Dear Black Organizing Community,
We are writing this open letter as an invitation to engage in conversations for the sake of ourselves and the communities we are working to transform. We are two sisters from the Black Diaspora who have been, and continue to be, interested in what experiences and knowledge our communities have to share about our organizing work for the movement, for the liberation of our people.
To clarify, the “Black” folks we are writing to are African American, Afro-Latina and Afro-Latino, African, and Afro-Caribbean leaders who are invested in and committed to strengthening the grassroots leadership and power of Black Communities. Our use of the term Black is not to group our identities, not to make us a monolithic group, and certainly not to erase the rich cultures each of us bring from our places of origin. We use the term Black to collectivize ourselves, indicate our Power, and elicit a united front.
The two of us have more than 35 collective years of work in movement building. During that period we have sat at hundreds of kitchen tables learning about leadership, economics, and family—from Yazoo, Mississippi; to Atlantic City, New Jersey; to Oakland, California. While we have worked in different geographic areas and with different communities, we are connected by the core belief that Black communities—organized in creative, strategic, and healing ways—are a central component to the personal and systemic transformation we work towards. This place—the Black Channel of Organizing Upgrade—is a place for us to learn, build, grow, and challenge each other.