“No more lunch tickets,” he said to a woman standing in the hallway. 

When Walz held up the signed bill in the crowded school cafeteria, the room erupted into applause as children hugged the former coach’s neck. “As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota’s working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state,” on the legislation. “This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen.”

The law reimbursed public school districts, charter schools, and non-public schools for meals purchased through the National School Lunch and the School Breakfast Programs. The state-funded Free School Meals for Kids program also provides reimbursement for meals served to students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals so all students receive the meals at no cost. The program is estimated to over a two-year budget period.

“Based on the latest data from the Department of Education, lunch participation was up about 19 percent and breakfast participation was up 41 percent,” says Sophia Lenarz-Coy, executive director of the Food Group, which is focused on increasing access to healthy, locally grown food in Minnesota. “W�� can see that students are just better prepared. They’re better able to learn and focus.”

Minnesota could be setting the framework for adoption on the federal level. In 2023, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who also represents Minnesota, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Jahana Hayes introduced the . The law would provide students with free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack each day, without needing to prove eligibility.

It would also raise , the amount of money the federal government provides to states for lunches, afterschool snacks, and breakfasts served to children participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. The bill would also increase the national average payment for free lunch from $4.01 to $4.63 and include additional payments to schools using locally sourced food.

“Minnesota has a long history of good coalition work around food,” says Lenarz-Coy. “When we look at what got us to universal school meals in Minnesota, [the health sector] was involved, food producers were involved, public health was involved, education advocates were involved, and anti-hunger advocates were involved. It really was a coalition.”

It is going to require that level of coalition-building to bring Minnesota’s approach to universal school meals to the national level. But now, with a Republican president-elect and a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, Project 2025 is a real possibility.

With its implementation comes the removal of many protections provided to school children across the country, including calling for an end to the community eligibility program (CEP), which, beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, allowed high-needs schools to begin providing free lunch to all their students and receiving reimbursement based on the percentage of students eligible for those meals. Schools are designated as high needs if a significant percentage of its student population qualifies for free or reduced-price meals.

The Food Group notes Project 2025 and similar proposals do not acknowledge or the need of many students who are above the CEP free or reduced-price eligibility threshold but are still unable to afford school meals. Since Barack Obama signed the into law in 2010, which aided the creation of the CEP, children in the U.S. have at school, and breakfast participation has increased by nearly 25 percent.

While feeding all children in schools is an expensive endeavor, Lenarz-Coy says it’s an essential element of education that shouldn’t be overlooked. In July, Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) compiled studies showing the value of free school meals for all children, including improved physical and emotional health among students, increased attendance rates, improved test scores among marginalized student groups, and reduced discipline infractions.

“[In Minnesota], we’ve made sure to continue talking to school nutrition associations about how we can keep improving the quality of the lunch along with getting lunch to everybody,” says Lenarz-Coy. ����’s not an easy lift, so the key is to have champions. [You need] several stars to align. Having a champion in the governor’s office was really important to getting a policy this big over the line.”

Hunger Is a Health Problem

Healthy meals for the nation’s children is not a new concept.

In 1946, to low-income students. The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 then condensed control of the school lunch program from several government agencies to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), established the School Breakfast Program, and authorized the Special Milk Program, which provides milk free of charge or at a reduced cost to children in schools who do not participate in other child nutrition programs.

The USDA piloted the Child Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) in 1968 to provide food and resources for local sponsors who want to combine a feeding program with a summer activity program. In response to reports of hungry children, out of churches and community centers, eventually expanding to 36 cities across the United States by 1971.

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, supplying school meals became an even more urgent priority. In 2020, Congress passed the , which gave the USDA authority to issue nationwide waivers making meals free for all students in participating school districts. �鶹���¼� than 5 million children were served during the summer of 2020, nearly double the number of children who received meals through the program in each of the five previous summers. The move led to a record drop in food insecurity among families with children, from nearly 12 million in 2020 to 9 million in 2021.

���� was a huge success,” says Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), an organization that aims to improve the nutrition, health, and well-being of people facing food insecurity in the United States. “Schools loved it, parents loved it, kids loved it.”

Though the program ended on June 30, 2022, when Congress failed to extend the waiver, at least eight states, including California, Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, have now passed legislation to provide free school meals to students.

Other bills such as the , the , and the would expand free meals to students, an idea the majority of people in the U.S. support. A found that 63 percent of voters nationwide support legislation that would provide free meals to students.

Free Food Without Shame

Despite this widespread support, Project 2025 suggests , which it refers to as a “major welfare agency” and removing references to “equity” and “climate smart” in the USDA’s mission statement. Besides the devastating overall effects of this move, conflating free meal programs with welfare discourages students from participating in free meal programs.

This framing continues the stigmatizing of free school meals as “welfare” that began during . In a 2023 interview on , Jennifer Gaddis, Ph.D., an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said that before the pandemic, 30 million children participated in the school lunch program on a daily basis. However, about 20 million more had access to the program but chose not to participate, partially because of the stigma.

“I think shame [was a reason people didn’t participate],” Gaddis said. “And just the stigma of this being like a government handout versus something that you expect to be part of the school day.”

Universal school lunch eliminates the visibility of who is receiving assistance. Consequently, more students are likely to participate in the lunch program. When students feel comfortable participating, they are more likely to consume healthy nutritious meals, which can positively affect their health and academic performance. Eliminating the negative connotation associated with school lunch also fosters a more inclusive learning environment and a decrease in disciplinary actions, while also alleviating stress on families that may already be resource-strapped.

“Families are struggling with increased food costs and housing costs,” FitzSimons says. “[Universal school meals] reduce the household food budget and make it easier for families to make ends meet. It’s much easier when [parents] don’t have to worry about making sure their kids have lunch, and it helps ensure that students have access to the nutrition they need so that they don’t show up in class hungry or get hungry in the afternoon.”

When the School Doors Close

As the push for free healthy school meals increases, so does the discussion about how the U.S. can reduce child hunger once the last school bell rings. Since the Families First Coronavirus Response Act expired, the number of children living in hunger has increased. Today, in the United States.

Some schools currently supplement school-day breakfast and lunch with weekend meals for students with an identified need, while other families are reliant on care food programs offered through local organizations. “If there is a weekend program, like at a rec center, a YMCA, or a Boys and Girls Club, they can serve meals through the child and adult care food program,” FitzSimons says. “They don’t reach as many kids, obviously, as school meals.”

But this isn’t a new problem, though there are old solutions: In 1995, a school nurse, who has remained unnamed, in Little Rock, Arkansas, observed that many of the students she treated for illness or fatigue were hungry because they did not have enough to eat at home. So she created a backpack meal program, where she partnered with a local food bank to provide bags with food for students to take home over the weekend.

Over time, programs such as Feeding America’s BackPack Program, Blessings in a Backpack, and Operation Backpack have cropped up in schools and districts all across the country. benefit from food backpack programs on any given weekend.��

The BackPack Program works with food banks and schools to provide healthy, easy-to-prepare food for weekends and school breaks. The program feeds more than 450,000 children each week by sending backpacks of groceries home with students. A study of the program in Urbana, Illinois, found that meals provided to families beyond the school day . Thirteen percent of families surveyed moved from “low food insecure” to “food secure” between October and December, and schools reported , school attendance, literacy and math test scores, and interest in school.

If we want to bring universal school meals to all children, regardless of income, it’s going to take a combination of imagination, tolerance for criticism, and a shift in how we consider this issue. “On test days, schools feed all kids well. Every day is a good day to do well in school,” she says. “W��’re really trying to make the case that in the same way we cover books and other things about school, we should make sure all kids going to public schools are fed.”

Still, Wolfson persisted as a self-described “internal gadfly” during much of the 1980s and 1990s. Throughout this period he worked to convince those around him that setting out a bold goal like freedom to marry would prove more effective than simply calling for more public acceptance of same-sex couples and less discrimination against them. “You should ask for what you want and not bargain against yourself. You may leave the negotiation or the round or the battle taking less than you initially wanted. But you should not go in asking for less than you want,” he told me. In other words, you won’t get half a loaf of bread by asking for half a loaf. You have to ask for the whole loaf. That principle has long guided my own advocacy in gun violence prevention. When I formed Guns Down America, I realized that no other group was asking for what all of us believed was necessary to truly reduce gun violence: fewer guns. As a result, we were not having much success on the legislative front getting the policies we believed we needed, and we are not building a strong people-powered movement that people can buy into. We are not offering bold solutions that people believe will succeed in reducing gun violence. Along with lack of a clear goal, the gun control movement has also lacked a clear strategy. A tight strategy is essential, Wolfson told me. It tells you exactly what you have to do and what you do not have to do. It ensures that you are not distracted by other obligations, educates everyday Americans about how you are achieving your goal, and allows them to plug into it. A clear strategy also helps sustain you through the inevitable turmoil of a movement: the wins, the losses, and everything in between. The marriage movement reminds us that after you’ve focused on one long-term objective, incremental changes that move you closer to your goal are essential building blocks to achieving your success, just as every yard forward moves a football team a little closer to the goalposts. Each gain provides a motivating victory for advocates in all parts of the movement and shows that progress is indeed possible. As the wins accumulate, they accustom the general public to accepting gains on the issue and, just as important, permit advocates to demonstrate the insufficiency of half measures, redoubling efforts toward the ultimate goal. Wolfson faced an important movement-defining decision after achieving incremental success in 2000, when Vermont recognized gay and lesbian civil unions but not marriage. Should he accept the half-measure or reject it? Would accepting it signal to others that the fight was over and suck energy out of the struggle to full marriage equality? Maybe people would think that civil unions were good enough. After much debate and deliberation, Wolfson decided to accept the win—but then push for more later. He went on to argue that because the sky didn’t fall when gay and lesbian couples entered into civil unions, why deny them access to the institution of marriage? And the same thing? Wolfson began to disparage civil unions and argue that they were not an adequate substitute for marriage because they were fundamentally unequal.

The fight toward the long-term goal was very much still on. “What we needed in the late 1990s was the affirmation of gay couples at the marital level,” Wolfson told me in describing his dual strategy. “And then what we needed later was the insufficiency of civil union as a substitute for marriage itself.” The most substantial wave of change that helped pave the way for marriage equality took place during President Obama’s presidency. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals were permitted to serve openly in the armed forces through the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The administration stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman for the purposes of federal programs. Obama himself came out in support of marriage equality, and ultimately the Supreme Court found that preventing gays and lesbians from entering into equal marriage was unconstitutional. All of that happened as a result of the foundation Wolfson and other advocates had laid down over the preceding decades of hard, often thankless, focused advocacy toward the goal of marriage equality. By the time Obama was sworn in as president, Wolfson was no longer a gadfly; his goal had become a goal of most grassroots LGBT advocates, and throughout the Obama era they pushed a reluctant White House to act on its equality agenda. While reporting for ThinkProgress, I covered gay and lesbian service members who tied themselves to the White House fence demanding equal service and rejecting the politics of incremental change. I covered grassroots advocates who criticized the president for initially defending DOMA and for not coming out for marriage early enough. They wanted change now and could not care less about the political process in Washington. As I wrote these articles, established political operatives and Democrats would tell me these grassroots actions were disruptive, naive, or, worse yet, counterproductive. The president, they argued, had to be sensitive to political realities. He was on the right side, they told me, but he needed time to make these decisions so as to avoid political backlash. Acting too swiftly could set back the movement and undo the progress already made. It’s easy, in hindsight, to laugh at these voices or view their stance as a miscalculation of the winds of political change. A sober reading of the history, however, suggests that they were as necessary for progress as Wolfson and the grassroots groups that were pushing the administration to boldly embrace true equality. Journalist Kerry Eleveld, who covered the progress LGBT Americans made during the Obama presidency with inspiring persistency and intelligence, told me that, in the end, “everybody ended up being right to some extent.” Take Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. On the campaign trail, President Obama had pledged to repeal the discriminatory law, but almost two years into his administration, it remained on the books, and Democrats in Congress were not rushing to get rid of it after losing their congressional majority in the 2010 midterm elections. Knowing that the window of opportunity was closing fast, grassroots advocates clamored for action, engaging in protests and direct actions and shaming lawmakers for doing nothing, while the insiders were preaching caution and patience. With just days left until a new Republican-controlled House would come into power, Congress added the repeal measure to a must-pass bill, and Obama signed it into law in December 2010. Here, too, diverse voices were necessary for achieving progress. Eleveld, author of Don’t Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama’s Presidency , told me, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal would not have gotten across the finish line if there weren’t people who knew Capitol Hill really well and could get the ear of very prominent lawmakers in positions of power within the last month of that Congress. But it also would not have gotten to that point if the grassroots activists hadn’t been pushing for it all along.”

In other words, everybody had a role to play, and a sort of righteous cycle emerged. The grassroots activists pushed the professional political insiders to expect more, not to settle for middling progress, but the movement would not have progressed to that point had the professional advocates and insiders not laid the groundwork that ripened the issue for action. A successful movement is a cacophony of voices, not a fine-tuned choir. Another similarity between the gun control movement and the fight for LGBT equality is familiarity of experience. For decades science had been disproving and professional psychology had been gradually abandoning the idea that nonstandard sexuality was some sort of disease rather than an array of natural and normal variations along the whole sexual spectrum in humans (and most other animals). But it took a long time for this view to spread more widely. One of the factors that helped drive the general population toward accepting and supporting marriage equality was the coming out of gay people themselves, a wave that really began during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when the community realized that silence would lead to death. It was a process that even a visionary like Wolfson could not have predicted, but in the ensuing decades, a growing number of Americans’ family members, friends, and neighbors told their loved ones that they were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. The general population began to see gays and lesbians of every religion, every race, and both genders as human beings, rather than caricatures who could be demonized as deviants who didn’t deserve civil rights. A growing number of families now saw themselves as part of the push for marriage equality. Heterosexuals began to see themselves as part of the movement for the sake of people they loved—their families, friends, neighbors, and community members. A similar phenomenon has led to gradual de-prohibition of cannabis, and the same thing could now be happening with guns. As gun manufacturers pump more and more guns into our communities, more and more people of all races, genders, religions, and socioeconomic levels are dying from or living with horrific gun injuries. The coverage of mass shootings and our ritualized grief after them continue to educate people about the dangers of too many guns. We all see ourselves in the faces of the bereaved, and we imagine photos of our own loved ones posted at the candlelit memorial. That dynamic of familiarity allowed the LGBT equality movement to achieve its goal faster than anyone could have predicted. If we build our movement and pair it with successful strategies, we can start moving toward a future with fewer guns sooner rather than later. Copyright © 2019 by Igor Volsky. This excerpt originally appeared in Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future with Fewer Guns , published by and reprinted here with permission.

The result is both symbolic and produces plants with tangible uses, says jackie sumell (who does not capitalize her name), who conceived the project; plants with healing properties will be redistributed to people who need them through what sumell calls a “prisoner’s apothecary.” The solitary beds are eventually overrun with plant life, a visual representation of a world without prisons, an idea that forms the project’s core mission.

Typically, a volunteer gardener on the outside will send a list of plants to an incarcerated gardener. The list provides plenty of options but is limited to what will thrive in the climate and season. They collaborate on a gardening plan and a calendar, often with a small floor plan filled in by the incarcerated gardener laying out the positioning of plants.

Once plants get chosen, a plant bed is constructed from tobacco, cotton, and indigo grown on-site, which is mixed with lime, water, and clay, a concoction sumell calls “revolutionary mortar.” Those plants were chosen because of their role in chattel slavery, meant to evoke the connection between the slave trade and the prison system. Then the volunteer plants the incarcerated person’s chosen plants to the best of their ability. Because the beds are only 6 by 9, sometimes not all the plants will fit, and they’ll have to wait until they’ve harvested what they now have.

Many choose plants with healing properties. sumell says one gardener is interested in adaptogens, plants like ginseng and holy basil that are believed to reduce stress levels, and which sumell says can help with internalized trauma. “Their garden was specifically designed thinking about ways that would have prevented getting them in prison to begin with,” sumell says.

The idea behind the gardens began through a dozen-year-long collaboration between sumell and Herman Wallace, who, along with Albert Woodfox and Robert King is one of the “Angola Three,” former Black Panthers who served decades in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary and whose convictions were later overturned. Their conversations and sumell’s quest to imagine a home where Wallace could return home from prison led to an art project called “The House That Herman Built,” also the subject of a .

Wallace was released from prison Oct. 1, 2013, and died from liver cancer three days later. sumell began the solitary gardens project to continue his legacy, inviting Albert Woodfox, who was released in 2016, to be one of the inaugural gardeners.

The garden has been funded through grants from about a dozen organizations over the years, and now gets most funding from the New York-based nonprofits Creative Capital and Art For Justice, but it relies heavily on the support of dedicated volunteers.

Christin Wagner, a volunteer who has lived in New Orleans for nine years, is partnered with an incarcerated gardener named Jesse, who is being held at ADX Florence, a maximum security federal prison in Colorado. Solitary Gardens requested that Jesse’s last name not be used for fear of retaliation from prison officials.

Jesse’s requests were for plants that people could find useful, according to Wagner. “He likes the idea that it can come from the ground and nourish someone,” Wagner says. Jesse also asks for pansies, for the color and because his mother loves the plant.

Wagner’s letter writing with Jesse led her to develop a friendship with Jesse’s wife, who along with Jesse’s mother, aunt, and cousins visited the garden he had planned from prison. ���� was really, really, incredible, it was very heavy too,” Wagner says. “None of us at the garden have ever met Jesse, but we feel he’s part of our extended family.”

Two solitary gardeners were recently released from prison and now volunteer in person. Ricky Teano, 30, was incarcerated for 10 years and released in January. Teano says he’s served a few stints in solitary, with the longest being two weeks. He got involved with the garden from prison about 18 months ago when an incarcerated mentor—who also has a garden bed at Andry Street—connected him with sumell. ���� was a way of healing the bridge between me being incarcerated and individuals in society,” Teano says.

“When I grew up, my dad was big on old school remedies and stuff,” he says. This led him to choose plants with healing or medicinal properties, including mint and sage. Since his release, he says volunteering with the garden has helped him transition into society. ����’s a form of therapy for me,” he says.

The concept of solitary gardens have been reproduced across the country, including garden beds in Philadelphia and Texas. “The solitary gardens are open source and totally replicable,” sumell says. She is not involved in all the gardens, but does help with some, including a . This garden bed is curated by Tim Young, who is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison.

Young answered questions over the phone via an intermediary, because San Quentin limits his phone contacts to a pre-approved list. “I think it was a matter of the stars and the universe coming into perfect alignment,” Young says about connecting with sumell and the gardens. Young had seen sumell in the “Herman’s House” documentary in 2012 and wrote her letters for years, he said, not receiving a response. In 2019, he received a letter asking him to participate in the solitary gardens project, to which he replied yes. Two months later, sumell visited him in San Quentin and asked him to be the solitary gardener for UC Santa Cruz.

“I think it’s a crime to encase people in concrete cages and deprive them of nature,” Young said. “What the garden has done is give me a greater appreciation of all the things that I am no longer able to feel, touch, or enjoy. I haven’t touched the earth or leaned upon a tree in over 22 years,” he said from prison. Young wanted plants that could heal the body and mind, he said, and chose mugwort as well as a favorite, stinging nettles.

Young has received letters over the years from people visiting the garden, including students and their parents on campus tours. “Many of them wrote about how it had changed their lives, it had served as an epiphany for them,” he said.

“To my surprise, much more has sprouted up than plants and herbs,” Young said of his experience with the project. “There have been friendships and alliances and collaborations and, you know, general support.”

sumell wants to create a more permanent space in New Orleans to host the prisoner’s apothecary, and hopes to eventually provide jobs with living wages to formerly incarcerated people working at the gardens.

This story was originally published by , and appears here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems

Clearly, what happens in a child’s early years matters. But there are a to early childhood development opportunities, including the exorbitant costs of childcare in the United States, miles-wide childcare deserts in rural areas, underpaid and burnt-out educators, and under-resourced facilities that can’t meet the overwhelming demand for their services.

Amid this already-uphill battle for early childcare, Project 2025—the , former Trump officials, and right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation—plans to make these barriers even higher.

Though Project 2025 aspires to overhaul nearly all aspects of the federal government under Donald Trump, its and family care are particularly brazen. Not only does Project 2025 intend to strip reproductive rights through federal abortion bans and restrict family-planning options such as IVF and contraceptives, it would also eliminate , a federally funded childcare and early-development program for low-income kids, pregnant people, and families.

Launched in 1965, Head Start was designed to disrupt, and ultimately end, intergenerational poverty by providing free, wraparound early-development services to children from infancy to age 5. Head Start offers education, full-time childcare centers, medical support, and social services to families in need. Since its founding, .

Even those who may never access or qualify for Head Start benefit from it. In the South, for example, local Head Start programs became spaces for . In the ’70s, for childcare centers and caregivers across the country and has since set the standard for innovative childcare methods and research. Head Start even funded the much-loved children’s TV show Sesame Street.

“Programs like Head Start serve majority-Black and Brown communities, and I think it’s just racist to defund these programs,” says Liz Bangura, a doula, social justice coordinator, and former educator at Jump Start, a national nonprofit partner program for Head Start. As a doula, Bangura works exclusively with Black and Brown mothers and says they’ve seen firsthand how Head Start changes families’ lives.

“Head Start plays a huge role in caring for the child after labor … when [families] are able to be in these programs, I visibly see the relief in [mothers] when they’re able to go to work and also drop their kid off somewhere where they know they’re being taught how to read, [where] they’re socializing with other students.”

Project 2025’s overt targeting of Head Start is about more than just early education and childcare centers. It’s about creating a country where generations of low-income children and families are left behind. But rather than fighting only for the preservation of Head Start, it’s equally important to understand its limitations and work toward a society where all families have access to the consistent, high-quality care they need—regardless of who sits in the White House.

Without Early Care, a Cascade of Harm

Head Start is a critical program, but it simply isn’t reaching all the families who need it. Access to Head Start is determined by , and as a result many families are caught in the welfare gap: scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck, but still making too much to qualify for Head Start. A (NIEER) found that in the 2020-2021 school year, Head Start and its sister-program, Early Head Start, did not reach even half of all eligible children living in poverty.

Likewise, many families who don’t meet Head Start’s eligibility requirements are left to make do on their own.

For Ymani Blake, a lower-middle-class mother living in Chicago, accessing quality childcare for her 3-year-old has been a challenge from Day 1. Despite applying for funding and assistance multiple times, Blake has always been denied support “because we’re either making too much money or our schedules are not aligned [with the programs].”

Timing, too, is a challenge. Last year, Blake applied to a program that would give her daughter, who has a speech delay, access to occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other resources the family couldn’t otherwise afford. But by the time program coordinators got in touch, Blake’s daughter was only a month away from aging out of the program. “No services were rendered because she aged out,” Blake says. ����’s a lot of advocacy and labor that is falling back on parents to get quality education and childcare.”

With limited options, Blake put her daughter in a private daycare program—but pulled her out after less than a month due to the cost. According to data from the Center for American Progress, the attending a childcare center was more than $13,000. For two children under 4, that number jumps to more than $23,000.

Blake was then drawn to a sliding-scale Montessori school with a progressive approach to early-childhood education. “Unfortunately, there was a situation where they left the gate open, and my daughter got out and crossed the street on her own,” Blake says. ���� was so hurtful because that was the only option that I could find … but then it’s not safe.”&�Բ�����;

Caught between age and income restrictions, the high cost of private care, and a concern for her daughter’s safety, this lack of childcare support has led to a cascade of harm for Blake. Without assistance, the family can’t afford daycare or private speech therapists, so Blake is forced to stay home from work and look after her daughter, who loses out on critical social-emotional and development opportunities with kids her own age. And without two parents in the workforce, the family’s income is ultimately lowered even more. 

Everybody should have access to these programs like Head Start, Blake says. “Daycare should be free.”

It Takes a Village

Without accessible childcare, many families must instead rely on their own creativity, grit, and communities to ensure their children have the support they need.

After separating from her husband in late 2021, Hattie Assan, a mother living in Ohio with her two children, ages 5 and 7, began relying more and more on the support of friends—mostly other moms in the process of divorce. The following year, one friend, Rachel, mentioned her landlord was increasing her rent, and Assan offered to share her own home. By August of 2022, Rachel and her three children moved into Assan’s three-bedroom house, forming a new household with two adults and five kids. 

“[Shared living] has always been a seed, and it really only started blossoming after my marriage ended,” says Assan. “I felt more free to just live the way that feels more compatible and sustainable and supportive to the realities of living in late-stage capitalism. I think we’re probably all designed to be more interdependent than an individualist society sets us up to believe.”

Eventually, Rachel moved directly across the street from Assan. This past fall, Assan welcomed in another single mom, Carli, and her three kids. (Rachel and Carli both requested their last names be withheld to protect their privacy.) In each situation, Assan and her housemates worked out equitable house payments and utility costs, and shared in the labor of cooking, babysitting, and running a household.

Assan opens her home to her wider community as well. Twice a month, Assan hosts “spaghetti nights” in her front yard, a free meal and welcoming space for families and kids of all ages. After Assan’s mother had a stroke in 2022 and was no longer able to help with babysitting, Assan says spaghetti night attendees banded together and raised $9,000 in less than 24 hours—enough to cover childcare costs for more than six months.

Blake, too, is finding success through mutual aid. Using her background as a doula and birth worker, Blake is working twice a week at a local play- and nature-based daycare in exchange for her daughter’s enrollment. “I do not get paid a lot for this position, but [my daughter] will have access. And that’s because me and the owner are centering community care,” says Blake. “I love being there because it also gives me the tools that I need to help parent my child.”

Still, no matter how important or inventive an individual workaround is, both Blake and Assan believe wider, systemic changes are needed to ensure all children and families have access to childcare and early-development resources. These solutions require not only defending Head Start, but also investing in programs not dependent on income.

Some politicians are already answering this call. In 2014, former New York City Mayor for all 4-year-olds, and then launched 3-K for All in 2017 to provide free childcare and education for all 3-year-olds. In 2023, New York City Council members proposed legislation that would aged 6 weeks to 5 years old—a dramatic expansion of early-childhood programming for all families in the city, regardless of location, income, or citizenship. (This legislation is especially important as the city’s current mayor, .)

Other countries, too, have long recognized universal childcare as a key strategy to support families, address inequality, and simply raise healthy, happy young people. in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are well known for their generous parental leave policies and well-run national childcare systems. Both at home and abroad, these initiatives provide a working model for the United States—and prove that universal childcare programs, at both the state and federal level, are attainable.

Given the , federal solutions to the country’s childcare struggles are unlikely under the incoming Trump administration. While states and cities can implement smaller-scale solutions, the reality is that many families will need to follow the community-care models embraced by Assan and Blake: fortify and expand existing networks, lean on their neighbors, and get creative when it comes to housing, childcare, and early-learning opportunities. 

In 2015, after four decades of attacks on Roe v. Wade, a new wave of the pro-choice movement hit social media. Seattle feminist Amelia Bonow posted her personal abortion story in defense of funding for Planned Parenthood, writer Lindy West reposted it under #ShoutYourAbortion, and a campaign erupted as tens of thousands added their own stories to the collective demand for accessible and affordable abortion.

That phenomenon is now rendered as , a colorful, zine-inspired coffee table book with portraits of a wide variety of people who share their abortion stories. It’s creative and courageous, a counter-narrative to the conservative framing of abortion as shameful and secret.

As West writes in the book’s introduction, “one in four people who can become pregnant will have an abortion at some point in their lives.” Abortion is normal, she writes, but beyond that, it is a matter of individual liberty. “Anti-choice legislation is a form of unconstitutional government intervention that undermines personal freedom. This country is ours just like our bodies are ours. Telling our abortion stories is a form of resistance.”

The collection also includes interviews with abortion providers like Alabama OB-GYN Dr. Yashica Robinson. Whether she helps patients have a child or have an abortion, Robinson aids their emotional and physical health, “helping women celebrate life in either capacity.” Abortion as a celebration of life. The pro-choice movement has moved on from “no coat hangers.”

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Dr. Yashica Robinson. Illustration from PM Press.

Dr. Yashica Robinson is an OB-GYN with a private practice in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as an abortion care provider at the Alabama Women’s Center.

Amelia: Between providing abortion and your work as an OB-GYN, you see people through all sorts of different situations. Did you start out as an OB-GYN and then get into abortion care, or vice versa?

Dr. Robinson: I initially decided that I wanted to be an obstetrician-gynecologist, and I wanted to work primarily with teenagers. I was a teen mom myself, and I felt like the medical professionals that I interacted with at that time really had the power to make me or break me. The people around me at that time could have either lifted me up and told me that I could have a child and still achieve my dreams, or they could have been like all the naysayers and told me that continuing my pregnancy would basically mean that my life was over. I wanted to be in the position to lift somebody up who is in a similar situation, so I went into obstetrics and gynecology and, incidentally, abortion care is part of that. And I respect that. Women have the right to choose what they would like to do, I’m just there to help them make that decision and get through it safely. I’ve come to realize that in just listening to patients, respecting their decisions, and helping them to get through that choice without judging them … you can really empower someone deeply in a life-changing way.

Amelia: You’re seeing all sorts of people, from people who might have come a very long way to have an abortion to someone who is joyfully celebrating a birth. You must see and experience a huge range of emotions day to day.

Dr. Robinson: Yes, it is a range, but also it all feels connected. I guess the best way to describe it is that I feel like I’m helping women celebrate life in either capacity, either in the abortion clinic or when somebody is having a baby. Often when somebody has an abortion, it’s the same celebration, it’s the same joy, it’s the same relief that is present when I’m helping a woman have a baby. Being able to be there for women, allowing them to exercise their right to choose, and then seeing their relief and their gratitude when they leave the clinic … it’s overwhelming.

Amelia: Abortion is a radical act of self-care for a lot of people. And I think for a lot of people, especially young people, choosing to have an abortion is the first time that they’ve ever been allowed to make a choice that’s completely self-determined. How incredible that no matter what somebody chooses to do, you get to say to them, “You can do this, and I’m going to help you.”

Dr. Robinson:��One of the things that I think that I enjoy the most—a good example of this was a young lady that I took care of just yesterday. She came through the clinic, and she’s talking to me and I can see that she feels like she’s already been judged so much. Maybe she’s even judging herself more harshly than the people around her are judging her. However, just being with her, releasing her from that, and letting her know, “This is your decision, you don’t owe anybody any explanation, and what you choose is absolutely OK.” And just in that moment, she decided she could just be quiet, have her procedure done, and leave with dignity.

This excerpt from edited by Amelia Bonow and Emily Nokes with a foreword by Lindy West (PM Press, 2018), appears by permission of the publisher.

Amid ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, genocide, and widening inequality, the urgent need for these stories and tools is clear. The challenges we face often feel overwhelming, but we are not starting from scratch. Across history and geography, people have responded to injustice and hardship with ingenuity, laying the groundwork for solidarity economies and imagining new systems that can work for all of us.��

The stories that follow illustrate how community-driven approaches can challenge entrenched institutions, foster collective well-being, and create tangible solutions to pressing global challenges.�� served the cuisine and culture of nations in conflict with the United States, sparking meaningful dialogue across political and geographic divides. ��transformed its cooperative network during COVID-19 to produce essential medical supplies, proving that mutual aid and collective ownership can outpace traditional business models. Meanwhile, the push for��publicly owned pharmaceutical systems demonstrates how prioritizing health over profit can lower costs, reduce shortages, and ensure equitable access to life-saving medications.��

These stories are part of a larger collection we call  (OR Books, 2024), a rallying cry for those ready to resist repression, reimagine thriving in our current conditions, and keep building a better world. The future we deserve isn’t a distant dream; it’s in the seeds already being sown in our communities. This collection inspires us to nurture that future, together. Written collaboratively by more than 70 contributors, and born from the lived experiences of grassroots organizers, solidarity economy practitioners, and communities on the front lines of climate and economic crisis, Beautiful Solutions demonstrates that a more just and democratic world is not only possible—it’s actively under construction.

Conflict Kitchen

Written by Sydney Arndt

Believing that the quickest way to a person’s heart is through their stomach, Conflict Kitchen sought to promote peace and build cross-cultural understanding by introducing people to the food and culture of places with which their government is in conflict. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the brainchild of artist-activists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, Conflict Kitchen used a simple takeout window framed by a colorful facade to serve up the cuisine, and celebrate the culture of a succession of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Palestine, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The takeout window functioned as a platform for public dialogue, and the food line became a space for hungry Pittsburghers to engage with people and places the media consistently distorts and misrepresents. The takeout counter was staffed by chefs and public artists trained to facilitate conversations about the featured country. Each food wrapper was printed with personal profiles of people who live in the country being celebrated, as well as articles on the country’s food, art, religion, culture, and government.

To extend the experience beyond the takeout line and further encourage cross-cultural dialogue, Conflict Kitchen also organized public events that centered around food. Pittsburgh locals and Iranians in Tehran shared a meal via webcam in a virtual, city-to-city dinner party. Both groups made the same Persian recipes, then sat down to eat together. Other events have included informal lunch-hour discussions on food and politics, dinners with invited speakers, and live cooking lessons through Skype. 

In November 2014, a series of death threats forced Conflict Kitchen to close down for nearly a week. In response to the threats and allegations of being anti-Israel, the directors of Conflict Kitchen emphasized that their purpose is to hold a loudspeaker to the voices and historical experiences of people from across the world—Palestinians and Palestinian Americans included. The backlash they received is proof that this type of work is necessary.��

Conflict Kitchen offered the public many points of entry, from the taste of a new dish, to interactions with employees or fellow customers, to the interviews printed on the food wrappers, and the intimate meals with people far away. Cultural exchange was central to the project; the organizers prioritized facilitating a space for locals and people overseas to express their respective points of view.

The webcam meals between Pittsburgh and abroad provided a temporary glimpse of what it can mean to share cultures, politics, and, of course, food. By creating a zone of open dialogue and cross-cultural understanding for at least one meal, Conflict Kitchen made a world where we listen to each other and draw our own conclusions seem possible. It used food as a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding—and also provided delicious takeout.

Carolina Textile District and COVID-19

Guided by Marciela Lopez

Written by the Industrial Commons Team

Western North Carolina has long been a center for manufacturing, especially of textiles and furniture. Despite free-trade agreements, which stripped jobs from communities on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, one in four people in North Carolina’s Western Piedmont region still work in manufacturing. Many Guatemalan Mayan immigrants have settled in the area to work in textiles and furniture production. Over the years, they have shaped the region by campaigning for dignified workplaces. Organizer Molly Hemstreet witnessed their struggle to unionize a production facility in Morganton, North Carolina, and began to wonder: Could workers own and operate their own companies?

In 2008, Hemstreet and leaders from the Mayan community co-founded a sewing cooperative, Opportunity Threads. They drew on inspiration from Frank Adams, an early architect of the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center). Opportunity Threads has become one of the largest immigrant-led sewing co-ops in the United States, with more than 50 workers as of 2020.

Aiming to expand cooperativism across the textile industry and strengthen local supply chains, Hemstreet collaborated with the area’s economic development association and a textile research and development center to establish the Carolina Textile District (CTD). Fueled by its mantra, “Be big by being small together,” CTD is a network that brings together over 30 small manufacturers, including Opportunity Threads, and is led by nine partners, representing 1,500 workers in total. Members cooperatively govern, train new workers, share contracts and contacts, develop strong ethical standards for the industry, and share their struggles and joys.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States in early 2020, CTD was well-positioned to produce personal protective equipment and cloth face masks. Pivoting its textile and furniture member-companies to manufacture medical supplies was a challenge with many moving parts. It required consulting with doctors and public-health professionals, navigating ever-changing federal guidelines, prototyping masks and gowns, sourcing medical-grade materials, organizing the cohorts of manufacturers, connecting with markets and sponsors, developing a cohesive warehousing and distribution center, upscaling production, and overseeing quality control. As factories in Western North Carolina were shuttering, CTD was not only safely keeping open their plants, but hiring as well. The pandemic underscored the need for CTD and accelerated the network’s growth.

Opportunity Threads was the hub for CTD’s sewn goods during the pandemic. Worker-owners responded quickly, putting their technical skills to use in developing market-ready goods. Other CTD members came on board to help. Since CTD members had several years of “coopetition” under their belts, the network rapidly developed new products and increased production. At one point, they were producing 50,000 units per week, which kept more than 60 mills humming. “W�� have achieved so many things that we probably would not have been able to accomplish in a company owned by one person,” says Maricela Lopez, a worker-owner at Opportunity Threads. 

Through this project, CTD supplied 190,000 sanitary gowns to North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services and more than 500,000 face masks and other personal protective equipment to frontline workers. Additionally, it generated $2 million in revenue for its textile and furniture manufacturers. According to Sara Chester, CTD co-founder and Industrial Commons co-executive director, “When weekly mask production hit 40,000 units, [we] realized something tremendous was being achieved.”&�Բ�����;

Instead of communities having to wait for companies to come in and to solve economic, health, and social problems, cooperative industry networks can solve critical problems quickly and creatively. This model is one replicable example of how rural communities can actively build an industry ecosystem where workers own a secure supply chain, collaborate in mutually beneficial ways, and solve their communities’ most pressing problems.

Public Pharmaceuticals

Written by Dana Brown

The global medicines market is dominated by large private drug companies responsible for a decline in meaningful innovation as well as skyrocketing prices, recurring shortages, troubling safety issues, and corruption in the institutions that are supposed to regulate them. These trends are harmful to our health, economies, and democracies—and they are inevitable outcomes of an industry driven by profit maximization.

So-called “Big Pharma” companies spend less than one-fifth of their revenue on research and development, but half of their revenue on marketing. Many also regularly distribute more than 100 percent of profits to shareholders by selling off assets, taking on more debt, and downsizing production—inefficient and extractive practices in an industry we depend on for our health and well-being.

To get different outcomes, we need a different design. Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical institutions at scale would remove the profit motive and help reclaim medicine for the common good. Public ownership of pharmaceuticals can exist at any or all points in the supply chain, from research for new medications to manufacturing and distribution services. Since they are not beholden to shareholders and have some insulation from market pressures, they can focus on goals other than maximizing profits—like contributions to public health, scientific advancement, and local economies.

From Massachusetts to the U.K., Thailand, India, and beyond, there are many existing examples of states turning to public ownership of pharmaceutical companies in efforts to combat high prices, medicine shortages, and political interference by multinational corporations. 

Since 1960, Cuba’s entire pharmaceutical sector has been public. It produces both low-cost generic drugs and first-in-class discoveries, while providing thousands of good jobs and educational opportunities in the national economy. Known principally for its innovations—like the world’s first lung cancer and meningitis B vaccines—the industry also manufactures most of the domestic supply of medicine and shares its technology with numerous low- and middle-income countries, lessening those countries’ reliance on Big Pharma to meet health care needs.

When properly resourced, Public Pharma can lower drug prices, reduce inefficiencies, and ensure broad, equitable access to new drugs. Public control of manufacturing, wholesale distribution, or retail pharmacies can serve as the basis for large-scale investments in public health, creating educational opportunities and decent jobs and increasing resilience in supply chains. South Korea, for instance, supports small and medium pharmaceutical companies with publicly owned manufacturing facilities, which generate local jobs and purchasing power that broadly benefit the economy.

Public Pharma can also assure that medications most essential to public health are prioritized for development. State-owned pharmaceutical companies in both Cuba and Brazil operate with explicit mandates to develop medications ignored by the market, like those for neglected tropical diseases, while Big Pharma companies prioritize medications that generate the most profit—often copies of existing products.

Public Pharma can contribute to the creation of a biomedical commons in which life-saving technologies, and the information needed to produce and improve upon them, are treated as collective resources for all of humanity. Large-scale public ownership and control of the benefits of pharmaceutical innovation, for instance, could help facilitate programs in which the wealth created by the industry could prioritize serving historically marginalized communities, rather than perpetuating neglect in the name of business imperatives. Public Pharma is a vital tool for reorienting the purpose of health care from profits to human needs.

Successful examples from around the world can inform the design and development of a robust Public Pharma sector for any country. Sweden’s state-owned Apotek Produktion & Laboratorier AB has found a niche in specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing, selling products to dozens of countries, and directing any profits it earns to its only shareholder: the Swedish state. China’s and India’s state-owned drug companies have long produced a significant portion of the world’s supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Brazil’s state-owned labs produce more than 100 essential medications that allow its national health service to offer free and reduced-price medications to low-income patients.

Around the world—even in the United States—public-sector labs were historically responsible for the development of most vaccines. Insulin as a treatment for diabetes was developed in a public lab in Canada and the subsequent sale of the rights to produce insulin to private United States manufacturers remains a powerful cautionary tale about the harm that can happen when privatizing public goods. Despite being a century-old drug, insulin prices in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent years as the three companies that control virtually the entire insulin market make small tweaks on their products in order to take out new patents and continually raise prices. This trend has produced a uniquely American epidemic of cost-related deaths because of people rationing insulin.

Because of the U.S.’s outsized role in global trade talks and the utter dominance of its Big Pharma firms in the global medicines market, developing a public pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. in particular would be decisive in global efforts to roll back Big Pharma monopolies and reclaim medicine as a public good. It would reduce regulatory capture and shrink corporate lobbying, opening up political space for much broader input into the priorities and outputs of this critical industry. With democratic, public-sector institutions innovating and producing medications at scale, Big Pharma’s interests would no longer dominate, and public institutions would have incentives to cooperate instead of competing in times of public health crises.

Communities around the world are grappling with the growing number and intensity of climate-related disasters because of climate change. Immediately after one of these disasters in the U.S., federal, state, and nonprofit agencies frequently pour financial resources into the communities affected by the latest fire, flood, or earthquake. But these emergency support systems are usually unable to address the long-term needs of those affected, and all too often, these structural support systems entirely overlook those of us who live at the intersection of multiple oppressions: race, class, gender, disability, and sexual orientation, to name a few.

There are endless stories: During Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, queer and trans communities lost access to medical necessities such as psychiatric medicines and hormones, and many faced discrimination and violence. During the fires in Northern California, a black queer environmental justice activist with asthma went into respiratory distress and now lives with permanent brain injury. From homeless encampments to local jail cells, the social, political, and economic disparities among disabled queer and trans people of color put our communities at the frontlines of ecological disaster.

The forces of capitalism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia may have cornered us into a vulnerable position in this unprecedented moment in our planet’s history, but the wisdom we’ve gained along the way could allow us all to survive in the face of climate chaos. The history of disabled queer and trans people has continually been one of creative problem-solving within a society that refuses to center our needs. If we can build an intersectional climate justice movement—one that incorporates , that centers disabled people of color and queer and gender nonconforming folks with disabilities—our species might have a chance to survive.

Let’s start by openly, joyously proclaiming that we are natural beings, not aberrations of nature. We find healing and justice in the realm of queer ecology, a burgeoning field exploring the vast diversity of gender and sexuality that exists in nature, such as the more than 50 species of coral reef fish that undergo one or more sex transitions in their lifetime, completely transforming their behaviors, bodies, and even reproductive organs.

When we begin to see the planet through this lens, we remember that the entire world has biodiversity that is precious, necessary for our survival, and deeply threatened. Whether we’re looking at ecology, society, or our human culture, biodiversity is our best defense to the threats of climate change. When we begin to see our own diversity reflected in the ecology of this planet, we can also recognize that the same forces threaten both. It’s not difficult to see parallels in the havoc that capitalism and the drive to hoard wealth has wreaked on our bodies as queer people, gender nonconforming folks, and people from colonized lands, and how that capitalism has abused and exploits the land.

Performance artist India Harville crouches to pour water from a pink conch shell into her hands for a 2016 Sins Invalid performance titled “Birthing Dying Becoming Crip Wisdom.” Sins Invalid is a performance project led by people with disabilities and intersecting identities. Photo by Richard Downing.

Just as capitalism is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity on this planet—seen in the clear-cutting of forests to plant monocultures for fuel—it is also the driving force behind the violence towards multiply marginalized people with disabilities, because our bodies are not perceived as being “productive.” This drive to hoard wealth is beyond anything we can conceive, and it has already cost our species so much loss. What we’re seeing in the climate chaos that’s erupting is the Earth’s resistance. The question is: How can we ally with this Brown, queer, disabled, femme planet to support her survival, and the survival of all who depend on her?

Each of us have an essential role to play in sustaining our communities, our environment, our planet.

In the face of so much institutional apathy, it is left to those living squarely at the intersections of all of these injustices to tear down the centuries-old silos among climate justice, disability justice, and queer liberation organizing. ��are already preparing for the survival of their communities through oncoming disasters, teaching each other skills in resilience-based organizing to strategically create the changes that we need for queer and trans futures.

During the fires and floods of 2017, queer disabled organizers in the Bay Area , while in Puerto Rico, communities banded together to share generators to refrigerate insulin. At the 2018 Solidarity to Solutions grassroots summit, held alongside the government-organized Global Climate Action Summit, trans Latinx organizers affected by the North Bay fires led a healing justice workshop for queer and trans people of color environmental justice activists from around the world to connect and learn from one another. This burgeoning movement may be invisible, but it should not be surprising.

We have to know our worth to value others. In this historical moment, we have to fight for the valuable lives of butterflies, and moss, and elders. Because our lives—and all life—depends on it. We must move beyond our cultural beliefs that tell us we are only worth as much as we can produce. Just as each component in Earth’s ecosystem plays a vital role in supporting everything around it, so do each of us have an essential role to play in sustaining our communities, our environment, our planet. In this time, people need strength models. Strength isn’t just about momentary power to jump building to building, it is also endurance to handle what is less than ideal. It’s the gritty persistence that disabled people embody everyday.

Even in the moments when we’re in pain, when we’re uncomfortable, when the task ahead feels overwhelming, and we feel defeated by the sheer scope of everything that’s wrong in the world, we don’t have to give up on life or on humanity. Queer and trans disabled people know that, because that’s how we live. At this moment of climate chaos, we’re saying: Welcome to our world. We have some things to teach you if you’ll listen, so that we can all survive.

Just meters away stands a library where several men either watch an educational program on television or immerse themselves in books. In a nearby carpentry workshop, three men work on furniture and model ships, while another room serves as a textile workshop. 

These diverse activities are part of Liberté, a cooperative association operating within Unit Number 15 of the maximum security complex of Batán, located in Mar del Plata, Argentina. This penitentiary facility houses approximately 1,600 inmates. But many individuals here, deprived of their liberty, have found a way to reclaim some for themselves.��

At first glance, the entrance to Liberté may appear to be just another barred gate within the prison. Yet on the other side of this barrier, things feel distinctly different.

“When we cross that gate, we forget we are in a prison. We feel free,” says Ariel, who works in the textile workshop. (Incarcerated individuals are being identified by their first names only, for legal reasons.)��

This sentiment is common among the 80-some men who make up Liberté today. They don’t define themselves as prisoners. Instead, through work, education, sports, and cultural activities, they are people preparing to integrate into society.

“If the punitive model of punishment worked, it might be worth pursuing,” says Xavier Aguirreal, who founded Liberté. “But what truly works is restorative justice.”&�Բ�����;

A Different Kind of Opportunity

“In prison, you either become dependent or beg,” says Aguirreal, 55, who is known to everyone as Pampa. “You come in with a couple of pairs of shoes and a shirt, but when those wear out, you cannot obtain new ones unless a family member or an NGO provides them. I didn’t want that for myself,” he recalls. So in 2014, two years after arriving at Batán, he asked permission from the Penitentiary Service to launch an entrepreneurial initiative. 

The head of the Work Department told Pampa that he needed at least two people to start, so he and his cellmate made a proposal to bring in materials and produce something that they could then sell outside the prison. “W�� started manufacturing wall clocks,” Pampa says.

According to official statistics, last year less than half of people incarcerated in Argentina��were involved in an educational program. Only a third had paid work in prison.��

But, says Diana Márquez, a lawyer and the coordinator of Víctimas por la Paz, “Most prisoners want to leave their cells and desire to work or study.  The problem is that in prison there are very few educational options available—mostly just elementary school—and nearly no job opportunities, many of which are undignified.”&�Բ�����;

The Víctimas por la Paz association was created by people who were affected by crimes and now works to promote restorative justice. This organization has supported Liberté since 2017, thanks to Judge Mario Juliano, who believed that model was the best route to restoration. 

Liberté operates on a self-management model, where each participant is responsible for doing their own work to earn their own money. “This fosters autonomy and self-esteem, essential values for successful integration into society,” Pampa explains. 

Liberté has launched various work projects, including leatherwork, carpentry, blacksmithing, radio programming, baking, beekeeping, and organic gardening workshops. There is even a small grocery store where incarcerated people can purchase their food and a restaurant named Punto de Paz. The meals prepared in Liberté’s kitchen have received official permission from the Buenos Aires government to be sold in supermarkets outside the prison.��

In addition to these ventures, Liberté has developed educational, cultural, and sports programs—such as soccer and karate—to support personal growth and promote teamwork. 

“Liberté offers something broader than just a single workshop or course. That’s its richness: Our lives consist of various interests and needs. Everyone has different preferences, and when I enter Liberté, it feels like a small neighborhood with diverse activities,” Márquez says.

An Effective Model for Change

“If you deprive someone of their rights for decades, what do you think they learn?” Pampa asks. “That human rights don’t exist.”

There are no official statistics regarding recidivism in Argentina. However, the Latin American Center for Studies on Insecurity and Violence at the Tres de Febrero National University estimates that seven out of 10 individuals who regain their freedom commit a crime within the first year after leaving prison.

“Prison should not be a place of punishment but of restoration. When we leave, we should be seen as people like anyone else—not as those deprived of their rights.”

Over the past 10 years, more than 1,000 people incarcerated at Batán have participated in Liberté. Of those,��104 have been released—none of whom have reoffended.

�鶹���¼�over, Liberté’s vision of self-restoration involves recognizing mistakes and addressing the harm caused by those actions. This is why they created the Victim Support Fund: They donate part of their grocery earnings to organizations that assist victims of crimes.��

“Liberté has changed my life,” says Omar during a break in his carpentry work. While at Batán, he got married in a ceremony at Punto de Paz. “I’ve learned to value things I previously overlooked,” he says. “All of this will help me in the outside world.”

“Here, I can do things like I would outside; I don’t feel like a prisoner,” says Roberto, the current coordinator of Liberté. Before arriving at Batán four years ago, he worked as a cook and played soccer for a club. Now, he cooks in Liberté’s kitchen and coordinates a soccer team. He has learned new recipes and how to manage with limited kitchen utensils. “All of this will help me in the future; otherwise, it would just be wasted time in jail.”

�鶹���¼� than that, Roberto says he has experienced personal growth that is not always available in the environments in which people grow up. “Liberté gives us the chance to depend on ourselves and appreciate every little thing. Outside, I used to be more selfish; here, I’ve learned about solidarity,” he says.

Carlitos shares a similar sentiment. He coordinates the library, which houses more than 5,000 books and offers opportunities for discussions and screenings of educational films. “Outside, we didn’t learn to love or respect one another or how to share. Here in Liberté, we’ve come to understand that dialogue through love is essential.”

Punishment vs. Restorative Justice

Marcelo spent the day selling religious ornaments in Mar del Plata. After work, he visits the homeless to distribute food with a Christian group. After that, he’ll travel to La Plata to visit his mother.

His life was very different two years ago when he was still at Batán. He arrived with mental health issues that led him to contemplate suicide. For a time, he felt guilty and worthless.

One day, Pampa invited Marcelo to lunch with other Liberté members and brought him a plate of burgers with French fries. “I started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten something like that,” Marcelo recalls. “I felt I was regaining my dignity.”

An engineer and teacher, Marcelo was drawn to Liberté by its library. He soon began participating in various cooperative activities, including restoring an old laundry facility into the current Liberté space. Eventually he became the cooperative’s treasurer, managing the accounts for Liberté’s grocery store. This role gave him a sense of worth.

“When my daughter and son visited me, they didn’t have to bring food for us to share. I could offer them a cake made by one of Liberté’s bakers or invite them to drink mate with my own yerba,” Marcelo says, referring to the traditional infused beverage that holds great cultural significance in Argentina. “I don’t know what would have become of me if I had spent all my time in the pavilion.”

That sentiment is shared. “Prison reinforces resentment and hatred, but Liberté fosters courage and helps us overcome those feelings,” explains Michael, a member of Liberté who runs the radio program. “In Liberté, you stop viewing prisoners as mere characters from movies; instead, you see them as individuals with new possibilities who can even find joy within prison walls. Because without joy, how can you move forward and experience change?”

Broader Cultural Change

Liberté’s innovative approach encourages a fundamental shift in how society at large perceives incarceration. To promote this model, Liberté launched a diploma program three years ago in collaboration with the Mar del Plata National University that focuses on restorative justice, social integration, and peaceful coexistence within prison contexts. The program is open to anyone who is directly or indirectly linked to the prison environment—from detainees to prison officers, as well as students and professionals in law, social work, and psychology. 

The program is conducted online using platforms like Zoom and a virtual campus, along with YouTube. Since the pandemic, people incarcerated in Buenos Aires Province have been allowed to use cell phones, which has also facilitated the program’s operation. The curriculum combines theory classes with practical workshops and activities, equipping participants with tools to understand and transform the penal system while promoting a vision of justice rooted in care, dignity, and reconciliation.

The program was initially designed for 100 students but has attracted more than 8,000 participants. “Preliminary data indicate changes in perceptions among those who held prejudices and stigmas. They have broadened their horizons by understanding the realities of prisoners and now see solutions as a collective effort,” stated Claudia Perlo from the Rosario Institute for Research in Educational Sciences in . She highlights Liberté as a model for policymakers regarding prison reform. And Liberté continues to innovate, now developing a Popular University based on a German model. 

Márquez attests to the impact of these programs: “Liberté has made me feel free too. It helps me shed my prejudices. When I come here, I see people—not prisoners or inmates.”

Ongoing Challenges

Despite ongoing legal blocks and bureaucratic hurdles thrown at them by the Penitentiary Service, Liberté persists. The group achieved legal status as a cooperative in 2021. “Every single piece of paperwork is difficult. For example, to create a bank account, a bank manager had to visit the prison, which took considerable time and goodwill,” Pampa explains. But the hard work is paying off.

“In 2021, the head of the Penitentiary Service told me he had received many calls from various places interested in replicating our self-managed model,” Pampa recalls. Prisons in Neuquén in southern Argentina and Rosario and Victoria in the north have expressed interest in Liberté’s work. Last year, Liberté began expanding its efforts into a prison in Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego—the southernmost province in the country.

“W�� are convinced that ours is not the only model or even the best one. But it’s working, and we want to share it,” Pampa says. “If we do that, human rights and dignity will emerge.”

It was a charge, el-Hakim says, by Minister Louis Farrakhan at the Million Man March in 1995 to men to go back to their cities and “join a community organization and try to make some type of contribution to our community,” that was the catalyst to start a mobile museum.

El-Hakim went from having tabletop displays at meetings of the local organization he joined to setting up exhibits for various organizations and institutions—first throughout the city and then across the state and nationwide.

His Black History 101 Mobile Museum travels throughout the year from coast to coast sharing African American history through the ages—from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights and Black Power movements, hip-hop and Black Lives Matter—with artifacts he’s collected from around the globe.

“I came to learn that not only are my students missing Black history, but there’s a whole bunch of people who have not been exposed to Black history,” el-Hakim says. “As word spread about the museum and the visibility grew on a national level, the audience grew well beyond my expectations—in size and diversity.”

Today, the mobile museum’s attendees get to experience the exhibits free of charge at the expense of host institutions that bring in el-Hakim at a nominal fee.

Before the museum’s , which began last month and will exhibit artifacts from 1968, el-Hakim and I chatted briefly about the museum, its significance today, and the impact he believes it’s making.

Zenobia Jeffries: What made you start collecting?

Khalid el-Hakim: I started collecting in 1991 after taking a sociology class with David Pilgrim at Ferris State University. He’s the one who started the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. I took his class, prior to him starting his museum. He was just a collector at the time, and he was using artifacts to teach about the history of racism in America. I found that his methodology of using artifacts to teach about very controversial subjects like racism was an effective way of teaching about racism.

But to teach that without the context of other people at the time and seeing how they were responding to White supremacy and racism, it just made more sense to include other material.

So, I took it to a different level [to show] what Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. Dubois or other individuals were doing during the Jim Crow era. It just made more of a powerful impact for me to see Aunt Jemima imagery next to somebody like a Paul Laurence Dunbar, and what he was doing at the time. So, I just started collecting everything that had something to do with the Black experience in America.

Jeffries: How do you decide what items you’re going to exhibit?

el-Hakim: So, the exhibits are tabletop exhibits. They’re usually about 10 tables of 150–200 artifacts. Themes have emerged over the years based on the growth and diversity of the collection.

In the early years it was just a wide array of material in one big exhibit. I decided to make thematic exhibits to be more nuanced in my approach to teaching history and to amplify the artifacts that may otherwise be overlooked in a larger exhibit. Currently, we have the following themes: women, hip-hop, Jim Crow, civil rights/Black Power, music, leadership, sports, and science/technology.

For ’68, it’s the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, so there’s a lot of King material in the exhibit. Also you have the 1968 Olympics with Tommie Smith and John Carlos, as well as musical performers of that year, like Sly and the Family Stone, Jimmy Hendricks, James Brown’s “Say it Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

Aretha Franklin, Ike and Tina Turner.

Shirley Chisholm runs that year [becoming the first black woman elected to the United States Congress]. I got Angela Davis pieces, Adam Clayton Powell pieces. In terms of sports, we got Arthur Ashe, Muhammad Ali. So, it’s material that represents music, politics, it’s a very diverse collection of material.

We build on the historical context of the time, starting with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Jeffries: Where do you get your pieces?

el-Hakim: The majority of the pieces come from me going into antique shops and used bookstores, and record shops—not just in the Detroit area. One of the ways I was able to travel to so many different places [and pick up so much material] is because I worked in the entertainment business for 20 years touring with hip-hop groups and poets.

So, anytime I was on tour, around the United States, or overseas—in Europe, Australia—I was able to go into different antique shops when those guys were out doing whatever.

Jeffries: What would you say has been your most impactful exhibit, or is your most impactful artifact?

el-Hakim: All of them are. We build on the historical context of the time, starting with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So, there’s original shackles in the exhibit, and there’s original advertisements for the runaway enslaved Africans.

There’s Jim Crow-related material. There are things from the Reconstruction era. There are original photos of lynchings, and postcards of lynchings that are very emotional. The Mammy images, the alligator bait phenomenon in America is represented. There’re a lot of different types of material.

Jeffries: What is the rarest? Something where folks are like, “Oh my God, how did you get that?”

el-Hakim: A lot of the exhibits are original documents signed by historical figures. So, I have documents signed by Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Carter G. Woodson. W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, Angela Davis.

And then from hip-hop: Ice T, Chuck D, KRS-One, MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Ice Cube. I have original photographs of Tribe Called Quest. Everybody from Busta Rhymes to Redman and Method Man.

There’s a lot of rare material. I have a collection of hip-hop photography from Ernie Paniccioli, who’s considered to be hip-hop’s pioneer photographer. I guess he would be the Gordon Parks of hip-hop, if you can say that. I have about 60 or 70 original photographs from him, of everybody from Queen Latifah to 17-year-old Jay Z and young Kanye West.

I have a lot of stuff from the Black Panther Party: original photographs, newspapers, coats.

Original artifacts and photographs from the Nation of Islam—early years. Letters written by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I have a very early letter written by Minister Farrakhan from the ’50s when he was still Louis X, a minister in Boston.

There’s a lot of very unique material. I even have clothing items. I have a hat from Aretha Franklin. I have one of Minster Farrakhan’s suits.

I have some things from the Jackson 5, stuff signed by Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson dolls. Things from just about every era, from slavery to hip-hop.

Having that social-political context in hip-hop is what informed me, informed my work.

Jeffries: Why is there such a heavy focus of items on hip-hop? 

el-Hakim: Hip-hop is what informed me in the ’80s growing up. My sense of Black history came from listening to groups like Public Enemy and KRS-One, and Queen Latifah, and Ice Cube. Having that social-political context in hip-hop is what informed me, informed my work.

I wouldn’t have known who Assata Shakur is if I didn’t listen to Public Enemy. If I didn’t listen to KRS-One’s By All Means Necessary album, I wouldn’t have picked up and read the Autobiography of Malcolm X back in the ’80s. So, I see a direct connection between my experience, listening to hip-hop, then reaching back studying Black history.

Jeffries: Are the responses you’re getting now any different from what you were getting before Trump?

el-Hakim: I think it’s more real to people now that Trump is in office. Prior to Trump you could see some of this material and you would think that you were kind of disconnected from it. Because I have a lot of White supremacist and KKK material. I have an original Klan hood, and Klan bumper stickers, business cards, original photographs from the Klan.

But over the past year, you have a lot of people seeing it and making that connection between Trump and his supporters, and how there’s very much of a White supremacist undertone to a lot of the campaigning that went on, and what you’re seeing at some of the rallies and in some of the speeches that he’s doing. His response to Charlottesville. So you see it. It’s more real to people now.

Jeffries: Do they make that connection on their own by seeing the artifacts, or do you make that connection in your program/lecture?

el-Hakim: Really it’s just me presenting the materials so that people can make their own interpretations through their own lived experiences.

I can’t dismiss somebody’s lived experience. If your experience is based upon the fact that you’re a Black man and you have been a victim of police brutality, or you have been a victim of some type of racism, I can’t deny that. So if you see this material and the way you respond to it is based on your lived experience, then we can use that as an opportunity to talk about your experience and how it relates to those artifacts.

And then on the flip side, if you walk through that exhibit, like [what] happened in Pennsylvania just a few years ago, and you’re a White female college student, and you walk into that exhibit and you start crying because you see KKK material. And because of your lived experience of seeing your father and your grandfather as Klansmen, and this material that you see represented in this is exhibit is what you see at home every day. I can’t minimize or disregard that being your lived experience.

Jeffries: What do you hope your attendees take away?

el-Hakim: I want us first and foremost to become critical thinkers, which is key.

I don’t want this to be just information that I’m giving people and they getting my opinion. I want them to see the material interpret it for themselves. Ask critical questions and have dialogue with me, and other people who are in the space.

I also want to spark people to go out and start their own research. If you see a name that you haven’t seen before, or an object that just resonates with you—and one thing I’ve learned is that different artifacts will resonate with different people based on their lived experience—I want you to walk away and do your own research, and learn something that you did not know about history already.

This year, for Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month, YES! asked nine illustrators to create original work responding to the following questions:

How are you connecting with your AAPI heritage right now?

What part of your AAPI heritage brings you the most pride or joy?

Here are their responses.

Brenda Chi

“I am currently comforting and celebrating my AAPI heritage through food, celebration of AAPI culture, language, and my family. This can also be seen as a self-portrait, as much of my identity is being an AAPI artist, so everything connects. This illustration features some of my favorite childhood foods, listening and speaking in Cantonese, celebrating my ancestors’ beauty through my self-expression, burning joss paper, praying to my family to wish us well, gratitude to my family, and claiming my space as an American Born Chinese (ABC) woman. This piece is inspired by vintage Chinese cigarette advertisements, which I’ve interpreted into a more intentional Chinese American illustration, with colors inspired by Cantonese Rose patterned porcelain. As a second generation Chinese immigrant, I often find myself researching my own Cantonese heritage as much hasn’t been taught to me. As I create this art, I am also learning about my AAPI heritage, which I think is really healing for anyone in Asian diaspora.”

Brenda Chi is a multidisciplinary artist and art director based in Los Angeles. View more of Brenda’s work here: / .

Ameena Fareeda / Eye Open at the Close

“Growing up Indian-Asian American, there were many instances in which I struggled with connecting to my identity. I would feel as though I played tug-of-war with my own Asian and American personas. As I got older, I learned to appreciate my culture and identity as a proud Asian American. The peacock is the national bird of India which symbolizes race, pride, and beauty. A peacock’s feathers are truly iconic. They spread not only for mating purposes, but also for means of boasting and protection. The feathers’ resemblance to eyes are known to be a symbol to ward off bad luck and attract positivity.

Eye Open at the Close represents how I navigate in today’s society as an Indian-Asian American. In light of the recent increase in hate crimes towards the AAPI community, it is vital to preserve and uplift the diversity, strengths, and uniqueness within the community. Eye Open at the Close raises awareness to the public eye and expresses how strong and beautiful the AAPI community truly is.”

Ameena Fareeda is an illustrator and designer based in Silver Spring, Maryland. View Ameena’s work here: / .

Eunsoo Jeong / Koreangry

“I’ve been making zines since 2016, and it has been my way of expressing myself. It started as a means to cope with my anxiety and depression but over the years, I’ve gained the confidence to own those narratives and turn it into humor. As a formerly undocumented immigrant, I had a hard time connecting with my identity as an Asian American, because I didn’t see many undocumented Asian Americans and didn’t know how to celebrate or to have pride within myself. In early 2020, I published Koreangry zine issue #8, that featured my Korean American history timeline after conducting self-driven research to understand and see what my roots were in this country. This showed me different perspectives on how we can define our identities regardless of what we are told to believe based on our immigration status in this country. By making zines based on my life experiences, I was able to connect with lots of AAPI folks across the country who could relate to my stories. During the grueling pandemic year, I felt isolated and lonelier than usual. Throughout that time, I pushed ideas that may challenge our AAPI communities (confronting anti-Blackness, defunding police), provided educational and informative comics (know your rights during protests, bystander intervention), and shared vulnerable confessions of my struggles and experiences living in this country today.

This artwork is a collage of my yearning desire to do ‘good’ despite the challenging struggles of being an immigrant today during the pandemic––the pressure of being a good, kind, nice, humble, grateful, by-the-book immigrant. Sharing my story through zine-making is how I connect with other AAPI groups, by accepting and rejecting, challenging, rebuilding, and redefining what our identities could be.”

Eunsoo Jeong is an artist based in Los Angeles. View more of Eunsoo’s work here: / .

Shyama Kuver / Heart Over Crown

“Being from a blended culture means that while you have a lot of pride in the resilience of your community and the uniqueness of its ethos, it is oftentimes invisibilized throughout society, mainstream media, and even within larger cultural contexts like the concept of AAPI or South Asia. I am IndoFijian, and it brings me so much joy because I come from spirited people who are hardworking and resourceful. Being IndoFijian in the U.S. means that for generations our decisions (or lack thereof) have been moved by the hands of state entities. From my great-great-grandparents being taken to Fiji from South Asia after the abolishment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to work sugarcane fields, to my father being drafted into the Vietnam War shortly after immigrating to the U.S. A war he knew was not his, waged against people he identified with more than with his own unit. The ocean has become a symbol of connection and force. We see the split in the sun and where it sets, like we do within duty and purpose, and belonging and isolation. While the acronym AAPI can invisibilize smaller communities, it still holds an important opportunity for coalition-building and education.”

Shyama Kuver is an artist based in Washington, D.C. View more of Shyama’s work here: / .

Cori Lin

“This painting is of a bake-kujira, a ghost whale, calling all to protect Henoko Bay in Okinawa, one of the most biodiverse environments in the world. Though I’m fairly disconnected from my Uchinaanchu heritage, I made this painting trying to connect to the land and culture of Okinawa while the U.S. and Japanese governments destroy the bay with another U.S. military base.

My ancestors come from Japan, Okinawa, China, and Taiwan, but I identify as a Japanese and Taiwanese American. Recently I’ve been unpacking the connecting layers of migration, colonialism, and violence my ancestors’ peoples have both faced and enacted, often against each other. The shifting national loyalties and ethnic identities in my family history help me understand how being ‘Asian American’ is a political choice. ‘Asian’ is an identity that unites my ancestors under one title even though they would never have seen themselves as unified. I can choose to see our histories—and futures—as being interconnected. 

I am finding joy in knowing that what it means to be ‘Asian American’ has—and will—change, and my identity can change along with it. I don’t yet know what it means to reclaim my Uchinaanchu identity, but I know that I can join the fight to protect the land that shaped my people.”

Cori Lin is an illustrator and designer based on land belonging to people of the Council of the Three Fires: the Odawa (Odawak), Ojibwe (Anishinaabeg), and Potawatomi (Bodéwadmik) nations, also known as Chicago. View more of Cori’s work here: / .

Alisha Kahealani Mahone-Brooks / Kahea Mana Hina

“Aloha mai kākou, my name is Alisha Kahealani Mahone-Brooks.

I was born on the island of Oahu, and I am Kanaka Maoli. 

I connect to my Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) heritage by committing to be present in relationship with our lāhui (people), and our ‘āina (land). 

I have found that committing my heart and actions to this land, to my people, and to the Creator of all things, I continue to connect, live, and perpetuate my heritage. For me, connection looks like using our language, learning the names of places and people, learning their stories, and learning how to show love to them. 

For me, it’s a deep relationship that makes me most feel connected to my heritage.

I think what gives me most pride in my heritage is that we are such deeply relational people, in a world that feels quite un-relational currently. I feel like leaning more into my heritage keeps me rooted and reminds me that we are all deeply connected, and how we treat each other, and how we show up deeply matters. I feel like my heritage is rooted in the care of people, the care of the Earth, and all living things. That is my whole heart.”

Alisha Kahealani Mahone-Brooks is an artist based in Hawai‘i. View more of Alisha’s work here: / .

Alexa Strabuk

“I’ve been thinking about curios lately: objects that might be meaningless junk to one person and revered treasure to another. That’s the nature of most things, I suppose. Curios have no real universal value, transactional or otherwise, beyond someone somewhere determining that this thing has value, and that this thing does not. In my mind, there’s something sacred—if not serendipitous—about finding yourself in a particular place, at a particular time, examining a particular mystery item with the same rapt attention that one might scrutinize a new forearm freckle at the end of summer. My favorite thing to find in a bin of unknown objects is something that I cannot fully comprehend at once but to which I feel inexplicably connected despite that. Or perhaps because of that. 

At the start of the pandemic, I moved into a new neighborhood, an Asian ethnic enclave with a rich history of survival, pooled resources, and cultural vibrancy. Heartbreak and circumstance had suddenly forced me into solitude, a confined state of painful decomposition and regeneration. There was no loneliness, not really, only exploration. I felt closer to my heritage, to all those who came before and those who have yet to emerge. As anti-Asian sentiment climbed, so too did my gratitude for living in a community known for welcoming strangers, a haven for the newly arrived or the rover passing through. I’d wander the district, inspecting window displays and architecture and bulletin boards littered with lost pet notices. This place is a living relic, where time has somehow folded in on itself. My people built a home here for us. 

How curious, I thought.”

Alexa Strabuk is a cultural worker, journalist, and editorial designer living on unceded Duwamish/Coast Salish land, also known as Seattle. View more of Alexa’s work here: / .

Sirin Thada

“For AAPI Heritage Month, I’ve been drawing some of the colorful Thai proverbs with which our family grew up. I’ve always loved hearing adages from around the world, and while the details may differ, the lessons are the same. Why? Because we all have more in common than we often think.

This desire to seek out commonalities is rooted in my AAPI heritage, and I’m grateful for it. I was born in Baltimore, where it was made clear from an early age that I was ‘foreign.’ There were minor incidents—comments about my ‘weird’ name, the shape of my eyes… But there were scary moments too, like that time I was 10, alone in the cereal aisle, when a stranger approached and called me a ‘fucking Asiatic asshole.’

Finally getting to visit Thailand was incredible, but I did not belong there either. From the language, to the sights, tastes, and smells—everything was unfamiliar, strange. But, armed with my loving family, I learned to approach things with curiosity, wonder, and respect. I would learn to love, even seek out, things that were unusual. The best thing is, when you don’t feel like you belong anywhere, then everywhere and everything and every moment becomes yours to explore.”

Sirin Thada is an illustrator and artist based in New York City. View more of Sirin’s work here: / .

Isip Xin

“Much of my work is rooted in being a queer Asian American. As a means of both self-expression and exploration, I investigate femininity, masculinity, beauty, and the body in my parents’ countries of origin. Being very disconnected from my parents’ experiences made for a nebulous identity that was difficult to grow up with. This same quality gave me the freedom to shape it as my own.

In Dragon Dance, I draw on the visual language of Chinese dragons and Filipino folk dance, both elegant and bold in their own way. This piece embraces my distant background that I rejected as a child, and that was used to box me off from my peers. It shouts against the image of Asian Americans being quiet and ugly in our otherness. Figures overlap and move in unified confidence, communicating the interwoven fabric of my identity, culminating as undeniably beautiful and stunning.”

Isip Xin is an illustrator based in New York City. View more of Isip’s work here: / .

students are likely to hear a tragic but vague narrative of massacre, disease, and death, a narrative devoid of the specific political and tribal context that is vital to understanding the colonial and imperial relationship between Native communities and the U.S. This renders indigenous bodies invisible. This also contributes to the concealment of contemporary indigenous rights movements, some of which are happening

It is essential that we acknowledge the physical, economic, and psychological trauma that U.S. colonialism has inflicted on indigenous communities. It is also essential that we acknowledge historic and momentous moments of resistance led by indigenous people. Here are seven moments in indigenous history that we should have been taught in school. (For further reading after this article, please check out Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book which was a vital resource in the creation of this article.)

1. Divide and conquer: the Dawes Act of 1887

An extremely complicated facet of history, The Dawes Act (otherwise known as the “General Allotment Act” or the “Indian Homestead Act”) intended and succeeded in dividing reservations already established by previously set treaties, though this effort was met with resistance.

. This amount of land lost is The Dawes Act gave the president of the United States “the right to dissolve any reservation created for Indian use … if it is his opinion that it would be advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes.” Native families were allocated small plots of land—under the stipulation that they pay a land tax. Any indigenous people allocated land who relinquished tribal life were “gifted” with United States citizenship. “Surplus” land left after allocation was sold by the United States to settlers.

This act played a humongous role in westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, and in indigenous assimilation efforts. It is an essential component to U.S. history that absolutely must be taught in schools.

2. The massacre at Wounded Knee and the AIM occupation

The massacre at Wounded Knee, which resulted in the bloody murders of was a part of a pattern in United States war tactics to quash anti-colonial movements and people. Dunbar-Ortiz says that this pattern would continue “from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for U.S. American identity.” How can students fully comprehend a history of the United States without first studying this event, which is exemplary of the horrific war tactics employed by the U.S. to eradicate this land’s first people?

How can students fully comprehend a history of the United States without first studying this event?

 Spotted Elk had led a group of Lakota people to Wounded Knee to dance the Ghost Dance, a traditional dance that a Paiute elder had prophesied would bring about the end of Euro-American imperialism. We cannot teach that the United States was founded under the freedom of religion principle when such violent acts are perpetrated against people practicing their religion. It is also important to teach that just

Important to teach alongside the massacre, however, is the It is irresponsible to teach moments of tragedy without also teaching the resistance movements which oppose colonial violence. The occupation lasted 71 days and aimed to challenge the substandard living conditions created on reservations by the U.S. government. The choice of placement here was critical; to advocate for social change on the land that had born witness to tragedy is power.

This movement was part of a larger string of protests and occupations known as the which included a 20-point position paper to address the injustices against indigenous people on behalf of the U.S. government.

3. Boarding schools and extreme assimilation efforts

Dunbar-Ortiz says that these schools were modeled after the Fort Marion prison, where Captain Richard Henry Pratt left “captives [shackled] for a period in a dungeon, had their clothes taken away, had their hair cut, dressed them in army uniforms, and drilled them like soldiers.” This is the same man who is famously quoted as saying, “Kill the Indian and save the man.” was the first to be implemented under this motto. At schools like these, indigenousness was posed as antithetical to civilization,

Indigenous culture is beautiful, brilliant, resilient, and proud.

By forcing cultural imperialism and genocide upon children, the U.S. government made its priorities clear: If Native people could not be massacred out of existence, then the next facet of life to attack was culture, language, and the soul itself.

But indigenous culture is beautiful, brilliant, resilient, and proud. Teaching the traumatic legacy of boarding schools is imperative to taking responsibility for the great harm colonialism has caused. Other ways to ensure that indigenous culture does not disappear is by and buying from inspired Natives rather than from culturally appropriative Native-inspired fashions.

4. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956

This was a Bureau of Indian Affairs-funded project that focused on relocating indigenous people to major urban industrial areas, most prominently to the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Minneapolis, Denver, and Cleveland.

Indigenous people were drawn away from tribal communities and funneled into urban areas with the promise of BIA benefits, housing, and job training programs. It is important to note that at this time, making relocation another act of assimilation, another act of trying to make Native people disappear. By further distancing Natives from tribal life and identity, the easier it would be to attack and destroy treaties and legislation upholding tribal sovereignty.

What the U.S. did not expect was for marginalized communities to inspire one another. As Native populations were scattered into poor communities and into existing communities of color, the proximity of Natives relocated to these communities in the thick of the civil rights movement led to the formation of indigenous advocacy groups, such as the Minneapolis-based .

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5. The 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island

a group of inter-tribal activists under the name Indians of All Tribes occupied the island after Alcatraz Federal Prison shut down operations on the island, citing the 1886 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which guaranteed the return of out-of-use federal lands to Native peoples. After a period of removals, the occupation gained traction and 79 Native activists held the space down, despite a Coast Guard brigade. , a sharp and bitingly pointed document, issued a direct statement of intent to the U.S. government: that since the infrastructure of government-created reservations became increasingly unstable and unlivable, it was only the natural course of things for indigenous people to “discover” new lands to populate.

The tribe held their ground and advocated for their treaty-given rights.

Unfortunately, and brought along with them drugs and alcohol, an action of total disrespect to indigenous people and intentional actions. A decree had to be issued that all of those who were not indigenous were to leave the island at night. However, this is a good moment in history to look to and draw example from when explaining to white activists why they must .

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6. The Walleye Wars

a traditional Ojibwe fishing method. Non-native sport fisherman, who are not allowed to spearfish due to state gaming regulations, became increasingly violent and

But the tribe held their ground and advocated for their treaty-given rights. The Walleye Wars should be taught in history class because it is a contemporary example of indigenous people standing up for—and retaining—their rights.

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7. The history of nuclear proliferation on reservations

. Many of these plants have since been abandoned This has affected the Navajo water supply to the point where it is nearly undrinkable.

In doing this, the U.S. government perpetuates violent colonialism and imperialism by extracting resources from the land it has already colonized. The history of uranium mining on Navajo land must be taught as a part of a continuing pattern of corporate interest extracting resources from indigenous land at the expense of the health of indigenous people and the health of the Earth.

(to further your understanding of how U.S. military interests harm indigenous communities.)

This article was originally published by . It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

It was the morning of June 14, and an Instagram user captured the moment, commenting: “If Trump is in the White House this morning he’s being woken up by … a Public Enemy dance party.”

A post shared by (@pearlcaliforniacountry) on Jun 14, 2020 at 12:11pm PDT

No one who has listened to hip-hop since its  should be surprised that rap music has become the soundtrack to protests in the wake of George Floyd’s&�Բ�����; while in police custody.

Hip-hop artists have protested police violence in their music for decades. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, rappers from different corners of the United States described the brutal and discriminatory police tactics they witnessed in their communities.

Most famous perhaps is N.W.A.’s&�Բ�����; from 1988. Fellow Los Angeles rapper Ice T  after his metal band, Body Count, ” in 1992.

In the Geto Boys’ “” from 1993, the Houston rap group bears witness to racial profiling and police violence in the so-called , before asserting: “Mr. Officer, crooked officer, I wanna put your ass in a coffin, sir.” In the same year, New York’s KRS-One referenced the  in “,” connecting the violent tactics used against enslaved Africans to the NYPD of the late 20th century and referring to an officer as a “wicked overseer.”

Minneapolis goddam?

As a , I know that the rich history of protest in Black American music started much earlier than hip-hop. The tradition is as old as Southern blues and continued through jazz and rhythm and blues.

Take, for example, the “,” a song that likely originated in the late 1800s. According to folklorist , Black residents of the Mississippi Delta used the earliest versions of the song to describe a White sheriff named Joe Turner who sent Black men to chain gangs or to work on building levees.

The lyrics recount a lover’s tale of loss: “They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone. Got my man and gone.” References to police officers in songs like “Joe Turner Blues” also link that tradition to the songs of enslaved Africans who warned about  in search of runaways.

As with hip-hop, protest against law enforcement came from communities of color in different parts of the country.

From east Texas, blues musician Texas Alexander describes false accusations of murder and forgery in “.” He laments, “They accused me of forgery; I can’t even write my name”—a statement that indicts both the segregated public school system of Texas and corrupt law enforcement officials.

Soul rebels

In the 1950s and 1960s, jazz musicians contributed to  through songs such as Charles Mingus’ “” and Nina Simone’s “.”

Black musicians also made direct references to racial profiling and police brutality. Marvin Gaye tackled police violence on his 1971 album, “What’s Going On.” “Trigger happy policing” is one of the many social problems mentioned in “,” and he demands, “don’t punish me with brutality” on the .

Protesters also co-opted seemingly nonpolitical Motown songs as part of their struggle against police brutality. As uprisings against violent police tactics erupted in places such as Watts, Detroit, and Newark between 1965 and 1967, “” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas became part of the .

Expressing anti-police sentiment in song is not exclusive to the Black American experience. Texans of Mexican descent have detailed their run-ins with law enforcement in Spanish for centuries through  – narrative ballad songs.

Like much of the blues played by Black Americans, the corridos that emanated from the Rio Grande Valley in the 19th and early 20th century often described conflicts between Anglo-American law enforcement and Mexican Americans. “” recounts an actual event from 1901, when an Anglo-Anerican sheriff shot a man named Romaldo Cortez. His brother Gregorio then shot and killed the sheriff before eluding the Texas Rangers for 10 days.

Gregorio is celebrated as a hero who resisted Anglo-American domination: “They had a shootout, and he killed another sheriff. Gregorio Cortez said with his pistol in his hand, ‘Don’t run you cowardly Rangers, from one lone Mexican.’”

