Invisible No More: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color in Troubled Times
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Description
As the pendulum swings toward intensified immigration enforcement, discredited drug war tactics, expansion of “broken windows” policing, rampant Islamophobia, and attacks on gender, sexual and reproductive liberation, the current political climate fuels police violence against Black women and women of color on every front. In this context, women of color’s experiences of policing – often invisible in broader debates – must in turn fuel our resistance.
Join activists and scholars including Barbara Smith, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Tourmaline, Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, and Elle Hearns for a two day conference exploring and building on the themes, trends, and organizing strategies outlined in the recently released Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by BCRW Researcher-in-Residence Andrea J. Ritchie. Through strategic discussions, participants will not only delve into the multiple forms and contexts of police violence against women of color, but will also work to collectively identify strategies to challenge the conditions that produce them, and thus begin to radically re-envision our approaches to violence and safety.
This conference is the first in a series of events taking place in the midwest, south, and west coast to explore the themes of Invisible No More and ongoing resistance to police violence against Black women and women of color.
Updates: Conference publications coming soon.
Program
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3
4 PM – 8:30 PM
4 – 5:30 PM – Policing Gender and Sex
Gabriel Arkles (ACLU), Bianey Garcia (Make the Road New York), Kate Mogulescu (Brooklyn Law School), Dean Spade (Seattle University School of Law), and LaLa Zanell (NYC Anti-Violence Project)
5:30 – 6:30 PM– Reception
6:30 – 8:30 PM – Evening Roundtable Discussion
Panelists: Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (Columbia University School of Law), Tourmaline (filmmaker and Activist-in-Residence, BCRW), Mariame Kaba (Project Nia), Robyn Maynard (author, Policing Black Lives) and Barbara Smith (Founder, Combahee River Collective)
Moderated by Tina Campt (Director, BCRW)
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4
9 AM – 6 PM
Each panel/workshop would be a blend of academics and organizers (and academic/organizers), prioritizing participation of women of all gender identities directly impacted by discriminatory policing, engaged in a discussion of an agenda for moving forward in each issue area.
8 AM – 9 AM – Registration and breakfast
9 AM – 10:30 AM – Policing Motherhood
Erin Cloud (Family Defense Project, Bronx Defenders), Jeanne Flavin (Fordham University), Victoria Law (independent scholar), and Dorothy Roberts (University of Pennsylvania)
Moderated by Monifa Bandele (MomsRising)
10:30 AM – 10:45 AM – BREAK
10:45 AM – 12:15 PM – Police Responses to Violence
Shelby Chestnut (Transgender Law Center), Renata Hill (New Jersey 7), Mariame Kaba (Project Nia), Cara Page (Activist-in-Residence, BCRW), and Jamisha Williams (Audre Lorde Project)
Moderated by Ejeris Dixon (Vision, Change, Win)
12:15 PM – 1 PM – LUNCH
1 PM – 2:30 PM – Policing Girls
Miaija Jawara (Urban Youth Collaborative), Octavia Lewis (trans health activist and Young Women’s Initiative), Cidra Sebastien (BroSis), and moderated by Joanne Smith (Girls for Gender Equity)
2:45 – 4:15 – Criminalizing Webs
Rose Berry (Black Alliance for Just Immigration), Kassandra Frederique (Drug Policy Alliance), Chaumtoli Huq (Law@TheMargins), and Joo-Hyun Kang (Communities United for Police Reform)
Moderated by Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College)
4:15 – 4:30 – BREAK
4:30 – 6:30 – Resistance Roundtable
Mizue Aizeki (Immigrant Defense Project), Elle Hearns (Marsha P. Johnson Institute), Nakisha Lewis (#SheWoke), Darnell Moore (Writer-in-Residence, Columbia University), Roksana Mun (Desis Rising Up and Moving), Kei Williams (Black Lives Matter, NYC), and Alexis Yeboah-Kodie (BYP100)
Videos
Presenter Bios
MIZUE AIZEKI is Deputy Director at the Immigrant Defense Project where she focuses on ending injustices related to the entanglement of the criminal and immigration systems, including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile due to criminal convictions. Mizue also coordinates IDP’s community defense work. Mizue has organized around racial justice, workers’ rights, and the policing and deportation of immigrants in the interior and at the U.S.-Mexico border since 1995. Mizue is also a photographer whose work has appeared in Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid, (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016).
