How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

one person I think it would be awesome if you wanted to talk with is my sister Marisa Franco, who is coordinating this network called Mijente. And I suggest her because their whole network was built in this context where she felt Latinos need to get in line and on board. Right? We’re fighting this fight around immigration reform, which is quickly turning into a fight around criminalization, and nobody wants to talk about that. Right? Right. Yeah. And they’ve actually done some really interesting work, but they also came out pretty hard after Mike Brown was killed. And they were one of the only non-Black, Latino-led groups that were like, “Not only are we taking leadership from Black folks, but we want to talk about anti-Blackness in our own communities and how some of our people are supporting people like George Zimmerman, or supporting people like Darren Wilson, because of the way in which criminal behavior is defined and because of the way in which Black bodies are criminalized.” So that’s an example of I think how folks have been shaped by this movement, Black folks and other folks of color. But I would say the Bay is a specific place. And it has its own history, patterns, traditions, like every other place. But it also has way more infrastructure than many places throughout the country. So what the Bay looked like, we didn’t actually start a chapter here until 2014. And we did it really slowly mostly because we were like, “Is that our best contribution to this movement...