New protest songs

Whether emanating from blues or corridos, Mexican and Black American music protested the ways that police buttressed White political, economic, and social power. Similarly today, Latino activists point to  for Black Lives Matter.

Meanwhile, recording artists are continuing the tradition of using music to protest police violence in communities of color. Los Angeles rapper YG  called “FTP” on June 4, in a nod to N.W.A.‘s “F— tha Police.” And hip-hop producer Terrace Martin likewise  commenting on the current unrest: “Helicopters over my balcony. If the police can’t harass, they wanna smoke every ounce of me.”

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

Maybe it’s because they don’t have friends and family to share the holiday with, or simply don’t want to share the holiday with the friends and family they have.

Maybe it has something to do with the myth of Pilgrims giving thanks to “Indians” for helping them grow their first crop for the harvest, and reconciling that with the truth about the genocide of Indigenous peoples on this land by those settlers.

But we don’t have to reject the holiday completely. We can, and should, decolonize and reinterpret it.

This tale that the new settlers held a dinner after the harvest to thank the native peoples has been told to generations who have uncritically accepted it. By now, Americans should know that this version of the occasion told in school plays and history books is nothing more than the patriotic indoctrination that is the foundation of our education system.

The celebration dates back to the 17th century. And over time, people have debated its origin and purpose.

The fact is, there is no one event from which the holiday is derived. And around the world, other countries such as Canada, Liberia, Netherlands, the Philippines, and Germany celebrate their own Thanksgiving on different days.

Some historians have documented that the tradition came to the New World with the settlers. Some say the holiday was secular. Others say it was religious. It has been observed on various dates throughout history.

In the late 1700s, George Washington declared November 26 a day of public thanksgiving and prayer. Seventy-four years later, Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November to celebrate the Union’s military successes in Civil War. And in 1941, FDR signed a resolution changing the date from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday of the month.

Since then, many have chosen to replace the traditional celebration with ones that honor their sociopolitical or familial beliefs.

In 1970, a group of Indigenous peoples in the northeastern region of the U.S. protested the day. Ever since, they and their supporters have been observing it as a . Participants gather at noon to honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native people today. The ceremony held on Cole’s Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts is in remembrance of their spiritual connections as well as in protest of the racism and oppression of Indigenous peoples.

Over time, educators and parents across racial groups have approached the decolonizing process by introducing nontraditional historical texts to their students and writing letters to K-12 schools requesting such texts be taught in place of the traditional myth. They cite the harm done to young people by lying to them.

One educator suggested a number of , including these texts and letters.

Other examples include more individual, and maybe less political or educational approaches.

Many of us celebrate what I learned later in life to call Family Day.

In some households, Pilgrims and “Indians” are never mentioned. Traditional American history is never mentioned.

The day is about spending time with family, and of course the culinary delights prepared by the matriarchs of our families.

My family would stand in a circle holding hands. We’d each share what we’re thankful for. My paternal grandmother would then pray and bless the food.

For some it’s about giving thanks by giving back to those who don’t have families to spend time with, or a meal to eat. They go to church, visit hospitals, nursing homes, shelters, food pantries, or folks on the streets in their communities. Some sponsor dinners for families who are experiencing financial challenges.

Let’s acknowledge the movement of decolonization and reeducation happening in our country.

A YES! reader shared that her family gave up their Thanksgiving turkey dinner to donate the money they would spend on food items to their local food bank.

“On [this] holiday we sit down with a simple bowl of rice (which two-thirds of the world population would have been happy to have) and we made lists of all the things and people we’re thankful to have and to know.”

Ultimately, within our families and communities and schools, we should stop, reinterpret, and repurpose traditions that are harmful, either in theory or practice.

I learned from my elders that when you know better, you should do better.

As we enter into this holiday, let’s acknowledge the movement of decolonization and re-education happening in our country.

We can observe and celebrate with our families in ways that honor those who the day originally dishonored, and those who continue to struggle under oppression.

Ofelia, then 25, had just moved into her new home in the northern Mexico town of San Pedro de las Colonias when she vanished in 2007. A shootout between law enforcement and the Los Zetas drug cartel occurred that night, but no one knows what happened to Ofelia. Though 17 years have passed, this is the first time Martínez dared to protest her daughter’s disappearance. “I waited two years to report it,” says Martínez. “People were being murdered in San Pedro every day. If you dared to file a report, you risked being shot.”

Around 9 a.m. the following morning, a group of about 40 mothers began marching through San Pedro de las Colonias, chanting “Alive you took them! Alive we want them!”

Since in December 2006 and deployed thousands of troops, widespread violence has ensued, leading to a surge in homicides, extortion, forced displacement, femicides, and disappearances. Since 2006, there have been and in Mexico. Men between the ages of 20 and 35 are disproportionately likely to be disappeared, though there are regions where a significant number of women have disappeared.

San Pedro de las Colonias, an agricultural town in the Coahuila desert, has officially recorded 106 disappearances between 2007 and 2013 during the conflict between the Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartels for control of the La Laguna region, a key part of a drugs and arms trafficking route between Mexico and the United States. However, the actual number of missing persons remains unknown.

Relatives of these thousands of victims, especially mothers of the disappeared, often called madres buscadoras, or searching mothers, have spearheaded a movement advocating for strategies, laws, and actions to locate their loved ones, seek justice, and prevent future disappearances. 

Although levels of violence have significantly decreased due to the collaborative efforts of the local government, civil society, and businessmen, families continue to fear reporting disappearances due to threats and persecution. In many cases, they have been coerced into accepting the loss of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the idea of attacking Mexico to combat drug cartels has gained popularity, particularly among the Republican elite. Although Donald Trump has repeatedly denied supporting Project 2025, this 900-page policy urges the next U.S. administration to adopt a “creative and aggressive approach” to addressing drug cartels at the U.S.–Mexico border, which echoes some of to assassinate drug kingpins. 

However, such an intervention could lead to a continued battle against Mexico’s most vulnerable without guaranteeing significant impacts on organized crime enterprises or drug trafficking.

The Legacy of U.S.-Funded Militarization in Mexico

When then Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on organized crime, he received through the Mérida Initiative. During Calderón’s six-year term, the Mexican military, with U.S. assistance, arrested or killed . 

While Mexican authorities have declared the “kingpin strategy” mostly a success, it has also fueled , leading to the fragmentation of the cartels. According to the International Crisis Group, at least between mid-2009 and the end of 2020. Fragmentation has also escalated local violence and put citizens, journalists, and human rights defenders at risk as criminal groups diversify their illicit activities, including human trafficking, poaching, extortion, illegal logging, and more.

Even searching for the disappeared is a dangerous endeavor: Since 2010, 21 people have lost their lives while searching for their relatives. One mother, Lorenza Cano, has been missing since Jan. 15, 2024. And yet, despite the danger, Martin Villalobos, a spokesperson for Movimiento por Nuestros Desaparecidos en México, a movement uniting more than 60 collectives of families of the disappeared, says these families are still best positioned to understand the operations of criminal groups and facilitate searches for their loved ones.

“W��’ve been saying that we families, across the country, know the territory,” says Villalobos. “How does organized crime operate? Not based on the result of a police investigation, but rather from our own experience. This knowledge has cost some of our ���dz��貹ñ������� their lives.”

Despite the risks, these families have often exposed varying degrees of collusion between state agents and organized crime that make their work even more dangerous. In 2020, General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was head of Mexico’s army from 2012 to 2018 and once the country’s secretary of national defense, was on charges of participating in an international drug trafficking and money laundering network. After being pressured by Mexican authorities, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration dropped the charges and released Cienfuegos, who was then bestowed an honorary military decoration in 2023.

This level of collusion places madres buscadoras in greater jeopardy. As drug cartels continue to infiltrate the Mexican state, from local officials to high-level government, “silence zones” emerge, where reporting human rights abuses and seeking justice becomes too dangerous.

Despite the challenging conditions families of the disappeared face, hundreds of collectives continue to lead searches across the country. In Culiacán, Sinaloa, Sabuesos Guerreras, a group of nearly 2,000 relatives of the disappeared, has located more than 650 bodies in clandestine graves. “W�� have found more than 18,950 charred fragments in water wells and rivers,” María Isabel Cruz Bernal, founder of the collective, adds. 

Cruz is the mother of Yosimar García Cruz, a police officer who disappeared in 2017 in Culiacán. She believes the only thing authorities are doing is “betting on our deaths” to end the search for the disappeared. Through their investigations, Sabuesos Guerreras have identified high-ranking officials colluding with criminal groups. They have urged the government to purge corrupt institutions and authorities as a first step toward increasing trust and transparency, but their demands have been ignored.  “There is no security strategy that protects us,” she adds.

A Civilian-Led Path Forward

In September, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies approved that would place the civilian-led National Guard under the control of the armed forces. Fundar, a center for analysis and research on democracy-related issues, warned that the concentration of power in the state and armed forces has that “disproportionately affect marginalized groups, exacerbating their precariousness and intersecting with gender and ethnic vulnerabilities.”&�Բ�����;

While a direct connection between the surge in disappearances and the country’s militarization is difficult to establish, Alejandra Ramírez, a researcher at Fundar, said it’s concerning that public security remains entrusted to military forces that often operate with impunity. “Instead of continuing to bet on the much-emphasized strengthening of state and municipal police forces, prosecutors’ offices, and other institutions, it appears that these entities [the military] are being given primary responsibility,” Ramírez says. “History shows that they have a track record of committing crimes that go unpunished and unsolved.”

In Culiacán, for instance, videos obtained by the influential daily Reforma show military and National Guard forces shooting at and detaining a man on Oct. 7. The footage suggests they planned to kill him but abandoned the attempt when they realized they were being filmed.  

In early October, Mexico’s new government unveiled its strategy to combat violence and crime. Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, said she would not engage in a new war against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. “The war on drugs will not return,” she said after taking office. “W�� are not looking for extrajudicial executions, which is what was happening before. What are we going to use? Prevention, attention to the causes, intelligence, and presence [of authorities].”

Instead of deploying assassination squads to capture drug kingpins (), the Mexican government wants to strengthen the National Guard and enhance intelligence gathering, similar to the work families have been doing for years. 

While both countries continue to rely on military efforts to counterattack drug cartels, families are demanding technical and financial assistance to accelerate the search of the missing and the identification of the more than 70,000 bodies that remain in the forensic backlog. As a first step, they seek to initiate a national dialogue, with the support of the international community, to advocate for their demands against the Mexican government and amplify the urgency of their struggle.  

Meanwhile, they continue searching for their loved ones, gathering information on criminal modus operandi, demanding preventive measures, and calling for the implementation of real actions. During the march to commemorate the International Day of the Disappeared, dozens of families walked through the quiet streets of San Pedro de las Colonias, breaking a decade-long silence. Many onlookers stood in stunned disbelief, watching the procession. 

Martínez walked in the middle holding the tarp featuring Ofelia’s face. For two hours, Martínez and the other mothers marched, chanting, “Where are they, where are they?”

For intercountry adoptees of color, “a better life” often translates to being taken in by White Christian parents in the West with money and means. We are considered “lucky” to have escaped the poverty and crude treatment we would’ve endured in our homelands. Sometimes that is true, but it assumes the best of our adopters, implies that our cultures are less than, and can cut ties and access to one’s roots and people.

There’s nothing lucky about that.

When I was adopted by affluent White folks from the Greater Boston suburbs, everyone saw what I gained—two houses and two sisters born from two White Catholic parents—but not what I lost. Adoption erased my Korean family, language, and culture, while granting my adopters a badge of honor for saving a poor child from a war-torn country.

It’s impossible to know whether things in Korea would have been worse. After all, mine was not the poster adoption experience.

Like many transracial adoptees with White parents, I was raised in racial isolation, which caused me to have a fractured identity, experiencing racial confusion and internal bias. When I looked in the mirror, the face I saw was not what I expected or wanted to see. I didn’t look like my parents and siblings, or my friends, or the people who I read about in books and saw in magazines and on television. I was often told race didn’t matter, despite the many racist jokes and slurs carelessly flung my way by family, schoolmates, and strangers.

Some swore they forgot I was Asian and considered me to be White. The gaslighting and denial had me blaming myself for my own suffering.

When my adoptive mother had four more children after adopting me, each birth further emphasized what I’d lost. Why were these children who were loved by their mother allowed to be kept? People gathered to celebrate, joyfully remarking on family features—which conflicted with what I was told of genetics being unimportant. I began to understand that they only meant mine.

I didn’t fit in at home or elsewhere.

I had two short-term friendships with other Asian kids. The first ended when my friend’s mother decided I was neither Asian nor American enough. The second was shut down by my mother—soon after my father’s disclosure of a sexual attraction to Asian women, which amplified my mother’s dearth of compassion for me. (I learned more about the broad oversexualization of Asian girls and its ramifications firsthand through sexual violence in my teens and 20s.)

The lack of racial mirroring deepened my imposter syndrome. When I encountered other Asians, I would sometimes avoid them out of shame—of cultural ignorance and inferiority for not being a “real” Asian.

When I visited my homeland, it was a complicated mix of reconnection and rejection, pride, and pain. I caught a glimpse of the life I may have had and witnessed those thriving from my displacement. Rather than helping to keep struggling families together through social services, Korea had����more than 200,000 of us. Thirty years later, the so-called Third World country I’d been saved from had a booming economy full of impeccably dressed people and technological advances.

Rarely is there the question of why I and so many other children from the Far East and Global South, are adopted by Westerners. Why our countries have been devastated by wars to the point that children are either left with no parents, or their parents are giving them away to people in far away lands.

The U.S. played a big part in Korea’s , and the Korean War was the for large-scale international adoption, continuing into my generation and beyond. Intercountry adoption is often political, and connected to the history of transracial adoption within the U.S., which began with colonization, racist policies and cultural genocide against Native and Black peoples.

Yet adoption advocates purport the deed to simply be an act of love.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of international adoptees in the U.S. remain , at risk of deportation to unfamiliar lands. A lack of shelter and resources, along with communication barriers, can leave the deported isolated, which for too many result in . This truth about adoption, unfortunately, is less heartwarming than social perception.

Yes, intercountry and transracial adoption can contain happiness and love. However, I recognize—and have experienced—the bad that shouldn’t happen. Contrary to what some think, exposing the negative aspects is not an attack on healthier adoptions, but doing so creates an awareness that the current system produces high rates of , , and .

Many call on adoptees for reassurance that most of us are happy, well-adjusted, and grateful. They don’t understand that it’s possible to love our adoptive families while simultaneously living with trauma and a sense of displacement.

Disconnecting from our adoptive family’s identity risks ��everything again. Fear and conditioning can cause us to cling to a cloak of Whiteness, and comply with the safe narrative.

We may stay in White communities, surrounding ourselves with predominantly White friends and partners when it’s all we’ve known. We may even buy into aspects of White supremacy and take on family politics that work against us as a racialized group. The self-actualization of transracial adoptees exists on a continuum, often evolving only when we feel safe. This explains why many Asian adoptees don’t identify as people of color until immersed in online community.

It takes a lot to break through the brainwashing and barriers—even for those raised with racial support. But to live authentically, we must consciously connect to our people, history, and culture. There’s power in knowing who we are without feeling shame. I no longer feel the need to perform Whiteness—or for White people.

I’m on a journey of decolonization and reclaiming what adoption stole from me. Understanding the plight of my people helps me unify with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s causes. I challenge us all to push back on the systems that cause injustice under the guise of love and good intentions.

Now, more than one year since the world started watching the genocide in Gaza—a reality Palestinian journalists have been trying to broadcast for generations—the general public is finally sharing in the Palestinian resistance. People around the globe have , , rallied despite , and orchestrated . “Israel can no longer coast on this idea of being this beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” Elal says. “People understand intuitively [that] this is a colonial situation.”&�Բ�����;

But as solidarity with Palestinians grows, so too does repression. In the United States, lawmakers have tried , while university administrators have , , and . Mainstream media outlets publish , while politicians  

Yet as those in power continue to attempt to crush the Free Palestine Movement, artists, writers, and other cultural workers are using creative practices to resist. They’ve organized to fight censorship, exposed the propagandist nature of mainstream media, and asserted Palestinians’ rights to their land and lives. They’ve refused to accept genocide and colonialism as normal. “That, I think, is actually what preserves your humanity and your sanity,” Elal says. “The fate of Palestinians is bound up in your own, whether you like it or not.”&�Բ�����;

Narrative Resistance

Since Israel’s inception 76 years ago, government and media institutions have continuously worked to control the public’s collective memory of Palestine. In 1969, Israel’s prime minister denied that Palestinians existed before . After Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023, tearing down walls that helped make Gaza an , media outlets described the attack as When Israel’s defense minister announced its food and water blockade on Gaza days later, he called it a fight against further dehumanizing Palestinians and their resistance against occupation. 

“Narratives are used to justify systems of domination,” Elal says. “Palestinians want liberation, freedom, the right to live in their homes and return to their homes, just like any other people. It requires this enormous apparatus of narrative to dehumanize and delegitimize Palestinian claims to the right of return, sovereignty, living free from violence, on a land where they aren’t second-class citizens subjected to genocide.”&�Բ�����;

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israel has����since Oct. 7, 2023. However,��scholars estimate that����of Palestinians have died��from starvation, infection, and disease caused by Israel’s food and water blockades and destruction of Gaza’s hospitals. The death toll continues to rise, and attempts to rationalize the Israeli government’s murderous impulse are proving ineffective.

Polls across the West show that an increasing number of people , and young people in the U.S. are . “This didn’t start last October,” says Elal. “The roots of what we’re seeing now with this genocide are structural, historical, and political.”��

Since 2021, Elal has worked as the information designer for , an organization founded in 2012 that uses data imagery to communicate the experiences of Palestinians and disrupt colonial narratives. The organization’s infographics, interactive visuals, and posters have been circulated all over the world, published by major media outlets, posted on subway billboards, and translated into multiple languages. 

“W�� see our role in the movement in terms of how we can intervene in narrative and media discourse around Palestine,” says Elal. “Especially since the start of the genocide, we’ve seen how rampant this dehumanization is, how distorted the Palestinian narrative is, how there’s not a lot of grappling with the deep history of the legacy of colonialism in Palestine.”&�Բ�����;

Visualizing Palestine works with partner organizations, including some in Palestine, to turn research reports into accessible visual resources. For instance, its presents side-by-side images from the and the current genocide in Gaza to show how the latter is an extension of the previous catastrophe. Another project called “” demonstrates how Israel uses artificial intelligence programs to surveil and kill Palestinians. 

Other visuals aim to expand the documentation of Israel’s brutality beyond statistics, including its impact on those who survive. “” takes the form of a child development chart that illustrates how children born in Gaza in 2007 have lived through four wars before turning 18, suffering compounded trauma. “” memorializes Palestinians who survived the 1948 Nakba to later be killed by Israel in 2023. “These people are older than the state that is killing them,” Elal explains. “[Palestinians] aren’t numbers. Each one of these people who has been killed [is] an entire world.”&�Բ�����;

The collective’s new book, , spotlights more than 200 visuals created in the past decade, alongside essays on humanizing data and provoking narrative change. Elal believes putting this resource in people’s hands can help organizers, advocates, and educators “build the kind of people power we need.”&�Բ�����;

The Role of the Artist

When Israel began bombing Gaza in October 2023, Hannah Priscilla Craig was among the group of artists who decided to launch , a movement using art and culture as “ in the struggle for sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination.” They released a solidarity statement, which received more than 8,000 signatures in the first few days. Soon after, Artists Against Apartheid transformed into a network that encourages artists to embed themselves in organizing and activism. ����’s not just we as individuals [who] are dedicating ourselves to Palestine,” Craig explains. ����’s actually a recognition of the practice of the artwork as part of the overall strategy toward liberation.”&�Բ�����;

Craig, who serves as the director of arts, culture, and communications for the —the community space in New York City where Artists Against Apartheid originated—sees how integral cultural production is to raising awareness about the plight of Palestinians. “People are consuming culture almost every moment of every day … whether we consciously realize it or not,” she says. ����’s important for us, on the side of justice [and] liberation, to take up that tool—and take it more seriously than our enemies.”&�Բ�����;

Artists Against Apartheid offers to help artists create banner drops, public art installations, film screenings, street theater, and more to bring the Palestinian liberation movement into their communities. the (theatrical testimonies written by Palestinian youth), of President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the annual , and developed more than 6,000 poster designs. Craig says the posters have been pasted around Barcelona, Spain; exhibited in galleries in Arizona; and made into stickers circulated throughout the U.S. 

People are consuming culture almost every moment of every day. … It’s important for us, on the side of justice [and] liberation, to take up that tool—and take it more seriously than our enemies.” —Hannah Priscilla Craig

Artists Against Apartheid draws inspiration from the , a group of cultural workers who in the 1970s and later inspired an international boycott that helped undo apartheid policies. Craig also highlights the , which were first formed in 1929 by artists, writers, and journalists to advocate for better working conditions during the Great Depression. 

“Those histories are often ignored, forgotten, and left out of the history books because they are so dangerous to the ruling class,” Craig says. Artists Against Apartheid works to “reinvigorate and bring back to the forefront the way that artists and cultural workers are part of political [and liberation] movements.”&�Բ�����;

The number of signatories on Artists Against Apartheid’s statement has nearly doubled in the year since it was released, with prominent musicians including , , and Noname signing on and using their art to . “Musicians are ready to take on the charge and the task of speaking clearly and with conviction about the need to take seriously the political situation in the world,” Craig says. ����’s really showing that these cultural spaces, these social spaces, are also spaces of political struggle.”&�Բ�����;

Ultimately, Artists Against Apartheid calls on artists of all media to use creative intervention as a strategy for mobilization. “The reality is that struggle happens everywhere,” she explains. “W�� have to fight back in all of the spaces that are available to us.”&�Բ�����;

Do Not Consent

While artists continue to envision an end to the U.S.-backed genocide, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) are disrupting the media apparatus that defends it. After releasing an , the coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers has engaged in a series of actions to call out national media outlets over their coverage of Israel and Palestine, including The New York Times. 

“[The Times] is considered the paper of record in the U.S. [and] in the West,” says Nour, a writer and member of WAWOG. (Nour requested to be identified by first name only and emphasized that the coalition acts as a collective.) But The Times has been “manufacturing consent for a genocide.”&�Բ�����;

Some writers at The Times after it cracked down on its own journalists for publicly supporting Palestine. Others, including Nour, in November 2023 to protest its coverage, carrying agitprop newspapers titled . “The Times is equivalent to an arms manufacturer, but in the cultural space,” says Naib, a journalist and writer who is also part of WAWOG and has asked to be identified by first name only out of concern for retaliation. The paper represents, in theory, “both objectivity [and] the high-minded, liberal elite of America.”&�Բ�����;

Following the protest, the coalition evolved the agitprop into a , debunking the false notion of objectivity and critiquing and analyzing The Times’ coverage of Israel. In the article “,” the paper provides a style guide demonstrating how The Times’ word choice, syntax, and passive voice push the narrative that Israel is fighting a “just war.” Another revealed that The Times quoted Israeli and American sources following Oct. 7, 2023, more than three times as often as Palestinian sources, and U.S. officials more than all of its Palestinian sources combined. The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment. 

Naib says mainstream reporters use other rhetorical tools to “create empathy amongst American audiences for Israel and not for Palestine.” For example, when a story describes occupational violence against Palestinians, it doesn’t specify that it was done by Israel or the Israeli military. ����’s ‘a strike killed Palestinians,’ not ‘an Israeli strike,’” he explains, referencing coverage of the ongoing air strikes. “In almost all media, any discussion of Palestine will always come with, ‘These events started on October 7.’ … We always have to acknowledge what happened on October 7, [but never what happened] before October 7.”&�Բ�����;

WAWOG is also committed to shining a light on the humanity of Palestinians. Through more than a dozen issues of The New York War Crimes, the coalition has published the words of and ; spotlighted , , and solidarity; and uplifted the voices of those (uprising). They’ve also inspired the birth of similar publications such as . 

The coalition also encourages audiences to collectively hold establishment media accountable. “W�� think so much about what is happening in the writing itself, but being an observer, a reader, [or] in the audience is not a passive activity,” Naib says. “You are actively legitimizing the organization by consuming what they’re producing.”&�Բ�����;

Nour adds that audiences can “refuse to be part of the New York Times narrative” by boycotting publications complicit in their coverage of Palestine, while motivating media workers to organize within their workplaces. “If we refuse to write the way they want us to write, we can actually do something,” she says. 

The network’s plan to build a “” also includes a that covers organizing history in both Palestine and the U.S., touching on the Black Panther Party as well as movements formed during the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis. “Culture is oftentimes the strongest tool in maintaining the status quo,” Naib says. “Our role as cultural workers isn’t only to produce culture; it’s to take action.”&�Բ�����;

A Dance for Palestine

���� is the right of children in Gaza to be joyful,” says Bashar Al-Bilbisi, a 24-year-old Palestinian dancer, theater artist, pharmacist, and head of the . Since 2016, the troupe of young people has performed and trained others throughout Gaza in , a traditional and Indigenous Palestinian dance. 

When Al-Fursan first launched, Al-Bilbisi used dance to address issues such as COVID-19, gender-based violence, and youth emigration. The group performed at the Palestine International Festival and toured around France. Their performances even contributed to the registering of dabke as “intangible heritage” . 

But everything changed when Israel began relentlessly bombing Gaza and destroying theaters and cultural spaces. Now, Al-Bilbisi and his fellow dancers mainly teach dabke to children in displacement camps across the region. “W�� face lots of trauma, lots of wars, and we need a tool such as dance to get that out,” says Al-Bilbisi, whose responses have been translated from Arabic to English. 

Sometimes that means encouraging children to “forget about the external world and to enjoy themselves” during training. Other times, it’s leaving space for them to grieve. During one exercise, a young girl suddenly began to cry. Her two brothers had been taken by Israeli forces, and she no longer knew where they were or if they were alive. “I left her alone to cry as much as she wanted,” Al-Bilbisi says. Afterward, she began talking more openly about her brothers’ capture and became more involved with the group. “That’s why I would work on the training of dabke. It helps them express themselves,” he adds. ����’s not just about movement or choreography; it’s what’s beyond the performance.”&�Բ�����;

Al-Fursan trainers are located throughout the Gaza Strip, including in heated war zones where, Al-Bilbisi says, “the only thing between them and death is a coincidence.” Two trainers were bombed by Israel at the Church of Saint Porphyrius; another in North Gaza trained children whose parents were killed in yet another Israeli bombing, Al-Bilbisi says. “Whenever we go to train children, there is always somebody targeted and killed as we go.”&�Բ�����;

At the time of this writing, Al-Bilbisi is based in a supposed safe zone. He plans to continue the work, saying, “The risks are enormous … but we believe in a mission and a vision, and we would like to fulfill it.”&�Բ�����;

Though the genocide has yet to end, he is firm in the role the ensemble will play in rebuilding Gaza and all of Palestine. “If houses are demolished, they can be rebuilt,” he says. “What’s more difficult is to rebuild people psychologically and to rebuild humanity.”&�Բ�����;

That’s why the ensemble also works to deepen the world’s understanding and awareness of what it’s like to be a Palestinian in Gaza. In 2023 the group released , an directed by Al-Bilbisi that focuses on how artists’ lives changed throughout the last year of occupation. It has been shown at across the world. “The message—as a group, as an ensemble, as trainers, as artists, as children whom we work with, and as a community in Gaza—is that we would like war to stop and that we love life,” Al-Bilbisi says. 

Underneath it all, he believes it is his duty to create not only artists, but human beings who belong to their land. “When we are in one line, holding each other’s hands, it gives the sense of solidarity, that we are all together,” he continues. ���� also shows how rooted we are, touching the land or the floor. We’re there, strongly. We’re there.”&�Բ�����;

The shout came from a group of Proud Boys, a far-right street gang, while they approached a (IWW) in September 2018. While the IWW, a radical labor union that and Washington State, is certainly anti-fascist, this was a union action—not an “antifa” protest. But those facts mattered little to the right-wing agitators who had made Portland a flash point in political violence. As the Proud Boys sought to instigate, one IWW member, Sinead Steiner, remembers union activists pivoting in an attempt to de-escalate. 

IWW members engaged the Proud Boys in mundane discussions about labor law while other demonstrators began using silly chants to lower the emotional temperature. The method was effective, no one faced harm, and the union action continued. This was not the first time the far right had threatened the IWW, so members knew they needed to walk into any protest with a nimble plan that included employing some form of community self-defense. 

As Donald Trump ascended to power in 2016, there was in as well as far-right and racist groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and militias, and other neo-Nazi formations. They stormed U.S. cities, often holding rallies intended to provoke counterprotesters whom they could attack. As a result, there was a rise in left-wing formations, including the John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association, that say armed community self-defense may be a necessary component of safety, which in this case means protecting activists from racist militants.��

The threats that the far right presented to Portland’s left—along with the historical repression of unions by racist foot soldiers—are why unionists were prepared in Portland that afternoon. In the 1910s and ’20s, IWW members, who were called “Wobblies,” invited coal miners and others to join “industrial unions” to win power by organizing as many workers as possible. Meanwhile, private security contractors whose job was to disrupt strikes with force in the 19th and early 20th century. 

The Ku Klux Klan, which, like later fascist groups, despised the anti-capitalist and multiracial implications of the IWW, also showed up to crush labor. In June 1924, members of the in San Pedro, California, injuring 300 members while kidnapping, tarring, and feathering others. To be a unionist, and a leftist, was to be a target.��

Amid this rise in brutality and repression, some IWW members created the IWW General Defense Committee (GDC) in 1917 as a separate organization to support activists facing reprisals. Nearly a century later, IWW members in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota—some of whom had been involved in anti-fascist organizing across the 1980s and ’90s—re-engaged the GDC as an anti-fascist auxiliary to the IWW. GDC chapters then popped up around the country, including in Portland, to fight the fascist insurgency and to defend communities against a rash of street violence. 

These kinds of threats were nothing new. Historically, wherever working-class social movements grow, fascists see them as distinct threats both because of their politics and the marginalized communities they represent. To guard against this, self-defense projects—organized efforts where people from these communities are trained, and often armed—are formed to ward off these outside threats. Whether the appearance of self-defense squads is enough to scare off fascist attacks or if actual force is necessary to fight far-right militants back, these kinds of formations have been a reasonably common feature of how communities maintain their autonomy during escalating right-wing violence. 

At the same time, the police—ostensibly defenders of peace and order— and rarely keep activists safe from right-wing assaults. For abolitionists who prefer transformative justice to incarceration, police are not the answer to community safety. “To me, community self-defense can be … an alternative to the police and courts, but it would depend on the situation—and for that matter the community,” says Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of the and its news website, . ���� means you do as much as you can to handle a situation as a community when one arises.”&�Բ�����;

Community self-defense has become central to contemporary social movements. Just as their predecessors did, activists today seek a safety model that understands the threats they face and doesn’t reproduce the problems of the justice system. 

Deep Roots

Social movements have historically had a self-defense component. Many earlier left-wing political parties or organizations had a militant wing, in which members were trained as a defensive force that could keep their growing membership safe from violent right-wing counterefforts. 

In the early 20th century, the Jewish Labour Bund, a Jewish socialist movement involved in organizing labor unions and Yiddish schools around Eastern Europe and Russia, created self-defense squads to protect Jewish communities from racist attacks, known as “pogroms,” which were escalating during that time. 

By 1905 there were Jewish self-defense groups in 42 cities, and they were often a collaborative offshoot from various leftist groups. Because many left-wing revolutionaries saw both modern nation states and reactionary political movements as their enemies, they believed they had to take measures to keep themselves safe from both entities. 

Much of the postwar left emerged directly out of the need for community safety. Take, for instance, the Black Power movement, which formed in the 1960s and ’70s and considered resilience and empowerment to be central to their work. “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense—and have acted on it,” wrote Robert F. Williams in 1962. Williams was an organizer who took control of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, grew it by hundreds, and chartered it with the National Rifle Association to teach members how to defend themselves against Klan terror. 

In 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded first and foremost as an organization to monitor and intervene on police violence, a project the party eventually saw as part of a “united front against fascism.” That slogan became the name for the Panthers’ 1969 conference that convened a range of other radical groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.��

In 1966, Panthers began armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods as a message to local police not to threaten the rights and safety of Black residents. They held rallies when police refused to investigate police killings, such as the . The Panthers used these opportunities to teach community members how to build armed self-defense squads as both an alternative to the police and a deterrent against police violence. The Panthers inspired other self-defense efforts, including the Lavender Panthers (sometimes known as Purple Panthers), an armed defense group formed by the Gay Activist Alliance in 1973 to defend San Francisco’s LGBTQ community against homophobic attacks. 

“Something that the Black radical tradition tells us … is that we can’t organize in just one mode,” says Jeanelle Hope, Ph.D., an associate professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University who studies Black anti-fascist movements. Along with legal pathways, self-defense, and more radical anarchist tactics, Hope points to the myriad mutual aid programs the Black Panther Party organized to meet people’s daily needs, including offering free breakfast to children and running the . 

This history creates what Ejeris Dixon described as a movement lineage, whereby she and others come from a tradition of radicals “who have dedicated our lives to our community safety.” This communal resiliency inspired Dixon to co-write “,” a community safety tool kit she created alongside the anti-racist organization . The guide offers a number of ideas, including how to create effective protest formations. 

When people on the right talk about security, it often simply means firearms. But for those on the political left, community self-defense is a much bigger idea. “The most important part of how you frame community defense is to acknowledge that you provide something the state cannot … when you build a culture of community defense around you … you have a lot more protection from violence,” says Lucas Hubbard, communications director for Socialist Rifle Association, which does not advocate for forming militias but does support working-class people learning firearm skills and developing mutual aid networks. 

But as Hubbard notes, self-defense projects are only an alternative to the status quo if they match the community’s expressed desires. “First thing you do in providing community defense … is to ask what that means to them,” says Hubbard, pointing to issues like food insecurity and housing access as frontline threats. Community defense could mean developing strong bonds between affected people to better address their needs, employing armed security at queer youth events, or securing resources for those facing eviction, but it is just as likely to involve getting people the resources they need during a COVID-19 spike. 

“If you want to help a community, they have to trust you,” says Snow, a founding member of the Asian American self-defense group (YPT) who goes by one name. The organization works to demystify community self-defense, including gun ownership and mutual aid organizing, in part by creating an alternative media infrastructure to shift perception about who owns firearms and why. 

“In moments where I have seen [community defense], it’s always been something that has been asked for explicitly,” says Snow. YPT formed in 2020 amid a slew of anti-Asian hate crimes. Organizers from around the U.S. met through activist networks and began supporting each other not just in learning self-defense and firearms skills but also in creating more visible networks of care and connecting their ideas about community empowerment to international struggles such as supporting anarchists fighting Russian aggression in Ukraine.��

YPT helped create educational programs around responsible firearm ownership and started a podcast, Tiger Bloc, that demystifies disaster preparedness and community defense in terms that avoid adventurism and right-wing cynicism. As Snow points out, firearms themselves are often less important to community safety than, for example, “good digital hygiene” (using security protocols in digital communication and taking measures to remove personal information from the internet), locating good de-escalators to intervene in tense protest interactions, and ensuring demonstrations have trained street medics who can save lives if needed.��

Community self-defense is directly intertwined with other social movements because all political causes—and their solutions—are tied with intersecting issues of race and class. Effective safety plans bring together a community’s struggles, identify what creates cracks in safety, and consider all movements to be potential tools for repair.��

A True Safety Plan

Because many potential harms and threats are distinct, a complete plan for community safety has to be broad enough to address everything from racist violence to incursions with the police. An expansive vision of community safety does not stop at the most immediate threats but offers some vision of an alternative to existing carceral options. 

Vision Change Win’s guide says a comprehensive vision of community safety includes “security, office and organizational safety, verbal de-escalation, physical de-escalation, personal safety, transformative justice processes, community safety neighborhood strategies, bystander intervention, and cop watch.” It helps to outline the different questions you need to ask about events you are holding, what roles are necessary to keep attendees safe, and how to align every security choice with the community’s values. 

While police often play similar social roles in repressing movements, they have different legal leeway and require different responses. This is why Vision Change Win’s training focuses on a range of situations, including what to do when police attempt to enter activist spaces and how to de-escalate nonpolice threats. 

An example is Vision Change Win’s section on dealing with Rebellion Containment Agents—“less lethal” weapons such as chemical gas or pepper spray that are used by police against protest crowds. While often presented by law enforcement as relatively safe, these containment agents were tied to major injuries during the 2020 racial justice uprisings. The guide instructs demonstrators on how to deal with incoming projectiles, how to care for someone who has been exposed to caustic chemicals, and how street medics and those providing on-site care can make medical remedies from common materials.��

In addition to responding to police arrests and ensuring people know their legal rights, community defense also includes strategies to mitigate COVID and other pandemics. Good safety plans take into account both a community’s values and COVID transmission so as not to replicate many of the harms activists are hoping to mitigate. 

“I think having vulnerable relationships with people … where if there is somebody in your life you can talk [to] about both survivorship and harm, I think that makes us safer,” says Dixon. This also points to what are often called transformative justice programs designed to, as Dixon describes, “prevent and intervene in violence, and repair and heal from harm without the use of prisons.”&�Բ�����;

These can take the form of “accountability processes” that combat harm by addressing the behavior, demanding change and the admission of culpability, and supporting both the survivor and the perpetrator in their journey. This kind of vulnerability can exist in many kinds of communities, but especially those that are bonded. “Transformative justice is relying on the relationships … to leverage them into better behavior and accountability,” says Dixon. 

These are big, radical ideas—and that is part of the point: Community self-defense is not a singular solution but part of an ongoing project that seeks to address the fundamental unsafety of the society we currently inhabit. Through overlapping systems of inequality and oppression, many people feel isolated, targeted, and forced to face huge hurdles alone. But when members of a community see their struggles as interconnected and their issues as systemic, then modest responses become insufficient. 

Community self-defense is a piece of the larger work of building an equitable society, but it will only be truly realized if a larger mass movement confronts the entire system of structural inequity. “You have to believe in something bigger,” says Dixon. “You have to believe in transformation.”&�Բ�����;

A judge may at times deem it necessary to appoint  to protect a vulnerable person from abuse and trickery by others, or to protect them from poor decision-making regarding their own health and safety. But when put into the hands of self-serving or otherwise unscrupulous conservators, however, it . 

Celebrities like Spears may be particularly susceptible to exploitation due to their capacity for generating wealth, but they are far from the only people at risk. As  representing poor and marginalized people and a scholar of tribal and federal Indian law, I can attest to the way  may exacerbate these potentially exploitative situations, especially with respect to women and people of color.

Perhaps nowhere has the impact been so grave than with respect to Native Americans, who were  due to a system of federal and local policies developed in the early 1900s purportedly aimed at protecting Native Americans receiving allotted land from the government. Members of the —Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations—were particularly impacted by these practices due to the discovery of oil and gas under their lands. 

Swindled by “Friendly White Lawyers”

A , or a related designation called a guardianship, takes away decision-making autonomy from a person, called a “ward.” Although the conservator is supposed to act in the interest of the ward, the system can be open to exploitation, especially when vast sums of money are involved.

This was the case between 1908 and 1934, when  of Native communities out of their lands and royalties.

By that time, federal policy had forced the  from eastern and southern locations in the United States to what is presently Oklahoma. Subsequent federal policy converted large tracts of tribally held land into —a move that fractured communal land. Land deemed to be “surplus to Indian needs” was sold off to white settlers or businesses, and Native allotment holders could likewise sell their plots after a 25-year trust period ended or otherwise have them taken through tax assessments and other administrative actions. Through this process  from “138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by 1934 when allotment ended,” according to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation.

During the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation and of the Five Civilized Tribes were deemed to be  due to the discovery of oil and gas underneath their lands.

However, this discovery turned them into the victims of predatory schemes that left many penniless . 

Reflecting on this period in the 1973 book “,”&�Բ�����;, a lawyer and member of the Kiowa Tribe, and  wrote that members of the Osage Nation “began to disappear mysteriously.” On death, their estates were left “not to their families, but to their friendly white lawyers, who gathered to usher them into the Happy Hunting Ground,” Kickingbird and Ducheneaux added.

Lawyers and conservators stole lands and funds before death as well, by getting themselves  with full authority to spend their wards’ money or lease and sell their land.

Congress created the initial conditions for this widespread graft and abuse through the . That Act transferred jurisdiction over land, persons, and property of Indian “minors and incompetents” from the Interior Department to local county probate courts in Oklahoma. Related legislation also enabled the Interior Department to  based on its assessment of the competency of Native American allottees and their heirs. 

Unfettered by federal supervisory authority, local probate courts and attorneys seized the opportunity to use guardianships to steal Native Americans’ estates and lands. As described in 1924 by , a  commissioned by the Secretary of Interior to study the issue, “When oil is ‘struck’ on an Indian’s property, it is usually considered prima facie evidence that he is incompetent, and in the appointment of a guardian for him, his wishes in the matter are rarely considered.”&�Բ�����;

The county courts generally declared Native Americans incompetent to handle more than a very limited sum of money without any finding of mental incapacity.  and Congressional testimony documented numerous examples of abuse. Breaches of trust were documented in which attorneys or other appointed conservators took money or lands from Nation members for their own businesses, personal expenses, or investments. Others schemed with friends and business associates to deprive “wards.”&�Բ�����;

“Plums to Be Distributed”

One such woman in �ܾ��ٰ�á����-Šá’s report was Munnie Bear, a “young, shrewd full-blood Creek woman … [who] ran a farm which she inherited from her aunt, her own allotment being leased.” Bear saved enough money to buy a Ford truck and livestock for her farm, with savings remaining in a bank account. Once oil was discovered, however, the court appointed a guardian, who appointed a co-guardian and retained a lawyer, each of whom deducted monthly fees that depleted Bear’s funds. During the period of her guardianship, she was unable to spend any money or make any decisions about her farm or livestock, nor did she control her bank investment.

�ܾ��ٰ�á����-Šá’s report displays the extent of this practice:

“Many of the county courts are influenced by political considerations, and … Indian guardianships are the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls. The principal business of these county courts is handling Indian estates. The judges are elected for a two-year term. That ‘extraordinary services’ in connection with the Indian estates are well paid for; one attorney, by order of the court, received $35,000 from a ward’s estate, and never appeared in court.”��

Wards were often kept below subsistence levels by their conservators while their funds and lands were depleted by the charging of excessive guardian and attorneys’ fees and administrative costs, along with actual abuse through graft, negligence, and deception.

Reports like that of �ܾ��ٰ�á����-Šá’s resulted in Congress enacting the . This put the Indian land that had not fallen into non-Indian hands during the federal policy of allotting plots back into tribal ownership and secured it in the trust of the United States. It also ended the potential for theft through guardianship.

But the lands and funds lost as a result of guardianships were not restored nor did descendants of those swindled ever enjoy the benefit of their relatives’ lands and monies either.

This article was originally published by��. It has been republished here with permission.

This story comes to us from our partners at , a project that brings the work of immigrant journalists to digital news sites and public radio.

When Linda Sue Park was growing up in Illinois, she spent hours at her local library, devouring Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series.

Park, 61, is and the daughter of Korean immigrants. As a child, she imagined going on adventures with Wilder’s central character, Laura. She indulged in daydreams of sitting by the fireplace with the Ingalls family, White homesteaders whose experiences are beloved by generations of American readers.

“I’ve spoken to many children of immigrants who really latched onto these books,” Park says. “I have this theory that we were searching so desperately for a road map on how to be American.”

As a Korean American kid growing up in Colorado in the 1990s, I, too, was a fan of the Little House series, and I was fascinated by the lore of the Old West. When my sixth-grade class visited an historic hotel in southern Colorado, a tour guide pointed at bullet holes dotting the ceiling—evidence, he said, of bandit-style brawls. I was hooked.

The characters who inhabited the Old West drew me in with their boisterous attitudes, wild independence, and refusal to conform to societal expectations. But in all of the stories I encountered, I never once came across Asian American people. I didn’t see them in history books, on tours, or on plaques. 

Chinese people were present—and prolific—in the Old West.

It turns out they were there all along. I just didn’t know their stories.

At age 16, I read Killing Custer, by Native writer James Welch, who Gen. George Armstrong Custer. The book introduced me to a tradition of historians working to correct the myth of the whitewashed American West. In time, my imaginings of the Old West expanded to include the Black, Latinx, and Asian American people who lived here, too—and who, like Whites, were settling on lands taken from Indigenous people.

“Asian Americans lived in the West,” Professor Gail M. Nomura. “They shaped the western landscape through cultivation and toil. They were not just excluded. They were not just passive victims to be conquered and subjugated. They built and they molded and they struggled.”

Though their presence has been written out of the record, nearly 15,000 Chinese men , an estimated 150 to 2,000 workers . But none of them were invited to pose for the iconic .

Chinese people were present—and prolific—in the Old West. “In 1870, almost 30% of the Idaho territory’s population were Chinese,” says Liping Zhu, 63, a professor of history at Eastern Washington University, in Cheney, Washington.

Chinese American communities faced great hostility and racial violence in the late 1800s. After the transcontinental railroad was completed, thousands of Chinese Americans moved to Truckee, California, in search of work. Within a few months, White townspeople set Chinatown on fire. A local Causasian League plotted to drive out all Chinese residents. In 1871, White residents of Los Angeles . In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S.

Zhu’s career spans several decades, uncovering the presence of Asian Americans in the Old West, shedding light on how they lived, and how their legacies have shaped our new understanding of an Asian American Old West. His scholarship challenges us to look past the stereotype that Chinese Americans were merely passive victims in the face of adversity. They also built lives for themselves.

His research has uncovered court . Chinese Americans operated laundries in Western mining towns, allowing them to gain economic mobility: Their profits often exceeded a standard 19th century wage of $1.50 per day.

“Laundry men could make up to $10 a day,” says Zhu. “They were ‘mining the miners.’”

which cites Zhu’s research, suggests the importance of Chinese businessmen in Deadwood, South Dakota. In 1800, the town of 5,000 was home to “two prominent merchants, Hi Kee and Fee Lee Wong,” who were “highly respected and well-known by the entire community.”

Archaeological excavations in Deadwood thriving intercultural relationships between White customers and Chinese businesses, from restaurants and gaming halls to opium houses and practitioners of Chinese medicine. White Deadwoodians attended Chinese funerals and cultural celebrations. Chinese Deadwoodians attended Fourth of July picnics.

These encounters weren’t necessarily a mark of assimilation, Zhu says, choosing to use the term “cultural fusion” instead. Cultural practice sharing went both ways.

By 1900, the Chinese population of Deadwood had dwindled to less than 90 people. But Zhu still keeps in touch with their descendants. “I don’t call myself a revisionist historian,” he says. He studies history—history that’s always been there.

Linda Sue Park didn’t set out to write a book about Asian Americans in the Old West. But more than 50 years after she first picked up the Little House series, she published : a middle-grade story about an Asian American girl growing up in Dakota Territory in the late 1800s.

Hanna, the main character in Prairie Lotus, is the daughter of a woman who immigrated to the U.S. from China and a White American man. She arrives in the fictional town of La Forge with dreams of attending school and becoming a dressmaker.

Things aren’t easy for Hanna. She endures constant racism and xenophobia, experiences drawn from Park’s own life. But Hanna’s life isn’t just about the racism she endures. Some of my favorite passages dive into her passion for garment-making.

Asian hate is not new. It’s been around for a long time. We’re just talking about it now.

“I wanted to give a little bit of a twist to the Asian laundry. I wanted to take that stereotype and work with it, but at the same time subvert it,” says Park, who comes from a family of accomplished needlewomen.

In a particularly multilayered twist, we learn that Hanna’s late mother—born in China and brought to the United States by Christian missionaries—was half Chinese and half Korean. It was Park’s way of writing Koreanness into the story long before substantial numbers of Koreans immigrated to the U.S.

Park thought a great deal about how to incorporate Native characters into the story, and she places Hanna in the context of a land that was stolen from Indigenous Ihanktonwan people. In the first few pages of the book, Hanna encounters Ihanktonwan women. These scenes were Park’s attempts in imagining what encounters with Indigenous people might have been like for a young girl on the American frontier.

In the wake of the , after a year of , Park has noticed a renewed interest in her books.

“Asian hate is not new. It’s been around for a long time. We’re just talking about it now,” she says. Park says she wants Prairie Lotus to be a resource for young readers about Asian American history—the good and the bad.

Park’s first book, Seesaw Girl, was published in 1999. 22 years later, she’s published 28 books, created and is an active member of the nonprofit . But she looks forward to the days when even more Asian American writers publish stories about Asian Americans in the Old West and beyond.

“There’s a lot more space for these stories, but I get so impatient. I don’t want three books. I want 300 and I want them now.” To Asian American authors, she says, “Please hurry up.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham voiced his concern of a at the when he said, “The demographics race we’re losing badly … [Republicans are] not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

Graham’s comments relay what social scientists and antiracism activists call “White Extinction Anxiety,” or “Fear of White Genetic Annihilation.”

The idea that White people could “” has been dismissed by some as , but the convergent effects of new laws banning abortion��together with old laws promoting mass incarceration of Black and Brown people��suggest that this White fear is not just an idea, but the catalyst for public policy.

There indeed appears to be a strong correlation between demographic projections, the fear of White genetic annihilation, and the recent wave of abortion bills.

Antiracism activist and diversity trainer that White people, including political leaders, “will do anything to see that doesn’t happen.”

Hyper-punitive abortion bans��the procedure outright except in cases of risk to a woman’s health, and in Georgia��a woman who obtains an abortion . Of 212 lawmakers in Alabama and Georgia whose votes ushered in the most restrictive abortion laws we’ve seen yet, .

What drives all of this is nothing as philosophical as religion. It’s not faith. It’s not principle. It’s the fear of genetic dominance of Black and Brown people.

The late Frances Cress Welsing, psychiatrist and author of��The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors��and The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation and Racism, is well-known for her theory of Black and Brown genetic dominance over the White recessive gene.

“People of color have the capacity to genetically annihilate White people,” she explained, “and unless White people control the reproduction of people of color, we can postulate that perhaps one day there won’t be any White people.”

But Welsing was not the only one who held this belief.

Her contemporary, demographer Ben Wattenberg, wrote in his book The Birth Dearth that the main problem in the United States is the low number of White births. Wattenberg believed that White people, without a change of course, would lose the numerical majority in the U.S., and it would no longer be a White man’s land.

He proposed three ways to address this: Pay women to have babies, increase the number of immigrants, and prevent abortions. The first two, he wrote, aren’t the answer because they would also increase the numbers of Black and Brown babies.��But the third, he posited, would solve the “birth dearth” problem because 60% of abortions are performed for White women.

The long-standing framework that once defined a woman’s reproductive rights as essentially her own prerogative is being zealously deconstructed to effect an increase of White births over time.

Since before the nation was formed, White people have controlled the lives and reproduction of people of color.

Not unlike the legal maneuverings that effectively made a person property under American chattel slavery, these , to variable degrees, take ownership of women’s reproductive rights, in essence forcibly breeding White women to produce at higher rates.

White patriarchal control over the��lives of women but especially women of color isn’t new, however.

Since before the nation was formed, White people have controlled the lives and reproduction of people of color.

Genocide of Indigenous peoples and chattel slavery of Africans and their descendants—a precursor to the criminalization and mass incarceration of Black and Brown people—are our most prominent examples.

Under chattel slavery, African women and their daughters were bred as animals for purposes of economic dominance, the financial benefits and dividends of which are still being realized today.

In “Un/Re/Dis covering Slave Breeding in Thirteenth Amendment Jurisprudence,” author and law professor as “intricacies of a practice that consisted of sexual domination and reproductive exploitation, designed specifically to facilitate, economically and physiologically, the institution of slavery.”

The war on drugs and “tough on crime” laws have also made long-lasting and devastating impacts on Black and Brown communities, the most significant being the loss of reproductive rights.

Even as some forms of marijuana have now been legalized or decriminalized in most states, many Black and Brown men and some women are incarcerated at higher rates than White people for the same offenses, and in many cases serve longer sentences.

Sociologist James Oleson suggests that the practice of eugenics didn’t disappear after World War II, but was “merely repackaged.” He writes in “The New Eugenics: Black Hyper-Incarceration and Human Abatement” that , and because minorities are incarcerated in disproportionately high numbers, they’re most dramatically affected. In fact, for Black males, “the effect of hyper-incarceration might be so great as to depress overall reproduction rates,” producing “a de facto new eugenics.”

In Gerber v. Hickman, a California district court held that incarceration of inmates “encompasses and restricts … the right to procreate,” that incarceration not only hinders, but also extinguishes reproductive rights and may influence overall fertility rates.

Birth rates across demographics have slowed. But the recent abortion bans favor a fearful White populace.

The Black economic oppression along with mass incarceration of mostly Black men means Black births are likely to continue their decline. Now, as women are under threat of death or life in prison, the bans could forcibly increase White births under the hope of generating an uptick in the national White demographic.

Still, in the foreseeable future the country will be, as Elliot puts it, “mostly brown.”

Eating disorder research has historically , and treatment plans are often expensive and lacking in cultural sensitivity. According to the , less than 13 percent of adolescents receive treatment for their eating disorders, leaving thousands of others to suffer alone, in silence. But not if Gloria Lucas can help it.

Lucas is the founder of Nalgona Positivity Pride, a /brown/indigenous body positive organization based in Compton, California, that takes an intersectional approach to eating disorder education. NPP provides community-based support for people of color who struggle with eating disorders and body image issues, emphasizing the need for decolonization within the body positive movement.

A post shared by NPP (@nalgonapositivitypride) on Dec 13, 2017 at 11:59am PST

Lucas, 26, identifies as a xicana womxn of Mexican indigenous descent. She has a background in sexual health education, HIV/AIDS services, and trauma and substance abuse services for women and transgender folks. Lucas founded NPP in 2014 after personally struggling with an eating disorder and experiencing firsthand the dire lack of resources—and representation—for women of color.

With over 50,000 followers on , Lucas uses her platform to create a safe space for women of color to find community. She does not allow numbers (in reference to weight, calorie counting, etc.) anywhere on her page, and she vigilantly moderates comments with a zero tolerance policy for body policing, food shaming, and health trolling.

I had the opportunity to speak with Lucas about NPP’s mission to decolonize body image and raise eating disorder awareness for communities that are too often left out of the conversation.

This interview has been lightly edited.

Ayu Sutriasa: What led to the creation of Nalgona Positivity Pride?

Gloria Lucas: I started NPP because I had an eating disorder and I know what it’s like to struggle with something that’s considered to only affect privileged white women. The research and information on eating disorders is not culturally sensitive—there were no resources for me. NPP started in response to wanting to create a platform that makes our experiences known. I realized we have to create our own healing opportunities in our communities instead of waiting for the medical-industrial complex to save us.

White supremacy informs us that our bodies and our lives are lesser.

Sutriasa: How do eating disorders affect people of color and indigenous people differently from how they affect white people?

Lucas: Our relationship with food was manipulated during colonialism. Connection and ceremony with land and food were disrupted and, in many cases, banned. Europeans came with a different set of beliefs from that of indigenous peoples. In Europe, food played an important role in religious affiliation and social class, and Europeans believed that specific foods made up the . Indigenous foods became inferior, and more varieties of meat and dairy were introduced.

Then you add years of poverty and , which inevitably leads to disordered eating. tell us that if someone in your family engages in eating disorder behavior, your chances of developing an eating disorder are higher. Now imagine 500 years of this ongoing trauma.

One of the most prevalent eating disorders in [marginalized] communities is . But BED wasn’t added to the until . Our communities have been struggling with this for years, but it wasn’t considered a real eating disorder until May of 2013? This shows that our eating disorders have gone unreported, undiagnosed, and untreated.

On top of that, the white supremacist narrative that arrived with colonialism tells us that we’re ugly, we’re inferior, we’re not smart, we’re disposable … and if self-love is not there, then we don’t take care of ourselves. This fosters self-hate, which can be part of the .

Sutriasa: How has the legacy of colonialism affected the way that body image is experienced by women of color and indigenous women?

Lucas: When the first waves of colonialism occurred on this continent, our people were killed off by disease, they were mutilated, they were raped, and they were enslaved. Our relationship to land was disrupted, and land is part of our self-esteem, it’s part of our well-being. Our ancestors had to enact extreme behaviors in order to survive, and, unfortunately, survival meant assimilating to white standards.

All of these traumas were passed down to following generations. There are more and more studies coming out on , which proves the idea that if one generation experiences trauma, it can be passed down. So with the introduction of colonialism, white supremacy became widespread. And white supremacy informs us that our bodies and our lives are lesser.

We have to create our own opportunities for healing.

Sutriasa: You mentioned communities of color shouldn’t wait for the medical-industrial complex to save them. Can you speak more about that?

Lucas: Historically, the medical-industrial complex has used black and brown bodies as means of . So there’s already injury and trauma there, not to mention ongoing racism within these institutions that make it very hard for people of color to receive services. When I had an eating disorder, there was no help for me besides Overeaters Anonymous, which is very white, and tends to be comprised of older people. A lot of these evidence-based treatments for eating disorders have not been tested on people from our communities—they have mainly been processed and evaluated in white populations. Part of healing is connection, and I didn’t have that in those spaces.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we were medicinal people. White people and medical institutions cannot appropriate our traditional medicine, so it’s up to us to create and reclaim that ancestral medicine. We have to create our own opportunities for healing, and not expect these institutions, that created injury for so many years, to save us.

Sutriasa: How does NPP facilitate this kind of healing in its community?

Lucas: A lot of my work is educating others. I travel and host webinars with the goal of teaching the connection between historical trauma and eating disorders. Knowledge is power, and it was my medicine to heal from my eating disorder. I had to recognize where it came from. If you don’t know where something comes from, how do you know what you need to heal yourself? So we have to recognize our own stories, because in this country the white narrative is dominant, but that doesn’t apply to us.

NPP also has different support groups. First is Sage and Spoon, which is an online peer support group that meets twice a month. It is specifically for indigenous peoples and people of color who struggle with troubled eating. It’s completely free.

We also have Te Con Miel, which is our monthly women of color circle that focuses on body image. Each month we discuss different topics regarding body image. That’s here in L.A., but starting in 2018 it will be hosted in Compton, which is where I live. Compton is a city with high rates of violence, of crime and corruption. There aren’t a lot of resources here. Look at the eating disorder world—where do they have their treatment centers? They have them in very luxurious places. They don’t have them here in the hood. There’s no money for that. So this is my chance to create a healing opportunity in a place where there really isn’t much.

We have to remember that regardless of the type of society that we live in, disease always exists. Disabilities have always existed. So we need to stop moralizing health and actually take action. We need to start addressing health disparities, food deserts, and low self-esteem. Let’s start talking about white supremacy and fatphobia. Let’s combat the systemic issues that are hindering our ability to exceed in our self-esteem and our worth. That’s how we help people heal: by actively working to remove the stigma attached to the bodies of marginalized people.

“Linguists’ work in communities when language shift is occurring shows that for the most part such refashioning, even when social identity is maintained, involves abrupt loss of tradition,” writes. “�鶹���¼� often, the cultural forms of the colonial power take over, transmitted often by television.”

In response to the threat of language loss, some Indigenous tribes are turning towards accessible technology to save and revitalize their languages.

Language revitalization is grounded in education and accessibility; if language resources aren’t available and there are no designated ways to practice that language, how will it continue to be used?

Some tribes, such as the and , have held language courses for several years, but many tribes face barriers to developing language programs of their own. There may not be any remaining elders who speak the language well enough to teach it—the Cherokee and Navajo Nations are the two largest Native American tribes who have retained the most speakers of their languages.

Then even if there is an elder available to teach, they may lack resources to set up structured, systemic language classes. Then, there is the added challenge of accessibility—if the classes take place at a high school on the reservation, how will tribe members living off the reservation access the information?

That’s where technological solutions can help.

The computers in our pockets

When Keegan Livermore, a member of the Yakama Nation, learned that there were —a language in the Sahaptin family spoken by the Yakama, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation—he felt a responsibility to learn the language himself.

While attending a technology panel during a linguistic education workshop, Livermore’s group discussed how language tools could be made more accessible to young people.

“W��’ve already had computer keyboards,” Livermore said. “If we’re thinking about how to get teenagers and college students to use it, why not make a phone keyboard?”

Livermore, who at the time was studying linguistics and learning the Ichishkíin language at Heritage University on the Yamaka Reservation, describes the process of creating an as a four-day fever dream, working on his graduate studies during the day and coding the keyboard at night.

Written Ichishkíin has a 39-character alphabet, many of which are modified English characters. But, the intention was to have a keyboard strictly built for Ichishkíin, not a keyboard based in English. For example, the alphabet has the characters ḵ, w, and ḵw. While Livermore could have created a modified English keyboard that just had ḵ and w, he chose to create a key for ḵw, honoring the actual alphabet of the language.

Livermore and seven other Ichishkíin speakers then tested the keyboard in text messages and social media posts, modifying the placement of characters until the keyboard seemed optimized for Ichishkíin.

“I was really pushing myself to use it as often as I could,” Livermore said, which helped him build his confidence speaking the language. ���� gives me a tether for the language.”

Livermore, who is now working on adapting the keyboard to iOS, envisions using phone keyboards as a way to assign homework in his own future language curriculum. An easy assignment could be a student texting him a couple sentences in Ichishkíin about what they did over the weekend or requiring a few texts a week between class “pen pals,” Livermore said. Those types of assignments inject the language in students’ everyday modern life—a key part of language revitalization.

Because Ichishkíin speakers must have a grasp of vocabulary to read and type the language, Livermore’s keyboard isn’t an early education tool, but rather an accessible way to integrate practice into a learner’s daily life.

���� enables you to use what you already know,” Livermore said.

Filling in the gaps

Along with keyboards and texting, help comes from teachers such as Tami Hohn, a southern Lushootseed lecturer at the University of Washington and member of the Puyallup Tribe.

Lushootseed is a Salishan language spoken by Indigenous people in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. Hohn has taught the language both to children and adults, groups that require different educational approaches, she said.

For children, Hohn developed a curriculum that uses a grammatical approach by breaking down sentences into individual words and syllable sounds. With adults, Hohn teaches an intellectual understanding of the language, one that is informed by history, culture, and meaning. An intellectual understanding of the language allows speakers to create their own thoughts through the language, not just string together vocabulary words.

For all language learners, Hohn said, language apps—such as phrase-to-picture matching games—can be a great way to practice the language in small moments, like waiting for an appointment or at the bus stop.

Lushootseed also has computer and mobile keyboards based on Unicode, a worldwide standard for digitally representing different written languages and assigning characters to specific keystrokes. But Unicode doesn’t always transfer across digital platforms such as email or various web browsers, making Lushootseed characters show up as odd boxes and nonsensical punctuation.

“The support that we really need from [technology] companies is the fonts,” Hohn said. “W�� shouldn’t have to type in Unicode, we should be able to type anywhere.”

Lack of font support is one way Native languages are being forced into the past. Hohn believes tribes shouldn’t have to find a workaround to type in their language.

Preservation through audio

According to Hohn, Lushootseed no longer has first-language speakers—people who grew up speaking fluently—so linguists only had access to the language through preserved writings and audio recordings. Recording and archiving audio files of elders or fluent speakers is another preservation tool that can provide a foundation to language revitalization.

FirstVoices is a suite of web-based tools designed to help Indigenous people archive language information for teaching and preservation. The service, launched in 2003, provides tribes with a page where audio clips of words, phrases, stories, songs, and more can be uploaded and organized. The initiative, run by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council in British Columbia, also provides grants for communities working on language revitalization to compensate them for the time it takes to archive the audio.

Daniel Yona, FirstVoices’ development manager, stressed that the service enables tribes to approach language documentation and revitalization as each community sees best fit by providing as many tools as possible for each tribe to customize their archive. For example, each tribe’s archive has an administrator who can determine which recordings are private and which are public. Public recordings can be played by anyone, but to listen to private recordings, a tribal member must create an account and be approved by the tribe’s administrator to access the audio. This keeps recordings of prayers or sacred songs strictly within the tribal community.

FirstVoices now hosts 31 of the 34 indigenous languages in B.C., as well as some Native American languages from the United States. Yona says that it’s not a goal to have all of the languages archived on FirstVoices, because the initiative is only one part of the multifaceted effort of language revitalization.

“Just because they’re not on FirstVoices doesn’t mean they don’t have dictionaries and they’re not doing work in their own communities,” Yona said. “Technology is one piece of this bigger picture of language revitalization.”

The threat of a long process

With the threat of language extinction looming, native language activists such as Hohn and Livermore feel a sense of urgency in everything they do. At the same time, language revitalization is a generational process.

“I will never see in my lifetime the state of language that I aspire to,” Livermore said. The Ichishkíin learners Livermore will teach will become better teachers than he is, and their students will pass on the skills to their descendents. Livermore foresees a language revival among future generations, but that doesn’t stop the pressure of needing to do as much as he can right now.

“I feel that sense of urgency all the time,” Hohn said, but being patient in the face of a constant threat of language extinction is essential to successful revitalization. A limited number of Lushootseed teachers deeply understand the language. If teachers who do not understand the language in a cultural and historical way are pushed to teach as many people as they can in the name of revitalization, the language will still be reduced to grammar and vocabulary. That childlike understanding of Lushootseed, or any other native language, will be detrimental to the integrity and significance of the language, Hohn said.

“You have to have language with meaning or what’s the point?” Hohn said.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the of federally recognized tribes in the U.S. The number has been corrected, and YES! regrets this error.

This theory was first established, in part, through rat experiments—ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advertisement by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The ad explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently?

So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was—at the same time as the Rat Park experiment—a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers—according to the same study—simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.

Rats in the Park

If you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover?

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for 57 days—if anything can hook you, it’s that.

Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is—again—striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them.

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don’t seem to make sense—unless you take account of this new approach.

Here’s one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief.

The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right—it’s the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them—then it’s obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to.

But here’s the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe, as I used to, that chemical hooks are what cause addiction, then this makes no sense.

But if you believe Bruce Alexander’s theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

The Opposite of Addiction Is Connection

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts.

A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.

Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn’t shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me—you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.

But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre’s book The Cult of Pharmacology.

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism—cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That’s not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that’s still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about chemical hooks is, in fact, real, only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the 100-year-old war on drugs.

This massive war—which kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool—is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people’s brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren’t the driver of addiction—if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction—then this makes no sense.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona—Tent City—where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (‘The Hole’) for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record, guaranteeing they with be cut off ever more.

How Portugal Halved Drug Addiction Levels

There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world—and so leave behind their addictions.

This isn’t theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with one percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse.

So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them—to their own feelings, and to the wider society.

Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system.

The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One group of addicts were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other’s care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I’ll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent.

Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country’s top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect: more crime, more addicts. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass—and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal’s example.

We need now to talk about social recovery—how we all recover, together …

Happiness in “the Age of Loneliness”

This isn’t only relevant to addicts. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster’s: “only connect.” But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live–constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.

The writer George Monbiot has called this “the age of loneliness.” We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander, the creator of Rat Park, told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery—how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence isn’t just a challenge to us politically. It doesn’t just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.

Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention—tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won’t stop should be shunned. It’s the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives.

But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction—and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever—to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can’t.

The term,  in 2014 by Southern California-based development company , is a real estate brand that—different from urban gardening—centers agriculture in neighborhoods, and is mostly targeted at affluent millennials, who are increasingly considering proximity to fresh and “clean” foods in their homebuying decisions. The defines agrihoods as master-planned housing communities with working farms as their focus. Overwhelmingly, they have large swaths of green space, orchards, hoop houses and greenhouses, and some with  barns, outdoor community kitchens, and environmentally sustainable homes decked with solar panels and composting.

Agrihoods, which number about , are typically in rural and suburban areas—with some near large urban centers such as Phoenix, Colorado, and Atlanta—replacing previous generations’ desire for the lush green acres of golf communities. They’re newer communities with homes that cost $300,000 to $700,000, but can be in the millions such as those in the Walden Monterey community in the Bay Area. At , luxury amenities are expected where lots start at $5 million each.

For us, food insecurity is the biggest issue.

Instead of living on or near a golf course, San Francisco’s tech giants can live near a unique farm-to-table agrihood, where they walk out their front doors to pick the fixings for their avocado toast.

But a new type of agrihood has emerged.

Within the city of Detroit, home to nearly 1,400 community gardens and farms, there is one officially designated agrihood, Michigan Urban Farming Initiative. The nonprofit in the North End neighborhood, just north of the recently gentrified Midtown area, calls itself .

It was founded in 2012 and gained its development designation in 2016.

Co-founder Tyson Gersh said at the time, “Over the last four years, we’ve grown from an urban garden that provides fresh produce for our residents to a diverse, agricultural campus that has helped sustain the neighborhood, attracted new residents and area investment.” They’ve received corporate support from Target, BASF, and General Motors.

The Michigan initiative is a 3-acre farm focusing on food insecurity in one of Detroit’s historic communities that was once home to a thriving Black middle class. Now the  is under $25,000, and about 35% of the residents are homeowners.

The Detroit agrihood model plans to provide a Community Resource Center with educational programs and meeting space across from the garden, a café, and two commercial kitchens.

“For us, food insecurity is the biggest issue,” says, Quan Blunt, the Michigan initiative’s farm manager. “The closest [fresh] produce store to this neighborhood is Whole Foods [4 miles away in Midtown], and you know how expensive they can be.”

MUFI grows lots of hot peppers and collard greens, because that is what North Enders like, Blunt says. But they’re also an . At MUFI, one of their sustainability goals is to create hot sauces from their fresh peppers to sell. The farm also has rows and rows of other vegetable varieties all dotted with marigolds, which help keep bugs away, organically.

Blunt, who joined the Peace Corps after college to do food security work in India, was born and raised in Detroit, and is proud of the agricultural heritage passed down through his family.

My grandmother grew up in this neighborhood,” says Blunt, a graduate of Michigan State University’s College of Agriculture who majored in Food Science and Environmental Studies. Growing up in Detroit, labeled a “food desert,” was a major motivation for Blunt to enter the agricultural field. “People deserve fresh food,” Blunt says, “I believe good nutrition can help people reach their potential.”

Blunt says MUFI recognizes the importance of being a part of the community, and works closely with the North End Block Club. MUFI has served them in ways such as neighborhood cleanups, he says. With a trip to the farm, one can see that the grass is neatly manicured, even at abandoned property near the area.

“Community members can use our tools, our lawnmower,” Blunt says. “Whenever we get large numbers of volunteers [for the farm], we go first to the block club president to see what she needs done. The goal here is to strengthen the community.”

At MUFI, produce is free to all. The farm is open for harvesting on Saturday mornings.

The free-food concept has been a topic of debate within urban farming communities, particularly those whose focus is food sovereignty, controlling the means of one’s own food production and distribution.

The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network has spent more than a decade working toward this end. The community-based nonprofit membership organization recently celebrated 13 years of service to the city. The Detroit network operates D-Town Farm, the largest of the Detroit’s gardens and farms, on the city’s west side.

“[At D Town] we are most interested in fostering self-determination,” the network’s executive director Malik Yakini says.

The 7-acre farm grows more than 30 different fruits, vegetables and herbs, which are sold at local farmers markets and to wholesale customers at the farm. It employs five people part time, and hosts up to 40 to 50 volunteers weekly during the busy summer months.

“Urban agriculture is not a one size fits all venture,”&�Բ�����; Yakini says. “There are various motivations behind it.”

Some folks are trying to improve food insecurity and access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and some do it because they think it is a good community exercise, he says.

“Our purpose is to get Black people working on their own behalf,” Yakini explains. “That is not to say that garden leadership has to be exclusively Black, but in a majority Black city [which Detroit is], we hope that the gardening organizations reflect the population.” For Yakini, building gardens in Detroit is to build economic and environmental justice as well.

Oakland Avenue Urban Farm—also in the North End, and a neighbor of MUFI—sells its produce as well, and products created from that produce, such as their delicious fruit jam, Afro Jam. But Jerry Ann Hebron, the Oakland farm’s executive director, allows bartering for volunteer hours or service to the farm.

At Oakland Avenue, community events are frequent. Farm-to-table dinners, parties, and other opportunities to gather is a priority. “The Oakland Avenue corridor, historically, was important to Detroit,” Hebron explains. The neighborhood was the northern extension of the historic Hastings Street, where Black entrepreneurship prospered. “And because it is where we chose to do this work, it was important to have a space that is for the community and they could feel connected to.”

Detroit’s agricultural neighborhoods, whether or not branded as an “agrihood,” are attractions for newcomers to the city. Gardens, to some, signal safety in a city that has for many years been labeled as “the most dangerous” or “most violent” for many years. And as more transplants make Detroit home, the hundreds of acres of vacant land across the sprawling 139-square-mile city are prime real estate opportunities for new developments.

Real estate entrepreneur and investor Rondre’ “Key” Brooks says as he sells homes to clients he finds that they are not just looking to buy a home, but to buy into a neighborhood and community.

“Agricultural neighborhoods bring a different look and feel to the community,” Brooks says. “While there are the obvious healthy lifestyle benefits, they also create a more appealing environment.”

For MUFI’s Quan Blunt, Detroit’s embrace of agriculture paints an optimistic picture, “Air quality would go up. Nutrition would improve,” he says wistfully, “What a city Detroit could be.”

Today, coffeehouses are still meeting places for business dealings and idealogical musings.

Last month, two young Black entrepreneurs visited a Philadelphia Starbucks to meet with a business associate. A minutes after the men arrived. The video of the arrest went viral. It’s not easy to forget the image of these men standing quietly in handcuffs—an eerie resemblance of enslaved men before them. Upon his arrival, their associate—a White man—made futile attempts to speak on their behalf. One of the young men later told a reporter that he feared for his life.

This week, Starbucks for four hours to conduct anti-bias training for its employees.

Centuries before a green-and-white mermaid logo became synonymous for lattes and free Wi-Fi, coffeehouses like the London Coffee House served as de facto organizers of financial markets in port cities on both sides of the Atlantic. People were lured by caffeine, of course, but moreover by the open exchange of ideas and the chance to mingle in elegant but affordable comfort. These English-style coffeehouses became “really important to the development of capitalism [in] London [from] the 17th to 19th century,” says Markman Ellis, author of The Coffee House: A Cultural History. During that period, the legendary London financial infrastructure was still forming. “People would go to a particular coffeehouse in order to meet a particular kind of merchant” who specialized in procuring the goods or capital for that industry, says Ellis.

For example, William Lloyd’s Coffee House in London specialized in being the first in getting marine news, such as arrivals and shipwrecks. Maritime businessmen met there with ship operators to arrange the trading of cargo and invest in future voyages. Merchants and traders profited from the transatlantic slave trade before abolition “not only in the buying and selling of slaves,” Ellis says, but also in the “whole marine business of ship insurance and mortgages to sea captains.” This commerce network sparked the creation of Lloyd’s of London and helped other businesses across Britain, such as Barclays prosper.

In the Cornhill section of London, there were coffeehouses that connected people with interests in the particular colonies, such as the Virginia Coffee House and the Jamaica Coffee House. Traders, bankers, and Lloyd’s merchants also met in coffeehouses in Bristol, England, to enrich themselves with profits from processed in that city between 1698 and 1807. It’s not surprising then that English-style coffeehouses spread to the British colonies very early, says Ellis, although there were fewer of them. There was one in Boston before there was one in Paris, he adds.

Today, the global coffee chain Starbucks markets itself as a public space. But for whom?

“[In the colonies], as the coffeehouse world is emerging, you don’t have large scale commercial banks to the same extent that you have [them] in the 19th century,” says Edward Baptist, scholar and writer of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. This scenario “means that the movement of capital in many cases is individual-to-individual, across mercantile networks that are knit together by relationships and family networks,” Baptist explains. While there was no real aristocracy in the colonies to navigate, coffeehouses became a “transition point” to connect people, “allowing erosion of the traditionalist grip on both politics and the economy of the Atlantic world.”

“From the 16th through the 19th century, the use of enslaved people’s bodies, futures, and families, the exploitation of their own hopes [was] everywhere and constant” in the economic system, says Baptist. Slavery-based commerce—and not just slave ownership—allowed Northerners and other people outside the plantation system to partake in the immense financial profits from slavery. Coffeehouses—a great place to connect goods and capital streams with seekers—facilitated the very aspect of slavery that amplified capitalism. “[In this system], enslaved peoples’ bodies are not only bought and sold, but made into part of these processes of credit and more rapid flow of finance,” Baptist says.

William Bradford opened his (there was an earlier one) in Philadelphia in 1754 at the corner of Front and High (now Front and Market) with funding from 200 merchants who wanted a place to assemble. Nearly 40 years later, just 100 miles away, the New York Stock Exchange was launched by merchants and traders in the Tontine Coffee House at 82 Wall Street. Shipowners registered their vessels with the exchange, and a monetary value was assigned to their freight, including the living cargo from Africa. “The aspiration of the city’s founders was to be the leading slave trading port in the Americas,” says historian Leslie Harris. At its height of activity in the Triangular Trade, New York City lagged only behind Charleston, South Carolina, in number of imported enslaved Africans.

“When we think about the end of slavery in the North, it is important to note that in New York and Philadelphia, no slaves were freed by abolition laws,” says Harris. Rather, formerly enslaved and those born to them continued to be bought and sold as indentured servants for years after legislation was passed. Indentured or freed Blacks could have also worked in the coffeehouses. After emancipation, however, they were kept out of the jobs they once performed because they were seen as competition by the White working class.

“Capitalism rests on the work, endeavors, and exploitation of non-White people.”

Today, the global coffee chain Starbucks markets itself too as a public space. But for whom? Like the drinking houses of prior centuries, the company touts an “all are welcome” policy, but their atmosphere, as well as the price and type of drinks on the menu, and discrimination by some employees, may imply otherwise.

The modern coffeeshop, for many, represents a more conducive working space than the cubicle system. But in the likeness of its predecessor, it doesn’t seem to be intended for all of us to experience it in the same way. “Capitalism rests on the work, endeavors, and exploitation of non-White people,” says Baptist. “And so does some of the assumptions about who gets to participate in what level of the economy, who gets to make decisions, and who gets to move in those kinds of innovative spaces.” He continues: “Those ideas seem in some cases to be very deeply cemented into many folks’ understanding of who capitalism is for.”

According to Baptist, the emergence of public spaces such as English-style coffeehouses is seen as a democratizing process. These establishments, despite their role in the commerce of slavery, provided people across social classes—originally White men, but later people of color and women—with places to launch revolutions. In addition to American colonists, some abolitionists organizing in 1790s London, such as Olaudah Equiano, “valued the openness of the coffeehouse to all kinds of people” and chose to use these spaces instead of private homes or religious edifices, says Ellis.

Twenty-first-century Philadelphia has Black-owned coffeehouses, in the tradition of those abolitionists, running quiet radical movements of their own.

, owner of Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, may have lacked the access to capital that William Bradford, Starbucks’ founders, and others had, but she has leveraged her personal savings, city grants, and other innovative financing solutions to launch her business. Now one of the most popular comic book establishments in the country, Amalgam has become an alternative to the traditional “White, hetero-normative spaces,” she says.

While companies like Starbucks step up to address historical social ills, there are other emerging spaces that welcome everyone.

Johnson says, “[We] support and highlight the voices of people of color and LGTBQ, as well as professional and business development opportunities.”

But the reality is that  until now has been quite prominent in American society—and not just in the South.

His statue stands between the two chambers of the House and Senate in the South Carolina Statehouse. However, a separate statue in Charleston has been  from the town square after nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd during an encounter with police. The statue had stood for 124 years just a block from , site of the  of nine Black worshippers by an avowed white supremacist. The church is also on Calhoun Street. 

Despite his historic prominence, Calhoun’s days as a revered icon in the public sphere are gradually coming to an end.

Calhoun is all around us

Numerous cities and counties, streets and roads, schools, and other public places are named for Calhoun, a  who served as , , , and two terms as .

For instance, the  sits in the capitol complex in Columbia, South Carolina’s state capital city.

Counties are named for him in his , as well as , , , and elsewhere in the South. There is even a  named for him. 

Major streets in Columbia and Charleston still bear his name.

Colleges and universities

Despite his prominence elsewhere, Calhoun is about to become less prominent on the landscape of American higher education.

The board of trustees at Clemson University, a public university,  June 12 that its Honors College would no longer be named after Calhoun.

South Carolina’s prevents renaming of buildings without legislative approval, but the honors college is an organizational unit, not a building.

This is a particularly significant development given that Clemson University sits on what was once , which his daughter and her husband, Thomas Clemson, inherited.

While public memorials of Calhoun appear to be on the decline, what I find more significant—and more troublesome—is the way that Calhoun’s ideology has been ingrained in the American culture and psyche—primarily because his ideas were embraced in U.S. institutions of higher learning long after his death.

I make this observation as a historian and author of a chapter for the , Persistence Through Peril: Episodes of College Life and Academic Endurance in the Civil War South.

Who was he?

, who was born in 1782 and died a decade before the Civil War began, in 1850, was not only a  and an ardent defender of slavery, but a chief architect of the political system that allowed slavery to persist.

�鶹���¼� enduring than the effects of his political career—which included the  to expand the number of slaveholding states —are the repercussions of his political ideology. 

As a political theorist, Calhoun is best known for two ideas: “” and “nullification.” A concurrent majority is the notion that a minority of the electorate—namely, one with money and property—can veto a political majority.

This idea is related to his belief in  theory, which is the idea that a state can void federal laws. Nullification made the idea of South Carolina seceding from the nation—and the creation of the Confederacy—a political possibility and then a reality. 

Calhoun laid out his arguments for these ideas in his treatise “.”

While some Americans defended slavery as a “” Calhoun viewed slavery as “.”

He held , declaring: “W�� make a great mistake when we suppose that all people are capable of self-government.”

