User:Agraceb09/Charlene Carruthers

Charlene Carruthers is a black queer feminist activist and author whose work focuses on leadership development. Carruthers has worked with high-profile activist organizations including Color of Change and Women's Media Center, and she was an integral founding member of Black Youth Project 100. She has served as BYP100's National Director or National Coordinator since the organization's founding in 2013.

Early Life and Education
Carruthers was born on July 28, 1985 to Gwendolyn White and Charles Carruthers. She was raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois and attended Senn High School, located in the Edgewater neighborhood. Carruthers graduated from Senn High School in 2003. In 2007, she graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University with a B.A. in History & International Studies. While attending Wesleyan, she participated in activities and societies including: Black Student Union, Student Senate and Intercultural Leadership Alliance. In 2009, Carruthers graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a MSW in Urban Development and Public Policy. During this time, she was a part of the Society of Black Student Social Workers on campus. As of 2020, Carruthers is attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois where she is working on her Doctor of Philosophy in African-American/Black Studies. Carruthers research includes Black feminist, critical theory, abolition and governance.

Activist career
The vast majority of Carruthers’ activist work is focused within the Chicago community. Broadly, Carruthers urges people to advocate for injustices against marginalized groups at a local level, and to use the successes of previous activists and demonstrations as a guide on how to create change. Carruthers cites her studies in South Africa at age 18 as her political awakening. Much of her work since has centered on developing broad based political participation and leadership for marginalized communities. She was worked with or sat on the boards of the Arcus Foundation, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Wellstone Action, and the NAACP. She has also focused on coalition-building between different marginalized groups, including traveling as part of a delegation of African-American activists to Palestine to create personal and organizational ties between organizers in both countries. In US electoral politics, Carruthers expressed her intent to vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 elections.

Black Youth Project 100
In July 2013, Carruthers was one of 100 black millennial activist leaders from across the country assembled by the Black Youth Project in Chicago for a meeting aimed at building networks of organization for black youth activism across the country. On the second day of that meeting news from Florida announced the acquittal of George Zimmerman on an all charges relating to his February 26, 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. This verdict galvanized Carruthers and the other activists into the formation of the Black Youth Project 100 to organize young black activism in resistance to structural oppressions.

Though initially hesitant to assume the role of national coordinator herself, Carruthers ultimately came to realize the rare opportunity afforded by the erupting turmoil. The BYP100 invests heavily in the training of leaders and the teaching of reformers, empowering a generation of black activism. In public actions and in the press Carruthers has emphasized that oppressive structures like race, gender, sexuality, and economic status overlap with one another in such a way that prohibits the resistance to any one structure at a time. Rather, they demand united action by marginalized action to overturn the whole system together. BYP100's initiatives embody this outlook of intersecting oppressions by targeting issues that tie into multiple systemic oppressions. For instance the publication "Agenda to Keep us Safe" identifies economic justice and the development of local economic power as essential tools to achieve gender and racial justice. Carruthers has been a particularly vocal critic of how the prison-industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline play a huge role in shaping the experiences of oppression for people and communities of color, transgender & non-binary people, and the poor.

Police brutality
Carruthers is an outspoken critic of unchecked police brutality, inadequate government responsiveness to major brutality cases, and the American criminal justice system's fundamental motivations and mechanisms. In August 2014, she went to Ferguson, Missouri to train and organize black youth response as the city reeled from the shooting of 18-year-old Mike Brown at the hands of Darren Wilson.

Chicago Police Department
As a native of Chicago's South Side, Carruthers has been a frequent critic of the Chicago Police Department, organizing demonstrations over the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd. Carruthers also responded to the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, condemning the city's handling of the event, especially the involvement of the mayor's office in the year long coverup of the footage. She demanded the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez.

Carruthers is outspoken on the need for defunding the police and diverting the money into social services, such as schools, affordable housing and job creation.