When news arrived on May 8, 2025, that YES! would be closing, I felt shock and sadness at the end of an organization I led as founding editor and at the loss to the progressive media world. But the outpouring of social media comments lifted my spirits, reminding me of the impact YES! had on so many people—some who started reading the magazine as young people, others seasoned activists who were introduced to work that inspired them to creative new approaches.

The responses got me wondering: Are there parts of YES! that can have continued life? While the current staff and board are doing heroic work to transition the organization and keep the archives available (see below for details on a new home for the YES! archive!), I want to offer something else—a look behind the scenes at the theory and practice of change we explored during YES!’s founding years and the first two decades, when I had the honor of serving as executive editor.

And I want to consider where the YES! approach fits, if at all, during the current rise of fascism. As I worked on this essay, I came to believe that these times call us, with even more urgency, to adapt and evolve the approach we developed at YES! in many different forms.

The Secret Sauce

People often asked about the “secret sauce” that made YES! Magazine what it was. Because of its exuberant name (including the exclamation point!), some believed our purpose was simply to make people feel good—to counter the doom and gloom in much of the news. Some labeled YES! as “feel good” journalism.

While we did hope to lift people’s spirits, we emphatically did not want to encourage complacency or offer journalistic antidepressants. Instead, we wanted to encourage readers’ active engagement in change by exploring realistic possibilities for a more beautiful world and by encouraging readers to take practical steps toward transformation.

Our starting point was clear: The world as structured harms working families, people of color, the poor, middle class, and future generations, while exhausting the natural world’s life and vitality.

Many believe our current system is the inevitable outcome of human evolution. But the exploitation of extractive capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy shatters relationships among people, undervalues individuals (especially people of color and other marginalized groups) and communities, exploits nature, and concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else.

Our question was this: If this destructive world order is failing us, what might replace it? Who is creating beautiful alternatives, liberated spaces, generative art and technology, economic forms that liberate creativity and cooperation, and better ways of life? What models from around the world, especially from Indigenous communities, can inspire us?

We wanted to be rigorous about real solutions. Well-intentioned acts aren’t real solutions unless they address the underlying structures—corporate capitalism, extractive treatment of people and nature, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other systems that keep groups oppressed.

Weaving New Stories

One way to approach these questions is to take a critical look at the dominant worldview that people today rely on to make sense of our world and to explore  emerging worldviews. A worldview is the set of beliefs most people accept without question. But, given the many ways the dominant worldview is failing people, we were looking for a new story about how we might live together on this finite planet.

Where could such a story come from? No single individual can dream it up, and we emphatically did not set out to create that story at YES! Instead, we set out to report on new stories of human possibility that are unfolding everywhere, woven from multiple experiences, from courageous visionaries, activists and community builders, and from diverse cultures—ancient and emerging. Making these stories visible could help bring to light the emergence of a new story.

We also reported on practical ways to make the changes in keeping with these emerging worldviews, especially lifting up community-scale stories, seeking out ordinary people who brought passion, imagination, and integrity to their work. We modeled approaches to change accessible to everyone that created possible avenues to transformation.

We always looked for ways to nourish our readers’ souls, realizing that all of us deserve healing and a chance to grow in wisdom and connection. We believed in unleashing our readers’ radical imagination and supporting their right and capacity to make change so that our society—rather than serving a few at the expense of everyone else—works for all.

Learning from History, Centering Excluded Voices

Understanding our current moment required understanding how we got here. Each of us inherited an unbroken chain of ancestral love and support, but also a legacy of trauma—slavery, massacres, land theft, colonialism, and shattered communities. And we inherited a dominant economic system and culture that treats humans and the natural world as resources to be exploited.

This history set in motion the huge disparities of wealth and power between those descended from Europeans and those from elsewhere, those descended from the ownership classes and working and landless classes, and between women and men, and it undermined our relationship with the natural world.

From the beginning, YES! prioritized excluded voices and stories, especially highlighting leadership by women, people of color, and Indigenous people. We sought practices that addressed historic harms while showing what reparation looks like and how a world based on justice might function.

In our early days, our staff was predominantly made up of white women, and we had much to learn about racial justice. Guided by our board, contributors, and an increasingly diverse staff, we prioritized voices of people of color and people from diverse cultures. We built strong relationships with Native writers, and some of us became active allies of the Suquamish Tribe—whose ancestral land we shared—and that relationship continues today.

This approach helped us break out of the dysfunctional dominant-culture worldview, and bring in fresh approaches and solutions across cultures and from the margins of society.

Respecting Readers as Change Agents

Our theory of change focused on encouraging ordinary people’s active engagement. We put readers at the center as people who are—or could become—leaders, visionaries, and creatives. We treated them as people with agency and dignity, avoiding condescension or jargon that few could access.

We encouraged the hard work of personal transformation by drawing on wisdom traditions and research about the science of human development. But we kept in mind a truth that was often missing from the self-help genre: our liberation as individuals is tied to the liberation of all life.

In our coverage, we recognized that people learn differently—some through stories, others through abstract reasoning, art, music, or how-to guides. Some want immediate action steps while others want to understand how their work fits into a multigenerational change process. We celebrated all forms of contribution and all styles of learning and engagement.

At the same time, we put a high value on humility, always respecting our readers and looking for grace in our own shortcomings and seeking opportunities to learn and grow.

Looking Back Over Three Decades

Over the three decades of YES!, each of us who were involved would have our own stories. For me, highlights included our coverage of social movements that challenged corporate capitalism and lifting up cooperative and sustainable economic alternatives. I was transformed by the weeks I spent at Standing Rock reporting on the work of water protectors from dozens of tribes and by what I learned editing issues of the magazine on the prison-industrial complex and restorative justice alternatives.

Traveling the country on the journey that resulted in The Revolution Where You Live (Berrett-Koehler), I was awed by people creating beautiful alternatives in rust-belt cities, Indian reservations, coal country, and other areas abandoned by corporate capitalism.

The best part was meeting extraordinary people—some famous, many more who, without fanfare, brought their passion, smarts, and hard work to making change in their communities and workplaces. These people gave me confidence that a better world is possible.

Why This Approach Matters More Than Ever

I write at a time when vulnerable communities are being surveilled and harassed, basic services are slashed, and our global climate emergency is undeniable. While mainstream political institutions fail to meet the moment, people everywhere are organizing, resisting, and reimagining.

Ending YES! amidst the nihilism of the Trump regime might suggest our efforts failed. But I’d argue that this disastrous time is a sign that — as we and others predicted — the status quo could not hold. Instead of struggling to return to the neoliberalism represented by the Biden Administration, we are called to go even further into creating a new story by building deeper connections to each other and to Mother Earth, resisting fascism and extractive corporations, opening up our imaginations, creating beautiful alternatives, and exploring multiple paths forward.

Fascism thrives when people give up hope and become isolated and fearful. Staying connected and building supportive communities is just what we need to get us through this dark time. We need courage, and we need to see courage modeled by others. More than ever, we need to see models of more just, compassionate, and sustainable possibilities at all levels of society, while we join with others to build power for change.

The Trump regime’s corrupt authoritarian policies are causing irreparable harm to all facets of society and to our global relationships.

We can’t go back, but we do have choices about how we rebuild. We can rebuild based on equity, sustainability, belonging, and community. We can recreate our economy so it serves all people while restoring ecological resilience.

We can encourage people to unleash their creative, wild, radical imagination—to dream about the sort of world they want for their communities and their children, to reach out to others, and to dare to build that world.

The Way Forward

The visionaries and practitioners featured in YES! explored what was possible then, and much of what they contributed suggests ways forward now. Articles originally published in YES! were placed in the — we encouraged their widespread distribution and re-use. There is great news about the future of those resources.

Thanks to the efforts of the current staff and board, the entire digital archive of YES! will now live on through, a like-minded independent news organization that will serve as the new steward of our digital content—ensuring ongoing access to nearly three decades of visionary journalism.

Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This is a crisis of global proportions that neither MAGA-style nationalism nor neoliberal centrism can fix. But we the people can—by making bold choices in our communities and joining together to exercise our collective power.

At YES!, we never spoke of certainties about the future — only about possibilities. But possibilities are powerful magnets, drawing us to the hard but deeply rewarding work of creating a world together where people and the planet come first.

The YES! approach offers a framework for this work: lifting up stories of people creating beautiful alternatives, connecting their efforts, unpacking the elements of success, and helping readers imagine and build the world we need. Whether through new media organizations, grassroots storytelling efforts, or whatever comes next, this approach remains not just relevant—but essential.

The creative energy of change is everywhere. Our job is to find it, share it, and weave it into the new stories our world desperately needs.

But the guise of criminality overlooks the nuance and complexity that can influence situations as well as the humanity of all people, especially immigrants. It’s also a notoriously to come back from, though immigrants are than those born and raised in the U.S. 

In a 2017 peer-reviewed paper for the, , an associate professor of law at the University of Houston who specializes in immigration law, keenly noted: “Every immigrant—like every citizen—poses a ‘risk’ of violence because every immigrant is human. The success with which this human mystery and the fear it inevitably elicits is managed by the legal and political system will to a significant extent determine the degree to which noncitizens are embraced by a society.”

The exclusion of individuals labeled “criminals” in the U.S. immigration system perpetuates discriminatory practices, ignores the complexity of human behavior, and reinforces this harmful narrative of irredeemability. Crimes of “moral turpitude”—crimes that have affect the moral fabric of society—define the criteria for exclusion and inadmissibility, and it is through the mask of morality that the nation-state justifies itself.

Such descriptions can—and have been—violently appropriated by the ruling class for centuries. While legislators claim these laws enhance “public safety,” the laws ultimately push a racist, classist, ableist, and overall discriminatory agenda that does little for actual safety. It is a framework that has been applied to , , , , , and .��

And what better way to weaponize undesirability than to deem someone a criminal who has transgressed America’s alleged moral compass?

A blanket sweep that decries crimes of “moral turpitude” doesn’t actually improve the moral standing of society, because the “offender” and “victim” dichotomy doesn’t really exist. “In reality, because law-breakers do not spend all of their time committing crimes, individuals move between these categories [of ‘offender’ and ‘non-offenders’],” writes Susan Bibler Coutin in a 2005 peer-reviewed article published in .��

This reduction of criminality must be done away with both for citizens and noncitizens alike because dichotomies make nuanced conversations seem more absolute. It’s easier to say that someone is a monster than to acknowledge that everyone has the potential to act monstrously. 

“‘Governing through crime’ works because of narratives that rely on simplistic dichotomies between offender and victim, violent and nonviolent, redeemable and irredeemable,” writes Mira Edmonds in a 2024 peer-reviewed article in the . “These dichotomies are empirically flawed, morally problematic, and ultimately self-defeating if our goal is to reduce violence.” 

But unfortunately, the stigmatization of criminality runs deep. Even within the U.S. justice system, those who commit “violent crimes” are more —regardless of case-specific recommendations. If we don’t allow for context and nuance, then how can there be any claim of just action? 

When a person is labeled a “criminal,” they’re then considered deserving of whatever the nation-state imposes on them. Once that label is applied and said person is deemed “undesirable,” “,” and “,” said person is then fixed into those labels and unable to challenge how that influences their immigration status, thanks to , which limits judicial review of visa decisions.��

Maybe it’s tempting to label an immigrant “irredeemable” and “inadmissible” because the designation can supposedly help the federal government distinguish between those who are likely to be law-abiding from those who are not. But that labeling system is uninterested in justice and the complexity of human experience. These labels serve only to establish a rigid hierarchy of human worth.

There are even open-border advocates who question whether or not the nation-state even has , especially as it infringes on a person’s freedom of movement. In questioning the state’s right to limit immigration, we should interrogate the question of whether or not the state’s deliberate suppression of freedom of movement is a just response to having a criminal background.

However, to date, U.S. courts have ruled that people seeking entry have . But in order to move past the idea of irredeemable and undesirable, our understanding of restorative and transformative justice must extend beyond the border. And if the United States were truly invested in preventing crime, the nation-state would focus on that dissuade anyone, citizen or non-citizen, from harming people rather than using time and resources to keep people out.��

Unfortunately, as Juliet Stumpf writes in a 2006 article in, “It is much easier to equate the criminal offender with the alien and exclude him from society than when the offender was well known by and considered part of a smaller community.”��

Is it possible to imagine a U.S. immigration system that allows for nuance? A system that acknowledges the multiplicity of a person’s character and makes space for the reality that people have the ability to change? Maybe. But in order for the immigration system to change, we must first advocate for this nuance to be considered when breaking down the dichotomies reinforced through and restrictions against people with convictions. And, importantly, this work must extend beyond the criminal justice system and beyond the idea of punishment.

“Our call for the abolition of what we see as a punitive dimension of immigration law responds directly to the hardships and injustices that it produces, but we also see it as a contribution to abolitionists’ efforts to broaden our scope of analysis and our political projects,” writes Souheil Benslimane and David Moffette in a 2019 article in the . “The move from prison abolitionism to penal abolitionism has been underway for a long time now, but more work needs to be done to further understand forms of punishment not anchored in criminal law, such as immigration penality.”

Some people think that the word citizen can save them just because the word criminal condemns. But these are just invented categories, simultaneously inflexible and malleable. The immigration system will never change as long as the U.S. judicial system remains carceral. Unless we acknowledge that punishment and punitive measures are not the solution for harm prevention, we will never move past the specter of the criminal—foreign or domestic—and the U.S. immigration system will only continue to be a form of double punishment.��

Replacing an abortion clinic with a site that mourns the pregnancies lost in abortion is emblematic of the abortion debates in the United States. For decades, these debates have set up a false dichotomy: You either focus entirely on the pregnant person and avoid discussing the concept of loss and death or you emphasize the loss of a baby while ignoring the needs of the pregnant person. In other words, we exist in a “clump of cells vs. baby” dichotomy. 

What would it look like to marry these two ideas? 

In 2018, this time in the state’s capital of Nashville, Tennesseans once again pushed the idea of eclipsing abortion access and rights through the grieving of aborted fetuses. After heated debate, the state’s House voted to use private funds to erect a “” on state capitol grounds. (Of note, this vote turned out to be primarily political theater. Years later, the monument has .) 

Through this vote, the state’s legislators succeeded in communicating its values loud and clear. Even before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, Tennessee has long been one of the most hostile states for abortion rights with a pre-existing trigger law that made abortion illegal from conception onward. After much controversy, a subsequent lawsuit, and a demand for a recount, to change the state’s constitution to specifically declare that the right to abortion is not protected. 

So why did lawmakers once more deem it necessary to put forth the idea of memorializing aborted fetuses? As an abortion researcher, I view these political moves as one piece of a larger issue in our abortion conversations. We discuss abortion in the U.S. in black-and-white binaries, ceding nuance to national political messaging. Much like pregnancies, abortion exists on a spectrum and shades of gray. 

While the majority of abortions occur early on in pregnancy, they are not all “clumps of cells,” and pro-life groups routinely utilize fully grown—and already birthed—babies in anti-abortion messaging. For instance, ProLife Across America has placed more than 12,000 anti-abortion billboards across 46 states that . Anti-choice protestors have often held ground in front of abortion clinics and used gruesome images to shame, scare, or dissuade patients from seeking care. While pro-choice circles shy away, the anti-abortion movement holds a monopoly on the imagery of abortion.��

One very rare exception is a 2022 article published in that featured a series of photos of petri dishes holding early pregnancies—though clearly after being and transformed into fluffy white blobs. While the cleaning process allowed the tissues to be more visible, it also created a sanitized image of abortion.

This false binary has also been weaponized in anti-abortion legislation. Across the country, namely Wisconsin, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas, legislators codified mandatory ultrasound viewing into their state’s abortion policy. explicitly mandated that medical providers place the ultrasound image in the patient’s line of sight, even if the patient did not wish to view the ultrasound. 

Legislators presumed that pregnant people seeking abortions would cancel the procedure if they simply saw the contents of their uteruses. Research disproved this assumption: The vast majority of continued on with their abortion decision after viewing the ultrasound, with only 2% of people changing their minds. In other words, thousands of people saw an embryo or fetus and still felt confident in their decision to terminate a pregnancy they did not desire or feel ready for. 

In a practice public health researcher Lena Hann calls “” some people even want to see the fetus, embryo, or pregnancy tissues after the abortion. In the research Hann and I conducted, we found that abortion providers habitually have to navigate this patient’s desire. Oftentimes, providers are wary of this practice because they do not want the patient to be upset or surprised by what they will see, but it can grant patients a sense of closure, agency, and knowledge about their bodies and pregnancies. 

Despite the benefits for patients, this practice is quite taboo; many clinics lack written policy around it or prohibit it all together. Some of this taboo stems from a fear of departing from the clump of cells vs. baby binary. Allowing abortion patients to see and feel complicated feelings about their abortion is also contradictory to national abortion messaging.��

But other countries offer cultural practices that acknowledge the fetus (and its death) without stigmatizing abortion, particularly if we don’t treat abortion loss as fundamentally distinct from miscarriage and stillbirth. In Japan, temples, graveyards, and roadsides are dotted with stone babies dressed in tiny red bibs. This practice, which is called , represents and honors unborn children who died from stillbirth, miscarriage, or abortion. Mizuko Kuyo is meant to provide solace to would-be parents and grant a space to grieve.

In New Zealand, Maori abortion patients are often allowed to take their fetal remains home and have a cultural burial. Rather than memorializing only aborted babies while vilifying the people who terminated them, these practices allow us to imagine a reality in which people in the U.S. can also respectfully acknowledge and have all sorts of complicated feelings about abortions.

If the U.S. were to depart from this “clump of cells” messaging, it could provide the nuance needed to acknowledge and normalize the fetus and��defang anti-choice messaging. Pregnancy is a spectrum, and pregnant people often like to visualize their pregnancies as they develop, including using apps that use a fruit or other common object to indicate the size of the pregnancy based on weeks of gestation. What if we were able to likewise acknowledge the facts of the fetus within abortion care?

“There is something infantilizing about denying the fact that embryos die when we scrape them out of the bodies of which they are a part,” writes Sophie Lewis in . “It sentimentalizes pregnant or potentially pregnant humans as fundamentally nonviolent creatures to imply that we can’t handle the truth about what we are up to when we opt out.”

Indeed, the notion that all women are inherently nurturing and feel an innate connection to their pregnancies is . To choose an abortion, amid abortion stigma, symbolically denotes rejecting these alleged truths about what it means to be a woman. By denying the loss involved in abortion, are we inadvertently perpetuating abortion stigma?

Abortion in a world where reproductive justice is realized means allowing each person full autonomy over their pregnancy decision. This means freedom to choose the type of abortion, full ability to access abortion without barriers or shame, and, critically, freedom to feel complicated feelings about one’s abortion. For some, an abortion is a clerical, non-emotional health decision that will . For others, an abortion is a loss. Freedom to choose means freedom to feel a full range of emotions—even if these feelings contradict the political messaging we have long clinged to.

We know your panic because we are no strangers to your fear. We resonate with your anxiety—perhaps even on a greater scale than what most of you have felt. That’s because we are no strangers to authoritarian regimes, human rights violations, and the exploitation of our lands and lineages.

And for many of us in the Global South, our wounds are directly caused by the legacy of the United States, down to the everyday decisions of the American people—through taxpayer money and day-to-day capitalist consumptions that are seldom questioned yet passively or actively consented to—resulting in the dispossession of countless communities in the Global South.

Yet we are here to encourage you in a pivotal time. Think of the following as a letter, one rooted in the wisdom of the Global South to remind you of an alternative way forward.

May you read with reverence, as most of these Global South organizers have written their messages in English, which for most of them is not their first language. Additionally, they offer frameworks, philosophies, and strategies after generations and centuries of resistance. They would like to teach you what has worked for them and their ancestors in the ancient and ongoing fight against autocratic power and state violence.

They send you—the organizers, activists, workers, and everyday people of the United States—messages of hope. Keep going, just as they have. 

To commence, Uganda-based environmental educator and grassroots organizer Darren Namatovu asks you to “keep hope alive—not as blind optimism but as an act of defiance, and remember our Global South family, especially our siblings who are depending on us for a deep sigh of their life.”

Collective Trust and Safety

Maria Reyes, a climate and human rights defender in Mexico, says it is essential to remember the shared humanity between those of you in the U.S. and those most vulnerable to authoritarian policies and orders. 

“From your neighbors in the South, we see your efforts to resist authoritarianism and we thank you, because whatever you do, deep within the heart of the beast, will delay the damage caused by its head,” Reyes says. “Although the mainstream media has tried to convince you that we are different, the truth is that you have much more in common with our immigrant uncles, cousins, and grandparents than with those who claim to represent you from the heights of power. A desire to live in dignity, remember that.”

She continues by encouraging strong and established infrastructures of community safety and accountability: “My wish for you is that you resist the individualistic urge to isolate yourselves in the face of imminent risks and uncertainty. Better than any security gadget, protocol, or exit plan is to build community. Don’t let states and [nongovernment organizations] monopolize security; weaving solidarity with your neighbors, monitoring your colleagues, and supporting your families may be the best first line of response.”

More than keeping up with the most advanced technology for digital security, we must prioritize the ideology, intentions, and culture in how we use technology. Of course, we need to secure our identities, devices, and internet networks by and , by whenever possible, and using other methods to improve digital security while organizing and mobilizing for social change. However, we must depend on human trust and communication more than technology in order to protect one another.

Selma Zaki, a Lebanese psychotherapist, reflects on the need to “create a ‘somewhere’ of connection where we can draw strength from one another.” To Zaki, this includes the freedom fighters of the past and future. “I’ve particularly found it powerful to draw strength from the generations before me and from the generations after me,” she says. “In my Sufi death class, someone said that the graves are not for those we lost, but for us who are still here: to reflect on what our responsibility is. It’s on us to care for this Earth. And it may feel like a lot, but… the past generation paid it forward, we pay forward, [and] the future generation pays it forward.” 

At times when we might feel our commitments to social justice have been too much—and they have—Zaki asks us all to remember our sense of humanity: “We have the burden to help people fulfill their humanity… and to do so, we must remain human.”

Hope as Deliberate Praxis

Dimitra, a Bangladeshi organizer in Southeast Asia who requested to use her first name only, is building on by adding hope.

“For the past few years, I’ve described the experience of working in movement spaces as a pendulum swinging between hope and despair,” she shares. “But recently, I’ve come to understand that I can’t afford to wait for hope to arrive before I begin the work I’ve committed my life to. Hope isn’t something that simply appears—it must be cultivated, practiced, tended to like something alive. It must be felt, lived, and chosen every day.”

Dimitra considers it strategic to lean into community and her legacies of resistance. This involves organizing queer film nights in Southeast Asia, a region where the majority of structural systems “co-opt and flatten [queer] identities.” This strategy also involves opening up about her everyday needs, which may be challenging to grassroots organizers. 

“It looks like telling my friends I’m exhausted and letting them nourish me with food and tenderness,” she says. “It looks like diving headfirst into joy with the same intensity I give to despair. It looks like remembering that my Bangladeshi ancestors endured tyrants and colonizers for centuries and still found ways to survive—and that survival, too, is a form of hope. In remembering that the act of resisting violence—again and again—is not new, I find strength. It has been done before. This moment is no different.”

She turns to Audre Lorde’s timeless words: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” which Dimitra believes is built on alternative structures of reciprocity and care. What does it mean to resist while also accessing the pleasure, rest, and self-determination in the revolution?

“Cultivating hope also requires self-reflexivity,” says Dimitra. “It means recognizing that in our interactions with systems of power, we often internalize the very messages and structures we’re resisting—especially when we live in close proximity to regimes of oppression. Hope, then, becomes a practice of examining what we’ve absorbed, noticing how it shows up in the alternative spaces we’re trying to build, and committing to creativity and reimagination as tools to unlearn and undo those patterns.”

With care, Dimitra invites us to “reflect on your own practice of hope. What might it look like in today’s climate?”

We have the burden to help people fulfill their humanity… and to do so, we must remain human.”

Andrea Cortés Islas, an ecofeminist and human rights defender in Mexico, shares similar sentiments: “Hope is a practice that must be continually nurtured.” She paraphrases Maya-Xinka community-based territorial feminist Lorena Cabnal in describing active hope: “Along with joy and rebellion, [hope] serves as an act of political resistance. This hope is strengthened within communities as they jointly seek to create dignified living conditions for all beings inhabiting the intricate web of life.”

Islas contradicts these dignified living conditions with “forced displacement … and various forms of spatial reconfiguration, [which result from] patriarchal, imperialist, extractivist, and colonial violence … increasing daily in the territories of the global majority. These issues are exacerbated by fascist governments that position themselves at the forefront of necropolitics globally. However, it is essential to remember a few key elements that can contribute to this active hope.”

Amid this fight, Islas believes it is important to recognize that those who are trampling on the rights of our most marginalized neighbors are in the minority. “We must recognize that the far-right governments that primarily target our Indigenous, peasant, trans, nonbinary, migrant, women, racialized, and neighborhood rights communities are not the majority,” she says. “I repeat: They are not the majority. While these governments try to create the illusion of disorganization and lack of mobilization—actions that have indeed been hindered by policies of fear—they actually bring us closer to reconsidering what is essential in life: Who are our communities? What does solidarity mean in a communal context?”

Islas doesn’t minimize the challenge that comes with offering this type of care, especially while systems continue to crumble and reckon with themselves. But she insists on a revitalized sense of imagination: “It is not governments or large corporations that sustain life; this has been abundantly demonstrated,” she says. “Rather, it is our communities that provide this sustenance. In an increasingly fragmented world, we must remind ourselves that all living beings require care (in varying degrees and forms) to continue existing, and we have the capacity to offer that care.”

What are the stories—past and present—that invigorate our “yes” to this liberatory path?

Islas is aware of collective sorrow, disillusionment, and fatigue, but she also believes that “continuing to inhabit a vision of utopia is also crucial for maintaining the struggle. As Eduardo Galeano said, ‘Utopia is on the horizon. I walk two steps, and it moves two steps away; the horizon moves 10 steps further. So what is utopia for? That’s what it’s for: walking.”

We Are Ready for This

Ni Ni, a leader in the fields of anti-human-trafficking and migrant protection in Myanmar and Thailand, believes the most powerful community organizing will always be led by the people most impacted by the problems movements are aiming to fix: “This is not merely an opinion that happens when people affected share their stories—it’s a fact that can connect people’s hearts,” she says. “Every big movement starts somewhere, and often it can be as simple as encouraging those most affected to tell their stories.” 

Ni Ni believes that telling stories blazes the trail toward social change: “Storytelling is one of the strongest ways to build empathy, inspire action, and bring people together. It’s through these personal stories that people connect, and that’s how change begins.”

And change is what we are and have been ready for. In times like this, it can be easy to forget the foundations of our current solidarity movements, which . Tara Abrina, a community organizer in marine conservation in the Philippines, harkens us to the crucial act of remembering. She writes to you as her kasama, which is a Tagalog translation for companion or comrade: 

Dearest Kasama, 

It’s here. The day we have studied, trained for, moved toward, and prayed for is finally here: the collapse of empire. Of course, like a hunted animal backed into a corner, the fascist will do all it can to claw its way through. It will rage against the setting of its sun on the horizon of history. I take heart in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings.”

You are the human beings tearing at the heart of this human power. Your struggles liberate us all. 

Do not be afraid of the world to come. We will be with you on the day the sun rises on a new world. In the Philippine movement, there is a saying: Nauuna ang kapasyahan bago ang kahandaan. Our commitment to their new world precedes our readiness to inherit it—but more importantly, it is in moving toward it that we become ready. Take heart, because everything and everyone that came before you has brought you to this moment. 

Dasig kanunay! Mabuhay kayo! [Have courage always! May you come alive more and more.]

LGBTQ+ history is filled with powerful stories of queer and trans people advocating for our rights by using every tool available, whether it’s seeking justice through the legal system or pushing back against police violence—yes at Stonewall, but also at and the hundreds of other, lesser-known protests that came before.

Yet boycotts haven’t played as central a role in LGBTQ+ liberation as they did during the civil rights movement. “We’re ultimately a fairly small group,” says Eli Erlick, activist and author of . And since companies haven’t historically valued queer consumers, the impact of a boycott is diluted.��

Still, boycotts have been an important tool for liberation. “Queer communities have used boycotts to amplify voices when mainstream media and politics ignored them,” says Jay Santana, an LGBTQ+ historian and activist. “These actions created not just pressure, but visibility.” 

LGBTQ+ Boycotts Build Coalitions and Acceptance

In the 1970s, the to protest discriminatory labor practices at Coors, where employees were disqualified from being hired if they were gay or pro-union. At that time, homophobia was widespread in , but labor leaders also recognized��the organizing power within the LGBTQ+ community, and the organizing talents of Harvey Milk and other LGBTQ+ leaders. Bay Area gay bars refused to stock Coors—to this day, many still don’t carry it—and bartenders ceremoniously poured out beer in the streets. The Coors boycott helped broker an alliance between LGBTQ+ people and union workers.

In 1977, Miami-Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance that prohibited discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Christian singer , who was a spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, instantly began campaigning for its repeal by claiming that LGBTQ+ people groomed children. 

In response, LGBTQ+ leaders organized a and orange juice. Bartenders poured orange juice out in the streets. Protestors wore . The boycott earned more than and made gay rights a mainstream conversation topic.

Though Bryant won the battle and the nondiscrimination ordinance was repealed, she lost the war. “The universal anger directed at Anita Bryant was so strong that others joined the struggle and Anita was fired and the LGBTQ+ community had an important victory post Stonewall,” says Robert Kesten, president and CEO of Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library.

In the years after the Florida orange juice boycott, HIV/AIDS spread through the gay community. We spent our collective energy caring for one another and organizing to demand the callously indifferent respond to the public health crisis. Things were pretty quiet until the same-sex marriage debates. 

When Chick-fil-A’s CEO spoke out against same-sex marriage in 2012, public outrage was swift. College students protested Chick-fil-A opening locations on their campuses. Local officials in , , and vowed to prevent Chick-fil-A from opening or expanding in their market.��

In the short term, sales increased as sympathetic conservatives bought chicken sandwiches in droves. However, the backlash forced Chick-fil-A to . While the company in 2019, they’re still perceived as anti-queer, which has cost Chick-fil-A .��

When North Carolina passed the first anti-trans bathroom bill in the U.S. in 2016, the ensuing mass boycott felt like a sea change. PayPal and Deutsche Bank nixed plans to expand into North Carolina, costing the state . Musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, and Demi Lovato canceled appearances. The and relocated events to more inclusive states. 

The anti-trans bill cost North Carolina between $450 million and $630 million, according to . Though that was only around 0.1% of the state’s overall GDP, it was enough for the state’s politicians to nix HB2 in 2017. 

In its place, the state’s legislators passed , which kept many of the anti-LGBTQ+ elements of the hated bathroom bill. Most crucially, HB142 prevented local communities from passing LGBTQ+ non-discrimination ordinances for three years. These subtleties were seemingly overlooked as public opinion celebrated what seemed to be a victory. 

I traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, when HB2 was in effect. While Asheville is a progressive city, I dreaded using public restrooms and being misgendered. The broad support for the boycott was comforting. It was one of a few times I’ve felt like my country was on my side. 

Boycotts Document Our Refusal to Be Erased

Anti-trans measures have only grown in the years since HB2’s repeal. “It’s alarming when [anti-trans sentiment] is so widespread that it becomes normalized and impossible to enact boycotts,” says Erlick.

With Donald Trump back in office and committed to using executive orders to erase trans rights—not to mention the very word “transgender”—a collective fury has spurred a resurgence of calls to boycott corporations that abandoned DEI. 

Take Target, which in market value earlier this year, as consumers have used an economic boycott to protest the company’s decision to cancel DEI initiatives. Jamal H. Bryant, the senior pastor at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, subsequently called for a that was timed to coincide with Lent. LGBTQ+ consumers, still angry about the retailer’s prior waffling on whether to , joined in. Now , foot traffic hasn’t recovered, and Target’s reputation is in tatters.��

“Target could have made a very different decision,” says Santana, pointing to the success of retailers like Costco, which stood by DEI and saw in response. Erlick agrees, noting, “Corporations are ultimately not that supportive of our communities outside of superficial initiatives.” 

The hollowness of brand promises can be painful to realize. But once we come to terms with the shallowness of corporate pledges, queer and trans people can seek ways to leverage our collective power. Santana points to the , a series of decentralized protests held at Tesla dealerships nationwide earlier this year, as Americans registered their discontent with government cuts proposed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in his role as adviser to Trump, as an example of what’s possible now. 

Tesla Takedown protests have brought joy and hope in dark times and, more crucially, caused a leadership crisis and for Tesla. When claims of homophobia or transphobia are dismissed as individual sensitivity or snowflake behavior, or minimized with labels like “culture war,” Santana says boycotts name the harm, which helps LGBTQ+ people to heal. 

Increasingly, travelers to the United States—and entire countries—are also refusing to cosign our nation’s bigotry with their tourist dollars. The most vocal critic has been Canada, whose citizens are seemingly furious with the U.S. over tariffs, broad anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, and calls to annex Canada and make it the 51st state. In response, Canadians have begun canceling their vacations to the U.S. and dumping bourbon and other imported products. 

Close allies like , , and have warned LGBTQ+ citizens against visiting the U.S., amplifying the persecution of trans Americans and validating our outrage. U.S.-based trans journalist Erin Reed maintains a for trans Americans, color-coded to reflect threat levels. Reed has flagged Texas and Florida as “Do Not Travel” states for the severity of their anti-trans laws, and she warns foreign citizens who are trans against traveling to the U.S. at all.��

The pressure comes with a hefty price tag: Goldman Sachs estimated from decreased travel and trade. 

“Boycotts document our refusal to fund our own erasure,” says Santana. So while the government publicly ’ from the Stonewall National Monument’s website and replaces LGBTQ+ with “LGB,” boycotts remain an effective means of tapping into our collective power and recommitting to queer liberation.

“They took us when we crossed into Chiapas and took everything we were carrying, except for [a] cell phone,” says Rivera, who is now residing in Casa Monarca, a shelter in Monterrey, Mexico. “Then, they took us to some bushes and made me undress to see if I was hiding any money.”

After the men searched Rivera and her mother for hidden items, they allowed the two women to get dressed again. While Rivera is grateful she and her family did not experience significant harm during their journey north, she says she is still deeply troubled by witnessing the women in her family being separated and treated differently than her male relatives. “It was very complicated,” she explains. 

Rivera left Honduras with her mother and 15-year-old brother in January 2024, aiming to reunite with their two older brothers in the United States. For more than a year, they have been at Casa Monarca and, instead of migrating to the United States, they are awaiting a residency visa in Mexico.

Rivera’s experience is becoming more common as migrant shelters in Mexico are increasingly filled with children and teenagers who run through the rooms or tents, play soccer, or gather to watch TikTok on a parent’s phone. Since Donald Trump began restricting migration along the U.S–Mexico border, families remain stranded in shelters, camps, and other locations as they contemplate whether to stay in Mexico or return to their homes.

Father Luis Eduardo Zavala, director and founder of Casa Monarca, said these new, harsher U.S. immigration policies have significantly altered the level of care families need. Children and teenagers journeying through Mexico face , exploitation, kidnapping, forced recruitment, and sexual abuse.

Those risks disproportionately impact women, including girls and teenagers. Oscar Misael Hernández, a social anthropologist and researcher at , a research center focused on the U.S.–Mexico border, says that while the risks are high for all undocumented migrants, there are notable generational and gender distinctions.

“They know that men can perform certain functions and women can perform others if they are forcibly recruited. And there is a gender reproduction in these jobs that they are then forced to do,” Hernández explains. “Young bodies are more susceptible to sexual exploitation. Adult bodies have less of this ‘bodily capital,’ less aesthetic capital for these illicit purposes,” he adds.

While comprehensive initiatives and safe spaces to protect these young migrants remain insufficient, the distinct impact of migration on them—including their increasing vulnerability—is gaining significant attention in Mexico. Organizations such as Casa Monarca are stepping in to thwart these threats and attempt to guarantee more safety for migrants. 

Networks of Information and Support

“We strive to create an environment for them that is as similar to a home as possible,” Father Zavala explains. “There are enormous challenges because some [teenagers] arrive having experienced a lot of violence, pain, and suffering. The parents communicate the anguish [of the journey] to their children, and sometimes even typical teenagers rebel.”

Zavala says Casa Monarca provides information about the risks migrants may encounter on their journey to the border, including human and sex trafficking. “We always advise parents to be careful with their daughters during the journey,” Zavala added. “Unfortunately, we’ve encountered cases of families who come with daughters who are exposed during migration and end up becoming victims of trafficking through kidnapping.”

But the desperation to get to the U.S.–Mexico border puts migrants at greater risk. They’ve even had people return to the shelter after being victimized. Yasmín Ramos, a psychologist at Monarca, agrees, adding that “extreme and urgent need” also exacerbates the risks. “It’s the ‘I don’t have the time, perhaps, to rule out job options because I urgently need to eat, I urgently need my children to eat, so the first offer is it.’ And then there’s the issue of documentation … This informality makes the undocumented population much easier to target,” she says.

Thanks to social media such as Facebook and WhatsApp, many migrants are aware of the risks of robbery, extortion, abuse, and kidnapping and have established safety networks along their routes that allow them to communicate, share locations, and warn of potential dangers.

Tamara Segura, a social anthropologist and researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, says that Central Americans are among the groups who often rely on these networks as they move along their routes. “They are supposed to spread the word about what they are doing, and above all, to look out for each other, so to speak, on social networks,” Segura explains. “For instance, they post videos of their location, and if they’ve already crossed into Mexico, they’ll post a photo of a Mexican landscape as a tip for others to know where they are.”

However, this network remains fragile and vulnerable, particularly to organized crime. Segura explains that prearranged agreements can be disrupted, leading to detention in certain locations for not paying the fee—a quota imposed by organized crime for the right to cross along the routes under their control.

“If they don’t know how to negotiate, or if the person they’re traveling with doesn’t know how to negotiate, they detain them and hold them hostage, or they have them detained in certain places for the payment of the fee,” Segura adds.

Though shelters can sometimes be part of the cycle of violence migrants face, places like Casa Monarca believe that providing more home-like conditions and opportunities for local integration can offer families, regardless of their final destination, a chance to recover from their journey and calmly rethink their next steps, acknowledging the complexity of their emotional processes.

“We have very strict protocols regarding harassment,” Zavala explains. “We have very strict protocols for situations of potential domestic violence. These are families who are stuck here, and there’s a process of frustration coming from them, a process of anguish, even a process related to those who have debts.”

Putting Education and Mental Health First

A significant percentage of the migrant population arriving at Monarca has experienced sexual abuse, whether in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, Ramos explains. While more prevalent among women, some men have also been victims. Additionally, sexual violence permeates the entire migration process.

“These are people in a vulnerable position due to a lack of support networks. Many don’t know their rights in Mexico, and they are obviously afraid to report anything,” Ramos says.

Casa Monarca has been working on strengthening psychological support and developing methods to promote mental well-being. They often organize outings to movies or museums for children and teenagers to foster a sense of normalcy, offer optional psychological counseling, and provide educational opportunities.

Erendira is traveling alone with her five children who range between the ages of 7 and 18. They were separated at some point during their journey on the freight train, commonly used by migrants to cross Mexico toward the border. “Those two days were the worst,” she says. “I thought I was never going to see them again.” 

For Erendira, it is her children’s forward-looking vision of their journey that sustains her through the ongoing uncertainty. She says, with a slight laugh, “They see it as an adventure and say, ‘Imagine how we’ll tell this story to our kids.’” They attempted to cross the border twice, but the water level became too dangerous for the children, and they decided to return. Their CBP One appointment never materialized, and they now await Mexican documentation at Casa Monarca.

Despite the prolonged waiting times, which often mean a lack of access to educational services and the stability crucial during these formative years, Erendira’s children have been able to attend school thanks to a Casa Monarca program in collaboration with the public school system. 

Through an agreement between Nuevo León’s Secretariat of Equality and Inclusion and Secretariat of Education, children are enrolled in schools near the shelter. This partnership allows parents and their children to follow a routine that includes going to school and doing homework. Additionally, it fosters intercultural processes within the schools, supporting the state’s evolving migration landscape.

“Any moment is a good time for children who go to school to have an integration process that allows the students at the school to learn about migration firsthand from the [migrant] children and adolescents, which benefits the school as well,” Father Zavala says. “In this way, the children and adolescents themselves also become promoters of migration.”

In 1939, the sleepy British town of Great Yarmouth rumbled awake. National media picked up the story of two brothers, Mark and David Ferrow. The trans teens recently returned to their hometown after spending four years transitioning in nearby Maidstone. 

The siblings were far from extraordinary. Mark, the outgoing older brother, loved fine arts and literature. David, the shy younger brother, joined his father’s book-selling business upon his return. The two grew more comfortable with themselves as they received overwhelming love and support from their small community. 

Mark and David found a way to thrive decades before the first trans kids were supposed to exist. 17-year-old Mark and 15-year-old David did not have our modern language to describe themselves in 1939. The term “gender” only came into common usage around 1955. Yet the trans siblings were far from alone. They were only a tiny part of the blossoming community defying gender norms.

Transgender people are nothing new. What is new, however, is the moral panic around gender identity. After opening up about my own trans identity at 8 years old in 2003, I know firsthand that trans people have existed for more than just a few years.

Calling us “new” erases our history. But exactly how much of our transgender past has been lost, forgotten, and destroyed? Who were the first documented children to transition? What means did activists have to resist society’s extreme discomfort in discussing gender before our language developed? How did trans people live their everyday lives before they had terms to describe themselves? Which trans athletes participated in sports before sex testing? 

I started researching lost trans stories and what we can learn from them after a friend asked me the name of the first minor to medically transition. Amid the 2020s panic over trans youth health care, I realized there was no historical documentation to answer their question. Even historical experts argue that trans teens did not begin medically transitioning until the 1950s. However, what I found was an entirely new history of transgender people.

I located Mark and David’s full story after digging through British news and government archives. The teens are not only among the first known minors to transition, but they also invented creative and whimsical ways to label themselves.

Mark told the Daily Mirror in 1939, “I feel I have worn these clothes all my life. I have always been a man at heart, and I am glad to be in trouser.” He used remarkably modern phrases to tell the public about his transition. “I am glad to be through with it all. I don’t think I could have faced up to it if there had not been some of the woman’s power of endurance in me, though really, I suppose, I have always been a man.”

Testosterone was rarely prescribed before 1939. With a mixture of surprise and excitement, I realized Mark’s story represents the earliest known case of a minor transitioning with hormones.