The Calhoun curriculum

Calhoun’s political doctrines were taught explicitly in college classrooms for decades after his death. are still in the curriculum.

His own views on nullification theory, states’ rights, and secession were formed when he studied at Yale University, where the college’s president, , introduced to him the espoused the idea that New England could leave the young nation and become a separate country. Yale named a residential college in his honor in 1931. It  after the intense pressure from students and alumni after the Charleston massacre at the Mother Emanuel Church.

In the chapter that I am writing for Persistence through Peril, I am explaining how Calhoun’s ideologies permeated Southern institutions of higher education. His views were taught at the Military Academy of South Carolina, before, during, and after the Civil War. When those cadets studied the U.S. Constitution, their professors and texts emphasized Calhoun’s interpretation of it.

, a Citadel graduate and Confederate Army colonel who served as professor, superintendent, and later trustee at The Citadel, heaped praise upon Calhoun, having served as editor for  in 1857.

In a speech given at Clemson University on June 22, 1897, Thomas declared, ���� is conceded that Calhoun’s standard in the science of government is so lofty as in some respects to be unattainable in our day and generation.”

The road ahead

Decades of teaching a particular doctrine do not fade easily or quickly. The United States is now witnessing another  with protests for social justice. Symbols of racism and white supremacy are being removed from higher education. 

On June 17, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees  its  on renaming buildings, put in place after the statue known as “” was torn down in 2018.

The , which includes the University of Georgia, also moved in June 2020 to review the names of its buildings. This would include the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism, which is named after Henry Grader, an .

After Calhoun’s death in 1850, his colleague in the Senate,  of Missouri, remarked about him: “He is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.” He was prophetic in his words. 

Calhoun’s ideologies , gave comfort to those who believed in the “” (that is, to show the Civil War in the best light possible from the Confederate point of view), and perpetuated the teaching of racist and white supremacist attitudes.

Because the ideas he espoused have flourished, I believe that dismantling his legacy will take much more than just removing statues of his likeness or renaming buildings, streets, and other public places named in his honor.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

But as we face the prospect of another potential Trump presidency, the architects of Project 2025 have made it clear that overturning Roe was just the first in a multistep plan to eradicate access to safe abortion. Though the Republican Party removed a federal abortion ban from its official party platform, there’s something more sinister that’s been hiding in plain sight for 150 years.

, signed into law in 1873, made it a federal offense to disseminate contraceptives, abortifacients, and information about either across state lines or through the mail. Named after Anthony Comstock, an anti-obscenity crusader who inspired the title of the biographical book , the Comstock Law had far-reaching tentacles. Even married couples who used contraception could be sentenced to up to one year in prison.

Over time, various challenges to the Comstock Act, including in 1936, which made it possible for physicians to distribute contraception across state lines; in 1964, which established the constitutional right to contraception; and, of course, in 1973, essentially made it unenforceable. However, the law was never repealed and has instead become a “zombie law,” a term used to describe laws still on the books that have been overruled by other legal cases. Take, for instance, Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban, a zombie law that became legally viable after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Though , it still remained on the books long enough to instill fear in those .

Now, after the fall of Roe, Project 2025 plans to revive the zombie Comstock Act and make it workable. Since it’s already on the books, Congress isn’t required to pass the Comstock Act. Instead, a president and appointed judges can choose whether to enforce it. Project 2025 architects hope that, if given another term, Trump will do just that.

A Significant Threat to Abortion

in the U.S. Since Roe fell in June 2022, every single time the issue has been on the ballot, even in traditionally conservative states like Kansas, Montana, and Ohio. While a national abortion ban could threaten congressional seats for Republicans, it would also require control of both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a higher threshold than simply winning the presidency. So, it seems, the architects of Project 2025 have developed a workaround to meet their aims.

After Roe was overturned, issued guidance about whether the Comstock Act could be used to criminalize someone who receives mifepristone and misoprostol through the United States Postal Service. “W�� conclude that section 1461 does not prohibit the mailing, or the delivery or receipt by mail, of mifepristone or misoprostol where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully,” the memorandum opinion states. “Federal law does not prohibit the use of mifepristone and misoprostol,” the memorandum continues. “Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (‘FDA’) has determined the use of mifepristone in a regimen with misoprostol to be safe and effective for the medical termination of early pregnancy.”

But under a Trump presidency, the DOJ would likely have a different view, especially since Project 2025 explicitly calls for “against providers and distributors of [abortion] pills.”

Additionally, the spate of radical, far-right judges Trump appointed during his first term have already proven their willingness to to curb access to abortion. In 2023, , who has deep ties to the anti-abortion movement, defied court precedent to suspend the approval of mifepristone. “The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly,” he wrote in his decision. “But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns—in violation of its statutory duty—based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.”

If Trump is able to appoint even more partisan judges like Kacsmaryk to the federal bench, it’s possible they would use the Comstock Act to criminalize folks sending or receiving mifepristone and misoprostol (or even information about it) through the mail. “If the Comstock [Act] were enforced, it would seriously impact the work we do,” says Sneha S. Nair, partnerships coordinator at , a collection of online platforms that provides abortion and contraception information and services. “W�� rely on digital platforms to share [sexual and reproductive health] content worldwide, and restrictions like the Comstock [Act] could lead to significant censorship and suppression of vital information.”

But even the threat of Comstock being enforced is concerning for abortion advocates and providers. “What people believe the law to be is just as important, if not more so, than what the law actually is,” says Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at , a legal organization that aims to transform the policy landscape to make reproductive justice a reality. “When people have to second-guess what their options are and they just know that there’s a sort of vague and looming fear of criminalization … that is not a risk that everybody has the privilege to tolerate.”

For Black and Brown people, who have already for pregnancy outcomes, even the threat of an enforceable Comstock Law could be enough of a deterrent to prevent them from seeking necessary care.

Refusing to Be Silent

While Project 2025’s architects may be banking on the Comstock Act, they will have to contend with a network of providers and advocates refusing to put the genie back in the draconian bottle. For example, ’s post-Dobbs campaign, “,” promotes information about and access to medication abortion online.

Similarly, the , a DIY medical collective, has literally turned into medication abortion. Embedded in the cards are three doses of misoprostol, which can be used on its own to induce an abortion, and since it’s a paper card, the pills are harder to detect.

Others believe the best way to combat Project 2025’s insidious ploy to use the Comstock Act as a backdoor abortion ban is to refuse to be cowed into silence about the revolutionary power of being able to terminate a pregnancy in your own home.

Today, the in the U.S. are induced through medication, most often a combination of the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Telehealth for abortion care, in which a provider virtually prescribes these drugs to patients, has become , even in states with abortion bans.

“The number of people served through telehealth has just grown exponentially since the pandemic,” says Elisa Wells, co-founder and co-director of , which promotes access to medication abortion online. “[When people find out] that you can get an abortion by the mail, which is a really new idea … they think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’”

Research from the revealed that in the second half of 2023, more than 40,000 people in states that restrict telehealth or ban abortion were able to receive medication abortion from providers in that protect providers from being criminalized. Plan C’s website traffic has surged since Dobbs; Wells says they now receive approximately 2 million visitors annually.

There’s also the option of self-managing abortion with abortion pills. For people in states with severe restrictions or bans, self-managed medical abortion with pills has become an option for many who otherwise wouldn’t have access to abortion care. Plan C, for example, showcases many sites that prescribe and mail medication abortion to folks directly, including and .

There is a vast digital ecosystem of medication abortion information and services that abortion seekers can have mailed right to their door—unless Project 2025 goes into effect.

“​​What we are most concerned about is that people have access to accurate information about how to get the pills, how to use the pills, and the fact that in some states there might be legal risks associated with using the pills,” says Wells. “Every day is a risk assessment, and people can make good decisions about their lives. It’s not for me to say about somebody else’s life. What’s the best choice for you?”

As support for immigration has waned, Donald Trump, in his most tried and true political move, has stoked a moral panic over rising “migrant crime,” fearmongering and pitting communities of color against each other to gain votes. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has not only gone along with the narrative, but his administration has gutted the asylum system and outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico, exacerbating the U.S.-manufactured crisis at the border and leading to more senseless deaths and precarity in the borderlands and beyond. Vice President Kamala Harris has followed the lead of the president she hopes to succeed.

I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue. Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is. In , I write about how moral panics and so-called “tough on crime” policies have facilitated the expansion of immigrant detention. The Democrats’ play on immigration feels akin to the Clinton era in the ’90s, when Republicans took hold of Congress for the first time in decades. The 1994 crime bill, along with immigration laws passed by Congress in 1996,  of the criminal legal and immigration enforcement systems, doubling the capacity of the immigrant detention apparatus.

Later during President Barack Obama’s tenure, his administration expanded collaborations with local police and ramped up border enforcement to make the case for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. As a result, deportations skyrocketed, earning him the moniker “deporter in chief.” But as I write in the book, years of accepting border militarization and criminalization as a strategy to bring relief to “innocent” immigrants in the United States have only resulted in more dehumanization of migrants in general, thus creating more barriers to securing legalization for the 11 million undocumented people living here. Despite this lesson, many organizations are falling back into the “good immigrant versus bad immigrant” frame—or in this case, the old immigrant versus the new immigrant, making the case for some at the expense of others.

It all feels incredibly bleak. But I try to remind myself that there have been numerous moments when anti-immigrant sentiment has ruled the political discourse only to retreat as movements fought back: California in the ’90s after the passage of the harsh ballot measure Proposition 187; the 2006 immigrant rights marches that brought millions to the streets in response to the post-9/11 immigration crackdown; and more recently the boycotts of the state of Arizona protesting SB 1070, the “show me your papers” law that gave the state unconstitutional immigration enforcement authority. In some of our most dire political moments, immigrant communities, organizers, advocates, and ordinary people have stepped up to fight back, opening space for crucial movement victories.

After the gut punch that was the 2016 election result, organizers and advocates have more seriously engaged in . Sometimes these sessions only serve to cause more anxiety. But they have also been critical spaces to figure out how our movements can prepare. It is important to recognize that we have lost ground since the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the near-simultaneous mass uprising for Black lives, which produced significant leftward shifts on mass incarceration, policing, and immigration enforcement. Since then, the backlash has been building, and opportunities for major victories are now out of reach. In many ways, the current conditions require us to return to the basics of organizing and movement building. There are no easy solutions, and broadening the base of support is our best bet for combating the harmful narratives about immigrants and immigration.

Since the release of Project 2025,  about what a second Trump term would look like on immigration. His administration would strip status from millions of undocumented people who benefit from programs such as Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to live and work in the United States. This would make them even more vulnerable to deportation. Along with local, state, and federal police forces, a second Trump administration plans to deploy the National Guard to round up immigrants already residing in the United States and warehouse them in detention camps across the country. The proposals conjure up images from World War II, when Japanese Americans were labeled “enemies of the state” and incarcerated in “relocation centers.” In addition to the full-on attack of immigrants currently living in the country, the plans include a more robust Muslim and African ban and other efforts to shut down the border to people seeking refuge. Other proposals that have been floated, such as ending birthright citizenship, are more outlandish and difficult to accomplish, but the intent is clear. Right-wing politicians have embraced the racist “” theory, and the goal is to end immigration as we know it.

In the case of a Trump election win, demanding that the Biden administration dismantle the detention and deportation systems and rescind harsh border policies will be imperative. So far Biden has received a pass from liberals and even some immigration advocates on his ramping up of enforcement, but the short period of time between the election and inauguration will require a united front to make Stephen Miller’s dark agenda that much harder to implement. Once Trump is in office, there will no doubt be a relentless onslaught of executive orders requiring rapid response. Many will turn to litigation, but there are obvious limitations given the makeup of the courts. And if we want to build for the long-term, it is critical that we invest in organizing and base building.

It may seem difficult to imagine a Trump administration being affected by mass mobilization, but in 2018, after widespread public outrage, he ended the zero-tolerance policy separating families at the border. Separations continued, but not at the same scale. As immigrant communities are targeted, going local in our strategies will also take center stage to mitigate the harm of his administration. Creating spaces for sanctuary and community defense networks, limiting collaboration between police and ICE, and waging campaigns to prevent detention expansion will be essential to throwing a wrench in their plans. We must also create on-ramps for those newly engaged or returning to the fight, fortifying the movement to protect communities now and build for the future when there may be openings.

As for Harris, her  made clear that she is positioning herself as tough on immigration and will continue to campaign around what both parties like to call “border security.” Depending on the makeup of the House and Senate, an immigration bill could move in Congress in 2025. The bipartisan Senate border bill proposed earlier this year, and , created a new floor for how much Democrats are willing to trade off to get something passed. Before this point, legalization for a large portion of undocumented immigrants was always on the table, but in this instance the tradeoff was more funding for military aid to Ukraine and Israel, and nonpunitive reforms to the system were minimal.

The border panic has divided the movement, but it’s imperative for us to understand that anti-immigrant sentiment is driven in part by rampant and widening social inequality. Solidarity across movements for racial and economic justice and against U.S. militarism will be essential as we tackle the rightward lurch on immigration. Now is the time to offer an alternative approach, one grounded in a vision of a world without cages that embraces the freedom of movement—one in which all our communities can thrive.

In addition to border policy, we should anticipate a Harris administration to follow Biden’s approach to interior enforcement. Despite Biden proclaiming a hundred days into his presidency that there should be “no private prisons, period,” his administration is still  and expanding their use. As of this summer, ICE has  for at least seven new detention centers in the Chicago, El Paso, Harlingen, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle jurisdictions. Much as if Trump were to win, similar strategies of ending ICE–police collaborations and preventing detention expansion would be paramount.

Already sanctuary policies are being attacked, as a moral panic is stoked over “migrant crime.” In an attempt to debunk these claims, many organizations have emphasized data showing that immigrants commit fewer crimes than do citizens. But this only serves to accept public safety as a metric for immigration and ends up throwing  under the bus, effectively pitting working-class communities against each other. A better understanding of  with immigration enforcement has helped the movement limit deportations. Given the backlash moment we’re in, we must continue to challenge the whole system and not fall into the moral panic over crime.

Just as concerning is how conservative states have acted under Biden, which we can expect to continue under a Harris administration. From Texas to Florida, states across the country are enacting some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation we’ve ever seen. Through these efforts, such as Operation Lone Star and SB 4 in Texas, states are commandeering state-level criminal legal systems to target and prosecute migrants as well as people providing aid to migrants. SB 4, for example, includes a 10-year minimum sentence for “human smuggling” or “harboring” undocumented immigrants. Governor Greg Abbott and Texas officials are essentially dictating immigration policy for the whole country. By filing lawsuits against forms of administrative relief such as DACA, deploying its own deportation force, and busing migrants to sanctuary cities, Texas has gone on a rampage, and Biden has done very little to intervene. If Harris wins, the question remains whether, given her history as a state attorney general, she will be more likely to push back on Texas and other states. But based on her recent comments on immigration, it is clear that she will need to be pushed, and we need to prioritize building up grassroots capacity to protect immigrant communities and fight back in these states.

The coming months will undoubtedly bring more heartache and confusion for immigrant communities. Regardless of who is president, educating people about their rights and expanding our base will be essential to building power toward longer-term change. Across the country, organizers and advocates are already planning for either outcome, hoping to be more prepared than we were in 2016. Dozens of organizations have gathered in multiple forums, such as Democracy 2025 and the Immigrant Movement Visioning Process, to develop strategies for preventing mass deportations if the worst were to happen. In this environment, abolition is a helpful tool for analysis and guidance. We must reject the reduction of immigrant lives to “public safety” and “national security” frameworks, and we must instead put forth a narrative of belonging and collectivity that helps bridge our struggles for racial and migrant justice. In this moment of political fervor, now is the time to start planting the seeds for a more grounded and accountable movement.

This article was originally published by . It has been republished here with permission. This essay was written in the author’s personal capacity. The views expressed are her own and and do not necessarily represent the views of Detention Watch Network. 

I’ve written about my��grandfather’s story��and about how redlining affected my family. But I never fully explored how this legacy continues to impact the housing situation of my family and many others. The legacy of redlining and housing discrimination has exacerbated California’s already devastating housing crisis for the Black community. As a result, California’s major cities stand to lose community members who have made some of the biggest contributions to our state’s rich culture.��

At the heart of all this is one simple question: Does every Californian have a right to remain in the city that they call home?

My family history on my mother’s side is relatable for many African Americans. My grandfather, Dave Campbell (from Galveston, Texas), and my grandmother, Lillian Lane (from Memphis, Tennessee), both hailed from the South. Like many Black folks from their time, my grandparents and their families moved to the West Coast to escape the crushing racial prejudices of the Jim Crow era. My grandmother arrived in 1943, and my grandfather arrived around 1950. This mass exodus, known as the Second Great Migration, shepherded thousands of Black families to regions like the Bay Area, where they hoped for a better future and more opportunities. 

Sadly, in California, many of these families faced redlining, discrimination, and police brutality. Nonetheless, they settled here, helping to shape the Bay Area’s trendsetting culture, politics, and distinct sense of identity. In the decades that followed, Black residents in Oakland, where I live, created things as varied as the Black Panther Party to the musical and countercultural hyphy movement. They led America’s fight against South African apartheid, thanks to the . Black Oaklanders also set down roots by building churches, opening popular small businesses, and even creating an  that helps all Oaklanders understand the role Black cowboys played in American history. The Black community in my beloved city of Oakland has often been on the forefront of radical and cutting-edge politics and culture.

Now, Oakland is losing the identity that Black Oaklanders worked so hard to create. The city is hemorrhaging its Black population due to gentrification.

My Mother’s Story

To get a sense of how living in Oakland has changed over time, I talked to a longtime Black resident and the most reliable source I know: my mom. Karen Campbell was born and raised in West Oakland and attended McClymonds High School. When she was growing up, in the 1960s and ’70s, West Oakland was one of the few communities where working-class African Americans like my grandparents could afford to live and purchase a home. My mom hoped to do the same when she grew up. In 1990, the time came for her to leave her parents’ house, but housing prices had already begun to rise, and she found herself with limited options. 

Apartments near the centrally located Lake Merritt were far too expensive for her budget as a fast-food worker. The most affordable option was to rent in East Oakland, but my mom worried that the area—then ravaged by violence due to the crack-cocaine epidemic—would be unsafe for a single woman living alone. With a heavy heart, she left Oakland and moved in with an uncle in San Jose who needed a roommate to split the rent with. She left behind her close friends, childhood home, church, and community.

My mom continued to dream of one day owning a house in Oakland. But when she began the hunt for a home again in the mid-2000s, now with a union job in the Alameda County Superior Court system and a middle-class income, there was nothing left within her price range. She did find an affordable option in Vallejo, 30 minutes north, but backed out after a lender attempted to sneak a balloon payment into the mortgage agreement that she never would have been able to pay. 

Eventually, she did move back to West Oakland, but as a renter. Extended family had sold my grandparents’ home long ago, never imagining this would lock them out of the housing market indefinitely. Today, my mom rents a duplex owned by her childhood church, which generously keeps her rent low enough so she can afford it. 

Many of my mother’s Black friends and co-workers who grew up in Oakland have not been so lucky. Although they still work in the city, some commute 2 to 3 hours each way from as far as Sacramento for work, church, or community events. Many others have given up on the dream of homeownership and moved away for good.

An Exodus of People of Color

As I finish grad school, prepare to reenter the workforce, and plan for my future, I, too, must grapple with the issues that affected my mom, including unaffordable home prices and limited access to equitable financial support for homeownership.

The reality is that living in Oakland has slipped out of reach for many Black residents. This is happening across the state as Black Californians move from urban cores to more affordable regions. But the Bay Area is seeing one of the largest exoduses of people of color. Of all large U.S. metropolitan regions, the Bay Area has the  in education and affluence between in-movers and out-movers. People moving to the Bay Area tend to be wealthier, highly educated, and either . In contrast, a disproportionate share of low-income out-migrants from the Bay Area are Black and Latino. Over time, this type of disparity deeply reshapes the sociocultural and economic makeup of communities while also pushing historically oppressed groups to the peripheries and away from centers of economic opportunity.

It’s clear that housing unaffordability is a major factor that drives Black Oaklanders out of the city—so what can we do about it? I’ve written about nonprofit organizations like the  that seek to preserve low-income housing stock and promote wealth-building by acquiring properties and selling or renting them at affordable rates. Land trust programs are helpful, but more needs to be done to address the systemic issues that impact Black Californians.

Policymakers need to go further in protecting Black Californians from predatory financial products like the one that was offered to my mom. And they need to expand programs that promote Black homeownership and housing affordability. Research has shown that non-bank financial institutions have grown greatly in recent years,  home lenders in California being non-banks. These types of lenders are not subject to the regulations present in the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed in 1977 to reverse redlining and shield low- and moderate-income communities from financial predation. 

Poor access to credit, predatory financial practices, and the nuances of the Bay Area housing market make homeownership challenging for many of the region’s Black residents. In California, Black residents access  of home loans despite making up more than 5% of the population. Many of the home purchase loans given to Black Californians are from non-bank lenders. 

I support efforts by racial equity advocates to increase accountability by further regulating non-bank financial institutions through a  for California. This would allow regulators to curtail racially discriminatory practices and also promote greater access to credit for Black households seeking to own or maintain their homes. Beyond this, policymakers must also continue to protect tenants and build affordable housing for low- and moderate-income Black families in cities like Oakland.

Oakland has been  for decades. Each loss represents a small tear in the rich cultural and social fabric that has held Oakland together for years. As housing costs continue to shatter the community and bleed Oakland of the rich culture that put it on the map, I fear for the city’s future. Now is the time for policymakers, housing advocates, and residents to come together and protect that diverse tapestry that makes Oakland and cities like it great. 

This commentary was produced in partnership with the .

In 2018, her work in creating and promoting Día de los Muertos-themed altars was recognized with the nation’s highest honor for folk and traditional art with a  from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

She spoke with YES! about the essential elements of altar-making and how she is passing on the family tradition to her children. Esparza is a mother to nine children. Her fifth child, Rosanna Esparza Ahrens, joined us partway through the conversation. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Sonali Kolhatkar: Is there a standard method of altar-making among Mexican Americans or is it an evolving art?

Ofelia Esparza: Altares or ofrendas are a bridge between life and death, between the living and the dead. When we create an altar, we’re creating sacred space. 

Over the years I’ve learned of different traditions, so I can’t really say what is the prototype for an altar, but the elements that I feel are important are the photographs, the candles, the flowers, of course, the food, incense, and papel picado. 

It’s become such an art form that many artists do representations of these elements, not necessarily the items themselves. 

There are so many ways of celebrating Día de los Muertos in Mexico, which of course has come over with the immigration of people into the United States, that I don’t say, ‘This is the way it has to be.’ The way that I do it is based on my mother’s tradition. 

My mother always had an altar with photographs. To me those are the main pieces because the photographs are what generate the stories, and then the actual images of ancestors that you might not have known in person but that you know were part of your background. 

Read about how Chicano artists like Esparza helped promote the modern-day version of Día de los Muertos and how they are fighting against hyper-commercialization of the tradition.

Kolhatkar: Besides photographs of ancestors, are there any other elements to an altar that you feel are essential?

Esparza: I have to represent the four natural elements—that goes back to Indigenous culture—and that’s&�Բ�����;wind, earth, fire, and water. 

Wind

In Mexico, and today here in the U.S., people are using papel picado. The papel picado are the cut paper banners that are made out of tissue paper that represent wind. So, with any breeze they move. They create the ambiance for the soul to come and partake of the altar that we have prepared for them. 

Also, candles are part of the wind element. 

Earth

Food and flowers represent Mother Earth. 

Marigold is essential, I believe. The marigold has a strong aroma, which beckons the soul, [saying], ‘Here is your altar.’ The scent draws them to the altar. Also, in ancient times it represented the sun, which was the major element of the deities. 

We also make tissue paper flowers. That tradition came from my mother. Something handmade for the ofrenda is your offering. Ofrenda means offering and sometimes I use the words altar and ofrenda interchangeably. It’s an offering to our loved ones, our ancestors. 

The handcrafted or handmade items, including food, are part of your essence that you’re offering to this altar, to your ancestors. 

Fire

In addition to wind, candles also represent fire. 

And incense is also a representation of fire. We use copal, which is a natural incense that is traditionally used since ancient times. 

Water

You need a glass of water on the altar because the souls came from so far away, they were going to be very thirsty. That’s a tradition that I learned.  

Watch a video of Ofelia Esparza explaining the essentials of altar making:

Kolhatkar: Rosanna, what is it like to learn the tradition of altar-making from your mother? Can you share some experiences of making altars?

Rosanna Esparza Ahrens: I remember the flower-making. It’s almost therapeutic, mediative, because you’re cutting paper and manipulating it. It has this familiar sound from moving this tissue paper. There’s a lot of folding and cutting. And meanwhile we’re sharing stories or having coffee and pan dulce, or wine, or tequila depending on who’s present and what stories we’re sharing. 

And those flowers are part of the arch that is on the ofrenda. Once that arch is up, it’s like, now we can do everything else because it is the first thing that goes up. 

We bring all the items together. We’ve made all the levels with shelves and boxes and covered them with fabric. We usually have three or four levels. Maybe there’s somebody that recently passed that you want to honor this year and so they have the higher position on the altar. And all the other ancestors are there because they’re all together. 

View a photo essay from the 2021 Noche de Ofrenda in Grand Park, Los Angeles, where Esparza set up her annual large-scale community��altar.��

While boarding the plane, we get the text. Mom was in the hospital.

My mother is a downwinder. She spent her early childhood in Kingman, Arizona, where the fallout of U.S. nuclear tests rained. She has nonsmoker’s lung cancer, diabetes, and blood clots. Now dialysis has entered the picture. She and my father left rural New Mexico for Phoenix, Arizona, when she first got sick. They figured big city doctors were better.

When my husband and I flew home that time in October 2017, we originally planned just a short visit to see my mom and dad. We’d use their house as a base camp, we had thought, fulfilling our filial duties before heading out for a two-week backpacking trek.

We’d loaded our backpacks with cold weather clothing, headlamps, two-person tent, sleeping bags, butane canisters, bug spray, powdered eggs, dry hummus—the usual stuff. But things didn’t go as planned.

Upon landing, we drove straight to Chandler Regional Medical Center. After four days, the doctors found the source of mom’s infection, and she stabilized. Dad told us to go on our trip anyway. He could see that we were tired of the waiting rooms, hurried doctors, cafeteria food. The white halls of institutionalized death are exhausting

As we jumped on the freeway to leave the suburban sprawl, I felt the pang of guilt. I was leaving my mother still in recovery. We were heading north to Sedona rather than southwest toward my homeland along the Colorado River and the Yuma Reservation where I was born and raised. Where most of my relatives still live.

Looking out the window as we climbed away from the valley’s buzz, I told myself my heart is in the right place. Far from being a rejection of my family, this trip would be a return to my spiritual values, I decided, a walking prayer for my ancestors and elders.

My bloodlines are more than half Native American, but thanks to the boarding school era, my elders all came from different tribes. My grandfather was born into the Quechan (Yuma) Nation in southeastern California, and I write about his traditions here.

We were delta dwellers, fish eaters, and bean growers living along the once-mighty Colorado. We thrived in an arid desert made fertile by the river’s rising. Every spring it busted its banks, and our people planted seeds when the waters receded.

We are a people of dreamers. Our way is the icama, a state of being that is more than ordinary sleep. Our elders teach us that our experience in the world manifests itself in two dimensions. Daytime experiences offer material gain; the dream world provides spiritual benefits. Nature writer Ellen Meloy writes about us as she hikes the canyons of our homeland, calling us sleepers “so laden with dreams that all during the day you carry them into waking thick as stones.”

The Yuma region is known for its geoglyphs, best visible from the windows of planes. Patterns, figures, and mazes cut into the desert by scraping off the dark top-layer of rocks to reveal the light-colored soil underneath. My ancestors hovered over the earth in their dream bodies, bringing designs from their sleep into their working day. They crafted routes followed by gods in the time of creation.

If I felt sad that my ancestors had been driven off these lands, I reminded myself that the land was still there.

Our people were whirled into existence in a windblown desert pockmarked by dust devils. Our desert trails are thousands of years old. Into the sandstone we roam, travelers, traders, long-distance trekkers, a people who find their sacred spaces with dreams and song. An old Arizona map I found in my basement refers to our beliefs in their legends: “Rock Maze built so the spirit of the dead could shake off the evil ones pursuing them in these tangled paths.”

I want to hike these tangled paths until I give my fears the slip. I want to exit the rock labyrinth with my peace of mind restored. I want to shake the anxiety of my mother’s impending death. Driving between Arcosanti and Camp Verde in the Coconino National Forest, my hospital headache started to fade. I couldn’t wait to tighten my boots and hit the trail.

My husband and I drove to the Red Rock Ranger Center to purchase our backcountry pass. I didn’t think twice about the $20 expense. The sandstone hoodoos—the spires, pinnacles, and cap rocks—are hard to maintain and protect.

When we arrived at the station, we found the parking lot packed with RVs, a gang of white-haired retirees milling around the information booth inside. The National Park Service’s centennial celebration had just ended, and the place was flooded with visitors. Looking around, I suddenly realized I was the only person of color in the station.

 of National Park visitors are people of color. The statistics are not surprising given the history of back country lynching and Native American removal campaigns. For many of us, America’s most stunning landscapes trigger memories of trauma. Survivors have nightmares in which they get hunted by blood hounds. To this day, the animalization of Native peoples as a tool for conquest makes some of us fearful of the outdoors: of sleeping outdoors without locked doors, or of being too closely connected to the outdoors in reductive, simplified, or romanticized ways.

Only twenty-two percent of National Park visitors are people of color.

My father grew up in the era when mountain resorts, alpine lakes, and soft sand beaches were labeled with signs that read “Whites Only.” He recounted a story about a powwow he went to with his family in the early 1950s. The Yuma Tribal Council rented an old school bus to take dancers and marching band members up north for the festivities, but as they passed through Sedona they were pulled over and harassed by the local sheriff and his deputies.

“We don’t like Indians in these parts,” they were told. The bus was turned inside out and their regalia were thrown on the side of the road. Dad said they were held for hours before the White bus driver finally managed to convince the sheriff it was OK to let them go. OK to let them go on the sacred land of their ancestors. OK to let them go, as long as the kids hiding and shaking under the bus seats understood that they didn’t belong.

Not me, I thought, as we chatted with the gang of RV owners in the visitor center. I had spent my adolescence in the 1980s sharing trails with White hikers and rock climbers all over the Southwest. But I had never begrudged anyone space on the trail. If I felt sad that my ancestors had been driven off these lands, I reminded myself that the land was still there, and I was still on it. Nothing was going to get between me and my sacred places.

Except perhaps the cost it took to get here after I moved away.

�鶹���¼� than 20 years had passed since I last lived in the Southwest, and as we pitched our tent in Oak Creek Canyon and I plotted the week’s trails, I vowed to see the land and meet it where it was. Some things did not change, things I had somehow forgotten: the infinity pools at the top of mesas after an October rain, the sponginess of the wet soil under my boots, and the sound of mud falling off the bottom of the car like hail hitting pavement when we drove away. The enormous size of the crows and the way their wings make a scratching sound as they fly above you in a canyon.

Some things, on the other hand, did change: the cost of two eggs and a cup of coffee in downtown Sedona. The extra $10 per car and $2 per person fee at the start of the West Fork trail. The price of local real estate and the commercialization of the canyon with massage therapy, all-terrain vehicle tours, and other businesses catering to vortex seekers, outdoor enthusiasts, and retirees. The absurdity of the vision quest workshops and sweat lodge gurus charging tourists a mint.

My ancestors had wandered through here freely for centuries, but I saw no acknowledgement of my people or their memories.

When we approached the start of the West Fork trail, and a woman with a Make America Great Again hat told us we had to pay to use it, I broke down.

“It feels like Disneyland,” I told my husband. The trail fee wasn’t exorbitant. It was the principle of the thing. All around me I saw sacred beauty. My ancestors had wandered through here freely for centuries—it was their place to pray—but I saw no acknowledgement of my people or their memories. I had to pay a volunteer to visit.

Merrill Gates, chairman and then secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners from 1899 to 1912, said losing the land was good for Natives. “We have to awaken in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. To bring him out of savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish,” he said. He thought Native people had to learn the value of personal property, that we had to have “a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars.”

The capitalism in Sedona struck me, the way New Age seekers and retirees had transformed the place into something unrecognizable. My poorest cousins in Yuma would never be able to afford this place. And I wondered, if I had the money, would I live here?

Everywhere I looked I saw where money had purchased our Nation’s treasures. I resented this fact, but at the same time I knew it was greedy to wish outsiders away from this beauty. The sacred is meant for all.

Everywhere I looked I saw where money had purchased our Nation’s treasures.

My husband and I went to a diner to mull over our plan for the remaining days. We didn’t want to stay in Sedona. “Why don’t we hike down into the Grand Canyon?” I asked.

We both knew it was a long shot. Havasu and Beaver Falls have become famous for their aquamarine waters. The waterfalls sit on the Havasupai Reservation and the tribe only issues about 300 permits a day. Phone lines open on the first of February and spots for the entire season are filled within hours. Still, I decided to call them. I said nothing about being a Colorado River tribal member until after they praised my impeccable timing. I’d called on the heels of a cancellation.

The next day, we wended our way down the slot canyons and cottonwood-lined washes to the Havasupai’s tribal land. Once I told them I was an enrolled Quechan Yuma member, they refused to accept any payment for the nights we would stay there. “This is what Natives need,” I said as we hiked, a bit embarrassed to admit I wanted preferential treatment for my people.

But I do. Deeply discounted “senior passes” are offered to America’s retired citizens when they visit the great outdoors. Since the inception of the National Parks, pristine places have been set aside for wealthy individuals who need time off to relax. The concept of vacation—the eagerness to partake in the “wild” and feel a bit of nostalgia for yesteryear—is a privilege for those who can afford it. Vacationers drive prices up, too often holding local Indigenous populations at a distance from their own lands. My ancestors saw “wilderness” not as a place to retreat but as part and parcel of themselves.

My parents and grandparents were made sick by the loss of their land, by the development of the land, by the nuclear testing done on the land. When I return to Phoenix after our trip to the Grand Canyon, I stand by my mother’s bed and think of all my ancestors gave to this country to make it what it is today. I think of the blessing I received as I swam in Beaver Falls at the Havasupai Campground. Would giving the descendants of Native Americans, their grandchildren who too often struggle for a decent paycheck in America, free passes to visit their ancestral lands be too much to ask? Would showing an awareness of what our people sacrificed in the name of westward expansion and national security be a form of reparation?

Our presence complicates other American stories, like the ones that get told about Appalachia. Historian Ronald Eller has pointed out that the region has long been seen as the “,” defining what the nation as a whole is not. According to this myth, America is prosperous, while Appalachia is poor. America is modern and progressive, while Appalachia is mired in the past. America is racially and ethnically diverse, while Appalachia is uniformly White, a land of hillbillies and moonshine.

“When someone hears ‘Appalachia,’ the first thing that pops into their head isn’t an African American face, ever. It’s kind of irritating.”

— (Washington Post interview, 2017)

Myths about Appalachia linger in the national subconsciousness and rise to the surface when politicians and pundits find them to be particularly useful. In the 1960s, for instance, President Lyndon Johnson made Appalachian poverty the face of his War on Poverty, believing that voters would be more willing to support programs that seemed to be aimed at poor White people than poor African Americans.

Recently, myths about Appalachia have been recruited to explain the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency. As historian Elizabeth Catte points out in her important new book, , the myths of poverty, backwardness, and homogeneous Whiteness have made it easy to paint Appalachia as “Trump Country.” In the aftermath of the 2016 election, an entire journalistic genre emerged that ignored Trump’s support among White voters of all income levels and in all regions of the country and instead focused on White working-class voters, especially in Appalachia. Somehow, the ignorance and racism of this “other America” had propelled Trump to victory, not the votes of middle-class suburbanites in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas.

The Whiteness of Appalachia is one of its most enduring stereotypes. Black folks, the story goes, live elsewhere. But in fact, African Americans, some of them enslaved, have inhabited the region since the first soldiers and pioneers drove Native Americans off of their land. Catte notes that when coal industry employment was at its height, in the early to mid-twentieth century, African American miners made up “20 to 50 percent of the workforce.” Even today, she writes, more people in Appalachia “identify as African American than Scots-Irish.” Yet the myth of Whiteness is so strong that even well-known Black people from the region—the educator and politician Booker T. Washington, singers Nina Simone and Bill Withers, and writers August Wilson, Nikki Giovanni, and John Edgar Wideman—are rarely associated with it.

Twenty-five years ago, poet and scholar , coined the term “Affrilachian.” It was a response to the long history of writing African Americans out of the stories we tell about Appalachia, giving a name to the Black presence in the region and raising its visibility. The term struck a chord and is now widely embraced.

“When I imagine our history, I see photographs.”

—Elizabeth Catte

Photography, Catte shows, played a crucial role in the creation of the mythology of Appalachia. Many others agree. Appalachian filmmaker Elizabeth Barret once noted that outsiders with cameras “mined images in the way the companies mined the coal.” Too often, the images they made were the ones that myths and stereotypes had prepared them to see—poverty, despair, and a cast of characters that was uniformly White.

Some photographers, however, have come to Appalachia with their eyes and minds wide open. Ben Shahn and Marion Post Wolcott were two of the best. Although Shahn is , the photos that he made during two brief stints working for the federal government’s now-famous documentary photography project at the are among the most significant documents that we have from the 1930s. as a photographer, although longer than Shahn’s, also was short. No matter. At the FSA, she still made some of the best and .

Neither Shahn nor Wolcott knew very much about Appalachia when they first arrived. But they were both sharp observers of people and society. And if they were burdened by stereotypes, they soon learned to discard them. They were both politically progressive and opposed to racism and segregation, and they shared an openness to and curiosity about African Americans.

“… my first assignments were very close to Washington. I think one of the first ones, if not the very first, was in the coal fields in West Virginia. That was a very short assignment, of course. And it was a very interesting one, too. I found the people not as apathetic as I had expected they might be. They weren’t too beaten down. Of course, many of them were, but they were people with hope. …”

—

In this article, I’ve selected only photos from West Virginia. That’s in part because it’s the , and in part because the images that Shahn and Wolcott made there are so strong. But these photos are only a small sample of the images of Affrilachians that can be found in the FSA archive. A rich history is waiting to be explored.

“I was offered this job [at the FSA] … but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it’s all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me. … my knowledge of the United States rather came via New York and mostly through Union Square. … I had desire to go to the United States, [but] I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the Depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at that time. It was really a very serious time. … the present seemed to be hopeless and I just felt that I’d never get out of New York again.”

—

There’s nothing special about the way that Shahn and Wolcott depicted African Americans. That’s one of the reasons that I like their photos so much. Black people here—Affrilachians—are part of the very fiber of society.

“My wife would do the driving. She was very understanding of the whole thing and just as much enthusiastic about it as I was, so that we’d retrace steps, sometimes 500 miles. I needed something to fill in. I’d missed it and back we’d go. We had a little A Model Ford that we knocked around in. It gave us no trouble but it didn’t have much speed, so going back 600 miles meant almost three days.”

—Ben Shahn

“When I first wanted to take their picture, they would be antagonistic, but as soon as I would explain, or briefly explain what the pictures were for and what I intended, they were cooperative.”

—Marion Post Wolcott

“In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture. But here you have to make some choices, you see.”

—Ben Shahn

It’s possible to look at an isolated photo, out of the hundreds that Shahn and Wolcott produced in Appalachia, and imagine that it merely confirms the stereotype of an impoverished and beaten-down people and region. But that would be wrong. The bodies of work that they produced show people and communities that couldn’t be defined by any single aspect of their lives.

It’s tempting to see Shahn’s and Wolcott’s Appalachia as an interracial paradise. It wasn’t. Schools were segregated. African Americans faced discrimination in the workplace, as well.

Yet it’s also clear that Blacks weren’t merely outcasts. They were part and parcel of their communities.

Neither Shahn nor Wolcott sugar-coated things. Poverty was real. But the people in the photos were always much more than simply poor.

Wolcott and Shahn are by no means that only photographers to picture the lives of Affrilachians. The great documentary photographer Lewis Hine did so in the early 20th century, as did Russell Lee, a former FSA photographer, in the 1940s. Recently, photographer and curator Roger May has spearheaded , a photo-documentary project that engages scores of Appalachian photographers in a collective effort to overturn visual stereotypes about the region. Affrilachians appear in many of the images they’ve made.

Why have Affrilachians remained almost invisible in American culture, despite this visual record? Perhaps it’s because, as Nell Irvin Painter has suggested in her introduction to , Affrilachians upset two cherished stereotypes—that Appalachia is uniformly White and that Black people can be found only in inner cities or what used to be the plantation South. And, because stereotypes help to orient us in a complex world, it can be hard to see them for what they really are. And, so, photographers and writers continue to reproduce myths and stereotypes about Appalachia and African Americans alike. We should demand that they do better.

But we must also ask more of ourselves as viewers and readers. Passive looking and reading is lazy, and it leads us astray. When we see beyond the myths, we find a world that’s infinitely richer and more rewarding than anything we’ve been taught to imagine.

This story was funded in part by a grant from the One Foundation.

“W�� all suffer three deaths, and the first death is the day that we die. The second death is the day that we’re buried, never to be seen on the earth again. And the third, but the most dreaded death of all, is to be forgotten.”—Ofelia Esparza, artist, recounting her mother’s words on Día de los Muertos

Screenings of the popular Pixar film Coco have become commonplace across the United States during the fall season. Released by Walt Disney Pictures in 2017, Coco follows the adventures of a young Mexican boy named Miguel who finds himself in the Land of the Dead. The film is steeped in the cultural aesthetic of Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, replete with calaveras, or sugar skulls, and marigold flowers. Today, thanks in no small part to Coco, Día de los Muertos is a de facto aspect of Halloween festivities across the United States.

Chicano artists in East Los Angeles helped to popularize the celebration starting in the 1970s, expanding on an Indigenous tradition that had been melded with Catholic observances of All Saints Day and All Souls Day on November 1 and 2. Now, with the mass appeal of Día de los Muertos culminating in commercially produced art and a Disney film, observers of the holiday are questioning whether the sought-after visibility has come at a price too steep. 

The Disney-fication of Day of the Dead

Walk into any department store, drug store, or even 99-cent store after August and you’ll find alongside seasonal markers like jack-o’-lanterns and scarecrows,  decorations, figurines, temporary tattoos, coloring books, and other knick-knacks. Halloween costumes of Coco characters are easily available, as well as makeup kits with accompanying instructions for transforming one’s face into a calavera. 

Even before Coco’s release, the tradition had started to gain traction across the U.S. and beyond. ����’s not Pixar or Disney’s fault—they’re not responsible for it,” says , a well-known political cartoonist and writer. Speculating about why Día de los Muertos is popular, Alcaraz says, ���� just has been a general trend because of mass communication, capitalism, and maybe NAFTA,” (because of the cross-border commerce between the U.S. and Mexico via the trade agreement). Disney and Pixar jumped on board a train that was already going full steam ahead. 

Still, there is perhaps no more fitting an example of the attempted commercialization of the tradition than Disney’s 2013 effort to  for the phrase “Día de los Muertos,” which was the original working title of Coco. “When we all found out, all the rabble, all the Raza, we went crazy,” says Alcaraz, who drew a scathing cartoon titled  as part of the campaign to oppose the trademark.  

Alcaraz relates how, “the Disney attorneys did not think twice about trademarking a community’s religious and cultural observance. They thought it was just part of doing business,” he says. 

“In our country, every tradition, every celebration can become so commercialized that it loses its significance,” worries Ofelia Esparza, an East Los Angeles-based master altar-maker whose cultivation of the art of Día de los Muertos earned her a  from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Artists like Alcaraz and Esparza have feared that without their stewardship, companies like Disney and Walmart will appropriate and exploit the tradition of the cultural holiday. Disney, embarrassed by the negative attention over its trademark application, quickly backed off. Eventually the filmmakers at Pixar invited Alcaraz, Esparza, and other Chicano artists to be cultural consultants for Coco to influence the film’s plotline and visuals. 

A Mash-up of Culture, Religion, and History

“The origins of this tradition go back thousands of years before the Europeans came in with the Catholic church,” Esparza says. Indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America melded their traditions with those of the Catholic Church. According to Alcaraz they, “mixed it together and came up with something new,” creating a “mix-master of culture and ingredients.”

Infused into this was the work of the famed Mexican political artist and lithographer , whose art satirized corruption in politics more than a century ago in the form of calacas, or , and who is credited with originating the iconic  imagery. Guadalupe Posada’s work, according to Alcaraz, “was cutting-edge back then” even as it has now become a mainstream aspect of Día de los Muertos.

Alongside the skeleton imagery, a hallmark of the festival is the ofrenda, or altar—a visually arresting display of paper and real flowers, candles, food, water, and, most importantly, images of lost loved ones. The word ofrenda means “offering” in Spanish and each October, artists like Esparza make an offering to their local community during Día de los Muertos celebrations.

Read Ofelia Esparza’s explanation of the essential elements of altar-making.

How Chicano Artists Shaped the Modern-Day Tradition 

Esparza first learned how to make altars from her mother who learned the art of altar-making from earlier generations. Today, the 89-year-old matriarch has passed down her expertise to her nine children and members of her local community. 

While families of Mexican and Central American Catholic background often built altars in their homes to honor their ancestors, the evolution of Día de los Muertos into a community event with social significance can be traced to the 1970s, when Chicano artists at a small East LA-based non-profit organization called  began promoting it. 

The organization claims credit for originating the practice of  the familiar calavera designs that are a signature of Día de los Muertos community events. And, it was at SHG where Esparza turned her family tradition into a community art form, creating large-scale interactive altars as art installations. 

Betty Avila, executive director of SHG, explains that the organization’s co-founders, “were interested in providing a cultural celebration that wasn’t Cinco de Mayo, that wasn’t totally commodified, and that was truly grounded in the culture of the community.” The early Día de los Muertos celebrations were “closely tied to this very nascent identity of the time—the Chicano aesthetic political identity,” she says. 

Decades later, SHG continues to organize large community celebrations in LA each October leading into early November, promoting the rich cultural tradition that it helped to craft and popularize. ����’s evolved over time for both the processing of communal grief and trauma and also as a platform to speak on issues that are impacting the community,” Avila says. 

Large altars at Grand Park in downtown LA invite interaction from attendees who are invited to display photos of their own loved ones who have passed away. The point is, according to Avila, for the community to acknowledge “things that are extremely personal but that are also universal.”&�Բ�����;

Alongside personal altars, it is common to see altars reflecting social movements centered on collective traumas such as remembrances of the victims of police brutality, of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and of undocumented migrant deaths along the border.  

View a photo essay of the 2021 Noche de Ofrenda organized by Self Help Graphics in Grand Park, Los Angeles.��

Over the years, many other community organizations in U.S. cities with large Mexican American populations have held annual Día de los Muertos celebrations, bringing together families for events that feature face painting and costumes, altar-making workshops, local artist performances and exhibitions, and food vendors. 

“Culture is shared and transported between people and it flows in both directions,” Avila says. Still, she finds the inevitable conflation of Día de los Muertos with Halloween to be particularly galling, saying that the Day of the Dead celebration “is very different, it is totally something else.”&�Բ�����;

Eventually the Chicano-led cultural movement that SHG was central in promoting throughout LA spread across the U.S. and even flowed back across the southern border, feeding into Mexican celebrations. Outside of cities like Oaxaca, “it wasn’t really a huge, huge tradition [in Mexico] until now,” Alcaraz says. 

“Chicano artists had everything to do with making it popular,” he continues. ���� only took 40 to 50 years. But that’s how culture works, and then all of a sudden, boom! It explodes, and there’s Día de los Muertos in every corner.”&�Բ�����;

Recentering the Tradition’s Original Intent: To Honor the Dead

Years before Coco was conceived, Sony Pictures Entertainment invited Alcaraz to pitch a Day of the Dead-themed animated film. Alcaraz remembers the studio executives telling him, “W�� like the pretty flowers and the sugar skulls, but could you keep the ‘death’ part out of it?” 

But of course, death is central. ���� was the ancient belief that death is not the end of life but another phase of life,” says Esparza, who sees the altars she builds each year as “a bridge between life and death.”&�Բ�����;

At the heart of the yearly celebration is family, ancestral memory, and the intimate connections between generations. Esparza recalls her mother telling her that “the remembrance of our ancestors, of our family members,” is the most important part of the celebration. “W�� are here on their shoulders, on their resistance, their resilience, their survival, their love.”&�Բ�����;

It is a concept that can get lost amid the eye-catching motifs of skeletons and flowers, both for consumers and those seeking to capitalize on the tradition. And it is what practitioners of the traditions are hoping to remind those who revel in the art, face paint, costumery, and other accoutrements of Día de los Muertos.  

Chicano Artists Continue Their Fight for Visibility

“I told them, ‘I’m not going to rubberstamp your project,” says Alcaraz, recalling his reaction when Disney/Pixar invited him to be a consultant on Coco. He told the filmmakers then that he wanted no part of a film that would engage in what he called “Brown-facing,” with White actors playing the roles of characters of Mexican origin. 

Participating in the making of Coco offered Alcaraz, Esparza, and others an opportunity to shape the way in which their cultural tradition would be presented to the world by a massive commercial enterprise. 

Ultimately the film’s cast was , a significant achievement for a community that is routinely  on American screens. “W�� needed that film to show Indigenous people, brown-skinned Mexican people on screen. It’s super important to show that,” Alcaraz says.

Día de los Muertos has offered Chicanos and Mexican Americans the chance to be uniquely visible in a nation that has overwhelmingly marginalized and oppressed their communities. If the tradition has become so pervasive today that it faces cultural appropriation and commercial exploitation, some see that as a marker of success and an opportunity for practitioners to continually re-center their communities and the original intent of ancestral connectedness. 

While artists like Esparza have seen the demand for their work increase dramatically over the years, they have faced increasingly powerful pressures to commercialize their art. “I feel it’s a spiritual endeavor far removed from being commercial,” says Esparza, who is often offered commissions to create altars that include product advertisement and has refused. 

Others see a bright side to the visibility. “Mexican culture is already a super popular culture all across the planet. I think that’s fantastic and I think we should get more of it,” Alcaraz says. “�鶹���¼�, more, more!”

—Scout Oath of the Boy Scouts of America

A Scout is: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

—Scout Law of the Boy Scouts of America

I was not athletic or popular in school. I was a nerdy, artistic kid who struggled mightily to fit in with my male peers, especially. I felt I lacked a certain toughness or masculine edge that all the other boys seemed to possess effortlessly. While they played first-person shooter video games with zeal, I sat in the corner and pretended to care. When my parents signed me up for Little League, I passed the time picking dandelions in the outfield.

It was in this environment—of awkward attempts to join sports or otherwise butch myself up—that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) became my refuge. It was one of the few places where the rules made sense to me, and where my skills were valued. Maybe I’d never learn how to throw (or catch) a football, but I could create a Pinewood Derby car that took home a trophy every year. And maybe I would never be good at Call of Duty, but I could organize a campout without hesitation. In other words, the Boy Scouts was the place I fit in and knew how to succeed.

What I’ve come to discover by writing this book about LGBTQ people in the BSA is that I’m far from alone. Nearly every LGBTQ Scouter I’ve interviewed has told me something similar: that in a world of toxic masculinity and homophobia, Scouting—though not totally immune to those forces—was the closest thing they had to a safe haven. This is why it is particularly cruel that antigay policies existed at all, and that they were often obfuscated and not clearly shared with membership: It was entirely possible for queer kids to gravitate toward Scouting—find a home there, excel there—only to discover after the fact that their identity rendered them an outcast.

This is true of James Dale, the Scouting poster boy turned Supreme Court plaintiff, who learned about the ban on gays only as he was being kicked out for being gay. It’s true of countless others. And it’s true for myself: I didn’t realize that Scouting prohibited gay members until the policy debate blew up in 2012, a year after I earned my Eagle Scout rank, and a couple of years before I would come to accept my own queerness.

The tragedy of this state of affairs did not fully click for me until recently, during a conversation with John Halsey. Halsey has been an active member of the BSA for more than 60 years and has accomplished just about everything you can in the program. He’s an Eagle Scout, of course, and as an adult volunteer he’s served as a council president in Boston, not to mention various regional and national leadership roles. His uniform is positively dripping with awards.

The first time I called up Halsey, I was looking to conduct a pretty routine interview for this book. I wanted to know about his experience at the Boy Scouts of America national meeting in May 2013, where he was one of the hundreds of Scouters who voted to end the BSA’s ban on gay youth.

But before I could start asking my questions, Halsey wanted to make a point: The ban on gay members never should have existed in the first place; voting to end it simply steered the BSA out of a decades-long detour it never should have taken.

Halsey said this as someone who has been involved in Scouting almost his entire life, long before any policy concerning gay members existed. He joined in the 1950s, his youth in the program coinciding with what many see as the golden age of Scouting. Membership was at an all-time high, and it seemed that virtually every boy in America joined the program, at least briefly.

And yet, despite those decades also being a time of rampant homophobia, Halsey says “sexuality was never a topic in Scouting.” He told me: “The fact that somebody might be gay really didn’t have any bearing on anything. And, frankly, nobody thought anything of it.”

That is, until 1978.

The 1970s were a tough time for the BSA. “If the period from roughly 1945 to 1970 was the ‘golden age’ of American Scouting, the 1970s was, to a certain extent, its dark age,” writes Chuck Wills, in the BSA’s .

The membership boom had faded. To stem its losses, Boy Scout executives were trying to retool the program to appeal to a growing number of urban (read: non-white) youth. The BSA had never explicitly endorsed racial discrimination but had historically allowed local troops to keep out Black Scouts if they wanted to. The last racially segregated Boy Scout council (in North Carolina) was not integrated until 1974.

This massive registration drive started in the late ’60s but fell apart by the mid ’70s, when news broke that the BSA was inflating its membership numbers for the sake of federal funds. Reports showed that a council in Chicago claimed a membership of 87,000, when the true number was about 52,000, according to a New York Times article. The BSA’s chief executive at the time, Alden Barber, owned up to the problem, and was quoted in the Associated Press saying, “If we were in the business of covering it up, it could be the Watergate of the Boy Scouts.”

But the BSA was covering something up in those years—and it was much more sinister. From almost the inception of the Boy Scouts of America, its leaders knew it had a pedophile problem.

The organization’s so-called perversion files—a record of child abusers within the ranks—date back to around the time the BSA was founded in 1910. The list was a closely guarded document available only to top BSA executives.

The BSA used these files to systematically identify child abusers, kick them out, and ensure they couldn’t rejoin a different Scout troop (though plenty of pedophiles slipped through the cracks of the BSA’s blacklist, allowing hundreds of child molesters to continue in Scouting). The organization’s leaders, however, typically kept all of this information away from the general public, the police, the media, and sometimes even the parents in the offender’s troop. So it went for more than 50 years.

In 1978, when the Boy Scouts prohibited gay members in writing for the first time, Halsey watched with skepticism. By this point, he was in his 30s, a businessman who still volunteered heavily with the Scouts. The BSA, on the surface, said its new antigay policy was a response to an incident in Minnesota, in which two teenage boys were kicked out of a Scouting unit for admitting they were gay. The new policy, the Boy Scouts explained, was in the “best interests of Scouting,” as homosexuality was not “appropriate” and could not be condoned in the program.��

But Halsey saw the policy as something entirely different. “The Boy Scouts—not unlike elementary schools, not unlike YMCAs, not unlike youth sports—tends to be a magnet for people who have a predilection to be involved with young children: pedophiles. And that’s no secret, everybody realizes—and has realized probably for decades—that the antenna needs to be up around pedophilia where there are young children. And the Boy Scouts failed in their mission there, and then they looked for a scapegoat,” Halsey says. “And they decided the way to create a scapegoat was to create division within the membership by placing blame on the gay community, which has nothing to do with the problem at all.”

When I first heard Halsey say this, I nearly fell out of my chair. It hit me as a theory I had encountered before, or maybe even arrived at myself. But I couldn’t place it. I dug through my notes, racked my brain, but couldn’t find any trace of this idea. Perhaps it simply matched up with a deeply held intuition I had: that, from the very beginning, the BSA knew gay men were not a problem, but decided to villainize them anyway.

I called Halsey again to try to flesh this out, maybe scare up some proof for what I saw as a provocative claim.

He explained his theory to me one more time: The antigay policy in 1978 grew out of a series of management failures at the highest levels of the BSA. The membership cheating scandal was certainly one of them—and the only one known to the public at the time. But there was also the compounding failure to stem decades of known child abuse in the organization.

����’s my opinion that a decade-long—or longer—very poor management, failure to address the issue, denying that pedophiles roamed among us, caused an explosive situation,” Halsey said. It could not be kept under the covers for much longer. In the mid-1970s, news broke that a Boy Scout troop in New Orleans was formed for the express purpose of giving its adult leaders access to children whom they sexually abused, causing a PR nightmare for the BSA. And indeed, the BSA would come to face many sex abuse lawsuits in the 1980s. “Somebody had to be the scapegoat. It couldn’t be the chief Scout, it couldn’t be regional directors,” Halsey continued. “My opinion is that when the lid was blown off, a clear decision was made to introduce a person’s sexuality into the equation, and I feel that gay Scouters were targeted as the problem.”

Many, if not most, Americans at the time did indeed conflate homosexuality with pedophilia, and some still do to this day. In 2024, “groomer” has become the slur of choice for Republican politicians looking to demonize the LGBTQ+ community. So it might seem, on the surface, that the BSA’s religious, overwhelmingly conservative leaders in the 1970s were genuinely trying to keep pedophiles out by banning gays from the ranks. But the logic didn’t hold.

When I spoke to Neil Lupton, a Scouting volunteer of roughly the same age and experience as Halsey, he told me about a conversation he had with a friend who was a regional Boy Scout staffer in the late 1970s. It was right after the antigay policy was instituted when women were being admitted to the organization for the first time as adult volunteers. Lupton, in a joking way, posed a question to his friend: If the antigay policy is about keeping out gay men who would naturally be attracted to little boys, wouldn’t the same logic also prohibit straight women? In other words, should we admit only lesbian women to ensure they won’t be attracted to the boys? His friend chuckled and said, “Asking those types of questions is the kind of thing that will prevent you from rising higher in this organization.” The exchange was casual, but it illustrated a truth about the BSA: Pointing out logical inconsistencies was not welcome.

The BSA’s actions also belied the idea that pedophiles and gay men were one and the same. Though gay men could and did end up in the BSA’s confidential files alongside child molesters, their files indicated it was their sexual orientation, not crimes against boys, that barred them from the ranks. Indeed, records dating back to the 1920s show that BSA knew exactly who these child abusers were, and—consistent with research about the demographics of pedophiles—they were usually straight, often married men with families. As Patrick Boyle notes in : “Pedophilia is a sexual preference all its own, independent of one’s preferences with adults.” The playbook for dealing with these molesters was consistent: remove the offending leader, but protect his identity and his reputation.

This is not quite how the BSA handled known gay men in the organization. “Avowed homosexuals,” as the organization long called them, were often swiftly kicked out, and when they had the audacity to fight back, they were publicly maligned in the press and the courts. 

So while the general public may have thought pedophiles and homosexuals were one and the same, the BSA seemingly knew the difference, and treated them accordingly. Child abusers, it must be said, were sometimes given more respect and privacy than openly gay men who committed no such crimes.

It is, of course, impossible to know the motives of Scout executives from decades past. Alden Barber, Harvey Price, and Downing Jenks—some of the top BSA leaders during the late 1970s—have all since died. We can’t ask them why they instituted the antigay policy, or why they failed to properly address the issue of child sex abuse.

But here’s what we can say: Experts have known for decades that homosexuality is not linked to pedophilia. In fact, most offenders are heterosexual men who are close relatives of the abused child. The idea that gay men are somehow more likely to abuse children has been thoroughly debunked. Whether the BSA’s executives knew this in 1978, we may never know, but it doesn’t seem inconceivable. Their actions—treating pedophiles and homosexuals somewhat differently—suggests that they did. Gay men at the time, with little cultural acceptance or power, were a prime scapegoat, even if the BSA knew they weren’t the problem. And there were certainly others during this period, like John Halsey and Neil Lupton, who did not buy into the myth of gay abusers.

But maybe divining the motivations of these executives is not the point. Because whether by design or by effect, the battle over gay membership served as a 40-year distraction to solving the problem of child sex abuse in the organization. As sex abuse claims rolled in through the 1980s and 1990s—resulting in large financial settlements—the BSA spent untold sums of money in court fighting the likes of Tim Curran and James Dale: exemplary Scouters who committed no other sin than being gay.

“For Scouting, it seemed to be more important to exclude gay Scouts and Scout leaders than it was to fix the pedophile problem,” said journalist Nigel Jaquiss, speaking in James Dale’s attempt to volunteer as an openly gay man in the program grew into a highly public, eight-year legal battle that ended in the Supreme Court of the United States in 2000. What most people didn’t know was that in the very same years that the BSA was in court fighting to keep Dale out of the ranks, the Scouts were receiving more than 100 child sex abuse allegations annually.

Indeed, the BSA trailed other youth organizations in their eventual efforts to prevent abuse. The organization did not start requiring criminal background checks for volunteers until 2008, and it wasn’t until 2018 that those checks became required for all adults, including parents, who chaperone campouts. And while the BSA launched its Youth Protection Training in 1990, it did not start requiring its volunteers to take the training until 2010.

For Halsey, it all comes back to a failure in leadership—the very thing the Boy Scouts prides itself on teaching its members. 

“I personally believe, based on my observations and analysis and what I’ve seen, we had a 20-year window where national BSA leadership was so timid and ineffective that they chose to scapegoat a whole community,” Halsey said.

With catastrophic consequences.

Amid mounting sex abuse lawsuits, the BSA filed for bankruptcy in 2020, and by November of that year some 82,000 claims of abuse had been made against the organization, according to The New York Times. The resulting fallout—financially and reputationally—could threaten the very existence of the Boy Scouts of America.

Adding to these tragedies, the ban on gays heaped on another layer of shame and stigma that incentivized victims of sexual abuse to stay silent, for fear that speaking up could get them (incorrectly) branded as gay, and potentially even kicked out because of it. Not to mention an entire generation of boys and men in the organization who were gay but were irreparably scarred by their experience in, or rejection from, an organization that otherwise could have been a safe haven.

“W�� added to a challenging time for these young men. That was unnecessary,” Halsey said. “They had an anchor called Scouting, which helped them weather the challenges of growing up, because there are challenges in growing up. And we’re talking about sexuality, that’s obviously one of those challenges, but there are many challenges of growing up, and Scouting has the beauty of being the anchor in the storm. And the sad truth is, we denied a certain group of boys and men, young men, the opportunity to hold on to that anchor.”

This excerpt from�� (Simon & Schuster, 2024) appears by permission of the publisher.��

Watching the Taliban’s consolidation of national control is like seeing the start of the war in reverse, when American forces with stunning speed in 2001. But now, the Taliban aren’t just back where they started—they’ve gained a well-armed military , bought and paid for by American tax dollars. And just as Western media pundits and liberal feminists in 2001 in the name of saving Afghan women from the institutionalized misogyny of the Taliban, today we hear about how women “will now be subject to laws from the seventh century” under Taliban rule.

I first became aware of the appalling conditions facing Afghan women in 2000 via reports by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. RAWA’s detailed the Taliban’s edicts and how the Orwellian-sounding Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice enforced those strict rules against women’s education, employment, and assembly. RAWA is the oldest feminist organization in Afghanistan and for decades has been operating underground inside the country as well as in the Afghan refugee camps of neighboring nations such as Pakistan.

Inspired by their courage, I joined a handful of other Americans in starting a to gather small donations from American individuals and grassroots groups to financially support RAWA’s long-term educational, health, and employment projects for women and girls. In 2000, I organized a nationwide speaking tour for two young RAWA members who spoke enough English to explain to American audiences why they should care about the Taliban’s misogyny. During their speaking events, the women showed an that a RAWA member had secretly recorded under her burqa in 1999 of the Taliban’s public execution of a woman in broad daylight in Kabul Stadium.

Then, the 9/11 attacks happened, and less than a month later, American aircraft were dropping bombs over Kabul and other Afghan cities. My colleagues and I, educated by RAWA of the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, knew in 2001 that a war would do nothing to solve the nation’s problems. In fact, as RAWA members had explained during their American events, the Taliban first came to power to quell a bloody civil war that was fought by fundamentalist warlords (known as the mujahedeen) hired by the CIA to defeat the Soviets using American-supplied weapons. War was the problem, not the solution.

Warnings Ignored

Within days of the U.S. invasion, RAWA released a titled, “Taliban should be overthrown by the uprising of Afghan nation.” The organization knew that war would only hurt ordinary Afghans: “This invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men, children, young and old of our country,” RAWA’s statement read in part. They were right. The eventual for Afghan civilians was more than 70,000—likely an underestimate, given that bombing victims were often and not counted as civilians.

RAWA also warned that, “The continuation of U.S. attacks and the increase in the number of innocent civilian victims not only gives an excuse to the Taliban, but also will cause the empowering of the fundamentalist forces in the region.” Once again, they were right. The Taliban has justified their return to power by claiming, , that “emancipating the country was a great, noble cause, to get rid of the occupiers.”

RAWA was also prophetic in its prediction that U.S occupation would fuel fundamentalist violence. The U.S. oversaw the , who were handed power and money and offered up as a less extremist . These men spent the past decade and a half ensuring that freedom for most women. As Human Rights Watch’s to the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 2010: “The Afghan government, often with the support of the Bush administration, has empowered current and former warlords, providing official positions to some and impunity to the rest.” She added, “Backroom deals with extremist and abusive commanders profoundly undermine the rights and security of Afghan women.”

What the Afghan People Want

When my partner James Ingalls and I visited Afghanistan in 2005 to research our book, , we were struck by the profound thirst among Afghan people for democracy, education, and women’s rights. Not only did we meet women who were working in dangerous conditions to educate their people, but we also met men who deeply believed in equality for their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters.

We visited an orphanage filled with bright-eyed children who had lost both parents to the civil war fueled by the U.S. or whose parents simply could not afford to care for them. We spoke with the male principal of a brand-new in Farah province run by RAWA. We met the widows of men who had died valiantly standing up to years of American-sponsored terrorism that predated the 2001 war. And, we met a young, soft-spoken woman named Malalai Joya who would go on to in 2005 to the Afghan parliament and emerge as one of the most vocal critics of the warlords, the Taliban, and the U.S. occupation.

As a member of Parliament, Joya gave voice to Afghan demands for democracy and women’s rights. Whether or not Afghanistan’s nascent government would tolerate her presence was to be a measure of the freedoms that Americans believed they had delivered via war and occupation. Within just two years, Joya’s outspokenness proved to be too much for the U.S.-backed warlords in government to bear. In 2007, they and forced her in what was a stark symbol of America’s failure to live up to the promises of Afghan women’s rights.

The Taliban Are Back—Because of Us

In a 2008 interview with , Joya warned, “The perpetrators of these crimes should have to face the courts. But every day, they become more powerful.” Like , she called for international accountability for war crimes by U.S.-backed warlords. Instead, the U.S. allowed the warlords to keep a stranglehold on political power, thereby ensuring that Afghan democracy remained weak and hostile to women.

Even more presciently, Joya pointed out in the interview, “Now the U.S. wants to negotiate with the brutal Taliban and share power with them.” Indeed, it during Barack Obama’s presidency that U.S. diplomats had been engaging with Taliban leadership to lay the groundwork for a withdrawal. Now, as the Taliban resume control of Afghanistan, we see the fruits of the Western validation of the very group that the U.S. had designated as an enemy and claimed to be saving Afghan women from. 

The Taliban’s return ought to be sparking retrospection among American elites about the folly of exploiting Afghan women’s oppression for war. Instead, a deeply racist victim blaming has emerged, exemplified most recently by an ignorant written by USA Today’s Jill Lawrence: “W�� can’t make a country care about its own women. Only Afghanistan can do that.” Like so many in U.S. media today, Lawrence ignored the U.S.’s central role in deliberately undermining women’s rights and democracy for decades by choosing over and over again to work with fundamentalist misogynist leaders.

Perhaps if Lawrence had met people living in the U.S.-backed fundamentalist hell that has been Afghanistan since the 1970s, she might have insisted on a different headline. Perhaps she would have realized that we can’t expect women’s rights to flourish when we have empowered misogynist leaders in Afghanistan.

We should have listened to RAWA and Malalai Joya. But we didn’t, and the Taliban are back.

Of the many people I met more than 15 years ago in Afghanistan, the words of a woman named Mariam, who lost her husband to war in the 1980s, still remain with me:

“W�� are also human beings. We are women. We want our rights, we want education. We also want all these things that your people want. I also want to be free like you people, to go freely to America, and to Japan, and to other countries to visit and see other people, to see how they live. For how long should we be living in these rooms with no freedom and such cruelty?”

I have no answers left for Mariam. Today, we have relegated Afghan women once more to a locked room with no freedom and such cruelty. No amount of bombing or U.S. troops will free them. No amount of hand-wringing or judgmental ignorance will absolve us.

When I asked RAWA about its response to the Taliban’s takeover, the group promised to persevere: “W�� will continue our struggles while finding smart ways to stay safe,” they wrote. But they still have fears—namely that “the world may forget Afghanistan and Afghan women like under the Taliban bloody rule in late ’90s.” After so many decades of using women’s oppression to justify our war and occupation, the very least we can do is not forget about the women of Afghanistan.

In 2022, Joe Biden made history as , which he did . States such as  and  have passed legislation to make the celebration an annual event, and dozens more .

This recognition is important, given the simplistic ways Arabs are often portrayed in American culture. From TV stations to , people of Arab descent are often stereotyped as violent, oppressed, or exotic. Nevertheless, as  who studies religious and racial dynamics in Arab societies, I am concerned that as the celebration of “Arab American heritage” becomes more mainstream, the diversity and complex stories of Arab Americans’ many different communities may be papered over. In short, Arab Americans are not a monolithic group.

Arab Christians

In 2023, Arab American Heritage Month overlaps with the second half of Ramadan, . For many in the United States, this overlap seems natural, given how often Islam is conflated with Arab identity. But just as most Muslims around the world , not all Arabs are Muslim.

While the 22 countries that make up the  all have Muslim majorities, Christian communities predate Muslim ones in the region. Indeed, Christianity began in the Middle East, with the , which is revered as Jesus’ birthplace, an important pilgrimage stop for Christians from all over the world. During the first significant wave of Arab immigration to the U.S. in the , families more often than not were Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Christians.

Today, most  identify as Christian. While the Arab community in the greater Detroit area, a short drive from where I live and work, , that sets it apart from many other Arab communities in the U.S.

 are themselves diverse, identifying as Protestants and Catholics, and with a variety of Eastern Christian traditions, such as Antiochian and Coptic Orthodoxy. 

Furthermore, some sects of Christianity have become intertwined with specific ethnic identities. For example, some Coptic Christian Egyptian Americans  “Arab,” even if they grew up speaking Arabic at home or learn the language to connect with their family roots. This refusal is often rooted in Copts’ collective experiences of marginalization in Egypt, where they face , including on .

From Mizrahi Jews to Shiite Muslims

Just as Christianity is an integral yet complex part of Arab heritage, so is Judaism. Arab Jews, often called , have existed since ancient times and helped shape Arab heritage through their philosophical, poetic, and political contributions across centuries.

To be sure, Israel’s establishment and its occupation of Palestinian territories has complicated Arab Jewish identities, with  becoming more common within many Arab communities. Still, there is  among scholars and Arab American Jews themselves in learning more about , as well as the Jewish background of beloved pan-Arab celebrities, such as , an iconic midcentury Egyptian actress.

The San Francisco Bay Area for generations has been home to the Egyptian  community. Karaites reject the authority of the rabbinic oral tradition used by more mainstream branches of Judaism, such as Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox groups in the U.S. Here in the U.S., as in Egypt, members struggle for recognition as a religious minority within a religion that is itself a minority, Judaism. 

Arab American Muslims are not a monolithic group, either. Over half identify as Sunni, 16% as Shiite, and the rest with neither group, according to a . Of course, the diversity of beliefs and practices within Sunnism and Shiism, the largest two branches of Islam, are themselves present within  as well.

Finally, many Arab Americans identify with no religion at all, or with other faiths beyond the Abrahamic traditions.

Many Nations, One Box

Arab heritage not only includes a variety of religious traditions, but also encompasses a wide range of ethnic and racial identities. It is difficult to make generalizations about Arabs, whose skin tone, facial features, eye colors, and hair textures embody the rich histories of human migrations and settlements that characterize western Asia and northern Africa.

The U.S. census erases this internal diversity, however, by categorizing Arabs and other Middle Easterners as “white.” Arab American advocacy groups have  that the form’s categories do not reflect the actual experiences of the vast majority of Arab Americans, who are not treated as white in their everyday lives. And Arab identities in the U.S. are becoming only more complex, given the diversity of national backgrounds reflected in the  from the 1960s to today.

Complicated Identities

Asking that Arabs check the box as “white” also marginalizes Black Arabs. The term  is growing as a term of self-description for Black Arab Americans seeking to make space for their multifaceted identities and heritage. Black communities are a part of every Arab country, from  to .

These dual identities are still fraught, given the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism within some Arab communities, which often stems from the legacies of . An estimated 15% of Tunisians, for example, are descendants of  from sub-Saharan Africa. Tunisia abolished slavery in 1846, two decades before the U.S., yet it passed a  only in 2018, making it the first Arab country to do so. Still, Tunisia’s president recently provoked outrage after he gave a  targeting African migrants and Black Tunisians.

Around the world, Black Arabs have consistently  such racism, especially after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., which sparked a  with anti-Blackness.

As the Sudanese American museum curator Isra el-Beshir , “I am an African person, who speaks Arabic and who as a result of speaking Arabic has Arab cultural tendencies. But I do not racially identify as an Arab. It’s still murky territory for me that I am trying to navigate.”

500-Year Journey

In her historical novel , which won the Arab American Book Award in 2015 and was , Laila Lalami recounts the experiences of Al-Zammouri, more commonly known as Estebanico. Based on true accounts, Lalami narrates how he was enslaved and brought to current-day Florida by 16th-century Spanish colonizers. Al-Zammouri’s name reflects his Moroccan hometown: Azemmour, a city famed for its ocean breeze. His identity—Black and Arab; Muslim, then Catholic—reflects the complexity of the Arab world while bringing to light the complex origin stories of America itself. 

Ideally, heritage month celebrations will create more opportunities to reflect on stories like Al-Zammouri’s, which portray how rich and diverse Arab American identity is—really, many different identities rolled into just two words. If heritage months are an opportunity to celebrate the diversity of America, the diversity of the Arab community itself should not be overlooked.

This article was originally published by . It has been republished here with permission.

Each year, those who live near the Atlantic Ocean, particularly those near the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, brace themselves for . As the water temperatures increase and mix with warm, humid air, tropical thunderstorms form and gather speed. Once a storm’s winds reach 74 miles per hour, the storm is officially classed as a hurricane—and people on land begin paying much closer attention. Between June and the end of November, the looming threat of high-speed winds, heavy rainfall, and coastal flooding hangs in the air; those who live closest to the water make emergency plans, keep an eye on their vulnerable neighbors, coordinate mutual aid efforts, and hold onto hope that, this year, they’ll be safe.

If a hurricane does make landfall, many in the area of impact will have the option to drive, fly, or run away from the danger and ensure their families are warm, dry, and far from danger. Some will choose to stay behind in spite of the risks, but thousands of others will be left with no choice at all. Prisons and jails are often when natural disasters hit. While people on the outside are given ample warning, the incarcerated are at the mercy of prison staff, government officials, and state politicians.

On Sept. 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene smashed into northwestern Florida and quickly made its way toward Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. When it made landfall, its winds whipped the air at 140 miles per hour, causing massive flooding and destruction across all four states. Authorities were well aware Helene was on its way, with each state declaring a state of emergency ahead of the storm. “There will be no place for you to go if things get bad,” on Florida’s Gulf Coast warned. “This is going to be a life-threatening surge. It is nothing to take lightly.”

Yet, even as the hurricane barrelled down, people incarcerated in prisons and jails in multiple states were not allowed to evacuate. Instead, or, as was the case in Florida, to “ built to withstand high winds.” In other cases, they were simply . 

Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Milton hit Florida again, knocking out power for millions, throwing up , and causing widespread flooding. The lead-up to the storm was grim, and photos of fleeing residents stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic only added to the alarm. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor went on television to tell Floridians, “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”

For the second time, though, thousands of the state’s incarcerated people—including more than —were left with no option but to ride out the storm behind bars. The stated it had “successfully relocated” 5,950 people ahead of the storm—out of 28,000 who lay in the hurricane’s path. As Jordan Martinez, an organizer with watchdog Fight Toxic Prisons, told , the number of evacuees only made up a small percentage of the individuals in harm’s way and some of the evacuations barely qualified as such.

The majority of those evacuated came from work camps, halfway houses, and work release centers, and in many instances they were “evacuated” to theoretically stronger facilities nearby. For example, women at Lowell Work Camp, a section of the Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, Florida, were evacuated just a few dozen yards away … to another part of the same prison complex.

“The fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes,” Martinez said. “If we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside that are themselves organizing on the inside to fight for better conditions, and quite often being forced during hurricanes to prepare to protect their communities via forced slave labor with sandbags or in cleanup in the aftermath.”

As Martinez noted, the trouble does not end once the wind stops blowing, either. Hurricane damage can disrupt incarcerated peoples’ access to light, clean water, food, and medical supplies, leaving them cold, hungry, thirsty, or sick for days or weeks at a time. Power outages can cut them off from communicating with their loved ones and the rest of the world, which also hamstrings their ability to report unsanitary or dangerous conditions inside their facilities. It also leaves them unable to check in on their own communities, or to find out whether their own families are safe.

When Helene slammed into western North Carolina, prisoners in multiple facilities outside Asheville told about losing access to running water—and having to relieve themselves in plastic bags. As one woman’s husband told her, “W�� thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.”

Elsewhere, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a nationwide collective of incarcerated individuals who provide support and legal resources to other prisoners, were able to share as Milton tore through the state: “Power’s out in here, and the COs are hiding in their offices while we’re left in the dark. We’re shouting for meds and updates, but no one’s listening. Just trying to hold on and hope this storm doesn’t swallow us whole…”

Another message illustrated the inhumane conditions inside as the storm raged, mirroring the hellish conditions stirred up by Helene: “Toilets backing up, feces running over. We’ve been told we’ll have to lay in it. No movement allowed.”

While incarcerated people can be denied the most basic level of hygiene inside their dorms, they are also often the first to be drafted to clean up after a climate disaster. As reported, both and to clear roads and haul debris after Helene and Milton. During a press conference, cheerfully framed this forced labor as “utilizing” the state’s “resources.” “They do prison labor anyways,” he said. “The good thing about that is you can use that on private property, not just on public.” He also noted the cleanup “would cost us way more money if you had to do that through some of these private contractors.”

Unsurprisingly, Florida and are two of seven states in which incarcerated workers are for nearly all prison jobs.

As the climate crisis worsens, incarcerated people and those who love them will continue to worry that every new weather emergency may mean a death sentence unless real, concrete action is taken and laws are put into place to ensure state and local county officials are prepared in advance to evacuate everyone who may be under threat, regardless of their address or legal status.

Amid this ever-growing threat, incarcerated people, their loved ones, and organizers are on the front lines, advocating for themselves and their co-prisoners. “W�� urge the public to understand our plight as people in jails and prisons,” a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak told . “W�� suffer during natural disasters and lock our dark cells, not knowing if we will survive or not.”

Publications such as , , and are also closely following the impact of the climate crisis on prisoners and amplifying the stories of incarcerated individuals who have been subjected to dire conditions or left behind during catastrophes. Every letter, every social media post, and every phone call counts. The louder the public outcry about this cruel practice becomes, the less likely officials will give a repeat performance the next time a deadly storm starts brewing.

“This is not just a logistical failure, it’s a profound moral failing,” the member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak emphasized. “While entire towns are evacuated and communities band together to seek safety, we remain locked within these walls, treated as less than human. It is heartbreaking to think that while the world preps for survival during a pending natural disaster such as Hurricane Milton, we are still treated as if we don’t matter, as if our lives can be tossed aside in the name of protocol. We must end this normalized routine. We beg the public to pay attention and have a heart of compassion.”

At first, getting in this much of a tizzy over what to wear to an abortion might seem silly or frivolous. But as Bracey Sherman talked to more people about their abortion experiences, she found that worrying about what to wear was quite common. It is the manifestation of uncertainty that stems from near-constant abortion stigma and lack of knowledge and expectations.

“I wish I had known” is a common refrain. Despite abortion being a near-universal experience, it can be hard to find advice that resonates. That’s the reason we believe a critical part of sharing our abortion stories and changing the narrative is sharing abortion wisdom.

Somatics coach, artist, and abortion storyteller Nik Zaleski taught Bracey Sherman about abortion wisdom—the advice that those of us who’ve had abortions impart to one another to try to make the path forward a little easier for those coming after us. These are the little tips and tricks we’ve learned from experience or that someone passed along to us—the little touches of care that we know to provide when showing up for one another, because we’ve been there, too.

We hope you can create an abortion experience that’s meaningful for you based on the advice of those of us who’ve been there. Although we can’t pick out your appointment outfit for you, we hope you’ll pick out clothes you feel confident in as you begin this next chapter of life.

Confirm What You’ve Suspected

There are a lot of reproductive conditions that mimic pregnancy symptoms, so first and foremost, confirm your pregnancy with a test. Pregnancies can be confirmed through a blood test at a clinic or hospital or by using a urine sample with an over-the-counter pregnancy test at least one week after missing an anticipated period.

