To Build a Black Future

The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care

By: Christopher Paul Harris

Narrated by: Landon Woodson

Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

This audiobook narrated by Landon Woodson shares how the new Black politics can forge a future centered on collective action, community, and care

When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression of a radical reorientation toward Black politics, protest, and political thought. To Build a Black Future examines the spirit and significance of this insurgency, offering a revelatory account of a new political culture—responsive to pain, suffused with joy, and premised on care—emergent from the centuries-long arc of Black rebellion, a tradition that traces back to the Black slave.

Drawing on his own experiences as an activist and organizer, Christopher Paul Harris takes listeners inside the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) to chart the propulsive trajectory of Black politics and thought from the Middle Passage to the present historical moment. Carefully attending to the social forces that produce Black struggle and the contradictions that arise within it, Harris illustrates how M4BL gives voice to an abolitionist praxis that bridges the past, present, and future, outlining a political project at once directed inward to the Black community while issuing an outward challenge to the world.

An essential book for the age of #BlackLivesMatter, this visionary and provocative book reveals how the radical politics of joy, pain, and care, in sharp contrast to liberal political thought, can build a Black future that transcends ideology and pushes the boundaries of our political imagination.

©2023 Christopher Paul Harris (P)2023 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“In To Build a Black Future, Christopher Paul Harris makes the revolution irresistible! This is not a book to be read once but one to return to whenever we get lost, a social compass bearing witness to where we have been, affirming where we are, and illuminating where we still might go.”—Ruha Benjamin, author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want

“To Build a Black Future is a loving and principled exploration of Black living, Black thought, and Black struggle. Everyone from beginners and active students to longtime scholars of Black liberation will find valuable and timely lessons in this book. I look forward to grappling with Harris’s ideas alongside my students and comrades in years to come.”—Charlene A. Carruthers, author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“Harris tarries with society-caused pain instead of pursuing rights to displace its consequences. If Harris is correct, Black futures require joy and care to sustain ourselves, period. We owe the world nothing more than our Black presence, which comes with a multiverse of creative disavowals of hierarchy and violence and sonic refutations of justifications for captivity, disposability, and theft. Harris recognizes us as the ratchet of the earth. That condition—and its houseless, addicted, perverse, orphaned, refugee, dispossessed, undocumented, poly and trans and intentionally queer wisdom—can disrupt enough of the anti-Black present to help us reach for a future free of manufactured catastrophe and willful ecocide.”—Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, University of California, Irvine, and University of South Africa