Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Bio
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an African American academic and writer. She is an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
For this book, she received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from Lannan Foundation. She is the author of several books and articles that discuss her work in activism for black lives. Taylor is an activist for black lives and focuses her work in this area.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Career/Education
She earned her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Northwestern University. Her dissertation is titled Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis in the 1970s. She previously worked at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of African American Studies from 2013 to 2014.
Taylor is currently an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the African American Studies Department. She teaches two classes in the 2018 semester.
Her current courses are “Rats, Riots, and Revolution: Housing in the Metropolitan United States” as part of the Sociology and African American Studies programs.
Examines the effects of housing developments and practices that led to underdevelopment in cities and their effects on the Black community.
Taylor also teaches “Public Policy in the U.S. Racial State” which looks at how “public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented” through the lens of racial discrimination.
Her work has appeared in The Guardian and Jacobin.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Havard
The next president will face a range of challenges related to race and inequality, from poverty and tensions with police to the Black Lives Matter movement, civil rights, incarceration and gender equity.
In the sixth installment of a Q&A series on important issues the next president will need to address, Princeton University professors Imani Perry and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor examine challenges related to race.
Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies and is affiliated with the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
She is the author of “More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States” (New York University Press, 2011). She publishes widely on law, cultural studies and African American studies.
Taylor is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies whose research examines race and public policy including American housing policies. Her book “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” (Haymarket Books, 2016).
An examination of the history and politics of black America and the development of the social movement Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States — received the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Quotes
1. “The essence of economic inequality is borne out in a simple fact: there are 400 billionaires in the United States and 45 million people living in poverty. These are not parallel facts; they are intersecting facts. There are 400 American billionaires because there are 45 million people living in poverty.
The profit comes at the expense of the living wage. Corporate executives, university presidents, and capitalists, in general, are living the good life–because so many others are living a life of hardship.”
2. “Justice is not a natural part of the lifecycle of the United States, nor is it a product of evolution; it is always the outcome of the struggle.”
3. “The essence of economic inequality is borne out in a simple fact: there are 400 billionaires in the United States and 45 million people living in poverty. These are not parallel facts; they are intersecting facts. There are 400 American billionaires because there are 45 million people living in poverty.
The profit comes at the expense of the living wage. Corporate executives, university presidents, and capitalists, in general, are living the good life–because so many others are living a life of hardship.”
4. “Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.”
5. “We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”
.06. “Although we were not doing political work as a group, individuals continued their involvement in Lesbian politics, sterilization abuse, and abortion rights work, Third World Women’s International Women’s Day activities, and support activity for the trials of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, Joan Little, and Inéz García.
During our first summer when membership had dropped off considerably, those of us remaining devoted serious discussion to the possibility of opening a refuge for battered women in a Black community. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.)”
7. “Always ally yourself with those on the bottom, on the margins, and at the periphery of the centers of power. And in doing so, you will land yourself at the very center of some of the most important struggles of our society and our history.”
8. “The essence of economic inequality is borne out in a simple fact: there are 400 billionaires in the United States and 45 million people living in poverty. These are not parallel facts; they are intersecting facts. There are 400 American billionaires ”
9. “I’m not nostalgic. I’m looking back to mine the past for what it can help us with right now, and for what it can help us pass on and create. – Demita Frazier”
10. “I mean, to me, all the explanation that’s needed is in the Combahee River Collective statement, about what it is we stand for, and who we think we should be working with. But as I have explained, the reason we used the term “identity politics” is that we were asserting at a time when Black women had no voice. -Barbara Smith”
11. “But we had made the decision—when we talked about who qualified as a woman of color, we came up with, after much discussion, that our definition of women of color was any woman who identified with the indigenous people of her respective nation or land. One of the reasons we put it that way is that there are people of European heritage in Argentina, for example, Jewish women.
Are they Latinas or not? Well, I think we could argue that indeed they are, because of where they were born, and the language they speak, and the culture that they’re a part of. So, we made that decision that we were not looking for photographs of people. We just wanted to know if you identified with the indigenous people of your respective nation or country.”
12. “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Combahee River Collective
This book is composed of writings from the founders of the Combahee River Collective, which was a group from the 1960s and ’70s of Black Feminist. The writings look at the Combahee River Collective’s impact on today’s Black Feminism.
Taylor edited the writings together in 2017 and the book was published on November 20, 2017, by Haymarket Books. The introduction is an essay by Taylor regarding the legacy of the Combahee River Collective begins by framing her discussion in the 2016 presidential elections. Following the introduction is a republishing of the Combahee River Collective Statement.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation
“From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” was published on February 23, 2016, by Haymarket Books. It won the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. This book analyzed the political aspects of the BlackLivesMatter movement including the history of the connection between race and policing and how the movement is separated from black politics.
The goal of Taylor’s book was to discuss the history and motivation for the BlackLivesMatter movement and to consider if the United States is post-racial. The book also looked if the movement can be applied beyond police brutality to a wider spectrum of activism.
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