Also, despite what the marketing suggests, the cheap pregnancy tests from the dollar store work just as well as the expensive ones at the pharmacy or grocery store, so grab whatever feels right for you and your budget. You may want to pick up more than one in case you don’t believe the positive result of the first one, which is quite common, or in case you take the test too early after your missed period and you need to test again in a few days.

We suggest picking up at least two—one to confirm the pregnancy now and another to confirm you are no longer pregnant a month or so after your abortion. But if you don’t believe the first positive test, get as many as you want. They’ll all say the same thing: It might be time to schedule an abortion.

You should be wary of free pregnancy tests. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers love to advertise free pregnancy tests to entice you to stop in, only to use the opportunity to proselytize, slut-shame, and misinform you. A lot of really wonderful community organizations, clinics, and abortion funds give out free pregnancy tests because they know tests are expensive—so free isn’t always bad. But if you’re looking for a free test, be mindful about who is giving it out.

Cover Your Tracks

Depending on whom you live with, where you live, and a whole host of other factors, you should be careful about whom you text with, what you search on the internet, and what information about your condition and decision you share.

As Texas-based organizer and We Testify storyteller Nancy Cárdenas Peña explained, it’s often the people who are closest to us who put us at deeper risk. She knows this from experience: “I wish I could have had more time to disclose my abortion story in the manner I felt comfortable with just as anyone should be able to share their story on their own terms.”

Surveillance is a reality of life now and can lead to criminalization for people seeking abortions. Even if you end up not having an abortion, you should be careful about your digital footprint throughout your process.

Talk to people on the phone or in person rather than in writing. Try to use messaging apps with encrypted or disappearing messages or those that don’t allow screenshots. Delete your call log history. Clear the browser history of the search engine you use, or use a private browser that doesn’t save or track your history. Use a lock on your phone and computer so that others can’t look at your messages or browser history when you’re not watching. Protecting your communications can help keep you safe.

Get Your Money Right

One of the most challenging aspects of obtaining an abortion is paying for it. The cost of an abortion (depending on how far along you are and the method) can range from $150 to well over $15,000. If you’re seeking a first-trimester appointment at a clinic in the United States, the average cost is $500. On top of that, you may have to pay for short- or long-distance transportation to and from the clinic, a multi-night hotel stay, meals, childcare, and pain medications. Some state and federal policies ban private and public health insurance from covering abortions. If you are going to a clinic, ask if they accept insurance—some do not.

Prepare for Your Abortion

It’s common to feel scared or embarrassed about asking questions during a medical appointment, even when it’s not an abortion. But the answers to your questions can put you at ease, so muster your courage and ask questions so you can feel as comfortable and informed as possible.

Travel Planning

If you’re traveling for your abortion, save all important phone numbers, including the numbers for the clinic, abortion fund case manager, practical support volunteer, or any other emergency contacts. Download maps to your phone so you can access them offline if cell service is slow or unavailable. Familiarize yourself with directions to and from the airport or train station so you know where you’ll need to go to catch your ride smoothly.

Getting to Your Appointment

Arranging a ride to your abortion can be complicated, because you have to trust someone else with your experience, and they may need to travel across state lines with you. If you trust a friend enough, this is a good opportunity for a bestie road trip. If you have the cash, you can always take a cab or use an app service to book a car, but remember there may be a digital history of your ride to the clinic. If you need to enter a destination digitally, instead of using the clinic’s address, try choosing a spot nearby.

Local abortion funds and practical support organizations can arrange volunteers to drive you from your home, work, airport, or train station—truly wherever!—to your appointment and back.

Be vigilant for police outside of the clinic or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who set up traps on thoroughfares and near clinics, schools, and hospitals to detain and arrest Black and Brown people, undocumented immigrants, and other marginalized groups. This step is critical if you’re crossing checkpoints or borders or if you live in or near heavily policed communities. The morning of your appointment, you might want to check with your community and trusted immigration organizations that document ICE checkpoints.

When you arrive for your appointment, double-check to make sure the place you’re headed to is indeed the clinic. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers often set up next door to abortion clinics, or an anti-abortion clinic may have a name similar to the name of the exact clinic you’re trying to get to. There are often anti-abortion protesters outside of clinics who scream and yell at anyone walking near the abortion clinic, in hopes of scaring people out of going inside or disorienting them so they walk into the wrong place.

Call “Your Person”

In the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) sits at a bar with Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) as they grieve their failing love lives over snacks. Cristina is pregnant and has an abortion scheduled, but according to clinic policy, she needed to designate an emergency contact on her form, so she wrote down Meredith’s name. “That’s why I told you I’m pregnant,” Cristina tells Meredith. “You’re my person.” Meredith hugs her friend, who receives the hug reluctantly. “Shut up. I’m your person,” Meredith replies.

This short scene in the iconic long-running television show created a beloved shorthand for best friends who promise to show up for one another, no matter what. That it grew out of a supportive abortion decision is just the icing on the cake for us. 

Like Cristina, you may want to identify “your person” to check in on you, hold your hand in the waiting room, or sit with you as you pass the pregnancy while binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy. Ask your clinic whether you can bring a friend or loved one with you. 

You might be a little dizzy after the sedation or cramping a bit if you have an in-clinic procedure, so we recommend having someone else drive you home. We Testify abortion storyteller Cazembe Murphy Jackson suggests finding someone who can attend the procedure with you and be with you in the days following. “Maybe plan out some restful activities that you really like to do or that will keep you happy—shows you want to watch, stuff like that. I think that would have been really helpful for me,” he explained.

If you’re having your abortion at home, you may want to call on someone from your community to sit with you through the process. They can help you get to and from the toilet, clean up, make food, and dote on you as you deserve.

Ask for What You Need

As wonderful as abortion providers are, some are still learning how to better care for patients with disabilities, those who are fat, survivors, or nonbinary or trans people, to name a few identities. Be ready to tell your provider what you need in order to have an abortion experience that is right for you. If your body doesn’t move in a particular way or you do not like body parts to be touched or referred to in a certain way, tell your providers during the counseling conversation.

You may also want to remind them your body requires a different dosage of pain medication compared with other patients. Good providers will be accommodating of your needs. While it is unfortunate you may have to be the one to initiate, you deserve an abortion experience that centers you.

Adapted excerpt from . Reprinted with the permission of the publisher Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2024 by Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone.

On June 11, a week after a police training facility in Richmond, California, broke ground, organizers from the  marched to the Overaa Construction headquarters in protest. Citing concerns over rising police militarization and repression in the predominantly Black and Latino area, the protesters—joined by local residents—called on Overaa workers to boycott .

“By furthering the militarizing and surveillance of our city—and coordinating law enforcement resources across the region, including ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]—they’re actually making our cities into Cop Cities,” said Refilwe Gqajela, a community organizer with the  in California’s Bay Area.

Gqajela said organizers in Northern California have been working to form the coalition since the facility was announced in August 2023. They’ve expressed their opposition at , saying the money should instead be put into other programs that would benefit the community.

Of course, California isn’t the only state where Cop Cities are being built. The term first captured national attention in January 2023, when  while  that’s displacing one of the largest urban forests.

The influx of these facilities parallels the emergence of the Defund the Police movement, which—following the murder of George Floyd in 2020—saw thousands of people across the country mobilize to decry police violence against Black and Brown communities. Within the last five years, there has been a across the country. 

This development is raising concerns with anti-police organizers, especially when it comes to the impact on marginalized communities and movements. There is now a facility in almost every state and, according to researcher and mutual aid organizer Renee Johnston, at least 10 states have multiple police compounds. 

“This nonsense with ‘the training needs to improve’ has been on a slow incline,” Johnston said. “2020 marks that period where, if we’re looking at a graph, there would be a sharp uptick in how quickly [Cop Cities] were going up.”&�Բ�����;

Groups like , , and Stop Cop City Bay Area have been fighting these new police facilities in their communities by way of canvassing, holding rallies, petitioning, and more—similar to the effort in California. 

At least seven cities, including Chicago and Baltimore, have allocated more than $100 million to their Cop Cities—and many are meant to host international police training programs like . Activists and scholars have said that Cop Cities are replicated after Israel’s own Cop City,  against Palestinians. This would be an expansion of already existing police training exchange with .

“W��’re told that police are here to serve and protect the public and they care about the community, but I just don’t think any of that is true,” Johnston said. “That’s why training doesn’t work, because there is no training that you can give that’s going to change the nature of a system.”

While Cop Cities have been rolled out , activists around the country have been vocal about their opposition. Many have decried the multi-million dollar allocations to policing, and called on their local leaders to instead invest in resources needed by their communities.

Divestment From Police, Investment in Communities

Tennessee lawmakers are throwing $415 million into their , an 800-acre facility to be built in a historically Black Nashville neighborhood currently experiencing a housing crisis, extreme displacement, and gentrification, according to Erica Perry, executive director of Nashville’s&�Բ�����;.

“$415 million is a huge amount of money, especially in a state where we ranked low in health, literacy, education, and housing,” Perry said. “That’s extremely frustrating because we know that money could be spent on things that would help people have healthy, thriving, safe lives.”

In response, the Southern Movement Committee began advocating for in the creation of an office of youth safety, community centers, and alternatives to police in schools—programs they say the community actually needs. In June, $1 million of this budget was approved by the Nashville City Council.

“W��’re trying to approach our budget work in a way that addresses safety and creates alternative forms of safety that do not require cops, courts, and cages,” said Southern Movement Committee Arts and Culture Director Mike Floss.

Activists in Chicago have shared similar concerns. In the years before the , the city had seen the closure of, as well as  in U.S. history. Naturally, many residents were outraged when the new multi-million dollar police training facility was announced, especially considering the Chicago Police Department already had seven other training facilities in the area.

“Why is there suddenly this new investment available, when we were told that the city was broke when we were asking for investments in our own communities?” asked Benji Hart, an adult ally with the youth-led No Cop Academy Coalition.

Chicago’s Cop Academy came after the police-killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was  by a Chicago police officer in 2014. Not long after, youth organizers from the Stop Cop Academy campaign began spreading information by canvassing and passing out fliers, as well as leading more disruptive actions like taking over trains in large groups chanting, passing out flyers, and talking to other passengers about the campaign. They also blocked city council building elevators. Eventually, they grew the effort into a coalition of more than 100 local organizations. 

 “The initial thought was that there has to be a challenge to this narrative,” Hart said. ���� can’t just be that the city announced it was going to build this thing. There needed to be some evidence of pushback and opposition to the construction, and calling for different funding priorities on the part of the city and for investments in community resources.”&�Բ�����;

For many organizers, the work is about making it known that crime isn’t the biggest threat—it’s houselessness, rising rents, food deserts, and the myriad other issues plaguing communities competing for funds with Cop Cities.

“The safest communities in the United States are not the communities that are over-policed,” said Kamau Franklin, a lead organizer with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta. “They are the communities that have resources that benefit the young people in their communities, that give people outlets, and make sure schools are satisfactory and building your mind. Those are the ways in which these resources could and should be used.”&�Բ�����;

Repression of Movements

Within the last two and a half years, local activists have been leading the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta through canvassing, demonstrations, rallies, town halls, and creating petitions that garnered more than 116,000 signatures, growing the mobilization into a national conversation.

They’ve faced pushback from the other side. Dozens of  and . According to Franklin, this a coordinated effort to criminalize activism and scare organizers. He said a large part of the facility will be built by the end of the year, even though that 59% of residents don’t support it.

Over the last year, repressive policing has extended beyond Stop Cop City organizers to encompass Gaza solidarity student encampments as well. Tamera Hutcherson, an organizer with Stop Cop City Dallas, said the city council held secretive meetings and used vague language around “public safety” to get  that gave $50 million to a police training facility. Soon after,  Gaza solidarity student encampment. 

“For students peacefully protesting, they came in riot gear and in tactical gear, they looked like they were ready for war against civilians,” Hutcherson said. “I think most residents are concerned about what this means, not just for the city of Dallas, but for Dallas county and North Texas as a whole.”

While Hutcherson said there are still not many people in Dallas who are aware of the facility being built, she is starting to see more conversations happen as organizers continue canvassing, going door-to-door, and making phone calls to community members. 

“Not just in Atlanta, but around the country, the militarized police are on full display, meant basically to derail and destroy movements, to scare people,” Franklin said. “Cop City is a way for them to organize that policing and practice those tactics and strategies even more so.”

In the Bay Area, Refilwe Gqajela said activists have faced increased police and city council repression amidst their efforts to host rallies and town halls. For example, when residents attended city council meetings to speak out about Cop City, the normal three-minute public comment period would be cut down to one minute. The San Pablo Police Department also shut down one of their attempted town halls at Costa County Community College. Nevertheless, Gqajela and others have continued to organize.

“W�� understand this to be a direct threat to our organizing—this is a state repression tactic,” Gqajela said. “W�� know that this isn’t just going to impact the people of San Pablo. It’s a regional training facility to organize the policing forces in the Bay Area to squash the kind of organizing that’s being done right now for Palestine, for example.”

The Movement Continues

Activists vow to continue their advocacy, despite the pushback. Along with Black Youth Assembly, the Southern Movement Committee has been meeting with Nashville city officials to get their Varsity Spending Plan on the city council’s radar. 

����’s our work to help people see what is happening—when it comes to their health and education needs—is connected to the state’s insistence on spending $415 million on this campus,” Perry said. 

As the organizers with Stop Cop City Dallas continue to strategize and mobilize, Hutcherson said that she sees the mobilizing of students across the University of North Texas system as a victory. Four of the five campuses have to pressure administrators to back out of the partnership with the Dallas Police Department through protests and organizing.

“W�� are continuing to educate the public, and also figure out and strategize ways to continue applying pressure to ensure that this is not built,” Hutcherson said.

The organizers with the Anti Police-Terror Project and the coalition in the Bay Area have been holding town halls and rallies to stop their Cop City from being built—and teachers, students, environmental activists, residents, and health care workers have been mobilized to join the cause. They’ve also been organizing alongside the Ohlone people, who are native to Northern California where this project is being built and have been  being built on their land. 

In Chicago, activists were able to delay the Cop City project, but not its eventual construction. Undeterred, Hart said that some of the youth organizers involved in the No Cop Academy coalition successfully campaigned for  contract with the Chicago Police Department, which eventually led to the contract’s end.

Around the country, activists and organizers have been building solidarity with the struggle in Atlanta and other states, as well as Palestine. As Hart noted, solidarity is important during this “clear orchestrated push for militarization and hyper investment in police—in the wake of arguably the largest protests in U.S. history calling for the defunding of the police.”

“W�� need to be supporting each other across city and state lines, and not just treating these as a bunch of little battles against individual Cop Academies or Cop Cities,” he said. “Our response needs to be as orchestrated as the police state’s response to our organizing.”

A court of teenagers, by teenagers, and for teenagers, Teen Court is exactly what it sounds like: a program giving a new name to justice and serving young people across Texas. The court offers a voluntary alternative from the traditional court system for teens under 17 who commit Class C misdemeanors. Students can avoid a fine and instead receive their penalty in constructive ways such as community service and jury terms in the Teen Court. Once completed, the charge is completely removed from their record.

The program allows young people to plead guilty in front of a student jury that empathizes with their situation and asks them questions about circumstances—their background, home situation, economic status, and what led them to commit the offense. Rather than face a punitive system, teens can avoid unpleasant experiences with law enforcement and move through an alternative criminal justice system that values them.��

Student attorney Alex Gonzalez, who is from El Paso, says the program is a way to avoid pigeonholing teens. “The program shifts the focus from labeling students as ‘offenders’ or ‘juveniles’ in a negative light to seeing them as people who made a mistake and are now learning from it,” she says.

The goal of the court and the student jury is to set teens up for success by making sure the penalty is feasible for each person. In Teen Court, what counts as community service isn’t strictly limited to volunteering; it’s any self-improvement action, such as going to counseling, achieving a higher grade in a class, or joining an extracurricular class. 

Sophia Garza, the juvenile case manager and director of El Paso’s Teen Court program explains how community service is defined broadly to accommodate all students. “I have kids that live on the other side, in Mexico, but they attend school in El Paso. … But as long as they’re doing anything that betters themselves or betters their community, I will take it as community service,” she says.

Sherry Maximoff, Williamson County attorney and Teen Court supervisor, says the volunteer hours also work as constructive punishment for teens because it encourages them to take care of a community they have served. “If you are taught to give back to your community and to volunteer, it gives you a sense of ownership and responsibility over your community. This is my community, and I’m going to clean up those streets, then why would I commit criminal mischief or litter?” she says.

In recent years, Texas has increased criminalization and policing of teens, especially those of color. The state has intensified the number of law enforcement officers on K–12 campuses with larger populations of Latinx and Black students. This has resulted in in arrests, court referrals, and use-of-force incidents. With students of color across the state saying they fear the officers on campuses, Teen Court allows them to avoid traumatizing experiences with law enforcement and have their stories heard without judgment from people within the system.

“[Students are] not dealing with anyone who they identify as law enforcement. That’s the whole point of positive peer pressure, that it is their peers who stand in judgment of them, not law enforcement, not the system,” explains Morales about how the program is a part of the justice system that veers heavily away from criminalizing students of color. 

Garza also says that she notices teens feeling more comfortable once they see other teens on the jury. “When I sit with the youth I can see some are being very cautious. I do see the youth open up more, share a little bit more with their peers, maybe because they feel like if they’re going to be judged, their peers are going to understand their situation a little bit better,” she explains.

As a state that eschews gun regulation, Texas has also used the overpolicing of schools as a temporary for gun violence. At a time when students are being criminalized at such a high rate, Teen Court programs allow students from marginalized communities to have their stories heard. This is especially important because students going through the system are often dealing with issues far too serious for their age bracket and sometimes beyond their control.

Williamson County Teen Court volunteer Audrey Seigman talks about a case in which a teen was involved in an accident while driving their siblings to school. “This person was put in a very difficult position. Their parents made them drive their siblings because they were busy with jobs. The accident wasn’t their fault, but the police found out they weren’t qualified to be driving and cited them,” she says.

Other student attorneys say that they’ve seen similar cases with teens who struggle with issues beyond their control because they come from first-generation families. “[There was] a case involving a student who didn’t speak English. He was charged with theft, but it became clear that he didn’t fully understand what was happening or how the legal system worked. His family had recently immigrated and there was a huge language barrier,” says Gargi Singh, a student attorney with the Williamson Teen Court program.

Gonzalez says that declining mental health is common among teens who enter the program. “Cases involve students dealing with emotional or psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, or trauma. A student might engage in risky behavior as a coping mechanism for their mental health struggles.”

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in “tough on crime” approaches to the justice system, including and harsh from the right. The conservative federal policy agenda Project 2025 seeks to increase criminalization and policing by eliminating training for federal law enforcement. Former President Donald Trump has promised he would increase the militarization of police and expand incarceration and the death penalty if elected. In such a context, Teen Court programs are more important than ever,  offering a crucial opportunity for teens to bypass the. Students are more likely to avoid entering the system later in their lives because Teen Court embodies a form of restorative justice that doesn’t use law enforcement or incarceration for discipline. 

“At the very lowest level, where the consequences are least impactful, we give them a positive experience with the criminal justice system. You interrupt that pipeline there, both with the way the child begins to define themselves and by actually physically dismissing the ticket,” says Morales about how Teen Court directly curbs the school-to-prison pipeline. “W�� have defendants who have gone through the program and have had such a positive experience at the end that they have chosen to become volunteers,” she adds.

Judge Elaine Marshall from Houston, Texas, talks about her Teen Court program and how it has discouraged recidivism among teens in her community. “I started my Teen Court in 2000. From those years I have had no repeat offenders. It says a lot that we’ve had students who come through as offenders wanting to join the program.”&�Բ�����;

For student volunteers, the program is also a unique way to learn about the legal system and restorative justice. Especially in a state like Texas, which from learning about historical injustices, Teen Court gives students a hands-on opportunity to learn about nuances within the criminal justice system.

“[The program] is not about branding students as ‘criminals’ but about showing them that they’re capable of growth. It has shown me how crucial empathy and understanding are in fostering real change,” says Singh.

Teen Court is creating a generation of students who know that reform in the criminal justice system is both necessary and possible. The program bridges gaps between teens and builds community and empathy, giving students the confidence to fight for change.

In 2014, Christina Zaldivar found herself pondering these questions with some fellow activists after she had accompanied one of them to an immigration check-in in Centennial, Colorado. That friend had been living without legal status in the U.S. for more than 30 years and had no family left in Mexico.

“W�� sat in [a coffee shop] afterward for about an hour or two talking about this,” recalls Zaldivar, who is a member of #Not1�鶹���¼�, an informal, immigrant-led campaign sponsored by American Friends Service Committee that advocates for and supports those caught up in deportation proceedings.

“And we’re asking, ‘What are people supposed to do, how do they find help? If you’ve not been there for 30-plus years, and they just drop you at the border, where could you go to find resources?’”

That 2014 conversation led to the creation in October 2019 of a called Crossing South, which provides those returning to four countries—Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—with information they’ll find useful along the way.

“W�� both had been afraid of the ‘unknown expectations’ of being tossed back South with no knowledge of what resources would be available to the already mentally, emotionally, and financially broke victims of our broken immigration system,” Zaldivar says.

Their conversation turned out to be prescient.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had allowed the fellow activist she’d accompanied to the check-in to remain in the U.S. until his daughter graduated from college. Then a few weeks after the coffee shop conversation, “sure as shit, they took him,” she says. He was then sent back to Mexico.

And then in November 2019, Zaldivar’s husband, Jorge Rafael Zaldivar Mendieta, was detained and in January, he, too, was deported to Mexico. Although he was eligible for permanent legal status because of their marriage, (she is a U.S. citizen), he had been checking in with ICE after a simple paperwork error had stymied his green card application.

After living in the U.S. for more than two decades, Zaldivar Mendieta had joined the multitudes of people the government deports each year—either after they’ve been held in detention in cities across the country or apprehended at the border.

Some 262,591 to countries around the world during fiscal year 2019, an increase of 4% from the previous year, according to figures from ICE.

�鶹���¼� than 90 percent of those deportees were from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. And while the number of Mexicans deported declined nearly 10% between 2018 and 2019, the number of those returned to the three Central American countries rose during that same time—by as much as 44% to Honduras, for example—a reflection of the surge of asylum-seekers from those countries in recent years.

often are flown to U.S. border cities and are either walked or bused across the border. Those from Central America are flown directly to their home countries.

Zaldivar said that, after the coffee shop discussion, she became obsessed with creating guidelines to help people who are deported—especially those who had been outside their countries of origin for so long that they no longer had any current contacts there. “I kept coming back to the idea, over and over. I couldn’t let it go,” she says. American Friends worked with her and the other activists from the group to create and produce the guide.

“Crossing South” draws on American Friends’ decade-plus experience navigating the detention and deportation system, community-based programs in the four countries, and extensive research. It distributes the guide through targeted outreach—email blasts, social media posts, through immigration attorneys and advocates, and at public events. Also, the organization is working on a number of fronts to get the information to people in ICE detention.

Crossing South is available online in both Spanish and English, and in a wallet-sized hard copy version people can easily carry with them. It explains what people can do if they have time to plan before they are removed, or what they can do if they are suddenly detained and then deported.

The guide offers advice about obtaining credentials in the consulates of the four countries, including getting passports and making arrangements for children who will remain the U.S. It also includes a list of nonprofit organizations working on the ground—in the case of Mexico, along the border—that can assist with basic needs.

The guide comes in handy when people land on the other side of the border with no idea where to even find something to eat or a safe place to sleep that first night, says Kathy Bougher, an activist with Coloradans for Immigrant Rights, another American Friends-supported group.

Immigration officials, she says “walk them up or bring them by bus to the border and take them to a Mexican office where they give them some orientation for, I don’t know, an hour or two, maybe a sandwich, a bottle of orange juice, and then good luck. … Sometimes it’s just adult men and women and sometimes it’s also children,” Bougher says.

They all face the same challenge: “Where do they stay, where do they go when they walk out the door of that building?”

Bougher, who has spent time in migrant shelters in Mexico and Central America, says the Mexican government sometimes helps deportees pay for bus tickets, or family members send them money for tickets back to their home cities. For Mexicans who speak only indigenous languages, the northern border, she says, “might as well be another country.”

along the Mexican side of the border, and deportees often stand out and are vulnerable, Bougher says. Detention center guards confiscate of detainees, which makes them clearly identifiable at the border. And because they are coming from the U.S., there might be an assumption that they have family with money, she adds. “They are absolute targets,” she says. They’re subject to robbery, to kidnappings, to extortion…”

The list of available shelters along the border comes in handy for those who arrive with no idea where else to go, but recent deportees may also find themselves competing for shelter space with U.S.-bound asylum-seekers stuck at the border under its .

Gabriela Flora, program director with American Friends Services Committee, says the hope is that the guide won’t be necessary in the future, “that we cut funds to ICE and CBP [Customs and Border Protection], end corporations profiting off of pain, end detention and deportations and create a path to citizenship.”

“But that vision immigrants and allies are working for is far from here, and there is a need to know how to be as safe and well-informed as possible when the difficult and awful act of deportation happens,” Flora says.

For now, Zaldivar and her family are trying to determine what they’ll do if her husband is not allowed to return to the U.S. Because he still has family in Mexico City, she says, it wasn’t necessary for him to use the guide. His immigration case is pending review by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

“As far as future planning goes, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place with taking the kids [to Mexico] or leaving them,” she says. “The government could never give us back what was taken from us.”

Several international legal instruments, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), confirm the right of Indigenous peoples to maintain connections to their homelands and peoples across international borders. Some Indigenous groups such as the have pursued actions to address rights violations through the U.N. reporting system. International human rights law, however, is not now recognized as binding for decision-making in U.S. courts.

Throughout my decade-long field research on grassroots Indigenous border activism in the southern Arizona region, the usefulness of international Indigenous rights for ensuring rights at the local level was one area of debate among activists.

Given the sovereign status of U.S. tribal nations, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has established some general policies and practices to facilitate border crossing for Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico border region. The only fully formalized policy for southern border crossing, however, is a mandate that tribes develop and make use of , tribal identification cards that include security technology to confirm the tribal enrollment and citizenship status of U.S. tribal members.

The absence of clear policies and procedures for such things as who are Mexican citizens has resulted in delays or denials of entry for Indigenous members into the United States for ceremonial and cultural events, detainments, and the mishandling or destruction of sacred items.

A number of grassroots Indigenous organizations such as the Indigenous Alliance Without Borders, O’odham Voice Against the Wall, and Indivisible Tohono are working in the U.S.-Mexico border region to raise consciousness about the negative impacts of current border enforcement policies on Indigenous peoples, and to work for new policies that recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples within their homelands. Since 1997, the Indigenous Alliance Without Borders has provided support to and advocated for the border rights of Indigenous groups throughout the border region.

The Indigenous Alliance has long advocated for the development of comprehensive legislation that would address Indigenous border rights at both the Canada-U.S. and U.S.-Mexico borders, and has envisioned summits that include both tribal government and grassroots community leaders. Recent in Tucson, Arizona, organized by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and the National Congress of American Indians are building toward this vision. The Indigenous Alliance has also advocated for the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by U.S. tribal governments on the U.S.-Mexico border to help build a common reference for Indigenous border rights.

While Indigenous leaders work to address issues they face with U.S.-Mexico border policy, Indigenous members must continue to grapple with the everyday impacts of increasing border enforcement, including the growing presence of Border Patrol and surveillance technology on reservation lands, as well as the disruption of their lands by border barrier construction.

“The effect of a wall is already in us. It already divides us… . It’s a psychological wall,” says O’odham activist Mike Wilson, who is also concerned about increased border barrier construction. That psychological wall has devastating impacts “that many will not realize until generations to come,” he adds.

Given the U.S. government’s historical treatment of Indigenous peoples in the attempt to eradicate their rights and presence on U.S.-claimed lands, both continued Indigenous movement and widespread public support are needed to help rectify the physical, social, and psychological harms caused by the “imaginary line.”

Unwilling to give up and accept the eviction, Jackson soon sought out support from other tenants like her, and within just a few weeks, she organized meetings in her garden to support fellow tenants facing eviction. She and others are banding together, using creative means to fight for their right to housing. 

First, a Housing Crisis; Then, the Pandemic

The pandemic exposed the long-standing failures of the housing market. After tens of millions lost their jobs and were unable to afford rent, the federal government  by adopting housing organizers’ demands for financial aid and increased  for tenants. Activists say that while these responses were inadequate in dealing with the scale of the problem, they demonstrated the power of collective action in bringing about meaningful change. 

Many pandemic-era protections, like the eviction moratorium, have since been struck down or have been allowed to expire, but community organizing in cities like L.A. has only intensified.

Today, Jackson is a member of the  (LATU); she displays a poster in her garden for the organization that reads, “This tenant is safe and cannot be evicted.”&�Բ�����;

“People like me were already fighting individually,” says Jackson. “But now I fight with a union of people.”

LATU employs tactics such as eviction blockades, mutual aid, and courtroom packing to fight evictions—all part of a long local history of collective action to fight gentrification in the face of rising property values and luxury development. The organization has secured historic wins, such as pressuring the LA City Council to vote to from a developer who was tripling rents after the properties affordable housing covenant expired. It also helped elect longtime LATU organizer  to the position of city controller in the November midterm election.

The scale of the rental crisis and the resulting social costs are difficult to fathom. Even before the pandemic, one study found that had to pay over 30% of their income on rent, forcing them to cut back on other essentials such as food, clothing and transportation. Since then, nationwide, the average rent has increased . High rents are increasing  and are a .

Further, researchers have linked evictions to increased rates of , , and mortality. One  found there were 10,700 additional deaths nationwide after eviction moratoriums were lifted during the pandemic. “W�� are learning that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty,” sociologist Michael Desmond  Harvard Magazine.

Deep-pocketed private equity firms are increasingly speculating on housing stock, which in turn has incentivized landlords to push out low-income tenants.  of households nationwide could face eviction as local, state, and federal protections implemented during the pandemic expire. 

And, despite statewide rent control protections,  California had a higher than national average rate of households facing eviction according to data. Low-income renters have few options if they are evicted. 

Additionally, renters like Jackson face  for receiving Section 8 subsidized housing vouchers. Nationwide,  voucher recipients is protected from landlords rejecting their housing applications based on their source of income. 

Tenants Refuse to Return to “Normal”

By summer 2022, L.A. County evictions had surpassed pre-pandemic levels, says Kyle Nelson, a postdoctoral fellow at the . In 2013, Nelson began compiling eviction statistics in LA after he discovered no local agency does so, as is common in other jurisdictions.

Marques Vestal, an assistant professor of urban planning and Critical Black Urbanism at UCLA, and a member of LATU, says the impact of the crisis depends on whether the public accepts “going back to normal,” or whether mass movements can successfully demand that housing should be a fundamental right. “That’s what’s going to give a future political movement of tenants that’s happening in the country right now longevity,” Vestal says.

Meanwhile, Jackson aspires to one day be able to return to the neighborhood where she was born, which is only a dozen miles from where she currently lives, but where her family was priced out amid rapid gentrification. 

���� would be a beautiful experience and a joy to not only live in the Leimert/Crenshaw district, but to be able to afford and qualify to purchase a home, and raise my children and family in the neighborhood that nurtured me in my childhood,” says Jackson.

Across town, other activists have a solution they think could make that possible one day.

Long-Term Solutions: Beyond Rent Control and Eviction Bans

Even as activists fight evictions and demand better housing conditions, they recognize that a long-term solution to evictions and insecure lodgings is to create housing stock that is owned by communities and not controlled for profit.

This is especially a challenge for people of color, who have historically been targeted by exploitative housing policies and systematically denied opportunities for homeownership and wealth creation tied to white-dominated real estate. Today, Black and Latino households have as little as  as their white counterparts. Unable to afford rising rents and housing prices, they are often priced out of the neighborhoods they have long called home. 

Crenshaw, considered an African American cultural mecca, is the site of a Black-led approach to resisting gentrification and displacement through collective ownership of land.

“Black is the only race that’s anticipated to see a decline in population in L.A. in every decade into the foreseeable future,” says Damien Goodmon, an L.A.-based activist and board member with the group . He adds, “Black is the group that’s most disproportionately represented in the unhoused population.” L.A. County is home to over  homeless people, according to a recent survey. 

Downtown Crenshaw was inspired by the success of community land trusts, a model that keeps ownership of land and housing in the hands of the community, who can choose to keep it permanently affordable while providing tenants a pathway to wealth building. 

The biggest limitation to collective ownership is raising the funds needed to purchase land. When the historic , which sits on 40 acres of land at the intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, went up for sale, Downtown Crenshaw submitted the top bid, raising over $100 million. But in August 2021, the owner inexplicably , and Downtown Crenshaw’s attempts to have the decision overturned in court have so far fallen short.

Despite the setback, the group is continuing with its vision, and since May 2021 has purchased ten parcels of land, which will be developed into residential and commercial space that’s affordable for longtime residents and businesses.

“Our goal is to build what will be the largest community land trust in America,” says Goodmon. He explains that in order to “stop the displacement crisis, we have to take as much land off of the speculative real estate market, so that people in Black communities can be free from displacement, [and] communities and commercial spaces can be free to grow and thrive.”

“W�� are so very intentional about saying this is not about closing the Black-white wealth gap by making some Black people rich; this is about lifting up an entire community,” says Goodmon.

Paul Yelder, who was once the executive director of Boston’s storied Dudley Neighbors Incorporated (DNI), understands what Goodmon means. DNI was a community land trust established by the . Yelder, who currently calls the Crenshaw District of L.A. his home, says, “The goal of this community land trust is really to acquire and preserve some of the affordability.”&�Բ�����;

Yelder says Downtown Crenshaw is adopting innovative solutions to the challenge of collective ownership, including “taking one single-family house and turning it into three and sometimes four units that can then spread that cost,” Yelder says.

The organization is acquiring inspiration from how other countries have largely eliminated housing insecurity through rent control and publicly controlled housing, even when local governments refuse to do so, says Dwayne Wyatt, a retired L.A. city planner and Downtown Crenshaw board member. 

“[Policymakers] refuse to look around the world and see how other countries have addressed this,” he says. “You go to Scandinavian countries. They don’t have people living in the street. … They have housing policies that see housing as a human right, not just a function of the market.”

This story is part of Building the Block, an original YES! series supported by a grant from the , which encourages the development of burgeoning alternative economies and fresh social contracts in ways that can help artists and cultural communities achieve financial freedom. Reporting and production of this story was funded by this grant, but YES! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood the manifold losses my mother sustained as a result of my father selling her 2.5 acres of land north of Miami. It was as an adult that I understood the grief she must have felt at losing financial security and the communal legacy she had hoped to bequeath to her children, whom she hoped would eventually co-steward this land. Her grief, amplified by post-traumatic stress with major depressive features, culminated in the lack of a will to live. 

Thankfully, when she dialed zero that day, the operator who answered was also a Black woman. She offered my mother, who was in a deep personal and economic crisis, exactly the sort of profound connection she needed. Their connection resonated with the communal environment of mutual aid and mutual rescue that has sustained Black women for centuries. 

Years later, I also understood that in having the land taken from her, my mother lost a healing space. She lost her fruit trees and the vegetable and herb gardens that grew on the land, all of which were critical to sustaining her mental and physical health. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) points to extensive empirical literature linking nature and health. An April 30, 2021,  by Marcia P. Jimenez, Nicole V. DeVille, Elise G. Elliott, Jessica E. Schiff, Grete E. Wilt, Jaime E. Hart, and Peter James in the NIH National Library of Medicine, titled “Associations Between Nature Exposure and Health: A Review of the Evidence,” connects engagement with nature to “improved cognitive function, improved brain activity, mood and sleep, and the potentially long-term positive effects on depression, anxiety, and other chronic health issues.”

The article also discusses protective factors essential to BIPOC community well-being and presents data supporting the assertion that land reparations, and the access it provides to wetlands and grasslands, “promotes a sense of escape from people’s everyday environments, facilitating relaxation and reductions in cortisol and stress levels.” It discusses how exposure to wetlands in particular improves “early childhood development, shows preschoolers improvement in socio-emotional competencies, and a decrease in autism prevalence.”

Engagement in what are often communal and collective activities, including horticulture, traditional medicine walks, forest bathing, gardening, and the keeping of herbariums, is a critical social determinant of health (SDOH). As defined by the , SDOH “are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.”

As , author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, describes, communal environments also provide the scaffolding required to heal and repair grief. They provide a sense of belonging, mutual aid, and support as well as the affirmation of a mutual struggle. Most of all, such spaces can spur mobilizations for justice, equity, inclusion, and belonging—and could even save lives like that of my mother’s. 

The Toxicity of “Rugged Individualism” 

Utilizing land as a mutual aid intervention, we can deploy healthy, communal, and reparative frameworks to bring about positive human functioning, and provide support to build thriving individuals, families, and communities. This means rejecting the century-old myth of and isolationist notions of divide and conquer.

We saw the deadly impact of toxic individualism during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an Oct. 30, 2020, column in the , titled “Column: U.S. individualism isn’t rugged, it’s toxic — and it’s killing us,” Carolina A. Miranda described how “the focus on individual rights over the greater good is one for which we are paying with our health and our lives.” She pointed out the ways in which our sense of the collective failed when individuals refused to wear masks in public spaces to protect others. There were numerous during the pandemic of people becoming violent in grocery stores and on airplanes, all in the name of protecting so-called “individual freedom.” This notion of individualism is counter to the culturally specific communal practices characteristic of many BIPOC communities. 

But American individualism has not worked for BIPOC individuals and families, who have historically leaned on each other for support and survival. While this nation’s commitment to individualism has been credited with fueling some of its greatest historical accomplishments, creating rapid economic growth, driving innovation, and spawning entrepreneurs, it has not yielded economic security or generational health for BIPOC communities. 

Furthermore, living under an ideology of rugged individualism can dramatically compound the lasting effects of trauma. A March 11, 2019, by Agorastos Agorastos, Panagiota Pervanidou, George P. Chrousos, and Dewleen G. Baker, titled “Developmental Trajectories of Early Life Stress and Trauma: A Narrative Review on Neurobiological Aspects Beyond Stress System Dysregulation,” points out that trauma and isolation can result in “diminished cognitive functioning and maladaptive emotional behavior.” It also concludes that trauma and isolation can lead to “failing health and permanent changes in neurobiological functioning.”

As evidenced by my mother’s story, a variety of intersecting factors are persistently at play and function as critical risk factors for BIPOC individuals experiencing grief, isolation, and suicidality. Developing and understanding ways of expanding the emotional connection between individuals, their communities, and the natural environment can promote health for BIPOC communities. �鶹���¼�over, as Lisa Corbett and Martin Milton show in a 2011 in the European Journal of Ecopsychology, titled “Ecopsychology: A perspective on trauma,” strengthening emotional health and remedying alienation from land-based cultural and ancestral practices, including mutuality with nature, can go a long way toward decolonizing Black women’s health and making land reparations.

Collective Land Stewardship as a Healthy Solution 

Black land collectives, whether through deeded lands or land trusts, are a remedy for the collective grief from which Black people have struggled to recover. A Harper’s Magazine by Audrea Lim, titled “W�� Shall Not Be Moved,” honors Black land collectives, like . Located on over 1,600 acres in , it is widely recognized as the original model for community land trusts in the U.S. Founding members include Charles and , former Georgia state director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The has provided the means for Black families to acquire 12.9 acres of land. Another such collective is , which I co-founded and lead as executive director. It is a Broolyn-based nonprofit dedicated to helping Black women and girls thrive after trauma through counseling, education, and health care access. 

In the summer of 2020, with the world in a health crisis, we purchased nearly 300 acres of land in Ava, New York, and launched a land-based healing entity called , which is a reconciliation center inviting individuals from all walks of life to recover from states of grief, restore health, and restore relationships critical to their lives and their well-being. Our mission is to steward the journeys where people can be seen, heard, and held by each other and by nature. The land provides healing spaces and offers educational workshops, events, exhibitions, and retreats, advancing equity, belonging, and inclusive change. 

However, we quickly faced , a common occurrence facing BIPOC collectives that acquire land. documented the overwhelming crowd that forced a Black Women’s Blueprint town hall meeting onto the streets, and the jeers we faced, in a news report titled “Proposed Healing Center in Ava Met With Backlash.”&�Բ�����;

in New Market, Tennessee, faced a similar backlash, documented in an article in entitled “‘White Power’ Symbol Was Found at Site of Fire, Civil Rights Center Says.”&�Բ�����;

Although the prohibits housing discrimination in the U.S., there is little to no evidence of meaningful racial diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), or justice-based initiatives targeting municipalities, local planning, zoning, and permitting agencies, in most of the towns where BIPOC collectives seek and acquire land. A Human Rights Campaign points out that “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is prohibited by the city, county, or state in areas of employment, housing, and public accommodations.” Additionally, the New York State Division of Human Rights offers a “.” While it offers some protection to those who file complaints, it doesn’t go nearly far enough to create a culture of DEI. There are no programs undoing racism or encouraging values anchored in BIPOC peoples’ right to enjoy a sense of belonging in any neighborhood or community where they choose to live, work, or conduct business. 

Through Black Women’s Blueprint, we aim to radicalize our sense of healing not as an individual process, but as a collective one, where working with each other, the land, and nature creates paths to peace and reparative justice. Our initiative, Restore Forward, weaves ancestral and traditional methods of healing: for the Earth itself as we restore the land, for each other as we restore broken relationships, and for ourselves as we rebalance connection, at a time when our world feels more fractured than ever.

Over the next few years, we hope that at least 800 individuals a year will engage with the land and our online programs, as Restore Forward marshals new paradigms for decolonizing health by increasing land and farm accessibility. We seek collaborators yearning to engage, fashion, and embody new, innovative communities responsive to the profound effects of injustice, violence, and exploitation on women and all people. From Land Back projects with Indigenous communities to giving Black farmers access to land, from building cooperatives in a solidarity economy to sustaining ecological systems, we are shifting our relationship with each other and with the Earth and the natural environment, utilizing land as part of our intervention to heal the type of intergenerational trauma my mother once faced.

I was incarcerated for more than eight years in Florida. I’ve been free for 18 months and just recently got the bug to vote again. Problem was, I didn’t know if I was eligible to register. I wasn’t debriefed on the matter when I left prison, and I’d heard different things from different people. Some said: “Felons can’t vote in Florida. Ever.” While others claimed: “You can vote as long as you’re done with your sentence.”������������

I needed guidance. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.  

A new proposal by the Florida Division of Elections seeks to end confusion around restoration of voting rights. If passed, the update to its existing advisory opinion process would provide people with felony convictions the chance to request a formal opinion stating definitively whether their voting rights have been restored. In so doing, it will clarify a complicated state statute that governs the process of reinstating voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. 

“W�� wanted to figure out a simple question: Whose job is it to determine voter eligibility?” Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Spectrum News 13 in August in support of the proposal. 

Confusion Over the Law

The state statute in question, SS 98.0751, dictates that for all crimes other than murder or sex offenses, restoration of voting rights is contingent upon sentence completion, including parole or probation and the satisfaction of all court-ordered fines and fees. People convicted of murder or sex offenses must seek additional permission in the form of clemency from a state-appointed board.

But this alone doesn’t definitively answer the question of eligibility. Many people are not even aware of all the fines they owe post-incarceration, let alone the offense-specific guidelines laid out in the statute.   

Meade said the proposed process, including a special form, would affirmatively address these issues. He added, “The other thing, which I think is huge, is that it provides protection for people against” being arrested for voter fraud. 

Forty-one formerly incarcerated people were arrested in 2022 and 2023 for voter fraud in Florida, according to Southern Poverty Law Center. At least some of them had attempted to vote based on honest misunderstandings of the state statute—yet their prosecutions proceeded. 

In response, some critics charged that Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Republicans were deliberately suppressing the voting rights of felons. 

“Instead of fulfilling its role to enable Floridians to vote, the state has made it more difficult, which is anti-democratic,” said Courtney O’Donnell, a senior staff attorney for voting rights with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article posted on the group’s site.

Florida does indeed make it hard for felons to vote. A 2023 fact sheet by The Sentencing Project states that Florida disenfranchises nearly 1.5 million people with felony convictions, more than any other state in the nation.

A History of Controversy

The latest saga in the battle over felony disenfranchisement in Florida began heating up in 2018. 

That’s the year voters in the state approved Amendment 4, which automatically restored voting rights to anyone with felony convictions—minus those convicted of murder or sex offenses—upon release from prison. DeSantis opposed the measure. Not even a year later, thanks to legislative support by his fellow Republicans, DeSantis signed SS 98.0751 into law.   

Legal battles ensued. Opponents of the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said it effectively instituted a “poll tax,” whereby only those who could pay could vote, echoing similar attempts from the Jim Crow era. 

DeSantis said the measure was a safeguard against giving “violent felons” certain societal benefits “without regard to the wishes of the victims.”&�Բ�����; 

Ultimately, the fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2020 decided against intervening in a lower-court ruling that upheld the new law. In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the law “prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor.”

Moving Forward

SS 98.0751 is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. In my case, once I did my homework, the registration process ultimately went smoothly. However, I credit this to my relative privilege in being resourceful enough to conduct such research and pay my fines, coupled with my not being convicted of murder or a sex crime.  Sadly, many others aren’t so lucky.   

The special opinion process proposed by the Florida Department of Elections is not expected to go into effect before the Oct. 7 deadline to register to vote in the fall election, according to CBS News Miami. 

For more information on voting in Florida, visit the website of the supervisor of elections in your county or. You can also review this����from the ACLU of Florida.

When in April 2024, Barrymore referenced that nickname. “That’s a great segue to say that I keep thinking in my head that we all need a mom,” Barrymore said. “I’ve been thinking that we really all need a tremendous hug in the world right now. But in our country, we need you to be ‘Momala’ of the country.”

I thought a lot about that moment while watching Harris debate former President Donald Trump in September. At the start of the debate, before shaking Harris’ hand, which continued throughout the night. Harris was poised, standing firmly on her policies, while Trump struggled to directly answer questions and made and poor Americans.

As Trump made silly faces and referred to Harris as “this one” instead of her name and title, I was reminded of the ways Black people, especially Black women, have long been called upon to be the adults in the room. Thanks to both and , Black people are required to be above reproach, emotionless, and with a heightened understanding of the feelings of white Americans. In many ways, Harris had to embody the role of “Momala” during the debate to assuage the fears of fragile white Americans, and some Americans of color, who were looking for her to be well-behaved, respectable, and unrattled.

Despite Trump’s overt disrespect and disregard for Harris’ station, many voters in the United States were interested in how Harris handled his childishness, his antics, his attacks, and his reactions, rather than judging her debate performance based on her expertise and preparedness for the role.

As I write in , Black women who seek political office are often expected to be hypermasculine superheroes with the ability to save white Americans from problems they themselves have created. These expectations play into the stereotype of the unsexed, unattractive, obsequious mammy, whose only desire is to care for white families, nurse white children, and relieve white women of their household duties. When Barrymore asked Harris to mother the country, that is the stereotype she was referencing—and that’s what white Americans hoped to see at the debate.

This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a Black presidential candidate withhold their emotions during a debate while their white male opponent displayed uncontrollable bouts of anger. When then Senator Barack Obama debated the late Senator John McCain in 2008, I distinctly remember McCain referring to Obama as “” and refusing to make eye contact with his opponent.

It’s a level of disrespect seemingly only tolerable when it’s exhibited by white men. But these behaviors are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness and the belief that Black Americans do not deserve the same level of regard and honor white Americans receive. We call that white supremacy.

And yet, in the face of impossible expectations, Harris managed to be pensive, thoughtful, clever, funny, and above her opponent’s demeaning critiques of her as a person. Regardless of your opinions of Harris, there are many people who will find safety and solace in her embodying the role of the country’s mammy, and they will care more about her performance of this insidious stereotype than anything she said on that debate stage.

But if we ever want to move past a political imagination limited to gender binaries and racial hierarchies, we must hope for more from anyone who stands to represent us. As such, it’s likely that those of us who believe in the fullness of Blackness and Black life have largely been left under-satisfied by Harris’ approach to this campaign.

Being white America’s “Momala” may win Harris the presidential race. It might even win her reelection in 2028. But it won’t challenge the expectations of those who see Black women as caricatures and reflections of their darkest fantasies. Being white America’s “Momala” won’t get us any closer to freedom—and it certainly won’t pave the way for the radical liberationist politics we need at this moment and moving forward.

Those watching Bezos might have realized just what it meant when the world’s richest man said that the public paid for the lavish goods he enjoys, especially seeing as  to the goods that the public enjoys. Maybe at a time when a raging pandemic has , people don’t want to hear how much they contributed to the wealth of a man whose net worth jumped by  over the past 13 months, while  Americans lost their jobs in the first three quarters of 2020. 

There is no denying the connections between wealth inequality, climate change, and racial inequality, and there’s no denying Amazon’s complicity in all three.

It could also be that at a time when the  are beginning to be felt, people don’t want to hear much from a man who has rained down  onto the Earth via his space joyride, and whose company has released as many greenhouse gases as a . Amazon in and of itself  through its championing of , , and —all while , ,  and .  There is no denying the connections between , , and there’s no denying Amazon’s complicity in all three.

Bezos seems to have realized that public opinion is souring. Not only has he announced a  contribution to fighting climate change, but he also took the time after his space flight to announce  of $100 million—pocket change for him—to various causes tied to an initiative he is calling the “courage and civility awards,” a thinly veiled attempt at public relations. The reality is that Jeff Bezos and Amazon are so entangled in a system of perpetuating inequality that no individual contribution can unwind the systemic oppression that makes such gross displays of wealth inequality possible. 

I am not slighting Bezos for his contributions, but I was all too aware of the inequality he perpetuates for me to see his space flight and donations and react with anything other than disgust. Bezos’ ugly display embodied Scott-Heron’s words, “Was all that money I made las’ year  (for Whitey on the moon?) How come there ain’t no money here?  (Hm! Whitey’s on the moon).

The poem was a scathing critique of the  and earlier space race, an act of geopolitical showboating between the U.S. and USSR whose resources Scott-Heron felt would have been better invested in fighting poverty. 

I believe that Scott-Heron used the word “Whitey” without racist intent. He was reflecting on the overlapping of racial identity and privilege in the U.S. In his eyes, the crowning achievement of the U.S. at that time solely benefited the White majority who stood to gain from the increasing prestige and privilege of landing a man on the moon. Scott-Heron, his sister, and the rest of Black America were not considered to have shared in any noticeable achievement as they continued to languish in racialized poverty. 

Maybe if we get our act together here on Earth, we won’t be in such a hurry to leave. 

Scott-Heron’s observations remain timely today, as do his solutions. As he urged his (presumably White) landlord to contact his fellow “Whiteys” to pay rent on his behalf, so too do I urge the (mostly White) American political system to make Jeff Bezos  in taxes into the public treasury. Theof the self-made billionaire is eroded by the billions of dollars Bezos’ company receives in taxpayer subsidy, which only serve to  and should be revoked.

We cannot rely on Bezos’ self-serving charitable whims to fight climate change and racial inequality, nor can we allow him to amass so much wealth without taxation that he can squander it on more lavish displays of excess. 

Systemic racism and its myriad manifestations are a difficult beast to wrangle, and the idea of significantly tackling such an issue with charitable donations from billionaires like Bezos is folly.  is hot air, especially given its history of , , and , all of which contribute to a perception by former employees that the company is  to tackling its own problems, let alone those of the wider society. 

���������Dz�’s&�Բ�����; at its majority Black fulfilment center in Bessemer, Alabama, is a perfect example of systemic racism. Its  on the threats that racial diversity poses to its model undermine any racial justice claims made by Bezos. If he really wanted to make a difference, he could start by , , and . 

Ultimately the work of  can never truly be accomplished by a company that . These are systemic problems, and they require systemic solutions. Bezos hopped off a rocket and made a fickle commitment to solve some nebulous issues, but to actually get shit done requires direct government intervention into how Amazon and other big businesses operate. 

Systemic racism can be addressed only by government action against the double disadvantage of, through the promotion of worker rights, anti-union busting legislation, and universal health care. Such solutions would remove the patronizing, dependent relationship that abusive bosses like Bezos have had over their employees by allowing them increased self-determination, by endowing them with more options, and by widening the social safety net. 

The dependency of so many climate justice efforts on the charity of individual donors could be reduced by reworking the tax code to tax Bezos and his ilk their fair share. The more than that goes unpaid each year because of tax evasion would be better served combating climate change, and there is no doubt that what would be left over would be more than enough to facilitate all the trips to space that the ultra-rich could ever desire. As for shifting the overall global economy away from the  that outsourcing and tax cuts have created, the  rate is a step in the right direction that should be accompanied by actions to  and a .

Forty-six years later, the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest returned to Scott-Heron’s subject matter, declaring that “There ain’t a space program for niggas.” There wasn’t one in 1969 or 2016, and it doesn’t seem like there will be one anytime soon. Maybe if we get our act together here on Earth, we won’t be in such a hurry to leave. 

During the closing, I listened through translation while Jim Antoine, former premier of the Northwest Territories, longtime cabinet minister and former chief of Liidlii Kue First Nation, spoke in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their clans at to the audience. His words were clear in their simplicity—this is our home and we need to protect it, not just now, but in the future.

I began the long journey back to my home—Nishnaabe territory in central Ontario, Canada. My first layover was in Yellowknives Dene, Somba K’e or Yellowknife, NWT, and by the time I had reached Yellowknife, Global News was reporting that “61% of Canadians oppose Wet’suwet’en solidarity blockades, and 75% back : poll.”

In some ways, 39% of Canadians supporting Indigenous dissent through solidarity blockades is significant, yet the single most profound way non-Indigenous peoples can help Indigenous peoples is by respecting our self-determination and our ability to protect our lands, waters, and peoples for the coming generations. The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have clearly stated that there is no access to their lands without their consent, and over the past two decades, they have done everything possible within the current structures to protect their lands. And when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded their territory to enforce a court injunction and to make way for the construction of the pipeline, they asked us for our help.

Help to stop a 670-kilometer (416-mile) Coastal GasLink pipeline, infrastructure that is part of the LNG Canada Project, which will transport natural gas fracked from northeastern British Columbia to a terminal near Kitimat, BC, where it will be sent overseas. A project that will become BC’s largest point source emitter of greenhouse gases in its first phase, and according to Marc Lee, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a “.”

Canada has always ignored consent when it comes to resource extraction, and they have always undermined our self-determination and paternalistically decided what is best for our communities and our lands. on Indigenous efforts to protect our lands and our peoples with clear demarcations between moral and “legitimate” forms of defending our rights—usually negotiations between state-sanctioned Aboriginal leadership and the crown, along with symbolic acts of peaceful and nondisruptive demonstrations sanctioned by Canadian law, and tactics that disrupt the economic and political systems, such as blockades. It was predictable that by the time I landed in ����������ɲ���î��â���첹�󾱰첹��, or Edmonton, Alberta, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was of rail blockades ‘unacceptable.’ ”

In other words, when protecting the land for generations to come, you must do so within the structures we’ve created, and we’ve created these structures to ensure the status quo will be maintained, and that you do not have the right to say no to the extraction of resources from your territory.

You can say no to a pipeline, but you must whisper.

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs can say no to a pipeline, but Canada is building it anyway, because in Canada, Indigenous consent simply does not matter.

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their clans have worked tirelessly since contact to protect their lands. They’ve used the Canadian courts in the landmark Delgamuukw decision; they’ve said no to pipelines since 2007; they’ve educated the public on speaking tours, videos, a website, and camp tours; and they have built the alternative—a land-immersive camp with cabins, a pit house, bunkhouses, and a healing center at Unist’ot’en. A tremendous expression of life-giving Wet’suwet’en law and land-based practices.

The practices of life-giving land protection of the Wet’suwet’en reminds me that blockades are like beaver dams. One can stand beside the pile of sticks blocking the flow of the river and complain about inconveniences, or one can sit beside the pond and witness the beavers’ life-giving brilliance—deep pools that don’t freeze for their fish relatives; making wetlands full of moose, deer, and elk food and cooling spots, places to hide calves, and muck to keep the flies away; open spaces in the canopy so sunlight increases, creating warm and shallow aquatic habitat around the edges of the pond for amphibians and insects; plunge pools on the downstream side of dams for juvenile fish and gravel for spawning; home and food for birds. Blockades are both a negation of destruction and an affirmation of life.

That’s why the words of Freda Huson, spokesperson of the Unist’ot’en camp, speak to the hearts of Indigenous Peoples all across Mikinaakong, the place of the turtle, when she says, “Our people’s belief is that we are part of the land. The land is not separate from us. The land sustains us. And if we don’t take care of her, she won’t be able to sustain us, and we as a generation of people will die.”

That’s why queer, trans, and Two Spirit artists and young people are on the front lines leading solidarity occupations in Vancouver and Victoria. That’s why Mohawk land protectors at Tyendinaga are blocking the tracks. That’s why, a few short years ago, thousands organized and gathered at Standing Rock to block the Dakota Access Pipeline. This isn’t about pipelines, or jobs or inconvenience or the best way to get our message out. This is about land and life for generations to come. This is about the kind of worlds we collectively want to live in.

In Peterborough, Ontario, my non-Indigenous neighbors have organized themselves into to say no to BWXT’s license request to create uranium pellets for the nuclear industry in our neighborhood. The plant is a few blocks from my house, directly across the road from the Prince of Wales Public School, the school my grandmother from Alderville First Nation attended in the early 1930s, after her family moved to the city from the reserve. My neighbors are concerned about the long-term health and environmental impacts of rising beryllium and uranium in our gardens and backyards, along with the accumulated effects of the degradation of our environment, climate change, and an ever-increasing exposure to industrial contaminants.  Last week on the picket line I was thinking of what my land looked like before the plant, before the house was built, before Treaty 20 was ignored, before the violence of 300 years of colonialism had removed my ancestors from this spot. I have to imagine what my intact homeland might have looked like. The Wet’suwet’en do not have to imagine—much of their lands are intact. The Dene along the Dehcho do not have to imagine, in part because they were part of a successful mobilization in the 1970s to stop the proposed McKenzie Valley Pipeline, and because of the hard work of the folks in the Dehcho K’ehodi Stewardship and Guardian program.

We can have the same old arguments we’ve been having for centuries about inconvenience, the extra-legal nature of Indigenous blockades, and we can pit jobs and the economy versus the environment. We can perform superficial dances of reconciliation and dialogue and negotiate for the cheap gifts of economic and political inclusion. Or we can imagine another world. We can remember the principled actions of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawake during the summer of 1990 and the mobilization at Standing Rock and find ways to support families, clans, communities, and nations that stand up and say no, you do not have our consent to build this golf course, pipeline, mine, hydro dam, clear cut because we are busy building a different world, and we are so deeply in love with our land, our cultures, our languages, and our families. It is that that Carrier Wit’at multidisciplinary artist and curator Whess Harman described emanating throughout the Wet’suwet’en solidarity protest sites, even in the face of state violence.

Our current world is on fire, warming and melting at an unprecedented rate. The whole world should be standing behind the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and their clans and their vision for a different future.

This article was originally published by . It has be published here with permission.

Cultural queerphobia is nothing new. In many ways, this recent wave of legislation is an overt escalation of the long-standing and long-normalized homophobia and transphobia in U.S. culture, not unlike ” of the 1950s.

Queer and trans people are deeply familiar with the myriad, relentless ways they experience daily discrimination, erasure, and misrepresentation interpersonally, institutionally, and through dominant beliefs and values. The cultural platforming of these values creates an environment for bigoted, discriminatory politics to be framed as legitimate, logical, and even “necessary.” Cultural attitudes build the stage that anti-LGBTQ politicians love to preach from.��

However, there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about anti-LGBTQ sentiments or cultural beliefs, according to , a queer studies and education scholar and professor at California State University. “Restrictive, binary understandings of gender and heterosexuality as the ‘norm’ are ideas that don’t start out ‘naturally,’ but rather get reinforced through repetition, social stigma, or restrictive policies,” says Mattheis. “W�� can just as ‘naturally’ direct people to expand their perspectives rather than restrict them.”

There are many ways cultural beliefs “happen.” The American educational system, and in particular K–12 public schooling, is one of the most prominent places where young people learn what’s considered normal, desirable, and valuable—and what isn’t. In this sense, education is both a window and a mirror, reinforcing certain worldviews and creating space for alternative perspectives. 

Because students are a captive audience and spend a significant portion of their formative years in the classroom, schools are, logically, a key site to change—or codify—cultural attitudes. Modern , , and anti-LGBTQ activists have been working to ensure schools mirror the existing power structures and exclusionary attitudes that benefit them, at the expense of everyone else. As a result, much of the recent anti-LGBTQ legislation targets youth and public schools, including book censorship, , and other and administrators, , and exclusions . And this list doesn’t even touch on the predatory that disproportionately targets youth of color and youth with disabilities.

As devastating as it is for the LGBTQ community, this legislation pales in comparison to Project 2025—a sweeping initiative developed by former Trump officials and the Heritage Foundation, a shadowy, conservative, . Project 2025 is a for the next conservative president to overhaul the federal government and implement an authoritarian regime of widespread surveillance, mass censorship, and discrimination. Project 2025 would dismantle the Department of Education, eliminate Head Start and other programs designed for low-income youth, revoke federal protections for LGBTQ students, and threaten schools that protect trans kids or develop inclusive curriculum with lawsuits. Public education would .

In short, queerphobic attitudes and increasingly prevalent anti-LGBTQ policies form two sides of one toxic bridge, mutually reinforcing one another and making life hellish for queer and trans people of all ages. Project 2025 merely scaffolds itself onto existing queerphobia and takes anti-LGBTQ policies in education to new heights. 

Still, schools can be a window. For every horror story, there is a knowing English teacher who slips a queer kid a life-changing book. There are the no-nonsense coaches who ensure trans kids are welcome on and off the field. And there are the lessons, friendships, and classes that offer all students a chance to connect, collaborate, and think critically across differences. Schools are sites of incredible potential—and spaces that can effectively intervene against homophobia and transphobia.

Sparse Support for Teachers—and Students

Creating an environment where homophobia and transphobia are challenged—and where LGBTQ youth feel seen, safe, and valued—requires understanding the challenges facing many students and educators on the ground.

Rebecca* is a third grade teacher in Florida—ground zero for much of the country’s anti-LGBTQ legislation, given the state’s proudly regressive political leadership. (Editor’s note: Rebecca asked to use her first name only, out of concern about professional retaliation for speaking candidly. Read YES!’s policy on veiled sources.) She says teachers in her district lack the support they need to navigate both age-appropriate conversations around identity and a provide culturally responsive, LGBTQ-affirming curriculum (which is ). 

At 8 and 9 years old, Rebecca says her students are already starting to use the word “gay” as an insult and parrot reductive gender stereotypes. In her experience, students don’t always have the social-emotional skills to understand corrective discussions. Educators are often left to address issues of identity or name-calling ad hoc—and Rebecca says many aren’t equipped or don’t feel comfortable with the responsibility.

“Some of my own teammates will get into [these situations] and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, “gay” means happy, so consider it a compliment,’” Rebecca says. Educators who know better, meanwhile, are caught in an impossible bind—trying to support students, teach kids and colleagues how to respond to these incidents, and not run afoul of state laws that in some cases prohibit the very mention of sexual orientation or gender identity.��

Though her school’s administration has been supportive of her personally, as a lesbian teacher, Rebecca says the school district does not invite discussions about LGBTQ issues, figures, or history in or outside of the classroom. Instead, LGBTQ topics are swept up under the umbrella of teaching “respect” and anti-bullying efforts. Rebecca sees her district as mostly reactive to bullying rather than proactive about inclusive curriculum, culturally responsive staff training, and social-emotional learning opportunities for students.��

In the absence of any meaningful presence of more inclusive, expansive cultural models, many students are absorbing restrictive, queerphobic norms by default.

Even in states with , there’s little direction on how to actually enact inclusion-focused policies. As a result, many of these responsibilities end up falling through the cracks or onto well-intentioned but overburdened teachers. “In California, state education code describes multiple aspects of school life in which teachers are expected to actively support and include queer and trans youth,” says Mattheis. “However, most teachers receive little to no introduction to state laws and policies as part of their preparation and are unfamiliar with these protections and requirements.”

Taken together, these factors—from top-down policies and lackluster curriculum to underresourced teachers and underprepared students—create an environment where all kids can struggle to shine and grow.��

Shaking Up the Syllabus

Building an LGBTQ-affirming classroom starts early, according to Erica Castro, MSW, a facilitator and educator at , a Denver-based organization serving queer youth. A large part of Castro’s job is going into schools, summer camps, and nonprofits—anywhere kids are growing up—and providing educator training and organizational audits.

“Particularly in elementary, there is this stigma and idea that talking about gender and sexuality does not belong,” says Castro. But Castro says that by the age of 2, kids are and differentiate between boys and girls—meaning the adages that kids are “too young” or “can’t understand” age-appropriate conversations around gender and sexuality just don’t hold up.��

“Being able to get into the elementary schools and do these workshops has been, I think, transformative for the ways that teachers are able to build foundational, cultural, and policy-level structures [from the] first day of school,” says Castro. 

In shaping workshops for all ages, Castro works directly with youth to identify what resources they want and the types of training their educators need—including using and respecting pronouns, creating gender-support plans in the classroom, and connecting to free or low-cost therapy and mentorships for LGBTQ youth. Castro also partners with educators to diversify and update curriculum. (As a jumping-off point, Castro recommends .)

Aside from comprehensive, and above all, consistent education for students, educators, and their families, it’s also important to consider two more factors: the physical environment and policies at a school.

“Am I seeing visual cues of queerness [or] that the school is openly accepting?” asks Castro when making an assessment of a school environment.  “And beyond it looking safe as a checkbox, what does it look like for our young people to actually feel safe?”

The implementation of many of these resources occur at the intersection of physical space and policy. Gender-neutral bathrooms, for example, are —but the policy doesn’t necessarily guarantee the resource is in place. At one Denver high school, Castro says a group of queer students were forced to cross a busy road to access a bathroom at a local library. “[LGBTQ students] were just holding it all day, or they would just go home and stay home. There were attendance barriers that impacted their education tenfold.” Access to sports, too, can be make-or-break for many queer and trans kids.��

To truly support their LGBTQ students, most schools need a major shake-up when it comes to the variety, consistency, and depth of resources they offer queer and trans youth, their families, and communities. The good news is that, by and large, these tools already exist. As their own program faces closure largely due to , Castro believes a school district’s budget and priorities must reflect .��

“What made us want to become an educator in the first place is to protect all students,” says Castro, who taught high school for five years themselves. “[LGBTQ youth] are experiencing so much at home, in addition to homophobia and transphobia, and it is our responsibility to be that safe place for them.”

Beyond the Classroom

In an ideal world, every school administration and teacher nationwide would hitch their wagon to the potential and needs of LGBTQ students and families. But as Nereyda Luna, a community organizer and former case worker for the gender-expansive community in New York City, points out, trans youth can be bullied at the kitchen table just as easily as in the classroom. 

“People often think that youth exist in this whimsical world. And no, I think that youth are very aware of what is happening around them,” says Luna. “They know that ‘If I come out, if I present myself to the world for who I am, this is going to be hard.’”

Community spaces often provide much-needed educational opportunities for caregivers to disrupt a queerphobic culture. Outreach to cisgender and heterosexual parents—particularly those with misconceptions about LGBTQ people or those unaware of the impact of anti-LGBTQ legislation—is especially important, because these adults vote, raise queer and trans kids, and take their values to all areas of public and private life.

“The most effective way to help families and ensure people break through cultural norms is through personal connection and stories,” says Rev. Ray McKinnon, in North Carolina. “The most effective way to reach people is not with data; it’s not going to be some incredible argument. It is humanizing the person, it is taking these means and scare tactics and [putting] a face on it.”

Through PFLAG, McKinnon and his colleagues offer peer-to-peer support and workshops for adults—primarily the parents and grandparents of LGBTQ kids. Last year, PFLAG Charlotte offered 29 workshops to more than 1,200 total participants. �鶹���¼� than 600 people—ranging from their 20s to 70s—used PFLAG Charlotte’s peer-support services. To better serve their community, McKinnon says they’ve recently launched Apoyando con Amor, a Spanish-speaking peer-support group, and plans to start groups for Black and gender-expansive families as well. “W�� also firmly believe that it is not the responsibility of queer people to educate straight people on these things, and it especially isn’t the job of queer kids to do that,” McKinnon adds.��

Though the organization is nonpartisan, PFLAG Charlotte also offers voter outreach and education on local legislation and policies that target LGBTQ people. “Advocacy, allyship must always have an action,” says McKinnon. “You are not just accumulating information when you come to the workshops … it’s for a purpose. It’s to give you tools so that you can become an accomplice who is walking lockstep with us.”

Those accomplices—in schools, churches, community centers, and culture-setting institutions nationwide—will be integral to cementing a culture shift that not only makes U.S. society safe for LGBTQ people, but welcoming and affirming. Building an LGBTQ-affirming culture requires a healthy dose of imagination, problem-solving, and critically, the willingness to become a life-long learner (and un-learner) to help map out a more just culture—in and out of the classroom.

As a Muslim woman and an immigrant from Pakistan, a human rights activist, and now the producer and host of a weekly podcast, , where I invite the guests to talk about anything from faith, love, and relationships to food and mental health, I have shared many interesting and exciting stories. It should go without saying that these stories are in no way limited to my race and identity. Yet, I often feel that I am invariably expected to relay painful and, at times, uncomfortable parts of my identity and experiences to be taken seriously in American society. 

My recent interview with , a writer and scholar focused on race, immigration, and LGBTQ issues, confirmed this observation as neither mistaken nor an individual experience. He summed up the dilemma perfectly, saying that for BIPOC people, “what gets you into college, what gets you that diversity fellowship, it’s this exercise in deploying the most traumatic experiences of your life.” In other words, my worth is seen through the narrow lens of tragedy and rejection. 

This is a terrible status quo to live in. 

Society glamorizes minority suffering and scrutinizes our activism.

Don’t get me wrong; racial minorities do face constant racism and discrimination and are subjected to inequities that the dominant White population evades, but as a minority woman in America, I am frustrated to see how we are pigeonholed almost exclusively into constrained narratives of trauma and rejection, how minority anguish is commodified for consumption, and how trauma-centered stories burden minorities.

Through my work, I have consistently observed American society’s propensity to consume trauma that is not its own. It seems as though society glamorizes minority suffering and scrutinizes our activism. It is a binary plane beyond which minority identities are not allowed to operate. 

As a result, those of us from marginalized communities are conditioned to view our identities through the narrow lens of tragedy and rejection and through tokenized stories of immigrant activism. This can significantly affect our mental and physical health; it puts the onus of bringing about meaningful social and cultural change squarely on minorities. We become the go-to narrators, teachers, and guides for the White population. This can be mentally taxing as it overexposes and even restricts us to the darker and more tragic side of our existence. �鶹���¼�over,  have shown that poor mental health can harm our physical well-being. 

The progress of minorities is measured by how well we share our trauma and work to overcome it. For instance, the story of a Muslim woman like me is centered on my oppression and lack of agency. American society sees Muslim women as docile, occupying secondary roles in our communities, and being valued through our relationships with male protagonists, who are almost exclusively White. 

For instance, in films like Hala and Iron Man 3, Muslim hijabi women characters are exclusively defined in relationship to their White saviors. Hollywood uses the White savior trope, especially in relation to Muslim women, to reinforce the stereotypical depiction of Muslim women as oppressed and Muslim men as oppressors, which requires outside intervention. In American pop culture, my identity as a Muslim woman rarely exists outside the confines of this classification. 

However, because my lived experience doesn’t reflect this stereotype, it feels as though my story is not worthy of normalization. To most non-Muslim Americans, I must be an outlier.

As a result, people from minority communities are often forced to relive agony to get noticed and become more visible in every sphere of our lives, whether writing a college application, applying for a grant, or simply telling a story. Many of us feel as though we are only worthy of attention if we present ourselves as a case study that appeals to White sensibility and even White saviorism. 

Are White folks in America more interested in BIPOC misery than glory because it allows them to act as the moral authority on various issues?

Mainstream media amplifies this phenomenon; our stories are essential or become part of the social and political discourse as long as they are built on our individual or collective suffering. I recently talked to someone about a season of Immigrantly focused on love and relationships. They said, “American society is not interested in knowing about a Muslim woman’s love life, because that doesn’t make for a sensational story.” While it sounded crass at the time, it nevertheless rang true. 

Generally speaking, White characters are allowed to publicly experience stories of triumph and everyday mundane life. Contrary to how minority characters are framed in the mainstream media,White folks represent a broad spectrum of humanity. Their onscreen depiction lends itself to three-dimensionality. Many stories centered on White characters are slice-of-life examinations of their experiences. A great example is the Netflix series You, whose protagonist Joe Goldberg, played by Penn Badgley, is afforded more nuance than any character of color on the show, despite being a stalker and a murderer.

In my opinion, the reasoning behind stereotypically tragic narratives around minority stories upholds the notion that minorities—especially those of us from non-European countries—are helpless, lacking agency, unaware, and sometimes even docile and in need of saving. 

Further, such a narrative undermines the richness of our cultures. It reiterates the misconception that White folks are more in control of themselves, enlightened, able to act as saviors, and worthy of being at the top of the societal hierarchy. 

Finally, it also enables America to further its imperialist ideals by justifying wars in countries that are part of the Global South. White saviorism formed the basis of Western imperialism, from British colonialism to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. White saviorism, among other things, manifests itself in U.S. foreign policy, which is centered on imposing “democratic values and systems” in places that are seen as inferior in their cultural, socioeconomic, religious orientation, and political ideologies.

I cannot help but think that the human capacity to consume distant trauma is linked to one’s desire to achieve a higher moral ground by helping others to alleviate that trauma—and American society is no exception.

How do we move beyond this vicious cycle of trauma regeneration?��

Thus, it raises an important question: Are White folks in America more interested in BIPOC misery than glory because it allows them to act as the moral authority on various issues? The answer is complicated. While I do not think White Americans are uniformly intent on glorifying racial trauma, I do believe it is essential for society as a whole to reflect inward on what drives our consumption of minority trauma and how that influences the type of stories that get told. 

It’s essential to identify the enablers of such stories and narratives. When the publishing industry, newsrooms, and mainstream media are dominated by Whites, the stories they choose to focus on will reflect how they have been socialized to think about minorities. This doesn’t necessarily mean they consider people of color a monolithic group of inferior individuals. Instead, the perspective is more unconscious yet equally insidious: BIPOC immigrants are valued through the narrow lens of trauma and, as a result, are often encouraged to relive their trauma for mass consumption. 

So, how do we move beyond this vicious cycle of trauma regeneration? 

To start with, we need to diversify decision-makers in newsrooms, publishing, writers rooms, podcasting, and other spaces of creative and artistic expression. But mere diversification isn’t enough. Putting more people of color into positions of power doesn’t necessarily mean the stories will move away from being trauma-centered. 

So long as minorities are rewarded for reliving our trauma, we have no choice but to keep leveraging it. To ensure real change, we must dismantle the “White saviorism” concept and acknowledge and showcase the richness of experiences and knowledge in minority communities. We can start by normalizing systems of governance and cultural and social norms that exist outside the Western ideals of life. For example, it’s crucial to recenter narratives of who gets to be a protagonist in the Western psyche and move away from binaries of right and wrong as seen through the Western lens.

Ultimately, we must create spaces for and prioritize diverse stories of minorities. This will help audiences become acclimated to three-dimensional views of people and characters from minority groups. Maybe then we’ll discover and genuinely appreciate the broad spectrum of minority stories of the American landscape.

Afghan women’s worst fears became their harsh reality. The streets of Kabul were devoid of women’s presence. “Seeking shelter in a corner of my house, it felt as though the earth was shifting beneath me,” says Saidi. “A sense of panic began to swell within me.” For the women of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s resurgence signified the potential erasure of all their accomplishments. 

The 21-year-old Saidi, who was raised in Kabul, knew about the Taliban, but only from a distance. She was born just a few months after the on October 7, 2001, and ousted the previous Taliban regime. She had never seen Taliban fighters in her neighborhood. All she knew about the group was either from the news, or from stories her parents and others told her.

In Kabul, under the protection of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, Saidi found hope and opportunity as she pursued higher education during the war. She had a thirst for knowledge, and attended Kabul University, where she studied Islamic law and aspired to become a lawyer.

My pen will serve as my unyielding weapon.

After its recent return to power, that the ban on women’s education was essential to prevent gender mixing in universities, and asserted that certain subjects being taught, such as agriculture and engineering, were in violation of Islamic principles. The Taliban’s Minister of Higher Education, Neda Mohammad Nadeem, said repeatedly that Afghan women’s behavior was in breach of the country’s , and that they dressed like they were “attending a wedding function.” According to Saidi, men and women had already been segregated within educational institutions before the Taliban implemented its ban.

The departure of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021 marked the beginning of a new era in the country, turning Saidi’s world upside down. Taliban leaders swiftly regained control of the country, . As they restored the Islamic Emirate, the progress that had been made in women’s education and rights. 

Under the previous government, women made up about in Afghanistan. Approximately were part of Afghanistan’s military, police, and security forces. And there were between in the country, most of them in Kabul, comprising approximately 8% to10% of the judiciary as a whole. But now, the Taliban government does not have any female judges on its payroll, and with the exception of the health care industry, Afghan women are prohibited from working outside the house.

With the Taliban back in control, Saidi’s dreams of furthering her education and pursuing a career in Islamic law have been shattered. The once vibrant and bustling university campus she frequented is now a shadow of its former self, as women like her were forced to abandon their aspirations and retreat to the confines of their homes.

Yet retreating to the corner of her home did not signify the surrender of Saidi’s dreams. Instead she was determined to seek alternative ways to pursue her education and ambitions.

In the privacy of her home, Saidi found an online storytelling and writing course launched by , an and human rights advocate. As she delved into the world of narrative and storytelling, Saidi discovered a powerful medium through which she could give voice to the experiences of Afghan women living under Taliban rule.

With each lesson, she felt her skills as a storyteller growing, and she soon found herself weaving tales that captured the resilience, strength, and courage of women like herself who refused to give up on their dreams. These stories became tools in the arsenal of the students in the course, empowering them to challenge the Taliban’s oppressive regime through the power of narrative. “They may have closed the doors of the university to me, but I will fight them with the might of my words,” says Saidi. “My pen will serve as my unyielding weapon.”&�Բ�����;

She is not alone in her struggle; Saidi’s sentiments are who, like her, appear determined to resist the Taliban’s oppressive rule. They have transformed the hidden corners of their homes into personal sanctuaries, where against the Taliban’s restrictions.

Armed with their pens and the strength of their convictions, Afghan women have turned to writing, storytelling, and art as a means of resistance, standing together in solidarity and fostering a sense of empowerment that echoes across the nation. Addie Esposito, writing in the about Afghan women artists, concluded that “art and women remain the greatest perceived threats to Taliban control.”

Although they have never met and live hundreds of miles apart—with Soltani in Herat and Kimia in Kabul—both artists share a common objective: to portray the pain of Afghan women through their art. Both are producing art that reflects not just the challenges women face in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, but also the courage and resilience they show in the face of these difficulties. For instance one of Soltani’s paintings depicts a woman who is fully covered, . Another piece while a Taliban fighter points a gun at her.

Artists like Soltani and Kimia are envisioning and illustrating their ideal future—a future where women are free. depicts a woman wearing an Afghan Gand dress, a beautifully handcrafted and embroidered red dress adorned with jewelry. The wind tousles the woman’s hair, and she is not wearing a traditional covering. portrays a young girl seated atop a stack of books, with a chain around her ankle. This image reflects the current situation in Afghanistan, where girls over the age of 12 are forbidden from attending school.

Kimia hopes her paintings are testimonies to the strength and resistance of her people, and that her art inspires widespread support for their plight.: “The Taliban may impose restrictions on our public lives, but they can never extinguish our unwavering determination to learn and relentlessly pursue our dreams.”

The that started shortly after the debate and continued through the weekend forced evacuations and closures of government buildings, hospitals, a university, and schools in Springfield. Although Trump’s words have imperiled Haitian immigrants, he has not withdrawn his claim; he has doubled down on it. On Sept. 12, while campaigning, he suggested Haitians had ruined “beautiful Springfield” and were not in the city legally, although Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said . Trump also insinuated the immigrants are involved in sexual violence against “young American girls,” continuing his pattern of linking immigration to the  

The targeting of Haitians in the small-town Midwest has led to an outcry of support from the public, policymakers, and immigration advocates. The National Parents Union, a women-led organization made up of parent advocacy groups fighting for equity in education, criticized “the reckless and irresponsible comments” from Republican leaders and announced that it “stand[s] with the families of Springfield” in a statement on Sept. 13. 

But no one empathizes with Springfield’s Haitian community like Haitian Americans themselves. The 19th spoke with scholars and immigrant advocates, mostly women of Haitian heritage, about the repercussions of Trump’s words. They contend that his claim—and the hate before and after it—are nothing new: Due to the unique ways race, religion, and resistance have intersected in Haiti’s history, immigrants from the Caribbean nation have experienced a specific brand of xenophobia in the United States, even as Black immigrants in this country lack visibility.

“This kind of narrative has been going on since at least the middle of the 19th century,” said Danielle N. Boaz, professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “W�� can connect all of this back to the thing that Haitians did that was unforgivable to people of European heritage, which is they had this … rebellion that started in the 1790s and culminated in what historians have sometimes called the only successful slave rebellion in history, where they were able to defeat not only the French but other foreign powers.”

The 1804 creation of Saint-Domingue, later Haiti, left slaveholding societies terrified that the human beings they held in bondage would also rebel. For securing their freedom, Haitians were demonized, with the often used to make wild claims against them, Boaz said.

