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.Ěý

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.Ěý

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. 

“Wąđ 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.ĚýSince their villages are close to one another, she would hear news of his well-being from mutual contacts.Ěý

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. “Wąđ 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.”Ěý

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. “Wąđ 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.”Ěý

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.Ěý

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.”Ěý

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,”Ěý 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.”Ěý

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.

“Wąđ 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. “Wąđ 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. “Wąđ 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.Ěý

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.ĚýĚý

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.ĚýHowever, 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.Ěý

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.Ěý

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.Ěý

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.Ěý

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.”Ěý

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 â€œinsane” 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.Ěý

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 PequeĂąo, 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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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. 

“Wąđ 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.Ěý

“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.Ěý

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. “Wąđ 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.”

PequeĂąo 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?’”Ěý

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.Ěý

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.ĚýĚý

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 PeĂąa sent a university-wide email stating “New York stands with the people of Israel.” A few sentences following, PeĂąa wrote, “Wąđ 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 PeĂąa 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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“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 “Wąđ 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, PeĂąa released her own university-wide email, asserting that Purchase College had “zero tolerance for antisemitic behavior or any other act of hate or bias.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“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.”

“Wąđ’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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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. 

“Wąđ 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, PeĂąa 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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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 PeĂąa’s Dec. 13, 2023 email, when Palestine Legal started, and the year the “Palestine Exception to Free Speech” report was published.ĚýRead 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.Ěý

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 notedĚýnot long ago, Trump “had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent.”ĚýĚýĚýthese 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 andĚýĚý, they successfully pushedĚýĚýand to adopt sanctuary laws that limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

WhenĚýĚýthousands 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 Ěýconfirmed this finding. Notably, Hausman also found that sanctuary policies had “no detectable effect on crime rates,” contrary to what manyĚý.

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 ,Ěýand pushed other measures to obstruct the transition to green energy. Researchers projected that these policies would killĚýĚýof people in just the United States by 2028, primarily from exposure to air pollutants. Other studies estimated that the increased carbon pollution would contribute toĚýĚýofĚý, 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 aĚý, 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 Ěýto keep their money in the sector, and some evenĚý.ĚýĚýandĚýĚýdidn’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 forĚý,Ěý,Ěýand evenĚý. Workers in hotels, supermarkets, and otherĚýĚýalso walked out. Ultimately,Ěýmore in 2018 than in any year since 1986.

This happened not just in progressive strongholds butĚýĚýlike West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. At leastĚýĚýdefied state laws denying workers the right to strike.

Ěýgains for workers, the strike wave apparently alsoĚý at election time by increasing political awareness and voter mobilization. The indirect impact on elections is aĚýĚýof labor militancy andĚý.

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 theĚý,Ěý63% of unhoused transgender peopleĚýare unsheltered.ĚýFor unhoused cisgender people, that number is 49%.Ěý

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. 

“Wąđ’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. “Wąđ 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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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 .

“Wąđ’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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“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.Ěý

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. 

“Wąđ’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. â€œChiefs obtained their whaling songs through a connection with whale spirits that they encountered in dreams or during a whale hunt,” writes CotĂŠ 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.

“Wąđ 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. â€œFood sovereignty embodies that real, deep spiritual appreciation for food as a sacred gift,” CotĂŠ 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.

“Wąđ don’t impose our spirituality on other people,” McCarty states. “Wąđ’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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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?Ěý

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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. “Wąđ’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. “Wąđ 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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.Ěý

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. “Wąđ 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. â€œSupport 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 asĚý , , 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.Ěý

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.”Ěý

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.Ěý

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.”Ěý

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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 orĚýcommunity 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.Ěý

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.

Founders like KimberlĂŠ Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Stephanie Phillips, and Teri Miller also grappled with this question as they kicked around terms and concepts in 1989 discussing what exactly unified their nascent group. What is CRT?

When Derrick Bell was asked to define CRT, he had a few things to say:

Definition 1: Critical race theory . . . is a new approach to legal theory pioneered by minority scholars. Practitioners, often through the device of either true stories or personal anecdotes or fictional tales, discuss the many ways in which race and law affect each other. 

Definition 2: Practitioners, often through storytelling and a more subjective, personal voice, examine the ways in which the law has been shaped by and shapes issues of race.

Definition 3: I rather think that this writing is the response to a need for expressing views that cannot be communicated effectively through existing techniques. In my case, I prefer using stories as a means of communicating views to those who hold very different views on the emotionally charged subject of race. 

Woven throughout Bell’s discussions of CRT is his insistence on centering the experiences and unique voices of people of color and communicating these experiences through the method of story. He emphasized “story” to his fellow race-crits.

We are living in a momentous time. As the global order slips toward authoritarianism, racial retrenchment is on the rise. Global economic shifts and growing wealth disparities are combining with the climate crisis to create renewed conditions for the exploitation of labor and the unjust distribution of resources. Laws and policies are being altered, modified, and reinterpreted to benefit those classes long invested in building a world that suits their interests. The faces at the bottom of the well, those communities consigned to poverty and degradation, are at ever greater risk of racialized dehumanization and violence.

It is no mistake that CRT—one of the most incisive and forward-thinking tools for critical inquiry and societal interpretation developed in the United States—is now coming under attack. As Bell observed in 1995, “At a time of crisis, critics serve as reminders that we are being heard, if not always appreciated.”

The power of CRT is in stories—stories that humanize data, that communicate truths. Although CRT has recently again come under attack, even those of us committed to its tenets and frameworks should not forget that the call is not primarily to defend CRT. Good tools are worth defending because of the good they can do for the sake of the world. When it comes to the storytelling heart of CRT, the point is to effectively humanize data to promote justice, to promote the flourishing of human communities.

Bell said that the perspectives communicated through CRT “are shaped by having lived our whole lives thinking about and experiencing issues of race—perspectives that, until now, have been ignored by the legal establishment.” That establishment is an extension of society as a whole. Storytelling—as a critical method—has the power to make those perspectives heard so dominant classes can no longer avoid the responsibility of listening.

We see the power of storytelling as method in Patricia Williams’ longstanding cultivation of her narrative voice while providing critical legal commentary in . We see it in the work of and the in her recent book, . We see it in the continued work of and Charles Lawrence, producing art exhibits that recover the parallel life stories of women who have fought for Hawaiian sovereignty and reparations.

We see it in the ongoing critical writing of and , still producing cutting-edge work challenging the boundaries of CRT itself while generously mentoring the next generation of scholar-activists. We see it in the work of , who since Derrick Bell’s death in 2011 has been the primary torchbearer of his legacy while producing her own projects celebrating the voice and witness of African American women.

Stories, by their very nature, are more accessible than more traditional academic modes of writing. They also more effectively communicate, as Bell said, with “those who hold very different views on the emotionally charged subject of race.” Stories demonstrate the power of CRT because they illuminate the power of human connection and empathetic concern at the heart of CRT.

This excerpt, adapted from by Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith (NYU Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

The good news is that climate justice movement organizers nationwide were prepared for the threats of Trump’s second term and are fighting against his administration’s regressive political agenda and for a greener future.

“Wąđ are already seeing our communities on the front lines being responsive [to Trump’s attacks],” says KD Chavez, executive director of (CJA). “They are continuing to provide mutual support, they’re continuing to organize, they’re resisting, and they’re creating regenerative climate solutions that are replicable.”

“When we say front line, we mean the people that are dealing with climate injustice day to day,” explains Chavez. “It’s folks in communities that have been intentionally marginalized and disinvested from for decades, and they’ve been having to come up with inventive solutions with, sometimes, shoestring budgets.”Ěý

Chavez points to the (GASP) as one example of a front-line community tackling environmental injustice. That nonprofit organization has succeeded in in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama, and is now working with the City of Birmingham to create a with climate justice principles at its core.Ěý

“When we aggregate those solutions, a just transition and a future that includes ecological liberation and liberation for the people and land doesn’t seem too far away because we have tangible examples of it happening all over.”

More than work under CJA’s umbrella, each furthering climate justice aims in their communities. Trump’s rapid-fire rollbacks have already impacted the work of many of CJA’s members and other groups like them. 

Some of the most significant disruptions to climate progress nationwide come from the administration’s , enacted on Jan. 27, 2025, and attacks on the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which includes provisions to help fight climate change, promote environmental justice, and transition the United States to . Among Trump’s many Inauguration Day executive orders is one aimed at , including terminating the office established to oversee the IRA’s implementation and halting disbursements of allocated funds. The same executive order also demanded a pause on all “Green New Deal” funding.Ěý

Of $50 billion in grants awarded under the IRA, $32 billion had not yet been disbursed when President Joe Biden left office in early 2025 and is at risk of being clawed back, according to . The EPA is meant to be responsible for disbursing about $20 billion of the unspent funds. On Feb. 12, 2025, the EPA’s new administrator, that the agency would rescind those contracts and the funds.

Even before that announcement, the agency informed some grant recipients their until further notice. The federal funding freeze also disrupted at least to thousands of state and local governments and nonprofit organizations, according to Inside Climate News. 

The effects of these funding disruptions are already being felt. Tens of thousands of nationwide are now threatened or canceled, many of which were meant to benefit underserved communities and those on the front lines of the climate crisis. CJA was among the groups that lost some EPA funding following Zeldin’s announcement.

That funding was part of the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities grantmaking program, which would have allowed CJA to seed community-based organizations advancing environmental justice in the western U.S. Chavez called the program’s cancellation one of the White House’s “attacks on working class communities” in a Feb. 13 .

Funding disruptions have also hit individuals and families as federally funded programs that help families save money on energy costs—such as and —are now in limbo.Ěý

Meech Carter, clean energy campaigns director at the , helps state residents access funding through programs like these. She says her organization has received little guidance on which programs will continue when the federal funding freeze is lifted. “When I talk to residents now, I have to tell them, ‘This is a very changing landscape, we appreciate your patience, and we are trying our best to get you the assistance that you need.’”

She adds, “Wąđ don’t want people to have unreasonable expectations, and we know there’s a possibility that these programs will be impacted.”

A group of nonprofit organizations and Democratic attorneys general in 22 states and Washington, D.C. have already challenged the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze in court. Two federal courts in early February 2025 to stop the freeze. On Feb. 25, 2025, a federal judge in one of these cases agreed to grant the plaintiffs’ request for while the case moves through the court. However, grantees have continued to report they awarded for climate projects. 

Meanwhile, environmental law organizations are gearing up to . It’s too soon to know how those legal fights will play out and whether the Trump administration will heed court decisions. But the litigation itself serves an important purpose. “The way that we’re thinking about it right now is ‘How do you grind down and bog down the administration?’” says Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the . “They are pretending that there are no laws binding them, but in fact, these laws exist, and we will check them on that through federal court litigation.”

While litigation on the federal level focuses on halting rollbacks and protecting vital programs, organizers say on the state and local levels, the climate movement is still looking to gain ground. “Local and state action is going to be really important over these next four years, and there are some really big opportunities there,” says Carter. 

One of those opportunities could be broadening the climate movement in the U.S. by rallying Republican politicians and constituencies behind IRA programs. Although no Republican backed the IRA during the Biden administration, Republican-held areas have benefited most from the legislation since its enactment. Nearly , representing 85% of investments and 68% of jobs, are in Republican congressional districts.

Carter sees the effects of disruptions on North Carolinians, where just over half of voters in the 2024 presidential election. Many in the state were counting on energy assistance, tax rebates, or new employment opportunities on infrastructure or clean energy projects—the futures of which are now uncertain. 

If Republican lawmakers want to remain in office in North Carolina and other Republican-held areas, they may need to bend to constituents who do not want to see cost-saving programs stripped away. “This is a big opportunity to leverage those connections and mobilize representatives to push back,” says Carter. “If that funding is taken away, that has a real impact for people across the political spectrum.”

Focusing on the material benefits of climate resilience programs has already been a winning strategy elsewhere, including in Schlenker-Goodrich’s home state of New Mexico. While New Mexico has Democratic leaders, it is a top . Transitioning to cleaner energy promises to reshape the state’s economy and workforce. Still, the , legislation aimed at decarbonization, is progressing through the state legislature. Schlenker-Goodrich says it has been successful because “climate equity principles are built into the bill,” ensuring communities on the front lines of climate change and those most affected by the energy transition will be targeted for support.Ěý

Messaging around the Clear Horizons Act in New Mexico highlights how the legislation would not only reduce pollution but also create new jobs, spur small business growth, and improve infrastructure. Carter says these talking points are persuasive in Republican-led constituencies and perhaps even on the federal level. “It’s something [to keep in mind], especially when you have a federal administration that is clearly very concerned with cost cutting,” she says. “Wąđ should be talking about cost benefits of renewable energy, of electrification, [and] the burdens of high energy bills.”

Looking ahead, the climate movement is not only facing Trump’s early top-down attacks but also fatigue and harmful misinformation campaigns seeking to divide it. “People are getting burned out,” Carter says. “I think it has felt like that for a while in the environmental space, but with the very quick dismantling of federal programs, it puts a lot of concern, fear, and just general exhaustion into the advocacy community.”

To combat these threats and ensure continued progress toward climate justice, organizers say building power within communities is more critical than ever. This work begins on the local level and requires critics of the Trump administration to be strategic in their organizing and communication. Carter, who organizes with North Carolinians across the political spectrum, suggests focusing conversations with neighbors on shared goals and material concerns rather than misinformation. “Say, Hey, if you need help with your HVAC, you need to call your legislator and tell them ‘I need this funding,’” Carter explains. “This is a huge opportunity to unite people.”

Looking at the bigger picture, Schlenker-Goodrich urges imagination and even optimism. “I think this moment compels us to think pretty expansively about not only how we defend against this moment, but also, how do we create something new that emerges out of it?”

To myself, I rationalized,
“I know this toxic narrative is wrong about us.”
“My partner and I have a loving, supportive relationship.”
“The kids are alright.”
“Other people have it way worse.”
“Wąđ’ve been through this before.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;
“Wąđ know how to survive.”

It’s true. We do know how to survive…
When your rights are stripped away on repeat 
When the walls keep closing in tighter 
When they destroyed
because they can. 
When it feels more possible to disappear than earn a doctorate degree, survival becomes the primary goal.

We know how to survive. A lot of us have been surviving our entire lives.
And I’m not just talking about raw survival against street and institutional violence. 
It’s the way the hypervigilance we carry in our bodies impacts our nervous system. 

It’s the increased prevalence of autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular issues, depression, and PTSD among trans people, particularly those who have also experienced racialized trauma.
It’s also the economic barriers to health care and discrimination within the medical-industrial complex. 
Being trans is beautiful, but the world makes it exhausting.

Path to Liberation

Trans people have saved my life time and time again. I came out in 1998. I was 14 and living in a town along the so-called U.S.–Mexico border. All we had was each other. In a time with few legal protections and next to no resources, we had to organize deep systems of care for ourselves. Over the past two decades, there have been many political and cultural changes, thanks to the labor of advocates (trans and otherwise) who have pushed tirelessly to implement pathways to better protect folks.

However, it is risky to become dependent upon incremental policy change. As important as these kinds of wins are, what is granted by colonial law can also be revoked by colonial law. When we become comfortable within the bounds of what is “given” to us (often crumbs), we settle for less than what we know we really need: real solutions to the root causes of the political and ecological crisis we are facing. 

False “solutions” and concepts like individual upward mobility or assimilation (when even possible) often distract us with temporary comfort and take us away from building up the collective care and self-governance muscle that will actually protect us. We need that are rooted in values like radical care, collective governance, and mutuality.Ěý

When we are not organized, the impacts of backlashes, such as the one we are experiencing now, are far more detrimental because when they come for us, what and who do we fall back on?  

Our autonomy is our power. Our long-built systems of survival and community defense are our power. There is so much to draw from in our collective DNA to guide us through this time. We know how to do this.

Trans people: Brown, Black, Indigenous, working class. 
So many beautiful stories. 
So much cultural wealth and lived wisdom rooted in the will to survive like hell against all odds.

From street economies to the people’s pharmacies
From houses for disowned youth to adopted queer parents
From Stonewall to
From our own designs of family to fierce love and solidarity
From prisons walls to asylum halls

Trans people have navigated a million plot twists—many steeped in violence—based upon a perception of us:Ěý
How we exist in the eyes of others.
Be it the state, religion, our families of origin, or neighborhoods.Ěý
And still they have no idea who we really are.Ěý
Nonetheless, we remain.Ěý
Our most prominent hxstorical rebellions powerfully led by Black and Brown trans women.

It Means Home…

I kept trying to understand why I was questioning my existence last month.
It might have had something to do with the right’s violent campaign to erase us while simultaneously hyper-visibilizing us, spending $215 million on anti-trans ads, to create another common enemy and boost votes.

“Take America back from pronouns and immigrants!”
Come on, we know they’re full of….

But it worked. Across our backs.
Not even 0.5% of the population posed a supposed threat so big it gave the right (and moveable center) a perfect point of unity: 
“Protect our kids.”

Protect them from what exactly?
Learning and embracing that all different kinds of people exist?Ěý
A culture that teaches to not harm people for being different from yourself?
It is no surprise that those who see our Mother Earth and her life sources as nothing more than a dollar sign would despise a worldview in which we respect and revere life in all of its complex and beautiful intelligence.Ěý

We will never understand all there is to this planet, but you don’t have to understand it to respect it. 

If we are speaking ecologically: Diversity is our best defense in the face of crisis. 
If we are speaking like my old timers: “Everything in its place.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; 
Eradicating one thread in an ecosystem disrupts the entire ecosystem. 
Global traditional knowledge has carried that teaching since time immemorial. Everything is connected.

Humans are but one expression of nature. And yes, we are human.
Never mind the dehumanizing, ableist narrative that we are “imposing mental illness” by advocating for a right to a dignified life and basic respect.

Despite the long-overused weaponization of “nature” against queer and trans people (“Its not natural!”), sex and gender variance is reflected all across the natural world.Ěý

From birthing male seahorsesĚý
to split-gill mushrooms’ 28,000 different sexesĚý
to the female swallowtail butterfly’s “doublesex” genes that provide wing pattern camouflage from predators—
Biodiversity is a part of nature.
Adaptation is a part of nature.
Trans, gender-expansive, and two-spirit people are a part of nature.
Honor it.ĚýĚý

My comrade asked me: “What are your wildest dreams for trans relatives?”Ěý
My dream is not just for us to survive, but that we come to know belonging.Ěý
That we remember the truth of who we really are in a mess of endless projections and attacks.Ěý
I pray that as we endure a war on our right to exist—we hold the deep knowing that we are not alone.Ěý
The Earth and so many others, human and non-human, are also enduring profoundly violent disruptions.Ěý
We struggle in solidarity with all those who persist on the side of justice, the side of life.Ěý
Now more than ever, our interconnection mandates us to protect the living world. Yes, we have a right to be here, but more than that, we need to be here.

For 30 years, Gastelum’s routine in Tucson, Arizona, was based on congeniality and familiarity. But when the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants without legal status in the United States hit close to home, nabbing an employee of the bakery near him, an unsettling uncertainty set in around his Southside neighborhood. 

“You don’t see as many people out and about,” he says. “Stores that used to be quite busy are now nearly empty.”

Some 7 miles north, at the nonprofit , located near the city’s downtown, Xochitl Mercado and her colleagues field a daily flood of calls from worried undocumented people. The organization is among various advocacy groups offering resources to immigrants. “People are looking for guidance on what to do if they have an encounter with immigration agents or police officers,” Mercado says. The nonprofit is distributing packets with materials informing undocumented people of their rights and various means to access legal services and community support.

Just days after President Donald Trump took office for his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, his administration launched the he repeatedly promised during his campaign. Border czar immigration agents would first focus on , but made it clear that no one would be immune from deportation. And, despite news reports that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn’t , the mere threat of mass deportations has had a chilling effect in immigrant communities.

“There’s definitely more uneasiness in our community now than during the last Trump administration,” Mercado says. “Wąđ’re hearing from many callers that they’re not sending their children to school, that they’re afraid to go to work.”

In response, a coalition of immigrant advocates quickly moved to quell concerns of undocumented immigrants. Many of them have mixed-status families that include U.S. citizens and permanent legal residents. At a recent community gathering, attendees received training on exercising their rights when confronted by immigration agents and learned of an available hotline for rapid assistance. Parents were also encouraged to make arrangements with a relative or trusted friend to care for their children if they are suddenly deported.

“Wąđ’re living in very difficult times, very aggressive times,” stemming from policies that justify racism, attorney Alba Jaramillo, a defender of immigrants’ rights, told the crowd. “But we are not going to allow them to separate our families,” she said, referring to immigration authorities. “Wąđ are not going to allow them to keep us terrorized. We will not allow them to enter our homes without judicial search warrants.”

Rafael BarcelĂł Durazo, the Mexican consul in Tucson, encouraged those at the gathering to use a mobile app that Mexico’s government rolled out as an emergency communication tool through its 53 U.S. consulates to assist expatriates at risk of deportation. He also highlighted, a that includes free transportation from border cities to the country’s interior for Mexicans who are deported, as well as those who choose to return on their own. 

At the consulate, there’s been an increase in the number of people seeking official documentation that could help ease a transition to rebuild a life in Mexico, Barceló Durazo says. “Many people are interested in having their Mexican nationality, probably because they feel that the political environment is different.”

Among those trying to secure documentation are fathers and mothers lacking legal status and whose children were born in the U.S., the consul says. Across the country, an estimated 4.4 million U.S.-born children under 18 live with an undocumented parent, according to the .

In 2022, the U.S. undocumented immigrant population was estimated at around 11 million, or about 3% of the total population, according to the center data. But the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., puts it at 12.8 million, or 3.3% of the population. By mid-2023, according to the Institute, a record number of migrants arriving from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras helped swell the undocumented population to about 13.7 million (about 4% of the total population).

In Arizona, where some of the nation’s strictest immigration laws have consistently targeted undocumented residents, an estimated 250,000 people live in the state without legal authorization.Ěý

Margo Cowan, an attorney who has practiced immigration law since the early 1970s, says in all those years she’s never seen the level of anti-immigrant sentiment now pervading many parts of the country. In Texas, in early February after being taunted in school about her family’s immigration status. “There are many layers of assault against the undocumented community: psychological, obviously physical, name calling, disparaging, no recognition of the contributions that folks make to our economy and to our communities in every aspect,” Cowan says.

She founded Keep Tucson Together in 2011, a year after the state’s , commonly known as the “show me your papers” law, went into effect. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 found the measure to be largely unconstitutional, although it upheld a provision allowing police to ask the immigration status of people suspected of being in the country unlawfully.

Since those days, Cowan and a cadre of volunteers have held weekly legal workshops where people seeking permanent legal residency, citizenship, or some form of legal status can get help navigating the complex immigration system. The workshops also teach undocumented people about certain protections they have in this country, including the right to due process, the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to legal counsel and the right to education.

“Many people think that because they have no status, they have no rights,” the attorney says. “And that’s not true.”

Meanwhile, educators reassure worried parents that student rights are still protected at school. Gabriel Trujillo, superintendent of the Tucson Unified School District, held a news conference to address community fear over Trump’s rollback of a federal policy prohibiting immigration authorities from making arrests at sensitive locations such as schools, churches, and hospitals. Immigration agents and police officers will be permitted to enter public school campuses only if they present a judicial warrant and valid identification, Trujillo said.

He emphasized that , a 1982 landmark case ensuring equal access to education for undocumented children, remains in place. “Wąđ stand firmly behind the belief that the traditional public school is, and always will be, safe for children and young people, regardless of immigration status,” Trujillo said. 

That’s the message Mercado works to impart at Keep Tucson Together, both by phone and in person, to worried parents who want to keep their children at home. But, she says, the threat of life-changing deportation can weigh heavily on people’s minds.

Back on the Southside, home to many Latino residents, a woman stands quietly inside an unassuming food truck adorned with photos of tacos, burritos, and other Mexican specialties. Customers are hard to come by since immigration raids were announced, says the woman, who declined to give her name.  

Under the shade tree outside the bakery, Gastelum and his friends lament the anxiety undocumented people and their families are feeling these days. He empathizes; he was once in their shoes. To peacefully protest Trump’s mass deportations, Latino immigrant  communities—people with and without papers—should boycott all businesses for a day, he says. “That would show the impact that we have on the economy.”

For the Indigenous peoples of Moananuiākea—across the water from our relatives on Turtle Island and around the globe—our fight for justice is rooted in our ancestral connection and kinship to the land, water, and earth. Our °ěĹŤąčłÜ˛Ô˛š (ancestors) have long practiced sustainable stewardship values, including mālāma ʝāina (care for the land) and kuleana (responsibility) to restore both our environment and our communities. Real climate justice work requires honoring Indigenous knowledge and empowering grassroots efforts to protect our sacred relationship with Mother Earth.

As we navigate a volatile economic and political environment, our resolve must be clear: Climate justice cannot take a back seat. We cannot abandon the decades of work to create healthier environments, regenerative systems, and economic opportunities in tribal, Indigenous, and rural communities across the country. 

The fight for has always been led by Indigenous, Black, and frontline communities because we have always been the first to experience environmental harm. The forced displacement of Indigenous peoples from our lands was one of the earliest acts of environmental injustice, literally paving the way for extractive industries that have since poisoned land, air, and water. Today, fossil fuel projects continue to bring violence to Indigenous communities. As a result, Indigenous communities around the globe have always been—and continue to be—on the front lines, protecting our land and our communities. 

Climate justice is not a separate battle from racial justice, Indigenous rights, gender equity, or economic justice—it is the throughline that connects them all. Take, for example, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIWR+), which is fueled in large part by transient male workers in fossil fuel extraction camps near reservations. The MMIWR+ crisis is inseparable from environmental exploitation. Ending pipeline construction and mining projects is not just an environmental imperative; it is a necessary step to halt violence against Indigenous communities, against women, and against our two spirit relatives.Ěý

When we view social issues through the lens of climate justice, we create pathways for real, systemic change. Investing in renewable energy and land stewardship is not only about sustainability; it is about sovereignty, community resilience, and protection from the rising tide of authoritarianism. 

Knowledge for the Future

Indigenous communities have long held the key to climate resilience. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) offers regenerative models of land and water stewardship, ensuring sustainability for future generations. One example is in South Dakota, an organization revitalizing Lakota culture, increasing job and food security, and reconnecting people back to our land through regenerative buffalo ranching. 

Buffalo are native to this land, and therefore have a symbiotic relationship with it. Their presence creates biodiversity in many ways. They graze the grasses down to different heights, providing nesting grounds for birds. They also roll around and pack down the soil in depressions in the ground known as wallows, which fill with rainwater and offer breeding pools for amphibians as well as sources of drinking water for wildlife across the landscape. And buffalo travel long distances to graze and find water, their sharp hooves churning the earth along the way, breaking up roots and aerating the soil to allow for new growth. 

Pre-colonization, 60 million buffalo roamed North America, supporting both the ecosystem and Indigenous lifeways. The U.S. government nearly wiped out the buffalo in a deliberate strategy to starve Indigenous people. Today, Native-led projects like Sacred Storm Buffalo are restoring buffalo populations, reviving local economies, and rebuilding biodiversity.

Similarly, in Hawai‘i is restoring Indigenous farming techniques to grow staple foods like kalo (taro). Before Western contact, HawaiĘťi was a fully autonomous island nation, supporting nearly a million people through the ˛šłółÜąčłÜ˛šĘť˛š system—a sophisticated land-management approach that connected mountain agriculture to shoreline aquaculture, ensuring ecological balance and abundant resources. 

Pre-colonization, Native Hawaiians used regenerative farming techniques such as diverting stream water to nourish wetland crops before returning nutrient-rich water to the ocean, which in turn sustained thriving fishponds. Colonization and exploitative plantation agriculture—particularly sugarcane—dismantled this system and caused widespread environmental and cultural devastation. The U.S. military and modern tourism industry has exacerbated environmental harm even further, creating the conditions that led to the devastating Maui wildfires and continue to cause among Native Hawaiians. 

Today, KIKA is revitalizing traditional farming practices, restoring ecosystems, and producing culturally appropriate food to support Hawaiian communities. And by teaching youth 21st-century versions of traditional farming practices, they’re also strengthening cultural identity and mental health, providing young people with a sense of belonging. 

These are just a couple examples of Indigenous-led efforts proving that climate solutions already exist—and make sense for our environment, our communities, and our economy. Indigenous communities are developing solutions to mitigate the climate crisis based on real-time experiences coupled with generational knowledge that is rooted in relationships with their environment. 

Supporting Solutions

With government agencies and programs being gutted on a mass scale, leaving countless organizations and efforts unsure of their futures, the role of the private sector has never been more urgent. Private foundations, high-net-worth individuals, and philanthropic organizations must step in to close the funding gap and ensure that communities on the front lines of the climate crisis are not abandoned.

We need strategic investment in climate resilience, Indigenous land stewardship, community-led sustainability projects, and the frameworks and strategies that Indigenous, Black, and frontline organizers have spent decades developing. The Bloomberg Foundation, for instance, has committed billions to combat climate change—this must become the norm, not the exception.

Philanthropy alone is not enough. We must also strengthen grassroots networks by increasing our resilience efforts. Every community should be asking: How can we become more climate resilient? How can we build mutual aid networks that support people during climate disasters? How can we use climate action as a tool for broader social change and economic empowerment? How does our existing work shift if we look at it through a climate justice lens? 

Indigenous communities are developing solutions to mitigate the climate crisis based on real-time experiences coupled with generational knowledge that is rooted in relationships with their environment. Investment in climate justice in Indigenous and rural communities helps those communities become energy sovereign, it helps communities access affordable and healthy food, and it creates regenerative economic opportunities. It just makes sense. 

Mitigating climate change is not a new endeavor for Indigenous, tribal, and rural communities. We already hold the knowledge necessary to navigate the next phase of the climate crisis. What we need now is unwavering support—from philanthropists, from organizers, and from every person who believes in a just future. 

Climate justice means food security for all, clean air and water for all, the development of clean energy on tribal lands, and protection for our Mother Earth. Climate justice is racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and the path to liberation for all people and Mother Earth. We must lock arms and stand for all that is sacred now.

There is no sager dietary advice than “Eat your vegetables.” A parent has probably told you this countless times. It’s also the mantra of Michael Pollan, which he turned into multiple best-selling books: “” Nutrition experts have been telling us to eat more fresh produce for so long .

However, it turns out vegetables are making us fat. The more servings of vegetables we eat, the more calories we consume. That’s the startling conclusion of a 2014 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) report titled “,” which concluded that when we eat one cup of a particular vegetable—read on to find out which one—in a restaurant, we rack up 364 more calories than if we didn’t eat it.

To understand why requires a brief primer in nutrition. We need fruits and vegetables to thrive. They provide water, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals. They have a lot of bulk but are low in calories, so they help us avoid sugary, salty, fatty snacks. Pickled produce, such as cabbage, mango, radish, and cucumbers, delivers probiotics for gut health. Most importantly, eating lots of fruits and vegetables can help us live longer. In the clinical language of : “Fruit and vegetable intakes were associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and all-cause mortality.”

Nearly everyone is familiar with the “five-a-day” recommendation for fruits and vegetables. , the , and even the agree we should eat five servings a day. That means half a cup of foods such as blueberries, cucumbers, broccoli, carrots, or apples. For greens such as spinach, kale, cabbage, or lettuce, a serving is one packed cup of raw leaves or a half-cup of cooked greens. A half cup of cooked pulses, such as beans, chickpeas, peas, and lentils also counts as a serving.

