Building the World We Want to See: A Herstory of Sista II Sista and the Struggle against State and Interpersonal Violence

I met Dumeha Vernice Thompson when she joined the Sista II Sista/Hermana a Hermana Freedom School for Young Women of Color (SIIS) in Bushwick, Brooklyn during the 1990s. She was in her twenties and she had amazing energy, bright eyes, and a huge wonderful smile. As a Black woman from St. Louis who loved to dance, she believed in leading with love. Dobi, as she was affectionately called by close friends, helped shape SIIS’s culture and embodied our work in the world. One of our members referred to her as a “bubble of light.” Despite many hardships, Dobi was larger than life. She always had her own style— she wore silver sneakers with wings on the side, glasses without lenses, and leg warmers. Her head was crowned with zebra-designed hats and t-shirts that she had cut, beaded, and twisted into a statement about who she was. She gave big hugs and looked you in your eyes so deeply that you thought she could see your soul. As an actor, she had an ability to tap the child in all of us, to make us laugh at ourselves, and to bring our type of beauty into every space we were in and to be unapologetic about it. In a world that is often dedicated to tearing down and deconstructing, she was always building—building relationships, performances, praxis, institutions, and new ways of doing life.

Dumeha passed away in 2018 from breast cancer, and while some of us remember only her passion and love, others remember her sense of rage. Her rage against white supremacy, gender oppression, at the cancer that took her life, at poverty, at the health care system that often circumscribed her ability to deal with the disease in the way that was best for her, at the systems and people who relentlessly tried to box her and force her to conform. Before our last SIIS retreat in 2016, on a conference call, she admonished us, “we need to write our own herstory and we need to commit to it. We are the only ones who can truly tell our story; other folks won’t know it like we do.” This article is a response to the call that she put to us in 2016.

In the wake of the Movement for Black Lives, activists, artists, and scholars have highlighted the need to connect issues of state-sanctioned violence, the historical lack of protection offered to Black women, and experiences of gendered intraracial violence, arguing that these issues are inseparable. Sistas Liberated Ground (SLG), a Brooklyn-based campaign in the early 2000s, was an embodied example of this intervention. SIIS, founded in 1996, led this initiative. Black and Latinax women organized together to challenge systems that marginalized us and devalued our lives.1

This article explores the vision and work of SIIS and what it meant to do gender-based work in Black and Brown communities at the turn of the 21st century in New York City. As one of the circle of co-founders who worked with SIIS for most of its eleven-year existence, I examine the organization’s genesis, how we understood intersectionality, our work as a collective, and the decision to be Black and Latina. I also shed light on how we worked to tackle questions of state and interpersonal violence, gender, race, class, and age simultaneously. My purpose in telling our story is to inspire others to give voice to the internal struggles that we continue to experience within movement work, to push open more space to be expansive in how we think about change and respond to the huge challenges that face us today, to highlight the potential power of struggling together—if we can truly see each other, if we recognize and have the space to name the differences in our experiences of oppression—and to demonstrate how messy it actually is.

Ultimately, I argue that the work of SIIS holds lessons that help us answer the question: “Beyond electoral politics, what kind of movement building is possible in this political moment?” The election of the 45th president has demonstrated the continued need for politics with a capital “P.” This reality is clear and daunting. However, we are also in a moment where politics with a lowercase “p” matters— the micro, the everyday, the local. A politics that creates new cultures, models the world we want to see, builds solidarity across communities, and does the work of Ella Baker–style radical democracy.2 Sister II Sista Freedom School for Young Women of Color was doing this work in the 1990s and early 2000s, and what we learned then remains critical now.

We as SIIS understood that we were pushing to change our little corner of the earth in a way that would ripple outward. We believed that what we did in Bushwick—the ideas we were building, the analysis we were growing—would outlive us and our organization. Further, we believed that the solidarities we built beyond our organization would help create cracks in a system that was untenable for all of us and the people we cared about most. In honor of Dobi, here’s one version of our herstory.

The 1990s in New York City

There is the common popular assumption that after the 1970s, community organizing in communities of color stopped and reappeared only recently. Scholars like Kimberley Springer, Joy James, INCITE!, Beth Ritchie, Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, Barbara Ransby, Andrea Ritchie, and others have collectively documented Black feminist and other women of color organizing from the 1970s to the present and the intersectional power of this work.3 In the absence of a national movement, groundwork was always being laid. As Barbara Ransby convincingly argues and documents about the Movement for Black Lives, “This is the first time in the history of U.S. social movements that Black feminist politics have defined the frame for a multi-issue, Black-led mass struggle that did not primarily or exclusively focus on women.”4 However, as she shows, these contemporary struggles did not arise out of a vacuum, a more-than-three-decade leap from the 1970s. In popular discourse, films, and media, the 1980s is articulated as a moment of decline of Black politics, leaving today’s movements to simply rise out of the ashes of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s with new life in the present. In setting up such a chronology, we ignore the high levels of face-to-face organizing required to prime the ground for these politics in a time prior to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I too challenge this popular assumption by highlighting the work of one organization in 1990s and early 2000s New York City. In many ways the conjuncture of that moment, and the work of many organizations, gave rise to these politics that we echo today in the second decade of the 21st century.

The 1990s was a tense time. New York was hit hard by the flurry of national initiatives advanced by the federal government during the 1990s and early 2000s, including the continuing “war on drugs,” and the inauguration of the “war on terror.” In the midst of these sets of policies that would have long-term ramifications for marginalized communities, the Clinton administration increased the levels of incarceration and policing with the 1994 federal crime bill; dealt a deathblow to the safety net in 1996 with the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act; and pushed increased surveillance and immigrant detention and deportation with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and the Illegal Immigrant and Refugee and Individual Responsibility Act of 1996.5 In 1994, Rudolph Guiliani was the mayor, and we were watching the city transform beneath our feet. “Broken windows” policing and “law-and-order” policies made the city less livable for many of us as it meant an increase in arrests, surveillance, racial profiling, and harassment in communities of color but did not lead to a corresponding increase in safety or justice.6 Community efforts around police brutality intensified with the brutal rape and torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by police officers in East Flatbush in 1997; when police officers fired forty-one shots, murdering the unarmed twenty-three-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999 for going to his apartment in the Bronx; and countless others.7 When the war on terror was unleashed in 2001, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities faced a dramatic increase in physical and verbal attacks, profiling, surveillance, arrests, and detention. We all were under siege. As one youth organizer stated, “[it was] such an intense time for young people in the city … where you could just feel the anger and you could feel the action.”8 By 2007, 73 percent of youth-organizing groups surveyed in New York City were organizing around issues of police brutality and racial profiling.9

By 1990, women of color became the majority of the city’s population, and by 2000 they represented 64 percent of the female population of New York City. Young women of color under age fifteen represented 76 percent.10 A report about the invisibility of women of color in the city’s policy solutions highlighted the escalating rates of HIV, arrests, imprisonments, and unemployment for women of color, and a lack of educational resources for young women of color in particular.11 Further, by the turn of the 21st century, one in five New Yorkers were living below the poverty line.12 This was the climate that gave rise to SIIS.

The Rise of Sista II Sista

In 1996, young women from the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) and the Universal Zulu Nation, a grassroots international hip-hop organization, created a partnership to launch the Sista II Sista/Hermana a Hermana Freedom School for Young Women of Color in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The initial plan was to create a summer program for teenage women. Over twenty sisters, the majority in their twenties, came together from various organizations in response to this call. They came from El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Student Power Movement at Hunter College, FIST, and other organizations. By the Fall of 1996, Sista II Sista became its own independent organization, and by 1997, the organization was based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with year-long programing. The organization closed its offices down in 2007.

Sista II Sista emerged from young women who did community organizing, culture-based, or youth-development work in male-dominated local spaces. At the time, a discourse existed that centered on “endangered” Black boys and men, and we felt that the challenges young women faced did not receive adequate attention.13 Most of us had struggled in our own lives, and all of us knew young women of color who were facing myriad challenges. We were not seeing the kinds of support systems that we wanted in the various community institutions. In response to our proposal, one man responded, “Why would we do something that only reaches half the population?” Despite these responses, most of our brothers were supportive. We wanted to engender a spirit of activism, racial and gender justice, and self-determination into youth work.

Fundamental to our approach was that our vision was central, not ancillary, to any possibility of change in our communities. We also knew that those young women of color coming behind us needed support. As an article we later wrote clarified, “We believe that the perspectives of young women of color are critical to the survival and flourishing of our communities, so our approach focuses on young women’s innate power as organizers for social change.”14

The model of the Freedom School grew out of work that BSLN was doing within the Black Community Crusade for Children, an initiative of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), a national child advocacy organization founded by civil rights veteran Marian Wright Edelman and the entity that gave birth to BSLN. Freedom Schools were loosely based on the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1960s and particularly during the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. SNCC initiated freedom schools as part of a ten-week campaign to challenge white supremacy in Mississippi through voter registration, an independent political party, and the development of parallel institutions. The freedom schools SNCC initiated were envisioned as spaces of “radical questioning” designed to counter generations of miseducation in Mississippi. They challenged racial hierarchies, envisioned new futures, and took action toward them. Held in beauty shops, churches, on porches, and in various locations across communities, freedom schools modeled the type of education that organizers and local citizens wanted to see in a transformed Mississippi.

Fast forward to 1993. CDF partnered with community organizations throughout the country to create freedom schools that would engage students and young adults in efforts to promote a love of learning among Black children and youth, to strengthen their academic skills with culturally relevant teaching, and to engage in local community organizing campaigns.15 By 1996, through a program named after the indomitable Ella Baker, BSLN had trained over 650 young Black people in community organizing, child policy, and youth development. In February 1996, under the leadership of the late Lisa Y. Sullivan, BSLN sponsored a national conference in North Carolina. Over 1,200 students and young adults from across the country attended.16 Brooklyn-based young women from BSLN and Zulu gathered at this conference with Sullivan and Rhamelle Greene, the international spokeswoman for Zulu at the time, and the idea of SIIS was born.17

That conference would be BSLN’s high point. Toward the latter part of 1996, for some members of the BSLN, the project seemed to change. CDF seemed to edge away from its Black-centered mission and community-organizing commitment to focus exclusively on “academic and cultural enrichment.” After a number of generational struggles and internal organizational fights, CDF disbanded the BSLN, founded the Student Leadership Network for Children, and centered the freedom schools heavily on reading programs.18 The Sista II Sista Freedom School, however, would be independent, center social justice in its mission, and, as a result of the partnership with Zulu Nation, heavily utilize hip-hop methodology.

Over the years, the political mission of Sista II Sista became clearer; it developed into a collective after the first summer of its existence, some of the cultural aspects of its agenda would shift, and its social justice mission would develop into community organizing projects. Each body of women that joined the organization would significantly shape and mold its direction, making it ever flexible and always changing. An article like this can never capture that type of dynamism.

