In Conversation with Rosa Clemente: Black and Brown Organizing Histories to Inform Revolutionary Resistance

​“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories...”

-Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts

Seasoned community organizer, activist-scholar, and independent journalist, Rosa Clemente, reflects in conversation with Maria Hinojosa from Latino USA on the urgencies of confronting anti-Blackness in Latinx communities and the importance of forging Black and Latinx alliances that can mobilize to resist and disrupt the assemblages of anti-Blackness, white supremacy and racial violence. 

Drawing from her own personal experiences as a Black Puerto Rican woman with decades of experience as a community organizer in New York, Rosa reminds us of the importance of Black and Brown liberation struggles, of the histories of multi-racial solidarity and movement building that can inform our present and future. By describing the coalitions formed between the Brown Berets, the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, we are reminded that in unity there is strength. More than strength there is resistance, revolution and radical hope to carry forward movements for liberation and humanizing possibilities.  

Noting the awakening of a racial consciousness among Latinx communities, including members of her familia, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Rosa calls upon us to engage in the disruption of anti-Blackness within Latinx communities, discourses and spaces. At the same time she reminds us of the importance of setting boundaries, even within our own families, to ensure that the radical revolutionary work of organizing for systemic change goes beyond the interpersonal. Political discernment of when and where, and how to push and resist, even among those most close to us, is a necessary strategy to sustain racial justice activism and organizing.

As the founder of the Black-Latinx Organizing Project, a non-profit committed to challenging anti-Blackness in Latinx communities, Rosa urges us to dive deep into our own colonial past and mindsets -- to unsettle and uproot the internalized racial logics that produce soul-wounds, both within individuals and communities -- and that keep us from actualizing racial justice and the humanizing affirmation that Black lives matter. In deconstructing the romanization of Latinidad, she urges Latinx to reckon with a history of colonial violence and the erasure of Afro-diasporic identities and experiences in the Americas. 

Affirmed by the reflections of white privilege acknowledged by her brother, and in bearing witness to the activism and mobilizing of the younger generation, including her daughter, Rosa’s words -- along with her tears -- underscore that racial violence and anti-Black racism “has to end and our generation has to stop this.” Urging Latinx families to begin the process of deconstructing anti-Blackness within and among themselves, and at the kitchen table, Rosa affirms for us through her own personal experiences that radical revolutionary change and resistance begins through dialogue and connection. And indeed, in conversation.

Check out the work mentioned in the podcast, consider buying from a Black owned bookstore

Writings by Rosa Clemente

"Who is Black?"

"How I Came to Know and Appreciate My Blackness an Afro-Latina"

Read Here

Read Here

Referenced Works