To Build a Black Future

Reviews

“In To Build a Black Future, Christopher Paul Harris makes the revolution irresistible! This is not a book to be read once but one to return to whenever we get lost, a social compass bearing witness to where we have been, affirming where we are, and illuminating where we still might go.”—Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want

“To Build a Black Future is a loving and principled exploration of Black living, Black thought, and Black struggle. Everyone from beginners and active students to longtime scholars of Black liberation will find valuable and timely lessons in this book. I look forward to grappling with Harris’s ideas alongside my students and comrades in years to come.”—Charlene A. Carruthers, author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“Harris has written a powerful book on the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) that details the ideology, practices, culture, and evolution of one of the most important organizations in both Black and left politics today. Although rooted in the Black radical tradition, Harris demonstrates how M4BL is working to build a new movement rooted in Black queer feminism that reimagines how we work for the freedom of Black and all people.”—Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago

“A sorely needed return to the basic ideas underneath the movements that are defining our political era. Important reading for Black activists, organizers, artists, and thinkers.”—Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

“Harris tarries with society-caused pain instead of pursuing rights to displace its consequences. If Harris is correct, Black futures require joy and care to sustain ourselves, period. We owe the world nothing more than our Black presence, which comes with a multiverse of creative disavowals of hierarchy and violence and sonic refutations of justifications for captivity, disposability, and theft. Harris recognizes us as the ratchet of the earth. That condition—and its houseless, addicted, perverse, orphaned, refugee, dispossessed, undocumented, poly and trans and intentionally queer wisdom—can disrupt enough of the anti-Black present to help us reach for a future free of manufactured catastrophe and willful ecocide.”—Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, University of California, Irvine, and University of South Africa Expand reviews