A 2001 SIIS report noted,

Our goal is to promote the holistic development of young women of color and to inspire them to take strong leadership roles in their local communities in order to bring about concrete social and political change.19

Through much process, discussion, and change, the vision ultimately became:

Sista II Sista is a Brooklyn-wide community based organization located in Bushwick. We are a collective of working-class young and adult Black and Latina women building together to model a society based on liberation and love. Our organization is dedicated to working with young women to develop personal, spiritual and collective power. We are committed to fighting for justice and creating alternatives to systems we live in by making social, cultural and political change.20

We saw our work as confronting a “braid of oppression.”21 One report stated, “As working class young women of color, we face multiple levels of oppression. Because of this we look critically at the intersections of sexism, racism, classism, and ageism … ”22 This was the language of intersectionality—the idea that various axes of oppression are interwoven, constitutive, and compounded to shape our experience in the world. This idea had been expressed over the long dur,ee of the Black Freedom Struggle by Black women as diverse as Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Jacques Garvey, Claudia Jones, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Beverly Smith, bell hooks, and Kimberl,e Crenshaw, who coined the term.23 Black feminist organizations of the past centered their work in this analysis as well as sisters in non-feminist organizations. Indeed, we lived in the legacy of organizations like the Combahee River Collective, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and the work of women in organizations like SNCC, the Young Lords, and the Black Panthers and the space they created for us, but we only claimed and named those latter organizations, even though in practice we were probably more similar to the former set.24

We flirted with ideas about womanism, but the majority of us did not readily identify as feminist, even though we were doing feminist work. As one of our collective members stated, “Until feminists are adamantly and passionately fighting against these issues that affect women of color and poor women, who are most disenfranchized in this system, we can’t call ourselves feminists.”25 Unknowingly, we participated in the long history of erasing women of color who actually shaped a radical feminist politic and the ground we stood on. Despite the fact that in this moment, formations like BYP100, Dream Defenders, the Movement for Black Lives, Let Us Breathe Collective, Freedom Inc., and many others center a Black feminist lens, there is still an unresolved feminist genealogy that remains marked by the most mainstream of white women’s movements and the continued erasure of Black and Brown women—how they develop movements, reshape ideas about feminism and how it circulates, and point to alternative futures. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that we never claimed the F word, at an informal SIIS gathering in 2018—amid tears for Dumeha—Nancy, a former youth member, stated with pride, “y’aul taught us to be feminists.”

The Collective

By 1997, Sista II Sista had reorganized as a collective.26 It was a nonhierarchical model based in the “principles of self-determination, interconnected personal and social transformation, and collective action against injustice.”27 As members wrote, “As a collective, we recognize that it is essential to create structures that model our vision of a more just society. By creating an organization that functions as a collective, Sista II Sista is developing a structure where young women can play powerful leadership roles in transforming their own lives as well as that of their community.”28 Those who joined the collective showed high levels of commitment and served on one or more of the larger teams. Our organization’s structure was represented on paper as a flower. Depending on which year’s organizational structure you examine, the petals represented the various work teams and the center of the flower included the general membership, the collective, the board and the sista squads.

Our collective made major decisions by consensus. We had long discussions weighing the pros and cons of one direction versus another. Sometimes the decisions took less time because the facilitation was strong and/or we were in agreement. Other times, we had tough arguments or call-outs, and if one person felt strongly, that person could tank a project or change the direction of the entire room. Theoretically, the collective model ensured that we all had a say, that the minority opinion was heard, that we made stronger, well-thought-out decisions, and that we had group buy-in. More often than not, these ideals largely played out well.

However, the collective model masks uneven power dynamics, it can be very time-consuming, and sometimes, certain decisions did not get made (or were made by default) because we did not have the time we needed to fully discuss the agenda item. This became a particular challenge when SIIS became a nonprofit in 1999 while trying to hold on to the collective model and process.29 This was a challenge for our funders, some of whom wanted to speak to the executive director or president, and even with some of our partners from more hierarchical organizations who wanted quick decisions about actions or sponsorships.

The purpose of the collective was to “create sustainable leadership centered on a diverse group of women sharing power and creating a vision together.”30 Being a collective ensured that we were never dependent on one person, and every project had multiple people assigned to it. We also rotated many of the undesirable, “unglamorous” tasks that no one wanted to do. One mistaken idea about collectives is that they make group decisions on every single issue—no matter how mundane—but the various petals within SIIS were empowered to make decisions within their purview. And when the most critical decisions were made, such as what campaign the organization would engage for the next year or for several years, the whole membership, above and beyond the collective, was called in.

In part, our decision to be a collective also led to our decision not to have chapters despite the number of requests we received. We wanted to remain nimble and dynamic. Instead, we shared our experience, our model, and our learning freely across the country, always telling people that what worked for us may not work for them; that what they do, imagine, and create has to grow out of their local conditions.

Black and Latina

In one of our earliest collective poems, we wrote, “I am Black. I am Latina. I am the hip-hop, merengue, reggae, salsa, calypso, bachata-rich woman who gave you life. I am the dark chocolate, caramel butter pecan, complexion filled with sazon and spices of my ancestors that gave me life … ”31 Our designation “Black” encompassed a number of people, including African American, Afro-Latina, AfroCaribbean, African, Afro-Canadian, and a number of ethnic identities in between. “Latina” included sisters born here in the United States but also folks from all over the Spanishand Portuguese-speaking Americas. Sista II Sista began in BedfordStuyvesant with a majority African American and Afro-Caribbean membership and a heavy Latina presence.

