Moderator
Jonathan Jayes-Green
Vice President of Programs at Marguerite Casey Foundation
(They/Them)
@JayesGreenJ
Jonathan Jayes-Green is an organizer, orator, strategist and believer. They are the former National Latinx Outreach Director for the Elizabeth Warren for President Campaign, where they focused on connecting the movement and the campaign in service of building big, structural change for Latinx and immigrant communities.
Jonathan is also the Co-Founder and former Founding Director of the UndocuBlack Network (UBN), a multigenerational network of Black undocumented immigrants organizing their own communities and building power. The Network was built at the critical intersection of immigration and racial justice, focusing on organizing, deportation defense, advocacy, wellness, and storytelling. Jonathan has also served in the Office of the Governor of Maryland as the liaison to the Caribbean and Latinx communities and worked on statewide campaigns and ballot measures, such as the Dream Act and marriage equality.
They have been the recipient of the Haas Jr. Outstanding LGBT Leadership on Immigration Award, the American Immigration Council’s Immigrant Youth Achievement Award, the Hispanic Heritage Foundation’s Inspira Award and the Frederick Douglass 200 List by the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center.
Panelists
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Assistant Professor of African American Studies, scholar,
author, and 2020 Freedom Scholar
(She/Her)
@KeeangaYamahtta
Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is a scholar of racism and inequality in U.S. housing policies. Taylor critiques public-private partnerships in public policymaking and the influence of market-based solutions in resolving trenchant social inequities. Taylor also studies radical politics and Black social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries.
She is the author of three books, including the award-winning “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” and “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.” “Race for Profit” was a semifinalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History. She is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker.
Taylor is currently working on a project tentatively titled “Morning in America or Black America’s Nightmare: Reaganism, Racism, and the Long Decade of the Nineteen Eighties,” which will explore the persistence of racial inequality into the 1980s during the successive presidential terms of Ronald Reagan, despite claims of colorblind governance.
Raquel Willis
Award-winning writer, activist,
Director of Communications at the Ms. Foundation for Women
(She/Her)
@RaquelWillis
Raquel Willis is a Black transgender activist, writer, and media strategist dedicated to elevating the dignity of marginalized people, particularly Black transgender people. She is the former executive editor of Out magazine and a former national organizer for the Transgender Law Center (TLC).
In 2018, she founded Black Trans Circles, a project of TLC, focused on developing the leadership of Black trans women in the South and Midwest by creating healing justice spaces to work through oppression-based trauma and incubating community organizing efforts to address anti-trans murder and violence. During her time at Out, she published the Trans Obituaries Project to highlight the epidemic of violence against trans women of color and developed a community-sourced 13-point framework to end the epidemic.
Raquel is a thought leader on gender, race, and intersectionality. She is experienced in online publications, organizing marginalized communities for social change, nonprofit media strategy, and public speaking, while using digital activism as a major tool of resistance and liberation. Raquel is currently working on her debut memoir detailing her coming of identity and activism.
Alicia Garza
Principal of Black Futures Lab and Black to the Future Action Lab, activist
(She/Her/Hers)
@aliciagarza
Alicia Garza founded the Black Futures Lab to make Black communities powerful in politics. In 2018, the Black Futures Lab conducted the Black Census Project – the largest survey of Black communities in more than150 years.
Alicia believes that Black communities deserve what all communities deserve – to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. An innovator, strategist, organizer, and cheeseburger enthusiast, she is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, an international organizing project to end state violence and oppression against Black people. The Black Lives Matter Global Network now has 40 chapters in 4 countries.
Alicia serves as the Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the nation’s premier voice for millions of domestic workers in the United States. She is also the co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism. She shares her thoughts on politics and pop culture on her podcast, Lady Don’t Take No.
Garza was born and raised in the Bay Area, lives and loves in Oakland, California, and she warns you – hashtags don’t start movements. People do.
