"I have consistently moved between the worlds of movement building as a strategist and community organizer, and the academy as an intellectual and cultural worker. My work now is to focus on my intellectual and cultural work in order to deepen my study and craft as a historian and theorist. The communities I belong to within Black, gender and sexuality studies fortify me and give me the courage to keep going in what is absolutely a protracted struggle. We can tell our own stories, develop our collective leadership and continue to shape worldviews at the same time."
Charlene A. Carruthers is a political strategist, cultural worker and Ph.D. student in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her research includes Black feminist political economies, abolition of patriarchal and carceral systems, and the role of cultural work within the Black Radical Tradition.
Her work spans more than 15 years of community organizing across racial, gender and economic justice movements. She is the author of the book Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements.
Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist.
A conversation with author Lorgia García-Peña, political strategist Charlene Carruthers, and our President and CEO Dr. Carmen Rojas.
What to learn more about the Freedom Scholars?
Questions about the Freedom Scholar awards can be sent to freedomscholars@caseygrants.org.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE FREEDOM SCHOLAR AWARDS HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY THE INATAI FOUNDATION.
