Barbara Barnes is white, cisgender, older woman of bourgeois, Christian, New England heritage. She is an educator who has taught in Kenya and Mozambique and worked with teachers and students in the New York City schools on resolving conflicts nonviolently. She was on the faculty at Brooklyn College in the School of Education. Barbara became a secular Buddhist practitioner after years of political activism in peace education and racial and economic justice work, using socialist, feminist, and Marxist frames.