Beyond Fragility: The Legacy of Anti-Racist White Women
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Beyond Fragility: The Legacy of Anti-Racist White Women
Dive into a powerful video discussion featuring renowned activists Susan Moir, Mab Segrest, and Barbara Smith, hosted by Kristina Teschner.
This conversation, originally inspired by the energy of the "White Women: Answer the Call" online meetings in support of Vice President Harris during the 2024 election cycle, shifts the focus to the broader, long-term struggle for racial justice.
At a time when Robert Brooks’s torture and killing by New York State Marcy Prison guards exposes how far U. S. society still needs to go to eradicate pervasive racial violence and as the nation awaits the inauguration of an explicitly white nationalist regime “Beyond Fragility: The Legacy of Anti-Racist White Women" is a unique resource for understanding U. S. racial history and how women past and present have struggled to bring about change.
As Barbara Smith emphasizes in the video: “This conversation isn’t about the election. It’s about movement history and the long-term fight for justice that continues to unfold.” She reminds us that “the work of anti-racism is a long journey—it has roots that stretch back decades, and its progress relies on patience, resilience, and the willingness to show up consistently.”
Susan Moir is a longtime feminist union activist in Massachusetts, who began their career as a Boston school bus driver and leader in the steelworkers union. Susan later directed initiatives at the University of Massachusetts to improve health and safety for union construction workers and expand access to these jobs for women and People of Color. As the founder of Tradeswomen Building Bridges and a Fulbright Award recipient, she has advanced global collaboration among women in the construction industry.
Mab Segrest was born in Alabama in 1949 and has worked in movements for social justice for over forty years. Focused on the US South in regional, national and global contexts, as an organizer, writer and teacher she has insisted on intersectional approaches. Her books include Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994) and Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum.
Barbara Smith is a legendary Black feminist author and activist. She co-founded the Combahee River Collective and has worked in movements for social justice since the 1960s. Two of her books are Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom.
Beyond Fragility: The Legacy of Anti-Racist White Women uplifts white anti-racist women’s participation in the abolitionist movement to end slavery, the anti-lynching movement, the labor movement, the Civil Rights movement, anti-racist feminist organizing, and the prison abolition movement.
The Combahee River Collective Statement. United States, 2015. Web Archive. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0028151/>.