GABRIEL ARKLES is a Senior Staff Attorney with the LGBT & HIV Project of the ACLU. He began his career at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, where he spent six years providing civil legal services and supporting community organizing for low-income trans and gender nonconforming people and trans and gender nonconforming people of color. Next, he taught law students at NYU and Northeastern for seven years. Gabriel has written about gender, race, and disability in prisons and the military, as well as about the role of lawyers in social change. Currently, Gabriel combines fighting for trans people at the ACLU with volunteering for grassroots groups and spending time with his partner, friends, and cats.
MONIFA BANDELE is Vice President for MomsRising.org, sits on the steering committee for Communities United for Police Reform, and is an activist with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. She has more than a decade of experience in policy analysis, communications, civic engagement organizing, and project management working with groups like the Brennan Center for Justice, Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. At MomsRising.org she manages the food justice campaign, helping to successfully increase children’s access to healthy food and working to stem junk food marketing. Monifa Bandele is also an impact producer with nearly a decade of experience developing education curriculum, resource guides, social/trans media projects, and community engagement campaigns for films like Hip Hop – Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Banished, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Soul Food Junkies, Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution, and the Emmy Award winning documentary Freedom Riders. She has worked as a community outreach consultant for both Working Films and Firelight Media engaging more than 100 educational institution and partner organizations ultimately reaching tens of thousands of audience participants.
ROSELYN BERRY is an Afro-Latinx femme organizer who committed her life to the fight for liberation at the age of 16. She was born in Panama and grew up in Boston, where she organized for 11 years around immigrant and women’s rights, and racial and socioeconomic equity. As one of the founding members of a young women’s organization called Reflect and Strengthen (R&S), she devoted her time as an organizational leader at R&S for 8 years before moving to Oakland and becoming a national organizer, fighting for the decriminalization of Black and Brown youth and for the liberation of all Black people. Rose is a proud Board member of BYP100. Rose has a deep commitment to social movement and has made a life-long pledge to invest in the work that will eradicate social inequality on a global scale. In addition to being a social justice freedom fighter, Rose’s other passion is writing. As a poet, spoken word artist and published author, she believes that art is not only a tool for social change, but a foundational piece of operative resistance.
SHELBY CHESTNUT is the National Organizing and Policy Strategist Transgender Law Center, overseeing their organizing and policy work. Prior to TLC Shelby worked at the New York City Anti-Violence Project for 5 years as their Director of Organizing and Policy, advancing the rights and protections of LGBTQ survivors of violence. For over a 9 decade, Shelby has been organizing with LGBTQ people, people of color, and low income communities to address violence, promote access to resources, and affect local policy change that is for and by the people most impacted by oppression. Shelby is a gender non-conforming, Two Spirit, mixed race organizer who has called Brooklyn their home for the past 7 years, but always draws on their Montana roots for country sensibility and dry sense of humor.
ERIN CLOUD is a Supervising Attorney and Team Leader at the Bronx Defenders, a holistic public defense office located in the South Bronx. She specializes in Family Defense, representing men and women entrenched in the child welfare system. She has published articles and given lectures on the racial disproportionality of the child welfare system, and its impact on Black and Brown women and children. In collaboration with the greater fight for reproductive justice for all women of color, she works with Black Mamas Matter to increase equity in maternal outcomes for all Black women. She is a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Fordham Law School.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, is a leading authority on Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, Critical Race Theory, and race, racism and the law. Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Crenshaw is the co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, a gender and racial justice legal think tank, and the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School. She is a leading voice in calling for a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice interventions, having spearheaded the Why We Can’t Wait Campaign and co-authored Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, and Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.
EJERIS DIXON is an organizer and political strategist with over 18 years of experience working in racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, and economic justice movements. She is the Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting (www.visionchangewin.com) where she partners with organizations to build their capacity and deepen the impact of their organizing strategies. She also serves as a consultant with Roadmap Consulting (www.roadmapconsulting.org), a national social justice consulting team. Previously, Ejeris served as the Deputy Director, in charge of the Community Organizing Department at the New York City Anti-Violence Project where she directed national, statewide, and local organizing and advocacy initiatives on hate violence, domestic violence, police violence, and sexual violence. Ejeris was the Founding Program Coordinator of the Safe OUTside the System Collective at the Audre Lorde Project, where she worked on creating transformative justice strategies to address hate and police violence. Her essay, “ Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation, “ is featured in the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. She is a widely recognized as an expert on issues of community safety, transformative justice, police violence, hate violence, sexual violence, and intimate partner violence as they impact LGBTQ communities and communities of color. Her writings and analysis have been featured in Truthout, New York Times, Huffington Post, SPIN Magazine, CNN, the New Civil Rights Movement, the New York Post, and NY1.
