I notice women of colour on television, in the paper, across the dance floor. It’s a fractured identity and a tenuous solidarity, I know. But it’s there.

It wasn’t always there. I became a woman of colour only a few years ago, through my involvement in anti-racist networks. When I say someone shares my background, often I mean my background in student activism, and then what might be called radical social justice: a left-wing politics that is, at its best, both intently conscious of subject positions and intelligently critical of identity. […]