The structures of unequal power are many-layered and complex in the ways they function in the world. But at its root, oppression is really quite simp… - Aurora Levins Morales

The Chicago I landed in in 1967 was on fire with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, antiwar activism, and the explosion of what was called the women's movement. If Pablo Neruda taught me that a poet could be passionately engaged in politics and write eloquently about it, it was white feminist women like Susan Griffin, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and Alta who taught me that writing about typing, housework, motherhood, the tangle of sex could be as powerful and gut-wrenching, as tender and exquisite as anything else in literature that my life was worthy. At the same time, the white women around me and my mother, both of us members of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, said things like "Mexican women don't need feminism because they are at the heart of their families and already have the power and support they need. Black women find empowerment in the fight against racism, not sexism. The movement is white because we're the only ones who need it." They could not yet envision a feminism shaped by the needs of brown women. Nevertheless, white feminism began the process of giving me voice.

Memory, individual and collective, is one of the most important sites of social struggle. The "false memory" movement of the 1990s that sought to deny authority over memory to sexual abuse survivors; escalating attacks on teaching the history and literature of indigenous people and People of Color, that frame sharing any information about oppression or the cultures of the oppressed as violence against "Western civilization"; Holocaust denial that pretends the attempted Nazi genocide against primarily European Jews, Roma, lesbian, gay, and disabled people never took place; the bizarre pseudoscience of misogynist politicians claiming that pregnancy results only from consensual sex-these are all examples of the attempted erasure of collective memory and knowledge and represent backlashes against powerful popular movements attempting to wrest control of history from the ruling class.

Storytelling is a basic human activity, with which we simultaneously make and understand the world and our place in it.