After the first year at the Decatur Clearpool Beacon School, we were offered space at El Puente-Buskwick. The population of SIIS became majority Latina with a heavy African-descended presence. For much of our existence, SIIS demonstrated a commitment to trying to have a balance of “both” populations; sometimes we were successful and other times we were not. The commitment however, was so strong, that at different points in our history we moved our offices based on that concern. Our efforts around this and the populations in Brooklyn neighborhoods at the time highlight the real complications of these categories: “Black,” “Latina,” and “woman of color.” This discussion does not capture those people who had different racial identities or did not fit these categories. An entire book could be written about all of these struggles.

It is important to note that majority Latina did not mean majority non-Black. Most, but not all, Latinas in SIIS were Afro-Latina. A major cultural aspect of SIIS was validating and highlighting African heritage. In a video from 2000, Sista II Sista: Our Response is Collective, one teenage young woman who had been with the organization starting at twelve years old stated,

I think one reason why I love Sista II Sista so much is because they raised me and they helped me grow to be a powerful young woman and I still work with SIIS, but I don’t know how to explain the energy that goes on …
My family tends to think they are more on the Spanish side than on the Black side and that’s always been an issue in my family … because of them learning their history, they feel as if being Black is something that is disgusting, not disgusting, but like, it’s not them, it’s too foreign to them and they don’t realize that [those] are their ancestors that they are speaking about.

When asked why she had a different understanding, she responded:

The way I see it, is like, how could I not realize it? Look at my hair, my skin, my beauty of African descent! [laughter] But also because I was in Sista II Sista, there was always this whole thing that there was always Latinos and Blacks of the young women, so it’s like, yeah, I spoke Spanish, but my history, somehow someway came back from Africa, so somehow someway, we are all family anyway.32

While some Latinas of African descent identified that way, others did not, but we always noted that the state does not often care about these distinctions. We also had some young women who were bleaching their skin, and they came from families who encouraged them to bleach their skin. Sometimes this nonidentification with Blackness was serious, intense, and off-putting for some of the women in the organization.

All the messiness of color, class, identity, hair, Blackness, nationality, queerness, citizenship, language, from New York/not from New York, motherhood, showed up in SIIS, sometimes as their own issues and other times as proxies for other concerns. We held extensive workshops that pushed us to analyze power as a group and to examine our individual areas of privilege. We did not believe that all categories of advantage were equal, but they helped us recognize and talk about the differences in how we experienced oppression in the United States.

These powerful labels of Black and Latina resonated with us and held deep political importance for us. We were building on New York City’s long history of community and student-organizing work across these categories. We felt that the issues we focused on deeply affected Black and Brown young women, and it made sense for us to push forward together. As collective member Adjoa Jones de Almeida reflected,

… there was a real lived reality of growing up in a city like New York where there was a lot of shared experiences around being a working-class person of color. … That being said, I think that we also wrestled with the fact that there were also some important differences that distinguished those experiences, and that it was important not to negate that or hide that … and I don’t know that we were always super successful in that regard but I think that there was a real commitment and an understanding [that] there was a structural reality that impacted Black and Latina women in some significant ways, and that there was real power in imaging strategies of resistance from a place of union.33

In today’s world, the idea of “people of color” has come under fire with good reason. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of #BlackLivesMatter, has spoken passionately about how the term should be recognized more as a term of solidarity as opposed to identity, and how some frameworks of multiracial organizing disguise the ways we perpetuate anti-Blackness. For her, the important question is “how we can talk about the different ways that we’re targeted because we’re not targeted in the same way.”34

While discussing how the Movement for Black Lives has embraced the idea of “unapologetically Black” as central to their organizing, Barbara Ransby points out that this mantra challenges “the generic, amorphous, and sometimes confounding political category of ‘people of color,’ which covers a vast range of diverse experiences, cultures, national identities, phenotypes, and, most important, relations to power and oppression.”35 Ransby further argues that

Unapologetically Black acknowledges that Blackness is rooted in a particular political and historical context with bloody roots in the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow (old and new). It exists as the ultimate antithesis of white supremacy, the ideological anchor of racial capitalism. But it also acknowledges something else—that is, the positive aspects of a shared connection to an African American past.36

Ransby later points out that initially the terminology “people of color” was used, in part, to recognize “the global uses of white supremacy in pursuit of empire” and argues that an important component of strong multiethnic coalitions is to tease out and truly understand some of the differences.37 In SIIS, we had a very strong global understanding of Blackness. However, today some members reflect that we were not always grounded in an understanding of racial formation specifically in the United States.38 We did, however, build a shared analysis, an understanding of our commonalities, and a recognition of our differences, areas of privilege, and relations to power as a way to build solidarity grounded in actual struggle. We sought to embody the words of Caribbean feminist M. Jacqui Alexander:

We are not born women of color. We become women of color. In order to become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each others’ histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression. … We would have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another. … We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company.39

Sista II Sista/Hermana a Hermana Freedom School for Young Women of Color

Sista II Sista’s Freedom School program graduated over six hundred young women over the course of our existence. Our Freedom School had many components designed to promote the holistic development of young women. The Herstory Project was a creative-arts component that encompassed photography, video projects, and theater performances geared toward allowing young women to produce stories based on exploring their own lives, the lives of the women around them, and the ancestors that we studied. We did annual performances and fundraisers at places like the Nuyorican Poets Caf,e on the Lower East Side and Joloff Restaurant in Bedford Stuyvesant.

Political education classes were designed to introduce young women to people like Ella Baker, Maria Elena Moyano, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Iris Morales—women of color who had fought for social justice. In one of the workshops on revolutionary women, sisters came in and embodied figures like Mama Tingo,, Assata Shakur, Comandante Ramona, and Leila Khaled. Some of these women graced the mural in front our offices. As part of the political education aspect of SIIS, we examined current issues and herstories of Third World liberation movements, the Black Freedom movement in the United States, the work of the Young Lords, and landless movements and quilombos in Brazil, among others.