“So, over the years, the narrative just kind of increases about how Haiti is this barbaric place,” she said. ����’s run only by Black people.”&�Բ�����;

Trump reinforced the barbarism messaging by implying that Haitians are “savage criminal aliens.”&�Բ�����;

Despite Springfield Police denying any “credible reports or specific claims” of Haitians abusing animals or committing other crimes, Trump’s allegations have reverberated nationally. Christopher Rufo, who has led the national push against in schools and is a trustee for the New College of Florida, where hundreds of books on gender and diversity were discarded last month, offered a $5,000 “bounty” to anyone with evidence of . In Florida and New York—the states with the largest Haitian American communities— condemned Trump’s remarks and of Ohio. 

The bomb and shooting threats targeting Haitians disproportionately place pressure on mothers, said Taisha Saintil, senior policy analyst for the UndocuBlack Network, which advocates for Black immigrants. Often children’s primary caregivers, women rearrange work schedules, stay home, or make childcare plans when schools close, losing household income in the process.

“Women are often the ones managing the day-to-day fears, picking up and dropping off children, and trying to shield them from the psychological trauma of these threats,” Saintil said. “This gender dynamic adds another layer to the stress, as women feel pressure to keep things normal for their families while silently shouldering the weight of their own fear and frustration.”

Having immigrated to Florida from Haiti in 2006 at age 9, Saintil said that she feels for Springfield’s Haitian community. Before moving to diverse Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she briefly lived in a white community where she said her classmates taunted, spat on her, and called her a cat-eater. 

“I remember … the fear, waking up every single day knowing that I’m going to get bullied, nobody wanting to talk to me, sitting at the lunch table by myself,” Saintil said. “When I compare it to what is happening now to the newly arrived kids, I think about just how … the bullying will mark them for the rest of their lives.”

Lured by manufacturing jobs, an estimated 15,000 Haitian immigrants have settled in Springfield—a mostly white town of just under 60,000 people—. Before then, Springfield experienced an economic downturn caused, in part, by population decline. Then, the immigrants arrived, .

Valerie Lacarte, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, said that immigrants typically settle in areas because they know they can find reliable employment or their ethnic community already lives there. Springfield wasn’t previously home to a Haitian community, but state officials reportedly advertised the city’s livability and jobs, news that attracted migrants.

“You have employers who are hiring these people, so from the job-market perspective, that’s a good thing. You have a match,” Lacarte said. 

But this mutually beneficial development did not prevent tensions, which worsened last year after a Haitian immigrant crashed into a school bus, killing one child, Aiden Clark, and hurting nearly 30 others. Still, Nathan Clark, Aiden’s father, spoke out at a city commission meeting last week to denounce . Anti-immigrant residents, meanwhile, have complained that Springfield lacks the infrastructure for population growth.

����’s tempting to think the growth of immigrants, that’s what’s causing the problems,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, coauthor of Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy and a University of California, Berkeley, researcher. ����’s the politicization of immigrants, and especially in places that have significant Republican voting populations, the scapegoating of immigrants tends to be higher. This is an issue we’ve seen time and again in the American heartland, places that are depopulating, places that are short of workers, that actually benefit from immigrant workers, but you have people … tapping into these national dynamics, when it comes to race and xenophobia, to win elected office.”

Officials must “be intentional about social cohesion” to avoid conflict between the longtime residents and the Haitian transplants, said Lacarte, the daughter of Haitian immigrants. It’s important to make sure that both the U.S.-born and foreign-born community members get the attention and resources needed to grow together as a diverse community.

Longtime residents may misunderstand why people who look and sound different from them are moving in, Lacarte said. They witness the demographic shift, but they don’t realize these changes can be helpful. Then, bad actors deepen anxieties by spreading disinformation about immigrants. 

“Immigrants have been not only filling these jobs and helping grow the economy. They have their own demand for goods and services,” Lacarte said. “They send their kids to school. They even, in some cases, create businesses … and that grows the economy.”

During the presidential debate, Trump did not portray foreign-born workers as a positive but as a threat to Americans, accusing . This framing overlooks that immigrants fill jobs the native-born population doesn’t pursue, Lacarte said, and that more workers are needed as birth rates decline and the white population ages. It also belies the fact that Black immigrants exist. 

About , the Pew Research Center reported in 2022. Africans have driven Black immigrant growth; their population increased by 246% between 2000 and 2019. In 2005, The New York Times reported that than at any time since the . Today, Africans make up 42% of the Black foreign-born population, while Caribbean immigrants make up 46%. Of the latter, most come from two countries: Jamaica and Haiti. 

After in Del Rio, Texas, went viral in 2021, Saintil said she received multiple messages disclosing, “I did not know there were Black immigrants. Where did they come from?” She assumed, due to her profession, that people knew the United States had Black immigrants.

“Most of my work now has been to raise visibility of Haitian and Black immigrants,” Saintil said. “W��’re the most detained, the most placed in solitary confinement. Our bail bonds are higher. So, the same things that are happening to African Americans in the criminal justice system are happening to Black immigrants in the detention center. Our asylum claims are the most denied because immigration judges don’t trust our pain.”

Long before the debate, Trump disparaged Black immigrants. In 2017, he reportedly said that   The following year, he labeled Haiti, African nations, and El Salvador “.” In Springfield, local Republicans have echoed Trump’s remarks. In addition to the pet-eating allegations, they’ve accused immigrants of being in gangs, spreading disease, and practicing “voodoo” rituals, claims police have denied.

As Haiti became the yardstick for measuring whether Black people could participate in society equally, attacks on its character escalated. By the 1880s, stories spread about Haitians engaging in cannibalism and human sacrifice, especially of white children, Boaz said. Told repeatedly, these stories inform the rumors about Haitians in Springfield today, and they may jeopardize women.

“Historically, women in marginalized communities, whether immigrants, ethnic minorities, or refugees, have been specifically targeted for intimidation,” Saintil said. “This may be because some view them as ‘easier’ to attack or harass than men. … In this context, when Haitian women are being targeted for threats, harassment, or even racial slurs in public spaces, the consequences are far-reaching. This not only creates an atmosphere of terror for women but can also ripple through the entire family.”

Haitian American anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse, a professor of humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that she’s tired of defending her personhood and identity. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Ulysse wrote a book called because she found the dehumanizing remarks about Haitians then disturbing. 

“W��’re always having to refute as opposed to having an identity that is an affirmed one,” Ulysse said. “There is a profound disappointment that in 2024 that I am listening to someone who is running to be the president of the highest nation in the land say something this surreal, this absurd. But I’m also someone as a Black woman, as a social scientist, as someone who understands race and racial construction, [knows] what that is meant to do, and that is to paint Haitians as the ultimate ‘others,’ cannibalists, and otherwise, so that it can keep fueling this narrative that’s necessary to strip people of their humanity.”&�Բ�����;

Ulysse said that the broader immigrant community faces xenophobia, too. One study concluded that the level of today rivals , a period that restricted Chinese immigration. Chinese immigrants have also been accused of consuming dogs and cats, insults revived during the onset of COVID-19, which Trump called the “China virus.”&�Բ�����;

“He’s gone from talking about Mexican immigrants as predominantly being criminals and rapists to then talking about immigrants as vectors of disease and now using similar kinds of dehumanizing language to talk about … not just what they eat, but the kind of the social threat they supposedly pose to American society,” Ramakrishnan said. “I think the kinds of emotions it’s supposed to evoke are emotions of disgust, of othering and reduced empathy, and also support for drastic measures like rounding up and deporting people who are not deemed to be American.”

If Harris becomes president, she would not only be the first woman in the Oval Office but also the first person of South Asian and Caribbean heritage. Might that change perceptions and policies related to Caribbean immigrants? 

“No matter how well-meaning one person may be, they’re part of a social structure and a system that makes decisions,” Ulysse said. “She’s not going to make decisions by herself, so what difference does it make that she’s from the Caribbean? She’s got advisors. She’s got to think about Congress. She’s got to think about the Senate. She’s got to think about geopolitics and history.”&�Բ�����;

When Trump took aim at Haitian immigrants during the debate, Harris laughed in apparent disbelief but did not rebuke him. Ulysse finds it disturbing that many people laughed at Trump’s claims because, as absurd as they are, they’re endangering Haitians. 

On Friday, President Joe Biden called the attacks on Haitians “simply wrong,” noting that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is “a proud Haitian American.”

Along with being terrified and traumatized, Saintil said the Haitian children and parents impacted by the threats and smears likely feel betrayed. 

“You’re getting it from a country that you thought you could be safe in,” she said. “You’re getting it in a country that you’ve been hoping to be in because you thought your life would be better, but now you’re being treated worse than dirt. You’re being called a savage. … How do you go on from there?”

This story was originally published by and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license.

Humor in Native culture, according to Deloria, has never been simply about entertainment and fun, but about governance and organizational styles and getting things done—but also, an irresistible response to absurd levels of tragedy. In his book, he recalled singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at a Native conference and the room breaking into laughter as they realized that their fathers most certainly did die at the hands of the Pilgrims—a hilariously dark twist on the lines “land where my fathers died … land of the Pilgrims’ pride.”

Well before the “White invasion,” Native communities used teasing and ridicule as a form of functional rebuke when people seemed to go against the broad consensus of a tribe; comedy became an important quality for effective leaders. 

Comedy, not surprisingly given its structural functions in Native communities, is also found in Indigenous activism.

Comedy, not surprisingly given its structural functions in Native communities, is also found in Indigenous activism. In 1969, in one of the most successful and well-known contemporary Native-led uprisings, activists seized control of Alcatraz Island, occupying it for months and demanding rightful land be returned as the had promised. As attention grew and allies and Natives arrived on-site, the poet John Trudell (Santee-Dakota) “wrote a satirical manifesto that conveys the feelings of the occupation,” as Kliph Nesteroff wrote in his book (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Trudell was rewarded for his efforts with an FBI file that said, in part, “He is extremely eloquent—therefore extremely dangerous.” Humor was embedded in the resistance itself. 

Cut to Native activism in the present day, where Crystal Echo Hawk, , , and a network of Indigenous artists are fighting cultural invisibility and structural oppression, and, in its place, asserting their identities. They are focused both on the power nucleus of Hollywood and on making and disseminating their own stories, using the participatory media tools of the digital age, striving to change the image and treatment of Native people by disrupting the narrative created by others. Comedy is meaningful here, too, says Echo Hawk: “There are times in our communities when we really faced some incredibly difficult challenges, and there are moments where dark humor is alive and well because it’s sometimes just the way that we cope. It’s the way that we are expressing our resiliency.”&�Բ�����;

As the 1491s’ Ryan RedCorn says, “Almost all of my actions are designed to work in service of social justice. They are often heavily disguised.” Incognito activism is where comedy gets to shine. And so it was that a group of us—Natives and allies, comedians and activists—arrived in Oklahoma in the summer of 2019 to see what we might create together. Our task: imagine and produce new comedy to agitate Native invisibility and push against long-standing doors of oppression.

: Creating Comedy for Native Activism

The drive from Tulsa to the Osage Nation reservation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, is long, flat, and blanketed with tall grass. Highway signs fall behind as prairie land gives way to smaller winding rural roads, and if there are prominent street signs to mark the path, I have missed them because we are fully trusting our guide, Ryan RedCorn, comedian and son of the Osage Nation’s assistant chief, Raymond Red Corn. RedCorn knows every detail and turn of this place, his lifelong home. The night before, after dinner in old downtown Pawhuska, we looked up from the bottom steps of the old courthouse where most cases of hundreds of murdered Osage—killed by envious Whites for their oil claims in the 1920s—remained unresolved, covered up by the FBI in one of the most scandalous little-known stories of violence perpetrated on Native peoples.

Stuffed into two SUVs, we are a noisy and funny (literally) little caravan: nine joke-cracking comedians—half of them Native, half non-Native—and me, making our way through the plains of Oklahoma on a hot June afternoon. 

Our visit was the culminating event in a remarkable week spent co-creating comedy between Native and non-Native comedians, alongside Crystal Echo Hawk and an assembled group of Native leaders, activists, and experts. When Echo Hawk and our team discussed making comedy together as social justice strategy, she knew immediately that she wanted to host our session on-site in Oklahoma. The learning and the immersive experience, in her mind, would be totally different than in a writers’ room in Los Angeles or New York, where this kind of work usually germinates. She was right. I learned more about Native culture as an invited guest than I had in a lifetime of living in this country, and I know the other non-Natives in our group shared my perspective. 

As RedCorn reflected, ����’s important to understand the geographic context. I live in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, but usually the people writing about Native people or rural Americans don’t live here. It’s a double uphill battle for people trying to write these characters in these spaces. There are so many misrepresentations of people in these spaces. … These stories are totally cut off to [writers’ rooms] because they don’t know the rules of those worlds.”&�Բ�����;

We have gathered to co-create comedy together for the first time, our effort part of IllumiNative’s ongoing cultural activism and its first official foray into leveraging comedy. Our group is a real who’s who of hot Native comedy talent—Joey Clift, Adrianne Chalepah, Bobby Wilson, Ryan RedCorn—and some of the best non-Native comedy improvisers and sketch writers and performers in the country: Sebastian Conelli, Shannon O’Neill, Johnny McNulty, Rachel Pegram. Bethany Hall, as always, is our comedy facilitator. 

We begin our week together with a full day of information gathering and presentations from Echo Hawk and other Native leaders who work in and for their communities; the is the heart of our session, and there is a huge amount of information to take in. As Adrianne Chalepah summarized the challenge, “W�� have to know what we’re talking about if we’re going to write jokes. We’re not just doing it for laughs, but community is on the line, and we have to find something relatable in all of that information.”

Producing comedy for activism purposes is a tricky balance when it comes to Native invisibility issues, as Echo Hawk puts it, because our work has to resonate strongly with Native audiences (and they are well aware of their cultural invisibility, as Chalepah wryly pointed out) even while it reaches non-Native audiences. Non-Native people, after all, are the ones who hold and perpetuate destructive misinformation at worst, or, at best, simply don’t know anything at all about Native peoples, culture, and lived experiences; the comedy has to be funny to both an inside and an outside audience. And if we are following the open artistic process of comedy—that is, not predeciding exactly what ideas should be developed, what facts to reinforce—we don’t know exactly where this will go. 

Following the serious information transfer, the first order of (comedy) business is an exercise in which every comedian in the room shares a story about how and where they grew up: Who were the people and characters in their lives? What is memorable? Where does their comedy derive from? It is alternatively hilarious and serious, but it definitely breaks the ice. Conelli has us on the floor laughing as he recounts stories about “Uncle Rocky”: a ham-handed, gregarious Staten Island man who would sit in his work truck to eat massive sandwiches in between shifts. (Quips RedCorn later, “I need to see better Staten Island representation in comedy!”) But we have to address the truly meta idea in the room itself: Non-Native comedians don’t know much of anything about Native culture or lived experiences. We have to break the ice and allow people to share their stories and ask questions. 

An informal session—“is this racist or is this funny?”—has everyone cracking up. It is hard to imagine this level of levity and honesty happening in “strategy” rooms for activist work, but once the comedians are able to hear each other’s stories and questions, it is an open playing field. As Bobby Wilson pointed out later, the really funny ideas didn’t start to emerge until all of the comedy writers had created a really funny comfort zone together, once non-Native folks “got past all the guilt of not knowing,” as he put it. If the room had stayed “careful” as people tried not to offend one another, the funny would have been suppressed. Joey Clift said, “The stories we told, the things we shared with each other, that’s where the light-bulb moments happened.”&�Բ�����;

Was it hard to find the comedy amid traumatic factual information? Not really, particularly given the long-standing role of humor in Native communities; the writers arrived with plenty of it. As Chalepah put it, “When you are dealing with systems of oppression, the comedy writes itself. It’s easy to find the punchlines because we can see what’s wrong with that picture.” The comedy balance was really important to find, though: “People who are never going to seek out Native American facts never will unless we do it like this,” said Conelli. ���� was important to make the comedy really funny rather than to work on the social justice topics so heavily.” By the end of the co-creation week, the comedians came up with easily 40 different ideas: TV shows, films, sketches, jokes, social media videos. On the final day, they pitched their final loglines, all centering Native joy and hilarity. Notably, none focused on the trauma or violence reflected in years and years of American culture—but all were designed to blast a hole into the absurdity of distorted Native tropes and celebrate Native truth and stories. 

Excerpted from (NYU Press, 2023) by Caty Borum.

For nearly two centuries, working-class, pan-Asian immigrants were the majority of migrants coming to the Western Hemisphere: , , , and in California and the Southwest, or the indentured servants in British South American and Caribbean colonies. These were all poor, working-class immigrants from across the Asian continent. 

Working-class, pan-Asian communities have historically been integrated and in solidarity with Black and Brown communities. For example, in , , and the , South Asian migrant workers integrated into Puerto Rican, Dominican, Black, and Mexican families and communities for protection against white supremacist violence and economic exploitation.

In California in the 1970s, Chinese immigrant students and families fought alongside Latine families for language access in public schools, which resulted in a favorable . 

Japanese and Filipinx farmworkers fought side-by-side with Mexican farmworkers in the .

Southeast Asians and settled in largely Black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican communities in Massachusetts, New York, California, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Minnesota, forming shared struggles around equitable education access. 

This is a very different reality than the that pan-Asian communities include mostly wealthy business owners, doctors, and engineers who are actively working to assimilate into whiteness. White Americans, particularly within academia and mass media, have perpetuated the model minority myth to weaken the organizing for racial and economic justice by Black and Brown communities and create further roadblocks for working-class Asian people to contribute to those struggles. 

The Current Political Moment

We are experiencing the in white supremacist, Zionist, and Christian nationalist forces in decades. These forces are joined by multiple Asian right-wing forces emerging internally from our own pan-Asian communities, such as the Chinese American Right and South Asian Hindutva (Hindu supremacists). �鶹���¼� and more, for right-wing forces across the U.S. in a multitude of contentious political issues. Despite Asian communities’ long histories of working-class and multiracial solidarity, these Asian right-wing forces have a dominating influence on public narratives about pan-Asian communities. While Asian conservatism in the U.S. has long existed, groups like the and have become more effective in how they organize and mobilize Asian communities and more strategic in how they create powerful alliances with white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and Zionist agendas. 

There are many examples of these strategic allyships across the nation. White supremacist groups convinced Chinese American plaintiffs to join their Supreme Court case to . In California, Hindu supremacists have pushed for the , and throughout the state. Christian nationalists have recruited conservative Asian faith-based groups to . Wealthy Asian landlords have worked alongside corporate real estate lobbyists to . Most recently, Hindu nationalists both and . have made public their deep ideological and political alliances with Zionist forces in Israel.

The growth of these proto-fascist movements has serious consequences for all people in the U.S., regardless of race, ethnic background, and class, but the connecting line is clear: The most systems-marginalized, the most poor and working-class parts of all our communities are most negatively impacted while also being misinformed and recruited by right-wing formations.��

White supremacists, Christian nationalists, and Zionists are once again using pan-Asian communities as the driving wedge against social justice movements, making it more difficult to retain historical, hard-earned, progressive wins. This is once again creating division and hindering progressive organizing and multiracial solidarity. We are the co-directors of (GAR), a national network of 34 grassroots organizations rooted in working-class, pan-Asian immigrant and refugee communities. Our member organizers are directly dealing with the ramifications of the right-wing’s growing power. We know that if we want to win the material changes our communities need and deserve, we need to build a movement powerful enough to make justice inevitable.

To deepen our collective understanding about the growing contingents of right-wing forces within Asian and Asian American communities, GAR has facilitated to share their experiences. Through this, we uncovered the vast infrastructures of right-wing forces and seen how far their influences have reached within Asian communities. Many organizers raised concerns about the prevalence of right-wing ideas in our communities through in-language content, local ethnic media, and cultural and religious community spaces. These are the spaces that many people flock to in order to build relationships and have a strong sense of belonging.  

According to Pew Research Center, Asians are predicted to be the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055, surpassing the size of the Latine population. Working-class, pan-Asian communities are rapidly growing in critical battleground states such as Michigan, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Various right-wing forces have already begun organizing in working-class, pan-Asian communities, including Christian nationalists from Asian churches, temples, and mosques and the Republican Party in ethnic enclaves with the hopes of swaying elections.

There are few grassroots organizing groups made up of directly impacted people leading and directing the work of providing social services or engaging in advocacy and policy in pan-Asian communities. This void is currently being peddling a proto-fascist agenda. 

Organizing is the clearest and most consistent tool we have at our disposal to change this dynamic, that has had the least investment. The ecosystem for community organizing in working-class, pan-Asian communities has to grow and meet the needs of the demographic trends across the U.S. Otherwise, we are left responding to one crisis after another, and with weak infrastructure for leaderful and powerful movements. 

If we want to build a multiracial democracy, which is needed now more than ever, our movements must that addresses working-class, pan-Asian issues. In fight after fight, we are witnessing the use of pan-Asian communities to advance right-wing and proto-fascist agendas. Building shared working-class interests is how we can build unified fronts for a multiracial democracy. If we don’t, progressive causes will continue to lose. 

As a network, GAR is committed to nationally uniting local organizations to grow our capacity to effectively organize working-class, pan-Asian communities. This includes for in-language political education to raise political consciousness; strong, local organizations committed to building working-class membership bases; and political and strategy alignment in working-class pan-Asian communities. 

Asian Americans have a history of working-class struggles, anti-war movements, solidarity, and powerful organizing. With Asian communities growing across the U.S., we must remember our history of organizing for working-class interests and solidarity, and return to the roots of our working-class, migrant, pan-Asian communities. We must take continued action in the current political moment we find ourselves in. 

Our ancestors grounded themselves in their working-class interests when they built meaningful relationships and mutual solidarity with Black and Brown working-class communities and won important racial, immigrant, education, and economic protections that we all continue to benefit from. Let’s remember and continue this legacy. 

Within a month, Dismer’s body began changing in painful and traumatic ways. Their chest grew larger, triggering gender dysphoria, and their preexisting health conditions quickly threatened both their health and the health of the pregnancy. ���� was miserable,” they told , an abortion storytelling organization. “After a month of contemplation, I knew I needed an abortion.”

It isn’t uncommon for nonbinary people to seek abortion care: A 2023 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that as many as do not identify as heterosexual women. But too often, the language used by abortion clinics, abortion funds, and abortion advocacy organizations don’t reflect that reality.

“W��’ve been the sole statewide abortion fund for 32 years, and we’ve prided ourselves on supporting folks from all backgrounds,” Sam Woodring, communications manager for the , said in an email. The fund, which used to be known as Women Have Options, intentionally in 2022 to be more inclusive of abortion seekers who don’t identify as cisgender women.

“When we use gendered language, the implicit message is that folks not included are unworthy of that care [and] support,” Woodring says. “To need support getting an abortion, and the only option available to you is also deeply gender-exclusive can be yet another barrier to accessing the care they [trans and nonbinary folks] want, need, and deserve.”

Moving Beyond the Battle of the Sexes

When freestanding and emerged in the 1970s, many deliberately branded as being women’s-health focused. This was the age of second wave feminism, when activists tried to assert and at every level of government. In 1970, provided federal grants for contraception; Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion in 1973. At the time, these were considered to be “women’s health” services.

But 50 years later, our understanding of gender has moved beyond the binary of “man” and “woman”—and it’s well past time for abortion care organizations and clinics to reflect that.

The Abortion Fund of Ohio is one of many organizations and funds that have rebranded in an effort to become more gender inclusive. Previously known as the Gateway Women’s Access Fund, the Missouri Abortion Fund , well before Roe was overturned with the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania from the Women’s Medical Fund in 2021. , the independent abortion clinic where Dismer works, was known as Hope Clinic for Women until early 2023.

Unfortunately, this tidal wave of change has been criticized for “.” Apparently, changing our language about abortion to be more inclusive and ensure access for everyone who wants, needs, and has an abortion is unfair and discriminatory to those who have fought “.”

Rebranding an organization to be gender inclusive and using language like “pregnant people” does not mean that someone who identifies as a woman can no longer call themself a woman. Woodring of the Abortion Fund of Ohio sums it up well: “Making the switch to gender-inclusive language hurts no one, because, as we like to remind folks, women are people too.”

Rebranding to Reality

Trans and nonbinary people have always existed, and while the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s may not have had the language or understanding to contextualize abortion rights within a gender-inclusive framework, we do now. Refusing to do so, continuing to say “women’s reproductive rights,” and specifically spelling out in the name of a clinic or fund that it serves “women” are all ways that deny the very existence of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people.

And, since research now shows that one in six people who have an abortion don’t identify as a heterosexual woman, it’s harmful to continue to insist that abortion or reproductive health care is a “women’s issue.”

Some clinics, like Boulder Valley Health Center (BVHC), have been providing gender-affirming care and other health care services to people of all genders for years. BVHC, previously known as Boulder Valley Women’s Health, in 2023, the 50th anniversary of the Colorado-based clinic. The clinic’s choice reflected the expansive care it had long been providing.

“W��’ve always actually served anyone,” director of development Jennifer Johnson told the . ���� doesn’t matter what people’s gender identity is; we’re here to serve the whole community … we really wanted to make sure that everyone in the community knows they’re welcome here for their health care, however they identify.”

For other clinics, pivoting to gender-inclusive language reflects the stark reality that it’s illegal for some of them to provide abortion care at all.

Once Roe was overturned, abortion became illegal in the state of Alabama. Robin Marty, executive director of WAWC Healthcare (formerly West Alabama Women’s Center) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, knew she needed to keep the clinic open to provide other types of reproductive and sexual health care.��

WAWC shut down for more than a week in the wake of the Dobbs decision. When it reopened on July 7, 2022, the clinic had revised its entire model. “W�� were then officially a nonprofit, sliding-scale health care center,” Marty says. “W�� built our new services around all of that, and that included HIV testing and treatment and prevention, as well as doing gender-affirming health care.”

In 2024, West Alabama Women’s Center became WAWC. The clinic waited to change its name because it was uncertain if it would be able to remain open at all. It took nearly two years for “us to feel that we were actually going to be able to stay open permanently,” Marty explained. “Before that, it didn’t make any sense to try to put into place an entire branding change if we thought we were only going to be operating for another month or two.”

Now, more than two years after Dobbs eradicated the constitutional right to an abortion, WAWC is still open and serving patients. WAWC doesn’t provide abortion care, but, true to its new gender-inclusive name, it does perform a wide range of reproductive and sexual health care options.

“W�� provide gender-affirming care across the state,” Marty said. ����’s not just those [in Tuscaloosa] who are coming to the clinic. We’ve been able to do a telemed program … We’re actually able to provide medication to people regardless of where they are in the state.”

It’s unclear whether WAWC will ever be able to provide abortion care again, but if it does, its gender-inclusive name will signal its willingness to accept abortion patients of all genders. Even if abortion remains illegal in Alabama, WAWC’s rebrand, as other clinic and fund rebrands, hold an important lesson for clinics and funds nationwide: Changing a name to be gender-inclusive isn’t a rhetorical exercise. 

Being gender-inclusive is about reflecting the many genders a clinic already serves. It’s about welcoming patients of all genders, no matter how they identify. It’s about signaling to the broader culture, to the entire country, that access to safe abortion care is for everyone.

Jan. 1 marked 10 years since the 22-year-old father was fatally shot by the Bay Area Regional Transit officer in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day.

In the decade since his tragic death, Grant’s family has helped to create a police citizen review board of BART, established a foundation, and launched a campaign to not only help bridge the gap between police and the community, but also to build a nationwide network of families affected by such violence.

“That’s a club that nobody wants to be a part of,” says Grant’s aunt, Beatrice X Johnson. “W�� can offer them love, support, and steps to getting justice, because we are the only ones that truly know what they’re going through.”

The impact of Grant’s death ripped through the country. Millions would come to know his story, which was depicted in the 2013 critically acclaimed film��Fruitvale Station.

BART officers had responded to a call about a fight on the Fruitvale station platform about 2 a.m. Grant, who according to reports was not among those fighting, was detained with several others. ��captured of the incident. Already restrained, an unarmed Grant was fatally shot in the back by Officer Johannes Mehserle.

Grant became part of a grim list of unarmed Black men, women, and children, killed in the years before the world started saying their names: Travyon Martin … Michael Brown … Philando Castile … Tamir Rice … Aiyanna Stanley-Jones … Rekia Boyd … Sandra Bland.

The United States has ��than any other industrialized country. In 2018, , according to The Washington Post. Of those killed, 38 were unarmed.

Research has recently confirmed what survivors of police violence have known for a long time—the trauma from these type of killings reach far beyond those who personally knew the victim. Entire Black communities are affected.

Organizing

To help their community heal from Grant’s death, his mother, Wanda Johnson, and uncle Cephus X Johnson, known as Uncle Bobby, along with members of their community, campaigned for the creation of the BART Police Citizen Review Board, which was formed in 2009.

Among their responsibilities, members of the board review citizen allegations of on-duty police misconduct, and recommend and monitor changes to police policies. , dozens of recommendations from the review board were approved by the BART board in March 2018, such as allowing the independent police auditors to investigate any kind of misconduct allegations.

In 2010,��Uncle Bobby founded the Oscar Grant Foundation to help mend the distrust between residents in predominantly Black, high-crime communities and law enforcement. The foundation offers community support through grief sessions as well as youth services and activities such as scholarships, school supplies giveaways, tutoring, and programs, including three basketball teams named after Grant.

He and his wife, Beatrice, later established the Love Not Blood Campaign in 2014. And Wanda Johnson took over as CEO of the foundation.

The purpose of both organizations is to help others who’ve been affected by gun violence, and to create an environment where that violence does not exist.

Love Not Blood works to build a network of families across the country whose loved ones have lost their lives to police or community violence. They offer emotional support through their family response team, which helps families with events, such as vigils or healing circles. They also help them with navigating the criminal justice system, attaining lawyers, attending trials, and creating a safe space for them to tell their stories.

The campaign also holds workshops at conferences and in schools to inspire youth activism.

“W�� offer services to educate children so they can get activated right away,” Beatrice says. “This is their future. You don’t have to wait until you’re grown to start making changes.”

Uncle Bobby��adds that they offer a unique perspective to families when a crisis occurs.

“Families impacted will have a better chance of engaging families that are newly impacted,” he explains. “W�� give them insight of this whole new trajectory that they’ve been placed on with the murder of their loved one.”

Healing Hurting Hearts

Dionne Smith-Downs, a mother of 14, was put on that new trajectory when she lost her son, James Rivera, to police violence in 2010. Rivera, 16, was shot multiple times by Stockton, California, police officers.

Uncle Bobby��reached out to Smith-Downs to let her know she wasn’t alone, and introduced her to Wanda Johnson, who convenes the monthly support sessions at the foundation for mothers whose children have died from gun violence.

The goal of the sessions is to introduce the mothers to the five stages of the grieving process, brainstorm solutions to policing, and talk about ways to improve the relationship between the community and police.

“I understand the loss. I can’t say I understand their full grieving process because everyone grieves different,” Wanda says. “[But] I understand the impact of losing your son at the hands of those we hire to protect and serve [us].”

Smith-Downs is one of 15 to 30 participants who attend the Healing Hurting Hearts monthly support sessions. She says coming together regularly with the mothers is empowering.

“My son was 16 years old when he was killed, and I had so many questions,” she said. “No one knows how you’re feeling, but these mothers do.”

Building relationships

Donna Smith, Grant’s godmother and foundation volunteer, is proud of the relationship the foundation has forged with local law enforcement. Over the years, officers have participated in the foundation’s community events.

“When we have the backpack giveaways or scholarship events, police officers and firefighters are all lined up on the walls and even out in the lobby. They’re saying, ‘We’re here to support your community and we’re going to be consistent,’” Smith says. ����’s overwhelming to see.”

In addition to building relationships with officers and holding them accountable, the foundation has provided nearly $70,000 in scholarships to youth in the community.

Jafar Bey, a sophomore at University of California, Davis, was awarded a scholarship in 2017.

“[I] can’t really describe how much it’s appreciated,” says Bey, who comes from a large family.

With nine siblings, he says, money can be tight. Two are currently in college.

“Getting the scholarship from the foundation allowed me to go to a prestigious university right away without waiting and having to go somewhere smaller,” he said.

At UC Davis, Bey majors in political science and philosophy, and plans to become a lawyer so that he can help at-risk and disadvantaged youth, who he says often get overlooked.

“They don’t get a chance to see their potential, but the Oscar Grant Foundation allows them to see themselves in a different light and lets them know there are opportunities out there for them to succeed.”

Looking to the future

In March, the foundation will hold its Fourth Annual Gala to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Grant’s death. An unveiling of a mural at the Fruitvale station in Grant’s honor is scheduled. And the family is working toward installing a plaque on the platform as well.

The funds raised from the gala will go toward youth scholarships, travel, flights, and uniforms for the OG Ballers basketball team, Healing Hurting Hearts materials, a building fund for a tutoring center, and more.

“[We want to] really pour love into the community and help with our collective healing,” Wanda Johnson says. “W�� can’t do this work without the community’s support.”

Every day for the past 22 years, I’ve left my house and traveled the same route to work. It takes exactly six minutes from the time I leave until the moment I open the door of my SUV to walk inside my school. Every day I walk to the passenger side to get my purse, school bag, and thermos of iced tea to drink at work, and then look at the large cutout of an eagle over the gym on my way into school. 

I attended Live Oak schools from elementary through high school, and the eagle has always been our mascot. After I graduated college, I went back to work at the school I attended as a child, once more an eagle. I have been an eagle for 35 of the 45 years that I have been alive, in more ways than one.

A few years ago, I took an online test that compares personalities to animals, and I had to laugh when my results came back as an eagle. Eagle personalities were described as being goal-driven, bold, action-oriented, and not afraid of a challenge. Eagle personalities, much like the actual bird of prey, are daring, persistent, savage yet nurturing, resilient.

Upon reflection, I wouldn’t say that I am naturally a courageous person, but I will go toe to toe with someone, regardless of who they are or how dangerous, if they try to harm me or someone I love. Like an eagle, I can be ferocious when needed.

After July 2022, when both myself and my became targets in Louisiana, I decided to show just how ferocious I could be. I never thought that attending a public library board meeting to speak against censorship would make me a target, but I wasn’t going to take it lying down. I set forth to create a game plan to help my parish that included getting to know the players, gathering allies, and creating alliances, and the determination that while we might lose some skirmishes along the way, we would win the big game no matter what. I am playing chess to their checkers.

The pro-censors are loud and obnoxious, and they’re only growing bolder. They’ll continue their rampage unless rational people speak out against them. This movement could have detrimental effects on our schools and libraries for decades to come if we don’t consistently confront them. 

People who believe in inclusivity, the freedom to read, and the public good need to be even louder and more active than the book banners. They post about saving children but provide no evidence that children are in danger. It’s not about kids for them. We all want to protect children. That has never been the difference between us and them. Their agenda is all about silencing voices, politics, and money. It’s very important in the quest for intellectual freedom that we get to know our foes.

I highly recommend that everyone take the following steps to stay informed within your community:

Attend school board, library board, and local governance meetings.

Take notes on which officials use words like “woke” and “indoctrination.” If they use words like “gender ideology” and “sexually explicit material,” chances are they are pro-censorship. Hate and oppression is a running theme, and you will find that they all post the same ridiculous memes filled with lies and conspiracy theories.

Follow the social media accounts of elected officials and take screenshots to document any extremist views.

Share the knowledge with others in your community.

Use a website like to track legislation and your elected officials.

Stay in the know.

Use your state government’s website to look up politicians and their donors.

Follow the money and you will find the motives.

Vote in every local election.

Keeping tabs on the pro-censors in other areas allows you to prepare for their hateful antics. From following the push to censor materials in St. Tammany Parish, I took note of some issues they had with their library signs. The St. Tammany Library Alliance, a group of citizens devoted to protecting the library, posted signs around town that said “Trust Our Librarians.” A group of local far-right ideologues then purchased nearly identical signs that said “No One Trusts Our Librarians.” I made a mental note to be sure that our future signs were harder to mock.

I also found out about an email that a woman named Connie sent the director of the St. Tammany Parish Public Library that said, among other things, “My ultimate goal is to make sure that you are not there,” and “W�� will see who ultimately prevails but remember I have God on my side, God always wins, and if you underestimate me you do so at your own peril.” I checked in with our director to make sure she was OK, and she told me a man called the library to tell her she was a cunt. The types of people who call and email librarians with threats and inappropriate comments are vile. Be sure you counteract the hate by emailing positivity to your library staff to help counter the negativity they hear too often.

After the attacks on me, I was helped by continued messages of support from across my state and the country. People I had never met were sending me postcards, letters, and gifts to my school, our local library, and the local bookstore. Hundreds of supportive emails were sent my way, and it made me feel less alone. I looked for ways to pay those messages forward and started combing through social media posts in communities where I knew librarians and educators were also being attacked. 

I would see the same disgusting comments over and over, but occasionally I would see someone defend the librarian or educator. I would then private-message those people and share how supportive emails had helped me and ask them to consider sending one to their local librarian. Who knows if the librarian would see the social media post, but a personal email can make a real positive impact. It’s one small way I have tried to help others.

I then discovered that the school librarian Christopher Harris has made the process a little easier with his website . This amazing website allows you to sign up so that you can mail messages of support to librarians across the country. You can also send them names of librarians under attack so that they will receive letters, and you can even donate to this website to help support their work. A letter may seem like such a small thing, but it can mean the world to somebody who is being bombarded with hate.

A bigger step to support your library, and stand up for intellectual freedom, is to create a solid community alliance for your school and public libraries. I have found that the vast majority of people are against censorship, but sometimes they can easily fall for lies posted on social media. A solid alliance can dispel lies and promote the truth. Alliances also act as support for the librarians and a common place where like-minded individuals can gather to plan and show solidarity. Many people want to help, but they don’t know how.

Alliances can keep residents informed about public meetings, agenda items, and politicians, as well as promote positivity. The citizen alliances joined forces during the 2023 Louisiana legislative session, and we were able to send thousands of emails and letters to legislators about the four anti-library bills.

With an alliance in place, you can play offense rather than defense. When I was first targeted, I was blessed to have personal support from ; our community was fortunate to have their help in creating a citizen alliance for our parish’s entire public library system. EveryLibrary was key in helping our residents set up a game plan for success, and with their help we steadily held off the censors. Consider contacting EveryLibrary for assistance getting started on an alliance.

Alliances offer support to our librarians. Whether it’s an email, the sharing of a post, or attending a public meeting, we want them to know that there’s an entire army behind them in the community. 

If you are alone and don’t know where to start, create an alliance Facebook page and invite your friends and family who support libraries. Ask them to invite their library-supporting friends. At each public meeting, pass out flyers with the name of your Facebook page and a little bit about your alliance. It’s amazing how quickly it will grow. 

I am proud to have founded a grassroots alliance of residents from across our parish that has helped our public library system. We started out as a very small group but found dozens of people willing to help over time. You can put as much or as little as you want into an alliance, but make no mistake: Your community needs one.

While larger groups like the American Library Association, PEN America, and EveryLibrary can help with the big picture, campaigns, and resources, the real work is at the local level with grassroots efforts. It takes members of the community to stand up, speak out, and stick together as a cohesive unit. You are better together in numbers. 

Consider forming a statewide alliance, or team up with your state’s library or school library association. Lynette Mejia and Melanie Brevis had already formed a solid community alliance in neighboring Lafayette. They wanted to unify the many parish alliances under one banner, and we formed . All it takes is one person, or a small group, to get the ball rolling.

When, inevitably, you have people in your community who try to say that there are sexually explicit materials in your school or public library, first and foremost it’s important to remind them about collection development and reconsideration policies. After that, prove their lies wrong. 

The next time you hear someone say there are sexually explicit materials in children’s sections of your library (which is not true), here are some suggestions:

Ask this person to give you a title of an actual book.

Look on your library’s catalog to see if the book even exists and/or if it is even in the children’s section. You can usually see for yourself that their claim is false. Then YOU don’t have to perpetuate the rumor and can stop it in its tracks.

Check out the book and read it for yourself.

Remember that every book might not be your cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean the book is sexually explicit. If you object to a title, fill out a formal request for reconsideration if you feel that is necessary. Keep in mind that a book in the adult section must fail to be considered obscene and sexually explicit. Books are taken as a whole and based on literary merit—not just one page out of context.

Ask yourself if they have a hidden motive.

Once you can prove to them that their claims are false and they continue to spread the lie, ask yourself why. You’d be amazed at how many people simply want to spread lies, even if they know they are lies. That’s called chasing clout. They want to feel important and/or were fed disinformation that they did not take the time to verify.

See if they or a family member is running for office.

Are they just jumping on the bandwagon of using the library as a punching bag to stir up drama so that they can say they will swoop in and save the day from that fake issue? This is called pandering for votes.

Ask your friendly neighborhood librarian or email the alliance, and we will help prove it for you!

Back in July 2022, I went to a public library board meeting thinking I would do my part to give one speech, sit down, and life would go on. Instead, I became a target. I could have chosen to ignore the online lies and hate being told about me, but why should I have stayed silent when I had done nothing wrong? In fact, they probably would have forgotten about me in a few weeks or months. Would I still be looking over my shoulder today had I chosen to do nothing?

Probably not. I chose to take a stand, and that decision changed the trajectory of my life. I chose to fight back. It was a hard decision that I did not take lightly. It has taken an emotional, physical, and mental toll on me and my family. I have zero regrets. This has become a purpose in my life—to stick up for librarians and libraries, speak out for historically marginalized students and authors, fight back against online bullying, and help others find their voices to do the same. However, I want others to understand that it is OK to walk away. There is no shame in taking care of yourself and your family first.

Regardless of my lawsuit, I will continue to speak out against censorship. Even if it takes years, we will win in the long run. I am an eagle through and through. An eagle will protect its territory by flying around it or by perching conspicuously near the top of a nearby tree. I will attend every local meeting with a watchful eye. I will continue to speak out. Like an eagle protecting her nest, I will help protect my community and myself from those who threaten us. I will circle above, going high instead of low, until the threat leaves the area.

This excerpt, adapted from by Amanda Jones (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), appears by permission of the publisher.

According to Euro-Med Monitor, those in the Gaza Strip have access to just for all needs, including drinking, cooking, and personal hygiene. The established international emergency water threshold —ten times what Gazans have now. At least 20 people have already , a number that will continue to rise as due to lack of clean water, leaving many unable to retain what few calories they ingest.

While the water crisis in Gaza is now catastrophic, the Palestinian struggle to access water long predates the current onslaught and is an issue in the West Bank, too. Before Israel’s October 2023 invasion, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had access to just 80 liters of water per person per day, while the World Health Organization estimates that individuals need as much to meet basic needs. 

Despite significant investment in water and wastewater infrastructure in Palestine from (USAID), continues to fall. 

The root cause of Palestine’s water crisis is not a lack of investment but the political reality that Israel, , manages water in a way that denies Palestinians fair access. call this “water apartheid.” They say that recent Israeli tactics in Gaza, such as , are just the latest examples of

“Water apartheid describes a form of segregation that results in unequal access to water, where policies and practices ensure that water resources are disproportionately allocated to privileged groups while marginalized communities face scarcity and denial of access,” explains Saker El Nour, a sociologist and co-founder of , a collective of researchers and activists that publishes a newsletter on water in Palestine.

While the specifics of these unfair water policies and practices look different from Gaza to the West Bank, the overall water crisis is by design. “Water is weaponized as a tool of occupation and control,” says El Nour.

In Gaza, as early as 2017, UNICEF estimated that from the enclave’s sole aquifer was unfit for consumption due to untreated wastewater and seawater pollution. Still, before Israel’s October 2023 invasion, the aquifer of Gaza’s water, with three desalination stations and three pipes from Israeli company Mekorot providing the remainder. 

One of the largest contributors to the aquifer’s degradation is overuse. The aquifer is not overused because Gazan families consume too much water. It is because the aquifer is not able to sustain the territory’s population, which has swelled through to make way for Zionist settlement. Today, of those living in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes elsewhere in Palestine. 

While there were three operational desalination plants in Gaza before the current onslaught, these only of the enclave’s water supply, and . Those same restrictions have made it almost impossible for Gaza to scale up its wastewater infrastructure to prevent untreated waste from polluting the aquifer. 

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, an agreement made in the persists, although it was only . “The agreement ended up being just a way to police water and Palestinian water professionals and water institutes,” says Mariam Zaqout, a water and economics researcher at University College London.

Wielding this power, Israel uses the majority of the water pumped from the West Bank’s main groundwater basin and restricts . Israel uses all the water from the Jordan River, leaving none for Palestinian communities. It has also created a system of forced dependency where West Bank cities are left with no choice but to import water from Israel via its national network, which has been built out into the West Bank to support illegal settlements. Today, those Israeli settlers as West Bank Palestinians. 

“There has been a lot of infrastructure building by Israel mainly to support settlements in the West Bank, all connected to Israel’s national water network,” explains Jan Selby, a professor of International Politics and Climate Change at the University of Leeds. “But Palestinian communities have been connected to it at the same time, partly to make them dependent.”

While Ramallah, a city in the central West Bank tucked into the Khalil Mountains, gets more annual rainfall than even famously gray London, it imports its water from Israel because restrictions on developing its own infrastructure, drilling wells, force it to do so. 

“There is a segregationist thing of investing in water infrastructure for the settler population, allowing them to dig deeper wells to pull out more water, and constraining the Palestinian population, not letting them invest in improvements in their water infrastructure,” explains Michael Mason, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics.

Solutions to these issues will include new infrastructure and water management agreements, but those must be developed within a new political reality. Even in Gaza now, where UNICEF estimates requires repair, Zaqout says she believes solutions must go far beyond the standard post-conflict paradigm of rebuilding and rehabilitating. 

“Development aid is just a band-aid put on to make things look good, but it does not necessarily offer a sustainable solution,” she says. “The United Nations or USAID, for example, could spend a hundred million pounds to build a big water treatment plant, but then it gets bombed and that’s it—nothing is protected.”

What is needed instead, Zaqout says, is an end to Israel’s control over Palestinian resources and its attacks on infrastructure and autonomy for Palestinian decision-makers to “think about their water needs, design their own infrastructure, and manage and decide on how they want to allocate funds.”

Mason says that the political pressure needed to push governments like those of the United States and the United Kingdom toward withholding support for Israel’s occupation could come from international courts and rights groups. Many of these are already spotlighting Israel’s weaponization of water. 

When South Africa gave opening arguments in its case at the International Court of Justice in January, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, it argued that genocidal acts included the deprivation of access to adequate food and water and the deprivation of access to adequate sanitation. United Nations agencies have also been highlighting the acute water crisis in Gaza, with Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, arguing that “ preventing the provision of safe drinking water [is a] brazen breach of international law.”

At the grassroots level, Water Justice for Gaza is mobilizing popular support to help end water apartheid in Palestine and make connections to other struggles for water justice. Last December, to coincide with , it held a “Day of Movement to End Water Apartheid.” spoke and distributed information about Palestine’s water crisis, and online participants, including water protectors, farmworkers, researchers, and activists from around the world, shared their stories and support for the cause.

El Nour says the response “indicat[ed] a broad recognition of the interconnectedness of justice movements worldwide and the global resonance of the water crisis in Palestine.”

Bringing about an end to this crisis in Palestine is ever more urgent as insufficient access to clean water threatens Palestinians nationwide and Gazans face an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Whether in the courtroom, online, or out on the streets, many in the global Palestinian rights movement are speaking out about water apartheid as part of their demands for meaningful change.

“The water issues are a reflection of those broader issues and the other way around,” says Selby. “If you resolve or address or manage to negotiate some kind of resolution or settlement to the core political issues of the conflict, the water issues are relatively easy to address.”

Read Part 1 of this story: Stolen Lands: A Black and Indigenous History of Land Exploitation

Today, Black and Indigenous communities are navigating these relationships to land while mapping and acting to build community economics that are decoupled from exploitative systems of production and trade. 

The Indigenous-Led Land Back Movement

Achieving justice includes restoring power through the reclamation of land and through reparations. For Indigenous people, the  movement embodies the push toward justice and healing. The movement works to reclaim more territories once occupied by their ancestors, to extend Indigenous care and governance to homelands that cannot be reclaimed, to push toward the dismantling of exploitative economic systems and policies that limit Indigenous peoples’ power, and to build economies and systems that are expressive of Indigenous values. 

A central tactic of the Land Back movement is to utilize land trusts to remove land from speculative markets and place it into collective care. Examples include the , the , the , and many others. 

Nations and organizations are also partnering with one another to purchase land that was lost and stolen, including the exemplary model of the . The Yurok Tribe has restored 2,424 acres of privately owned culturally and ecologically significant timberlands in Northern California, resulting from its partnership with investment firm New Forests. New Forests worked with the Trust for Public Land, which supported the Tribe in accessing funds from the California Natural Resources Agency. 

This wasn’t the first time the Tribe pursued a partnered land purchase. In 2006, it partnered with Western Rivers Conservancy to buy back 50,000 acres of ancestral lands from Green Diamond, a logging company, including the watershed of Blue Creek, a critical salmon refuge. In 2019 the Tribe began caring for these lands as a . 

According to Frankie Myers, Yurok Tribal vice chairman, “As Yurok people who have been literally locked out of these lands—some for up to a hundred years—just the ability for our members to go out and to access these lands and to harvest and gather, interact with the forest; the shift in land management itself, to allow Indigenous people back onto their landscapes … I think that’s absolutely key.”&�Բ�����;

Indigenous peoples are also working to extend their care and governance to traditional territories that are out of their legally recognized land tenure—a vital part of the Land Back movement. The  and the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network are notable leaders, working extensively with the state of California and the Forest Service to establish integrated management plan agreements. The  is another exemplary leader in re-establishing Indigenous care of lands, developing a groundbreaking “” and holding leadership within the .

Other Indigenous organizations and nations are utilizing contemporary legal entities to resist dispossession by collectivizing new regenerative businesses to ensure care of the land and people. One example is , a nonprofit organization based in the Great Lakes region. Akiing is transitioning its business operations to become a collaboration of cooperatives working in agriculture, renewable energy, and hemp production. It has also incorporated the Akiing Land Trust to protect lands for the future of the Anishinaabe people. 

Black-Led Movements to Reclaim Stolen Land

Black folks across the country are also continually working to gain access to land, albeit using different approaches to Indigenous communities. Their efforts include attaining farmland, fighting redlining and racist financing systems to achieve land and homeownership, and building political movements to push for the restoration of lands taken from Black families through historical violence and eminent domain. In September 2021, in response to a powerful organizing effort led by the Bruce family and , California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill restoring beachfront land in Southern California, known as Bruce’s Beach, to a Black family driven out by white supremacist violence from their lands almost a century ago. 

After this win, Ward, with her colleague Ashanti Martin, went on to found a groundbreaking national organization, , working to reclaim Black folks’ land and help them obtain financial restitution for violations of their civil and human rights, lost wealth, and business. 

Organizations have been working to turn the tides of Black dispossession using a diversity of strategies. The  supports the retention of land within Black communities through planning, education, and networking. Meanwhile, the  offers investment into capitalizing Black-owned farms and food systems businesses. At a local level, in Michigan, the  works to rebuild intergenerational Black land ownership in the Detroit area through funding, networking, and capacity building. 

In a manner that echoes the Indigenous-led Land Back movement, Black community members and organizations have also been utilizing cooperative structures to advance land justice.  is a community-controlled land and financial cooperative supporting the development of Black family land commons through providing non-extractive financial resources, legal support, and advocacy, rooted in spiritual and community tradition. 

Another example is the , which creates community cooperative solutions to the catastrophic levels of displacement in the Bay Area of California by taking land out of the market and placing it into community land trusts, thereby ensuring the affordability of housing, cultural continuity, and common-good values in the East Bay.

There are also efforts to skill up and resource Black communities to access land and resources.  of the Twin Cities is a community organization whose strategic vision centers on a restorative, regenerative, and just economy that includes land access; strong, culturally grounded leadership; and a move away from individualistic capitalist processes. To support this, Nexus offers a North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship, as well as training and consulting. 

What sets Nexus apart from many other Black-led land-reclamation projects is its solidarity with Indigenous efforts. Nexus is in shared cohort community with , an organization designed to build power, advance Land Back, and decolonize wealth through moving land and wealth back into Indigenous communities. (Disclosure: I am a program officer with NDN Collective.) 

Both organizations are creating funds specifically designed to invest in building the economic power of individuals and seed intergenerational prosperity while redefining the concept of wealth to reflect the cultural and community values of those they serve. This work is supported by the Bush Foundation and, as such, is in service of communities in the tri-state region of Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Nexus has designed a community-guided Black Community Trust Fund, while NDN Collective has developed the , to open in 2023.

Nexus and NDN Collective shared a  about their allyship in this work: 

“W�� know Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation are tied to one another. While our people have unique histories and current needs … neither of us will be free without the other … When we talk about alternatives to the current systems, we are talking about building community wealth and regenerative systems that aren’t extractive of people or the planet … Black and Indigenous solidarity means building something new, together with our people.”

Building Collective Futures, Together

Coming together to build power is not easy. Historically, Indigenous and Black folks have been turned against one another by oppressors and colonizers. The U.S. government compensated Indigenous nations for capturing escaped enslaved people. The “Five Civilized Tribes,” the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—nations who determined that their best chance of survival was to imitate their colonizers—were known for their practice of  both before and after their removal from their lands during the Trail of Tears. 

Buffalo Soldiers—Black men who enlisted in the military in the late 1800s when white enlistment was low in an attempt to —ended up being utilized to put down Indigenous resistance to colonization and oppression in the West. 

Black and Indigenous peoples both have historically adopted beliefs and constructions of white supremacy as a survival technique, resulting in the presence of anti-Blackness within Indigenous communities, and colonial narratives of Indigenous primitivity and land subjugation within Black communities. 

Yet Black and Indigenous people have also supported one another over time, through offering , sharing knowledge, and becoming family.  shares her powerful lineage of herbalism on Turtle Island, reaching back to ancestors in Virginia and South Carolina who learned their herbal knowledge in part from Indigenous people, saying, “Our people share common threads of experience—from land reverence and kinship, to violence, displacement, and genocide—so it makes sense that we would work in solidarity to free ourselves.”

Building Power Through Solidarity

, a Black-owned farm in upstate New York, is an impactful story-creating, community-building advocacy and training center, creating a space of land connection and training for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in culture-based agroecology. The farm is committed to both Black land reconnection and Indigenous homeland governance, doing the work of learning and growing toward liberated futures together. Hundreds of BIPOC farmers have been educated in Soul Fire Farm’s farming and construction immersion schools, benefiting from its community-supported agriculture food shares and culture-building initiatives. A newer initiative, called the Braiding Seeds Fellowship, provides funding and mentorship to continue the Black–Indigenous agrarian tradition.

Leah Penniman, co-executive director at Soul Fire Farm, recognizes that Land Back is “squarely an Indigenous movement,” while also honoring that Black folks have rights to secure land tenure as well, and to create a place to build connection and hold ceremony for the sources of life and ancestors. The lack of stable family land in Black communities is illustrated by the fact that Soul Fire Farm has received many requests from Black families to spread the ashes of their ancestors on the land, a place they know they will be able to return to honor their ancestors. 

Soul Fire Farm organizers have worked with the Mohican Nation, whose land they live on in upstate New York, to establish cultural respect easements, enabling Mohicans to access their homeland occupied by Soul Fire Farm. They have learned, built devoted relationships, and stood alongside the Mohican in their organizing, protesting, and direct-action defense of their sacred  from pipeline development. The organization sees this kind of relational reciprocity as building power. 

Stephanie Morningstar of the  underscores the criticality of built relations, sharing, “Relationships are central to all aspects of land, kin, and community care. The core of our work … considers how we can be in reciprocal relationship with the land and each other in a restorative way that recognizes we not only desire to have a relationship with land, but we also have a responsibility to it, and that colonial relationships to land are the reason we’re currently experiencing systemic inequity in every sphere of our human and non-human experiences.”

NEFOC has outlined a practical path forward to build relations between various BIPOC communities, establishing an Indigenous Community Consultation Policy when acquiring lands for the trust. This policy includes “stages of consultation ranging from initial relationship building to formalizing protocols and partnerships (if desired) that resituate Indigenous land practices, rematriate land, [offer] exclusive ownership, shared ownership, holding rematriated land in trust as an act of solidarity, cultural or conservation easements and agreements, rights of first refusal, decision-making authority in land use decisions, and pathways to storymaking and knowledge transfer through oral history and languages on land through truth-telling projects, and consultation about project plans.”&�Բ�����;

Their work also includes a grouping of four programs that, together, resource farmers with education, advocacy, and networking, and a policy initiative with a special lens on climate justice. The organization hosts a , sharing farm and land tenure projects across the nation in order to connect people looking to dismantle white supremacy through reparations. NEFOC is also creating fertile soil for the building of a co-powered future through convening what it calls “Braided B.L.I.S.S.” (Black Liberation and Indigenous Sovereignty in Solidarity), a space to dig into the real conversations, truth telling, and healing necessary to build collective power. 

Dismantling Racial Capitalism and White Supremacy—Together 

Healing journeys such as the one modeled by B.L.I.S.S. are not simple or easy given the fraught histories of Black and Indigenous communities. , an Afro-Indigenous organizer, activist, and thought leader, says, “I fundamentally believe our arrival at Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty will certainly require us to remember who we are outside of our oppressors’ institutions, ideologies, and imaginations … to remember that both of our peoples have always been the authors of our liberation and the architects of our deliverance.”&�Բ�����;

Organizers within the Indigenous-led Land Back and the Black-led movements for reclamation and reparations see themselves in common cause, striking at the heart of the colonial-capitalist belief system and economic infrastructure. According to organizers deeply involved in the movements, their work is aimed at ending wealth extraction from the homelands of others and amassed capital at the expense of the people, ending white supremacy. It is also focused on the powerful work of all peoples, across cultures, to commit to this transformation through restorative investment in Indigenous and Black communities, and to engage in the active dismantling of systems of power that benefit the white and the wealthy. 

As Nkuli Shongwe of Nexus Community Partners describes, such work “demands investment beyond organizations. It requires investment in cultural work and community leaders; in giving us the time and space needed to fail and try again, to engage in the conflict and tension. … [We need] the spaciousness to collectively imagine, practice, and reimagine what liberation looks like in the context of our world today.”&�Բ�����;

Fundamentally, Black and Indigenous land, power, and liberation struggles, forged in the violent imposition of individualist capitalism, racial and economic hierarchy, and private property law, are a threat to the continuance of those systems. Black and Indigenous communities increasingly see that creating healing relationships with one another is at the heart of building true transformative power to achieve land justice, with seeds of healing being planted every day. This generational work appears to be well underway.

This story is part of Building the Block, an original YES! series supported by a grant from the , which encourages the development of burgeoning alternative economies and fresh social contracts in ways that can help artists and cultural communities achieve financial freedom. Reporting and production of this story was funded by this grant, but YES! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy.

As the coronavirus spread in the spring of 2020, North America’s Indigenous Peoples carried a unique experience of stress and fear because of this blood memory. In the 18th century, as European settlers sought to colonize Indigenous lands, they weaponized germs, giving blankets infected with smallpox to tribal communities to slow down Native resistance and to decimate Native populations. In addition to smallpox, measles and influenza were also brought to North America during these early centuries of colonization. It is estimated that together these diseases killed 90% of Native Americans.

Colonial violence has led to other public health injustices and crises within Indigenous communities. In the 19th century, the federal government forced Native peoples onto reservations, disenfranchising Native populations and creating, to this day, vast injustices in access to public health services. During the 1970s, the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act led to the sterilization of Native women. Between 1970 and 1977, at least 25% of Native American women of childbearing age were sterilized.

These historical events matter in this moment because our communities remember. What’s more, our bodies and our spirits remember.

Yet despite this collective remembering, this trauma, and the anxieties that this deep-rooted grief brings up, Native peoples organized and came together in innovative and courageous ways in 2020. Once again, we demonstrated our ability to survive and thrive in the face of uncertainty and peril.

In the Navajo Nation, one of the largest tribes in the U.S., the COVID-19 infection rate reached the highest per capita in the U.S. during the summer of 2020. As the Navajo Nation responded to the exponential rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths, it had to grapple with health care gaps that have existed for decades, if not centuries. Even before cases reached the peak, there was a lack of doctors, hospital beds, respirators, and equipment across the Navajo Nation. To be sure, this problem isn’t new; the coronavirus just amplified the long and shameful history of underfunding health services in Indian Country.

While these communities struggled to respond with emergency health care, they also faced food and water shortages, highlighting yet another gap: infrastructure. In the Navajo Nation, it is estimated that one in three families haul water to their homes, and it can take multiple hours to drive to a water-filling station—that is, if you have transportation. Of course, during a pandemic, access to water is essential for basic health and safety. However, strict but necessary stay-at-home orders disadvantaged Navajo families’ ability to survive as hauling water became limited. This is but a microcosm of what the pandemic has brought to our attention in the last year: Investment in basic infrastructure and health care has been too long neglected, leaving us unprepared for crises such as pandemics or impacts from climate change.

Yet Indigenous communities, like the Navajo, showed how community care and self-determination can provide security and solutions during times like this.

Across the Navajo Nation, mutual aid powered by community members and leaders provided Navajo and Hopi families across New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah with everything from food and water to firewood, protective personal equipment, and traditional medicine bags to support people spiritually. During the summer, I traveled from my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Flagstaff, Arizona, to deliver supplies to a warehouse that served as a hub for receiving goods to be distributed to Navajo families. Inside the warehouse were all of the supplies one might need from the grocery store—boxes of baby food and diapers, women’s health care products, light bulbs and, yes, toilet paper. Goods were delivered to people in need so families could avoid travel and remain safe in their homes. On this same trip to Flagstaff, I learned that Navajo doctors were also providing mutual aid to one another and sending protective equipment to remote clinics in order to stay safe as they provided care. In 2020, so many of us saw the value and deep reciprocity that exists within mutual aid. This trip, for me, affirmed the power of mutual aid and community organizing and how this solution will be needed in the years and generations to come.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Navajo communities used social media systems to connect community members far and wide, enabling urban family members to fill out request forms so that supplies could reach their families living in rural areas. Many Navajo people do not have access to Wi-Fi or cellular networks, another infrastructure gap that needs to be addressed as we rebuild and recover from this pandemic.

Thanks to this community organizing, food and water were delivered safely throughout the 16 million acres of the Navajo Nation. Connecting people with mutual aid across vast distances is no small feat and requires cultural understanding to support a community this large.

It makes sense for the help to come from within, from people who speak the traditional Diné language, who know how to best reach people and collect data, and, of course, who understand the environment and landscape itself.

Indigenous values are woven throughout implementation of the community care we saw during the pandemic. Elders were and are being prioritized, culture and language are being integrated and honored, and, above all, the organizers and volunteers are practicing compassion and care for the whole, instead of focusing on individualism.

Perhaps this is one of the lessons or memories that has survived throughout time to serve us as Native People again and again: caring for the whole. Recall the first weeks of the pandemic, when we saw American society fall into toxic individualism as masses began to panic shop and hoard supplies, creating shortages of food and health care supplies across the country. But not in Indian Country. Instead, we looked around our communities and responded by identifying who in our community was most vulnerable. We thought about food security, ensuring that there was abundance for our people as we navigated shelter-in-place and lockdowns. But these questions are not new for us. Because of threats like climate change, environmental destruction, and displacement, we are often faced with questions about what will best serve our survival.

Are we overly dependent on food and materials coming from nonlocal sources? Do we have energy security in case the electrical grid is damaged by extreme weather or we cannot access fossil fuels? What are the most fundamental collective values we will draw upon in high-stress moments? How do we make decisions? And how do we not turn on each other? These questions and our responses to them will continue to help us thrive.

As some nations relied on mutual aid to navigate the storm of COVID-19, other nations relied on their sovereignty to protect their people.

The Lummi Nation, in the coastal Pacific Northwest, showed how self-determination benefits tribal communities. Over the past decade, the Lummi Nation has been developing its community health care system in an effort to fully practice self-determination. In 2017, the tribe adopted an Emergency Health Powers Code, which provided a framework for implementing rapid responses, and in 2018 the tribe received a grant from the Indian Health Service to support self-determination in health programs. Since 2010, the Lummi health services have raised substantial revenue by treating patients on Medicaid and Medicare as part of a third-party billing program created by President Obama. This added income has enabled more financial flexibility and health autonomy, allowing the tribe to work outside the bureaucracy of the severely underfunded Indian Health Service. Because the Lummi had the financial resources and infrastructure in place before the pandemic hit, they were able to respond quickly and effectively.

Lummi medical teams led the way in responding to COVID-19 by creating preventative measures in their community long before the federal government did. As the first U.S. case was confirmed in Seattle, just 115 miles south of the Lummi reservation, the Lummi people quickly responded. On March 3, 2020, the tribe’s leaders declared a State of Public Health Emergency, 10 days before the U.S. president declared a national state of emergency, and they turned a fitness center into a field hospital—the first in the nation—to be ready as cases emerged.

The Lummi Nation’s response stands as a model for other tribal communities—all communities, in fact—for how self-determination can create meaningful infrastructure and better allocate resources.

Because the Lummi Nation is not solely reliant on federal programs for accessing emergency funds, leaders were able to act more quickly to keep their people safe. In April, many tribes worried about how they would receive funding from a stimulus bill that provided $8 billion to tribal governments. And by June 2020, as COVID-19 brutally swept through Indian Country, these stimulus dollars still hadn’t been distributed to tribes and their citizens. As it historically happens, federal and state bureaucracy created barriers and slowed the distribution of “emergency” funds while tribal members faced their normal food, water, and health care shortages. The Lummi, however, were not put into a holding pattern, nor was their pandemic response as a nation dependent on these funds, signaling the power in building self-governance and determination.

While these two examples illustrate the potential of nations and communities to respond to crisis, individuals have also shown what Indigenous people are capable of when we reclaim our Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in the face of existential threats.

In northern Nevada, in Numu Territories, Autumn Harry put her passion and traditional knowledge of fishing to use during this time. “Living in a rural community, it is difficult to access healthy, nutrient-dense foods. Due to the pandemic, our nearest grocery stores are still getting ransacked and items are being hoarded, forcing our rural communities to pick from the scraps. Although I can’t make monetary contributions to elders during this time, I can use my fishing skills to help put ancestral foods on the table,” said Harry.

Throughout March and April, Harry fished for trout in the mornings. She would take her catch home and create sterilized and safe packages for elders, demonstrating that we as Indigenous people have knowledge useful not just in this COVID-19 crisis but also for generations to come.

As 2020 progressed, in addition to evolving and expanding responses to COVID-19, Native communities also took on the responsibilities to usher in a new normal. In May, uprisings swept through the nation in response to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota. This moment was a catalyst, uniting movements and communities to dismantle white supremacy, another toxic sickness that was only illuminated more by the pandemic.

By summer 2020, Native communities across the country were organizing to get out the Native vote. In the Navajo Nation, horse rides were organized to encourage those living rurally to get to the polls by any means necessary, and hotlines were created to share voting information in Navajo, Hopi, and Apache languages.

Personally, I had the distinct honor of creating the Sko Vote Den podcast, which explored the realities of voting across Indian Country through interviews with organizers, movement leaders, journalists, and researchers. This project addressed the nuances and gray areas of the Native vote as we dove into topics like how one can stand in their sovereignty as well as participate in the U.S. democratic process. I learned so much about the gaps and infrastructure needs when it comes to the Native vote and data on what really matters for Native voters—not to mention how voter suppression in Indian Country goes hand in hand with the social issues we face, like poverty, lack of access to technology or energy, language barriers, and so on.

Thanks to all the efforts to get out the vote in Indian Country, we voted in record-breaking numbers. In states like Arizona, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the Native vote played a significant role in turning these once-red states blue, which, one could argue, made it possible for the Democrats to win the 2020 election. Let’s not forget, we did this during a deadly pandemic, despite our communities being hit worst by COVID-19, and despite a long history of both voter suppression and health care gaps. And we didn’t stop there. Just a month after the elections, our people advocated on social media and organized to pressure the Biden transition team to nominate the first-ever Native American to lead the Department of the Interior. Now, Rep. Deb Haaland is the first-ever Native American to hold this position or hold a seat in the President’s Cabinet.

My dear friend Julian Brave NoiseCat often writes about how Native peoples have already survived apocalypse: We survived germ warfare. At multiple moments in history, we’ve survived the U.S. Army killing our food systems: the bison, the sheep. We’ve survived being removed from everything we knew, displacement, boarding schools, and concentration camps that were meant to exterminate us. Native peoples are more than resilient: We have overcome some of the most tremendous oppressions. Many of us have healed or are healing, and, in doing so, we have cultivated creativity, fearlessness, and unwavering determination. No matter what the challenge is, what the crisis is, these will be the characteristics, the traits, the blood memories we will bring into our futures to build regenerative solutions for our communities.

This excerpt from , edited by Alastair Lee Bitsóí and Brooke Larsen (Torrey House Press, 2021) appears with permission of the publisher.

“I lay dog-eyed for 10 years saying, ‘I’m not going to criticize the government at every chance that I get,’” Dillon says. “‘I’m just going to try and work with them.’”

Dillon successfully led a decade-long negotiation with the Tasmanian state government, backed up by a six-year study on Aboriginal leadership in fisheries management led by Emma Lee, an associate professor at Swinburne University and a descendant of the Trawlwulwuy people, one of the oldest Tasmanian Aboriginal clans. The government ultimately granted a three-year lease for 40 quota units of abalone (9 tons a year) to the Land and Sea Aboriginal Corporation of Tasmania. The agreement is the first of its kind, giving commercial fishing rights to the Aboriginal community, who up until then only had rights to fishing for sustenance and practicing their customary traditions.

Lee says the Tasmanian fishery agreement is also helping to change the perception of Aboriginal communities from “fish thieves” to leaders in regional development. By being a part of the AUD $136 million fishery that has so long excluded them, Lee says, Aboriginal communities hope to establish fisheries food tourism in Tasmania; to use cultural fisheries to reduce juvenile justice interventions for Aboriginals; and to turn commercial fisheries into social impact ventures.

“What 40 units gives us is the right to have a voice where we’ve never had it before … to have our custodianship recognized and legitimized within the existing industry,” Lee says. “I can sit here and say this isn’t enough, but this time last year, we didn’t have any of this.”

Aboriginal Leaders in Regional Development

This agreement is significant considering the history of Native Aboriginals and Torres Straits Islanders in Australia, particularly in Tasmania, where they were all wiped out by 1876 in a white colonial genocide. Aboriginal rights weren’t officially recognized until a 1967 referendum. The Native Title Act of 1993 (and an amendment in 1997) finally recognized Aboriginal communities as the traditional owners of the land and waters of what is now known as Australia. However, since the act has no legal force, First Nations people continue to be charged for alleged poaching and illegal hunting.

Tasmania isn’t the only state in Australia that has signed agreements with an Aboriginal corporation. In February 2021, South Australia entered into an Aboriginal Corporation, formalizing their rights for traditional fishing in the Yorke Peninsula. The deal followed a 2018 agreement to collaborate on the development of Guuranda (the Native name for Yorke Peninsula), starting with the shared management of Innes National Park.

Klynton Wanganeen, former CEO of the Narungga Nation Aboriginal Corporation, says the community is working to build relationships as they pursue their aspirations for commercial fishing.

“W�� really can’t have a treaty unless our rights are recognized, and our rights has to be to access our resources,” Wanganeen says.

The fishing agreements should provide much-needed relief and protection from prosecution for petty crimes, like poaching that Aboriginal youth are particularly vulnerable to, and for which they have been disproportionately incarcerated in .

The was raised from 10 to 14 in 2022, thanks to Dillon’s campaigning. He spent much of his own childhood hiding from the cops in thick bushes to evade capture while he and his family were fishing abalone and crayfish or hunting mutton birds and other game. Although never jailed, Dillon was arrested several times. In court, the fiery activist has claimed fishing as a right under the Native Title Act of 1993 and as a custom under common law. However, in Rodney Scott Dillon v. Clive Davis, the court refused to recognize general practices under common law, demanding concrete evidence against customary traditions or practices, so Dillon has had to pay up to AUD $80,000 in fines and legal representation.

Similarly, in August 2021, 64-year-old Keith Nye, a Yuin Nation elder, was found to have frozen abalone catch way above the personal consumption quota that he had allegedly sold to restaurants sans a commercial license. A judge in New South Wales recognized Nye’s cultural connection to fishing and didn’t sentence him to prison, but the Walbunja man still had to pay AUD $4,500 in fines and serve 200 hours of community service.

When asked about the “lack of evidence regarding traditional laws and customs having a bearing on a right to take abalone” cited in the Supreme Court order, Dillon says, “W�� fucking live here. We’ve got middens. We’ve got quarry sites and ochre sites—that’s our evidence. That’s us.”

The Rightful Place in an Industry

Now, with the right to harvest abalone commercially, Dillon says the Aboriginal community aims to create jobs for Indigenous divers and chefs. This won’t be easy. Due to overfishing, abalone production has dropped from 300 tons per year in 2006 to less than 150 in 2021, according to . COVID-19, too, has brought down prices in China, its primary export market. But with aquacultural production and strategic marketing of abalone as a Tasmanian delicacy, both output and .

���� took years of negotiating with the outgoing premier, who agreed that instead of exporting the abalone, we could draw tourists and visitors to Tasmania by serving it in local restaurants,” Dillon says.

But six months after the Tasmanian fisheries agreement, and three weeks since the harvest season opened, the program has only been able to employ two Indigenous divers (instead of the four they had hoped for). The divers are only pulling in 400 kilograms of abalone a day, which isn’t enough to distribute to local markets, since most of the Aboriginals’ catch has been exported to China. Still, they are using the proceeds from the sale of this abalone to buy more quota units. Dillon, for his part, is also trying to negotiate units and licenses for other resources, like crayfish and scallops.

Lee, who spent decades researching land and sea management, says quotas and licenses have become even more difficult to buy since international consortiums and hedge fund companies now own the largest shares.

“The rules and regulations around abalone are geared towards exports,” she says, “and I’m crazed by anxiety that international investors will overfish and kill off who we are in pursuit of profit.”

Ironically, the negotiations on increasing Aboriginal quotas are often stonewalled by concerns of environmental sustainability. Leaders like Lee call them “bullshit excuses,” considering the impact that export-driven overfishing has had on warming the Southern Oceanic waters in the past 40 years versus the footprint left behind by the Aboriginals in 60,000 years.

A Future That Recognizes Sovereignty

Generations since colonial occupation, a document called the “” has renewed hope for consolidated Aboriginal rights in Australia. Drafted by First Nations community stakeholders and leaders after a series of dialogues in 2017, the statement pushes for a voice to parliament, treaty, and truth. With the support of the new Labor Party Prime Minister and the appointment of Linda Burney—the first-ever Native woman as the Indigenous affairs minister—Aboriginal leaders feel the time is ripe for Aboriginal councils and corporations.

First Nations leaders like Dillon are advocating for parliamentary representation and historical reparations while also bringing their communities into the fisheries.

“Because we come from poverty, a lot of our people are welfare-dependent,” Dillon says, as he scrolls through his phone, eating mutton bird meat he’d cooked the day before. He opens a message from his son, who wrote that hunting for their own food in the bushes had helped him feel closer to their ancestors and culture. For Dillon, this wild game was once all they could afford, yet they were criminalized and treated like savages for it.

“But we don’t want to be,” Dillon says. “W�� just want part of the resources that [are] ours and [to] sell it as Native food.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2:03 p.m. PT on Nov. 3, 2022, to correct Lee’s quote to read “fish thieves” instead of “fish people.”&�Բ�����;Read our corrections policy here.

But for the past century, a series of dams have blocked the to their historical spawning grounds, with ripple effects to the entire ecosystem.

Normally, after salmon return to a river to spawn and die, their bodies provide key nutrients to other organisms in the river. This includes the trees that grow along the riverbanks whose roots help prevent erosion. Near Upper Klamath Lake, wetlands once served a vital role in filtering toxins from upper basin lakes and rivers, but they have been drained for agriculture.

An interdependent water-centered ecosystem has been replaced with warm stagnant waters and toxic algae blooms. Many of the fish populations are now dwindling, some of them approaching extinction. And tribal traditions can’t continue without these life-giving waters.

But thanks to the grassroots actions and intense lobbying of the lower basin tribes, especially the Yurok and Karuk, all of that is about to change.

In 2024, four of the five major dams on the Klamath River will be removed. This will be the largest dam removal process in U.S. history and will have far-reaching effects for the entire West Coast. Tribal efforts for removal began in 1903, when work on the first dam began. In recent decades, these efforts have received growing support from federal, nonprofit, and state agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where I work as a fisheries biologist and consulted on the impact of dam removal on endangered species. A collaborative network of these groups has been working hard to assemble an environmental framework that can support species once the dams are removed, and minimize any short-term consequences of the dams’ removal. The long-term benefits for the Klamath River’s fish and ecosystem will likely be huge.

“When we remove these dams, we’re restoring the river and also ourselves, because we’re so interconnected with everything,” says Barry McCovey Jr., a biologist and Yurok Tribal Member.

Cultural and Ecological Importance

The vital nature of salmon to the tribes has been known since well before the dams were built. The Hupa “Legend of Gard” ensures that “the red-fleshed salmon shall never fail in the river” as long as the people practice the spirits’ teachings of love and people. 

In a Karuk creation legend, fishes were the first beings created “that have breath,” followed by other animals, and then humans.

With salmon mostly absent from their diets today, the tribes struggle to keep those cultural practices and traditions alive, such as smoking fish and presenting salmon to elders.

“Salmon have always been a keystone species for us and for this ecosystem,” Barry says. “But salmon are also important to people outside of the basin, and in the cities.” With the promise of dam removal secured, the tribes are finally seeing a larger societal response toward protecting wild salmon. Barry knows people want to be able to buy wild salmon with the assurance that it’s sustainable.

“On the backs of the salmon—a kind of Trojan horse—rides the bigger idea of ecosystem restoration,” Barry says. That’s critical to the tribes’ larger message. “If we talked about how dam removal is going to help lamprey runs,” he says, “well, we wouldn’t get the same response or support.”

Historical Fishing Versus Current Fish Runs

In addition to blocking access to hundreds of miles of fishes’ upstream habitat, the impoundment of water by the dams increases water temperatures. During a hot summer, river temperatures can reach 22 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit), stressing a fish’s immune system, and making fish more susceptible to pathogens and parasites in the Klamath, notably and Ichthyophthirius multifiliis (known as “ich”), which can both be deadly.

The large reservoirs behind the dams also create conditions for a blue-green algae toxic to humans and dogs, known as , to thrive and deplete water oxygen levels. Kathy McCovey, a Karuk Tribal Member and cultural resource management specialist, says they have to put up signs warning people, especially dogs and kids, not to touch the water. That’s antithetical to the annual late-summer medicine and renewal ceremonies meant to bond the community together with water and each other. “I bathe in the Klamath that time of year for ceremony, so do a lot of us, and we’re afraid to be going into the river,” Kathy says.

Fish health and abundance, too, are closely tied to poor water quality in the Klamath River.

Barry has seen the Chinook salmon population, which was once the third-largest in the country, plummet dramatically. “For most salmon runs on the Klamath, we’re in the 10% range of historical abundance. Some are even less. Some Chinook runs in recent years have dropped to as little as 2% to 3%.”

The Southern Oregon and Northern California Coho salmon populations, too, have declined sharply since the mid-20th century. The Klamath River commercial coho fishery was closed in 1994 and has remained closed to California ocean fisheries. In 1997, this same population of coho was listed as threatened under the federal .

“The fish are not really limited by annual rainfall, they’re limited by not having consistent sources of cold water,” says Toz Soto, fisheries biologist and Karuk Tribal Member. “There’s a lot of cold water in the basin. … There are springs basically coming right out of the earth, but they flow into the reservoirs above the dams, so fish don’t have access to that cold water.”

Green sturgeon, Pacific lamprey, and eulachon—a small, oily fish that can be dried or smoked—are also of great importance to the tribes, but their runs, too, have diminished in the past few decades. Lampreys use their sucker mouths to adhere to and climb rocks but are unable to navigate through a traditional fish ladder installed near many dams.

Climate change is layered on top of these already challenging conditions: In 2021, the Klamath saw massive juvenile fish die-offs as a result of extreme drought, warm water temperatures, and fish disease.

“Fish runs aren’t big enough for our harvest to be at the level that we need,” Barry says. Last year, the allocation of fall Chinook salmon for the Yurok Tribe was 6,500. But the Tribe needed 12,000 to meet the subsistence needs of its 7,000 members. Such low numbers mean the Yurok Tribe often leaves its unused. And that has huge ramifications for the lower Klamath Tribe’s ability to feed itself.

Food Insecurity

Many downriver tribes live far from stores that would provide regular access to healthy foods. For residents of the Yurok reservation, the closest city is Crescent City, which requires a nearly two-hour drive along winding remote roads in need of repair.

“The Karuk Tribe is located in the mid-Klamath, so it’s pretty remote,” Soto says. It and the Hoopa tribal lands can only be accessed by Highway 96, which meanders along the river and is susceptible to landslides and flooding. It’s a lonely drive from where the highway starts near the border with Oregon to the eventual salty coast of Northern California. A drive at dusk reveals long hours of dark stretches without a single headlight or house light to be seen. “There’s not really a lot of access to traditional foods, or even just groceries,” Soto says.

was conducted in 2019 by University of California, Berkeley, researchers with tribal colleagues among the Hoopa, Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath. They found that food-insecurity rates among Native American communities in the Klamath River Basin were higher than in any other Native American communities studied to date: 92% of households were suffering from some level of food insecurity. �鶹���¼� than half experienced very low food security.

According to the study, “There is a strong demand for Native foods and fresh fruits and vegetables that is not being met.” Some 70% of all households in the Klamath River Basin rarely or never have access to desired Native foods. Still, nearly 40% of households rely on fishing, hunting, and home-canned foods to minimize food insecurity.

