In the face of rising fascism and political instability, activists say the liberatory framework offered by Black feminism is more crucial than ever
by Gracelynne West January 6th, 2026
In the face of rising fascism and political instability, activists say the liberatory framework offered by Black feminism is more crucial than ever
Real journalists wrote and edited this (not AI)—independent, community-driven journalism survives because you back it. Donate to sustain Prism’s mission and the humans behind it.
Tamika Middleton enrolled at the historically Black college and university (HBCU) Xavier University in New Orleans in 2001 as a pre-med student. Driven by a loved one’s experience facing incarceration, Middleton joined movement spaces determined to organize against mass incarceration. She was introduced to Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex.
“I had a loved one who had just been sentenced to 20 years mandatory minimum, on a drug conspiracy charge, and I was seeing so many other folks that I grew up with [who were] navigating and facing long prison sentences,” Middleton explained.
The New Orleans Police Department has a long history of police brutality and corruption spanning decades, but in the summer of 2010, when Middleton was 26 years old, several current and former officers were indicted for shooting civilians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
As an intern with Critical Resistance and a student at Xavier, Middleton immersed herself in movement literature. She also regularly attended speaker series hosted by Critical Resistance, sharpening her analysis of Black feminist politics. She was able to meet and have ongoing discussions with Black feminist elders such as Nikki Giovanni, Angela Davis, and the co-founders of Critical Resistance, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Rachel Herzing. Eventually, Middleton got a job at a local bookstore, which gave her further access to Black feminist texts that allowed her to deepen her knowledge and share it with her broader community.
Middleton initially wanted to be an OB-GYN because Black infant and maternal mortality rates impacted various people in her life. Middleton’s mother miscarried twins, and her cousin’s best friend died while giving birth. The young girl tried to hide her pregnancy and did not receive any prenatal care.
“And so at a very young age, I wanted to support Black women in having babies,” Middleton told Prism.
In the U.S., more than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, and globally, the U.S. ranks the highest in maternal death rates when compared with other developed countries. Out of 48 states, Louisiana’s maternal mortality rate ranks 47th. In the state, Black women are 2.5 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related deaths than white women.
Twenty years later, Middleton, now a national organizer for the feminist organization Women’s March, continues to build from her roots in Black feminist organizing.
“I organize Black domestic workers in the South, and so I have always tried to bring with me this Black feminist politics as a grounding for all of the spaces that I enter,” she said.
Middleton is one of countless prominent organizers whose life, politics, and work were shaped by Black feminism. As the U.S. faces rising fascism and political instability under the Trump administration, liberatory frameworks such as Black feminism are even more crucial in uniting communities to fight against government attacks. Prism spoke to several activists and organizers across the country to discuss why a Black feminist lens remains a key tool heading into 2026.
A political home
Brittany Whaley is the Southeast regional director of the Working Families Party, a progressive political party that first emerged in the late ’90s. Whaley has been involved in political organizing for 20 years, and she told Prism that Black feminism shapes her approach to organizing. For her, this means that exclusionary politics will not bring the U.S. closer to liberation in the face of fascism.
“A dominant narrative in this moment is [that] we can afford to leave people behind—and that’s not an option for Black feminists,” Whaley said. “I think we have to understand that under capitalism and billionaires controlling our government and our public resources, nobody is safe.”
Black feminism is explicitly anti-fascist and is explicitly anti-capitalist, and I think we cannot undermine that. If we really understood what that meant, then we would make different choices than a lot of us are making now.Yemi Combahee
One year into President Donald Trump’s second term, Whaley noted that the need to center the principles of Black feminism has never been clearer. Over the next decade, the country will face $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid which will push more than 17 million people out of health coverage. The NAACP reports that more than 60% of all Black children and more than a third of older Black adults are covered by Medicaid, with the cuts leading to disastrous health inequities nationwide.
Under the Trump administration, Black unemployment has also steadily increased to 7.5% following the government’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, pointing to hiring barriers for Black workers in the private sector.
The 2015 U.S. Trans Survey, the most comprehensive accounting of life for trans people in the U.S., found that the unemployment rate for Black trans people more than doubled the rate of overall Black unemployment at 20%. Also, nearly 38% of trans people surveyed experienced poverty. The survey also found that nearly 27% of respondents were denied access to medical care because they were transgender. As of July 2025, more than 50% of youth ages 13 to 17 live in states that have banned gender-affirming care and as Prism previously reported, U.S.-based LGBTQIA+ organizations are now pushed to the brink, facing funding issues as their services for trans kids are in higher demand. The Trump administration has also obliterated decades of progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS, posing life-threatening challenges to Black communities on a global scale.
Patricia Hill Collins’ landmark text, “Black Feminist Thought,” called attention to the ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality are intersectional and central to the identities of Black women. Through a Black feminist lens, organizers told Prism that it is imperative to examine the multiplicity of identities that Black women hold in order to better understand how systems of oppression function in their daily lives.
Toni-Michelle Williams, executive director of the trans and queer-led abolitionist organization Solutions Not Punishment, told Prism that the best way to ensure Black trans futures is to move away from harmful institutions and to foster community as a site of healing.
“That path calls for reimagining our current systems that have failed us since inception and developing community as a way of sustainability and collective healing,” Williams said.