In 2014, Americans ate, on average, , or five servings, according to the USDA. It sounds like we are meeting our goals, but all is not what it seems. One problem is the real minimum is a day, per theĚýU.S. National Cancer Institute. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, eat this amount of fruit or vegetables.Ěý

But even seven servings a day is misleading. That’s what should eat. The first problem is many of us should eat 10 or more servings a day, as I will explain. Because we are so far below 10 a day, the advice to eat five servings is a form of harm reduction. Nutrition experts are encouraging us to eat one or two more servings a day rather than discouraging us by admitting we are falling far short of out minimum needs.

The second issue is we also need . Every day we should have a serving of dark leafy greens; a red or orange vegetable, such as a tomato or a sweet potato; and lentils, peas, or beans. Virtually no one eats these foods every day. The third problem is the type of vegetables we eat regularly, how they are prepared, and what accompanies them. Related to this is the problem of what the USDA considers a serving of a fruit or a vegetable.

Here’s the rub: We average about three servings of vegetables a day, and of that. Potatoes almost always come loaded with fat, calories, and sodium, such as fries, chips, mashed, scalloped, or gratin. Baked potatoes are healthier, but spuds are typically swimming in butter, cheese, sour cream, and bacon. Tomatoes are even worse. We may think we usually enjoy them on a refreshing salad with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, but in reality we eat tomatoes as salsa, ketchup, and sauces in cheesy pizza, meaty lasagna, stuffed burritos, loaded nachos, thick hamburgers, and greasy fries. That’s why for every cup of tomatoes we eat in restaurants, we pack on an extra 364 calories. 

Eliminate potatoes and tomatoes, and Americans eat less than one cup of vegetables a day, and there is no guarantee it’s healthy. It might be creamed spinach, broccoli with cheese sauce, or greens piled with meat and cheese and slicked with oil. 

Adding fat to vegetables is a strategy in the restaurant industry. Vegetables can be made tasty, healthy, and low fat, such as those roasted, but such methods are labor intensive. Instead, restaurants have adopted the mantra “.” These ingredients are taxpayer subsidized, packed with flavor, and require little added labor, which makes them high profit. But we end up ingesting excessive amounts of , only adding to the restaurant’s bottom line and our waist line.

Our diets have worsened since the USDA’s 2014 report. since 2003, dropping from more than 400 pounds annually per capita to about 350 pounds in 2022. This is largely a result of social conditions: The Great Recession, the pandemic, and inflation have pushed more people into poverty even as food, especially fresh produce, rises in cost.

The situation is just as bad for fruit. That’s because the USDA considers juice a serving, which accounts for . Sure, 100 percent fruit juice has vitamins and minerals. But it can have , and it’s the added “” that are most harmful to our health. Another 10 percent of our fruit intake is canned or dried—and it’s a good bet they have added sugar as well.Ěý

Remove potatoes, tomatoes, and fruit juice, and Americans eat barely 2.5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day on average, and even that may be overstating it. How did our diets get so bad and how can we improve them? 

The main problem is corporations hold sway over our food system and our lives, from work and housing to family and leisure. Agribusiness fruits and vegetables are expensive. They are grown thousands of miles from our tables, expensive to transport and store, and cost far more per calorie than energy-dense and heavily such as beef, cheese, wheat, and sugar. Since we are time and money stressed, we eat subsidized foods in the form of ultra-processed fast food and junk food that give us a moment of satisfaction at the cost of a lifetime of illness.Ěý

The solution is simple: Remove the profit motive so workers and communities own and operate farms, kitchens, grocers, and restaurants. This would allow us to mine our vast culinary history to match food cultures with local communities, tastes, and bioregions. Food cooked daily from fresh ingredients in small batches is mostly found in immigrant or high-end restaurants as it requires skill and labor. Such restaurants often exploit workers, but we could redirect tens of billions in agricultural subsidies that benefit food giants to subsidize local systems with cuisines that are far more delicious than corporate food while being healthy and low cost.

Of course we need to build a constituency and political power to have any hope of creating food systems free of capitalist rot. In the meantime, how do we get more fresh produce every day?

I tried one method after stumbling on an created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2013. Based on age, exercise, and gender, it told me how many fruits and vegetables I should eat. Forget five a day—as a male in my 40s who exercised more than one hour a day, I had to eat 12 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. For my partner, Michelle, who is similarly active, it was 10 servings a day. (, but there is a similar one at .)Ěý

I was stunned. Having cooked professionally, I knew that meant shopping, prepping, cooking, cleaning, and storing 154 portions of fruits and vegetables a week. I tried it for several months. It took me 25 hours a week or more, almost a full-time job. But I discovered something interesting. When I ate more than eight servings of produce a day, I shifted to a plant-based diet. I was eating fewer chips and cold cuts, and more salads, beans, pickles, fresh fruit smoothies, and stir fries. 

Even though I work from home, spending so much time cooking wasn’t a realistic solution for me, much less for families with kids and those who don’t have professional skills and equipment. 

The most important morsel of knowledge for healthier eating is understanding what motivates food choices. Taste, convenience, speed, predictability, and cost determine what we eat. We hit the drive-through because we know and like how that fried chicken sandwich tastes, it is (relatively) cheap, the location is convenient as is eating—it can be done with one hand while driving—and it’s quick to order, cook, eat, and clean up. 

have risen sharply as eating out has soared. Over a 40-year period, beginning in the late 1970s, more than 70 percent, and fast food visits nearly tripled. Knowing this, eat at home as much as possible. Minimally processed foods such as pre-cut vegetables and salads are fine. When possible, avoid highly processed foods in bags, cans, and boxes. Plain frozen fruit and vegetables are great since they preserve the nutritional value at peak harvest, but when possible, avoid frozen meals like burritos, dumplings, and pizzas. They tend to have lots of additives, are high calorie, and lead to overconsumption. Eat produce without gobs of meat, dairy, oil, and sugar. We joke that “,” but putting a salad on top of a slice doesn’t make it healthier. Have a salad instead.Ěý

While we should eat more fruits and vegetables however we can, we can’t put the onus on individuals if for no other reason than 50 years of health advice is not working. Real change begins with knowing how Big Food is tricking us into thinking we are eating healthy when we aren’t. Ultimately we need to tear out the existing food system root and branch, and create a culinary polyculture that serves the needs of humans and the planet.

“Wąđ saw, finally, after about a year and a half of genocide, a ceasefire was reached, which was a relief in many respects and a reflection of the might of the movement,” says Sumaya Awad, director of strategy at the (AJP). 

“Still,” adds Awad, “it’s not a sigh-of-relief-and-sit-down situation. This is when the work really begins, because what existed pre-ceasefire was oppression, occupation, and violence, and that’s not what we want to go back to. And certainly, we owe the people of Gaza so much more than that.”

Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire arrangement before President Joe Biden left office. The first of three phases of that agreement mandated a temporary ceasefire, which took effect on Jan. 19, 2025, and concluded on Mar. 1, 2025. As part of the second phase, Israel was supposed to accept a permanent ceasefire, but that did not take effect as the Israeli government sought to . 

Rather than abiding by the terms of the three-phase arrangement, Israel has and supplies into Gaza since Mar. 2, 2025, worsening the humanitarian crisis and and the in . 

Gaza’s population is in desperate need of food, , and other vital supplies. At least have been displaced since Israel invaded in October 2023. More than was at crisis level of acute food insecurity or worse in December 2024, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. Even after aid increased following the ceasefire agreement in late January 2025, the United Nations Children’s Fund found in mid-February that 90 percent of children under the age of 2 and 95 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding people in Gaza continued to face “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Since the ceasefire agreement, Israel has also on Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli forces have and expelled an estimated from their homes in the West Bank since late January 2025, as Israeli lawmakers more territories in the area .

Meanwhile, since his inauguration, Trump has continued the U.S.’s long-standing policy of cozying up to Israel and funding its occupation and attacks on Palestinians. The new administration has already approved about $12 billion in major foreign military sales to Israel, including an emergency authorization that . This support adds to the more than 100 to Israel, amounting to tens of billions of dollars since October 2023. 

Trump has also set out to capitalize on the genocide in Gaza, aiming to extract profits from cleanup and reconstruction efforts, which are expected to cost over the next decade. At a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 4, 2025, Trump to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the enclave, assume U.S. ownership of the territory, and redevelop it as the “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

While Trump and his allies attempt to shift the conversation about colonization and genocide in Gaza toward one about a profitable redevelopment, organizers in the U.S. remain committed to demands for Palestinian liberation and sovereignty. “Palestinians should be rebuilding Gaza and no one else—not outside contractors, certainly not the U.S., not foreign NGOs with their own agendas, and obviously not Israel,” says Awad.

For Stefanie Fox, executive director of , efforts by those in power to build a narrative obscuring violence against Palestinians are nothing new. Since Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023, American lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and much of the mainstream media have weaponized a dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism to obscure Israel’s atrocities and condemn anti-war protestors. JVP has been at the forefront of battling claims that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, including through organized campaigns to stop policymakers, news agencies, and schools from working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a U.S.-based Zionist nonprofit organization. 

“The ADL uses this banner of so-called Jewish safety to protect Israeli apartheid and genocide and even right-wing antisemites in [the U.S.],” explains Fox. “[The organization] spent the last year lambasting students, including Jewish students, who are protesting genocide as antisemites, yet it has nothing to say about the coming from the inaugural stage or MAGA forces that are the source of actual antisemitism endangering Jewish safety right now.”

JVP also organizes against the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticisms of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism, in legislation and at public institutions, . This work includes a campaign against to use the IHRA definition to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws. Fox says these ongoing fights are crucial “to ensure that false accusations of antisemitism can’t be used to pit our communities against each other and defend war crimes.”

Referencing the narrative of ethnic cleansing as redevelopment coming from the Oval Office now, Fox says, “Wąđ will keep fighting, and we won’t be confused that just because the genocide is being rebranded, that it has stopped.”

The Trump administration also presents to those organizing in the U.S. against attacks on Palestine. On Jan. 29, 2025, Trump issued that the White House would use “ to marshall all Federal resources to combat the explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and in our streets since Oct. 7, 2023.”

Adam Michaels, a graduate student worker at City University of New York (CUNY) and an organizer with CUNY for Palestine, who requested a pseudonym to protect them from retaliation, says those in the student movement remain resolute. Student-led , including one on , helped bring attention to the genocide in Gaza last year, put significant pressure on lawmakers to take action on the issue, and won some concessions from the universities. Now, Michaels says, “There’s definitely a fear of the kind of chilling effect of Trump,” who has on the pro-Palestine movement and student protestors. Following the and , a Palestinian lawful permanent resident of the U.S., on Mar. 8, 2025, Trump took to social media to promise that Khalil’s eventual deportation would be “.” Khalil was unlawfully targeted by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement because he helped lead negotiations between the Columbia University student encampment and administrators last year.Ěý

“These kinds of threats have been hung over Palestine organizers for so long—the Biden administration —so I think people are like, ‘We’ll deal with it as it comes,’” says Michael. Khalil’s detention has already and drawn condemnation from rights groups, including the . On Mar. 11, 2025, a federal judge , allowing time to review a petition challenging Khalil’s arrest.

Fox emphasizes the need to persist, saying, “Wąđ’re clear on the fact that we’re not going to cede an inch before it’s taken and that we will remain in struggle, and that includes being in mobilization, in the streets, and in protest, and that defiance is going to be essential.”

Beyond campaigns to combat weaponized narratives and commitments to continue mass mobilization, those in the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. are also forging ahead with divestment campaigns, which began to gain steam last year. Nationwide, workers have begun . Many student groups are making the same demands of their universities, while other campaigns target municipal or state funds. 

As part of this work, JVP leads an initiative called , which seeds and supports local efforts to demand divestment from . “Economic pressure campaigns have shifted seemingly immovable political conditions time and again from apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow South,” says Fox. “It has never been clearer that it’s time to escalate those campaigns for Palestine right now.”

Meanwhile, AJP also has a new tool for organizers to support economic and social pressure campaigns: . This research initiative offers a dataset with more than 500 entries, showing board members and executives at major weapons companies who also serve in administrative or advisory roles at educational and cultural institutions nationwide, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and . It gives organizers a roster of secondary targets who could be pressured to drop partnerships with weapons companies and their executives due to the threat of lost prestige or legitimacy, whereas putting social pressure on a weapons manufacturer is less likely to be effective. 

Going forward, organizers working toward Palestinian liberation agree that coalition building will be vital. Awad sees not only opportunities to build solidarity between the Palestinian liberation movement and the immigrant rights movement but also a duty to do so. “There is a deep connection between the Palestinian struggle and the immigrant rights struggle,” she says. “Wąđ [need to] show up for them in the way that they’ve shown up for us in a way that can tie our struggles together.” Indeed, Khalil’s case ties immigration to Palestine issues in a concrete way. 

Michaels sees similar opportunities to build solidarity within the labor movement. “Union work is crucial here,” says Michaels, who is also a member of the (PSC), a union representing faculty and professional staff at CUNY. “People are thinking about, ‘How do I bring the struggle to my institution?’ Well, taking back grassroots control of unions and using that to organize with Palestinians.”

The 10 national unions of the have made organizing for a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo part of their day-to-day union work. Together, those labor organizations represent more than 10 million workers nationwide. Many more unions are also pursuing , including the PSC.

Fox says building solidarity is also key to defending democracy under the second Trump administration. “The right is going to attempt to really take down the movement for Palestinian rights and freedom, both because they want to go after this really powerful social movement that’s risen in the last year and a half and also because they’re trying to sharpen tools they’ll use on all of our movements and communities,” she says. “Wąđ need to see that our struggles for safety, freedom, and justice are all inextricably linked.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2:02 p.m. PT on March 31, 2025, to anonymize a source. Read our corrections policy here.

Gonzalez, 56, had spent most of her adult life recovering from the pain and trauma of childhood abuse and domestic violence. She has a loving family and a stable marriage of 25 years. Her family couldn’t understand why she would want to talk to the kind of person she’d spent her life trying to escape.

But for Gonzalez, sharing her story was a way to bring her healing journey full circle. After years of perseverance, she’d established herself as a community services manager for House of Ruth, a nonprofit organization based in Pomona, California. Every day, she helps survivors wrestle with similar challenges to the ones she’s faced. 

When she received an invitation to speak at the California Institution for Men, a prison in the city of Chino, California, in August, she saw a new opportunity to help interrupt the cycle of domestic and sexual violence: talking directly with people who have caused harm.

“I know that change is possible,” Gonzalez says. “It’s good when somebody is able to tell you that a life without violence and any type of abuse in the home is possible.”

The panel was organized by a program called the Victim Offender Education Group. Founded by, the program provides rehabilitation activities for men at the California Institution for Men. The curriculum is grounded in principles of restorative justice, commonly defined as an alternative to punitive justice that promotes healing for the person who was harmed, the person who carried out the harm, and the communities they both belong to. 

Although the group was not created specifically for people involved in domestic violence and intimate partner violence, it has increasingly focused on serving this population as it became clear that many program participants had committed these types of crimes, said Rev. Nora Jacob, a minister at Covina Community Church and program lead in restorative justice at the prison.

Jacob has been organizing education groups in prison settings since 2014 and has facilitated the rehabilitation of several cohorts of men who have committed a variety of crimes, including domestic violence and intimate partner violence. A two-hour session is held once per week and consists of a mix of readings and empathy-building exercises. Participants spend time sharing and self-reflecting on the decisions and circumstances that led to their incarceration.

“People come out changed,” Jacob says. At the introductory meeting, she tells participants: “Wąđ are asking you to share as much as you’re willing to share, and we are going to ask about everything.”

Reconciling with hurt is something that Jacob has had to do in her own life. As a child growing up in upstate New York, she was sexually abused. “What I’d been told about God—that a creator was real, that God had not seen or heard me when I cried out” she could no longer believe, she says. “So I rejected any kind of organized religion for a long time.”

Decades passed, and Jacob found herself married and living in Orange County, California. She then faced a crisis when her husband of 19 years suddenly passed away from a brain aneurysm. “One night I was contemplating suicide and called out to God—I didn’t believe in God—and had a feeling of the Holy Spirit coming over and reassuring me.”

Jacob, a library services director at the time, joined the Disciples of Christ denomination church in her county. She eventually enrolled in Claremont School of Theology where she spent time with social justice activists. After graduating, Jacob trained at Insight Prison Project in the Bay Area to be a restorative justice facilitator and eventually secured her current position at the California Institution for Men.

“I’m committed to restorative justice,” Jacob says. “I live differently because of restorative justice, and anything that can do that [kind of transformation] for a person I think is worth the pursuit.”

Restorative justice started gaining momentum among grassroots organizations in the 1970s, but it is not a new practice, as its roots are in Indigenous customs, such as talking circles. Restorative justice has grown in popularity for its, which is the likelihood that a previously incarcerated person will re-offend for the same crime. That’s what Jacob has seen among the men her program works with. Incarcerated individuals who take part in rehabilitative programs are less likely to reoffend than their counterparts who don’t, according to by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The Costs of Violence

Domestic violence refers to any type of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse inflicted on a person by their partner, family member, or cohabitant. Intimate partner violence is similar, but refers specifically to violence from a partner, spouse, or ex-partner. These crimes don’t just affect the victims and their families; they also have huge financial implications for society at large.

Intimate partner violence against women costs California $73.7 billion in health care, lost earnings, criminal justice expenses, and survivor support, which accounted for 2% of California’s gross domestic product in 2022 alone, according to . The study, which primarily uses data compiled from the, measures both the tangible and intangible costs of intimate partner violence. The study also draws on data from other sources, including the U.S. Department of Justice, the state budget, health care providers, the Centers for Disease Control, and many others.

, PhD, an associate professor at UC San Diego and principal investigator for the survey, said that while the price tag might be high, it only represents a fraction of these crimes’ negative impacts because of gaps in data collection. 

Thomas gave some examples, such as lack of data quantifying the amount of time police spend investigating intimate partner violence, or more specific data regarding health care costs and the impact on survivors’ quality of life. “ This is not just costing taxpayers,” Thomas says. “It costs the people who have to deal with that violence quite dearly, both financially and in intangible ways.”

Breaking Cycles of Abuse

For the panel event, Gonzalez and other nonprofit advocates were paired with an education group member and filled the role of a surrogate survivor, someone who could tell their member how it felt to be the victim of domestic or intimate partner violence. The exercise represented the culmination of the members’ education and was meant to gauge whether each man could feel empathy for their surrogate survivor and remorse for the immense hurt they had caused others.

For the surrogate survivors, sharing their stories is potentially a cathartic experience, said Melissa Pitts, the chief program officer for , who also served on the panel. That’s because many survivors have never had the opportunity to address the people who caused them harm.

That’s what convinced Gonzalez to participate in the panel. She said she was initially skeptical of the idea. “Then I thought about it and [realized] I’ve never been able to face any of my attackers and let someone know exactly how I felt,” Gonzalez says.

Pitts said that organizations like House of Ruth are increasingly interested in restorative justice practices, while remaining survivor centered. One motivation, she said, is that domestic violence is widespread, but carceral solutions typically don’t get to the root of the problem. For example, many people who cause harm are replicating abusive patterns they learned in childhood, she explained.

The need is widespread. “If you go to the prison system, a corrections officer will tell you 90% of their caseload has experienced domestic violence growing up in the home,” Pitts says. “And then you can go to an affluent community with lots of monetary resources, and they are experiencing domestic violence.”

One former education group participant at the California Institution for Men, who requested anonymity because of safety concerns, believes the harm he committed stems back to his traumatic adolescence. The participant was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for a domestic-violence-related murder.

The man said he grew up in a household where violence was commonplace. Years of neglect and abuse carried out by his father, mother, and other adults in his life pushed him toward drugs and gangs, he said. The violence also distorted how he viewed relationships. “The way that my mom, father, and stepfather talked about women led me to believe that you couldn’t trust women, and I carried that into my relationships,” he says.

Once incarcerated at the California Institution for Men, the man began to meet other people in rehabilitation classes who had faced similar struggles. After connecting with Jacob and other advocates affiliated with the Victim Offender Education Group, he decided to apply. He spent the next few years in group restorative justice circles unpacking his pain and learning to accept responsibility for the violence he inflicted upon women and others.

The man said his life-changing moment came when, after years of therapy and reflection, he took part in a surrogate survivor panel. “Hearing the raw emotions coming out of someone that had been a victim of a similar crime, it stirred up something in me which I had never felt, which was empathy,” he says. “I really started to realize the harm that I caused. Before, I always felt that no one cared about me, so why should I care about anybody?”

The participant was paroled over a year ago and is now involved in restorative justice advocacy, speaking to youth in juvenile hall. He also visits the California Institution of Men to share his story with those who are incarcerated. For him, being able to feel guilt and remorse for his past actions has been the key to genuinely turning his life around.

“For me, genuine change is remorse,” he says. “It changes who you are, so you don’t … continue to harm people.”

For Gonzalez, participating in the panel didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. She said she left the event feeling like the incarcerated person she’d spoken with had more work to do, a sentiment she shared with Jacob afterward.

“The reaction I got from this individual wasn’t what I was expecting, so I walked out of there feeling a little confused,” she says. “I thought I was going to see the remorse. My expectation was to see something visual.”

Instead, the man didn’t say much and, according to her, didn’t appear to show empathy. Still, Gonzalez said she believes in the program’s mission and thinks the person she talked to can benefit from it.

“Even with the harm he’s caused, I feel he deserves to have somebody continue to teach him, whatever needs to be done for him to come to terms with how he has caused harm,” Gonzalez says.

She also walked away feeling proud of the progress she’d made to date.

“The biggest thing I took [away] is that change is so powerful,” she says. “Even as a victim, it’s possible to become 100% a survivor and have full control.”

This story was produced in collaboration with the.

In 2018, she discovered the childfree subreddit, an online forum on Reddit for people who do not have children and do not want them. In that forum, she learned about , a procedure that removes both fallopian tubes and permanently prevents pregnancy.

“I was 19 or 20, and I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to get it,” says Young, who didn’t meet the minimum age requirement to have a at the time. “But it was something that was kind of in my back pocket.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

In 2022, when a document suggesting the U.S. Supreme Court was likely going to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked, Young, who now met the minimum age requirement, immediately made an appointment with her gynecologist for a bilateral salpingectomy. 

After observing the mandatory one-month waiting period, Young received the procedure. “[I had felt like] an animal in a trap,” she says. “But when I woke up from that surgery, it was just … indescribable peace.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Young is one of many people of reproductive age whose health care decisions have been influenced by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the fundamental ruling protecting the right to abortion in the United States.

In the years since, for people between 18 and 30 has jumped, particularly among female-born people. During the 2024 election, abortion rights were a key ballot issue and several states, including Maryland and Colorado, enshrined the right to abortion into their state constitutions. 

Political promises to legalize abortion—a critical issue, but one topic in the much larger ecosystem of reproductive health care—have overlooked some of the discussions the country must have to improve reproductive rights for the millions of reproducing people in America. When we take a closer look at the quality of reproductive health care that most people receive, it’s clear that simply restoring Roe v. Wade isn’t enough.

“The populations with the best reproductive health care outcomes … have all of [their] basic and human life needs met,” says Dr. Regina Davis Moss, president and CEO of , a group that amplifies Black voices to advocate for reproductive equity. “That is why we have some of the worst outcomes when we compare ourselves to other industrialized countries.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Pregnant people in the United States are more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum than any other high-income nation, even though are preventable. The , who statistically are less likely to have access to high-quality medical care. On average, giving birth in the U.S. can . 

Cost is a leading prohibitive factor for those who most need to access birth control, abortion, and other reproductive health care. But there are legal barriers to subsidizing reproductive health care services—such as the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion with few exceptions—and in many counties, no one to provide them. An estimated , for example, do not have a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician to deliver maternal care. 

So, what might reproductive health care look like in a reimagined America that puts equity first? There’s already a framework for it: , a critical feminist framework that advocates for the right to have children, the right not to have them, and the right to raise children in a safe environment.

A Quest for Overall Well-Being 

In 1994, a group of Black women activists coined the term “reproductive justice” to achieve, as , “the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, and economic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of women’s human rights.”

While reproductive justice promotes equitable reproductive health care for everyone, the idea was born out of the struggles that people of color—particularly Black women—have faced in the United States since slavery, when they were forced to bear children to work on plantations.

The framework acknowledges that Black women face poorer reproductive health outcomes—and aims to do something about it. “The reproductive justice framework analyzes how the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community—and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access,” Ross writes. “Reproductive justice addresses the social reality of inequality—specifically, the inequality of opportunities that we have to control our reproductive destiny.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

There is a modern-day implicit bias in health care, says Davis Moss, that women as a whole can’t be trusted to make their own decisions about their bodies. For example, Black women commonly report that health care providers are not offering them the full range of contraceptive options.

“The subjugation, the control, all that has happened ever since the country was born,” says Davis Moss. “Wąđ’ve seen that happen over the years in our health care system, in segregated hospitals, all the way up to modern day in clinical care encounters.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Though Young’s bilateral salpingectomy, which can cost thousands of dollars without insurance, was fully covered by Ohio Medicaid, cost remains a prohibitive factor for many people accessing reproductive health care in the United States. 

Take contraception, for example. A , which interviewed more than 5,000 female-born participants, looked at how cost influences contraceptive choice. Researchers found that a quarter of those surveyed with insurance had to pay at least part of their birth control costs out of pocket. “Any time you have to make a choice about day-to-day expenses and a copay… you know, living expenses, keeping food on the table… that is going to have an impact [on health],” says Davis Moss. 

The survey also found that of those who were in their reproductive years, one in five women who were uninsured had to stop using a contraceptive method because they couldn’t afford it. That data is supported by a Commonwealth Fund survey of women in several high-income nations, which found that women of reproductive age in the U.S. were the most likely to due to cost.

Solutions for the Future

In 2023, In Our Own Voice and more than 50 other Black women’s organizations published the , a playbook on how to improve reproductive justice for birthing people at the policy level. 

The report makes more than a dozen policy recommendations that Davis Moss calls “proactive, comprehensive, and life-saving.” Among them are , requiring states to provide maternity and newborn care for at least one year (the time frame in which ), and increasing access to doulas and midwives who advocate for patients.

Passing acts like the would require the federal government to provide funding for abortion services. “That in and of itself directly impacts a large percentage of Black women of child-bearing age [who] are on Medicaid and Medicare,” says Davis Moss.

For people struggling to pay for contraception, with or without health insurance, the cost of an in-person abortion—the median price is $600—is somewhat unthinkable. Medication abortion, however, can be cheaper and more accessible. Such is the promise of telehealth abortion, a virtual way to connect with a doctor, receive a prescription, and take abortion pills in a supportive environment.

Increasingly more women in the United States are finding themselves living in maternity care and —areas where there is limited or nonexistent access to prenatal, postnatal, maternity, contraceptive, or abortion services. Telemedicine can provide a range of services for people living in these areas at a fraction of the cost—the median price of a telehealth medication abortion is $150.

“Telehealth does a lot to remove barriers to access to health care,” says Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at UC San Francisco who researches the impacts of telehealth abortion. “People who live in rural areas, young people, people who report facing food insecurity… in our research, they are the most likely to have said that telehealth enabled them to have an abortion.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

But even with the advent of telehealth, both Upadhyay and Davis Moss say addressing racism is essential to establishing an equitable reproductive future. That’s one of the reasons the Black Reproductive Policy Agenda recommends funding anti-Black racism programs as a part of its agenda. 

“This is the reason those 12 Black women 30 years ago said ‘You can’t only focus on abortion,’” says Davis Moss. “It’s impossible to have one without the other.”

After getting a bilateral salpingectomy, Young feels relieved. Yet she still worries about what will happen with Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act—the resources she relies on to help her afford care for chronic health issues—under the Trump administration, and what that means for others seeking care.

“Thinking about if other women don’t have access, that breaks my heart, and from the abortion side […] it’s too much to bear,” she says, emotion tugging at her voice.  “I feel relieved I got [the procedure] done when I did. I feel safe.”

The frog appears to be calmly responding, or at least thinking, “Bro, relax, I am literally just attractive.” Underneath this image and text is a scene from the gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain, showing Heath Ledger’s character, Ennis, hugging Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Jack, from behind.

Mediatized panic over the specter of gay frogs, including queer mockery of this panic, has a more traceable history. Beginning in the 1990s, scientists began sounding the alarm over synthetic substances called endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which interfere with naturally occurring hormones and thus interfere with all kinds of bodily functions and organ development, including but not limited to reproductive organs. 

While these environmental health scientists meant well, and hormone-interfering chemicals do appear to cause serious health issues, including cancer and diabetes, the science and advocacy around these chemicals almost exclusively focused on their reportedly feminizing effects, in terms of reproductive organs as well as what’s understood as sexual behavior.

One 2008 documentary lamented the “disappearing male,” for instance, and a , publicly endorsed by famed environmental activist Erin Brockovich, despaired over the threats that “plummeting sperm counts” and “shrinking penises” posed to humanity.

Frogs, meanwhile, have been a model organism for laboratory science for as long as laboratory science has existed. And frogs make sense to study in the context of toxic environmental exposures because they spend so much of their lives in the water, where so much chemical pollution circulates.

Scientists studying the effects of EDCs on frogs widely reported that individual frogs exposed to these chemicals displayed same-sex sexual behavior, exhibited both female- and male-marked phenotypes, and tadpoles changed sex during development, resulting in what researchers and journalists variously called “gay,” “intersex,” or “transgender” frogs (with “sad sex lives” to boot). Queerness was thus characterized as a bad outcome of toxic exposure, and media outlets—both mainstream and fringe—were quick to jump directly from frog to human bodies and behaviors.

Framing same-sex sexual behavior, transness, or intersex conditions as both unnatural and undesirable has a long and ugly history that continues to rear its head, as demonstrated by recent and proliferating statewide bans on gender-affirming care and sexuality education. But labeling frogs as harmed by toxicants because toxicants “make them gay” is not only socially wrong, it’s also biologically wrong.

Frogs, among many other animal species, engage in same-sex sexual behaviors in the wild all the time. And tadpoles, it turns out, change sex all the time, irrespective of chemical exposure. Intersex frogs, meanwhile, can still successfully mate to produce offspring.

Scientists overwhelmingly assumed that intersex frogs and male-male frog sex—nobody seemed concerned about female-female frog sex—demonstrated evidence of chemical harm because that’s what biological sciences like toxicology have taught them. I hope my work helps correct this scientific and popular miseducation, for the sake of stamping out stigma as well as injustice.

Toxic environmental pollution, as environmental researchers and activists have amply documented, is indeed demonstrably harmful, while its demonstrable harms are vastly and unevenly deployed. The challenge I offer—and rise to—is how to organize effective political action against the poisoners without stigmatizing the poisoned. I am pushing people to ask not simply what makes a poison, but rather who?

Toward Critical Toxicity Studies

The scientific elites who codified toxicology occupied particular gender-, race-, and class-privileged social locations, positions that empowered them to grant themselves the authority to define what makes a toxicant safe (and measurable), what chemical risks are acceptable (and to whom), and how much of an exposure is tolerable (where, for whom, and for what). 

I show that despite toxicologists’ best intentions, toxicology’s inherent biases undermine the usefulness of toxicological findings for environmental justice struggles by focusing on the environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology of EDCs, which is the sub-field fretting about feminized frogs.

The challenge for critical feminists and EDC toxicologists, including those who identify as both, is to communicate the urgency of reducing toxic pollution—by both better regulating chemicals and reining in corporate power—without resorting to eugenicist and masculinist tropes of deformity, low intelligence, queerness, or weakness.

I do not mean to sound flippant; EDCs are a class of toxicants that have become ubiquitous throughout our environments, being constitutive components of such commonplace objects as plastic bottles, receipt paper, or body lotion, among many other items. EDCs are particularly alarming to scientists and other environmental health advocates because they have been shown to interfere with our bodies’ hormonal processes via the endocrine system. 