Kathy McCovey knows this firsthand. She says during the pandemic, even basic staples like beans and rice were sold out. “If there is a kink in the system for us here in rural area[s],” she says, “that’s pretty dire circumstances.”

As traditional foods, also known as “,” have been removed from Native diets, the rates of diabetes and other diseases have risen, with about 83% of Klamath tribal households reporting at least one person in their household suffering from health issues, including high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

Of dire need are foods sourced from what is traditional and accessible to the tribes: earth and river. have shown that restoring more natural flows to the river would provide many significant benefits, including the protection and restoration of anadromous fisheries and a connection to wetlands that are of vital importance to the tribes and their health.

A Future With First Foods

With the future promising a more natural river hydrology with seasonal ebbs and flows and cleaner water, tribal people can start looking forward to the return of ceremony and first foods on their tables again.

Justin Alvarez, a biologist working with the Hoopa, is optimistic that with the dams out, new populations of lamprey will make their way into areas even above Upper Klamath Lake. Kathy remembers large freshwater clams once taken from the river. With natural sediment deposits from a free-flowing river, the Yurok may have access again to healthy runs of eulachon, which they may be able to trade with other tribes farther upstream.

Other first foods will benefit from the return of annual spring floods, colder and faster-moving waters, and natural sediment dispersal. Newly expanded wetlands and woodlands could provide bulbs, like camas and wapato, which can be boiled and eaten like potatoes. Mushrooms like morels appear after the flooding of riverbanks, as do blackberries.

Eventually, as the river restores itself, newly expanded oak woodlands could return acorn mush to the plate and once again provide habitat for deer and elk, too.

“Removing dams is a huge step towards restoring balance to the Klamath River. And that’s who we are, as a people, as a culture,” Barry McCovey says. “W�� are always striving towards a restorative and balanced ecosystem.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:46 p.m. PT on Feb. 28, 2023, to replace an image that was mislabeled as Toz Soto. Read our corrections policy here.

This suit represented a brazen attack by the state of Texas and evangelical foster parents (using fossil fuel industry lawyers) to put Native children and families in the crosshairs—but also, potentially, Federal Indian Law and as we know it. That was no accident. All the well-earned joy we feel about this monumental legal win must be tempered by three key takeaways. 

The moment colonizers came to our shores, the genocide of Indigenous people began.

First, the decision simply preserves the status quo. Second, the status quo remains hugely problematic. Finally, this fight is a long way from over, and important work remains to be done. Even if we have avoided disaster for now, the current state of affairs leaves much to be desired. A little historical context can help explain why. 

The moment colonizers came to our shores, the genocide of Indigenous people began. Displaced from their homelands through forced removal, our Native ancestors were subsequently sequestered onto reservations, which were internment camps by a different name. Later, as a way of fully dismantling the cultures indigenous to these shores, federal and state governments began specifically targeting our children.

For about a century, beginning in the late 1800s, North American governments uprooted Native children from their homes and sent them to Indian boarding schools. As the recent discoveries of mass graves of Native children on these properties make all too clear, the conditions were brutal. You’ve probably heard the , former superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The hard truth is that saving the man was always the lesser priority.

The weaponization of our children in order to stamp out our cultures—because, of course, a family or a nation without children has no future—continued after the boarding school era with the epidemic of of our young ones and their placement into non-Native foster care. I grew up on the Standing Rock Nation in the Dakotas, and too many of my relatives lived in fear that their children could simply vanish into a mysterious and faraway home. In South Dakota, , though we make up only 15% of the population. It’s been estimated that nationwide pre-ICWA, a quarter to more than a third of our children were from their homes.

That’s the backdrop that moved former South Dakota Sen. James Abourezk—who until his earlier this year, chaired our advisory board—to author and sponsor ICWA. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, ICWA keeps Native children in kinship care with Native families and is considered the in child welfare practice and policy by a sizable coalition of child advocacy organizations.

In Brackeen, the petitioners challenged the law in several connected ways. In simple terms, they claimed that Congress overstepped its authority (well-established through Federal Indian Law and prior precedent) in commandeering state courts and agencies by insisting they place Indigenous children in Native foster and adoptive care. They also argued that ICWA’s placement preferences for Native adoptive children, which gives tribes, as sovereign political entities, the right to seek Native homes for them, violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection. In other words, they claimed ICWA is racist against non-Native (mostly white) people.

Native organizations and advocates have spent years preparing for this moment.

Happily, the Court ruled that petitioners lacked proper standing to present their arguments. In a nutshell, the majority said that the petitioners failed both to demonstrate that the Court could remedy harm done to them (the Brackeens, for whom the suit is named, actually succeeded in adopting two Native children) and that they sued the wrong people. The suit’s defendants—the federal government’s Department of the Interior and its secretary, Deb Haaland—don’t administer child welfare; states do.

The Court, then, ultimately didn’t even consider questions of equal protection. Importantly, however, it did leave the door open for future challenges on those grounds. In his concurrence, associate justice Brett Kavanaugh essentially invited future petitioners with proper standing back to present arguments. 

That’s a red flag. If we needed further indication that the Court won’t be consistently favoring Native communities in its decisions, less than a week after the majority opinion in Brackeen dropped, it in a major water rights case.

As for the arguments regarding congressional authority and commandeering, the Court upheld long-standing precedent. It recognized that Congress possesses a “muscular” and broad range of power on behalf of the federal government, with whom tribes have a “trust” relationship as dependent sovereigns. Put a different way: under the law, “Indian” isn’t actually a racial classification. It’s political, because tribes have a nation-to-nation relationship with other governments, including the United States.

Given some of its prior decisions, it was far from certain the Court would respect precedent, treaty obligations or the foundations of Federal Indian Law. A different ruling on these issues might have precipitated a domino effect of further decisions undermining tribal sovereignty. It’s nearly certain that more attacks will come. A coalition of special interests has worked long and hard to attack ICWA—and use any other means—to compromise the power of Native nations. And because they also have a reliable legal avenue through the courtroom of a far-right federal judge, Reed O’Connor in Texas, they can get those cases into consideration by the high court. 

I’m so grateful to all who participated in the massive organizing to protect this law. Native organizations and advocates have spent years preparing for this moment. When it came, all hands were on deck to create effective media outreach, draft scores of briefs for the justices (including from Lakota Law), and provide top-notch legal representation.

Now we must stay proactive and vigilant in all quarters. The federal government, which provides foster care funding to states, can take an active role in demanding those states create more resources to help keep Native kids with Native families. States must abide by and enforce the law. We’re also asking lawmakers to create legislation to , further buttressing its enforcement and implementation. 

In the end, the Supreme Court’s decision demonstrates that Native nations can win—even against the odds—by uniting in a collective effort with a cohesive strategy. 

However, the legacy of colonialism worked to nearly sever this symbiotic relationship by imposing barriers and invisibilizing Indigenous food systems. The Stevens Treaties of 1855, for example, led to Native nations ceding millions of acres of our ancestral homelands to the United States government in exchange for rights that would protect and continue our way of life for future generations. These obligations remain the law to this day. 

But these, like so many Native rights throughout history, have too often been undermined and broken. From land dispossession to environmental degradation, the obstacles Indigenous communities face in order to obtain access to traditional foods are numerous and deeply entrenched. 

But so are the victories. 

In the 1960s and early ’70s, numerous tribes in the Pacific Northwest led a movement to uphold treaty rights and honor our sacred responsibility to protect vital salmon populations. My mother-in-law, Georgianna “Peachie” Ungaro, spent her life as a ceremonial fisher for the Suquamish Tribe and was one of the many women who fought fearlessly during what came to be called the Fish Wars. She recalled the experience of fishing for Chinook salmon (or “king salmon”) in Elliott Bay. “When you get out on the water, you can smell the salmon,” she said. ���� is a spiritually uplifting moment. And, God, I just love it. The smell always reminds us to give thanks for the salmon, and for that, we always had a good season.”

The Fish Wars represent a pivotal chapter in the history of Indigenous resistance, culminating in the 1974 Boldt decision that ruled in favor of Native rights.

This landmark case not only reaffirmed Indigenous fishing rights but also recognized tribes as equal partners in resource management. This was a watershed moment in the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, heralding a new era of cooperation and empowerment.

The legacy of the Boldt decision extends far beyond legal victories, embodying the enduring spirit of Indigenous resilience and the interconnectedness of Indigenous rights and environmental justice. It also serves as a reminder of the ongoing struggle for food sovereignty a half-century later. 

Today, as Indigenous communities address the repercussions of historical trauma and systemic oppression, the fight for food access and restoration remains as urgent as ever. As we work hard to address the barriers obstructing our vital connection to our heritage, we are fueled by the significance of our culinary traditions, the echoes of past struggles to uphold our kinship, and the ongoing commitments to strengthen food sovereignty in our communities.

Celebrating Indigenous foodways is significant and offers profound learnings, but it also requires us to confront the barriers and threats that continue to impede us from doing the restoration work we require. Environmental degradation, loss of habitat, and the erosion of our food heritage pose daunting challenges to food access and Indigenous sovereignty. �鶹���¼�over, the commodification and industrialization of food have further displaced traditional Indigenous foods, exacerbating health disparities.

To address these challenges, we must embrace a holistic approach to Indigenous food sovereignty, one that recognizes the interconnectedness of land, culture, and community. This entails reclaiming ancestral lands, revitalizing traditional food systems, and fostering partnerships with allies committed to honoring sovereignty, as well as environmental and social justice. By centering Indigenous voices and experiences, we can amplify the call for systemic change and build a more just and sustainable future that truly feeds us all.  

Chinook Salmon in Parchment

This cooking method locks in the salmon’s natural flavors and also pays homage to ancestral Coast Salish culinary techniques, which use various seaweeds and waxy leafed plants in place of the parchment. As Ungaro describes cooking salmon, “Their beautiful meat is dripping with good fat, and that is their medicine.”&�Բ�����;

• Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F
• Season a 4-to-6-ounce salmon fillet with salt, pepper, and garlic powder��
• Lay the seasoned fish on a sheet of parchment paper large enough to fully envelop the salmon
• Add a tablespoon of water or vegetable broth to enhance moisture and flavor��
• Seal the parchment paper securely, perhaps with a silent acknowledgment of gratitude
• Place the wrapped fish on a baking sheet and put into the oven
• Bake for 15 minutes. Makes one serving.��

As scholars Sani Adamu Jauro and Ibrahim Yahaya explained in a  reviewing Indigenous African perspectives on land, recognition of kinship with land is accompanied by traditional care and governance designed to ensure the continuance of the life-giving power of the land; from harvesting restrictions and guidance, to ways of distributing what the land offers to community members. Kenneth Tafira, Indigenous scholar at the University of South Africa, shared greater detail of what this means in an  for The Conversation:

Land is understood as embracing the ecological, cultural, cosmological, social and the spiritual… (Indigenous) African land laws debunk the idea of ownership. Instead, land is a natural endowment that can neither be bought nor sold. African land tenure is not based on ownership but on use and access. Since Africans have common rights to land, communal rights override individual rights, which are subsumed to the overall communal good. Tenure rights are built through reciprocal obligations and mutuality. Land belongs to the living, the dead and the unborn, making it inalienable. … Depriving one of land means robbing them of their personhood, being and identity – in other words their full humanity.

These principles guide practical daily life and community governance in relation to land, and they are shared by Indigenous people worldwide. They frame the contemporary movements led by colonially impacted Indigenous nations to regain rights to land, broadly termed Land Back.

Colonization, through genocide, land theft, and the imposition of private property, has dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their homelands across the continents since the birth of colonialism. The origin of private property as we understand it today lies in ancient Europe, where the Roman Empire colonized Indigenous Europeans. The Roman Empire was a key originator of the notion of “private property,” a “dominion” approach to ownership, as well as written laws, legal systems, and militias to enforce this way of believing. 

As Simon Fairlie explains in “A Short History of Enclosure in Britain” for The Land, in two primary waves, including in the 18th and 19th century eras of industrialization, European villagers were dispossessed of their land through the enclosure of the commons (common land with shared usage). This was done for the benefit of elites, forcing people into low-wage labor to survive.

This can be considered a significant marker of capitalism’s origins: a system that is reliant on maintaining a lesser dependent class of wage laborers to fuel the wealth-building expansionism of the upper classes. The enclosure of lands has been followed by the enclosure of trade, as increasingly larger economic entities have isolated markets for themselves, locking others out and into dependent worker relationships. 

Writing in The New Yorker, Eula Biss points out that a 1968 essay by Garrett Hardin titled “The Tragedy of the Commons” articulated the long-accepted idea that communities could not be trusted to share land and its resources. This system was exported to what would become the United States, where land was brutally taken from Indigenous peoples and racism strategically cultivated to undergird the institution of slavery. 

As has been written about widely, including in the 1999 anthology by M. Annette Jaimes, , both the violence against the Indigenous and the practice of slavery were justified by the use of Roman Empire–based legal frameworks and the papal bulls issued by the Catholic church in the 1400s, known as the “.”&�Բ�����;

When the U.S. government was initially formed, only land-owning white men could vote or influence government, and as rights gradually expanded, this economic power continued to be guarded strategically for the benefit of white men for much of the nation’s history, excluding Black and Indigenous communities. While the histories of both peoples are profoundly different, they have experienced hundreds of years of systematic and strategic psychological degradation and ensured economic dependency, and have been subjugated as a relatively impoverished underclass. 

As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz wrote in her 2014 text An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 

Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it. … Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

Initially, Indigenous peoples in the Americas were confined to reservation lands, . Black folks, after the abolishment of slavery, were only able to  or otherwise face violence. 

Throughout history, when it was discovered that Indigenous or Black peoples had unexpected natural resources on their land, they were also dispossessed. While Indigenous communities were robbed of their lands by the , Vann R. Newkirk II, , pointed out how a million Black farmers had their lands stolen from them since the 1950s through white militant violence or eminent domain. 

Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm says, “There is so much land-based trauma. For us, land was the scene of the crime, as 6 million people would flee the rural agrarian South, creating a refugee crisis, as landowners were lynched for audacity of owning land.” She adds, “There was so much trauma that people were raised thinking that the way to succeed was to get as far away from the land as possible.”

Black people were also violently victimized when they managed to play by the capitalist rules of the white owning class and attain economic prosperity. The 1921 razing of the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, is one of the most prominent examples of this. According to a series by The Associated Press&�Բ�����;�پ��ٱ����&�Բ�����;“,” “Racial violence in America is a familiar story, but the importance of land as a motive for lynchings and white mob attacks on blacks has been widely overlooked, and the resulting land losses suffered by black families have gone largely unreported.” The story concludes, “For many decades, successful blacks lived with the gnawing fear that white neighbors could at any time do something violent and take everything from them.”

And, in spite of this, Indigenous and Black peoples in the United States continue to exist, grow, heal, and thrive in incredibly powerful ways. As Stephanie Morningstar of the  says, “The resilience of our communities has continued to persist in the minds and hearts of our activists and liberators, demanding a seat at the table, and for the tables to turn by any means necessary.”

Relations to Land Today

While Indigenous peoples have experienced continuous atrocity and dispossession, many have been able to retain a connection to their original homelands and source of life, spirit, and culture. 

Even so, access to a liberated relationship to land—free to practice stewardship and care, have physical access to traditional homelands, or even exercise full decision making in relation to on-reserve or reservation lands—is extremely limited. The contradictory nature of colonial law related to Indigenous people has resulted in the federal government having a trustee role over otherwise “sovereign” Indigenous nations. This has resulted in exploitation and limited Indigenous governance that is often illegal according to international law or even by the standards set by U.S. courts. The Indian Land Tenure Foundation noted that the Department of the Interior , and stated that “the federal government, acting as ‘trustee,’ has allowed energy, mining and other extractive industries to exploit Indian nations.”

Land theft itself occurred long after the initial reservation period. The federal General Allotment Act resulted in the dispossession of  and restricted Indigenous governance of the remaining lands. Today, Indigenous nations are working continuously to  and care of land and community. 

For Black folks removed from their ancestral homelands, maintaining and building connections to land has been incredibly difficult and fraught with violence. Black Americans have continuously had deep connections to land severed. Penniman explains that after the abolishment of slavery in 1865, Gen. Sherman met with Black clergyman Garrison Frazier, who shared that the deepest need that Black folks had was “homes and the ground beneath them, to plant fruit trees; to be able to tell the children, ‘these are yours.’” 

According to , Afro-Indigenous scholar and historian, this consistent unsteady relationship to place and land remains unresolved for those in search of home. He says, “The ideas of place, home, and land are an unresolved trauma at the core of Black belonging.” Even when Black families were able to hold on to their collective farmlands, the ongoing  has greatly undermined the strength of Black family farms and connection to generationally held land. This is transforming, however, through the power and work of people. As Leah Penniman shared, “Land was the scene of the crime, but land was not the criminal. Now, some are returning to the land, and their souls, heritage, and wisdom.”&�Բ�����;

The structural transformations required to enact justice for Black and Indigenous peoples are connected and deep, touching the founding cosmology of settler-colonial society. This cosmology, founded on the exploitation of land and people, has proven harmful to all. As Wendell Berry wrote in his 1970 book The Hidden Wound, the “psychic wound of racism [created to maintain economic power] resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, and in the country itself.” The next story in our series explores some of the work being done by Black and Indigenous people to heal these wounds, build power together, and enact the critical transformations it will take to achieve justice and a liberated future.

This story is part of Building the Block, an original YES! series supported by a grant from the , which encourages the development of burgeoning alternative economies and fresh social contracts in ways that can help artists and cultural communities achieve financial freedom. Reporting and production of this story was funded by this grant, but YES! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy.

A decade later, Wilbur’s efforts are bearing fruit in the form of a new book, (Ten Speed Press). Over the course of her time meeting, talking with, and photographing Indigenous people around the continent, Wilbur’s goal changed. 

“Our identity cannot be defined by a number,” Wilbur explains, adding that the count is now 574 federally recognized tribes—but that number still excludes so many people, communities, and tribes that she encountered. “The federal government cannot define who we are.”

Wilbur took the time to let her subjects define themselves. She spent hours, days, weeks traveling to and conversing with people in order to really get to know them. If and when subjects agreed to be photographed, she let them choose the location and what they wore. That agency and self-determination is central to what she was trying to achieve with the project.

Initially, Wilbur had organized the book around major themes—decolonization, rematriation, sovereignty, traditional lifeways, Two-Spirit identity and gender, and land as identity. She wrote a chapter for each, spelling out the concept and how it manifested in the stories of her subjects. After realizing that her text took up 40 pages, which meant she would have to cut 20 to 30 people from the book, she scrapped the whole manuscript, making a conscious decision to let her subjects speak for themselves.

Wilbur is forthcoming about how important context is to understanding these stories. One tribe may be referred to by multiple terms throughout the book, but she chose to prioritize her subjects’ self-identification over consistency. She also chose not to locate these Nations using designations such as state names from a typical U.S. map. Rather than explaining concepts that are fundamental to Indigenous life today or spelling out Indigenous ways of knowing, she implicitly invites the audience to do their own additional learning. 

“This work aims to counteract the relentlessly one-dimensional, archaic, insipid stereotypes of Native Americans circulating in mainstream media, textbooks, and the culture industry,” Wilbur writes in her introduction to the book. She rejects what she calls “lurid and degrading illusions of Indigenous people as leathered and feathered sidekicks in the ‘cowboys and Indians’ sham.”&�Բ�����;

Such representation not only “denies illegal land grabs and dilutes the horrible reality of Native genocide,” Wilbur writes, it also assaults and scandalizes the Native psyche. She points to the research of Tulalip psychologist Stephanie Fryberg, who found that . Fryberg also found that when white youth see these same images, their self-esteem rises. 

Wilbur experienced this disturbing reality firsthand in her own life. As she recounts in Project 562, she was teaching at the high school on the Tulalip Reservation, where she shared a TED Talk by a white photographer who engaged in what Wilbur called “poverty porn” on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Her students cried seeing the work. 

“The stereotypes are damaging our bodies and stealing our children’s minds,” writes Wilbur. “The majority of Native youth do not believe they will live beyond the age of 25.” She came face to face with that reality when one of her students died by suicide the day after viewing the TED Talk. In her heartbreak, Wilbur sought out better visual representation of her people and their truth. Finding none, she set out to create it herself, with her grief and her camera in hand. 

How to Hold One Another

Wilbur says she learned a lot on the road. While she was at Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, she says she was twice assaulted by police, and had her camera confiscated. “That impacted me,” she says, describing how she saw supposed public servants protecting the interests of a private corporation over the constitutional rights of people engaging in prayer and peaceful protest. After that, she could no longer maintain the belief she used to have in institutions like law enforcement, because it “literally got beaten out of me.”&�Բ�����;

She learned other lessons through the conversations she had and the connections she formed. Wilbur says it’s one thing when you know your own people’s story—how you were dispossessed of land, removed, and relocated. But as she traveled, she heard more and more of these stories and saw how closely they paralleled the experiences of her family and her tribes. It also became clear how closely linked this mistreatment was to the coping mechanisms that continue to cause so much harm to Indigenous communities. These interactions galvanized her anger over the sweeping impacts of settler colonialism and the U.S. government’s assimilation and termination policies.

“The manifestation of settler colonialism is trauma,” she says. “There was a lot of trauma-bonding for me with a lot of people and a lot of the places that I went to because I grew up on the Rez.”

“If you grew up on the Rez, you know about death. If you grew up on the Rez, you know about poverty, you know about drug addiction and alcoholism. These things are very intimate to us,” Wilbur says. “And we also, in the same breath, know about overcoming, and resiliency, and taking care of community in those times, and how to hold one another.”

Part of her work was learning how to absorb people’s stories, feel them, and then let them move through her. “I had to learn how to be like water,” she says. Connecting with people over shared struggles can be healing, but she also didn’t want to retraumatize people in the process. 

Wilbur was blown away by how many communities identified themselves by the places they called home. “People have this intimate knowing, this long-standing relationship with the land, and that land has informed their society.”&�Բ�����;

Wilbur found that she, too, draws much of her identity from the land, though she wouldn’t have said as much prior to doing this project. She says she did grow up fishing, on the water, in relationship with salmon. She did go to salmon ceremony every year. She does know how to can salmon and how to give it away. She does know her people’s creation stories and songs. “I didn’t realize I had all this cultural knowledge about my land-based identity because it was just normal to me,” Wilbur recounts.

And despite every effort of the colonizers to deny that relationship between people and land, it persists. Despite hundreds of years of oppression, Wilbur celebrates the fact that Indigenous people continue to make babies, to make love, to laugh loud, and to support schools and social services that are underfunded by the state. Despite all that colonization tried to do, it didn’t win. She points to the fact that canoes can still be seen on the water in the Pacific Northwest. Longhouses are still in use. Salmon ceremonies are still held. People can still learn their native language if they want to. 

“W��’ve managed to become these powerful nations despite all of that, so I have incredible hope for the future.”

Visions of Indigenous Futures

Wilbur aims to look both forward and backward, facing the future as much as the past. She dedicates her book to her daughter, Alma Bea, who was born in 2019, partway through the project:

Wilbur’s deep love and reverence for her people is clear throughout our conversation. And it comes through when her daughter, now a toddler, interrupts our interview for a wardrobe query. Wilbur is gracious, patient, and loving as she redirects her. 

Wilbur operates with an understanding that joy and justice are married, and she is upfront about the difficulties they bring. “The work of social justice is hard. It’s long. It’s arduous. But we do it for joy and love,” Wilbur says. “Only love can fuel a project like this: a love for my people, a love for my family, and the love that I felt around me during the process.”&�Բ�����;

She says her project is part of the work of generations, documenting and sharing the accumulation of Indigenous knowledge and resilience over centuries. So while she’s fully aware that changing the mainstream consciousness can’t be accomplished with one social media post or one protest, she sees her work as an important contribution to shifting the narrative. 

Wilbur fully admits that the scope of the book is limited and incomplete. Of the 1,200 people she interviewed and photographed (enough content to fill 30 hard drives), she could only include a couple hundred in this volume. Even so, the book is already in its fourth printing. 

Wilbur says it’s humbling, and hopes that readers will receive Project 562 in the spirit in which it was made: “love for our people.” That message is reinforced by the fact that the Swinomish and Tulalip tribes purchased hundreds of copies of the book to give away to elders and youth. Wilbur also did a book giveaway for the students at the high school where she once taught.

Wilbur sees her work as part of the collective effort to create a pathway for the next generation. She wants to uplift Indigenous stories, identities, scholarship, and knowledge, and shift mainstream misconceptions. Through this work, she hopes to empower readers, especially students like those in her class back on the reservation, to feel agency and possibility in their indigeneity. 

���� frees them from having to do narrative-correction work,” Wilbur says. “They can focus on Indigenous futurism instead.”

My guilt, on the other hand, was related to the fact that I had left my family behind, living under perpetual siege. Since then, some of them have died, including my father, who was denied access to proper medical care—like countless other Gazans still living under Israeli occupation. In the ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, I have lost literally hundreds of members of my immediate and extended family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. My guilt, back then, was fully justified. It still is.

That July morning, when I handed my laissez-passer to the U.S. immigration officer at JFK, he looked perplexed. He adjusted his polarized sunglasses repeatedly as he flipped through the strange document. “What does it mean that your nationality is ‘undefined’?” he asked. I understood the question, but could neither find the words—nor the courage—to answer. I saw my face reflected in his shiny lenses and felt embarrassed. I did not look like the brave Gazan taking on the world, as my father and neighbors back home expected me to be. 

“Always remember, you are from Gaza,” my father had told me, as he stood in the predawn morning with my younger brothers and a small cluster of neighbors and friends who insisted on bidding me farewell before the taxi taking me to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport arrived. My mother had died many years earlier, during the first intifada (uprising), but her kind eyes still stared at me gently, one last time, from a framed photo in the living room. 

The look on my face as I confronted my first American obstacle was hardly one of bravery. I cannot be sent back, I thought to myself, amid a rush of other thoughts I couldn’t articulate in that moment. I wanted to tell the officer that I am “undefined” because Israel refuses to acknowledge my nationality, my roots, my history, and my present, let alone my humanity. I wanted to tell him this is the only term they could find to avoid simply acknowledging my identity as a Palestinian; that Israel’s dehumanization of me and my people does not begin or end with language; and that I am a refugee from a place called Gaza, whose people have been forced into an internal exile within Palestine itself, and that those Gazans, like me, are, in fact, considered lucky for having a document with a name and a face. 

Other officers joined the man in the mirrored glasses, some investigating the unusual paper, while others examined me—a strange, spectacled creature with blue jeans and navy blue T-shirt with an alligator logo. After much deliberation, they decided that I could proceed with my journey to Seattle. They did not manage to successfully decipher my nationality, but ultimately deferred to the valid visa I carried from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. 

Thirty years later, I have done much with my life. I have studied, raised a family, and, at least in my own estimation, contributed to U.S. society through my books, papers, articles, media engagements, and more. My children—who now seem poised to achieve more than I ever have—are undertaking their own journeys to find ways to “make a difference,” a calling repeated many times in my household. 

Yet I still feel “undefined,” not only by Israeli standards, but also by the standards of the country that should have—at least in theory—become my own. 

Denial 

The story of the passport is, of course, a political one. We, Palestinians, obviously do exist. I am not Russian, Moroccan, Brazilian, or a member of the Māori people—although I feel a particular affinity with the latter group given our shared struggle against settler colonialism and cultural erasure. But I do not exist as a contrast to anyone else, including Israelis. Palestinians are as old as—and even older than—recorded time. 

“Palestine was the name used most commonly, consistently and continuously for over 1,200 years,” Palestinian author, historian, and academic Nur Masalha wrote in his seminal 2018 book, .

Yet in 1969, then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir—an —insisted “There were no such thing as Palestinians,” in an interview in The Sunday Times of London. ���� was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them,” Meir continued. “They did not exist.”

That infamous interview coincided with the second anniversary of the 1967 war. In Israel and the West, it’s known as the ; for us Palestinians it is the (“the setback”). The latter term must be distinguished from the (“the catastrophe”), which was coined shortly after Zionist militias—which would later coalesce into —gutted out a whole nation from its historic homeland to build a state on its ruins. Amid , more than 500 by these militias between December 1947 and July 1948. This is how most Palestinians became refugees, as nearly 80% of our people were forced out. 

We never found safety elsewhere. Those who were internally displaced in the West Bank and Gaza by the Nakba were then caged in by . Many Palestinians and Arabs had hoped that the 1967 war—which involved Egypt, Syria, and Jordan against the U.S.-backed Israel—would reunite refugees with their long-destroyed villages. Instead, the Naksa resulted in , added to the original . 

Since then, Palestinians have been caught in a seemingly endless circle of dispossession that, with time, extended beyond the boundaries of both historic and occupied Palestine. When in 1990, Palestinians, already refugees from earlier conflicts, were mostly pushed out of the country. Hundreds of thousands of from a place that they helped build. Following the discovery of oil sometime in the 1960s, Kuwait needed Palestinians as much as Palestinians needed Kuwait. However, Kuwaitis viewed Yasser Arafat’s political stance—also adopted by his Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—as supportive of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. As Iraq was forced out of Kuwait, so too were the Palestinians.

Palestinians, many of whom were Kuwaiti government workers and teachers at educational institutions, were collectively fired from their jobs and asked to leave the country. This sad scenario was repeated in Iraq, almost immediately following the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Then, too, Palestinians went on the run, thousands of them trapped in desert refugee camps on Iraq’s borders with Jordan and Syria. While some found refuge in Jordan, others , Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scandinavia, and the U.S. 

The so-called Arab Spring—which failed to bring freedom, democracy, or justice to Arab nations—once again made Palestinians run for their lives. Some were fleeing war-torn Libya following another , while others fled from Lebanon, overburdened with economic hardship, foreign meddling, and the Syrian refugee crisis. But the largest number of new Palestinian refugees originated from Syria itself. 

Yet in Gaza, where we lived under Israeli , surrounded by military bases and opulent Israeli Jewish settlements——we perceived Palestinian refugees in Iraq and Syria as the most privileged of all refugee communities. Palestinians living in Iraq were relatively economically prosperous, and those in Syria had access to quality education, which we lacked in the Gaza refugee camps. Access to health care facilities and other basic services were things that both groups had learned to take for granted. In Gaza, we did not. But all of us, regardless of location, were cursed with bizarre travel documents that served little purpose and generated confused looks from inquisitive immigration officers at various borders, whose typical verdict was “Access denied.”

Palestinian refugees had—in fact, many still do—travel documents issued by Egypt and known as , which severely restricted the movement of their holders, essentially requiring a visa to go anywhere, including Arab countries. Though, in 1995, the Palestinian Authority issued new travel documents to Palestinians in the occupied territories; Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East continued to use the restrictive old wathiqa. Countries that allow Palestinians to visit or work differ from year to year, and from one political context to another, though those from Gaza (as well as Lebanon) remain the most rejected of all Palestinians. Those of us who lived under Israeli occupation had an additional and equally useless document, the laissez-passer (French for “let them pass”), which was issued by Israel to distinguish between occupied Palestinians and Israeli citizens, who had full travel rights. The Israeli document, however, never lived up to its name—it served to restrict our movement, rather than facilitate it.

These documents were meant to be used only outside the borders of occupied Palestine, or Palestinian refugee camps scattered all over the Middle Eastern Diaspora. In Palestine itself, the system is far more complex and dehumanizing. 

Kafkaesque Reality 

On Sept. 13, 1993, the unwise PLO leadership signed . The agreement granted the PLO—not the Palestinian people—recognition by Israel. In exchange, the Palestinian organization, which had ceased to meaningfully represent Palestinians, Israel’s right to exist. The latter move may seem innocuous, but it was not. Aside from the philosophical that states are political creations and have no inherent moral right to exist, Israel’s existence is taking place at the expense of the erasure of the Palestinian people—our political rights, our culture, our language, and more.

That agreement essentially certified that Israel had the right to exist on top of the very Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed during the Nakba. It forfeited, with the stroke of a Norwegian pen and a U.S. stamp of approval, the rights of the Palestinian refugees to their original homeland. Palestinian proponents of the agreement at the time argued that fundamental issues such as refugees, water, borders, and the status of Jerusalem were . To date, no such discussions have occurred.

Instead, into three distinct territorial zones, each to be governed by different military ordinances. Israel never truly respected the zoning system it crafted to corral Palestinians behind , , fences, and bypass roads. Israel invades any region, in any zone, at any time, at will; it carries out , , , and the , mostly ancient olive groves. But for Palestinians, the zones still matter, as each zone includes , cutting off communities and families from one another, separating farmers from their land, students and teachers from their schools, and so on.  

Life in Gaza, at least prior to the ongoing war-turned-genocide and famine starting on Oct. 7, 2023, represented a different kind of struggle. It was, in the words of current British foreign secretary , who visited Gaza in 2010 in his capacity as prime minister, an “open-air prison.” Gaza is constantly surveilled by Israeli guards, who keep an armed, watchful eye from land, air, and sea. 

This reality was not the only context behind the Oct. 7 attacks, but is certainly a main motivator behind the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip. It turned out that humans have a certain tolerance level to oppression and an innate desire to be free. 

No Right to Human Rights 

Little has changed in Israel’s rhetoric around Palestinian existence in the 55 years since Golda Meir insisted there was no such thing as Palestine. On March 19, 2023, Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich : “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” A day later, then U.S. national security spokesperson that “we [in the U.S.] utterly object to this kind of language,” saying it does little to “de-escalate the tensions” in the region. Like most U.S. officials, Kirby did not acknowledge Washington’s role in serving as the first line of defense against criticism or international sanctions against Israel, before or during the genocide. This diplomatic focus on language continues to obfuscate the brutal reality of an ongoing genocide—painstakingly recorded by before the International Court of Justice at The Hague on Jan. 11, 2024.

But, in truth, we Palestinians also do not exist as far as U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is concerned. When the Trump administration began implementing its “Deal of the Century,” aimed at helping Israel “normalize” its relations with Arab countries without resolving the question of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it did so with no regard to Palestinians and their rights, which are in international law. After Palestinian leadership boycotted Jared Kushner’s 2019 economic leadership conference in Bahrain, the son-in-law and senior adviser of former President Donald Trump “hysterical and erratic.” Trumpism remained committed to the same dehumanizing idea. Israel has to “finish the problem” in Gaza, on March 5, 2024, amid Israel’s genocidal war on the Strip.

“The right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible,” , a German American historian and philosopher, argued in 1949. She was responding to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948—incidentally, but also tellingly, the very year my people’s existence was being systematically destroyed in one of the greatest violations of the collective human rights of a single group in modern history.��

Indeed, without political context and legal recognition, human rights on their own are of little value, a mere recurring subject of repeated press releases by the likes of and (HRW). Incidentally, both organizations, along with Israel’s own rights group, , have recognized Israel as a fully fledged apartheid state. In response to a 2021 report by HRW, President Joe Biden’s state department , ���� is not the view of this administration that Israel’s actions constitute apartheid.” This attitude is typical. For successive U.S. administrations, Israel’s actions do not matter. All that matters is the language, and only if it deviates from the U.S.-championed political discourse. This remains unchanged even when well over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded in Gaza in a matter of months.��

If the Palestinian struggle can be summed up in one phrase it would be a struggle against erasure. When Israel passed its so-called Nation State Law, it aimed at that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” This exclusivity immediately and irreversibly denies the rights of the native Palestinians to their own land, and thus the to millions of Palestinian refugees expelled during the Nakba and the Naksa.��

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 insists that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” That was 76 years ago. The refugees, my family included, are still waiting for the “earliest practicable date” to actualize. For Israel, is tantamount to calling for the eradication of Israel altogether. 

The dehumanization of Palestinians has been taking place for many years and is a functional element of the settler-colonial structure. In 1983, former Israeli army Chief of Staff described Palestinians as “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” In October 2023, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, , said they are “bloodthirsty animals,” echoing the words of Israeli defense minister who, three days earlier, had called Palestinians “human animals.” With time, however, this dehumanizing language serves other functions aside from racial discrimination. The genocidal language became a precursor for genocide.��

Even before the latest war on Gaza resulted in the horrifying massacres of tens of thousands of mostly women and children, and the subsequent human-made lethal famine, the language of genocide has long been legible writing on the wall. Israeli heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu in November 2023 that one of Israel’s options in the war against Gaza could be to drop a nuclear bomb, while Israel’s minister for the advancement of women, May Golan, in March 2024 that she is “personally proud of the ruins of Gaza.” Euro-Med Monitor, a human rights group, even evidence that Israeli forces “brought Israeli civilians to watch” Palestinians being tortured.

The Israelis, for once, are no longer expending much energy or time fending off accusations of genocide, which was accurately described by anti-Zionist Israeli historian as “the first-ever televised genocide in modern times.” Indeed, the masks have finally fallen, and the world is able to see the true face of Israeli settler colonialism in its ugliest manifestations. 

Patrick Wolfe’s words continue to ring true. The late Australian scholar and historian that “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Genocide is an of this domineering structure, as Wolfe explains that settler colonialism “…perpetuates the erasure and destruction of native people as a precondition for settler colonialism and expropriation of lands and resources.”

Although this understanding is becoming clearer to many in Western academic institutions, thanks to the relentless efforts of , Indigenous, Palestinian, , and other intellectuals, it is hardly a subject of debate in the Global South. In my visits to South Africa, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and my numerous interactions with Southern intellectuals, the intersectionality between the Palestinian cause and other Native struggles is neither an academic theory nor a debate. It is the only possible salvation to many nations that continue to struggle under the oppressive weight of marginalization and racism, within national frameworks, or colonialism and neocolonialism within an unfair, Western-inclined global system. 

We Do Exist 

Unlike my early years as a student in the U.S. and a young academic in Western institutions, I am now far more invested in building connections with people who understand, and even share, my positionality: dispossessed, marginalized, and even outright oppressed. 

This process, however, started with my own family, with my daughters and my son. Raising Palestinian children in the U.S. was always difficult, especially for those who live in small, isolated communities. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, however, made it even more difficult. Fearing for my kids’ safety, I simply stopped speaking our native Arabic to them in public. Racism and reached unprecedented levels. Eventually, we left the U.S., spending years in Malaysia, where my son was born. It was a needed respite. My greatest fears were that my kids would grow up hating themselves, abandoning their identities simply to “fit in,” or worse, seeing themselves as perpetual victims. 

So their bedtime stories consisted of tales about two brave Palestinian girls, and eventually a boy, who traveled to Palestine to help liberate the people. With each quest, they learned about a new city or refugee camp. They learned about places, historic figures, and food. And each time, they flew over the sea to break prison walls, remove fences and checkpoints, always donning their precious kuffiyas, Palestinian traditional scarves. These stories, which we called “The Palestinian Warrior Girls Express,” helped them see themselves as fighters for a just cause, a legacy that continues to live with them many years later; one of them is a political activist with a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies, and the other is a health worker and future doctor, advocating for equal access to health care among marginalized communities in Washington state. 

It took years for this to happen, a process that is shared by many Palestinian American families across the country, each developing their own tools to stay close to home. Wherever we are in the world, Palestine is now part of our existence. Our food, clothes, spirituality, values, and daily conversations are all deeply rooted in our culture. With time, we grew sensitive to any injustice taking place anywhere, putting Palestinian American activists, writers, lawyers, and the like often at the forefront of any just struggle in the U.S. 

My hope grows stronger as I witness my people’s steadfastness in the face of genocide. I know that we will not be wished away by some Israeli politician empowered with U.S.-provided weapons and emboldened by the world’s support or silence. ��

I have a passport now, a U.S. one, though such citizenship resolved very little of my quandary. Yes, papers had granted me, at least in principle, access and the right to have rights, but they did not, nor should they, grant me an identity. My identity is not a piece of paper with colored stamps, but is defined through my struggle as a member of a collective that is fighting and dying to preserve our sense of peoplehood, against a backdrop of untold, rooted, and continuing injustices. 

�鶹���¼�over, I no longer possess the laissez-passer of old. It was replaced by an alternative Palestinian Authority passport, which is, sadly, equally useless. Still, the new piece of paper, at least, declares that my nationality is “Palestinian” (although still a refugee). 

It took me years to satisfy all the bureaucratic procedures, complicated by the distance and the Israeli occupation administration, to obtain similar papers for my children, who are also now proud “Palestinian refugees” from the Gaza Strip. It was important for me—and now, for them as well—that the bond between us and the homeland is never severed. 

A piece of paper may grant you access, but identity is something you must seek for yourself. And in the case of my people, it is something we have to fight, and often die, for. 

I believe that many of our recent efforts to abolish harmful systems of oppression are being done with consideration of the white gaze, through a lens of scarcity and lack. Our responses to oppression have been colonized. If we are to be successful at dismantling the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and anthropocentrism that enforce domination and oppression over people and ecosystems, we have to start seeing our abundance. It’s imperative for us to move forward and live in right relationship with each other and the planet.

The late Grace Lee Boggs said, “The time has come for a new dream, that’s what being a revolutionary is. I don’t know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but you might be able to imagine it, if your imagination were rich enough.” How do we liberate ourselves from all supremacy culture to dream the new dream that Boggs speaks of? Dreams are an essential part of our human cognition, identity, and being. They allow us to bring our whole selves and our communities into imagining new worlds and realities. They conjure the unseen and unknown, while redesigning our notions of what is possible.

I often reflect on the dreams of my parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1973. Like many other immigrants from the Global Majority, they arrived here with very few possessions—and a dream. One of economic and physical security for their newly arrived family, their family back home in India, and also their future generations. Their dream of familial economic and physical security is not exclusive; it’s a dream that all people have, but the oppressive structures that exist in this country and around the world actively prevent queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color from realizing our dreams. 

When we remind ourselves that we are enough, we can decolonize our dreams to decolonize our responses to oppressive structures so that we can move through the portal toward liberation.

My parents raised me in the South Asian faith of Jainism, where the core tenets of Ahimsa and nonviolence hold that all life is sacred and interconnected as kin. I also grew up in a part of rural Indiana that was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold and where the KKK still held rallies during the time I was in school. Although the nearby farming families, most if not all of them White, held a close and intimate connection to the land, this intimacy wasn’t extended to me and my family. I faced the paradoxical reality that my identity and behaviors were all wrong and threatening outside of my home, while I was fully loved and accepted inside my home. Holding both of these realities confused and limited me. Why was I not enough?

To this day, I often experience moments of insecurity  and question the authenticity of my behavior—if my intelligence is enough, if my hustle is enough—even around my friends of color. 

It’s then I’m reminded of adrienne maree brown’s words in her book, Pleasure Activism: “Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough?”

Affirmations like this one, along with the foundation of security my parents laid help me to have my own dreams—of total liberation where the sacrality of all life-forms is honored. This is why I work for a Just Transition that builds economic and political power to move us from an extractive economy to a regenerative one. But I also believe that a Just Transition gets us to the first step and beginning of the work toward liberation and a society that is fully able to live up to the potential of what it is to be human. And it is also why I see the current dreams and imaginings of abolishing systems of persecution as reactive and conditioned to our current reality. Our dreams have been colonized. The focus on abolition, while necessary for the survival of our people, also limits us by centering the world that supremacy culture built. How can we do the vital work of abolition while also dreaming beyond the world they built to one that is for us and by us?

I acknowledge my own privilege in this sentiment and that I have had time, space, and support for healing for my own trauma. I acknowledge that I have the privilege of being asked what my dreams are and have been supported in pursuing those dreams. What about those who are in everyday trauma, who don’t get access or space for healing? Who gets to heal and to dream? How do we support others on their pathway of healing and knowing that they are enough? When we remind ourselves that we are enough, we can decolonize our dreams to decolonize our responses to oppressive structures so that we can move through the portal toward liberation.

We can liberate our dreams from reacting to our current reality into dreaming of entire new realities and ways of being that tap into the mosaic of our ancestral cultures and stories. Dreams of a new economics where the currency and capital are banked on interdependence and liberation; widespread ecological and community designs that are braided by Indigenous designers from across the continents; bioregional forms of governance that see the watershed as the geopolitical entity where we all come together, rural and urban, to be in true right relationship and belonging with each other and ecosystems; Black reparations and Native rematriation meld together to form new models of justice and stewardship, recognizing that land doesn’t have to be owned by humans to support habitats for our and other species. These are my dreams for my people and my kin—the vulnerable who are part of the seed bank of my soul, waiting for sunlight, nourishment, and hydration so that they can spring up and root down.       

Perhaps my parents would think that these dreams are not for us or that they are too much. Perhaps because of the collective trauma of people who have been marginalized by supremacy culture over the past decades and centuries, it is too difficult for many of us to dream beyond abolition or even our current day to day survival. Others who work for a Just Transition might say that these dreams might not be practical. But dreams aren’t practical, they are a vision of what is possible. 

We have to shed these oppressive structures that contain us so that we can dream of new realities where we can freely be who we already are—enough.      

Boholle stayed on after the colonial exhibition was over. Despite rampant racism, he became a carpenter, married, and started a family. When the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, Black people living in Germany, who were already seen as racially inferior, became the of prosecution. After Boholle died in the 1930s, his family was deported to concentration camps during WWII. His wife died there, but some of their children survived. Their descendants still live in Germany today. 

The struggle and perseverance of Boholle and several other immigrants who came to Berlin during and immediately after the colonial period is told in “Despite Everything: Migration to the Colonial Metropolis Berlin,” a current exhibition in Berlin Kreuzberg, a multicultural neighborhood home to many immigrant communities.

German efforts to and atone for the crimes of the Holocaust are well known. The country’s history of colonialism, which preceded—and, some historians even say, —the Nazis, not so much. “There has been very little done to critically deal with this past,” says Anna Yeboah, project coordinator at Dekoloniale, a coalition of activists, historians, and educators in Berlin that co-produced the exhibition in collaboration with the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum.

In 1884, Germany initiated the infamous Berlin Conference, which European nations’ “Scramble for Africa.” In the decades that followed, the country became the world’s colonial empire, occupying swathes of Africa, including parts of modern-day Rwanda, Namibia, Cameroon, Congo, and Tanzania, as well as areas in China and the Pacific, such as Samoa. During this time, Germany committed what historians now call the genocide of the 20th century in Namibia, nearly wiping out the Herero and Nama, two Indigenous peoples of Namibia, through starvation and forced labor in concentration camps. In Tanzania, at least 180,000 people died revolting against the German colonial rule during the . German colonizers also the skulls and bones of deceased Africans for pseudoscientific research aimed at proving the racial superiority of white Europeans.

“The goal of Dekoloniale is to find a way for a critical appraisal of German colonialism from a civil society perspective,” Yeboah says.

With funding support from the Berlin State Department for Culture and Europe as well as the , Dekoloniale aims to confront German colonial history and its racist legacy by implementing a series of ambitious initiatives by 2024. These efforts include cultural programs, such as festivals and exhibitions like the one in Berlin Kreuzberg, guided tours that reveal the concealed remnants of colonialism in urban spaces, and an pinpointing locations of colonial legacy across Germany and the world.

The Work Started Earlier

Before coming together to form Dekoloniale in 2020, its member organizations—Berlin Postkolonial, the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD), and Each One Teach One (EOTO)—had already been devoted for years to addressing colonial injustices and racism in Germany. The activists were motivated by a shared frustration at the exclusion of colonial history from school curricula and public discourse. 

“German colonialism was simply not a part of the curriculum in my education,” says Yeboah, whose father is an immigrant from Ghana. Through her own research, Yeboah discovered that Friedrich Wilhelm I, the ruler of Brandenburg-Prussia, had colonized Ghana as early as the 17th century and traded enslaved Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Christian Kopp, organizer of Berlin Postkolonial and a trained historian, recalls his surprising discovery of Germany’s colonial past in Tanzania while attending an unrelated conference there. “As a historian, you should be committed to telling the truth if you see that there are whole areas not covered, voices suppressed, and stories not told,” Kopp says. “Otherwise, you are writing the story of the victors.”

Together with his Tanzanian colleagues in Germany, Kopp established Berlin Postkolonial in 2007. The group has offered postcolonial walking tours and staged protests against German museums to demand the restitution of cultural artifacts and amassed during the colonial era. They’ve also campaigned to remove racist street names in the city.

The work of Kopp and other activist organizations are yielding results: The public discourse around colonialism is changing. In 2021, the German government officially its genocide in Namibia. In December last year, the country returned 22 , prized artifacts looted by British soldiers from the former Kingdom of Benin, today Nigeria, and sold across Western museums.

Today, Berlin Postkolonial runs up to 70 walking tours a year, bringing students, interested residents, and international visitors to locations that reveal the hidden history of colonialism, up from five tours at the start of its activism efforts. “W�� can hardly catch up,” Kopp says.

The activists also credit the intensification of discussion in Germany to the Black Lives Matter movement. After George Floyd’s murder, demonstrations took place throughout Germany, with people taking to the streets of Berlin. ����’s not a small segment of citizens interested in change, but a majority seeing the disparities in society,” Yeboah says.

As the public dialogue has escalated, so, too, has the backlash. Following years of pressure from activists like Berlin Postkolonial and ISD, district officials voted to change the name of a street that used a derogatory term for Black people, to the name of Anton Wilhelm Amo, Germany’s first Black scholar and philosopher. However, the process stalled after the district faced several lawsuits against the renaming.

Conservative outrage also took aim at the Dekoloniale activists, whose office is nearby on Wilhelmstrasse, the site of the Berlin Conference and the Reich’s Colonial Office. “W�� had people come into the office; we had racial slurs on our windows,” Yeboah says. 

“I find it still surprising that people just get kind of militant by fighting against the changing of the street name,” Kopp says. “They know it’s about a principle and it’s about who’s telling the history.”

Give Voice to the Resistance

Last December, Berlin finally renamed two streets that commemorated former colonizers. Lüderitzstrasse, a street named after Adolf Lüderitz, once lauded as the founder of German South West Africa, was replaced by Nama resistance fighter Cornelius Fredericks. Nachtigalplatz, a square named after Gustav Nachtigal, a brutal colonizer in West and Central Africa, was renamed after Rudolf and Emily Douala Manga Bell, the King and Queen of Douala in Cameroon.

Jean-Pierre Félix-Eyoum, a great nephew of Rudolf Manga Bell who now lives in Germany, recalls taking a bus the day after the renaming ceremony, where he heard the announcement: “Next Stop, Manga-Bell-Platz.”&�Բ�����;

“I almost cried with happiness,” he says.

The retired teacher has also spent decades campaigning for the rehabilitation of his great uncle, who was educated in Germany and later executed for resisting German colonial rule in Cameroon. He credits the name change to the activists in Berlin. “They fought for it,” he says. “They forced it through with their stubbornness.”&�Բ�����;

Felix-Eyoum says he is on an unstoppable wave of success. Ulm, a city in southwestern Germany, also renamed a square after Manga Bell last year. Many other cities are considering the possibility of honoring the Cameroonian resistance leader.

Kopp estimates that more than 30 postcolonial and migrant organizations like Dekoloniale have emerged in recent years. In cities big and small, activists and concerned citizens are pushing governments and societies to interrogate a brutal past and to better represent their increasingly diverse urban communities.

For Dekoloniale activists, giving a voice to the resistance is crucial to bringing justice to the descendants of the formerly colonized and to empowering Germany’s Black community, which faces widespread . “Resistance is an aspect that has been made invisible for decades,” Yeboah says. “The white mainstream likes to portray people of African descent as the victims, as people who have no agenda of their own, and that is simply not true.”

As more cities and countries in Europe confront their colonial past, Yeboah hopes politicians and institutions of power will acknowledge the work civil society organizations and marginalized communities have been doing for decades and support them to lead the change.

“W�� know for a fact that these groups are in all of the towns and all of the cities in Europe,” Yeboah says, “because everywhere, you have descendants of colonized people, you have people who educated themselves on their own history.”

Rikers, located on an island between the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, is one of the largest jail complexes in the United States. It houses nearly people, the vast majority of whom are pretrial defendants who have not been convicted of a crime. 

Rikers is notorious for its dire conditions and high death rates. “Almost everybody is worse off for spending any amount of time at Rikers,” says Zachary Katznelson, policy director at the . ����’s an incubator of violence and misery.”&�Բ�����;

Since the beginning of 2022, have died on Rikers. Correctional officers doled out head strikes since the beginning of last year, compared to at Los Angeles County jails during the same period, despite L.A.’s larger jail population and notoriety for use of excessive force.

����’s a dark and dank and dreary place,” says Hope Sanders, who was sent to Rikers in the mid-’90s at age 16. It was clear to her as soon as she arrived that “[Rikers] was unsafe for children” like herself. “The officers called us ‘animal-lescents,’” she says. Sanders vividly remembers the stench of rotting garbage, as well as mice, roaches, and the “terrible” air quality. 

Beyond the well-documented issues of violence and neglect, there is another hidden danger that looms at Rikers: The jail was built on a landfill, and its decomposing garbage emits gas. “W�� know that methane does very bad things to human beings, in addition to what it does for the climate,” says Rebecca Bratspies, law professor at the City University of New York School of Law and director of the . 

But some advocates envision a different future for this island. In response to the shocking reports of violence and toxic conditions at the facility, justice-impacted individuals devised a plan to shut down the jail and repurpose the island. The plan aims to transform the facility into a hub for renewable energy—a source of hope amid the ongoing threats of violence and climate change. The proposed project seeks to benefit the people and communities that Rikers has historically harmed. 

A Toxic Foundation

In 1884, the year New York City bought Rikers Island, it occupied less than 88 acres. In the following decades, the city hauled in garbage and ash to expand the landmass, with the landfill labor performed almost entirely by incarcerated people. By 1932, when the jail opened, the island had more than quadrupled in size to 413 acres. 

The landfill is a weak foundation for the buildings on Rikers, contributing to crumbling infrastructure. Katznelson describes seeing blankets covering the floors to absorb the rainwater flooding one building during a recent visit. He says the buildings are “so far gone” that they are not fixable and even serve as a source of weapons at Rikers, posing yet another safety risk to those inside. “You can just break [a piece] off almost anywhere, and you can use it as a weapon. It’s just a living, dangerous thing,” Katznelson says. 

Isolating toxic waste and polluting industries in minority and lower-income communities is a common practice in this country, and that inequity is exacerbated in prisons. As in the greater U.S. prison population, Black and Latinx individuals are disproportionately incarcerated at Rikers, which pulls of its population from these groups, who represent just of NYC’s general population.

of state and federal prisons in the U.S. are located within 3 miles of a federal site. Exposure to these hazardous waste sites poses a threat to incarcerated people’s health, but due to the terms of their incarceration, they have no way to escape this threat. 

When Darren Mack was incarcerated at Rikers in the 1990s, he was unaware of the toxic conditions that existed around him. ���� wasn’t until I actually went back to Rikers as a volunteer for a restorative justice pilot project for adolescents that, for the first time, I saw a sign that said ‘Don’t drink the water,’” says Mack, co-founder and co-director of a grassroots decarceration organization called . Though visitors were advised to avoid drinking it, “people who are detained there are forced to drink the water,” he says. “That was a red flag.”&�Բ�����;

Rikers was designed to be out of sight out and out of mind—a theme consistent throughout U.S. environmental sacrifice zones. A New Yorker myself, I did not know Rikers Island existed until I had to. When I was 11 years old, my older brother was arrested and sent to Rikers to await trial. Suddenly I saw the tremendous pain, suffering, and injustice Rikers inflicted. 

Like of the people at Rikers, my brother suffers from mental illness. He spent the majority of his 18-month term in solitary confinement, an inhumane and overutilized practice. At the time, I struggled to understand what my brother was going through. Now, having spent the past year researching and reporting on the issues at Rikers, I know the conditions are worse than I could have imagined.

In 2012, a group of cancer-diagnosed correctional officers filed against the city and the Department of Corrections (DOC), claiming their diseases were the result of their exposure to the toxic landfill while working at Rikers. The city denied the victims’ claims, and their cases were dismissed. 

In addition to methane in the air on Rikers itself, the island is less than a mile from Hunts Point, a predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhood in the Bronx that has been coined “Asthma Alley” due to dangerously high levels of (fine particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter). Rikers is also in LaGuardia Airport’s flight path, exposing those at Rikers to and significant noise pollution from the more than 1,000 flights that take off and land at the airport every day. 

A Cleaner, Fairer Future

After decades of anti-Rikers advocacy and awareness-building, a successful movement finally took hold. “For the first time, in 2016 a grassroots campaign of survivors of Rikers like myself, family members, allies, and organizational partners built a broad-based movement that was so deep that it changed the hearts and minds of New Yorkers,” Mack says. 

Sanders, after serving a 20-year sentence, went back to school to become a social worker and joined the , alongside Mack. “My experiences [at Rikers] angered me, but also gave me a passion to move forward and do everything that I could to try to prevent [others from suffering the same fate],” Sanders says. 

As a result of the campaign—and a subsequent by the council-appointed Lippman Commission that concluded that the facility should be shut down—advocates’ demands have become stated policy: The city has committed to closing Rikers by 2027.

The city’s involves a drastic reduction in the city jail population; a transition to a smaller, borough-based jail system; and an increase in hospital beds to treat the many people behind bars who are in need of treatment rather than incarceration. However, due to the recent rise in the city jail population, argue that a jail system half the size of the current one cannot keep New Yorkers safe, inevitably leading to overcrowding in jails and an increase in those they deem “violent criminals” on city streets.

“The reason we’re closing Rikers—the reason we’ve been making this argument for years—is that Rikers undermines safety every day that it’s open,” Katznelson says. He says that violence is so embedded in its ethos and its infrastructure that the jail is beyond reform. “You can’t bring a whole new culture and way of operating [into] the existing structure. You need a clean break from what you have.”

The proposed borough-based jail system, Katznelson says, could streamline NYC’s notoriously slow and bogged-down judicial system, which would reduce the number of people in jail awaiting trial. 

The mandate to close Rikers has opened doors for imagining future uses of the island. Four hundred acres is a substantial landmass in New York, the most densely populated city in the U.S., with 26,403 people per square mile. 

Proposals have included using the land as an extension of or as the site of . But these proposals fail to get to the root of the environmental concerns on the island and would continue to expose its next residents to toxic conditions. Justice-impacted New Yorkers wanted to break the cycle of harm. 

Those who have spent time at Rikers “almost unanimously requested that the jail be closed and that the land be used for something positive. That would in many ways be the best memorial and honoring of the suffering that’s happened there,” Katznelson says. From this aspiration, a visionary plan has emerged that seeks to simultaneously address two of the biggest, most difficult-to-solve disasters of our time: mass incarceration and the climate crisis. 

The plan for envisions replacing the facility with green infrastructure to help the city reach its goal of 100% clean electricity . This would allow the city to replace its antiquated wastewater treatment facilities with new, more efficient technology on the island. “New York is continually in violation of the Clean Water Act because we don’t have the capacity to adequately clean and treat the [waste]water we release,” Bratspies says. Renewable Rikers would change that. ����’s like a win-win-win!”

Solar panels and battery storage on the island would replace oil- and gas-fired peaker plants, which are activated during times of high energy demand. In New York City, are located predominantly in communities of color, “spewing pollutants,” says Bratspies. Shutting them down would significantly improve the air quality and health outcomes in these communities, she says. 

Sanders, who now lives in the Bronx, sees a peaker plant every day while walking in her neighborhood. If such facilities were shut down, Sanders envisions using the land for “green parks where children could play, without having to worry about traffic or warehouses or peaker plants—somewhere where they can really just enjoy nature.”

While Rikers’ isolation has worsened its conditions as a jail, as a renewable energy site this isolation works to its advantage. “One of the concerns you have with battery storage is potential for fires,” Bratspies says. “An island where nobody’s living is probably a really good place to have a lot of dense battery storage.”

In keeping with its restorative justice philosophy, Renewable Rikers would offer a job training program for people whose lives have been upended by incarceration. Advocates believe the program will also aid larger decarceration goals: “If you help people flourish, your needs for policing and incarceration plummet,” Bratspies says. 

The City Signs On

Renewable Rikers has the potential to set a new standard. Though cities nationwide are seeking to close their jails and reduce jail populations, no others have developed a plan that also incorporates climate solutions. Renewable Rikers can serve as a model for how to simultaneously decarcerate and decarbonize. 

When the City Council and then–Mayor de Blasio successfully passed the in 2021, the vision moved one step closer to becoming a reality—and one step closer to offering justice for survivors like my brother, Mack, and Sanders.

The act mandates a study of the island’s capacity for renewable energy and the transfer of any unused land and buildings from the DOC to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. But since Mayor Adams took office in 2022, he hasn’t initiated the land transfer or appointed commissioners to the Renewable Rikers advisory committee. “The crisis has [been] exacerbated under his administration,” Mack says. “He’s on the wrong side of history.”&�Բ�����;

Rather than outside “experts” or academics imposing a solution to the problem, “[Renewable Rikers] was developed alongside, and in many ways by, people who are formerly incarcerated and people who live in environmental justice communities,” Bratspies says. “This is a very different way of thinking about policymaking.”

Sanders, now a member of the Renewable Rikers advisory committee, offers insights and recommendations from her own and others’ experiences on the island. “W�� are asking those directly impacted, ‘What do they want it to look like?’” she says. 

Despite facing resistance, activists and policymakers remain committed to the end of Rikers as we know it. City Council Member Carlina Rivera, who chairs the council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, is resolute on the council using its powers to ensure Mayor Adams adheres to the planned closure. “This administration bears the burden of demonstrating that they’ve marshaled every possible resource to keep the plan,” Rivera says. 

At the end of October, the City Council to ensure that Rikers shuts down by the mandated August 2027 deadline. The Rikers Commission 2.0 plans to take a renewed look at the current conditions at Rikers and aims to find the quickest and safest path to closure. 

����’s the morally right thing to do to close Rikers Island,” Mack says. “And we hope that we can move forward towards a city that removes a stain that has harmed generations of Black and Brown New Yorkers.”

Through friends, Tilley learned of a program where users could get free new syringes—no questions asked. At Tapestry Needle Exchange, she also discovered a community of people eager to improve their lives and the lives of others addicted to drugs.

“W�� started talking about the mistreatment we received in emergency rooms,” Tilley remembers. “I told them, ‘We need to advocate for ourselves. They might not listen to just me, but if all of us share our experiences, maybe someone will listen to us.’”

Twenty years would go by before attempts to organize drug users would help to ignite a national movement. Last month, Tilley was among more than 50 active users from across the country who traveled to St. Louis for a first-of-its-kind meeting to lay the groundwork for a coordinated response to America’s war on drugs.

There were an estimated 68,600 fatal overdoses in 2018, 69% of them involving opioids such as oxycodone, heroin, and fentanyl.

---

The Urban Survivors Union had arranged to attach a side conference to the annual meeting of the non-profit Drug Policy Alliance so members could discuss crucial next steps for growing the movement.

Addressing the historic gathering of the USU on that first morning of the convention, Tilley, the group’s co-director declares: “This is a labor of radical love. When I started doing drug-user organizing in 1998, there were just two of us in the room. And now, as a woman who injects drugs, I’m a little teary-eyed standing up here, looking out at a whole room full of people.”

Robert Suarez, a veteran activist from New York City, then rallies the crowd. “No longer are we going to wait for the slow ticktock of politics,” he tells the group. “W�� are organizing, we are building power, and we are going to take it to them.”

The union’s first chapter was formed in Seattle in 2009. Other locations followed, and over the past 18 months leading up to St. Louis, the organization established chapters in more than 30 cities across the U.S.

Members say this recent period of rapid growth reflects the new challenges users face. A reinvigorated drug war has the Trump administration instructing prosecutors to impose for drug crimes and against high-level traffickers.

Meanwhile, the opioid epidemic and the spread of fentanyl, a dangerous synthetic-opioid, has sent overdose deaths skyrocketing. There were an estimated in 2018, 69% of them involving opioids such as oxycodone, heroin, and fentanyl. That’s down slightly from in 2017, but far exceeds a rough annual average of 15,000 fatal overdoses each year through the 1990s.

Louise Vincent, the USU’s other co-director, describes the epidemic’s impact this way: “You don’t remove 72,000 people from a community without touching people and their families,” she says. “People are feeling this shit hard core and feeling a damn need to do something about it.”

Impact of the War on Drugs

No group is more affected and simultaneously more-often excluded from debates on drug policy than drug users themselves. The St. Louis convention was organized to change that.

“W��’re doing this with a team-based system and sharing decision-making – working together to a build a national union that can get shit done,” Vincent tells the group.

Most of those who came together in St. Louis are addicted to hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Many live in poverty. They’re stuck with criminal records and marginalized in countless ways that push them to the edges of society.

Everyone has a story about how the war on drugs has harmed them. Tilley, for example, was evicted from her apartment in Northampton after a friend suffered a nonfatal overdose there. �鶹���¼� recently, her open identity as a drug user has prevented her from gaining meaningful employment.

Vincent says she lost her leg to stigma intrinsic to the drug war. She was hit by a car and her history as an intravenous-drug user led hospitals in her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, to treat her poorly. She was denied adequate pain medication and doctors failed to provide procedures that were required for her damaged leg’s long-term recovery. �鶹���¼� than a year after the accident, an infection festered and her leg was amputated.

In addition to reducing overdose deaths, these sorts of incidents are what the USU is organizing to prevent. As with a labor union, the idea is to bring a strength-in-numbers approach to their cause. The group intends to function as an advocacy network, lobbying city, state, and federal governments to enact policies that will save drug users’ lives and alleviate the worst harms of America’s persecution of people who use drugs.

“Nine-tenths of the pain I’ve experienced in my life was caused by the drug war,” Tilley says. “I can look back at so many periods of my life and say, ‘My habit was totally manageable. It was the drug war that made me miserable.’ It was a fear of arrest, fear of discrimination, fear of losing my job—a fear that had nothing to do with my job performance. That’s what has always haunted me.”

Coming Together

There were many steps on the way to St. Louis. One of the largest was taken in New Orleans in October 2018. Drug users met there for the annual conference of the Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC), which advocates for policies such as needle exchange and supervised injection. The HRC has long welcomed drug users under its large umbrella. But in New Orleans, users broke away and marched in the streets on their own, signaling their autonomy and their power as a community with unique demands.

����’s time for us to stand together,” shouted Shilo Jama of Seattle, who is one of the USU’s founders. He spoke through a bullhorn as their demonstration wound its way along Canal Street from the HRC conference headquarters. “W�� need to stand here and fight as one.”

Tilley was among about 30 people who walked to a park on the banks of the Mississippi River, quietly calling out the names of friends and family members lost to an overdose or the war on drugs. She cried and buried her head in the shoulder of a friend. After several minutes, the group fell into silence.

Vincent spoke next. “This was put together by people that use drugs, people that sell sex, people that they say can’t do these things,” she said. “W�� have done them. And we will continue to do them. We will grow bigger and grow stronger. We will not stop until we are fucking free.”

Thirteen months later in St. Louis, Jama reflects on that night. “That was a really big growing-up moment for us,” he said. ���� was the first thing that we did as a national movement all by ourselves. And so it was incredibly powerful….If the drug-user movement was in its infancy, it became a teenager at that moment.”

After New Orleans, the St. Louis convention was the next step — and a greater stride forward.

Pulling together a national event for active drug users didn’t come without challenges. It was understood that members would not stop using while in St. Louis. Moving into a legal gray area, organizers made loose arrangements for people to inject drugs in as safe a manner as possible. They encouraged everyone who was going to use drugs to never use alone and to always go slow in a new city with an unfamiliar supply of illicit narcotics.

Other arrangements had to be made for those who wanted to receive opioid-substitution medications such as methadone or buprenorphine. It turned out that the nearest clinic offering those services to out-of-town patients was a 45-minute drive from the conference site in St. Louis. Ensuring those who needed it received medically assisted treatment became one of the most challenging components of the entire affair.

Growing the Movement

At the union meeting, members had to work through a long list of decisions. But Vincent remarked that simply bringing everybody together was a victory in itself. “Just sitting in a room with 60 drug users, that shit felt powerful,” she says.

They agreed that going forward, they’d need to address three basic questions: What is the Urban Survivors Union’s mission? Who gets to be a member? And how should the national organization make decisions? Agreeing on answers is the USU’s next step. Today those conversations continue online.

In the meantime, the attendees in St. Louis have determined that the USU should maintain space for people who have entered recovery and no longer engage in regular drug use. In response to questions around how drug-users’ allies might interact with the organization, one idea was to create an advisory board composed of non-drug users, similar to how public-health authorities and research groups sometimes create advisory boards composed of drug users (flipping the common power structure on its head).

There were also vocal demands for the guaranteed representation of marginalized communities, including sex workers, people who identify as transgender, visible minorities, and homeless people, among others.

“W��’re going to take two years to really make sure the structure works,” Vincent had mentioned during an online meeting ahead of the St. Louis conference. “This allows us some room. Then we’re going to have quarterly meetings where major decisions around change can happen.”

Looking ahead, Tilley says, it is imperative for drug users to have a say on health care programs designed for those who use drugs. “Treatment on demand,” she says. “W�� know that is the answer to ending overdoses. Access to Suboxone and methadone—MAT [medically-assisted treatment].”

Tilley says the USU also intends to provide input on criminal-justice initiatives that have arisen out of the opioid epidemic. A USU campaign called Reframe the Blame, which challenges favored by the Trump administration, is already underway.

She recalls that during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, public-health authorities were initially reluctant to involve LGBTQ community leaders in decision-making roles. When they finally did, Tilley says, the expertise of people affected quickly proved invaluable to turning the tide on the crisis.

“Drug-user unions are going to play a major role in ending this overdose epidemic,” Tilley says. “W�� have the knowledge and the tools to do that, we just don’t have the money and the resources. But with sustainable unions across the country, we cannot be ignored any longer.”

In 2005, he lost his home to Hurricane Rita. He applied for federal assistance to rebuild his home but was rejected. Instead, he was compensated with a temporary trailer, which he then lost to Hurricane Ike in 2008. He has been moving between Texas and Lafayette, Louisiana, for work since then. 

are becoming more frequent and across the U.S. , and they’re displacing more and more people—especially BIPOC folks, who have been disproportionately affected by climate change across the globe. 

“W�� have to acknowledge that disaster outcomes exacerbate sociopolitical inequalities,” says Sara McTarnaghan, senior research associate at Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. , and the institutions set up to provide relief often aren’t accessible or relevant to their particular needs. 

In the aftermath of the 2020 Hurricanes Laura and Delta, for example, Allaire says the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came and did an assessment but offered no direct relief. ���� was all community organizations,” Allaire says.

In 2021, were internally displaced worldwide by the climate crisis, and there will be climate migrants by 2050. Yet institutionalized protections for climate-displaced people are not guaranteed. 

In the U.S., the national apparatuses for disaster and displacement management—the and the Department of Housing and Urban Development—are marred by and perpetually of determining the jurisdictions of state versus federal government. Globally, climate migrants can’t be and have no legal protections . 

Operating outside the limitations of these institutions, community organizers are tackling climate displacement from all angles—advocating for climate-displaced people, providing them with resources, and making their communities more climate-resilient.

The Limits of Institutional Support

Right before Hurricane Ida struck his community in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, in 2021, Justin Fitch of the United Houma Nation—the largest state-recognized tribe in Louisiana—made the decision to stay in his home with his wife, and used the family’s funds to have their children stay in Texas, away from the storm. 

Fitch is an activist who works for the nonprofit Healthy Gulf and says that those hit hardest by climate disasters and who most need to leave are usually BIPOC like him. “People do not have an extra $4,000, $5,000 to leave,” Fitch says. “That’s the reason I didn’t leave.”&�Բ�����;

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Fitch says residents turned to groups like Gulf South Rising and The Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy (now Taproot Earth) for help. Mutual aid can help mitigate some of the financial stress that affects homeowners dealing with buyouts, or help unhoused people who have lost access to shelters and resource centers impacted by climate events. Hotel assistance, for example, can provide a person with a few days of shelter, but it requires an application and is often . That makes this option out of reach for many.

To combat this exclusion, Roishetta Ozane has been helping temporarily shelter people in disaster-prone areas. Her organization, The Vessel Project of Louisiana, put an estimated 300 people in hotels across Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi during the winter storm in 2021. 

“I started Vessel because I realized a lot of organizations had a lot of red tape,” Ozane says. 

Instead, her organization meets folks where they’re at: no demands for documents or proof. It works to provide emergency shelter, food, oxygen tanks, and document recovery. It even helps folks apply for more traditional forms of aid. 

In her work, Ozane has assisted undocumented people, unhoused people, and other marginalized folks who are sidelined by restrictive assistance. Her no-questions-asked policy is key to establishing trust while providing support. 

The approach is based on her own experience: Faced with a series of climate events and the pandemic, Ozane struggled to support herself and her children after their home became unlivable in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura in 2020. She tried to obtain a mobile trailer from FEMA but didn’t receive it until a year later. So she knows how hard it can be and how individualized the struggles are. 

“I can’t tell you what’s an emergency to you,” Ozane says. 

Around in Louisiana live in FEMA’s interim mobile shelters, many of whom have received temporary housing assistance since 2021. Some people are there because they have nowhere to go, others because they were renters before the storms, and still others are facing an unstable housing market that is environment. 

Others are awaiting assistance to rebuild or relocate. Those who choose to relocate may find themselves in an endless web of , lawyers, government officials, and protocols. FEMA runs buyout programs that allow residents in disaster-prone areas (particularly flooding) to sell their homes to the government and relocate to areas with lower risk. 

Buyouts can be risky, they require extensive paperwork, the requirements are inaccessible for many, and there’s no guarantee of success. The from the aftermath of the disaster to the completion of the buyout can be as long as five years. And oftentimes, people are pursuing buyouts for uninhabitable homes, which means this effort is on top of finding a place to live. 

Other residents are shut out of traditional systems altogether, including homeowners without insurance, homeowners with , renters, and undocumented folks. These populations don’t typically have access to a dignified move that utilizes traditional modes of assistance, though their immediate needs are still ever-present.

Thirteen months after Ida made landfall, Fitch says, “I still have friends and family that are homeless, living in FEMA trailers.”&�Բ�����;

Lacking a Legal Framework

While folks in climate-unstable areas are making decisions in reaction to climate change, “climate change might not be how people conceive of their experience,” says Ama Francis, climate displacement project strategist for the International Refugee Assistance Project, “even as they are experiencing climate change.”&�Բ�����;

In many parts of the world, people still don’t as catalysts for their migration. Unfortunately, neither does the law. 

“One of the constraints that I work with is that people need to fit into frameworks to access a legal benefit,” Francis says. “W�� have asylum law, for example, and for that framework, you have to experience harm or persecution from a human.”

Currently, there is that denotes climate change as . Not only does this make a pathway to asylum for climate migrants cumbersome, but it also creates difficulties for climate migrants trying to receive resettlement assistance. 

Part of systemic advocacy like Francis’ is to bring awareness to this fact. So, while the International Refugee Assistance Project champions the , new Department of Justice opinions, and other legal recompenses to help climate migrants, the organization is also working to document the experiences of those displaced by climate change and surrounding it. These stories can then inform policy recommendations. 

For this reason, equitable access to climate education is imperative to address climate displacement. It enables people to correlate their experiences in the larger context of the global issue. In the context of the U.S. South (and the Global South at large), is rampant, even as these communities are impacted by its effects. 

Resource extraction and manufacturing put food on the table. Talk of climate change signals a possible disruption to even basic needs being met, especially to those who don’t speak the “highfalutin language” in which these issues are explained in policies. 

“That’s the case in impoverished communities that have been exploited,” Rev. Michael Malcom of explains. “They just want to get out of [poverty].”&�Բ�����;

Speaking to folks’ priorities is the best way to get people to engage with climate change as a concept. Local southern organizations, like the Partnership for Southern Equity, are running programs to combat the effects of the climate crisis on public health, focusing on communities that have been excluded from equitable access to health care. The People’s Justice Council promotes solar buybacks and weatherization programs, and the Athens Land Trust’s invasive-plant removal program has encouraged buy-in from communities. The programs are economically advantageous while making people environmentally conscious. 

Organizers are already seeing the benefits of climate education in their efforts to mobilize communities: The People’s Justice Council received an estimated 90,000 signatures on its “No Dirty Deals” collaborative petition to reject the contradictory climate actions in the that it says would disproportionately impact already marginalized communities.

Standing With Community

After Hurricane Ike destroyed John Allaire’s FEMA trailer in 2008, he was lucky enough to have the means to relocate temporarily. Since 2020, John has returned and is working toward building a home on his property in Cameron. Allaire talks of the good life he and his family have there, close to nature and his community of friends—. 

Discussions on climate displacement often focus on the simple facts of who leaves or stays, and they exclude the real connections people have to their homes—their ties to the land, their livelihoods, and their communities. The overarching goal of efforts to address climate displacement, therefore, should be to provide a range of possible solutions: solutions to curb climate change, solutions to help facilitate safe and dignified migration, and solutions to support those who stay in climate-unstable areas.

“Some people do need to move, and we want to facilitate and ensure that people do so with dignity,” Francis says. “For some people, the right to stay is important, and we need to support that as well.”

Those chances diminished in early June, when a allowing border authorities to stop processing cases of asylum seekers once a certain threshold is met. For many migrants like Mariño, the Biden administration’s latest asylum restrictions are as unfamiliar as the Mexican border cities where they are forced to engage in an unpredictable waiting game.  

In Nogales, Sonora, a Mexican town that borders Arizona, migrants find support from nonprofits and various other advocates. While they wait for appointments in the U.S., migrants can access temporary shelter, meals, legal workshops, and opportunities to earn some money for living expenses.

“This is a big help,” says Mariño, holding up the tote bag she decorated. “With my last earnings I was able to buy groceries for the week.”

The assistance has been invaluable for Mariño and her children, Aaron and his 8-year-old sister, Lluviana. They often stop in for a family meal at the dining hall of the , a Jesuit immigrant rights advocacy group located just a few yards from a U.S. port of entry. In early 2020, the organization opened its migrant outreach center, which also includes classrooms and shelter space. 

This story is part of . Learn more about Progress 2025 and find more coverage here.

At least twice a week, Mariño attends workshops run by Kino volunteers in a small building across the street, where the group’s volunteers for years served meals to migrants expelled from the U.S. for crossing the border unlawfully. 

Mariño, 24, arrived in Nogales on June 6. Weeks later, she was still perturbed by what she says was a harrowing two-month journey north from Ecuador during which she and her children survived two kidnappings.

Lucrecia Almada Leyva, a Kino volunteer, says stories like Mariño’s are not unusual among the migrants at workshops where adults can sew, embroider, or bake goods to sell while their children play. “People share their experiences with one another,” she says. ���� helps them to show solidarity and know that they’re not alone.”

The gatherings serve not only to help migrants forge connections with each other, but also aid them financially, explains Angela Meixell, another volunteer. Supplies are donated and migrants keep the proceeds from finished products.

The workshops keep migrants busy, which Almada Leyva says can help them endure long waits for an appointment to apply for asylum. “She’s been here nine months,” says the volunteer, pointing to a woman focused on her sewing. “Another lady who comes in has waited seven months.”

All around are migrants sewing at tables, talking among themselves, or playing with their children. Some landed in Nogales after being displaced by drug-trafficking violence in certain Mexican states. Many are too afraid to share their reasons for migrating.

Workshop volunteers say they find it rewarding to lend a helping hand to asylum seekers who are far from their homeland and in need. “I feel a great empathy for them because they leave their families behind,” Almada Leyva says of the migrants she has met. “They leave many things behind and it is out of necessity.”

When they arrive in Nogales, most migrants are unaware that in June the U.S. halted asylum processing at the border when arrests for illegal entries reach an average of 2,500 a day in a seven-day period. The rule is the latest in a series of restrictive policies that the Biden and Trump administrations have implemented in recent years to curb an unprecedented number of asylum seekers. In an election year, the border influx has become a political liability for Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans have taken even harsher aim at immigrants, as outlined in the now-infamous plan by the Heritage Foundation.

Chelsea Sachau, an attorney with the in Arizona, explains that the new rule halts asylum until average daily arrests for illegal entries drop below 1,500 for seven consecutive days and stays at such levels for two weeks.

But, she says, asylum seekers generally don’t know that entering the U.S. between ports of entry could have long-lasting legal consequences—such as being barred from the U.S. for a number of years—potentially hurting their immigration cases. When the rule is in effect, more people are “highly likely going to be disqualified outright for asylum just because of how they access territory and sought help,” Sachau says. 

Sachau is managing attorney for the program’s , which provides pro bono legal services to migrants in Nogales. She and her colleagues hold workshops at the Kino outreach center two or three times a week to inform migrants of the deterrence policy before they cross the border, but many migrants learn of it only after they’ve already been deported. They also hear from attorneys that the government wants migrants to apply for asylum through a special phone app, after which they must wait to be assigned an appointment to cross the border through an official entry point. 

“Most people are shocked by what the rules are or what the process is until it’s too late, when they’re already kind of ensnared in these really harmful processes that are very hard to navigate,” Sachau says.

Attorney Francisco Loureiro, director of the San Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, says there’s been a noticeable increase in migrants removed from the U.S. since the asylum rules were tightened. Besides a bed to rest, migrants also get three meals a day at the shelter and legal counseling about Mexican laws. While many of those staying there now are Mexican citizens, migrants from various other countries continue to arrive, he says.

“On a daily basis we shelter men, women, and children accompanied by their parents, regardless of their nationality and legal status in Mexico,” Loureiro says.

Volunteers also are on hand at the migrant shelter to provide medical assistance and even psychological care to those who need it. ����’s very difficult to see a huge number of children who have no place to stay, no place to eat, no food,” Loureiro says. “They are sick children, dehydrated children, children with gastrointestinal problems. They need our continuing support.”

The support Mariño has received in Nogales has helped her adapt to life in a new city. She left Venezuela in 2018 for Ecuador and then left Ecuador for the U.S. border in late March of 2024 to escape what she described as economic turmoil and rising crime. She currently rents a room in a house with five migrant families.

