Black feminism is for everybody

I came to black feminism through my mother Vernell Cherry. Vernell was born in 1954 and would six years later become a foster child due to her single-mother’s death. Though she would grow up to be a mother of two girls, a grandmother, an active church member, and a community organiser, her life was lived as a black, physically-disabled, working-class woman. I knew by observation and through conversations with her that her experiences with discrimination, for example, were unique - different from her girlfriends’ and different from my own. But I also saw, through her life, a reclamation of her humanity and a certain consciousness that she exercised through constant struggle - whether by political activism or providing shelter in her home to black women who had recently become homeless. Though I