politics, and she talks—she’s talked about—
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about who Dr. Ransby is.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: She is a historian. She wrote Ella Baker’s biography. And she’s also, just as importantly, a community organizer. She’s an actual organizer in Chicago. And she talks about the necessity for a defensive strategy right now, in knowing that we are up against opponents both in the White House, in our states, in our cities, that have been moving—they have been moving a 40-, 50-year agenda to strip away any semblance of access to civil and human rights and dignity for our people.
And so, we need to end this time and this moment to have a defensive strategy that says that we’re going to move agendas and support candidates that are going to help us move our agendas in broader society through government, through elected office, right? And so, in doing that, it’s super, super important for us to be clear that conservatives will do pretty much anything. They’re putting children in prisons right now, right? We actually were in action in San Diego not too long ago supporting Mijente and a number of local organizations in San Diego. And so, we have a formidable opponent. And in this moment, we don’t have time to cut corners or act like we don’t need to mount a defense, so that every two seconds we don’t have to react to yet another threat of stripping away abortion care, another threat of closing all of our public schools and turning them over to charter schools, another threat of a hyperincarceration. That’s what this is about in this moment.
Again, electoral politics are not the final destination. And for some people, that’s an uncomfortable thing to hear, right? I envision a world where we are governing beyond the confines of what we have right now. And I don’t have all the answers of what that looks like, but I know that it’s more—it’s not based in profit, it’s not based in wealthy donors, and it’s based in actually what the people and the communities want.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about—we were just talking about governors’ races, but you have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez here in New York. Huge upset victory.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Huge.
AMY GOODMAN: Proud Democratic Socialist. You have Rashida Tlaib—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —in Detroit. She’s running unopposed, so we can’t say absolutely—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —but almost for sure she will become the first Muslim woman in Congress, proud Democratic Socialist. What does those—what do those words mean to you, “Democratic Socialist”? What does that word mean, “socialism”? And the fact that they are entering electoral politics, as they’re being, you know, constantly slammed by Fox—I mean, Alexandria, you would think she was the main host of Fox. Her name is mentioned so many times. And that everyone, she is the reference point. Gillum is the new Alexandria, you know, Ocasio-Cortez. Or it’s just constant—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Oh, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: They are so threatened by these people.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Does it even surprise you, though, that they—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: You know—
AMY GOODMAN: —have traversed from grassroots politics into electoral politics?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: It doesn’t surprise me, the movement of folk. I actually met Rashida Tlaib years ago. And the thing I remember most about her is her fervor. She was actually telling me I needed to run for office in that conversation: “When are you going to run? When are you going to run?”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, that’s our question, coming up.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: That’s a whole other thing. “When are you going to run?” And her fervor for supporting women in running for office, and black and brown women, Muslim women, all kinds of women, and women with a certain set of like actually like progressive and radical politics, to run for office. And so, I’m excited about her victory and then her hopefully entering, of course, entering as a congressperson.
And so, when I think about the word “socialism,” I actually look to the black feminists in my life who are socialist, and knowing that be it Barbara Smith or N’Tanya Lee at LeftRoots or Jamala Rogers, who is the executive director of Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis, and how black feminists have articulated socialism for, what I want to say, decades, well over decades, one that doesn’t say that class—that we can move a class-only strategy, and that socialism, absent of dismantling gender-based oppression, absent of dismantling white supremacy and anti-supremacy, is actually not socialism. That’s something else. But socialism, if we’re about building, to me, and how I’m understanding from my comrades at LeftRoots, a 21st century socialism, it is, yes, about workers controlling the means of production and us radically organizing the society that we live in, so that we have more collective-based choices and that we’re in right relationship with each other and the land that we live on, right? And so we can’t have the old stale, pale, white and male socialism that everybody thinks is the thing, when we have people like Claudia Jones, who was left of Karl Marx. She was a black woman who was exiled out of the U.S., right? And she was a Marxist and a feminist, and she was black. And this was decades ago. And so, I think there’s so much for black feminists to reclaim in socialism, given our tradition and what work is happening right now.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, one of the things, the arguments that you make in your book, is a defense of identity politics. So, and we’re just talking now—the title of your book, “black, queer, feminist.” We’ve just spoken of Rashida Tlaib as a Muslim woman, potentially the first one to enter Congress. Now, could you talk about why you think identity politics is important and needs to be defended, and also how it’s come under attack by both members of both the Democratic and Republican parties, and, in particular, by Democrats following Trump’s victory?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes. So, in 2016, no less than—what?—two or three days or so, definitely less than a week, after 45’s victory and Hillary Clinton’s defeat, there were articles by various liberals, who once supported identity politics, saying that identity politics were the reason why Hillary Clinton lost the election. They didn’t point to all the other things that actually were in play here, but blaming identity politics.
