One of Charlene Carruthers’ earliest memories about power comes from her visits with her mother to the public aid office in Chicago for food stamps or cash assistance. She recalls entering a “colorful and always noisy” room full of Black and brown women, many of them with children. The front desk “was placed on high, and even then the symbolism of this was evident to me, and I found the arrangement uncomfortable and odd,” Carruthers writes in her new book, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, published last month by Beacon Press.

“I also didn’t understand why we had to wait in a room all day for a conversation of no more than fifteen minutes with a caseworker,” Carruthers continues. “I didn’t understand why the caseworker asked my mother invasive questions about my very present father. I didn’t know the government viewed Black fathers as a barrier to need and Black mothers as unworthy of dignified treatment.”

This experience was one of many that left an imprint on Carruthers as she came to understand the impact of anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and capitalism in the United States and around the world. But it was social justice movement work that showed the Chicago-based organizer, who would serve as founding national director of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), how to “think more expansively about Black freedom and collective liberation.”