26 Introduction: Social Movements and Identities

“History is also everybody talking at once, multiple rhythms being played simultaneously. The events and people we write about did not occur in isolation but in dialogue with a myriad of other people and events. In fact, at any given moment millions of people are all talking at once. As historians we try to isolate one conversation and to explore it, but the trick is then how to put that conversation in a context which makes evident its dialogue with so many others—how to make this one lyric stand alone and at the same time be in connection with all the other lyrics being sung.”

—Elsa Barkley Brown, “’What has happened here,’” pp. 297-298.

Feminist historian Elsa Barkley Brown reminds us that social movements and identities are not separate from each other, as we often imagine they are in contemporary society. She argues that we must have a relational understanding of social movements and identities within and between social movements—an understanding of the ways in which privilege and oppression are linked and how the stories of people of color and feminists fighting for justice have been historically linked through overlapping and sometimes conflicting social movements. In this unit, we use a relational lens and historical to discuss and make sense of social justice movements, beginning in the 19th century up to the present time.

Social justice movements have generated, made possible, and nurtured critical race feminist theories and academic knowledge. In this way, social movements are fantastic examples of praxis—that is, they use critical reflection about the world to change it. It is because of various social movements—feminist activism, workers’ activism, and civil rights activism throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries—that antiracist feminist history is a viable field of study today. Race, gender, and sexuality studies is part of a larger historical project that draws on the experiences of largely ignored and disempowered groups (e.g., factory workers, immigrants, people of color, queer and trans people) to re-think and challenge the histories that have been traditionally written from the experiences and points of view of the powerful (e.g., colonizers, representatives of the state, the wealthy)—the conventional yet incomplete histories we typically learn in high school textbooks.^[1]