Black Feminist Thought Grounds and Centers Us

This article was written by Lisa Sangoi, Co-Founder of Movement for Family Power, and Bekura W. Shabazz and published in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism.

“Working in and around the law for the past several years, we became acutely aware of—have felt in our bones—a certain paradox in the law: how legal resources and opportunities to shape the law are completely unavailable to the vast majority of people in the United States, and yet legal structures exert an enormous, tsunami-like force on those people, even those who are trained to work within those structures. Give birth to a baby who tests positive for opioids? The law says the state can take your baby away. How does the law govern when and how you can get your child back? Can you—and how often can you—visit your baby? What must you do to be reunited? How long can the agency that took your kid away stay in your life? The answers to all these questions should be readily available to you, but instead, they will likely be made up as you churn through the system.”