21st Century African American Women

"You have a sacred duty to put your magic in the world. Your voice matters"

"You are not in competition with anyone else in life. You get to run your own race."

"If you have medicine that could change someone’s life, you are honor-bound to share it."

"Against Aryna it's never easy. I'm just going to do my best and focus on myself and what I want to do on court. We usually have these matches that are really exciting and really tough, both mentally and physically."

"But obviously, in the wind, it's tough to be as aggressive as you want, because the bounces are weird and the ball was moving. So I'm glad I made that adjustment and didn't get too frustrated when I missed. You pay the price for hopefully a good reward."

"I felt like I needed to hit through the court"

"It’s the tendency, which is unfortunate, for people to want to publicly shame and humiliate people. And it's based on what they say, or what they look like, or what they wear, or who they're hanging out with, or who they agree or disagree with. It's attaching labels to people without really doing any kind of nuance."

"Call in is actually a callout done with love and respect. Because you're really seeking to hold people accountable for the potential harm that they cause, but you're not going to lose sight of the fact that you're talking to another human being. And so you extend a hand of active love and active listening to help them maybe stop and think about what they said."

"We have to remember that there is humanity behind the words, that there is humanity behind the action."

"I think we overuse that word ‘trigger’ when really we mean discomfort,and we should be able to have uncomfortable conversations."

"If a Black woman can learn to have civil conversations with someone who's been in the Ku Klux Klan, we should be able to have civil conversations with everybody."

"Do the work, but also make sure you intentionally bring joy into your life because our job is to look at the worst things people do to each other, the ugliness–what I call the vomit of humanity."

"I find that people who take themselves too seriously burn out really quickly because they become very cynical because they've become very overwhelmed. When you're overwhelmed, the most common response is to check out mentally because everything is so overwhelming."

"College is where you're supposed to find out things about yourself, discover your voice, and discover what moves you and what makes you passionate."

"That's what all activists need to do: we look at the ugliness of the world and we keep on working."

"Reproductive justice can’t become a reality for Black women around the world until human rights become a reality. Reproductive justice is based upon the global human rights framework."

"The human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities."

"My best advice is to party as hard as you work and have fun doing good work! And that way, you'll be in it for 50 or 60 years, like I’ve been."

"Even if you can't see the changes that you want to see immediately, you just keep on doing the work and eventually they will radically change in a way that's totally unanticipated but at the same time is what you're working for."

"No matter what your otherness is, it is not an impediment, it is not a detraction, it is a source of power."

"Dorothy Lee Bolden's emphasis on voting rights and equality was also heard loud and clear by another generation of community-minded Black leaders like voting rights activist and politician Stacey Abrams, whose 2018 gubernatorial campaign was strongly supported in Atlanta by the National Domestic Workers Alliance."

"Part of our leadership is understanding that you can’t change what other people think of you, but you can change how you react to their thinking and how you respond to it."

"I'm proud to be supporting Stacey Abrams for Governor of Georgia. She will make access to universal Pre-K a reality for Georgia’s children, raise the minimum wage, that currently at $5.15 an hour keeps families trapped in poverty, eliminate cash bail, and make sure people can participate in their government by introducing automatic voter registration."

"It was an extraordinary night, not just for me and what it symbolized for women and women of color, but what it symbolizes for Georgia and for America. We’re changing the face of leadership in this country. And that means reflecting the very different experiences and lives that folks have, recognizing that that change is a good thing for Georgia and a good thing for America."

"I’m running on very clear progressive values, Democratic values. We talk about educating children from cradle to career. And that’s something that resonated across the state of Georgia. We talk about a diverse and inclusive economy that works for every Georgian, no matter where you live."

"We must remember that we’re in the state where the red clay gives life to generations of dreamers; a state where Martin marched on ballot boxes and challenged a nation’s conscience; a Georgia that gave us the Godfather of Soul, the queen of the Met, and sent a peanut farmer to the Oval Office. That is our Georgia."

"The minute the elections are over, the people who won—who did not share our values—are going to be working hard. We have to be working even harder."

"I’m proud to be part of a pantheon of elected leaders who, from around this country, found their voices and lifted up their communities. What we were able to do in Georgia was build an unprecedented multicultural, multiethnic coalition. We tripled Latino and Asian Pacific Islander participation. We increased youth participation by 139 percent. And we outperformed with African Americans and with white voters to numbers that haven’t been seen in Georgia before. And what that signals is that you can win in America, you can win in the Deep South, by talking to communities and engaging them where they are and treating them with the respect that every community deserves."

"I built a campaign that’s been very different from a lot of campaigns that preceded me. Rather than spending a lot of money trying to convert Republicans into Democrats, I’m spending the bulk of our resources encouraging voters who share our values, Democratic-leaning voters and independent thinkers, so that they know that if they vote, they actually will get a different result. Because what’s really happened is that the unheard and unseen have given up. And I believe that with the right candidate and the right message and the right investment, we can turn them into active voters."

"I want us to understand that those who are on the sidelines, those who find their voices muted or find their voices actually silenced have power. And there is no more profound power in a democracy than the power to vote."