After I shared Mark and David’s narrative online, millions of people read their history, saw their photos, and heard their story for the first time in more than 80 years. I began sharing more stories of forgotten figures from trans history: a Black trans church leader whose segregated Florida town came together to mourn her death, an Indian snake charmer who hid her trans identity from the California press in the 1940s, and a trans boy who gained the support of his large family in 1862.

Each of these stories inspired feelings of hope and familiarity for readers. Some showed their parents stories of familial support in the face of backlash and confusion. Others were excited for figures who once lived in the same cities or towns as them. I knew this moment was a rare opportunity to share trans narratives that never made it into the history books.

The period from 1850 to 1950 is a unique era sandwiched between the explosion of mass media (newspapers, radio, and photographs) and the term gender (as opposed to sex) becoming popular in the 1950s. The division between the terms gender, sex, and sexuality represents the turning point when trans people became a related but ultimately separate population from those called “homosexuals” at the time.

Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld coined the German term transsexualismus (transsexualism) in 1923, although the term did not gain widespread usage until decades later. It was only when David Oliver Cauldwell translated the word into transsexual in 1949 that we had an English name for the category describing the people I have researched and shared.

The terms “transgender” and “trans” did not come into common usage until the 1990s. From 1850 to 1950, there was not a common language to describe trans struggles, yet trans people still existed—everywhere from the largest cities to the most remote villages.

What do we gain from the stories of trans people who have not been sufficiently studied? Trans narratives that were lost, forgotten, or destroyed can still describe breakthroughs, adventures, and influential moments in transgender history.  After years of research, it is clear we need to change our cultural appreciation of queer, trans, and gender history. We can use lost histories to foster this understanding—and change—for future trans generations.

While writing , I located what may be the first mass queer and trans uprising, a riot against police in 1930 Berlin involving hundreds of people that was later erased from history by Nazis. Then there’s a formerly enslaved Black trans woman, Sally-Tom, who is possibly the first trans person to have her sex legally changed in the U.S. in the 1860s. One of Europe’s greatest athletes, Stefan Pekar, transitioned in 1936, only for conservative bureaucrats to remove him from the record books. These are just a few of the lost stories that help us grasp the true depth of transgender history..

The archive may not save us, but it will illuminate a path forward. We cannot challenge bad-faith arguments with history and rhetoric. The arguers do not intend to change their minds. However, those who bear witness to the vastness of history may be moved to fight for a better future—and to learn lessons from those who came before us. 

As Martinican author Aimé Césaire writes, “The shortest route to the future is always the one that involves the deepened understanding of the past.”

This excerpt, adapted from by Eli Erlick (Beacon Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

Hysterectomy also often indicates a tragedy inflicted by external, malignant forces. Yet one in five people who are born with a uterus will have it removed by the time they are in their 60s, a statistic that was one in three when I began this project and one that never ceases to shock the person who asks why I study hysterectomy.

Hysterectomy is at once highly common and yet primarily discussed—if at all—as a devastating event that happens to you. While we rarely read about this in news headlines, many people want a hysterectomy, choose a hysterectomy, and are happy to have had a hysterectomy. People might want a hysterectomy for a number of reasons, whether to find freedom from one of the many illnesses that affect the uterus and ovaries or to affirm their gender. These stories contradict fundamental assumptions we hold not only about hysterectomy but about gender, bodies, and reproduction.

A pervasive idea within culture and medicine alike is that all people with uteruses will inevitably want to become pregnant and be mothers. Following this logic, choosing hysterectomy will almost certainly spark regret. And yet, as I found, a hysterectomy can elicit various emotional responses, ranging from delight to grief to something in between. 

While the assumption is that hysterectomy invariably causes grief, it is not the procedure itself that brings on this grief but rather the degree of agency afforded and the social context in which the hysterectomy is situated—the degree to which a hysterectomy feels choosable.

Hysterectomy stories lay bare the dangers of viewing “women’s bodies” as perpetually pre-pregnant, or as existing in the zero trimester of pregnancy, as the sociologist Miranda Waggoner aptly named it. As it turns out, this ideology can be used within medicine to prevent people from making informed decisions about their bodies, both in the realm of hysterectomy and far beyond.

Even opting out of one pregnancy, as in the case of abortion, contradicts central truths we hold about gender in general and women specifically. The abortion scholar Anuradha Kumar and colleagues theorized that abortion is so widely stigmatized because it violates cherished feminine virtues: perpetual fecundity, the inevitability of motherhood, and instinctive nurturing.

As myself, the more I delved into the puzzle of hysterectomy, the more I realized the notion of choosing hysterectomy likewise causes fissures in how our culture understands gender and bodies, perhaps even to a magnified extent. If women are valued for being perpetually fertile, one-day mothers who are born to be nurturing, how could they ever be happy about removing the organ that is purportedly the source of these fundamental attributes?��

How could it be that some people would willingly have this organ removed to achieve happier, healthier, more self-actualized lives? Hysterectomy seekers must confront these questions and assumptions in their quest toward a hysterectomy. Ironically, the overemphasis on fertility promotion within health care simultaneously leads people to desire a hysterectomy while also making this surgery difficult to access for many.

The emphasis on fertility is even found in the way we refer to the uterus and ovaries (“reproductive organs”) and to the illnesses that affect them (“reproductive illness”), which erases the other functions these organs hold for bodily well-being. This emphasis is reflected in the financialization of health care.

Only 2% of the National Institutes of Health research budget is allocated toward understanding the various illnesses that impact these organs, many of which lead to a hysterectomy. Accordingly, despite how common these conditions are, patients often require seeing a specialist to receive proper diagnosis and treatment after years of neglect—that is, of course, unless the illness is causing fertility issues, in which case, time to diagnosis typically shrinks.

Within this system, people whose uterus is causing suffering might eventually come to desire a hysterectomy for themselves as a mode of self-care. Yet, these same people who wish to choose hysterectomy might then be told they are not sick enough, are too young, or haven’t had enough babies to warrant a hysterectomy. To have a uterus in a medical system built for cis women having babies often means being pushed to want hysterectomy and then being told to wait.

The freedom to choose hysterectomy is endlessly complicated by gendered reproductive politics as well as a health care system that does not invest in understanding and treating the uterus beyond its capacity for pregnancy. Hysterectomy access is stratified by race and gender, and more specifically by a proximity to white womanhood. Those who embody white womanhood are often paternalistically barred from choosing sterilization, typically due to a physician’s concern about anticipatory regret. Simultaneously, women of color—particularly Black women—are often pushed toward hysterectomy and are told it is the only option for relief from their symptoms.

Meanwhile, the reproduction of trans and nonbinary patients is often clerically forgotten altogether during clinical conversations about hysterectomy. Trans men as young as 19 are recommended a hysterectomy as part of their gender-affirming medical journey (often without counseling on fertility-preserving methods like egg freezing), while a white cis woman might be told she’s too young to choose such a “drastic” procedure at the age of 35. Of note, a wanted hysterectomy as part of gender-affirming care is considered essential health care, and is associated with improved psychological well-being, while a hysterectomy for a cis woman in chronic pain is often deemed elective.��

Across race and gender lines, the meaning of “medical necessity” for the same procedure shifts, as do concerns around fertility, age, and regret. While individual doctors might not be consciously acting out of malice—and some might even be motivated by a genuine desire to protect their patients—these individual encounters ultimately make up the fibers of stratified reproduction based on race, gender, and class.

To move forward toward a world where hysterectomy is choosable, then, requires viewing all reproductive health choices through the analytical framework afforded by this study of hysterectomy. This analytical framework is rooted in reproductive justice, is trans-inclusive, and accounts for the complex ways race, gender, history, and politics come together to stratify choice. It is imperative to examine not only who is being barred from the right to choose to parent and why but also who is being barred from the right to opt out of parenting—and thus to opt into infertility. These two infringements are inextricable and together form the bedrock of stratified reproduction and reproductive injustice.

As we wade into a second Trump presidency, and the looming possibility of a national abortion ban, understanding these reproductive politics becomes more dire. 

In the process, a deep dive on hysterectomy sheds light on broader inequalities faced by people with chronic illness, gender-expansive people, and racialized communities. By imagining a world in which hysterectomy is truly choosable, we imagine a world where all people have more freedom to live self-determined lives.

This excerpt, adapted from by Andréa Becker (NYU Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

The campaign is led by the , which succeeded in mobilizing the St. Louis Board of Aldermen to calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in January 2024. Elior Berkowitz, a member of St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a coalition partner, says the new effort is “about making a statement that this ceasefire city does not want to support apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and also that it won’t give its resources to companies that profit from or participate in human rights abuses and environmental destruction.” Other campaign partners include the St. Louis chapters of Democratic Socialists of America, the Green Party, and CodePink.

One of Not Another Nickel’s highest profile targets is Boeing. In March 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Air Force had to build the next-generation F-47 fighter jet. Boeing plans to develop the warplanes in St. Louis County, at a facility about 15 miles from downtown St. Louis. The county granted Boeing about for the project. 

Berkowitz says that even before Boeing landed the new contract, the specter of its involvement in the war on Gaza hung over St. Louis. From 2021 to 2023, the company was the of guided bombs and munitions to Israel. The Israeli Occupation Forces also . 

“Last year, I broke down crying when I was driving to the airport , a 2-year-old child amputee who lost her legs in Gaza when Israel bombed her home,” says Berkowitz, who was brought to tears when they drove past a Boeing facility on their way to the airport and wondered, “Who’s to say it wasn’t a jet made there that dropped the bomb that caused Rahaf to lose her legs?”

ICL Group, another target of Not Another Nickel, also has strong ties to Israel and has been implicated in its recent attacks on Gaza and the wider region. The chemicals and specialty minerals manufacturer was founded as an Israeli government-owned entity in 1968. At the time, ICL was an acronym for the company’s full name, Israel Chemicals Limited. Now, ICL Group is a publicly traded company with a shortened official name, and its majority shareholder is the Israel Corporation. That holding company is Israel’s largest and has long been due to its role in the occupation.

Last year, a new electric-vehicle battery-component manufacturing facility in north St. Louis. For the new plant, the St. Louis Planned Industrial Expansion Authority tax abatements . An unelected board of voted on the tax abatements on Nov. 19, 2024. The company for a prior development in Carondelet, a neighborhood in south St. Louis.��

Organizers with the Not Another Nickel campaign, as well as , allege that phosphates manufactured at ICL Group’s Carondelet facility are used in the production of white phosphorus munitions, a chemical weapon that and southern Lebanon since October 2023. Some of those munitions were manufactured in the U.S, according to investigations and. Some came from Pine Bluff Arsenal in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which sources phosphates from ICL Group in St. Louis, according to , a research group that tracks the global arms trade. 

Israel’s white phosphorus attacks have from rights groups., which burns at temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees, causes severe and often fatal injuries. Environmental organizations have also cautioned that white phosphorus attacks can have on agricultural production, water quality, and biodiversity. 

Amira al-Badri, a St. Louis–based Palestinian American who is using a pseudonym to protect her identity, says many of her neighbors seem not to realize that companies operating in the city profit from the violence in Palestine. “It’s so heartbreaking, and it’s so, so polarizing,” she says. “It’s really difficult to be a Palestinian in this space. We watch the news, we hear stories from our family members in Palestine, and then I leave my house and meet people who live in a completely different world, a completely different reality.”

Al-Badri welcomed news of the Not Another Nickel campaign, which recognizes the adverse effects of weapons manufacturing in St. Louis on communities at home and abroad. “There’s so much work that needs to be done locally,” she says. “To turn a blind eye to our own people here, and turn a blind eye to the damage we’re inflicting on other people across the globe—it’s disgusting.”

Organizers with Not Another Nickel highlight the need for investment in schools, infrastructure, housing, and health care in St. Louis. “Schools are the biggest losers when it comes to these incentives being given to these companies,” explains Emanuel Taranu, a campaign organizer. Because property taxes fund public schools in St. Louis, exempting multibillion-dollar companies from those taxes hurts students.

One and St. Louis County public school districts found that economic development tax abatements like those ICL Group has been granted cost schools in those districts more than a quarter of a billion dollars between 2017 and 2022. The tax abatements harmed Black students disproportionately, amounting to an average loss of $610 in education funding per Black student per year.

The St. Louis Development Corporation, which houses and staffs and claims it is “,” declined to answer questions for this article. 

The movement to end tax abatements for weapons manufacturers in St. Louis has found powerful allies in environmental justice organizations concerned about Boeing and ICL Group’s adverse environmental effects. at Boeing’s north St. Louis plant in June 2023, which into neighboring Coldwater Creek, proved that concerns about pollution of the city’s waterways were well founded. Now, groups including (MCU) and (MCE) are also raising the alarm about the manufacturers’ effects on air quality.

“Community members in Carondelet report smells and that they definitely feel the impacts on air quality that the ICL facility has brought,” says Beth Gutzler, lead environmental justice organizer at MCU. Gutzler says she questions why officials continue to grant permits to so many industrial facilities in St. Louis when the region is already overburdened with polluters. Both St. Louis and St. Louis County’s repeated set by the Environmental Protection Agency landed them on in December 2024.

The situation in north St. Louis, where ICL Group is building its electric-vehicle battery-component manufacturing plant, could prove even more worrisome. For starters, it is slated to be built “within blowing distance” of settling bins used to treat St. Louis’ drinking water, says Maxine Gill, MCE’s policy coordinator, meaning that contaminants emitted by the plant could make their way into the city’s water.

Gill also says the area where the new plant will be built, which is home to majority-Black and low-income neighborhoods, has long been treated like a “sacrifice zone.” St. Louis and St. Louis County used to on property sales, which segregated Black communities in neighborhoods near dangerous industries in the north. Even after the Supreme Court outlawed racial zoning, the practice continued in less official ways. Today, St. Louis’s Black residents, particularly those in the north, disproportionately shoulder , including lead poisoning and air pollution. “Because of the placement of the facility, it’s just this extremely egregious example of an environmental injustice,” says Gill.

Residents are particularly concerned about the new plant after hearing about in Fredericktown, Missouri, in October 2024, and in Monterey County, California, in January 2025. “They want to know that this is going to be safe, and so far, ICL has not gone through any effort to prove to the community that this is safe,” says Gill.

Berkowitz, the JVP organizer, says that the Not Another Nickel campaign partnering with environmental groups is not only a matter of coalition building, it is also an acknowledgement that the struggles for Palestinian human rights and environmental justice cannot be separated. “[It] is rooted in an understanding that Palestinian liberation is essential to all our liberation, and that’s materially obvious when it comes to the war and death industry that exploits us here to kill abroad.”

The Democratic Party suffered major losses in the November 2024 election, which saw Donald Trump elected for a second term and the Republican Party win majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Since then, the party has seen its popularity as voters demand their Democratic representatives take more action against the Trump administration’s overreaches. Instead, much of the party leadership continues to .

Still, a new vision for the Democratic Party’s future, backed by organizers like Sparks, seems to be emerging from its progressive contingents. That vision could appeal to voters in the coming elections, after many have grown disillusioned with Democratic Party leadership in recent years.

While news headlines following Trump’s election win last year painted a grim picture for progressives, the popularity of progressive ballot measures in and Democratic-led states and the success of and local levels . For years, polling data has also shown that a majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, support progressive policies, such as , , and .

nationwide over the Trump administration’s agenda and Democrats’ unwillingness to act as a bulwark against its overreaches also points to a growing desire for alternatives to the old guard. A series of organized to protest the Trump administration’s actions drew an estimated in on April 5, 2025. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also drawn tens of thousands on stops for their Fighting Oligarchy tour, which Sanders launched following Trump’s re-election. Many of those rallies have drawn larger crowds than any other event .

Rallying cries on the Fighting Oligarchy tour go beyond frustration with the Trump administration and include calls for progressive policies such as universal healthcare and wealth taxation. These more progressive ideas resonate with voters who were fed up with the Democratic Party even before Trump’s re-election because they felt Democratic leaders were not doing enough to protect abortion rights, , against communities of color, mitigate the effects of , or .

Sparks is among those who began losing faith in the party years ago. “One of the things that really radicalized me was the pandemic,” they say. Sparks lives with chronic illness, and their mother is disabled, making COVID-19 a particular threat. When Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, he promised to prioritize protecting Americans from the virus. Instead, Sparks found the government’s response insufficient. “They weren’t doing much, [and] a lot of my friends were forced to go back to work, and they got sick, and some of them have either passed or have lifelong disability issues because of it,” Sparks says.

For Rebecca June Lane, a New York City–based Democratic voter, Democratic leaders’ waffling on reproductive rights has been a disappointment for years. Lane says she began to follow politics more closely in the early 2010s, when in state legislatures were making headlines, and “the Democratic Party at that time wasn’t even there.” She welcomed Hillary Clinton’s commitment to protecting abortion rights when she ran for president in 2016. “I respected Hillary a lot because she stood 10 toes down about late-term abortions and the medical necessity of those all the way through the debates,” says Lane, who also worked as a video editor for Clinton’s campaign once she became the Democratic nominee.

Biden, on the other hand, offered only on the campaign trail in both 2020 and 2024, while disclosing that he personally . Lane was disappointed when he became the Democratic Party’s nominee for a second time last year. When Biden stepped down and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place, “There was hope; there was some momentum,” recalls Lane. “But that died as soon as it became clear that Kamala’s platform was Biden’s platform.”

Many voters were also disappointed that to growing police forces nationwide and invested federal funds in militarized police training facilities, often called “cop cities,” during his term, despite being elected on the tail of the 2020 nationwide protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. 

The Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which began in October 2023, was also a deal-breaker for many. “Anybody with their right mind would not go back to the Democrats, because they have not shown any change,” Farah Khan, co-chair of the campaign in Michigan and a former Democrat, told after Harris made clear she would continue Biden’s pro-Israel politics and refused to meaningfully engage with voters concerned about conditions in Gaza. “They’re going to have to work really, really hard to win their votes back.”

Democratic voters who have grown tired of the status quo on these issues are finding hope in a growing wave of progressive grassroots candidates seeking election. “​​We have seen a huge surge in people raising their hands to say they want to run in just the last six months,” says Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of , an organization that recruits and supports young progressive candidates running in down-ballot races.

Since Trump’s re-election, more than 40,000 people have signed up to attend one of Run for Something’s candidate calls to learn about running a campaign and the support the organization can provide. That’s more new sign-ups in about six months than what Run for Something saw in the first two years of Trump’s first term. “There’s a sense of fury, rage, disappointment, and a little bit of hope” among those who join the candidate calls, says Litman. “They are seeing other people step up to run and lead in this moment, and it’s inspiring them to do the same.”

Some districts long-held by conventionalist Democrats are already running on more progressive platforms. No candidate is more famous than , the 24-year-old content creator turned politician who is running in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, where longtime unexpectedly on May 5 that she would not run for reelection. “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dismantling our country piece by piece, and so many Democrats seem content to just sit back and let them,” Abughazaleh said in a . “While current Democratic leadership might be fine cowering to Trump, I’m not.”

, a 33-year-old New York state assembly member from Queens, is also making waves with his campaign for mayor in New York City. Mamdani is running as a socialist on a platform that promises to make the city more affordable for working people. It’s a significant change of pace in a race typically dominated by real estate and finance money and won by party insiders—and . 

of political change in the U.S. for years. Now, Litman says they are stepping up to lead progressive efforts in record numbers after many in the most recent election. “The thing that really makes this moment different is that there is so much interest in not waiting to be given permission,” she says. “A really common theme we have heard from folks on our candidate calls is that they are done waiting for someone else to do the work for them.” Run for Something expects to work with about 300 candidates this year and at least double that in 2026 when midterm elections are held. 

Young people are also shaking up the Democratic National Convention (DNC), with David Hogg, a 25-year-old political organizer and survivor of the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, winning a bid to become DNC Vice Chair in February 2025. Hogg also founded Leaders We Deserve, a grassroots political organization that helps elect young progressives to Congress and state houses nationwide. The organization has more than a dozen Democratic incumbents in the 2026 midterms, which has drawn both and who think Hogg’s agenda does not go far enough

Besides welcoming a new wave of progressive challengers in elections at every level, disillusioned Democratic voters are also getting involved in other political arenas, such as and mutual aid efforts. “I think for progressive politics to really win, we have to start local,” says Sparks, who organizes with the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA and volunteered on Nithya Raman and Gina Viola’s campaigns for local government in Los Angeles in 2020 and 2022, respectively.

Lane, the New Yorker, says she hopes the despair and frustration that many left-leaning Americans are experiencing now will lead them to think big. “I truly believe that we should not be hampered by the restrictions of where we are right now, but we need to take bold steps,” she says. “I see this on the other side in terms of marching toward fascism, and I want that boldness on the left to march away from fascism.”

Now, some history advocacy organizations are leaning into community-based education programs to continue teaching a more diverse and comprehensive picture of the nation’s past. 

“Education doesn’t have to be within school buildings. We need to have outside activities that provide the teachings of Black history. I think that’s crucial,” says Kristi Williams, founder of , an organization offering free Black history classes to community members of all ages in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Whether they be in our churches, whether they be on the sidewalks, or in different spaces, we have to create those spaces.”

The need for community-led spaces has become increasingly apparent over the past few months as the Trump administration has sought to stifle cultural institutions dedicated to preserving the histories of communities of color while promoting its white supremacist political agenda. In March 2025, the White House to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American Education,” which targeted the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. While the is to capture and share “the unvarnished truth of African American history and culture,” Trump’s executive order labeled its work “divisive” and “anti-American.”

Following the executive order, the National Park Service (NPS) reportedly from its exhibits about the great abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. That network of secret routes and safe houses for freedom seekers escaping to the Northern U.S. in the late-18th and 19th centuries and Tubman, the network’s most famous “conductor,” have become symbols of resistance to enslavement. On its site, NPS replaced a large photo of Tubman with images of postage stamps highlighting “Black/white cooperation.” It later walked back the changes after public outrage.��

Around the same time, NPS removed the in Socorro, Texas, the most recently designated Latinx National Historic Landmark, from its site. That landmark honors the contributions of Braceros, millions of guest workers from Mexico who came to the U.S. to mitigate farm labor shortages beginning during World War II. 

Experts warn that the Trump administration’s actions will also affect future preservation activities and education programming, threatening to reverse a decade-long toward expanding the nation’s preservation system to include more sites and stories representing the nation’s communities of color.��

“This executive order, which restricts federal funding for projects addressing systemic inequality, directly assaults the truth of our nation’s history,” says Sehila Mota Casper, executive director of (LHC), the leading nonprofit organization working to preserve Latinx places in the United States. “By limiting funding and erasing Latinx narratives, it silences millions and jeopardizes the preservation of crucial histories.” 

The administration’s actions follow similar efforts made during Trump’s first term, when he issued a that sought to ban what he called “divisive concepts” about race from federal institutions. In 2020, Trump also created the 1776 Commission, which aimed to promote “patriotic education,” a whitewashed version of the nation’s past that obscures systemic racism. He this year in a January 2025 executive order.

The actions also mirror state-level efforts in recent years. Nationwide, more than 20 states have or already have legislation in place restricting the teaching of race and the histories of America’s communities of color. While Republican-led states have been at the forefront of this regressive movement, many Democratic-led states have also moved similar legislation forward. have begun debating legislation that would limit how schools can teach students about race, according to an analysis from EdWeek.

Williams launched Black History Saturdays in response to Oklahoma’s House Bill 1775, which was signed into law in 2021 and and is meant to restrict discussion of race and power in the classroom. Among the prohibited classroom content is anything that could cause students to “feel discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish.”��

“But history is uncomfortable,” says Williams. “Especially when you have been the aggressor in history and you don’t want to come out looking like the bad person. But the thing is, we are still operating under the same system that protected slavery, and when students learn that, they’re going to want to change it.”

Historians, educators, and that undermining efforts to enact systemic change could be the purpose of Trump’s attacks on historical truth. Restricting education on race helps prevent Americans from developing an understanding of racism, how it has been maintained, and how it continues to function through the nation’s and , . The status quo serves figures such as those in Trump’s administration, who have accumulated wealth and power thanks to the nation’s systematized inequities; they are invested in continuing it. Similarly, that Trump’s agenda appeals especially to white, Christian, and male voters who are concerned about threats to their status. 

Williams says that while the federal government’s agenda and its reasoning are part of a grim trend, the recent crackdown has also “created the right time for us to organize and learn how we can protect our histories.” Black History Saturdays and LHC remain committed to teaching about racism and uplifting the histories of communities of color through their community-based education programs. 

Black History Saturdays gives students of all backgrounds and ages in Tulsa a chance to learn about the historical struggles and contributions of African Americans at day-long monthly convenings in a repurposed schoolhouse. When Williams launched the program in 2023, it served 120 students. Now, , there are nearly 400 regular attendees. The group is divided into eight classes sorted by age. The youngest participants are preschoolers, and the adult classes include a 90-year-old attendee. The program also offers free breakfast and lunch to participants, where a chef “teaches Black history through his food,” says Williams. 

Meanwhile, LHC, a nationwide organization, offers online workshops to community groups and educators to help them lead Latinx historic preservation and education efforts in their communities. These workshops are based on LHC-designed curricula, and the organization offers a downloadable, which provides step-by-step guidance on historic designation processes to equip communities with the knowledge to lead preservation efforts.

To hold the federal government accountable, LHC also of its Equity Study in April 2025. That study examines how and why Latinx heritage sites are underrepresented in official efforts to recognize and preserve historic sites. It also calls for increasing funding and attention to such work to counter the Trump administration’s regressive approach. Williams says she sees community-of-color-led efforts like these as “part of a national movement to reclaim education, memory, and power.”

For historian Ida Jones, author of Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, D.C.: Education and Activism in Logan Circle, community-led programs focused on Black or Latinx histories follow in the tradition of earlier educators of color who taught in their communities when the government failed or refused to do so. She draws a line back to the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when a generation of Black Americans whose parents had endured enslavement began exploring their identities as African Americans. Education was an essential .

, a teacher and civil rights activist, and Carter G. Woodson, a historian and , were two of the movement’s most prominent leaders. “What Bethune did, what Woodson did, was create a curriculum to teach the African American community, who didn’t know their history,” Jones explains. Importantly, this generation of educators, who Jones says stood “on the cusp of enslavement and freedom, of property and citizenship,” integrated their ancestors’ African pasts, their experiences of enslavement and racism, and the ways they had endured and won their freedom, into a uniquely African American narrative. They were “building this case for their humanity at the same time in which they were trying to embrace their citizenship,” says Jones.

While the Trump administration tries to paint Black histories and the histories of other communities of color as “anti-American,” Jones says teaching these histories has always been a deeply American project. In Bethune and Woodson’s time, Jones says, “They sought to be patriots of the country in which they now lived and be integrated into the fabric or the tapestry of that narrative. African Americans never sought to stand opposed or outside of the conversation of American history and culture. They saw themselves and their children as citizens, as patriots, as residents, and Americans.”

Williams also takes inspiration from the , a series of about 2,500 schools mainly located in the U.S. South that offered summer programs to Black students of all ages. Those programs were meant to supplement the substandard education that many Black students received during the Jim Crow era, and helped the community improve its social, political, and economic status. 

Asami Robledo-Allen Yamamoto, director of education and outreach at LHC, says her organization is also taking cues from the past in its opposition to Trump’s attacks. “When you look at the history of education, we’ve been here before,” she says. ”So, we’re going to get through this, and we’re going to get through it through acts of resistance, like staying our course, and providing tools, and supporting educators.”

Truthfully, I just wanted to see their art. All of the Black art. They had busts, sculptures, and paintings on almost every wall, and I would gaze for hours at every item. There was a particular piece that captivated me each time I laid my eyes on it. The painting, which I found out later was a poster, had a melancholy-faced Black woman sitting in what looked to be a bathroom or subway terminal because of the white-tiled walls behind her.

There was a phrase written next to the woman’s despondent face, etched in exquisite rainbow lettering. It read: “for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.” It wrecked me every time I read it. I would wonder, Why was this beautiful Black woman contemplating suicide? And why was she referring to herself as ‘colored’ when it was 1988 and most Black people I knew called themselves ‘Black American’ or ‘African American’?

Prior to seeing the poster, I had never heard of suicide in reference to Black women before. The only knowledge I had of suicide was when it was uttered during a Lifetime movie my mama made me watch during one of our weekend movie marathons. Even then, there weren’t any Black women in that film, or in any Lifetime movie in the 1980s that we watched. 

Even though I had all of these silent contemplations about my aunt and uncle’s magnificent poster, I never posed these questions to them or my mama. Instead, I would just stare at it in awe anytime I visited. 

I wasn’t introduced to Ntozake Shange’s work and didn’t learn about the political and cultural significance of until I was a graduate student and had the opportunity to read her 1975 choreopoem. for colored girls is a Black girl’s song, an ancient yet contemporary tune that allows a Black girl like me to begin to know herself, see herself. It allows Black girls to become familiar with their own voices, souls, and genders.

Shange’s work enlightened me to the complexities of living within the intersection of gender and race, and how those complexities related to the life chances and choices for me as a Black lesbian woman. Although I had been living within this identity all of my life, I had not yet thought about my existence theoretically: how my reality was interconnected with those who came before me and with those who would come after me.

Shange’s work showed me how my sociopolitical embodiment directly affected my ability to even dream about something as universal as love. Like Shange’s characters, I would have to navigate a racist, homophobic, and sexist world that chose not to recognize my humanity, nor my fragility as a sentient being in ways it did for others. Through its words I realized that I wasn’t the only Black girl, now woman, grappling with these realities.

Shange’s work, love, and now ancestral light for Black girls has remained a great influence on my work. Her metaphorical use of the rainbow as a symbol of the multifaceted and complex lived experiences of Black women struggling with and surviving racial and gendered oppression, within and outside of Black communities, is a brilliant illustration of the difficulty of unearthing and unraveling the complex and intricate nature of a people who represent multiple axes of difference.

Her metaphorical use of the rainbow as a symbol of the multifaceted and complex lived experiences of Black women struggling with and surviving racial and gendered oppression, within and outside of Black communities, is a brilliant illustration of the difficulty of unearthing and unraveling the complex and intricate nature of a people who represent multiple axes of difference.

The rainbow is a longstanding image for queer and trans communities. In fact, it was a tiny rainbow in the corner of a shop located in Ann Arbor, Michigan’s that drew me in. I was still a gayby at the time, and the rainbow represented a pathway into a new queer world. The shop turned out to be an LGBTQ+ bookstore that housed documentaries, films, and books about LGBTQ+ history, politics, and life.

I would spend hours after school devouring the anthologies dedicated to coming-out stories, watching what happened at Stonewall, and flipping through the photography books that showed our community members in beautiful and resilient ways. It was also in this bookstore that I learned that in 1978, artist and peace and AIDS activist was commissioned by the openly gay politician Harvey Milk to create the rainbow flag to represent the multidimensional nature and pride of LGBTQ+ people.

Each color of the rainbow was intended to represent the diversity and solidarity of our communities, visually capturing our nuances, our differences and sameness, and our complex identities. The flag was created as a symbol to not only spread love and inclusivity but also to counter sexual and gendered regulation within mainstream society. Leaders, community change makers, and inclusive businesses display the flag in stores, offices, and schools as a symbol of solidarity with LGBTQ+ folks and to express their support and welcome of people belonging to such communities.

However, throughout time, some of the most vulnerable yet resilient people within our communities have not found the rainbow marker to symbolize diversity, inclusion, or solidarity. For many, it has symbolized terror—racialized and gendered terror to be specific—causing many to disidentify from the flag’s symbolism, use, and consumption.

For example, in 1973 when Sylvia Rivera took the stage at one of the first gay Pride parades and celebrations in New York, she was booed, told to “shut up,” misgendered, and subjected to objects being thrown at her by the mostly white, mostly cis, and strikingly racist audience. She repeatedly stated, “.”

As an activist, Rivera, along with , founded the (STAR) shortly after the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, and both she and Johnson worked tirelessly to protect transgender and street youth whose needs and identities weren’t being recognized by early gay groups. Desiring to untether the Mafia’s control over LGBTQ+ bars and night life, Johnson and Rivera created the first LGBTQ+ shelter in the U.S., the first sex worker labor organization, and the first trans women of color organization.

They expanded their mission and goals to other cities until the organization’s collapse in the mid-1970s. Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson stood at for nearly 25 years, serving as a central figure and activist, not only for queer and trans rights but also an advocate on behalf of sex workers, prisoners, and victims of police brutality.

She became a resounding voice for those living with HIV/AIDS, and for those Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ folks who had to navigate and suffer through gay racism. As a political agitator who lived at the intersections of racism, homophobia, and transphobia, Johnson, along with Rivera, helped to transform public consciousness when it came to queer liberation. Yet, in 1992, Johnson’s body was found floating in the Hudson River, and the circumstances surrounding her death remain a mystery to this day. Rivera died in a homeless shelter of liver cancer in 2002.

Thus, even before Baker’s creation of the Pride flag, many Black and Latinx queer and trans folks dealt with antagonism, violence, ridicule, disregard, and neglect by members of their own communities, despite the mainstream perception of unity.

So, I wasn’t surprised to learn that in 2017 the office of LGBT Affairs in Philadelphia was met with backlash when they unveiled a of the Pride flag with the addition of the colors black and brown to the bottom of the rainbow. Many people that I was in community with saw the gesture as moving in the right direction, finally illuminating the need to confront issues of racism, sexism, and transphobia.

The office’s More Colors, More Pride campaign seemed to feel similarly. Their press release read, “In 1978, artist Gilbert Baker designed the original rainbow flag. So much has happened since then. . . . Especially when it comes to recognizing people of color in the LGBTQ+ community. . . .To fuel this important conversation, we’ve expanded the colors of the flag to include black and brown.”

While marginalized folks saw this move as one that spoke to their everyday experiences, many white cis gays and lesbians felt that the revised version of the flag was racist and unfair, and some even felt that the color white should also be added in the interest of keeping things equal. Some took to Twitter to express their anger and frustration with the new flag, while others wrote op-eds to express their discontent.

In the years that followed, other cities, countries, and Pride festivals began to adopt the new version of the Pride flag to show solidarity with those of the LGBTQ+ community who don’t feel represented by the original flag. A London volunteer who leads the LGBTQ+ social and support group Rainbow Noir wrote an op-ed for the U.K. news outlet Gay Star News in response to the anger about the modified flag, following Manchester Pride’s announcement to adopt it for their festival.

“We are worn out; physically sick and tired from having to defend our right to be seen, both individually and as queer, trans, and intersex people of color (QTIPOC) collectively.” They argued throughout their essay that the rainbow flag for many Black and Brown queer and trans folks has never felt like it was created for them, and that the “racism and silencing that has ensued since Pride’s announcement is a painfully clear example of why the stripes were included in the first place.”

On June 27, 2018, Stonewall, the United Kingdom’s leading charity for the equality of LGBTQ+ people, released a report about the extensive and longstanding discrimination and . They reported: “Half of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) LGBT people (51%) faced discrimination or poor treatment from the wider LGBT community.” They further stated that the “situation is particularly acute for Black LGBT people: Three in five (61%) have experienced discrimination from other LGBT people.”

The study, which was based on 5,000 participants, revealed the longstanding problem that queer and trans communities are also plagued by racism, sexism, cisnormativity, and even homonormativity. Before I came out, I wasn’t aware of this fact, either. I neither recognized nor thought about the fact that LGBTQ+ communities, like Black communities, weren’t monoliths or communities made up of unmitigated unity. I never thought about how intricate, nuanced, complex, and diverse they were. 

After I came out, my experiences began to reflect the respondents’ voices, not only those in the Stonewall study but also sentiments voiced by the activist collective Rainbow Noir. When I came into my own grown Black queerness, I finally understood that some white queer and trans folks would never cede their own racial privilege over creating the necessary solidarity with queer and trans people of color. 

It was and is this reality that has led me to interrogate my own relationship to the rainbow flag, trouble the contention that LGBTQ+ communities have always been and are harmonious, borrow from the genius and nuance of Shange’s use of the rainbow, and assert that whiteness, cis-ness, wealth, and the like aren’t the only signifiers or representations of queer and trans identities.

This excerpt, adapted from by Kaila Adia Story (Beacon Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

In a quiet residential neighborhood near downtown Bogotá, Pinzon enters a graffiti-scrawled building, where he’s led into a room outfitted with a small lab. A mural on the hallway reads: “End the War on Drugs.” A lab technician takes Pinzon’s paper square of LSD and douses a small sample with a reactant. It turns a dark copper color, a sign the drug is not what it appears to be.

“There’s no presence of LSD,” Christian Gordillo, the lab technician at Échele Cabeza, the drug-checking site, tells him. “So we don’t recommend taking it.”

With drugs banned around the world, substances are manufactured and sold without regulation, putting the health of consumers at risk. Drug checking is a way to protect consumers by testing the makeup of drugs and providing recommendations that help them to make safer choices. 

Drug checking originates in the ’90s European club scene, where the service was commonly used to test synthetic drugs like MDMA during electronic music concerts. But in Colombia, a country at the epicenter of the war on drugs, drug checking has transformed drug users and those most affected by prohibitionist policies into activists, championing harm-reduction strategies and drug legalization. 

“Drug checking started as a strategy to care for people’s health and has ended up becoming a social movement that is demanding rights, but also proposing actions to change drug policy,” says Julián Quintero, founder of Échele Cabeza.

From Prohibition to Harm Reduction

For decades, Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, has persecuted drug traffickers and targeted the farming of coca plants, the natural ingredient used in cocaine. Colombia has also used its police force to crack down on drug users, who are often labeled by society as criminals or vagrants.

But Quintero, who began using cocaine, alcohol, and other drugs as a sociology student in the mid-aughts, questioned conventional drug policy. By the time he was in college, the Medellín and Cali Cartel, Colombia’s infamous drug cartels, had been dismantled, but the drug business still flourished. Other armed groups filled the void left by the cartels and took control of the trade. Despite numerous efforts to eliminate the trade, Quintero knew drugs were here to stay.

“The war on drugs had failed, so it was time to start proposing other strategies,” says Quintero.

In 2010, Quintero launched , a nonprofit that strives to make drug use safer instead of trying to eliminate it outright. At first, he focused on spreading information on drug use, with the aim of preventing overdoses. Two years later, Quintero opened a drug-checking booth in Bogotá’s underground raves, using reactants sent by Energy Control, a Spain-based harm-reduction program.

While Colombia has never faced an opioid crisis to the same degree the U.S. has, the growing popularity of synthetic drugs and their alterations posed a risk to Colombians. Échele Cabeza aims to catch the dangerous alterations before they are consumed. But nearly immediately, Quintero said Colombia’s media and politicians accused the organization of promoting drug use.

The nonprofit eventually won over some of its detractors by publishing reports about the adulterated drugs they detected. Their reports attracted the attention of Colombia’s Justice Ministry, which reached out to Échele Cabeza to request leftover drug samples in an effort to help identify new substances on the market. 

In 2013, the government granted the nonprofit a permit to operate legally in return for regular samples. Échele Cabeza became the first drug-checking organization in Latin America to have a government permit. “We’re located in the Global South, so no one found out, but we were the first to operate with a permit, before anyone in England or in the United States,” Quintero says.

That permit allowed them to foray into renown music festivals and exclusive clubs, where their services suddenly reached a wider audience. Concert goers were not only finding their services valuable, but also demanded that they be available at festivals. As demand grew beyond the festival circuit, Échele Cabeza opened its first permanent drug-checking office in 2023, where it currently offers services three times per week. That same year, Échele Cabeza also opened the first supervised drug-consumption site in South America.

Drug Checking Goes Mainstream

At the drug-checking site, youth carrying drugs stored in plastic bags file into the lab, where drug checking costs 20,000 pesos, or about $5 per substance. In another room, a psychologist is available for clients who wish to discuss problematic relationships with drugs or to ask for advice on how to speak to children about drug use. 

On a recent afternoon, Esteban Pinzón, the 36-year-old public school teacher, wondered aloud what to do with the drug that had been misrepresented as LSD. Gordillo, the lab technician, said there was no way to find out exactly what the drug is. In this case, the reactants only determined whether the sample included LSD or not. But he said that it was likely 251-NBOMe, a psychedelic Pinzón had taken before. 

Pinzón hesitated before saying whether he would use the drug or not. “The analysis created a lot of distrust,” Pinzón explains. “I’d rather take it easy.”

Between 2013 and April 2024, Échele Cabeza analyzed 39,982 substances. Of those substances, about 13% were adulterated. A 2023 study published by graduate students at Bogotá’s Andes University examined whether Échele Cabeza’s services changed the behavior of its users. The study found that there was a significant increase in self-care practices adopted by service users when compared to those who didn’t use the service and that negative effects associated with drug use increased among those who hadn’t used the services. 

Quintero said the impact of their services and their regular reports on Instagram, which currently has more than 220,000 followers, has earned them credibility. They are now commonly cited in news reports and consulted by magistrates from the Constitutional Court, Colombia’s top judicial body. Their influence has also reached the highest levels of government. 

When President Gustavo Petro took office in 2022, he called the war on drugs a “failure” and vowed to end it. While his actual drug policies have not been as far reaching, his administration consulted Quintero as well as a number of other experts in the development of a new national drug plan, which included harm reduction strategies, such as improving access to naloxone, a drug used to reverse an opioid overdose, and strengthening drug-checking organizations. 

According to the Justice Ministry, there are currently 13 groups operating across the country. Quintero said the Petro administration is tapping Échele Cabeza to provide training to these groups and to create a national network. “The government wants to bring together all these youth-led projects from all over the country and train them to do the same thing we did, which we think is amazing,” Quintero says.

The rise of new drug-checking initiatives are an indication that attitudes toward drug policy are changing, Quintero said. He hopes this momentum will give way to drug legalization that includes cocaine, which he said would make drug use safer. 

While he acknowledges drug legalization is still far off, he trusts the next generation might actually achieve this far-reaching goal. “I’m not in a rush now because I know it’s going to happen,” says Quintero. “All we have to do is to continue to work and to allow the next generation to take over.” 

This is a grave mistake that betrays our collective strength as well as our moral and ethical responsibility to resist the coordinated attempt to reshape our social and political reality through further monopolized power and control by a global elite. 

The reality is that much of what the Trump administration is doing—executive orders, policy threats, pressuring agencies and non-government organizations—is not law. Many of these moves are challenged and even overturned. Yet across the country, too many institutions are falling in line without a fight. Cities and universities are . Medical facilities are pulling gender-affirming care. Businesses and organizations are scrubbing their websites of anything that might read as “DEI,” along with critical work to address climate change. It’s a preemptive surrender—a reflection of how fragile our so-called progress really is. It also shows how comfortable we have gotten with institutions that never fundamentally changed to effectively protect basic human rights.