Hormonal disturbances, in turn, can adversely affect fundamental aspects of physiological development and function, leading to a range of serious health issues, including different cancers and cardiovascular and metabolic failures. Moreover, because EDCs either mimic or override bodies’ naturally occurring hormone signals and hormone receptors, these particular toxicants may be more harmful at lower doses than at higher doses, upending the core tenet of toxicology: “The dose makes the poison.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

My work does not question the urgency of attending to EDC contamination, but rather how EDC toxicology inadvertently—or by design—reviles the poisoned more than the poisoner.

As mentioned, decades of EDC research on frogs in particular has been built on the homophobic and ableist assumptions that same-sex sexual behavior is abnormal, that frog sex changes are unnatural, and that intersex frogs cannot produce offspring.

The violent histories that EDC research unwittingly recites by deploying such terms as “demasculinization” and “chemical castration” is a form of violence in and of itself. By assuming and perpetuating the white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies that queer, transgender, intersex, neurodivergent, and disabled bodies are somehow aberrant (read: abhorrent), the work of prominent EDC researchers and anti-toxics advocates reinforces social stigma as well as judicial, material, and biomedical inequity.

Social science scholars and activists have well documented the unjust ways that people who are marked as queer, trans, disabled, nonwhite, and foreign struggle disproportionately more to receive the medical care they need, safely access transportation and public restrooms, survive bullying and other forms of violence in schools and sports, and so on.

Put another way, feminist critique of EDC research and advocacy is not simply about problematic language or social stigma on a conceptual level, it’s about how scientific theories can be complicit in prejudicial mistreatment on an undeniably material, visceral level—and sometimes fatally so.

Critical Toxicity Studies calls for a queer, ecofeminist study of toxicants that explicitly, carefully situates toxicants in their sociohistorical contexts, while simultaneously prefiguring a world where all bodies and identities—whether female, male, trans, intersex, disabled, queer, melanated, more-than-human, microbial, weedy, fungal, fishy, fat, young, old, sick, and so on—are fiercely, generously, handled with care.

This excerpt, adapted from by Melina Packer (New York University Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

No Other Land chronicles the efforts of Palestinian townspeople to combat an Israeli plan to demolish their villages in the West Bank and use the area as a military training ground. It was directed by four Palestinian and Israeli activists and journalists: , who is a resident of the area facing demolition, , Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor. While the filmmakers  in a number of U.S. cities, the lack of a national distributor makes a broader release unlikely.

Film distributors are a crucial but often unseen link in the chain that allows a film to reach cinemas and people’s living rooms. In recent years, it has become more common for controversial award-winning films . Palestinian films have encountered additional barriers.

 who has written about Palestinian cinema, I’m disheartened by the difficulties No Other Land has faced. But I’m not surprised.

The Role of Film Distributors

Distributors are often invisible to moviegoers. , it can be difficult for a film to find an audience. Distributors typically acquire rights to a film for a specific country or set of countries. They then , cinema chains, and streaming platforms. As compensation, distributors receive a percentage of the revenue generated by theatrical and home releases.

The film , another finalist for best documentary, shows how this process typically works. It premiered at the  in January 2024 and was acquired for distribution just a few months later by , a major U.S.-based distributor of independent films.

The inability to find a distributor is not itself noteworthy. No film is entitled to distribution, and most films by newer or unknown directors face long odds. However, it is unusual for a film like No Other Land,Ěýwhich has and has been recognizedĚýat various film festivals and award shows.ĚýNo Other LandĚý, where it’s easily accessible on multiple streaming platforms. So why can’t No Other Land find a distributor in the U.S.? There are a couple of factors at play.

Shying Away From Controversy

In recent years, film critics have noticed a trend: Documentaries on controversial topics . These include to unionize and , one of the few Republican congresspeople to vote to impeach Donald Trump in 2021.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, of course, has long stirred controversy. But the release of No Other Land comes at a time when the issue is particularly salient. The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip have become a polarizing issue in U.S. domestic politics, reflected in the campus protests and crackdowns in 2024. The filmmakers’ critical comments about the Israeli occupation of Palestine have also  in Germany.

Yet the fact that this conflict has been in the news since October 2023 should also heighten audience interest in a film such as No Other Land—and, therefore, lead to increased sales, the metric that distributors care about the most.

Indeed, an earlier film that also documents Palestinian protests against Israeli land expropriation, , was a finalist for best documentary at the 2013 Academy Awards. It was able to find a U.S. distributor. However, it had the support of a major European Union documentary development program . The support of an organization like Greenhouse, which had ties to numerous production and distribution companies in Europe and the U.S., can facilitate the process of finding a distributor.

By contrast, No Other Land, although it has  and received some funding from organizations in Europe and the U.S., was made primarily by a grassroots filmmaking collective.

Stages for Protest

While distribution challenges may be recent, controversies surrounding Palestinian films are nothing new. Many of them stem from the fact that the system of film festivals, awards, and distribution is primarily based on a movie’s nation of origin. Since there is no sovereign Palestinian state—and many countries and organizations â€”the question of how to categorize Palestinian films has been hard to resolve.

In 2002, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences  submitted to the best foreign language film category——because Palestine was not recognized as a country by the United Nations. The rules were changed for the following year’s awards ceremony.

In 2021, the cast of the film , which had an Israeli director but primarily Palestinian actors,  in protest of the film’s categorization as an Israeli film rather than a Palestinian one.

Film festivals and other cultural venues have also become places to  and . For example, at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, the right-wing Israeli culture minister â€”a˛Ôťĺ&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;—dress that featured the Jerusalem skyline in support of Israeli claims of sovereignty over the holy city, despite under international law.

At theĚý, a number of attendees, including Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo, and Mahershala Ali, wore red pins in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, and pro-Palestine protesters delayed the start of the ceremonies. As he accepted his award at the 2025 Academy Awards, No Other Land Ěý“the foreign policy” of the U.S. for “helping to block” a path to peace. Even though a film like No Other Land addresses a topic of clear interest to many Americans, I wonder if the quest to find a U.S. distributor just got even harder.

This article is republished fromĚýĚýunder a Creative Commons license. .

When Tisoy was 20, she began transitioning. Within five years of her transition, Bucaramanga, which was once her refuge, no longer felt safe. So in late 2024, Tisoy, who is now 25, decided to begin journeying toward the United States because she’s drawn to what she calls the country’s “open-minded culture.”

“The last time I went [to my community] was very difficult because there was criticism, insults, threats, and I made the decision to leave Colombia,” Tisoy said from a migrant shelter in northern Mexico. “I said I’m [also] not doing well in Bucaramanga, so I want to change my life.”

Since taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump has taken a series of as well as transgender and nonbinary people. For trans migrants like Tisoy, who are already undertaking arduous journeys to the United States, asylum options have been shut down, and the hope of finding safe haven is dwindling.

In response to the changing environment, key initiatives in Mexico are focusing on developing more long-term and comprehensive support for LGBTQ migrants, who may be in Mexico for a longer time than originally intended.

A Continuous Search for Safety

The LGBTQ community experiences continuous displacement, especially if they are rejected by their communities and families and are seeking access to medical care. However, there is little data on LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers in the U.S., which hinders a better understanding of their characteristics and experiences.

found that between 2012 and 2017 an estimated 11,400 asylum applications were filed by LGBTQ individuals. Nearly 4,000 of these applicants sought asylum specifically due to fear of persecution based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

RaĂşl Caporal, director of , which provides refuge for LGBTQ migrants in Mexico City, Tapachula, and Monterrey, Mexico, explained that the majority of the individuals they serve are fleeing violence and seeking international protection.

“The population we focus on leaves their countries because of persecution and violence motivated by sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression,” Caporal says.

“[This is compounded] by organized crime taking advantage of their vulnerability, the absence of the state, and the inability to access justice institutions when they try to report crimes.”

Latin America and the Caribbean report the highest number of trans murders of any region in the world. According to Transrespect Versus Transphobia Worldwide, globally occur there, with the majority of victims being Black trans women, trans women of color, and trans sex workers. In Mexico alone, according to data from Mexico’s National Trans and Nonbinary Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Trans No Binarie), last year, making it the second deadliest country in the world for trans people, after Brazil.

Brigitte Baltazar, a Mexican trans activist who resides in Tijuana, Mexico, after being deported from the U.S. in 2021, explains that trans asylum seekers no longer see the U.S. as a safe haven as Donald Trump signs harsh executive orders targeting trans and nonbinary people as well as immigrants. Baltazar says that these executive orders “increase the stigma and discrimination [trans migrants are] already experiencing,” which “creates a state of panic.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Though Casa Frida documented that 67% of the people they served in 2024 didn’t have the U.S. as their final destination, the remaining 33% intended to reach the U.S. using CBP One, a mobile app that migrants can use to apply to enter the U.S. However, that option was discontinued by the Trump administration in January.

Activists and organizations agree that strengthening access to asylum in Mexico, along with health care and job opportunities, is key to sustaining support for trans migrants. 

“Mexico has a great opportunity to strengthen its local public policies on integration, particularly at the municipal and state levels,” Caporal adds. “Ultimately, it is the municipalities where refugees will reside, where they will find work close to their homes, where they will generate an income, and where people can continue their studies.”

Strengthening Support Systems for Trans Migrants in Mexico

The persecution and violence LGBTQ individuals face often continue during their journey. Shortly after crossing the Mexico–Guatemala border, Tisoy and a fellow group of migrants were kidnapped. She recalled being held in the backyard of a house for 12 days until her best friend in the United States could raise $1,000 to meet a ransom demand.

Caporal explained that the lack of state protection and inaccessible justice institutions increases the vulnerability of trans migrants, making them easy targets for organized crime. In its latest report, highlights the risks and precariousness faced by people in the U.S.–Mexico border, at the hands of both state and non-state actors. The report warns that many migrants are forced to pay bribes to Mexican authorities, criminal groups, or individuals at checkpoints.

Tisoy arrived in Matamoros, Tamaulipas—a city less than three miles away from Brownsville, Texas—days before Trump’s inauguration. She planned to cross the river and request asylum, but she didn’t have the $200 fee she needed to pay the cartel to cross. With deportations beginning, she now waits near the border as she doesn’t want to risk being taken back to Colombia.

“In this journey, you have to be very positive because if you get depressed, you’re in a city that isn’t yours, in a country that isn’t your own,” Tisoy says. “I cried and prayed a lot, but then I realized I had to keep going. I wiped away my tears and here I am.”

Waiting near the U.S.–Mexico border is increasingly dangerous. Most migrants in Matamoros remain in shelters due to threats of being kidnapped and robbed. For Tisoy, even being at the shelter can be uncomfortable due to the lack of specific support for LGBTQ individuals. 

After families complained about her presence in a shelter with children, she moved to a neutral room in a nearby shelter, but her stay is uncertain with more migrants seeking an extended stay in Mexico. “I arrived normally, and no one had said anything to me,” Tisoy explained. “Then one mother said I was trans and went to complain, but I didn’t understand why she did it.”

After the cancellation of CBP appointments, some migrants returned to Casa Frida to seek legal advice for requesting asylum in Mexico. To seek asylum in Mexico, individuals must apply within 30 days of arrival at a Commission for Refugee Aid (COMAR) office. The application requires completing a form explaining their reasons for leaving their home country, providing supporting documentation, and detailing their fear of persecution based on factors such as race, religion, nationality, political opinion, gender, or social group membership. 

Casa Frida, along with other organizations, is currently working with COMAR to find alternatives to the 30-day rule for those who didn’t apply for asylum because they were waiting for their CBP appointment. Caporal says that Mexico must strengthen its asylum system and provide COMAR with the resources to meet the increasing demand for guidance, incorporating both gender and sexual diversity perspectives.Ěý

“Wąđ are preparing a draft bill to reform the refugee law in the Chamber of Deputies, which seeks to include persecution based on sexual orientation and gender identity as a direct cause for obtaining and recognizing refugee status,” he added.

Guaranteeing Safe and Dignified Spaces

Along with legal counseling, Baltazar said “dignified access to health care” is also a critical need. Baltazar, who also coordinates the LGBTQ program at the migrant organization , explained that Mexico’s bureaucratic and often inhumane health system poses a significant challenge, particularly for trans individuals. 

She regularly accompanies trans migrants to health centers to access antiretrovirals or STI medications, a challenge even for internally displaced Mexicans. The lack of documentation—common for both domestic and foreign migrants who fled without documents or lost them on their journey—further complicates their access to proper health care. 

“With hormone treatments, unfortunately there is no program and there are no specialized doctors, like endocrinologists, who can care for this population,” Baltazar added. “This puts their health at risk since they do not have a hormone treatment controlled by a specialist.”

Tisoy has been struggling to get tested after being sexually assaulted on the train north. “I spent 15 days on the train, and I was raped. So it’s important to me to get tested,” she says. During a stop at Casa Frida in Mexico City, she tried to get tested, but after three days, she decided to continue her journey rather than waiting. 

Before Trump’s inauguration, there was a focus on helping people “while they were able to cross,” but now, Baltazar says there’s an urgent need for a longer-term strategy where people can access health care and other services and opportunities in Mexico. 

“People cannot return to their countries or regions because their lives are in danger. The idea is to offer them workshops and integration support, giving vulnerable people tools so they can do anything in a new country,” Baltazar added. “Perhaps they even discover passions they didn’t have the opportunity to explore in their countries because they weren’t free or didn’t have access to schools, universities, or job training.”

Most shelters and resources for LGBTQ asylum seekers rely on grassroots efforts by activists like Baltazar and organizations like Casa Frida, which depend on volunteer and community support. Casa Frida obtained external funding to continue growing, but nearly 60% of its 2025-2026 budget is at risk due to USAID cuts. 

Though they are developing an emergency plan to continue operations, Caporal warned that wait times for services will likely increase. “Our operational capacity will likely be reduced,” Caporal says. “This may result in longer wait times for those who visit our facilities daily and we will have to ensure that we continue providing the 54,000 meals we serve daily.”Ěý

Caporal agrees that the focus should be on strengthening paths to settle in Mexico and pushing to implement these integration policies, particularly at the local level. Casa Frida is concentrating on these local integration opportunities, providing a safer environment where individuals can explore a wide range of life options.Ěý

“That is when they begin to make the decision that in reality it is not that they want to reach the United States,” Caporal added. “In reality what they want is to reach a safe territory where they can live in freedom, autonomy, and—above all—with pride in being who they are.”

However, as the movie progressed, I shockingly began relating more to Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) than Nessarose, though I am also a wheelchair user. While Elphaba and Nessarose have the same mother, Elphaba was conceived when their mother has an extramarital affair with a man who gives her a green elixir to drink. 

From the moment Elphaba is born with green skin, her father, Frexspar (Andy Nyman), rejects her and begins treating her like an outsider. He even delegates her child-rearing to an anthropomorphic bear named Dulcibear. At the same time, Frexspar dotes relentlessly on Nessarose, his biological daughter, and discourages Elphaba from using magic in public.

Elphaba is treated as an outcast because of her green skin, which the film regards as a disability. Whenever Elphaba encounters a person for the first time, they often visibly gasp because her skin is so different from theirs. “Fine, let’s get this over with,” she always retorts. “No, I am not seasick; no, I did not eat grass as a child; and yes, I’ve always been green.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

When Elphaba first meets Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera) and offers this spiel, Glinda says: “Wąđll I, for one, am so sorry that you have been forced to live with … this.” She then offers to fix Elphaba’s “ailment,” saying, “It is my intention to major in sorcery. So if at some point, you wanted to address the, um, problem, perhaps I could help.”

Elphaba’s green skin, which , is treated by the people around her as a liability or something worthy of being pitied. The inability of Elphaba’s father and classmates to connect with her because of her exterior difference made me recall the many times over the course of my life where I have been pre-judged because I use a wheelchair.Ěý

The hesitation to acknowledge Elphaba’s existence is something I’ve experienced as a Black woman with a physical disability. People have judged and misjudged me before they even learned my name or heard me speak; the world isn’t kind or thoughtful to people whose physical presentations are different. 

It’s painfully familiar for me to be ridiculed before being embraced. I’m always in a cycle of wondering what others think and if they’re being genuine. That’s a sadness that never leaves, even as I’ve grown immune to what others think about me. Throughout the film, Elphaba is isolated, which fuels loneliness—another emotion that’s particularly resonant. Being the “only” in your family and community with such a striking difference is a bold act of existing in a world that demands conformity.  

And yet, despite the fact that Elphaba’s stepfather treats her as if she’s a burden, she’s still incredibly protective of Nessarose. When the sisters first arrive at Shiz University, where Nessarose is enrolled, an overbearing teacher attempts to push Nessarose’s wheelchair before she even asks for assistance. When Elphaba sees this transpire, she becomes upset about her sister being infantilized and conjures powerful magic that gains her impromptu admission into Shiz and gets the immediate attention of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), a professor who begins mentoring her.

Elphaba respects Nessarose’s autonomy, though other people in their lives fail to do so. It’s an example of what I call “The Good Samaritan Gone Wrong” factor, wherein people overextend themselves to help a disabled person without pausing to interrogate why. I am often forced to ask: Did the disabled person ask for help, or are you projecting a sense of helplessness onto them simply because they’re disabled? 

The latter is incredibly ableist, and a disabled person has a right to rebuff that projection. But seeing Nessarose deal with ableism in a whimsical film about magic reminded me that ableism is always lurking, even in Oz.  

But Nessarose doesn’t reciprocate Elphaba’s protective impulse. When Elphaba begins sounding the alarm about anthropomorphic animals losing their ability to speak, she’s disregarded and then silenced, an all-too-familiar reality for Black women in our real world who are constantly attempting to save our society from itself and its cruelty. Since Elphaba is also an outlier who’s isolated and disbelieved, she’s able to easily make the connection between how she’s been treated and how these animals are being treated. She understands that the push for conformity is closer than anyone recognizes. 

This parallel is even more relevant during our current political climate. During the 2024 presidential election, Black voters, especially Black women voters, considered harm reduction while some other voters leaned into—and even relished—the harm. It can be isolating to point out injustice, especially when others can’t see or don’t believe it’s happening.

As a disabled activist, I know that the people—including your fellow comrades, who should understand the misgivings of the world—will choose a less friction-laden route rather than directly addressing the injustice. When I began speaking out against , I realized that people with privilege can be severely conflict avoidant and would rather “play nice” than hold people accountable.

Glinda, who has built a friendship with Elphaba, knows the animals in Oz are losing their ability to speak. And yet, we see her internal conflict around making noise about the issue because she’s worried it could negatively impact her social status as the most popular student at Shiz. Like Glinda, people don’t confront injustice because they still want access to the resources, money, and connections of those who cause harm. It reflects a scarcity mindset in which one believes an oppressor is worth keeping around because of potential gain. 

When Elphaba tries to bring attention to the issues occurring in Oz, she’s first scrutinized, then disbelieved, and eventually betrayed by the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and Madame Morrible. She’s coerced into using her magic to further discriminate against the animals in Oz—and neither Glinda nor Nessarose come to her defense. Instead, she’s forced to go it alone, even as Madame Morrible calls her a “wicked witch” across Oz’s radio waves.

Elphaba is villainized simply because she’s attempting to stop powerful people from causing more harm. There’s a deep “know your place” tone when Elphaba bucks against the Wizard and Madame Morrible—it costs her deeply and shifts the public narrative of who she is. In this moment, we see Elphaba’s undesirability in a new light; it’s no longer just the micro (her interpersonal relationships). It’s now on a macro level, as she’s being treated as a political enemy of the state. 

The parallels in Wicked regarding the ways disability, disabled people, and overall differences among people (and other species) mirror the hardships people who cannot (and do not) conform endure in our society. I left the theater better understanding that the people we view as villains may not be the true or only villain in their story. Erivo breathtakingly embodied Elphaba through every emotion and every moment of rejection and frustration, a commitment that will hopefully continue in Wicked: For Good when it’s released in November. Ultimately, I hope that our collective understanding of Elphaba expands as we uncover what happens to her—and how her story is further shaped by those who failed to view her with care.  

The rapidly circulating avian flu has yet to be detected in New York’s dairy herds, but these farmworkers—members ofĚý, a group dedicated to fighting for the rights of dairy workers and their communities—don’t want to take any chances.

Already detected in New York’s wild birds, a range of wild mammals, and multiple poultry farms, the virus could soon hit the state’s dairy industry—New York’s largest agricultural sector, spanning almostĚý. While the virus is still considered low-risk to the general public, it poses aĚýĚýwho directly feed, medicate, and milk the cows from dawn to dusk.

So far,ĚýĚýof the U.S. outbreak of the virus have been in poultry or dairy farmworkers, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Yet members of Alianza AgrĂ­cola say that farmworkers in their group have not received education or training in their workplaces about how to protect themselves from the virus. This has prompted them to take matters into their own hands. Over the past few months, the group has educated hundreds of other farmworkers on how to prepare for avian flu, including by traveling directly to dairy farms and providing education at their meetings.

“None of the employers have given us any information about this,” Luis Jiménez, a dairy farmworker and the president Alianza Agrícola, tells Sentient. “All of the information I have [on avian flu]—and that we’ve been able to share with other workers—is because we’ve been able to inform ourselves from other institutions.”

The CDC has issued interimĚýĚýto protect farmworkers and other people working with animals from avian flu, recommending that employers train workers on how to identify the virus and other infection-control practices. Yet this guidance is voluntary, without any means of enforcing or even widely distributing it—creating a significant gap in worker protections, in New York and across the country.

Even in states where the H5N1 virus is already circulating in dairy herds, advocates have observed that dairy farmworkers lack basic training and information on the virus.

“A lot of workers have told us that they weren’t told anything, which actually really stresses people out. When cows were getting sick, they weren’t told why,” said Bethany Alcauter, who directs research and public health programs for the National Center for Farmworker Health. “Many workers were really concerned that they were doing something to make the cow sick, and it caused a fair amount of distress,” she added.

Providing Education to 500 New York Farmworkers

If the virus were to strike New York’s dairy farms, these farmworkers—low-wage,Ěýwithout health insurance—would be on the front lines. Beyond protecting other farmworkers from H5N1, Alianza AgrĂ­cola’s outreach helps prevent the spread of the virus toĚý and the rising risk of itsĚýĚýif it were to mutate to become transmissible between humans.

“Farmworkers, of course, are the most vulnerable to the disease because they’re the ones working with the animals,” said Delcianna Winders, the director of Animal and Law Policy Institute at Vermont Law School. “But then, of course, they don’t live in isolated bubbles. They live in larger communities, and so when they go out into those communities, they’re at the highest risk of spreading the virus to other members of the community.”

JimĂŠnez says that they’ve worked with the New York Department of Health, theĚý,Ěýand other institutions outside of the state to ensure that their educational materials on the quickly evolving virus are accurate and up to date. This has involved printing and distributing a brochure (inĚýĚýandĚý), “H5N1 Guidance for Farmworkers,” to about 500 dairy workers so far, according to JimĂŠnez.

The brochure explains how the virus can spread through milk, feces, and other body fluids of the infected animals and provides guidance on how farmworkers can reduce exposure to the virus.

While JimĂŠnez has encountered some farmworkers who have never heard of avian flu, the majority of workers are familiar with it. More frequently, he encounters farmworkers who are confused about the public health risks of the virus, while not realizing that they areĚýĚýof contracting the virus.

“[Other farmworkers] always tell us that they believe you can’t get infected so easily, or that it’s like any normal flu. So we tell them that, ‘No, it’s different symptoms, and it’s very easy to get infected if you work with infected animals,”’ says Jiménez.

The brochure also includes information on how to identify symptoms of the virus in humans with clear visual graphics, though it also notes that . Finally, the brochure provides farmworkers with QR codes and links on how they can get tested for the virus through  and receive health services through New York’s statewide .

At every meeting, JimĂŠnez says they pass out the brochures. “Wąđ tell them, ‘Don’t forget, we have brochures to be informed about what is happening and what avian flu is,’” he says. They also host meetings dedicated to discussing the virus, sometimes with speakers like Mary Jo Dudley, the Director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, who spoke with the group about how to prepare. They’re currently working with Dudley and the New York Department of Health to put out a graphic video with further guidance for farmworkers on the virus.

Dudley says she fielded questions from farmworkers about how they would be able to know if the virus is spreading through cattle—questions that are critical not only to the safety of farmworkers but also to the broader prevention of the virus.

“There’s a lot of questions about how would we detect it if the cows have it? How is it spread?” Dudley tells Sentient. “So it’s spread through milk. So milk includes splatter. Splatter gets into manure. So there’s all these different levels. How do you protect people at each level?” As H5N1 continues to spread, the answers to these questions are also evolving—particularly as some scientists are concerned the virusĚý

Keeping Farmworker Communities Safe

In addition to the looming threat of avian flu, the recentĚý,Ěýor Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, since Trump returned to the White House has heightened fears and anxieties among farmworkers.

In recent weeks, Dudley says that she has observed both ICE and local enforcement parked directly outside health clinics where New York farmworkers would seek care if exhibiting symptoms of the virus. “That creates pause,” says Dudley. “Are you going to try to go into that health center, you know?”

Dudley has also heard concerns from farmworkers about the prospect of government personnel entering farms should there be an outbreak. “If there is an event with avian flu, then the first step is that inspectors will come to inspect the herd,” she says. Yet in this environment of heightened immigration enforcement, Dudley says, farmworkers are more suspicious of strangers and government officials who come to their workplaces.

“There’s a lot of government vigilance,” says Dudley. “When you see somebody who you interpret to be a representative of the government, you can’t differentiate between what they’re there for,” which can create fear and confusion.

Dudley recommends that dairy operators put a sign in front of the farm entrance that reads, “No Visitors Allowed for Biosecurity Reasons,” along with a number that any invited visitors can call if they need to inspect or conduct business on the farm. (The biosecurity issue isn’t a cover;  can increase the risk of tracking in avian flu.)

JimĂŠnez says they’ve provided virtual and in-person trainings to the local community in western New York on how to respond to ICE raids. “Right now, we’re in this difficult situation with the new administration, so we’re asking allies to be alert,” he says. “If the police call ICE, I think that the allies can help byĚýĚýsupporting the families, orĚýĚýsaying that the workers are part of the community and they are just working and being good neighbors.”

In the meantime, JimĂŠnez plans to keep working hard at his job at an large-scale dairy farm where his role is tending to the calves. “The weapon that we use as workers is doing good and responsible work,” he says. “Wąđ are always going to have that as a tool for organizing.” Alianza AgrĂ­cola has won what seemed like an impossible fight before, successfully pushing New York to allow undocumented immigrants toĚý.

While the fights ahead may be even larger, JimĂŠnez has never been one to give into fear: He plans to keep organizing with other farmworkers to prepare for both the risks of immigration enforcement and the avian flu hitting New York dairy farms. The future may be deeply uncertain, but Alianza AgrĂ­cola is informed and ready.

This story was originally published by .

If we want to sustain life on Earth in the face of this crisis, we’re told to do everything from buying electric vehicles and taking shorter showers to avoiding plastic straws and shopping with reusable bags. The elites promote the idea that “technology will save us” with solar panels on every home, mirrors in space to reflect the sun away from Earth, and cloud seeding to make it rain during a drought. So-called tech “solutions” offer an attractive and compelling narrative, but these false promises crumble under scrutiny.

offers a different understanding of the climate crisis and how we should respond. In our analysis, the climate crisis is better understood as part of a larger ecological crisis, which can be described as a crisis of disconnection: We are disconnected from the land, and we are disconnected from each other.

The ecological crisis predates climate change. It did not begin with the burning of fossil fuels. It began with the trans-Saharan/transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the through colonialism and imperialism. The magnitude of these events and the impact they had on humanity and our ecosystems are incomprehensible.

In the span of about 1,250 years, from 650 CE to 1900 CE, more than 50 million people of African descent were taken from their homes and forced into enslavement. More than 50 million Indigenous people in the so-called Americas were killed, and more than 1 billion acres of their land were stolen. Trillions of dollars were generated and circulated almost exclusively among people of Arab and European descent.

The forced labor was used to heavily exploit and all over the world. Entire landscapes and ecosystems were destroyed to create colonies that grew into countries. The tremendous amount of money that was created during the period of enslavement . Since the burning of fossil fuels would not have been possible without slavery and genocide, then the response to this crisis requires Black liberation and ecology. A global redistribution of power and wealth through reparations and Indigenous sovereignty will move land away from the few who see it as an object to exploit and transfer it to the many who long to care for it but have been violently denied the right to do so.

In 1970, Nathan Hare, Ph.D., the first coordinator of a Black Studies program in U.S. history, published “,” a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Black Studies and Research. “The emergence of the concept of ecology in American life is potentially of momentous relevance to the ultimate liberation of black people,” Hare wrote. “Yet blacks and their environmental interests have been so blatantly omitted that blacks and the ecology movement currently stand in contradiction to each other.”

One year later, Marvin Gaye released his iconic album What’s Going On, with songs that played to the theme of Black liberation and ecology, including “,” “,” and “.” In 1977, in Kenya to empower African women and their communities to plant trees and think more ecologically. With just a handful of examples, we can see what our ancestors have long known: Black liberation and ecology go together like soil and water.Ěý

So what does that mean for us today? I think about Black liberation as the process of obtaining safety, sovereignty, and self-determination for people of African descent. It is inherently revolutionary and the antithesis to the myth of white supremacy. Black liberation seeks to create a world where people of African descent can reach their full potential. It seeks to restore people of African descent to their traditional greatness—part of which includes being the original stewards of the Earth, the people who have an 80,000-year-old relationship with the Earth.

The evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens—the currently agreed upon ancestor of modern humans—occurred about 150,000 years ago on the continent of Africa, likely in central Africa. Our species lived exclusively there for the next 80,000 years, before the great migration out of Africa began. Therefore, for the first 80,000 years of our existence, all humans on Earth were exclusively people of African descent.

In that time, our ancestors created the building blocks of life as we know it today. They mastered the use of fire, created complex tools, developed languages, created art, engaged in trade and resource sharing, and advanced cognitive abilities like planning and problem solving. An instrumental part of their progress was ecology, the study of home. It was an 80,000-year study of animal behavior, human growth and development, plant medicine, seafaring, cartography, astronomy, and the relationship between earth, water, air, fire, and spirit.

MG understands ecology as the study of home/earth. (Eco comes from the Greek word oikos, which simply means “home,” while -logy is a word rooted in Latin meaning “the study of.”) Home can be as big as the planet or as small as a drop of water. It all depends on the perspective of the student. Ecology invites us to study the relationships that make up home, not just the container that is home. Through relationships of home, we can explore concepts like interdependence, reciprocity, dynamic balance, growth through conflict, zero waste, and regeneration. Ecology is a modern word for an ancient practice, and I believe it is vital to the survival of our species.

One of the most important and enduring teachings from our ancestors is the idea that humans are not separate from nature. We are all connected. What you do to the land, you do to the people, and what you do to the people, you do to the land. This overarching message has been a foundational belief of humanity from our earliest days on the African continent up to the present moment.

However, in the last few hundred years of our story, the dangerous myth of white supremacy has sought to eradicate this belief. This myth makes a delusive claim that white people are innately superior to other races (especially the Black race), animals, nature, and life itself. 

Human activities that would be considered atrocious to our ancestors are now celebrated as proof of white superiority: the construction of mega dams that disrupt entire ecosystems, the discovery and burning of fossil fuels that create climate disruption, the development of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that deplete soil and pollute groundwater, and the over extraction of rare earth minerals to power the information economy. All of this is made possible by the myth of white supremacy and its evil economic offspring, the extractive economy (more broadly referred to as capitalism).

If we are going to create a sustainable future with life-affirming, regenerative economies, then we must fight for global reparations—not only cash payments but also an opportunity to repair our relationships with the land and with one another. We must earnestly study our planet and develop responses to the crisis that are rooted in regeneration, care, and cooperation with the purpose of creating ecological and social well-being. Traveling the path of Black liberation and ecology will increase our chance to survive as a species in the face of catastrophic changes to our ecosystem that have just begun.

