Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor ’11, ’13 named 2021 MacArthur Fellow

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor ’11, ’13 has been named a 2021 MacArthur Fellow. These fellowships are awarded to individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

Taylor is a historian and writer who received both her Master’s degree (’11) and her PhD (’13) from the Department of African American Studies at Weinberg College. Taylor brings her experiences as an activist and organizer for housing rights to her scholarship, where she explores the political and economic forces underlying racial inequality.

According to the MacArthur Foundation’s website, “Taylor helps us understand why racial inequality in the United States is so devastatingly intractable while offering new visions of justice and democracy with the power to improve people’s lives.”

Taylor is the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017) and a contributing writer and columnist for The New Yorker. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Jacobin, among other media outlets.

Additionally, her first book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016), examines the history and the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. She situates the movement within the context of life after the Civil Rights Movement, and she argues that Black elected officials are often complicit in perpetuating systemic racism. In her second sole-authored work, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership (2019), Taylor documents how deeply racialized, exploitative real estate practices continued long after the establishment of legal bans on housing discrimination.

Taylor is currently a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Read more about Taylor here.