For Indigenous Peoples, the consequences of this fear-driven obedience are devastating on many levels. DEI backlash and ICE crackdowns are impacting us heavily. This is despite the fact that we are not a racial or ethnic group but rather political entities with collective rights established by treaties. Our tribal sovereignty is defined by a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government and international standards. 

There are in education, advocacy, art and culture programs, science and research, and even military spaces. We’re seeing a full-scale attack on community infrastructure such as health care and Head Start programs. This is a coordinated weakening of social and political services and agreements in order to accelerate access to natural resources found in and near Indigenous Peoples’ lands. 

We are witnessing that define the legal relationship between tribes and the U.S. government. This isn’t a fringe debate. It’s a constitutional crisis. Oligarchs are showing us in real time how far they are willing to go to unravel the “rule of law.” This is enabled by a systemic failure to understand who Indigenous People are and the legal and moral obligations the U.S. government has to us. 

If we continue to lack a shared understanding of what’s at stake in this new wave of colonization, we will keep losing ground——and enabling the full-scale attack against all people. 

This is part of a broader pattern. Too many Americans—even progressive ones, and even people working within the leftist movement—do not understand that Indigenous nations are not minorities seeking equality in an inherently unjust system. We are sovereign nations with a long history of resisting colonial governance structures. And that misunderstanding—which is the result of colonial governments relentlessly working to erase our history and invisibilize Indigenous People—is a critical liability in the broader fight for justice. 

We must not give ground to these tactics. Now is the time to honor the incredible strength and relationships we have built through decades of resistance, to hold the line together, and to to these inherently unjust systems. We, the global majority, are not in the same position we have been during previous waves of colonization. 

We call on our allies and accomplices to deepen their understanding of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, our resistance, and our solutions. By better understanding the entrenched power we’re all truly up against, we can collectively organize meaningful resistance. 

We must move past land acknowledgements. Indigenous Peoples have been fighting to protect our land, resources, culture, and people for hundreds of years. Indigenous Peoples have always known we are up against a global oligarchy that we must resist—not assimilate into. Now is the moment for everyone to recognize how much is at stake and decide how to move accordingly. 

The exhaustion in progressive circles is real. People are burned out. But maybe that burnout stems from a deeper problem: We keep trying to fix a system that was never designed to work for us. The U.S. government is structurally anti-democratic, which is why this administration can so easily dismantle decades of work with the stroke of a pen. That’s why, even as those who hold elected offices have become more diverse, we have descended further into authoritarianism. We’re not fixing the machine—we’re just changing the people operating it. 

Pouring billions of dollars, time, and talent into a political system that keeps betraying us is not working. It has normalized the stripping away of our humanity, disconnecting us from each other, and redirecting our faith into politicians and a political infrastructure that is more suited to protect private interests than our collective well-being. We have forgotten our own power.

What if we instead invest our precious energy and resources into Indigenous-led systems and models—governance rooted in relationality, balance, and deep care for the land and each other? Our ways have survived genocide, forced removal, and centuries of erasure. That endurance is not accidental—it’s instructive.

I’m not offering distant dreams of a future utopia. I’m speaking about acting on urgent, real-world solutions now. Grocery prices are too high? Worried about foodborne diseases? offer sustainability and abundance, and they are a striking counterpoint to the extractive, exploitative food industry that is failing our lands, farmers, and nutritional needs. 

Wildfires, flooding, desertification? Our knowledge can prevent and mitigate devastation. 

The daunting housing, education, and climate crises? Indigenous Peoples have been building effective, dynamic, diverse, place-based solutions, rooted in centuries of lived experience, intimate knowledge of local ecosystems, and steadfast resilience. 

We have knowledge of how to honor the specific land you’re on—traditional ways that vary across Tribes and ecosystems, from the desert South to the Pacific Northwest to the woodlands of the East and beyond. Protect the sacred and build with us. Believing in this system, or believing in and building something better, has always been a choice. 

We don’t just have ancestral memory; Indigenous people are actively practicing these solutions. We remember governance models that honor women, protect two-spirit relatives, and invest deeply in children. We still hold processes for resolving conflict that do not rely on punishment but on restorative justice. Our democracies are relational, human-centered, and alive.

Recently, I joined other Indigenous leaders for an . One of the topics we covered was how in movement spaces in which leaders imagine what real democracy looks like, Indigenous sovereignty was completely invisibilized and overlooked—even before the 2024 election. This is not surprising. There is a huge lack of political understanding of our unique positionality within the colonial borders of the United States. This is purposeful and has been used to keep people from understanding our—and, inadvertently, their own—power. 

This is the moment to root ourselves in a more critical analysis of , , and how we need to root ourselves in our collective power and strength. We need to honor the role of Indigenous Peoples in creating and informing an alternative vision for everybody and for Mother Earth. 

We need to stop feeding a system that was never meant to serve us. Let’s stop trying to just hold on long enough, as if the next election will save us. It won’t. 

But we can save ourselves—by turning toward Indigenous Peoples’ leadership, memory, and vision. We can remind you that you are sacred. That you have gifts that are needed for this moment. That you are medicine for a world out of balance. That you are part of a beautiful, interconnected, and sacred relationship with all that is. We can remind you that this has always been a fight for our shared humanity and that together we can build something better. 

All Peoples and all sacred life deserve liberation from all unjust systems rooted in principles of supremacy. Our power will never be taken by any executive order, so let’s not quietly give it up.

On Jan. 22, the , a community-building and land restoration organization led by Indigenous women, announced that it purchased a section of the site the BOP identified as its first choice for the new prison. With the acquisition of 68 acres of private land, the ARP aims to heal the land and the local community—in part by stopping the prison from ever getting built.

“This land has already seen so much harm in the strip-mining industry and has already been out of access [to] environmental care and tending,” said Tiffany, one of the leaders of ARP who declined to use her last name for privacy and safety reasons. “The thought of adding another extractive industry—one that extracts people from their communities and extracts labor out of them—was really horrifying to us.”

The land purchase, made with the help of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration (IEMI), comes after 20 years of back and forth between the federal government and residents of Letcher County, the eastern Kentucky municipality with a population of 21,000 where the prison was originally intended. The saga began in 2006, when Republican Rep. Hal Rogers requested that the BOP evaluate the potential for a new prison in Kentucky, citing the need for an economic stimulus. 

Ten years after, the BOP approved $500 million for a new prison built atop a former mountaintop coal-removal site. In 2018, a small coalition of ��in forcing the agency to table the project. By then it was clear that the BOP preferred to spend the funds improving aging prison infrastructure rather than on building new prisons. Also concerning to locals was that most of the initial cost for the Letcher County facility was slated for preparation of the land, as mountaintop removal sites require extensive remediation.��

“The last time [Donald] Trump was in office, he did speak out vocally against this project; he thought it was a wasteful allocation of funds,” said Joan Steffen, an attorney at the . She told Prism that the Department of Justice has consistently asked for the earmarked funds to be taken out of the agency’s budget. 

This is why it was a surprise when in 2022, the BOP announced that it was revisiting the project—this time under the guise of constructing a medium-security facility. When the agency released the Record of Decision in late 2024, locals assumed it was the end of the road for any resistance, despite significant��gaps��in .��

But throughout 2024, the ARP quietly organized and collected funds for the purchase. Tiffany also met with the landowners multiple times and built a relationship with them, finding common ground in that they were both born and raised in Letcher County. The landowners even knew her mom. She emphasized the importance of community ties in Appalachia, explaining that her deep roots in Letcher County resonated with landowners. 

There’s no chance that the ARP will sell to the BOP, Tiffany told Prism. This means that the federal government has to reconsider its plan and reevaluate potential sites for prison construction—a lengthy and bureaucratic process that can take years. Meanwhile, the price tag for a new construction project will balloon beyond what the agency wants to spend.

In this latest iteration of the fight against the prison in Letcher County, organizers hoped to articulate not just what they are against, but what they are for. 

“Rematriation is a solid strategy for abolition,” Tiffany told Prism. One of the hopes of organizers is to return bison to the land. The animals were once ubiquitous throughout the Midwest and Appalachia until they were hunted into extinction for the purpose of rendering Indigenous life unlivable. They also plan to plant native and non-native plants like persimmons, pawpaws, and grasses, both as food sources and as natural flood prevention. Of course, they’ll also need to hire local people to put up fencing for the bison, help plant and restore the area, and manage other projects.

The ARP’s approach to economic development and land care offers a tangible alternative to the promises made by the region’s congressman. Rogers insisted that a prison would result in jobs and a local boost to the economy. However, locals worried about the educational requirements for correctional officer positions as well as mounting evidence that prisons depress local economies. 

In one study of how the introduction of prisons affected rural Central Appalachian communities, researchers found that poverty rates remained just as high as before construction. The federal agency, Appalachian Regional Commission, lists the Kentucky counties where three federal prisons have opened under Rogers’ tenure as “distressed.” Recent research from the Prison Policy Initiative also found that chronic understaffing at prisons and jails isn’t effectively countered by promises of pay increases or workplace benefits. In other words, the growing body of research contradicts the purported reasons for constructing prisons. 

“​It’s become something that [Rogers] is so ingrained towards establishing that his ego will not let him let go of it,” said Artie Ann Bates, a resident of Letcher County and organizer with the coalition group Concerned Letcher Countians. “I think when someone is so driven to acquire something that they no longer listen to logic or reason or dissenting voices, then that’s a problem.”

But it’s not just claims about jobs that concern local residents like Bates; it’s also that the BOP appears to have no comprehensive plan for issues such as flooding. Eastern Kentucky and much of Central Appalachia faced catastrophic flooding in 2022. This includes Roxana, where the Letcher facility was planned for. Not only have the impacts of mountaintop coal removal increased streamflow, bringing greater amounts of contaminated water at faster paces through Kentucky’s mountains and hollers, but when disaster strikes, prisons rarely have adequate plans for how to evacuate people in their custody. 

“Folks who are incarcerated really do get bottom-of-the-barrel treatment,” Bates said. “They’re sort of the forgotten population.”

Bates has a different view of Letcher County’s potential for economic revitalization. She’d like more mental health services provided to locals and to see an economy based on regenerative agriculture. The ARP’s acquisition is a great place to start. For her it also offers another benefit: healing. 

“[Concerned Letcher Countians] think that it will be the kind of growth and development that will provide the nexus for young people to learn Indigenous practices and restorative use of the land,” Bates said. “It’s economically good. It’s ecologically productive, it’s culturally positive. It’s the beginning of righting a wrong that started 500 years ago.”

This story originally appeared in .

The mangrove seed is born suspended in the air and attached to its mother plant. When it matures, it separates and falls into the water where it rides the tide until it finds a place in the ocean depths where it can take root—until it is ready to reach toward the air again.

Mangroves remind me of social justice movements in Puerto Rico, serving as a symbol of our histories and our interconnection. The history of Puerto Rico—and the Caribbean overall—is marked by the violence of colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and more recently, the climate crisis. An archipelago that floods will always have to be evacuated. A people that loses its history does not survive. 

Creating new memories in this region is a complex process full of opacity and without guarantees. However, much like the mangrove, some of us in Puerto Rico weave the stories that situate us in time, shed light, and sustain us. This is how many of our stories are born. 

Strengthening Our Roots in the Face of Disasters 

are in danger of disappearing. Ensuring their survival is crucial for the survival of Caribbean resistance movements because mangroves are our first line of defense against hurricanes and coastal erosion. Fighting for the future of mangroves teaches us how to regenerate ourselves.

Mangroves cover only 0.1% of the Earth’s surface. Curiously, the Puerto Rican population also represents 0.1% of the world’s population. Most mangroves are found in tropical and subtropical areas. The Puerto Rican archipelago has many of these forests. Mangroves help absorb CO2, and their resilient ecosystem reduces the effects of coastal erosion, hurricanes, and tsunamis. Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities have always understood the . 

For centuries, mangroves have protected the Caribbean from storms while also providing food, wood, habitat, and water filtration. Our coastal towns, particularly Loíza and Salinas, have been our greatest teachers, continuing with of their importance in the face of their imminent destruction. The Caribbean, one of the regions that emits the least greenhouse gases, receives the strongest attacks from the climate crisis. Recent studies show that nearly are affected by coastal erosion.

The supremacist capitalist crisis also threatens us with extractivist and harmful constructions on our ecosystems for the of foreign investors that and displace us. It’s tempting to want to skip this moment. But it’s also powerful to remember that we are privileged to have in moments of fear. 

The Land Continues to Be Named

Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain for more than four centuries and is now a U.S. colony. In the mid-19th century—the last decade of Spanish rule—a group of young working-class intellectuals formed (the Society for the Collection of Historical Documents of the Island of San Juan Bautista, Puerto Rico) to recover a sense of national identity. 

and other young prominent figures with a profound love for art and culture led these efforts. La Sociedad sought to preserve Puerto Rico’s robust and autonomous culture in the face of the of the Spanish authority. Spain perceived Puerto Rico as a colony of inferior subjects to be extracted from rather than a community of dignified people whose culture and history deserved to be preserved. 

the histories of an emerging people and an archipelago-wide cultural identity that was not being centrally preserved. This project had elite colonial nuances, since it wanted to gain acceptance from Spanish rule, and lacked our aboriginal and Afro-descendant stories. 

While the project was imperfect, it still inspired major political figures, including��, an advocate for��the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico.��Most importantly, La Sociedad inspired national independence hero , who in 1868 led , the most successful insurrection during his time.��

Puerto Rico had a brief period of autonomy and self-government until the U.S. military arrived in 1898 and our lands from the Spanish. The usurping U.S. government further and liberation and began instilling obedience to Americanization. Despite this, there was resistance��against coloniality. The was founded in 1919. By our histories and traditions from our ancestors, a national sentiment of Puerto Rico can begin to be researched, understood, and remembered.����

For decades now, our local communities have been rescuing the stories of our recent freedom fighters to preserve their memory and their dignity: , , , , , , , , , , and among others. 

Many grassroots archiving projects such as , , and are continuing to germinate the seeds of that mangrove in ways that expand the lands of our archipelago. But the people of Puerto Rico and their diaspora are tired of being resilient. Survival is not the only thing that defines us. And yet, our history shows that we prevail under circumstances that seek to erase our trajectory. 

We have experienced the whitening of our identity, the usurpation of our lands by foreigners, and our forced displacement—and we are still growing, still fighting, and are even more alert and enraged. 

Mangroves Rooted

The efforts of telling our stories and sharing our knowledge helps others to be inspired by it. We gain access to further freedom and power. To some outsiders, Puerto Ricans can seem submissive, obedient, and grateful for Americanization. Global coverage of recent events, including on May 1, 2017, the mutual aid and , and have helped shed light on a more complex sentiment for Boricuas, one that reflects a shift in national consciousness. 

Right now, we are facing two parallel political hurricanes: Puerto Rico’s recently elected and . Both ran fear campaigns that have resulted in deep human rights violations. Despite this, the Puerto Rican community has strengthened its memory of resistance. 

During the 2024 election, there was mass popularity toward a government candidate for the first time since the U.S. began occupying the archipelago. The candidate, , obtained 33% of the votes compared to the statehood candidate, Jennifer González-Colón, who reached 39%. With each event lived—earthquakes, Hurricane María, Trump, pandemic, genocides, wars, González-Colón—we continue to forge common narratives, a history that interweaves our roots. Our resistance is rooted and reaching for air. The recovered ground continues to regenerate.

The mangrove has thus become a metaphor. Like roots, memories ground our collective experience and strengthen our ties to our land. The strength of our collective power lies in recovering our lost, forgotten, invisibilized, or untold stories as a way of resisting. In the face of disasters, we use our creativity to face the coming changes. 

We are Caribbean beings, surrounded by water and at the mercy of its tempest. With strong roots, mangroves protect our coasts, preventing the tempest of wind and sea to drag us away. No hurricane will sweep us out. We are rooted and dispersing our seeds. Colonialism will be swept away by coastal erosion while we recover our land in dignity and community. Our stories will be told, treasured, and celebrated.

The mangrove interweaves its roots between water and land to protect the soil from storms; we play with the elements to strengthen our communities. Let us not forget that before these hurricanes, we were already mangroves.

These grants—canceled by the National Endowment for the Humanities—included $282,000 that would have gone to the and enabled the digitization of more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records. With this program, Native families researching ancestors who went to government boarding schools would have been able to easily access digitized copies of their relative’s school records, including the cause and date of the relative’s death.

It was not infrequent that children died at these schools. An investigation commissioned by former Interior Secretary and been buried at Indian boarding schools during the program’s 150-year history. Many more are thought to be buried in unmarked graves.

The legacy of historical and intergenerational trauma caused by the boarding school era upon victims, their families, and their communities echoes down generations. Only by hearing the stories of boarding school victims can descendant families process and understand what happened to them and hopefully heal the wounds of this country’s tragic experiment in forced assimilation.

The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) condemning the Trump administration’s decision. “The action is not just a bureaucratic decision conjured in ignorance,” NCAI President Mark Macarro wrote. “It is a betrayal of our communities, our survivors, and our sacred responsibility to the children who never made it home.”

A Forgotten Victim’s Story

Eddie Spott was just 14 when he was ripped from his home and family on the Puyallup Reservation in Tacoma, Washington, in 1894 and taken across the country to the in Pennsylvania.

He was no doubt taken by train, a trip that would have lasted several days. He and his family would have had no choice in the matter. Across the U.S. and Canada, Indian agents came to reservations every year and illegally took children without their parent’s consent, often by force or in secret, and shipped them off to one of the more than 400 Indian boarding and mission schools established across the country.

The Carlisle boarding school, which was run by the U.S. Army, was going to train Spott to be white. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Carlisle founder at an 1892 convention, just two years before Spott’s arrival at the school. This mandate meant Spott could not wear his own clothes, eat his traditional foods, or even speak his own language. He would be punished harshly for doing so. Perhaps worst of all, he was permanently separated from his family.

We can only guess what Spott was thinking while traveling the 2,700 miles to Carlisle. Traveling alone or with strangers, each click of the railroad tracks taking him farther from his home, he may have wondered, “What did I do wrong? What is it about me that they think is so bad? Doesn’t my family love me anymore? All I know is that I must survive.”

Two years later, Spott was dead. Official records indicate he fell victim to the “white plague” of tuberculosis that was rampant at Indian boarding schools. He was buried in the school’s cemetery, forgotten and alone.

Spott’s descendants believe his death was part of a plot to steal the family’s land allotment. His siblings all died around the same time under questionable circumstances, leaving no heir to the property when their father died. This would have made the land eligible for sale to whites. Thousands of acres of Puyallup land on which Joint Base Lewis-McChord and the city of Tacoma now stand were stolen around the same time from the original Native allotment owners.

Of course, it’s now impossible to prove such a hypothesis, but in light of recently released historical retellings such as Killers of the Flower Moon, the theory cannot be dismissed.

One descendant, however, found evidence of Spott in online records and fought to repatriate his remains back to the Puyallup Tribal Cemetery in 2023.

A Lost Ancestor Discovered

Y-askdt Spirithawk, whose government name is Tiauna Augkhopinee, is an enrolled member of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians and grew up listening to family stories that her grandmother Ramona Bennett told her.

“I would sit and listen to her for hours,” Spirithawk says. “We would talk about history, and she would tell me all of the stories about our family and all of the important names that she said that I would know in the future that I need to remember.”

Bennett was a leader in the successful and also prominent in . She was an early member of the Puyallup tribal council and would later serve as its chairperson. Bennett was raised by her mother, Gertrude McKinney, who is also a boarding school survivor.

McKinney attended the from the time she was 5. The experience was so traumatic that she later forbade her children from speaking Twulshootseed, the Puyallup tribal language, because she associated it with punishment. But she always made sure her children knew they were from a strong bloodline.

Spirithawk, who is now 27, says she was maybe 7 when she first heard about boarding schools. From a young age, she had a deep interest in the institutions and dedicated a lot of time to researching them on her computer.

“I felt like I had a calling to learn more about the boarding school system,” she says. “I remember thinking that boarding schools were atrocious. How could the government do this to these kids? And how could these adults follow suit and actually abuse these children … and strip them of everything that makes them Indian? I remember being heartbroken about it.”

One night while Spirithawk was doing online research of her ancestors Marcellus and Mary Ann Spott, she kept coming across an article about a young man named Edward Spott who was buried at Carlisle boarding school. At first she assumed there was no connection to her family, because it was clear across the country and a name she’d never heard her family speak of.

“It must have been about 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning when I clicked on the article and discovered the young man’s parents were named Marcellus and Mary Ann Spott,” she remembers. “I showed the article to my grandma and said, ‘Is this our cousin? Is this our relative?’ And grandma went, ‘Oh my goodness! Yes!’”

Y-askdt’s Quest to Bring Edward Spott Home

The Carlisle school operated for 30 years, from more than 100 distinct cultures, before it closed in 1918. A century later, in 2017, the cemetery began the process of repatriating the remains of Native children back to their home tribes and families. 

Spirithawk contacted Carlisle and inquired about repatriating Edward Spott’s remains. They sent her the necessary paperwork to certify that she and her family were his closest living relatives. The Office of Army Cemeteries approved Spirithawk’s request and paid to have Spirithawk and three additional members of her family, including her aunt and research partner Amber Taylor, flown to Pennsylvania for the disinterment.

The planned return of Edward Spott to Spirithawk and her family in 2023 was part of the Army’s sixth repatriation project. The family intended to have a tribal repatriation ceremony at the cemetery to welcome their long-lost relative back into the arms of the Puyallup Tribe. Later, they would take his remains away from Carlisle, finally rescuing Spott from this factory of cultural genocide.

“The Army was very helpful and very respectful through the whole process,” Spirithawk says. “They were as kind as they could be. They fought for us and beside us. It’s important to remember that they’re not the ones who committed these atrocities.”

Just before the day of the repatriation, Spirithawk and her husband Solo Augkhopinee tested positive for COVID-19 and were not allowed to attend the exhumation. They could only stand outside the fence of the cemetery and watch from a distance. Instead, Spirithawk’s Uncle Muck, whose government name is Michael Hall, led the tribal repatriation ceremony.

The Heartbreaking Discovery Inside Edward Spott’s Grave

The Army examined the remains the next day and discovered them to be that of a girl who was between 16 and 22 years old at the time of her death. The headstones were purportedly mixed up when the school moved the cemetery to a different location in 1927.

“It was the worst news imaginable,” Spirithawk remembers. “It felt like boarding school trauma in its fullest effect.”

The whereabouts of Edward Spott’s body and the identity of the young woman found in his grave are currently unknown. Spirithawk hopes the school’s medical and dental records will help identify the girl, but the possibility of finding Spott’s remains among the other graves isn’t as good.

In October 2024, President Joe Biden formally apologized for the government’s role in the boarding school era, calling it a “.” In December, he to preserve its history. But links to both the apology and the designation have since been . 

The Trump administration has enacted cuts that severely limit the ability of the descendants of boarding school victims to access the information they need to heal from more than a century of intergenerational trauma. The cost saved by those cuts amounts to one-half of 1% of the cost of Trump’s planned June 14 military birthday parade, currently estimated at $45 million.

The work Spirithawk and her family did was not for nothing. Together they brought Edward Spott home, not physically, but in every other way. His life has re-entered the family history, honored and remembered instead of remaining alone and forgotten in a far-off place. His spirit was welcomed back through prayers, songs, ceremony, and most importantly, the love of his family.

It wasn’t just Clark and her husband who lost a beloved home in Altadena, where they had deep roots—so deep that Katie is a highly active member of the . The couple also have a terrier, Ginger, a “very good dog,” who constrained their ability to find new housing. Some landlords flatly refused to rent to tenants with pets, while others demanded high pet deposits or monthly pet rents that made already-stratospheric pricing unsustainable.��

“There’s not a world in which we can go someplace without our dog. She’s part of our family,” says Clark, who goes on to explain she got lucky, comparatively. After a brief time in a hotel, she, her husband, and Ginger found a home in Pomona, 40 minutes away from Altadena, which, Clark is quick to say, is still home to her. 

“I don’t think of myself as leaving Altadena,” she explains. “I think of myself as temporarily displaced.”

She’s not alone: 2.5 million people across the U.S. were , the most recent year for which data is available. 

compared to . Nationwide, the U.S. Census Bureau found , especially households of color, are “cost burdened”; in Los Angeles, . In the immediate aftermath of the fires, , despite . 

Amid a national housing crisis that’s exacerbated in disasters such as the L.A. fires, Hurricane Helene, and Hurricane Harvey, there’s a particular slice of renters who are sometimes forgotten: those among the . As renters who have lost everything—or been displaced by those who can afford to pay more—scramble to find new housing, they need their pets, who can and . 

No-pets policies, as well as breed, weight, size, and number restrictions, make it difficult for families to find homes. Even when landlords allow pets, additional deposits and tacked-on, nonrefundable “pet rent” are essentially . “These layers of fees and charges related to pets, with the majority of those charges not being refundable,” act as “a revenue stream for landlords,” argues consultant Lauren Loney, who specializes in pet-inclusive housing.��

Animal welfare and housing advocates are finally understanding that pets are a housing issue. Renters feel squeezed into housing without pets, or homelessness with them. , as well as the ability to pay for care, are why people surrender their pets.

Getting to “Pets Welcome”

In a tangled, complicated housing market, this is actually a very fixable problem. 

From a regulatory perspective, pet deposits can and should be limited, along with other rental deposits. States have highly variable laws around as a deposit, from three times or more the monthly rent to just one month, many with additional fees applying to pets and furnished units. In addition, similar bounds on “pet rent” can also make housing more affordable, and spare pet guardians the bait and switch of securing a rental only to discover that it’s more expensive than advertised.��

Ross Barker, who leads the  at Michelson Found Animals (MFA), argues there’s an distinction between pet-friendly and pet-inclusive housing. 

According to MFA’s research, “pet-friendly” housing can come with barriers such as breed, size, and species restrictions; an ad might say the property “welcomes dogs,” for example, but the fine print may limit that to a single dog under 35 pounds. Other housing might allow cats and dogs, but not parrots and rabbits. 

Barker argues that true “pet-inclusive” housing includes all pets, and the distinction between pet-friendly and pet-inclusive housing needs to be resolved to expand access to the rental market. “About 80% of all rentals allow pets, that sounds pretty good,” he says. “So why are so many people struggling to find housing?”��

Seventy-two percent of renters report , according to the organization’s research, citing issues such as fees and restrictions that make housing searches challenging. In Los Angeles, they found only 67% of housing allowed pets, and after eliminating properties that charged pet fees or had restrictions on the types of pets renters can have, that number dropped to 8%. 

Resistant property owners might want to reconsider: that while pet guardians pay an average of $864 in deposits, damage (in the 10% of households where it occurs) costs around $210, with many renters electing to cover these costs themselves. Tenants with pets also stay 21% longer, cutting down on costs associated with turnover.

, a 2024 bill in California, would have limited pet rents and restrictions, but it was . In Colorado, barred additional deposits of more than $300 and pet rent over $35 or 1.5% of monthly rent. A currently under congressional review seeks to regulate breed and size limits, fees, and pet restrictions in shelters. In Los Angeles County, a proposal in December 2024 to study issues related to pets and housing.

No Pet Left Behind

Clark is also a strong endorser of tenant unions being a possible solution to this issue, as they allow renters to build strength, solidarity, and connections. “You’re a member of your community, and you shouldn’t be treated like a second-class citizen just because you don’t own property,” she says. 

Being a renter doesn’t make residents less engaged. Clark has served on the since 2018 and explains that the library is playing an active role in supporting the community after the wildfires, including setting up wifi hotspots, distributing hygiene kits, and working with L.A. County to provide services to kids displaced by closed schools.��

Looking to the aftermath of the Lahaina fires on Maui, she says renters were “left to their own devices,” a common phenomenon for a community that can be challenging to organize. 

Finally, considering the needs of evacuees with pets needs to be part of disaster planning. U.S. emergency planners learned a stark lesson from Hurricane Katrina, when around 250,000 pets were left to weather the storm, with , even as some people refused to evacuate without their pets, while buses and shelters refused to take pets with their guardians. 

The response of a horrified public pushed Congress to pass the . The PETS Act requires the inclusion of animals in evacuation and sheltering planning, with some regions, such as New York, implementing highly successful animal disaster planning, while others, such as Texas, . 

Hurricane Katrina also changed emergency response for animal welfare organizations such as Humane World for Animals, a major player in disaster response , with organizations, for example, freeing room in local shelters by transporting existing populations of adoptable animals out of area and to increase the chances of reunions.  

People in the United States love animals, from A Quiet Place’s and I Am Legend’s to real-world counterparts such as , , and the . That devotion is sometimes expensive—pet guardians spent more than , according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and heartbreaking, with animals leading short, vibrant lives.��

Fully pet-inclusive housing would open up opportunities to keep pets and their people securely housed as loyal, long-term tenants building community, just like Clark in Altadena. “There will be another crisis,” Clark says, and “whatever that next crisis is, attention will shift, and all the folks in Altadena are still going to be dealing with this…this is going to be a really long road.”

Street food goes as far back as . Four thousand years ago, city dwellers short on time, money, or cooking facilities patronized street food vendors offering quick, cheap, and tasty meals. 

In colonial America, the street was the supermarket. City residents shopped at outdoor markets for meat, bread, and produce, according to Cindy R. Lobel, author of . By the early 1800s, “hot corn girls,” mainly African American women, sold ears of corn from buckets in cities. In New York City, each wave of immigrants took their turn: Italian women peddled preserves made from scavenged fruit, German mothers hawked bread from baskets, and Jewish men dished out pickled herring and vegetables from barrels.

Street food is still a fixture of city life, providing a living to thousands of vendors and affordable food to many more customers. Given the vital role of street vendors, one would expect local governments to ease their path, but nothing could be further from reality. Many cities slap vendors with large fines, criminal penalties, and in the case of New York City, and them.

In New York City, the (SVP) is fighting back by working with more than 3,000 street vendors to publicize the essential services they provide, advocate for more official support, and end harsh penalties. Criminalization of street vendors has taken on added urgency as many are undocumented immigrants from the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing agenda. SVP is backing before the New York City Council that would provide street vendors with more security, assistance, and eliminate criminal penalties.

The Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) 20,500 “mobile food vendors” work in New York City, 96% of whom are immigrants, and half are women. But this is likely an undercount as the in 2021, “.” Since then, more than have arrived in New York City, swelling the ranks of informal street vendors.

Street food vendors include Colombian women serving obleas, wafer cookies sandwiched with caramel, from laundry carts; Mexican families dishing out tamales, pozole, and aguas frescas from folding tables; Caribbean men grilling on a sidewalk barbecue; and the “,” a grandmother peddling savory and sweet rice dumplings out of a battered tin box on a busy Chinatown corner.

Among the newest vendors are candy sellers who navigate New York’s sprawling subway system cradling a cardboard box in one arm with colorfully arranged chewing gum, mints, and M&Ms for a couple of bucks each. Candy sellers tend to be young women, many with a child in tow or infant swaddled to their back. Most are “Kichwa-speaking Indigenous people from Ecuador’s rural central highlands,” according to . arrived in the city in the last few years, fleeing economic and social chaos by Ecuador’s right-wing government.

Vending also includes legal food trucks packed with seven cooks cranking out thousands of tacos a day, vendors who rent permits to dispense bagels and coffee, biryani, and halal chicken out of a silvery metal cart for 12 hours a day, and unlicensed carts with dishes like fish-ball soup, beef curry waffles, and tortas. Some vendors set blankets on a sidewalk with cans and bags of food likely rescued from a dumpster. Others are newly arrived Latinas by underground kitchens who haul coolers filled with South American–style lunches to midtown where Latino construction workers buy a taste of home for 10 bucks. 

Mohamed Attia is intimately familiar with the life of a street vendor. That’s not just because he is managing director of the Street Vendor Project—Attia was a street vendor for nearly a decade. After emigrating from Egypt in 2008 when he was only 20, he served up java and bagels out of a metal cart to commuters, then sold hot dogs and pretzels to tourists in Times Square, eventually graduated to his own business selling smoothies and juices from a cart in Midtown, and finally ran a halal food cart before joining SVP full time.

Among the valued services street vendors provide, says Attia, is selling fresh fruits and vegetables that are affordable and just steps from people’s homes in neighborhoods that are otherwise food deserts. 

. Three-quarters of vendors have been hustling for four years or more—and nearly 40% for a decade or longer—and selling one tamale, sandwich, and smoothie at a time is the main source of income for 80% of them. According to the IRI survey of vendors, nearly 90% want to expand their business, secure legal permits, or open a storefront eatery. “When the conditions are good, street vending can be pretty profitable,” says Attia. 

But now vendors have the added burden of being criminalized by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Attia claims. “It is just mind blowing the amount of resources allocated to the NYPD, to the sanitation police … who are just raining down fines and handcuffs on the vendors day and night,” says Attia.

Under Adams, whom New York Magazine calls “” for bribery scandals, criminal citations against street vendors from 2019, the eve of the pandemic, to 2023. Overall, the city slapped more than on street vendors in 2024. Immigrant advocates Adams of waging “war on street vendors” by sending phalanxes of police to break up informal markets hosting scores of vendors in four different neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

As the NYPD dishes out tickets like Taco Bell does chalupas, the city has shut the door on new permits, despite a 2022 law authorizing 445 more street vending permits per year. The new law came after food vending permits had been capped at 5,100 for decades with “almost 12,000 other people stuck on an endless waiting list,” according to .��

As a solution, Attia says, “The city should reform the vending system and make it work for everyone.” To that end, SVP backs changing laws regulating vendors. Attia says they have dubbed “the street vendor reform package” are currently before the New York City Council. 

He says the is the “core” of the reform, as it would bring all vendors into the formal economy by creating thousands of additional licenses and permits over five years, and then lift limits on licenses and permits after that point. The would reduce and “hopefully eliminate” criminal liability by not involving police enforcement anymore. The would create a Division of Street Vendor Assistance within the city government to provide “support, education, outreach, and training for street vendors,” and the would expand vending locations.

Even if the city passes all four bills, street vending is still difficult. Attia says, “It’s very hard to run business out of the street in a food cart or truck. They are vulnerable to attack or being robbed. Locations are unstable. They deal with very harsh weather. Sometimes folks can’t vend because the weather is too brutal.”

Despite the difficulties, he says street vendors enjoy their work. “Most people who start vending love being entrepreneurs, they want to have agency over their business, work schedule, hours. They don’t want to look for a traditional job where they can be exploited and sometimes underpaid or treated unfairly.” 

The benefits of street food vendors extend to the entire city. Neighborhoods throughout New York City have become renowned for vendors introducing new cuisines and foods. That is a big motivation for many vendors, says Attia. “They love the experience of bringing their culture into the communities they serve.”

Imperialists and colonizers alike have storied Asian food as strange, revolting, and/or impure, limiting narratives that have persisted through generations of settler colonialism, extractivism, and Western military domination. 

As Soleil Ho argues in her evergreen article “,” many of us have internalized these stories—especially when the cultural rejection of our foodways is folded into our experiences of racialization—and are also actively refusing them, given the second and third generations’ desire to form new attachments to tastes, traditions, and stories that have been forgotten on our behalf.

For me, food has been my strongest anchor in recuperating ancestral relationships in diaspora. A mixed white and South Asian Sikh who is regularly consumed as white, I am the product of my mother’s lineage of white settlers on the Dakota lands and waters of Mni Sota Makoce (called Minnesota) and a Punjabi Sikh settler who moved to the same unceded lands.

I only learned about my Indianness when my father and I visited our family farm during childhood Christmas breaks. I do not speak Hindi or Punjabi because it was not spoken to me at home, and I only attended gurdwara in the United States in elementary school. These were not my choices, but they acutely impact how I have been perceived by family, community, and everyone else for my entire life.

That said, I, like many children raised in an even obliquely Sikh household, knew that my people were fighters—had been forced by circumstance to become not just warriors, but committed protectors of all who face oppression. Our holidays celebrate the martyrdom of children and elders who submitted to death rather than convert to Islam under Mughal rule, gurus who risked their lives to free people of other faiths they had been imprisoned with, and so on.

Sikhs celebrate our love for our people and all people—we are called upon to “see the whole human race as one”—in shared prayer and contemplation, which is inevitably followed by dancing and eating and joy. There is no Sikh history without food and no food without our history.

Food is a vehicle through which Asians in diaspora cannot just imagine, but perhaps embody and emulate, ancestral revolutionary traditions for our own times. More, in thinking with food, we can recuperate ways of knowing otherwise—of seeing ourselves in futures we have legally, socially, discursively, or materially been excluded from—that help us understand historical and ongoing modes of community building and collaborative survival across Asian America.

As soon as I was conscious of the world around me, I knew that my self—my essential, uncategorizable mixed-ness—would always be understood as an aberration or something to be “fixed” by Punjabis and Sikhs, white folks, and, ultimately, everyone else.

My families reinforced this in their own ways and, while not malicious, the lesson of my childhood was that I couldn’t please anyone given my inability to perform the idealized traits of both identities.

There were two people who never made me feel like a failure, an aberration,

or a complication to be dealt with, though: my paternal grandparents. My dadaji, or paternal grandfather, told anyone who would listen how I taught him English because once I learned to speak, I never stopped. This was not true, but became a running joke for as long as he remembered my name and face. My dadiji—paternal grandmother—never learned English, but took great pride in watching me trace my fingers across new words in picture books, smiling at my excitement rather than lamenting my lack of language. 

In the absence of shared words, she brought me into our family and culture by teaching me about food. Every year, my father and I visited our family farm bordering Nepal. Although my grandparents were both born in Punjab, they had fled home in their teens during the violence of Partition, ending up a subcontinent’s breadth away from loved ones, support structures, and the land their families had cultivated for generations.

As a child, I didn’t understand what Partition, the British Raj, or refugeeism were; all I knew was that my grandparents had made a lovely life for their five children by tending the land. 

This land, former jungle sold by the Indian state to refugees displaced by colonizers who drew borders where they saw fit, was a haven for my 18-year-old dadaji, dadiji a few years later, their children, and my cousins and me, the third generation to think of “the farm” as a second home. A small revolution, perhaps, but isn’t survival under impossible conditions always revolutionary?

My childhood trips to the farm always centered around the kitchen, where my dadiji would let me observe as she made meals. One of my earliest memories is of her showing me how to use a thumbnail to shimmy peas from their pods. I laughed as the fruit she had so lovingly tended in her kitchen garden pinged into a steel bowl, then grew frustrated at my own inability to wield my much smaller, less dexterous fingers with nearly the same precision.

She would bring me into the kitchen, motioning to me to sit on a braided stool so I could watch as she added oil to a pan for tadka (spices tempered in oil) before dumping its contents into a freshly pressure-cooked vat of dal. The way she could slice peppers and carrots with a paring knife—drawing the blade through the vegetable and stopping it with her thumb—without cutting herself amazed me.

I distinctly remember my awe at my grandmother’s pantry, which was stacked with shelves of pickle, jaggery, and other dried goods neatly nestled in a broken refrigerator someone had converted into extra storage space. On Christmas—a holiday that wasn’t a part of the Sikh calendar but had crept into our family’s own traditions—she would use an ancient-yet-perseverant toaster oven to make a plain yellow cake, which will persist in my mind as the best dessert I’ve ever had.

My dadiji passed when I was 12. She was drinking cha in her bedroom

when she had a massive heart attack brought on by hereditary heart issues. I was not allowed to go with my father to her final rites. Twenty-odd years later, I still miss her every day.

Punjab, the land my paternal family is from, is called such because it historically was home to five rivers: the Beas, Satluj, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum. Before Partition, these rivers made the land perfect for growing, so much so that the region is often still referred to as “India’s breadbasket.”

On March 24, 2020, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi announced that in 14 hours, the whole country would go into COVID-19 lockdown. As the markets for rural industries like agriculture became more tenuous in the global COVID-19 economy, hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of work, leaving urban centers for homes several days’ walk away. Most of the places where they would be forced to recuperate a stable life relied on agriculture. 

During the 21-day lockdown that followed, Modi passed three laws that undid farmers’ long-standing access to price assurance, or a minimum fixed price for their yield. For a decade, India’s farmers were living under constant threat of suicide. Their labor and land have been so undervalued on the market and so threatened by environmental change that the practitioners of the foundational livelihood of 70 percent of the nation’s rural population did not know whether it was possible to stay alive under crushing debt.

The new farm laws doubled down on these ongoing and compounding vulnerabilities, essentially telling farmers that while their livelihoods were the backbone of the country and heavily contributed to feeding the world’s people, they should not expect to be able to live off that work. Should not hope to make life from the land they had fought so hard to keep solvent. Should not expect to make life at all.

Modi was hoping to bring more foreign investors and private money into

the agricultural sector, and he was willing to sacrifice the labor that had made the sector a global force to begin with. This guaranteed vulnerability— institutionalized expendability, in the eyes of most farmers—sent shock waves across all of the nation’s agricultural regions. 

Punjab, the so-called breadbasket of India, began mobilizing. I knew that many Punjabis and Sikhs would be impacted, both in the country and across the diaspora. Impacted because they could not make a living in the country. Impacted because they were too far away to do anything. Impacted because our marrow has traces of Punjab in it, and the ache for life and land is foundational, no matter how many borders or generations removed we are.

The movement now known as the Farmers’ Protest began among Sikh farmers in Punjab and solidified in Delhi, where Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jain, and many other farmers from all over the country converged to block roadways into the capital city. 

As the farmers, so many of whom looked like my grandparents, aunties, and cousins, pressured the government to repeal laws that ultimately underwrote Modi’s agenda of religious purity, they made a temporary home in the city streets.

At every blockade—called a “morcha” by the protestors, which in British English translates to “a hostile demonstration against the government”—protestors weatherized tractor trailers to sleep in, built massive communal kitchens and lavatories, and erected free stores, libraries, and schools for elders and youth alike.

When the protesting farmers were beaten with lathis and shot with water cannons on Republic Day, farmers established medical clinics, patched up their wounded, and refused to leave. When Delhi police installed barbed-wire walls and tire-puncturing spikes around them, farmers nailed down the spikes with shoe heels and planted flowers and herbs in their stead, an act of refusal that made me cry.

We will grow anywhere, they said. Will bloom in response to your barbed wire. Your open-air prison cannot contain our spirit. We will prevail because we are the revolution.

The COVID-19 lockdown brought me back to my kitchen. While I made all of the requisite COVID foods—my sourdough starter never really matured—I craved the dishes my dadiji made for my cousins and me when we were ill as children, the dishes that brought our family together at the table, and the ones that felt like a celebration. Each time I remembered and tried to replicate my family’s recipes, I lit a candle in the kitchen and on my altar. This was both an invitation and an ask: here, let’s make something together and please, help me remember how it should taste.

