2019 Gensler Family Symposium: Black Feminism and the Politics of Revolution

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, African-American Studies at Princeton University

In an age where the politics of socialism have pierced the mainstream and have derived a level of unprecedented popularity in the United States, there is still the tendency to reduce it to its analyses of class and see it as particularly appealing to white people. But what if we understood socialism to be the politics of Black feminists, how would that change our understanding of its radical potential? How would it transform its acceptability as a form of political analysis? How has Black feminism historically shaped the politics of socialism and how do we understand that inheritance in today’s contemporary iteration of socialism and Black feminism.