Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.
She is author Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018.
Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times.
In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians.
Taylor is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, from Angela Davis: An Autobiography to Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.
Publication date: June 1, 2021
"This brilliant book is the best analysis we have of the #BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle for freedom in America. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has emerged as the most sophisticated and courageous radical intellectual of her generation."
Dr. Cornel West
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order offers important context for understanding the necessity of the emerging movement for black liberation."
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
"From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an essential read for anyone following the movement for Black Lives. The text chronicles a portion of history we rarely ever see, while also bringing together data and deep primary source research in a way that lucidly explains the origins of the current moment."
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 's has not written the average rushed first-wave book on a social movement. Taylor, a professor of African American studies- at Princeton, is the rare academic writer whose sense of humor is as sharp as her scholarship. She 's written a sweeping yet concise history not just of the Black Lives Matter movement, but of the past seven years under the first black president and of how the 20th century led to our current state of woke uprising. It 's full of gems of historical insight and it fearlessly tackles what black liberation looks like when it happens in a black-governed city 40 miles from a black-occupied White House."
Steven Thrasher, The Guardian
"Class Matters! In this clear-eyed, historically informed account of the latest wave of resistance to state violence, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor not only exposes the canard of color-blindness but reveals how structural racism and class oppression are joined at the hip. If today 's rebels ever expect to end inequality and racialized state violence, she warns, then capitalism must also end. And that requires forging new solidarities, envisioning a new social and economic order, and pushing a struggle to protect Black Lives to its logical conclusion: a revolution capable of transforming the entire nation."
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"With political eloquence, intellectual rigor, and an unapologetically left analysis,the brilliant scholar-activist Keeanga Taylor has provided a powerful contribution to our collective understanding of the current stage of the Black freedom struggle in the United States, how we arrived at this point, and what battles we need to fight in order to truly achieve liberation. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a must read for everyone who is serious about the ongoing praxis of freedom."
Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has a strong voice, a sharp mind and a clear, readable style that all come together in this penetrating, vital analysis of race and class at this critical moment in America's racial history."
Gary Younge, editor-at-large for the Guardian
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor brings the long history of Black radical theorizing and scholarship into the neoliberal 21st century with From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Her strong voice is deeply needed at a time when young activists are once again reforging a Black liberation movement that is under constant attack. Deeply rooted in Black radical, feminist and socialist traditions, Taylor 's book is an outstanding example of the type of analysis that is needed to build movements for freedom and self-determination in a far more complicated terrain than that confronted by the activists of the 20th century. Her book is required reading for anyone interested in justice, equality and freedom."
Michael C. Dawson, author of Blacks In and Out of the Left
Free study guide available for Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor's From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
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Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, et al.
Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
by Anand Gopal, Owen Jones, et al.