When the Farmers’ Protest began, I knew that I had to learn more about my community’s histories and our presents. While I continue to negotiate my own and others’ complicated relationship with my identities, in 2020 it became clear to me that because I am descended of the Punjab, I am of every farming family who remade their lives at the morcha. I knew it was important that I understand and value what they are risking their lives for.

While the protestors ached to return to their already emaciated land, I tried to understand the Sikh precepts that kept them away from home for more than a year. Lighting a candle, I pulled out books that I had borrowed from but never returned to my father, reading about our history at my altar with my ancestors. 

Then, I would cook. Adding onion, garlic, ginger, and tomato to my pressure cooker before choosing what dal or sabji to add to what a friend called “Punjabi mirepoix,” I stirred the texts and what came through at my altar into every step of my meal, testing out Punjabi words in the safety of my home, my cat Loui the only witness to my linguistic incompetence.

As I brought our precepts and histories into conversation with our foodways, I was reminded that  responding to injustice is Sikhs’ duty: to see someone in distress and do nothing is to fly in the face of every teaching our gurus had cultivated across ten generations and a myriad of revolutions.

I would put ingredients or a bite of the finished product on my altar. A way to share, remember, and create across time, space, and tangibility. We all ate well. We ate together.

Tens of thousands of suicides, draught, erratic weather, and so much else have created so much distress. But living communally, moving toward a common cause, making the world see their brilliance and values, also made the morcha joyful. 

Clip after clip on social media showed protestors feeding each other and their neighbors, dancing bhangra, and reading side by side quietly. Instagram posts showed elders teaching math to local children who couldn’t attend school, youth leading elders in daily exercise, and everyone sharing in the burdens of cooking, washing, and surviving, together. 

The amount of love present in these multigenerational spaces, which brought organizers for labor, against caste and religious violence, and growers together, was overwhelming, palpable even from my far remove in North America.

When, after a year of occupying Delhi’s streets, the farmers prevailed and the laws were rescinded, knots I didn’t realize had formed across my shoulders and down my thighs slowly released. For a week, tractors rolling back into Punjab were greeted by crowds of people dancing, singing, and showering their kin with marigolds and sweets. It wasn’t, as some might say, a victory for the tenacious people who had endured heat, monsoon, and near-freezing to keep their livelihoods. No, these days and weeks were celebrations of a collective future that had become more possible because of the protestors’ tenacity. They were celebrations of the few who gave so much for the many—the many families, critters, seeds, and soils who did and still have so much to lose.

They were a promise of survival, and a refusal to accept things as they are. 

They were also a promise to return if the government reneged on its agreements. 

To return if harm continues to be done to the land, people, water, and animals.

To refuse to be cowed in the face of violence today, tomorrow. 

To make resistance a daily act, one seed, one bite at a time.

To reverberate from the other side. To make revolution inevitable.

This excerpt, adapted from edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan, and Anita Mannur (New York University, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

During his arrest, Ulises invoked his Fourth Amendment rights to remain silent, talk to a lawyer, and review a warrant. Instead of respecting his rights, ICE officers beat his car window with batons to force him out and then physically assaulted him until he lost consciousness. Paramedics rushed Ulises to a hospital, where he presented with symptoms of heart attack and stroke. 

Ulises’ family contacted their local rapid response hotline, and SCC RRN dispatchers activated two on-call emergency legal responders from Pangea Legal Services. This collective response worked, connecting Ulises and his family to a strong network of legal and community support. 

Elena Hodges, the on-call lead attorney responder, traveled to the hospital to provide a free legal consult and document ICE’s ongoing violations, with help from remote support and other on-call responders and colleagues. Over the course of the rapid response activation, the legal team averted Ulises’ immediate deportation, mobilized community support, and coordinated referrals to ensure ongoing legal representation. 

The SCC RRN also connected the family with material and accompaniment resources, including rent support and mental health services to address the trauma of witnessing Ulises’ unlawful arrest and the impact of ongoing family separation. Two months after his unlawful arrest, Ulises remains detained. But his family and community have prevented a deportation and continue to organize for Ulises’ release, so that he can reunite with his wife and daughter and fight his immigration case from home. 

Ulises’ case illustrates how rapid response is a vital tool for community safety and resilience, offering a model of defense grounded in care, mutual aid, and a refusal to let our people face harm alone. And, given the political climate, our communities need rapid response now more than ever. 

For immigrant communities across the country, the past few months have been filled with fear. Parents are afraid to take their kids to school. Workers are skipping shifts because they are too scared to drive. Rumors of mass raids flood social media, spreading panic. While these rumors are inaccurate—no mass raids have taken place in the San Francisco Bay Area as of this writing—they do express a shared recognition: We are living through a renewed era of targeted enforcement and rising repression.

And yet, amid this fear, people are showing up for one another. They’re protecting their neighbors, organizing in real time, and building systems of resistance grounded in solidarity. 

A Community Model for Defense

is a nonprofit that provides direct legal representation to immigrants facing deportation along with community organizing. We are building toward a world where no immigrant is detained and where all people have a pathway to citizenship and the resources they need to thrive. 

When the first Trump administration escalated deportations in 2017, the team of organizers, movement lawyers, and immigrant justice advocates at Pangea realized traditional legal services weren’t enough to meet the demand. By the time someone needed a lawyer, it was often already too late. 

We needed something proactive, community based, and ready to respond in real time when ICE made arrests. We also needed public actors, especially county governments, to help fund these efforts. Pangea Legal Services and its partners responded to the community need by building such a network from the ground up.

Across the San Francisco Bay Area, and other rapid response networks emerged to monitor ICE, verify enforcement activity, and provide emergency legal support. Parents, students, and day laborers became first responders in their own communities. They trained in Know Your Rights, set up hotlines, and formed rapid response teams that could mobilize within minutes. 

These networks didn’t disappear after Trump left office. Rapid response continued under the Biden administration, even as ICE enforcement became less visible. Now, as targeted enforcement ramps up again and protections are rolled back nationwide, these same networks are being activated and expanded. 

Rapid response is more than legal support. It’s mutual aid, organizing, and community defense, which is informed by and reflects the Bay Area’s decades-long history of community-based resistance: from the immigrant rights and Black Power movements to disability justice and Indigenous sovereignty to LGBTQ liberation, free speech, and anti-war movements. At its core, rapid response is an embodiment of community power and the recognition that we protect ourselves.

When Pangea began our rapid response work, only a few team members participated; just four of the organization’s 20 members were leading rapid response. But anticipating that the community need would surge after the 2024 elections, our team prepared. 

We engaged in months of collective discussion and made a strategic decision: Rapid response would become an organization-wide commitment for a limited period of time, as we continued to advocate for longer-term solutions at the county and regional levels. 

“If we do our jobs well, the impact of our rapid response networks will be that immigrants lead in our local and state-wide policy decisions on community safety and power, in a sustainable way that outlasts any single federal administration,” says Jessica Yamane, a co-director at Pangea and an immigration attorney. “To achieve this vision, we have to create systems that do not concentrate power with single organizations or individuals, but instead encourage collaboration and sharing responsibility.”

Our whole team, including legal and non-legal staff, now takes part in rapid response. We all rotate on the hotlines for three Bay Area counties. We all train. We all respond when our communities need us. 

It wasn’t an easy shift. Many staff worried they weren’t equipped to do this work. Nearly all feared burnout. But by democratizing the process, offering training, and building collective buy-in, we have ensured that no one person carries the weight alone. This is community defense at its best: shared leadership, shared responsibility, and shared power.

Beyond the Bay: A National Blueprint

The Bay Area’s model of community-led rapid response is spreading. The details look different across regions, but the goal is the same: protect our people. Some models focus on removal defense while others center community organizing, legal accompaniment, and public education. No matter their focus, each of these models exists because government systems have failed to offer meaningful safety, and communities have moved in to meet that need. 

In New York, the and similar grassroots coalitions offer a 24-hour community-based response system. Similarly, in Philadelphia, the and provide accompaniment and legal support. In Chicago, groups such as offer emergency hotline response and accompaniment services. In Los Angeles, the coalition and the have mobilized and defended entire neighborhoods for years. And yet, the need still persists. 

Since Trump’s second inauguration, deportations are surging once again. In the Bay Area, ICE is ramping up targeted enforcement (distinct from mass raids) by systematically tracking, detaining, and attempting to deport specific immigrants, from long-time community members with past criminal system contacts to individuals with prior deportation orders. Agents are testing the boundaries of sanctuary ordinances, showing up at parole offices, waiting outside of homes, circling grocery stores, and conducting .

We know that the federal government’s current attack on immigrant communities is connected to assaults on the rights of other linked and often overlapping communities, including trans and queer people, Muslims, and activists speaking in support of Palestinian liberation. 

Rapid response offers a blueprint for community defense and collective care in the face of government repression. The networks that sustained communities through previous waves of attacks are mobilizing once more, reminding us that our greatest strength lies in collective action. 

How We Resist

For those feeling overwhelmed, know this: We are not powerless. Here are tools we can use to protect ourselves and each other. Remember, rapid response is a form of mutual aid! 

• Save your hotline number. Add your local rapid response hotline to your phone. If you live in California, check out this .��
• Know your rights. ICE depends on fear and misinformation. Use Know Your Rights (KYR) tools and resources such as��, , and to make sure you and your neighbors know how to respond if ICE shows up.
• Make a family preparedness plan. Designate emergency contacts, guardianship plans, and safe points of contact. Keep important identity documents and immigration records in one secure, accessible place—and let a trusted friend or family member know where they are. Use to get started.����
• Organize your workplace. Talk with your team about creating a protocol for ICE enforcement. This is especially important for schools, construction sites, restaurants, and public-facing organizations.����
• Show up for your neighbors. Volunteer with rapid response networks like and those listed . Offer accompaniment support. Always verify reports before sharing them.
• Demand stronger protections. Local governments have a responsibility to fund and enforce real protections—not just in name, but through sustained investment shaped by impacted constituents. Call on your city and county officials to support rapid response, uphold sanctuary policies, and prevent collaboration with ICE.

This moment calls us to choose courage over fear, action over silence, and one another over isolation. History shows us that when we build together, we don’t just endure; we transform. 

There were also government stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit that slashed poverty by and supported many families through the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic crisis. It seemed as though we were beginning to adopt a new paradigm for assistance centered on efficiency, trust, and dignity.

But, as the political landscape is moving to the right faster than ever, could all that progress be lost? Basic income experiments are now facing from several states legislating against the visionary idea of granting individuals cash with no strings attached. And, as the Trump administration pledges to dismantle social programs and make life harder for those on welfare and those who don’t earn an income, it may seem like our window has passed to advocate for the right to a financial floor independent of work. 

However, giving up on the idea of a world where our intrinsic value is detached from our productivity would be a mistake. Basic income is meant to address the very economic insecurity and anxiety that helped fuel conservative populism.

Making a forceful case for a cash program that would benefit the vast majority of American residents is now more crucial than ever. New data from OpenResearch’s cash transfer program, the most comprehensive undertaken in this country, suggests basic income may even . 

It is time to consider a bold paradigm shift. In the philosophy world, we might call this “normative change”—an opportunity to change not just how we deliver social protection, but also what we think we owe each other. 

, which provided $1,000 monthly payments to 2,400 artists across New York State for 18 months, recently released findings from its . The research revealed significant benefits of guaranteed income on artists’ financial stability, creative output, and overall well-being. Key findings include a 19% increase in time spent on arts-related labor, improved work-life balance for 75% of caregiving artists, a 19% reduction in food insecurity, and a 29% reduction in severe anxiety and depression.��

The study, conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, underscores the transformative potential of cash transfer programs for artists, addressing systemic inequities and enabling creative workers to focus on their craft. These findings make a compelling case for investing in artists as essential workers, supporting both their financial needs and creative contributions to cultural and economic ecosystems.

Artists are often pillars of their community. They work hard, like most people, and contribute . They also contribute to the well-being of our communities: embellishing our spaces, enriching the lives of children, preserving old cultures, and helping new ones emerge. They lift us when we are down and ensure we remain uplifted. When we strengthen them economically, we strengthen everyone. 

There can be a tendency in progressive movements to present basic income almost defensively, as a program that will not reduce employment hours or result in labor market withdrawal on the part of recipients. That’s understandable, and it is true: Research on cash programs has generated that people will withdraw from the labor market en masse if they get unconditional cash. In fact, it’s often .��

But UBI shouldn’t be considered a good idea only if it results in no changes to our current labor market participation. It is a good idea, whether it stimulates productivity or not. Basic income was always about reassessing the centrality we place on paid employment to make ends meet. At the origin of basic income was the powerful idea that we should stop viewing the right to an income exclusively through the lens of productivity and embrace instead our universal dignity—what , who advocated for a universal right to welfare, called “the right to life itself.”��

Artists are used to being berated about their impractical and financially irresponsible aspirations, often being told “to get a real job.” This approach to artists is insulting and based on false representations given that  

Nonetheless, such representations make artists the “hard case” for basic income. And so, to convince people that we need a guaranteed income floor, it can feel easier to start with non-artists. That’s why, in public discourse, the figure of the “working poor” is so central. 

But this is precisely why we need to make the case for a guaranteed income for artists. If we can agree that even artists deserve unconditional cash, we will have won the moral case for everyone else too.��

Why haven’t we invested more dollars in national cash programs given that research shows it is a simple and effective antidote? This is partly thanks to our puritanical obsession with paid labor. It’s also because of the conservative argument that providing a modicum of support for artists, friends, and neighbors will lead to a plague of laziness. 

It’s time to reject the insulting and damaging myth (often gendered and racialized) that low-income families are unmotivated layabouts. We need to establish an unconditional right to an income to help us build a more humane society where no one is relegated to a life of poverty and no one has to grow up with the looming threat that they could one day be left with nothing to survive.

This normative change would be beneficial for more than economic emancipation. With our productivist paradigm comes that of competition: competition for jobs, for resources, for status, for esteem. This is unleashing a politics of envy and resentment: for the welfare recipients, for the non-white applicants who get spots at elite colleges through DEI efforts, for immigrants who come to the U.S. for better prospects.

This logic of competition and scarcity mindset is driving us into a downward spiral and, perhaps most importantly, it is teaching our next generation that value in life comes from being better or having more than others. There is little room for dignity, solidarity, trust, and human flourishing, and this is underserving all of us. Guaranteeing everyone’s right to a modest income independent of labor will not change everything, but it can help us make room in our society for these alternative sources of value.

This land and this river have been home to the Mashkiigong-ziibiing and their ancestors, the Chippewa, Ojibwe, and Anishinabe, for more than 500 years. The wild rice (manoomin in Ojibwe) that grows near where Lake Superior meets the land is a sacred dietary staple. And it’s why the Chippewa settled near Lake Superior; their ancestors foretold to go west until they found food that grows on water. 

Today, the Mashkiigong-ziibiing, or the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians, is up against the odds to defend its land rights, sovereignty, and healthy water. 

The small 8,000-person Bad River Tribe has taken on a billion-dollar Canadian oil pipeline company to demand the removal of an illegal oil pipeline. 

“Most communities can not afford those legal battles,” says documentary filmmaker and producer Mary Mazzio, who has been filming the land rights battle at Bad River since 2022. “This is not a wealthy community, but this is a priority for them because of what’s at stake for them: Lake Superior and fresh water for the country.” 

Currently, more than 30 million people rely on fresh water from Lake Superior, according to the .  

Mazzio released her documentary in November 2024. It was awarded the best documentary film from the Environmental Media Association as well as being nominated for the Critics Choice best historic documentary and the best political documentary. The film has elevated the Tribe’s efforts and broadcast them across the country—even getting shared on social media by Leonardo DiCaprio with support from Mark Ruffalo, Edward Norton, Channing Tatum, and Jason Momoa.

“This is about a very small group of people fighting so hard for one of the world’s most precious resources, doing it at risk, at their own cost, for all of us Americans,” Mazzio says. It’s about redefining the American myth of conquest and Manifest Destiny. 

As the case makes its way through the courts and environmental agencies, the Bad River Tribe is in a defining moment in its history, as members hold strong in their defense of manoomin and the fresh waters that sustain it—and sustain us all.  

Treaties and a Sovereign Framework 

The Bad River Tribe’s fight for sovereign autonomy is an all-too-familiar battle across North America. Since the 19th century, treaties, legal acts, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have attempted to eliminate and control Native Americans. For example, the 1887 Dawes Act, also known as the Allotment Act, illegally broke up reservation land into parcels, which could then be purchased by private outside groups like timber companies. 

“The Dawes Act intent was to assimilate people,” says Patty Loew, Bad River Tribal member and retired Northwestern University journalism professor. “We lost 98% of our land within 25 years.”

The Bad River Tribe’s 124,655-acre reservation—and tribal members’ right to fish, hunt, and gather on ceded territory as well as have a tribal government—still remains thanks to the seventh-generation mentality, says Edith Leoso, the Bad River Tribe’s former tribal historic preservation officer. Leoso says this framework is how the Ojibwe people made decisions during the time of the treaty signings as well as today: “How is what we’re doing now going to affect us seven generations from now?”��

Despite the protections the Tribe had put in place through treaties and their own government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs allowed a Canadian oil company called Lakehead Pipeline, now Enbridge Energy Partnership, to build part of its 645-mile pipeline through the Bad River Reservation in the early 1950s. 

And they did so without any tribal input. 

from Superior, Minnesota, through Wisconsin and Michigan until it reaches Sarnia, Canada. Every day, it transports 540,000 barrels (23 million gallons) of crude oil through this landscape, threatening the beings who depend on this land and water.

Erosion Exposing the Pipeline

In the early years, the 12-mile segment of pipeline that sliced through the Bad River Reservation was overlooked.  “The priorities were to buy back land that was originally in reservation borders,” Loew says. Thanks to the income from its casino, which opened in the 1980s, the Tribe has managed to buy back about 70% of that land, says Tribal Chairman Robert Blanchard.

This is no small feat for a community of this size. “The average income of the people living on the reservation is $8,000 annually,” Leoso says. Their progress has taken decades of commitment and investment, using the casino income, which brings in about $40 million a year. 

When a number of easements granted to Enbridge expired in 2013, the Bad River Tribal Council voted against renewing pipeline access. The council was motivated by a spill a few years earlier, when another Enbridge pipeline burst and poured more than 800,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River in neighboring Michigan. Leoso says this influenced the Bad River Tribe’s decision to vote no.

“It was unanimous,” she says. “No one abstained. I was surprised because we’re so conditioned to just go along with everything. I was like, ‘Oh, OK. We’re starting to play ball now? Let’s do this thing.’”

In the 12 years since then, the pipeline has still been illegally operating on Bad River tribal land. 

Because of climate change, the risks are getting closer to home. When the pipeline was originally installed, it was approximately 350 feet from the Bad River, but erosion and two catastrophic shifted the river’s course, so the pipeline is now just 12 feet from the river. 

While Bad River has been fortunate to have not yet experienced a spill or rupture, the risk is ever present. In 2017, the that 29 other spills have occurred on the Enbridge Line 5 between 1968 and 2017, totaling 1.1 million gallons of oil. 

Still the pipeline remains on the Tribe’s land.

In 2017 the Tribe doubled down, insisting the pipeline be decommissioned and removed from the reservation. And in 2019, the Bad River Tribal Council sued Enbridge for violating its treaty rights.

Enbridge to settle the lawsuit. The Bad River Tribal Council declined to settle and persisted with legal action. When I asked then-Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins in 2023 what this money could do for the Tribe, Wiggins replied with a question of his own: “How much is your water worth?”

The pipeline, should it leak, threatens the very thing that brought the Tribe to this land and allowed its members to thrive. 

“We’re facing a threat to wild rice from Enbridge,” Loew says.

Manoomin, or Northern wild rice, is particularly sensitive to pollution and flooding, according to a 2023 climate vulnerability assessment conducted by the Great Lake Fish and Wildlife Indian Commission, an intertribal agency of the Lake Superior Chippewa Tribes. Pollutants from industrial runoff, like sulphate, are linked to the . 

Kathleen Smith works for the commission as the Genawendang Manoomin, which translates to “she or he who takes care of the wild rice.” Smith spends time surveying and collecting data in her canoe or via aerial surveys. She says that rain events can uproot the manoomin: “The 2016 flood prevented rice for a few years.”��

For the people who depend on wild rice for physical and cultural sustenance, this loss is existential. 

Defying the Odds

Enbridge’s proposed workaround is to reroute the pipeline to avoid crossing the Bad River Tribe’s land. The new segment of pipeline would be 41 miles long and would cost the company $450 million. Though the reroute wouldn’t cross the reservation, it would still cut through the Lake Superior watershed that fills the Bad River.

“We remain committed to finding an amicable solution that recognizes the sovereignty of the Bad River Band, protects the environment, and secures essential energy infrastructure that millions of people on both sides of the border rely on,” Juli Kellner, a communications spokesperson for Enbridge, said in an email in March.

The Line 5 Wisconsin Segment Relocation Project permit is the most-studied pipeline project in state history, she added, and called the pipeline an “energy lifeline, feeding a network of refineries that produce critical transportation fuels, propane, and thousands of everyday consumer goods.”

In September 2022, Judge William Conley of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. But he did not issue an injunction that would have shut down the pipeline immediately, citing “significant public and foreign policy implications.”

In his ruling in , Judge Conley by 2026. Enbridge would also need to pay the Tribe $5.1 million and a portion of their profits.

“It was good news,” current Tribal Chairman Blanchard says with trepidation. “At the same time, we’ve got to expect what has happened. They appealed it, and they have the money to appeal and appeal and appeal. We don’t.”

And so, the 12 miles of pipeline still cut across the Tribe’s land. As the community continues to wait for the pipeline’s removal, Leoso says they’re “on edge.”  

“It was a victory,” Leoso says. “But a small victory. We know it’s never going to stop. They have acquired most of the land around the reservation for that reroute.”

Never Give Up, Prioritize Land

In March 2024, Enbridge offered the Tribe

The Tribe refused the money. 

In April 2024, the Biden Department of Justice issued an amicus brief in the case, stating that Enbridge “lacks any legal rights to remain on those lands.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit heard arguments in the case in 2024 but has not yet issued a ruling.

As of May 2025, the Tribe still has not seen a decommission and removal plan. And Leoso hinted that she is fearful of what the Trump administration will try to come in and change.

“The Bad River Band is not looking for monetary damages. They want [Line 5] out of the watershed,” explains Mazzio, the filmmaker.

“We’ve been sending that message ever since Europeans touched foot over here,” Leoso says. “We keep telling the federal government they shouldn’t approve these things, they shouldn’t allow these things to happen, because it will impact the environment so much that it will kill us.” 

As the oil continues to flow through the Line 5 pipeline and fossil-fueled climate disasters rage around it, Leoso says succinctly, “And now those things are killing us.”

In the fall of 2024, Enbridge was by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to build the new 41-mile pipeline. The Bad River Tribe and environmental groups are now suing the department.

Enbridge is still awaiting federal permits, and Kellner says the company will not begin construction until all necessary permits are in hand.��The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has listed the project as eligible for emergency fast-tracking under . After releasing a draft environmental assessment, the agency has��.��

Blanchard says the rerouted pipeline could still harm the Tribe’s ceded territory. “We do want it removed from the reservation, but we don’t want it within the Bad River watershed.”

Since the rerouted pipeline would be upstream from the Bad River, if there were to be a spill or leak, it could affect the Tribe’s ability to hunt, fish, and gather on the reservation, which he believes still violates the treaties.��

“We are looking after our land, water, and harvest,” Blanchard says. “I do harvesting of wild rice and traditional medicine, all to feed my family, and I want my great-great grandkids to have what I have and to be able to do what I have done. Money is nice, but is it worth giving up land?”

CORRECTIONS: This article was updated at 10:28 a.m. PT on May 15, 2025, and at 1:20 p.m. PT on May 13, 2025.
The piece originally stated that the 70% of land bought back by the Bad River Tribe was within its ceded territory. This land was within its reservation.

The piece originally stated that the reservation size was 125,000 acres. The reservation is 124,655 acres.

The piece originally stated that “Genawendang Manoomin” translates to “she who takes care of the wild rice.” The language is generally not gender-specific, so a more accurate translation is “she or he who takes care of the wild rice.”

The piece originally stated that Bad River Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins, who was tribal chair from 2017 to 2023, declined to settle and persisted with legal action. This decision was made by a vote of the entire Tribal Council. 

The piece originally stated that the Great Lake Fish and Wildlife Indian Commission is an intertribal agency that represents Bad River and 10 other Ojibwe Tribes. The Commission is an intertribal agency of the Lake Superior Chippewa Tribes.

The piece originally stated that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin ruled in favor of the Bad River Tribe. While the judge ordered Enbridge to remove the portion of Line 5 that runs through the Bad River Tribe’s reservation by 2026 and pay the Tribe $5.1 million and a portion of their profits, the judge also ruled in favor of Enbridge on some claims.

The piece originally stated that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit sided with the Bad River Tribe, saying Enbridge “lacks any legal right to remain” on the Ojibwe land in Wisconsin. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has heard arguments but not yet issued its decision. The quote is from an amicus brief written in April 2024 by the Department of Justice under the Biden Administration.��

The piece has been updated to include several events that have transpired after the date of publication:�� The Army Corps of Engineers listed the project as eligible for emergency fast-tracking, the agency, and the Tribe and environmental groups sued Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources for approving the project.

Read our corrections policy here.

When Juliaticia, who asked to be referred to by first name only, arrives, a nurse directs her to sit in a green plastic chair situated in front of a pale yellow building with a rusting corrugated iron roof. Within 30 minutes, more than two dozen women have gathered outside the inconspicuous building to wait for a comprehensive educational demonstration on female reproductive health and a potentially life-saving, free cervical cancer screening.

In Guatemala, cervical cancer is a stealth predator. It is the primary cause of cancer deaths among Guatemalan women, and silently and disproportionately claims lives in low-income rural communities, where access to basic health care ranges from limited to nonexistent.

The World Health Organization’s 2021 cervical cancer country profile for Guatemala reported 872 cervical cancer deaths in 2019 and suggested that this number has remained relatively stable in recent years. However, with more than 60% of Guatemala’s population living in rural areas where there’s a chronic lack of access to health care, there’s a high likelihood that causes of death aren’t properly attributed.

“With so much of Guatemala’s population living in poverty or extreme poverty, the cost of traditional [pap smear] cervical cancer screenings is maddeningly out of reach,” says Andrew Raphael, executive director of , an Antigua-based grassroots nonprofit aiming to address this issue. 

“Assuming [there’s an opportunity for a pap smear] at all, it could be months before test results are returned from the lab, at which point it might be near impossible to communicate them to the patient and her family,” he continues. “Even if the results come back [positive] and make it to the patient, the financial and personal cost for treatment in the case of a positive result can be insurmountable.”

But there is an alternative: The visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) is a simple, low-cost, and straightforward screening method that uses vinegar, halogen lights, and a microscope to identify abnormal cervical cells—and lower some of the world’s highest rates of premature female deaths due to cervical cancer.��

The VIA procedure is currently the only viable alternative to pap smears—the standardized cervical cancer screening method in the West—for the majority of staggeringly under-resourced communities in rural and urban Guatemala.“With this VIA procedure, we can detect abnormal or cancerous cells right there, right now, and take action straight away,” says Raphael.

Detection in a Matter of Seconds

Since 2011, Nursing Heart has used VIA to perform more than 4,000 mobile cervical cancer screenings in more than 40 rural communities in the Chimaltenango, Sacatepéquez, and Sololá departments that lack basic health infrastructure.��

Nursing Heart’s rolling mobile clinic program is composed of a team of advanced nursing students; local VIA-accredited Guatemalan practitioners; and Faith in Practice’s Dr. Patty de Baiza, one of Guatemala’s foremost experts on both cervical cancer and the VIA procedure.��

The team collaboratively operates several mobile reproductive health and cervical cancer screening clinics in rural, underserved Guatemala communities every year. Patients who attend Nursing Heart’s mobile clinics are assessed by the nursing students under the supervision of and in tandem with local VIA-accredited Guatemalan practitioners.

So far, hundreds of women who have tested positive for abnormal or cancerous cells have received immediate referral and free life-saving treatment on the spot. If cervical cancer is detected, patients can choose between two treatment options: the cryotherapy technique, which uses liquid nitrogen to remove abnormal or cancerous cells on the cervix in roughly 20 minutes, or thermocoagulation, a process that takes just 30 seconds. 

Patients, some of whom wait hours to be seen and are anxious to return to their workplace or families, tend to prefer the latter procedure due to time pressures. However some patients report that thermocoagulation is a more painful procedure, which can be a deterrent. But while the treatments can be painful, they work. And with around 4% of women tested at Nursing Heart clinics showing abnormal or cancerous cells, Raphael says it’s already saved “hundreds of women’s lives.”

“In Guatemala, the mother is the pillar of the family; she takes care of everybody. But nobody takes care of her,” explains Blanca López, better known as Blanqui, a VIA-certified cervical cancer technician and pharmacist who works on Nursing Heart’s mobile clinics. “It’s a tragedy when a mom or young woman dies of a preventable form of cancer and leaves her family to fend for themselves, when it’s a really simple and straightforward procedure that can save their life.”

It’s not just women’s lives at stake when it comes to early detection of cervical cancer. Early detection and treatment of cervical cancer, which is sometimes caused by the common human papilloma virus (HPV), is a crucial lifeline for families in remote, underserved communities that don’t have access to the preventative HPV vaccine that’s available in the West. 

Put simply, more women being tested and educated about their reproductive health means fewer preventable deaths. “At the most fundamental level, the VIA procedure is portable, cheap, produces immediate and clear results, and promises isolated and marginalized women something that is horrifyingly rare in Guatemala: knowledge of their bodies and how to prevent an otherwise avoidable death,” says Raphael. “[These women] deserve so much more, but this is a crucial and promising first step in that process.”

Rural Access Riddled With Roadblocks

Dr. de Baiza, Guatemala’s leading VIA practitioner, has personally treated thousands of women in Guatemala’s most underserved communities with Nursing Heart and Faith in Practice. However, it is still complicated for women in these rural communities to access these mobile clinics, with de Baiza attributing this disparity to lack of availability of quality services, lack of sex education and overall lack of knowledge about cervical cancer, and patriarchal attitudes about women’s sexual and reproductive health. 

“Women often require permission from their partners [to attend the clinics],” says de Baiza. “And often, due to ignorance [and cultural and religious stigmas], their sexual partners don’t allow them to undergo such exams.” Guatemala is one of Latin America’s most conservative countries; not only are women often required to get permission from their spouses or caregivers to undergo the cervical cancer detection screening, Raphael says “the woman often ‘needs to be accompanied,’ which means the male ‘caregiver’ might need to take the day off of work to accompany his partner or wife to a facility where cervical cancer screening services are available.”

To put this into perspective, at Nursing Heart’s last mobile cervical cancer clinic in Candeleria, three women tested positive for abnormal or cancerous cells. Three of the women with positive diagnoses were treated by Dr. de Baiza. However, one woman who tested positive disappeared before she could be treated. Nursing Heart staff were unable to confirm why the woman left before receiving treatment but suspect she may not have received permission from her husband, succumbed to negative stigmas about the treatment process, or simply needed to return to work.

“For some of our partner communities, that’s a two-hour ride on the one public bus per day that makes that trip: a rough journey over dangerous roads that implies lost wages and out-of-pocket expenses for something that could be deemed a luxury, as it’s not addressing an acute illness rather checking for something quiet and insidious,” says Raphael. 

That’s one of the reasons the mobile clinics also offer comprehensive sex education lessons, which Raphael says is “virtually unheard of in some of Guatemala’s most rural communities, where machismo attitudes, along with social and religious stigmas, can prevent women from understanding their reproductive health and well-being.”��

“It’s not just about the exclusion of women from conversations that affect their bodily autonomy and their right to ask questions about their bodies,” he continues. “It’s also about geography and the broken infrastructure that isolates already marginalized communities and families.”

For women like Juliaticia, the VIA screening and reproductive health workshops Nursing Heart teams provide are a lifeline. “We’re so grateful that the Nursing Heart clinic has come to visit us here,” she says. “We wouldn’t have an opportunity for a health check like this without them.”

How to Practically Scale VIA 

Though Nursing Heart coordinates mobile clinics, brick-and-mortar clinics devoted to reproductive health rarely exist or are only open a few times per month. The nurses who staff the latter have to cover wide swaths of land and multiple communities, often using their personal vehicles for little to no remuneration.

“Then, the facilities are usually devoid of medications, sometimes lacking even a fridge to keep supplies at the appropriate temperature,” says Raphael. “All these factors create a culture of distrust and disdain for government services, which understandably are viewed as unreliable, dysfunctional, and sometimes demeaning to communities that may not speak Spanish.” There are 24 officially recognized Indigenous languages in Guatemala. 

Blanqui believes building relationships with women leaders in rural communities is a crucial first step to creating awareness and beginning to dismantle the stigmas, shame, and fear around women’s reproductive health. “[If we don’t], women won’t take advantage of these kinds of services,” Blanqui says. “The key is gaining their trust so that they understand the procedure, the risks and benefits, and what’s happening to their bodies because women’s health isn’t talked about in the family home.” 

Dr. de Baiza says a solid next step could be educating medical practitioners on a local level. “Training a greater number of people who can offer this service, with efficient and adequate training is key,” says de Baiza.

However, with the current state of Guatemala’s chronically underinvested public health care system, where less than 3% of the country’s GDP is allocated to health—one of the lowest in Latin America—such extensive training would require significant funding from private donors. Raphael says there’s “widespread, systemic corruption in Guatemala,” so the country “invests so very little in its public health and education systems while enriching politicians and business leaders who abscond with the resources that should be going to those systems of care. Preventative health care shouldn’t be a luxury.”

In order to meaningfully scale cervical cancer screening training, Raphael says that this��systemic corruption, which has historically deprived rural communities of basic health care services, must also be addressed.

“Guatemala has one of the lowest nurse-patient ratios in the world, and the public health care system is chronically underfunded and understaffed,” he says. “Few have the facilities that can assure patients of dignified screenings, a major issue in a country where more than half the population belongs to historically marginalized ethnic and linguistic communities, and for whom a visit to a medical professional happens seldomly, if ever.”��

But despite Nursing Heart’s promising data, some research questions the efficacy of the VIA technique. A published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention found that though VIA is treated as an alternative to pap smears, “Its effectiveness in terms of reducing invasive cancer and mortality is uncertain.” Instead, “Some trials have shown that there is a significant reduction in mortality after VIA screening while others have failed to prove this.”

But ​Dr. Stephen Holtzclaw, the CEO of the U.S. Orthopaedic Partners who previously educated and mentored future medical practitioners at Johns Hopkins University and attended the Nursing Heart’s clinic in Candeleria, vehemently disagrees with this finding. 

“As they say, ‘The enemy of good is great,’” he says. “The procedure doesn’t have to be perfect to save a ton of lives. You literally can wipe out cervical cancer in a matter of seconds.”

As the VIA gains traction, there’s another looming challenge that might limit access to preventative care: the global phasing out of halogen lights.

In August 2023, the United States implemented a ban on the manufacture and sale of most halogen light bulbs due to their low energy efficiency. But while certain specialty bulbs, such as those used for medical purposes, are technically exempt from the regulation, their availability has significantly decreased.

The phase out has made it difficult for Nursing Heart and other nonprofit organizations using the VIA method to procure halogen lights. “It’s been a major weakness/vulnerability for us,” Raphael says. “Even the products we used to purchase on Amazon are no longer listed on the website. For all intents and purposes, we’re about to face a major shortage.”

Additionally, it is unclear what the impact of the Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts will have on Nursing Heart’s mobile cervical cancer screening clinics. But should the clinic’s funding be impacted, Raphael says, the chain of care that would be needed for them to benefit from a more formal type of screening would not be feasible and would eradicate the limited opportunities women have to find and treat cervical cancer.

“These women live several hours from proper laboratories, and even if they were able to get to those labs, the cost of that service is often well beyond their economic means,” he says. “The roads that take them there, the medical devices that provide that information, and the technicians to operate them… all are deficient in terms of the investment required to make them accessible to the people who most need them.”

That would be devastating for women like Juliaticia. “It’s so important they keep coming back, for all of us,” she says. In places where access to health care is scarce, these clinics offer something invaluable: care that comes to them.

While navigating enormous contradictions in a world where power comes from violence and force, the DAANES was able to organize governance of the historically Kurdish region of what is now Syria. With the fall of the Assad regime and the Trump administration’s recent cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), change is again creating crises as well as possibilities for a range of futures.��

Disorganization creates an opening to reorganize. While the MAGA right sows fear, anxiety, chaos, and overwhelm to try to reorganize us around an elevated level of fascism, what does the living world teach us about how to respond? Species that have adapted to change show that stressors can be a catalyst for change: For example, salmon populations have begun migrating earlier to align with temperatures warming up earlier in the year.

When we are comfortable, it can be hard to take big actions. And yet, in being complacent, we have become frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. What we need is a from a “banks and tanks” economy to economies of sacredness and caring. So while those in the White House are disorganizing us to try to reorganize us around heightened fear, isolation, and competition, we must instead use the openings to reorganize around reconnection, rest, joy, and sharing.

When we’re alone, it is easy to feel immobilized. Rather than isolating, we need to come together and move together. Looking up at the sky, mesmerized by constantly transforming shapes of starlings murmurating, reminds me that we need to find our way from our hearts and our instincts as much as from our heads.

The ability to feel, read, and respond together is what will keep us safe. The ability to align our actions with our values and intentions together makes us safer. Organizing as collective units in which more and more of us have our antennae up, can contribute our analysis, and can offer ideas on how to respond is much safer than any one or two of us isolated and dissociated in our bubbles.

As Movement Generation always returns to, the root of the word economy is the Greek word “oikos,” or eco, meaning “home.” Economy is just the care of or management of home. Rather than letting MAGA forces reorganize us around authoritarianism and oligarchy, how can we reclaim our agency to govern and manage home?��

If we understand that every being has a purpose, we see that governing our lives is not simply a right, but a responsibility in order to live that out as fully as we can. Here are five ways we can organize block-by-block toward in these times.

Organize Locally to Directly Meet Our Communities’ Needs

We absolutely need protest and dissent in order to reject fascism. But we also need to organize around what we want and need. Like pandemics, things like loss of employment, loss of health care, ICE raids, mental health crises, and housing insecurity will be felt in our homes, on our block, in our neighborhood schools, in the bodies that are all around us feeling fear or hunger or need for connection. In doing this organizing, we can normalize the values of honoring all life, cooperation, and people’s needs. 

Our program can include going door to door on our block to find out where the needs and offers are. Who needs their utilities shut off and on in case of a wildfire or tornado? Who can do it? Where are the households with elderly or disabled people or small children, and how can we organize to ensure everyone is cared for? How can we prepare to protect people threatened with deportation or violence? 

This will look different depending on where we are, who we are, and who our neighbors are. Who can risk going door to door, and who can play other roles? What are conversation openers that build common ground and reach out from a place of care? How do we listen to the needs and take small steps over time?

Build Collective Governance

This is a time to restore our own agency. While the strongmen want us to think they are all powerful, we can still learn from past movements, including the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Black Panther Party created 65 survival programs that transformed material conditions as well as the culture.��

When the Panthers realized children were going to school hungry and therefore unable to learn, they started a free breakfast program and established a simple set of guidelines members could use to set up similar programs in their own communities. How many volunteers are needed for each role—securing donations, preparing the meals, serving the children, welcoming and seating them? What spaces should they have—tables and chairs, a waiting area with seating?

Through block-by-block organizing, we can transform the material conditions as well as the culture—from “get mine” to “share ours.” From isolation and fear to care and cooperation. From slash and burn to . 

Get Permanently Organized

As we practice working together to meet basic needs, we can build our level of organization, which is political power without bosses. We move through different needs, ideas, opinions. We build skills to name what we need, listen to others, and find common ground. We learn about how to regulate our nervous systems. We ask for support.

While we are organizing to meet needs amid a crisis, we must use this organization to codify the material and cultural shifts we make in these moments. Through political education, we can unpack the extractive economic and political systems we live under and how they create trauma and poverty. In this process, we shift hearts and minds so that we can increasingly move together. We begin to cultivate the future rather than just react to oppressive systems.

Honor Care Work

This is a time to shift more of our labor to mutuality and care and push back on a devaluing of life that has escalated to a frenzied pitch. During the pandemic, my father moved in with my family and became part of the fabric of our community, while also teaching my kids how to see and appreciate their loved ones. 

What are the roles aging people can play that call them into their leadership and help them make meaningful contributions in these times? And, as this system continues to collapse around us, how can this care work be increasingly converted from “jobs” to life roles that feel meaningful and fulfilling for people? 

Rather than applying our labor to the systems that are harming us, how can we move more of our time, attention, and passion to taking care of each other and the places we depend on?

Look for the Openings

I regularly ask those around me: Where do you think we are in Octavia Butler’s Parables? This helps us all reorient to see ourselves as world builders. Our actions today are building the vehicles, the pathways, and the worlds we will inhabit in the future.��

While we build forms of organization to meet our community needs, we must also look for the openings. These are the spaces created when a veil is lifted. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, there were major shifts in the reckoning around racial injustice. Over the last 18 months, as there’s been an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the veil has lifted on Zionism, especially for young people.��

We are seeing the backlash to the effectiveness of both of these movements. But these openings were seized to win shifts required to move us toward the future we need. Local groups everywhere began digging into how to defund the police and instead fund care and transformative justice for a future that will be safer.

We must harness the shocks and direct the slides to the shifts we need. Don’t burn out reacting. Look for the openings. It’s impossible to do this as individuals, but as we build up our squads, pods, and teams, we have more of a basis from which to make assessments and move. Together. Across blocks and neighborhoods. Across cities and bioregions.��

And be ready to codify the shifts—culturally, in custom, and in policy. With the economic downturn, more people will be unable to pay rent not just for a couple of weeks but for months or longer. Can we organize rent/mortgage strikes across class lines? Across a number of places? Can we get some base of people to put land in the commons instead of more speculation? We must organize to win the shifts.

“What’s coming out of Washington—it’s whiplash-inducing and tragic,” says one California middle school and high school history teacher who spoke anonymously for fear of being targeted. “To me, the message [has been] that education is unimportant and the needs of students [are] unimportant.”

The Trump administration’s highest-profile attack on public education came on March 20, 2025, when the president directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the Department of Education. While the president needs congressional approval to abolish the department, to his supporters, this executive order is the next best thing. 

