1/ I just read that I should introduce myself as a newcomer, migrant from Twitter here. Apologies for not having done so. Given my time on the planet – this will be fairly long.
I'm a 75 year old Black woman, born in Brooklyn NY in 1947. My parents were politically very left of center - my dad was a Tuskegee Airman, and later a stage actor, and professor, my mom a very educated woman whose grandparents were enslaved in Virginia.
2/
I was raised to be political, so from an early age (3rd grade) I’ve been engaged in activism - from ban the bomb to civil and human rights. Over the course of a lifetime I’ve been a member of the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, The Young Lords Party, The Black Panther Party, and worked in solidarity with groups fighting for the rights of Black women, Native Americans, Asian-American and Chicanos
3/ I got involved in media via WBAI Pacifica in NYC and co-founded the first Black/minority controlled public radio station in Washington DC – WPFW-FM, Pacifica. Later I became the Executive Director of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. During the AIDS crisis in NYC, with friends and neighbors dying all around me, I shifted focus & became involved in harm reduction actions, working as a medical anthropologist/ ethnographer doing research intervention with heroin addicts in NYC and Puerto Rico.
4/4/After I retired from doing fieldwork, I started teaching cultural anthropology and women’s studies. A few years ago I retired again, and since 2008 have blogged at Daily Kos (and forcefully push back against racism and misogynoir on social media ).
DeniseOV
TheJen
LVN2DRM
Patrick Chizeck
Indistinct Chatter 🥄