Unapologetic

Starred review from May 21, 2018
This electrifying debut by Carruthers, founding director of Black Youth Project 100, is part testimony and part activist’s toolbox with snippets of Carruthers’s personal history sprinkled throughout. Carruthers makes an urgent case for organizing movements and reexamining history through a black queer feminist lens to better equip activists in a “principled struggle” to end racism, ableism, homophobia, patriarchy, and ingrained prejudice. She outlines strategies on how to prioritize issues, build strong leaders, and adopt healing justice to bring about radical change. She devotes an entire chapter to the Chicago model of activism, which dates to the antieviction protests of the 1930s when “communist-inspired organizing... is said to have mobilize five thousand people in less than 30 minutes to stop an eviction.” Carruthers, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago and remains active in the community, points to the more recent success of the “Reparations now!” campaign, which, in 2016 after decades of work, won $5.5 million in reparations for victims of racist police violence in Chicago. Incantatory without being incendiary, strong but not strident, Carruthers argues for “a world in which everyone is able to live with dignity and in right relationship with the land we inhabit.” This handbook for the revolution is a rousing call for collective liberation.

July 1, 2018
A black lesbian activist offers insight into forging a radical black liberation movement through the lens of her experience as a community organizer in Chicago.Frederick Douglass once wrote that "power concedes nothing without a demand." Carruthers, who is best known as the founding national director of the Black Youth Project 100, revises her predecessor's observation to highlight that it is "organized demand" that wins revolutionary struggles. Drawing on her experience as a reader, thinker, and grass-roots activist, the author illuminates the past, present, and future of black radicalism. She opens by first addressing recent "calls to end identity politics." Carruthers argues that what is needed instead is to "end liberalism." The intersectionalist approaches of black queer feminists are what will give (white) democratic progressives the tools to combat the intertwined ills of patriarchy and capitalism. A crucial part of the movement also involves reviving--or reimagining--the black radical tradition. Only by remembering the collective past can activists resist social erasure and see a clear way forward. In the fight to end liberalism, writes the author, focusing on such issues as "leadership development [and] healing justice" is also key. Moreover, activists must be self-reflective at all times and ask themselves and each other questions about who they are, where they came from, what they want and want to build, and whether they are "ready to win." The author concludes with a discussion of the "Chicago Model" of community organizing and a mandate to continue the struggle. Though imperfect, the Chicago Model still managed to bring together "multiple institutions with varying political alignment" to fight police brutality and oust racist and corrupt political officials. Timely and important, Carruthers' book is a strong testament to the resilience of the radical black liberation movement as well as an impassioned appeal to continue the fight for social justice in a political environment characterized by increasing hostility to equality and difference.Powerful, potent reading.

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September 1, 2018
This short but powerful handbook to the contemporary black liberation movement, including Black Lives Matter, is an important addition to the social-injustice bookshelf. As its title indicates, it is indeed unapologetic, as first-time author Carruthers, a community organizer, founding national director of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), and self-described Black lesbian leftist, confronts structural racism and white privilege, toxic masculinity, and gendered violence, among many other topics, head-on. She discusses such concepts as anti-blackness ( a system of beliefs and practices that destroy, erode, and dictate the humanity of Black people ); the black radical tradition; and radical black feminism. She makes a strong case for reimagining the black radical tradition while making specific demands, including reparations for chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration; living wages and freedom from discrimination; and investments in the black community. She also shares her own personal story as the daughter of two parents from the South who was raised in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. A bracing and provocative report from the front line.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)