Close your eyes. Can you remember what you were doing in October of 1991? Zoom in on the crisp fall days of the Senate hearings when Anita Hill stood up and told her truth. Can you see it?

I can. I was a senior at Yale, and I had a very cute boyfriend whom I berated constantly for using sexist, homophobic language -- like calling a guy who wouldn't stand up to his girlfriend a pussy or a fag. He was a very nice young man from a well-known activist family that had fought for civil rights for generations. He said he was talking like one of the guys, and that I was blowing things out of proportion.

I wasn't having it. I had taken bell hooks' class the semester before. Had grown up crawling around the Ms. magazine offices and spent summers at my godmother Gloria Steinem's house. My mother was one of the most visible black feminists in the world. All of which meant that the boyfriend and I had some lovely discussions about Rousseau and the Enlightenment over ramen at my tiny off-campus apartment, but we almost came to blows over what I found to be his unfathomable utterances of patriarchal subterfuge.

And there was more, much more, happening that fall. The shocking footage of Rodney King being beaten mercilessly by the Los Angeles Police Department was viral before any of us even had email. George H.W. Bush was after Roe v. Wade, restricting access to reproductive choice for women and families -- one law, one county, one clinic at a time. 

In other news, my generation was marked with a giant X that, we were told repeatedly, stood for unengaged, apathetic, self-absorbed children of Reaganomics, dilettantes who only wanted to make a ton of money. Newsweek screamed that feminism was dead, and the civil rights movement was, too. The pundits opined that this generation without a name had moved on from the equality game. Our parents may have marched, but we were going to business school.

But the hype never rang true to me. My friends and I were the opposite of apathetic. We were consumed. Van Jones and I argued on street corners in New Haven, Conn., about whether it was more effective to work for change within the corridors of power and privilege or outside of them. A brilliant law student I dated for a bit introduced me to KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions -- and their recycled slogan: By Any Means Necessary. After dinner we talked about how to apply the missive to build and control black media outlets.