Gutting the Department of Education has been a , as conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, which penned Trump’s Project 2025 playbook, is a seedbed of liberal-left social and political action. Over the last several years, Republican administrators and politicians on the state and local levels have or legislation to censor teachers, ban books, and for marginalized students.��

The adoption of this regressive agenda on the federal level will have even farther-reaching effects. Changes to funding will have an immediate impact on how students nationwide access education—or if they can access it at all. This is because the Department of Education provides crucial funding for public K–12 schools, focusing on districts with the greatest need for support and narrowing gaps between needed resources and state and local revenue.

The department also provides dedicated support to low-income children through and to disabled students under the (IDEA), which is meant to guarantee that disabled kids have equal access to public education.

Trump’s order to dismantle the Department of Education claims that state governments can take over federal responsibilities, but experts warn this could lead to no longer receiving the funding needed to serve students. “Absent the Department of Education to ensure fairness in funding allocation for programs like Title I, it’s unclear how states will handle the disbursement on their own, which could widen inequalities in education,” explains Hilary Wething, an economist at the . Advocates have also begun over protections and funding provided under IDEA being under threat.

The Trump administration’s anti-education agenda will not only strip students of vital resources; experts also warn that dismantling the Department of Education will undermine its ability to vital to addressing inequalities in education. Already, several of the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) . The OCR is meant to enforce civil rights laws at public schools and all colleges and universities that receive federal financial assistance. It does so through investigations and compliance reviews.��

However, as the Trump administration reduces staff and seeks to reorient the OCR, the office will no longer be able to perform these functions. related to disability access and sexual and racial harassment have already been placed on hold.��

Rather than investigating allegations of discrimination, the OCR has begun issuing guidance meant to further the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and bring curricula and instructional materials in line with its agenda. One memo, issued on Feb. 14, 2025, gave schools two weeks to in all aspects of student, academic, and campus life under threat of .

The memo appears to forbid everything from teaching racism in schools to sponsored student groups, such as Black or Latinx student unions. While it is not itself a law, the memo reveals the Trump administration’s warped interpretation of and intention to undermine existing nondiscrimination legislation.��

A Jan. 29, 2025, called for “ending radical indoctrination” in schools and promotion of “patriotic education,” reflecting the administration’s dangerous interpretation of nondiscrimination laws and its desire to whitewash schooling. “The executive order on ending radical indoctrination in K–12 schooling is asking schools to ignore a fulsome, truthful history and to only focus on what’s ‘inspiring,’” says Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, quoting the executive order. Gallagher-Geurtsen is a lecturer in critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works with primary and secondary school teachers as co-chair of the San Diego Unified School District Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee.��

“The main issue with all of these orders is that the thinking behind them ignores the statistics that show racism exists in every facet of American life,” Gallagher-Geurtsen continues. “If you don’t see race, you can’t see racism, and therefore, it will grow unabated, so the executive orders are woefully ignorant and also incredibly dangerous.”

The Trump administration’s demands are already having a chilling effect on educators. “Teachers have shared with me that they’re frightened of what’s to come,” says Gallagher-Geurtsen. “They’re also really angry that the executive branch is determining what should be taught in schools. Teachers are describing this as censorship and a reflection of white supremacy.”

“It’s a chilling effect to know that I have to look over my shoulder because of the political times we’re living in,” says the California teacher. They also worry that the Trump administration’s efforts to whitewash education could drive some students, particularly students of color, out of school. “When their history education is being curtailed or attempted to be curtailed, I think they’re going to lose a lot of interest in school in general.” 

Research on the shows that students who take such courses tend to engage more in school and are more likely to graduate and enroll in college. The classes have also been shown to and academic performance of students who are at risk of dropping out. “To me, the purpose [of Trump’s attacks] may be to continue the oppression of certain groups and make them not want to fulfill their potential [through] education,” concludes the California teacher.

Additionally, research shows that teaching about race and racism , while attempts to ignore race in the classroom have the opposite effect. The California teacher believes undermining the positive effects of learning about race and racism is core to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle public education. “It’s a systemic approach by the Trump administration to return the country to a time when communities of color had their place, and their place was a lot lower down the academic ladder and the financial ladder, and a time where only a handful of chosen people could contribute [to the nation’s story].”

Many educators are unwilling to bend to the Trump administration in its pursuit of these regressive aims. The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ labor union, sued the Trump administration over the Feb. 14 memo from the OCR. The suit argues that the memo’s guidance .

On March 24, and labor unions sued over Trump’s order to shutter the Department of Education. “Working people are not going to stand idly by while this administration destroys public education,” said April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, in a announcing the suit.

Plus, in classrooms nationwide, educators are making brave choices to continue recognizing and honoring the diverse needs and backgrounds of their students despite the Oval Office’s posturing. Gallagher-Geurtsen is among those who believe that “the way forward is not through a colorblind, whitewashed education.” Rather, she says, “The way forward is through a reckoning with the past and present of racism. When we understand and lift up our understanding of how racism works, we diminish it, and that happens through looking at race and racism in our origins and our present.”

The California educator says in their classroom, they will continue to uplift the diverse perspectives of their students because they believe “the country is a lot better when everybody has the opportunity to contribute to its story and to live up to [its] promise.”

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the����for the����and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible.��

Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people will be put in the dark again by the draconian policies of a second Trump administration. 

“Are things worse than they were before Stonewall? Not yet,” she said. “It’s certainly possible that people will have to go back to underground lives, that trans people will have to flee to Canada, but it’s not worse yet.” 

The 19th spoke with several LGBTQ+ elders, including Jay, about what survival looks like under a hostile political regime and what advice they would give to young LGBTQ+ people right now. 

Many states protect LGBTQ+ people through����that ensure fair access to housing, public accommodations, and employment. Supreme Court precedent does the same through��. Other states have passed����for trans people.��But to Jay, a cisgender lesbian, it all still feels precarious. The Trump administration is trying to make it����to live openly and safely, and lawmakers in����want to undermine marriage equality.��

“We have forgotten that the laws are written to protect property and not to protect people. They’re written to protect white men and their property, and historically, women and children were their property,” she said. “To expect justice from people who write laws to protect themselves has been a fundamental error of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans community.”��

To fight back, LGBTQ+ Americans need to organize, Jay said. That starts with thinking locally—supporting local artists, independent stores, and small presses, as well as LGBTQ+ organizations taking demonstrable political action and protecting queer culture. 

“See what you can do without going crazy. If you can focus on one thing, and you can spend one hour a week, or you can spend one day a week, that’s much better than being depressed and doing nothing,” she said. “Because the person you’re going to help is yourself. This is the time for all of us to step up.”��

To fight back, LGBTQ+ Americans need to organize. That starts with thinking locally—supporting local artists, independent stores, and small presses, as well as LGBTQ+ organizations taking demonstrable political action and protecting queer culture.”��

Renata Ramos feels obligated to share her experiences with young people. As a 63-year-old trans Latina, she wants young people to know that so many of their elders have already been through hard times—which means that they can make it, too, including during this moment. 

“I’m not scared in the least. Because we have fought so many battles—the elders. We have fought so many battles, with medicine, with HIV, with marching on Washington, with watching our friends die,” she said. “It’s been one war after another in our community that we have always won. We have always been resilient. We have always stood strong. We have always fought for our truth, and we’re still here. They haven’t been able to erase us.” 

As Ramos watches the Trump administration use the����to target transgender Americans and erase LGBTQ+ history, she’s not afraid for herself. She’s afraid for young LGBTQ+ people, especially young trans people who now find themselves at the center of a growing political and cultural war. If someone transitioned six months ago, she said, they now have a target on their back—and little to no experience with what that feels like.��

“They don’t know what it is like to be a soldier going into war, as far as social issues. So I fear for them,” she said. “Who wouldn’t be scared?” 

Criss Christoff Smith has seen firsthand what that fear can look like. On Jan. 28, at 3 a.m., he received a phone call from an LGBTQ+ person who was considering taking their own life. This was a stranger—someone who admired from afar Smith’s advocacy as a Black trans man and Jamaican immigrant. This was someone who had been considering a gender transition for years, Smith said, who was now feeling broken. He spoke with them for two hours. 

“It’s been quite dark,” Smith said. The onslaught of policies targeting marginalized people and the turbocharged news cycle are working to keep Black and trans people in a constant state of fear and uncertainty, he said.  

“I tell everyone in my community, you have to stop responding to those alerts and just try to go inward,” he said. “Find a space of peace and spirituality.”

To Smith, who is 64, looking inward can mean reflecting on what’s still here. Although the Trump administration is going to make daily life harder for LGBTQ+ people, he said, laws can’t be undone with the stroke of a pen on an executive order. LGBTQ+ Americans need to find whatever source of strength and peace they can find right now—and try to remove themselves from the daily fray as much as possible—while still finding ways to take action.  

“This is the time when we really have to find community, where we really have to hone in on our spiritual feelings and try to talk to someone. Don’t keep it to yourself,” he said. Joining protests or lobbying days at state capitols are great ways to find community in-person, Smith said—to be around like-minded people and to not feel so alone. 

“That’s the best space to be in, not home alone and in your feelings and in your mind, because we can get lost there thinking negatively. So we have to stay positive and stay with like-minded people, and have those people constantly around you to reassure you and just hold you tight in that space,” he said. 

“It’s been one war after another in our community that we have always won. We have always been resilient. We have always stood strong. We have always fought for our truth, and we’re still here. They haven’t been able to erase us.” 

Protests against the administration’s hostile LGBTQ+ policies have been ongoing—including outside the Stonewall National Monument. In at least one way, history is already repeating itself. 

The National Park Service deleted all references to transgender and queer people from its web page honoring the 1969 Stonewall uprising—the most well-known moment from LGBTQ+ history in the country—leaving references to only lesbian, gay and bisexual people.  to protest. Among them was Renee Imperato, a 76-year-old trans woman and New York native. 

“Protests like this are our survival,” she told The 19th over email. “The rhetoric of this administration is driving a violent onslaught against our community. The Stonewall Rebellion is not over. We are at war, and we are still fighting back. What other choice do we have?”

Jay, herself an old hand at joining protests and demonstrations, said that she’s been afraid before every one of them. She’s lost sleep the night before and feared for her safety—but she did it anyway. 

“I’m afraid I’ll be beaten. I’m afraid I’ll be arrested. But if you don’t do something even though you’re afraid, they win,” she said.

This story originally appeared in .

In more than a decade of dictatorship rule, the military had imprisoned, tortured, and killed scores of people they viewed as dissidents, and in 1979, a newly passed law gave amnesty to political prisoners and exiles whom the dictatorship persecuted. But the amnesty law also pardoned the murderers, torturers, and leaders of the military dictatorship, setting the stage for a 25-year struggle to get the Brazilian government to recognize the victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses of the regime.

With no institutional recognition of human rights abuses committed between 1964 to 1985, the door was open for denial and diminishment of that brutal period in Brazilian history. In right-wing circles, the dictatorship is often viewed as “not that bad,” or as a necessary evil to keep Brazil from opting into communism, a common Cold War talking point. 

It was only in 2011, more than 25 years after the end of the regime, that the Brazilian government instituted a to investigate the torture and murder that took place during that era. 

The success of I’m Still Here, this year’s Academy Award winner for , might give the appearance that Brazil is a country committed to remembering its past—but behind the film, there’s a multigenerational, ongoing struggle to keep remembering the victims and the perpetrators of harm during the dictatorship period. 

Families of Victims Insist on Remembering 

After Rubens Paiva was kidnapped and murdered by the regime in 1971, the lack of institutional recognition of his death left his wife, Eunice Paiva (portrayed by Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here), without any access to his bank accounts or estate until until 1996, when the government finally admitted to his murder and issued a death certificate.

In the 25 years since, Eunice has given interviews to magazines, newspapers, and TV broadcasts, calling for the return of her husband’s remains, as well as financial reparations and institutional recognition of the Brazilian state’s human rights abuses.��

In 1994, when Brazil’s democratic president Fernando Henrique Cardoso for investigations into the human right abuses committed by the regime, Eunice unearthed an old article from 1980, where where Cardoso, then a senator,��pressured the federal government to find a solution to the hundreds of disappeared. Paiva’s son Marcelo, a journalist and writer, used the article to urge the president to take action on the matter.��

Two years later, the Special Commission on the Dead and Disappeared was officially launched by Cardoso’s administration, with the objective to recognize the dead and disappeared from 1964 to 1985, attempt to find the bodies of the people identified, and determine recommendations for financial reparations for the victims’ families. The Commission helped identify 434 murdered and disappeared people during the regime.

Beyond this government commission, victims and families of victims have, for decades since the atrocities, been at the forefront of fighting to preserve the memory of the dictatorship as well as the memory of their loved ones. 

The family of metalworker and union organizer Santo Dias, who was shot dead by the military police in 1979 at a picket line in São Paulo, organized a committee for recognition of his murder in the years following his death. In 2023, Dias’ friends, family, and his widow, Ana Dias, honored his legacy of resistance and advocacy for workers’ rights.

This practice of memory keeping led by family and friends of the victims of fascism is a common practice across Latin American countries. “It is important to say that nobody chooses to fight this war,” says Lorrane Rodrigues, executive coordinator of memory, truth and justice at the Vladimir Herzog Institute. “This struggle is a kind of survival. We have so many Eunices. We have many women who never had the opportunity of telling their stories.” 

The Vladimir Herzog Institute was created to maintain the memory of its namesake—journalist, teacher, and playwright Vladimir Herzog, who was imprisoned and murdered in 1975 by the regime. The institute was founded by his late wife, Clarice, 30 years after his death, to archive his work and promote conversations about him as well as the human rights abuses committed during the regime.

Creating a Methodology for Memory Work

The work of remembering those lost to fascism goes hand-in-hand with demanding investigations, punishment, and reparations for the victims. Rodrigues says the efforts of these families have become instructive for memory efforts in Latin America, citing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, a movement led by the mothers and grandmothers of students who were disappeared during Argentina’s dictatorship. 

“They have a fundamental role in policies about memory in Latin America and, I think, internationally,” Rodrigues says. “The legacy that these women have left behind in Latin America allows us to think in a much broader context of policies of memory, truth, and justice. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo movement that pressured the Argentine government so that investigations and forensics around the dictatorship are not carried out by state agents, for example.” 

This movement, started in the 1980s and echoed by women in their respective countries struggling against fascism and its afterlife, created a “methodology for the search of the disappeared,” says Rodrigues. “The questions these women made in the ’80s generate methodological and social implications so we can think through what policies of memory and justice look like in Brazil. These questions lead us to ask: What does a reparation process look like for a victim?”

When Marcelo Paiva decided to write a book about his mother’s experience surviving and fighting the dictatorship, Eunice was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, a disease she lived with for 12 years. Marcelo’s book, which was eventually adapted into I’m Still Here, originated from his decision to write down his mother’s memories as she was losing them because of her illness.

“I would not have written this book if my mother didn’t have Alzheimer’s,” Marcelo said in a 2015 interview. “She was the spokesperson of the family, she knew the details, she had an emotional intelligence that was superior to all of us. I even told her about the book, and I think she knows about it… but today, her moments of lucidity are few.” 

As he interviewed her during her spurs of lucidity, she would tell him: “I’m still here.” The phrase has traveled far since the first publication of the book in 2015, geographically and in meaning, making visible the presence of victims and families of victims of the regime as living, breathing, and still waiting for justice. 

In 2011, then President Dilma Rousseff created the Truth Commission, a government organization that specifically investigates human rights abuses of the military regime. The commission gathered testimonies, documents, and evidence that helped reconstruct instances of torture, forced disappearances, and murders carried out by the regime. 

While the commission did not have power to punish any of the perpetrators, the commission used the testimonies of victims to form a 976-page report published in 2014 that shed light on the gravity of what took place from 1964 to 1985, even naming 377 people involved in human rights violations. The report exposed the details of what and who had been pardoned by the Amnesty Law passed in 1979. 

One of the victims of these crimes was Rousseff herself, who was arrested and tortured in 1972 when she was only 22, for her role in armed resistance. Nearly 40 years later, as a democratically elected president, Rousseff’s launch of the Truth Commission has directly educated new generations about the impacts of the dictatorship. 

When writing the book about his family, Marcelo Paiva drew from the findings of the Truth Commission. “Because of the Truth Commission, I had the information necessary to write the book I’m Still Here, and now we have this stunning film,” . “And Dilma [Rousseff] paid a high price for the necessary recovery of memory.” 

From Policy to Film

As multigenerational efforts have become an award-winning feature film, the question of continues to haunt Brazilian politics. Amnesty is a particularly loaded question in 2025; the right-wing rioters who invaded the country’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace a week after left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated in 2023 are currently being prosecuted and sentenced. 

As of March, 434 people have been found guilty and sentenced for their participation in the coup d’état. Much like the fascists Brazil has seen in the past, the rioters were led by former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, to “save” Brazil from communism and socialism. In 2025, as I’m Still Here showcases the human impacts of the dictatorship and the impunity of its crimes, Bolsonaro and his allies are —even before several of them have gone to trial. 

According to Rodrigues, this is the legacy of Brazil never having an institutionalized process to recognize the crimes committed by the military regime. In Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, the people responsible for torturing and murdering political dissidents were held responsible through public trials, but Brazil never formally conducted any punitive processes. 

“We have barely understood the amnesty that was given in the ’80s, and in 2025 people understand that amnesty could be applied in the same way,” Rodrigues says. “So there’s a lack of an effective accountability process in the ’80s.” 

In March, a panel of Brazilian Supreme Court judges for attempting to stage a coup d’état in 2023, marking the first time military members will ever be tried for anti-democratic activity. After decades of intergenerational struggle calling for consequences for the destruction of Brazilian democracy, the tide is finally turning. 

“I’m Still Here has created a unique moment for Brazil, a moment for us to look at this topic with more care and not to apply the same amnesty or the same norms that were applied in the ’80s,” says Rodrigues. “It’s an incredible moment.”

My grandmother’s parents and younger sisters died on the deportation route. After that, my grandmother and her younger brother were among 8,000 Armenian orphans herded into a tent camp in the Syrian desert on the outskirts of Ras al Ain. It is estimated that 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives in this mass annihilation, and I have spent most of my career as a writer plumbing this terrible history.

Genocide is not an event, but a process. For Armenians, it is a process that never ends and one that takes on different forms, including the denial of historical reality. In 2020, a decades-long struggle with Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabagh, which Armenians call Artsakh, turned into a renewed war. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, with the aid of Syrian mercenaries, and with drones and arms supplied by Israel, took over more than half of the territory, forcing Armenians to flee their towns and villages.

In early 2023, Azerbaijan enforced on the remaining area, and then in September of that year launched another military campaign to complete the job. On Sept. 19, 2023, of the more than 100,000 Armenians fleeing Artsakh in a snaking convoy of cars resembled the deportation caravans of my grandmother’s childhood more than a century earlier.

I watched the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh unfold on social media from afar, as I was on a trip to Greece at the time. I flew home to New York City on Oct. 7, 2023, and when I opened my smartphone upon landing, I saw the news of the Hamas incursion into southern Israel. Before being able to fully register that violence, I understood immediately that Israel’s response would be cataclysmic.

As the descendant of Armenian genocide survivors, I was sickened to witness the same despisal and dehumanization that my people have faced—this time being meted out to Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli officialdom boldly announced its genocidal intent, and we were told not to believe what they were saying or what we were witnessing in real time. All our institutions in the U.S. as well as in Europe—the government, the media, arts organizations, and the academy—with few exceptions, were colluding with and covering for what was recognizable as a genocide.

My spouse teaches at Columbia University, so we have been more than spectators to the drama that has been occurring there for the past year. On April 17, 2024, students set up a Gaza solidarity encampment in one of the fenced fields on the campus. On the same day, the university president, who is a literal , testified before Congressional inquisitors. She boasted of having to deal with student protesters for the first time in 50 years, and she touted the fact that she had suspended the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

The next night there was a phalanx of cops just outside the campus gates on Broadway, the university’s western bounds, who looked ready for battle. The mood was ugly. It reminded me of when I was a student at Columbia during the height of the anti-apartheid movement. In 1985 we padlocked the front entrance to Hamilton Hall and renamed it . At that time, we were able to negotiate an end to the blockade without police involvement, and Columbia divested from South Africa six months later. 

On April 18, the students at the encampment called for faculty and community members to come to the campus to forestall police action against them. I was on the quad with close to 1,000 others ringing the fenced field when the first round of arrests happened. The police bus drove off with the arrestees, and I watched as more students established a second encampment after just having seen their handcuffed comrades marched away.

During the night of April 30, hundreds of riot police, most of them from a unit notorious for its violence, wearing body armor, carrying nightsticks and zip ties, filed through Columbia’s gates. Hundreds of other cops flooded the streets surrounding the campus. The neighborhood was turned into a closed military zone. 

My spouse and I beheld a dystopian scene where hundreds of young people were brutalized and arrested because they refused to remain silent and complacent in the face of genocide. We watched from Amsterdam Avenue, the university’s eastern bounds, as police used a “tactical vehicle” to enter an upper-story window of —the same building we had once christened Mandela Hall, renamed by organizers in 2024 to honor Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.

While media accounts of the encampment tended to focus on conflict and controversy, most of what I saw firsthand was a principled group of students who had come together to fight against their generation’s Vietnam War. In the process, these students had organized themselves to provide safety, food, and alternative education for their community. I witnessed a profound and moving demonstration of solidarity during the encampment that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

During the encampment there were nightly teach-ins, and I saw that Columbia Armenian Students for Palestine were on the roster to speak on the evening of April 24, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. In the middle of the encampment, with an attentive audience encircling them, Armenian students talked about the connections between the Armenian genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, and the slaughter in Gaza. They talked about the arms that Israel provides Azerbaijan, the natural gas that Azerbaijan provides Israel, and the pan-Turkic alliance that wants to erase Armenia from the map. 

These young Armenians provided a lesson in history and solidarity, and the other students listened intently to their words. This was the People’s University for Palestine, and for a brief moment one year ago, before the dragnet that is now many of those students, history was both being learned and made.

There are many dangerous parallels between the Islamic Republic’s repression and what’s currently happening in the U.S., though this is not a one-to-one comparison. The U.S. isn’t Iran, but for those of us who’ve lived through a shift from a somewhat repressive system to a full-blown authoritarian crackdown, the warning signs are flashing.

I have seen what happens when rights vanish overnight, when culture and community are weaponized, and when fear becomes a governing force. I am also amid a chorus of people who have been sounding the alarm for years about the impending return of the imperial boomerang—the same force that has wreaked havoc across the globe, including when , which ultimately forced me to flee. 

When I moved to the U.S. when I was 14, I never expected to encounter echoes of post-revolution Iran, but the echoes are loud and clear. Amid such political instability, it is time to mobilize, get creative, and resist.

Autocracy Is Here. What Now?

I was 6 when Islamic fundamentalists seized power in Iran in 1979, launching a reign of terror that began with many of the actions currently happening in the Trump administration. The revolution’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, kept an ever-growing , systematically dismantled cultural institutions, and rapidly eroded personal freedoms to an extreme degree. Sound familiar?

Within months of Khomeini coming to power, my childhood was over. Women’s rights that had been painstakingly built for more than five decades were . As a girl, I could no longer move freely in public, play, or even ride my bicycle. The newly imposed morality laws forced me to cover my hair and body, and disappear into the background as my rights were systematically stripped away, one by one. The morality police also began raiding and kidnapping people off the streets without due process. 

Similarly, families in the U.S. are now canceling quinceañeras out of fear of ICE raiding them, arresting their relatives, and deporting them without so much as a court hearing. Much like in Iran, plainclothes agents are now . Religious dogma is bleeding into public schools and lawmaking. Even education is under siege, just as it was in post-revolution Iran, where textbooks were rewritten and ideology replaced learning.

Shortly after the revolution, Iran’s government began mass-firing professionals deemed ideologically impure. My relatives, teachers, doctors, and civil servants lost their jobs. A declassified in 2003 confirms that anyone tied to the previous regime or the West was systematically pushed out. 

“The original purge after sought to rid the ministries of senior-level holdovers from the former regime and to provide the revolutionary faithful with jobs,” the memo notes. “This was accomplished rather quickly. The second wave of purges began… after a series of Khomeini speeches. Lower-level individuals who had been part of the Shah’s bureaucracy, those with Western training, or those who were deemed to lack full Revolutionary fervor have been retired or fired on an increasingly large scale since then.”

A similar purge is currently underway in the U.S., with a particularly focused assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the public and private sectors. The absurd fixation on DEI mirrors the Islamic regime’s relentless pursuit of oppressive homogeneity. I now personally know educators, , and experts who’ve lost their jobs. The has begun. Scientists are fleeing. The nightmare I escaped is unfolding again—this time in the country I chose as my refuge.

Despite stark ideological differences, Iran’s Islamic regime and the Trumpist movement share similar tactics: wielding fear, relying on , and eroding civil liberties. Both distort truth, punish dissent, and strive to remake the world in their image. Yet, amid repression, resistance flowers.

The Power and Creativity of Resistance

In Iran, once the shock wore off, defiance bloomed in large street protests as well as that friends and I took part in: flashing strands of hair, dancing quickly in public, and wearing colorful socks that sent the morality police scrambling after us. 

Within one year of Khomeini’s takeover, Saddam Hussein, the then leader of neighboring country Iraq, took advantage of the internal turmoil and started a bloody . At the same time, the regime grew more brutal, and soon, every schoolmate of mine knew someone who had been executed, imprisoned, or lost to war. My friend Roya, just a teenager, was among the thousands executed. 

Over the years, many more have been , imprisoned, and tortured. But despite the immense repression, the power of persistence and solidarity keeps transforming, adapting, and finding new ways to challenge the oppression.

Unlike the oppressors, people who resisted were never confined to a single ideology.��It was born from necessity and lived experience. For more than four decades, Iranians have resisted through mass protests, underground clubs, , and other everyday acts of defiance.

The , sparked by the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, reignited women’s defiance. Many still refuse the hijab today, and despite the crackdowns, they have changed the look and feel of Iran’s public spaces. Iranians also engage in creative compliance: Women wear their hijabs in loose, fashionable ways. to mock the regime. Workers slow down to frustrate the regime. Some officials, including police officers, look the other way and refuse to enforce the regime’s rules when they can. 

Iranians create underground art, subversive poetry, and encrypted communication. Families teach banned history at home. VPNs and messaging apps bypass censorship. Having enjoyed a robust and mutual care, Iranians tend to be generous with their time and resources. Acts of solidarity—shared meals, safe houses, whispered encouragement—create webs of resilience. Every act matters.

The Fight Is Ours Now

Oppression in Iran didn’t begin with Khomeini—and it didn’t end with his death in 1989. Just like in Iran, the road to our current predicament in the U.S. was laid brick by brick by those in power long before this moment. 

After all, the Nazis took much of their inspiration straight from the United States, particularly from its laws on eugenics, racial segregation, and the systematic disenfranchisement of marginalized communities. Hitler and his inner circle studied , the displacement of Native Americans, and the treatment of non-citizens as models for implementing racial purity laws. 

Some of the groundwork was laid more recently: The gave wealthy interests outsized political influence, the overturning of Roe v. Wade erased five decades of protected reproductive rights, and campus crackdowns have helped restrict freedom of speech. Meanwhile, many communities, including Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities, have been experiencing systemic oppression in the U.S. for decades. Now, that oppression is spreading wider and becoming more normalized. It’s unsettling, but the reality is authoritarianism is here. 

The good news is that, unlike Iranians, Americans have a longstanding tradition of free speech, making it much harder to silence dissent. The sheer size of the U.S. population also presents logistical challenges for any regime seeking to control its people. And while Trump’s tactics have been brutal, they have not reached the draconian extremes of Iran’s ruling regime.

Still, resistance is not only born from freedoms we have; it’s forged in the fire of what we’ve survived. The Iranian resistance movement has deeply shaped my work with marginalized groups and frontline workers here in the U.S. We learn from each other—those who have long shouldered systematic oppression continue to defy it in creative ways, proving that and the fuel that sustains it.

I’ve learned not to think of resistance as a sprint or even a marathon. It’s a relay. We rest, we care for each other. We pass the baton, and we keep going. The shows we don’t need a majority—just a small, committed group to spark meaningful change.

So now we face the real question: Are we willing to act? Are we willing to build and expand our communities of resistance?

Because no one is coming to save us. We can’t put our faith in politicians or institutions that have already failed so many. Overwhelm helps no one; we’re not meant to do everything, and certainly not alone. But we do have to save ourselves—together—using vigilance, solidarity, and relentless imagination. This is our moment to rise or risk losing what remains of our freedoms.

“It’s so sad. I just feel heartbreak, like a piece of me just went down the mountain,” said Ryan, whose traditional name is Sm’hayetsk, as the logging truck roared past her. “The ancestors are there. We actually used to put our people in the trees,” she said, speaking of traditional burial practices of the Gitlan of the Tsimshian Nation.

Ryan explained that her ancestors put the remains of their people in bentwood boxes and hoisted them into trees, into the life of the forest. So when she said the ancestors were in those trees, just cut from the mountain where they had lived for centuries, she meant it literally.

Ryan is an Indigenous knowledge and natural science lecturer in the Department of Forest & Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. I had joined her and Suzanne Simard, an eminent forest ecologist and professor in the same department at UBC, in these woods for a week of fieldwork.

Ryan and Simard had gone out on this logging road to find their crew. But right now, that was out the window. They had to go see the clear-cut those logs had come from. Ryan jumped in Simard’s battered field truck, and I squeezed into the back seat with their clipboards, batteries, and gear for sampling and measuring trees. Simard bucked the truck up steep, rugged slopes to reach the top of the cut and killed the engine. We got out and looked around at the cutover land, bare and baking in the July sun. A grapple skidder awaited the next day’s haul of logs, and sawdust lay fresh over the ground.

“This kind of machinery is devastating to the forest floor,” Simard said, eyeing the carved-up ground, rutted and scraped to mineral soil. “And we are left with that. There is no carbon left, it’s gone, and it’s never coming back. It took 12,000 years to make this, and we have lost it in a snap of a finger.” The air smelled sharply of ground-up fir needles.

“You can’t stop it, these trees are already down,” Ryan said, assessing the stumps, slash, and logging debris. “It was coming straight at me,” she said of the logging truck. “All I could see was big logs. They were so huge.” This cut was not exceptional; as we walked to the top of the cutover hilltop and took in the landscape around us, we saw logging roads tracing through a maimed landscape into the far distance, mangy with clear-cuts so large they covered entire mountainsides.

“It’s a tree hearse,” Simard said of the logging truck, as we walked back to her truck. “We are down to the last drops. It’s a fucking graveyard out here. These are some big trees. They were,” she said, correcting herself. “There is nothing we can do. I know we can’t save every tree. But we have to do a better job. We are going to need wood, but it should not be the old-growth. That was all cedar. It just makes me feel sick. And the fact we have seen it, day after day after day, all over the country, I’m sure those trees are a thousand years old. People grow so numb to it, we all are.”

Ryan gathered a scarred piece of wood from the ground as we walked back to the truck. “We’ve got to burn this, to honor the spirits. Honor the ancestors,” she said. As we headed down the mountain, a distant rumble filled the air. “Here comes another,” Simard said, yanking the wheel to pull over to get out of the way of the log truck. After it passed, as we descended the mountain, ravens were circling and calling.

“Stop,” Ryan said. “Stop right now.” Simard jerked the truck to a halt, and the ravens’ calls filled the still air. “They are crying, their home is being taken,” said Ryan, who is of the Raven Clan. “Their nest trees are being destroyed. That is the mom. That is the baby. She’s in shock.”

We just sat for a minute, quiet. Then Simard started back down the logging road, jouncing over the ruts. “It’s so disrespectful to the mountain, it puts the mountain to shame. Our shame,” Simard said, gathering speed past a numbered sign for the logging road. It was riddled with bullet holes. We made the long, bouncing drive down to the valley bottom, where we hoped to rendezvous with their crew, in silence.

Called the Mother Tree crew, this was a team of researchers Simard had assembled in 2015 for a research project creating a time sequence of the amount of carbon stored in these clear-cuts—in the first pass, the second pass, every time the loggers came back. They wanted to learn, through analysis of the soil and its layers, the toll taken by each cut, compared to the original soil baseline condition.

“It shifts down, and down and down, they will come back and plant it, and it will come back to that pale green, impoverished condition, a second-growth stand, with no variety in the canopy,” Simard explained. It was soil that started her career, and now soil that had made her internationally famous, as the author of the bestseller , which tells the story not only of Simard’s scientific work but also her struggle to overcome skepticism of her findings.

Simard’s lab explores the role of mycorrhizal fungi in connecting trees, one to the other, sharing nutrients and communication, all around hubs of the largest trees she dubs “Mother Trees.” When in the journal Nature and popularized by the press as the “Wood Wide Web,” likening the networks to the internet, Simard was suddenly an internationally famous scientist.

Simard, who had labored in obscurity and hostility from industry and even her own colleagues, was a sensation, with millions of views on and a crush of media attention. She bore the attention stoically, doing interview after interview for the sake of the forest—which, even as her notoriety grew, was still being cut down.

Protests during the summer of 2021 against one logging operation, near Fairy Creek at the south end of Vancouver Island, sparked the largest civil disobedience in modern Canadian history, with more than a thousand arrests of protestors trying to blockade the logging roads.

They dug trenches in the dirt logging roads cut into the sides of remote mountains. Locked themselves to concrete blocks, and erected platforms in the middle of logging roads they then locked themselves to. They camped in the canopy of towering firs. They hiked miles to the leading edge of the cut, where the loggers were dropped off by helicopter for their daily work—amid protesters leaping from the understory blowing air horns. They wrote peace signs on the cut stumps with fresh sawdust, scooped from scarred ground next to gas cans left by the loggers for the next day’s cutting.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, backed by the courts, hauled away the protestors. The logging continued—but the provincial government of British Columbia was beginning to talk about deferring logging in some areas, with the effect of spurring even more logging. “They are cutting it faster and faster,” Ryan said. “They’ve got to get it quick before it’s locked up forever, they are cutting hill after hill. It’s apocalyptic.”

Simard bumped over more logging roads until we saw the crew’s work trucks. We parked and headed into the forest. We hopped from piece to piece of downed logs over inky-black mud in a fructifying bog at the edge of the road, following a faint trace of the crew’s path. In here, the light was soft, the ground even softer, and it was cool, even on this blazing July day.

Fallen logs were crumbling back into the earth, where they started as seedlings centuries ago. The logs were soft to the touch and furry with moss. Lush lichen grew over them, leafy as lettuce. The sunlight diffused through needles of hemlock and fir, and long shafts of gold, late-afternoon summer sunlight found canopy gaps and gilded the forest floor. Far above, a breeze was stirring green branches across the blue of the sky. Simard had found her research crew, measuring giants in this old-growth stand. It was day’s end and time to wrap up. When they had gathered their equipment, we headed back to camp.

Mak’wala (the traditional name of Rande Cook) gathered us nightly in a circle after a camp dinner to reflect on the work underway. He is an artist and hereditary chief for the Ma’amtagila, one of the 18 tribes of the Kwakwaka’wakw whose territory reaches from northern Vancouver Island southeast to the middle of the island and includes smaller islands and inlets of Smith Sound, Queen Charlotte Strait, and Johnstone Strait.

In 2022, Cook had invited Simard and other scientists, artists, filmmakers, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and writers including myself to the second annual Tree of Life Project, for a weeklong exploration of the old-growth forests in Kwakwaka’wakw territories. Founded by Cook as the Awi’nakola Tree of Life Foundation, he partnered with Simard from the start. He saw parallels between his people’s understanding of the connections between all living things and her work focusing on healing damaged forests. The goal on this trip was to share both new and ancient ways of understanding the land, and to directly experience together the impact of industrial logging on the land, water, and Native cultures.

“Right now this is really about the next 100 years,” Cook said in camp that first night. “That 100 years doesn’t belong to us. In a very short amount of time, the amount of damage we are doing is irreversible.” It was time, he said, for a societal shift from devastation to regeneration.

Simard’s goals were in alignment with Cook’s: to use Indigenous, scientific, and artistic knowledge to understand and heal the forest. In her Mother Tree Project based at UBC, Simard and her team were assessing the biological and ecological status of clear-cuts, comparing their soils with what they found in intact old-growth forests, to get a sense of a baseline condition. They were like arboreal ambulance chasers, trying to stay one step ahead of the logging crews, searching out the last of the unprotected old-growth in these lush river valley bottoms, hurrying to learn what they could of what intact old-growth forests look like and how they function before they are gone.

“We are trying to find old-growth in these ravaged landscapes; all we find are rare patches, scraps perched on cliffs,” Simard said as we drove to the day’s research site—the places the day-trippers and vacationers to Vancouver Island rarely see. “We will never know what we have lost. We are at a point in history where we can never understand what we once had. But there are still clues—what seeds are buried in the ground, what soils—that is what we are doing, trying to reconstruct what is there, so we can heal these landscapes.”

This is the Vancouver Island off the main highway, with its beauty strip hiding the views of the cutover slopes and valleys. We were in a hub of logging roads, logging signs, clear-cuts, loading areas, and equipment yards. This land is hardly a forest at all anymore; it is a manufacturing plant for timber products, with remnant old-growth stands amid a sea of industrial tree farms on their third cutting.

It is the nature of her work that Simard has to drive through active logging areas to access her research plots. As we drove on, dust boiling behind us, the caravan of research trucks and the Tree of Life crew ground to a halt: There was a chain across the road. “Active Logging Area” read the sign on the chain. We smelled it before we saw it: the unmistakable odor of ground-up, freshly cut trees.

“Those are old-growth trees,” Simard said, glancing at logs piled by the side of the road, on the other side of the chain. She swung out of the truck to talk to the logging crew, to explain she needed them to let her and the rest of the crew pass. After a brief conversation Simard returned, dropped the cable to the ground, and the procession of vehicles drove through. We regrouped by the piles of logs heaped by the road to be taken away for milling. The cuts were fresh, weeping sap. The bark was still fragrant, the wood moist to the touch.

“I’m just numb,” said Cook. Logged on his people’s unceded territory—a 500,000-acre swath of Vancouver Island. This displacement of his people from their lands, of the trees from their land, of the wildlife from their forest, continues the legacy of settler colonialism, Cook said.

“Nothing has changed since the beginning,” he said. “Those policies are designed for these actions to happen, and for us to say something, we are the criminals, we are the disrupters. We are so conditioned by society to say, This is okay, we support this. I need an extension on my nice home. Why do you guys get in the way, why are you so disruptive?”

Cook said he formed the Awi’nakola Tree of Life Foundation out of desperation and as a matter of cultural survival. “We are watching our own traditional territory be wiped out, demolished; we are down to the last 2.7% of old-growth, we have got to get it all, it’s sick to me. I think more and more it’s like a panic, that we are getting closer and closer to having nothing.”

But he wonders, “Who are we without our forests? How can we carry on if we don’t have this connection to this land that’s at my absolute core? It’s severing our tie. Culture is not a performance, it’s connection. That is how it is in our culture. We can’t just sing and live disconnected in order for there to be new songs, for it to be a living culture.”

We kept going, to get into the uncut forest, to lay out some sample plots and dig. Simard led the way, walking right over the ridge on the opposite side of the road from the heaped old-growth logs into the trackless deep forest beyond. The steepness of the slope to the valley floor did not slow her. She was headed with her sampling crew to a place the maps showed should have what she called “the white rhino of the forest”: enormous, untouched old-growth forest, reigning supreme for centuries deep in the heart of the Tsitika valley. Unprotected yet still uncut.

We made our way across downed logs over streams, through bogs, the islands of forest floor in between the muck carpeted with sphagnum moss. The coolness coming off the Tsitika River reached us before we found the trees. Even on this hot mid-July day, it was so cool in the shade of giant hemlocks and Douglas firs we kept our coats on. But the sun found us too, aglow through gaps in the canopy where bigleaf and vine maple surged into the light. A goldfinch spangled in the sun, a brilliant yellow flash amid the river’s sparkling blue.

Excerpted from by Lynda V. Mapes with permission from the University of Washington Press.

This stance reflects widespread stigma and misconceptions about what people with disabilities can and do accomplish.

Negative stereotypes and exclusionary practices persist despite the fact that people with disabilities are the  in the United States, representing nearly . Whether or not you identify as disabled, most people  to others with a disability.

For years I have researched how people with disabilities have been kept out of efforts to guarantee equal access for everybody, particularly in higher education. This exclusion is often due to unfounded , and the false premise that disability inclusion requires lowering standards.

However, studies demonstrate that including people with disabilities is , not just disabled people. Schools and workplaces are more collaborative and responsive when people with disabilities are included at all levels of the organization. In other words, disability inclusion isn’t about charity; it’s about making organizations work better.

Rolling Back Protections

President Donald Trump issued executive orders the day he took office for a second time that aimed to end government and private-sector efforts to make U.S. workplaces and schools more . In addition to affecting LGBTQ communities and people of color, these measures could  toward protecting the rights of people with disabilities to earn a living.

Between 40 million and 80 million Americans . Even the higher end of this range underestimates the actual number of people with disabilities, because some individuals choose not to identify that way or even realize they qualify as such. That includes people with impairments from chemical and pesticide exposure, as well as many older people and those who are living with HIV and AIDS, to name some examples.

Only 15% of people with disabilities , so most individuals become disabled over their lifetime.

Tracing Historical Precedents

Blaming failures on people with disabilities and people of color echoes the , an attempt to scientifically prove genetic inferiority of disabled, LGBTQ, Indigenous, and Black people.

Eugenics led to the institutionalization and forced sterilization of, and the coercive experimentation on, people with disabilities, immigrants, and  Even the  the concept in the early 20th century.

These studies began to fade after World War II, but their legacy persists. Even today, forced  in U.S jurisdictions in 31 states and in Washington.

Due to widespread activism and the advent of new legal protections, many states finally  in the late 1970s. But eugenics-era experiments provided foundations for contemporary medical research, standardized testing, and segregated school placements.

People with disabilities have far-reaching legal guarantees of civil rights and access today due to the . The statute, which was enacted in 1990 and strengthened in 2008, provided protections in the workplace, educational settings, transportation, and places of recreation and commerce, among others. It also guarded against negative perceptions of disability.

For example, if an employer perceived someone as disabled and denied them consideration in the hiring process because of that, the candidate would be protected from discrimination under the ADA—whether or not they had a disability.

While these advances are significant, many people with disabilities still do not have access to their basic civil rights. This is particularly true of Black people with disabilities, as they are disproportionately , , , and marginalized in .

Gaining Workplace Accommodations

Critics of inclusion efforts sometimes wrongly argue that employing people with disabilities is too costly due to the accommodations they may require. But the  in the Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy found in 2023 that nearly 60% of these accommodations cost nothing.

