Since Donald Trump took office again, public schools, many of which were already severely struggling, have faced increasing challenges. The administration’s education policy has aimed to defund public schools in favor of private institutions; sanitize curriculum and replace critical thinking with a “patriotic,” white supremacist vision of society; and eliminate practices that protect vulnerable children like immigrants, trans youth, and working-class youth. From attacks on teaching Black history, to ICE raids on campuses, students’ bodies and minds are under threat.

Lack of resources, children’s safety, and culturally appropriate pedagogy have been perennial fronts of education justice struggles. So while Trump has undoubtedly intensified and broadened the scope of these problems, it’s important to recognize that they predated his administration — and so have community-led efforts to address them, many of which did not wait for the results of elections and ascendance of elected officials to change the situation.

Starting in 2019, the Black Organizing Project (BOP) in Oakland organized a coalition of parents, students, and other supporters to rid their schools of police officers, who had long served as a funnel into the school-to-prison pipeline. Public support for the BOP campaign accelerated in the wake of the George Floyd uprisings, resulting in the eventual passage of the George Floyd Resolution for Police-Free Schools, named after the Black man killed by Minnesota police in May 2020.

Writing for YES! in 2024, BOP organizer Malaika Parker explained that “the George Floyd resolution did not come about because elected officials agreed to far-reaching reforms. It was the result of a movement led by those most impacted for justice based on years of organizing and community leadership”:

Our progress in Oakland has shown us what works to transform local systems that punish Black youth and communities of color: Put young people, parents, and community members at the center of the work. Be bold and keep fighting for transformational change and not just incremental, feel-good actions. And claim every single community win. That is what will continue to inspire those who will come after us. That is what will ignite everyday, regular people to realize that we ourselves have the power to shift, change, and transform.

–Malaika Parker

Read the full article: How Black Parents Got Cops Out of Oakland Schools

From the Archives: How Educators Are Working to Compassionately Address Trauma

Efforts to address trauma in the classroom have grown as more educators and scientists have begun to understand the impacts of poverty, colonialism, discrimination, and other traumatic experiences on children.

Starting in 2009, public schools in many states with a high number of Native American students began to embrace trauma-informed approaches to help them thrive. Tanya H. Lee described the motivations behind this approach for YES! in 2018: “Schools like these are using trauma-sensitive practices to address children’s mental health, behavioral, and academic issues. The goal is to create schools where adults — from the principal to the lunch room personnel — consistently respond to children with empathy and compassion.”

Read the full article: How Native American Children Benefit From Trauma-Informed Schools

From the Archives: Children’s Futures as the Classroom’s Starting Point

Between the climate crisis, AI, and rapidly shifting global forces, today’s rising generation faces an ever more uncertain future — and these kids will become adults who will have to work to support themselves amid the tumult. Does this mean that the role of schooling is to prepare an obedient, submissive workforce that follows top-down directions in hard times, or can it be a means to encourage children to create a liberated, nurturing world from the ashes of crisis?

Writing for YES! in 2022, former public school teacher Ruben Abrahams Brosbe described alternative forms of education that could empower kids to create a better future for themselves if these models were made widely accessible: “It is exciting to imagine what would be possible if these models were freed from their exclusive silos and made more widely available to all young people in the United States. Imagine a generation of children given the chance to practice autonomy and creativity at school.”

Read the full article: To Transform Work, Start With Schools

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sonali Kolhatkar, the host of Rising Up With Sonali, reports on how the federal government is withholding funding for immigrant children’s legal representation and diverting it to dubious alternatives.
• Marianne Dhenin reports on a movement that is building to stop New York state from investing in Israel Bonds.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? Organizing for Survival in an Era of Climate Chaos – Truthout

?️ Former Strikers Start Cooperative News Organization – In These Times

? Learning from COINTELPRO’s Survivors: Accountability and Repair – Convergence

⛪ Maryland Faith Leaders, Civil Rights Advocates Rally for Haitian Community Amid End of TPS – Prism

? US Communities Are Organizing to End Complicity With Genocide in Their Backyards – Waging Nonviolence

Rising Up With Sonali

From now until September 30, every purchase of Sonali Kolhatkar’s new book, Breaking ICE, through this link will get 3 months free membership to RisingUpWithSonali.com.

And, those who also buy Sonali’s last book, Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible, will get 6 months free membership to Rising Up With Sonali.

Note: Please allow a few days after your purchase to activate your free membership.

Better Schools and Futures for Students Are Possible

We know what are the tools for building transformative schools — grassroots organizing, trauma-informed practices, nourishing pedagogy — but they must be in the hands of those who will most benefit from such a transformation. By building grassroots coalitions of youth, parents, community members, educators, and unions, we can work together not only to preserve what we have, but to imagine and build institutions that fuel a more just, liberatory, and hopeful future for our children.

The last year has seen a remarkable upswell of grassroots resistance to the latest spawn of Big Tech: data centers. The threats of these centers are multitudinous — air, water, and noise pollution; environmental racism; ballooning electricity bills; loss of energy resources; and ever more corporate control over our data.

Communities facing the impact of data centers have responded quickly, standing up to these technological catastrophes. Often building across partisan lines, organizers — both new and veteran — have won moratoriums on data center construction, stalled or halted projects altogether, and forced candidates for office to take a position on this issue. These communities have recognized a fundamental truth about challenging systems of power: You can’t do it alone.

While campaigns against data centers are relatively new, social movements have for a longer time recognized Big Tech’s data projects as a pernicious form of social control. AI, algorithms, and other technological developments have been used to criminalize populations, deepen exploitation at work, or enable bodily harm.

Writing for YES! in 2024, Juliet Kunkel warned us that there is ultimately no path to winning by individually opting out, but “that in order to confront these systems, we must build something greater than individual autonomy”:

Our response to a world trending toward alienation from each other and data-driven social control cannot be based solely on personal privacy. Any engagement with these systems that takes solidarity seriously must remember that, whether we find ourselves shoulder to shoulder or embedded in an algorithm, our liberation is bound up with each other.

–Juliet Kunkel

Read the full article: We Keep Our Data Safe

From the Archives: Care in the Aftermath of Wildfires

Wildfires are scorching the U.S. Pacific Northwest, with Oregon seeing record levels of destruction, while Spain, Portugal, and France are each enduring the largest wildfires in their respective histories. While building the struggles to halt climate catastrophe through systemic changes is absolutely necessary, it is also crucial that the victims of these crises receive compassionate responses in the immediate aftermath. The stories of mutual aid movements in response to past wildfires can help guide the way.

Writing for YES! in the wake of devastating wildfires in North California in 2017, Dani Burlison reported on how “Santa Rosa residents — and the greater Sonoma County community — rushed in to offer support services through pop-up holistic clinics, mental health education, and free counseling services. It’s a response that may help other communities cope with future disasters.”

Read the full article: What Wildfires Do to Our Minds

From the Archives: A Decade Since the Sanders Shakeup

Almost 10 years ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders launched his first campaign for the U.S. presidency. His seismic run played a major role in generating electoral coalitions and inspiring other campaigns to challenge the neoliberal, corporate hold on the Democratic Party.

Writing for YES! in 2016, Sarah van Gelder advised progressives to utilize key lessons from the Sanders movement in organizing their own communities. She urged readers to ground their politics at the local level to build enduring power: “Local is where we are unstoppable, where corporate money has less influence and we can do more with volunteers and our own $27 contributions. That is where we can build the foundations of a movement that extends from our communities to Washington, D.C., and brings about real change, while holding those we send to D.C. accountable to we the people.”

Read the full article: Sanders Might Soon Be Out of the Race, But Not the Revolution

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sonali Kolhatkar, the host of Rising Up With Sonali, reports on the first case to hold Big Oil accountable for an individual’s death in a climate-related disaster.
• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, revisits advice from organizers about using midterm elections to build local power.
• Marianne Dhenin reports on organizers who are pressuring local and state agencies to cut ties with the federal task forces endangering their communities.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? You Can’t Drink Data: Native Communities Are Resisting the AI Death Cycle – Truthout

✊ What Amazon Organizers Can Learn From the Fight for 15 – In These Times

?️ Tennessee Death Row Abolitionists Organize Vigils to Protest State-Sanctioned Murder – Prism

? What India’s Cockroach Party Won — and What’s Next – Waging Nonviolence

? Being Pro-Working Class Isn’t Enough: We Need Victories People Can Feel – Convergence

Rising Up With Sonali

Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews.  

Sonali has a new book out this year that collects powerful interviews from her show with activists who battled ICE raids and with academics who put the attacks on immigrants into a broader historical and cultural framework. Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press, August 2026) is available for pre-order now through an independent bookstore. You can also directly subscribe to support Sonali’s solutions-based broadcast effort.

We Are Keeping Us Safe – Now Keep It Going!

If we can’t opt out of crises, then we certainly cannot opt out of the care we will all need to truly become an unstoppable — and sustainable — collective force. Whether taking on data centers, providing mutual aid in the aftermath of ecological disasters, or building local power for the long haul, communities are coming together in the toughest times to forge interdependence and practice tangible hope.

The impacts of climate change are becoming stark in parts of the U.S. and Europe, as summer heat waves claim the lives of thousands of people and threaten the well-being of many more communities.

Policy experts, scientists, educators and ecological advocates have made enormous strides in helping the broader public recognize the need to shift the ways in which we produce and consume energy, food, infrastructure, and other aspects of society. How can we expand this recognition into meaningful, expansive social and economic transformations?

Writing for YES! in 2021, climate scientist Peter Kalmus described collective action as the product of individuals leading the way, showing what’s possible, and shifting our understanding of what ought to be accepted as normal:

I believe there’s a deep connection between individual and collective action, that collective action is comprised of our individual actions — both informed by and informing culture. And it’s certainly possible to reduce our own emissions while at the same time doing everything we can to demand systems-level change….

If we find it difficult or irrelevant to use less fossil fuel ourselves, how effective can we be in pushing for broader systems-level change? If we want cultural shift, we need individuals to lead the way. We need many individuals showing what’s possible, shifting the normal, telling a new story with their actions. Those of us situated to do this with relative ease have a moral responsibility to do so. Sooner or later, our social norms will reflect this.

–Peter Kalmus

Read the full article: A Clear Choice: My Fossil Fuels — or 5.6 Million People Fleeing a Hurricane

From the Archives: What the Freedom 250 Celebrations Ignored on July 4

Freedom 250, the Trump-endorsed celebrations of the U.S.’s 250th birthday, often cited the Declaration of Independence, but only sections of it that are both familiar to much of the public – and unthreatening to the authoritarian president. We all know the familiar sentences: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In 2019, Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, the former executive editor at YES!, drew attention to the deliberately overlooked section of the Declaration of Independence, which upholds the right to overthrow tyrannical governments.

“Baked into this nation’s founding is a remedy for exactly the kind of dangerous politicking currently oozing from the Oval Office,” wrote Warfield.

Read the full article: The Declaration of Independence Told Us What to Do About Tyrants Like Trump

From the Archives: We’re Still Feeling the Impacts of the Encampments

It’s been two years since students launched Palestine solidarity encampments on their campuses across the country. The impacts of these courageous efforts continue to be felt in our movements, as organizers carry the encampments’ practices of collective care and solidarity into anti-ICE, anti-Trump, and other political spaces.

The legacy of the encampments in New York City can also be seen in recent electoral victories for pro-Palestinian candidates. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently won a Democratic primary for a House seat as member and endorsee of the Democratic Socialists of America in New York City, was interviewed by Arun Gupta for YES! in May 2024, while taking part in the Columbia University encampment.

Read the full article: Students for Gaza Are Undeterred

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, finds a sense of national pride in the multitudinous ways Americans are resisting the Trump regime.
• Sonali Kolhatkar, the host of Rising Up With Sonali, looks at how some state governments are finding ways to fight back against the rising influence of money in politics.
• Marianne Dhenin reports on grassroots canvassers who are urging voters to defend abortion rights in their states this November.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

✊ Taking on the Rich Is Possible. Our Illinois Coalition Won a Tax on Tech Giants. – Truthout

?? Houston Birth Workers Respond to the Black Maternal Health Crisis – Scalawag

? Miami Artists Use Spotlight on FIFA World Cup to Challenge Immigration Enforcement – Prism

✋? These Black Georgians Refuse to Be Silenced – Hammer & Hope

? The Data Center Backlash That’s Uniting America – Waging Nonviolence

✌️ How We Survive and Turn the Tide: Lessons from Florida – Convergence

Rising Up With Sonali

Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews.  

Sonali has a new book out this year that collects powerful interviews from her show with activists who battled ICE raids and with academics who put the attacks on immigrants into a broader historical and cultural framework. Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press, August 2026) is available for pre-order now through an independent bookstore. You can also directly subscribe to support Sonali’s solutions-based broadcast effort.

Doing Our Part for Collective Transformation

Over the last few years, anti-authoritarian and anti-genocide movements have shown that systematic transformation requires masses of people to find their roles in the struggle, but not everyone knows where to start. By taking meaningful personal steps while also demanding systems-level change, each one of us shows what’s possible and helps fuel bigger fights. From the person who offers water at the anti-Trump march, to the medic who provides care at anti-ICE protest, we shift our norms toward collective care and transformation — and discover “a remedy for exactly the kind of dangerous politicking currently oozing from the Oval Office.”

The ruling class is striving to take everything from us – including our future. From the Trump administration’s anti-ecological blitzkrieg against government regulations to the proliferation of gargantuan data centers swallowing up our water and electricity, far right governments and powerful AI corporations are seizing the means of life to enrich themselves.

The material of life that sustains us all is not only being concentrated in the hands of a few ultrawealthy people; it is also being destroyed. And these two processes are not just happening simultaneously – they are interlinked.

Writing for YES! in 2021, ecofeminist activist Vandana Shiva explained how privatization and extraction are the key drivers of planetary destruction, and that the solution lies in “commoning” – practices that protect the right of all beings to enjoy the Earth’s gifts of life:

In the commons, we care and share — for the Earth and each other. We are conscious of nature’s ecological limits, which ensure her share of the gifts she creates goes back to her to sustain biodiversity and ecosystems. We are aware that all humans have a right to air, water, and food, and we feel responsible for the rights of future generations.

Enclosures of the commons, in contrast, are the root cause of the ecological crisis and the crises of poverty and hunger, dispossession and displacement. Extractivism commodifies for profit what is held in common for the sustenance of all life.

–Vandana Shiva

Read the full article: Reclaiming Our Common Home

From the Archives: The Global Danger of Unfettered Deforestation

The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda are facing a major Ebola crisis, with more than 100 deaths and hundreds of confirmed cases recorded since the outbreak began in May.

The Trump administration’s cuts to USAID have likely played a major role in delaying an emergency response, but factors such as corporate-driven deforestation lie at the root of ongoing outbreaks of new and emerging diseases.

Writing for YES! in 2021, Sarah Sax reflected on how the COVID-19 pandemic could push us to become “aware of the connection between deforestation and emerging diseases …  shoring up the connection among forest health, human health, and equity.” We can heed these lessons today by calling for structural changes in our relationship with the environment to reduce the likelihood of future emergencies while demanding fully funded public health measures to respond to the immediate crisis.

Read the full article: The Ever-Clearer Link Between Deforestation and Public Health

From the Archives: Women-Centered Forms of Grassroots Justice

The Epstein files have revealed an extensive network of relationships that facilitated the abuse of women and girls, but so far, the courts and Congress have failed to hold many high-profile and powerful perpetrators accountable. In India’s capital, New Delhi, an alternative model has emerged for dealing with gender-based violence that does not depend on law enforcement agencies, which often are marked by patriarchal, casteist norms. Through women-led councils, participants have found a means to address domestic violence and other forms of interpersonal violence.

“Such councils are helping women to speak up and reframe their ideas of justice,” wrote Poorvi Gupta.

Read the full article: Justice by and for India’s Women

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, explains why defeating Trump’s agenda in the midterms will depend on organizing at the community level.
• Sonali Kolhatkar, the host of Rising Up With Sonali, reports on Los Angeles activists who are applying lessons from the city’s uprising last year against ICE in anticipation of the next round of repression.
• Marianne Dhenin reports on disability rights advocates who are fighting a lawsuit that targets discrimination protections, threatening to push more people to be warehoused in institutions.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

✊ A Movement Is Growing to Close the Largest ICE Jail on the East Coast – Truthout

?‍? The Ripple Effects of Organizing Against Data Centers – Waging Nonviolence

✈️ How to Halt a Deportation Flight – The Progressive

? Loved Ones and Supporters of Delaney Hall’s Striking Immigrants Rally Around the Clock Outside Detention Center – Prism

✌️ How to Remove an Authoritarian Leader: Lessons from Hungary – Convergence

Rising Up With Sonali

Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews.

Sonali reports that subscriptions have been dropping off since the beginning of the year, a reflection of the poor state of the economy and a on-going subscription fatigue from news consumers. When you subscribe to Rising Up With Sonali, you’ll receive 3-4 interviews a week in your inbox, with full access to video and transcripts of all conversations.

Rescuing Ourselves to Rescue the Earth

The core truth at the heart of the idea of the commons is that we can’t pin the blame for planetary destruction on human nature – a misanthropic idea that fails to recognize who is truly responsible for the crisis. The project of the commons also requires us to recognize that apocalypse is not inevitable. The Earth has enough for all of us to flourish if we can wrest what truly belongs to all of us from those who seek to exploit it for wealth and power. Through the embrace of models like grassroots councils, and the forging of a consciousness of our interdependence with the natural world, we can sow the seeds for a future commonwealth that excludes no one and no being from the Earth’s gifts of life.

Ten years ago this spring, an Indigenous-led movement against an oil pipeline transformed the consciousness of the country. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe began protesting in April 2016 against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatened to poison the Missouri River. Protests turned into mass encampments of thousands of Indigenous activists and their supporters, drawing crucial connections between Indigenous sovereignty and climate change. They would eventually be cleared by federal agents in February 2017, as Donald Trump’s first presidency began.

The pipeline continues to run today. “But this Indigenous-led disruption, the awakening resolve that was cultivated at Standing Rock, did not dissolve after February,” wrote Jenni Monet for YES! in 2018. “Rather, it spread in so many different directions that we may never fully realize its reach”:

Americans saw the global struggle faced by the estimated 370 million Indigenous people — the violence, stolen resources, colluding corporations and governments that go hand in hand with protecting the Earth.

Sustaining this awakening is the next great task.

Climate change poses one of the most serious reminders of why the sacred fires ignited at Standing Rock must continue to burn: Indigenous peoples and their knowledge and value systems matter.

–Jenni Monet

Read the full article: What Standing Rock Gave the World

From the Archives: What We Can Do Now to Defend Voting

The Supreme Court and Republicans have waged a ferocious assault on the rights of Black voters in recent weeks. After SCOTUS ruled to defang the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee proceeded to gerrymander their state voting maps at warp speed ahead of the November midterm elections. These changed maps target the power of Black voters in these states.

Racial justice requires that these changes be reversed. And even beyond that specific battle, there still may be space on the electoral terrain to fight for democracy, and we can learn from past strategies to protect voting rights. In 2019, Lornett Turnbull wrote for YES!, “Now, with the civil liberties of so many people and entire communities at stake, having your voice heard and your vote counted is more important than ever.”

Read the full article: Five Ways to Empower Voters Now

From the Archives: The Indubitable Power of Independent Media

In the latest wave of corporate media mergers, a $111 billion deal between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery may soon bring CNN and CBS News under control by a single owner. The further narrowing of political perspectives on the dominant airwaves makes it ever more important to support independent media at this moment. But can small outlets that are often just trying to stay afloat make a meaningful impact on public discourse when they are up against extremely well-resourced behemoths?

Reporting for YES! in 2017, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser highlighted a study showing that newsrooms not controlled by billionaires can punch above their weight when it comes to changing the political conversation. “When independent news outlets work together to co-publish stories on the same topic in the same week, they can have a mighty effect,” wrote Kaiser.

Read the full article: Why Science Says You Should Be Reading Small Independent Media

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, encourages us to embrace solidarity as the key to developing the kind of collective resilience that can challenge authoritarianism.
• Sonali Kolhatkar, the host of Rising Up With Sonali, reports on the electoral success of progressive policies over centrism.
• Marianne Dhenin reports on the ongoing challenges faced by public educators in California who are defending pro-Palestine speech.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

✊ The Unions We Need Will Be Built by Workers, Not Labor Officials – Truthout

? Mothers Are the Most Underestimated Force for Change – Waging Nonviolence

? Community Solar Puts People in Charge – The Progressive

?️ Another Way Out: We Need a Mosaic Movement, Not Fragmented ‘Leftism’ – Prism

? The Jewish Labor Organizers Who Challenged Zionism From the Start – Hammer & Hope

? Turning the Page on Corporate Bookselling – In These Times

Rising Up With Sonali

Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews.

When you subscribe to Rising Up With Sonali, you’ll receive 3-4 interviews a week in your inbox, with full access to video and transcripts of all conversations.

Unbreakable Bonds of Solidarity

Pipelines may flow, gerrymandering proceeds, and corporate media mergers continue apace, but the transformation of our consciousness forged in struggle against these injustices cannot be stopped. We see how the fight for Indigenous sovereignty advances the fight against fossil-fueled climate change. Efforts to increase access to voting support the struggle for racial justice. And the work of independent media counters the malignant influence of corporations in political discourse. When we recognize the interconnectedness of our movements, we can find hope for a better future in the solidarity we build together.

Veteran organizing was key to ending the U.S. war on Vietnam. While the movement against the Iraq war did not succeed in preventing the U.S. operation, veteran organizing planted the seeds for long-term efforts to turn youth against war. Writing for YES! in 2023 on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Ruben Abrahams Brosbe reported on efforts by veterans “to counter both the narrative and incentives that military recruiters offer young people” and “share the truth about traumatic personal experiences as well as practical information”:

“I think it’s super trippy, that there are children who are old enough to be in the military and being deployed to Iraq, who were not born when the war started. That is something that is just devastating and tragic to me,” Damiani says. “It fuels my fire to keep talking to the kids, because they need to know.”

–Ruben Abrahams Brosbe

Read the full article: Veterans Push Back Against Military Recruitment in Schools

From the Archives: Holding Up What Trump Seeks to Destroy

Trump has been pledging for months to overthrow the government of Cuba, and he has continued to make these threats despite the unpopularity of his war on Iran, which has killed at least 2,076 people so far. This is a crucial time for progressives to hold up the achievements of the blockaded Caribbean nation that the U.S. administration seeks to destroy. Its health care system, for example, has brought care around the world while forging peaceful ties with other countries.

“Cuba’s spending on medical services and training, then, is an investment in its national security,” wrote Sarah van Gelder for YES! in 2017. “They invest in training people to heal, not to kill, all over the world.”

Read the full article: What Cuba Can Teach Us About Health Care

From the Archives: A Blueprint for Ending Global Food Crises

A global food crisis is mounting due to the disruption of fertilizer shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. While the US-Israeli war on Iran is to blame as a short-term cause, it’s crucial to recognize how pro-corporate globalization has made supply chains for food production highly vulnerable to disruption. Writing for YES! in 2017, Eric Holt-Gimenez argued that recurrent food crises can be ended with a global shift toward local, ecological, and regulated production.

“For decades, family farmers the world over have resisted this corporate control,” Holt-Gimenez wrote. “They have worked to diversify crops, protect soil and native seeds, and conserve nature. They have established local gardens, businesses, and community-based food systems. These strategies are effective. They need to be given a chance to work.”

Read the full article: 7 Steps to Solving the Food Crisis

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, argues that the most reliable form of resilience is not individual wealth or distant institutions, but solidarity — the power of ordinary people to collectively meet their needs and determine the conditions of their lives.
• Sonali Kolhatkar, the host of Rising Up With Sonali, describes how U.S. sanctions function as economic warfare against entire populations in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba.
• Marianne Dhenin reports on the aftermath of DOGE’s attacks on Social Security, as disabled, ill, and aging Americans are facing a broken system that’s now harder to navigate than ever.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? Inside the Grassroots Campaign That Pushed a Drone Company Out of Brooklyn – Truthout

? Mutual Aid Is a Lifeline for the Million People Displaced by War in Lebanon – Waging Nonviolence

? No Kings Must Mean No War – Truthout

?️ The Life and Career of Democracy Now! Founder Amy Goodman – The Progressive

? These Indigenous Iditarod Mushers Are Preserving Dogsled Culture – Prism

❤️‍? Fighting Cancer Has Given Me New Insights on the Anti-Fascist Challenge We Face – Truthout

Rising Up With Sonali

Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews with change makers. In recent days, Sonali Kolhatkar discussed the antiwar movement with Truthout editor-in-chief Negin Owliaei, as well as the new documentary Steal this Story, Please with Amy Goodman, and the Black Census Project with Kristin Powell.

When you subscribe to Rising Up With Sonali, you’ll receive 3-4 interviews a week in your inbox, with full access to video and transcripts of all conversations.

We Have Models for Facing and Surviving Crisis

From veteran-driven organizing and food sovereignty, to global antiwar struggles and health care for all, past generations have demonstrated that crises do not inevitably lead to devastation – they can be faced, and we can survive them. Through that creative survival, we have the opportunity to dismantle U.S. militarism once and for all, and in its stead, build a world that can feed and care for everyone.

You make this newsletter possible! Please support us in uplifting solutions journalism – even, and especially, in these turbulent times – by making a one-time or monthly donation.

In solidarity,

t r u t h o u t

There are so many fronts on which organizers are tirelessly working and where activists are constantly mobilizing. While multitasking between antiwar protests and rapid response, to divestment campaigns and survivor advocacy, it can feel like there is not enough time to even breathe.

What can hold us together when capitalism, empire, and fascism are ruthlessly committed to tearing us apart?

Writing for YES! in 2018, Ari Honarvar drew upon her childhood experiences in Iran to reflect on how rituals sustained her community through the darkest hours. These kinds of practices support our deeply human need for belonging and shared meaning, and ground us amid troubling times. Shared rituals may be crucial for holding us together in an era of seemingly permanent crises:

In this age of isolation, we need nourishing and uplifting means of creating community by bringing together members of different generations as our ancestors did. From my experience in Iran, rituals can be particularly valuable during hard times. In the U.S., we don’t have to worry about bombs and food rations, but we still have challenges to our security that affect our mental and physical health. Rituals can help us, though, by offering our communities opportunities for healing and support.

—Ari Honarvar

Read the full article: Why Rituals Are Good for Your Health

From the Archives: Rescuing Ourselves and the Planet From Oil

As airstrikes on oil facilities across Iran produce apocalyptic columns of fire and toxic black rain across Tehran, the terrible war launched by the US and Israel further threatens to raise energy prices to historical levels. The scourge of war should remind us of the curse of oil: Even in the absence of war, our global energy infrastructure threatens to render the planet uninhabitable while enriching the destroyers of earth.

Writing for YES! in 2016, Yessenia Funes described the potential for a just energy transition to produce a safer and more equitable world.

“We know about the effects on the climate of burning oil, gas, and coal for energy, but we don’t know what turning our backs on them will do to our economy. Some worry that closing our oil refineries and shutting down our mines would throw the market into a dangerous vortex. That doesn’t need to be the case. A successful energy transition could actually benefit the economy and reduce inequality,” Funes wrote.

Read the full article: Jobs After Oil: The Path to a Cleaner, More Equal Future

From the Archives: Fighting the Battles That Matter

There’s only one way we will defeat creeping fascism — together. Staying united for the long haul will not be easy; but when conflict arises, we can’t let it pull us apart. In the wake of the Charlottesville killing of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist in August 2017, Kelly Hayes implored organizers to strive to overcome internal divides, resolve interpersonal grievances, and prioritize relationship building.

“United fronts aren’t about unity. They’re about survival. And if we could table some of our angst for the sake of survival, we might just overcome some of our differences in the process — or not,” wrote Hayes. “But you know what? Living to fight another day matters.”

Read the full article: Dear Fellow Lefties: Know Who the Real Enemy Is

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, urges Congress against investing in the expansion of ICE concentration camps.
• Sonali Kolhatkar, former racial justice and civil liberties editor at YES! Magazine and the host of Rising Up With Sonali, reports on recent nurses’ strikes in New York, California, and Hawaii.
• Marianne Dhenin, former contributing writer at YES! Magazine, follows the ongoing struggle to protect pro-Palestine speech in higher ed.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? In the Fight Against ICE, Kids Are on the Front Lines – In These Times

? A Successful General Strike Requires Trauma-Informed Mutual Aid – Waging Nonviolence

❤️‍? How Union Bargaining Can Buoy Affordability – The Progressive

?️ As Trump Bombs Iran, We Need to Reckon With the American War Machine – Truthout

Rising Up With Sonali

Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews. When you subscribe to Rising Up With Sonali, you’ll receive 3-4 interviews a week in your inbox, with full access to video and transcripts of all conversations.

We Must Hold Each Other Together

To navigate these turbulent times, let’s remember to ground ourselves in shared rituals and care. Together we can confront the daunting challenges ahead, and live to fight another day for transformative solutions.

If you’re excited about YES! and want to support the newsletter, please consider making a small one-time or monthly donation.

In solidarity,

t r u t h o u t

The nonstop violence of capitalism and empire in these times is meant to exhaust, demoralize, and pressure us to accept ever more injustice as a new status quo. But will we throw our weight behind temporary truces between the two parties of U.S. empire just to win a temporary reprieve, or will we continue to strive for a deeper transformation – one that seeks to put each and every relation of domination in the dustbin of history?

As David Korten wrote for YES! in 2006, a future without successive catastrophes requires solutions that put a culture of care at the heart of relationships with each other and the earth:

If we look for the source of the social pathologies increasingly evident in our culture, we find they have a common origin in the dominator relations of Empire that have survived largely intact in spite of the democratic reforms of the past two centuries. The sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction that have plagued human societies for 5,000 years, and have now brought us to the brink of a potential terminal crisis, all flow from this common source. Freeing ourselves from these pathologies depends on a common solution — replacing the underlying dominator cultures and institutions of Empire with the partnership cultures and institutions of Earth Community. Unfortunately, we cannot look to imperial power-holders to lead the way.

—David Korten

Read the full article: How Will Future Generations Remember Our Time?

From the Archives: We Can’t Let Them Take Away Our Neighbors Again

Mass resistance to the intensified brutality of ICE and other federal immigration agencies under Trump’s second term has shown us the power of solidarity and the necessity of confronting authoritarian violence. Writing for YES! during the first year of the first Trump administration, Tracy Matsue Loeffelholz explained the significance of the phrase nidoto nai yoni, “Let it not happen again,” for the Japanese American community in Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, and how it can inspire action today.

“It’s a motto with a call to action that shifts. It can be an appeal to justice and compassion: ‘Let it not happen again … please?’ It can be a demand to stand up: ‘Let it not happen again … dammit!’ It’s the latter that is resonating with me now, a reaction to this new government’s racism,” wrote Loeffelholz.

Read the full article: What Japanese Internment Taught Us About Standing Up for Our Neighbors

From the Archives: Community Control of the Economy

If we are willing to take up the task of epochal transformation as Korten described above, then we must ask: What concrete ways can it be done? Writing for YES! in 2013, Marjorie Kelly pointed out, “Many of the great social struggles in history have come down to the issue of who will control land, water, and the essentials of life.”

“The cooperative economy — and the broader family of generative ownership models — is helping to reawaken an ancient wisdom about living together in community, something largely lost in the spread of capitalism,” Kelly wrote.

Read the full article: The Economy: Under New Ownership

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, explains how elections, labor, mutual aid, and local organizing wins in 2025 point toward strategies that can work to defeat MAGA in the coming year.
• Marianne Dhenin, former contributing writer at YES! Magazine, reports on health care workers in Minnesota who are organizing to protect their colleagues and patients.
• Sonali Kolhatkar, former racial justice and civil liberties editor at YES! Magazine and the host of Rising Up With Sonali, analyzes California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s resistance to a billionaire tax that would help fund the state’s health care needs after the loss of federal subsidies.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

?️ Minneapolis Community Defense Is “Riding on the Learning Edge of a Whirlwind” – Truthout

? How We Can Defeat Authoritarianism Together – Convergence

? Iranian Artists Keep the Spirit of “Woman, Life, Freedom” Alive – In These Times

❤️‍? The Power of Collective Care – The Progressive

Rising Up With Sonali

The Washington Post recently announced layoffs of nearly a third of its workforce, sending shockwaves through the media landscape. As more billionaire-owned outlets are decimated – because the rich don’t want the rest of us understanding how the world truly works, do they? – independent media outlets continue to do what they do best, operating on meager resources and taking on the mantle of educating and informing the public. Rising Up With Sonali, formerly the broadcast arm of YES! Media, is lifting up solutions journalism through hard-hitting interviews. When you subscribe to Rising Up With Sonali, you’ll receive 3-4 interviews a week in your inbox, with full access to video and transcripts of all conversations.

Community Is the Common Solution

David Korten warned us two decades ago that imperial power-holders will not lead the world out of a terminal crisis – it is up to us. Today, the resistance we are seeing in the form of rapid response networks, mutual aid, union solidarity, and countless other initiatives is showing us that, indeed, another world is possible.

May future generations remember these times as the beginning of a great transformation, in which we built communities and institutions of nurturance – and made empire obsolete.

If you’re excited about YES! and want to support the newsletter, please consider making a small one-time or monthly donation.

In solidarity,

t r u t h o u t

Historians of Black liberation movements have pointed out that large-scale acts of revolt were key to advancing freedom struggles. When we draw on this history, we tap into a long tradition of diverse, coalitional struggle which developed and advanced some of the most progressive ideas which the left celebrates and continues to fight for today. In the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Jamon Jordan reminded us, “Protest as an act of resistance to oppression is a staple of American culture; the very founding of the United States is connected to protest, which exists in myriad demonstrations”:

There were hundreds of rebellions during the period of slavery — some small, some major.

Rebellions worked.

Today’s protests are no different. They’re modern-day uprisings, or rebellions, and part of every era of U.S. history.

—Jamon Jordan

Read the full article: Rebellions Work

From the Archives: Organizing From the Heart

Channeling people’s anger into concrete efforts for change is a perennial preoccupation of the organizer. Newcomers to activism sometimes find that traditions of organizing from the last century lack the compassionate qualities that they are looking for in political spaces. As Sally Kohn wrote for YES! in 2013, “the advice that helped shape modern political organizing [was] not always the most effective approach for alliance building and mass public appeal.” Organizers in recent decades have responded by putting more emphasis on building relationships, community, and solidarity.

“The new generation of community organizers is adapting the antagonistic politics of the past and building bridges instead of burning them,” wrote Kohn.

Read the full article: A Caring Economy Requires Building Bridges — Not Burning Them

From the Archives: Amid the Plunder of Venezuela, How Can We Build Activist Coalitions to Counter Chevron?

Chevron’s lobbying seems to have paid off: Trump’s abduction of Maduro from Venezuela may benefit the oil giant with more access to the country’s oil fields. One could say that Chevron is fueling imperialism. But the company’s role in facilitating violence doesn’t stop there. Last year, Palestinian solidarity activists in Oregon launched a campaign connecting Chevron to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their organizing efforts linked apartheid with ecological destruction, resulting in broader coalitions.

“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,” Ahmed wrote.

Such an example of coalition building may be useful for organizers today looking to build broad resistance against US intervention in Venezuela by linking it to the climate crisis and genocide.

Read the full article: Boycotting Chevron for Fueling Genocide

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sonali Kolhatkar, former racial justice and civil liberties editor at YES! Magazine and the host of Rising Up With Sonali, chronicled the nationwide growth of grassroots resistance to ICE throughout 2025.
• David Korten, co-founder of YES!, reviewed a new book about the ruinous impacts of extreme inequality on every facet of our lives.
• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, explains why the phenomenon of loneliness in our society is not an outcome of individual pathologies, but the product of our economic, political, and social systems – which we can change.
• Marianne Dhenin, former contributing writer at YES! Magazine, interviewed several disability justice organizers about their hopes and visions for struggle under the second year of Trump 2.0.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

⚡ As Electricity Bills Rise, Activists Are Demanding Public Control of Utilities – Truthout

? Elbit Subsidiary Empties Out Raleigh Offices After Protest Campaign, Activists Say – Prism

? Inside the Fight To Unionize California’s Climbing Gyms – In These Times

?️ The American Peace Movement We Need Today – Waging Nonviolence

Rising Up With Sonali

In this new and terrifying start to the year, our hope lies not only in sustained activism, but independent, justice-oriented media. YES! Media’s broadcast arm, Rising Up With Sonali, is a hard-hitting program that offers solutions perspectives on news and politics via regular interviews with changemakers on the frontlines of social justice. Spearheaded by YES!’s former senior editor Sonali Kolhatkar, this project is sustained entirely through subscribers at a very low monthly rate of only $4. 

Currently, Rising Up With Sonali has just about 400 paying subscribers. Doubling that number will get the show well on its way to sustainable independence. You can subscribe to Rising Up With Sonali here.

The Heart of Resistance

As we come to the end of another YES! edition, we’re reflecting on the need to not only resist injustice, but to also build solidarity with love and care. Nurturing connections and community strengthens movements in the short term – and makes it possible to sustain the work over the long haul.

Please share this newsletter with others and encourage them to subscribe. Our next edition from the YES! digital archives will be sent in February. 

If you’re excited about this continuation of the YES! tradition and want to support the newsletter, please consider making a small one-time or monthly donation.

In solidarity,

t r u t h o u t

These wars have wiped out millions of lives; plunged masses of people into poverty, trauma, starvation, and the status of refugee; and left many U.S. veterans burdened with PTSD and homelessness.

Now, the Trump administration is taking the U.S. on a path to war with Venezuela.

Writing for YES! in 2020, Nancy Hill profiled dozens of veterans about their experience in combat. Their testimonies speak to the moral catastrophe of war and the necessity of mass resistance to military conflict:

War breaks us. It detaches us from our core humanity. War removes us from ourselves and programs us to find enemies in anyone or anything that is unfamiliar. It robs us of our humanity and empathy. War poisons our hearts, minds, and spirits. It reduces us to cold shells — unfeeling, unloving — of ourselves first and then others, and back around. We can break that cycle though. The opposite of war is creation, nurturing, and healing. When we do our work to slow down, feel, and see ourselves in others, we can end wars. But we all have to do it. We all have to do the work to end wars.

—Letty Martinez, as quoted by Nancy Hill

Read the full article: Combat Veterans Tell Us What We Need to Know About War

From the Archives: War Budgets Lead to National Insecurity. What Creates Security?

The drive to war turns us away from systems that foster creation, nurturing, and healing. We all want to live in safety, but seeking security through the funding of so-called defense budgets ultimately takes us further away from realizing it.

“If we want a healthy Earth, justice, peace, and democracy, we need a 21st-century security agenda that addresses the causes of contemporary conflicts, encourages cooperation and diplomacy, and supports every person in their quest for a healthy and dignified life,” David Korten wrote for YES! in 2016.

Read the article: Want National Security? Dismantle the War Machine

From the Archives: Workers Cooperatives for Our Mental Health

With Elon Musk on track to become the world’s first trillionaire, it’s time for us to recognize how inequality is a key source of our collective mental suffering. Writing for YES! in 2018, Tabita Green proposed democratic and collectively owned workplaces as part of the solution to the inhumane dynamics of capitalism.

“Clearly, many of those suffering mental and emotional distress are actually having a rational response to a sick society and an unjust economy,” wrote Green. “This revelation doesn’t reduce the suffering, but it completely changes the paradigm of mental health and how we choose to move forward to optimize human well-being.”

Read the article: What a Society Designed for Well-Being Looks Like

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, has written an open letter to billionaires, imploring them to give up their luxury bunkers and wealth hoarding, and instead invest in repairing the world.
• Sonali Kolhatkar, former racial justice and civil liberties editor at YES! Magazine and the host of Rising Up With Sonali, reported on Starbucks workers’ ongoing strike after months of stalled contract negotiations under the leadership of the company’s new CEO.
• Evette Dionne, former Executive Editor of YES!, has republished selections from a Bitch Media series on access and disability that was curated by Alice Wong, a disability justice activist and writer who died in November.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? How Somerville Became the First US City to Vote to Divest From Israeli Apartheid – Truthout

?️ As Global Climate Talks Fumble, Texas Campaigns Target Companies Powering Genocide and Ecocide – deceleration

? Graduate Student Workers Find Unity Amid Intense Repression – In These Times

☮️ The Playbook of Every Successful Nonviolent Struggle – Waging Nonviolence

? It’s Time for Progressive Philanthropy to Commit to Funding Journalism – Prism / Truthout

Rising Up With Sonali

YES! Media’s broadcast arm Rising Up With Sonali is going strong after spinning off as an independent venture. Spearheaded by former senior editor Sonali Kolhatkar, the program offers solutions perspectives on news and politics via regular interviews with changemakers on the frontlines of social justice.

On Rising Up With Sonali, you learn about important efforts such as how Montana is using an innovative approach to ending Citizens United, how climate-destroying AI data centers can be stopped, what’s really happening with the US attacks on Venezuela and the Caribbean, and how Starbucks workers are engaging in a historic strike.

Sonali is sustaining this project entirely through subscribers at a very low monthly rate of $4 – less than a cup of drip coffee at the union-busting Starbucks!

When We Connect Through Solidarity, We Make a World Without War Possible

The US may be on a path toward war, but it’s crucial to remember that what we do next matters. As we heed the testimonies of those who have seen firsthand where war leads, remember that the worst is only guaranteed if we do nothing. 

When we connect through solidarity, we reconnect with our core humanity – and make a world without war a possibility.

Please share this newsletter with others and encourage them to subscribe. Our next edition from the YES! digital archives will be sent (next year!) in January. 

If you’re excited about this continuation of the YES! tradition and want to support the newsletter, please consider making a small one-time or monthly donation.

Best,

t r u t h o u t

While the current administration has certainly made it harder for millions of people to eat, the problem of food insecurity in the U.S. long predates Trump. Previous administrations failed to address inflation, corporate greed, poverty wages, health care costs, housing affordability, and the myriad of other key contributors that force millions to go hungry. Our so-called democracy, whether dominated by Democrats or Republicans, is not delivering the goods.

What if we approached solutions to the worsening food crisis as not just a matter of maintaining existing policies like SNAP (however necessary), but as a struggle for democracy?

Writing for YES! in 2008, Raj Patel advised us to push for more than evidence-based scientific changes to our food systems to address the global hunger crisis. In order “to feed the world, we’re [also] going to have to develop a taste for more democracy”:

Improved farming science alone won’t fix things, though. As much as they need nitrogen in the soil, tomorrow’s food systems need democracy on the ground. The problem of starvation is one not of production — we produce more than enough food to feed everyone — so much as poverty and distribution.

—Raj Patel

Read the full article: Food From the Grassroots

A Note to New Subscribers

You are currently reading the third edition of a monthly newsletter produced by Truthout featuring content from the YES! digital archives and new solutions journalism from independent media. Though YES! Magazine ceased regular publication earlier this year, Truthout will continue to uplift its rich reporting and commentary through these newsletters.

From the Archives: After the Big March, Build Power Locally

The second day of No Kings marches on October 18, 2025, saw historic participation in national nonviolent protests, with an estimated 7 million people demonstrating against the Trump administration’s agenda. The next steps we take locally will be crucial for consolidating these numbers into real movements of change.

“National demonstrations are important, but to make real change, we’ll need to build power where we live,” Sarah van Gelder wrote after the Women’s March in 2017. “It’s in our communities that we can resist hate and stand up for each other.”

Read the article: Big Protests Are Fine, But Here’s a To-Do List for Lasting Change

From the Archives: Abolition Through Free Public Transit

Public transit was among the key issues which Zohran Mamdani addressed with much success during his successful campaign for New York City mayor. While Mamdani has backtracked on his criticisms of the New York Police Department, his proposals for free public transit may provide an opening for abolition. Organizers could take up the demand for free fares as a way to strike down a key justification for police presence in public transit: fare enforcement. 

“By removing a key incentive to police subways and buses, transit agencies could meet the demand surging through New York’s subways and realize the abolitionist call to ‘Live free, ride free,’” suggests Justin A. Davis, in a January 2025 YES! piece.

Read the article: Can Free Public Transit Eliminate the Need for Police?

New Content From YES! Contributors

• Sonali Kolhatkar, former racial justice and civil liberties editor at YES! Magazine and the host of Rising Up With Sonali, has a new article highlighting the heroic resistance of everyday people against ICE and rising fascism in the US.
• David Korten, co-founder of YES!, has published a two-part series exploring how China’s pursuit of innovative ecological policies alongside fossil fuel-powered economic expansion will have serious consequences for the world’s poor majority.
• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES!, recently appeared on Nonviolence Radio to discuss the necessity of building local power amid a collapsing U.S. empire.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? In These Times, We Need Consciousness Raising — and Radical Unlearning – Truthout

? Lessons From the Movement to Stop the ‘War on Terror’ – Waging Nonviolence

? NYC-DSA Strategy in Zohran’s Race Shows the Path to Mass Municipal Governance – Convergence

✊ ‘Solidarity Is the Way Forward’: An Interview With Kelly Hayes on Navigating Crisis – Prism

Rising Up With Sonali

YES!’s broadcast arm, Rising Up With Sonali, is continuing the YES! legacy on many platforms. For only $4 a month you can get all of host Sonali Kolhatkar’s interviews in audio, video, and print formats, with exclusive access to extended cuts of interviews.

In recent weeks, Sonali has covered the food-stamp crisis and how to address the roots of hunger, how bodily autonomy is linked to economic justice, and how Montana voters are pioneering an innovative overturning of the Citizens United dark money ruling.

Food for Thought, Food for Everyone

We hope that this edition of solutions journalism from the YES! digital archives has indeed whetted your appetite for democracy.

Please share this newsletter with others and encourage them to subscribe. Our next edition from the YES! digital archives will be sent in December. 

If you’re excited about this continuation of the YES! tradition and want to support the newsletter, please consider making a small one-time or monthly donation!

Best,

t r u t h o u t

Amid these authoritarian times, a question arises: At what risk will we resist?

Fran Korten, the former publisher of YES! Magazine, raised this sobering question after Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016. Her piece from 2017 perhaps carries more urgency now as the U.S. moves further down an authoritarian spiral:

We are entering a time of testing.

Much that we hold dear appears under threat. We will be asked in new and sometimes frightening ways, “What do we stand for?” “What do we care about enough to risk ridicule, funding, a job, our lives?”

Many of us have not had to face such choices before. Sure, we act for what we believe in. We march. We write letters to the editor. We call our elected officials. We speak up at council meetings. We join committees. We donate. But at what risk? Often very little.

That may change.

—Fran Korten

Read the full article: The Trump Era Will Test Us. What Are You Willing to Risk?

A Note to New Subscribers

Earlier this year, YES! Magazine, a legendary independent publisher of solutions journalism, ceased regular publication. The work produced by YES! did not merely shine a light on injustice; it emphasized the brilliant and creative ways that people were challenging it.

You are currently reading the second edition of a monthly newsletter produced by Truthout featuring content from the YES! digital archives and new solutions journalism from independent media. Truthout is producing this newsletter and stewarding these archives because we believe YES!’s work continues to provide much insight and hope for the years ahead. If you wish, you can support the newsletter here.

Now that you’re up to speed, enjoy!

From the Archives: Antifascists Are the First Line of Defense

After Donald Trump designated “antifa” as a “domestic terror organization,” corporate pundits failed to clarify that it is not a centralized organization, but a broad, decentralized movement against fascism. Clearly, the administration is attempting to build consent for crushing all opposition.

But not everyone has been fooled by attempts to malign “antifa” in the past. Consider the perspective of Barbara Roose, a Holocaust survivor who counterprotested a hate rally in 2017. Roose praised “the young militant antifascists who have been vilified in some of the media for their tactics.”

