If We Were Kin

In If We Were Kin, Lisa Beard has crafted a work of urgent beauty, offering readers a powerful exploration of identification and the many ways people come to understand themselves politically. Drawing on a vibrant tradition of Black, Latinx, queer, and trans activism, organizing, and theorizing, Beard moves from civil rights and Black Lives Matter activism to rural southern LGBTQ+ kinship organizations, to migrant justice struggles to far-right political campaigns, crafting a rich and ideologically capacious account of identificatory appeals and what such appeals make possible. Through both methodology and archive, Beard reminds us that the struggle to forge a larger and more just sense of who we are is the democratic challenge of our time. * Cristina Beltran, author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity * Beard brilliantly invites our exploration of these activists' kin, their people. Reading this book, I felt like I was sitting around a breakfast table with them, wanting another biscuit, but not willing to interrupt the conversation. * Pat Hussain, co-founder of Southerners On New Ground * Lisa Beard offers eloquent and compelling readings of an archive of antiracist (and) queer/trans political speech in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. If We Were Kin shows how an array of visionary activists tune into the frequency of intimacy as they craft calls to political identification that foreground rather than elide the structural violence of racism. An illuminating and thought-provoking read for scholars and builders of social movements alike. * Emily L. Thuma, author of All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence *