In the Time of the Right

Suzanne Pharr is a Southern queer feminist and anti-racist organizer. She founded the Women’s Project in Arkansas in 1981, was a co-founder of Southerners on New Ground in 1984, and was director of the Highlander Center from 1999 to 2004. Pharr is an organizer and political strategist who has spent her adult life working to build a broad-based, multiracial, multi-issued movement for social and economic justice in the United States. Major themes in her movement work include intersectional issues and strategies, anti-violence, racial and gender equality, cross-generational collaboration, democratic participation, economic justice, and human rights based on equality and justice. Since 1981 and the election of Ronald Reagan, Pharr has observed and documented the development of an authoritarian right-wing agenda aimed at dismantling democracy step-by-step. Based on six decades of work across movements, she now thinks of herself as a political handywoman, working across issues with activists of diverse races, genders, sexual identities, classes, ages, abilities, and cultures to develop strategies for justice and equality. Pharr is the author of Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (1988), In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation (1996), and Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy (2021).

Various video recordings that expand on the different themes in this book can be found at http://www.suzannepharr.com.