“I feel gratitude to these young people for being our first line of defense, for being willing to stand up to the hateful actions of neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Roose wrote.

Roose died earlier this year.

Read the article: I’m an 80-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor. Antifas Aren’t Scary. Neo-Nazis Are.

From the Archives: Getting Real About Winning

With each day carrying the risk of further repression from the state, the pressure to defend — and broaden — our democratic rights is mounting. Mobilizing for protests and one-off actions will be crucial, but winning will also require that we build lasting infrastructures of dissent.

Earlier this year, Arun Gupta, a long-time journalist and organizer, offered YES! readers his hard-won wisdom for building enduring organizations in these times. “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,” Gupta wrote.

Read the article: 10 Organizing Principles for Defeating Trumpism 2.0

New Content From YES! Contributors

• Sonali Kolhatkar, former racial justice and civil liberties editor at YES! Magazine and the host of Rising Up With Sonali, has a new article exploring how a vibrant, grassroots, bottom-up movement was behind the victory for universal child care in New Mexico.
• Julia Luz Betancourt, former associate editor at YES! Media, has written a new report about the troubling growth of a private corporation that is building mass surveillance throughout the United States.
• David Korten, co-founder of YES!, and Fran Korten, former publisher of YES!, have co-written a new piece pointing out how Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s speech to the highest ranks of the U.S. military earlier this month exposed the utter recklessness of the Trump administration’s foreign policy — and raised the question of whether military leaders will comply.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? We Said “We Will Block Everything” and We Did: Inside Italy’s Strike for Gaza – Truthout

?Jimmy Kimmel’s Reinstatement Shows the Power of Noncooperation – Waging Nonviolence

✊ These Tenants Are Going on Strike Against “Rent Debt” – In These Times

? Baptism By Fire: Leadership Insights From Reproductive Justice – Convergence

✍️ Meeting Community Information Needs Can Build Community Power – The Objective

Rising Up With Sonali

Remember to subscribe to Rising Up With Sonali if you haven’t already! Hosted and produced by award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar who worked as YES!’s senior editor, the weekly TV/radio/podcast show sustains YES!’s solutions journalism legacy. Rising Up With Sonali is funded entirely through small-dollar subscriptions. For $4 a month, you will get 3-4 interviews per week in multiple formats — audio, video, podcast, and transcript — leaving you feeling more hopeful about the world and inspiring you to action. At a time when the state of the nation sparks deep despair, Sonali’s topics remind us that solutions exist and plenty of people are fighting to realize them.

In recent weeks, she interviewed Tariq Khan, a historian who learned firsthand what it was like to be targeted by Charlie Kirk’s goons, and how that has informed his unequivocal opposition to fascism. She spoke with Angela Gonzales-Torres, the daughter of a deportee, who is running for Congress. She covered how New Mexico’s grassroots organizers made their state the first in the nation to win universal childcare, and how a Universal Basic Income gave a young woman the space to follow her dreams.

Taking Risks Together for a Better World

Please share this newsletter with others and encourage them to subscribe. Our next edition from the YES! digital archives will be sent in November. 

If you’re excited about this continuation of the YES! tradition and want to support the newsletter, you can do so here.

And if you’re moved by Fran Korten’s words to take bolder steps, just remember to stay connected to others while taking action — rooting yourself in interdependence. We’re in this together, we change the world together, and we keep each other safe.

Best,

t r u t h o u t

But the impact of extraordinary journalism extends far beyond the date of publication.

The Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism is stewarding the digital content of YES! and carrying on the work of solutions journalism precisely for this reason – to ensure that everyone can draw on the YES! tradition to inform their fight for a better world.

On this note, we have an exciting announcement: Truthout hosts a monthly newsletter with relevant content from the YES! digital archives and new solutions journalism from a variety of publications. You are reading the first installment of that newsletter! We look forward to providing our subscribers with these curated resources that can help us imagine – and build – movements for transformation.

“The stories found in YES!’s archives, along with new solutions-driven reporting, will continue to be urgently relevant, especially in these repressive times — we need examples, models, inspirations,” said Maya Schenwar, director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. “We’re honored that the Truthout Center will be stewarding YES!’s archives and creating a YES! newsletter.”

As Sarah van Gelder, co-founder of YES! Magazine, writes, “The visionaries and practitioners featured in YES! explored what was possible then, and much of what they contributed suggests ways forward now”:

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

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

—Sarah van Gelder

Read the full article: The World Is Burning — Does the YES! Approach Still Matter?

From the Archives: We’ve Won Before

Social movements undoubtedly have a major task ahead of them. From Trump’s authoritarian takeover of D.C., to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it may often seem like we can’t change anything until we get a majority on board.

However, as Kevin A. Young reminds us in this 2020 YES! piece, the past is replete with examples of committed groups of people outside the majority that have changed the world. It is precisely these “militant minorities” who defeated slavery and Jim Crow, and brought an end to the Vietnam War.

“The lesson of these past victories is that successful change depends not on majority opinion, but on the ability of the key participants in a system to disrupt that system,” Young writes.

Read the full article: History Shows That Sustained, Disruptive Protests Work

From the Archives: A World Beyond Capitalism Is Possible

Zohran Mamdani has brought national attention to the idea of democratic socialism through his victory in the Democratic party’s primary for mayor of New York City.

Capitalists are not happy about it. Corporate media is attempting to discredit his policy proposals, such as a rent freeze and universal child care, as unrealistic and utopian.

How can we convince others that another world is possible? As Andrea Brower advised us in YES! in 2013, “Those committed to building a more just future must question the taken-for-granted ‘truths’ that support the beliefs that capitalism is the only common-sense possibility and that there is no alternative.”

Read the full article: What to Say When People Say “It’s Impossible”

New Work by YES! Contributors

• Sonali Kolhatkar, former racial justice and civil liberties editor at YES! Magazine and the host of Rising Up With Sonali, has launched Rising Up For Justice: Conversations with Change Makers, a weekly interview show with organizers. Learn more about her new project here. 
• Sarah van Gelder, founding editor of YES! Magazine, has a new report out in Truthout about how Trump’s plans for AI may exacerbate racial bias and climate denial. 
• David Korten, co-founder of YES! Magazine, has written an interesting essay exploring how Indonesia’s reckoning with authoritarian rule may offer lessons for how the U.S. can heal its own intense political divisions. 
• Evette Dionne, most recently editor-in-chief of YES! Magazine, is a cofounder of FlyTrap Media, which is a worker-owned, intersectional, feminist media group. You can subscribe to The Flytrap newsletter here.

New Solutions Journalism From Independent Media

? How LA is uniting to provide mutual aid for those impacted by ICE raids – Waging Nonviolence

? Southern Workers Have a Lot to Teach Us About Organizing Against a Backlash – Hammer & Hope

? Four Wildlife Success Stories—That Require Continued Federal Engagement – deceleration

?️ Public Assemblies Strengthen Community Resistance to Rising Authoritarianism – Truthout

? ‘What could we build instead of prisons?’: New projects at the intersection of abolition and design – Prism

Rising Up With Sonali

Rising Up With Sonali, a broadcast program that former YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar leads, is continuing YES‘s legacy of solutions journalism. Each week, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar interviews change makers who are fixing our broken world, showing by example how creative organizing and sustained activism can actually make progress.  

In recent weeks, Sonali has interviewed Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls, formerly undocumented Latina playwright and screenwriter Josefina Lopez, Pulitzer-prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, and incarcerated essayist Dortell Williams.

Looking Ahead

Please share this newsletter with others and encourage them to subscribe. Our next edition will be sent in October. And if you’re excited about this continuation of the YES! tradition and want to support the newsletter, you can do so here.

May this repository of hope help you chart ways forward in these troubling times.

Best,

Truthout

When news arrived on May 7, 2025, that YES! would be closing, I felt shock and sadness at the end of an organization I led as founding editor and at the loss to the progressive media world. But the outpouring of social media comments lifted my spirits, reminding me of the impact YES! had on so many people—some who started reading the magazine as young people, others seasoned activists who were introduced to work that inspired them to creative new approaches.

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

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

The Secret Sauce

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weaving New Stories

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

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

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

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

Learning from History, Centering Excluded Voices

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

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

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

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

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

Respecting Readers as Change Agents

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

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

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

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

Looking Back Over Three Decades

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

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

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

Why This Approach Matters More Than Ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Way Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the guise of criminality overlooks the nuance and complexity that can influence situations as well as the humanity of all people, especially immigrants. It’s also a notoriously difficult categorization to come back from, though immigrants are no more prone to criminality than those born and raised in the U.S. 

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

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

Such descriptions can—and have been—violently appropriated by the ruling class for centuries. While legislators claim these laws enhance “public safety,” the laws ultimately push a racist, classist, ableist, and overall discriminatory agenda that does little for actual safety. It is a framework that has been applied to people of color, sex workers, physically disabled people, anarchists, people with chronic illnesses, and poor people. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, to date, U.S. courts have ruled that people seeking entry have no inherent rights. But in order to move past the idea of irredeemable and undesirable, our understanding of restorative and transformative justice must extend beyond the border. And if the United States were truly invested in preventing crime, the nation-state would focus on preventative measures that dissuade anyone, citizen or non-citizen, from harming people rather than using time and resources to keep people out. 

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

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

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

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

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

What would it look like to marry these two ideas? 

In 2018, this time in the state’s capital of Nashville, Tennesseans once again pushed the idea of eclipsing abortion access and rights through the grieving of aborted fetuses. After heated debate, the state’s House voted to use private funds to erect a “monument to the unborn” on state capitol grounds. (Of note, this vote turned out to be primarily political theater. Years later, the monument has received $0 toward its creation.) 