JEANNE FLAVIN is a professor of sociology who teaches at Fordham University in New York City. Her scholarship examines gender, crime, and justice. She wrote the awardwinning Our Bodies, Our Crimes: Policing Women’s Reproduction in America (NYU, 2009), is co-editor of Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror (Rutgers, 2007), and author of more than two dozen other publications. She was the 2013 recipient of a Sociologists for Women in Society award for social action. For the past 10 several years, she has proudly served on the board of directors for National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Jeanne grew up on a farm in rural Kansas.
KASSANDRA FREDERIQUE is New York State Director at the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). Frederique also represented DPA as a member of Communities United for Police Reform, which focused on addressing Stop & Frisk and broader police reform/accountability measures bridging the gap between the War on Drugs and policing. In addition to working for policy solutions to reduce the harms associated with drug use, Frederique works with communities throughout the state to address and resolve the collateral consequences of the War on Drugs – state violence. Frederique cultivates and mobilizes powerful coalitions in communities devastated by drug misuse and drug criminalization to develop municipal strategies to foster healthier and safer communities. A native New Yorker, Frederique holds a M.S. in Social Work from Columbia University and earned a B.S. in Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University.
BIANEY GARCIA-D LA O came to the United States at age 15 escaping trans-phobia back in Mexico. At 19, she began attending transgender support groups and worked with community leaders to educate them on STD prevention. After a unfair and discriminatory experience from the police with community members, Bianey joined Make the Road NY as a way to combat discrimination, build leadership and educate LGBT community members about their rights. She is also the organizer of the largest annually march in Jackson Heights called “The Trans-Latina March.” Bianey is a warrior combating the hate violence against Trans-Latinas in Queens.
TOURMALINE is an activist, writer, and filmmaker. Along with Sasha Wortzel, Tourmaline wrote, directed and produced Happy Birthday, Marsha! a short film about legendary trans activist Marsha P Johnson starring Independent Spirit Award winner Mya Taylor. As the 2014-2016 Activist-In-Residence at Barnard College’s Center for Research on Women (BCRW) Tourmaline produced and directed No One Is Disposable, a series of cross media platform teaching tools used to spotlight the ways oppressed people are fighting back, surviving and building strong communities in the face of enormous violence. She recently completed the short animated film The Personal Things about iconic black trans activist Miss Major. A long time community organizer, Tourmaline worked as the membership director at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project from 2010 to 2014 to lift the voice and power of trans and gender non conforming people and helped lead the successful campaign to end healthcare discrimination against low income trans and gender non conforming New Yorkers. She also worked at Queers for Economic Justice where she directed the Welfare Organizing Projected and produced A Fabulous Attitude, documenting low-income LGBT New Yorkers surviving inequality and thriving despite enormous obstacles. Prior to her work at Queers for Economic Justice Tourmaline worked with Critical Resistance organizing with low income LGBTGNC New Yorkers in a campaign that successfully stopped NYC’s Department of Corrections from building a $375 million new jail in the Bronx. Tourmaline is a 2007 Soros Justice Fellow, a 2009 Stonewall Community Foundation Honoree, and the recipient of the 2016 Ackerman Institute Community Award. Her work has been supported by the Open Society Foundations, Art Matters Foundation, and the Astraea Foundation’s Global Arts Fund. She was a 2012-2013 fellow of filmmaker Ira Sach’s Queer/ Art/Mentorship. Along with Eric Stanley and Johanna Burton, Tourmaline is an editor of the forthcoming New Museum anthology on trans art and cultural production to be published by MIT Press in 2017.