She has become familiar with the intricacies of asylum—including the fact that applicants must prove they have a fear of persecution in their homeland—by attending legal workshops. She already knew about the phone app, which schedules appointments randomly, because her partner used it in the fall and he is now in Chicago. Mariño expected they’d be together by now, but her journey was fraught with setbacks, including two traumatic kidnapping experiences. 

When she first entered southern Mexico from neighboring Guatemala, her family and other arriving migrants from Central and South America were taken to a chicken coop and held there until they paid a nominal fee for their freedom.

After their release, Mariño and her children walked, accepted rides from good Samaritans, and rode buses to Mexico City, where she applied for an asylum appointment on her phone app daily. She secured an appointment after several days while in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, she says. However, when she arrived there with her children and was about to take a cab, several men pushed them into a car and drove them to an abandoned house crowded with other kidnapped migrants.

It was a distressing time, recalls the young mother, who feared for the safety of her family since she had no money to pay ransom. She pleaded with her captors for their release and on the fifth day, Marino and her children were freed alongside another family without explanation. They headed to Nogales but had already lost the initial asylum appointment while in captivity.

“I believe this is a process of change that I have to live with,” Marino says. ���� is a process that God chose for me and I just have to learn from it.”

So the young mother waits patiently. She checks her phone app daily in hopes of snagging one more asylum appointment. And when another day goes by without one, she finds comfort in the support around her. 

The tiny Native American settlement is named after the sacred, 10,000-foot-high sandstone peak that dominates the craggy skyline. It has been inhabited for centuries. It is in one of the most remote parts of the Beehive State, and in turn, the entire continental United States.

“Everything on Navajo Mountain is scattered and isolated,” says Dalene Redhorse, who was born in the town of Mexican Waters, around 60 miles to the east. “There are many off-roads with just one house. It’s not like a city here. Everything takes time.”

Redhorse is one of two “addressing specialists” at the nonprofit who, since 2019, have been going door-to-door visiting every home in the western half of Utah’s San Juan County, which includes Navajo Mountain. Her goal: to connect off-the-grid residents with essential services that they have often been denied.

Across Navajo Nation—the largest and Native American reservation in the country, spanning and three states—formal street addresses are a rarity. Out of the more than 60,000 structures, fewer than 500 are on roads with names and house numbers, according to the .

The culture of the Navajo, who are also known as Diné, , but modern American governments have imposed a systematized, Western concept of territory onto these communities. This has effectively erased their holistic relationship with ancestral lands and created staggering inequality. �鶹���¼� than of the Diné live in poverty, are unemployed, 60% lack broadband, and 40% don’t have running water at home. Those structural issues played a role when Navajo Nation at one point reached (though it also achieved a far higher vaccination rate than the national average).

The Diné say they have suffered because fundamental services and amenities such as emergency healthcare, mail delivery, broadband internet, government-issued IDs, and the right to vote often require having a formally recognized address. 

“I had to describe landmarks to direct the ambulance,” says Gordon Folgheraiter, 66, recalling an incident when his brother once cut his head after falling off a truck in Navajo Mountain. “I said: ‘Go to the end of the highway, continue for two miles, pass a house on the left with a red roof, and then turn right,’” adds Folgheraiter, who was then told by the dispatcher to stand outside wearing bright clothing to flag down the vehicle.

But steps have tentatively been made in the right direction. Last year Folgheraiter had a bright blue plaque mounted on his front door after Redhorse visited. All of the 800 or so residents of Navajo Mountain now have one.

Each sign is embossed with a plus code (e.g., ) in bold white lettering. This acts as a physical confirmation of the home’s location for deliverers, emergency services, and visitors. These fixed, simplified, 10-digit versions of traditional geocoordinates pinpoint a location to within three square meters. 

The open-source Plus Code tool, developed by , allows codes to be generated anywhere on the globe and instantly located on Google Maps. ���� helps everyone get on the same page,” says Patricia Blackhorn, chapter president of . “People can just look it up.”

The technology is simple, but the ability to easily communicate a location without a street address could have a transformative impact on the world’s most marginalized populations. Beyond the sparsely populated expanses of remote Utah, creating addresses for informal spaces could bring change to densely packed urban areas that also lack addresses, such as in Lagos, Delhi, and Rio de Janeiro. One billion people lived in informal settlements in 2018, , and by 2030 that number will triple.

The Rural Utah Project is focusing on Navajo Nation, where it worked to obtain buy-in from local officials. The project is also deploying plus codes in other San Juan County communities such as Bluff, Mexican Hat, and the White Mesa Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. Separately, plus code projects are at various stages of deployment by other organizations in dozens of other countries, including India, Egypt, and Brazil.

For Folgheraiter, it means he no longer has to drive 50 miles to the post office to pick up packages from certain delivery companies. In San Juan County, there are countless uses—to buy vehicles, to locate ceremonies in remote areas, and, as one young student needed: to prove her residency for in-state tuition rates. The uses plus codes for patient home visits, and during the pandemic they proved invaluable for delivering supplies to those in need.

In addition to the technology, another crucial ingredient has been painstaking human labor: Initially, Redhorse and her colleague spent months scouring satellite imagery on Google Maps, zooming in over the arid landscape to locate homes. They identified 5,600 potential structures across San Juan County, but when they went to confirm each one in person, which involved long days of driving (the county has fewer than two people per square mile on average), many turned out to be rocks or abandoned houses—only half were occupied homes.

During her visits, Redhorse explains to residents how to use plus codes with emergency services, and also updates household voter registration and provides nonpartisan information about elections. The Rural Utah Project identified voting as a key target because flawed registration of rural, remote households has had a significant impact on democratic rights of the Diné: Research by the nonprofit found 87.7% of Diné residents were registered by San Juan County at the wrong location and a quarter in the wrong . 

“That was a massive problem for democracy,” says TJ Ellerbeck, the organization’s executive director. “There had never been a Navajo majority on the County Commission even though there is a majority Navajo population in the county.”

Since plus codes were deployed in San Juan County, which now accepts them as a valid address for voter registration, democratic participation has reached historic highs. Analysis by the Rural Utah Project found turnout in majority Native precincts has rocketed from 52% in 2014 to 87.6% in 2020. Along the way, Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth Maryboy to form the first-ever Native American majority on the County Commission. Plus codes are considered a major factor in that rise, alongside the switch from mail-only voting and the , as well as a after a court ruled they were . 

While turnout dropped in 2022, a midterm election, it was still the highest-ever overall number of midterm Native votes cast in the county, only slightly behind the historic high of 2020’s presidential election.

Before plus codes, Grayeyes, who is a longtime resident of Navajo Mountain in Utah but was relying on an Arizona mailing address, was from the ballot after a complaint was filed against his residency eligibility. “I threw my hat into the ring and then sparks started flying,” says the 77-year-old, who helped establish the . “All this time, Native Americans have been disenfranchised and our lands have been taken,” he says. “But we won. We were rewarded for persisting.”

Despite the benefits plus codes have brought, however, they have limits. While UPS and FedEx recognize them, the United States Postal Service (USPS) and Amazon don’t. For Diné representatives, there’s exasperation at a system that continues to disenfranchise them. “The norm does not factor in places such as Navajo Nation,” says Leonard Gorman, executive director at . ���� impedes our people’s human rights.”

A spokesperson for the USPS said plus codes are “not consistent with the sorting and delivery operations used by the Postal Service” since the company is limited to “what is considered a traditional address format.” Amazon said in an emailed statement that it uses the USPS “as our source of truth for U.S. address information.”

In addition, the broader issue of mapping Indigenous lands has led to skepticism due to the historic and ongoing . “Some residents have been worried about being numbered, placed, exposed,” says Redhorse. “Even my grandfather used to say: ‘Don’t let the white man map your homes.’”

But plus codes are only given out to those who want one, adds Redhorse, and increasingly Diné are proactively reaching out to request them. 

Google developed the open-source software so anyone can generate a plus code for any location in the world. It’s free and instantaneous and no data is collected. The Rural Utah Project is using the tool (along with its ground-truthing teams) to confirm the location of homes and install the signs. 

Google says the company’s only involvement is to provide the signs for free. “W�� wouldn’t have designed Plus Codes if it wasn’t open source,” says Doug Rinckes, its creator. “An address is official, but nobody owns it. For me, an address is something that you are assigned, but not something you have to pay for.”

The is taking a different, longer-term approach: naming the streets. A team of three is working with the reservation’s chapters to create road names, which must be translated from Navajo into English—Naatsis’áán means Navajo Mountain, for example—before they can produce street signs. About 20 of the 110 chapters of the territory have put up signs since 2010. 

“Plus codes are only a supplement to what we’re doing,” says M.C. Baldwin, who oversees the authority’s rural addressing activities. “The part that’s missing is the physical address for the people that live out there. If we had a physical address for every house on Navajo Nation, it would be postal-compliant.”

So while Baldwin’s efforts and plus codes are making a huge difference for some residents and their representation, these solutions only touch on a fraction of the stark challenges across Navajo Nation: limited cell signals and grid electricity, , and the threats of infrastructure development. But a new generation of Diné sees the technological advance as an opportunity to empower themselves and transform their homeland for the better. 

Shandiin Herrera, 26, lives in Monument Valley, a red-sand desert region along the Colorado Plateau marked by enormous sandstone buttes. After a lifetime without internet at home, she used her plus code last year to sign up for the satellite-powered internet provider, .

“I tried every other internet service, but none of it worked because I needed to enter an address,” says Herrera. “But I just tried my plus code on Starlink and it zoomed straight into my address. I was so excited. I can even watch Netflix now.”

A public policy graduate of Duke University and a fellow with , Herrera has also used the tool for the betterment of her community. When the pandemic hit, Herrera became the leader of the Utah Navajo Nation COVID-19 response. Her team delivered food, medicine, and PPE to more than 1,500 households.

“The biggest challenge was finding people’s homes,” she says. “W��’d hear: ‘Take the third dirt road, go past the brown house, and look for a place with a red car outside.’ For us, plus codes were easy. It was a luxury. But not everyone has one yet.”

For now, though, Herrera feels that after years witnessing the maddening difficulty in tracking down homes on the reservation, and often having lost ambulances turn up at her house asking for directions, the way forward might finally have arrived. 

“People always told me you need to get off the Rez to be successful,” says Herrera, leaning against her wood-paneled home; a tiny speck on the sandy horizon. “But I’ve always been proud of being Diné. I believe we can rewrite our own future.”

YES! Senior Editor Chris Winters spoke with Miller from his home in Arizona. This interview has been condensed and edited for publication.

Chris Winters: You’ve written about borders before, and you’ve got a lot of personal experience living on both sides of our southern border. But why did you choose this time around to write about not just “the border,” but about borders in general?

Todd Miller: The previous work that I had coming up to this book was looking at borders from different angles. My first book was called Border Patrol Nation, so I was looking at the post-9/11 expansion of the border apparatus. The second one was Storming the Wall, which looks at climate change and displacement and how borders are playing a part in that. And then I looked at also the internationalization of the U.S. border in the third book, called Empire of Borders. …

There’s a lot of in-depth reporting, and looking at all these different aspects, all these different angles, and really getting to know intimately what is exactly going on: unpacking this apparatus, looking at all the different components of it, looking at the strategies—for example, the strategy on the southern border. “Prevention Through Deterrence” is a strategy to inflict suffering on people. That’s what it is, it’s purposely blockading certain areas, so that people circumvent them and go through the Arizona desert where I live. And the idea is that the suffering or potential of death of going through those areas will deter people, that the word will get back. And that’s been the strategy for 25 years.

My argument is that border security is not about security at all.

And then watching … the $1.5 billion budget for border and immigration enforcement [in 1994] going to $25 billion today. … So I’ve lived on both sides of the border, and just watching this thing just build up, build up, build up, build up with all kinds of technologies—drones, surveillance towers, motion sensors—it’s just a militarization of the border, really. And this is what just really led to this book: What is this thing that we’re told is sacrosanct? That we’re told that you can’t question?

Winters: In the book, you somewhat rhetorically ask the question, “What if we just showed up at the border and started taking it down?” We like to talk about the cliché of a world without borders, but what could it mean in reality?

Miller: You can look at the U.S.-Mexico border, and then you can look at the border systems around the world, and there’s 70 border walls in various countries. There are border patrols in a lot of different places. My argument is that border security is not about security at all. Or you have to ask the question, what does it secure? Whose security is it for? And then when you come down [to] that question, then it’s like, oh, the border is almost formed like a scaffolding to keep a status quo, to keep a business-as-usual world where, it may be overly simplified, but I’ll say it: like the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

When we look at the 21st century, you have problems of inequality that are just yawning gaps between, what, that have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, right? The fact that people are going to get be on the move more than ever before due to climate change, those are the some of the things we have to look at. So the global border system is designed to keep this kind of world in place. And [it’s] a world also where, for example, U.S. companies can go to Mexico and get cheap labor, so there’s a whole labor component to it. And so my argument is this: This is a completely unsustainable world. But it’s getting more and more pressured by all these different changes and, for a world of justice, a world of equality, a world where we would respect all those values, the borders inhibit those forms of justice from happening. …

It’s time to look holistically at the border, to have an actual conversation about one of the things that’s problematic… : You can’t question this thing. But it’s time to put it into a question: Is this the best way to go about things as we move into the 21st century, with its challenges, like climate change, where there will be tons of people on the move? Or is there a better way that we can organize the world? …

Winters: One of the issues that you also talk about in the book is the idea that there’s an underlying deterrence strategy that feeds into this notion of the border industrial complex. But the actual strategy underneath that, and the physical manifestation of that, which is the wall, tends to monopolize conversations about the border. It’s a question of either building the wall here or over there. How can we keep our focus on the broader issue?

Miller: When you think of the Biden presidency, that was a worry, obviously. With shifting from Trump to Biden, I was worried that the [attention] would go away from the border. And strangely, there has been a little bit of a focus on the border of late, especially with unaccompanied minors. And so there has been more reporting than actually I thought there would be. …

Biden comes out with some really nice-sounding executive orders, very much intent upon reversing some of the most egregious Trump policies, which everyone is probably happy with. And yet, at the same time, there’s almost no admission that there was anything going on before Trump, right? There’s no acknowledgment of this bigger issue, that bigger arc, what the border apparatus is, how many years that it’s been built up how it’s been built up in bipartisan fashion.

I like to look from the beginning of the Prevention Through Deterrence strategy on the U.S.-Mexico border in 1994, which is, of course, during the Clinton administration, and Operations Hold the Line, Gatekeeper, Safeguard, and others. And just looking at the budget then [in ’94], which was $1.5 billion for border and immigration, 4,000 Border Patrol agents. And then you look at the end of the Clinton administration: $4.2 billion, about 8,000 Border Patrol agents. And then you look at the beginning [and] the end of the George W. Bush administration with 9/11 happening, [which led to the creation of] the Department of Homeland Security, and the Customs and Border Protection and ICE. And it goes from $5 billion to $15 billion. … All of a sudden, you just have the money faucet just opening up, a flood of money going into this thing. …

Winters: You mention the concept of “wall sickness” in the book. What is that, exactly?

Miller: Well, wall sickness came from the Berlin Wall, and from I believe psychiatry and psychology, from looking at how people experience psychologically living so close to the wall. The conclusions that were drawn were that there was a sort of narrowness, that people [experienced] increased anxiety, that people would have a sort of “dis-ease”—and they want to put the hyphen there—by being so close to a wall. …

They’re impediments that are put down, physical barriers, but they also have these profound psychological impacts on people in many different ways. And in the end, the conclusion is breaking down the walls is therapeutic. The prescription is to break down the wall to alleviate the wall sickness.

Winters: Do you see that wall sickness is a thing that’s not confined to the geographic area surrounding the wall?

Miller: Oh, yeah. You can definitely see that it’s spread throughout the United States, in certain degrees. I mean, [it’s been] particularly evident in the last four or five years, the kind of fervor. It’s almost a sickness and a religion at the same time. And I base this off Trump and Trump’s constituency, and the constantly mentioning of the wall and the fervor behind the wall.

I remember I was reporting on the Trump campaign in 2015, or ’16, one of those years, and Mike Pence came to Tucson to do a talk and, and I went there and it was a full house. And I was in the back and no standing ovations the whole time. And then Pence mentioned, they’re going to build this great big wall on the border, and then just people just rose like, into this huge standing ovation. It was quite the scene, and to me, when I think of wall sickness and how it spreads, we’re well past the walls. When you’re near it, it’s almost like you’re against it, because it’s so confining.

Winters: Do you find, where you live, that geographic separation is part of it, in the sense that the communities that are down there on the border, are less enthusiastic about it than the people who are up in Phoenix or are further north?

Miller: Yeah, that’s truly the case. There’s a poll, a that came out a couple of years ago that the in-from-border counties that showed that people were against the wall and border counties, it was a pretty high percentage, too, I believe it was over 70% [opposed the wall]. I didn’t see a counter-poll in the interior. So yeah, there’s this tendency towards, the farther away you [are] from the border, if you’re of a certain mindset, the more you might say we want a wall.

With a more humane world, do you cease to need borders at all?

And in the borderlands here in Arizona, where you have some ranchers who were in media a lot 10-15 years ago for being fervently anti-immigrant, now they’re anti-Border Patrol. It’s shifted, mainly because the [migration] routes shift a lot and now the Border Patrol’s going into their land and cutting their fences. And the ranchers don’t like going through the Border Patrol checkpoints. Nobody likes it. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your political party, no one likes the checkpoints.

Winters: You chose to include your kids in the book, and anecdotes with them, whether it’s your 5-year-old son urinating on a piece of DHS concrete barrier on the beach in San Diego, or watching a Border Patrol vehicle squash an iguana in Puerto Rico. What might we as readers experience through that inclusion, of having them along for the ride?

Miller: There’s a number of reasons. One, just seeing the world through their eyes offers this really incredible perspective to me. But I think one of the main reasons is … I’m part of a world [that is] handing off the world to another generation. When I was writing about William and Sofia, I was also thinking about the generations beyond them, the generations and generations that will be inheriting this planet, and what is being left to them. And I mean that in the sense of the bad, of course, but also of the good. What are possibilities for them to do something different? … Just being able to open up the imagination to something new, especially, it almost grounds it for me when you start thinking of these future generations.

[When] I’m with William, he has had these incredible insights and moments around the border. Because I bring him down to the border all the time. And, and I quote him in the book, and he says, “Why can’t we turn the border wall into bikes?” And then he says, “Why can’t we turn the border wall into houses for people?” And then other [times he’ll say] “Why can’t we turn the border wall into rails for trains?” And to me, those are some of the most profound insights. …

You know that quote about tearing down the wall in the book, like why can’t we just go tear down the wall? What’s interesting is when, in the last part of the book I do put the border in conversation with some of our some of our most well-known prison abolitionists, like Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. When she’s talking about prison abolition, she talks about abolition as “presence.” So maybe it’s 1% about destroying the prisons, this idea of destruction, but it’s 99% about creating a new world … where prisons aren’t an answer, or a solution to a problem.

So, I really tried to put the border in conversation with that. How does the border apparatus become a solution to the problem? And are the right questions even being asked? And then when you start to ask the right questions, then the solution, from an abolitionist approach, is a more humane world. And then with a more humane world, do you cease to need borders at all?

I heard these myths at home, at family gatherings, and even in the mostly immigrant church I attended. The story of the immigrant who left everything to contribute to the U.S. was in our textbooks, songs, news reports, and even some of my favorite media. I saw this message in memoirs, poetry, and later, the nonprofit sector, organizing spaces, and even artwork about immigration.

I, in fact, created art about these immigrant talking points. For many years, I believed in this narrative. Surrounded by so many fellow first-generation immigrants, I thought it was a good thing to emphasize my contributions to the U.S. The stories of our parents’ and elders’ success, in spite of the odds stacked against them, made them all sound almost superhuman. I was proud that I’d someday have a chance to prove myself worthy of the American Dream—without questioning why I wasn’t able to have that dream in the country of my birth.

And then the narrative slowly changed.

It was common in my community to hear racial slurs about people not like us. Members of my community, including older relatives, constantly talked about how much stress they felt because of systemic or individual racism. However, that didn’t stop some of those same adults from making racist comments about people of other ethnicities. Though I was lucky to have caring teachers and classmates who talked about how these comments hurt them, I still heard racial slurs in Spanish in multiple settings.

WATCH: Toward a Multiracial Immigrants’ Rights Movement

When I was a kid, I didn’t recognize that these remarks and the reaction they elicited in my community weren’t just racist and inappropriate; they were hypocritical. I was undocumented until I received my green card at age 15. At around age 9, my mom and I began meeting more frequently with our lawyer, and I started noticing that people in my immigration hearings and meetings weren’t just Spanish speakers, light Brown, or Christian. And yet, immigration has been codified as a mestize Latinx issue at the expense of people of various creeds and countries trying to get our attention.

Thanks to my interactions with the U.S. immigration system, I was exposed to different stories, and thankfully, my experiences in college and beyond also helped me grow and understand that there’s no way the immigrants’ rights movement can continue to exist while mostly catering to Spanish speakers and non-Black/non-Indigenous Latinx folks.

These realizations came to me just as I began meeting friends from different countries. I attended college at the University of California, Irvine, where multiple friends and I shared meals, exchanged stories, and sometimes discussed our immigration status or that of undocumented loved ones. Nightly news stories about immigration contradicted what I learned about U.S. policies, such as , Japanese internment camps, the Trail of Tears, and the Three-Fifths Compromise. Anything that melted in our proverbial pot did so through violence. Ours isn’t a multicultural or multiracial country forged in peace.

According to the Pew Research Center, the biggest undocumented community in the U.S. Countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, , and multiple Soviet bloc countries now have large undocumented communities. The U.S.–Mexico border continues to receive a major influx of migrants from around the world, but today’s focus on the means routes have only gotten more dangerous.

While many immigrants continue to arrive from Latin America, Latinx isn’t a race. People from any ethnicity can be Latinx, and people whose ancestors migrated to the region may find it necessary to make their way to the U.S.

In order to successfully assimilate, some immigrants often side with whiteness. It can be argued that we’re conditioned to want this even before migrating, because many countries around the world also have systemic biases that uphold white characteristics as desirable. For people from Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, the lack of inclusion of non-mestizo peoples begins in our countries of origin.

The , known as a Mexican concept, applies to much of Latin America as well. The premise of mestizaje is that Latinx/Latin American peoples are a mixture of Spanish and Indigenous peoples, erasing the fact that mestizaje was created through violence.

“I’ve heard, you know, the whole spectrum of Latinxs say, ‘We don’t have racism. We don’t talk about race in the same way as in the U.S.’ I experience the complete opposite of that color-blindness,” , a Panamanian American multimedia creator, historian, and educator says. “When I’m in mostly Latino spaces, it’s a guarantee that it’s going to be racist, anti-Black, or anti-Indigenous.”

Despite the presence of Black communities, Asian migration, and Indigenous peoples, there remains a false notion that all Latin Americans are Brown and speak only Spanish. Mestizaje and its many iterations also prevent many white Latinx folks from acknowledging their privilege in the U.S. or Latin America. 

“In the U.S. imagination, an immigrant is a Brown person that receives anti-immigrant vitriol. It’s also a face that can garner empathy,” Harris says.  

In extreme circumstances, immigrants even join and take part in violent tactics. Research from senior fellow Ran Abramitzky even shows that some immigrants give their U.S.-born children “white-sounding” names in an effort to secure a better future for said children.

Not doing the work as non-Black Latinx folks can have additional consequences when people of non-Black immigrant origins gain power. In 2022, former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez was after a leaked tape revealed her racist remarks against multiple communities, including Asian, Black, and Indigenous communities. The scandal shed light on the need for more anti-racist and intersectional work among mestize Latinx communities.

But all is not lost: Immigrant communities are now waking up to the need . They’ve received help from pop culture brands such as Refinery29, whose social media accounts often feature about how to discuss racial justice in Latinx communities.

Today, multiple community organizations, including , , and the , are working hard to include Indigenous peoples. Multiple immigrant rights organizations are also increasing legal assistance, destigmatizing the lack of legal status, and advocating for people who speak languages other than English or Spanish. 

While these groups have always been here, they have gained more visibility since the 2020 iterations of the #StopAsianHate and Black Lives Matter movements. Unfortunately, in the four years since these movements gained traction, we’ve only seen greater need and fewer resources. Harris says that the , and other nonprofits such as the that offer vital services for Black immigrants, continue to be underfunded, though Black immigrants experience a disproportionate amount of violence .

Even when immigrants become naturalized citizens, the lack of language-inclusive services can make it harder for them to have access to reliable information in their native language. Asian Americans Advancing Justice is working on for Asian American, Asian Islander, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters, while the is using the legal system to help AAPI voters experiencing discrimination. There are also multiple local and regional organizations, such as the , defending AAPI interests across the country through an intersectional lens.

Lack of funding and support for models based on solidarity is still a problem. Burnout is common in social justice work, but the good news is that those of us who’ve been educated on better ways to be allies can speak to our families and friends about why assimilationist rhetoric is harmful. After all, appealing to the desires of people in power didn’t help pass comprehensive immigration reform. 

Building a more inclusive immigrant rights movement, I’ve learned, ultimately means abandoning all white-supremacist thinking in the U.S. and our countries of origin.     

Below us in Nogales, the agent abruptly halted his lecture and tore up the hill again, spitting gravel from his wheels. I was relieved, because you never know how such a scene might play out. Every day such displays of asymmetrical power take place, small acts of aggression that never make the news. Before long, the agent returned to his perch under the camera post, an elevated spot providing unobstructed views of the surrounding area. This whole scene would not have happened before 1994, when there was only a chain-link fence with big holes through which people would cross back and forth. According to longtime resident and musician Gustavo Lozano, back then the only worry was the occasional presence of a kid at the hole asking for pocket change. When Lozano occasionally got caught by the Border Patrol and thrown back into Mexico, there was no incarceration, no formal deportation on his record. He told me that he would often cross from Mexico into the United States to pay a bill at a department store for his mom, to play basketball with his cousins, to hang out with his family. As late as the 1980s, on holidays such as September 16—Mexican Independence Day—officials opened the borders completely and a parade zigzagged back and forth as if the international boundary simply didn’t exist.

Ambos Nogales is one place that exists on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico border. Ambos means “both,” and as the name suggests, communities on both sides of the border share deep familial, community, social, economic, and political ties. They also share common infrastructure. As Ieva Jusionyte writes in her book Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border, “extending from northern Sonora to southern Arizona, the railway, the highway, even the sewage pipeline facilitate dense ties between the two sides of the border. It becomes impossible to disentangle one town’s everyday logistics from the other’s.” The border cannot stop the roots of trees and the vast mycelium networks symbiotically entangled with them from reaching across to the other side.

At Ambos Nogales, the border is not designated by a mountain, lake, or river. This border first came into being as an imaginary line in the sand with the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, that is, if a transaction at gunpoint can be considered a “purchase.” Officials from both countries put up the first permanent fence in 1918 after what was known as the Battle of Ambos Nogales. The battle resulted from spiking tensions after the implementation of passport requirements by the United States, which included limiting the number of times Mexican citizens could cross the border. Repeated shootings by U.S. Customs agents and military, including the killing of two Mexican citizens, precipitated the combat. In his book Violent Borders, geographer Reece Jones argues that borders are implicitly violent, often from their very inception.

It’s a worthwhile thought experiment to imagine the world without human-imposed borders for working-class people.

Nevertheless, despite these U.S. border wars with Mexico, there is a long history of cross-border cooperation and mutual aid among the people. For example, fire units on both sides have crossed back and forth for decades in mutual assistance. Louie Chaboya, who served as the director of emergency services in Arizona’s Santa Cruz County, where Nogales is located, noted to Jusionyte this underlying sense of connection uniting the communities on both sides of the divide. “In Nogales,” he said, referring to this cross-border cooperation, “we are not associates. We are not business partners. We are not even friends. We are family.”

In that spirit, anthropologist Josiah Heyman posed a broader question in his 1999 essay “A Border that Divides, A Border that Joins.” “What if we think of Mexico and the United States as one country, unified, rather than divided by the border?” Heyman asks. “Issues often framed as contrasting the United States with Mexico are better understood as the allied elites and finances of both countries (plus Canada) versus divided and somewhat anxious commoners of the entire continent.”

It could also be understood in another way: For the cross-border networks of allied elites, borders are open, but for a purposely discombobulated working class on the Mexican side, borders are all but closed. The working class in the United States is told that the Mexican working class is dragging its wages down, while the allied elites move good jobs across the border without impediment.

It’s a worthwhile thought experiment to imagine the world without human-imposed borders for working-class people. The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, humans and ancestors of humans for 6 million years, and civilization as we know it for only 6,000 years. Perhaps the world’s astronauts sensed this as they contemplated the sweeping view of the planet and experienced a sense of interconnected global consciousness. There is a reason they cannot see the borders, mostly because human-drawn international political boundaries are artificial and new, and do not register as topography, unlike bodies of water, rivers, and mountain ranges. The border in Nogales, for example, was drawn in 1853 without any agreement from the original inhabitants of this land, the Tohono O’odham. Colonial European powers sliced up Africa during the 1883 Berlin Conference, effectively creating the borders of its modern nation-states, without consulting any African people. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divvied up the Middle East to the logic of the British and French, and not, say, the Palestinians. These artificial borders and their enforcement apparatuses are relatively new—border militarization, for example, has accelerated in the last 25 years—and often imposed by faraway allied elites. In the grand scheme of things, borders now largely serve as a neocolonial scaffolding for a planet divided into exploiting and exploitable countries and peoples. They are untouchable. As an example, on one occasion Moroccan military and security personnel surrounded me and briefly confiscated my phone for simply taking pictures outside the border wall separating Morocco and the autonomous Spanish city of Ceuta. But even as they surrounded me—they were paid by the European Union to provide “security”—I realized this was the universal conditioning around borders. You are on the “sacred ground” of the nation-state, the border is its ultimate monument, humanity be damned.

So to continue the thought experiment, what if we were to allow ourselves to imagine a world without borders? What if we were to see borders not as shields, but as shackles keeping the planet in an unsustainable status quo of inequality, racial divide, and climate catastrophe?

Perhaps philosopher Michael Marder was contemplating these questions when he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on March 3, 2020, titled “The Coronavirus Is Us.” In his op-ed, Marder describes his version of wall sickness: “W��ll before the current outbreak, a global tendency to build walls and seal off national borders…had taken hold. The resurgent nationalism instigating this tendency nourishes itself on the fear of migrants and social contagion, while cherishing the impossible ideal of purity within the walled polity.”

Concerned with how such tendencies would complicate solving the coronavirus crisis, Marder continues the metaphor to encompass the global lockdown in which people are further divided by class. “As panic sets in,” he wrote, “in some quarters, personal border closure imitates the knee-jerk political gesture: Food and medical supplies are hoarded, while the wealthiest few prepare their luxury doomsday bunkers.” Marder arrives at the border’s eternal paradox: “Borders are porous by definition; no matter how fortified, they are more like living membranes than inorganic walls. An individual or a state that effectively manages to cut itself off from the outside will be as good as dead.”

In April 2020, political cartoonist Matt Wuerker published a cartoon of a stern general looking out from a missile-laden border barrier, as his minion spots a coronavirus floating over the wall with his binoculars. For better and worse, the virus reveals humanity’s interconnection, and the inability of borders to truly partition us, even when sealed as tightly as possible. In this sense, the coronavirus becomes not only a catastrophe but also a lyrical messenger.

For Marder, it delivers a prescient message for the post-pandemic future: The coronavirus speaks to the inability of walled countries to respond to global issues such as climate catastrophe—the pandemic being but one aspect of it—and advocates for us to “learn to live in a world that is interconnected.” Contemplated as one might contemplate a poem, the pandemic could be seen as a deep call to action, part of the “great turning,” as deep ecology scholar Joanna Macy has written, from an industrial-growth society that relies on borders, to a more sustainable civilization for which borders are an impediment. “The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth,” says Macy, “is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves, and each other.”

In this sense, we can only hope that the director for the International Institute for Environment and Development, Andrew Norton, is right to state that the lessons drawn from COVID-19 could apply also to climate change. “Strengthening recognition of our interdependence—that everyone’s health is everyone else’s business—could strengthen the understanding that compassion and empathy are functional traits for humanity,” he writes. “The virus may lead to a deeper understanding of the ties that bind us all on a global scale.” Coronavirus is thus an offering for us to reimagine borders, what they are, who they are for, who they are not for, and how humanity and the Earth will be better served without them.

This excerpt from Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights Books, 2021) by Todd Miller appears with permission of the publisher.

Read an interview with Todd Miller about his book here.

Twelve years after the film’s release, when my husband and I were navigating the challenges of his green card application, many of my friends brought it up, joking that it was their only reference for legal immigration via marriage. 

The fact that this movie stands as one of America’s cultural touchstones for immigration is unquestionably problematic, largely because of the implication that “green card” and “marriage” are only paired in fraudulent relationships. The reality of marriage to an immigrant partner is far different from what films depict, and for some couples, nearly impossible. 

Our Immigration Love Story

My husband and I met on a dating app in 2019. I spent much of our early get-to-know-you months learning about the beauty and diversity of India, the country where he grew up. He was in his 20s when he moved to the U.S. for a master’s degree that eventually led him to the job and city where we met. He also shared his anxieties with me over the news of his H-1B application, the work-petitioned visa he needed to legally remain in the U.S. now that he was out of school.

We were thrilled and relieved when he was granted the visa a few months later, offering some security to our growing relationship. But the start of the COVID-19 pandemic quickly shattered our illusion of safety when all his department co-workers, except for him, were suddenly laid off. If he were to lose his job too, his H-1B would quickly become invalid, requiring him to return to India.

It was a sobering reminder that, while my partner was thankfully still employed, we were entirely dependent upon his employment status not only as a steady source of income, but also for his legal resident status in the country that we both called home. Insecurity, I was learning, is the norm for immigrants. Education, work experience, abiding by governing rules—none of these things offers true security. That’s where a green card comes in. 

Having a green card, or legal permanent resident (LPR) status, means that as long as one has not been convicted for specific criminal offenses, one can live in the U.S. indefinitely. It offers the most secure legal status, second only to citizenship. Immigrants can earn it in a variety of ways, many of which can take years. One of the quickest ways to obtain LPR is through a family or marriage sponsorship.

Thankfully for my partner and me, it didn’t take long to know that we wanted our relationship to last for life. After two years of dating, we got engaged and then married in 2021. The next step was submitting our LPR petition with the hope it would be accepted, despite rumors about pandemic federal staff shortages leading to green card delays. But we had no other options and had to work within an immigration system that processes and accepts about  as legal residents. 

The Application

From start to finish, our application process lasted about a year. It was a tedious, though mostly doable, process that involved answering hundreds of questions and tracking down family documents. The trickiest part was the fluctuating rigidity of the requirements. Sometimes there would be a request for a specific document, and sometimes it would feel completely arbitrary. Would photos of our wedding be convincing evidence that our marriage was real? How about our joint bank accounts or a copy of our co-signed lease? We had to guess, hope, and submit.

Some couples opt to hire immigration lawyers to help navigate the unpredictable nature of the process, which often results in thousands of dollars in legal fees. We chose to instead prepare the application ourselves, and then briefly consulted with a lawyer to review the documents to give us some added peace of mind.

Over $2,000 in fees later, our application was in the hands of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It was now up to the government to assess if we were in a real relationship. Our life was on hold, with no predictable timeline, and no guarantee of the result. 

Another Immigration Journey

It was while we were waiting for a decision from the government that I met Lauren Krupp, an American citizen living in the U.S. and working as a newborn care specialist. Krupp diverted much of her salary to continue the process of petitioning for a green card for her husband, Doriel Acosta. It was through her that I learned the legal immigration process for marriage-based green cards could be even more difficult for some couples.

The two met when Krupp was visiting Cuba on a humanitarian trip in 2017. Two years later, they got married in Cuba, knowing they would continue their long-distance relationship as they worked to secure Acosta’s green card. Despite poor diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, they were hopeful. Neither could have predicted then that it would take them three and a half years of bureaucratic challenges and more than $20,000 to be together.

First, their application was submitted incorrectly by a third-party contractor, and was left unprocessed for nine months with no notifications. Krupp eventually contacted an immigration officer from her senator’s office who was able to verify that some documentation was missing. 

Shortly thereafter, the COVID-19 pandemic brought Cuban diplomatic processes to a standstill. Since the closure of the U.S. embassy in Cuba following  in 2017, Cubans have been forced to fly 1,000 miles to the . But Krupp says the Guyanese embassy was closed for almost nine months during the pandemic.

Finally, after pandemic restrictions were lifted in March 2022, Acosta and Krupp made it to Guyana for their immigration interview. Even after being told that his green card was approved, Acosta had to remain in Guyana for another 45 days while his visa was processed. In all, the couple paid $12,500 just for the travel and accommodation during his unexpectedly long stay in Guyana.

Finally, after all the expense, the waiting, the effort, and the distance, Acosta hugged his wife hello on U.S. soil this past May. It was the same month my husband and I went to our own immigration interview where he was granted his green card.

Krupp reflected on how she’s been feeling since being reunited with her husband. She says, “You find yourself feeling things that you don’t expect; sometimes a wave of grief for the time that was lost. Or sometimes feeling like you’re undeserving of it. … We only waited three and a half years. Some people wait 10, 15 years, or never are reunited at all.” I’m left feeling much of the same.

Immigration Challenges

The one emotion that united all four of us—and possibly all immigrants and the citizens who petition on their behalf—is an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Despite Krupp and I being U.S. citizens, we had to place our trust in opaque, bureaucratic systems to judge our marriages and allow us to live with the person we love. Despite their eligibility, our partners had to trust they were being judged objectively and fairly. The positive outcomes we experienced are not guaranteed for all applicants. 

USCIS prioritizes family-petitioned green cards and has granted about  in recent years. Processing time averages between 10 and 17 months, although this was much longer at the start of the pandemic due to  and federal worker shortages. Immediate relatives, like spouses, have a faster processing time than other family members, like parents, children, or siblings. Overall, a family-petitioned green card has a higher chance of acceptance than any other type, .

This doesn’t even include the millions of other forms of emigration that are not as highly prioritized. The DACA program has become  for recipients, and the yearly figures of how many  changes based on the current presidential administration. These challenges lead to many undocumented people risking border crossings, family separation, and deportation rather than accepting the possibility of being forgotten or denied by the American immigration system. The  claims that 23% of all immigrants in the U.S., about 10.5 million people, are undocumented. 

It’s clear that compared to many, our immigration story was not only easy, but was also extremely privileged. We were left feeling gratitude for our security and deep frustration at how broken the system is for everyone. 

Support for Immigrants

There is plenty of work still to be done to support legal immigration. With so many shifting variables and unknowns, there is great need for more support and resources for couples petitioning for residency from all nations. But through our own immigration journey, and hearing Krupp and Acosta’s story, I learned about some of the existing efforts to help mixed-status couples emigrate through green card petitions.

One of the places where Krupp and Acosta found reassurance was through online communities. Krupp says, “W�� joined a support group on Facebook that was about Cuban family reunification. We got so much more helpful, actual information from that group than we ever did from anywhere else. … It was just other people going through the same process, telling us what they had learned and observed.”

My husband and I also found the greatest support from friends who had gone through the application process. They shared tips and tricks, and even connected us with a lawyer who could review our application and answer our questions. Depending on one’s budget, there are many immigration lawyers and visa experts who can help couples navigate the process. Though from experience, we suggest choosing experts based on recommendations from people you trust. Naturally, lawyers cost money—something that disadvantages lower-income applicants.

Elected representatives can also help—indeed, most federal representatives and senators offer help with federal agencies via their websites. Krupp highlighted the help of an immigration officer at her state senator’s office who was able to inquire on their behalf. Using state and federal resources like a senator’s office is a great way for petitioners to advocate for themselves. 

Ultimately, what is needed is a change in the immigration processes so all people applying are treated humanely. For example, FWD.us, a , points out that green cards are sometimes wasted due to systematic “roll over” protocols. The organization is pushing Congress to reform the system so that an additional 220,000 green cards would become available, which in turn would help reduce the backlog of applicants.

In good news for Cuban petitioners, the  at the Havana embassy, raising the possibility that petitioners could soon process their visas in Cuba instead of traveling to Guyana. And, this year, USCIS  to increase the efficiency of immigration processing, reducing wait times for in-country couples to a maximum of six months. 

We all know rom-coms aren’t real life, especially the ones about green card marriages. But Krupp described her love story perfectly, saying, “Just because you had the weird opportunity to fall in love with someone from another country, and you have this different path, in the end, you just want to be normal. The end goal is just normal things, like stability, comfort, and time together.”

The prisoners’ demands were pretty simple: basic human rights, educational opportunities, and a reform of Alabama’s harsh sentencing guidelines and parole board.

The labor strikes are a turn from the most familiar type of political protest behind bars: the hunger strike. 

The strike in Alabama was just the latest in a series of strikes at U.S. prisons. On April 4, at least seven prisons in Texas staged a work strike after a prisoner sent out a call with the help of outside organizers. About a month earlier, prisoners in multiple states including both Texas and Alabama, as well as Virginia and Ohio, called for a national general strike among prisoners on Sept. 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion, where guards and inmates died during a prison revolt in upstate New York.

The labor strikes are a turn from the most familiar type of political protest behind bars: the hunger strike. While hunger strikes pull at the moral heartstrings of the public, work stoppages threaten the economic infrastructure of the prison system itself.

The strike in Alabama was organized by the Free Alabama Movement, a nonviolent grassroots organizing group created by prisoners that focuses on the human rights of Alabama’s imprisoned. Not only does Alabama have one of the highest incarceration rates in the United States, but it also has one of the most overcrowded prison systems. The system’s current population sits at about 80 percent over capacity. With nearly double the inmates that the prisons were designed to hold, the packed prisons produce violence, unsanitary conditions, and .

“We view prison labor as real slavery…[in] 1865 when the 13th Amendment was ratified…they started the first wave of mass incarcerating black people,” said Melvin Ray, co-founder of the Free Alabama Movement. In the years after slavery, a formal prison system formed in the South. Some plantations were bought by the state and . “They use [these prisons] as a tool of control. They target African-American communities. They target politically conscious people, politically conscious organizations. And they use these prisons as a form of social control in addition to a plantation [that’s] generating revenue.”

In 2014, when Ray, along with Robert Council, founded the Free Alabama Movement, they organized a work stoppage at the Holman and St. Clair prisons. The strike at Holman prison, where Council was incarcerated, lasted from Jan. 1 to 22. Immediately afterward, both men were thrown into solitary confinement. Ray stayed there for more than a year and was just recently released to general population. Council remains in solitary confinement to this day.

Prison officials list a number of justifications for Council’s segregation including that he allegedly administered the Free Alabama Movement Facebook group, and he was a leading and significant factor in the work strike.

From Robben Island to Guantanamo to San Quentin, the hunger strike and the penitentiary seem attached to each other. 

In the past, hunger strikes have targeted solitary confinement. The well-known hunger strike in 2013, where tens of thousands of prisoners across California refused to eat for 60 days, protested the state’s use of indefinite solitary confinement. It was coupled with other political organizing, including lawsuits and another smaller hunger strike in 2011. Two years after what was called the largest hunger strike in U.S. history, California agreed to limit its use of solitary confinement.

From Robben Island to Guantanamo to San Quentin, the hunger strike and the penitentiary seem attached to each other. Yet the organizers of the Free Alabama Movement have intentionally moved away from the practice.

In an titled “Let The Crops Rot in the Fields,” Ray and Council laid out a plan for tackling mass incarceration. The essay argues that the old ways of protesting in prisons—including hunger strikes and letter-writing campaigns—are not sufficient. Instead, organizers should attack the economic incentive of prisons. The answer, then, is to stop working—and remove the corporate profit from the prison industrial complex. The title was a reference to work strikes conducted by people who were enslaved in the South.

Members of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, the prison-organizing group of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, started sending copies of “Let The Crops Rot in the Fields” to prisoners in other states. The labor union, apparently the only current union that welcomes prisoners, has about 800 members behind bars across the country. The essay has inspired prisoners in Virginia, Ohio, and Mississippi to organize to participate in the National Day of Strike in September 2016 and, for Texas, to have organized a work strike of their own in April.

Ray and Council haven’t always held these views. “Over the years we’ve tried a few other different things. We’ve tried letter-writing campaigns. We’ve tried marching, protesting, filing complaints in the court. We’ve tried basically all of the avenues that can be used that are made available to people who are incarcerated,” Council said.

In 2007, the entire population at Holman prison, including Council, . The prison was in a deplorable state—backed-up sewage issues, mold on the walls, collapsed and rusted pipes. The prisoners demanded that internal affairs and reporters be allowed inside the prison to document the conditions.

Ray and Council met in prison when they were both jailhouse lawyers, assisting other prisoners with filing lawsuits and complaints about the issues in the prison while also writing their own. As their incarceration continued and their lawsuits and grievances against the prisons went nowhere, Council, Ray, and other prisoners began to have a change of heart on how to bring about change. “We were begging [officials] to please follow the rules. Please have mercy on me. We’re asking some people to have mercy that just don’t have any mercy,” Council explained. “That revelation brought us to the fact that you can’t appeal to the moral [part] of a system that doesn’t have morals.”

Prisons would “grind to a halt” without the use of prison labor. 

The sentiment echoes the thoughts of the late Stokely Carmichael, a civil rights leader and organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which led the civil rights movement among youth in the South. “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponents must have a conscience,” he famously said in 1967, two years after the assassination of Malcolm X and a year before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. “The United States has none.”

Alex Friedmann, the managing editor of Prison Legal News, a publication of the Human Rights Defense Center, said, in an email, that prisons would “grind to a halt” without the use of prison labor. “The work strikes in the Alabama and Texas prison systems are a natural and predictable result of treating prisoners as slaves and benefiting—and often profiting—from their labor. If prison officials treat prisoners as slaves, then they should not be surprised when there are occasional slave revolts,” Friedmann said.

In prisons across the country, incarcerated people are paid as little as 15 to 45 cents an hour. Even worse, in Texas, the minimum wage for a prisoner starts at zero dollars. However, these wages aren’t always what employers are paying to hire prisoners. Employers in states like Alabama, Colorado, and South Carolina pay the federal hourly minimum wage for prisoner labor. However, the wage is paid to the state, and prisoners see only a fraction of that check. In Alabama, the Department of Corrections is to take up to 80 percent of a prisoner’s income, half of which can go to “offset the costs of the inmate’s incarceration.”

In prisons across the country, incarcerated people are paid as little as 15 to 45 cents an hour. 

Corrections departments across the country have laws stating they can take part or most of prisoners’ wages to pay for the upkeep of the prison or room and board. Incarcerating the highest rate of prisoners in the world comes at a cost, so states have increasingly used the prisoners’ own labor to lower prison costs. Prolonged work stoppages threaten to increase these costs and create a more expensive prison system—some states, like Alabama with its high budget deficit, simply can’t afford that.

Two weeks after May’s strike ended, the warden at Holman Correctional Facility, Carter Davenport, retired. Davenport had arrived at Holman in December 2015, and just three months later, a major prison uprising erupted where a prisoner stabbed him (he recovered). Before Holman, he was the warden at St. Clair Correctional Facility from 2010 to 2015. In 2012, he was suspended for two days in the face, according to an Alabama news site. Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit in Alabama, Davenport, as well as the Alabama Department of Corrections, in 2014 for facilitating a culture of violence at St. Clair (the lawsuit is ongoing). That same year, with violence at St. Clair increasing, the nonprofit called for Davenport to be replaced as warden.

Last year, Charlotte Morrison of the Equal Justice Initiative criticized Davenport’s leadership at St. Clair. “[Those] in charge of leading these facilities are creating abusive, dangerous environments,” Morrison said. “Warden Davenport, somebody who punched a handcuffed inmate in the face, that’s the kind of leadership he models. And what we see at the prison is control through intimidation and violence.” Prisoners at Holman had similar opinions about Davenport, so his retirement was a major victory for them.

The ADOC denies Davenport’s retirement resulted from the work strike or the March uprising; however, his removal was a goal for nonprofit advocates and prisoners alike.

Now, he’s gone.

The school district’s passage of the (GFR) didn’t come easy. Parents and teachers demanded a plan to eliminate officer positions in the schools at a board of education meeting in March 2020, but the fundamentals of the resolution date back to from 2019. At that March meeting, a divided board voted down the resolution. George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis two months later prompted BOP to mobilize community partners during a week of action, lifting up the voices of Black and Brown youth across Oakland. As a result, the OUSD school board to eliminate police from all Oakland schools, becoming the first in the nation to do so.

Under the GFR, the school district eliminated police officers in Oakland schools, while committing a one-time fund of $1.9 million from the previous school police budget in critical resources. This was in addition to the more than $5 million over three years in funding for services from the Department of Violence Prevention—including expanded counseling, violence-prevention services, and academic and mental health support—to help more Black and Brown students feel safe and thrive.��

The resolution was a critical win against systemic racism, over-policing, and the criminalization of Black and Brown youth at a time when people across the country were . In the years leading up to the resolution’s passage, Black students in Oakland public schools were 76% of those arrested by school police but only 26% of all local students.

Today, the new policy is starting to reverse this racist trend with a in suspensions for physical violence across Oakland’s public high schools and a substantial decline in police calls since in-person teaching resumed post pandemic. The 2021 OUSD board report compared police calls before and after the new policy and found that “police calls to campus have dropped dramatically since the George Floyd Resolution, with 134 calls to campus between August 2021 and April 2022, compared with 1,814 during the same timeframe from 2019-20.”

The report also found that “with no police presence on campuses teachers, admin, and students have been able to exercise healthy alternatives to de-escalate situations with the use of the police-free guidance, problem solve conflict, and start to build meaningful relationships with each other.”

The GFR also led to School Safety Officers being renamed�� “Culture Keepers” and “Culture and Climate Ambassadors.” As per the OUSD board report, “ no longer carry handcuffs or wear police symbolism or logos and instead are tasked with “promoting school site safety through relationship building, de-escalation techniques, and the use of trauma-informed restorative practices.”����

However, while this is a victory, data from the California Department of Education, analyzed by Organizing Roots and DSC California shows that while suspension rates for all races are higher than pre-pandemic levels, Black, Native, and Pacific Islander students remain disproportionately impacted. The district clearly needs to do��more work to address the underlying biases and racism in our schools that are causing disproportionate disciplinary action.����

Oakland set out to bring people together to imagine a better path to safety, security, and Black liberation. It chose a path that has started to reimagine the purpose of schools: supporting all students to learn, thrive, and be safe. The Oakland model provides lessons for school districts across the country to look for ways to advance racial equity and support all young people to succeed.��

In cities across the nation, including Chicago, Madison,��Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix, grassroots movements have been exploring or moving forward with similar plans to get police out of schools. This growing movement reflects an understanding that real safety—for students, teachers, and staff—doesn’t come from school police. It comes from having access to support services, trusted adults, and other resources that help all students.��

Research has proven what we know from lived experience—that students of color when schools remove police. And police presence in schools has to actually protect students, teachers, and staff from shootings and other threats of external violence. In fact, having police in schools increases violence and crime by criminalizing school-aged children, forcing them out of the school system, and fueling the school-to-prison pipeline.��

The George Floyd Resolution is a manifestation of what the community has always known: We must invest in spaces of creativity, joy, and connection for young people. Our children thrive when we center violence prevention and mental health support, and work alongside the community to co-create learning environments that welcome the whole person.����

Another important lesson from the fight to win real safety in Oakland schools is that community-led change delivers results. Oakland residents first came together to transform local systems that harm Black youth and families in 2011, soon after the killing of 20-year-old Raheim Brown by OUSD police. Dating back to the 1940s and 1950s, the migration of Southern Black families to Oakland spurred police and schools to join forces in targeting Black youth—Brown’s killing mobilized the community to stand up and say “Enough.” It was in the wake of that tragic event that BOP members created the B.O.S.S. Campaign (Bettering Our School System) to focus on the decriminalization of Black youth and removal of all policing in schools.

This history is critical because the George Floyd resolution did not come about because elected officials agreed to far-reaching reforms. It was the result of a movement led by those most impacted for justice based on years of organizing and community leadership. Parents, students, and community members worked together to develop a school safety plan that prioritized the needs of Black students and their families. They showed up at hearings and community events, wrote letters of support, and flooded their social media channels with information and calls to action.  

Our progress in Oakland has shown us what works to transform local systems that punish Black youth and communities of color: Put young people, parents, and community members at the center of the work. Be bold and keep fighting for transformational change and not just incremental, feel-good actions. And claim every single community win. That is what will continue to inspire those who will come after us. That is what will ignite everyday, regular people to realize that we ourselves have the power to shift, change, and transform.

There was a time when CRT referred only to a relatively obscure legal framework for analyzing structural and institutional racism, pioneered by scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado. Then, in 2020, journalist Christopher Rufo  to include anything that disrupts whitewashed interpretations of American history and current events—and to intentionally ignite partisan debate and mobilize conservative activism around education policy and curriculum content. 

When Conservatives fomented national furor over alleged widespread CRT indoctrination taking place in K-12 schools, many progressives dismissively insisted that the decades-old legal framework was taught only in higher education institutions—completely missing the opportunity to reclaim the narrative and publicly endorse more culturally responsive education at all levels.

“W�� can’t just uplift and say, ‘We need to be neutral, don’t teach CRT,’” says Cierra Kaler-Jones, a social justice educator and director of storytelling at the Communities for Just Schools Fund. “Actually, we should be moving in a more radical [direction], saying that there are ways to teach critical race theory in schools.”

Contrary to popular progressive belief, some Black and Brown educators are explicitly and unapologetically using CRT in their classrooms to deepen students’ historical knowledge and help them build skills to make sense of the world around them.

High school history and social studies teacher Jania Hoover regularly fields questions about topical issues, like police brutality, in her classroom. Students are “smart and mature enough to handle the truth,” she wrote in an . “A well-meaning parent should want their children to understand CRT, American exceptionalism, as well as other frameworks they can use to understand American society.”

There are many ways to incorporate CRT into lessons. For example, in a recent lesson, Hoover not only covered the New Deal policies that successfully ended the Great Depression, but she also explained how they included racist lending practices to create segregated communities.

“I showed them maps that detailed areas where the FHA guaranteed loans in the city where we live,” says Hoover, who teaches at a predominantly White private school in Texas. “I then showed them current maps showing housing patterns based on race and income levels.”

The lesson did not, as Conservatives might have you believe, make White students feel bad, make Black students feel powerless, and make them all hate America. 

“Both Black and White students were blown away at the very real implications of that information. The White students didn’t feel guilty, and the Black students didn’t feel helpless,” says Hoover. “Everyone felt powerful, because they knew information that helped them understand patterns they see on a daily basis.”&�Բ�����;

Teaching the most shameful aspects of our nation’s history through a critical race lens also opens opportunities to showcase Black and Brown resistance to the White supremacist structures and systems that the legal theory was originally established to critique. 

����’s important to focus on agency, resilience, and joy, and not just violence and oppression,” says Hoover. She offers the following example: “W�� don’t do a good enough job of telling [students] the many ways enslaved people did resist. They worked slow, feigned sickness, they ran away for short times, they broke tools, they learned to read and write, grew vegetables to feed their families, maximized skills to generate income away from the enslavers. Slavery was much more complex than the abbreviated storyline included in many state standards.”

Unfortunately, most teachers are not equipped with the lived experiences or nuanced resources they need to explore such complexities in history education. Common Core standards, adopted by most states after 2010, have been criticized for their  (and for ). Some school curricula even call for teaching enslavement through re-enactment, just one example of “” that traumatizes minority students, , who founded . 

Even in minority-majority New York City, more than 80% of schoolbooks used in English Language Arts were written by White authors, according to a study by the . And course materials intended to improve minority representation almost exclusively focus on the struggles, rather than the deep history and heritage of Black and Brown communities, says Natasha Capers, parent organizer and director of the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice. 

In 2019, the New York State Education Department adopted a Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework to improve equity in public education. “One of the key parts about [the framework] that has been informed from CRT is that we have to stop teaching history as if Black people only started to exist on the shores of South Carolina,” Capers says. “W�� don’t allow Africans and Black folks to have a prequel. We only have slavery. We don’t let Asian Americans have a prequel. They only have internment camps. We don’t let Latinx people have a prequel [prior to] Columbus.”

Counter-storytelling, a core component of CRT that centers the lived experiences through the lens of race, is a powerful tool that teachers can employ to layer that texture and complexity into conversations about Black history and culture.

“W��’ve done activities where they’ve drawn pictures of themselves and said, ‘This is what I say about me, and this is what society says about me,’ so that they can actively critique the structures and the systems around them, while also developing a solid sense of self,” says Kaler-Jones. “W��’ve also [used the lyrics from] India Arie’s&�Բ�����;I Am Not My Hair and Solange’s&�Բ�����;Don’t Touch My Hair … as a framework for writing our own counter-narrative song lyrics.”

Black and Brown teachers like Kaler-Jones have the advantage when it comes to adapting critical race theory into such rich classroom experiences due to their lived experiences with race. According to , 80% of public school teachers and 85% of private school teachers are White, and most learned “a very liberal, neutral way of talking about race” in their teacher prep programs, says Kaler-Jones. 

“There is … deep internal work that needs to be done in order to even be able to show up to have critical conversations about racism and oppression,” she continues. 

Trailblazing educators, like Kaler-Jones and Hoover, are normalizing the inclusion of CRT, the framework, and its key concepts in history and social studies classes. Some schools, like the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, already offer workshops and electives on  for high school students. 

Approaches like these dovetail with a robust—and largely overlooked—tradition of Black pedagogy that predates CRT and anti-racism scholarship, according to Harvard professor Jarvis R. Givens in .

“Black educators have always known that their students are living in an anti-Black world and, therefore, decided that their teaching must be set against the very order of that world,” wrote Givens, whose book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching was published last year.

“They took a holistic approach to teaching—honoring Black life, with all its beauty and contradiction,” he explained, adding, “In my classrooms growing up, we had to study and enact anti-racism, certainly. But we also had to know that our worth and our offering to the world, and to ourselves, was much more than that.”

But educators who want to draw on CRT and Black pedagogy in their practice continue to face numerous obstacles, in addition to the overwhelming Whiteness of teachers and curricula. To date, 36 states have passed or are considering legislation banning CRT from classrooms, reports . The notoriously vague language of enacted bills has created a chilling effect on teachers, who are unsure what they can say about race and what will get them fired. According to , many Black teachers are leaving the profession entirely. 

Still, there is reason for cautious optimism about the future of CRT in classrooms. The American Civil Liberties Union has brought legal challenges against ’s&�Բ�����;and ’s Conservative-led anti-CRT bills and, more recently, against a Missouri school district’s ban on books reflecting POC and LGBTQ+ perspectives. 

Teachers like Kaler-Jones and Hoover are demonstrating the benefits that CRT-infused lessons bring to students and paving the way for other educators to adopt similar strategies in their classrooms. 

Also, “There are many reputable and useful organizations and groups dedicated to creating resources to help teachers teach about these topics,” says Hoover, citing the  and 

Many teachers are also publicly committing to , bans be damned. Perhaps even more encouraging is how educators and young people themselves are creating Instagram and  to provide extracurricular education on CRT concepts, like intersectionality, systemic racism, and privilege. 

“My dream is for history classes where no one feels left out or undermined,” says Hoover. “Every student feels seen and valuable in the world.”&�Բ�����;

How Teachers Navigate Texas Laws 

The laws banning or curtailing history education vary by state. Texas and Florida, two Republican-dominated states, have been early proponents of these policies. For some of these legislators, Black and diverse history appears to not be a valuable part of the U.S. educational curriculum. In early 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida  the College Board’s new AP African American history class, claiming it “lacks educational value.” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who seems to agree with DeSantis, signed Senate Bill 3, a law that would prohibit the teaching of current events without “deference to both sides,” into .

Jesse Arrieta, a high school history teacher at the Young Women’s STEAM Research and Preparatory Academy in El Paso, Texas, says she struggles when teaching about race. “Some of my colleagues were nervous at the beginning of last school year due to declarations by Greg Abbott that [he] would crack down on teachers in this anti-CRT moment.” But, she adds, “my goal as a  has always been to disrupt the ‘grand narrative,’ to be inclusive, and to help students understand that their history, whoever they are, is part of U.S. history.”&�Բ�����;

Anti-CRT laws have only increased Arrieta’s resolve to teach what’s being denied to students. She says, “The revolution is in the classroom, and it is up to teachers to resist oppressive bills and bans, as it does not coincide with our job as state employees who have to follow a certain curriculum.” She explains, “ [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills] state what we are to teach, not how. Teaching about race, racism, sexism, etc. is not Critical Race Theory. It is simply part of the reality of life and of history.”&�Բ�����;

Although Arrieta is committed to teaching through such a lens in her classroom, other teachers may not do the same. She points out, “Those teachers who never cared about the ‘isms’ and never cared to highlight Black History Month or any other month will continue to ignore it. Unfortunately, I have worked with many of those teachers too, over the years.”

Chandra Woods, another educator at the Academy, relates her experience, saying, “I just had a conversation with a really good friend of mine about how I can appropriately implement Black history into my classroom while not going against state law. It is truly upsetting and unfortunate that this is happening in today’s world, especially with so many racially charged situations happening all around us.”&�Բ�����;

For Woods, talking about race in the classroom doesn’t violate the law. This month, she is focusing on “Black excellence” specifically centered on her all-female school. She says, “Although very limited in what we can cover, I think that discussing influential Black women in high spaces, such as former First Lady Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Viola Davis, etc. are just a few starting points on still being able to provide impact during February while also keeping with the theme of my school—women who succeed.”

Students Speak Out 

Students across Texas worry that their education is going to remove them from the realities of the past and present. Jahzara Wheaton, a high school junior attending the same school where Arrieta and Woods teach, says there was a lack of diverse perspectives in Texas education even before these laws: “When I was younger, I, as most children, was taught a very one-sided version of history. And in this version, the role that Black people played was largely that of a victim.”&�Բ�����;

Now, she is concerned that accurate depictions of her community’s past will be even more elusive. ���� is very challenging to get an accurate picture or an account of history.” Wheaton speculates that the bans are in place because “if educators were allowed to teach students about the reality of oppression throughout history, it would go against everything this country prides itself on.”

Otitodilichukwu Ikem, another high schooler from Coronado High School in El Paso, shares that she has had similar experiences: “I go to school in Texas, so the topic of Black history is very filtered. I try my best to learn more on my own, but it is very discouraging when schools paint what I’m learning in a different light.”

Ikem believes the educational system is undermining Black voices, saying, ����’s very hypocritical and harmful. We learn about European, Spanish, French, Italian, and even Japanese history. Why is African American history the one that’s banned?” She says, “The message they are sending to everyone is, ‘Hey, you can learn everything in school, but learning about African American history is too much.’” 

When asked how this is changing the way her classes function, Wheaton explains there is fear among students and teachers. “Many teachers have been intimidated into teaching what others feel should be taught and not what needs to be taught. Even those teachers I’ve had who were not afraid to challenge what is accepted had to do so in secret.”&�Բ�����;

Such secret conversations on social issues seem to be a new normal for students. Worse, some worry it changes the way they navigate their lives outside of school as well. According to Wheaton, “The impression that it left on me was that of fear. Not just for me, but for anyone willing to learn about social issues outside [the classroom] for themselves.”

While the boy’s experience is an extreme example, it’s not an uncommon one. Many children in this country hate school. According to a 2020 study by the , 75% of high schoolers self-reported having negative feelings about school. Some of the teens’ most common descriptors for school were “bored,” “tired,” and “stressed.”&�Բ�����;

Our current conventional model of schooling inculcates young people in the United States to not expect pleasure or joy from a place where they spend at least 1,100 hours a year. These negative attitudes toward school continue into the workplace. One Gallup study from 2017 found that only 33% of U.S. workers were engaged at their jobs. 

What exactly makes school terrible for young people can vary somewhat from setting to setting. Many poor Black and Brown students are forced to experience curricula that don’t represent their experiences, taught by teachers who don’t look like them, in buildings that are under-resourced and overpoliced. Amanda Latasha Armstrong, in a published by New America, pointed out how educational materials are routinely unrepresentative of people of color. That lack of representation has a negative impact on Black and Brown students.

Meanwhile, in private schools serving wealthier, White students, , even at a young age, as per education expert Peter Gray, writing in Psychology Today.

There’s a range of alternative models for schooling that schools—and workplaces—could learn from.

There are several common characteristics across school settings that mirror adult workplaces. Most schools do not offer young people autonomy, work that feels meaningful, or enough time for rest or play. The U.S. is one of a handful of countries without guaranteed paid time off. Daily breaks vary from state to state, but generally workers earn 10 minutes off for every four hours of work. Meanwhile, as Sarah Jaffe describes in her book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, U.S. . 

Educator and organizer described the dominant model of schooling as a means of maintaining oppressive power structures, calling it the “” of education. In this model, Freire describes students as passive recipients of knowledge who do not develop creative and critical thinking skills that allow them to disrupt oppressive social systems. 

French philosopher also pointed out that a defining characteristic of schools is the maintenance of power. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault describes schools as a means of isolating students from broader society in order to bring them under control. The ranking of students based on grades and other criteria is a further example of how schools exert control over them. 

Reflecting on my 12 years as a public school teacher, both Freire and Foucault’s analyses resonate. Students, particularly Black and Brown ones in under-resourced schools, are rarely treated as knowledgeable or expert. Curriculum and pedagogy in these schools tend to emphasize “foundational skills,” i.e., procedural understanding, rather than cultivating curiosity and critical thinking. The curriculum not only de-emphasizes asking questions, but often punishes curiosity if it is viewed as critical, tangential, or disruptive. 

Meanwhile, “productivity” in schools remains a constant priority—just as it does in the American workplace. During a typical school day, my students were expected to engage in academic tasks for a little more than five hours out of a six-hour school day. One of the most common offenses teachers complained about (and punished) was “off task” behavior. In other words, if kids daydreamed, goofed off, or displayed other unserious behaviors during time meant for learning, or even the transition between subjects, they were disciplined.

Imagine a generation of children given the chance to practice autonomy and creativity at school.��

Thankfully, there’s a range of alternative models for schooling that schools—and workplaces—could learn from. Perhaps the most radical is “.” Free schools first emerged in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s and offer students a “self-directed” model of education. Generally, there are no required classes, tests, or grades at free schools, and students participate in democratic decision-making. Many such schools prioritize social justice in their mission; however, most cater almost exclusively to middle- and upper-class children.

Montessori schools are more widely known than free schools, but also . This is in spite of the as an educational model serving poor and working-class children in a tenement building in Rome. Montessori schools are somewhat more teacher-centered than free schools, but still emphasize student choice. Montessori school days generally give students more control over how they spend their time and use longer unscheduled blocks of time in their day as opposed to the high-paced, fragmented schedule my students experienced. 

It is exciting to imagine what would be possible if these models were freed from their exclusive silos and made more widely available to all young people in the United States. Imagine a generation of children given the chance to practice autonomy and creativity at school. 

With different schooling experiences, how might young people transform their workplaces as adults into places where people care about their work? What demands could they make for workplaces to care about workers? Perhaps they would ask for more input into decision making. Or they might demand more frequent and longer breaks. 

There is potential here for teachers unions to make a difference. It is often said that students’ learning conditions are teachers’ working conditions. However, until recently, most teachers unions have focused their bargaining power to negotiate salaries and contractual obligations rather than transforming the education system, and subsequently their own work.

Recent teachers strikes, like the one in , are signaling that there may be a shift. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers won stronger job protections for teachers of color and pay raises for paraprofessionals who are majority workers of color. They also demanded increased funding for school nurses and mental health professionals in school. By doing so, the MFT, following in the footsteps of the and the , showed a growing effort by teachers unions to tie students’ well-being to their bargaining power. 

Schools are microcosms of our society.

It would be a profound shift if teachers unions began to also demand control over curriculum and the structure of the school day. It is not an unreasonable step either. As a public school teacher in New York City, I was contractually guaranteed a “duty-free” lunch and one planning period each day. This time was often insufficient. Nonetheless, it offers an example of the benefits enjoyed by educational workers that students ought to expect for themselves. 

Why not bargain for our students to have a minimum of 60 minutes of recess, or demand a school day that includes opportunities for student choice and leadership? Carrying out a strictly regimented curriculum takes a toll on students and teachers alike. Creating a school day with more free time for students would undoubtedly make work more pleasurable for their teachers too. One promising example is Seattle teachers’ successful negotiations in 2015, which won students . With burnout in the profession at breaking point, the urgency of this shift could not be greater.

Ultimately, schools are microcosms of our society. The structures that make schools oppressive to children—particularly kids from historically excluded communities—are shaped by capitalism, patriarchy, White supremacy, and all the other forces we face in the larger world. However, transforming these structures is possible if we begin by addressing the mindset of education. 

In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, visionary thinker and author writes, “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. … To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”&�Բ�����;

Centering schools around the well-being of our students (and their teachers) is one path to positive change in the workplace. We need to respect students as full human beings worthy of dignity, honor their ideas, and give them space to explore and play and the power to shape their days. Such schools could train young people to expect more meaning and joy from the work they may spend the rest of their lives doing.

is all too familiar with the sort of contradictory statements like those DeSantis spouted. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains that he “came into the profession at the height of a battleground over history, in the 1980s, with the war on political correctness.” And although he’s lived through decades of conservative-led attacks, like those by DeSantis, he describes the 2020s as “dangerous times.”

The Origins of CRT

Kelley sees right-wing attacks on CRT—what he considers an umbrella term for the teaching of “any kind of revisionist or multicultural history”—as a measure of the success communities of color and progressive parents and teachers have had after pushing for years to ensure that educational curricula reflect racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.

The most recent movement for such education can be traced to the of the 1960s, which, in the words of educators Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View, “were intended to counter the ‘sharecropper education’ received by so many African Americans and poor whites.” In a civil rights history lesson created for , Menkart and View explained that the education offered in nearly 40 such schools centered on “a progressive curriculum … designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors on their own behalf.” In 1968, after months of pressure from student activists, established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.

A movement to offer ethnic studies courses in public schools, including colleges and universities, has gained traction nationwide. Such education is now standard fare as part of required college courses. California remains on the cutting edge of multicultural education, becoming the first state in the nation, in October 2021, to in order to graduate.

Leading African American scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, coined the term “critical race theory” and co-edited the book of the same name, which published in 1996, to define race as a social construct and provide a framework for understanding the way it shapes public policy. Crenshaw explained in a article that CRT, originally used by to analyze educational inequities, “is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced … the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”

Understanding the Attacks on CRT

Critical race theory is precisely the sort of nuanced educational lens that Crenshaw, Kelley, and others use in their courses and that has White supremacist forces up in arms. Attacks against CRT are taking the form of multi-pronged , as well as accused of teaching biased histories.

Kelley sees conservatives like DeSantis working relentlessly to eliminate any education that actually reckons with the history of American slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their lands, sexism and patriarchy, and gender and gender identity. Reflecting again on the ’80s, he says the attacks on ethnic studies, culture, and race didn’t only come from the Right. “In fact,” he says, they also came from “liberals, from the Left,” and from those saying “we’re not paying enough attention to class [struggles].”

Kelley cites “classic liberal fatigue” against ongoing demands for racial justice, which he encapsulates in responses such as, “W�� already gave you some money, we already gave you this legislation, what else do you want to ask for? Why are you criticizing us?”

A case in point about how liberal figures are joining the right-wing war on CRT is a new venture called the , Texas, created by a group of public figures led by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. Weiss, in an , cited unpopular ideas, such as “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” She expressed dismay that such an opinion—generally considered a racist one—is shunned by many academics.

To counter what Weiss considers censorship, UATX’s founders say they are devoted to “the unfettered pursuit of truth” and are promoting a curriculum that will include the “” centering on “the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”

As if to underscore Kelley’s warning about liberals joining the right-wing culture war, the nascent university’s includes figures like Lawrence Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and former President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the left-leaning .

A Counter to the Moneyed Interests Backing CRT Attacks

Kelley sees a difference between earlier battles over political correctness and those centered on CRT today. “The Right has far more political weapons. They are actually engaged in a kind of McCarthyite attack on school teachers, the academy, on students, on families, and passing legislation on what’s called critical race theory,” he says.

Right-wing narratives have cast the backlash against CRT as a led by parents concerned about bias in their children’s education. But secretive and powerful moneyed interests are at work behind the scenes. The watchdog group recently exposed how right-wing organizations, like the Concord Fund, are part of “a network of established dark money groups funded by secret donors … stoking the purportedly ‘organic’ anti-CRT sentiment.”

Additionally, CNBC reporter Brian Schwartz how “business executives and wealthy Republican donors helped fund attacks” on CRT and that it is expected to be a centerpiece of the GOP’s campaign ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

In contrast to the politically formidable and well-funded forces arrayed in opposition to CRT, the each year gives out unrestricted funds to prominent thinkers, like Kelley, to counter “the limited financial resources and research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports social movements.”

The Foundation chose six scholars whom it as doing “leading research in critical fields.” Those include abolition and Black, Latino, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies, which are precisely the fields that are anathema to anti-CRT forces.

Kelley, who was named one of the foundation’s 2021 Freedom Scholars, agrees that such funding can help level the playing field for academics working to expand educational curricula that challenge White supremacist and patriarchal histories.

Going beyond defensive countermeasures against the right-wing attacks on CRT, such awards can help fund the study of histories of social justice movements that are thriving. “W��’re beginning to break through the narrative of civil rights begets Black Power, [which] begets radical feminism,” says Kelley, citing grassroots change-making groups that have been active over the past 50 years through today and that have not gotten enough attention, such as the , the , the , , and . “Just in the last two decades, we’re seeing so many amazing movements whose history is being written as we speak,” says Kelley.

He is heartened by what he calls “new scholarship” that is “thinking transnationally, thinking globally, and moving away from a focus on mostly [White] male leadership and thinkers,” giving way instead to the “political and intellectual work of those who have a different vision of the future.”

Those numbers do not account for unreported and misreported murders, or trans people who have unexpectedly died under suspicious circumstances, but whose deaths have not been determined to be homicide.

While the number of individual deaths is low, Mic’s “Unerased: Counting Transgender Lives” project in 2016 estimated that, while the overall murder rate for the U.S. was 1 in 19,000 per year, the , more than seven times as high as that of the general population.

Many institutional factors are at play in this trend, and while there is no clear solution to ending the violence, some activists argue for direct financial support of trans women of color—paying them.

“Even small bits of economic security can help keep us away from unsafe situations,” Renee Jarreau says. Jarreau is a Seattle-based musician, DJ, and producer who runs a Twitter account called “Pay Black Trans Women” (@PayBlkTrnsWomen) and uses this platform to amplify disparate calls for financial support.

Trans people are a demographic highly at risk of being victims of violence and discrimination. The Human Rights Campaign has estimated that , and the vast majority of the victims are Black. Trans people often are denied work or fired when they come out as trans, present as their true gender, ask to be called by a different name or pronouns, or when their employers otherwise find out their gender identity. For this reason, many trans women turn to the dangerous underground economy of sex work because it has historically been a place where trans women have been able to make a living and even found acceptance in a community of peers.

But the financial burdens they face are considerable: common health care practices for trans people, such as hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgery, are also costly. According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, undergoing , but the , according to the Human Rights Campaign. And when being passing as a cisgender woman can mean the difference between life and death, many trans women are left with little choice but to try to find the money anyway they can.

Take the example of : Her trans identity was rejected by her family, and she was kicked out at the age of 16. Houseless and desperate, she had little choice but to engage in sex work. Eventually she found work outside the underground economy and engaged in sex work less often. She got engaged to her boyfriend and had found a community outside of her blood family. However, she and her fiancé still struggled to find an apartment they could afford. At age 27, Carmon was found shot dead on a street in Fairmount Heights, Maryland, known to be a gathering place for sex workers and trans women.

When a trans person dies, the police reports of their deaths often are inaccurate, listing the individual’s “deadname,” the name the individual stopped using once they came out as trans, or misgendering them or using incorrect pronouns. This makes it more difficult for communities to be informed of a trans woman’s death, and also for groups such as the Human Rights Campaign to get accurate data on deaths.

Jarreau says there are unique ways that trans women of color, and specifically Black trans women, are disenfranchised. “W�� [Black trans women] sit at the intersection of anti-Blackness and transmisogyny,” Jarreau says.

“Having that [financial] security so we’re not worried about what’s going to happen at every moment of our lives gives us the opportunity to do other things that either helps us to sustain ourselves more or organize to help combat some of the issues we face,” she says. Financial support means trans women of color can support themselves in fighting the violence they are subjected to.

“A lot of the legal progress is becoming undone, and a lot of that legal progress has never protected us anyway. The system, the courts, the police, they don’t support us. They often use their powers against us even when the letter of the law says otherwise,” Jarreau says.

However, the ultimate goal isn’t money, but the security that money can help provide. “Don’t just give money to Black trans women,” Jarreau says. “Give us jobs, support our work. Support us if we’re artists, if we have businesses, if we have regular jobs. Check on us if we say we’re not doing well. Provide emotional and mental support. Provide in any way you can. Listen to the things we’re saying and center our words especially when we’re talking about issues directly related to us. Amplify our voices. It goes deeper than just money and economic security.”

Formed in 2018, The Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network is a Seattle-based organization that collects money from the community through its Patreon page and redistributes it to . The group distributes up to $250 per person per month with no strings attached.

“Trans women and femmes of color are still fighting for the right to live,” says Lourdez Velasco, a founding member of the volunteer-run network. “W�� haven’t seen something modeled in this way specifically for trans women of color.” It all started when one of the group’s founding members was planning for gender-affirming surgery. The operation ended up being covered by their insurance, and so they decided that they would use the fundraiser they’d planned to instead support the larger community.

The fund is not where the team’s work ends, however. Looking to the future, Velasco says, “we’re hoping to build a housing solidarity network.” Access to housing and safe places to stay is another large concern in the trans community, specifically when it comes to trans women of color.

Devin Lowe launched the Black Trans Travel Fund in June 2019 to provide Black trans women with funding to pay for safer ride-share services through Lyft or Uber. The group�� operates in the New York City metropolitan area, including New Jersey, but Lowe hopes to expand to a larger reach. “I would like to expand to more high-risk areas, places like [Washington,] D.C., Baltimore, Dallas. Places where there have been lots of encounters of violence against Black trans women,” Lowe says. “No one is free until Black trans women are free and safe.”

“Trans women and femmes of color are still fighting for the right to live.”

Lowe started the project after becoming frustrated with the lack of response to the killings of Black trans women across the country. He says he was inspired by his partner, who is a Black trans woman. “Very often, she spoke about issues regarding harassment every day while walking down the street, trying to use public transportation, and issues with men on the train,” he says, adding that many of his friends and other people in his community who are Black trans women have expressed similar sentiments.

United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance, or UTOPIA Seattle, is an organization that serves queer and trans Pacific Islanders (or QTPIs, pronounced “cutie pies”). Taffy Johnson, the organization’s executive director, describes the organization as, “a trans and �ڲ�’a�ڲ��ھ��Ա�-led member-based organization,” explaining that, “��’a�ڲ��ھ��Ա� is a cultural gender identity native to Samoa, which translates [as] ‘in a journey between masculinity and femininity.’” The organization has many programs to support QTPIs and many of them are tailored to trans women, including a sex worker support group, HIV prevention/screening resources, employment education, workers rights workshops, tenant housing rights workshops, and a program called Mapu Maia, which supports trans people with name changes, health insurance, and obtaining access to trans-affirming health care such as hormone therapy.

Johnson says that legal obstacles that the trans community faces are compounded by the way society treats trans people. “Our undocumented siblings, they could face incarceration and possibility deportation,” she says. A 2018 Washington state law passed ostensibly to target sex trafficking in reality has made sex work more dangerous by making it more difficult to screen possible clients. In addition, an arrest could affect a trans woman’s ability to find housing and employment, and if they seek shelter in temporary housing, they will face additional structural barriers and discrimination.

Donato Fatuesi, UTOPIA’s operations manager, says that trans women of color are at risk for violence for many reasons, not just in sex work.

“There are often times that trans women of color, especially Black trans women, face violence, and in a lot of cases that violence is bred through toxic masculinity and it also comes from their partners,” she says. “Sometimes it can be hard to navigate safe spaces in order to be able to receive resources, especially when that violence is coming from somewhere close.”

Violence towards trans women often occurs when cis male partners feel that their masculinity is threatened, Fatuesi says. “W�� really need to have pressing conversations around toxic masculinity that continues to stigmatize trans women.”

While paying trans women of color will not put an end to systemic transmisogyny or racism, advocates of the practice say it can be a step in the right direction toward more equity and safety. ����’s not going to alleviate the trauma of discrimination, criminalization, personal and state violence that trans women of color face,” Velasco says. ���� is one radical way in which we can resist all types of oppression and violence. … There’s going to be so many ways collectively that we can create community and collective care.”

Chilton’s apartment building is located within the campus, which is designed to facilitate intergenerational interaction. The bustling 180,000-square-foot Rosenstein campus brings LGBTQ youth, seniors, and housing together in a unified setting. to and is the only large-scale intergenerational campus in the United States to specifically provide housing, services, and programs for LGBTQ adults aged 50 and older with low incomes, and for LGBTQ youth—primarily aged 18 to 24—experiencing homelessness. [Disclosure: The author was a writer and editor for the L.A. LGBT Center’s quarterly magazine and blog through April 2022.]

“I look after them and they look after us,” says Chilton, who is a lesbian. “I live in a colorful building in a colorful neighborhood. We have every race, we have everyone across the sexual and gender continuum. It’s almost a microcosm of the world.”

The Campus also serves as the administrative headquarters for the 54-year-old Center, which is the , with seven locations across the city. “Some of our seniors feel very isolated, and being able to interface with the youth, I think that’s pretty special,” explains Lisa Phillips, the Center’s director of youth services. “W�� had an intergenerational Thanksgiving event last year, and it was a line out the door. The seniors had a great time; the youth had a great time.”

