We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest and Possibility (Paperback or Softback)

In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means—and how we take steps to get there.

“In the United States, being poor and Black makes you more likely to get sick. Being poor, Black, and sick makes you more likely to die. Your proximity to death makes you disposable.”
The uprising of 2020 marked a new phase in the unfolding Movement for Black Lives. The brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and countless other injustices large and small, were the match that lit the spark of the largest protest movement in US history, a historic uprising against racism and the politics of disposability that the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare.
In this urgent and incisive collection of new interviews bookended by two new essays, Marc Lamont Hill critically examines the “pre-existing conditions” that have led us to this moment of crisis and upheaval, guiding us through both the perils and possibilities, and helping us imagine an abolitionist future.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the co-founder of Hammer & Hope. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book, was recently published in an expanded second edition by Haymarket Books, with a new foreword by Angela Y. Davis. ​Her book Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. In 2021, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. With Colin Kaepernick and Robin D. G. Kelley, she edited Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies. Her latest book is the expanded and updated edition of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, featuring a new introduction by Taylor and a powerful new interview with Angela Y. Davis.

Samori Coles is a Philadelphia-based music producer and audio engineer who has over 20 years of experience in the recording industry. As the owner of Lil’ Drummaboy Recordings, he has produced, recorded, edited, mixed and mastered a diverse array of musical projects over his career including Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rock, R&B, Reggae, Pop, Spoken Word and Gospel.

A voting member of the Recording Academy (Producers & Engineers Wing), Samori relishes each and every opportunity and experience that he has to share his art, craft and experience with musicians, media content creators, publishers, authors, recording and voice-over artists, and businesses.