ELLE HEARNS is an organizer originally from the Midwest, and currently living in Washington, D.C. She made history when she led the design of the first-ever Movement for Black Lives Convening, held in Cleveland, Ohio, and later when she played a pivotal role in the creation of the official Black Lives Matter network the organization that formed 11 after the founding of the popular hashtag. In other words, she is at the center of the most catalytic social movement of our time. In 2014, after the murders of Cemia Dove, Brittney Nicole Kidd-Stergis, Tiffany Edwards, and Betty Skinner, Elle turned pain into action by organizing Black trans women to have safe spaces to build and collaborate on ways to better their lives by co-founding the Black Trans Lives Matter movement. She is also a fearless spokesperson. Elle’s writing have been featured in TruthOut, Huffington Post, and Ebony. Her work has also been covered widely by outlets like Essence, The New York Times, and Fusion. Audiences love Elle’s hard-earned wisdom on intersectional organizing and movement building, as well as her infectious passion for centering marginalized voices for a brighter, better future for all of us.
RENATA HILL is currently a full-time student on the path to earn an Associate’s degree in Human Services at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and will then work to get her master’s degree in Social Work. She has toured the country speaking out for this case and for all women who are incarcerated for defending themselves. She spoke to a room of over 1600 people at the national INCITE! Color of Violence Conference in Chicago in March 2015. Renata won the 2015 Beyond Measure Award co-presented with DapperQ and New York Fashion Week for her dedication to activism and social justice. Most recently she was asked to speak at the Sadie Nash Leadership Project as well the National Convening of Black Lives, organized by the Black Lives Matter national movement. She is a sought after by universities and colleges nationwide to continue speaking as an advocate. Renata is ferociously protective of people around her and she has an incredible sense of humor that has probably been her greatest source of strength throughout her life. Renata has spoken at a dozen colleges and universities including the University of Seattle Washington, the University of California – San Diego for The Nicholas Papadopoulos Endowed Lecture in Gay & Lesbian Studies, the College of Mount Saint Vincent, University of California Irvine, Stanford University, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, University of Chicago University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, Toshi Reagon’s Word*Rock*Sword Festival, the Athena Film Festival, Human Rights Watch Film Festival and at the Envision screening with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, as well as dozens of film festivals. Renata is currently serving as an AmeriCorps member at St. Paul’s Community & Development Corporation in Paterson, NJ. Her position as an AmeriCorps member is a Case Manager Aide for formerly incarcerated individuals.
CHAUMTOLI HUQ founded Law@theMargins in 2013 and serves as its Editor-In-Chief. Huq is a social justice innovator with extensive experience in movement lawyering, litigation, public policy, management and creation of programs from emerging trends in law, teaching, and assisting non-profits and individuals with strategic direction and governance issues, mainly in areas of labor and human rights both in the United States and South Asia.
MIAIJA JAWARA is a second year student at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY pursuing a degree in social work. She is the Executive Assistant for her school’s Spectrum E-board (an intercultural diversity club on campus) and a Youth Leader for the Urban Youth Collaborative. She believes in speaking things into existence and has a passion for using her voice to better her community.
MARIAME KABA is an organizer, educator and curator whose work focuses on racial justice, gender justice, transformative/restorative justice, ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, and supporting youth leadership development. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander (now Love 12 & Protect) and Survived & Punished among others. Mariame is also a member of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence. She is on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Mariame is a 2016- 2017 Soros Justice Fellow. Her writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, Teen Vogue and more. She runs the Prison Culture blog (www.usprisonculture.com/blog).
JOO-HYUN KANG is the director of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), a NYC campaign to end discriminatory and abusive policing. CPR has worked to redefine community safety in NYC, built local infrastructure to challenge police violence, and secured landmark policy victories, including City Council passage of the Community Safety Act, and worked in partnership with families whose loved ones were killed by police to secure a special prosecutor for police killings in NYS. Prior to her work at CPR, Joo-Hyun has been a trainer, organizer, activist, including as the Audre Lorde Project’s first executive director, building an organizing center for LGBTSTGNC communities of color, and as director of global grantmaking for the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. She’s also an acupuncturist.
VICTORIA LAW is a freelance journalist who focuses on the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. She is also the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women and the editor of Tenacious, a zine of art and writings by women in prison. Her upcoming book, Your Home is Your Prison, explores ways in which proposed “alternatives” to incarceration actually expand the carceral system. She is also the proud parent of a NYC high school student. More about her work can be found at victorialaw.net.
