Dr. Jane Ama Mantey

Director, Narrative Strategy and Capacity Building

for Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty (BLIS) Collective

Can you share your journey into the work you do? What experiences, moments, or values led you here?

Narratives shape and reshape the parameters of what is possible, which can then manifest as our lived experience. I didn’t understand this at the time, but when I was a kid, I thought that one day I would be a cartoonist or an animator because I loved stories, from my mom’s favorite soap operas on television, my older brother’s comic books, my dad’s coveted record albums and CDs, to my YA novels and more. I would make little drawings about what life was like for the random people I’d see walking around my neighborhood once they went into their homes. I’d wonder how life in adjacent neighborhoods could be so different once you crossed a single road. And, why some people were poor, locked up, or died young, and why, despite all our Black brilliance, so many of those people happened to look like me. I wanted to see and tell the stories of my life — my family and friends, the streets I ran, my community — so we (or maybe just me) could make more sense of why the world was the way that it was and make different choices.

My Ghanaian parents, though? They wanted a doctor. So, of course, I became a doctor.

I ultimately earned my PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Meharry Medical College, thinking I would go on to be a professor at an HBCU teaching about and researching health disparities. A lot of my personal time throughout college, though, was spent advocating for my fellow students against jacked up power dynamics and repressive institutional culture; eventually being drawn into community organizing, which led me to an early career in public policy and administration somehow. But, regardless of whether I was working in the lab or in the legislature, a constant was the allure and power of stories — the power of narrative — and who gets to set the narrative about everything we accept as real, true, normal. I witnessed how the narratives of our beautiful struggles could be co-opted and used against us. And one day, I decided that I was going to take a leap of faith and spend the remainder of my career shaping and reverberating narratives for repair, justice, and liberation.

Who or what has most influenced your leadership and commitment to this work? This could include mentors, community, lived experience, books, faith, or movements.

Questions like this give me so much anxiety, lol; they make me feel like the winners on syndicated award shows, who start rattling off as many people and organizations as they can before the music drowns them out. I don’t want to leave anyone out.

So, what I will say is that first and foremost, I try to live my life with the hopes that if anyone ever comes across my name or life’s work generations from now that I will be remembered as someone who tried to contribute to the Black Radical Tradition and helped us get closer to real freedom. That’s what keeps me going. In turn, I have been inspired and influenced by the many great minds and brave souls, whose bodies of work have shaped what the Black Radical Tradition is and will become. (If this is your first time hearing about the Black Radical Tradition, please let this serve as your invitation to follow the breadcrumbs and learn more about it.)

Bonus: Whenever I need to assess and reset how I am showing up as a leader, I refer back to the 1991 Principles of Environmental Justice created at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. It’s 17 principles in total, and each one serves as a guide for how I want to treat other people and communities (and the planet), the types of recommendations and decisions I make, and the future world I am helping to co-create regardless of my position at the time. If you’ve never read the principles, you should and then commit to applying them in your professional and personal life.

For those who feel called to doing this work, where would you suggest they begin? Is there a book, organization, practice, or resource that helped shape you?

Your guess is as good as mine; I think it’s more important that you just begin. Begin wherever you’re at and be in an unrelenting, unapologetic pursuit of what is fair, just, caring, and healing for the collective, even when it is deemed inconvenient or impractical. Because if you’re in a constant pursuit of what is fair, just, caring, and healing, you will inevitably run head-first into the contradictions of the United States and Western world at large, which is crucial. That’s where your personal transformation will happen and you can decide if you’re really cut out to be a leader. Because at that point, when those contradictions are glaring, you can either decide to remain complicit in upholding some really sinister oppressive practices and systems – OR – you can begin a journey of learning how those oppressive practices and systems truly came about, what we need to do to abolish and liberate each other from them, and how you can contribute to that shared mission regardless of your profession or geography. I hope you choose to join the legions of freedom fighters before you, with you now, and those to come.

A few books I would recommend as you embark on this journey are:

Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition by Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen
We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

What wisdom or encouragement would you offer to the next generation of Black women leaders entering this space?

Be brave. Many of the institutions and systems we are inheriting are irredeemable to be blunt. While it may seem like the path of least resistance, don’t get caught up in the myth that you can tinker around the edges and make them better once you break the glass ceiling. While we all got bills to pay, use the position and power you have been granted to disrupt these systems. To borrow from Andrea Ritchie, to confront, challenge, refuse, and uproot them. To help us devise new practices, institutions, and systems to replace them that are life-affirming and rooted in love and care for humanity.

This future world can be more than a wild dream. It can become our present reality if we speak it into existence and push together.

How can people stay connected to and support your work? Please share your website, social media, current campaigns, or other ways to get involved.

I write from time to time, but you can follow me personally on Threads at @The_Black_Jane.

I also work for BLIS Collective, a solidarity and action hub braiding narratives and growing movements for Reparations, Land Back, and economic justice nationwide. Follow us on Instagram at @blis_collective and consider becoming a sustainer.