What they missed in 2016, and what people continue to miss, is that identity politics are older than this country and that white men, particularly slaveholders, other property owners, the Ku Klux Klan, have always engaged in identity politics. The identity—and identity politics is when people connect their lived experiences, who they are, how they identify, to their values and the actions they take out in the world. And so, white men have done that for centuries. Now, when we do it, when black folks do it, brown folks do it, migrants, immigrants do it, LGBTQ folks do it, it’s a problem.
And so, the identity politics that I work through are those that the Combahee River Collective talked about in 1977, which was a collective of black feminists, including black lesbians, and they talked about the place that they organize from. The best place for them to organize from was out of their own experiences and out of their identity. And they didn’t stop short of saying, “Because I identify as this, I’m automatically radical.” No, identity isn’t enough. The politics, what are your values, what are the actions that you take to live out your values in the world, those two combined, when they’re grounded—and, for me, radical black feminism and also these radical black LGBTQ movements and various movements across the world, those are the kind of identity politics that I believe in, not ones that actually seek to restrict the freedoms and the dignity of other people, but ones that actually give us more room and expand how we understand what it means to be a human being with our dignity.
AMY GOODMAN: Charlene Carruthers, one of the commitments you ask organizers to make is to combat liberalism through principled struggle.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What is liberalism?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What kind of world are you trying to create?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: So, when I talk about combating liberalism through principled struggle, it’s a combination, again. I have to say, this book is going give me all kinds of trouble, some of the stuff that I talk about. It comes from the The Little Red Book from Mao Zedong. And talking about how in our movements, that we oftentimes let things slide because someone is a friend, or we know something wrong is happening, we know that this thing is not the right thing, and we’re silent, we don’t say something. And when sometimes the principled struggle piece, which I also get from N’Tanya Lee, is one about when we struggle, when we have conflict, are we honest with each other? Are we straightforward? Are we direct? Do I pick up the phone and call you or the person who I know—a person that I know you’re accountable to, right? Or do I just get on social media and say what I’m going to say, but we never have a direct conversation, or I never have a direct conversation with someone who you’re accountable to, because I don’t feel safe talking to you in this moment?
And so, it’s about how we show up. Because I always go back—and I talk about it in the book—I believe it was 1969, when two members of the Black Panther Party, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, were shot and killed during a meeting after the COINTELPRO actually incited conflict between the two.
AMY GOODMAN: COINTELPRO being the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah, the FBI—yes, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program sent letters to the US Organization and the Black Panther Party saying that the other—the respective organization was going to assassinate someone from the other organization. And they were—it was rumors.
AMY GOODMAN: So each one thought the other was going to assassinate him.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah, these were rumors. And unchecked rumors can lead to death. They can lead to death. And it’s that serious, right? And they should still be here. That doesn’t mean that organizations can’t have conflict or disagreements. Because—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain what happened in that case.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah. So, in that case—when they died?
AMY GOODMAN: That they both died.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah, they both died. They both died. They were shot and killed in a meeting between the two organizations, after this rumor had been spread by the federal government, by the FBI. And, you know, I don’t want it to get to that state in our movement today. I don’t want it to get to that point where someone actually loses their life, someone’s life is taken, because we’re not having—we’re not engaged in principled struggle with each other.
