Black August in Amerikkka: A State of RJ Address

This Black August, we are thinking of how Reproductive Justice was born because its founders looked around at the so-called movement for all and found none of themselves, their voices, or their struggles present. The existence of our movement was to resist white supremacy and center the thriving lives of the Global Majority. It is too easy to imagine Black organizers of 1994 looking around a “National Pro-Choice Conference” and seeing no one else that looked like them around, as we experience it today, and with force. The landskkkape we organize from, in this right, is unchanged. At the height of new administrations and midterm elections, the repro movement will remind you of the ways abortion and other single issues are intersecting into the lives and struggles of Black, Indigenous People of Color. Organizations hire the exact right members of our local communities: our beloved story tellers, our wisdom keepers, our soothesayers and poets and disappear their work behind branding before discarding them at the end of each campaign. 

This movement is no longer merely segregated; today’s iteration is 501(c)(3) classified and micromanaged into content irrelevant to progress or the people directly impacted. Today, the very organizations seeking to realize Reproductive Justice are using the means of tokenization and then erasure. Reproductive rights and health landscapes are taking ethics passed down through organizers to Canva and refusing to apply it to their praxis and Black and Brown organizers of Repro, who build this movement, are the human cost. Let us be perfectly clear: There is no Reproductive Justice without BIPOC, there is no movement without activists, advocates, community members who hug, hold and feed us, and organizers. There will be no classification of our liberation. 

In 2023, we said something similar, and to quote, stated:

We would be remiss not to recognize these actions as a reflection of the pervasive anti-Blackness within the movement and how it’s taken new form since the fall of Dobbs. We are disgusted that a call to change the culture of an organization has been answered with retaliatory layoffs. We are tired of seeing the people, and our people, who are the leaders of social change, who are the drivers of the movement, and who are at the center of this work build this movement and bring it into their own communities just to be discarded. 

The following year, upon finding ourselves repeating this sentiment, but as people who will not accept the things we cannot change, we moved our rage to action and opened an unconventional internship with a focus on the community members who were organizing us with or without credential based, university or organizational backing if they didn’t have it. We got to spend two cohorts reuniting with incredible thought partners, vital voices to the movement, never to be forgotten. While we cannot wait to reopen this internship, it is a bandaid on a larger problem. 

If you seek Reproductive Justice from the vantage point of a national organization, as a white organizer, as a sitting member of Congress, as a board enmeshed in privilege, then you take a seat behind the living tenants of this framework of the ground creating the pieces that pushed you into policy. You may know the phrase and the “founding” of RJ, but it can’t even be properly personified without Black and Brown, especially Queer and Trans Black and Brown, especially disabled Queer and Trans Black and Brown voices and people at the forefront of this movement as this framework intended. 

This is our annual call in of what is holding us back from meeting the moment as a movement. The moment is wrapped in racism to the point of genocide and concentration camps. This sort of extremism begins with a societal belief that anyone is disposable. Reproductive Justice will not bloom without us.