What’s more, many  are available to cover these costs. Disability civil rights law does not mandate hiring people who are not qualified or lowering standards to include the disabled. The law requires that candidates meet the “” of the job in order to be hired.

According to a , the employment rate for working-age people with disabilities was 38% compared with 75% for nondisabled people. Though there are countless reasons for this disparity, many people with disabilities can and want to work, but employers don’t give them the opportunity.

Providing Benefits for Everyone

Many accommodations designed for people with disabilities also benefit others.

Captioning on videos and movies was originally meant to benefit the deaf community, but it also helps multilingual speakers and people who simply . Similarly, visual or written instructions assist people with depression, Down syndrome, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, but they can also make tasks more accessible for everyone, along with breaking assignments into smaller components.

 benefit people with autism and post-traumatic stress disorder, while also providing a reprieve in a noisy work environment and minimizing distractions. Remote work options can make it easier for people with chronic illnesses to be employed, and they similarly benefit others who may have caregiving responsibilities—helping attract and retain talented employees. Text-to-speech software provides people with cerebral palsy and nonspeaking individuals with options for communication, similar to options that many people already use on their phones.

A  demonstrates the broad benefits of making jobs and schools more accessible to people with disabilities, which is ultimately an advantage for everyone.

Studies on diversity in educational and workplace settings also demonstrate positive outcomes. In a study of 10 public universities, researchers found that students who reported  had higher scores on measures of more complex thinking, a concern for the public good and an interest in poverty issues, and were more likely to vote and develop strong leadership skills.

In a national survey of human resources managers conducted in 2019, 92% of the respondents who were aware that one or more of their employees had a disability said  than their peers who did not.

Research published by Harvard Business Review  to hiring people with disabilities.

For one thing, people with disabilities can have unique insights that contribute to the workplace culture. The presence of employees with disabilities can make the environment of entire companies and organizations more collaborative. Earning a reputation for inclusiveness and social responsibility can improve customer relations and can give businesses an edge when they seek funding and recruit talented new employees.

Ultimately, I believe it’s important to create conditions where anyone can thrive, including people with disabilities. Doing so benefits everyone.

This article is republished from  under a Creative Commons license. .

With the current freeze on federal funding—and its severe impacts being felt across industries—philanthropists and grassroots organizers have a unique opportunity to join forces and shift the paradigm. In today’s hostile political climate, funders and organizers must defy fear-mongering, reject conformity, and shift strategies—and they must do so together. 

This is the moment to be bold and to expand infrastructure and sustainable systems for justice. We can’t afford to wait and see just how bad things get, or to hold onto philanthropic resources until the next presidency. Real change demands more than one- or two-year commitments. We need major, sustained, decades-long, trust-first investments in the people who have the experience, courage, and vision to challenge the status quo.

Indigenous Resilience Must Be Bolstered 

Indigenous communities are no strangers to long-term struggle. From the American Indian Movement and Landback efforts like the Klamath Dam removals to the recently successful Free Leonard Peltier campaign, Indigenous leaders have consistently organized with minimal resources against the most powerful and violent systems in the world. Indigenous peoples’ continued commitment to justice, rooted in multigenerational resistance, is a testament to the power of sustained movement work.

Meanwhile, the resources Indigenous organizers can access pale in comparison to well-funded efforts like Project 2025. This initiative to dismantle federal agencies and consolidate power among the ultra-wealthy is the result of decades of unwavering commitment from the far right. It is bankrolled by billionaires from . 

With Trump’s reelection, the far right has gained significant momentum and is rapidly advancing its radical vision built and supported by billionaires. From page one, Project 2025 makes clear that the conservative movement has been organizing against governmental power since the 1970s, with its predecessor, the “Mandate for Leadership,” released in 1981. Utilizing this framework, the far-right movement had a goal of establishing a conservative administration in 2025 that would enact policies to fulfill the mandate’s “conservative promise.” With Trump’s re-election, they are making tremendous headway toward actualizing their vision.    

The Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations have demonstrated the effectiveness of well-resourced, long-term organizing. Philanthropic organizations that are instead committed to justice must apply similar dedication and boldness. 

Without a comparable match to the well-oiled machine the right has built, we risk further entrenching authoritarianism and systemic injustice. We’re already seeing rapid moves toward this, only two months into the second Trump administration. But with 30+ year investments, progressive movements can make real and lasting moves toward justice. 

Trust-Based Grantmaking Practices Need to Be Standard

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many foundations pledged to adopt social justice frameworks and increase their giving. Yet when faced with the existential threat of authoritarian governance, those same foundations withdrew funding from civic engagement initiatives altogether. 

Many are following the Trump administration’s lead and abandoning their partners by watering down their narrative strategies or even eliminating their DEI programming. This kind of cowardly reaction is the opposite of what should be happening. Foundations are some of the best positioned organizations to leverage change that would otherwise be impossible without their support. 

Foundations too often bend to the winds of change, becoming tight-fisted in times of political uncertainty. But these are the very moments when it’s critical to release resources to those who can use them in the most effective and creative ways to resist and build something different. This is when funders should make meaningful investments in people who can and will weather all storms. 

Further, foundations must move away from the transactional, risk-averse model that requires grantees to justify their existence at every turn. Trust-based grantmaking, which provides flexible, multi-year general operating support, allows movements to adapt and thrive. Funders should consider the long-term vision of grantees and support their strategies without micromanaging the path they choose to get there. 

This partnership can manifest in many ways. One way is by providing multi-year general operating grants with no reporting requirements, like the Radical Imagination Family Foundation’s six-year commitment to NDN Collective’s general operating expenses. Another way is by releasing large investments to community trusts who can lead hands-on initiatives, as the Bush Foundation did in 2020 when it established with NDN Collective and to close the racial wealth gap.

Each organization received $50 million to launch five-year initiatives that address the systemic wealth disparities among Black and Indigenous individuals across Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. In addition, the Bush Foundation increased their regular grantmaking programs by $50 million.  

These “acts of power sharing,” as the Bush Foundation describes them, can be as simple as sharing a grantee newsletter. Or it can be increasing current commitments to have a bigger impact, as the MacArthur Foundation and a few other supporters of NDN Collective have done in recent months.��

Resourced Movements Yield Real Change 

Philanthropy’s reluctance to invest deeply in grassroots organizations often stems from risk-assessment models that fail to grasp the realities of systemic oppression. Wealth-holders, many of whom are disconnected from marginalized communities, frequently lack the lived experience to judge what is or isn’t a risk.

During the 2024 election cycle, many movement organizations experienced a funding cliff that affected their ability to proactively engage with communities and develop political education strategies. This denial of funding requests left organizers without financial support to provide critical safety and security measures for staff and community members against politically motivated attacks like doxxing attempts. 

Foundations are too often focused on investing in reactionary initiatives that lack a real community-based lens and approach, which only amplifies the “white saviorism” trope so often displayed in social justice spaces. Instead of perpetuating these hierarchical dynamics, funders should trust those closest to the work to determine how resources are best used.

The fight to free Peltier is a striking example of the power of an adequately resourced grassroots movement. Peltier’s release this year was a testament to the persistence and resilience of Indigenous organizers and their nearly five decades of unwavering advocacy. During Peltier’s most critical time of need, grassroots organizers, movement and nonprofit leaders, policymakers, and community members stepped up and came together, determined to change the conditions of one individual who had the U.S. government stacked against him.��

We are aware that our movements will remain under political attack, facing more intensity with the current regime. However, we also know that together we have the power to create the conditions needed to set new precedents. Imagine what could happen if that same multigenerational, coordinated energy is applied toward the goal of our collective liberation from an authoritarian state. 

Breaking Free From Performative Philanthropy

Providing long-term grants is an important starting point; true support requires actively engaging with grantees. Meaningful relationships are built through regular conversations, site visits, and opportunities for collaboration. Funders must also be good guests in the space of grantees, being present and respectful to listen, learn, and seek to understand. Indigenous organizing relies on engaging in meaningful ceremony, where the offerings of wisdom and consensus are received by a collective to envision a better path forward. 

NDN Collective is dedicated to building the collective power of Indigenous people while dramatically increasing philanthropic investments into Indigenous-led organizations and initiatives. In determining how to distribute funds, uses specific tactics to help us fully understand our relatives and their concerns, while informing our approach as an accessible community resource.

Our staff members regularly attend city council, tribal council, and school board meetings; go door-to-door to gather data; host town halls, direct action, and safety-related trainings; and gather frontline narratives. This informs our wealth rematriation strategy, which has moved $107 million since NDN Collective’s founding in 2018. 

Organizational staff such as program officers can play key roles translating grantee stories to the board, advocating for grantee needs, and leveraging additional funding in a foundation. Now more than ever, we need program staff and leaders to advocate for their grantees, appeal to their boards, and most of all, to be reliable.

In a time of increasing authoritarianism and social fragmentation, philanthropy must rise to the occasion. Foundations must ask themselves: What would it look like to relinquish power and control over wealth that was built through the exploitation of Black and Brown people? How can we use our resources to support movements that are already working toward collective liberation—and currently managing to do so with only table scraps? 

The path forward requires financial support as well as a willingness to stand in solidarity. True commitment means embracing uncertainty, taking risks, and staying the course even when victory seems distant. 

The far-right’s dedication to sweeping change has shown the effectiveness of long-term, large-scale investment. It’s time for philanthropy to match that commitment in service of justice. The future of our communities depends on it. 

After they eloped, the couple, who are interfaith, sought the district court’s protection from their parents and broader society. Imran is a Muslim man and Neha is a Hindu woman in a country that has always frowned upon interfaith relationships, but they are even more vulnerable now due to rising religious extremism. The court instructed police to mediate between the couple and their families, leading Imran and Neha to relocate to a safe home.

A similar scenario played out for Suhana Begum*, a Muslim woman who lived with her family in Bharog, also near Ambala. Her parents forcibly confined her to their house in 2019 after she told them she loved a Hindu man named Rajiv Saini* and wanted to marry him, despite the difference in their religious backgrounds. 

“We met at my aunt’s wedding where he worked as a DJ operator,” Begum, who is 32, says. “He gave me his number through friends, and a few months later we started talking to each other.” But when her family discovered their relationship, they held her captive to prevent her from communicating with Saini. “For two years, we couldn’t speak to each other, let alone see each other,” she says.��Since their villages are close to one another, she would hear news of his well-being from mutual contacts.��

After being confined for four years, Begum persuaded her family to allow her to join a polytechnic school in the village so she could enroll in a grooming and beauty course. That’s when the couple decided to elope and seek refuge at the Ambala safe home, where they would both have police protection.  

Begum joined Arya Samaj, a Hindu temple that conducts legally valid Vedic wedding ceremonies without elaborate rituals or caste restrictions, and converted to Hinduism in order to marry Saini. “Our parents were upset with us when we ran away from our homes,” she says. “We were scared that they might come after us, so we decided to seek legal help. One of Rajiv’s friends had also had an intercaste marriage, so he helped us get married and get police protection in the safe home.”��

Begum says she endured taunts and mockery from Saini’s village community and his family for being a Muslim. “But eventually, everyone calmed down,” she shares. “We moved to Ambala right after we got married. … Initially, it was difficult to get everyone to love us and respect us. But slowly, they have come to terms with our marriage. Everyone in his family calls me Khushi since I changed my name to Khushboo after our wedding.”��

Begum and Saini never considered religion a barrier to their love. Now, even her own family agrees that Saini is the best partner for their daughter. “It doesn’t matter that his religion is different,” she says. “He is a good person, so I fell in love with him.”

How Haryana Became the First Indian State With Safe Homes

In the early 2000s, people in Haryana scorned and actively attacked intercaste and interfaith couples, as well as couples from the same Gotra (clan), village, or adjoining villages because these were considered incestuous relationships. Their resistance to these couples helped give rise to honor-based killings. The families of these interfaith and intercaste couples—or an unlawful village council, called a Khap Panchayat—socially ostracized, harmed, or killed their relatives for wanting to marry people of their own choosing rather than those chosen by their families.��

Thanks to concerted efforts from social activists, socially conscious law-enforcing agents, and the judiciary, in 2010 the High Court of Punjab and Haryana directed police in Haryana and Punjab and the union territory of Chandigarh to create operational safe homes for runaway couples. Since Haryana had a deeply entrenched tradition of honor killing those involved in self-choice marriages, the then Haryana government became the first state to establish these safe homes.

Jagmati Sangwan, a member of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and an active campaigner for safe homes, remembers how the honor killings of several couples pushed AIDWA to call for safe homes, an idea favored by Haryana’s government at the time. 

“These safe homes have been instrumental in saving so many couples from being mercilessly killed, and it allows space for runaway couples to rebuild themselves to face society together,” says Sangwan. However, as Sangwan notes, “After the safe homes were formed in Haryana, we pushed for a law against honor killing, but that was never enacted.”��

It is difficult to ascertain accurate data on honor killings because they are grossly underreported, and in most cases, the families of the couples, the Khaps, and the village community hide such killings until they are reported by the media. “The bride’s parents faced a lot of social pressure, so they would coax the newlywed couple to come to the village and meet them,”�� says Vikas Narain Rai, retired deputy general of law and order of Haryana. “That’s when they would kill them, or if they see them in the market then they would murder them.”��

In 2000, conducted a study that estimated that as many as 5,000 girls and women lose their lives to honor killings around the world each year, though some nongovernmental organizations estimate that there are each year. By June 2024, with one in the Jind, Sirsa, and Hisar districts, respectively.

Given these statistics, Rai explains there has been a “barrage of petitions from young couples seeking police protection,” so “the High Court ordered that the couples be given protection in the initial period until the pressure from their families is tapered and they can figure out their life forward.”

Hindu Supremacy’s Influence on Interfaith Couples

Aside from social disapproval of self-choice marriages, India is seeing a growing trend of brutal attacks on interfaith couples, particularly Hindu–Muslim couples, by Hindu supremacists and Bajrang Dal members—the youth wing of the Sangh Parivar, which is the ideological branch of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. “The opposition against interfaith marriages has become more aggressive than ever before,” Rai says. “It’s gone beyond the families in the current scenario.”

Ashutosh Kumar* married Alfia,* a Muslim woman, in June 2023 after meeting on Instagram and feeling instantly connected. They lived less than one mile apart from each other, so they decided to run away from their families to seek protection in the Ambala safe home for seven days. Now, nearly two years later, Alfia’s parents don’t speak with them, though Kumar’s parents were on board with the marriage.

“We were in a relationship for about two and a half years before we ran away to get married,” Kumar shares. “I’d started saving up money for a year because I knew she would call me any day to say that she had run away from her house and then I’d have to run too.”

When the two landed at the Ambala safe house, Alfia had nothing with her. However, Kumar had taken a friend’s advice and withdrew more than $175 (Rs15000 in his own currency) from his bank account, so they were able to begin rebuilding their lives. “One doesn’t need phones to pass the time,” Kumar says. “We were accompanied by five [other] couples, so everyone would share their stories, and that’s how we spent our time away from everyone at the safe home.” The couple made friends with others in similar circumstances. “We continue to stay connected,” he says.

The couple eventually left the safe home and married at Arya Samaj temple, after which they stayed with different relatives and friends for more than a month before returning to Kumar’s home. However, it wasn’t a smooth journey for the couple, as Alfia’s parents kept intimidating and invoking fear among Kumar’s family and distressing the couple.��

Meanwhile, Kumar benefited from being a Hindu man marrying a Muslim woman and was able to gain a Bajrang Dal member’s support. When the scenario is reversed and Hindu woman marries a Muslim man, right-wing agents call the pairing a “love jihad,” an unverified conspiracy theory in India that alleges Muslim men lure Hindu women into relationships to convert them to Islam.����

Asif Iqbal, founder of , a nongovernmental organization that helps interfaith couples register and legalize their marriage without religious conversion, says it has become an increasingly common practice for Hindu men marrying Muslim women to approach a right-wing organization and persuade them into intimidating their families into accepting the marriage.

Runaway Couples in Haryana

Between 2018 and 2021, 10,736 couples took advantage of the shelter offered by safe homes. A female guard at one of Haryana’s safe homes tells YES! that most couples consist of young women between the ages of 18 and 21 while most of the young men are between the ages of 21 and 24. “The highest numbers are that of intercaste [couples,] but interfaith couples also come, and about 10% are from the general category or same-caste couples,” says the guard, who asked to remain anonymous. “Once the couples arrive at the safe home, they are not allowed to step out even to the verandah of the building but they are free to roam around inside. We are responsible for them so we have to ensure their safety.”

Couples from the neighboring state of Rajasthan also use safe homes in Haryana because there are none in their state.��However, as more couples seek safety in these homes, the homes themselves are facing a major funding challenge. As a police superintendent who asked to remain anonymous explains, “The police department doesn’t have an additional budget for the maintenance of the safe home.”

There is a 2018 apex court directive for all 22 Indian states to implement safe homes. As a result, there are such facilities in Punjab, Maharashtra, and New Delhi. However, neither the state governments nor the central government has passed a law to implement the directive.��

In current-day India where interfaith unions are increasingly under state-sanctioned assault, Dhanak for Humanity’s Iqbal points out the need for political will to be used to expand Haryana’s model and make safe homes a part of the legal system across the country. “The future for safe homes is bleak, and it will continue to be a makeshift arrangement unless an act is brought in to formalize it,” he adds.

Despite the challenges, safe homes are critical to the security of runaway couples and help reduce incidents of honor killing in Haryana. “Safe homes are a very good thing for couples like us,” Kumar concludes. “People should not look at love marriages negatively. Whether parents choose or the boy and girl choose, ultimately, it is the couple who have to live together, right?”

* The names of some people have been changed to safeguard them from potential abuse and harassment.

In the United States, with legal protections for LGBTQ people in jeopardy and violent incidents of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia on the rise, it has become clear that the world we currently inhabit is broken and deeply unjust.

We now see the world before us more clearly. And this new clarity brings with it an urgent longing to deconstruct and reconstruct the world, to try again, to experiment with radically alternate ways of being, to build the world otherwise.

Before we can build the world in alternate ways, however, we need to be able to envision alternate worlds. Works of science fiction and other forms of speculative art have long been at the forefront of efforts to build new worlds through imagination. Worldbuilding of this sort is never a neutral endeavor; designing the world anew always entails resisting or reinforcing (sometimes simultaneously) existing structures of power.

The cultural stakes inherent in worldbuilding have been made particularly clear through creative and scholarly work around Afrofuturism and Black speculative worldbuilding. As performance studies scholar Jayna Brown argues in her writing about Black mystics and musicians, structures of white supremacy have placed Black communities into a “bleak and bloody dimension we are taught to call reality.” In response, Brown calls for “build[ing] alternative worlds, in this dimension and in others,” as a way to “practice alternative ways of being alive.”

In addition to turning to fiction, art, and music to find the speculative worlds that inspire us, there is another media form we should be taking closely into consideration when we look for these “alternative ways of being live”: video games. Video games have often been derided or dismissed precisely because they seem disconnected from the “real world.” Yet, in truth, the relationship between video games and the world around us is much more complex than these critiques would suggest.

As many game studies scholars have argued, video games are intimately bound up with the real world; they shape and are shaped by the conditions of their production and reception. At the same time, video games offer opportunities to inhabit worlds that differ from our own. Indeed, we can understand video games themselves as alternate worlds.

In their own ways, they are each models for other ways that the world might operate. They offer us opportunities to “question the order of things,” as the disability studies scholar Robert McRuer writes in , to ask how this order has been “constructed and naturalized . . . and how it might be changed.”

Certainly, not all video game worlds offer visions of empowerment for those who are pushed to the margins. Video games are a vast and varied medium, and games culture is still marred by , sexuality, and gender. At the same time, games themselves offer powerful opportunities to experiment with strategies for rebuilding the world we currently live in, one where many forms of oppression currently reign.

Yet, through games, we can see that building (or unbuilding and rebuilding) the world necessitates a revolutionary redesign of the foundational logics and underlying operations of the world we inhabit.

Through video games, I theorize a practice that I term queer worldbuilding. Queer worldbuilding is not the same thing as building worlds that feature queer stories or communities, though such worlds themselves have immense value. Instead, queer worldbuilding describes the practice of constructing new worlds through methods, frameworks, and tools that can themselves be understood as queer.��

In this spirit, I analyze video games to offer as examples of building worlds through a process that itself challenges or rewrites norms around sexuality, gender, identity, and desire. In them, we find tools for both building queer worlds and queering the world around us.

Every Video Game Is a World

This alternate vision of worldbuilding is premised on understanding video games themselves as worlds. When we think of video games and worldbuilding together, it is common to think of large-scale, expansive, story-focused games with extensively developed narratives. These games, certainly, are worlds. But so are all video games, regardless of their content. Small games are worlds. Abstract games are worlds. Puzzle games, mobile games, experimental games, absurdist games, games with no characters: All of these video games are worlds, in their own right.

Video games do sometimes contain games, but what they are, above all, is worlds: universes in miniature. Reframing video games as worlds opens up new opportunities for making sense of the cultural meaning that games contain. 

If games are worlds, then the importance of competition, achievements, and technological prowess fades into the background. In its place, what comes to hold meaning in a video game is its qualities as a space for existing. In this game world, who has power? Who is afforded freedom, and who is placed under constraint? How do beings connect with one another?

The spirit of video game worldbuilding has much in common with the spirit of queerness. Both describe a mode of imagining alternate ways of being in the world. As I and my fellow queer game studies scholars have argued elsewhere, video games are rich sites for locating and expressing queerness. While some video games (whether mainstream or independent) contain the presentation of LGBTQ identities, a great many more contain queer meaning—offering themselves as opportunities for exploring queer play, engaging with queer design, or undertaking queer analysis.

Insisting on the queerness of video games, in its many forms, is a way to reclaim a medium that has long been exclusionary to queer people. To say that video games can model queer worlds is to expand on this reclamation, to move beyond making a place for queer people in the world of video games by insisting that video games can aid us in making the world itself more queer.

There are many ways in which queer worlds manifest themselves in video games. Multiple AAA games of the sort that engage in elaborate narrative worldbuilding now prominently feature queer characters. One high-profile example is The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020), which includes a lesbian protagonist and a transgender side character and was the recipient of a 2021 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Video Game. 

Beyond the sphere of mainstream video games, the rise of queer avant-garde game makers has brought with it an explosion of indie video games whose worlds are directly structured around queer experience. Mattie Brice has noted that white designers were centered in the early days of the queer games avant-garde, which began to take form at the start of the 2010s. Today, a growing number of these games are being made by, about, and for queer people of color. 

These range from The Black Trans Archive (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2021), which wrestles with the erasure of Black trans people from documented histories, to the upbeat roller derby “rhythm ga(y)me” Skate & Date (Geneva Hayward, 2020). In Skate & Date, players skate to a musical beat in the role of Maggie, a Black femme roller derby team captain with a crush on a woman from a rival team. A game like Skate & Date creates its own vision of a queer world: a world where femmes are, as a matter of course, powerful physical competitors who romance other femmes.

Queer Video Game Worlds

Queer video game worlds also manifest themselves as queer communities. Many queer and transgender people have shared stories about using online role-playing games to explore their identities and connect with others who share similar experiences: a way of forming queer games worlds while using game worlds to understand oneself as queer. Beginning in 2012 and 2013, events like GaymerX and the Queerness and Games Conference built temporary worlds where queer people who made, studied, or simply loved video games could come together to play.

At the same time, many video game worlds that do not appear queer can be understood queerly. These worlds are places where the norms that we often mistake for universal truths—our unquestioned beliefs about how the world works, both socially and physically—are sidestepped, rewritten, or overturned. Indeed, the relationship between video games and queer worldbuilding goes deeper than the queerness of any individual game world.

Video games serve as opportunities to transform queer world-making into something concrete. They offer us playgrounds where we can reach out and touch, as trans studies scholar Susan Stryker writes in describing the process of transing, “the material truth of a potential for worlding otherwise.” They show us world-making in action.

Certainly, the queer worlds we find in video games offer us a critical entry point into imagining how we might queer the world around us. Like all queer works of art and ways of living, they are messy. Queer video game worlds are often silly, improbable, or impossible, ecstatic and joyful but also broken or mournful, posthuman and nonhuman, postapocalyptic, counterhegemonic in some ways and complicit with dominant structures of power in others.

Queer video game worlds balance the longing to fix worlds and the hunger to destroy them. These worlds are many things at once. They are an invitation to remake the world through play. They are whole universes, shrunk down to the scale of tiny dioramas, galaxies under glass. Video game worlds challenge us to question how the universe—our universe, any universe—functions.

Games will not fix a broken world. They will not save a world on the brink of collapse. But they will inspire us to explore new ways of rebuilding our world. And, when necessary, they will remind us that some worlds cannot be saved.

This excerpt, adapted from by Bo Ruberg (New York University, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

The women, both in their 40s, worry about the Trump administration’s ongoing funding cuts to a multitude of programs and services that they—like many other Americans across the country—depend on. “Trump is taking away everything,” says Lewis, a part-time cashier at a discount store who earns minimum wage. Siebold, also a part-time cashier, delivers air filters at a second job to make ends meet.��

On Saturday, Mar. 22, Siebold and Lewis took a ride-sharing service to Arizona Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s district to see Sanders speak at Catalina High School’s football stadium. The two women were among thousands of people who braved long lines in hot weather to hear what the self-described democratic socialist had to say. 

The independent senator launched his nationwide tour in February 2025, in the absence of a united Democratic Party against President Donald Trump’s dizzying dismantling of legally funded federal agencies and programs. Texas Democratic Rep. Greg Casar and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at the Tucson rally. Ocasio-Cortez has partnered with Sanders in several other cities including Denver and Las Vegas. 

Sanders, 83, has attracted large crowds at rallies in cities across the U.S. as he pushes against the ever-growing influence within the federal government of billionaires—part of the so-called 1% of the nation’s population. “At the end of the day, 99% is a hell of a bigger number than 1%,” Sanders said during his address, noting the huge crowds attending his rallies. 

“Brothers and sisters, don’t let them divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our religion or sexual orientation,” the senator told an ebullient audience. “Let’s stand together as one people. Proud people. Let’s take on Trumpism and defeat it.”

A two-time presidential candidate, Sanders has long railed against billionaires in politics, often bringing attention to wealth inequality in the nation. These days, his message is soundly resonating with voters alarmed by the novel role of tech billionaire Elon Musk as the executor of Trump’s sweeping cost-cutting mandates.

In the Democratic stronghold that is Tucson’s Pima County, the progressive politicians found a friendly crowd. The mere mention of Trump and Musk elicited a chorus of boos, and when Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez denounced the men’s actions, chants and cheers reverberated throughout.��

Sanders decried the Trump administration’s possible cuts to , and , as well as and . Americans, said Sanders, wouldn’t stand for losing those and other social-safety programs and benefits meant for “the working class of their country in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires.”

Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd that federal budget cuts are not just about reducing costs, but also a fight over the values that define the nation. “Trump handed the keys of government to Elon Musk and is selling the country for parts to the richest people on the planet for a kickback,” she said, in reference to Musk’s oversight of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The New York representative also spoke about her own financial struggles as a former waitress, saying she empathized with the challenges facing working-class people. “When the system is stacked against you, it’s hard to feel like anything you do matters, that we matter in a democracy.”

It’s common sense, not radicalism, says Ocasio-Cortez, that when someone gets sick in the world’s wealthiest nation, “They shouldn’t go bankrupt.”��

She encouraged audience members to get involved in their community by joining block associations, neighborhood groups, and other local organizations. Building community “is the tissue and the infrastructure” paving the way to victory, she explained.

Meanwhile, Casar emphasized that it’s time to take on Trump and the ultra-rich. “They want you to feel powerless because they are afraid of the power on this field. They are afraid of the lines of people wrapping around this high school.”

That kind of people power, the Texas representative said, has Republicans running scared rather than holding town halls in their own districts. Around the country, constituents are demanding answers from their congressional representatives, and Tucsonans are no exception. Hundreds have , who represents southern Arizona’s Congressional District 6.

Casar encouraged the crowd to stay hopeful. “On our darkest days, I want you to remember there can be a world that is better after this. There has to be a better world after this.”

Siebold and Lewis walked out of the roughly three-hour rally a bit more optimistic that life could indeed get better. “It definitely gave me hope to fight for a possible future where we don’t have to have two jobs and where we can actually be able to afford groceries,” Siebold says. “It feels like we’re being heard.”

While Siebold rents an apartment that she pays for with wages from her two jobs, Lewis, who says she has asthma and a neck injury, sleeps on her parents’ couch because she can’t afford her own place with the $500 she earns every two weeks. The government food assistance she got helped, but it stopped recently. “They told me that I made too much money,” she says.

Lupe Mora, a grandmother who attended the rally with her daughter, Annie, and grandchildren Alex, 16, and Marc, 10, traveled to Tucson from the Arizona border town of Douglas to see Sanders. She and her family were excited to shake his hand after he spoke. 

“He’s been my hero since 2016,” Mora says, referring to the year Sanders ran his first presidential campaign. “I like his progressive views and everything he said here. We would be such a great nation if he had become president.”

Support for veterans undoubtedly would be stronger under Sanders’ brand of politics, Mora maintains, and seniors would not be panicking about the possibility of having their Social Security benefits cut. “I don’t feel very happy that Trump’s in control,” she says.

Neither does Steve Brown, a retired educator who was at the rally with his wife, Alice. “I just dread to pick up the papers or turn on the news,” he says. He thinks it is “insane” that the Trump administration is cutting funds for public schools. He likes Sanders’ suggestion that public school teachers who dedicate their life to educating children should get paid what they’re worth. And although he says he supports the senator, Brown doesn’t fully espouse a democratic socialist society. 

“Democratic socialism is a complex ideological and political system that has pieces that I admire and other pieces that I think could be done differently,” he says. “But what’s really important is for all of us who believe in the truth, in honesty, authenticity, integrity and love, to stand together and elect people who will embrace those values.”

For Rousel Orozco, the rally served as a reaffirmation that democracy can prevail in challenging times. “After the last election, I completely lost hope,” he says. The microbiologist says he has a difficult time accepting Trump’s election to a second four-year term. But the Republican with other Latino voters, particularly men, in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I have a friend who’s gay, immigrant, and Latino,” Orozco says. “He voted for Trump because he thought that as soon as he took office, his wages were going to go up and the prices were going to go down. And it is unbelievable to me that people had that vision.”

Orozco agrees with much of what Sanders said at the rally, but he doesn’t see democratic socialism ever taking root in the United States. If it had, “It would have served to balance the current ideology that’s out there,” he says.��

Seibold and Lewis figure that if the country had gone down the path Sanders favors, their quality of life would be better. They envisioned having basic necessities and peace of mind. 

“Can you imagine not having to worry about what’s for dinner, how much is the rent, how much you have to pay in utilities, or how much is my doctor bill?” Seibold asks. “So many people live in survival mode on how we’re going to get to the next day.”

Lewis nods in agreement. Then the friends head to a nearby city bus stop, strolling on a sidewalk running parallel to the school. Across the street, a house yard sign perched on a prickly pear cactus urges: Deport Elon.

Medicaid—the state and federally funded program that provides health coverage for almost and about half of the state’s children—could face billions of dollars in federal cuts under a budget proposal from House Republicans. That’s alarmed families like the Pequeños, who rely on Medicaid, called Medi-Cal in California, to pay for medical care and other support for their children with chronic conditions.

Pequeño’s 11-year-old son, Xavier, has a rare, genetic immune disorder that undermines his body’s ability to fight disease. Thanks to Medi-Cal, Xavier receives medications that keep him alive and would otherwise cost his family around $100,000 a month. The program also pays for Xavier’s medical equipment such as a wheelchair and portable oxygen tank, antibody and respiratory treatments, and hospital stays when he gets sick.

“It’s allowed him to go to school. It’s allowed him to be home and not living in a hospital 24 hours a day,” says Pequeño, who cares for Xavier while her husband works as a forklift driver. “There’s no way right now we can afford his monthly medications, his treatments or his hospitalizations. Without Medi-Cal it would essentially be a death sentence for him.” 

Parents of children with special health care needs aren’t the only ones alarmed about the potential cuts—disability advocates, health care providers, budget analysts, and state lawmakers have also expressed concern. Although the House proposal, passed Feb. 25, doesn’t specifically call for Medicaid cuts, it does direct the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, to come up with $880 billion in savings over the next 10 years. Achieving that amount of savings would be difficult without making cuts to Medicaid, experts said. 

The requested budget cuts still need to be adopted by the Senate, written into legislation, and passed by Congress. But Aaron Carruthers, executive director of the California State Council on Developmental Disabilities, said he doesn’t see how cuts to Medicaid can be avoided under the Republican plan. The council is an independent state body that advises the governor and legislature on policies related to adults and children with developmental challenges.

“This is a four-alarm fire, this is all-hands-on-deck, there is no messing around,” Carruthers says. “The cuts are so big that it’s going to [impact] everyone in the program, there’s no way around it.”

President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have said Republicans—who have sought to cut Medicaid in the past—won’t touch it this time, but will look to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse. But information from the Congressional Budget Office shows that there is no way to reduce the budget by the proposed $880 billion without making cuts to Medicaid (the only other option is cutting Medicare—the health insurance program for people over 65—and Republicans have ruled that out too). 

Republicans have also floated proposals aimed at reducing spending on the program such as through work requirements (although most people with Medicaid already work), capping the amount of Medicaid funding sent to states, and making it harder for people to enroll and renew coverage. 

“We don’t really have specific proposals to react to yet. It’s kind of a list of ideas, and most of them are bad ideas,” says Mike Odeh, senior director of health policy at Children Now, a children’s research and advocacy organization. “For kids with special health care needs, thinking about their access to specialty care, to medical equipment, to prescription drugs—all of that could be jeopardized, as well as the care and coverage of their family members.”

Medi-Cal is especially important for children with disabilities because they often need more specialized and expensive care than children without special health care needs. The program recognizes this and allows some of these children to qualify for Medi-Cal even if their families earn too much to make them eligible under standard rules, or if a parent already has insurance through an employer. 

Private insurance typically doesn’t cover the full cost of care for people with severe disabilities, and copays and coinsurance add up when someone needs a lot of medical care. In these instances, Medi-Cal covers the costs that private insurance doesn’t. 

Anita Morris, who is based in Fresno, California, relies on Medi-Cal to cover costs for her daughter, Jayline, that her employer insurance won’t cover. These include daily nursing care, diapers, and a wheelchair. Previously, Jayline also received physical and occupational therapy. Jayline, 26, has severe epilepsy and autism due to a genetic disorder. She can’t talk, walk, or eat by herself. Without the nursing that Medi-Cal provides, Morris said she’d have to quit her job as a clinical social worker to take care of her. 

“I’m not freaking out yet, but it does cause me concern,” Morris says. “If they need to look at abuse and fraud, do that, but don’t take away the services in that process because the services aren’t causing the abuse and fraud.”

Cuts would also impact children with special health care needs who aren’t enrolled in Medi-Cal, said Ann-Louise Kuhns, executive director of the Children’s Hospital Association. That’s because, for most hospitals and providers of specialty care to children, about two-thirds of their income comes from Medi-Cal patients, she explained.��

“If you start reducing support for that network, you jeopardize access to care for all of the children that rely on those services, not just the ones on Medi-Cal,” she says. “The whole system is knitted together.”

Beyond Medi-Cal health insurance, Medicaid dollars support other important programs and services for children and youth with disabilities, including Regional Centers, early intervention programs for children with developmental delays, California Children’s Services, in-home nursing, and special education services such as speech therapy and school health aides.

Fernando Gomez, who lives in West Los Angeles, has two sons who receive Medicaid-funded services through their local regional center. Oscar Antonio, who is 18 and has Down syndrome, has a physical therapist who works with him to navigate daily life and build independence. He’s also received speech therapy to help him learn to talk. As a result, a dream that once seemed impossible—attending college—has become feasible, Gomez said.��

Meanwhile, Gomez’s other son, Diego, 15, who has autism, is receiving educational support. Gomez, who’s retired, said it would be impossible for him and his wife to afford those services themselves. He also worries that Medicaid cuts could destabilize the lives of other Latinx families and their children and undermine progress he believes California has made toward reducing disparities in access to regional center services.

“I call it a death blow because it will be, it literally will be,” he says. “It will kill many of our family members’ ability to have a productive and engaged … life.”

While California contributes state funds to Medi-Cal, more than half of the funding—$98 billion out of $161 billion in Medi-Cal spending—comes from the federal government. That makes it difficult for the state to backfill any large federal cuts to the program, health policy advocates and budget experts said.

For now, many organizations and advocacy groups are focused on trying to avoid cuts to the program. Some groups are offering guidance and trainings for parents of children with special health care needs on how to share their concerns and Medi-Cal stories with their congressional representatives. Others said they are connecting directly with those representatives to urge against cuts.

Nevertheless, some said California could do more to prepare for potential changes to Medicaid. The California Budget and Policy Center has suggested the state raise corporate tax rates, eliminate certain tax loopholes, and reduce tax breaks for the wealthy.

“State leaders really could proactively develop contingency plans and explore solutions to safeguard health care coverage,” says Adriana Ramos-Yamamoto, a senior policy analyst with the center. “We know that there are actions that state leaders can take to raise additional revenue equitably, making sure that profitable corporations pay their fair share in order to support critical health care programs like Medi-Cal.”

Aides for the chairs of California’s Assembly and Senate health committees, Assemblymember Mia Bonta and Senator Caroline Menjivar, respectively, said they were both unavailable for interviews. However, Assemblymember Bonta’s office sent a written response that said she is “committed to ensuring our communities can continue to access the care they need.”

Pequeño said she’d like to see more evidence that the California legislature is trying to keep the cuts from happening, and wants to know what the state will do to protect children like Xavier if cuts do go ahead. 

“What is the backup plan?” she says. “What are they doing, and what can they legally do to help protect families like ours that are going through these things and are wondering, ‘What’s next?’”��

In the meantime, she and her family are trying to come up with their own backup plan. Pequeño said she’s even considering taking Xavier to another country, such as Canada, so he can get care.

“The thought of losing benefits that keep him alive and the possibility of having to watch things get cut and watch his quality of life deteriorate … watch him essentially die because of a choice the government made, it’s terrifying,” she says. “No one’s life should be cut short because of the government’s choices.”

This story was produced in collaboration with the.

However, when considering the concept of marriage equality, there has been one population overlooked and excluded: disabled people. , a “documentary rom-com” streaming on Hulu, takes up this problem, bringing a siloed issue to the forefront in a nation that believes the fight for marriage equality has already been won. But, as the documentary aims to explain, there’s no true marriage equality if disabled people are grossly penalized for falling in love.

Patrice follows a mixed-race disabled couple, Patrice and Garry, who desire to get married. But there’s one pesky problem: the marriage penalty. When disabled people who receive Social Security benefits such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) get married, they are and their healthcare coverage, the latter of which is typically provided through Medicaid.

That’s the predicament Patrice and Garry find themselves in. Though they love one another, they are unable to live together or legalize their union or they will no longer have access to the critical lifelines of support that allow them to live independently. Unfortunately, the Social Security Administration (SSA) doesn’t know how many disabled people lose their SSI benefits when they marry—they don’t keep track, an SSA spokesperson told in 2024.��

Patrice’s desire to live on her own stems mostly from her upbringing: She came of age in the 1970s and ’80s when our understanding and societal inclusion of disabled people were vastly different. Patrice endured stigma for being intellectually disabled in school before she was placed in an accessible education setting that better suited her learning and social needs. As a young adult, she was institutionalized and was harmed by those responsible for her care in the facility. She then faced discrimination once out of the institution while trying to find employment to live on her own as a disabled adult.����

Despite the hurdles she’s faced, Patrice innately knew she had a right to create the life she envisioned for herself—and that she did. Though Patrice is unable to wed without significant risk, the film still spotlights how she has been able to build a supportive community. From her relationship with Garry and her friendships to her eclectic hobbies and her job as a crossing guard, the film fully humanizes Patrice without leaning into the stereotypes and tropes that often plague disabled people. That community steps in when Patrice needs to replace an essential lifeline—a modified van large enough to accommodate a wheelchair.

The average person may be unaware at how costly these modified vehicles are. Used vans, for instance, can cost as much as a modest luxury-brand car. Patrice’s struggle is familiar; as someone who was once on benefits, acquiring a car was out of my financial grasp. I didn’t want to take out a loan because of my limited financial means, and I knew that crowdfunding could jeopardize my benefits.

We see this conundrum when Patrice shares how fundraising efforts for her first van impacted her benefits. In order to acquire this new van, she has to use other means that allow her to purchase a replacement van without directly accessing the funds. Once again, Patrice, like many other disabled people, has to jump through unbelievable hoops to get the basic tools she needs to thrive in society. 

Currently, SSI limits in savings and assets. Since 1989, the limit has been $2,000 for an individual and $3,000 for a couple, with an exception made for a single car and a single home. Not only should that number have increased to $10,000 for an individual and $17,000 for a couple to accommodate inflation, but it should also consider how expensive it is to provide in-home care for disabled people. 

“There’s anger, there’s a feeling of betrayal sometimes,” attorney Ayesha Elaine Lewis . Lewis is leading a national campaign to secure marriage equality for disabled people by ending this marital assets clause. “Because the [Americans with Disabilities Act] has a beautiful promise of full integration into society, of people with disabilities being able to live their destinies and make their life what they want of it. But with these rules still in place, it’s obvious that the full promise of the ADA hasn’t been implemented.”

At the end of the film, Patrice and her community raise enough money for the new wheelchair van. It was a beautiful ending that filled me with joy, especially now that I am on a journey to acquire my first set of wheels as a disabled adult who uses a wheelchair. Since I am several years removed from receiving benefits and I now have secure employment, I now have the financial ability to purchase a car and learn more about installing a wheelchair rack on the roof of the car I choose.

Financial freedom and the ability to take care of one’s needs or even purchase simple wants or luxuries of life shouldn’t feel out of grasp because one is receiving governmental assistance. We all deserve to be able to take care of ourselves and have the resources to do so without outdated strings attached.

It was refreshing to watch Patrice possess and display joy and wins while navigating antiquated systems that harshly impact the quality of life for disabled people. Often, storytelling surrounding disabled people can be heavily negative, and the light moments are downplayed or rarely seen; the documentary did a fair job in displaying the highs and lows with balance and nuance.  

Of course, since Patrice is a documentary rom-com, the ending is pleasant: Patrice and Garry are able to have a commitment ceremony during a protest to raise awareness about the fight for marriage equality for disabled people. Though they are unable to legally marry, Patrice and Garry still secure a “happily ever after” for themselves on their terms. From the beginning of the documentary until the end, Patrice is fighting for a better world for not just herself, but for all those impacted by the rules and regulations that intrude on aspects of our lives that should be our choice.