After into anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ ads during the election, Trump spent the first few weeks in office signing a number of rapid-fire executive orders. The , issued on inauguration day, attempted to limit the definition of sex to male and female only. Others followed suit, banning trans people from , , and rescinding .

Taken together, these executive orders target everything from the and to basic, life-saving health care.

“[An executive order] doesn’t carry the force of law itself,” says Sruti Swaminathan, a staff attorney at the ACLU. Indeed, opposition is mounting as these orders face significant logistical and . But, Swaminathan says, the impact is felt immediately through a “chilling effect” that and emboldens their detractors—cultural sentiments that can’t be challenged in the court of law.

For trans people, especially those existing at the intersection of multiple identities, the impact of anti-trans policies and rhetoric doesn’t trickle down into their lives so much as it opens the floodgates for harm.

“ It’s got the pressure of a fire hose being sprayed, and it’s not being filtered in. It’s beating into our existence,” says Nish Newton, an organizer for the Idaho-based organization (BLC). Simple tasks like running errands, seeing friends, and other essential, enriching parts of life can feel out of reach for trans people right now. “A lot of folks don’t even feel like they can leave their homes.”

Since 2020, there has been a swell of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, all running parallel to attacks on reproductive care, , and education. According to , there are currently 569 active bills in the United States and nine have passed. Though some of this legislation may pass, it is important to note that the , in part due to their own unpopularity and the dedicated work of organizers. (The in both the Senate and the House, which also may make it challenging to enact Trump’s agenda.)

Now, grassroots organizations—specifically those led by and with trans people—are uniquely poised to not only help their communities weather the storm but also challenge the policies and attitudes that harm trans people in the first place.

“I see the moment as an opportunity. An opportunity for trans leaders to really, really get engaged, unite, and speak in one voice,” says Sean Ebony Coleman, founder and CEO of , a LGBTQ grassroots organization working in New York City, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. “Folks that understand history know that we’ve seen some of these tactics before, so that means there are ways to push back.”

On the Front Lines

Political actions on the state and federal level have a direct impact on the day-to-day lives of trans people. Bathroom bills, for example, which require people to use the restroom based on the sex assigned to them at birth, can mean that trans people have to plan their days around when they will use the restroom or risk potential harm. 

“You learn to navigate systems and places early when you are trans,” says TC Caldwell, executive director of , a Black trans- and queer-led organization in Alabama. “I make sure to use the bathroom before I go out to eat or shop. Why? Because most places don’t have gender-neutral bathrooms. If I do have to go, I go to the bathroom of the gender I’m called the most for that day because safety is our priority when going out as trans people.”

But in reciprocal fashion, grassroots actions—providing mutual care, building resources, and developing effective programming—can ripple upward and bring systemic and cultural change.

“Wąđ know our communities best,” says Caldwell. “Wąđ are on the front lines, responding to crises in real time while also working to dismantle the systemic barriers that create those crises.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

According to Caldwell, TKO Society uses a mutual aid and care-based approach to provide comprehensive health and wellness services to their community. “Wąđ focus on building networks of trust and support, leverage community knowledge to design programs that actually work.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Caldwell says the care coordination program, for example, has helped hundreds of people access affirming health care and secure stable housing. “Wąđ’re expanding those efforts by partnering with other grassroots collectives to scale up.”

“When people are turned away from shelters or denied health care because of their identity, we step in—not just to provide immediate support but to advocate for systemic change through education, coalition-building, and policy work,” says Caldwell. “This approach isn’t just about filling gaps. It’s about building infrastructure that uplifts and empowers marginalized people.”

And unlike top-down charities or larger, more hierarchical organizations, grassroots networks have the ability to adapt in real time to the changing needs of their communities. 

BLC organizer Nish Newton says their organization used to rely on a mutual-aid-focused model of fundraising, but soon they found that “[the model] wasn’t really proactively pouring into folks and sustaining their wellness.” To move away from this more “reactive,” emergency-based model, BLC launched a guaranteed-income program in 2023, BLC PWR, which provides Black trans Idahoans with $1,000 monthly stipends. 

This year, Newton says they are already reimagining the program to better respond to their community’s feedback around financial support and other direct services. “It has been really, really beautiful in a lot of ways to shed our skin every year, and it doesn’t really fit into the mold of a lot of traditional organizations,” says Newton. “ It’s an innovative way of existing, but essentially we make ourselves and we break ourselves every year.”

Trans Rights Start Close to Home

In addition to providing direct services, there are a few main ways grassroots organizers push back against transphobic policies at the federal level—and much of it starts close to home.

Though it may sound simple, this type of relationship-building—especially with Congressional members who vote on —can help set a political agenda that’s actually aligned with the overall country’s expressed desires. (After all, most voters, , think the government should be less involved in legislating the lives of trans people, according to a by Data for Progress.)

Destination Tomorrow founder Coleman says speaking to elected officials about funding, policy work, and anti-trans legislation helps who otherwise may not truly understand the scope and impact of these initiatives. “If [elected officials] don’t see [trans people] as their constituents, I think it’s easy to harm us,” Coleman says. “When folks pass these ridiculous laws, executive orders in this case, it is done without the thought of how it’s honestly going to impact people.”

This manner of networking also allows advocates to play offense, nudging policymakers to introduce bills that would both enshrine and expand rights for trans people. Currently, 14 states and the District of Columbia have that protect access to gender-affirming care, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Two additional states, Arizona and New Jersey, have protective executive orders in place. 

Introducing protective policies at the local, state, and federal levels makes it harder for new transphobic legislation to take root—and if there are more progressive LGBTQ elected officials, then more protective, trans-affirming policies will possibly be passed. In Minnesota, for example, the state’s first openly trans legislator, Rep. Leigh Finke, made sure a was a priority among Democratic leadership. And despite an attempted filibuster from opponents, the bill passed both the state’s House and Senate. 

In 2023, Minnesota’s “trans refuge” law , offering protection to patients and clinicians seeking gender-affirming care, including those coming from out of state. “Hundreds of people and families within the first six months moved to Minnesota,” Finke told NPR. “I’m sure that’s a major undercount.”

In the Courts

Despite these efforts, some anti-trans legislation will surely pass. When proposed anti-trans legislation becomes laws, litigation offers an important guardrail against discrimination. Litigation, which resolves rights-based disputes through the courts, can retroactively challenge unjust policies, enforce civil rights laws, and set far-reaching legal precedents. 

Lawsuits start at the local or state level and can flow upriver, all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2023, three families of trans minors and a medical doctor in Tennessee filed a lawsuit to challenge the state’s law banning gender-affirming care for minors. 

Though the court’s ruling is still forthcoming, the impact of litigation similar to  is twofold. Not only does the case question the legal basis of harmful, transphobic legislation, but it also provides a platform for trans people to that counter far-right fear mongering. In other words, these cases are not just legal proceedings. They are tried in the court of public opinion, too.

By mobilizing public support on behalf of vulnerable trans youth and naming bullying for what it is, ACLU staff attorney Sruti Swaminathan says it is possible to deter further policies and “reshape the political narrative around trans people in general, but also what rights we deserve.”

There’s no denying that these strategies—educating officials, introducing protective policies, litigating anti-trans discrimination, and shifting cultural narratives—are hard and slow-moving, sometimes taking years to come to fruition. Part of the value of grassroots organizations is that they tend to their communities now while still planting the seeds for a future where all trans people can thrive. 

“Every time someone gets connected to life-saving care, or finds a stable place to live, or even just feels seen and affirmed by their community, we’re chipping away at the systems designed to erase us,” says TKO Society founder TC Caldwell. “A big part of our work is to remind people that no one is disposable, and we prove that change is possible when we fight for each other.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:01 a.m. PT on Feb. 26, 2025, to update the number of active anti-trans bills circulating in the United States. Read our corrections policy here.Ěý

A child of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, Marroquin—who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s—worried that speaking to anyone in authority about her father’s physical and emotional abuse would put her family in danger of being separated, or get her parents deported. But she desperately wanted the abuse to stop.

“All I ever wanted as a child was somebody to talk to my abusive father and make him understand the harm he was causing,” says Marroquin, who is now 48. “I believe my father could have changed if he’d had the support he needed to believe his family when we told him he was hurting us.”

Her father never got that support, but Marroquin is now trying to help other people interrupt the types of abusive behaviors that made her own childhood difficult. Recently, she became the first California-based responder working for , a free and confidential helpline for people causing or considering causing harm to an intimate partner or other loved one. 

The helpline began in Massachusetts, but a coalition of California-based advocacy groups are promoting its use across the Golden State. Their goal is to make the helpline widely accessible to people across California and ultimately generate enough interest and funding to power a team of locally based helpline responders like Marroquin who can answer calls specifically from people in the region and offer relevant referrals when needed. 

, a network of community and advocacy organizations focused on advancing racial and gender justice, is spearheading expansion of the helpline in California. For the past several years, the network has led a campaign to create new ways of addressing intimate partner violence that don’t involve the criminal or legal system. Network leaders and many other advocates believe alternative approaches are needed because, despite the prevalence of domestic violence—it affects approximately . Many people don’t report incidents to the police because they fear it will make their situations worse. Their fears are not unfounded, .

Most domestic violence interventions focus on helping survivors, often requiring them and sometimes their children to upend their lives by seeking shelter and safety. Far fewer resources are dedicated to helping the people causing the harm to stop what they’re doing, says Jordan Thierry, a consultant for the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color. 

These people may realize they need help, he said. But the programs that exist, traditionally called “batterer intervention programs,” are usually court-mandated and not financially accessible or tailored to people who haven’t been convicted of a crime. Therapy is another option, but many people don’t have the health coverage or money to afford it, or struggle to find .

That’s the gap organizers believe A Call for Change can fill.

“Wąđ know there’s a demand and a need,” says Thierry. Other than the helpline “there’s no resource that’s available that’s confidential and anonymous for people who are causing harm who don’t want to submit themselves to the legal justice system and out themselves in their own community.”

A Call for Change launched in 2021 in rural Massachusetts in response to reports of growing domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws inspiration from similar helplines in the and , and was designed with input from a 12-member advisory board of professionals and activists whose work involves addressing domestic violence. 

The helpline is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.​ But because people can call the helpline from anywhere, about half of the approximately 1,000 calls annually come from out of state, including California, said co-founder JAC Patrissi.

Callers to the helpline talk to a responder trained in trauma-informed and transformative justice principles. That means the responder doesn’t judge or shame the caller but has a respectful and compassionate conversation that aims to help them gain insight into their own beliefs and behaviors, and recognize patterns of control, manipulation, and violence that are harming their relationships. 

Callers are not absolved of their violence, Patrissi emphasized. Responders guide people causing harm to move beyond denial and blame so that they can understand the impact of their actions and take responsibility. Responders then help callers develop strategies for being a safer person for their loved ones to be around. Often, this occurs over several hours-long phone sessions, Patrissi said. Callers frequently call back multiple times.

Patrissi said part of the problem with criminal justice responses to people who engage in domestic violence is that they replicate the same patterns of dominance and control that they’re trying to stop. That’s why the helpline offers a different approach. “You can’t shame people into stopping shaming others, you can’t control people into stopping controlling others,” Patrissi said. “Wąđ have to find a way that interrupts sexual and domestic violence in a way that doesn’t replicate dominance.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The helpline may not be the right fit for everyone. People who are taking the time to call a helpline are generally already open to making some kind of change, even if they’re only in the beginning stages of that journey, she said. That’s why Patrissi believes no one has ever called the helpline in the middle of committing violence. Making the call is in itself a form of de-escalation and self-control.

All calls are anonymous. Because they’re routed through an operator, responders have no way of knowing who the caller is or where they’re calling from, unless the person chooses to disclose that information. This is important, said Patrissi, because most callers are very worried about being reported to the police and the impact that could have on their lives or their families. Without reassurance that their identity is protected, they won’t feel comfortable speaking freely and honestly with the responder, which would deprive them of the opportunity to get help, she explained. 

About half of the callers to the helpline are family members, friends, or professionals seeking assistance in dealing with a person engaged in intimate partner violence. Responders provide guidance on how they can talk to the person they’re concerned about and can also offer referrals to services.

The helpline is already open and available to callers from California, though most of the responders are in other parts of the U.S. Responders receive 40 hours of initial training followed by additional weekly training and debriefing sessions. Some responders are licensed therapists, but many are drawn to the work from other backgrounds. The positions are paid.

The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, with collaboration from Patrissi’s organization, , have begun spreading the word about A Call for Change to men’s groups, local governments, youth organizations, and nonprofits working to address domestic violence, among others. Last fall, they hosted two online webinars and an in-person gathering in the Bay Area to inform people interested in the helpline and guide them on how to speak about it to those they think could benefit. 

In October, about 35 people from a variety of organizations gathered at the RYSE Center in Richmond, California, to hear presentations from Patrissi and others involved in running the helpline. They listened to a reenactment of a real call from a man seeking to understand why someone he went on a date with is accusing him of sexual assault. The responder encourages the man to look more closely at a moment during his interaction with his date in which he deliberately ignored her cues to stop. Gradually, the caller is able to identify an underlying belief that caused him to keep going, and to see the interaction from the woman’s point of view.

Attendees also practiced role-playing how to talk with people in their communities about the hotline and encourage those they think could benefit to call. Ruby Leanos, a project manager at the Contra Costa Crisis Center, which runs a crisis and suicide prevention line, said she planned to share information about A Call for Change with staff there so they could offer it as a resource to relevant callers.

“Just knowing something like this exists is great,” she says. “Wąđ have so many of these hotlines and warmlines and helplines, but really A Call for Change and the population it’s working with, I think that’s something that we don’t see enough of.”

PamĂŠla Tate, co-executive director of , which offers support to women and families affected by domestic violence, said survivors have long been asking for the type of intervention that A Call for Change offers. Many of her clients still love their partners and want to be with them, but they want their partners to get help to stop their harmful behavior. The helpline offers an opportunity for people being abusive to proactively get that help without reaching the point of causing their partner to flee or call the police.

“Batterers intervention programs are because you’ve already battered, you’ve already been found guilty of battering, they send you to a class,” Tate says. “This is, ‘I’m voluntarily calling … Maybe I can talk this out and figure out how to de-escalate and not cause harm, because I don’t want to harm my partner.’”

The question remaining for Tate is, will enough people who need the help actually call the helpline?

Ben Withers, who works for , an organization in Contra Costa County, California, that runs a batterer’s intervention program, said he was already recommending the helpline to people in his program to call for extra support between classes. Withers said he hoped the helpline would steer other people who could benefit from anti-violence programs like his to enroll in classes voluntarily.

Currently only about 10 percent of people in the batterer’s intervention program are there because they want to be, he explained. “I’m excited for the people calling,” he says. The helpline “creates an avenue for people to enter services outside of the carceral system.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color plans to do additional trainings about the helpline and is fundraising to support expanding its hours and responder staff in California. Ultimately, organizers said they hoped to get state government support for the effort.

Meanwhile, for Marroquin, the abuse she experienced as a child pushed her to pursue a career working with and advocating for survivors of domestic violence. Although she said she never succeeded in persuading her father to change his ways, she’s hopeful her work as a responder for A Call for Change will break the cycle of abuse for other families and intimate partners.  

“To be able to do this for somebody else’s parent, somebody else’s partner is deeply healing for me too,” she says.

To reach A Call for Change, call 877-898-3411 or email Help@ACallForChangeHelpline.org The helpline is open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. PST every day of the year. It’s free, anonymous, and confidential. Language translation is available. After-hours callers can leave a voicemail and receive a call back within 24 hours. For more information visit .

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, you can also contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support and referrals, or text “START” to 88788. Information on local domestic violence programs can be found using this online tool.

For Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the StrongHearts Native Helpline at 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483) provides 24/7 confidential and culturally appropriate support and advocacy for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. A chat option is available through their website.

This story was produced in collaboration with the . 

The court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson may have been designed to send pregnant people back to the 1950s, but the oral arguments surfaced an idea that could only be at home today. It was the idea that abortion was no longer necessary. Things had changed since 1973, one Supreme Court justice pointed out in their only question. There may have been a time when women needed the right to abortion, but not now. Today women were free.

The source of this “freedom” was about as ghastly as it gets. “Safe-haven laws” allow birthing people to abandon their newborns in places like fire and police stations without facing criminal prosecution. If it was so easy to abandon a newborn, wasn’t the ability of abortion restrictions to “hinder women’s access to the workplace” … “take[n] care of”?

Much of this argument—its erasure of the pregnant body and trivialization of the experience of pregnancy and the adoption decision—was straight out of the conservative playbook.

But what hit me was not the familiar misogyny. It was hearing a staunch abortion opponent claim that women were free. Since when were conservatives saying that women were free? And since when did they seem to be conceding that we should be?

The idea that women deserved freedom was decidedly not from the conservative playbook. The conservative side in the abortion debate had long been spouting versions of the idea that women needed to stay where we belonged, whether that meant accepting the “consequences of our decisions,” remaining in the kitchen, or as the alt-right would have it, accepting that “America belongs to its fathers and is owed to its sons.” But instead, here was an abortion opponent suggesting that “forced motherhood” (yes, she used that term, and yes, it was a she) was not something women should have to undergo.

The only way I could make sense of this seeming about-face was to think about the person who had argued that safe-haven laws respected women’s “bodily autonomy” in the first place. She was a pearl-wearing mom of seven, drafted to the Supreme Court from a Catholic law school, known for seeming to weave a very demanding form of motherhood seamlessly into a high-powered career. It was these bona fides of traditional white femininity that made her popular with her conservative Christian base.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her supporters had long been presenting her as something other than traditional. Barrett, in the eyes of her supporters, represented a new kind of woman.

Barrett was the type of woman who made her own rules. She showed up to her confirmation hearing in a fuchsia-colored dress, as though to make a statement about how femme presentation belonged even in the halls of power. The conservative theater surrounding her confirmation hearing portrayed her as a gender warrior, someone who should be celebrated for not fitting into the conventional mold of what a Supreme Court justice looks like. Never mind that she had been part of a religious group that

Barrett’s embrace of freedom for women wasn’t from the conservative playbook. She was taking pages from the feminist playbook now. And any long-term strategy feminists were going to craft after Dobbs was going to have to face this fact.

Feminist ideas are powerful, perhaps more powerful than they have ever been. This means, on one hand, that my daughter gets to grow up in a world where there are children’s books full of women, including queer women of color, doing amazing things. It also means, though, that there are plenty of women who, like Barrett, are doing amazing things without my or my daughter’s interests in mind. Seemingly feminist ideas can be harnessed for causes like misogyny and white supremacy, and it’s not always obvious when that’s happening.

When Barrett argued that the illegality of abortion was compatible with women’s freedom, she was using a feminist idea to justify throwing the majority of women under the bus. When she portrayed herself as brave enough to defy sexism, and when her supporters painted her as the victim of regressive gender stereotypes, they affirmed the idea that “representation matters.” The price the rest of us have to pay for that representation is not just lack of control of our bodies, but also judicial decisions that have eroded protections for workers, immigrants, and defendants.

If we want to understand how we got here—to a world where abortion is illegal in 14 states, where the final nail in the coffin was hammered by the “ultimate dystopian girlboss,” and where public support for feminism is at an all-time high—we need to understand that lines of reasoning like Barrett’s are not so dissimilar from those advanced by actual feminists.

Feminism has always included more conservative and more radical strands. It has contained within it, at the same time, people who believed that a feminist reproductive agenda was about keeping the “unfit” from reproducing, people who believed it was about keeping the government out of the doctor’s office, people who believed it was fundamentally about wresting control of our lives from men, people who believed it was about the right to parent, and many, many other things.

There have been people who believed that specific work protections for pregnancy and childcare were politically regressive because they undermined the idea that women could do any job men could, and people who believed that they were dismantling the assumption that men’s work was the only socially valuable work, and all kinds of people in between. Feminists converge on the idea that there is gender injustice and that we should fight against it, but we have not always agreed on what this injustice consists in or what should be done about it.n

But sometimes we have to agree on some fundamentals about what feminism is, and this is one of those times. It is either a goal of feminism to demand abortion rights or it isn’t; it is either a goal of feminism to fight for choice alone or to fight for more; it is either a goal of feminism to tell individual women to dream big or to question the economic system that makes dreaming big so important to begin with. In all of these cases, and many more, what feminism is depends largely on what we decide right now. 

In this moment when we are finally talking about the fact that many feminists have been active supporters of oppressive systems, we should feel very keenly that we don’t get to pick and choose. Many of the same feminists most of us were taught about in history books were at some point allies of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, ableism, cissexism, and homophobia, even producing as feminist goals ideas that supported keeping these other systems of oppression in place.

From Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt’s very public statements that women’s suffrage was compatible with (and could perhaps even strengthen) white supremacy to Betty Friedan’s claims that women needed to free themselves from “biological living,” as though no one would have to pick up the slack of caring for children or cleaning houses, feminisms for the few have been with us for a very long time.

But freedom feminism is not our only option. We can think toward something else—a feminism for the many. If there have always been many strands in feminism, this moment is an invitation to pick up another strand.

Excerpted from by Serene Khader (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

In other words, overloading us so we don’t know where to begin is the point. 

But the good news is people are fighting back with every tool at their disposal, from trainings and legal challenges to walkouts and strikes. Here is a non-comprehensive list of ways people across the United States are rising up against Trumpism. 

1. Immigrant Rights

“Know Your Rights” trainings are one of the most effective ways to counter Trump’s promised ICE raids against undocumented people and those suspected to be undocumented. Large networks such as the and smaller local groups such as in Stockton, California, are educating local communities about what their rights are in the event of raids by federal immigration officials. is available in numerous South East Asian languages as well as in Spanish.

Groups such as the in Southern California are also using to spread awareness of people’s rights, share ways to report ICE raids on a hotline, and learn how to identify different federal law-enforcement vehicles.

Additionally, students from immigrant and mixed-status families are flexing their grassroots power by leading and in protest of ICE raids.

2. Transgender Rights

Trump’s attacks against transgender people include an executive order that bans gender-affirming care for minors. This has caused chaos for those seeking care, as numerous hospitals and providers have . In response, advocacy organizations and have joined forces to launch a against the administration. 

Some are heroically providing care to their patients in the face of Trump’s ban, promising to continue until they are forced to stop. And State Attorney General of New York for providers in New York to continue necessary care in line with state laws. 

Meanwhile, transgender-led media outlets such as as well as individual are rewriting narratives on trans rights.  

3. Workers Rights

Though among people in the United States, the Trump administration is still and hamstringing the , which became a bulwark against corporate resistance to unions under the Biden administration. In response to these actions, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 federal workers, has . 

are also working at the state level to push attorneys general and governors to step in and fortify already existing protections. Additionally, in December 2024, in anticipation of Trump’s anti-labor stance. And unions are slowly changing the way they organize rank-and-file workers, making their institutions less hierarchical and more responsive to worker needs and concerns. According to labor writer , that reorganization can make unions more resilient in the face of Trump’s anti-labor policies.

4. Reproductive Rights

Newly confirmed Health Secretary has sparked deep concern among medical professionals because of his anti-vaccine stances and conspiracy theories on health. And, as Trump , Kennedy appears to have . 

But access to abortion procedures remains popular throughout the nation, so much so that last November protecting abortion care, . 

Meanwhile, are also intervening to protect abortion access. North Carolina Governor Josh Stein has moved to ensure his state will not allow federal enforcement of abortion restrictions, and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced his state will begin stockpiling mifepristone, which can be used to induce abortion.

The is offering legal support for abortion providers and the for those needing abortion care. Individuals have also begun stockpiling abortion pills, obtaining them from groups such as and .

5. Racial Justice and Equity

One of Trump’s most high-profile actions has been banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government and threatening private institutions to not implement such programs. Under his purview, the has dismantled its DEI programs.

In response, a coalition of DEI advocates, including the , has filed a lawsuit against the administration, saying the DEI bans are vague and unconstitutional. The has also taken similar legal action. 

While some schools and faculty are complying with Trump’s orders, and . A network of community college leaders called Education for All is going further by on how to resist the DEI bans. 

As private corporations like Target have announced they will roll back DEI programs, plan to preserve them. Some consumers say they will participate in a , in protest of corporate DEI rollbacks.

6. Climate Justice

The Trump administration pulled back on the United States’ while also launching an immediate and massive and environmental initiatives, especially those aimed at assisting . 

Large such as the Center for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council have already planned legal challenges to Trump’s actions. These organizations have a track record of winning a majority of such cases during Trump’s first term. States like are doing the same. 

are also vowing to fight back and are promising disruptive, though peaceful, actions. 

7. General Strike

Americans are angry about Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to government. They’re so enraged, in fact, that millions have been making phone calls to their Congressional representatives, . Unfortunately the opposition party is, in the words of The Nation’s Chris Lehmann, “.”

In such a political vacuum, a grassroots effort has launched a that is gaining traction. Based on research showing that 3.5% of a nation’s population striking from work can force leaders to meet their demands, the effort is calling on people to make a pledge to strike by signing strike cards.Ěý

As of this writing, more than 200,000 people have signed strike pledges. The goal is 11 million people.

She’s set up benches and toys outside for Chago and his friends to play with, strung lights over the trailer the way she used to over her front door, and hung up a smiling sun ornament that looks like the one they lost in the flooding that devastated parts of southeastern San Diego on Jan. 22, 2024. 

But lately Chago has been asking Calix a question that breaks her heart, one that she doesn’t know the answer to: Will we ever live in an apartment again?

“I basically told him, ‘We’re not going to be able to move soon,’” Calix said, sitting outside her trailer on a recent evening. “How do I explain the current housing market to an 8-year-old?”

Calix and Chago are among approximately 5,000 San Diego–area residents impacted by that led to dramatic flooding in parts of the city and county, with particularly severe damage in Southcrest and Shelltown. The mother and son were among hundreds of people who suffered severe property damage and displacement. Five people died.

While some flood survivors have been able to return home, many others are still struggling to recover, rebuild their homes, or find new places to live. Some survivors, particularly renters like Calix, have been forced to restart life elsewhere, with little hope of returning to their old communities.

Extreme flooding events, even in regions typically associated with dry weather like Southern California, are becoming more common as the climate warms. Climate change, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels, is changing weather patterns, leading to heavier and more dangerous downpours that can overwhelm infrastructure designed for more predictable times. 

But Calix and others impacted by the disaster insist there is another force that exacerbated the flooding, one that also led to what many see as a disjointed and inadequate disaster response: decades of government neglect and indifference toward San Diego’s lower-income neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods, located primarily in southeastern San Diego where much of the flooding happened, are among the most  and  areas in the region. They were also historically â€”a racist, government-sponsored practice that made it difficult for people in those neighborhoods to get financial services such as mortgages and insurance, and concentrated low-income and people of color in flood-prone areas.

Residents say the legacy of discrimination continues to this day through lack of city investment in flood-control infrastructure and inadequate disaster planning and support for those affected. The result is even greater hardship and precarity for people and communities already on the edge. The situation is also a microcosm of the inequitable distribution of risks from climate change, and an example of the challenges communities and governments must grapple with as floods and other weather-related disasters become more frequent.

“What happened on that day was a planning disaster,” says Andrea Guerrero, executive director of , a community organization whose offices in Barrio Logan were damaged in the flood. “That climate event happened throughout the county, but where was it felt, it was felt in the places where the city had failed to modernize and update its infrastructure.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Alliance San Diego is among approximately 700 people and organizations now suing the city, alleging it failed to maintain stormwater infrastructure, and instead prioritized investments in wealthier communities. They point to a  that said segments of Chollas Creek, which flooded during the storm, had not been maintained and had the potential to cause property damage. The lawsuit also notes the city’s admission of a severe lack of funding to maintain stormwater infrastructure. Last year, the city estimated it needed about $9 billion in infrastructure upgrades.  

Nicole Darling, director of communications for the city, said it does not comment on pending litigation. But she said the city dispatched more than 300 staff members to clean out storm drains and inlets before the rainstorm, including critical drains in the Chollas Creek area. One segment, close to Beta Street in Southcrest, which suffered severe damage, was scheduled for upcoming debris removal at the time the storm happened, she said in an email. 

Darling emphasized that the storm was historic and its impact unpredictable. “This was an unprecedented storm,” she said. “It was the fourth wettest day in history. We’ve never seen this level of flooding before.”

Guerrero and others participating in the lawsuit said they want the city to compensate survivors for their losses and do more to prevent the Chollas Creek stormwater channel from flooding. Some community organizers and flood survivors are demanding other changes as well. 

Clariza Marin, chief financial officer for the Harvey Family Foundation, a community organization that has been on the front lines of helping those affected, said the response on the ground has been chaotic. She said local authorities need to work in collaboration with residents to create a disaster preparedness plan that reflects what community members need, so they can be better prepared for future disasters.

She and other residents interviewed said they also want the city and county to provide more support to help the many survivors, both homeowners and former renters, who either didn’t receive aid or didn’t get enough to help them rebuild their lives. This would include assisting people like Calix who were displaced from the floods but didn’t benefit from county and city financial aid to help them find housing. “All of our resiliency planning should be community driven,” Marin says. “It shouldn’t be about scrambling to tell (residents) what I can do for you, what you’re going to have to accept.”

Darling pointed to various efforts by the city to support flood survivors, including money for temporary lodging and help for small businesses. She said city officials have been attending public meetings and listening to community feedback since the disaster. She added that the city has also been distributing pamphlets to residents living in floodplain areas about how to prepare for potential flooding in the future.  

Neglected Communities

Calix, who is part African American, liked the multicultural community in the area around Beta Street in Southcrest where she and Chago settled in 2020. The sounds and smells were familiar. She felt comfortable. She liked the cost of rent even more—$1,500 for two bedrooms, the same as she’d paid for a one-bedroom apartment in the northern, more expensive part of the city.

About 80 years ago, the federal government categorized large swaths of southeastern San Diego, such as Southcrest, as “hazardous,” declaring that the properties there were “high risk” for defaulting on loans largely because of the people who lived there: laborers, immigrants, and people of color.

Although redlining has since been outlawed, its impact continues to this day, with people in historically redlined communities and ill health than those in other non-redlined areas. Southcrest, Shelltown, and other neighborhoods that suffered flood damage, including Logan Heights and Barrio Logan, have disproportionately higher rates of residents living in poverty compared to other parts of the city. These residents are also exposed to other negative factors that can impact their health, such as pollution from diesel fumes, hazardous waste sites, and lead from housing, according to California’s Environmental Protection Agency.   

It’s these types of economically and environmentally stressed locations that climate scientists say are most vulnerable to flooding, and where populations have the hardest time recovering from natural disasters. People of color and those living in mobile homes, in particular, are , research shows. And these same populations as well as low-income people in general, have the most difficulty accessing .

“Wąđ know that risks of climate change are absolutely higher in communities of concern or communities that are historically marginalized,” says Darbi Berry, director of climate and environmental programs at the University of San Diego’s Nonprofit Institute and director of the .

But southeastern San Diego is also a haven for people priced out from more affluent areas of the city. Some neighborhoods are full of paid-off homes where families have lived for generations. Low-wage workers and immigrants are also drawn here, looking for an affordable place to rent in a city where the cost of housing seems to rise by the day. 

A Shocking Loss

Calix’s son, Chago, turned 8 the day the flood destroyed their rental home. The day started out normal enough. Calix dropped her son off at school in Point Loma, resisting Chago’s pleas to let him stay home for his birthday. It was drizzling, but she thought nothing of it. She promised to deliver some treats for him and his classmates later in the day and drove to a nearby party supply store.

But during her drive, normality ended. It started raining intensely. At an intersection, Calix noticed a car stuck in what looked like floodwater. By the time she got to the party supply store, she’d passed numerous other flooded streets and stranded cars. The store was closed and the parking lot flooded. Her mind leapt to the rental apartment she and Chago shared in Southcrest, 10 miles south. “Was it OK?” she wondered. “Wąđre my neighbors OK?”