Finally, we believed in personal, physical, and spiritual development. We organized sessions on sex education, the erotic, health, and body image.40 The Freedom School also offered academic support and used pedagogy based in popular education techniques. Physical power segments included programing in boxing, selfdefense, Afro-Dominican dance, African dance, Capoeira, b-girling, yoga, and a variety of other activities geared toward physical strength, cultural expression, and emotional release. We held healing retreats and sista circles, and we connected young women to counselors who volunteered their time.41 Many of us saw spirituality as a key factor in personal development and movement building.

As Adjoa noted, “We acknowledged that learning and communicating and building is not just a cerebral process, not just an emotional process, that there is an element to transformation that is energetic and spiritual. That is why we embraced a bunch of creative processes, and in my mind, that is very much connected to a spiritual understanding of the world.”42 For example, some members held workshops on Yoruba cosmology and traditions. We also hosted and coorganized INCITE!’s first national interfaith conference. In SIIS, our religious practices were varied and included Christianity, Candombl,e, Santeria, Islam, and a number of other faiths, but we had a prayer/meditation room that was beautifully designed by one of our collective members, Gia, where everyone contributed their vision and time to paint and decorate.

Food was always a deep part of Sista II Sista’s culture from the beginning. We ate together as a way of building with each other, and because some sistas came from rough situations and were hungry. We always had meals at our events and workshops, often donated from local businesses or individuals, cooked by members, or catered by other activist organizations. Over time, our food choices became healthier ones—from pizza (often!) to options including salads and quinoa. Eventually, we initiated a farmer’s market that sold low-cost organic vegetables from local farmers out of our offices for families in the neighborhood.

The Freedom School programs were the main recruitment tool for our organizing work. We engaged in community organizing, particularly around issues of violence and war, and we participated in a number of citywide and national coalitions over the years, including the Azabache Collective, the Coalition Against Police Brutality, Sistafire, and Third World Within. Members of SIIS participated in national and international gatherings, including Sister Song; the Black Radical Congress; INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence; LISTEN, Inc; the National Network of Immigrant and Refugee Rights; the World Conference Against Racism in South Africa; and the World Social Forum in Brazil, to name a few. Young and adult women participated in, led, and developed trainings, but we learned most often through action—through brainstorming creative ways to address difficult issues, thinking through questions of power, bringing our own intersectional experience and analysis to the work, and running community campaigns.

Challenging State and Interpersonal Violence

There are strong bodies of work that link racialized and gendered state violence and interpersonal violence. In 2006, INCITE!, “a nation-wide network of radical feminists of color working to end violence against women, gender non-conforming, and trans people of color,” published an anthology titled The Color of Violence. The editors wrote:

There are many organizations that address violence directed at communities.
… There are many organizations that address violence within communities.
… But there are very few organizations that address violence on both fronts simultaneously. The challenge women of color face in combatting personal and state violence is to develop strategies for ending violence that assure safety for survivors of sexual/domestic violence and do not strengthen our oppressive criminal justice apparatus.43

Over a decade after the original release of this publication, these concerns continue to animate scholars and movements today. Referring to disproportionate violence against Black transwomen, Black women studies historian Kali Nicole Gross argues that “connecting community violence to the movement for accountability for police brutality would help call attention to the disproportionate violence experienced by all kinds of Black women, and girls, and it would also create a space to more closely interrogate the detrimental aspects of police abdication on Black communities.”44 Beth Richie has written about the rise of the “prison nation” and the ways that the mainstream antiviolence movement pursued policies that further criminalized communities of color and how anti-racist movements declined to pursue cases of those Black women and queer people who were the most vulnerable and did not fit traditional norms and notions of respectability.45 Andrea Ritchie has extensively documented the policing and criminalization of “Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color” through a wide intersectional lens that includes gender, race, sexuality, class, age, motherhood, and nation in order to “understand the full shape and reach of state violence in ways essential to countering it.”46

Campaigns like #SayHerName emerged to counter the tendency to exclusively focus on male victims of state-sanctioned violence. A leader of the campaign, legal scholar Kimberl,e Crenshaw, has engaged these issues for decades, but in 2015, she helped open space to recognize the intersecting ways Black and girls women faced state violence, and how their names were often not the ones called when communities organized.47

At the beginning of this century, SIIS faced this dilemma quite dramatically in Bushwick. This experience completely changed the trajectory of our organizing work. By 2006, organizing around violence became much of what we were known for. As a Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing report on the Northeast noted, “working with young women, Sista II Sista infused policy accountability work with a gender analysis, challenging widespread assumptions that systemic violence strictly affects men of color and calling attention to the distinct ways in which law enforcement and the justice system shape the lives of young women.”48

As SIIS collective member Paula X. Rojas remembered,

This wasn’t like a theoretical idea, that was a lived thing day-to-day. … You could be in a moment of having a fight with someone that’s real and that’s hard, but having a cop come and interfere is not going to help, it’s only gonna make it worse. [That] might feel different for a different woman in a different neighborhood of a different background who would welcome a cop to come and help them, but it was absolutely clear here that, that wasn’t the case. That having a cop come into the mix was not going to help anybody feel safer …
The whole police brutality movement at the time was so focused on male victims of direct police attacks of violence, which was really important, but what we knew and what we saw, and I myself have lived, was how cops sexually abuse young women and young women of color in particular. … [T]he way the cops looked at the young women and sometimes me as well was disgusting …
For us, the two forms of violence [state and interpersonal] were just inextricably linked—two sides of the same problem, you couldn’t pull them apart too easily. … [W]e couldn’t focus on one thing without the other.49

