Feminist Author Feature: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an award-winning Ghanaian-American researcher, entrepreneur, and writer. Her new book, The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System, is the first collection to exclusively feature Black scholars and experts across economics, education, health, climate, criminal justice, and technology. She graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2019 with a Bachelors of Arts in Mathematics and a minor in Economics. Currently, she is a graduate student at Harvard Kennedy School studying public policy and economics. Her advocacy, research, and commentary are featured widely by media outlets such as Bloomberg, NPR, Teen Vogue, Slate, and The New York Times.
Q: What is your personal mantra?
Anna: Lift as you climb! As you rise higher and get closer to your goals, bring others with you.
Q: How did you find your voice?
Anna: It took me a long time to find my voice, and in many ways, I am still on the journey of finding it. Finding my voice was born out of people attempting to silence me or minimize what I had to share with the world.
I have always been an outspoken person, especially as a young girl. I remember starting a student newspaper at the age of 10 after my teacher told me I couldn’t do it and co-founding the Sadie Collective after a few people could not see the vision of what the organization could be. The words “you can’t do that” have always fueled my lifelong search to find my voice.
Q: How do you use your power to empower your community?
Anna: I have always been dedicated to service, but there is something about wielding access and resources towards the betterment of the most marginalized amongst us that propels me into action. I relentlessly believe in the future and the next generation of young leaders emerging, especially those who identify as Black and/or Brown women. As I’ve shared before, I have co-founded an organization, The Sadie Collective, that is the first organization to provide Black women (and students of all genders) with resources and community in economics, finance, policy, and data science.
Shortly after, I helped champion the #BlackBirdersWeek digital campaign, which was a direct response to Christian Cooper being profiled in Central Park in Spring of 2020. I have written extensively about how Black and Brown women are robbed of our power and ways we can begin to address that fundamental issue head on. And on a personal note, I mentor young people, tutor students, and serve where and when I am needed. In other words, I do everything in my power to empower. That is the creed by which I live my life and it has served me, and the world, well.
Q: What inspired your book - and what do you hope people will gain from it?
Anna: The biggest thing that inspired me was the fact that I wasn’t seeing a lot of Black faces cited by the media. More specifically, during the first month of the pandemic. Ultimately, I recognized that despite the conversations that were happening over Twitter about racial inequity in healthcare, there wasn’t that many conversations happening in the mainstream.
I did [a] SNAP analysis, specifically in the economics realm, where I showed that in one of the more major media outlets in their opinion section and in their popular column, they had cited about 42 economists that they were gathering analyses from. They hadn’t cited a single Black person among those 42 individuals who had been cited within the first month of the pandemic.
What was even more concerning was that out of the many articles that were written during that time, only one article was actually written by a Black person, and that was the only article that addressed racial disparities. From then on, I started thinking quite a bit about what does it mean for someone to be a Black expert? That led me to reach out to my agent at the time, and I said, ‘Look, I had this idea. It’s kind of crazy,’ and thus the book was born.
What I hope readers get from the book is that it is more than a call to action. It’s a resource, a guide if you will, that can help in determining how we honor Black life and see Black people as people. And that is perhaps the biggest takeaway from the book: The best outcomes for Black people are better outcomes for all people.
Q: Intersectionality repeatedly is discussed as a guiding framework in ‘The Black Agenda,’ what example do you give those that are just scratching the surface of understanding intersectionality?
Anna: Huge shoutout to Queen Kimberlee Crenshaw for coining a term that has shaped so much of the 2010s and 2020s public discourse. To me intersectionality boils down to honoring the unique humanity of each person and recognizing that identities that intersect can sometimes lead to challenging circumstances in our society. An example of this is recognizing how race and gender intersect to create compounding issues for Black women, which is why Black women are central to the book itself.
For example, did you know that most Black mothers are the primary breadwinners of their households (Centers for American Progress)? So when work-to-home policies failed to accommodate how mothers would fare, they likely impacted Black women disproportionately. Put another way, us Black women are not just women, we are Black too, which means our race contributes to our experience as women and colors the way the world chooses to interact with us. Solutions that address our lived experience almost always account for everyone else’s.
Q: What was your process in editing and curating the voices and messages represented in ‘The Black Agenda’?
Anna: It was tough! It took about two years. I had to identify voices, which was a combination of word of mouth and known contacts. I had to reach out to people, many of whom said no due to capacity reasons. I then selected the individuals included, expanding the set of essays beyond just topics I was personally familiar with. As you can imagine, rallying up thirty-five (very busy) Black experts and advocates is no small feat. Nonetheless, I enjoyed learning from each of them, reading their essays (multiple times), and citing and celebrating their work when the book published. The process was tough, doable, but exceptionally rewarding.
Q: Did it feel particularly imperative to write this book now? If so, why?
Anna: This is probably the number one question I get after “how do we solve racism?”. The reality is the book came together early 2021 and I pitched the book in the Summer of 2020. I did not know that everything the contributors would write would be relevant to our current times. That is actually something I feared, by the way, that the book would be too future oriented. I even told contributors to write as if we had survived the pandemic and moved past it. And boy, I was wrong. The book could not be more relevant and provides really key takeaways that can usher out of these compounding crises.
Both the beautiful and somewhat sad thing about this book is that it will be relevant for a long time. As long as a racism remains the air we breathe, this book, its contributors and their words, will have staying power as both a litmus test and glimpse into the future.
Q: What does being a Feminist mean to you?
Anna: Being a feminist means honoring the humanity of women and nonbinary people to the fullest extent. And I plan to do that as I continue to advocate and serve the world around me. Thanks for having me FEMINIST! The honor is all mine.
the Author
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an award-winning Ghanaian-American researcher, entrepreneur, and writer. She graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2019 with a Bachelors of Arts in Mathematics and a minor in Economics. In 2018, Anna Gifty co-founded The Sadie Collective, the only non-profit organization addressing the underrepresentation of Black women in economics, finance, and policy. She also co-founded the viral and award-winning digital campaign #BlackBirdersWeek. To date, Anna Gifty remains the youngest recipient for a CEDAW Women's Rights Award by the United Nations Convention on the Elimination all forms of Discrimination Against Women— previously awarded to Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Her advocacy, research, and commentary lie at the intersection of social justice and quantitative analysis and are featured widely by media outlets such as Bloomberg, NPR, Teen Vogue, Slate, and The New York Times.