It wasn’t until five hours later, after the floodwaters receded, that Calix was able to return to Southcrest and find out. She encountered devastation: streets and homes caked in black sludge, cars piled on top of each other, dead animals, shellshocked neighbors—some of whom had narrowly escaped drowning. Her apartment looked like the inside of a muddy blender. Her and Chago’s furniture, clothes, and other possessions were destroyed, including her father’s ashes and recently opened Christmas presents.

“To see all that devastation at once, it was very desperate,” says Calix, who spent the next several days trying to salvage what she could: a couple of bikes, a pet snake. “There was probably more stuff I could have saved off the walls, things up in cabinets, but I had to just walk away. I couldn’t do it anymore. And neither could my kid.”

Renters in Peril 

Some of the people who suffer the most in the wake of flooding and other natural disasters are â€”a population that accounts for one-third of U.S. households. Renters tend to have less wealth than homeowners, are less likely to have insurance to recoup lost belongings or the costs associated with displacement, and also receive  after disasters. To add insult to injury, research shows that . 

In other words, the people with the fewest financial resources to weather losses from a natural disaster get the least help to recover, and then end up paying even more for housing if they’re lucky enough to find another place to live. In California, and in San Diego especially—where more than  already don’t make enough to meet their basic needs, and where the average rent is â€”losses and displacement from a flood can result in a compounding cycle of long-term financial pain and housing insecurity. 

That’s the predicament Calix found herself in after the flooding. Even though she received $5,000 in emergency assistance from FEMA, that wasn’t enough to secure another apartment rental that she could afford on her salary as a massage therapist, she said. She was also in debt from having to replace clothes, toys and everyday items she lost in the flood, as well as extra gas and food while living in the hotels. 

“It’s overwhelming … ” Calix says. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

The county and city of San Diego, with support from other local cities and community organizations as well as the federal government, have tried to mitigate the challenges facing displaced flood survivors. The county allocated $33.7 million to recovery efforts, including to help provide food, emergency lodging, fund home and infrastructure repairs, and help residents secure federal disaster aid.

Some of this funding went to a program that provided temporary accommodation for people in hotels after the flooding, and housed more than 2,200 people, or nearly 900 households, at its peak. That program ended in June. With about $7 million in support from the county and city, the San Diego Housing Commission then provided up to $15,000 in assistance to people still in emergency lodging near the end of the program to help them pay for rent, security deposits, and other expenses to relocate. 

But there have been problems. Numerous participants in the temporary lodging program have complained they were housed in unsafe or unsanitary hotels and evicted or threatened with eviction because of payment delays from the contractor hired to run the program. Many people who needed accommodation didn’t even get the help because they didn’t know about the program, had trouble accessing it, or were afraid to seek help because of their immigration status, says Clariza Marin, CFO of the Harvey Family Foundation. Others left before they were ready because of conflicting information from FEMA workers that led them to believe staying in the hotels would jeopardize their federal aid money, Marin and Calix said.

The housing commission also limited who could apply for the financial assistance to those still in the program on May 23—a date by which many had left. That meant just 313 families initially received aid. The commission recently who had applied but left the hotels earlier, offering them up to $5,500. But that doesn’t cover all of the approximately 900 families that were in the program at its peak. 

Calix is one of the flood survivors and former renters who, so far, has not qualified for financial help from the housing commission. She decided to leave the program after three months because at the last hotel she stayed at, she felt unsafe. She was also hearing about other people getting evicted and got nervous that she and Chago would be next. She never applied for aid because she assumed she wouldn’t qualify. Now she’s angry that she, and many of her neighbors, have been left out. 

“Wąđ’re all in a hole, and we’re trying to get out and they just keep, you know, letting us fall deeper,” she says. “To be told you get no help and other people do, it is very frustrating.”

Low-Income Homeowners Suffer Too

The disaster has been devastating for homeowners too. Many are low income and elderly and didn’t have any or enough flood insurance. Several of those who received money from FEMA said it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the damage. According to Marin, some residents have been forced to take out loans, pay for repairs using credit cards, or live in flood-damaged moldy homes. Others have given up, abandoning or selling their residences to out-of-town buyers, she said.

Juan Chavez, a retired truck driver, has been trying to help his mother-in-law, 79, hold on to the Beta Street home she lived in for 30 years before the flood forced her to move in with him and his wife. She uses a wheelchair and has dementia. Although the home had some flood insurance, the payout barely covered the cost of basic cleanup, he said. Chavez estimates he and his wife, a secretary, will have to cobble together $100,000 of their own money to make the home livable again. 

Across the street, Harold Roberts, 74, is still trying to get his home fixed after it was flooded with several feet of water. A caregiver for the elderly, he said he couldn’t afford the $6,000 a year he would have needed for flood insurance on his home, and the FEMA money he received only partially covered the damage. He lost his car and truck in the flood and spent six months at a motel in Chula Vista paid for by the county. Now he’s among dozens of his neighbors receiving assistance from the Harvey Family Foundation to restore their homes.

“A lot of families, for a situation that they didn’t cause, they’re forced to go into debt in order to save what little they do have,” says Armon Harvey, the foundation’s CEO. “They lost cars, they lost everything, and now they have to dig into their own pockets, into their savings, just to save their homes.”

Flood recovery is expensive. The average is more than $32 billion and rising. According to a recent study , California lost an average of $1.7 billion annually to floods as of 2020. That’s expected to rise to almost $2 billion by 2050. Yet typically doesn’t provide enough support to the people who need it the most, research shows. 

A Last Resort

After several weeks in the hotel program, Calix learned that her grandfather was selling an old trailer. He offered to give it to her, if she paid for repairs and moving it. Calix saw it as her ticket out of the hotel program, and a chance at some kind of stability for herself and her son. She racked up more debts on her credit cards to pay for new tires, towing, and a parking spot at a local RV park. 

Calix now pays about $1,600 a month for her spot at the RV park. She and Chago have to move to a different park every six months because stays are time limited. She said she’s grateful to have a place to live, but it feels temporary. She’s still in debt because of the disaster, and her credit score has suffered. If she had received $15,000 from the Housing Commission like some of the other survivors, she could have paid off her debt and stabilized her financial situation enough to get an apartment, she said. 

“It would have made a huge difference,” she says. â€œWąđ would be a lot further along. I’m basically falling behind and my stability is hanging on by a thread, to be honest, and that’s the truth of it. We really needed that help, and we’re not the only ones.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The Harvey Family Foundation has been trying to stem the exodus of low-income renters and homeowners from the flood-struck areas. Over the past year, they’ve received about $700,000 in city and county funds and raised another $500,000 in philanthropic support to help repair homes in Southcrest, Shelltown, and neighboring communities.

So far they’ve completed 73 home repairs with 14 more in the pipeline. These include rentals, such as those owned by Tony Tricarico, 77, who before the flood rented 11 small apartments on his Beta Street property for between $1,200 and $1,400 a month. 

The flood destroyed Tricarico’s home and all the rental units on the property. He had no flood insurance and didn’t qualify for FEMA aid. He was ready to give up and sell, he said. But the Harvey Family Foundation offered to help him restore the units if he didn’t raise the rents and offered them back to the displaced families. He agreed. So far, three units are fixed and rented, another three will be completed soon. At least one of the families is living in a trailer in a nearby alleyway waiting to return, he said. 

“I wanted to help” the renters, Tricarico says. “I’ve known them 20 years, I’ve watched their children grow up.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Much more funding is needed to help with repairs, Marin said. Even now she’s receiving calls from distressed homeowners who have run out of insurance or FEMA money, or are newly discovering mold or other problems in their homes caused by the floods, she said. 

Investments in infrastructure to prevent future flooding and make San Diego’s most vulnerable communities more resilient to the effects of climate change are vital, Berry with UC San Diego said. Infrastructure projects should include green, nature-based solutions that remove concrete and create more spaces such as parks where excess water can be absorbed into the soil, she added. It’s also important that officials take care to avoid “green gentrification” that drives up housing costs and displaces low-income residents, she said.

A state initiative called the  program is working to address this challenge by funding community-led development and infrastructure projects designed to simultaneously improve climate resiliency and bring economic benefits to California’s most disadvantaged communities. These include investments in affordable housing, bike lanes and walking paths, public transportation, and community gardens. 

Fresno is one community that has successfully used this funding through its , Berry said. More recently, the  also received the funds to develop climate- and community-resilience projects in San Diego’s central historic barrios.

The dilemma is that more investment is needed and San Diego taxpayers are reluctant to fund infrastructure projects, Berry said. Measure E, which would have raised the city’s sales tax by 1 percent and generated up to $400 million in additional general-fund revenue, including for infrastructure, was narrowly defeated in November.

She said she’s hopeful that the passage of state Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond to help California pay for efforts to address the impacts of climate change, including flood control and sea-level-rise protections, will further improve climate resiliency in San Diego and elsewhere. But it won’t be enough, she said. 

“Wąđ can’t keep waiting for disasters (in order) to respond,” she said. “Wąđ need to be proactive and not reactive, because we’re well aware that the reactive systems that we have are not sufficient … If we aren’t building resilience, it’s not going to get easier to respond” when disasters happen.

Back at the RV park in north San Diego, Calix is trying to keep herself and Chago focused on the positive. But she, like many other flood survivors, is worried about the next disaster. Worried that the city still hasn’t fixed the problems with its infrastructure. Worried that the local government has no plan in place to better help future disaster victims.

But, for her son, she takes a deep breath and tries to set those worries aside.

“At least we have a place to live,” she tells Chago. “At least we’re not living in a car or sleeping on friend’s couches,” like some of the other people they know.  

At least they have each other. At least they survived. 

Reporter Lauren DeLaunay Miller contributed to this story. This story is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. This story originally appeared in .

As cooperatives, St. James and Southbridge are peopled by their owners, families with shares in the company that holds title to the buildings and the land they sit on, those shares entitling owners to apartments and a say in governance. As limited-equity co-ops, the price of those shares—the cost of buying a home—is kept affordable to middle- and lower-income families by restricting their resale value.

These share prices don’t follow the jagged rise and fall of a stock market; they largely track with inflation, ensuring that families can leave with the value they put in, plus all the years of a solid, stable, safe affordable home. That limit on resale maintains the same opportunity for the next family in their wake. This is social housing: kept outside the market, decommodified, permanently affordable, and controlled by its residents. 

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A programmatic change meant to spur more rental development under the Mitchell-Lama program early in its existence had unintended consequences for these co-ops. The controversial loophole allows for cooperators to collectively vote whether to leave the program—or “privatize”—once the building’s mortgage is paid to its public lenders.

Leave the program, and cooperators can sell their share for whatever they can fetch in the market—no small amount in the rabid real estate market of New York. But leaving also means the loss of affordability for the next generation of owners, and the threat of rising costs at home for those who don’t wish to sell out. This is the choice put before the residents of St. James and Southbridge in my book .

Turbo-charged by potential profit and cut through with the ethics of consuming the public goods that support us, the stories of the fraught privatization fights within these co-ops—seen at eye-level from the perspective of the residents—reveal themselves to be deeper than simple morality tales of profiteering vs. altruism, more complex than a battle between selfish privateers and idealistic defenders of the public realm. Rather, the sides that cooperators take in these community-shredding debates, how they construct their arguments—how they justify their positions to themselves and the pitches they make to sway others—all hold key information on the fervent contest over space across the country.

The human perspectives of Southbridge and St. James serve as a prism through which to better distinguish the consequences of how we govern, the language we use, and the rights we feel entitled to—and what they mean for our ability to create and sustain cities that approach the ideal of equity, which, though increasingly invoked, remains painfully out of reach. 

The fights within these co-ops, and the paths their residents ultimately choose, diverge in key ways. We pick up, here, in the aftermath. 

Right around the time that St. James cooperators voted down privatization, David Madden and Peter Marcuse, two scholars of urban studies and sociology, published the book , which lay bare the contemporary politics of the places we call home. The authors take issue with the dominant narrative of “a system in crisis” that took hold after the crash of 2008. “Wąđ need to be careful with this usage of the concept of crisis. The idea of crisis implies that inadequate or unaffordable housing is abnormal, a temporary departure from a well-functioning standard.”

That isn’t what is happening, say Madden and Marcuse. They add: “Housing crisis is a predictable, consistent outcome of a basic characteristic of capitalist spatial development: Housing is not produced and distributed for the purposes of dwelling for all; it is produced and distributed as a commodity to enrich the few. Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended.”

In short, the very causes of the crisis are one and the same with the central ideology of homeownership. When that ownership carries a perceived right to profit from housing, without any responsibility for the collateral damage, crisis will be perpetual. Housing becomes a commodity, but one that has no rivals in its importance for organizing our lives and our politics. That is distinct from the role of housing that needs defending: housing as home.

Structuring housing as a limited-equity co-op, as the Mitchell-Lama program did, is a defense of home. The program sought a path to sheltering middle-income folks that was different from the exclusive suburbs supercharged by government-backed mortgages—subsidies immediately privatized and transmogrified into morally deserved earnings. The permanence of this defense can, however, never be guaranteed. At the program’s outset, co-op privatization wasn’t a possibility, but then laws and politics changed. The bulwarks against commodification need to be continually maintained, rebuilt, occupied, and augmented. 

A total of 194 St. James cooperators, with their votes on Feb. 23, 2017, managed to preserve their collectively owned social housing. Southbridge’s defenders were unable to do the same. That fortress against commodification in Lower Manhattan was transformed into a pillar of the housing system it had once stood against. How, exactly, did the Concerned Shareholders of St. James, with so many prevailing winds blowing against them, achieve their victory?

There is no exact formula or single answer. But we can learn lessons from how the battles at St. James and Southbridge diverged and in their different qualities as places and communities. These are applicable to how we might preserve other social housing in the future. As Madden and Marcuse point out, housing can be “a vehicle for imagining alternative social orders. Every emancipatory movement must deal with the housing question in one form or another. This capacity to spur the political imagination is part of housing’s social value as well.” The lessons of Mitchell-Lama extend beyond the housing sphere. Any attempt at realizing a truer, deeper form of our commonwealth must heed them.

Where Southbridge’s defenders spoke solely of the financial side of privatization—countering its alluring rewards with the specter of its risks—St. James’s concerned shareholders broadened the frame. They stressed that privatization wasn’t just a financial decision but a moral one: a statement about who the city was for, what recipients of public support owed to future generations, and how their own lives and choices intersected with those around them. They coupled this altruistic message with information that showed how privatization presented a financial risk—not only to the wider community but to the cooperators themselves.

They activated three different forms of unselfishness: empathic unselfishness through identification with future beneficiaries, communitarian unselfishness through identification with their neighbors who feared maintenance increases, and moralistic unselfishness through arguing that privatization was, in a sense, theft. In doing so, they triggered a key causal mechanism of collective action: a shared narrative, with which defection (privatization) was incompatible.

St. James’s predominately Black cooperative body, situated in a neighborhood where gentrification and displacement had transformed the streets for all to see, was particularly well primed to hear these messages. Many of the cooperators had themselves experienced discrimination in the housing market. Even among those who hadn’t, most knew the history of Bed-Stuy and could see where its future seemed to be heading if action wasn’t taken. Moreover, that future was not abstract but proximate, already right outside their doors.

The prospect of big money through privatization came with an asterisk: They would still be Black in a real estate system that had racism baked into its core. They’d internalized the need for social housing. At Southbridge, Lower Manhattan’s luxury turn didn’t have the same effect on the residents. The already-insular community remained at a remove from the rest of the neighborhood. As the prices on everything from groceries to movie tickets shot up with the glossy skyscrapers catering to capital, they felt under siege.

Privatization beckoned as a bulwark against those high prices. If you can’t beat them, the pro-privatizers seemed to say, join them. This call simply did not appeal to the residents of St. James in the same way. Because they had connections to their wider neighborhood, joining “them”—the monied companies and individuals snapping up buildings for passive profits—would have meant selling out their very sense of community.

Just as St. James’ defenders didn’t see their privatization decision as only about their individual well-being, they also didn’t go it alone in the debates. Where Southbridge’s pro–Mitchell-Lama residents considered it too risky to bring in outsiders, their counterparts at St. James heard those critiques and pushed through anyway, calling on the solidarity of citywide advocacy group Cooperators United for Mitchell-Lama (CU4ML) and local officials. In doing so, they gained access to crucial resources while also broadening the debate. CU4ML brought tactics, expertise, and the kind of political education that both Southbridge and St. James were internally starved of.

Public Advocate Tish James and her coterie of other officials packed up their bully pulpits and stationed them onsite, driving home the need for cooperators to consider a “we” beyond their own building. They connected the struggle at St. James to other struggles, and the strugglers to one another, activating another causal mechanism for collective action—what sociologist Charles Tilly calls “straightforward coercion by outsiders.”

Southbridge’s privateers had been able to keep most politicians out of their debates by wielding the sheer heft of their voting bloc. That complex is roughly 4.5 times as populous as St. James. It was thus much more difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the St. James privatizers to drown out the local politicians speaking to the clear public interest of preserving social housing amid a housing crisis that they had been elected to address. Southbridge board president Harvey Marshall, looking on from his now-privatized home across the East River, considered the politicians’ involvement at St. James to have been instrumental in defeating privatization there.

One can’t say what the outcome of the final Southbridge vote would have been if the anti-privatizers there had recruited nonresidents to their fight or if they had added moral, normative arguments to their rhetoric. But if Daniel Brampton can wring his hands over the additional flyers that his Venice vacation left unwritten, it’s also valid to speculate that those approaches may have closed the paltry 11-vote difference by which Southbridge’s privatization passed. Then again, it’s worth recalling that Southbridge had thwarted an earlier attempt at privatizing their co-op years before. At any Mitchell-Lama co-op, voting down privatization is never a permanent solution. Within a year, the whole process could start again. St. James remains an island of social housing, destined to be eroded if its floodwalls aren’t maintained.

For that reason, Madden and Marcuse endorse some skepticism around housing models like Mitchell-Lama that both oppose and exist within a larger system of commodification. “Human relationships cannot be confined to the boundaries of a housing estate. It is not possible to insulate a small group from what goes on in society as a whole; any such group is likely to be shaped by broader patterns of oppressive relationships. And islands of residential liberation will have limited impact in a sea of housing oppression and commodification,” they write.

Islands are good locations for lighthouses, though. They continue: “But experimental dwellings and emancipatory movements have wider significance as living demonstrations of housing’s potential. They should be seen as beacons pointing towards a broader possibility: that housing might support non-oppressive social relations, not in some utopian realm but in everyday life.”

That is one of the beauties of social housing: The models exist, and they work, even here in the capitalist United States. Activists like Graham Hales, Tia Ward, and Wenna Redfern have managed to keep the light on at St. James. And across the country, interest has grown in establishing new limited-equity co-ops, community land trusts, rent control, and public housing at a level that, less than a decade ago, seemed politically untenable. But as with all infrastructure, just building these refuges in a sea of commodification is not enough.

Our public goods need to be maintained, and central to the maintenance of social housing is a wholesale transformation of the prevailing American conception of homeownership. We must abolish the notion that ownership includes a right to profit. The defenders of St. James and Southbridge point the way toward an ethic to install in its place. Those who claim that ownership endows one with absolute control over some definable thing—a piece of land, a house, an instrument, a toy—are preachers of isolation.

As I took in the stories of Southbridge and St. James, I was struck by how pro-privatizers willingly curtailed their perception of the spheres of their influence and concern. They didn’t consider their neighbors or even friends with whom they’d built a community over decades. They denied any ties between their own decisions and the well-being of their fellow New Yorkers, save for the hypothetical rich family who would now have another housing option at their disposal, possibly at a slightly lower price.

Their sense of entitlement to profit overpowered any sense of connection to a public program that had provided them a most fundamental need: a safe, stable, affordable home. They were under the sway of what Rebecca Solnit calls . “If you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone,” she writes, but “we are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.”

Those who fought the privatizers largely bought into an ethos of connection. Their definition of ownership, of course, was still not entirely devoid of rights and entitlements. Just as James Szal could decide to paint his walls a screaming shade of red to complement his shoe-shaped furnishings, he could also tell you to get the hell out should you find his aesthetic, or the barking of his senior shih tzu, to be too much. But he and his allies also saw the layers of responsibility that came with owning something.

As residents of social housing, they knew this entailed more than just paying their share of collective costs or ensuring that their leaking toilet was fixed before the apartment below suffered a collapsed ceiling. They recognized their responsibility to steward the public good they’d been given control of, even if that meant declining a major influx of personal wealth. They operated on a different spatial and temporal scale. In doing so, they fulfilled their responsibility as stewards of not just a building but a neighborhood, a city, and, crucially, the future inheritors of their homes, be they a family member or a stranger pulled from a list.

For the pro-privatizers, their right to profit came first, and their responsibility to care for their asset—to “conduct your business well,” as Lester Goodyear put it—came in service of realizing that right. For those who believed in social housing, ownership was bundled up with a responsibility to steward. This understanding is similar to the idea of reciprocity in gift economies that predominate in Indigenous societies. As Potawatomi writer and scientist , “Responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all.”

A safe, stable, affordable home is a gift, just as land and life are, and residents’ fulfillment of their responsibility to steward that gift is what made their ownership real. When pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators stood up for their co-op as a public good, they affirmed their ownership of their homes, their communities. “True ownership,” to borrow a phrase from an exasperated Goodyear, isn’t achieved when the possession can be sold off at any price. True ownership is consummated with care, maintenance, and preservation—with faithful stewardship.

Pro–Mitchell-Lama cooperators weren’t the only stewards in those communities. Folks like Lester Goodyear had also done their part, serving in service organizations and advocating for what they thought was right. Goodyear and other pro-privatizers worked to keep St. James a great place to live despite the tumult outside its doors. This was its own kind of stewardship, even if these residents eventually wanted to transform it into undue profits. Casting a narrative of heroes vs. villains is easy. Less so is highlighting the gray areas—all the folks who struggled with this decision and all the reasons why supporting privatization is understandable though unjustified.

Those personal decisions are indicative of the wider difficulty of maintaining commons, but this hardship doesn’t alone stem from the prevailing commodification of place and home across the United States. It’s also born of narrative, held up by ideology, supported in policy, and fueled with the scraps of a collapsing safety net. Buying and selling a home for profit is held up as the American Dream. It’s positioned as the way to attain full citizenship and a voice.

Home equity is the only tool many Americans have to attain economic, educational, and aspirational family goals at a time when wages aren’t what they should be, work security is nonexistent beyond unions, and higher education is dependent on increasingly large sums of cash in its own commodified hellscape. Equity in a place one calls home is the backstop for disaster, for the unexpected or inevitable. 

Excerpted from by Jonathan Tarleton. Copyright 2025. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

More than a century before, Ford overcame the setbacks and complexities of the two strikes against her—her race and her gender—by opening a home medical practice in the heart of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. Known as , this thriving African American neighborhood in downtown Denver dates back to the late 19th century. An economic and cultural center for the community, Five Points was filled with entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and licensed educators, lawyers, and doctors. 

As part of the African American professional class, Ford intentionally used her knowledge and skills to meet the needs of African Americans, who experienced health disparities due to limited access to health care and financial resources to pay for medical services. By the time of her death in 1952, “the Lady Doctor,” as she was widely known, had delivered more than 7,000 babies. 

It was two of those “Ford babies,” Moses and Elizabeth Valdez, father and daughter, who catalyzed the memorial movement to save her home and practice nearly a century after it was built in 1890. 

After years of organizing and advocacy, in February 1984, the two-story house was removed from its foundation and transported 13 blocks on an oversize platform to 3091 California Street in downtown Denver. Since that time, it has remained the official site of the . In this way, Ford, one of the most renowned medical professionals in Colorado’s history, has remained a beloved beacon of the African American community, in life and death.

The successful campaign to preserve and restore Ford’s home exists as part of a larger narrative of the evolution of African American women’s memorialization, or the process of commemoration. Its origins in the United States date back to the early 19th century, when free Black communities in the North organized festivals and parades to celebrate emancipation, promote abolitionism, and disseminate Black history. They used these public venues to also herald the contributions of Black women through commemorative oratory, trumpeting their legacies through speeches. 

After the Civil War, public festivals and parades spread to the South. African American clubwomen began creating named memorials—public memorials attached to a person’s legacy—for women like Phillis Wheatley. At , the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was instrumental in establishing a nationwide infrastructure for named memorialization to expand in the 1890s, all while Jim Crow laws increasingly restricted the parameters of Black citizenship. At the same time, white organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy began to that supported false narratives of the Civil War and conveyed dehumanizing myths about enslaved Black people. 

With limited to no control of the public landscape domain, African American communities employed named memorials as strategic resistance against the erasure and caricature that existed among white public history memorials, race pseudoscience, and published historical narratives. In the absence of statues, monuments, and museums, African American women sparked the era of named memorials, which spread across the United States and manifested in domestic and Pan-African organizations, public libraries, public housing, and even commercial ventures.

As the ruling power of Jim Crow laws began to lessen in the 1960s, the prominence of named memorials ebbed as the ability to erect traditional public history sites, such as museums and statues, increased. Integration decreased the visibility of named memorials as constituencies of public buildings and African American neighborhoods began to change.

In the midst of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements, African American communities had more access and negotiating power with local and national bureaucracies to influence the public history landscape. They advocated to save buildings and create new spaces to celebrate Black heritage and culture, ushering in a new era of African American traditional memorials. Though urban renewal at times galvanized memorializers to save meaningful cultural places, it irrevocably restructured African American communities. 

Still, by developing public and private partnerships, a new generation of memorializers, African American preservationists, and public historians and organizations resisted erasure of their communities from the physical landscape when they established the first traditional public history sites.

In the 21st century, memorializers’ ability to create and sustain traditional memorials has only increased, with web-based technologies and social media platforms expanding memorials for African American women even further. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X posts, along with Google Doodles and digital humanities projects, have become integral to how Black history is disseminated to public audiences. The internet has provided a new public history terrain shaped by memorializers of all backgrounds. Community advocacy for more visible multicultural representation has broadened the scope of museums, statues, and historical markers in locales across the United States.

Despite all the national and regional representation, significant underrepresentation of African American women memorials still remains. With the addition of the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park in 2009, there are now three African American women represented in units of the National Park Service—less than 1% of all designations.

The silence of underrepresentation and unseen memorials has been countered by the national movement of African American public memory crafters to resist erasure and cultivate historical narratives that can withstand generations. Operating with unprecedented savvy, African American memorializers have been at the forefront of establishing a national public history landscape. The civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements created a political and social landscape for African American communities to establish public history sites using public federal and state funding.

The legacies of Black women continue to be celebrated in named and traditional memorials, by generations of memorializers and public memory crafters, through a continuum of commemoration manifested in a vibrant public history landscape throughout the United States.

This excerpt, adapted from by Alexandria Russell (University of Illinois Press, 2024), appears by permission of the publisher.

While navigating this unjust system, Flanagan felt out of her depth, so she began reaching out to other families who have experienced police violence. Those conversations inspired her to found the protest group (MAPB). “I just felt compelled,” Flanagan says. “[I wanted to] start a group where moms [who have lost a child to police violence] could meet. I remember feeling so isolated. I just couldn’t break through that grief.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Now, more than a decade after Allen’s death, MAPB focuses on advocating for better policy around police brutality—like —and training mothers to advocate within their local communities. 

On May 14, 2014, Johnatha de Oliveira Lima, 19, left his house in Manguinhos, a community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to walk his girlfriend home and drop off dessert at his grandmother’s residence. While walking home, Lima encountered the police having a confrontation with residents of his community. Amid the chaos, policeman in the back. By the time Lima’s mother, Ana Paula de Oliveira, arrived at the hospital, her son had died.

During Lima’s funeral, Oliveira met FĂĄtima Pinho, whose son, after being asphyxiated by a cop. During that conversation, Pinho invited Oliveira to fight for justice for both of their sons. “The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to fight for my son’s memory and for the truth,” Oliveira says. “That’s how the MĂŁes de Manguinhos movement emerged.”

That same year, Oliveira and Pinho founded Mães de Manguinhos (Mothers of Manguinhos), a collective that organizes protests against police brutality, helps mothers report their children’s state-sanctioned murders to the appropriate channels, and supports families in the aftermath of losing a relative to police violence.

“[Our] objective was to denounce police violence in Manguinhos, but we started moving away from Manguinhos [and] started meeting mothers from outside the community,” says Oliveira. “[That’s when] we noticed [many of] those families are also Black.”

Though they are separated by more than 5,000 miles, Oliveira and Flanagan are connected in myriad ways. They have both been left to pick up the pieces after the Black men they birthed were brutally murdered. Neither of them received support, monetary or otherwise, from their respective governments. And both have founded movements aimed at advocating for better policy around police brutality and teaching mothers who lost their children how to get justice.

Every year, , while due to police interventions in 2023 alone. In both countries, most of the victims are Black men and boys whose mothers are often forced to dispute the idea that their sons were disposable or responsible for their own deaths.

Both Mães de Manguinhos and MAPB aid mothers seeking accountability for the state’s violence against men and boys of color—a labor they are thrust into with little resources. After their children are murdered, these mothers can experience and , and yet, these mothers still devote their lives to seeking justice for their children and others. But, as they fight for their children’s legacy, we must ask ourselves: Who takes care of these mothers?

Connected by Struggle

In Rio de Janeiro, the Mães de Manguinhos collective pressured the state to prosecute the officer who killed Lima. Oliveira gathered testimonies and evidence to prove her son wasn’t a drug trafficker, as the officer claimed. When , Oliveira argued that her son was not a threat to police. Ultimately, the officer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, so Oliveira has appealed the verdict and requested a new trial. The second trial has not yet been scheduled.

“Most investigations into cases like this do not go anywhere because they are based on the character of the victim, investigating what the victim was doing at the time of the shooting,” explains Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo, a sociologist at Unigranrio University in Rio de Janeiro who researches the narratives of mothers who lost their children to police violence. “When [these] mothers tell their stories in the public sphere, they are breaking with this narrative. They are combating these discourses and humanizing victims of police violence.”

Oliveira alchemized her grief into care for other mothers by providing them with a road map for pressuring authorities. “This project was born with the intention of denouncing police violence and the murders of our children,” Oliveira says. “But there’s also a need to welcome, embrace, and care for these mothers, to show them that we are also victims and that we won’t die despite the pain, that we manage to stay alive through the purpose of the struggle.” Finding similarity in their struggles, these mothers become stronger in numbers, even when they are separated by oceans. 

While fatal police violence is common in both countries, there are also no protections or aid—monetary or legal—for families who lose a loved one to state violence.Ěý

That’s one of the reasons MAPB began running a two-year fellowship program in Dallas in 2021 where mothers who lost their children to police brutality are trained to be agents of change. Flanagan says the fellows learn how to organize for change; how to engage effectively with policymakers, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, and media; and how to effectively collaborate with other organizations.Ěý

Some of those fellows include Sheila Banks, whose son Corey Jones was fatally shot by Palm Beach Gardens police officer Nouman Raja in 2015. After a five-year battle, by culpable negligence and attempted first-degree murder with a firearm in 2019 and sentenced to 25 years. Another MAPB fellow, Dalphine Robinson, founded , an organization that supports families affected by police brutality.Ěý

“Wąđ have 20 powerful women who know who their representative is, who know legislation, and who know who their city officials are,” says Flanagan. “They are a force in their community, and I think that’s how we get the change collectively that we need.”