NAKISHA M. LEWIS is an impact strategist and social justice advocate who specializes in developing grantmaking and advocacy strategies that address racial and gender inequities. She has nearly two decades of experience as a frontline organizer, and is one of the founding members of Black Lives Matter NYC. She has spent the last 10 years working with foundations and individual donors to foster grantmaking that seeks to support, empower and strengthen marginalized communities, including in her most recent post as Program Officer and Senior Strategist for Safety at the Ms. Foundation for Women. She currently serves on the board of Emerging Practitioners In Philanthropy and is the former cochair of Grantmakers for Girls of Color. She is a respected thought leader in the field who has worked to establish the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls as a founder of the #SheWoke Committee, and is co-creator of the Philanthropic Action for Racial Justice. Nakisha is a also writer and public speaker who has appeared in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, ESSENCE, The Huffington Post, CNN, Mic News, NBC News and several nonprofit journals. She is a transformational leadership coach and is committed to developing opportunities for increased diversity and inclusion in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector by advancing the next generation of social change leadership. Currently, Nakisha is an independent consultant, working with organizations to support their strategic programming and fund development.
OCTAVIA Y. LEWIS, MPA, holds an Associate in General Studies from Atlanta Metropolitan College, a Bachelors in Business Administration/Marketing from Georgia Gwinnett College, a Masters in Public Administration/Health Services Management, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Public Policy and Administration at Walden University. She remains rooted in community issues that plagues the Transgender community through mentorship of other young Transgender youth to one day takes her place in the fight for equality. She is focused on her professional development through scholarly practice and 13 engagement with industry leaders who are willing to not only address the disparities of the disenfranchised and impoverished but are willing to allow them a space to create solutions toward sustainability.
ROBYN MAYNARD is a Montreal-based Black feminist who has spent years documenting racist and gender-based state violence. She spent the better part of the decade doing frontline harm-reduction outreach work with organizations like Stella and Head & Hands, and continues to provide trainings for health and social service providers on the harms created by systemic racism, criminal laws, and stigmatization. Maynard has been involved in grassroots organizing against police violence for over a decade, and helped co-found Montreal Noir, a Black activist group committed to combating anti-Black racism in Quebec. Additionally, she is a part of the Black Indigenous Harm Reduction Alliance, where she co-coordinates harm reduction education for incarcerated women. In 2010 she helped found Justice for Victims of Police Killings, who work alongside families of victims of police killings to demand an end to police violence and impunity. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, the first book of its kind to attend to the historical and current realities of anti-Black state violence in Canada, alongside histories of Black resistance and refusal.
KATE MOGULESCU is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Law at Brooklyn Law School, a role she recently assumed after 14 years with The Legal Aid Society as a supervising attorney in the Criminal Defense Practice. Her work and scholarship focus largely on gender issues in the criminal legal system, with special attention to human trafficking. In 2011, she founded the Exploitation Intervention Project, which represents victims of trafficking and exploitation and sex workers who are prosecuted in New York City. She also developed and continues to lead the Survivor Reentry Project at the American Bar Association Commission on Domestic & Sexual Violence, a national training and technical assistance initiative on post-conviction advocacy for survivors of trafficking. Kate advocates extensively against the criminalization of vulnerable and exploited people and her critical analysis of human trafficking policy and discourse has been published in the Florida Law Review, the CUNY Law Review, and the Anti-Trafficking Review. She has also been widely featured in popular media, including an op-ed in The New York Times in 2014 titled “The Super Bowl and Sex Trafficking,” and she has been profiled in The Guardian and The Village Voice. Kate received her J.D. from Yale Law School and B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton.
DARNELL MOORE is Editor-at-Large at CASSIUS (an iOne digital platform) and formerly a senior editor and correspondent at Mic. He is co-managing editor at The Feminist Wire and writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University and is presently working on a memoir titled, No Ashes In The Fire.
ROKSANA MUN is currently the Director of Strategy and Training at DRUM-Desis Rising Up and Moving. She oversees the development and progress of the Racial, Immigrant and Education Justice campaigns across both youth and adult memberships. Roksana joined as a youth member of DRUM in 2003, through their Summer Organizing Institute. She is a Posse Scholar alum and a 2007 graduate of Dickinson College. After graduating from college, Roksana was the Youth Organizer for the YouthPower! project of DRUM from 2008-2009. From 2009-2011, she was a Legal Advocate at the Urban Justice Center for welfare advocacy for low-income/no-income New Yorkers. Roksana rejoined DRUM in April 2011 as the Dignity in School Campaign Organizer to focus on local and national policies to end the School-to-Prison Pipeline. She was born in Bangladesh and migrated to NYC in 1991 and grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Jackson Heights, Queens.