And I’m not perfect. I want to be real clear, I’m not on some high horse, some person who always shows up principally in all situations. Principled struggle is that: It is struggle. Right? And we have to create these containers where we are able to hold ourselves as individuals, and also containers where we create communities, where we can actually create real communities of care, where people can do self work.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But what do you see as the failures of liberalism in that regard?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Because people who defend it say that it does all that.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Oh, yeah. So, liberalism in a political context, when we’re talking about government, political parties, it’s this—it sounds good on face value. It’s about equality, people having access to things, freedoms, all of that. The thing is, I know everyone’s seen those graphics on the internet with like the little people with their arms up, and they’re standing at these different things. What I’m interested in is equity and justice. I’m not trying to just be equal to white men. It’s a liberal idea for us to lean in. It’s a liberal idea for us to just want to like become millionaires or become wealthy just like white men, right? That’s not what I’m after. It’s a liberal idea for us to not be really clear that we want nothing short of transformation. Because liberalism is about tinkering around enough of the system and not actually getting at the root, as Ella Baker would talk about, and upending the system and turning it into something that actually improves our material needs, not just in the short term, but in the long term.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting, as we talk, there’s a school strike happening throughout Washington state, and it’s spreading even further. And among their demands are not just increased salary, but increased school funding and fighting inequality in the schools.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes, yes, yes. So I think that’s super important. And it oftentimes take people—it takes folks being fed up enough, like really fed up. Something has to tip the scale for folks to take action and make demands that are bold demands. Because our opponents are not afraid to make bold demands. Betsy DeVos is not afraid to make bold moves, bold demands. And so why are those of us on this side afraid to say, “We want fully funded education, public education,” while we have other folks who are saying, “Actually, I want to dismantle this, and I’m going to do it. I’m going to do the things that I can do, within my power, to dismantle this thing that you have”?
And so, what liberalism tells us is that we want 10 percent of our schools to receive more funding, or 20 percent or 30 percent of our schools receive more funding. What we actually need is to recognize the however many years of divestment, the inequities, that the schools in Washington state have experienced, and not just equally fund them with the schools that haven’t been divested from, but they likely need even more funding, more resources, more support, because they’ve been behind, here—right?—or just below here, not receiving the kinds of resources that they need, while other folks are over here. So, if we just get at—it’s not just about getting here. It’s about—there’s a lot—it’s a higher way, a longer way to go, to get to where people want to get to and where we need to be.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to ask about your own—you talked earlier about—we were talking about identity politics and how part of that is using your lived experience to—you know, to inform your politics and your work. So, could you say a little bit about your own lived experience, growing up—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: —in Chicago, of course?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, you talk about this identity—black, queer, feminist.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes, yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But how did that come about in the context of growing up in Chicago? And then we also want to ask you—of course, the other person who grew up in Chicago is President Obama—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: —your assessment of him.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes. So, I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, and my parents are the children of black women who migrated from Mississippi. And so, from the way I talk to the way I understand food and so many like ways of being are what has come up with—what was it?—millions of black people who migrated from the South during the Great Migration, and from the people who stayed, the people who didn’t migrate. And so, for me, for a very long time, I was clear in my consciousness—
AMY GOODMAN: Where did your parents come from?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Oh, Chicago. My grandparents migrated from Mississippi. And so, for years, I was super conscious of being black. When I went to college, I went to a predominantly white institution, and I knew about being black. And obviously I knew I was a woman. But it was later in college where I was actually introduced to feminism. And I didn’t meet my first like out black feminist, Dr. Venus Evans-Winters, until I was a senior in college. And so I didn’t read black feminist texts, really, at least not knowingly, when I was in college. It was through movement that I came—that I really came into feminism, and specifically radical black feminism. I read a lot, but I never feel as well-read as other people do. Like I never feel that way. I feel like I’m behind. And there are entire books that people would, I don’t know, burn me at the stake for because I haven’t read it, I haven’t read them. I don’t know that stuff.
And so—and then my queerness, right? I think black people are inherently queer, frankly. I think black folks are queer, in a sense that we’re different. We are—we make things different. We’re expansive. We don’t fit into one simple box like one single thing. We’re super—we have multitudes. We’re very diverse. And then you have queer as like a sexual identity, right? A sexual orientation identity. And so, for me, when—as I continue to grow in my own queerness politically, as some people think, and then also when it comes to like how I relate to people, it is political for me. It is a part of my politics, Like I remember—I remember, like I was alive. I wasn’t alive. But, you know, there was a whole wave when lesbianism was a politic, like women loving women, or I’m a lesbian because this is my particular politic. And so, you know, I have a partner. She’s a woman. And she’s also an organizer. And so, like, who we love, how we love—
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve also interviewed her on Democracy Now!, if in fact—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Mary Hooks. Mary Hooks from Southerners On New Ground.