Patrice’s activism—from talking to legislators to demonstrating during the day of action for marriage equality—are a testament to her understanding that these issues are not isolated; marriage equality matters to the health and sustainability of the fabric of our society. Patrice: The Movie was captivating, led with so much care and intention, and showed us that the work to ensure that every American can live and marry whoever they want is a fundamental right, even for people with disabilities. 

After October 2023, the Purchase campus became a protest site for students like Paul who wanted to raise awareness about Palestinians’ struggle for liberation against Israeli occupation. But Paul says advocating for Palestine on campus was “dangerous.” “Students would put up [printouts of] Palestinian flags, and they would be taken down immediately,” he says. “There were students putting things up about Israel, and it was fine.”

But the double standards weren’t just relegated to the materials students hung on walls. Paul says the double standards included an institutional stance that Purchase’s leadership took with Israel. On Oct. 10, 2023, Purchase President Milagros Peña sent a university-wide email stating “New York stands with the people of Israel.” A few sentences following, Peña wrote, “We also recognize that this conflict is devastating to the residents of Gaza.” The word “Palestine” does not appear anywhere in the email.

“Why isn’t Purchase talking about Palestine?” Paul wondered. He was certain that Purchase, which “claims to be diverse” and “will always talk about what’s going on in the world” would eventually “do something for Palestine,” he says. But as weeks went by, and the , no email was sent to acknowledge the .

Then there was the hypocrisy, Paul says. The Purchase administration did not acknowledge that Palestinians have —the last 77 years of which Israel has been the primary occupying power. When Peña released a university-wide email on Nov. 21, 2023, honoring “the Wappinger and Lenape people,” whose land Purchase’s campus occupies, Paul was “confident the school would advocate for Indigenous people [in Palestine], as they did for Indigenous people here.” But, he says, “I was wrong.”

Paul decided to advocate for Palestine himself—he draped his body in a large Palestine flag and wore it to school. But that, too, was met with resistance. “More than five times I was approached for wearing a Palestinian flag,” he says. The first interaction he remembers was with an elderly female student who yelled at him, “Palestinians are the bad people.” Another time, a female student followed him through a parking lot to ask him if he “condemns the actions of Hamas.” 

“Every day felt like a fight,” Paul says. “I felt like I was just constantly protesting, even though I was simply wearing a flag.”

Yet the two “We Stand With Israel” banners hung for weeks in the office window of Paul Nicholson, the school’s , despite  prohibiting both banners and large materials on windows.

Paul’s decision to take them down was to “inspire the student body to not abide by these double standards,” he says. “To not be silent.”

Paul knew he would likely face consequences. He expected Nicholson to tell him to stop or maybe call security to have Paul removed from the office. But something else happened. “As I’m taking the banners down, he cursed at me and grabbed me. He was grabbing me so tightly that even though I was wearing a really puffy jacket … I could feel it,” Paul says. “He shook me back and forth and pushed me toward the floor.”

A video recorded by Paul and shows a scuffle between the two before Paul falls to the floor. Nicholson can be heard shouting in the background, “No you’re not. Get the fuck out of here!”

“I called for help immediately,” Paul explains. “I was in survival mode.”

A few hours after the incident, Paul received a call from Patricia Bice, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management. He had been placed on interim suspension amid a pending investigation. At 6:15 p.m. that same day, the New York State University Police, also known as UPD, released a university-wide email stating that it was notified of “an anti-Semitic incident” and investigating the circumstance “as a possible hate crime,” emails obtained by YES! Media show.

The following day, on Dec. 13, 2023, Peña released her own university-wide email, asserting that Purchase College had “zero tolerance for antisemitic behavior or any other act of hate or bias.” 

Nicholson faced no repercussions. He did not respond to a request for comment.

At the time that these emails were sent, there had not yet been a student conduct hearing where Paul could explain his actions or clarify that he was not motivated by antisemitism. To the contrary, Paul says he wanted to remove banners that made him and other students feel unsafe. 

“[The banners] are advocating for the right of Israel to genocide Palestinians,” he says. “A Palestinian student told me they took different routes [to class] because they didn’t feel safe.” Yet, in describing the incident, UPD “immediately threw out these words—‘hate crime,’” while the university’s president indirectly suggested the incident was “antisemitic.” Days later, Paul was officially charged by the Office of Student Conduct with five violations, most of which he says were false.

“Then the media came in,” Paul adds. “I was thrown into this information war.”

In a series of articles published by local and national media outlets, including the and , Paul was painted as an aggressor. The New York Post In one article (a conservative magazine that is allied with Israel and even ran a story titled “”), the author relies on an anonymous source who claims Paul attacked Nicholson. Only Paul and Nicholson were present inside the office at the time of the incident.

Every day felt like a fight. I felt like I was just constantly protesting, even though I was simply wearing a flag.”

Paul, who is Afro-Latino, says he decided to record the incident to protect himself. “Taking my camera out was my defense mechanism,” he says. “Otherwise, people will perceive me as being aggressive.”

But the recording didn’t prevent those assumptions. Readers , calling Paul a “thug” and calling for him to be expelled or even jailed. Others “made fun of my hair,” he says. Months later, he received a message from an individual whom he did not know that read: “terrorist bitch.” 

“It really devastated me,” Paul says of the university’s response and the backlash he faced as a result. “It took a big toll on my mental health.”

More than one year since the incident, Paul has still not been allowed to return to class. After being charged with five violations in December 2023, which ranged from removing property to inflicting harm, abuse, and injury, he says an advisor suggested he just accept the charges, even if it meant being expelled. But Paul was determined to fight. In June 2024, he sued the school, alleging that he was attacked by Nicholson and excessively punished because he criticized Israel and supported Palestine.

“They’ll say that I just wanted to destroy property, but what I did was a symbol of me saying, ‘Down with white supremacy, Zionism, and the oppression of Arab and African peoples,’” Paul says. “Israel is involved in the suffering of Black people in countries across the world, whether it’s , , , or .”

Paul entered Purchase’s disciplinary process in late December 2023, which included several administrative hearings that were conducted by a single staff member serving as a hearing officer. Paul requested a committee hearing, which is conducted by three people instead of one, and can involve a student who listens to the case. But Purchase beginning the Monday before the last two weeks of the semester through winter break, making an administrative hearing his only option at the time.

“The waters of due process were muddied the moment Cesar [Paul]’s actions were deemed an ‘anti semitic hate crime’ prior to any fair hearing,” Maryam Fatouh, Paul’s lawyer, wrote in an email. “From that point on, there were countless procedural missteps on the part of Purchase College, including its failure to produce Mr. Nicholson for questioning, despite my client’s requests. Given the seriousness of the allegations of physical assault, and Mr. Nicholson’s direct, first hand knowledge of the incident, Cesar [Paul] should have been afforded his legal right to directly question the individual making accusations against him.”

Ultimately, Paul’s fate was decided by that single staff member, who questioned the two UPD officers who wrote the incident reports as “witnesses” despite neither of the officers being present at the time of the incident. As Fatouh notes, Nicholson was not required to be a witness, and he was not questioned during the hearing process. Student-conduct records show Paul was declared responsible for two of the five charges, suspended for one semester, and placed on disciplinary probation for one academic year. The terms of his suspension declared him “persona non grata,” which banned him from campus. 

Paul appealed the suspension soon after, asserting that the punishment was excessive, but it was denied. Then in April 2024, Paul rode a bus to a , where student organizers from multiple colleges gathered to protest the school system’s investments in Israel. On his way there, the bus stopped at Purchase. Paul got off the bus briefly and stood on the edge of campus to record a video, where he spoke out against his ban from Purchase grounds while Nicholson was able to “walk on campus facing no repercussions.”

He was once again charged for violating the terms of his suspension. In February 2025, Purchase extended his suspension up until January 2026—effectively pushing his education back two years. “They’re trying to expel me, without labeling it as that,” he says. “They’re trying to put me to other students as an example—to be afraid to speak up.”

But Paul is still speaking up. He continues to fight to resume his education at Purchase while advocating for Palestinian liberation and his fellow student protesters. Since being suspended, he’s spoken during protests at several other campuses, often emphasizing his solidarity with Palestinians as “a Black, gay boy in America.”

“We’re living in times where we must put our morals to the test,” he says. “Nelson Mandela once said, ‘We know too well that our freedom is not complete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’”

Free Speech for Whom?

Paul’s story is just one in an ecosystem of college students who have been targeted for protesting Israel and advocating for Palestinian liberation. Students have been , , and while university administrations have (for the most part) looked the other way—or used pro-Israel outrage as fuel to dish out excessive disciplinary punishments such as suspensions and . 

Meanwhile, a collaborative crackdown between administrators and law enforcement has resulted in , , , and . Now, immigrant students are disappearing in a targeted campaign to capture, detain, and . , a Palestinian student who was a negotiator at Columbia University during the encampment, was abducted by ICE on Mar. 8, 2025, and has been detained since, despite not being charged with a crime. 

Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia student who attended protests for Palestine and posted on social media, on Mar. 11, 2025, after ICE . Yunseo Chung, another Columbia student who attended similar protests, is after ICE agents tried to arrest and deport her. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who in support of the student senate’s divestment resolution, was on Mar. 25, 2025. And Momodou Taal, a student activist at Cornell University who was also , was forced to leave the U.S. after his student visa was also revoked.

But as the general public’s focus rapidly shifts from fascism abroad to fascism in the United States, it must not forget the Palestinians still under siege in Gaza and the West Bank. Even after a “ceasefire” agreement was in January, and continued to starve and kill Palestinians. Israel officially ended the ceasefire agreement when it on Mar. 18, 2025, killing more than 400 people, many of whom were children.

“The United States is a huge player in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” says Tori Porell, a staff attorney with , a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that supports Palestine advocates. “The movement here is very important in the movement for Palestinian liberation—which is also why it has faced so much backlash.”

With Israel’s resumption of genocidal bombing and aid blocks, and the U.S. president touting the possibility of turning Gaza into a resort, student activism for Palestine is only gaining momentum. But by targeting the to Israeli and U.S. imperialism through and , the modern student divestment movement is showing us the lengths universities will go to in order to shield those ties. 

Universities rely on excessive disciplinary processes, , and allegations of antisemitism to silence, criminalize, and discredit students who dare to demand an education free of human rights abuses. 

Since the early 2010s, Palestine Legal has been supporting those who face this repression—providing legal advice, training, and litigation support to college students, grassroots activists, and communities involved in Palestine advocacy. From its extensive research and legal cases, the organization has gained a critical understanding of the forces encouraging repression of the movement for Palestinian liberation. 

“A lot of people are kind of aware of AIPAC and the wider Israel lobby that exerts so much influence on our government,” Porell says. “But there are also even more targeted organizations and operations working to suppress the pro-Palestine movement and the student movement, in particular.”

In 2015, Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights co-published a 124-page report titled “” that details how “a network of advocacy organizations, public relations firms, and think tanks” use a variety of tactics to “pressure universities, government actors, and other institutions to censor or punish advocacy in support of Palestinian rights.” 

Donald Trump and his administration are only joining this bandwagon, leveraging and the United States’ decades-old to and stop the divestment movement’s widespread influence on college campuses. Trump’s Day 1 who engage in protest for Palestine aims to further “weaponize universities as arms of the surveillance state and encourage universities to report their own students for free speech activity,” Porell says.

It from his previous term in office, which sought to have the Department of Education adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s , “a very politicized definition … that includes nearly all criticism of Israel,” Porell says. In March, the Trump administration revoked $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University for  The Guardian reported. Columbia agreed to a series of policy changes in order to restore the funding, meaning Trump successfully pressured a university to prioritize its cash flow over free speech rights.

The United States is a huge player in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The movement here is very important in the movement for Palestinian liberation—which is also why it has faced so much backlash.”

But universities share blame for fostering campus climates hostile to free speech and immigrants. “Universities might assume the position of ‘this is not us, this is the [presidential] administration,’ but they very much created the environment for these things to be possible,” says Patrice, an international graduate student worker and labor union organizer at New York University (NYU), who is using a pseudonym to protect her identity. “For the last year, universities like NYU have engaged in mischaracterizing and slandering their own students—categorizing them as disruptive and giving into dangerous narratives about members of our community.”

Right-wing groups have also formulated plans to silence Palestine activism on individual college campuses and elsewhere. Kenneth Marcus, who worked as Trump’s during his first presidential term, is the founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonprofit organization that has against universities, including and the , claiming they are not doing enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses.

Alongside the Brandeis Center is the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think tank behind Project 2025—which also uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition in , a little-known but incredibly authoritarian initiative posited as a “national strategy to combat antisemitism.” Porell says Project Esther is a “companion to Project 2025” that offers a “blueprint for crushing the pro-Palestine movement in the U.S.” 

Project Esther hopes to mischaracterize the movement for Palestinian liberation so much that Americans view it similarly to how they view the Ku Klux Klan. The Heritage Foundation is attempting to achieve this by claiming that activists, nonprofit workers, government officials, and journalists who advocate for Palestine are all part of a global “Hamas Support Network” that must be dismantled. Because the U.S. government has designated Hamas, another government entity, as a , Porell warns that falsely linking those who are or perceived to be within the Palestinian liberation movement to Hamas unlocks a legal strategy for the government and legal organizations to target them. 

“Not only is that a messaging strategy to delegitimize the movement, but the U.S. has very harsh antiterrorism laws,” Porell explains. Accusing individuals of terrorism can lead to “government surveillance, a law-enforcement investigation, even criminal or civil prosecution.”

Elements of Project Esther are already being pursued. And if the wider plan is successful, it will reduce free speech in the U.S., leaving no corner of society untouched. That means the tactics being used on college campuses can eventually be weaponized across institutions, corporations, workplaces, and levels of government against anyone who criticizes Israel, advocates for Palestinians (or any oppressed people for that matter), or even critiques capitalism. would be ushered in, threatening the future of all leftist organizing and the people’s right to dissent. 

Though these forms of repression are not completely unprecedented, mimicking 1950s and other surveillance strategies used to , they “absolutely exploded after October 2023,” Porell adds. “Many universities across the country changed their policies around protest or speech on campus and made them much more restrictive than they were before, and that was directly a result of students speaking up for Palestine.” 

Once those policies are on the books, universities can use them against any students speaking out. “Palestine is the canary in the coal mine for our free speech rights,” she adds. “Today it is Palestine activists, but tomorrow it could be antiracist activists or pro-immigrant advocates.”

That makes learning to resist this repression and out organize the opposition even more dire. In the long fight ahead, students are reevaluating their strategies and developing new organizing defenses to secure a movement that will survive not only the Trump administration but also the rise of a coordinated right-wing movement.

Community Solidarity

Though he is isolated from campus and his peers, Paul is not completely alone. At the same time that a wave of backlash was making him feel distraught, his fellow students and comrades within the wider SUNY ecosystem came to his defense.

One peer helped Paul start a Change.org petition to demand fair disciplinary action. Nearly 20,000 people have signed the petition. A group of more than 30 Jewish students also sent a letter addressed to the Purchase administration, writing that “a student [who] pays tuition at your college has far more value than a piece of paper endorsing one of the most brutal apartheid regimes in recent history.” Paul sent the signatures to the administration, and though “they acted like it was nothing,” he says community support made him feel like “everything was gonna be OK.”

Closer to home, two unaffiliated student groups at Purchase known as and a newer initiative, the , continue to fight for Paul, to pressure administrators. “Words cannot explain my appreciation, how deeply grateful I am,” Paul says. “It felt so fulfilling because my original mission was to inspire other students.”

Raise the Consciousness has also planned a series of direct actions, which have included and , to hold Purchase accountable for its excessive punishments and . But student organizers with the group face their own surveillance threats. On Mar. 10, 2025, the Department of Education announced that it was investigating 60 universities, including Purchase. While the DOE claims these investigations are about combating antisemitism, students assert that the DOE’s actual goal is to silence support for Palestine. 

“We reject the dishonest conflation of anti zionism and antisemitism,” wrote Raise the Consciousness, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition, and Jewish Voice for Peace at Purchase in a released on Mar. 19. “The Department of Education’s so-called investigations are part of an ongoing smear campaign against students opposing our universities’ financial backing of U.S./Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.”

One organizer, who asked to be called “Rin,” says that Raise the Consciousness has been “on the radar of the administration” since it staged a protest during Accepted Students Day in 2024. When the collective , “[the police] literally outnumbered the students,” Rin says. “Everyone was arrested,” including professors, despite eyewitnesses observing that until police showed up.

Though students were disciplined soon after, they managed to fight off suspensions. The administration was being “torn apart by critics on both sides,” says Rin; in addition to facing backlash over the violent arrests of students, Peña was also to address antisemitism on campus. “So they entertained a ‘good-faith conversation’ in the hopes it would stop a resurgence in our encampment,” Rin says. 

On May 6, 2024, selected representatives from the Gaza solidarity encampment to negotiate. According to a document obtained by YES! Media that lists “verbal agreements” made during the meeting, university leadership agreed to “make public all investment records…in the interest of transparency,” grant amnesty to students facing disciplinary charges from the encampment, and for the president to release “a statement to the campus community regarding the ongoing events in Palestine, specifically addressing how her previous communication has caused harm.” 

Student organizers agreed to disperse all student encampments so long as the agreements were upheld. It is unclear how many of the resolution’s eight total agreements that the Purchase administration has followed through on. But on Oct. 2, 2024, students staged a sit-in over “the administration’s dismissal of our Encampment Resolution,” an Instagram post by Raise the Consciousness reads. The outcome is not unique; other universities have begun to .

For Rin, the resolution’s life cycle only underscores the need for students to organize more often and more directly. But university police wouldn’t forget the names of student organizers who had been charged for participating in the May encampment. 

After the action, Rin says students were heavily surveilled and targeted by UPD, including being stopped outside of their dorm rooms on the way to class, pressured into interrogations, egged on by officers while in the dining hall, or accused of being behind autonomous actions students performed on campus like banner drops and chalking. Rin adds that heavy police surveillance contributed to a culture where Raise the Consciousness was “blacklisted”; no student government club wanted to “get too close” to the group in fear of having their funding cut.

“Whenever they couldn’t bust you for something, they would make your life miserable and like looking over your shoulder,” Rin explains. 

The surveillance emphasized the need for a decentralized, collective network of student organizations and groups. “How can we turn every space into a political activism space?” Rin asks. “With [the Purchase Solidarity Coalition], this was the idea.”

Though in its initial phases, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition will work to “address the immediate material needs of the community” at Purchase while building a network with other student groups that are aware of the issues marginalized students face, Rin explains.

“There is untapped potential of these clubs to be hot spots for how we organize, especially in light of the threats that come with the Trump presidency,” he adds. “Palestine is still at the forefront of our minds, [as are] Congo, Sudan, and everywhere beyond Purchase, but we also have a bunch of immediate needs in the campus community.”

In addition to organizing for divestment, the Purchase Solidarity Coalition’s immediate functions include supporting Black, Brown, transgender, and undocumented students, especially as these students face increasing threats when they are involved in organizing. “If people are fearing for their safety, struggling to make ends meet, [or] experiencing repression in their daily lives, then they’re going to be less able to organize,” Rin explains.

The Purchase Solidarity Coalition has already served as a funnel to connect students with Westchester ICE Watch, a local immigrants rights group. Rin says 18 students have been connected with the group so far, while others have circulated “Know Your Rights” flyers around campus. As the coalition grows, Rin hopes to fundraise to support students who need legal counsel. Beyond that, he hopes to eventually to demand better housing conditions and protect student activists residing in dormitories.

“Where leftist organizing is today is, I think there’s a realization that is occurring for a lot of people, more so under Trump, that is how politicized everybody’s lives are. You cannot live an unpolitical life,” Rin says. “Everything from your student loans, to the color of your skin, your sexual orientation and gender identity—everything that we do, are, live, and like—is a political issue.”

Multiple staff and administrators at Purchase College—including Nicholson—were contacted for this article, but did not respond to requests for comment.

Student Union Power

Like many other campuses after October 2023, New York University’s became a hub for student organizing against Israeli occupation: NYU students waged multiple encampments pressuring their university to . And like many college administrations, NYU’s also in response to the encampments. In August 2024, NYU released an updated code of conduct that stated “Zionist” was now a protected class under its , erasing “the long , which has existed as long as Zionism itself,”  Natasha Lennard, a Jewish journalist, for The Intercept.

More recently, Patrice says the administration has “given leverage” to groups like Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism (MACA), a Facebook group of more than 62,000 parents whose founder has bragged about pressuring NYU to . Meanwhile, a far-right group, , is .

In a time where universities are allowing government overreach, and college administrators accept borderline harassment and online stalking of their students, unions can offer tangible legal protections against targeted punishments, sanctions, and criminalization. Patrice, who is an organizer with the (GSOC) at NYU, which represents more than 2,000 graduate student employees, says the union is fighting for the rights of students to protest for Palestine on their campus: “GSOC has been at the forefront of political organizing for students, even before the current protests.”

Drawing on its history as the first graduate student union to in 2016, GSOC is continuing to advocate for a holistic set of principles as a union that “includes protections for workers who are international and workers who want to exercise political speech,” Patrice says.

One strategy GSOC uses to invoke protections includes filing grievances that require the university to meet with union members. Filing grievances is one way the union can support students by fighting “in community and in solidarity” when members are targeted for campus organizing, she adds. 

After students staged a sit-in at Bobst Library last December, NYU , including a GSOC member, on “little evidence,” Patrice says. “If the new norm becomes that you can be suspended for quietly sitting in the library studying” then students are discouraged from “being present, near, or associated with campus organizing.”

The union filed a grievance in defense of the student, alleging that a suspension violated the “discipline and discharge” clause in their contract with the university, which requires just cause. The suspension was dropped, and the grievance later denied (a common occurrence over the past year, says Patrice), but the grievances, one-on-one support with sanctioned students, along with support from 100 union alumni who pledged to boycott donations to NYU, could have applied collective pressure. “For someone to help you through a student conduct meeting—like a union representative—that grassroots support is really essential,” she explains.

But the underlying goal is to form a stronger contract with NYU. For GSOC, a strong contract includes measures that prohibit NYPD and ICE from accessing campus buildings—a pressing need, as at other universities. Universities are showing their true colors when it comes to policing. They don’t just to surveil students, they act as collaborative partners to identify, investigate, and charge student protesters and activist groups. 

Victoria, another international graduate student worker and union steward who is also using a pseudonym, says that police presence at NYU has increased since the encampments, but that NYU has “no mechanisms” for recording NYPD activity in and throughout campus buildings, which will be the first step to solidify protections against them. “NYPD is now being allowed to arrest, brutalize, and collect information on students, which should never be allowed,” she says. 

Victoria says NYPD arrested students after the library sit-in but were also patrolling campus buildings for minor incidents, including after finding graffiti. “That’s a much lower standard for heavy police action,” she says. That’s why GSOC is working to make the language in its contract with NYU more specific and draw clear guidelines on how the university can interact with law enforcement. The union hopes to extend protections that will prohibit NYU from allowing law enforcement, including ICE, to target international graduate student workers. 

Beyond forming a new contract, GSOC is offering critical community spaces for students to express concerns, evaluate strategies, and plan collective courses of action. It has who are concerned about Trump’s executive order and begun . These are just initial steps to negotiating “with the main institution that has brought you to the U.S. and through that, other institutions,” Victoria says. 

From those negotiations, students can build preventative measures into their contracts and take necessary action when universities violate their rights. “As a first-generation international student, you can feel very lonely in your relationship with the university,” she adds. “The union is a community that can give collective power to a group that otherwise would not have much.”

The Movement Lives

Despite all of the repression students have faced from their colleges and the government, they are no less committed to the movement for Palestinian liberation than they were before. In fact, it continues to grow beyond the lines of major cities. 

Adam, an organizer with at Stony Brook University in Long Island who asked to be identified by first name only, says organizers with the group are committed to building a suburban mass movement, despite being suspended, , and evicted from their dorms for their activism. The group is in the process of building a stronger organizing network on Long Island by engaging with surrounding communities and addressing other pressing needs like attacks on immigrants.

To stay prepared for the next phase of organizing under Trump, Adam says organizers are looking to the and for inspiration, studying these movements to learn what they accomplished during their time, what impeded their success, and how to evolve in a heavily surveilled society.

“It was almost impossible for [the Panthers] to understand how big surveillance would become, what kind of technology would be developed, the programs the FBI would pursue to defeat this revolutionary attitude,” Adam says. “This repression will always be coming at us. Learning and growing from there, I truly believe that revolution is possible.”

Meanwhile, Paul is unsure if he will ever return to Purchase, noting how difficult it is to feel welcomed back by the institution that targeted you. Regardless, he says he will “continue to fight and tell my story.” 

“There are many students like me who are facing severe punishments for their stances against genocide,” he adds. “I only hope my story inspires [them] to break through that fear and to fight for each other.” 

And they already are. For example, Jewish students at Columbia recently to protest ICE’s capture of Khalil. Though the Trump administration is counting on inducing fear, students continue to protest, organize, and try new methods of direct action.

That’s because they believe in a future where their universities do not invest in war or genocide—and that belief holds firm, no matter who tries to silence them.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:50pm PT on April 9, 2025 to correct the year of Milagros Peña’s Dec. 13, 2023 email, when Palestine Legal started, and the year the “Palestine Exception to Free Speech” report was published.��Read our corrections policy here.

Here’s a simple way to understand how trauma starts and how trauma spreads: A person goes to sit in a chair, but the chair breaks. Perhaps they are embarrassed because someone witnessed their humiliation. The primal part of their brain automatically wants to prevent a similar event, so they begin to fear chairs. They might think twice before they sit in a chair again. Maybe they avoid chairs altogether or let someone else sit in the chair first to ensure it won’t break.

In this instance, the traumatic memory of the event has changed the way the person responds to similar situations.

Now, let’s apply this metaphor to real life. If a young person witnesses one parent being beaten by another parent, then that young person may feel both fearful and helpless. They may even subconsciously say to themselves, “I’m never going to let that happen to me.” As that young person gets older, they may have a fervent desire to acquire a knife or a gun without actually realizing why they have such a strong need to feel protected. 

, which is when people repeat behaviors associated with past traumas, may manifest in the form of bullying aimed at their peers. As they spread their trauma onto others, they or their peers may take it out on society. They may rob or otherwise hurt others. They may even harm themselves through cutting, substance abuse, or violent crimes against others. 

When someone hurts others, their victims and the criminal justice system push for them to be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law. This is the real-life contagion of trauma. While we very rarely link such outcomes to the initial traumatic events, this is the way trauma actually works: Hurt people tend to hurt others.

Inequality Causes Trauma

Modern American society is marked by , , , , and , all of which cause stress and hurt people, and thereby fuel trauma.

We have the means to equalize social strata. Yet too often we choose to spend disproportionate public revenue on reacting to crimes rather than preventing them, enforcing inequality through “tough on crime” policies such as policing, aggressive prosecution, and harsh sentencing. Punishment does not stop the cycle of trauma but worsens and either fuels existing trauma or creates new ones.��

When people suffering from the trauma caused by inequality are violently policed, they suffer even more, their families and communities suffer, and such suffering continues for years, decades, or even generations. When children of the incarcerated grow up without parents around to support them, we contribute to the contagion of trauma. We merely rinse and repeat the cycle of trauma to no end.

It’s no wonder the United States, whose cities invest between of public revenue into policing, subsequently has high levels of incarceration. There are currently confined behind bars around the U.S. About half a million of those are jailed before trial, which means they may be innocent. The trauma such systems inflict can be measured by the level of trauma reenactment in any given society. Yet, we continue to pour limited resources into a system that fails to keep us safe.

What If We Prevent Trauma?

Our current system does little to address the hurt victims of crime suffer. Indeed, victims are not the loudest advocates of policing and mass incarceration and tend to support non-punitive approaches. The found that victims “support rehabilitative over punitive responses to crime” and “prefer state spending on mental health and drug treatment, job creation, and education over spending on prisons and jails.” And “60% of victims prefer shorter prison sentences focused on rehabilitation over longer sentences aimed at incapacitation for extended periods.”

What if, instead of spending huge percentages of our city budgets on policing and prisons, we reduce the source of the traumas that fuel crime and pain? Effective crime mitigation includes , , , , and publicly funded , all of which are that remain poorly funded.

In 2020, when mass public protests against racist policing and violence made connections between city and police budgets, the idea of “” became a rallying cry. The was swift, as politicians equated the idea to an attack on police officers as individuals.

Yet if we envision a fairer world where we aim to prevent traumas before they begin, where people have the collective apparatus to build strong social connections and have their needs met, we can reduce the need for policing and prisons altogether.

Today’s modern-day abolitionist movement—named deliberately to draw parallels with the movement to abolish slavery—could be called trauma abolition, and is centered on investing public dollars into stopping trauma, and therefore crime, before it begins, and divesting from the architecture of trauma contagion, such as violent policing and mass incarceration. It is an idea we need to keep . 

On the other side of abolition is a fairer world where there is less need and thus, less violence. In this world, crime and punishment are prevented rather than responded to. Who wouldn’t want to live in such a world?

As noted��not long ago, Trump “had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent.”������these days. But what if it’s wrong?

As , I study how our narratives about the past shape our actions in the present. In this case, it’s particularly important to get the history right. In fact, popular resistance in Trump’s first term accomplished more than many observers realize; it’s just that most wins happened outside the spotlight.

In my view, the most visible tactics—petitions, hashtags, occasional marches in Washington—had less impact than the quieter work of organizing in communities and workplaces. Understanding when movements succeeded during Trump’s first term is important for identifying how activists can effectively oppose Trump policy in his second administration.

Quiet Victories of the Sanctuary Movement

 has been a cornerstone of for more than a decade. Yet despite his early pledge to create a “” that would ,  only half as many people in his first term as Barack Obama did in his first term. Progressive activists were a key reason.

By combining decentralized organizing and����, they successfully pushed����and to adopt sanctuary laws that limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

When����thousands of cities and dozens of states, he found that a specific type of sanctuary law that activists supported—barring local jails and prisons from active cooperation with ICE—successfully reduced ICE arrests. A ��confirmed this finding. Notably, Hausman also found that sanctuary policies had “no detectable effect on crime rates,” contrary to what many��.

Another important influence on state and local officials was employers’ resistance to mass deportation. The E-Verify system requiring employers to verify workers’ legal status went , since businesses quietly objected to it. As this example suggests, popular resistance to Trump’s agenda was most effective when it exploited tensions between the administration and capitalists.

The ‘Rising Tide’ Against Fossil Fuels

In his effort to prop up the fossil fuel industry, Trump in his first term withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, weakened or ,��and pushed other measures to obstruct the transition to green energy. Researchers projected that these policies would kill����of people in just the United States by 2028, primarily from exposure to air pollutants. Other studies estimated that the increased carbon pollution would contribute to����of��, and untold other suffering, by century’s end.

That’s not the whole story, though. was partly thwarted by a combination of environmental activism and market forces. His failure to was especially stark. faster during Trump’s first term than during any four-year period in any country, ever. Some of the same coal barons who  in 2016 soon .

The most obvious reasons for coal’s decline were the U.S. natural gas boom and the falling cost of renewable energy. But its decline was hastened by the  that protested coal projects, filed , and  to disinvest from the sector. The presence of strong local movements may help explain the  in coal’s fortunes.

Environmentalists also won some important battles against oil and gas pipelines, power plants, and drilling projects. In a��, organizers defeated polluters through a combination of litigation, civil disobedience, and other protests, and by pressuring banks, insurers, and big investors.

In 2018, one pipeline CEO lamented the “, litigation, and vandalism” facing his industry, saying “the level of intensity has ramped up,” with “more opponents” who are “better organized.”

Green energy also expanded much faster than Trump and his allies would have liked, albeit  to avert ecological collapse. The U.S.  more in Trump’s first term than under any other president, while  more than doubled. Research shows that this progress was due in part to  , particularly at the state and local levels.

As with immigration, Trump’s energy agenda divided both political and business elites. Some ��to keep their money in the sector, and some even��.����and����didn’t always share Trump’s commitment to propping up fossil fuels. These tensions between the White House and business leaders created openings that climate activists could exploit.

Worker Victories in Unlikely Places

Despite  as a man of the people, his policies hurt workers in numerous ways—from his attack on  to his , which accelerated .

Nonetheless, workers’ direct action on the job won meaningful victories. For example, educators across the country organized dozens of major strikes for��,��,��and even��. Workers in hotels, supermarkets, and other����also walked out. Ultimately,��more in 2018 than in any year since 1986.

This happened not just in progressive strongholds but����like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. At least����defied state laws denying workers the right to strike.

��gains for workers, the strike wave apparently also�� at election time by increasing political awareness and voter mobilization. The indirect impact on elections is a����of labor militancy and��.

Quiet acts of worker defiance also constrained Trump. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic featured widespread resistance to policies that raised the , particularly the lack of mask mandates. Safety-conscious workers frequently disobeyed their employers, in ways . Many customers steered clear of businesses where people were unmasked. These disruptions, and fears they might escalate,  for mask mandates.

This resistance surely . With more coordination, it might have  in how  responded to the virus. Labor momentum could continue into Trump’s second term. Low unemployment, strong , and  offer .

Beyond Marches

Progressive movements have no direct influence over Republicans in Washington. However, they have more potential influence over businesses, lower courts, regulators, and state and local politicians. Of these targets, business ultimately has the most power.

Business will usually be able to  if its profits are threatened. Trump and Elon Musk may be able to dismantle much of the federal government and , but it’s much harder for them to ignore major economic disruption.

While big marches can raise public consciousness and help activists connect, by themselves they will not block Trump and Musk. For that, the movement will need more disruptive forms of pressure. Building the capacity for that disruption will require sustained organizing in workplaces and communities.

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

Lau, who was living in the Washington, D.C. area at the time, began specifically searching for housing for aging transgender people, but she discovered how little support is available for trans people experiencing housing insecurity. “There was nothing available,” she says. “Nothing in the state of Maryland or D.C. was available at all. So I put a campaign out on Facebook about starting my own nonprofit for senior housing.”

That’s when Lau met Iya Dammons, the executive director at Baltimore Safe Haven, who hired her as the house manager for the organization’s senior home in 2019. Currently, Lau says Baltimore Safe Haven is the only transgender-specific housing provider in Maryland, with five different houses throughout Baltimore and a sixth property underway.

“[Baltimore Safe Haven] is the [only] housing provider for transgender people in the state that [is actually] dedicated to people within the community,” she explains, an issue that persists across the country as housing-insecure trans people of all ages seek safe, dignified shelter and learn that it often doesn’t exist.

in their lifetime, according to the . And if these numbers weren’t stark enough, data indicates that both homelessness and —the wider spectrum of insecurity ranging from frequent moves, overcrowding, and trouble paying rent—have dramatically risen in recent years among trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people.

Though homelessness is , trans people have been hit harder than other populations. Between 2017 and 2019, the National Alliance to End Homelessness found that went up 57%, while the rate increased by 80% for gender-nonconforming people.

That trend has continued, according to more recent data published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). From 2022 and 2023, increased by another 31%. This community is also —living on the streets—when compared to their cis counterparts. It is also worth noting how young homelessness can start for trans and nonbinary people: A found that between 35% and 39% of trans and nonbinary youth have experienced either homelessness or housing instability.

Housing remains a critical and generational issue for the trans community, but as we enter into a second Trump administration, there are now additional roadblocks to consider. 

During Trump’s first term, the administration proposed anti-trans changes to , which required housing facilities and other federally funded services to ensure equal access and accommodations regardless of gender identity. The proposed changes were never enacted. In 2021, former President Joe Biden issued an against gender- or sexuality-based discrimination, including those impacting the Fair Housing Act. HUD later announced it would around sexuality and gender.

During his second term, Trump is once again swinging at both housing protections and trans rights. In addition to a wave of anti-trans , newly appointed recently ordered staff to suspend the efforts. Though the National Alliance to End Homelessness points out that , it is unclear how, exactly, this order will impact trans and gender-nonconforming people seeking housing.

No matter who is occupying the Oval Office, trans people need safe, dignified housing. So, across the country, housing advocates and trans-led organizations are filling in these gaps by advocating for and building better housing practices.

Cracked Foundations

There are a number of systemic factors that lead to housing instability. The is the most obvious culprit, according to Donald Whitehead, executive director of the . The cost to purchase a home has skyrocketed by , and the majority of people are struggling to manage mounting, and largely unregulated, .

“[Trans people are] in the largest numbers [of homelessness], according to , the largest number that we’ve been in the history of those counts,” says Whitehead. “[Those] counts started back in 2007 … and we’re at the highest level [of homelessness] in that span. And most believe the highest level in history.”

Costs have been driven up in part by a familiar equation: low supply, high demand. To ease the housing shortage, researchers estimate that the U.S. needs to build between across the country. Despite this conundrum, some cities are still partnering with high-end developers to rather than mid-range and low-income units. 

For example, there are an in Los Angeles County. The average rent price for a two-bedroom apartment is just under $3,000, according to , but for luxury apartments, rent can easily stretch into the double digits. Developers can then generate much higher profits building luxury housing than mid-range two-bedroom apartments.

Additionally, Whitehead says “structural -isms” such as racism, gender discrimination, and ageism all contribute to homelessness, as do “, emancipation from , the lack of resources for people leaving the criminal justice system, and lack of mental health resources.” Climate change, which leads to stronger, more frequent natural disasters, may also and drive up .

But there are certain factors, including familial rejection, , and , that make trans and gender-nonconforming people uniquely vulnerable to being unhoused. 

Housing support led for and by the trans community is often a matter of safety. According to the , 44% of trans people experienced mistreatment at a shelter, including harassment, assault, or being forced to present as the wrong gender. Another 41% report being denied shelter access altogether. Though there are legal protections designed to prevent discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, privately run shelters often . For example, some faith-based shelters may only take heterosexual married couples or cis women and children, which can of safe housing.

This dangerous and exclusionary atmosphere means that many gender-expansive people avoid shelters. Instead, they may risk unsheltered homelessness, which can increase the likelihood of hate crimes, arrest, and illness. According to the��,��63% of unhoused transgender people��are unsheltered.��For unhoused cisgender people, that number is 49%.��

Building Better Housing Practices

At the policy level, there are a number of ways to improve housing access. To prevent homelessness, Whitehead says states need better zoning laws, regulations for landlords, increased wages, and . Meanwhile, more comprehensive, national standards around shelter conditions would help increase accountability and ensure safety in the now. 

Realistically, the Trump administration is unlikely to usher in any federal housing wins over the next four years—though strides can still be made in the courts, state governments, and through a bipartisan congressional push. But smaller-scale changes can have a big impact on trans people’s access to housing—and these strategies can be implemented without overhauling the entire housing market, economy, or executive branch.

For Beth Gombos and Ashton Otte, organizers at Trans Housing Initiative St. Louis (THISL), better access and competent service for the trans community begin with education. THISL works directly with shelters, housing providers, and other entities that might harm trans people or or turn them away. 

“We’re training them to learn how to interact with and accept and serve trans and gender-nonconforming people with respect,” says Gombos, who is the organization’s cofounder and executive director. 

Typically, this work begins by teaching trans identity 101: gender identity, sex, pronouns, and myth busting. “We start off by trying to build a level of understanding and basic empathy for this community,” says Otte. From there, THISL educates housing providers on anti-discrimination protocol and their responsibility to ensure care and access for the trans community. 

In their work, Otte says they’ve seen many shelter providers who are simply unaware of federal shelter regulations and mandatory anti-discrimination standards.

THISL is also educating trans and gender-nonconforming people on homeownership, financial wellness, and their housing rights to ultimately help people “get into these systems and these programs that would not typically have space for them or make space for them,” says Gombos.

In 2023, THISL partnered with the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing & Opportunity Council to on fair queer and trans housing practices. The report recommends not only policy, but also basic trans-inclusive housing practices, ranging from basic pronoun usage and inclusive intake forms to ID documentation services and diverse hiring practices.

“ There are a lot of ways that you can subtly but very intentionally support this community, even without those non-discrimination policies in place,” says Otte.

We Take Care of Us

Though equitable housing policies are needed at the federal level, trans-led organizations are not waiting for the federal government to take action. They are already taking care of their own. 

Sean Ebony Coleman, founder and CEO of the Bronx-based LGBTQ grassroots organization , says housing support goes beyond providing a safe place for unhoused people to be.

 “One of the biggest issues is that everyone’s at a different level when it comes to being ready to access housing, particularly independent living,” says Coleman. “The conventional shelter model has just this one-stop-shop approach, right? It’s just ‘You’re going in, we’re going to house you, you’ll stay for a little while, [and] we’ll try to get you into transitional housing or some type of supportive housing.’ [But they’re] not really going to train you as far as getting better employment or securing a better job or even sending you back to school.” 

For Coleman, getting into a shelter is just the first step. Destination Tomorrow’s housing support also includes building wraparound services that consider the care of the entire person, including offering independent living support, career and academic opportunities, culinary training, mental health care, and financial literacy programs. 

Coleman adds that providing documentation services, such as covering the cost to change a name or gender marker on identification cards and birth certificates, is a critical “first step” to addressing the root causes of trans homelessness. Accurate documents are a building block for gaining employment, accessing higher education, and even traveling.

So far, Coleman says Destination Tomorrow has served about 50 people through their Sex Workers Immediate Temporary Comprehensive Housing program, which offers emergency housing for trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming sex workers and domestic and sexual violence survivors in the Bronx. Coleman says Destination Tomorrow has also made more than 700 housing referrals around New York City.

Destination Tomorrow is now gearing up to open a brand-new shelter that can house up to 300 trans single adults—an especially underserved demographic. In New York City, Gothamist estimates that the city’s traditional homeless shelter system only has for single adults in a city with more than 200,000 shelter-seeking migrants and an estimated .

“We’re one of a few trans providers when it comes to doing housing for single adults,” says Coleman. “That was also incredibly important, because the landscape that we came up on was [that] you have housing for youth that went up to [age] 25, and then you had housing for seniors that started at 55. If you were in the middle of that, you just had to try to figure out how to navigate a system that wasn’t designed for you and at all prepared for your success.”

“ The biggest impact is we give folks hope,” Coleman continues. “In this moment of uncertainty, trans people need to feel as if there’s community there for them. And not just within the trans community, but overall, whether it is lesbian, gay, or bisexual, whether it’s the Black community or the Latinx community, whatever it is, we need to feel like there is some love in their space.”

The film, which is co-directed by journalist Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman, and executive produced by Macklemore, has for having the highest per-screen-average opening for a documentary. On Apr. 4, 2025, The Encampments will be released nationwide, meaning theatergoers all over the United States will be able to watch one of the most crucial films of this decade—one that dissolves the widespread claims of antisemitism brought upon the Palestinian liberation movement and captures the unrelenting spirit of Palestine activism in the U.S.