Working around issues of racialized and gendered state and interpersonal violence was not our initial plan. However, in October 2000, Carmen “Blondie” Valentine, a young woman and a friend of some of our members, was having an argument with her mother at her home at 1185 Dekalb Avenue in Bushwick. An off-duty police officer from the 23rd precinct intervened and fatally shot her in the chest and stomach. She was twenty-one years old. A small notice in the New York Times reported that she and her mom had assaulted the officer with a baseball bat and pool cue when he tried to intervene. Further, the article incongruously highlighted witness testimony that Blondie and her sister “played loud music and stomped noisily through the building.”50

Anger and sadness plagued the meeting where we discussed what happened. The article in the New York Times could never capture what that loss meant to her family or the young women of SIIS. As we discussed her tragic murder, inevitably the conversation turned to men and the ways young men of color were constantly victims of police violence and lethal force. Even when we were talking about Blondie, the conversation turned to how deeply brothers were affected. Despite the fact that we were all women discussing this issue, and it was a young Latina who had been killed, we had trouble recognizing how our understanding of police violence—and who was affected by it—was completely gendered. Our own experiences were silenced, even in our own spaces.

At another members’ session a few months later, in an emotionally charged meeting with more than forty-five youth members, it became clear that an overwhelming majority of our members had experienced some level of sexual assault or violence. At this point, those of us in the collective (a group of about twenty sisters) realized that we needed to act. We had never spoken about organizing around violence against women, but Blondie’s murder, and this meeting about our own experiences, marked a turning point.

Glenis Santana, another young woman from Bushwick, was volunteering as an auxiliary police officer. In January 2001, her lifeless body was found inside a trashcan on Stagg and Gardner Streets in Bushwick.51 The main suspect was an auxiliary police officer. We could no longer afford not to act. Her tragic death was the start of a multifaceted campaign designed to confront state-sanctioned violence, intimatepartner violence, and the politics of protection. As collective member Isabel Gonzalez explained, “there were two murders of two young women in Bushwick … that happened to be friends of some of the young women in Sista II Sista. One of the young women [was] raped repeatedly and murdered, and the prime suspect at the time was an auxiliary police officer from the 83rd precinct. The other young woman was in a domestic dispute with her mother on her doorsteps, but a police officer came by and saw this argument and shot the young woman in her chest and she was killed. … [T]hese two incidents kind of forced Sista II Sista, also along with other personal experiences … to take action around this issue.”52

We held a membership meeting where over seventy young Black and Brown young sisters attended. At that meeting, we agreed to organize a campaign around violence against young women of color. Our first step was to conduct a community survey. Teams of young and adult women hit the streets interviewing young women. We conducted over four hundred surveys of young women of color living in Bushwick. The results were not surprising. The majority of young women did not feel safe. As one of our brochures explained,

Our primary focus right now is working on violence against young women of color.
We also did a community survey of over 400 young women in Bushwick.
[The] results found that: 64% felt that this community was not safe for young women; 57% knew of someone who had been raped; 90% of those cases the young women were not helped during the incident; 38% of young women know 2 to 5 other young women who have faced sexual violence; and, 30% know more than 5 other young women who have experienced this violence. But most people do not recognize this as a community issue.53

In 2002, we held an Action Summer that included a video project on police harassment of young women called You Have the Right to Break the Silence, street theater addressing sexual harassment and assault, and an action in front of the 83rd precinct. By 2004, we created SLG, a place where “violence against women would not be tolerated.” SLG was a hyper-local campaign designed to challenge attitudes about state and interpersonal violence against young women of color through street theater, videos, workshops in the local high schools, a public art project, block parties, and vigils. Our organizing included:

• police accountability campaigns and coalition work;
• an action hotline;
• “sister circles” that provided space for sisters to talk about the violence and other issues in their daily lives. We encouraged the community—rather than the individual woman—to find solutions, including restorative justice;
• international solidarity campaigns54; and
• a media arm.

One critical area of work was about police abdication in communities of color. We specifically confronted the idea that Black and Latina women’s bodies were not worthy of protection. One of our members, Nayobi, highlighted the dilemma many women of color face. “There’s no trust anywhere. You can’t trust police. You can’t trust, sometimes, even your own community.”55 In another video we produced, Loyda, from the Audre Lorde Project, discussed the lack of police and community response when she and a friend were assaulted, “… these men, two men in a car, assumed she was my girlfriend and began telling her that, like, I was cheating on her … and basically started harassing us.” They were attacked and when they informed the police that it was a homophobic attack, “the cops left” and she and her friend had to go to the hospital in a cab.56

In 2003, we highlighted the case of Ramona Moore, of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. She was a young Black woman, twenty-one years old, and a student at Hunter College. Her family unsuccessfully begged police to look for her when she disappeared from her home. They refused, arguing that she was twenty-one and probably hanging out with her boyfriend. She did not have a boyfriend, and she did not take her wallet, keys, or a jacket. When police finally began a search after much multipronged community effort, her tortured and raped body was found a few blocks away from the precinct, not far from where another young woman reported being raped. Their refusal to look for her, their disregard for her family, and their indifference to this young woman’s life implicated them in her murder.