Through this vote, the state’s legislators succeeded in communicating its values loud and clear. Even before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, Tennessee has long been one of the most hostile states for abortion rights with a pre-existing trigger law that made abortion illegal from conception onward. After much controversy, a subsequent lawsuit, and a demand for a recount, Tennesseans voted in 2014 to change the state’s constitution to specifically declare that the right to abortion is not protected. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective Trust and Safety

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope as Deliberate Praxis

Dimitra, a Bangladeshi organizer in Southeast Asia who requested to use her first name only, is building on bell hooks’ notion of love as praxis by adding hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Are Ready for This

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

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

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

Dearest Kasama, 

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

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

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

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

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

Yet boycotts haven’t played as central a role in LGBTQ+ liberation as they did during the civil rights movement. “We’re ultimately a fairly small group,” says Eli Erlick, activist and author of Before Gender: Lost Stories From Trans History, 1850–1950. And since companies haven’t historically valued queer consumers, the impact of a boycott is diluted. 

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

LGBTQ+ Boycotts Build Coalitions and Acceptance

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

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

In response, LGBTQ+ leaders organized a boycott of Florida oranges and orange juice. Bartenders poured orange juice out in the streets. Protestors wore cheeky merch. The boycott earned more than 50,000 newspaper mentions and made gay rights a mainstream conversation topic.

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

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

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

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

When North Carolina passed the first anti-trans bathroom bill in the U.S. in 2016, the ensuing mass boycott felt like a sea change. PayPal and Deutsche Bank nixed plans to expand into North Carolina, costing the state 650 new jobs. Musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, and Demi Lovato canceled appearances. The NCAA and NBA relocated events to more inclusive states. 

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

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

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

Boycotts Document Our Refusal to Be Erased

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

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

Take Target, which lost $12.4 billion in market value earlier this year, as consumers have used an economic boycott to protest the company’s decision to cancel DEI initiatives. Jamal H. Bryant, the senior pastor at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, subsequently called for a 40-day boycott of Target that was timed to coincide with Lent. LGBTQ+ consumers, still angry about the retailer’s prior waffling on whether to sell Pride merch, joined in. Now the boycott is indefinite, foot traffic hasn’t recovered, and Target’s reputation is in tatters. 

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

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

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

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

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

The pressure comes with a hefty price tag: Goldman Sachs estimated the U.S. could lose $90 billion from decreased travel and trade. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Networks of Information and Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Education and Mental Health First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This excerpt, adapted from Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950 by Eli Erlick (Beacon Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This excerpt, adapted from Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy by Andréa Becker (NYU Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

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

One of Not Another Nickel’s highest profile targets is Boeing. In March 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Air Force had selected the company to build the next-generation F-47 fighter jet. Boeing plans to develop the warplanes in St. Louis County, at a facility about 15 miles from downtown St. Louis. The county granted Boeing about $155 million in tax breaks for the project. 

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

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

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

Last year, ICL Group began developing a new electric-vehicle battery-component manufacturing facility in north St. Louis. For the new plant, the St. Louis Planned Industrial Expansion Authority granted ICL Group tax abatements valued at more than $8 million. An unelected board of just three members voted on the tax abatements on Nov. 19, 2024. The company received similar tax abatements for a prior development in Carondelet, a neighborhood in south St. Louis. 

Organizers with the Not Another Nickel campaign, as well as accountability groups, allege that phosphates manufactured at ICL Group’s Carondelet facility are used in the production of white phosphorus munitions, a chemical weapon that Israel has dropped on Gaza and southern Lebanon hundreds of times since October 2023. Some of those munitions were manufactured in the U.S, according to investigations by Amnesty International and The Washington Post. Some came from Pine Bluff Arsenal in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which sources phosphates from ICL Group in St. Louis, according to The Corruption Tracker, a research group that tracks the global arms trade. 

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

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

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

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

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

The St. Louis Development Corporation, which houses and staffs the board that granted ICL Group’s tax abatements and claims it is “focused on equitable and inclusive economic development,” declined to answer questions for this article. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While news headlines following Trump’s election win last year painted a grim picture for progressives, the popularity of progressive ballot measures in Republican and Democratic-led states and the success of left-leaning candidates at the state and local levels tell a different tale. For years, polling data has also shown that a majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, support progressive policies, such as Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and getting money out of politics.

Anger among Democratic voters nationwide over the Trump administration’s agenda and Democrats’ unwillingness to act as a bulwark against its overreaches also points to a growing desire for alternatives to the old guard. A series of “Hands Off” demonstrations organized to protest the Trump administration’s actions drew an estimated 3 to 5 million people in more than 1,400 locations across all 50 states on April 5, 2025. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also drawn tens of thousands on stops for their Fighting Oligarchy tour, which Sanders launched following Trump’s re-election. Many of those rallies have drawn larger crowds than any other event currently being held by Democrats.

Rallying cries on the Fighting Oligarchy tour go beyond frustration with the Trump administration and include calls for progressive policies such as universal healthcare and wealth taxation. These more progressive ideas resonate with voters who were fed up with the Democratic Party even before Trump’s re-election because they felt Democratic leaders were not doing enough to protect abortion rights, bring down the costs of living, address police violence against communities of color, mitigate the effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, or moderate Israel’s assault on Gaza.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The actions also mirror state-level efforts in recent years. Nationwide, more than 20 states have introduced legislation or already have legislation in place restricting the teaching of race and the histories of America’s communities of color. While Republican-led states have been at the forefront of this regressive movement, many Democratic-led states have also moved similar legislation forward. At least 44 states have begun debating legislation that would limit how schools can teach students about race, according to an analysis from EdWeek.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Williams also takes inspiration from the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, a series of about 2,500 schools mainly located in the U.S. South that offered summer programs to Black students of all ages. Those programs were meant to supplement the substandard education that many Black students received during the Jim Crow era, and helped the community improve its social, political, and economic status. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Prohibition to Harm Reduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drug Checking Goes Mainstream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I wasn’t surprised to learn that in 2017 the office of LGBT Affairs in Philadelphia was met with backlash when they unveiled a remix to Gilbert Baker’s 1978 version of the Pride flag with the addition of the colors black and brown to the bottom of the rainbow. Many people that I was in community with saw the gesture as moving in the right direction, finally illuminating the need to confront issues of racism, sexism, and transphobia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This excerpt, adapted from The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf: On the Myth of LGBTQ+ Solidarity by Kaila Adia Story (Beacon Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story originally appeared in Prism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the moment to root ourselves in a more critical analysis of what has transpired throughout history, lessons we’ve learned across generations, and how we need to root ourselves in our collective power and strength. We need to honor the role of Indigenous Peoples in creating and informing an alternative vision for everybody and for Mother Earth. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strengthening Our Roots in the Face of Disasters 

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

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

For centuries, mangroves have protected the Caribbean from storms while also providing food, wood, habitat, and water filtration. Our coastal towns, particularly Loíza and Salinas, have been our greatest teachers, continuing with initiatives that remind us of their importance in the face of their imminent destruction. The Caribbean, one of the regions that emits the least greenhouse gases, receives the strongest attacks from the climate crisis. Recent studies show that nearly 40% of Puerto Rican coasts are affected by coastal erosion.

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

The Land Continues to Be Named

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

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

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

While the project was imperfect, it still inspired major political figures, including Segundo Ruiz Belvis, an advocate for the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico. Most importantly, La Sociedad inspired national independence hero Ramón Emeterio Betances, who in 1868 led El Grito de Lares, the most successful insurrection during his time. 

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

For decades now, our local communities have been rescuing the stories of our recent freedom fighters to preserve their memory and their dignity: Eugenio María de Hostos, Pedro Albizu Campos, Arturo Schomburg, Celestina Cordero Molina, Ana Roqué Geigel de Duprey, Lolita Lebrón, Blanca Canales, Adolfina Villanueva, Luisa Capetillo, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Rafael Cepeda among others. 

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

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

Mangroves Rooted

The efforts of telling our stories and sharing our knowledge helps others to be inspired by it. We gain access to further freedom and power. To some outsiders, Puerto Ricans can seem submissive, obedient, and grateful for Americanization. Global coverage of recent events, including the Milla de Oro protest on May 1, 2017, the mutual aid and community response to Hurricane María, and the “Ricky Renuncia” movement in 2019 have helped shed light on a more complex sentiment for Boricuas, one that reflects a shift in national consciousness. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not infrequent that children died at these schools. An investigation commissioned by former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found at least 973 children had died and been buried at Indian boarding schools during the program’s 150-year history. Many more are thought to be buried in unmarked graves.

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

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

A Forgotten Victim’s Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Lost Ancestor Discovered

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

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

Bennett was a leader in the successful Washington State Fish Wars of the 1960s and early ’70s and also prominent in the Red Power movement of the 1970s. She was an early member of the Puyallup tribal council and would later serve as its chairperson. Bennett was raised by her mother, Gertrude McKinney, who is also a boarding school survivor.

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

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

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

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

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

Y-askdt’s Quest to Bring Edward Spott Home

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

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

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

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

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

The Heartbreaking Discovery Inside Edward Spott’s Grave

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

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

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

In October 2024, President Joe Biden formally apologized for the government’s role in the boarding school era, calling it a “blot on American history.” In December, he designated Carlisle as a national monument to preserve its history. But links to both the apology and the designation have since been removed from the White House website. 

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

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

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

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

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

She’s not alone: 2.5 million people across the U.S. were displaced by climate disasters in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. 

Fifty-five percent of Los Angeles households are renters compared to 35% across the United States. Nationwide, the U.S. Census Bureau found 49.7% of renters, especially households of color, are “cost burdened”; in Los Angeles, that number jumps to 60%. In the immediate aftermath of the fires, rental prices spiked, despite restrictions on price gouging. 

