After the World Changes......Resistance Keeps Going

It’s 2076, I’m 90 years old, and I am writing a letter to my descendants. They will find the letter between the pages of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a gift that I will leave to them.

My loves,

The fight for our lives still rages on. Everyday we continue to slowly build the type of world we want to live in and leave to you all. I wish I could say that we were there already, that you are living in a world free of state violence and oppression, where access to food, housing, healthcare and economic resources is abundant for everyone. Alas, transformational change doesn’t happen overnight, or in a few years, or even a few decades. There is no end point, we keep fighting and loving to create the best world that we can.

When the truly frightening man who promised to “make america great again” was elected president in 2016 (Octavia foretold this), we were all shocked, angry and scared about what would he would do to us, our families, friends, loved ones, communities, and country. With his unofficial army of white supremacists across the country harming people in our communities, and his cabinet full of people invested in maintaining and strengthening white supremacy as carried out in laws and policies, we knew we were in a fight for our lives. All we had to do was study our history to know that whenever there is any type of progress for marginalized communities (especially for Black people) and when there is mass resistance to state violence and oppression, the backlash is swift and brutal.

But we were ready. We studied our history of resistance movements, built community with each other, educated our community and brought new people into our movements, protected each other from violent repression, held mass protests, organized, worked to dismantle the prison system piece by piece so we could have more of our people on the outside fighting with us, loved/fought/disagreed with each other, rediscovered survival strategies rooted in community, tested new ways of holding each other accountable, laughed, danced, shared food, and made art that spoke to our time.

Do you think the state just sat back and watched all of this resistance happen? Hell no! Even after the “make america great again” president left office, his rhetoric, cabinet and supreme court nominations fed into a far-reaching system of state sanctioned violence. The repression was (is) vicious and ongoing, and we lost too many people, whether to death, imprisonment, co-optation, betrayal, or they just couldn’t fight anymore. But we have not, and cannot, give up! Another world is possible and we have to fight like hell to make it a reality.