#Blacklivesmatter Archives

Feminism

Re-Revolutionizing the Female Orgasm

A conversation with Rosa Campbell on Shere Hite’s fight for feminist sexuality

July 1, 2026 • by Rosa Campbell and Rachel Potter

Shere Hite’s goal was to bring feminism to the women in the suburbs she grew up in. To her conservative Christian grandmother who raised her; to her mother who fell pregnant with Hite as a teenager and was forced out of school; and to herself—an aspiring feminist academic who, without ...

Podcast

Black Resistance, Black Joy

In Episode 37, conversation with political theorist Christopher Paul Harris about his new book, To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care

September 13, 2023 • by Claire Potter

To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care (Princeton University Press, 2023) draws on Christopher PaulHarris’s own experiences as an activist and organizer to analyze contemporary Black struggle and places that struggle in the long history of Black oppression, resistance, community making and joy....

Activism

To Build a Black Future

In this excerpt, an introduction to the new Black politics of joy, pain, and care

September 11, 2023 • by Christopher Paul Harris

One of the critical features of the contemporary moment in Black movement, the time of #BlackLivesMatter, is how capacious the definitions of Blackness and, with it, Black radicalism have become....

Democracy

Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

The democratic project is both unfinished and unstable

January 31, 2023 • by James Miller

Even though the post-war consensus over the meaning and value of specifically liberal democratic institutions seems more fragile than ever—polls show that trust in government experts and elected representatives has rarely been lower—democracy as furious dissent flourishes as rarely before, in vivid and vehement outbursts of anger at remote elites ...

Hannah Arendt: Insurrection and Constitutionalism

Literature

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

“Hers is the story, if ever there was one, of a great American”

September 7, 2022 • by Dwight A. McBride

The story of Poems on Various Subjects, like the story of its author, the slave girl named after the ship that brought her across the Atlantic, is a story that should both inspire and enrage. ...

Excerpt from “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects”

Social Research

Books That Matter II, the New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its last issue

July 20, 2022 • by Social Research

The current issue of Social Research is based not on a special theme but rather on the conviction that words matter, books and ideas matter—and some books, special ones, deeply affect our lives and how we think and what we think about. To bring home this perhaps trivial truism—that books ...

Books That Matter II, the New Issue of Social Research

Politics

Why Movements Matter in Black Politics

And why scholars of American politics should pay closer attention

March 29, 2022 • by Megan Ming Francis

But when we expand the analytical lens in scholarship on the American party system, what other areas of research have been silenced or overlooked?...

Activism

The Power of Black Feminist Pragmatism

Why the Black Lives Matter movement is the best alternative to the anti-democratic, white supremacist, authoritarian capture of the United States

January 20, 2022 • by Deva Woodly

The Black Lives Matter movement is not a “new social movement” that focuses on cultural transformation while eschewing policy intervention, nor is it fashioned after “old style,” “traditional” social movements that attempt to move policy while deemphasizing the need for deep changes in public understandings of the problems facing polities ...

Activism

On Coming to Terms

What form should a “post #BlackLivesMatter” movement take?

January 19, 2022 • by Christopher Paul Harris

BlackLivesMatter” world, it won’t be one where the current constellation of movement organizations simply disappear or become ineffective in their attempts to bring Black people closer to liberation....

Activism

Reckoning with Deva Woodly’s Reckoning

What kind of coalition must the Left forge in order to defeat Trumpism and whatever comes after it?

January 18, 2022 • by Sidney Tarrow

Black Lives Matter was not born in the streets, even if it sometimes moved there following the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014, and again after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. But the movement, after these intense episodes of protest and direct action has not stayed in ...

Activism

The Promise of Black Lives Matter

How to sustain a popular movement that can dismantle structural racism in America

January 18, 2022 • by Maneesh Arora

How can BLM activists and other allied individuals and organizations capitalize on the outrage they are precipitating by bringing first-time protesters into the fold? Moreover, how can they help people who are concerned about racial inequality—motivated to do something about it and already thinking structurally—to also act structurally? ...

Activism

We Are a Reckoning

Deva Woodly introduces her new book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

January 17, 2022 • by Deva Woodly

This nation is mine. Mine to claim. Mine to hold to account. Mine to participate in reshaping. So I tell an American story because it is my story to tell....