— Editorial Board

September 29,2020

We could start this letter off with something deep and affirming about how trash 2020 has been, but we know that for Black people 2020 is just an example of a familiar set of conditions that we, and our communities, and our lineages have experienced for generations. These conditions go further beyond this moment of us writing this and you reading it to before us, but hopefully not much longer after us. Both the generations-long experiences and the current moment we are in have set the stage for the LEFT OUT platform to exist. Our mission:

“Left Out Magazine seeks to provide the space for the voices of a new generation of Leftist working class Black people, anti-racist activists and Black political thinkers.”

These political thinkers, whether they are professors of Black studies and history, or protesters of police brutality and prisons; whether they are anti racists authors or abolitionist activists are struggling to give birth to this new world. 

The world struggling to be born requires that this particular audience take up greater visibility in the American and global body politic, but the way the U.S. has been set up, it’s not that simple. Working class Black people, Black activists, and Black political thinkers - have (throughout U.S. and international history) been silenced, jailed, co-opted, and even assassinated. The result has been the watering down of our Black radical and revolutionary thoughts, ideas, and actions; political and social coercion; and the confusion and loss of Black messaging about the relationship between racism and capitalism. 

It’s no wonder that the demands to defund and abolish the police are met with harsh pushback and artificial confusion about the movements simplest demand; “Defund the Police.” Our People’s Movements are instead told that we need to “reword our demands” and make them more “palatable” - it’s the tradition (and in the interest) of racial capitalism. 

The murder of Black people by police - such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, Tony McDade - during a global pandemic that is hitting the U.S. so hard, has shown us that a movement for Black Liberation, or even simply to end police violence, is not enough without intentional demands outside of just policing. We have to make demands around for a just and equitable economy, and demands to end white patriarchal violence. But those demands are nothing without the people vocalizing or visiblizing them, and that’s where LEFT OUT Magazine would like to make our offering. 

LEFT OUT is not a “voice for the voiceless”: Black people have demonstrated time and time again our ability to make demands and raise hell in all the ways we need in order to make those demands met. 

LEFT OUT Magazine is a platform and magazine that offers writing and other forms of media for Black people to deepen their understanding and analysis of the world around us to work towards shared goals of Liberation for All Black People. *Our “All” is all-inclusive: this platform is Black poor folks, Black working class folks, our Black queer and trans siblings, our Black disabled fam, our Black people who’s politics are “just not there yet” but in progress, and everyone in between and on the margins. 

Black people have utilized our power of the pen for decades and we offer LEFT OUT as an addition to this powerful archive of radical Black, queer, feminist, and leftist writing spaces.