Black feminism helps Williams and others stay rooted in liberation work by providing a political home, but how did Black feminism become a longstanding historical tradition? In part, by shedding light on the ways Black women’s bodies have been routinely exploited to preserve white supremacy, and by providing a liberatory framework to build solidarity across communities.
Although various iterations of Black feminism can be traced back to the 1800s(most famously with Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman” speech at the Women’s Convention in 1851), contemporary Black feminist politics really emerged in the 1960s and ’70s with the second wave of the women’s movement.
In the late nineteenth century, Black feminists were largely grounded in cisnormativity and heterosexuality, but by the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, Black feminist politics centered mainly around queer and trans Black women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people. The Combahee River Collective (CRC), a Boston-based radical queer Black feminist collective, authored a monumental statement in 1974 that is still used by Black feminists today.
Also fundamentally different in CRC’s approach to Black feminism was the need to center international solidarity and the demand to end oppressive structures such as capitalism, both of which are considered critical for the liberation of Black women.
Black feminism has evolved during the 50 years since the CRC’s statement was first published. Movements such as #MeToo, led by Tarana Burke, have put American feminism on a global stage, and social media provides a platform for young Black feminists to speak openly about the current issues that impact their lives and communities. While online activism is important, women such as Middleton believe that identifying as a Black feminist requires mobilizing material change in people’s lives.
“Black feminism is nothing without political action to transform the conditions that we’re living inside of,” Middleton said. “So to be a Black feminist requires work towards changing those conditions and transforming the world.”
“Never been the way to liberation”
While the current political moment may galvanize Middleton and others who spoke to Prism to organize for better conditions, the 2024 election had the opposite effect on some Black feminists.
An astounding 92% of Black women voters supported former Vice President Kamala Harris as the presidential candidate. But after Harris’ loss, some prominent Black activists and organizational leaders expressed their unwillingness to organize against a Trump presidency, citing the need to prioritize rest and self-care.
For example, Teja Smith, the founder of the advocacy social media agency, Get Social, told WABE in November 2024 that the people of the U.S. had spoken “and this is what America looks like.”
“And there’s not too much more fighting that you’re going to be able to do without losing your own sanity,” Smith said.
Tracey Corder, an Oakland, California-based organizational development training consultant, advocates against this shift in Black organizing.
“Something that’s been not sitting well with me since this most recent election is this collective throwing up our hands and saying, ‘I voted the right way, y’all got it.’ It’s truly never been the way to liberation for any of us. We’ve always cared about [the] collective, as Black feminists, because it’s the right thing to do,” Corder said.
This was echoed by Yemi Combahee, a reproductive justice organizer in Georgia. Combahee told Prism that organizers and those who embrace Black feminist politics should reflect on what it truly requires to achieve liberation—and it’s not giving up.
“Black feminism is explicitly anti-fascist and is explicitly anti-capitalist, and I think we cannot undermine that,” Combahee said. “If we really understood what that meant, then we would make different choices than a lot of us are making now.”
Middleton told Prism that disengaging is a form of action, one that the most impacted communities cannot afford to take.
“We can either make a decision that we are going to fight to change our conditions, [or] we are going to leave our conditions in the hands of others,” Middleton said. “If we are saying that we do not trust other folks with our well-being, for me, it feels counterintuitive to then trust them to fight to provide the conditions for our communities that are in our best interest.”
The impacts of the federal government’s disastrous cuts to health and human services will be felt for decades, creating the most detrimental impact on low-income communities. As just one example, the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reports that combined Medicaid and Medicare cuts would place over 338 rural hospitals at risk, largely impacting the U.S. South, where the largest concentration of Black communities reside.
Combahee said giving up isn’t an option. For her and others who spoke to Prism, the real question is: In 2026, how will Black feminists work to address the harm of the Trump administration? Combahee said the key is to reflect on and reassess how you contribute to your communities.
“What I’m really interested in doing in the next few years and beyond is asking myself: How am I showing up for my community? How am I constantly growing and expanding my community? How am I deepening with them? How am I making sure that no one in my community actually gets left behind?” Combahee said.
According to Middleton, liberation requires outreach, including outreach and work in communities that may not be totally aligned with Black feminist values.
“Black women make up a small portion of the population of this country, and if every single Black woman of voting age voted one way, we would still not win an election,” Middleton explained. “If we understand Black feminism, [we know] that if we transform the conditions of the most marginalized amongst us, we transform everybody’s conditions.”
And as the Trump administration has proven again and again, there is still so much work to do. Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s book, “How We Get Free: Black Feminism and Combahee River Collective,” features an interview with Demita Frazier, one of the core co-founders of the CRC.
“The point of talking about Combahee is not to be nostalgic,” Frazier said in the interview. “Rather, we talk about it because Black women are still not free.”
While marginalized people nationwide are under attack, and as the Trump administration imports its state violence on a global scale—targeting Venezuelaand threatening other countries with unlawful incursions—many are entering the new year feeling demoralized and unmoored.
But as the organizers who spoke to Prism noted, the path to liberation is a continuous journey. Black feminism has survived for centuries despite the violence of white supremacy, and Black feminist resistance will continue to guide us—no matter who’s in office.
Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor
Source: https://prismreports.org/2026/01/06/black-feminist-organizers-reflect-on-trumps-second-term/