According to Flanagan, MAPB is also advocating for a change in policy in Texas that would make these families eligible for the state’s Victim’s Compensation Fund, which currently aids police officers involved in the killing and not the families of the victim.Ěý

By leaning on each other and learning through their grief, these women have become change advocates. “Social movements teach the people that exist within them,” Pinheiro de Araujo says. “It’s the pedagogy of the streets. The mothers themselves say they become investigators, they go after evidence, [and] some of them go to law school. And they teach one another through solidarity.”

After a , a network of mothers in Rio who lost their children to police brutality, including Oliveira, created RAAVE. Since 2022, RAAVE has been providing mental health services to the families of victims and conducting research on the impacts of fatal police violence. This year, a partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro provided scholarships to mothers across the state to be trained as researchers and develop public policy proposals to combat police violence, including monetary aid to victims’ families and mental and physical health care for the mothers.Ěý

The RAAVE project pays these mothers for their expertise and participation in the project to counteract the economic impact state violence has on families. Often, after the victim is killed, families experience a sudden loss of income either because the victim was the primary earner or the victim’s mother has to stop working due to grief. 

“Many of these mothers die without seeing justice for their kids’ murder, they die of depression or other illnesses,” says Pinheiro de Araujo. “There’s the financial question too. These women lose their jobs and end up in very vulnerable positions.”

As a result of this project, Oliviera will receive a degree in psychiatry while also influencing policy on how to care for families after the fact. Taking the project as instructive, Oliveira wants the state to provide general care and political education for the families of victims. “Our intention is that this project grows into other results and that our contributions become public policy,” Oliveira says. “Wąđ think it’s fundamental to care for the body and mind, but there’s also a need for political education.”

Demanding Care From the State

Since the right to raise children in a safe environment is , Oliveira argues that this also has to be addressed as a dimension of justice for police violence. The murder of Black boys and men by the police is the more extreme manifestation of this lack of rights, Oliveira said, but the state’s infringement on Black boys’ existence is everywhere, starting with low-quality education and lack of access to leisure.Ěý

“Wąđ are denied access to many spaces like the cinema, the theater, which are spaces of culture, and we don’t see people having the right to these spaces [because of policing and racial profiling],” Oliveira says.Ěý

While both Flanagan and Oliveira have dedicated their lives to filling a gap of care for other mothers, the question still remains: Who takes care of them? Oliveira says the women in MĂŁes de Manguinhos take care of each other through companionship, cooking for each other, organizing and going to protests together, and helping each other find the right channels to get justice. If the state isn’t there for them, they are there for each other.Ěý

Oliveira sees this work as a continuation of her care for her son, so the sacrifices feel worth it. “The struggle is a space where I can still care for my Johnatha,” Oliveira says. “Where I am still his mother. That’s something I agonized about. What’s it going to be like now? How will I speak about him? What will my relationship with my son be like?”

For Flanagan, who recently took a break from MAPB due to health issues, this question is more complicated. “I threw myself at the work, and the work just really helped me but also caused me a lot of health problems,” she says. “A lot of the moms in the movement have never been to therapy. You have to make it healthy for you at the same time, [while] honoring their space and pain.”

Across the world, grieving Black mothers have organized themselves to clamor for justice, to care for one another, and to advocate for their murdered children. Through their grief and pain, these mothers build support networks, help each other gather evidence, study legislation and advocate for better laws, and hold space for one another’s  loss—a model for how states around the world should approach the consequences of state violence with care, solidarity, and an integral concern for  those who survive.

Peltier’s freedom is priceless in its own right. But just as his wrongful imprisonment symbolized the systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples, his release embodies the liberation that’s possible through intergenerational organizing. It speaks to the possibilities of collective Indigenous power. 

Peltier’s entanglement with carceral systems began at the age of 9 when he was forcibly taken from his grandmother’s home and sent to a federally funded boarding school hundreds of miles away—a traumatic displacement that was part of a broader policy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Decades later, while fighting on the front lines for Indigenous rights and land—and against federal agents trying to suppress the American Indian Movement—he was wrongfully convicted in the deaths of two of those agents. Peltier’s story is a microcosm of the systemic injustice Native people have endured—a reminder of the United States’ dedication to exploiting, incarcerating, and attempting to erase Indigenous peoples.

Yet, despite nearly half a century behind bars, Peltier never gave up. He maintained hope and fought for his freedom by staying connected to his spirituality, culture, and people. His resilience inspired generations to join the movement for Indigenous justice, underscoring the power of intergenerational activism grounded in ceremony and community.

The fight to free Peltier was long and arduous, fueled by grassroots organizing and high-level political advocacy, and ultimately kept alight by people who know and love him. Many doubted his release would ever be possible. But Indian Country proved them wrong by bridging the gap between frontline activism and decision-making at the highest levels of government.

A significant turning point in the campaign to free Peltier came when the U.S. government began to reckon with its role in the boarding school era. As more truths emerged about these institutions’ devastating impact on Indigenous peoples that fueled generations of trauma, Biden’s perspective began to shift. Learning that Peltier was a boarding school survivor deeply moved the former president, humanizing Peltier’s story and adding urgency to the clemency request.

The federal government’s formal acknowledgment of these historical injustices helped pave the way for Peltier’s release. In October 2024, Biden apologized for the government’s role in the boarding schools. This apology was the result of decades of unwavering advocacy by Indigenous peoples who insisted that the U.S. confront this dark chapter in its history and work to repair the harm caused.

While his apology itself was an important step, freeing Peltier was one meaningful action to address the ongoing impacts of the boarding schools policies. Yet the work is far from over, and continued efforts—such as passing the U.S. Truth & Healing Commission Bill—are needed to ensure large-scale reparative justice for the devastation caused by boarding schools. 

Peltier’s freedom is also a testament to the growing presence and influence of Native leaders in the U.S. government. Figures like former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland have played a crucial role in amplifying Indigenous voices and bringing frontline issues to the attention of those in power, and her direct advocacy to former President Biden was invaluable in Peltier’s release. 

One critical piece of the collective efforts to free Peltier was countering the false narratives perpetuated by institutions like the FBI and Department of Justice, who were using Peltier as their own symbol—one of punishment to Indian Country for the 1975 shootout in which two FBI agents were killed. Though the other two American Indian Movement members charged for the same shooting were found not guilty due to self-defense, Peltier was used as an example, touted by law enforcement as a threat of what could happen if Indigenous people dared to resist. 

Getting clemency for Peltier took a long time and immeasurable effort. But through organizing, advocacy, and storytelling, we dismantled decades of misinformation and mobilized a powerful coalition of allies. Peltier’s story resonated with people across the world, awakening a shared sense of justice and humanity that transcended political and cultural boundaries.

The fight for justice in Peltier’s case is tragically echoed in more recent struggles, such as the by police in Atlanta. Tortuguita was defending forest land against the construction of “Cop City,” a proposed police training facility on Muscogee forest land, when they were shot and killed by 57 police bullets. Their death highlights the ongoing violence and criminalization faced by those who put their bodies on the line to protect sacred lands. 

Like Peltier, Tortuguita was accused of shooting at officers, though zero evidence of this has been found. Like Peltier, Tortuguita’s story illustrates the lengths to which state power will go to suppress dissent and silence defenders of justice. 

Unlike Peltier, Tortuguita is not alive to tell their story. 

As we celebrate Peltier’s release, we must honor the memory of activists like Tortuguita by continuing to fight for justice—from fighting the current assaults on the LGBTQ community to making sure peoples’ basic needs aren’t stripped away overnight to refusing to let our school curriculums be defined by racism, queerphobia, and fear. No matter who is in office, Indigenous peoples will continue to protect our lands, cultures, and ways of life against the forces that seek to destroy them. Peltier’s freedom is not just a symbol but a call to action—a reminder that even in the face of insurmountable odds, we have the power to create change.

Now, as the Trump administration aggressively pushes forward with drilling and oil extraction plans, withdraws from the Paris Agreement, and freezes Inflation Reduction Act funding critical for combating the climate crisis, the need for mass mobilization has never been clearer. 

Since the U.S. government will no longer be contributing its share of the UN climate body’s budget, Michael Bloomberg . While this is not an ideal or complete solution to new climate threats, it does represent incremental progress toward the wealth redistribution and action needed to protect our shared planet. Other philanthropists must follow Bloomberg’s precedent by directing substantial funding and resources into frontline climate justice organizations immediately. Indigenous-led movements are at the forefront of defending our planet, and they need robust support to succeed.

From the American Indian Movement of the 1970s to the land and water defense movements of today, Indigenous organizing and power-building has remained steadfast against all odds. Peltier’s release shows us what is possible when we stay rooted in our values, connected to one another’s humanity, and committed to organizing for the liberation of all people. We will continue to expand our power and mobilize for our collective future—the next four years and beyond demand nothing less.

I am writing with an exciting update about this column. Since we launched “ÂÜŔňÉç” in 2021, we have collectively survived, witnessed, and lost loved ones, species, and land to floods, drought, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, genocide, a rise in fascism, and so many variations of cancer and disease.

We’re also enduring the ongoing violence of late-stage capitalism that shows up as institutional violence—denied health care, trigger-happy police, identity-based violence, and increasing economic disparity and insecurity. As all of these crises unfold around our precious globe, we are learning to persist in the work of living. We can simultaneously feel the end of the world as we’ve known it and the beginning of what will be shaped by us.

Though it’s looking dire, I am constantly reminded by friends, comrades, Octavia Butler, and historians that these are the conditions from which we have to make our way to lives worth living. We are at the beginning. Right now, I mostly feel a sense of devastating loss, but as the smoke clears, I know we will learn what is lost and where there are opportunities to survive. 

I began this column because I was feeling overwhelmed by what the pandemic had unveiled to us, about how hard it was to protect each other, and about how much we need each other. I wanted to call on the wisdom of murmuration: moving together, with adequate space and proximity, avoiding predation by being in right relationship. For humans to be in right relationship, we must practice accountability—being intentional about how we take up space and resources, attending to our role in the world and our impact on others, shaping what we can touch, and being able to repair and set boundaries, especially as conditions change.

After a year of exploring these themes in this column (also collected in ), I opened ÂÜŔňÉç up to other emergent strategists who are thinking about and practicing how we relate, change, grow, and hold each other through changing conditions. Those columns have been abundant and divergent, representing a healthy ecosystem of ideas and practices.

Emergent strategy is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. The Earth awaits our partnership, and we have to decentralize but move together to avoid the predation of this moment. We feel smaller and we may be smaller, but we—the workers, the makers, the parents, the birthing bodies, and the Earthlings who want a future on Earth—are still the majority. We need a place to keep learning how to flock together.

So, for our third iteration of the column, we are partnering with (MG), a group I worship. MG is shepherding a set of ideas that blow my mind every time I encounter them. I reference the organization often in conversation and interviews, and I included their “Shocks, Slides and Shifts” framework in . To me, MG feels like emergent strategy in action, and the thinkers who founded the organization were teachers in the soil of my own “ahas” about how the world works, what matters, and what we must do.

MG taught me that eco– comes from the Greek word oikos, which means home, and that home is what we always want to center, protect, and grow. That takes multiple forms: Ecosystem is all the relationships in our home. Ecology is what we know and understand about home. Economy is not money or markets, but how we manage the resources of our home. And ecological justice—a state of balance between human communities and healthy ecosystems—is rooted in and flows from home. 

MG also taught me about “.” Without realizing it, I had developed a short-term way of thinking about the impact of humans on Earth, but the “lag effect” framing helped me understand the cumulative effect of human behavior on our planet. Did you know it takes between 40 and 50 years to fully feel the effect of burning fossil fuels? Our Earth is experiencing the effect of the fossil fuels humans were burning in the 1980s. Consider how much fossil fuel has burned in the decades since then, a climate impact that will shape our next half century. Understanding this can give us a clearer picture of what is to come and how to take the right action. 

MG taught me that everything is precious. One of their beloved founders, , often tells the story about how he and his daughter would brush their teeth together so he could simultaneously teach her about the preciousness of every drop of water. I took that practice into my own life. 

MG helped me understand the true web of our interconnectedness. Our Earth isn’t organized by the borders we have set on top of it. Instead, Earth is a single living system operating as a spider’s web, where all of us are connected and impact each other, and core webbing ties it all together. There is fragility and strength in all of this connection. 

Learning interconnectedness helped me understand there is no “over there.” There is no climate catastrophe that can actually be contained. If we hope to survive, then we have to think about how we cause impact and are impacted by others and how we can protect the meta systems—air, water, soil, and energy—that hold us all. 

helped me understand strategy in a way I could quickly use and apply. In this exercise, the three overlapping circles represent what we need, what’s politically possible, and what are false solutions. So often, our political system will hear us articulate what we need and return with a false solution, claiming it is the only option that is politically possible. MG helped me understand that our work is never to settle for the false solutions, but to instead organize, exert pressure, and educate ourselves to make what we need politically possible. This has saved me so much time and helped me determine where to expend my own precious life force. 

This is just a taste of MG’s incredible thinking and experimentation. The organization has also liberated land in the Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco Bay Area and is building a Justice and Ecology Center for communities to gather, deepen, and learn in part of a larger shift to return land to Indigenous hands and those who will love and steward it. 

As we keep watching our government devolve, I am calling on MG to helm ÂÜŔňÉç in 2025 and offer a guide for how we can foster a , even against the odds. Movement Generation is going to use this column to provide current ideas, frameworks, and practices that can help us navigate this storm. 

I am so excited to be their student again, and I am grateful for YES! Media letting us continue to iterate to make the best offer we can. We invite you to learn with us, grow with us, and change with us.Ěý

, in practice, it will be much harder for the Trump administration to actually pull back funding. But the IRA doesn’t just tackle climate; it represents a addressing everything from carbon emissions and health care to tax codes and the economy. (It’s worth noting that the link to the comprehensive overview of the IRA that I used for my reporting back in December has since been removed from whitehouse.gov.)

Often considered a landmark achievement of the Biden administration, the IRA includes, among other policies, an ambitious set of initiatives for clean energy jobs, funding for climate resiliency infrastructure and disaster relief, and more aggressive taxation for large corporations. But perhaps one of the most important, if under discussed, aspects of the IRA is its impact on prescription medication costs.

At a time when due to the expense, the IRA gave the government the ability to curb rising drug costs through a variety of strategies. Most notably, the law gave Medicare the power to negotiate prescription prices directly with drug companies for the first time, which could have a cumulative, long-term impact on drug prices. 

“[The IRA] has given the government for the first time the ability and also the tools through which it can negotiate drug prices” says , director of the , a nonpartisan research organization. This ability ramps up over time, allowing a set number of additional drugs to be negotiated each year. “That really changes the ball game in an important way—not so much today or even tomorrow, but over time, you’ve equipped the government with a whole bunch of new opportunities to keep prices in check.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

As far as immediate price reductions, the IRA also guarantees that many Medicare beneficiaries will pay no more than . This price cap is not only a practical win for people on Medicare, but a symbolic victory for many activists who have long lobbied to make predatory insulin and .

In recent years, insulin has become a poster child for the broken health care system. By , a mere three pharmaceutical companies control —and this monopoly has given them free reign to .

A recent found that from 2012 to 2021, the price of a 30-day supply of insulin nearly doubled from $271 to $499. The estimated , meanwhile, is only $2 to $4. When compared to international prices, insulin in the United States is eight times more expensive, per a . For many, these discrepancies are particularly outrageous; without insulin, .

It’s unclear exactly how Trump’s executive order will affect the IRA’s climate initiatives, let alone how or if it could have any effect on other aspects of the law, such as insulin price caps. But just a few years after Biden signed the IRA into law, it is clear that its benefits are under threat. Project 2025—a harrowing, authoritarian “wish list” published by the Heritage Foundation and meant to guide the next Republican presidency—calls for the repeal of the IRA. Republicans, too, are already pushing for and its so-called “woke agenda,” including its climate provisions and tax increases for corporations. (Republicans’ continued distaste for the IRA is not surprising, however, as every single Republican in Congress . But that partisanship does not extend beyond the halls of Congress: The majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, .) 

The main goal of Project 2025’s repeal is to strip Medicare of its power to negotiate with corporations, according to , vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute. “To achieve that goal they’re willing to undo progress and throw prescription drug affordability into jeopardy for everyone in Medicare,” Ducas says. “By and large [Project 2025], this mandate for leadership, is grounded in a worldview that prioritizes profits, corporations, and business over people—full stop.”

In short, Project 2025’s IRA repeal would throw the baby out with the bathwater. In order to maintain corporate monopolies and profits, Americans would lose out on insulin price caps, health care savings, climate initiatives, clean energy jobs, and a whole lot more.

Yet even with the IRA currently in place—and a that health care and are simply overwhelming for most Americans—people with diabetes still struggle to afford their insulin on a day-to-day basis. In 2021 alone, more than , with Black Americans, the uninsured, and those too young to qualify for Medicare being the most vulnerable to rationing. 

Clearly, the IRA represents only one step on a much longer journey toward equitable health care access. But health advocates, grassroots organizers, and people living with diabetes continue to lead the way in advocating for a future where accessible insulin is a reality for all.

Insulin Policies for All

While the IRA is an achievement, it’s important to understand its limits. The IRA grants a co-pay price cap for certain Medicare beneficiaries—not a holistic price cap. This difference is an important one, according to Shaina Kasper, executive director of , a grassroots nonprofit run for and by people with diabetes. 

The $35 co-pay limits monthly out-of-pocket expenses for certain people with Medicare, but it does nothing to regulate the actual list price of insulin, the initial price of a drug set by pharmaceutical manufacturers before any rebates, discounts, negotiations, or insurance kicks in. As a result, Kasper says , premium insurance plans, or any health care coverage are still left in the lurch. (It should be noted that the IRA initially did include a $35 co-pay cap for those with private insurance, not just Medicare recipients, but it was .)

“Our goal is an absolute price cap [and] lowering that list price of insulin to make sure that it’s affordable and accessible to all,” says Kasper. Together, Kasper says, lowered list prices and co-pay caps would impact the full spectrum of people in need, including those with private insurance, those without insurance, and those with Medicare benefits. (Even without a full price cap, however, the IRA did play an important role in pressuring all three insulin giants to or reduced list prices for some insulin products—an important, if incomplete, step toward affordability.)

But affordability and accessibility aren’t always the same thing when it comes to medications. The fact that insulin and diabetes supplies need to be prescribed also means added barriers. Tracy Ramey, leader of the Ohio Insulin for All chapter and T1 International organizer, has recently helped pass an in her state, which grants pharmacists the ability to dispense an emergency supply of a chronic maintenance drug without a prescription. The law was named after 36-year-old after being turned away from a pharmacy and unable to contact his doctor for an insulin refill.

The impact of Kevin’s Law is immediate—even for Ramey’s own daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes. While Ramey was between jobs and waiting for Medicaid to kick in, her daughter was still able to get her supplies, even after a prescription had run out. “I’m very proud that my daughter was able to benefit from that as well,” Ramey adds. 

Since 2016, 26 states have passed some version of Kevin’s Law, but Kasper says expanding the law is an important way to ensure equitable access to health care across the country. Taken together, these policies—universal price caps, lower list prices, and an expanded scope of practice for pharmacists—would add much-needed guardrails for people struggling to afford and access their medications.

Insulin Access on the Ground

However well crafted or impactful a potential policy may be, people urgently need insulin access here and now. To fill in the gaps, communities across the country are creating their own mutual aid networks.

“Wąđ can’t sit and wait forever for someone else to save us. It’s just not going to happen,” says Brandon Lopez, founder of , a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization in Arizona that sends free diabetic supplies to people who need it. “Who knows, maybe a policy will pass or something will change where health care will be free, but until then it’s our job as a community to take care of each other.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The Embrace Foundation has its roots in Lopez’s own health care experiences. In 2017, Lopez was working full time, living without health insurance, and struggling to afford his insulin. 

“With bills, rent, cost of living, I had no money for diabetic supplies, [which] added up to almost $1,000 a month. I simply couldn’t afford it,” says Lopez, who has Type 1 diabetes. “For months I didn’t test my blood sugar once. I couldn’t afford the strips. I took insulin when I felt high and ate something when I felt low, completely in the dark. I spread out what insulin I had, skipped meals, took half doses, and reused the same bag of dull pen needles I had over and over, completely unsanitary and unsafe.”

To get by, Lopez described how he sold whatever possessions he could and spent days going from hospital to hospital, “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;Eventually, Lopez landed a better job that provided health insurance. But he continued building an ad-hoc insulin-supply-sharing network on social media, where he connected people experiencing insulin insecurity to a growing inventory of donated supplies.

In 2018, Lopez formally launched the Embrace Foundation, and nearly seven years later, says it has expanded to 19 volunteers, three storage units of supplies, and more than 2,500 people served across the country. According to Lopez, the majority of supply requests come from people who don’t qualify for insurance, college students who may have aged out of their parents’ insurance, and people who are out of work. But plenty of people with insurance still can’t afford their supplies.

“It’s either have insurance [with] a co-pay or pay [more than] $600 to live,” says Lopez. “This month we had a woman reach out that was a single mother with three children and was rationing her supplies so she could keep the power on and feed her family. We’ve set her up to where she will receive a package from us every month so that she can [have] one less thing to worry about.”

Lopez says the Embrace Foundation is meant to continue , the Canadian researcher and doctor who discovered insulin in the early 1920s. “Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1 … saying, ‘,” Lopez says. “Wąđ will always stay true to that.”

Lupe and Manuel, who requested the use of anonymity because of the personal information they shared, were participating in a restorative justice circle, the final stage of their work with (CHAT) Project. Housed in the Family Justice Center in Richmond, California, Lupe and Manuel met with facilitators for months in a series of sessions aimed at healing their family and helping them find a way forward from the pain they’ve endured, both individually and together. The CHAT Project’s restorative justice model served as a beacon of hope, one that gave them the tools they each needed to co-parent effectively while mending their own relationship.

Restorative justice, according to The CHAT Project, is a community-based, nonpunitive approach to harm that encourages accountability, healing, and repair. The work emphasizes healing, not punishment, and asks participants what they need in order to move forward. Rooted in Indigenous practices, restorative justice invites in communities and builds and strengthens relationships.

Lupe and Manuel are two of nearly 100 people whom The CHAT Project has served in Contra Costa County. The program’s participants are 84 percent people of color and 49 percent Spanish-speaking, and all of their services are free.

Lupe reached out to The CHAT Project in fall 2023, after struggling to find a way forward in her relationship with Manuel. The two share a young son, and they’d practically grown up as a couple. Lupe and Manuel met in their early 20s, working at the same restaurant in San Francisco. They didn’t typically work the same shifts, but one day, Lupe covered for a coworker. That night, she met Manuel and was instantly captivated by his smile. She wanted to get to know him, and they took a walk around Bernal Heights. They bonded immediately, and two years later, their son was born. The problems in their relationship started soon after.

The couple started arguing regularly; sometimes Manuel would leave, sometimes it would be Lupe. Their relationship was in turmoil. And even though Manuel never did anything to make her feel in danger, Lupe was afraid for her son and the environment their relationship was creating.

“I wanted to be that parent, that adult that I wish I had when I was little,” Lupe said. 

Over the next five years, the couple’s relationship fluctuated between the occasional happy period and periods of immense stress. They struggled in family court to determine a custody schedule for their son. Manuel desperately wanted to change his ways and be there for his family, but he was always drawn back to old, unhealthy patterns. Then, in the summer of 2023, things escalated. In a moment the two describe as an “extreme invasion of privacy,” Manuel crossed a line with Lupe, and they both knew it was time to try a different approach.

At first, Lupe felt like an imposter seeking help at the Family Justice Center. She knew that her relationship was unhealthy, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to classify her experiences as domestic violence. But after reading about The CHAT Project’s mission to “help families and communities connect with each other and to learn (or relearn) practices for moving through conflict, reducing violence, and strengthening connections,” she was excited to try.

“I went in with zero expectations,” said Lupe. “I had never heard of restorative justice.”

The first part of working with The CHAT Project is an initial assessment to make sure that both the family and the project are a good fit. The CHAT Project Co-Director Camila Robayo Durán explained that in this first step, she wants participants to think clearly about their goals. After hearing what the program can offer, some potential participants “have the wisdom on their own” to know it’s not what they’re looking for, said Robayo Durán.

“It’s not a crisis-intervention type of service,” said Robayo Durán. “It’s something that you do for your healing and to strengthen relationships.”

Lupe and Manuel agreed that their shared goal was to learn how to coparent effectively; they weren’t necessarily looking to mend their own romantic relationship, but they were open to it. After the initial evaluation, both Lupe and Manuel started on their individual journeys. They worked with therapists and their CHAT Project facilitator, Alejandra Escobedo, to address some of the root causes of the problems in their family. It became clear quickly that they both were being triggered by childhood sexual abuse, something that Manuel had never shared with anyone before.

“The first time that I saw my therapist, it was very, very difficult for the words to flow,” said Manuel. “I was afraid of feeling judged.”

Manuel explained that throughout his relationship with Lupe, she had struggled with his inability to express himself and his feelings. “All my life, I was used to ‘Listen and shut up,’” said Manuel. Lupe agreed: “I would communicate when something was upsetting or when he hurt me in any way, and he just shut down.”

But, Manuel said, therapy was starting to give him new tools to address not just his past trauma but his present-day struggles. At the same time, Lupe’s therapy experience was giving her the tools she needed to have more empathy and understanding for Manuel’s incredibly different upbringing. As a couple, they were able to bring these skills together and begin communicating more openly and freely than they ever had, getting to know each other on a deeper level and sympathizing with each other’s experiences.

For Robayo Durán, Lupe and Manuel’s experience with this element of The CHAT Project is a great example of how the court system often stops short of helping families move forward. Lupe and Manuel had been working out some of their childcare logistics in family court, but nothing there was preparing them to ever co-parent effectively again, let alone heal their own relationship.

“What is interesting is that systems tend to label people in a certain way,” Robayo DurĂĄn said. But at The CHAT Project, said Robayo DurĂĄn, “Wąđ don’t label people ‘the survivor’ [or] ‘the person causing harm’ right away. We try to explore with people ‘What is your role, what was the situation, what was your past life, how did you come to this situation?’”

On top of participating in therapy individually, a key element of The CHAT Project’s work is accountability. And in the case of Lupe and Manuel, that meant realizing, for both of them, that Manuel wasn’t the only one who needed to be held accountable, even though it was his actions that brought them to the program.

“Something that CHAT did for me was help me realize that I wasn’t just a victim, right? That I also had a part in everything that was happening in my relationship, which is also very hard to do because I definitely went in with a 100 percent victim mentality, and that wasn’t 100 percent accurate,” said Lupe. She began to see that healing her own past traumas could help her show up more fairly and compassionately in her relationship.

Lupe and Manuel met individually with their facilitator for several sessions before deciding they were ready for what The CHAT Project calls a restorative justice circle. Lupe and Manuel were told to clear their schedules for a whole day of a “soup of emotions,” said Lupe.

Joined by people close to them, Lupe and Manuel’s circle was a time to bring all the work they’d been doing individually, together. They shared, listened, and cried, learning about themselves and each other. They agreed to ways they would work together moving forward, and by the end of the hours-long session, they knew things had changed. “When we left the circle that day, we left with a clear idea of what we were wanting to continue to work on,” said Lupe.

Communication, Lupe said, was at the top of the list. The CHAT Project facilitators helped them develop tools for communicating more clearly and respectively, and in the months since their restorative justice circle, they’ve cemented these practices into their everyday lives in ways that have completely changed their relationship. They’ve been able to manage their anger and impulsivity better, and they’ve both continued in their personal therapy practices.  ”We work on ourselves to be able to bring the best version of ourselves to the relationship,” said Lupe.

“Wąđ have many ways to measure success,” said Robayo DurĂĄn, “and our priority, most of all, is safety.” Success looks different for all their participants; for some, taking the first step to ask for help is a success in itself. Not everyone who contacts them is ready for a dialogue with their partners like Lupe and Manuel were, but there are still services The CHAT Project can offer them. “Having a circle is not always the goal, but to be able to provide the support they need to make a change in their life,” Escobedo said.

For Lupe and Manuel, the change was felt immediately. They’ve surpassed their goals, and in addition to finding healthy ways to co-parent, they’ve also restored their own romantic relationship. They’re living together, rebuilding relationships with their families, and using the tools they gained through the program every day. 

“I  honestly do feel like we wouldn’t be where we are as a family without having received that resource when we did,” Lupe said.

Domestic Violence Support

To find your nearest family justice center, visit the .

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, you can also contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support and referrals, or text “START” to 88788. Information on local domestic violence programs can be found using this online tool.

For Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the StrongHearts Native Helpline at 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483) provides 24/7 confidential and culturally appropriate support and advocacy for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. A chat option is available through their website.

This story was produced in collaboration with the.

“They’re not trying to impose dictatorship from a position of strength, they’re trying to impose it from a position of weakness and fear.” —

“In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the dominant aspirations.” —Peter Kropotkin

The start of 2025 has been unsurprisingly chaotic. As a surge of wildfires engulfed the Los Angeles area, stealing people’s homes and livelihoods, the news broke that the world’s lands and oceans recorded the  in 2024. 

Even before his inauguration this week, President Donald Trump floated invading Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal, and making Canada the 51st state. While pointing his “America First” policies toward expansionism and imperialist ends, he threatened the  justifying Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. He also sought a public health justification for shuttering the southern border, much like the  that once inspired the Nazis. 

Since being sworn in, Trump acted on many of his statements immediately and  redefining birthright citizenship and gender as well as reversing climate regulations, among other terrible things. These issues alone paint just a portion of the picture of what’s coming to those of us who plan to fight back. 

The truth of these moments and many others is that if we plan to defy the order of the day, we must decide between what’s worth fighting about and what’s not the best use of our time. 

Often, the fights we choose to take up may not reflect the urgency other issues demand. Those emergencies can become so great that they choose us when we can no longer deny the need for our full participation. Now is the time to commit ourselves rather than wait to be forced into action by circumstances;  between proactively planning instead of waiting to see what happens and reacting to it. 

Resistance based on reaction may operate from the point of disadvantage if it usually requires an antagonism or a spark to mobilize a response. So we’re forced to admit that we have priorities if we understand this and then decide what to do about them. 

Some fights are over issues that concern life and death, while others may be about much more trivial things. Internalizing awareness here will provide needed wisdom and precision about what makes the best use of our time during compounding crises. The nonstop news cycle, personal conflict, and the weight of survival make it hard to figure out where to focus our energy. However, as recent years have shown, it’s of the utmost importance to figure this out so that we don’t exhaust ourselves from pointless ventures. 

The political moment we’re in, where fascism is wearing us down, demands intentionality that should disrupt nonsense. Therefore, if we find ourselves amid unserious squabbles, it’s a testament to the unseriousness of the parties who choose to remain entangled. It’s not that we cannot multitask and focus on multiple issues simultaneously or that we should use dismissiveness to avoid accountability by labeling it a “distraction.” It’s that an unending circus of self-centeredness, celebrity drama, and political theater disrupts our focus and degrades our perspective. 

Unimportant fights are disagreements like those that center the famous and influencers as representatives people attach themselves to. They’re the conflicts that become inundated with pitfalls of disempowering political representation. That’s how the public ends up arguing for politicians who don’t care about them and stars who don’t share their class interests.  

This means that people must overcome the draw to participate in celebrity worship, symbolic issues, and other quarrels like the “petty ideological struggles”  once spoke about. He said we have to “look at the substance,” and that’s what’s always missing from so much of the messiness capitalist culture inundates us with. If more of us had genuine, deep relationships, too, many of the insignificant spats among us might subside. We can have our differences and even dislike one another while recognizing the gravity of this time we’re trying to survive. 

The oft-quoted psalm of revolutionary and author George Jackson to “settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here” rings hollow among much of today’s “left.” Anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and egos, among other things, make disputes a feature and not a flaw of bickering denominations. Siloed, powerless people fighting over who gets the most influence while those with actual power pummel them all is undoubtedly a goofy scene. 

