ABOLITION Derives from the contemporary prison abolition movement and borrows from the nineteenth-century movement to abolish chattel slavery. It refers to the goal of eliminating the need for prisons by addressing the social and economic bases for behaviors deemed criminal and finding alternatives to incarceration formed on the basis of a restorative justice model that focuses on making amends, healing, and restitution. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, and the organization Critical Resistance have been important catalysts in this movement.
BLACKBIRD Founded in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson uprising by Thenjiwe McHarris, Merv Marcano, and Maurice Mitchell, this is a strategy and communications team that has been instrumental in the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives.
BLACK LIVES MATTER GLOBAL NETWORK (BLMGN) Formed in 2014 as an outgrowth of the #BlackLivesMatter social media campaign to oppose anti-Black racism and state violence.
BLACK YOUTH PROJECT 100 (BYP100) National organization of eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old Black organizers founded in 2013 and committed to organizing for Black liberation through “a Black queer feminist lens.”
CROSS-MOVEMENT ORGANIZING Organizing or collaborations that link and involve not simply multiple organizations but multiple networks of organizations, such as the Movement for Black Lives and the environmental justice movement.
DREAM DEFENDERS Statewide Florida-based activist organization led by young people of color and founded in 2012 in response to Trayvon Martin’s murder.
HETERO-PATRIARCHY The structural and institutional practices and values that reinscribe male power, authority, and centrality in communities, in families, and in the dominant political, economic, and cultural institutions of a society. The normalization and privileging of heterosexual practices and relationships work in tandem with the assumption that men should be the “heads” of families and the leaders of communities, organizations, and society.
INTERSECTIONALITY Coined by critical-race-theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality refers to interlocking and mutually reinforcing systems of oppression and inseparable categories of identity, most notably race, class, gender, and sexuality. This analytical and political approach preceded Crenshaw’s naming of it and is reflected in the work of Black feminist scholars and activists, including Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and in the Combahee River Collective statement of 1977, considered a foundational Black feminist manifesto.
MILLION HOODIES MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE A New York–based activist organization led by Dante Berry. It was sparked by protests after Trayvon Martin’s murder but has expanded to address a range of human rights issues.
MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES (M4BL) An umbrella coalition that includes most of the major organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter Movement.
NEOLIBERALISM First advanced in the nineteenth century, it currently refers to privatization, deregulation, and a kind of laissez-faire capitalism, according to which the government plays a minimal role and the free market supposedly governs the economy. Milton Friedman is closely associated with neoliberal policies, such as those he advised the Pinochet government to implement in Chile after the US-backed coup that ousted the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. David Harvey, Marxist geographer and critic of neoliberalism, views it as the capitalist instrumentalization of politics. In a neoliberal frame, the market is supreme.
PRAXIS The merging of theory and practice.
RACIAL CAPITALISM Refers to the inextricable connections between white supremacy and modern capitalism, as exemplified by the transatlantic slave trade and race-based slavery in the Americas, colonialism and imperialism, and various forms of forced racial segregation that reinforce economic subordination and exploitation. It is a concept informed by the work of Cedric Robinson in his foundational book Black Marxism, which is both a leftist and radical historical analysis and a critique of orthodox Marxist views of race.
SAY HER NAME The title of a report—issued by the African American Policy Forum and then embraced by Black Lives Matter Movement organizations, led by BYP100—which has been a catalyst for demonstrations and vigils that draw attention to women and femmes who have been victims of police violence.
STATE VIOLENCE Different theorists and activists might use this term differently, but for the purposes of this book, it refers not only to police violence but to the policies that enact physical and psychological harm and are either endorsed or administered by the state (government).