Building A Pro-Black World

Pro‐Blackness Is Aspirational: A Conversation with Cyndi Suarez and Shanelle Matthews

In this interview, Cyndi Suarez, Nonprofit Quarterly's president and editor in chief, and Shanelle Matthews, communications director of the Movement for Black Lives and the 2022 Nonprofit Quarterly fellow, talk about what it means to be committed to pro‐Blackness in a world where “everybody's experience of Blackness is on a spectrum.”

Cyndi Suarez:

In conversation with you recently about how the spring 2022 edition of the magazine is centering on building pro‐Black organizations, a comment you made piqued my interest. You said something like, “Supporting BLM is not the same as being pro‐Black.” I have questions beyond that, but I wanted to start by following up on that statement. What did you mean by it?

Shanelle Matthews:

Several things came up for me when you first talked about this. First, I've spent the last six years—on and off—communicating on behalf of the Movement for Black Lives, and I have received, on the other end of that, a lot of public commitments and declarations from people about how they support the Black Lives Matter movement—and from some of them, how they're pro‐Black. And I was asking myself—when you initially said it, and when I would get these declarations—How do they understand Blackness? What does it mean to them to be pro‐Black?

During my time with Movement for Black Lives and BLM, I have watched a lot of people's commitment—to the Black Lives Matter movement ...