OUR WORK
Language Justice
Black South Rising is committed to a foundational practice of language justice.
Black South Rising was founded on the principles of racial justice, equity, and liberation.
In the words of a dear friend of Black South Rising, Marco Castro-Boroquez, language justice is racial justice. Black South Rising will integrate language justice as a racial justice practice to dismantle barriers to access for linguistically marginalized communities by training and supporting leaders in the HIV movement. We commit to a practice of language justice in all that we do as embodied in our work with Colibri Academy and African Sisterhood Empowerment (ASHE) (2025). We commit to language justice as a liberatory practice of inclusiveness, authenticity, multicultural, multilingual, and love for all the people of the African diaspora. We embrace our immigrant brothers and sisters in all your wholeness to Black South Rising! We have a ways to go to achieve our vision, but we commit to always moving forward in our practice.
We strive to speak the language of love so that others can speak too.
Language justice is not just about non-English translation/interpretation but is also about how we speak to each other, how we use and share information, body language, tone, verbal/nonverbal language, and what some have called “ebonics.”
BSR envisions the South as a place where the lived experiences of Black people of African descent are celebrated through education, self-discovery, healing, and resilience.
Where all shades of blackness, language, and cultures, steeped in our ancestries, are forever present in our people’s sights, sounds, smells, and songs. We have achieved true solidarity, equity, inclusion, and integrated language justice practices into our cultural norms, organizations, policies, structures, staffing, work, and the American society we live in.