"We have to give ourselves permission to want more...I think the first and most important foundational piece of advice is dream big. Think about what you want, and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t have it."

"There is nothing inherent in being a minority that says you can’t have everything you want."

"Influenced by the Civil Rights, Black Power and Nuyorican movements, Miriam often asserted, “African Americans have always been in the vanguard. Everything that’s worthwhile in this country has come about because African Americans have pushed it. We all benefit everyday, white people as well as people of color, from the struggles of African Americans.”"

"Prior to graduating high school, Miriam wrote, “Each new mask is put on, tested, and finally disposed of…Just who am I?” adding, “It should not matter who your parents were. The product is what is of importance. It should not matter!” This introspection and insightfulness would serve her well in future endeavors."

"She authored dozens of seminal works that challenged racial democracy, Taíno revivalism, blanqueamiento, and the U.S. census"

"She received all of her formal education in public schools and universities during the early years of ethnic studies, saying, “I owe my less formal but likely strongest intellectual, professional and personal development to the African diasporic community of scholars and activists,” whose worked inspired her for a lifetime."

"Jiménez Román and Flores write: "Afro-Latin@ is at the personal level a unique and distinctive experience and identity because of its range among and between Latin@, Black, and United States American dimensions of lived reality. In their quest for a full and appropriate sense of social identity Afro-Latin@s are thus typically pulled in three directions at once and share a complex, multidimensional optic on contemporary society." Taking a cue from W.E.B. Du Bois, we might name this three-pronged web of affiliations "triple-consciousness." To paraphrase those unforgettable lines from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) in studying the historical and contemporary experience of United States Afro-Latin@, one ever feels his three-ness, -a Latin@, a Negro, an American; three souls, three thoughts, three unreconciled strivings; three warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. Du Bois's reference to strength and resilience bears emphasis: the multiple experiences and perspectives including the contradictions, pain, and outrage-does not necessarily translate into pathological confusion. As many of the contributions to this volume suggest, embracing and celebrating all the dimensions of one's self has not only been possible but has also resulted in significant innovations at the personal and collective level."

"She was an influential pioneering architect of the Afro-Latinx Studies movement."

"As a Research Coordinator and Curator of Exhibits and Special Programs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Miriam worked closely with SNCC activists Roberta “Bobbi” Yancy, professor Zita Nunes, and director Howard Dodson to produce dozens of widely celebrated international Africana exhibits (1987-1997)."

"We keep denying the importance of race because white people are becoming the minority."

"Afro-Latinos serve as bridges. The most obvious example would be Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. The Schomburg Center for Black Culture [Harlem, New York, USA] is probably the premiere institution for any type of serious scholarship and research on Africans and their descendants. Schomburg was a Black Puerto Rican who came to the United States from Puerto Rico in 1891 at 17. He became an integral part of the Black community – African American and Caribbean; most definitely he served as a bridge. Most of his writings were about Black Latinos, whether in Spain, the Caribbean or South America."

"In Latin America there is this general concept that because we are all racially mixed, somewhere back in everybody’s family tree there is an African or Indian then we are incapable of being racist because that would be being racist against ourselves. Since most of these countries became independent that has become the guiding line that we are all mixed and because we are all mixed we cannot be racist."

"("Are there any countries working to acknowledge the historical and cultural impact of their African roots?") Every single country in Latin America and the Caribbean is doing that, including places you would never imagine like Chile and Uruguay and Paraguay, all have Black advocacy organizations. The only exception is El Salvador. And I think we can contribute some of the reluctance to organizing to El Salvador’s civil war. The political instability works against organizing."

"struggling for racial equality [in Latin America] is far behind the United States."

"This kind of book should have been around when I was a kid because blackness was equated with being African-American. This limited view left me concerned about my blackness because I grew up as a Black Puerto Rican and I’m very conscious how race and ethnicity have both impacted my life."

"In the process of putting the book together, we discovered a whole series of people who were identified as being African-American because they appeared—Black. There was no real attention to their [Latino] ethnicity even if they spoke Spanish; they served as bridges. Afro-Latinos function in two worlds: African [Black] and Latino."

"we’re not in a post racial state. Race is still a very important part of how all of us – globally – live our lives. African-Americans and Latinos need to get together, create change that will benefit not just Latinos and African-Americans but all people of color."

"The way ideology is constructed in Latin America –if you claim Blackness or talk about race, it’s because you have some kind of complex; you just can’t seem to deal with the world the way it is. It’s a good way of silencing any kind of protest against discrimination because people think you’re saying because you have a problem, it’s your personal problem not collective discrimination."

"In their introduction to the Afro-Latin@ Reader, the first major academic effort about Latin@s of African descent in the United States, editors Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores struggle to define the term Afro-Latin@, asking within a North American context, "What's an Afro-Latin@? Who is an Afro-Latin@? The term befuddles us because we are accustomed to thinking of 'Afro' and 'Latin@' as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@""

"Whether we look at race as a fixed notion or culturally constructed concept it is very real. Race itself is an invention, a creation. Many people feel race is something that’s fixed, rigid and doesn’t have variances. By looking at Afro-Latinos, you kind of get a better sense of how fluid race has been. People have constructed it in different ways depending on conditions and circumstances."