AMY GOODMAN: Bailing Black Mamas Out.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes, Bailing Black Mamas Out. And so—
AMY GOODMAN: For Mother’s Day.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: For Mother’s Day.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, beyond.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Of course. And so, our values are connected to that. Like I’m not just queer because I happen to be in a relationship with another black woman, or I’ve been in relationships. It is about my values. How do I treat the women in my life? How do I treat the trans folk in my life, the gender-nonconforming folk, the straight folks in my life? How do I treat children? All those things matter. Like, identity is super important. And how does that actually—how it actually informs how you treat people and how you show up in the world is also important. So…
AMY GOODMAN: What about President Obama?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Oh, President Obama.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re a fellow Chicagoan.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes. So, I mean, BYP100, we’re actually a part of a campaign right now fighting for a community benefits agreement, calling on the city of Chicago, the Obama Presidential Center and the University of Chicago to say that if we’re going to invest millions, millions upon millions of dollars, into the Obama Presidential Center, that we actually have to ensure that it benefits, and not—it doesn’t tear down the community that it’s being built in. And I live in South Shore, and not in the immediate area of where they’re going to build the Presidential Center, but in the adjacent community.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to clarify, for people who aren’t clear—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —you know, every president has a big library and center.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And President Obama’s is going to be in Chicago.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: In Chicago.
AMY GOODMAN: Run by the University of Chicago?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: It won’t be run by the University of Chicago, but the University of Chicago stands to benefit from the building of the Obama Presidential Center. We have been fighting the University of Chicago for a long time for various things. You know, there are a group of young folks and organizations, STOP and FLY, that won the trauma center victory in Chicago, fighting against the University of Chicago to build a high-level trauma center. So, it’s nothing new.
And when I think about President Barack Obama and the narrative of his legacy that gets to—that is able to be told, my question to him and everyone who is able to celebrate like all of his successes is: Why—if we can celebrate the success of the president, why can we not look to the things, the actions, that he and his administration have taken that actually haven’t been a benefit to our community? And if the presidential—Obama Presidential Center is built in Chicago without a community benefits agreement—and this campaign is being led by KOCO, a number of organizations in Chicago. There’s a whole coalition that we’re a part of.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, community benefits?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Community benefits, so that means jobs. So, who’s going to be employed to build it? What kind of housing is going to be built in the area? Right? Who—how are the rents or the costs in that neighborhood going to be raised or not raised as a result of it? Right? All of those things are in the agreement. We even are working on a piece of the agreement around policing, because with that presidential center, one can imagine that they will increase police presence. And our communities in that area, in Woodlawn, in Jackson Park, in South Shore, we don’t need more police. We have a lot of police, and they’re not actually keeping us safe in our communities. And so, if that center is built and there is no community benefits agreement, our communities will absolutely suffer. And that’s why the community benefits coalition of—Community Benefits Agreement Coalition is working hard to make sure that that happens.
AMY GOODMAN: And your assessment of his presidency? Go from President Obama—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —to President Trump.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah. So, you know, this is why it’s really important to me that we do the work to not just focus on candidates, and like actually focus on issues, because I was excited when he was elected. I was living in St. Louis at the time, in school there, and I was excited. I was optimistic. I was fired up and ready to go, just like everyone else. And then we enter eight years where we have unprecedented healthcare reform that’s passed. We have a super diverse White House. We have people doing really good work in the White House. And at the same time, we had the highest rate of undocumented people being deported, under this administration, in the country’s history.
And so, I believe that we have to contend both with the successes of his administration and the failures. And it’s not easy. I mean, you know, the imagery of Michelle Obama and their daughters, and the work of Michelle Obama, because she wasn’t always first lady—she did work before she entered the White House as first lady—it’s inspiring. And I know that it’s inspired black folks and all kinds of folks across the world. And I just implore us to contend with the things that didn’t go well for our people. Just like people would say, “He’s not the president of black America,” I guarantee you one thing, and what I saw, is that people from all groups were lobbying that administration for eight years, demanding—whether or not they voted for him. Black women voted in astronomical numbers. Black women—were it not for black women, Barack Obama wouldn’t have been elected two times in a row. It just wouldn’t have happened, as president, right? And so, we have every right. A comrade, Gopal Dayaneni from Movement Generation, talks about, if it’s the right thing to do, we have every right to do it. And in regards to Barack Obama, his presidency, there were a lot of things we had a right to do, but we didn’t take up the right to actually do it.
And now, we’re in this presidency with Donald Trump. And he is—oh, my gosh—he’s moving an agenda that has been in the works for decades. And he is a part of, intentionally or unintentionally, a broader base of—a coalition of people, who are both organized and disorganized, who are actively stripping away every semblance—or working to strip away every semblance of human rights and civil rights that we have in this country. And it is a state—it is urgent. It is a state of emergency, and it’s not something to play around with. And I think—I remember how I showed up in 2016. And I actually think I should have showed up differently in 2016. I should have taken it a little—not just a little, a lot more seriously, that this person could be elected, because they, be it the Supreme Court justice that he may be able to appoint in his tenure, or be it the—and, consequently, impact, be it Roe v. Wade or other pieces, cornerstones of what people like to call a democracy in this country, that’s something that we have to fight at every single step against happening.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, how do you—how do you understand Trump being elected right after Obama serving two terms as president?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: So, I understand that is not just white anxiety over the economy, but a huge fear of losing power, of losing identity, as losing privilege in this country, and knowing that we have a growing majority of black and brown folk and other folk in this country, and that after having—some people have called it like a whitelash, a backlash, things like that. But this is a highly reactionary moment for people.
And what I wish was happening was that people saw that actually Donald Trump is not acting in the best interests of poor white folks. He’s not acting in the best interests of—and poor white folks weren’t the folks who got him elected. Middle-class and upper-class and upper-middle-class white people got him elected. And so, they were voting within their best interests, because they understood that—and they understand that he’s not acting in the interests of working-class or poor white people. And so, that’s what I would love to see happen, is for the folks in Appalachia, for the folks in other parts of the country, the folks in the Midwest, to see that the emperor absolutely, indeed, has no clothes, that he’s not here for you, that his agenda will not actually benefit your life in the way that it should.
And so, I think his election was, folks had—one, they were tired of this black man in office, and everything that he represented, and they wanted something that was completely different. They absolutely, the media and other folks, stoked sexist tropes about Hillary Clinton during the election, and so it fed a certain thing, a certain level of anxiety that people hold, and also, quite frankly, a deep level of just institutional racism that exists in this country. And they heard the messages of Donald Trump, and they said, “You know what? I agree with him,” or, “You know what? He’s not serious. He’s not completely serious. But he’s got to do better than that guy. He’s going to put more money in my pockets.” And that’s not actually happening for the people who actually need it the most.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you consider this a hopeful time, Charlene?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: I’m an organizer. And so, for me, all times are troubling. They’re always troubling. And there’s always hope at the same time. I’m optimistic. If I weren’t optimistic about the possibility of now, the possibility of people running for office on radical agendas, the possibility of the young people who are organizing across this country, the folks who have gotten back in the movement after decades, I couldn’t do—I couldn’t do the work. And it’s seeing people take action, be it what people perceive as small actions or major actions, that gets me up in the morning. And as I continue to talk with people across the country about this book, about this work, about our movement, I’m excited to wrestle with these ideas with folks. Everybody doesn’t have to agree with me. I’m cool with that. But I do want people to wrestle and struggle with the ideas.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, one last thing.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: You said earlier—you talked about being a Marxist. And then you just spoke on—you just spoke about the fact that poor white people who voted for Trump were voting against their own interests, because he’s not going to do anything for them. Now, Marx called that false consciousness. So let me ask Amy’s question in another way, which is to say: Do you see it as a hopeful moment now, given the fact that people like Andrew Gillum and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and all of the other progressive candidates we’ve been speaking of, that people are now voting for their interests?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Mm-hmm. I think that people are organizing for their interests and voting for their interests, right? And I’m a—I mean, I’m a black woman. We voted for our interests in Alabama. We voted for our interests in Virginia. We voted for our interests in 2016. We showed up. And we continue to show up over and over again. And so there’s a certain group of people in this country who have a muscle around engaging in elections, engaging in civil rights, human rights work, black liberation work. And there’s also a group of people or groups of folks who are starting to exercise their muscle, who are learning how to do this thing, how to vote, and then also know that that muscle has to be exercised after you vote, like engaging in the process in an ongoing manner, that really, really matters to us in 2016, 2018, 2020 and beyond.
