It has been over a year since members of Sister-to-Sister (S2S) and their allies stood at the 2024 Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) Winter Meeting to protest gendered racism, racial gaslighting, and lack of accountability from then current and former SWS leadership. Memory fades and gets lost with time. Given the lack of accountability and the revisionist history from SWS, S4TJ leadership believes it is important to stand in solidarity with previous members of S2S who are now convening as the Radical Feminist Collective. We do so by reaffirming our commitment to centering the experiences and history of the people of color harmed by SWS, including several S4TJ members. We, representatives of S4TJ’s 2024-2025 Executive Council, have communicated with the Radical Feminist Collective (RFC), and would like to remind our members of the racialized harms experienced within SWS and the lack of accountability in the aftermath of the 2024 meeting. While it was the events during and after the 2024 meeting that led to the creation of the RFC, these were not isolated incidents. SWS has a history of causing harm to scholars of color and has continuously failed to take accountability for these harms.
Sociologists for Women in Society has projected a narrative of events from their 2024 Winter Meeting and its aftermath that does not match the lived experience of many people of color involved. We continue to center the lived experiences of our colleagues of color and believe that the harms done have not been adequately repaired. S4TJ council remains committed to withholding our labor and finances from SWS by not renewing membership. We will continue to support the work of the Radical Feminist Collective, and our colleagues of color.
As Fannie Lou Hamer reminds us, “No one is free until all of us are free.” SWS’s dismissal of the racial harms it caused is not separate from but rather deeply tied to our current political moment. During a moment when transgender people are under renewed attack, when deportation is being used indiscriminately to silence critique and tear apart communities, when the US continues to fund genocidal violence in Palestine, when people with disabilities, elders who have worked and retired, and the poorest of the poor are at threat of losing the little financial support available, and when climate change is ignored in favor of greed and profit, her words weigh especially heavy. As S4TJ’s 2024-25 Executive Council, we condemn these attacks both from within our academic communities and from without.
While individual members have the agency and autonomy to decide for themselves their view of these current social issues, we want to make it clear that these are the values of the current council and we remain committed to always do our best to incorporate these values into our work.