In Bushwick, in 2004, we helped bring attention to the murder of eighteenyear-old Sharabia Thomas. She was a high school senior who was raped and found stuffed in a bag in a park by EBC High School in Bushwick. Along with her high school and other organizations in the neighborhood, we co-organized a march and vigil to highlight her brutal rape and murder and to demand an investigation. In the video No More Violence Against Our Sistas, one of our members, Kimberly, who was sixteen, stated,

It was scary. She was supposed to graduate and she was found murdered. … I walk to school by myself every morning every day, she lost her life, I could be next. … We organized a march with the local high schools and walked through the community talking to people and giving out flyers. … We are letting them know that young women are dying due to violence and we are not going to take it anymore. We felt proud of ourselves [that we accomplished this] because we knew that Sharabia was looking down on us, knowing that we were trying to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.57

Violence is a challenging issue to organize around as women of color who did not believe in expanding the carceral state and did not want to pathologize our communities. As activists, we could talk about state violence perpetrated by police, how they were not protecting or serving us, but it was more difficult to talk about our experiences of violence—the men in our communities as perpetrators of violence against us, the women who commit violence and abuse, and the violence that also takes place against and within same-sex relationships. But we made an effort to do work around the multifaceted ways that young Black and Brown women experienced violence.

We aimed to challenge our own (and our communities’) attitudes about these issues. Voices of Women, one of the organizations that we partnered with, had a long track record of such work. One sister, Gillian, discussed how her partner would hit her and people would respond in surprise to her disclosure, “he is so nice, what did you do to make him react like that?” She stated emphatically, “A woman’s spirit doesn’t just die from rape and beating, when you are constantly being told that you are nothing, that you will never be anything … that is violence.”58 Our effort to build a liberated zone was as much a move to confront the state as it was an effort around cultural change and community accountability. We organized community members to sign pledges that they would not tolerate violence against women as a way to engage people around this issue and to begin to help all of us see how we are all accountable for each other’s safety and wellbeing. One of our collective poems envisioned “not one more stabbed, shot or killed sister anywhere …” Building community where none supposedly exists— that is a radical act.

Art was an important strategy in the work to challenge the culture around violence against women of color in Bushwick, including violence enacted by the state. Kai Lumumba Barrow, a local organizer for Critical Resistance who served on SIIS’s board and helped us develop public art projects, described the process: “The more that we work together on any number of creative solutions … my big thing is art, so how do we make visible in our communities that we will not tolerate violence against women. Neighborhood by neighborhood, small block by small block, we don’t have to start out with the world, right? We can start out in our own neighborhoods, in our own communities, and build from there. But I definitely think it’s possible [to end violence against women].”59

SIIS members did street theater performances depicting different forms of harassment. Onlookers who were part of our team would instigate people passing by to comment on the scene. Some of the young men who performed with us met with the former Young Lord Ritchie Perez who talked with them about his own journey with masculinity and violence in order to have them think critically about these issues and prepare them for the process.60 Once the crowd was big enough, SIIS members would facilitate a conversation with everyone about violence against women of color and have people sign the pledge. These scenes took place on street corners, subway platforms, and in front of high schools. Our video tours also took members across the neighborhood to schools, people’s homes, and beauty shops to do consciousness-raising on the various forms of violence that affect young women of color and a call to join or support the work of SIIS.

Our community pledge included the words, “I believe that in the struggle for justice, women’s personal safety is an important community issue.” The pledge continued, “As a member of this community, I commit myself to ending violence against women! … I stand in support of Sista’s Liberated Ground, a territory where violence against women is not tolerated. I will dedicate myself to creating relationships based on respect, love, and mutual support and to struggling for justice and liberation on a personal and broader community level.”61

There were also major challenges that we faced in our work—we were pointing out the lack of protection offered to communities of color by police, and we were arguing that the police state was not the best response. We did not have the infrastructure to truly deal with the issues we were confronting, particularly intimate-partner violence and the serious attendant mental health issues, and even though we connected to service organizations, those resources were not necessarily set up to deal with the populations we were addressing: minors, undocumented families, Black and Brown people. Sometimes, they were also at odds with our politics.

Finally, this campaign led to an increased level of harassment. At least in part, SIIS’s decision to address these incidents in a confrontational manner created tension with the local police precinct, men, and sometimes even women in our community. For example, similar to other groups in the city, at one point police set up a huge mobile unit in front of SIIS offices for a month. We believed that this was an intimidation tactic in response to local marches and rallies we organized. Hostility also emanated from community members who felt that we were brainwashing their partners or family members. We were accused more than once of trying to turn young women into lesbians. Above our offices hung a large beautiful wood sign engraved with the SIIS logo. It was designed by a female graffiti artist from Ecuador, TooFly, who supported us often. One day we arrived at our offices, only to find the sign torn down and literally broken in two—no easy feat. Someone actually climbed up there and worked hard to destroy that symbol of our work.

Closing Down

By 2007 SIIS spiraled to a close under the weight of the work, our dreams, mission drift, the triage of our lives, and, probably most importantly, the gentrification of the neighborhood that many of us considered home. Somewhere around 2004, we made a bold decision to no longer accept foundation funding.62 It was our effort to return to our roots, to be consistent with our values, to forge a non-capitalist path, and to confront the political limits of our nonprofit status. Some members argue that, in part, this decision also marked the beginning of the end.