CARA PAGE is a Black Feminist Queer cultural/memory worker & organizer. She comes from a long ancestral legacy of organizers and cultural workers from Southeast to the Northeast. For the past 20+ years, she has fought for LGBTQGNC POC liberation, and organized in racial, reproductive, and economic justice movements. In particular, she has organized to build community led strategies to interrupt and intervene on policing and surveillance of state and communal violence. She is a current member of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Project South, the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), and INCITE! Cara is the former Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project; an organizing center for, by and about Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Two Spirit, Transgender & Gender Non Conforming People of Color in New York City. She is also the co-founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective; a southeastern network of healers, health practitioners and organizers responding to and intervening on incidences of state violence & generational trauma. She is a current Barnard Center for Research on Women Activist-in-Residence, where she focuses on transformative justice strategies to confront and shift the practices of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) and reshape traditions of collective safety and wellness as integral to our political liberation.
DOROTHY ROBERTS is an internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, who has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of race and gender in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming thinking on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. She is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon 1997; Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Vintage 2017), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books 2002), and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the TwentyFirst Century (New Press 2011) and more than 100 articles and book chapters, as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has served on the boards of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Black Women’s Health Imperative, and National Coalition for Child Protection Reform and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society and Family Defense Center. Recent recognitions of her work include Columbia’s 2017 Mamie Phipps Clark & Kenneth B. Clark Distinguished Lecture Award, Society of Family Planning 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award, and American Psychiatric Association 2015 Solomon Carter Fuller Award. She is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also Founding Director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society.
BARBARA SMITH co-founded the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts in 1974. The organization was best known for its Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), which she co-authored with her twin, Beverly, and with Demita Frazier. This document became one of the earliest explorations of the intersection of multiple oppressions, including racism and heterosexism, critiquing both sexual oppression in the black community and racism within the wider feminist movement. Smith also cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first U.S. publisher of books for women of color. One of the books edited by Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), broke new literary ground by integrating black lesbian voices with those of other black women. Smith also co-edited the groundbreaking anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship. Smith has been a visiting professor, writer in residence, freelance writer, and lecturer at numerous other universities and research institutions, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (1995-1996). She entered politics in the early 21st century and was elected to the Albany, New York Common Council (city council) in 2005, where she focused on 15 community efforts to prevent youth violence. Among other honors, Smith received the Stonewall Award for Service to the Lesbian and Gay Community (1994). She was also nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.
JOANNE N. SMITH is founder and Executive Director of Girls for Gender Equity (GGE) and moves the organization closer to its mission through strategic advocacy, development, and leadership cultivation. Ms. Smith is a Haitian-American social worker born in NY. A staunch human rights advocate, Smith co-chaired the nation’s first Young Women’s Initiative for girls of color in NYC, is a steering committee member of Black Girl Movement, and a Movement Maker with Move to End Violence, a 10-year initiative designed to strengthen the collective capacity to end gender based violence in the United States. Smith is featured on the summer 2016 Gender Justice issue of YES! Magazine sharing her experience of intersectional feminism. Joanne is an alumna of Hunter Graduate School of Social Work and Columbia Institute for Nonprofit Management. She has co-authored Hey Shorty: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Public Schools and on the Streets. Girls for Gender Equity’s work to combat sexual harassment in schools is featured in the 2014 documentary Anita: Speak Truth to Power. Smith resides in Brooklyn, NY. More information about Girls for Gender Equity (GGE) may be found at ggenyc.org.
DEAN SPADE is an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law. In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit collective that provides free legal help to low-income people and people of color who are trans, intersex and/or gender nonconforming and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (Duke University Press 2015).
NEFERTI X. M. TADIAR is Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She is author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), and co-editor with Angela Y. Davis of the collection, Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (2005). Her current book project, Remaindered Life, is a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire. Professor Tadiar is co-Editor of the New York-based Collective and international journal of interdisciplinary cultural studies, Social Text.