In March, the Center hosted an opportunity fair for youth and seniors looking for employment; youth residents later performed a drag show during a senior dance hosted at the Ariadne Getty Foundation Senior Housing complex. Kiera Pollock, the Center’s director of senior services, says these facilitated intergenerational interactions help create intentional opportunities for connection between people who may be at vastly different points in their lives. “Our folks have different challenges in the community, and we have to kind of meet them where they are,” Pollock says. “I think many of our youth are trying to just figure out … how to survive, how to get back into school, how to stabilize their lives, how to get clean. So the way in which they interact with the older adults, we found, has to be kind of structured within a program that makes the most sense.”

On any given day, there are more than 4,000 youths (under age 24) living on the streets of Los Angeles, mostly in Hollywood, according to the 2020 count. The percentage of unhoused youth who are LGBTQ can be as high as 40%, according to the Center. Before senior housing was available on the Rosenstein campus, the Center opened the doors of the Michaeljohn Horne & Thomas Eugene Jones Youth Housing building in 2021. The 25 apartments in the building are the first micro-units designed for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, .

The campus also offers 92 beds available for youths—52 for the Transitional Living Project (TLP), where youths can stay for up to 24 months. Youths housed in the TLP work with Center staff to develop the skills they need to be able to live independently. The remaining 40 beds are for an emergency and crisis shelter. Youth residents have access to the Center’s full range of wraparound services and support, including case management, education, employment training and placement, health and mental health care, food and clothing assistance, counseling and support groups, and activities and events.

Carlos J. Mejia Vijil, 23, moved out of TLP in July, after living there for two years. He first arrived at the Center when he was just 19, after making a harrowing journey through Mexico from Honduras, where he feared for his life because he is gay. An immigrant-rights attorney connected him with the Center’s legal services department, which represents immigration and asylum clients from more than 70 countries—many of whom risk arrest or physical harm if they go back to their home countries because they are LGBTQ. “They helped me out with everything,” Mejia Vijil says of Center staff. “Everything I have, every opportunity is thanks to the Center.”

Mejia Vijil was initially placed in the Center’s emergency overnight shelter, then moved into TLP.  He made the most of his opportunities by completing an English as a second language program held at nearby Hollywood High School, then enrolled in the culinary arts program on campus. “The culinary classes are in English, and I was just learning English. I tried real hard,” he says. “The older people were co-workers, and we talked like friends. They really respected who I am.” Mejia Vijil now works as a line cook at Osteria La Buca on trendy Melrose Avenue, and lives in his own apartment in Hollywood.

Connecting Across Age 

The Center’s culinary arts and social services training programs are the most prominent examples of success in forging intergenerational connections in the classroom. The 100-hour social services vocational training program teaches younger and older students necessary skills to build a career in social services. Many graduates have since landed jobs at the Center, working in intake, street outreach, and peer support.

The 12-week, 300-hour culinary program focuses on developing basic culinary skills, producing 500 meals a day to be served to Center clients. Students also do a four-week internship at a local restaurant or hotel, and are then offered job placement assistance within the restaurant or hospitality sector. “I think what’s been pretty amazing [is] to be able to have youth and seniors enrolled in a culinary class together,” Phillips says. “Many of these young people have not had adults who are affirming of their identity. To see the seniors and a generation of older queer people, and to be able to support them and to share their experience from a different generation, has been really remarkable.”

Pollock says since the older students usually have career and employment experience, mentoring and an abundance of mutual support occur organically in the campus’s commercial kitchen, where classes and meal production take place. And despite the decades between them, the students’ experiences sometimes mirror each other when it comes to gender identity or sexual orientation.

“W�� had in our culinary program a youth who was transitioning and a senior who was transitioning,” Pollock recalls. “They just happen to both apply for the program at the same time. They were able to support each other and talk about some of the different issues around that together—how they were dressing and using different pronouns. And they talked together about how that transition is different for a younger person. That was amazing to watch.”

After a career in sales, 64-year-old Annetta Daniel, who is gay, hopes to work with food in a variety of ways, and so jumped at the opportunity to enroll in the culinary program. “They make you very aware that this is going to be the seniors and the youth mixed. I thought, that’s fantastic!” Daniel says. “I know I have a lot to bring to the table for them. I’ve been down the road that they’re headed down. And they’re going to bring a lot to the table for me.”

When Daniel first moved into the Getty building in 2021, “I had nothing but my clothes,” she says. Her partner of 23 years had died in 2017, leading to housing instability. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, which enabled her to secure temporary housing because she was high-risk due to her health, then she moved into her current home in the Getty building, where she has thrived. “I want to grow as tall as I can, I want to know as much as I can, and I want to go as many places as I can,” Daniel says. “I want to have as many friends as I can, and experiences, and this place offers that to me.”

The High Demand for Housing

The Center has a total of 202 units of affordable housing for seniors who are 62 or older. �鶹���¼� than half of the units are in the Triangle Square Senior Apartments complex, located at the corner of Selma and Ivar in Hollywood—one mile away from the main campus. Of the , a majority (68%) live alone, as LGBTQ seniors nationwide are four times less likely to have children or grandchildren to care for them than their heterosexual counterparts, and are twice as likely to be single, notes Pollock. 

Before the doors of the Center’s affordable senior housing units had even opened in late summer 2021, more than 2,000 applications had been submitted. Most of the residents were chosen by a lottery system, but 25 of the units are designated as permanent supportive housing units for seniors experiencing homelessness, whose rents are funded by L.A. county and city grants.

The Triangle Square complex has an outdoor swimming pool and garden while the Getty building has amenities including a community room, communal kitchen, pool table, and a fitness center. Residents have direct access to the Center’s Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Senior Center and its services that include counseling and support groups, case management, home-delivered meals, in-home care, and benefits assistance. Residents can also be connected to health and mental health care, and HIV support.

For Chilton, moving into the building has been “life-changing.” ���� is a personal miracle,” she says. ����’s about having my own sanctuary. You don’t really understand that until you don’t have one. I had 10 years without [my] own sanctuary, of couch surfing and trying to make myself small, to not get in the way. Everything in my life has fallen into place, with a constant state of contentment. I don’t know that I ever felt this good emotionally, spiritually, and physically.”

John Maragioglio, an 82-year-old Air Force veteran, has also found community since moving into the Getty building in October 2021. He worked at the Center as an accountant in the 1980s, during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic, and returned to the Center in 2021 when he needed a place to live. “I’ve met a lot of gay people in here,” says Maragioglio, who is also gay and attends a veterans social group every Wednesday. “There’s one guy who does a movie night twice a month downstairs. You go to lunch downstairs every day. It’s so nice to have that lunch.”

He has not connected with the youth the way Chilton and others have, but he’s usually happy to see them around. “I can see where some of them have a little attitude,” he says. “But you know, we have to realize all kids have attitudes. They’re just finding themselves.”

Together, Independently

Center leadership has been learning in real time how to best bring the seniors and youth together. Pollock says they’ve had to learn to manage their expectations and be mindful that youth who have recently experienced homelessness may also have suffered any number of traumas in their young lifetimes.

“I think their goals are different in intergenerational connection, and we had to learn that right away,” she says of the youth. ����’s really great that folks get to connect across our programs but can still go back home to live in their units, where maybe they’re hanging out with other 21-year-olds. Our [senior] folks are hanging out with other 70-year-olds, who maybe want it quiet after 9 p.m.”

But when the connections are made, they can be invaluable. “In the LGBT community, often people come out but they don’t have any members of their family who are queer,” Pollock says. “As a younger person, you don’t necessarily have another gay person in your direct life to mentor you. So the opportunity for some of our seniors to kind of mentor and support our youth, it’s really powerful in a community that doesn’t have that.”&�Բ�����;

This story was funded by a grant from Kendeda Fund, as part of the YES! series “.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein.

Even as we continue to —the shooter’s motive, the acts of heroism and sacrifice made by people who only wanted to gather in love, safety, and community—it’s important to be honest about what we know. Club Q was not simply “a nightclub.” It was for LGBTQ people to gather in Colorado Springs. The politically conservative city of less than 500,000 on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains is circled by five military bases (including the Air Force Academy) and several prominent, well-funded that have been drumming up anti-LGBTQ sentiment for decades. 

The gunman opened fire moments before the clock struck midnight, signaling the beginning of Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), an annual observance of the ever-growing list of transgender people killed by hate violence. At least one of the five people killed at Club Q was an out transgender man; his name was no doubt added to the ceremonial reading of names in somber gatherings around the country on Sunday. 

Club Q was hosting a weekend of events to commemorate TDOR, including a drag show on Saturday night, and an all-ages drag brunch scheduled for Sunday morning. Events like these by far-right, anti-LGBTQ groups, including the Proud Boys—who have showed up to harass families at drag queen story hours in , , , and other states this year. 

On a local scale, the member of Congress representing Colorado Springs—Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, who just secured re-election by a razor-thin margin—has spent much of her time in Washington , including introducing legislation that would criminalize gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. On Sunday, “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families, adding, “This lawless violence needs to end and end quickly.” Out lawmakers, including Brianna Titone, the first out trans woman elected to Colorado’s state legislature, were , noting that Boebert not only opposes common-sense gun control, but also has promoted the anti-LGBTQ myth that gay, transgender, and queer people target children for sexual abuse. 

The death, devastation, and despair in Colorado today is the tragic but predictable outcome of relentless fearmongering, of hate speech allowed to go unchecked on major broadcast and social networks, and of legislation that attempts to control and punish people deemed “different” simply by the nature of their existence. All of this, in a country that refuses to implement even basic gun control measures that might have kept weapons like the AR-15 used at Club Q (and in ) out of the hands of people who use them to commit mass murder.

Many of us have seen the writing on the wall. Queer people have been bracing for another attack like this, and many have been sounding the alarm for years. Sunnivie covered the Pulse massacre in Orlando in 2016, and it’s impossible to ignore the parallels with the attack on Club Q—and what members of our community have learned about how to protect each other since then. In Orlando, police waited hours to enter Pulse, likely resulting in additional fatalities. In Colorado Springs, reports indicate that a transgender woman and an with his wife and daughter, actively fought, disarmed, and detained the gunman before police arrived. They undoubtedly saved countless lives. We have always been the ones to keep each other safe—but this rises to a new level, where LGBTQ people and our loved ones now carry active combat training and knowledge of emergency medical care to a night out with our community. 

It doesn’t have to be like this.

There’s little doubt that the mass shooting at Club Q is the horrific result of rising anti-LGBTQ sentiment. There’s also little doubt that it will happen again unless we, as a collective community—straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, nonbinary, and cisgender—make a serious commitment to act. We must commit to stopping queerphobic and transphobic legislation, to publicly and privately challenging anti-LGBTQ rhetoric spewed by politicians and people we’re in community with, and to protecting LGBTQ people at all costs. 

That’s what YES! is about: bringing people together to explore solutions that transform our world for the better. The mass shooting at Club Q might not change gun laws, but it should be a rallying cry for all those committed to a world where LGBTQ people are free—free to exist as we are, free to thrive, and free from hatred. We deserve that—and so do each and every one of you.

Raeyun, a queer Filipino trans student, was carefully navigating the stairs down and paused midway. He was looking for me. Most lighting work had to be done during blackouts, so often Raeyun did not have much to do during regular rehearsals. Instead, we sat in the tech booth and hung out.

Sometimes he wrote fan fiction, which he referred to as his “gaymances”; other times he drew on his phone. Mostly, we talked.

Up in the booth, Raeyun pulled out his phone and started scrolling through photos of his favorite K-pop artists. He wanted me to see what he saw: beautiful, idolized, masculine men who were wearing skirts, crop tops, and eyeliner.

Raeyun loved K-pop. He had a singer from NCT as the backdrop on his phone. Raeyun’s adoration was not just about the music. He described K-pop as a world in which men of color could engage with their gender expression and each other in ways that felt distant and not quite possible to him.

As he was flicking through photos of all the fashion styles he admired and limning the possibilities of femme masculinity, I felt acutely aware of my recorder tucked into my backpack downstairs in the auditorium seats, turned off and unhelpful.

Got Trans?

East City High is an imposing building that encompasses a full city block and enrolls around 1,800 students. It has four floors, several outbuildings, an auto shop, a turf field, a track, and tennis courts. A local nonprofit runs a community gardening program from the grounds, and in the spring, local elementary school children regularly gather there, learning about seeds and plants.

East City High occupies the unceded lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Squamish Nations. This area, which is now known as the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, has been split into several neighborhoods, though it is often simplified into the east and west side. The west side is associated with wealth and understood as having better schools and opportunities. The east side is positioned as grittier and more politically progressive.

I was at East City High conducting an ethnography on the ways gender-nonconforming youth navigated their genders as they moved through different spaces and relationships at school. In my year at East City High, I accompanied youth to their classes, joined in during their extracurricular activities and clubs, ate lunch with them, attended their performances, and hung out in hallways, in tech booths, and on the peripheries of classrooms.

Sometimes we skipped school together, met up in cafés, and just roamed the halls. We texted (often). They taught me how to play Dungeons & Dragons, introduced me to the world of K-pop, schooled me on what TV shows I really should have been watching all along, and read me their writing. 

Many of these young people were nonbinary and genderfluid. Sometimes they used the term “trans,” though they also struggled with not feeling “trans enough.” They talked about themselves as gay, queer, bisexual, pansexual, trans, gender-nonconforming, genderfluid, and nonbinary. These words overlapped and existed together, in sometimes seamless and other times uneasy ways. 

Therefore, I most often use “gender-nonconforming” and “trans,” an umbrella term for any person whose gender does not align with the one they were designated at birth, to signal how the youth desired to be recognized as trans and, at times, held this desire for recognition in tension.

The Labor of Gender Legibility

Over the year I spent moving alongside six youths in grades 9–12 at East City High, I noticed that youth performed myriad forms of labor throughout a school day to exist as gender-nonconforming. This labor was in response to the people, the physical environment, the curriculum, and the policies that reproduced narrow understandings of trans identity that did not have space for the capaciousness of their relationships to gender. At times, this labor was apparent and perceptible as work.

Youth corrected adults when they were misgendered and deadnamed or spoke to teachers and administrators to secure accommodations in their classes. Other times, this labor was unnoticed and devalued, as with Raeyun’s sharing of K-pop photos in the tech booth.

Though youth regularly engaged in small acts of resistance and rebellion by escaping into their own spaces or disappearing into their writing during classes, this behavior was not acknowledged as important, as valuable, or as a form of intervention.

I take seriously their daily acts of trans life as forms of labor. I consider how in the tech booth, for instance, Raeyun was engaged in not only the labor of survival but also the work of utopic world-building. He was creating another world to exist in while at East City High through the work of caring—for himself, for his gender, and, ultimately, for the burgeoning trans community he was cultivating through this labor.

During my year at East City High, I observed many teachers respond with care and concern to the idea of trans youth and to the trans youth they were aware existed. This response aligns with recent scholarship on the privileging of visibility as a metric when working with and supporting trans students in schools.

Overwhelmingly, when East City High teachers were aware of a trans student, they endeavored to support this young person. This support was framed within an accommodations approach, which has become the dominant strategy for pursuing trans-inclusivity in Canadian schools. 

Teachers assisted students in accessing workarounds in physical education classes or changing their names and pronouns. At times, this support was seamless and useful. At other times, it was awkward and halting. However, it was always reactive, compelled either by adults’ awareness of a trans student in their class or by a student making themselves explicitly known as trans to an adult.

The administrators, teachers, and staff promoted this progressive version of the school in part through visuals. As one entered, one of the first visible images was a painted land acknowledgment expressing awareness of the Indigenous peoples on whose land the school was built. Throughout the school, there were poster campaigns denouncing racism and homophobia. 

The narrow hallway leading into East City High’s theater studio was lined with posters from old productions, potted plants, and a couple of couches. In this hallway, there was also a queer and trans visibility campaign, mostly obscured by the plants, that featured photos of celebrities and asked, “Got Pansexual? Got Trans? Got Two-Spirited? Got Femme?”

Scarecrow Jones, a mixed-race, nonbinary grade 9 student, abhorred this campaign. On many occasions, they ranted about the wording of this display: “What, like, I mean, have I got the disease, do you mean? Oh man, are you coming down with the bug?” Scarecrow Jones offered, “At least it’s not blatant homophobia… They’re trying, which I guess is nice, but at the same time, it’s the bare minimum form of representation that’s not accurate at all.”&�Բ�����;

Scarecrow Jones did not see themself in these posters, but they reckoned that it was a nice attempt by East City High to recognize that trans people might exist.

Frequently unnoticed was the labor that youth performed to construct ways of existing that were unrecognizable to the adults at the school. At times alone and at times collaboratively, gender-nonconforming youth at East City High worked not just to understand and resign themselves to the circumstances and limitations of the school but to create trap doors—spaces that did not require them to show up the same way from hour to hour or day to day.

These were spaces where they could be flamboyantly gay trans men who gushed about wearing halter tops, or long-haired, nonbinary, mixed kids who sometimes did not know if they were having a boy day until they went to bed that night. Gender-nonconforming youth created both physical and fantastical trapdoors where they could exist in relation to their genders in ways that adults in the school either did not notice or could not understand. 

Their practices of world-making were often undetected because they were intentionally happening in spaces that were tucked away, peripheral, and, at times, imaginary.

Theorizing Gender Nonconformity

At East City High, adults were quick to express care and concern for known trans youth because they believed that being trans makes a young person vulnerable, especially in a school. While educators accepted recognizable trans youth, they did not want youth to be trans.

When trans identity is associated with risk, then wanting a young person to be trans is analogous to wishing a young person a hard life. Therefore, despite adults’ care and support, no one ever expressed desire for a young person to be or grow up queer and trans.

As a result of the concern of adults at East City High, they were invested in helping visible trans students. I argue that this approach to trans-inclusivity both relied on and reproduced narrow terms of gender legibility that tethered gender nonconformity to risk, harm, and danger. It is critical to emphasize that most of the youth I worked with were not visible as trans. They were not recognized as trans because of the ways they were racialized, their fatness, their neurodivergence, and the many ways their genders did not align with societal expectations for what it “means” and “looks” like to be trans.

Many youth wanted to be understood as gender-nonconforming based on the ways they transgressed societal gender norms. However, youth also desired gender nonconformity precisely because it was confusing and uncategorizable. Being gender-nonconforming, therefore, meant that adults in the school would not be able to place them because they were intentionally unplaceable.

At times, their resistance was grounded in a fierce intention to disrupt cisheteronormative assumptions; at other times, it was others who resisted knowing them, unable to recognize the complexities of their genders.

I am not interested in making these youth and their genders stable and knowable. Rather, I ask: When educators respond to trans youth from places of risk and concern, how do youth work daily to create space to exist as gender-nonconforming young people? Though the youth I worked with regularly confronted transphobic, racist, and ableist ideas and narratives from adults, other students, the curriculum, and the physical space of the school, they intervened at East City High through their labor.

In North America, we are currently witnessing a heightened conversation regarding the bodies, experiences, and lives of queer and trans youth. There is a proliferation of fearmongering about their existence, leading to district-wide book bans, the blocking of gender-affirming health care, and legislation that criminalizes discussions of gender and sexuality in schools.

Often, this condemnation of queer and trans issues in schools is happening alongside the denouncing of antiracist teaching and learning. These intertwined denunciations are mired in widespread understandings of adolescence as a risky period of life and the belief that youth need adult protection to be safely guided toward adulthood.

However, the six youth I spent a year moving alongside did not predominantly understand themselves and their genders through discourses of risk and harm. Rather, they worked hard to build worlds at East City High where gender nonconformity was not defined by suffering. Their thinking illustrates the potential of a pedagogy of trans desire in schools, and I call on educators to turn away from concern and instead cultivate desire for trans and gender-nonconforming youth.

This adapted excerpt from by LJ Slovin (NYU Press, 2024) appears by permission of the publisher.

Like many people, I spent most of 2020 to 2022 indoors. The global pandemic halted most air travel in those early days and, once flights were available, I was far too concerned that people would be traveling unmasked, risking spreading the virus to those of us who had properly masked and practiced preventative measures for years. My concerns were valid. After years of no vacations, many Americans were engaging in “,” or booking all the vacations they felt they had missed out on for years. COVID cases , producing new, highly contagious variants that were less likely to cause hospitalizations but were nonetheless concerning. While saw an overall decrease in hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, the surges in rates still followed the general trend: When people are outside, so is Corona.

There is a part of me that yearns for community. I grew up in Oakland, California—a lovely place to be young and queer. Pride parades were regular occurrences both in my hometown and across the Bay in San Francisco. Even beyond June, I often saw visibly out and proud queer people of all races, ethnicities, colors, shapes, and creeds. I’d seen breasts and chests with sticky stars over the nipples at least a dozen times by the time I was in middle school. The rainbow flag was raised in doorways, windows, and planter boxes all over my town. I’m pretty sure that’s where I first learned to take Pride for granted.  

In fact, I never actually attended a Pride celebration as an out queer person until I was in my mid-30s. A few trips to New York—most of them ruined by exes—are all I really have to remember the season. My social anxiety has always been a deterrent for me as I often avoid large crowds, loud music, or spaces where I will have to be seen. After years of therapy and healing, I’m hoping to find safe queer spaces where even I can be fully “outside.”&�Բ�����;

For queers like me, who likely haven’t had many Pride experiences, this year is special. I’m turning 40 this year, a milestone for a neurodivergent heart patient who was told I would be lucky to make it to this age. Not only that, but as a professor at a private university, I am among the many people in academia navigating the political atmospheres of our college campuses, as pro-Palestinian students and faculty have been by university leadership. Meanwhile, I am watching people sit silently as Palestinians are , seeing our state governments , and witnessing an impending that offers us a vote for “” or no vote at all. So many of us queer and trans folks live in isolated communities, existing as “the only” at our jobs, in our classrooms, or in our neighborhoods. Pride has long been an opportunity to be one of the many. 

We have to remember, though, that Pride was a rebellion against police brutality. As I write in my book, , ���� was a Black butch lesbian and drag king named Stormé DeLarverie who ignited the confrontation between police and onlookers when she allegedly punched police who were arresting her.” Meanwhile, it was trans icon Marsha P. Johnson who is said to have thrown the first brick that started the Stonewall Rebellion. Johnson and her longtime comrade, Sylvia Rivera, were critical in organizing protests in those early hours, helping many white gay men see the struggle for freedom from oppression as their own. On June 28, 1970, the first Pride parade—then known as the —was held, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. We come from this rich queer and trans history. Pride is the result of this struggle.

For our Pride events to live up to the benchmarks set by our queer and trans forefolks, today’s events must consider the fullness of our identities. Pride has to be accessible and cop-free. Wheelchair ramps, hand sanitizer stations, free masks, and outdoor venues seem like the most basic accommodations. For folks who are sound- and sight-sensitive, we should have more events with sensory considerations and places where we can find quiet. We can no longer accept Pride events that only make room for one type of queer person—or that cater primarily to the corporations more invested in than collective liberation. 

The overpacked clubs, skin-to-skin dance halls, seedy bars, and sweaty festivals are emblematic of Pride. And I want all of it. I want to touch grass and dance until my knees hurt. I want to find glitter in my hair with no clear explanation of how it got there. I want to feel comfortable and safe meeting new people in intentionally created venues, given that there are so few places for us to really just be. I want to feel as though no one is watching me because I’m gay but they are watching me because I’m fabulous. I want to feel free.

Though I am firmly of the belief that I am way too old to be in “in the club,” I am confident that there are places for us queer aunties seeking community and fellowship with our comrades. Spaces centered on us and our fellowship are spaces that take away the unease and overwhelm we typically feel outside. Spaces like these help prevent us anxious gaybies, femme and butch queens, androgynous goddexes, and broken-wristed twinks from feeling the isolation we feel most everywhere else.��

So, this year, instead of worrying about my mental and physical health at Pride, I just want to be focused on asking, “Who all gon’ be there?”

For Murphy, starting her gender transition helped her focus on her education as she developed her career—but she faced near-impossible barriers at every turn. She started her transition while incarcerated with the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC), which repeatedly denied her gender-affirming care. She had to make multiple appeals before she could access hormone replacement therapy, she recalls, and she experienced severe depression because she was unable to treat her gender dysphoria. Even a recommendation by a CDOC psychiatrist wasn’t enough to qualify her for surgery. 

Her safety was also compromised, she told The 19th. Murphy was denied transfer to a women’s prison, she said, and constantly harassed and misgendered by staff and inmates while housed in men’s facilities. She endured sexual advances from other inmates and was punished through solitary confinement for speaking out when faced with threats against her life. Survival was exhausting. 

“At one point for me, if I wasn’t at my job assignment, I didn’t really come out of my room a lot,” Murphy said. “I just wanted to stay away from the drama and any type of attempt to try to victimize me.”&�Բ�����;

Murphy is one of hundreds of transgender women with similar experiences in the state. Her story is included in filed in 2019 by the law firm King & Greisen, LLP and the Transgender Law Center. According to the lawsuit, these women were frequently subjected to sexual and physical violence, and their requests for medical care were routinely ignored, in violation of the state constitution and Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. 

This March, that suit resulted in a groundbreaking that requires Colorado to overhaul how it houses incarcerated transgender women and provides medical care to all trans people behind bars. Now, Colorado’s prison system must provide the same gender-affirming health care covered by state Medicaid, and trans women must have the option to be housed with other women.

While other settlements may mandate specific changes without any input from the government agency involved, in this case lawyers worked with Colorado officials to outline a legally binding agreement. Experts hope it will serve as a model for comprehensive change for other states. Transgender women across the country face life-threatening circumstances behind bars—and the majority of them are forced to live with men. 

The roots of the case trace back to 2018 when a Black trans woman named Lindsay Saunders-Velez after she was . She later worked with attorney Paula Greisen and the Transgender Law Center to file her case. During the legal team’s investigation into Saunders-Velez’s experiences, the attorneys learned that many others in Colorado shared similar problems.

“W�� started going to the prisons to meet witnesses and we were shocked at that time to learn that there were about 150 women living in men’s facilities,” said Greisen, who is now a partner with Greisen Medlock, LLC, a civil rights and employment law firm. Over time, that number more than doubled to about 350 women, resulting in that Greisen’s previous firm filed in November 2019 against Colorado’s governor and the state’s corrections department, in which Murphy is named as a plaintiff. 

Saunders-Velez’s own case was settled in July of that year for $170,000. It did not allow her to transfer to a women’s facility, which she preferred, but she was allowed to serve the rest of her sentence in the men’s facility where she felt the safest. It also did not require broader changes to the state’s treatment of incarcerated transgender people. 

The new consent decree, however, mandates systemic changes aimed at addressing trans women’s health and safety needs. These must be implemented in full by January 2025, although it allows for some flexibility if the Colorado Department of Corrections experiences staffing or budget shortages. 

This agreement is unique because of the ways it addresses housing and care for incarcerated trans women.

Since 2003, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) has required that transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people be assessed on an individual, case-by-case basis to determine the appropriate housing for them. But the ambiguity of the law’s language gives corrections departments broad discretion to make housing assignments for transgender people. Many prisons require trans people to undergo gender-affirming surgery before they can be placed in a facility that aligns with their identity, yet accessing gender-affirming care within prison at all is often impossible or involves long wait times. 

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) publishes internationally recognized for transgender and gender-diverse people. Frequently, however, prison facilities, including those in Colorado, deny trans people’s requests for care and housing that aligns with their gender identity.

To address these concerns, the CDOC has agreed to house transgender women in one of three areas, including two new units, depending on what the person wants. These can include living in the general population at one of the state’s women’s facilities or the integration unit at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, which would help an incarcerated trans woman adapt before moving into the women’s general population. Another option is living in the voluntary transgender unit at the men’s Sterling Correctional Facility, the largest prison in the state’s system. 

Julie Abbate, a lawyer and advocate, said it is clear that a lot of thought and attention to detail was put into the Colorado agreement. “This consent decree seems to have drawn on lessons learned in the field that if you just throw a bunch of people who have lived in a facility designated for men into a facility for women—without any kind of transition period or warning—then it can really be an awful situation,” she said. Abbate worked for 15 years in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice and is now the national advocacy director for Just Detention International.

Shawn Meerkamper, managing attorney at Transgender Law Center, who worked closely on the Colorado lawsuit, said that the housing options laid out in the consent decree should help both transgender and cisgender incarcerated people adjust to new living situations. The integration unit is meant to be a temporary place to ease the transition for everyone involved, they said—while the voluntary unit is meant for trans women who don’t want to leave the only prison system that they know and have experience navigating. 

Having so many options for transgender women is unique, and is a significant achievement for state advocates, said A.D. Lewis, attorney and project manager for Trans Beyond Bars at the nonprofit Prison Law Office. Although PREA requires prison officials to ask transgender people how they want to be housed, none of his clients have ever been asked, he said. 

“In the vast majority of prison systems, they will be housed by the external appearance of their genitals at the time of booking,” he said. Some trans women are placed into women’s facilities based simply on that criteria, while others are placed into solitary confinement or isolated from the general population—often because they are such a target for violence. 

The Colorado consent decree outlines a process for making housing placement requests for transgender inmates and it sets deadlines for when the CDOC must respond. Any of the placement requests that are denied for the integration unit, voluntary transgender unit or women’s general population must be reviewed every six months. 

The agreement also directs the CDOC to update its clinical standards for medical care and to work with an independent medical and mental health consultant to provide training for staff. It allows for flexibility depending on the type of medical care an incarcerated trans woman may want, Abbate said.

The policy provisions of the consent decree apply to “persons who have been, are, or will be incarcerated in the CDOC and who have, at any time, identified themselves to CDOC during their incarceration as transgender women,” according to the consent decree.

These changes will make transgender women behind bars safer, experts told The 19th—which is sorely needed, as the problems in Colorado are part of a pattern throughout the country. D Dangaran, director of gender justice at Rights Behind Bars, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, takes on legal cases for incarcerated transgender people who are being denied gender-affirming care and other needs. Trans people behind bars are misgendered, deadnamed, forced to endure strip searches, they said—and these everyday violations of bodily autonomy are torturous. 

“Violence occurs behind bars on a daily basis for all trans people, especially trans femme people,” they said. 

Transgender people behind bars—particularly women housed with cisgender men—experience a of sexual violence, harassment, and assault in prisons. It is still rare for transgender women to be housed in women’s facilities, Dangaran said.

Researchers are in the early stages of understanding the outcomes of policies that aim to support incarcerated transgender people, since there are so few examples of inclusive policies to learn from, said Elana Redfield, federal policy director at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. “There’s a huge need for more information,” she said. “On their experiences and particularly what policy changes actually make a real, concrete, measurable improvement for them.”&�Բ�����;

In California, such an experiment is currently underway. In 2020, the state that requires transgender women to be placed in a women’s facility if they ask to be. The law went into effect in 2021. Yet Lewis, who works closely with trans clients in California, said that in the three years since then, only 44 people have been approved for transfer out of hundreds who have requested it. There is a huge backlog of requests and no formal administrative policy on how the state’s corrections department should address it. 

“I think it would take over a decade for them to house the rest of the people that have requested to be reviewed for housing in a women’s facility. That’s just trans women,” Lewis said. “So we’re talking about pretty significant delays.”&�Բ�����;

Frequently, prison facilities only change their policies on housing or gender-affirming care if a lawsuit forces their hand, Dangaran said. 

Donna Langan federal prisoner to receive gender-affirming surgery in December 2022 after she sued the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, according to her lawyers. In June 2022, Cristina Nichole Iglesias to receive gender-affirming surgery while in federal prison. She received her treatment in 2023. 

Even with a court win, implementation can be slow or further enforcement may be required.

Ashley Diamond after she was held in men’s prisons, where she reported being sexually assaulted multiple times and denied hormone treatments. In 2016 she won an undisclosed settlement, which prompted policy changes in Georgia. Diamond in 2023 because the state failed to provide her adequate health care or protect her from sexual assault after a second incarceration, according to her complaint. Ultimately, Diamond withdrew her second lawsuit, citing mental health reasons.

As for Murphy, she never got gender-affirming surgery while in prison. She was released in May 2020 and was able to get the surgery last year—since it was covered by Colorado Medicaid, she didn’t have to pay out of pocket for the expensive procedure.

The settlement reached alongside the consent decree also requires the state prison system to pay over $2 million in damages to members in the class action suit, which Murphy sees as an acknowledgment that the state did something wrong, she said. The policies brought by the consent decree are going to make “some monumental and systematic changes in the system,” Murphy said. “I feel like it will be a catalyst for the rest of the country. A blueprint.”

Consent decrees, while legally binding, must also be monitored for enforcement. The limited data collection inside prisons can make the process of determining outcomes for transgender people a challenge, Abbate said. Surveying the affected women about their experiences is one important way to understand the effectiveness of a particular change, she said.

And in the Colorado case, if the state prison system falls out of compliance with the consent decree, they can be taken to court again. The Transgender Law Center will stay in touch with plaintiffs as well as with the outside experts who will help implement the new policies, in order to make sure the state is following through on its obligations. 

These changes will show other courts what is required for incarcerated trans people to be safe, even if it’s not binding precedent in other states. The policy changes mandated by the Colorado consent decree are groundbreaking in their breadth, Dangaran said—and hopefully, those changes will play out more effectively than in California.

“If it’s what the people in Colorado really wanted and needed, that itself is going to create an impact that will have ripple effects—and that is a carceral intervention that could lead to a lot of good,” they said. “Or we could find after five years of this that it didn’t.”&�Բ�����;

This story was originally published by .

Since 2021, PEN America has recorded cases of book bannings—a staggering number on the rise. In just the first half of the 2022–’23 school year, PEN America saw a compared to the previous six months. A striking written for and by the LGBTQ community.��

“The real power of a book is that they open up a different world to readers. And what people want to ban is our worlds and our lives,” says Julie R. Enzser, Ph.D., editor and publisher of the lesbian literary and art journal . “Book bans are a concrete strategy [used] by folks who are interested in denying the existence of LGBTQ people and people of color who have ideas that challenge white hegemony.”

Book bans—which describe any action taken to limit access to a book—can happen through a variety of channels. On a local level, parents or an individual may decide to challenge a book in their local libraries or schools, triggering a review of the titles, and often their removal from shelves. Regardless of the motivation behind these complaints, the impact is undeniable: In Florida, following the complaints of a single man. There are also organized, large-scale efforts from far-right parent groups like Moms for Liberty, which lobbies school districts and officials to oppose curriculum and books that are LGBTQ inclusive or related to critical race theory. 

The targeting of books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color isn’t new—author George M. Johnson, who wrote about growing up as a Black queer man in the oft-banned 2020 memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, has spoken openly about the connections between . But what is new is the of these book bans—and their symbiotic relationship with conservative and anti-LGBTQ legislation. 

“The bans and challenges are resulting in proposed legislation or [passed] legislation,” says Leigh Hurwitz, the collections manager at Brooklyn Public Library. “They are targeting lists of hundreds of books in some cases. [It’s] not just a single person coming to a PTA meeting talking about a single book.”&�Բ�����;

In 2021, the Oklahoma state senate, for example, that would ban all books that dealt with sex, sexuality, and gender identity from public school libraries. �鶹���¼� recently in Utah, a to “objectively sensitive” materials and books—allowing public school employees to be charged with a misdemeanor if banned books are found in their classrooms. Meanwhile in Florida, some school districts are due to recent, and incredibly vague, state laws. At the same time, states that targets queer, and especially trans, access to education, health care, and other basic human rights. 

LGBTQ youth are particularly vulnerable to book bans, as they may not have the means to buy, find, or keep a book outside their school or public library. And while by publishers, authors, and advocacy groups, most young people can’t afford to wait for slow-moving legal action. Given the stakes, the role of librarians, publishers, and grassroots organizers are critical in the fight to maintain access to these cherished queer and trans stories. 

Libraries as a Lifeline

The first line of defense is libraries. For Hurwitz, there are two main strategies for protecting book access—administrative and communal. Libraries have policies to handle bans, but often these procedures aren’t being used. “In many cases, books are just taken off the shelf once someone complains, and that’s not what should be happening,” says Hurwitz. Clear, protective policies are needed so that librarians can field complaints and point to a systemic response. And there are organizations there to help—the American Librarian Association for libraries and individuals navigating a ban.

At the same time, libraries are also urgent sites for youth organizing, which is why Hurwitz helped develop through the Brooklyn Public Library. Launched in 2022, Books Unbanned provides youth all over the country with free, no-questions-asked access to the library’s entire digital collection, as well as access to book clubs, a podcast, and intellectual freedom forums. Recently, the program also launched the training, where youth can learn hands-on advocacy skills and fight censorship through civic engagement.

“Teens are so aware that books are extremely powerful for learning more about themselves and the world. They’re a force for change,” says Hurwitz. By leveraging youth engagement, libraries and programs like Books Unbanned empower the and advocate for their right to read.

Beyond the Shelves

Still, access to queer and trans stories can’t rely solely on institutions—independent publishers, informal advocacy networks, and tight-knit social groups all create vital points of access. 

Sinister Wisdom, for example, not only publishes new lesbian writing, but also recontextualizes and redistributes rare, formerly out-of-print works through its , which has published works by banned author Audre Lorde, as well as authors like Pat Parker, Judy Grahn, and Beth Brant. In this way, access to LGBTQ texts isn’t just about fighting a wave of book bans. It’s about challenging a publishing landscape that allows vital LGBTQ books to fall out of distribution in the first place. Likewise, Sinister Wisdom offers an dating back to 1976 and free books for incarcerated women.

“What we’re really trying to do is bring people together to organize around books, to talk about books, but also to really know one another and to really expand our sense of what it means to be a lesbian in the world today,” says Enzser. “W�� always need to bring back stories from our history to talk about our future.”&�Բ�����;

Others look towards the internet. , an independently run online database, was launched in 2019 by Ash*, a trans woman and researcher, after she realized there was no centralized location for free, trans-related texts.

“W�� believe education should be free and knowledge shouldn’t be behind a paywall,” says Ash. There are dozens of volunteers who manage the growing collection of more than 2,000 texts, and the estimated 120,000 yearly visitors to the site. And the independence of sites like Trans Reads makes them less susceptible to pressure by school administrators, lawmakers, or parents to remove books. Simply put, anyone can on Trans Reads any time, for free. 

The project is dedicated to Leslie Feinberg—a butch lesbian, author, and transgender activist who released the 20th-anniversary edition of hir canonical, banned novel Stone Butch Blues for free in 2014 shortly before hir death. “The novel was a way for trans, gender nonconforming, and queer people to realize ourselves. It told us we aren’t alone,” says Ash.

Like Ash, Kayleigh Lassonde was changed by this single banned queer book. In 2023, a friend gifted Lassonde a copy of Stone Butch Blues—a text Lassonde was always drawn to, but felt hesitant to read alone. “The idea of experiencing and reading the book alongside fellow butches made the content feel significantly more approachable,” says Lassonde. Inspired by Feinberg, Lassonde launched Butch Nook in February 2024, a New York City–based book club for butch, stud, and masc-identifying folks. The first book discussion welcomed 23 people and since launch, 70 people have filled out the interest form.

“Right now in the United States we are in a moment of extreme censorship and historical erasure. There are people working at this very moment to remove as much evidence of queer and trans existence from the law as they can,” says Lassonde. “At the Butch Nook we are providing space and resources for butches to not only read and discuss censored literature, but to understand what meaningful solidarity looks like. The group may bring people together through our shared identity, but our purpose goes beyond the issues of the butch community. We believe that none of us are free until all of us are free.”

Taken together, these strategies—protective, institutional policies in libraries; intentional youth development; and independent trans- and queer-led literary projects—work to create a world in which queer and trans stories aren’t just accessible, but abundant. 

* Ash requested to use a pseudonym to protect her from professional reprisal and the risk of doxxing. Read YES!’s policy on veiled sources here.

10 Banned LGBTQ Books for Your Reading List

The author and the sources they spoke to for this article have curated a reading list of their recommendations for oft-banned books by, for, and about LBGTQ people. Bring a bit more color to your spring reading list by adding these titles:

by Maia Kobabe

Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer is one of my personal favorite banned books. Kobabe has been at the forefront of censorship and we always need more youth-oriented comics and literature like eir graphic novel!
—Ash, Trans Reads

by Kyle Lukoff and by JR and Vanessa Ford

Although literature by, for, and about trans youth has historically been overwhelmingly white, new books like When Aidan Became a Brother by Kyle Lukoff and Calvin by JR and Vanessa Ford speak to the stories of trans kids of color. Unfortunately, these books are almost immediately targeted with bans upon publication.
—Ash, Trans Reads

by Trung Le Nguyen

This award-winning YA graphic novel roots itself in the past, the present, and the timeless realm of fairy tales. Every night since he was a kid, Tiến and his mother, Hiền, have read each other fairy tales from the local library, a tradition that continues through to Tiến’s adolescence. Told from both of their perspectives, we see them learn about each other through stories: Tiến’s grappling with how to come out as gay and Hiền’s omnipresent memories of the family she left behind in Vietnam. now at Brooklyn Public Library!
—Leigh Hurwitz, Books Unbanned

by Alison Bechdel

Bechdel’s rich graphic novel about growing up in a funeral home, coming out, and thinking about her father’s homosexuality is a romp through queer literary culture and contemporary lesbian communities. It is wonderful in every way.
—Julie R. Enszer, Sinister Wisdom 

by Alice Walker

The Color Purple is a novel written in letters about two sisters, Celie and Nettie, in rural Georgia. It is gorgeous and difficult and challenging and provocative—and it won multiple awards when it was published and continues to delight audiences today, not only as a novel but also as a film and stage play. Our lives would be diminished immeasurably if we could not read and grapple with The Color Purple.
—Julie R. Enszer, Sinister Wisdom 

by Leslie Feinberg

Originally published in 1993, Stone Butch Blues tells the life of Jess, a stone butch living a working-class life in 1950s New York. Banned shortly after its publication, Stone Butch Blues is a call to action, exploring identity, violence, trangender and lesbian community, and the power of organizing.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

by Jonathan Evison

Lawn Boy tells the story of Mike Muñoz, a Chicano man living in Washington state, who, after getting fired from a dead-end landscaping job, is trying to figure out exactly what the American dream means for him. With humor and wit, Lawn Boy explores capitalism, class, discrimination, and sexuality. It’s the perfect coming-of-age novel for readers of any age.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

by Malinda Lo 

This book is at the top of my list for its emphasis on historical and cultural detail—you’ll feel immersed in 1950s San Francisco, Chinatown, and the lesbian bars of the era as Lily Hu, the main character, explores her sexuality. Last Night at the Telegraph Club was also the first YA book with a queer woman as the main character to win the National Book Award.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

by Susan Kuklin

Originally published in 2014, this book features the stories of six young trans and nonbinary youth through interviews and photography. Touching, triumphant, and sometimes heartbreaking, this book is a lifeline for not just trans youth, but also the people who care for them.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

And occasionally, an ask, on behalf of a client: “I need $100 … Do you have it?” The money might be for transportation to help get a client to an abortion clinic across the state or across state lines.

Another request might be: “I am overwhelmed; can I shift my calls to you today?” says Laurie Bertram Roberts, who runs the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund in Jackson, Mississippi.

Across conservative states and in cities such as Jackson, home of the state’s only abortion clinic, or in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, grassroots organizations like Roberts’ are working nonstop to support reproductive justice. Funding cuts and increasingly restrictive legislation have transformed large swaths of the Southeast into , where low-income women increasingly have come to depend on these groups to access abortions.

The recent surge in new laws is leaving many women with few options.

“It’s not just about taking away access from one state,” Roberts says. “It’s about making sure we have nowhere to go.”

States like Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, and Georgia have been a gathering storm around abortion access—and what many believe is the before the U.S. Supreme Court over the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion a constitutional right. Conservatives hold a 5-4 majority on the court.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey this week signed perhaps the to date, banning the procedure in almost all cases, including for incest and rape, and making an allowance only for cases where a woman’s health is at “serious” risk. Under the law, doctors who perform abortions can be charged with felonies and sentenced to up to 99 years in prison.

It’s the latest in a series of so-called “heartbeat bills” passed by Republican-controlled legislatures in six other states, including Mississippi. With limited exceptions, the measures outlaw abortions after a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, usually after six weeks, a point before most women even know they are pregnant.

So far this year, have proposed abortion bans, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America. Several have passed so-called “trigger laws,” which would make abortion illegal if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

The ACLU has said such bans are blatantly unconstitutional and has sued to block Ohio’s heartbeat bill from taking effect in July. It has already and vowed to challenge the Alabama and Georgia measures. A .

So far this year, 28 state legislatures have proposed abortion bans.

Reproductive justice advocates and their allies see these cases as real-life Handmaid’s Tale scenarios. They have been raging on social media and scrambling for women in need.

Amanda Reyes, executive director of Yellowhammer Fund in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, said her office on Wednesday fielded so many frantic calls from scared, confused women that she pinned a message to its Twitter account: “YOU CAN STILL GET AN ABORTION IN ALABAMA!”

“This happens every time there’s a restriction,” says Reyes, whose organization, like Roberts’ Mississippi fund, also helps low-income women get to and pay for abortions.

She said one call was from a woman who wanted to know if she could “self-manage” an abortion based on the supplies she had on hand.

“This is the danger of these kinds of things.”

Both Yellowhammer and Robert’s Mississippi Fund are part of the National Network of Abortion Funds, which provides funding to help remove the financial and logistical barriers to abortion access. It supports dozens of funds across the country, including across the Southeast. It is one of across the country working to help make abortion more accessible, especially for lower-income women.

“We see people facing the most extreme financial and social barriers to getting an abortion,” Reyes says. People sometimes roll their eyes when they hear about a typical case: “a minor who is disabled and her parents who are poor and undocumented. That is normal for us. That’s what we get every day.”

Yellowhammer volunteers started out as clinic escorts, but Reyes said she always had the idea of starting an abortion fund. “Then Trump happened,” she says. And the clinic protestor rhetoric he espoused, unheard of at that level before then, created more of an urgency.

She funded the first abortion in January 2018, and more than 300 abortions last year. She expects to do 1,000 this year.

“You can hear the fear in people’s voices when they call us—nervous and scared. They are talking to complete strangers” about intimate details of their lives.

“We tell them, ‘We’ve got your back” … And you can literally hear a huge sigh of relief.”

In Mississippi, Roberts, who was raised religious and held anti-abortion beliefs until her own changed her, operates under the motto “by any means necessary.”

She helps clients pay for abortions but also for things like transportation and child care, or for airfare, hotels, and food when they need to travel away from home. Clients are assigned abortion doulas, who might accompany them or be available and on call.

She recalls one client who at 25 weeks pregnant flew—for the first time—out of state for an abortion. “We were literally on call the entire time she was” in Colorado, she says. And Roberts cultivated a contact on the ground there to help her.

Roberts embraces a more holistic approach by also offering services to women who are pregnant and parenting. For example, one client whose abortion she funded a few years ago is now getting help while she’s pregnant.

People who want to help, she says, “need to think about what they are willing to do. What’s your threshold for resistance?”

Beyond Planned Parenthood and NARAL fighting to protect reproductive rights in many parts of the U.S., there are organizations seeking to make abortion more accessible, especially for lower-income women.

Here are some located across the Southeast:

Access Reproductive Care Southeast, ARC, is a volunteer organization in 12 Southeastern states that help people access reproductive care.

National Network of Abortion Funds is a network of over 80 funds that helps lower-income individuals access abortion care.

Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund is volunteer-run group that helps people access abortion in Mississippi.

The Yellowhammer Fund is based in Alabama and provides funding for abortions as well as help with other obstacles, such as travel and lodging.

As House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a post-failure news conference: “Obamacare is the law of the land … We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.”

For his part, Trump (who, of course, says he is not to blame for the loss) “The best thing politically is to let Obamacare explode.” He called the law “totally the property of the Democrats” and said that “when people get a 200 percent increase next year, or a 100 percent or 70 percent, that’s their fault.”

The president and his administration can do a lot to make that happen. The secretary of Health and Human Services has extraordinary authority under the Affordable Care Act and can use the power of regulation to . There will be many battles ahead on the regulation front.

But, and this is the good part, states will have a say in this too. And there is the potential for a few states to engage in experiments that might improve the law. The question here: Is the administration willing to work to improve insurance options for Americans or is it more interested in punishing Democrats? (Yeah, I know, but there is a political upside to answering that question correctly.)

Here’s the thing: There is a crisis in insurance markets. And a bipartisan solution, meaning most Republicans working in partnership with Democrats, is the best way to reach a solution.

There are three ways most of us get health insurance: our employers, public insurance such as and , and the individual market when we buy our own insurance policies. Employer-based care is an accident of history (it’s a long story) and has been . Public health insurance has been growing (something the conservatives in Congress really object to because it codifies the notion that health care is a right), and under the Affordable Care Act the number of people who have individual insurance coverage has increased from about 10.6 million to 15.6 million.

Much of the current health insurance debate is about that individual market. Even if it is the smallest part of the problem, it’s important to understand, as :

Individual markets were troubled prior to the ACA’s enactment in 2010. One reason was that premiums for these policies were increasing more than 10% a year, on average, while the policies themselves had major deficiencies. They often excluded pre-existing conditions, charged higher premiums for people with health risks and for young women, placed limits on annual and lifetime benefits, or refused to renew policies for individuals who became sick. Many people who tried to buy plans were turned down. In 2010, an estimated who had tried to buy a plan in the individual market over the prior three years reported that they were turned down, charged a higher price, or had a condition excluded from their plan because of their health.

Thus “returning to the status quo ante—before the ACA—is not a viable option for the individual markets.”

The fix does not involve a “great mystery,” according to Blumenthal and Collins. It’s simply making certain that more young people buy insurance to help pay for the higher health care costs of older Americans. The bigger the pool, the lower the cost. (Which is why single payer works as a public policy.)

One part of that solution is to increase the government subsidies so more people will buy in. That’s how the insurance market could work better.

Where does Indian Country fit into this matrix?

There is a legal understanding that the Indian health system is federal obligation that stems from the promises made in treaties to provide doctors and nurses to reservation communities. Yet no Democrat or Republican government has ever—ever—proposed fully funding that Indian health system. Members of Congress often acknowledge the treaty responsibility but have never followed those words with an adequate budget.

No Democrat or Republican government has ever—ever—proposed fully funding that Indian health system. 

The Affordable Care Act separates insurance from health care delivery. It basically makes the Indian health system (both the government-operated Indian Health Service facilities and those run by tribes and tribal organizations) medical care that’s mostly funded by federal appropriations and by insurance. Nationally that mix right now is about 80 percent appropriations and 20 percent insurance. But the insurance side of the equation under the Affordable Care Act is unlimited. That pool of money grows every time an eligible American Indian or Alaska Native signs up for insurance.

This makes full-funding of Indian health a possibility. Even better: Insurance collections remain at the local clinic or hospital. It really is the best kind of funding.

There are three ways to add money to Indian health care now.

First: �鶹���¼� American Indians and Alaska Natives can sign up for Medicaid. The fact is there are many more people eligible than have signed up. estimates that nationwide 1 million American Indians and Alaska Natives lack coverage. Already, Medicaid covers more than half of all children, but 11 percent of those children remain uninsured.

Second: �鶹���¼� American Indians and Alaska Natives can sign up for exchange plans under the Affordable Care Act. This is huge. , “If you get services from an Indian health care provider, you won’t have any out-of-pocket costs like co-payments, co-insurance, or deductibles, regardless of your income.” And this benefit has essentially a permanent open enrollment.

Signing up for insurance (including plans from an employer) makes the Indian health system stronger for everyone. It’s the same principle as any insurance: the larger the pool of people who participate, the lower the cost.

1 million American Indians and Alaska Natives lack coverage.

Third: It’s time to make the case for Medicaid expansion in state governments that have said no now that the Affordable Care Act will remain the law of the land. Currently, there’s unequal funding. States can remedy that by expanding Medicaid eligibility (even while trying some of the conservative experiments such as imposed work rules). It’s a win for Indian Country when a state does this because it increases the number of people eligible for insurance. It’s a win for the state because Indian Health Service patients are a 100 percent federal obligation— so the state will be reimbursed by Washington, D.C.

expansion. And it’s likely that the Trump-Ryan failure will push other state legislatures to consider this approach. Indian health patients would benefit from Medicaid expansion in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Utah, Idaho, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

It might be easy to see the defeat of Trump and Ryan’s plan as a huge win. But it is also a warning sign—make that a flashing red light with sirens—that Congress is deeply divided and cannot govern.

The same Republican divisions that killed their health reform plan will kill President Trump’s budget (thank you). But it will also make it nearly impossible to pass any kind of budget. The best outcome might be a “continuing resolution,” a status quo budget.

An even bigger challenge will be for Congress to pass an increase in the debt ceiling. Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin informed Congress that the United States reached its limit on March 15. The Treasury is now juggling accounts so that the government can continue to pay bills.

Conservatives in Congress—actually, just about every member of Congress—hate this part of governing. But a no vote here has enormous consequences for everyone’s finances: the markets. There is an absolute requirement that Congress increase that borrowing authority. It will be a nasty fight.

Of course there is a solution: Create a new coalition of Republicans and Democrats. This works in state legislatures across the country (most recently Alaska). It takes 216 votes to pass legislation in the House so a working body of 22 or so Republicans, plus the 194 Democrats in the House, could accomplish a lot together. But that would mean rethinking the role of party politics. And governing.

This article was originally published at Trahant Reports. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

For those of us who aspire to an equitably shared multiracial democracy, freedom and safety require, at minimum, dominion over your own body and responsibility for the well-being of the larger community, including those with less power and fewer resources.

That blending of personal and communal well-being has been at the heart of, an annual, national event initiated nine years ago by the —which has for 25 years organized to shift resources away from prisons and punishment and reinvest in our communities.

NOSL was our response to the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American boy who was killed by a Florida neighborhood watch captain. The purpose of this yearly event is to reimagine safety as dependent on community, and centered on health rather than on punishment. It is held on the first Tuesday in August every year and organized as an alternative to the police-centered National Night Out to redefine how we can create safety and joy in our communities without policing. Since its inception, NOSL has spread across the country, with more than  to redefine safety centered on the power of community, not cops.

Just a few weeks ago, I joined more than to celebrate that alternate vision for public safety at the 2022 NOSL. There was music and face painting, food and workshops, free books and diapers, and a drag show. Unlike the police-centric National Night Out, which pushes a narrative of “” as the pathway to community safety, NOSL models how we can be together in secure and supportive communities.

But underlying it all was the profound understanding of how that vision is endangered in today’s America. Some of those threats have roots going back to the institute of slavery. As author Michelle Alexander exposed in her groundbreaking 2010 book, our prison industrial complex of incarceration and detention is too often a rebranded form of cruel bondage and servitude, falling most heavily on Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

Those racial disparities have been so sharply and painfully revealed over the past few years by a succession of highly publicized murders and deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of police and within our prisons. While local governments have continued to fund law enforcement and expand jail budgets, police continue to kill people of color: .

The racial and gender hatred fomented by Trump and embraced by far too many of our citizens has added layer upon layer of physical danger and spiritual trauma to vulnerable communities. The same “MAGA” politicians and right-wing fanatics who howled about mask mandates and vaccinations as overly intrusive show no compunction about asserting dominance over the bodies of people of color, the LGBTQ community, or the women who make up more than half this nation.

We have witnessed the vilification of immigrants, young children torn from their parents, and young adults who have never known another home outside the U.S. needlessly deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We have seen Asian elders and transgender teens increasingly become the targets of violence and abuse, fearful of walking to the supermarket or attending school. And this year, our courts have yet again failed to keep us safe by ripping away the bodily autonomy and freedom of pregnant people across the country.

NOSL invites us all to expand our definitions of freedom and public safety by seeing the intertwined nature of both the challenges of violence that happens in our communities and the solutions to keep each other safe from state violence and the systems that harm us. Even within our own communities of color, queer people, transgender people, and gender-nonconforming people have been historically marginalized. That has made them doubly vulnerable to mistreatment and violence within the carceral system as well. NOSL provides an opportunity to educate us all on those intersections.

This year, as part of NOSL, we commissioned  to reflect on what safety means to them. The artwork they created reflected the hunger we feel to hold our blended communities in a safe embrace. Their loving and luminous depictions emphasized that true safety and liberation go far beyond “fair and respectful” policing. Artist  reflected on their artwork for this year’s event:

“My art for Night Out for Safety and Liberation came with a lot of reflection on the recent hardships of these past few years of the COVID-19 pandemic and uprisings against state violence. This piece reimagines safety and liberation by conveying a desire to bask in rest, appreciation, and healing by way of one’s immediate natural environment; relying on your loved ones to hold you up or even teach you how to float when it’s necessary and while you can. Our work towards liberation shouldn’t come at the expense of our health and individual care.”

True safety and freedom come when we work together to heal ourselves and each other beyond the need for policing.

It comes with people having their needs met.

It comes when we invest in community-based alternatives to policing, like community mental health programs, public education, restorative justice practices, and economic justice.

True safety and freedom come when we change local, state, and national spending priorities to bolster those systemic changes and fund local community people and programs that can implement them. 

Only then can the artists’ vision become our lived reality.

But that progress is likely invisible to a casual media consumer, as coverage of these myriad efforts in mainstream media has been cursory, at best. That’s why YES! has created “Realizing Reparations,” a six-part series of deeply reported stories that illuminate the rich ecosystems of reparations already growing throughout the country. We are proud to present this series, funded by a grant from the , during Black History Month. 

As Torsheta Jackson explains in her examination of local reparations efforts, cities such as Evanston and Chicago in Illinois, as well as Asheville, North Carolina, are carrying out their own versions of reparations, paving the way for other cities around the nation to do the same.��

But in Tulsa, Oklahoma, home to arguably the clearest incident of racial harm deserving of compensation, formal reparations efforts have stalled. In a powerful report centered on Greenwood and the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Anneliese Bruner, who has deep roots in that community, explores how the descendants of survivors are rebuilding economic power.��

Meanwhile, the politically powerful state of California has gone the furthest of any state in realizing reparations. As Erin Aubry Kaplan reports, the California legislature is considering a bill based on careful recommendations by a reparations task force that it appointed some years ago. Yet the big question remains: Will there be cash compensation?

Because reparations are not restricted to compensating for the harms of slavery, they must also include recognition of the myriad lost opportunities that slavery’s legacy and ongoing systemic racism continue to deny Black people in the U.S. Torie Weiston Serdan knows firsthand the impact on Black youth who have been deprived of generational wealth. In a report that spans the nation, she examines how Black youth-centered spaces can be a form of reparations for a new generation, and explores the edges of what is possible in an economy that continues to marginalize young people of color.��

There is an urgent need for a cultural shift on reparations at a time when right-wing forces are attacking history education. Given Hollywood and social media’s outsized impact on the public discourse, Jonita Davis scours through pop culture narratives on reparations and finds that young Black influencers are pushing the envelope on how to talk about the issue in simple terms. Our series opens with a forward-thinking report, where Trevor Smith explores what it means to identify as a “reparationist.” Examining how identity politics can further social justice, he raises comparisons to distinct identities such as abolitionist or feminist and leaves readers to consider becoming reparationists on the road toward realizing reparations.

The (Identity) Politics of Reparations

Can “reparationist” be a distinct identity, akin to feminist or abolitionist, a label worn with pride by progressives who believe in reparative compensation for Black people?

By Trevor Smith

How Pop Culture Shapes Reparations

As the movement for reparations gains steam, mainstream and independent content creators continue to find new ways to advance the idea of reparative damages for Black people on screen.

By Jonita Davis

Spaces as Reparations for Black Youth

Investing in programs, resources, and physical spaces by and for Black youth is critical to narrowing generationally inherited disparities in wealth, health, and beyond.

By Torie Weiston-Serdan

Beyond 40 Acres and a Mule

Cities like Evanston, Illinois, and Asheville, North Carolina, are paving the way for local reparations in the absence of a federal plan.

By Torsheta Jackson

Will California Do Reparations Right?

California is closer than any other state to realizing reparations for Black people. Now, the state faces a make-or-break moment.

By Erin Aubry Kaplan

Rebuilding Tulsa With or Without Reparations

Tulsa’s Greenwood District is measuring its wealth in bonds between people and generations, even as reparations for the 1921 massacre remain elusive.

By Anneliese Bruner

�鶹���¼� to Explore

YES! was privileged to be the media partner of the inaugural —a historic and unprecedented national convening on reparations hosted by the Decolonizing Wealth Project. For three days in June 2023, hundreds of activists, organizers, politicians, and funders gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, to connect, collaborate, and take action to make reparations a reality in our lifetimes. On the final day of the conference, DWP announced a to support the reparations ecosystem with a new round of direct grantmaking of $3 million to be deployed in 2023, in addition to other resource and education programs to support the reparations movement over the next five years. YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar was on location in Atlanta, and had in-depth conversations with more than a dozen leaders in the reparations movement—including elders who have dedicated decades to this fight, and young people who are bringing fresh energy and momentum to the movement.

Watch these exclusive video interviews below:

This series was funded by a grant from Liberated Capital, a fund of the , which is led by Edgar Villanueva, of the Lumbee tribe, and works globally to disrupt the existing systems of moving and controlling capital using education and healing programs, radical reparative giving, and storytelling. Reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, but YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein.Read our editorial independence policy.

Chris Harris, policy director at the , explains that the 2020��demands were rooted in a vision of public safety that ensures communities have access to “different means by which people get their needs met, [and] that people’s needs are actually being met, and they’re not just being sent police because that is the only public service that the community has invested in or that’s available.” By the time the general election rolled around that November, however, establishment figures, including soon-to-be President Joe Biden, were from the demand to defund the police. Cities such as , , Austin, and Los Angeles that took initial steps to cut police funding in response to protesters’ demands soon faced challenges.��

Today, the struggle to realize the movement’s central goal of reimagining public safety continues in the streets, the conference rooms of community justice organizations, and in discussions around government budgets despite roadblocks and a lack of mainstream support. 

“The importance of this work is to see public dollars invested in and meeting the needs of people in our community and prioritizing those who have been historically marginalized,” says Harris.

Following the George Floyd protests, some cities initially made big changes, shifting hundreds of millions of dollars of city funds away from law enforcement. In August 2020, the city council in Austin, Texas, to the city’s police department budget totaling about $150 million over a year and to reallocate those funds to violence prevention, food access, and abortion access programs. That November in Los Angeles, California, , requiring that 10% of the county’s unrestricted general funds, totaling between $360 million and $900 million per year, be invested in social services and prohibiting the county from using the money on prisons, jails, or law enforcement agencies.

These wins soon faced establishment opposition. A superior court judge in Los Angeles issued a tentative ruling just months after voters approved it, claiming it improperly restricted the L.A. County Board of Supervisors from deciding how and where to spend county funds (an appellate court and upheld the measure last year). Meanwhile, the Texas state legislature passed , which levied penalties against cities that reduced police budgets. This legislation forced Austin to halt plans to reallocate police department funds and restore funds it had cut from its police budget the previous year. Similar legislation is being to ensure that even in cases of a city budget shortfall, “the police department will be the last department that would be defunded,” according to Representative David Marshall, one of the bill’s Republican sponsors.

Democratic politicians on Capitol Hill have also rejected calls to defund the police, even condemning Republican-led moves that would in federal budget appropriations using the talking point that “defund[ing] law enforcement hurts communities.” During his 2022 , President Joe Biden declared that when faced with questions about safety and justice, “W�� should all agree the answer is not to defund the police.” During Biden’s tenure, in 2023, by U.S. law enforcement than in any other year in the past decade. Since 2020, state and local governments in have also green-lit militarized police training facilities, some with federal funding.��

Research shows that the growing militarization of police forces nationwide communities and disproportionately worsens law enforcement outcomes for marginalized groups, such as disabled people and people of color. Claims that funding police training could help better protect communities fall flat, too, with research showing that even training programs designed against marginalized groups do not improve police interactions with those communities.��

Communities of color have led the movement against police violence for decades, recognizing that the institution of policing is rooted in racism. “Historically, those who were involved in lynching people in our community were local judges and sheriffs up into the 1950s and ’60s. We have continued to have similar incidents with police departments and abuse,” says April Albright, legal director of .��

With stubborn opposition from both sides of the aisle to reducing police budgets, organizers have shifted tactics. Harris says community leaders in Austin are now focused on preventing the city’s police budget from growing. They are also working on allocating funding from the city’s general fund in ways that align with some of the aims of movements to defund the police through a .

“This is a community-built and collaborated-upon set of budget recommendations at the city level, designed to invest in the community with a focus on equity, meaning particularly folks who have historically had their neighborhoods and communities disinvested by the city,” explains Harris. “W��’re pushing forward for recommendations to see services, programs, and direct dollars given to people in those communities.” A similar budget-focused initiative is .

Starting the struggle with budget allocations is practical. “Most budgets—whether at the municipal level, county level, state, or national level—almost a lion’s share of these budgets are committed to public safety. And what safety looks like, traditionally, is law enforcement,” says Albright. Most cities dedicate of their budgets to policing.

Recommendations in Austin’s annual community investment budget include funding harm-reduction services, homeless services for Black youth and adults, emergency rental assistance, and alternative forms of first response to reduce police interactions with community members in crisis. “W�� have community health paramedics and community health workers [who] have proved pivotal in responding to both health and mental health issues in the community, particularly among unhoused folks, and connecting folks with services rather than pushing them into the criminal legal system,” explains Harris.��

When armed police are dispatched to an individual in crisis, especially those experiencing a mental health crisis, results can be deadly: According to at least 20% of those killed in a police shooting since 2015 were experiencing a mental health crisis at the time.��

Austin is one of dozens of cities to non-police first-response programs since 2020. Early research on these programs suggests that not only do they improve outcomes for people in crisis but they also . The public agrees: According to a recent national survey, think “sending behavioral health care workers to certain calls related to mental health, substance use and homelessness” would help improve public safety.

Efforts like those in Austin have also garnered some institutional support, with organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) backing them as evidence-based approaches to community safety. “W��’re looking at shifting the paradigm in community safety to more front-end, solutions-driven approaches,” explains Cynthia W. Roseberry, director of the Justice Division at the ACLU.��

The ACLU recently held its on Capitol Hill to brief Congress and the White House on research showing the success of non-police first-response programs and investments in solutions to prevent crime, including addressing rising housing costs and improving access to mental health care. One of the ACLU’s asks to Congress was for $100 million to be earmarked for mobile crisis response in the appropriations process, which Roseberry says was well received by lawmakers.

There are legislative efforts already underway to reimagine public safety and first responses. Arguably, none is more promising than . This legislation, introduced by U.S. Representative Cori Bush in 2021, would establish a Division on Community Safety within the Department of Health and Human Services and provide funding for noncarceral first responders, restorative justice, and harm-reduction-based mental health and substance use treatment programs for communities nationwide.

Albright says that recent actions to stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia, and high-profile brutal crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests on college campuses have brought the demand to defund police back into the national spotlight and could help spur change. “Cop City and the movement against cop cities around the country, as well as what we see happening on campuses… is renewing the cry for folks to find a way to redirect the funds that are normally given to law enforcement to other areas,” she says.

While the demand to defund the police may not have the sort of establishment lip service it got four years ago, organizers say the issue remains top-of-mind in communities nationwide and will be on the ballot this fall. “W�� have to join forces and use every tool that we have available—from voting to protests to boycotts, whatever it is,” Albright says. “History shows us that when we do that, we win.”

Conditions at Men’s Central are so dangerous that it has been under federal oversight for . Located just minutes from downtown Los Angeles and Chinatown, the sprawling cement structure is surrounded by barbed-wire-topped walls. Inside are some 12,000 people awaiting trial after arrest, or prison after conviction—and some of the most notorious  in the country. 

Years of reform efforts driven by elected officials and federal oversight have resulted in  toward ending the neglect and countless abuses documented at the facility. Activists say it’s past time to shut down the system altogether. Grassroots groups working with the  are leading a campaign dubbed “Care First, Jails Last” that advocates replacing jails with affordable, quality housing and mental health resources. Meanwhile, the  has worked to move county revenues away from incarceration and toward community-based initiatives.

The Case of Jalani Lovett

In September 2021, 27-year-old  became one of the latest victims of the L.A. County jail system. The Oakland native was being held in solitary confinement at Men’s Central while awaiting the start of his prison sentence when he was found unresponsive in his cell. Despite having multiple injuries and deadly levels of fentanyl and heroin in his system, the county coroner ruled his death “accidental” and closed his case shortly thereafter. 

But Lovett’s mother, Terry Lovett, says there’s no good explanation for how her son, held in a single-person cell, could have obtained drugs or sustained injuries so severe that his shoulder was dislocated. She points to the , which indicated that her son had high levels of heroin and fentanyl in his system at the time of his death. “You die at 2 milligrams [of fentanyl],” Lovett says. “How did he get 10 in him?” 

Lovett is convinced that a notorious  operating inside Men’s Central, known as the “3000 Boys,” is responsible for her son’s death. In a  against the county and its former sheriff, Alex Villanueva, Lovett’s lawyers claim: “The 3000 Boys hold de facto control over the Men’s Central Jail,” and “instead of protecting and serving, deputies who are part of the 3000 Boys terrorize individuals and operate the deputy gang similarly to a street gang.”

In 2018, Villanueva became the  to be elected sheriff of L.A. County,  to policing and jails. But he proved to be a  to progressive hopes. In 2022, he  in a probe of abusive deputy gangs, and he vehemently  the closure of Men’s Central. Villanueva lost his bid for re-election in 2022 to , who ran on a platform of bringing stability and a spirit of collaboration to the office. Villanueva’s predecessor, Republican , had also promised to reform the jail system and end inmate abuse, and likewise failed to do so. Before McDonnell,  oversaw the L.A. Sheriff’s Department for half a century, before being convicted of interfering in a federal investigation into inmate abuse. 

It is against this backdrop of corruption and violence that Lovett’s lawsuit alleges nefarious conduct as the reason for her son’s mysterious death. She’s clear about the first step toward real reform: “I think first of all, you need to get rid of the [sheriff’s] deputies,” says Lovett. 

Depopulating Men’s Central Jail

Activists like Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, executive director of , one of the member organizations on JusticeLA’s executive committee, notes a “pattern in which Black and Brown mothers are finding their children dead in the county jails with no answers, with cover-ups.” He believes that beyond holding sheriff’s deputies accountable, jails ought not to exist at all. 

“People who have lost loved ones to brutality and medical abuse and negligence in those jails have actually moved the board of supervisors to close [Men’s Central],” he explains. The Care First, Jails Last campaign he backs is centered on replacing L.A. County jails with facilities that foster both mental health and restorative justice.

Mental health crises are inextricably linked to incarceration and abuse in L.A. County. Built in 1997 as an expansion of Men’s Central Jail is Twin Towers Correctional Facility, which the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department touts as the “.” Like Men’s Central, Twin Towers is also  of its approximately 3,000 residents. About one-third of all those incarcerated within the L.A. County jail system have received treatment for mental health. “By default, we have become the largest treatment facility in the country. And we’re a jail,” Tim Belavich, director of mental health for the county jail system, told NPR’s&�Բ�����;. “I would say a jail facility is not the appropriate place to treat someone’s mental illness.” Activists seeking to close the facility echo this sentiment, saying the county is simply locking up people who need mental health resources. 

“People with mental health disabilities [are very likely] to experience the type of brutality and medical abuse and negligence that is costing people their lives,” says Clayton-Johnson. Abolitionists like him say brutality and abuse are only amplified when incarceration and mental health illnesses are combined at the hands of law enforcement. In 2019, JusticeLA beat  to replace Men’s Central with a nearly 4,000-bed facility that activists decried as a “.” In September 2022, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors again considered a motion to build what the Sheriff’s Department called “.”&�Բ�����;

Again, activists succeeded in thwarting the plan, and instead pushed the board to adopt a  filed by county supervisors Hilda Solis and Janice Hahn on “developing mental health care facilities to help depopulate Men’s Central Jail”—a critical distinction from “secured mental health facilities.”&�Բ�����;

These victories signaled crucial, if preliminary, steps toward reducing the harm incarcerated people continue to experience while under the care of L.A. County. 

“There is a map, there is a solution, there is a well-researched, well-substantiated plan … that would improve the well-being of our communities and see less and less jail facilities in Los Angeles County,” says Clayton-Johnson. Part of that plan includes diverting those who struggle with mental health issues into “programs that would get them out of the jail, out of a cell, into the community, into peer-based models with clinicians on-site, and resources on-site, and permanent housing.”&�Բ�����;

“W�� know that that model works,” he adds.

Moving Money Out of Jails

 is a well-known activist who challenged longtime incumbent L.A. City Councilmember Gil Cedillo in June 2022 by running on a platform of abolishing mass incarceration—and .

The 32-year-old points to the data illustrating that jails are a racial justice issue. “In L.A. County, 50% of the people in the jail system are Latino, 30% … are Black,” she says, adding that “Black community members only make up about 9% of the population.”&�Բ�����;

Hernandez was part of the grassroots , which pushed for the demands of the Care First, Jails Last campaign to be codified into a ballot measure. 

Responding to relentless community pressure, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors convened an Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) work group, which in turn produced an  in spring 2020, built from the consensus of thousands of stakeholders. 

In fall 2020, nearly 60% of L.A. County voters , a ballot measure that came out of the ATI report. Hernandez believes Measure J “was a groundbreaking measure, written and championed by community members and organizers,” and one that “reallocates existing general funds into community investments, alternatives to incarceration, and housing.”

What’s more, Hernandez notes that Measure J “moved 10% of locally generated tax dollars back into community … to make sure that money could go specifically to Black- and minority-owned businesses.”&�Բ�����;

Progress Amid Challenges

County supervisor  was once a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the nation’s first woman Labor Secretary (under President Barack Obama). Today, she has successfully turned part of JusticeLA’s vision into reality via a newly launched project called .

Funded through federal CARES Act money, the village, which opened in summer 2021, is a 4-acre housing facility built on the site of what was to be an expanded Men’s Central Jail. The village offers shelter to the unhoused, as well as wraparound services, including mental health care. 

“Investing in an infrastructure rooted in care is necessary to not only reduce the jail population, but to provide resources that interrupt cycles of incarceration,” says Clayton-Johnson. He applauds Supervisor Solis for “driving forward an essential model of what is needed to close Men’s Central Jail; and the promise of this model should be the basis of setting a timeline to do so.”

Construction has now begun on a similar, larger project called the , part of what Solis calls a “care first infrastructure,” echoing the language used by grassroots abolition groups. 

Meanwhile, the impacts of Measure J’s passage remain unclear. Although it’s been two years since the ballot measure passed, the reallocation of funds from incarceration into social service has been slow, prompting local journalist , “Why is the current Board of Supervisors, the same one that adopted Measure J, not doing anything?”

Part of the problem is that a  challenging Measure J’s constitutionality has delayed implementation of the voter-backed measure. But crucially, Hernandez explains, “the county never needed Measure J to reallocate funds—so they renamed this effort Care First Community Investment (CFCI) and continued with implementation.” A  outlining expenditures for the diverted funds includes money for permanent housing, education, violence prevention, job training, and youth development.

����’s not perfect,” says Hernandez of the measure she helped to realize. “But it has been successful in moving money to the priorities of community. It takes a while to get here, but this is just the beginning.”&�Բ�����;

Although the  framed Hernandez’s win as “a testament to the solidifying power of the city’s progressive movement,” it remains to be seen if she can move the city and county to end mass incarceration when she takes her seat on the City Council in December 2022. 

Waiting for Justice

“I will fight until the day I die to get justice for my son,” says Terry Lovett. 

She remembers how, growing up in Oakland, her son was an athlete, winning numerous trophies for basketball and football. “He was a product of the hood,” she says, and he “went to L.A. to pursue his rap career.” She pictures him fighting for his life in his jail cell, wondering if he may have been beaten to death. She imagines him saying, “My momma is going to get y’all.”&�Բ�����;

In the meantime, Men’s Central Jail continues to operate—and continues to generate disturbing reports. In September 2022, the  in “psychological distress” had been shackled in the inmate reception center at Twin Towers for days at a time while they awaited processing. 

Conditions like those—and the high likelihood of additional fatalities within the jail system—are just a few of the reasons abolitionists like Clayton-Johnson say, “Men’s Central Jail needs to close, and … that is not up for debate.”

Given the glacial pace of federal change, cities like , and , have begun implementing their own version of reparations. And in 2020, California became the to take on the monumental task of studying the devastation wrought by centuries of racial terror and oppression against African Americans and exploring tangible compensation for harm.

California Goes It Alone

Last fall, under the leadership of , who served as a state assembly member, the California legislature establishing the first state-level reparations task force of its kind in the nation. The nine-member task force is expected to “Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, with a Special Consideration for African Americans Who are Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the United States.”

Weber, who went on to become California’s state secretary this January (becoming the first African American to assume that role), addressed the task force earlier this year, that its aim is “to heal the injustices of the past and present with tangible action, and to set a course for a better future for African Americans in the state.”

While California—which retains an arguably —might seem an odd precedent-setter on reparations considering that it was not part of the Confederacy, Weber outlined the ongoing effects of slavery still felt today. She said the task force will address “redlining, theft of labor, wealth and capital, over-incarceration, over-policing and systemic discrimination.”

The road toward reparations for African Americans has been a long one. “African Americans and descendants of slavery started to push for reparations immediately upon emancipation,” explains Lisa Holder, civil rights attorney and a member of California’s reparations task force. “Everyone’s heard of ‘40 acres and a mule.’ That was the first known push toward reparations.”

Of the appointed to California’s task force, eight, including Holder, are African American, and one, Donald Tamaki, is of Japanese descent. The group is charged with three tasks: to propose what reparations could look like, to educate the public about the task force’s study of reparations, and to make specific recommendations to the state on how to implement them.

Holder explains that the reparations task force will make “evidence-based recommendations” drawn from two years of gathering testimony and documenting the harms arising from “the original systems of oppression, like slavery and Jim Crow segregation, and the continuing and ongoing systems of oppression that we’re seeing in institutional racism and structural racism.”

“The evidence will be unassailable,” she says.

Among the witnesses who have already testified to the task force is , the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. At a Sept. 24, 2021, , Wilkerson said, “I am testifying because not enough Americans know the true and full history of our country or the origins of the divisions that we now face.”

Wilkerson believes “that knowing our country’s history is the first step toward overcoming the challenges we face as a nation.”

The Economic Harms of Racism in California

One of the most powerful stories of financial harm wrought against African Americans in California is that of the Bruce family, who in the 1920s purchased and developed many acres of beachfront property in Southern California. Members of the Bruce family, who testified to the reparations task force, were “pushed out and racially terrorized by the residents of Manhattan Beach and by the government,” says Holder.

Eventually, the Manhattan Beach City Council, using eminent domain, claimed the land, Holder explains, “as a way of making sure that that area was exclusively White.” Today, is one of the most expensive places in the nation to live.

The Washington Post related how the seizure of from its Black owners was one of many such cases of land theft across the country, and that this is “a scenario that, repeated many times over, lies at the root of the wealth gap between Whites and African Americans.”

Holder estimated that Bruce’s Beach should have “generated billions of dollars of wealth for this family,” but instead, the Bruce family “has not been able to meet many of their most basic needs.”

It’s not just historic discrimination that the task force is studying. We’re still seeing “virulent White supremacy in this country,” says Holder. The task force has also heard from witnesses about the modern versions of , where homeowners of color see their properties devalued, are quoted too-high mortgage interest rates, or are subjected to other forms of housing discrimination.

For example, Paul Austin and his wife, Tenisha Tate, who live in San Francisco, testified about the discrimination they experienced from an appraiser. The couple made to their property before expecting a bank appraisal to reflect the extent of their investment, but their home was appraised at a value far lower than they expected. They then asked a White friend to pose as the owner, and a new appraisal came back half a million dollars higher.

Holder sees Austin and Tate’s experience as proof of the ongoing racial harms in California that exist within a racially biased system, one she says is “based on the notion that White people are essentially better than Black people.” She maintains that “whether or not you consciously believe that, you are unconsciously being given that message every single day, every moment in this country, and that is why we see these legacies of oppression continuing.”

The Psychological Harms of Racism

Cheryl Grills, a professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University and a member of California’s reparations task force, says that when people think about reparations, they immediately think of the economic harms done to African Americans. But Grills points out that the “psychological and emotional harm[s], the community harm that can happen across generations” is just as severe. She sees her role in the task force as highlighting what she describes as “the health consequences of the trauma and racial stress that people experience, in particular Black folks” in California. 

Grills says she relates to the “heavy testimony” from people who have been sharing their personal family history and experiences with the task force. “I’ve been seeing the deep scars emotionally that have resulted from this exposure to racism,” she says. The “level of disempowerment, the level of oppression, of intense response, that’s necessary and exhausting to counteract the negative narrative about who we are as Black people.”

Bertha Gaffney Gorman, a Black woman whose family came to California from Clarksville, Texas, by way of New Mexico, with the task force about the years of racial and gender discrimination she experienced in her educational and employment career in Sacramento. “This has been a very emotional memory trip for me,” she told the task force.

“The negative narrative about who we are as Black people wears and tears on the very fiber of our being,” Grills says.

Can California Successfully Implement Reparations?

Holder describes the process the task force has taken as incredibly comprehensive and expansive. “There’s almost no industry that we’re not pursuing and getting evidence from, and no stone will be left unturned.” So far, it’s too early to tell what form reparations will take, but the task force will continue to gather testimony and evidence until summer 2023, after which members will compile those findings into a report and present it to the California legislature with specific recommendations for compensation.

Because the task force is the first state-level body of its kind on reparations in the country, California could set a significant precedent if the task force’s recommendations are carried out. ���� will have a major impact on the reparations movement that we’re seeing in full bloom at the local level,” says Holder.