This reality may overshadow another one of Jackson’sĚý: “Each popular struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new ideas.” Accepting dogma and making movements past into prescriptive guides regurgitates old tactics, offering us new defeat. Bitter unity isn’t the answer; it’s often disastrous, too, but we have to answer something.ĚýWho is fed, housed, given health care, safety, and security by what we’re fighting about? Does the fight we’re in lead to a change that can alter people’s lives for the better or advance us toward a revolutionary shift?Ěý

What are the most important fights, then? That may depend on where you’re at and what the conditions say at a given moment. Someone fighting an actual fire knows that putting out the flames around them supersedes everything else at that time.

The beauty of the Black Panther Party’s intercommunalist proclamation “survival pending revolution” is that it recognizes that we have to sustain ourselves to have any struggle whatsoever. It’s what led them to strategically confront problems about health care, housing, food, environment, and state violence. And while the Party was certainly not free from petty drama and avoidable conflicts, the model they established still matters today. 

Nonsensical, repetitive debates on social media and posturing keep tiring us out. We need as much energy as possible to challenge the dominant status quo of capitalism. It’s one of the main reasons we have to be able to differentiate between disputes that happen for dispute’s sake or because people or entities around us want to create problems.

Our efforts should abandon self-aggrandizing optics, clout chasing, and content creation that doesn’t constitute a counterforce against oppression. The way we wage confrontation should be a threat to whomever or whatever is putting our lives at risk. Threats have to become kept promises too. 

When Black Power–era theorist and former member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers  reflected on the successes and failures of that time, he arrived at a conclusion that’s important now. Mohammed stated that we needed to “reorganize our thinking.” That reorganization “of our political thinking,” he said, “is necessary because it has become too narrow, limited, and elitist. Unless we immediately begin to expand our vision, we will constantly find ourselves submerged in cynicism, pessimism, and despair.”

He continued, “a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness has already begun to surface. … But that particular feeling can easily be overcome. … Not only must our analyses show our accomplishments, they must also show our failures and mistakes. If such analyses are properly done, we will have the type of transmission fuel needed to transcend feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.” One of the main mistakes generations have made in recent years is the sort of radical tourism and spreading of ourselves too thin. Focus is necessary to beat back everything that needs to be destroyed enough to gain new ground. 

Our enemies and the oppressive elements we know all too well may not be as strong as we imagine. Teen hackers have made breaching federal authorities into . We saw this tyrannical president  when we rose against state violence in response to the killing of George Floyd. Even now, we’ve seen that  with something to prove has sent shockwaves throughout the ruling elite. These aren’t distant memories; these things all tell us a lot about what’s possible in today’s world. 

A call to focus and concentrate our efforts is not necessarily a plea for centralization. Instead, it’s about being led by what the world around us is showing us our primary concerns should be. Sometimes, the stakes are so high it’s not even a question or a debate; it’s an immediate action that happens without question. You’re supposed to duck when someone throws a punch, but if you’re too preoccupied, the blow will hurt that much worse. We can look around and see who’s hitting us and who wants to knock us out of the frame completely. Instead of waiting for them to swing on us again, let’s evolve and hit them first.

This story was originally published in .

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:55 p.m. PT on Jan. 27, 2025, to change the term “rejecting dogma” to “accepting dogma.”ĚýRead our corrections policy here.Ěý

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind.

Eketi arrived at The Green House on Feb. 17, two weeks late for her residency. Harmattan was wearing off, and everywhere was becoming hot again. It was the year 2100, and Eketi was returning to Lagos after a short, unsuccessful career as an environmental journalist in Uyo. She had not intended to be late. In fact, she had never imagined she would arrive late at anything she spent the last three years dreaming and praying and worrying about. But when the acceptance message popped on her smart pad, she had found it difficult to muster enough enthusiasm to pack her bags and leave her failures in Uyo behind. Said failures had wrapped themselves around her neck and simply refused to let go. They took her sleep, tightened her chest, and manifested themselves as multiple voices in her head telling her things she could no longer refute, because she was no longer certain they were lies.

Her career had not been going as planned, but she didn’t think she would be fired. She had it planned out in her head: Put up with her micromanaging editor for two years, lead the reporting on a big story or two, get enough experience and credibility to eventually apply for a long-form reporting grant. But her story on Big Oil divestment had gone south. Her competence called into question; words were exchanged. Heavy words, words that still caused acute pain even in recollection. After she was given her sack letter, a day before the acceptance message popped on her smart pad, her editor had given her the password to access Soji, his AI unemployment therapist. “A lot of our former staff have found it useful,” he had said, patting her shoulder. Shame swelled in Eketi’s chest afresh. She shook her head, willing herself to move on. 

Eketi took in the green duplex she would be calling home for the next three and half months, a hideout for all six residents of the Green Nigeria Youths Fellowship. Flowers grew on top the short fence and crawling plants were all over the building like a robe. An electric keke glided past as she swiped her card on the gate’s sensor. It took her three attempts to do it right. Her hands were shaking and her back ached terribly. She had entered the wrong train twice on her way here. She grew up in this city and had practically spent most of her adolescence here, but it still managed to elude her every time. She felt stupid. But why should she? Lagos was constantly changing—the government was always changing something. Closing off a street, uprooting buildings, erecting mini dams, hydrokinetic plants, artificial carbon trees … it was new every time. If it weren’t, “getting lost” would not be listed as a trendy activity on Lagos Vox. 

She stepped into the grass-carpeted compound, a battered box made of recycled car tires in each hand. Tucked in a discreet corner of the compound almost out of her eyes’ view were compost bins, categorized waste baskets, and a biodigester system powered by human waste. She stood still for a while in the eerily quiet compound, a sharp contrast from the stories her great-grandmother used to tell her about a Lagos that was noisy, congested, and a huge threat to mental well-being. Every time she told those stories, Eketi wondered what it must have been like to live in that bustling city rife with tribal tensions and famous for being a land of opportunities. Lagos was no longer that place. After going underwater around the year 2050, people took their energies and opportunities elsewhere. Now, it was a slow city mildly abuzz with 10 million people, quiet enough to host a residency. 

Eketi entered the house without finesse—one box had scraped her knee, and her palm was sore from trying to hold up the other one. The living room was a tidy but startling neon green. Minimally furnished with simple white sofas and a center table carved in the shape of the Nigerian flag, the room boasted a few real plants. 

“Wąđlcome to The Green House, Eketi Edo,” the smart house system spoke. “Take the stairs to your left, and you’ll find your room on your right.”

“Great.” Eketi shrugged. There was no human to receive her, and she was glad she would not be seen in her current hideous state. She climbed the stairs and found the room with her name across the door. 

A quick swipe in one attempt and this time, there was no green. Just white. A lot of white. A small bed. A desk. A closet. A mini fridge. A bathroom. The plan was to put away her things, take a bath, rummage through her boxes for something to snack on, but she collapsed on the bed and fell into a deep sleep. She woke hours later to cackling laughter and several voices talking over themselves. Someone was knocking playfully and supplementing the effort by saying “ko-ko-ko.”

Eketi opened the door to a small group with measuring eyes. Her fellow residents. She recognized them from their headshots on the Fellowship’s website. She opened wider to let them in.

“If it isn’t the late resident!” Tracing gruff voice to face, she saw it was Chimezuo. Ecocide lawyer.

“The digital house assistant said you had arrived,” a gentler voice said. “Are you one of those ‘arrive late in style people’?” The voice belonged to Bukky. Eco-anxiety researcher who always overshared on social media. She was wearing a shirt that said “Stop Deep Sea Mining.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Eketi managed a tired smile. She suddenly felt shy.

“But why are you late, sef?” Chimezuo again.

“Let her breathe, abeg,” a bespectacled person spoke from behind Bukky. Boma. Climate justice campaigner and carbon credits analyst.

“And who is stopping her from breathing?” Chimezuo said almost immediately.

“Sorry we were not here to welcome you. We went for an afrosoul concert.” It was Bukky again.

Eketi started to worry immediately that she did not fit into the group, that she did not look as well put-together as they did. That as the days went by, they would find her wanting, and she would be ousted as a fraud. She watched the trio continue to talk all over themselves, feeling an intense wave of gratitude they gave her no chance to speak. “If you keep quiet, nobody will know you’re stupid,” her mother used to say every time she failed the random Bible quiz in church. She was keeping quiet now. 

Another girl, Ajaratou—circular economy specialist—was peering into her closet, peeping into her bathroom. “Your room is better than mine,” she said, mostly to herself. Someone else was standing at the door, in but mostly out. Thick, short locs dangled across his face and the buttons on his white linen shirt were undone, an inner black tee exposed. He had a bag of plantain chips clasped in both hands. He gave Eketi a reluctant smile. She smiled back. He nodded and retreated quietly. Esosa. Documentary filmmaker.

Life at The Green House was routine. Eating was a collective activity; the cook was always overeager and the food too much. The morning always started with Bukky talking about how committed she was to exercise, something a lot of people couldn’t do because “if it were easy, everyone would do it.” There was a group session every morning after breakfast to discuss progress on personal projects. After, the group spent the day indoors or outdoors working on their projects individually. Socializing was left for nighttime and weekends.

Today, breakfast was moi moi and akamu, and it was Eketi’s turn to discuss her project. This past week, she had listened to everyone talk about their projects with certainty and a kind of pride she knew she’d never be able to muster for her own work. She was apprehensive. The discussion was like a bloodbath. They’d let her go last so she could listen to everyone talk about their work and be enthused about the joint publication they’d have to produce at the end of the residency. The publication would be a statement of their collective vision for a sustainable Nigeria. But Eketi was still not enthused. About the publication, maybe, but the group discussion, no. Yesterday, Boma had talked about his project involving the degrowth movement and the dismantling of the prevailing capitalist economic model, and Chimezuo had called it a “a little too idealistic.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“So was your work at one time,” Boma returned.

“To be fair, capitalism has delivered climate action,” Ajaratou put in. “Nigeria went green because the rich wouldn’t have thrived any other way.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“I’m not sure you even understand what your work is about,” Boma said. 

Eketi had spent a significant chunk of the night rehearsing, and she found it laughable. This project got her into the fellowship. A jury had read and believed it was residency-worthy. Why was she beginning to think otherwise? Her former boss used to call her stories “silly, little ideas.” He would call a senior journalist and say, “Come and hear the story Eketi wants us to cover o.” And everyone would gather, and her editor would insist she shared the idea “for constructive feedback.” Foolishly, she would share, and the feedback would destroy so violently she would run to the toilet to vomit spit like a pregnant woman.

There was spit in her mouth now. They were all seated around a table, the smell of breakfast still in the air. Chimezuo looked like he couldn’t wait to get back to his room. Bukky was giggling with Boma, and Ajaratou was writing something on a sticky note. Esosa looked like he was not in the room. His eyes were shifty and distant, and his fingers trembled slightly. 

She swallowed the pool of spit in her mouth and told them about her intention to document the reintroduction of Indigenous knowledge and ways of living into Nigeria’s modern realities.

“On the train on my way here, I overheard an old man remark about how civilized we are now. But isn’t it interesting that our celebrated modernity is about reclaiming the things we once thought primitive? You know, taking once-rejected traditional wisdom and innovating with it.”

Nobody said anything. She swallowed again.

“You see, we’ve been creating the new by reconnecting with the old. Progress has not been a distinct divide. It’s been a circle.” She was gesticulating now, some nervousness beginning to creep in. “Think about the many things we can begin to reimagine simply by learning more about the past.” She told them about the photos she had taken of modern houses with flat roofs, how they mimicked the ways the Yorubas used to build their houses. And the reintroduction of thatch barriers and the obi of the Igbos. “Even the prominence of protected areas—seas, forests—can be traced back to the precolonial ways of having sacred forests and rivers, and fishing and hunting and planting practices that allowed for the regeneration of biodiversity.”

“Hmm,” Bukky said.

“So, what’s the overall intention?” Boma asked. “Getting everyone to focus on the past for the sake of the future?”

“Or another rant about colonialism?” Chimezuo jumped in. He laughed and looked around as if to confirm if others were enjoying his joke as much as he clearly was. “You guys na, it’s the 22nd century!”

“She didn’t mention colonialism,” Ajaratou quipped. “I like the idea sha.”

“So, how will you go about this ‘reconnection’?” Boma does the quote with his fingers.

“I think the more important question is how this changes anything really,” Bukky said.

Eketi began to feel like she was in a Rapid Fire Questions episode on TV. They had begun to talk over themselves again. Esosa remained quiet. She held his eyes for a while, and whatever she saw in there made her feel deeply pitied.

“Can we just stick to the discussion format?” Eketi asked, wringing her fingers together.

She quickly told them what she had done so far, what she aimed to do this week, and how she would like to approach it for their joint publication. Their responses were a few noncommittal grunts and an “alright” here and there. Everyone left as soon as she was done. She remained seated, with the returned voice of her mother telling her to have stayed quiet. 

Eketi was avoiding everyone, so she came down after dinner was over. She hurried to the kitchen to make some eggs she would eat with a steaming cup of Milo. She found Esosa there, eating cookies and energetically stirring something in a wok. His body stiffened when he saw her, but he said nothing to her. She went about mixing her eggs. 

The omelette was a little too burnt and most of the spices had concentrated on one side, but she pretended to eat it with relish. Esosa was done with whatever he was making in the wok. It looked like some kind of Korean stir-fry. He transferred it to a bowl with a lid, made some fresh orange juice, and started to fry some yams. 

“Hungry much?” Eketi said, a feeble attempt at conversation. 

He shrugged and tucked a stray loc behind his ear. 

She mentally kicked herself for bothering. His yams were almost ready, and she was on her second cup of Milo. The silence had grown awkward between them. She was washing the dishes she used when he finally spoke. 

“I like your project,” he said, turning to her.

Eketi released a breath she did not know she had been holding. “Thank you.”

He nodded. He placed his food in a woven basket and covered it with a cloth. 

“Taking that to your room?” They were not supposed to eat in the rooms.

He raised one thick brow. “Going to report me?”

She shook her head. He walked away. 

Ajaratou came into the kitchen then. She sneered after him. “That one,” she said pointing with her lips, “that one is a troubled soul.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“H´ÇˇÉ?”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“You did not hear it from me. Better leave him alone.”

“I’m not holding him.” Eketi was feeling defensive, and she hated it. 

â€Ŕá˛Ôťĺąđąđťĺ.”

Eketi spent the remainder of the night wondering why Ajaratou said Esosa was a troubled soul and why, without any context, she was inclined to agree, what with him always appearing perpetually fatigued. On occasion, Esosa was calm only to become so fidgety like he wanted to jump out of his skin the very next minute. His nonchalance at morning meetings also felt rehearsed, his performance hanging on by a thread.

His room was right next to hers, so eavesdropping became another routine for Eketi. Every night, she would press her ear against the wall to learn more about him. Most times, there was talking. A lot of talking he didn’t seem quite capable of in person. Sometimes, she heard “fuck!”, hiccups, gasping, crying? It sounded like crying. During the day, she would watch him and try to make sense of whatever she thought happened at night. Eketi began to worry that she had become too invested in someone else’s life. She brought this up with her e-therapist, who suggested that it might be because she didn’t have the courage to face her own life.

Today, there was a group trip to the Lekki Conservation Centre. They were on a solar-powered train weaving its way leisurely through the city. Eketi was seated next to Esosa, who was busy taking photos. His body was hanging out the train, and it was different to see him so immersed, so involved with something. 

She peered out the window to try catching the sights that had him so engaged. The train was currently at Yaba, a busy market area that still managed to be a booming tech hub. Whatever was left of the Lagos spirit resided mostly in Yaba, with its colorful shops, noisy traders, and vibrant young population. There was a signpost announcing an altruistic vacation to Delta State that involved mangrove planting in the creeks. Someone had written on a wall just beside the governor’s e-poster that they fixed solar panels. A man was getting into a fight with another man for using his keke to charge his own. 

Eketi texted her friend about the keke fight, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Why is it that I never ever see any serious fights in this Lagos?

Esosa was done taking pictures and had resumed his quiet self on his seat. There was a loud “Hallelujah somebody!” on the train.  A short, stout woman began preaching about Jesus coming soon. “Brethren, tomorrow may be too late,” she shouted at the top of her voice.

When her sermon was over, she asked for donations to support the minister of God. When she retook her seat, a middle-aged man began to walk around, advertising his decomposable pads and diapers made from banana stems.

“Sure you don’t want pads?” Esosa asked, turning to her. He was all charm, a lopsided smile on his face.

Shocked that he was starting a conversation voluntarily, she blubbered a bit. “No. I use discs.”

“My sister uses discs too.” He was nodding. He looked out the window again. “Do you know this place?” 

The train was gliding by the Third Mainland Bridge.

“Yes. Makoko. Home of asoebi.”

He shook his head. “It used to be a fishing community. You know, canoes. Stilt houses. Clinics on water. Stuff like that.”

“Did my undergraduate thesis on Makoko, and I never came across that information.”

He shrugged. “Why do you think that is?”

“Cos you made it up?” Eketi said carefully.

He laughed. It was a titillating sound, and she was hearing it for the first time. “For God’s sake, Eketi!” 

She laughed too. He said her name perfectly, as someone who was from her village would. “A little odd you’re the only one with this information, no?”

He laughed again. “My great-grandparents used to live there,” he said when he had recovered from his laughter.

“Ołó.”

“I think it’s easier to control what people know and what they care about with the kind of technologies we have now.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“T°ůłÜąđ.”

“States are partnering with millionaires to keep everyone obedient and functional.”

“You sure you’re not a conspiracy theorist?”

He smiled. “See? I can’t even convince someone who cares about history.”

Eketi felt chastised. “But—”

“What if I told you Bayelsa went through a genocide fueled by climate inaction?”

Eketi said nothing. They sat in silence for a while before he spoke again. 

“There is a lot of stuff we don’t know, but maybe it’s good we don’t know. Because if we know,” he cleared his throat, “can we forgive it? Can we fix it? Can we look beyond it?”

“I guess not.”

He shrugged. 

The Lekki Conservation Centre was a 78-hectare nature reserve. Established in 1990, it was a biodiversity hotspot home to the rich flora and fauna of the Lekki peninsula. It also housed an urban agroecology farm where domestic animal rearing had been seamlessly integrated with mixed cropping agriculture and the preservation of wild animal species. The Centre was proof that humans could thrive alongside nature without separation, a binary way of thinking that dominated environmental discourse in the 21st century. 

The agroecology farm was impressive. They were shown some native endangered seeds from a time when the world was obsessed with genetic modification, and lab-grown seeds thrived at the expense of native seeds. The group also saw a demonstration of farmers using the black ant as a biological pesticide, an idea borrowed from Indigenous farming practices in precolonial Africa.

“This farm is our past meeting the future,” the head farmer said proudly. 

“See?” Esosa said, tapping her shoulder from behind. “You should believe more in your ideas.”

Warmth flooded her cheeks. The next day, Eketi had to talk about her project, and she felt more confident. She started by talking about the agroecology farm and how it leaned into her ideas. “So, you see,” she said looking around the table, forcing herself to meet everyone’s eyes, “the idea is not so far-fetched when you actually open your mind to it.”

It was the third month of the residency, and Esosa did not show up to the morning meetings four times in a row. Eketi was worried—she had been pressing her ears to the wall at every chance—but the rest of the cohort thought he was acting up.

“But do you think he’s inside and not coming out of his room?” Bukky asked with a glance at the stairs. “I think he’s out.”

“He’s in,” Boma added. “The assistant didn’t say otherwise.”

“But what did he say was wrong with him?” Bukky asked, turning to her.

All eyes were on Eketi. She shrunk. “Wąđ are not that close.”

“Told you he was trouble,” Ajaratou murmured in a singsong voice. 

“He’s a strange one, I admit,” Bukky said. “But I envy him a bit. Eats a lot but doesn’t get fat. My dream metabolism!”

“As in! If I could do that, there’s nothing I won’t eat in this world,” Ajaratou said. “Nobody will be able to separate me and food.”

“I don’t think anyone can separate you and food right now,” Boma put in. 

Chimezuo laughed. “There’s a circular economy in her stomach.”

“Get out!” Ajaratou was laughing too. 

They moved on to other topics, passing a tray of baba dudu around them. 

“Wąđ should let the organizers know we think something is wrong with him,” Eketi said, interrupting. 

“What if,” Ajaratou asked, “he hacked the assistant and is out having fun, and you ruin it for him by snitching?” 

“He’s not out having a fun time.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“I thought you didn’t know him so well,” Boma said.

Eketi shrunk even further.

“But hacking? Isn’t that far-fetched?” It was Chimezuo. 

“He used to be a badass emojineer and tech bro,” Bukky said. “Wąđ went to the same school.”

Emojineers were linguistic virtuosos and masters of digital expression in mainstream emoji communication. This new information made Eketi feel like she didn’t know him at all. Yes, he said a few nice things, and she liked him a tiny little bit, but how did she imagine eavesdropping could reveal a person fully? 

That night, the rest of the cohort went for a live theater rendition of the EndSARS protest, but she stayed behind and glued herself to the wall against her better judgement. She was waiting for any sound of life. She decided to do what no one had tried: knocking on his door. 

She knocked a few times and for a few minutes. She said her name and said she was just checking in. She was returning to her room when she heard the door open.

Esosa’s room was dimly lit and in utter disarray. In the semi-darkness, she could see empty bags of chips, a stack of pizza cartons, and half-finished tubs of ice cream. His mini fridge was open and the smell of alcohol hung in the air.

“E˛ő´Ç˛ő˛š?”

Eketi found him in the bathroom, bent over the toilet bowl, emptying his stomach. He finished, rinsed his mouth in the sink and collapsed gently on the floor. She sat beside him. His skin was damp with sweat, and he smelled like he hadn’t showered in days.

“E˛ő´Ç˛ő˛šâ€”âśÄ

He shook his head and lurched towards the toilet. He vomited some more and returned to the floor. He looked frail, breakable. His eyes were the most bloodshot eyes Eketi had ever seen.

“I have an eating disorder,” he said, his voice hoarse from misuse. After a long stretch of silence, he added, “Bulimia.”

Eketi nodded. 

“Don’t tell the others.”

“I won’t.”

“Increase lights,” she said to the assistant. Bright lights came on and he winced, his eyes struggling to adjust.

In the brighter room, Eketi sighted some laxative pills and a big bottle of agbo, traditional Yoruba medicine used for a variety of ailments, including stomach troubles.

She fetched him water in a glass.

“Don’t go,” he said when she neared the door. 

“I’m only going to bring a broom.”

“You don’t have to.”

She ignored him and returned with the broom. He watched her tidy the room in silence, sniffing and heaving intermittently. With the room tidy, she rummaged through his wardrobe for some clean clothes. He had only a few. She hung them in the bathroom.

“Go and shower. I’ll wait out here,” she said, helping him to his feet.

He began to cry but went into the bathroom. While he was showering, Eketi made his bed and had a quick trip to her room for some candles. She lit them and their smell began to waft around the room. 

Esosa emerged in clean clothes. Shadows of the candle flame danced around his skin. He was gaunt, his eyes were hollow, but he remained beautiful. 

She patted the bed, signaling for him to come lie in it. 

He climbed in and pulled the duvet over his chest. “Will you sleep with me?” he asked gently before his eyes widened in alarm. “Not, not with me. Not, not in that sense.” He sat up. “I’m sorry. I meant—”

She giggled. “It’s okay na.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

He exhaled loudly. He did not return to his lying position. “Thank you, really.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

She nodded. They sat together in comfortable silence. 

“You should seek help,” she said after a sigh.

He cringed. “If I go to a specialist, it is one more thing that’s wrong with me.”

She reached for his hand. “But if you go, it becomes one less thing that’s wrong with you.”

He sighed. “When it started, I told myself I had it under control. I told myself it wouldn’t get this bad, that it was just my love for cooking.” He laughed dryly at himself.

“You could die.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“I know.” He sighed again. “In the kitchen, I am in control. I can make things come out the exact way I want. Outside it, I can’t.”

“Is this about your personal project?” she ventured.

He winced. “A little bit. I’m making a film about my family.”

She waited for him to continue, but he did not. 

“Their life in Makoko?”

“Yes.” He reached for a tissue by his bedside and blew his nose. “My father was a very sad person. I always felt like he didn’t love me, and I didn’t know why until he died, and I found this journal about his life as a climate refugee. And somehow, the things he wrote about did not exist anywhere; it was as if he had made it all up, as if he had imagined some suffering to justify how bad a parent he was.” He blew his nose again. “But he didn’t imagine it. I did some research and my father’s story is true. And now …” he buried his face in his palms, “now, I feel I have a responsibility to get this story out. I quit my job and became a filmmaker just for this story.”

She waited a beat. “I don’t have all the answers, Esosa, but I know you can deliver this story.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“Perhaps. But it makes me struggle, it makes me …” He droned off. 

“Struggle is normal. I’m struggling too.”

“You’re not eating yourself to death, at least.”

She smirked. “But I’m self-sabotaging. I have anxiety attacks for breakfast. My whole life feels like running a race I already lost.”

“I don’t think you know how brilliant you are,” he said, turning to her. 

She bit her lip. “I believe everyone who compliments me is lying to me.” She shook her head, as if shrugging off the thought. “I just feel like I’m not meant to be brilliant, that I stumbled on it somewhere in my childhood, and it’s not mine to keep.”

Esosa squeezed her fingers gently. 

“You know, my mom used to call me ode, oponu, all those names for the mentally retarded. In primary school, my teachers would act like they couldn’t see my hand whenever I attempted to answer a question because I was always getting the answers wrong. I just don’t know how to not doubt myself. And sometimes,” she wiped a stray tear—was she crying? “I think I set myself up to fail so I can appease that voice in my head that’s calling me a failure. Like, ‘See? I failed. Can I go free now?’”

“Eketi —”

“I was fired from my last job. I don’t think I deserved it, but I don’t think I was a good journalist either. I’m seeking help already, so don’t worry about me.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

He held her shoulders and hugged her real tight. She burst into tears, and hugging, they cried together. It was loud and ugly and intense.

After, they laid in bed, Esosa being the little spoon.

“I’ll get better, Eketi. I promise.”

“I’ll get better too,” she responded. “I’ll do yoga.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

He chuckled. “Real yoga or American yoga?” 

She laughed. “Ode.”

He began to snore softly in a few minutes. She stayed awake, eyes wide open in the dark, contemplating her struggles and her many attempts to act like they did not exist. Not dealing with them meant they’d had ample time to worsen and calcify. She felt ready to try addressing them again. She made mental notes to finally log into Soji and update her profile on Job Finder. She also had to have that dreaded conversation with her mother.

The next day, she woke up feeling centered, like something had been fixed inside her while she slept. Esosa was not in the room, but he had left a note on the bedside stool. It was a quote by the 21st-century Nigerian writer, Eloghosa Osunde. Silence is a dangerous thing to give yourself to, especially if you were born to speak. 

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind.

Special thanks to this year’s judges, Annalee Newitz () and Omar El Akkad (). 

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind.

1. Naty

It’s 6 a.m. and the heat is rising quicker than the sun. Today is going to be another hot, smoldering day, as it has been for the past six months—the only difference, the humidity. If I must be honest, I liked it better when the air was dry. We are blessed to be one of the families living with the new architecture. For centuries, Creole houses have been designed to have trade winds flow through them from east to west. 

With the rising heat and longer droughts, many families have migrated to constructions with rounder walls, like our West African siblings—made to avoid angles and the accumulation of heat. Still, with the change of the season, the level of moisture in the air is suffocating. Even inside our home, the ambient wetness hugs the skin and refuses to let go. I wish I were 3 years old, running around in my underwear all day. Back then, Mama would place soursop leaves and guinea mint in a tin bucket all day in the sun. In the evening, she would bathe me with the water. I would feel refreshed and sleep so soundly. At 17, that attire is no longer an option, and a daily herbal bath would require way more water than we should spend. At least this present discomfort is a sign that the rains are coming.

Mama is already clanking on pots, filling up a bowl with yam, cassava, and stewed meat. There is a flask of rum in her basket, some fruits, and, of course, gourds filled with fresh filtered water. By the large calabash and sweet scent hanging in the air, I know that she has made use of the freshest hours before sunrise to fire up the griddle and prepare coconut kassav—those sweet, goodness-filled pancakes made of cassava flour our Kalina ancestors have passed down to us.

I give Mama a kiss and, like every morning, I pour water from our charcoal fountain into the moka pot—just enough. I pack the ground coffee in and I heat up the stove to distill Ma Nee’s morning brew. We are all going to the plateau today. It is time to lead our cattle to another spot, where—we hope—they will be able to graze on something that is not dry for a couple of days and have sufficient shade to escape the sharp bite of the sun. Mama thinks it would do Ma Nee some good to visit the family’s plot. As a child, NeeNee (as they called her) would visit this place in the deep countryside of Saint Ann’s. She would run and play with her siblings in the savanna, at the foot of the mango and the guinep trees, under the watchful eyes of her own grandmother, who had been born right there and had played there as a girl herself. My grandmother has so many stories about this place from the time before the yearly droughts—stories from her childhood, from the generations before her but also legends of our island. Who knows? Going there might spark memories and keep her with us a bit longer.

I pop a few slices of breadfruit cake in the oven and call Ma Nee to the kitchen. Mama is glad her mother still answers to her name and walks without a stick but I can tell she keeps a tight leash on her hopes.

“Precious little girl,” she says with a gentle smile. “Why you shout me name like dis? We a fi go home?”

“Naty callin’ you for breakfast, Ma,” Mama replies.

“Naty? She me daughter Maryse. Me know me own pickney,” Ma Nee says, with a side eye.

“I Maryse, Ma. This me daughter, Naty.” Mama does not skip a beat and leaves no room for further questions. “Come get your breakfast, Ma. Naty done make that good coffee you like, from Gran Fon and the breadfruit cake is warmin’ up.”

“Yes… .” Joy spreads all over Ma Nee’s face. “You remembered. Get de coffee from de place…”—Mama joins Ma Nee and they finish the sentence together— “…where they did not grow bananas.” Ma Nee laughs and it turns on a light in Mama’s eyes.

The truth is our island stopped the production of coffee in those areas decades before I was born. The French authorities had allowed the spraying of chlordecone on banana crops but never fully dealt with the leftover residue. Even though they claimed it was safe to grow fruit trees on top of polluted soil, the industry suffered from the bad publicity and only a few independent producers on our wing of the butterfly-shaped island still persist.

It’s almost 7 a.m. Papa is in the driver’s seat and Ma Nee is sitting next to him. Mama and I have hopped in the back of our family’s old pickup. Each of us has grabbed our large bakwa before leaving. When we get there, the sun will already be fully at work and we will need the extra protection. These hats were once reserved for fishermen—no larger than shoulder-width and with a cone-like top to dissipate heat. They are now a necessity during the hotter months and are made quite large to protect the head and provide shade to the upper body.

I love the short trip to Fon Limèl. Once we leave the public road, we plunge onto a tuff road that pretends to be neat for a while but quickly turns bumpy and is only an introduction to the next one—a dirt one—that is made of hills and valleys. Mama holds on to her hat and her basket. I too hold on to my bakwa and keep a hand on the railing.

We pass the spot where Ma Nee’s grandmother was born. The house is no longer standing, but we always acknowledge it and lower our heads in a respectful nod. We drive on and pass through a majestic green arch formed by two giant mango trees that sit on both sides of the dirt road. It is said that Ma Nee’s grandfather, Papa Charles, once left his garden in Fon Limèl after sunset—a great taboo—but these trees are home to duppies that are known for being playful. The spirits started humming at him, louder and louder, but he knew you are not supposed to acknowledge them or things may get worse. Papa Charles put a little speed in his steps and did not look back.