JAMISHA WILLIAMS is a black, queer femme born in the Bronx and currently living in Brooklyn. She is a former apprentice at the Center for Neighborhood Leadership, and extremely passionate about both food justice and abolition. Jamisha is the current organizing fellow for the Safe OUTside the System collective where she is constantly imagining and working towards a new world; devoid of cops, prisons and other institutions that prioritize punishment over healing. She wants liberation for all Black and brown, queer and trans people. Jamisha wants a life that is rooted in community, love and justice.
KEI WILLIAMS is a queer transmasculine identified community organizer with #BlackLivesMatter, NYC Chapter. Kei is currently the Community of Practice Project Coordinator with Movement Netlab, a practice-centered ‘think-make-and-do tank’, and the U.S. Coach with Rhize. They are also an Organizer-In-Residence with Civic Hall. A self-taught visual artist & graphic designer, they assist small businesses and nonprofit organizations with communications, marketing, and social media. Kei centers their work on those most marginalized in society: transgender persons and those who live with mental illness. Kei is passionate about film, travel, food, mellow-hop music, and their city – Brooklyn. Twitter: @BlackBoiKei
ALEXIS YEBOAH-KODIE is dedicated to advocating for the most marginalized in both her personal and professional life. As a member with the New York City Chapter of Black Youth Project 100(BYP100) – a coalition of 18-35 year old Black folx who utilize a Black Queer Feminist lens for Black Liberation – she has participated in and co-organized multiple actions across the city. Alexis also works at the Prisoner Reentry Institute as the NYC Justice Corps Program Coordinator. Her primary responsibilities include conducting contract administration and compliance activities, providing technical assistance to program partners, coordinating PRI’s program administration obligations, and researching various reentry issues. Previously, she was a Legislative Intern at the office of Assemblymember Michael A. Blake. Additionally, Alexis also launched the Teen and Police Services (TAPS) Academy in the South Bronx, coordinating an 11-week program that brings together NYPD officers and high school students for training and dialogue. Alexis graduated from Columbia College, Columbia University in May 2016 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Political Science.
LALA ZANNELL is the Lead Organizer at the New York City Anti-Violence project (AVP), and is the face and leads AVP’s public community organizing work, doing advocacy, outreach and networking on behalf of LGBTQ New Yorkers who have experienced violence. LaLa also plays a key role in AVP’s Rapid Incident Response team, which responds whenever incidents of hate violence, sexual violence or intimate partner violence impacting LGBTQ and HIV-affected New Yorkers become public, as well as national responses to hate violence. LaLa is a gifted public speaker and speechwriter who speaks out on issues related to anti-LGBTQ violence, and especially the disproportionate violence that Trans and gender non- conforming people of color face. LaLa is a member of the National Coalition of Anti Violence Programs (NCAVP) Movement Building Committee. In addition, LaLa spoke at the White House for the first Women’s history month briefing to include transwoman and the last Trans women of color briefing under the Obama administration, and testified at the first historic Congressional Forum on violence against transgender people. LaLa continues her part to culture shift as a co-chair of the Policy Working Group of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), Program Committee Chair for a series of citywide Trans forums with the LGBT Caucus of New York City Council and other community partners. LaLa is a member of the Trans Women of Color Collective (TWOCC) leadership team anchoring their Healing and Restorative Justice Institute, and made 2015 Trans 100 list for LaLa’s work with making the lives of Trans Women of Color better. LaLa recently created the first trans discrimination survey in New York city to collect data on trans peoples experiences in employment and job access to create a campaign to inform policy and informing demands to help TGNC New Yorkers with equal access to jobs.
Take Action: Resources
Information on Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, the inspiration for this conference: invisiblenomorebook.com
Resources for organizing around police violence against Black women, trans, and gender nonconforming people: inournamesnetwork.org
Resources for organizing around criminalization of survivors of violence: survivedandpunished.org
Learn about and support the Barbara Smith Caring Circle: smithcaringcircle.com
Accessibility
This venue is accessible to people with mobility disabilities. For additional accessibility requests, please contact bcrw@barnard.eduat your earliest convenience.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is preferred but not required and seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basis.
Appreciations
The Barnard Center for Research on Women would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Ford Foundation, and express special appreciation to BCRW staff members Pam Phillips, Avi Cummings, and Hope Dector and to BCRW Research Assistant Levi Craske for their hard work to make this conference possible.