ACADEMIC WRITING
How Do We Listen to the Living?
“Protect Black women and girls while we are living,” we cry. Not some of us: those who you may find attractive, those who ascribe to god’s beauty, educational, career, and family standards. Protect all of us—trans, disabled, abused, unloved, poor, loud, unruly, fat, sassy, ordinary, magical and nonmagical—from police, sexual, domestic, and other forms of violence. A movement, inside and outside of the academy, that does not address our conditions while we are living will never be liberatory.