From Truth-Telling to Imagining New Possibilities: Listening to Youth, Families, and Communities of Color

Every day that people of color are hyper-surveilled, harmed, threatened, diminished, dehumanized, and disenfranchised is a day absent of racial justice. In my view, this special section illuminates two critically important truths of oppression: First, it shows up physically, psychologically, and socially (e.g., the sequelae of racism), and second, the locus of the cause of the oppression is in institutions and systems. Yet, that is not the whole story. Although we need to continue including the voices and capacities of racially marginalized people in telling the truths of oppression, we also need them to be part of radically re-imagining those oppressive systems in the first place.