And so, that’s exciting to me, because it gives folks like me, who have ideas that other folks may think are impossible—people are talking about prison abolition in this moment. I didn’t come up with the idea. When folks were talking about prison abolition decades ago, people believed it was impossible. And now we have articles in major media outlets that are saying abolish prisons. That’s the work. And so, folks like me should use this as an opportunity to come in—right?—and work alongside people who may or may not agree with us, may not hold all of our politics, and see it as an opportunity to bring folks up, expand the politic and expand the narrative.
AMY GOODMAN: Some have said every prison is a Confederate monument. Explain what prison abolition is.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes. So, I learned about prison abolition from folks like Mariame Kaba, Asha Ransby-Sporn, Ruthie Gilmore, as a politic and as also—and critical resistance, that it is a long-term movement towards abolishing the prison-industrial complex and replacing it with alternatives that are not grounded in punishment, not grounded in incarceration.
And so, prison abolition, or the abolition of the prison-industrial complex, is, yes, let’s get rid of these things, and we have a responsibility, because—very simple story. Someone breaks into your car. What do you do? How—or they steal your car? What do you do? I’ve had my car stolen before. If I call the police, they’re actually not likely going to get my car back. But if we have the types of communities that actually look out for one another, that know what’s going on and know who stole that car, I want to have a conversation with the person who stole my car, and I want my car back. That’s what I want, because locking them up is not going to get me my car back. It might make me feel temporarily good.
Well, what are the alternatives that we can build when someone is in a mental health crisis? Police officers are not trained crisis interventionists. So what if a social worker responded? What if a rape crisis counselor responded in the middle of a crisis? What if we actually had those resources in our communities? That’s what abolition is about. It’s about doing that thinking, that tough thinking. What do—what are we doing right now with people who kill people? What are we doing right now with people who act—who commit acts of—
AMY GOODMAN: Who rape people?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: —who rape people? They’re in our communities right now. They’re on the streets right now. They’re not all in prison. And so, prison is not the solution for dealing with even the most difficult things in our society. So, as abolitionists, we have a duty to do the hard thinking and the hard work to think about what are going to be the alternatives. And I don’t have all the answers, but I’m committed to figuring it out.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re stepping down as head of BYP100—
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —Black Youth Project 100, at the end of the year.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: You made that announcement.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your plans?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Yeah, so, first, I’m excited about our incoming co-directors, and I hope they get to talk to you one day on Democracy Now!, D’atra Jackson and Janae Bonsu. I’m really excited for them.
And as I think about myself, I’m excited about myself and what I’m going to do. I’ll be on this book tour for quite some time. I want to teach. I want to build an actual center for leadership development in Chicago, where we can train organizers and activists and strategic communicators. I’m really excited about the opportunity or the prospect of training folks how to do the things that they’re most passionate about, and sharpening each other in a broader community.
And then, one thing that may be surprising to people is I love food. I love cooking. And so, I actually want to do that for a while. Like, I can tell you the best restaurants to go to in most places in the country and some in the world. And so, I want to engage people in conversations over the plate, because what’s on our plate is inherently political. And you can politicize people over talking about how a curry landed in Trinidad, and talk about migration and politics in a way that doesn’t hit them over the head like conversations about abolition and political candidates and elections and things like that. And so, I want to dig into that and have some fun and travel a bit and do some education and building with people around food.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with us. Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100, outgoing director, as she expands her horizons even further. Her new book, it’s just out. It’s titled Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. And we’re going to link to two things: your book tour, as you travel around the country—you’re headed to?
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: I’m headed to Atlanta next, and I’ll be at the Strand tonight.
AMY GOODMAN: And we are going to link to your recommendation of restaurants in this country and around the country.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Oh, OK!
AMY GOODMAN: And your favorite food, all of those things.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: OK! Sounds great. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Charlene Carruthers, thanks so much for joining us.
CHARLENE CARRUTHERS: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: To see Part 1 of our discussion with Charlene, you can go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us.
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