The release of The Encampments was accelerated after Mahmoud Khalil—one of its main protagonists—was . We learn in the documentary that Khalil was a Palestinian scholar at Columbia University, known for his diplomatic character and handpicked by his fellow students to negotiate with the university administration on their behalf.

Since his capture, Khalil with what will ultimately be a bogus crime. In the meantime, the Trump administration, , and other government entities are actively trying to rewrite his story and tarnish his image. They claim that Khalil is a supporter of terrorism who slipped through the cracks rather than a brave and selfless Palestinian student committed to the liberation of his people.

But like all great works of journalism, The Encampments intervenes at a critical point to offer a powerful declaration: There’s the government’s story, and then there’s the real one. The documentary captures that true story in ways that are politically inspiring, emotionally demanding, and visually riveting all at once. 

The majority of the film is narrated by Khalil, co-negotiator Sueda Polat, and other students, all of whom impart their perspective on the exhausting work of trying to influence a collegiate administration. An interview with a whistleblower from the university’s communications department reveals the institutional bias administrators had against pro-Palestine campus protests from the start. And a Columbia alum provides a retrospective of the university’s own history of student activism during the 1960s anti-war movement, highlighting the hypocrisy of Columbia’s celebration of activists of the past while calling the police on those in the present.

All of this journalistic storytelling supports the camerawork of co-director Pritsker, who skillfully submerges us in the daily activities of the encampment. During a Q&A following the screening, Pritsker—who himself camped for several days at the encampment—said that many negative stories told about the encampments and broadcasted on television come from individuals “who never even set foot on Columbia’s campus.” 

“It just so happened that we were sitting on this trove of film that disproved everything they’ve been saying,” he added. To make this point, The Encampments juxtaposes a montage of news broadcasts in which anchors utterly reject the protests, claiming they are disgusting and hateful, with the encampment footage recorded by Pritsker. In doing so, the film convincingly probes at these vilifying narratives by placing us as casual observers of the encampments so that we can come to know the true motives of their student dissenters. 

Viewers follow Columbia students as they embark on months of activism to demand investment transparency from the university administration, as well as divestment from weapons manufacturers and other companies complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We see the outcomes (or lack thereof) of countless lengthy meetings with administrators until eventually—inevitably—students construct an encampment at the heart of Columbia’s campus. 

Once the tents are erected, large text (Day 1, Day 2, and so on) introduces subsequent scenes, establishing a chronological timeline of the encampment’s rapid growth and joyous celebrations that ultimately led to violent clashes initiated by counterprotesters armed with weapons and fireworks. 

The Encampments’ keenly observant recording of day-to-day interactions between students also helps viewers realize the layers of planning and organization that go into a , as well as the multicultural solidarity that undoubtedly kept it intact for several days, despite threats of disciplinary action and raids by the NYPD. The camera is often shoulder height, sitting beside students as one shows another how to play bongos during chants, or within the crowd, listening as Khalil and Polat give the latest news from their meetings with administrators.��

At one point, we are shown a whiteboard schedule with dedicated time for studying, teach-ins, and nightly communal mourning to pay respects to the latest Palestinians killed in Gaza. Multiple times throughout the film, Jewish students are seen participating equally in the encampment—engaging in speeches, religious prayer, and song—and getting arrested by the NYPD. 

But the weaving of campus footage with footage filmed in Gaza, including exclusive interviews with Palestinian journalists who live there, is what makes The Encampments particularly painful and gripping. There are hard-to-watch clips of interactions between Palestinians, Israeli military, and Israeli settlers, and Khalil’s narration of his family’s story is interspersed with historical footage of refugee camps formed after the 1948 Nakba. “A big part of our political goal was to contextualize why the students were doing what they were doing,” co-director Workman said during the Q&A, before adding that it was critical to ground the documentary in Palestine. 

The result is a historically conscious film that testifies to generations of occupational violence with a narrative that is just as much in service of Palestinian freedom as the movement it so thoroughly depicts is. As the filmmakers intended, it becomes impossible to forget the connection between the bombs Israel drops in Gaza and the tuition dollars students spend at prestigious universities like Columbia. And just as this conclusion is reached, we are thrust into a compilation of video clips that show the widespread influence of the encampment movement at several universities across the U.S. 

“This isn’t a mentality you can just lock away in a prison,” Pritsker said, adding that students expressed a commitment to return to the encampment regardless of the consequences. Munir Atalla, one of the film’s producers who facilitated the Q&A, concurred: “This is a mass movement. It’s un-deportable.”

For anyone still awaiting an invitation to join the Palestinian liberation movement, The Encampments offers a compelling one. And for journalists with any moral or civic bone left in their bodies, this film is an example of how to not only report on the movements of our time, but how to also reclaim truth in a new era of escalating political repression.

I undertook the five-hour drive to Neah Bay from Tacoma, Washington, with fellow Indigenous allies and friends of the Makah Tribe to celebrate Makah Days, a yearly three-day festival celebrating the 1924 granting of U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans.

But this year, Makah Days held an additional significance. Not only was it the 100-year anniversary of the first festival, but it was also the first celebration after the Tribe’s victory in their decades-long struggle to legally resume hunting gray whales.

When night falls on my first evening here, fireworks explode in the sky over Neah Bay. A steady rain pats our faces as we look up at the display. Each explosion proclaims freedom to the darkness—the freedom of the Tribe to finally practice food sovereignty once again.

Physical and Spiritual Health

The Makah is a marine-based Tribe. Their history and identity are tied to the sea—as are their traditional foods. 

Archaeological evidence at the site of the ancient Makah village of Ozette indicates the Tribe’s whaling tradition goes back at least 1,500 years, probably earlier. It’s so important to their identity that the Tribe gave up vast areas of land when they signed the in exchange for keeping the right to hunt whales. They are the only tribe guaranteed this right by Congress.

But over the decades that followed, commercial whaling operations decimated whale populations. To protect the whales and honor their sacred connection with them, the Tribe voluntarily stopped hunting whales in 1928. 

With the loss of this practice went the health benefits. Sea mammal fats are high in n-3 fatty acids that are essential for fighting cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, as well as having many other health benefits. 

“We’ve seen a growing epidemic of lifestyle disease among our communities such as Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, a rise in obesity in our communities—not just in adults, but in youth as well,” explains (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth), Ph.D., a professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. 

The Makah are hardly the only tribe to suffer this way; the destruction of traditional foods, most notably the buffalo, was part of a continent-wide effort to eradicate Indigenous peoples. Boarding and residential schools took traditional Native foods away from children and replaced them with highly processed foods. This weakened the cultural connections the people felt and opened the door to health problems.

Even when the Tribe wasn’t whaling, the spiritual connection between the Makah and the whale spirits was kept alive in the form of sacred whaling songs. “Chiefs obtained their whaling songs through a connection with whale spirits that they encountered in dreams or during a whale hunt,” writes Coté in her book .

These songs reinforced the connection between the chiefs and the whales they hunted. The songs are sacred property that belong to the chiefs and their people. They are more than simple tunes or even prayers. They are an auditory manifestation of the sacred relationship between the Makah and the gray whales. 

And these songs were practiced for the decades when hunting itself was not. 

To Revive a Tradition

The Makah’s treaty-guaranteed right to whale was last officially invoked 25 years ago. It was prompted by the 1994 removal of the eastern North Pacific gray whale from the federal list of endangered wildlife.

Makah member Theron Parker and a whaling crew prepared for months, not just physically but spiritually, by praying and performing sacred rituals at secret locations on the reservation. Hunting a 30- to 33-foot giant of the sea, with eight men in a wooden canoe, requires spiritual as well as physical strength.

On May 17, 1999, Parker heaved a harpoon into the back of the first gray whale his Tribe had hunted in more than 70 years.

After a second harpoon strike, the whale’s suffering was ended with a shot from a high-powered rifle fired from a support boat. Without this, a whale’s death could last hours. Parker, who is a descendant of a great Makah whaling family, then led the eight-man crew of the whaling canoe Hummingbird in a song releasing the whale’s spirit back to the sea.

When they towed the whale to shore, they were met by hundreds of Makah and their supporters. Polly Debari, Parker’s partner at the time, joined the procession of whalers making its way through the jubilant crowd.

Debari was as much a part of the whaling crew as the rest of them. She and several other young women of the Tribe performed the vital task of observing a sacred ritual during the hunt. In 2019, Debari submitted a for Makah whaling to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in which she described the ritual: “Generally speaking,” she writes, “my role was to lay still while Theron was out whaling. In this way I was ‘becoming the whale’ according to our tradition.”

This blending of identities through ritual and prayer guided the whale to the whaling crew. Video from a news helicopter shows the magnificent giant gliding to the left just under the Makah canoe’s bow when Parker hurls the harpoon. The Makah believe the whale gave herself to the Tribe.

Debari was then free to move as the creature she had spiritually merged with was brought ashore. The community worked together, pulling the massive beast onto their land. The whale was butchered and its meat and blubber were served to the Tribe and its guests at a massive feast.

The Tribe’s most recent hunt was a celebrated revival of tradition for the Tribe.

“It reinvigorated the purpose of our culture,” Micah McCarty, a former chair of the Makah Tribe and speaker at a recent , which was co-founded by Coté, says. “In doing so, it’s inspired a lot of people to be involved in [our] culture.”

McCarty, who is the great grandson of Chief Hiškʷi·sa·na·kši·ł or Hishka, one of the last great hereditary chiefs of the Makah, notes how youth of the Tribe became inspired by the resurgence of interest in their people’s whaling tradition. The skeleton of the gray whale harvested in 1999 is now housed in the Tribe’s museum.

“We have younger generations now that are leading the Makah Days songs and dances,” he explains. “The last generation that once led that are now sitting back and watching the fruits of their success in grooming succession.”

A lot of that success relates to food sovereignty for the Makah. “Food sovereignty embodies that real, deep spiritual appreciation for food as a sacred gift,” Coté says. “At its most basic, it is really reinforcing those sacred relationships that we have to our world, including the plants and animals that give themselves to us as food. This is why the recent waiver for the Makah is very, very important, because it really is around food sovereignty that the Makah regain the right to access a very healthy food.”

The Harassment by Animal Rights Groups

Despite the health and cultural benefits garnered by the whale hunt in 1999, the practice was soon stifled once again. 

Members of animal rights groups, including Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, harassed the Makah community and the whaling crews and even made death threats to tribal officials.

“Save the whales, kill a Makah” read signs at an anti-Makah whaling rally on the day of the 1999 hunt. McCarty, who has become a prolific Makah artist, points out how this attitude is both racist and un-American.

“We don’t impose our spirituality on other people,” McCarty states. “We’re not evangelists. It’s an American value to have a freedom of religion and a freedom of who we are. It’s inherently un-American to be anti–Makah whaling.”

On the second day of my visit to Neah Bay, I stroll along Bayview Avenue perusing the stalls that sell Native artwork and baked salmon, another Native food whose right to harvest is guaranteed to all Washington tribes by treaty. People smile and say “Happy Makah Days” as they pass.

Before long, the Makah Days parade begins. Men in military uniforms at the head of the procession carry flagpoles with Makah and American flags waving. No anti-American sentiment is evident. Many of the Tribe’s elders served in the military and some fought in foreign wars. They are proud to be American and proud to be Makah. 

Still, in 2002, the bowed to pressure from animal rights groups and revoked the Tribe’s authorization to whale, demanding a new environmental impact study be performed. And so, despite the Tribe’s treaty-guaranteed right to hunt whales, they refrained while the studies were performed and decisions were made. 

Two and a half decades after the 1999 hunt, NOAA’s environmental impact study shows that Makah harvests would have no significant impact on the population of gray whales. And so in June 2024, after decades of Tribal advocacy, NOAA granted the Makah Tribe’s request for a waiver from the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The Tribe can now harvest, on average, two to three eastern North Pacific gray whales per year, up to 25 total, over the next 10 years. 

The Tribe Calls the Whales Back

On Saturday night, my friends and I go to the Makah Community Gym to witness sacred Makah dancing and the singing of sacred whaling songs. The bleachers are packed. The floor slowly fills with more than 200 Makah members in beautiful handmade regalia, many featuring images of the giant deity Thunderbird carrying a whale to the Makah people. 

According to oral tradition, Thunderbird saw the Makah people were starving one winter and captured a whale to feed them. Saved from death by a sacred gift from the deity and by the whale’s sacrifice, the Makah honor all gray whales. 

On the gym floor, each member holds a hand-painted canoe paddle that they use to mimic pulling a canoe through the sea that defines their people. When the song ends, the dancers all hold their paddles straight up. This is traditionally done when a canoe skipper calls “Paddles up!” to his or her canoe family as they approach a Native village. A Native canoe must wait until the leaders in the village call them to shore before they can land. 

In much the same way, the Makah waited more than 70 years before the conditions returned for them to resume whaling. Then they waited another 25 years after animal rights groups challenged that treaty-protected right. Finally, this past June, NOAA finally cleared the way.

The Makah wait now only for the migrating gray whales to return.

Actions included “donating to a cause” or “calling your senator.” found comfort in texting photos of “someone floating in the ocean” to friends, or “twice-daily meditation.” suggested “Try to be everything that Trump is not: compassionate, honest, calm and decent,” and that such efforts might charm Trump “into doing the right thing.” This was not a joke. 

While this advice might reduce stress, it isn’t much help fighting a dictator. We can’t claim Trump is a fascist hell-bent on rolling back 20th-century progress and then respond to an enraged MAGA cultist by, as , placating them with empathetic sentiments like “I’ve felt that way sometimes, too.”

Playing nice ain’t going to cut it with people who want to kill you and your community. We need principles that build power now and for the long term. 

After Trump was elected in 2016, I helped found the . Our strategy was to build municipal power to fight Trump while shifting local politics to the left. We attracted a lot of interest because we were among the few independent multi-issue groups seeking to build grassroots power. Eight years later, the PMPC is still going strong.

Here are the organizing lessons I learned from the PMPC and from movements for worker organizing, immigrant rights, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, Palestine solidarity, and abortion rights. These lessons may serve us well under Trump 2.0.

1. Tap people on the shoulder.

After years reporting on politics in Portland, I found the organizing scene to be rife with divisive social-media personalities who attack organizations around race, gender, and identity to gain attention, money, and clout. Because of this, the PMPC never opened our meetings to the public. Instead, we chose to “tap people on the shoulder” by recruiting organizers who were doing real work and had a solid reputation. This undercut outside attempts by provocateurs seeking to disrupt the work.

2. Play well together.

We also picked people who play well together. It’s not enough to have good politics or say the right things. Can they collaborate without being dominating or domineering? Are they self-centered, quick to anger, or prone to attack others? Do they seek compromise to advance our principles and vision? Do they do the grunt work or do they just want all the glory? Asking such questions helped keep us on track and get things done.

3. People with lots of time will waste your time. 

In my experience, an activist who has lots of time often lacks community, which may mean they alienate others or can’t work in a group. I have noticed such people often want to debate and discuss everything, including re-opening decisions that have already been made. Resist the temptation to organize everyone. If someone is a drain on your efforts, don’t let them guilt trip you into letting them in your group. 

They will sap energy, chase away existing members, and might be more effective as lone activists. Many effective activists who work alone are tenacious around issues like housing, police brutality, and climate change, and can make great allies but may not be cut out for group activism.

4. Build community.

People say this all the time, but what does it mean, in practice, to build community? We need to play together, create music and art together, cook and eat together, live and love together. Creating strong, layered bonds among individuals, groups, and communities helps us withstand state, corporate, and police repression. You are far likelier to have someone’s back who has been a close comrade for years than a stranger you met yesterday. 

A caveat: Be aware some people use group settings to act out issues about their upbringing, past trauma, or ex-lovers. They may be overly needy, try to turn meetings into therapy sessions, or demand constant emotional labor. We should take care of each other—but no one has a right to make you their caretaker. 

5. Build capital.

Activists are often told to “build sustainable structures.” Here’s an idea related to the previous suggestion, but is rarely spelled out: “Build capital.” Money is not a cure-all, but it can help tremendously. Many progressive public spaces are the result of an individual or group’s foresight to buy real estate years ago. One lefty magazine I know is funded largely out-of-pocket by the publisher. Another progressive news show received millions of dollars from a foundation bankrolled by Wall Street money. 

The left has unfortunately become puritanical about money. Groups like the Communist Party historically encouraged members to start businesses, make money, and give it to the party. 

This is a different strategy than starting worker-owned businesses or co-ops, which have their place in the organizing world. It is also not a form of charity. Instead, the strategy is to fund radical leftist organizing rather than delivering social services.

6. Don’t just mobilize. Organize.

Many activists confuse mobilizing with organizing. Mobilizing is turning out people who agree with you, such as Get Out the Vote efforts for a candidate or asking friends to join a protest. Organizing means changing minds. The latter is harder, but the impact is far more significant and long lasting. We need to win people over to our side, and that means changing their consciousness.

I have interviewed thousands of people across the country, and with rare exceptions, their politics were a mess of left- and right-wing ideas, conspiracies, and falsehoods. People want to be heard—so actively listen to them, don’t lecture or berate them. Find a genuine point of agreement, steer the conversation in that direction, and build on it. Make them feel good about themselves and the idea that together we can make positive change—and you might just win them to your cause.

7. Be ruthless.

The right understands minority movements can win if they are disciplined, single minded, and ruthless. Look at the anti-abortion movement, which never stopped trying to overturn Roe. v Wade and eventually succeeded in doing so. Despite extraordinarily low support, anti-abortion extremists are moving closer to a total ban on abortion in places such as Texas, where only . 

We don’t need everyone to agree with us if we build power and use it ruthlessly. Right now we have a president breaking the law to enact his thieving, white-nationalist, authoritarian agenda. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a president breaking norms instead to enact Medicare for all, oversee a just green transition, or protect immigrants?

8. If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.

The Democratic Party is a cautionary tale on what happens if you compromise your principles. Last year, many people, , warned that Kamala Harris’s would cost her the 2024 presidential election. showed Gaza dragged her support down. By not opposing genocide—the worst political act possible—liberals got the worst of both worlds: a genocide that went on for 15 months and Trump. Or, as explained: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.” 

As if on cue, Democrats exposed their ideological bankruptcy following Trump’s inauguration. has repeatedly lamented that Democrats have no leverage. In March, outright surrendered by endorsing a government spending bill that hands Trump and Musk a “blank check” for their “authoritarian agenda,” according to . 

In contrast, the movement opposing genocide was a master class in how to wield power. Muslim and Palestinian Americans led the campaign to until she agreed to end the genocide. Two days before the election Harris said she would “do everything in my power to ,” though it was too little too late. 

We build power by sticking to our principles and forcing Democrats to fulfill our demands instead of surrendering to a party that embraces war and Wall Street just as much as the GOP.

9. Democracy is overrated.

Many people who flock to dynamic movements are happy to do data entry, send emails, clean, and run errands—the small tasks that help organizing happen. Not everyone needs or wants to be a part of democratic decision-making within organizations. Horizontalism sounds nice, but over many years of reporting on protests, I have seen it repeatedly decay in the hands of the least competent and most intransigent individuals. 

I reported on Occupy Wall Street from New York City to Los Angeles, and I sat in on meetings that would meander for hours, debate pie-in-the-sky ideas like boycotting the internet for a month, or argue over where to place recycling bins. After such experiences, many activists never returned to the camps. There is nothing wrong with hierarchy or authority as long as it is earned, transparent, and accountable. Set the rules and practices for your organization, and people who don’t agree are welcome to start their own project. Not everything needs to be voted on. Not everyone needs to agree.

10. Act globally, think locally.

Knowing what to do often starts with knowing what not to do. For example, don’t give into suggestions to focus only on a single issue or local organizing. Trump is trying to deport pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil precisely to that can be used against all of us. 

Khalil’s case is at the intersection of multiple issues: brutal colonialism, free speech, Palestinian rights, campus activism, and immigration. Our struggles are inseparable. They also happen on a national and global terrain. If we focus only on local issues, then the right can pull the rug out from under us the way they have with “” to prevent progressive cities from passing rent control or higher minimum-wage laws in red states. It’s the same with single-issue movements. If we don’t have other people’s backs, then who will have ours when the fascists come for us?��

But at in September 2024, Molly, one of the organizers, reminded the crowd that the naked bike ride wasn’t just a spectacle: The event was originally started in the early 2000s as a protest against fossil fuel companies. 

Molly, who asked to use her first name only for privacy, spoke about how oil and gas companies aren’t just worsening climate change and polluting the air in . In 2024, after nearly a year of watching Israel drop U.S.-made bombs on civilians in Gaza, she highlighted that at least one oil and gas company is also fueling the genocide in Palestine. 

“The community had been quiet about issues like Palestine,” Molly says. “But it isn’t a faraway place. It ties back to everything you care about.”  

, including to prisons and military facilities that are crucial to Israeli occupation and in the West Bank. According to news reports, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea can be seen from the Gaza Strip. 

Yet the Israeli government decides if and when Palestinians can access any of that energy. That led the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement (BDS) to of Chevron’s products. The movement is calling for consumers around the world to stop buying the fuel Chevron sells at gas stations, as well as its automotive coolants and engine oil. In addition, they’re calling for banks, pension funds, local governments, and other institutions to divest from the company’s stocks. 

“I think for a lot of people, it was the first time they’d heard about this, and it felt like a really important moment of connecting the dots,” Molly says. 

In the six months since that event, Molly and other organizers have continued to mobilize dozens of Portland’s bike enthusiasts to protest—fully clothed, and usually in the pouring rain—at local Chevron stations. for local organizers focuses on educational components for customers. When it comes to gas stations themselves, many gas station owners are typically locked into 25- to 30-year contracts with Chevron. So the toolkit calls for organizers to ask gas station owners to display anti-occupation flyers in their stores, or to sign letters to Chevron demanding that the company end its Israeli operations. 

The Portland protests have allowed people to realize that their individual actions can create collective pressure, said Hami, another organizer of the bike protests, who is only using their first name due to safety concerns. “When we talk about mobility freedom, there’s nothing as stark as seeing how hindered Palestinians’ mobility has been since 1948.” 

A Playbook From Apartheid

The BDS movement’s campaign against Chevron was inspired by a similar movement to pressure Royal Dutch Shell and BP to end their operations in apartheid South Africa, said Olivia Katbi, the co-chair of the U.S. BDS campaign. Shell and BP jointly owned the country’s largest oil refinery, much like Chevron currently operates . 

Under apartheid in South Africa, Black communities were denied access to electricity and running water. “They were relegated to impoverished homes far from urban centers,” says , a 20th-century historian and fellow at Yale. “Black South Africans accounted for 85 to 90% of the population on 13% of the land.” 

The country’s main power company, Eskom, maintained as anti-apartheid activists sabotaged its power lines and stations. After South African workers went on strike following the death of a worker at the company’s coal mine—and were met with private security firing tear gas and rubber bullets—American labor unions supported . 

“When you’re looking at oil companies, and at the South African military and police, anti-apartheid activists were able to make those connections, and in my research, that is what made the case for divestment successful,” Webb says. “It was consistently showing Americans and concerned citizens globally that companies were not just profiting off of apartheid, but were allowing the regime to conduct its violent attacks on Black South Africans.” 

Today, the parallels to Palestine are stark. “Israel is pillaging these resources that belong to Palestinians—because it is Palestinian land that Israel is occupying,” Katbi says. “And then they are selling it back to them in a really unfair way.” 

After its 1967 occupation, Israel took over the existing power infrastructure in Palestine. The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), which purchases most of its power from Chevron, has banned some Palestinian villages in the West Bank from connecting to the grid for more than 70 years. Other villages are charged different, variable rates and receive substandard service compared to nearby Jewish settlements, according to the . 

In Palestinian villages that Israel has refused to connect to the grid, the Israeli military has even . In Gaza, where Israel has imposed a siege since 2007, the military destroyed the area’s only power plant—making the IEC its sole source of electricity. And in the ongoing war since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel completely . 

In December, Human Rights Watch said that this amounted to “,” particularly as the lack of power meant that there was virtually no clean water for millions of civilians once the Strip’s desalination plants were cut off from power. Gazans rely on treated seawater or brackish groundwater, or on water pipelines that Israel can shut off on a whim. In March, UNICEF estimated that 90% of Gazans—some —may not have access to clean water as Israel continues to cut power and from entering Gaza.

Climate organizations, like Oil Change International and some local chapters of Sunrise and 350, have supported the boycott and divestment campaigns, highlighting Chevron’s broader history of environmental catastrophes. “We’re not really inventing something new,” Katbi says. “BDS is most impactful when it’s taken as a collective action.”

And she said the campaign is winnable: There are plenty of alternative gas stations for consumers to fill their gas tanks. And perhaps more importantly, over the past year, making investments in the country . 

That means, in addition to the consumer boycott, the movement will continue to put pressure on institutions, governments, and other organizations to stop working with, investing in, or taking money from Chevron. 

So far, three U.S. cities have divested from Chevron and other companies profiting off of Israeli apartheid: ; ; and . In February, the City Council of Portland, Oregon, announced it would drop the company’s sponsorship from , a nonprofit civic organization. 

“These sponsorships reach the general public in ways that Palestine activism does not—state fairs, sports teams, community events,” Katbi says. Chevron’s name is featured on , for example. “We are mapping those out and trying to get campaigns around this to not only impact [Chevron’s] bottom line, but make them a pariah in our community spaces.” 

Hitting the Headquarters

In Houston, Chevron is something of a household name. The company has had a presence in the city for a century and has nearly there. In 2024, the company moved its headquarters to Houston. 

Last year, the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter started a campaign to get the Houston Marathon’s board to drop Chevron as its main sponsor—a title the company has held for 13 years. 

“The majority of the money the marathon makes is from the runners—the people who are making it happen,” said AJ Holmes, an organizer with the Houston DSA. “It’s really hypocritical to plaster Chevron’s image on this event. Personally, my family has run in the marathon before, and I grew up thinking this was totally normal. It’s like it’s in the air that we breathe, literally.” 

The campaign has had conversations with local running clubs and the marathon’s staffers, educating people about the connections between Chevron and Israeli apartheid. They’re making clear what it means to be in the “belly of the beast of imperialism,” Holmes said, thinking more broadly about Houston’s role in the fossil fuel industry. 

Despite collaborating with groups like the Sunrise Movement and the Palestine Youth Movement, the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful: The Houston Marathon renewed Chevron’s sponsorship contract for five more years. 

Still, the work will continue: Activists will keep pressuring the Houston Marathon to cancel the new contract, Holmes said, and they will focus on Chevron’s other activities, like its sponsorship of the local . Organizers are gearing up for major ahead of CERAWeek, a that convenes the CEOs of the world’s largest oil and gas companies in Houston annually.

“They spend a lot of money on these events, trying to make themselves seem more progressive or palatable,” Holmes says. “Our goal is to make sure that doesn’t work, and that all their propaganda money isn’t useful.” 

Building on the decades-long fights for reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ rights, we marched in the autumn sun and chanted about collective power outside the Capitol and Supreme Court buildings. Our route ended with a rally elevating intersectional themes and a defiant dance party outside the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, a key architect of .

At the time, we were among a minority of Americans who took that agenda’s promise of societal regression seriously. We hoped our effort would serve as an antidote during an uncertain election cycle. By then, the course charted by leaders across the political spectrum had proven dismal.

Democratic candidate that myopically focused on cisgender women and girls accessing abortion care with sparing mentions of access to in vitro fertilization. In contrast, Republican candidate Donald Trump danced around whether he would enact a . At the same time, his vice presidential pick opined about “,” insinuating that women who couldn’t or didn’t bear children were of lesser societal value than their counterparts.

Due to countless threads missing from the larger political discourse around care, things worsened for people on the margins by the time we made it to the ballot box. The chief conservative demonized Haitian immigrants, planned to “,” and orchestrated a rally that drew similarities to the historic Nazi regime. He also dealt a heavy blow to our burgeoning movement, spending on ads denouncing the idea that transgender people, especially migrants and those who are incarcerated, deserve holistic health care.

Now, less than four months after Trump’s inauguration, there are more profound threats toward the universal right to bodily autonomy—and it is essential to understand the connective tissue and how they impact everyone, trans and cis alike.

On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an claiming to collapse sex and gender into a single identity category defined by a binary. He asserts that people assigned male at birth must identify as a man, and people assigned female at birth must identify as a woman. But the deeper aim, as has been the goal of the Republican party for nearly a decade, was to eliminate the acknowledgement and discussion of trans people in all corners of society. 

While the presidential action wasn’t legally binding, it set a precedent for continued attacks against the community. Within days, trans and nonbinary people reported that requests to change were being denied. The administration also struck down the option for an “X” marker for more nuanced gender identities. This order, however, goes far beyond attacking trans and nonbinary people. It also erases the experiences of intersex people, whose sex often isn’t adequately defined by binary ideas of male and female. 

Then came an executive order calling for an end to gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 19. The Trump administration elevated the conservative lie that affirming trans and nonbinary youth is detrimental, ignoring that shows the opposite. Further, anti-trans advocates never discuss cis youth who may have to access similar care to have a more normative bodily experience. They also ignore that intersex youth regularly face to make their bodies conform to a sex binary. We must also understand the widespread practice of nonconsensual youth circumcision as incompatible with bodily autonomy, regardless of the cultural or religious implications.

Many, like the majority of , regard these attacks on trans and intersex people as inconsequential because each group is estimated to make up just of the total U.S. and global populations, respectively. But Trump’s directives also reveal a malicious desire to define personhood as beginning at conception and to reduce people to their reproductive capabilities.

This has far-ranging influence on the fight for abortion access and resurfaces an outdated notion of child-bearing as a defining factor, which has historically limited opportunities for those assigned female at birth, particularly in education and employment.

Conservatives are obsessed with telling people who they are and what they can and can’t do with their bodies. Their current platform blends Christian religious dogma, the goals of the science-fiction-inflected , and the so-called . All of these, in their own ways, urge conformity and uniformity at all costs. In essence, you and your body are for serving a particular version of god and an authoritarian executive while upholding a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Otherwise, those on the margins (including LGBTQIA+ people, women, migrants, people of color, and those who are poor) will fully wrest control and destroy society.

Over the last two months, it seems like those forces are winning, but there are historical sources of inspiration that believers in bodily autonomy can look toward. The concept of reproductive justice provides a sturdy foundation to expand how we think about access and the care that we deserve.

The framework was coined in a placed by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice collective to demand that Congress center Black women’s barriers to the U.S. health care system and to comprehensively reform it. They specified their ideal outcomes, including universal coverage, physician choice, equal access to services, and protection from discrimination. 

The “reproductive justice” framework moved beyond the limited focus on that dominated mainstream feminist discourse and organizing and shifted toward overall reproductive care. But unfortunately, three decades later, many of the initial aims and subsequent wins of the abortion rights and reproductive justice movements are in peril. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a near half-century of constitutional protection of abortion rights. 

Since then, the conservative push for statewide abortion bans has accelerated, with access at risk of being severely limited or prohibited in 26 states and three territories, according to the . While the language, promise, and organizing power of reproductive justice endure, this restrictive political landscape is demanding a retrenched focus on abortion access to the detriment of other goals.

In the last few years, for trans people, particularly youth, have increased alongside abortion bans. A year before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for trans minors. That number has since increased to 27. Now, the trans rights movement has taken up the mantle to defend the right to gender-affirming care to varying degrees of success.��

Unfortunately, the movement has been plagued by widespread cis ignorance about what the care entails and whether youth deserve access to it. If people moved beyond salacious headlines and hateful rhetoric, they’d learn that “encompasses a range of social, psychological, behavioral, and medical interventions.” They’d also realize that plenty of cis people access similar treatment for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately, this endless discourse often ignores that other health care decisions for minors are often trusted to be handled by physicians, parents, and the minors in question.

While conservatives regularly claim that banning gender-affirming care will defend and protect youth, the Trump administration’s order tries to ban gender-affirming care for people in the first year of legal adulthood as well. It reveals a larger conservative hope to , as was tried in Florida in 2023. This is all the more reason why we must build a broader movement that intertwines the fight for reproductive rights, gender-affirming care, intersex rights, and bodily autonomy writ large.

Every day in this Trumpian hell has been chaotic and demoralizing. These stressful times encourage us to turn inward and pull away from the collective. However, now is the time for us to expand and tap into collaboration and solidarity. We must begin to think beyond the silos of queer, trans, feminist, or reproductive justice movements, but as a broader fleet of gender liberationists. After a decade of discussions about trans visibility that have proved largely ineffectual, I’m invested in moving away from having my experiences simply being seen. They need to be understood as just one thread of a larger collective tapestry that includes everyone understanding their right to gender liberation.

But over the years, more frequent and intense rains—linked to —came earlier in the year, disrupting the harvest.

“Before, it rained in March, and we would sow seeds when it happened, but these days the rains can begin in February, and there can be a lot of ice and colder conditions,” said Tomas, 42. “We would have to work so hard, but receive little.”

Indigenous communities around the world are losing the crops their forebears had bred over centuries to a changing climate, deforestation, and industrial farming.

Three-quarters of has been lost over the last century, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, with only 30 plants fueling 95% of the calories that all humans consume globally. Such a homogenized food system raises the risk of , , , and the .

Though it’s difficult to gauge exactly how much the biodiversity crisis is costing farmers, suggests smallholder farmers are spending $368 billion of their own income every year on measures to adapt to climate change, which include pest control, soil improvements, and biodiversity conservation.

Increasingly, farmers like Tomas are turning to seed banks.

These modest, community-run storage hubs—typically located within walking distance of the fields—preserve Indigenous, climate-resilient seeds adept at dealing with harsh conditions, while also providing farmers like Tomas with a free, direct supply of seeds. In turn, proponents say seed banks can help to protect biodiversity.  A by the company Terraformation found more than 400 seed banks operating in 96 countries worldwide.

“There are so many uses of the seed banks,” says , senior technical manager of , a Guatemalan nonprofit that works with 16,000 farmers in the Huehuetenango region where Tomas lives. “They protect biodiversity. They protect incomes. If there’s a disaster or emergency, they are there as a kind of insurance for farmers.”

ASOCUCH launched its seed bank program in 2007, and Tomas joined in 2010. It has provided him with long-term, protective storage for his native seeds, meaning he no longer has to pay for them at the market, and crucially, a kind of insurance for when extreme weather strikes. has also found that cultivating these native seeds in banks has tripled farmers’ yields. “They increase food availability for families and create income from the sale of surpluses,” said Alonzo.

Tomas’ local branch of the seed bank, run by a committee of local farmers of which he is a member, has seen his community through crop-destroying frosts, floods, heatwaves, and a severe seed shortage in 2018. 

“Without the seed banks, it would have been disastrous,” Tomas said. “You save a lot of money not having to buy seeds, too.”

Each storage hub holds hundreds of containers of seeds, divided into sections for each farmer. Seeds shown to be resistant to harsh weather are prioritized. Some farmers visit the bank every month, while others just use it in case of emergencies. 

When Tomas first joined the bank, he was one of only six participating farmers in the community—now there are more than 40 of them.

“They saw the need,” he says. “Many farmers now see the importance of the banks.”

Agricultural experts say that supporting the use of traditional seeds, also known as heirloom varieties, could minimize the likelihood of food shortages, improve diets amid , and bolster the resilience of rural farming communities.

“Farmers have long been conserving seeds—and the banks support them to do this,” said , a genetic resources specialist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, a nonprofit. “It’s so important because we are losing crop diversity everywhere. We have to take action to protect seeds.”

The emergence of modern seed banks follows in the path of the ancient , which is becoming increasingly important for areas relying on subsistence farming as they are .

“Before, the focus was on national seed banks,” says Vernooy. “They would put seeds in a freezer and store them for as long as possible. But that has its limits. And that’s very far away from the farmers.”

Instead, community seed banks provide a living use of seeds, at once supporting farmers and their families, helping to secure the future of native and climate-resilient seeds, as well as encouraging social cohesion, equality, and knowledge exchange among farmers.

“They become more than a physical area, they increase interchange, sharing of seeds,” said Vernooy.

A 2023 study co-authored by Vernooy focusing on found that 2,630 smallholder farmers protected 72 “unique” crop and tree species, serving as a platform for community action and women’s empowerment. “Women have always played a key role in seed saving and management,” he says. 

Similar projects are sprouting up across Central America, home to who are knowledgeable about seed keeping, yet also . Many of these communities suffer . 

In Nicaragua, a is working with more than 7,000 farmers to identify native breeds of maize, grains, beans, and other legumes and develop new drought-resistant varieties. Mexico’s national , a state-led initiative, works directly with community seed banks and international partners to conserve about 12-13% of the country’s 23,000 plant species. 

In the United States, volunteers to regrow native plants in areas of Southern California devastated by January’s wildfires. Seed Savers Exchange, based in Iowa, is one of the nation’s seed banks, holding some 20,000 species. 

But in order to live up to their potential, which could allow farmers to through sales, advocates say the seed banks need more support from national governments. “Support is improving, but it remains lacking,” Vernooy said.

Alonzo of ASOCUCH agreed that institutional backing would make it easier for farmers to develop and independently maintain their own seed banks while recognizing their crucial role in protecting biodiversity. “Even if the banks are working, climate change still presents challenges,” he says. “If we want to safeguard the needs, we need to recognize the value of these smallholder producers.”

This article appeared in Nexus Media News, an editorially independent publication of .

Since the new presidential administration has entered the White House, there have been a number of , including the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1965 and the resulting equal protection clauses that have been in effect for decades. These policies—many of which have been gutted via executive order—were created to ensure women, low-income folks, disabled people, members of racial minority groups, and other historically disprivileged groups in the United States have equal access to the workforce.

These cuts have also resulted in companies such as�� , , and rolling back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that were designed to make employment more accessible for all people, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, or color. The problem is that many of these same companies have been actively recruiting members from marginalized racial, gender, and class groups for decades under the premise that they actually valued diversity.��

Target, a company that has embraced DEI wholesale for the past decade, and Black-owned brands when they rolled back their DEI initiatives in January. This disappointing decision has led to calls for mass boycotts of the big box retailer, which has lost , faces plummeting stock values, and is being . Recently, Pastor Jamal Bryant, a prominent voice within Black religious communities, called on his congregation to for the 40 days of Lent to “divest from Target because they have turned their back” on Black communities. 

Despite Target’s abandonment of the DEI initiatives that ingratiated the brand to Black consumers, their recent decisions are a stark contrast to what many Black communities have come to admire them for. These efforts also brought many Black business owners to Target’s shelves. Though the company seems to have lured Black consumers and brands to their stores under what now seems like false pretenses, a prominent Black influencer, content creator, and, now, mega-brand has surprised her supporters by backing the brand. 

On Jan. 27, popular vegan influencer Tabitha Brown, whose products are carried in Target stores all over the country, posted a asking her followers not to boycott the retailer because “it has been very hard for Black-owned businesses to hit shelves.” Emphasizing how “heartbreaking” it is for her to feel “unsupported” by retailers such as Target, Walmart, and Amazon, Brown shared that she still sells her products with these companies: “I do business all over, just like many other people.”��

She then encouraged her followers to reconsider boycotting Target because of the potential long-term impact on Black-owned businesses. “What happens to the businesses that have worked so hard to get to where they are?” Brown asked her followers. “To get there, we unfortunately have to play the game.”

But how long should we have to watch a few extremely wealthy Black folks “play the game” before we acknowledge that they might be playing us, too?

“Don’t allow foolishness to take us into separation and weed us out,” she implored. The video from those who felt Brown’s message centered the needs of Black business owners over larger Black communities and their concerns about representation. Others suggested that negative responses were just rooted in a hatred for Brown.

But, others, myself included, that it was quite possible Brown’s followers were simply disappointed because they were looking in the wrong place for liberation. No shade to Tabitha Brown. She seems like a lovely human being. But is she a comrade, abolitionist, or freedom fighter? Absolutely not.��

The messaging Brown provides here suggests that the only way for Black people to “win” in this society is by playing into capitalistic, anti-Black, exploitative labor and production models that have never served us. No other event exemplifies this more than American football and the phenomenon of Black artists giving “revolutionary” Super Bowl performances. 

On Feb. 9, rapper Kendrick Lamar joined this “tradition” when he performed in Super Bowl history. In addition to being the most unrivaled lyricist alive, Lamar presented viewers with imagery of wave-cap-wearing Black men symbolically dancing in the form of an American flag, gaggles of Black folks pouring from a hoopty on stage, and even dressed as Uncle Sam. And Lamar performed all of this in front of the .

Lamar opened the performance by telling : “The revolution is about to be televised. You picked the right time, but I’m the wrong guy.” Playing on the iconic 1971 Gil Scott-Heron song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Lamar excited Black viewers about the potentially disruptive and culturally impactful performance. But, honestly, that line left me at “yikes.”��

Lamar’s chart-topping song “Not Like Us” is one of the greatest and most successful diss tracks of all time. His opponent, Drake, hates it and has even . But over time, the song has moved beyond its origins to become a catch-all critique of larger culture, namely because of the line “You not a colleague/ You a fuckin’ colonizer.” 

What’s more striking is that Lamar performed this song in front of the same NFL fans who ousted Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee to protest racial injustice in 2016 and from the end zone ahead of the 2025 season. At this point, maybe the question we should be asking is: Who do we mean by “us”?

But Black folks seemed largely OK with this performance being touted as “the revolution.” Just like Brown’s request that folks keep patronizing Target, Lamar hasn’t been as critiqued as he should for giving the performance of a lifetime in front of a fascist.

Wealthy Black folks acting in their own best interests and the interests of those closest to them isn’t synonymous with Black uplift or��community investment. In this political moment, there’s a fascist who and who stands to unravel every protection and equity initiative secured by organizers and freedom fighters for the past two generations. We don’t also need more empty platitudes from Black celebrities and influencers, or pretend revolutions that line the pockets of mega-wealthy NFL owners, record producers, and racist businessmen.��

I also hope this moment is teaching those of us who are truly invested in building a freer and more just future that we won’t often find the revolutionary work of dismantling white supremacy and building a better world by looking up at people who are deeply embedded in it. We have to look at the people alongside us—the bus drivers, church mothers, nurses, school teachers, and librarians—who are not only struggling each day to confront the realities of this administration but who are directly impacted by its violent and harmful policies.

I’ve never disagreed with Lamar before, but he got this one wrong. The revolution will not be televised because the revolution won’t be happening on a football field or in store aisles. The revolution will happen where it always has: silently, quietly, and away from the white-coded and white-centered systems seeking to pacify and destroy it.