Solidarity Statement with BLM

As Black women leaders, activists and supporters of the Reproductive Justice movement and members of the Trust Black Women Partnership, we offer our formal solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The United States has a long history of over-policing and over-criminalizing Black bodies that started with the forced removal of Africans from our homeland. Ever since we were brought here against our will, this country has been a hostile birthing environment for Black women, and a dangerous place to raise Black children. This nation has yet to prove that Black Lives Matter, and it has yet to prove its ability to Trust Black Women.

Trust Black Women is grateful to Black Lives Matter for building the movement for Black lives to a critical tipping point: no longer can the public or our political leaders ignore our struggle. We also recognize the role of reproductive justice and Trust Black Women in contributing to this tipping point. We walk in one another's footprints even as we stand side by side.

We offer to the Movement for Black Lives the analysis that brought Trust Black Women into being: an analysis that centers Black women, low wage workers, LGBTQ people, and those living at the crossroads of these identities. We offer to the Movement for Black Lives our commitment to hold gender justice as dear as racial justice, with reproductive justice as the core of both these aspirations.

We seek community, fellowship, and connection with Black Lives Matter, and we know that we must stand together or fall separately. Our lives are at stake. To realize a future where Black Lives Matter, we must Trust Black Women. To Trust Black Women is to affirm that Black Lives do Matter.

So we say, in the same breath, in the same freedom song: Trust Black Women. Black Lives Matter. Together we march toward justice for us all.