I was there for the final meeting that determined our fate. I remember feeling the weight that these women felt; they were overwhelmed, and a heavy cloud loomed over the room. No organization should live forever, we argued. And while I would guess that most of us believe that closing was the right decision, there are constant conversations about reviving the organization. Along with the joy of that possibility, the idea also automatically gives some of us gray hair. To this day, however, former youth members lament the closing of SIIS, highlighting the void that it left in their lives, and for some of them, that loss also highlights their inability to find living-wage jobs where their voices matter in the ways that they did in SIIS. Adjoa stated, “when I sit down now with the ‘young women’ who are not so young anymore, who have their own incredibly challenging life histories, they all, they all have this deep sadness about the fact that Sista II Sista no longer exists.”63

Significance

Yet, SIIS lives on. Its power, culture, and lessons live in those of us who tried to build a vision and continue to do so in our everyday lives. It shows up not only in our relationships but in our work as educators, community organizers, midwives and birth companions, museum workers, artists, dental hygienists, filmmakers, performers, lawyers, assistants, political strategists, counselors, poets, deejays, retail workers, writers, leaders of youth development organizations, public health leaders, consultants, union organizers, government workers, translators, politicians, and day-to-day visionaries.

SIIS conducted workshops with coed high school classes all over Bushwick and all over the country. In the high schools, we challenged students’ (and their teachers’) common sense and supported young women to see their own experiences as valid. Our mobilizations raised the level of visibility and importance of these young women of color who had been murdered, by the state directly and by its negligence. The work was creative—from street theater to public art—and our messaging encouraged a wider public dialogue about these tough issues. We pushed everyday peoples’ and other activist organizations’ analysis of the work against state and interpersonal violence to include a gendered analysis. We gave people permission to take risks. We worked to build spaces of support and community, we built international and domestic connections and collaborations, and we lived what it meant to seek personal and societal transformation in conversation.

SIIS, much like other freedom school models, was based on the idea that young Black and Brown women could create communities of support; that they could challenge the injustices in their personal lives and in the larger society; and that their voices and lives mattered. It was our effort to model a vision that we wanted to see, an effort to create a space of freedom and struggle. It was hard, painful, beautiful, and profound work. I also think that it is important to say that we made mistakes along the way, but we worked to support teenage women of color to have a sense of their own power and their ability to wield it collectively. As Adjoa noted fiercely, “We were really successful in pulling out young women’s fire and their sense of who they are as free and unique and irreverent young women. I think we were really successful in doing that because we strived to do that ourselves …” As we wrote in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “With every sista that is a little more powerful and thinks differently because of their encounter with SIIS, we are successful.”64

Conclusion

Scholar-activist Barbara Ransby has argued that we should interrogate the continuities within movements across time rather than focusing only on ruptures. If we recognize that this work has been happening, even when there was not a mass movement, we can begin to be more expansive in how we choose to respond in the present. To revive this story is to push back against the forgetting that takes place almost immediately when Black and Brown women lead.

The experiences of SIIS and the campaign of Sistas Liberated Ground, raise important considerations for this generation of activists who are doing amazing and difficult work on the ground. Our strategies around these issues were inherently long term but we could not always fully deal with the reality of people’s lives. If we do not want to expand the carceral state, what support systems and institutions can we put in place to truly support those who need it right now? This was one of the deep challenges that SIIS faced. The experiences of SLG also show us what many in this generation of abolitionists already know, that safety is not about policing but rather is about building community, providing systems of support, changing culture, and advancing community accountability around interpersonal violence.

In this current political moment, the herstory of SIIS demonstrates the possibility of a politics that creates new cultures, models the world we want to see, builds solidarity across communities, and does the work of Ella Baker style radical democracy. “It is a struggle that says that we won’t tolerate individual behavior, nor the wider system, that renders our bodies—and our very lives— disposable, violable and invisible.”65 In SIIS, we were working to build a culture that promoted this vision, hence the name Sistas Liberated Ground. Given that the culture of this society is based in hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, empire, and capitalism, we need to keep the idea of transforming culture central in our analyses and approach. Some on the left believe that small-scale collectives that work to create alternatives fall in alignment with neoliberalism, in part because of their de-emphasis on taking state power, and their corresponding focus on the micro, mutual support, and what some see as utopian experiments and dreams. I would argue, however, that collectivism fundamentally challenges the logic of the neoliberal state—that what we do together matters, that our collective well-being and vision is critical. If we continue to reproduce the systems we fight against, politics with a capital “P” will not transform society. Period.

SIIS demonstrated a model of grounded solidarity across ethnic lines. In these tumultuous and violent times, we need all the solidarity we can get. Not only is it possible, it’s undeniably urgent. This is no easy task. It is not a call to paper over difference. It is an uneasy process, born through struggle, that is deliberate. It’s also a politics that looks you in the eye and says, “I need you to survive.”66

Finally, given the violence of racial capitalism and the global shift to the right, we need to build alternatives now more than ever that counter the racial logics that justify throwing entire communities under the bus. As access to public education and higher education narrows, as neo-fascist tendencies become more and more acceptable, freedom schools and other programs that center an intersectional and holistic praxis, focus on popular education and critical thinking, and lead strategic community organizing campaigns, become indispensable. Ella Baker and Septima Clark taught us what it means to create spaces where people can learn, grow, build a collective vision in a participatory way, and give that vision life in the world. This daily local work ripples outward. Our sister Dumeha understood this and made it her business to build these types of spaces wherever she went. She did it with swagger, an artist’s vision, the rage of the oppressed, and a boundless love for our people and freedom.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback, the editorial team at SOULS and the editors for this special issue. An extra special thanks to all the Sista II Sista members who continue to share their love and vision with me, especially Adjoa Jones de Almeida and Paula Rojas. Finally, Ujju Aggarwal, Mo,nica A. Jim,enez, Christen Smith, and Cynthia Yaudes read different versions of this article and I am very grateful for their comments, time, and suggestions.