We park near the small pond where Mama’s people have been fetching water for their animals since no one here can remember. Over the years, they have made it deeper and shaded it with trees to slow down evaporation.

We all go to the one kapok tree—a majestic tree that itself is a piece of history. Mama digs a small hole between its huge roots. She hands the flask of rum to Ma Nee, who takes a swig and pours the rest in the hole. Papa places a square of banana leaf at the bottom of the hole, then Mama pours the yam, cassava, and stewed meat she had packed earlier. She fills the hole back in and hands me a small gourd of water. I take a swig and pour the rest on our gift to the ancestors.

The soil is cracked and our cows look battered. Papa fixes his bakwa and goes to tend to them. Mama and I find shade under a very old and large guinep tree and sit with Ma Nee, who brushes the dry earth with the heel of her foot, eyes brimming with stories. She and Mama press their backs on the trunk and I sit facing Ma Nee.

2. Ma Nee

“Me done fell here from this tree once,” I tell my daughter and the nice woman who looks like her. “Me done come here every Saturday with me Mommy and me sisters. Me brother older than we so he don’t want to come. He stay home doing big boy business. But I here, on we family land with Tòtò, Sy, Mommy, and me grandmother, Ma Nò.”

I see the curiosity in their faces. They want to hear the story of how I fell, but I am tired and the heat is oppressive. Guadeloupe has always been hot—we are in the Caribbean, after all—but I do remember days when people just left a metal barrel by their gardens and it was enough water to sustain production for an entire family. Six months without rain was a phenomenon that was unheard of.

As a child, I used to enjoy the dry season. I did not truly know what the cracks in the soil meant, but I enjoyed leaping over them. They made me feel like the world was about to open beneath my feet and I would be able to explore the depths of the Earth. Now these cracks have become rifts and, indeed, you could dive deep into their darkness. They have become traps where cattle—and uncareful children—can lose a leg.

And to think that we were once called the Isle of Beautiful Waters… . In a way, we have taken a path that has led us away from this name. In a way only… . The waters are still beautiful. The issue is that some of them are polluted.

“France did we dirty with dat chlordecone.”

“Yes, Ma,” the woman says. She has a sadness to her. Perhaps I can change that.

“Me done tell you already how we island came to be?”

My daughter looks not quite like my daughter, but I recognize these eyes. They are round and have an appetite for the world.

“De goddess Atabey was bathing in de Caribbean Sea. Beautiful she was with her golden bracelets, her queenly earrings, and her wonderfully carved golden half-moon hanging between her breasts. Her husband, Sukaimo, had offered her a necklace made of precious pearls and a butterfly she did wear with pride. One day, she done learn of his indiscretions. You see, Sukaimo was known for having a soft spot in his heart for beautiful women. Atabey was so smitten by grief and anger. She did snatch de necklace from her own neck and threw de pearls across de Caribbean Sea. Dem became de islands and de butterfly became Guadeloupe.”

“And why is it called …”

I do not recognize this child. Is Maryse old enough to have a daughter this age?

“Precious little girl, do you know Maryse?”

3. Maryse

“And why is it called the Isle of Beautiful Waters?” Naty asks.

My mother looks confused.

“Precious little girl, do you know Maryse?” Ma asks.

“Yes, Ma.” She turns to look at me. “She’s my daughter.”

“She beautiful. She look like you when you was her age.”

“I no look beautiful now, Mommy?” I laugh.

“Yes, baby!” She takes my hand in her wrinkled ones and for a moment, stares at me with a smile until I can tell that this reality has dissolved and she has moved to a different one. She lets go of my hand.

“Naty, dahling. Perhaps, you can refresh Ma Nee’s memory,” I say to my daughter. Then I pretend I am listening to this story I have heard countless times and hope none of them can guess that, inside, I am screaming. I want to hold on to my mother but I truly do not know how long I will be able to keep her at home.

4. Naty

“Legend tells us of an Arawak princess who lived on the island Waitukubuli—Dominica today. Her true name has been lost to the millennia, but she called herself Anuk. She was forbidden to bathe alone in the rivers. At the time, the gods roamed the Earth and the blue serpent god, Iniki, younger brother to Quetzalcoatl, had taken the habit of leaving Abya Yala, the continent, which was too crowded by other gods. So he went to the islands and bathed in their waters. He loved Waitukubuli above all.

“Anuk’s father did not want her to fall prey to the blue serpent god. He was known to devour young, beautiful flesh. But the princess had a mind of her own, and in her father’s short absence, she went to the river and bathed alone in a plunge basin.

“Alas, within minutes, the water started gurgling, and a giant blue snake slithered up from the depths. He was magnificent—scales blue as the sea, eyes and underbelly yellow. He had feathers on the back of his head, the colors of the rainbow. The princess was not afraid. She let the snake coil around her legs and around her belly. Together, they danced in the water for hours. When she came back to her village that same night, her belly was round and full. This made her father angry and he banished her to the butterfly island, which was dry like the desert.

“Anuk was sad and alone, but not for long. Instead of a child, she laid a multitude of eggs. When they hatched, they became the fierce Kalina people. Their father, the blue serpent god Iniki, called upon the waters and created cascades, rivers, and ponds of all sizes. The land became lush and the Kalina people lived in abundance on the butterfly island they now called Caloucaera, the Isle of Beautiful Waters.”

5. Maryse

My daughter has a hunger for the stories. She knows them all and is always eager to hear them once more. At her age, I was very different. My excitement was reserved for other things. I must say it feels good to see her take after my own mother and keep the tradition.

All our phones ding at the same time. That is the sound of an official alert. I look and, indeed, there is news.

“Naty, go tell your father we must change our plans. The hurricane that was coming to Antigua is headed further south—straight for us.”

We were only expecting bad weather, but it will be a storm. We are used to them now, but we have work to do. I turn to my mother.

“Ma, now I understand why the weather so humid and hot today. A hurricane comin’. A big one.”

“Ah … It go be like Hugo in 1989?”

“Ma, you know they changed. You was little pickney in 1989.”

“It was serious business!” she emphasizes.

“Oh … I know, Ma. Me seen the archives. Today, they all worse. Only the smallest ones is like Hugo.”

“Ah …” My mother opens her mouth in astonishment.

“But don’t worry, Ma. It’s early. We still have some time to snack on the kassav, and we can head home to prepare.”

6. Naty

It is 5:30 p.m. and night is already claiming the rays of the sun. Mama, Papa, and I have joined the neighbors to bar windows and put tape on any exposed glass. Those who live in more fragile housing secure space for themselves and their families with other members of the community. Our communal water cisterns have been protected from harsh wind and any debris that may contaminate them.

Mama and I have made sure our dry food reserves are where we need them to be. Now, my favorite part begins. We prepare the candles and some snacks so we can tell each other stories during the worst of the storm to keep everyone calm.

“Ma Nee, will you tell me again the story of the Africans coming to Guadeloupe?”

I step into my grandmother’s room and she is not there.

“Mama, is Ma Nee with the neighbors?”

“No. She is home! What do you mean?”

7. Ma Nee

I dislike being outside when the sun is already setting, but I know it’s not proper of me to abuse these people’s kindness. I have to go home.

There should be a June plum tree here. And this road should be dirt, not asphalt. I might be lost. With some luck, Papa Charles will be coming from his garden soon. He’ll help me. Let me have a seat.

It’s too dark now, where is Papa Charles?

“Papa Charles?” If I call him out loud, maybe he will come. I think he cannot see me in the pitch black.

“Papa Charles! Me want go home. Tell Mommy, me want go home!” I start to cry.

“Duppies fi get me on de road. Me scared.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

8. Maryse

We have looked in the kitchen garden. We have scoured the backyards of our closest neighbors, and there is no sign of my mother. Darkness is fully here and with the storm coming, they are going to cut electricity everywhere. We need to find her. I must not let Naty see my distress, but I am terrified of what could happen.

“Naty, baby.” I steady my voice as much as I can. “Give me a torchlight. I go see Aunt Tòtò’s old house. You go with your Papa and see around the baker’s. She always lookin’ for sweet things.”

Why did I refuse to put a tracker on her? Hurricanes make landfall at night. We only have about 90 minutes before the first winds.

9. Ma Nee

“Me sorry, Mommy. Me sorry.”

“You’re OK, Ma Nee. You’re OK.”

“Papa Charles angry wit’ me?”

“Nobody’s angry, Ma Nee. You’re good.”

“Wąđ go home now?”

“Yes, Ma Nee. I’m taking you home. Your daughter waitin’ fi you.”

10. Naty

It’s 8 p.m. Ma Nee was out for at least two hours and most of it in darkness. Both she and Mama look quite shaken. Papa does his best to lighten the mood with jokes and rubbed shoulders. But the anxiety that just visited us is only turning away to leave space for the hurricane, which is no comfort.

“Naty, baby. Tell us a story.” Mama asks.

“There was a time when the Kalina gods would spend their leisure time observing and visiting Caloucaera. It was such a quiet island with beautiful waters and a powerful but peaceful people.

“One day, boats were spotted from afar. They were large constructions of wood that somehow did not sink into the sea. They seemed to be pushed by clouds of cloth and slid as oil toward the island. The Kalina people did not fully understand what was happening, but were hospitable. They were horrified when the spirits of the sea coming off the boats, the Palanakiłi, returned their welcome with attacks on their families. The Kalina chased them all away, but they had underestimated the Palanakiłi’s greed. They came back with more boats, more weapons, and something special in the bellies of their ships.

“The war being waged on the beach was parallel by another one in the heavens. The Kalina god Hurakan gathered his winds and attacked the fleets that had not yet landed. When he was about to unleash the worst of his fury, he was interrupted by Yemọja, goddess of the sea and mother to those made cargo.

“She pleaded with Hurakan for the lives of her children. But in order to save them, she had to save the Palanakiłi as well. This is how the ugliest of trades started on our beautiful island and in the Americas.

For centuries after that, it is said that Yemọja and Hurakan conspired and finally managed to get rid of this evil. The legends say that it required them to sacrifice a lot of their powers. That is why they have trusted us with the responsibility to make sure that this scourge never comes back.”

The winds outside are rising and I look up, in the candlelight, to see Ma Nee falling asleep.

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind.

Special thanks to this year’s judges, Annalee Newitz () and Omar El Akkad (). 

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind.

“Emeka, you forgot your respirator.”

I reached for the holster at my waistband and felt nothing. Not again! 

“No, I didn’t.”

“So what am I holding right now, young man?”

I pictured Mum with the face-hugging contraption raised to eye level, a frown wrinkling her brow. 

“Did you go into my room?” I was sure my sigh rang clearly through the tiny mic of my earpiece. 

“That’s not the point. How are you going to get home without it?”

“The air-quality counter’s green.” I rechecked the small, flat disk dangling from my neck to be sure. Definitely green. “You worry too much.”

She didn’t, but I couldn’t turn around. Not if I planned on making it to the other side of Shepherd’s Bush on time. I just had to make sure to return to West Brompton before the night dust set in.

The expected reprimand for my back talk came, and I listened quietly, my arms pushing metal oars into murky water. The slush of the blades slicing through liquid was already loud enough to draw peeks from windows. Especially at that time of year when the water level receded enough for my oars to occasionally collide with roofs of long-abandoned cars. I wouldn’t have minded on most days, but prying eyes weren’t needed for this trip.

I arrived at my destination just as Mum’s voice cut out from my earpiece.

“Was that your mum?”

My head snapped in the direction of the speaker. Adriana perched on the first-floor window ledge of a semidetached brick house, her rubber-booted feet dangling above a moored tandem kayak. My lips turned up. They always did when I saw her. 

“Are you psychic now?” My canoe bumped her hull, my fumbled actions failing to match my unflustered tone.

She chuckled and dropped into my wobbling vessel, tying back her thick, dark hair with a scrunchie that circled her wrist. “Your scowl gave it away.” Grabbing my second set of oars, she helped me steady the canoe. 

“You know how she is. Always trying to baby me.” It was impossible not to make a face.

“That’s because you keep doing things like forgetting your respirator.” She pointed at my telling holster with a headshake. “Here, have mine.”

I frowned as I caught the device that came flying my way. “What about you?”

Reaching into the cargo hatch of her kayak, she pulled out a spare from her duffel bag, shaking it at me before shoving it back in. “You forget I know you well. Anyway, mine or yours?” 

She hauled the rest of her equipment into my canoe when I pointed out the sack I’d managed to pilfer from reserves. There was no way our combined load would fit in hers. We wasted no time covering our stash with a tarp before starting to row north, even though people mostly ignored each other when their boats crossed paths in these narrow West London water streets. 

“I can never get over how stunning the skyline looks lit up like this.” Adriana spoke quietly a few minutes later, her strong hands lifting and lowering my second set of oars as we went along.

I looked up, following her gaze. The setting sun cloaked everything around us in a wash of deep red and orange, creating a striking contrast with the backdrop of green foliage covering the flat-roofed houses we went past. Only a few pitched roofs had metal planting decks built over them, because people realized the resources needed to keep those types of vertical farms up during windstorms weren’t worth the effort. 

Dad had learned the hard way when the platform he’d installed nine years ago crashed into our last house. I still don’t think he’s been able to get rid of the guilt he felt about the loss of my childhood home, a place we’d managed to stay in long after half of the neighborhood was forced out. Dad’s clever tanking of our upper floors to stop damp and mold seeping through from the lower floor couldn’t compete with the gaping hole in the roof. 

“It’s still not as sexy as Venice was before it disappeared,” I joked, crinkling my nose at the discolored water we pushed through. The sulphur-tinged smell wafting toward us made my point.  

The foul odor hadn’t lifted ever since the Thames Barrier broke 15 years ago, flooding London’s densely populated banks for a few miles either side of the city’s epicenter. As I’d only been in diapers back then, it helped that I couldn’t remember what the air smelled like before The Break happened. But occasional jaunts to the drier shores, where the city’s sewers weren’t completely engulfed by the river, made sure I knew the difference. 

Mum always went on about how the government’s decisions to delay the Barrier’s fortification had been down to mismanaged funding. Money channelled toward defending us from external dangers that never materialized. And when the deferred crisis at our doorstep bubbled over, causing the inevitable to happen, the same government was quick to pack up and move the capital’s political house from a waterlogged Westminster to the less affected grounds of Wembley. 

The few thousand residents able to join in the exodus had been the two-home-owning caliber of well-off people, and the fortunate homeowners who had airtight environmental disaster clauses written into their insurance policies. Some others had found lodgings with sympathetic family members living in towns and cities far away enough from the river to only watch on their tellies as the drama unfolded.  

But the rest didn’t have that luxury. They stayed where their lives had once made sense, watching anxiously every day as water levels rose around them with every downpour of torrential rain. 

Helpless as the city they knew and loved became one with the river. 

The truth is, when you have nowhere to run, you don’t die out. You simply adapt.

Adriana scoffed at my Venice comparison, drawing me back to the present. “You’re just going off photos. This view is plenty sexy to me.”

She glanced over her shoulder at me and winked, and for a second, I wondered if she was actually referring to me. No, not wondered. Hoped. 

Catching myself before I full-on stared at her, I huffed. “First of all, I don’t think the gondolas they had were trying to navigate submerged cars and drifting furniture. There’s absolutely nothing sexy about that.”

The contradiction of our situation was that, with no more active cars clogging London’s streets, the air quality within the expanded river line was much cleaner than in places on the outskirts. The main atmospheric pollutant we battled was sporadic carbon hazes the night winds blew in from those areas. Dust thick and stifling enough for the air counter disks around our necks to be necessary.

Adriana shrugged. “Wąđll, my abuela went to Venice for her honeymoon, and she swears London was just as romantic, if you had the right person to share the city with.”

“How is she holding up?” I asked now that Adriana had brought up her grandmother.

Her slumped shoulders said a lot more than words.

“I should have started earlier. I don’t know if she’ll hold out.”

“You’ve done the best you can. I’m still amazed you found a way to pay for those rhizomes.”

“It was worth it. For her.”

I nodded, my eyes dropping to the covered supplies between us. At first, I hadn’t understood the magnitude of what Adriana intended to do when she’d pulled alongside my boat one Sunday morning as I waited for Mum and Dad to say their exceptionally long goodbyes to the crush of worshippers inside the upper room of Saint Ambrose Church. The way they carried on, you would think we weren’t going to see everyone again in just a week. 

“Can you keep a secret?” 

She had smiled as I’d looked to my left and right, then behind me for good measure. Adriana Diaz was talking to me, Emeka Emezue. Nearly four years after her family started attending Mass there, she was acknowledging I existed past the nods we shared during the service’s peace offering. 

A small part of me wished I’d been the one to pluck up the courage to say something to her, but it was finally happening. That was all that mattered. 

She was clearly her family’s designated rower for the day, sent out before Mass ended to bring their boat close to the church’s converted window exits before everyone else came out. Her mother, brother, and grandmother were probably still being sociable inside. I wondered if, like me, she didn’t mind not being stuck in there with all those people. 

“Depends on what it is.” I crossed my arms casually, as if I wouldn’t carry a murder to my grave if that was what she wanted to confess.

I watched as she struggled to resist an eye roll and failed. “I’m only asking because I know you work at Kew.”

My eyes narrowed. I wondered what her angle was. My job at Kew Gardens had never been something anyone showed interest in. At least not anyone below the age of 30. Those who remembered the days before our new normal and were eager to tell me how glorious the place had been. 

Hugging the river, it was no surprise the sprawling grounds of the botanic gardens hadn’t been spared during The Break. On my first day as a volunteer there, we were told that, at first, the horticulturists and grounds workers had done their best to secure the area. But with far too many specimens to rehome at short notice, they eventually took what they could and left the rest to be salvaged by a handful of volunteers who lived locally. 

In more recent years, Kew’s outreach program had spread slightly farther, allowing people like me to sign up. Teens who cared about what our agricultural science teachers showed in our online classes and wanted some practical knowledge to help land jobs in the vertical farms dotted across the city. Kids with few friends and with parents eager to get them out of the house.

“Can you get your hands on something for me?” Adriana asked when I didn’t respond to her statement. 

My squint solidified into a frown. Of course, that was the only reason she was talking to me. It was no secret that some exotic seeds and shoots found their way out of the undamaged storerooms left at Kew for the right price. I just never thought anyone would imagine I would be able to help broker such a deal. 

“Why are you so keen on growing this?” I’d asked when she showed me a photo of what looked like long, fat bananas on her phone. “You know it’s going to be near impossible for plantains to mature here without constant warm weather and care.”

I knew quite a lot about plantains because of Mum. She reminisced about them all the time, swearing no self-respecting Nigerian family could do without them once upon a time, even in the confines of London. Ripe, unripe. Fried, boiled, roasted, mashed. The variety of ways they could be consumed were endless. Before The Break, Mum swore she could find them easily in African shops. She even claimed supermarket chains began stocking them when they realized there was a large enough market to see them fly off shelves, if you threw in people from the Caribbean, South Asia, and South America. 

Now, most fresh foods we were able to buy were locally grown to save on resources and reduce the importation carbon footprint. Potatoes, peas, leeks, squashes. The types of crops accustomed to the city’s natural climate. We still had some items brought in from outside London, but after a strong governmental push for communities to be locally resourceful, the cost of getting these luxuries put most people off. 

“Wąđ’re pretty much matching the summer temperatures for Florida back in the early 2000s,” Adriana insisted with confidence, shutting off the image on her phone. “And I’ve read they were able to grow plantains there.”

She had a good point, although I still couldn’t see how she expected them to survive. Seasonal temperatures started to level out about a decade ago, but the heat in London had risen so quickly before that merciful moment, we were already several degrees above what anyone would have imagined when the Paris Agreement was struck at the turn of the century. The converse was that the temperatures also dipped drastically during the winter months, bringing a chill that only began to ease in early June. 

Definitely not a plantain-growth-friendly climate. 

“It’s for my abuela,” Adriana finally admitted after I explained this to her. Her body tensed as she looked toward the church. “There’s not a lot she talks about so clearly and constantly these days. She goes on about how much she loved fried ąčąôĂĄłŮ˛š˛Ô´Ç˛ő from her childhood in Puerto Rico. I didn’t even realize she liked them so much before she began to lose her …”

She looked away. I let the moment pass. 

“Anyway, it’s a craving she can’t seem to shake. It broke my heart when she joked that at least she’ll get to taste plantains in heaven. If I can do this for her, she won’t have to wait that long.”

I was going to protest some more, try to make her see how difficult it would be, but loud chatter and movement near the church’s window signaled people had started to emerge. 

“What’s in it for me?” I didn’t want to look too eager to say yes. 

She frowned as if she hadn’t considered I wouldn’t just do this out of goodwill. “A quarter of my stash?” 

The fact that this came out as a question confirmed my suspicions. 

“Eh, that payment is only dependent on whether you yield any crop. If it isn’t already clear, I’m not confident your plan’s going to work.”

“Look, it’s going to take all the money I’ve saved up to pay for what I need. I doubt I’ll have anything left over for you.” Her reply came with a desperate glance at the window. 

I only had a moment to consider her offer. The thing was, if this worked, I would also be able to surprise Mum with something she had craved for years. It wasn’t quite as noble an act as Adriana going through all this trouble to give her ailing grandmother something to cherish, but it would make my mother happy. 

I realized what I had to do.

“OK, I’m in.”

â€Áčąđ˛šąôąô˛â?”

“On one condition.”

Her face clouded over again as she waited for my demand.

“If I’m going to benefit from this transaction, I have to make sure the plants actually reach maturity. You can’t possibly manage this all by yourself. Watering, manuring, weeding, frost protection. There’ll be plenty to do.”

And it certainly wouldn’t hurt that it would give me an excuse to spend time with her. 

“So you want to help me?”

At my nod, her hand shot out quickly, taking mine and shaking it.

â€Ćŕ´Ç˛Ôąđ.”

Her family came out at that moment, so I was never sure if she agreed to my condition just to close the deal, or if she actually wanted my help. Either way, we were locked in.  

The purchase was much easier than I imagined. I made a subtle inquiry the next time I was at Kew. A guy called Paul spoke to his mate, Mo, who asked his supervisor, Lee, if there were any plantain rhizomes going. I was probably holding my breath as much as Adriana for the five days we waited for a response. Not wanting to scare her off, I never asked how she was able to afford the extortionate amount of credits I’d been told to transfer. 

When Paul finally handed me something wrapped in damp cloth in the loos after work one day, it was a miracle I didn’t fist-bump him. I snuck a peek at the weird-looking cuttings and crossed my fingers we weren’t being swindled.  

About a month later, Adriana showed me the small leaves shooting out of an earth-filled box she’d hidden in her canoe. Now this was no longer just an idea she’d been holding on to; we’d started to leave Mass even earlier than usual to strategize. Her face glowed with so much excitement, I wondered how she was able to keep our plans a secret from her family. 

“Aren’t they stunning? I can’t believe they didn’t die right away. I was sure I’d overwatered them or hadn’t let them sit in enough sunlight.”

“Don’t get too excited, this is only the beginning.” I’d tried managing her expectations, but it was pointless. Seeing how happy those tiny sprouts made her, I was proper hooked. There was no way I was going to let this fail. 

The next challenge we had was identifying a space tall enough to hold the stems when they were fully grown. A suitable internal space at least 4 meters high with windows to let in enough light, but not so much that the plants could easily be spotted by passersby. And one with sufficient floor strength to carry the weight of the soil needed. The problem was, most spaces that ticked all those boxes were located on ground floors. 

We found the perfect ballroom a few weeks into our search, on the upper level of a hotel that didn’t have a massive red cross on its front wall. Although we chose to live within the river line at our own risk, the government felt ethically obliged to send structural engineers and surveyors around every now and then to check for weakening foundations. Council taxes were still paid by homeowners, and what better way was there to rationalize this than building safety inspections? Nothing in London had been built to survive years of submersion in water. Not even with the respite of extremely dry summer months. 

The hotel was close enough to the water’s edge to have been abandoned by its owners. Most multistory buildings with lifts couldn’t function properly with flooded plant rooms at basement level. Once we were sure all floors were unguarded, I’d helped Adriana dig up earth from parks nearby. I also occasionally nicked a bag or two of manure when my supervisor sent me on deliveries to vertical farms. It wasn’t uncommon for items to fall into the water every so often.  

As it turned out, Adriana had everything else worked out. It was warm enough that we didn’t need much extra heat in summer, but when she showed up with a stash of solar panels, some UV lamps, and a toolbox to make sure her investment was secure during the cooler months, my admiration for her went up more than a notch. 

“Wąđ’ll install the panels on the roof so we can keep the lamps on all year round if we want. They should produce enough electricity to also power some portable heaters.”

“Have you done this before?” I eyed the panels as we hauled them up the stairs. Not that I didn’t trust her confidence, but it was hard to fully buy into it when we were only 16.

She shrugged. “Perks of Mum being an electrician. She installed the panels we have at home. I helped her last year when she had to change a few, and I’ve read up a lot on the rest.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“That’s impressive. Sometimes, it almost feels like you don’t need me,” I joked with a short laugh. 

“Nah, mate, I’m glad I have your help.” She stopped walking and smiled at me. “It would have been really lonely doing all this by myself.”

The sincerity in that smile had kept me going for days. It became clear not long after we started working together that Adriana had no friends. At least no one she mentioned to me. I could see how she had very little time for any when she spent most days helping with her grandmother’s care after school and on the weekends.

Maybe working at Kew wasn’t the only reason she’d approached me. Maybe she’d recognized a fellow loner in me back then. Maybe she’d seen I needed her company as much as she needed mine. 

Now, four months after she initially came up to me outside the church, I couldn’t remember what my days had been filled with before that point.  

“Something’s wrong,” Adriana said as we pulled up near the hotel. 

I tilted my head to see past her, spotting a boat by the building’s entrance. An engine hummed on this one, and it was wide enough to fit five people.

“Could it be an inspection?” I asked, despite knowing she wouldn’t have an answer.

“Whatever it is, we can’t go in until they leave.” She stated the obvious.

“But we can’t lurk here, they’ll wonder why we’re watching them.”

We weren’t doing anything illegal by being there, but if an official decided to get nosy, poked around, and asked about the manure I’d taken, or if they discovered we were occupying a building we didn’t own or realized how we’d got our hands on the rhizomes in the first place, it would be a different story.

As if on cue, one of the women on the boat turned our way. 

Adriana panicked at the exact second I did. Our oars clashed as we drove them into the water at the same time, and the canoe wobbled.

“Whoa! Brace against that wall,” I called out, pointing to the building we were beside.

We’d managed to attract the attention of everyone on the boat. There was no time to waste once we were steady. 

“This way,” I directed Adriana, keeping my head down and rowing swiftly into a side street. “Wąđ just have to wait them out.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Adriana frowned. “I have to get back within the hour. They need my help at home.”

“It shouldn’t be long. It’s quite late in the day for inspectors to be out anyway.”

I was right. We heard the boat’s motor drawing closer as they left the hotel. And then even closer when they began to turn into the street we were hiding in.

“Crap!” I shrieked, looking around for an escape route. There was a double-casement window behind Adriana wide enough for us to row into. The building already had a cross on its wall, so the crew wouldn’t be checking it. “In here. Hurry!”

I let out a sneeze the moment we pushed our way into the waterlogged living room. Something hung heavy in the air, and it wasn’t the unmissable stench of damp and decay. It took another second for me to realize what it was, but not before I watched in horror as Adriana’s oar banged against a floating tabletop.

A plume of small black particles rose all around us. Thick layers of toxic carbon dust that had lain undisturbed for goodness knows how long in the abandoned house. I felt the disk around my neck vibrate before the room filled with teeny beeps as our air counters did what they were designed to do to protect us. I looked at Adriana, and the flashing red light at her chest matched mine. 

Even as my eyes began to water, I knew I couldn’t do what a lifetime of training and logic begged me to do. All I could think of was shutting off the sound before the inspection crew decided to come to our rescue. Between a fit of coughs, I tugged at the chain at my neck, reaching forward to yank Adriana’s off too. I was full-on gasping by the time I dunked the disks into the water. The irony was, the beeping had cut out, but the sound of my wheezing was now louder than those had been. 

Something cold and metallic covered my nose and mouth, giving my lungs a chance to suck in sweet, clean air. I looked down at the hand holding the respirator to my face, and turned to find Adriana had already sensibly put her spare on first. We rasped into our devices, waiting to see if we’d been fast enough to stop the sounds reaching the crew, each passing second feeling like a lifetime.   

By the time the hum of the boat’s engine began to fade, I was no longer gulping for air. And when the only sound that reached our ears was that of our breath, I didn’t stop to think before I pulled Adriana against my chest. We sat there for a moment longer, our racing heartbeats failing to match the room’s serenity. 

I had always imagined how it would feel to hug her for the first time. Relief was not one of the emotions I thought would be coursing through my veins. Especially with the added realization that Adriana’s arms had found their way around my shoulders. On any other day, a heartfelt declaration would have been the only way to seal this moment. 

“That was … the respirator … I don’t know if I …” The words tumbled out of me, making more sense in my head than out. “Thank you for doing that.”

Adriana leaned back, the fear in her eyes still clear. “No, thank you for shutting the disks off. We’d be in bigger trouble if you hadn’t done that.”

“I think the fact that you saved my lungs deserves more credit than what I did.” I somehow found it in me to chuckle.

“Technically, you wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t asked for your help.”

“Still, thank you.” I reached for her again and didn’t let go for a little longer. Adriana didn’t pull away, only sighing heavily when I finally sat back. 

We said no more, keeping the respirators on as we carefully made our way out of the house. The street was empty, as expected, so we turned the corner and headed to our original destination. 

When we arrived outside the hotel, a fresh red marking on the wall greeted us. 

“No! It can’t be!” The despair in Adriana’s voice was almost as stifling as the dust cloud.

“Hang on. Let’s see what it says.” I pulled out my phone and scanned a black dot by the cross. 

“Limited structural damage detected in basement-level walls,” I read the summary on my screen. 

“Foundations unaffected; however, structural integrity of the building fabric is likely to deteriorate further within 12 months.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

My sigh of relief echoed Adriana’s. At least it didn’t say a month, or even two. There was still time for the plantains to reach maturity.

Adriana’s head snapped my way, her eyes widening. “Do you think they … .” She couldn’t get the rest out.

We moored the canoe and sprinted up to the ballroom. 

“Thank god!” Adriana cried out when we stumbled in to find our investment intact.

“But we’re screwed anyway,” I said, walking up to touch one of the broad green leaves. “This building’s now on their radar.”

“I think it may be a good thing.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “What part of this could possibly be good?”

“Think about all the houses they inspect on your street. Once they mark them as structurally unsound, they don’t bother with them again for a while, do they?”

“Wąđ’re still risking collapse on ourselves if we stick to this.”

“And when last did you hear of a marked building collapsing?”

I frowned. She wasn’t wrong. 

“If my projection is right based on the temperatures we’ve been maintaining, we have about six more months to go before we can hope for fruits to show up.” Adriana didn’t look deterred. In fact, there was a new light in her eyes. “All we need is one bunch to make all this worth it. We can still make it happen.”

“You deserve a medal for all this, you know.” I couldn’t help smiling this time. “I would have given up ages ago. Maybe all the way back in that week when we were waiting to hear if the rhizomes were available. And definitely that time the plants started to wilt because you thought we’d overwatered them. But somehow, you just keep going.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

I thought my compliment would turn her lips up, but she only shrugged.

“Is it silly that I keep praying this has to work, because what if there are no plantains in heaven?” 

Adriana choked back a sob.

My hand reached for hers. Adriana looked down at it. 

“Your abuela will hold on for the ones right here.”

Her answer came after a long pause. “Promise?” When her eyes met mine again, they glistened.

We both knew my answer held no meaning, yet I nodded, squeezing her hand gently.

“I promise.”

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind.

Special thanks to this year’s judges, Annalee Newitz () and Omar El Akkad ().