POSTPONED: How We Get Free: A Conversation on Black Feminism, Politics, and Liberation

[EVENT POSTPONED]

How We Get Free features three leading activist-scholars who will come together in conversation about Black Feminism past and present. The speakers, each coming from a unique radical tradition, will combine their own research and experience with the history of past movements to explore questions around race, gender, class, and ultimately, liberation. What is the role of elections? Of #BlackLivesMatter? Of Trump? How should we be organizing today for our collective liberation?

Our speakers are Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Alicia Garza and Zoe Samudzi. How We Get Free takes place Saturday, December 1 at 7pm at First Congregational Church of Oakland, 2501 Harrison St, Oakland, CA 94612. The event is sponsored by the Fifth Annual Howard Zinn Book Fair (being held Sunday, Dec. 2 from 10-6 at CCSF, 1125 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA) and the International Socialist Organization. A donation of $5 - $10 is requested and any proceeds will go toward the Zinn Book Fair and ISO.

In the last several years, Black feminism has reemerged as the analytical framework for the activists response to the oppression of trans women of color, the fight for reproductive rights, and of course, the movement against police abuse and violence. The most visible organizations and activists connected to the Black Lives Matter movement speak openly about how Black feminism shapes their politics and strategies today.
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, an examination of the history and politics of Black America and the development of the social movement Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States. Taylor’s book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective explores the history of the Combahee River Collective, a trailblazing 1960s-70s group of radical black feminists through interviews with the groups founders. Her research examines race, housing, and public policy.

Alicia Garza is a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement and the special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) which strives to get better pay and working conditions for nannies and housekeepers. She also serves on the board of directors for the School of Liberation and Unity (SOUL) in Oakland. This school works to help underprivileged youth and people with low-income develop skills so they can improve their communities. Garza is also on the board of directors of Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), another Oakland organization which helps black activists further develop their organizing skills. Garza is one of the activists interview in Taylor’s How We Get Free.

Zoe Samudzi is a co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation and doctoral student in medical sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research focuses on the scientific logics that produce race and gender, particularly focusing on transgender health and the ways Blackness is constructed. Her writing has been featured in The New Inquiry, Warscapes, Truthout, ROAR Magazine, Teen Vogue, Black Girl Dangerous, and Bitch Media, among others.

Also featuring poetry readings by fiction writer and poet Idrissa Simmonds.

If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.
—Combahee River Collective Statement