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

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

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

Getting to “Pets Welcome”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AB 2216, a 2024 bill in California, would have limited pet rents and restrictions, but it was torpedoed by the commercial housing industry. In Colorado, a law that took effect in 2024 barred additional deposits of more than $300 and pet rent over $35 or 1.5% of monthly rent. A bill in Washington, D.C., currently under congressional review seeks to regulate breed and size limits, fees, and pet restrictions in shelters. In Los Angeles County, Supervisor Hilda Solis introduced a proposal in December 2024 to study issues related to pets and housing.

No Pet Left Behind

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

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

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

Finally, considering the needs of evacuees with pets needs to be part of disaster planning. U.S. emergency planners learned a stark lesson from Hurricane Katrina, when around 250,000 pets were left to weather the storm, with an estimated 150,000 dying, even as some people refused to evacuate without their pets, while buses and shelters refused to take pets with their guardians. 

The response of a horrified public pushed Congress to pass the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006. The PETS Act requires the inclusion of animals in evacuation and sheltering planning, with some regions, such as New York, implementing highly successful animal disaster planning, while others, such as Texas, are still struggling. 

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

People in the United States love animals, from A Quiet Place’s Frodo and I Am Legend’s Samantha to real-world counterparts such as Taylor Swift’s cats, Noodle of “bones or no bones” fame, and the therapy llamas of Portland International Airport. That devotion is sometimes expensive—pet guardians spent more than $100 billion on their care in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and heartbreaking, with animals leading short, vibrant lives. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Community Model for Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Bay: A National Blueprint

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

In New York, the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative and similar grassroots coalitions offer a 24-hour community-based response system. Similarly, in Philadelphia, the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia and Free Migration Project provide accompaniment and legal support. In Chicago, groups such as Organized Communities Against Deportations offer emergency hotline response and accompaniment services. In Los Angeles, the ICE Out of L.A. coalition and the Los Angeles Raids Rapid Response Network have mobilized and defended entire neighborhoods for years. And yet, the need still persists. 

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

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

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

How We Resist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) estimates 20,500 “mobile food vendors” work in New York City, 96% of whom are immigrants, and half are women. But this is likely an undercount as the survey ended in 2021, “during the height of the COVID pandemic.” Since then, more than 210,000 new immigrants have arrived in New York City, swelling the ranks of informal street vendors.

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

Among the newest vendors are candy sellers who navigate New York’s sprawling subway system cradling a cardboard box in one arm with colorfully arranged chewing gum, mints, and M&Ms for a couple of bucks each. Candy sellers tend to be young women, many with a child in tow or infant swaddled to their back. Most are “Kichwa-speaking Indigenous people from Ecuador’s rural central highlands,” according to New York Magazine. Nearly 20,000 Ecuadorians arrived in the city in the last few years, fleeing economic and social chaos instigated by Ecuador’s right-wing government.

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

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

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

Street food vending isn’t a whim. Three-quarters of vendors have been hustling for four years or more—and nearly 40% for a decade or longer—and selling one tamale, sandwich, and smoothie at a time is the main source of income for 80% of them. According to the IRI survey of vendors, nearly 90% want to expand their business, secure legal permits, or open a storefront eatery. “When the conditions are good, street vending can be pretty profitable,” says Attia. 

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

Under Adams, whom New York Magazine calls “flagrantly corrupt” for bribery scandals, criminal citations against street vendors skyrocketed nearly sixfold from 2019, the eve of the pandemic, to 2023. Overall, the city slapped more than 10,000 civil and criminal citations on street vendors in 2024. Immigrant advocates accuse Adams of waging “war on street vendors” by sending phalanxes of police to violently break up informal markets hosting scores of vendors in four different neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This excerpt, adapted from Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan, and Anita Mannur (New York University, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There can be a tendency in progressive movements to present basic income almost defensively, as a program that will not reduce employment hours or result in labor market withdrawal on the part of recipients. That’s understandable, and it is true: Research on cash programs has generated no empirical evidence that people will withdraw from the labor market en masse if they get unconditional cash. In fact, it’s often shown the opposite. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Currently, more than 30 million people rely on fresh water from Lake Superior, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  

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

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

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

Treaties and a Sovereign Framework 

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

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

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

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

And they did so without any tribal input. 

The Enbridge Line 5 pipeline now runs from Superior, Minnesota, through Wisconsin and Michigan until it reaches Sarnia, Canada. Every day, it transports 540,000 barrels (23 million gallons) of crude oil through this landscape, threatening the beings who depend on this land and water.

Erosion Exposing the Pipeline

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

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

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

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

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

Because of climate change, the risks are getting closer to home. When the pipeline was originally installed, it was approximately 350 feet from the Bad River, but erosion and two catastrophic flood events in 2016 and 2018 shifted the river’s course, so the pipeline is now just 12 feet from the river. 

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

Still the pipeline remains on the Tribe’s land.

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

Enbridge offered $24 million to settle the lawsuit. The Bad River Tribal Council declined to settle and persisted with legal action. When I asked then-Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins in 2023 what this money could do for the Tribe, Wiggins replied with a question of his own: “How much is your water worth?”

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

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

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

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

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

Defying the Odds

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

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

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

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

In his ruling in June 2023, Judge Conley ordered Enbridge to remove the portion of Line 5 that runs through the Tribe’s reservation by 2026. Enbridge would also need to pay the Tribe $5.1 million and a portion of their profits.

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

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

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

Never Give Up, Prioritize Land

In March 2024, Enbridge offered the Tribe $80 million to “settle past disputes.”

The Tribe refused the money. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enbridge is still awaiting federal permits, and Kellner says the company will not begin construction until all necessary permits are in hand. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has listed the project as eligible for emergency fast-tracking under President Trump’s executive order declaring an national energy emergency. After releasing a draft environmental assessment, the agency has received over 150,000 comments opposing the reroute. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The piece has been updated to include several events that have transpired after the date of publication:  The Army Corps of Engineers listed the project as eligible for emergency fast-tracking, the agency received more than 150,000 comments opposing the reroute, and the Tribe and environmental groups sued Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources for approving the project.

Read our corrections policy here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detection in a Matter of Seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rural Access Riddled With Roadblocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Practically Scale VIA 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But despite Nursing Heart’s promising data, some research questions the efficacy of the VIA technique. A 2022 study published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention found that though VIA is treated as an alternative to pap smears, “Its effectiveness in terms of reducing invasive cancer and mortality is uncertain.” Instead, “Some trials have shown that there is a significant reduction in mortality after VIA screening while others have failed to prove this.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organize Locally to Directly Meet Our Communities’ Needs

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

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

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

Build Collective Governance

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

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

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

Get Permanently Organized

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

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

Honor Care Work

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

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

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

Look for the Openings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, as the Trump administration reduces staff and seeks to reorient the OCR, the office will no longer be able to perform these functions. More than 10,000 student complaints related to disability access and sexual and racial harassment have already been placed on hold. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many states protect LGBTQ+ people through nondiscrimination laws that ensure fair access to housing, public accommodations, and employment. Supreme Court precedent does the same through Bostock v. Clayton County. Other states have passed shield laws to protect access to gender-affirming care for trans people. But to Jay, a cisgender lesbian, it all still feels precarious. The Trump administration is trying to make it harder for transgender Americans to live openly and safely, and lawmakers in more than a handful of states want to undermine marriage equality. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story originally appeared in The 19th.

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

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

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

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

Families of Victims Insist on Remembering 

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

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

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

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

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

The family of metalworker and union organizer Santo Dias, who was shot dead by the military police in 1979 at a picket line in São Paulo, organized a committee for recognition of his murder in the years following his death. In 2023, Dias’ friends, family, and his widow, Ana Dias, honored his legacy of resistance and advocacy for workers’ rights on the 44th anniversary of his murder.

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

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

Creating a Methodology for Memory Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Policy to Film

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autocracy Is Here. What Now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power and Creativity of Resistance

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

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

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

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

The 2022 uprising, sparked by the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, reignited women’s defiance. Many still refuse the hijab today, and despite the crackdowns, they have changed the look and feel of Iran’s public spaces. Iranians also engage in creative compliance: Women wear their hijabs in loose, fashionable ways. Men wear them in solidarity to mock the regime. Workers slow down to frustrate the regime. Some officials, including police officers, look the other way and refuse to enforce the regime’s rules when they can. 

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

The Fight Is Ours Now

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve learned not to think of resistance as a sprint or even a marathon. It’s a relay. We rest, we care for each other. We pass the baton, and we keep going. The 3.5% rule shows we don’t need a majority—just a small, committed group to spark meaningful change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpted from The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches From the Salmon Forests by Lynda V. Mapes with permission from the University of Washington Press.

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

Negative stereotypes and exclusionary practices persist despite the fact that people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, representing nearly 30% of the population. Whether or not you identify as disabled, most people live or work in close proximity 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 beliefs about capacity, intellect, and merit, and the false premise that disability inclusion requires lowering standards.

However, studies demonstrate that including people with disabilities is good for everyone, 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 diverse, equitable, and inclusive. In addition to affecting LGBTQ communities and people of color, these measures could erode years of progress toward protecting the rights of people with disabilities to earn a living.

Between 40 million and 80 million Americans identify as disabled. 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 are born with their impairment, so most individuals become disabled over their lifetime.

Tracing Historical Precedents

Blaming failures on people with disabilities and people of color echoes the harms embedded in eugenics, 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 people of color across the U.S. Even the Supreme Court endorsed the concept in the early 20th century.

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

Due to widespread activism and the advent of new legal protections, many states finally dismantled their eugenic policies 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 Americans With Disabilities Act. 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 pushed out of school, disciplined more harshly, targeted for incarceration, and marginalized in disability representation and research.

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 Job Accommodation Network 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 tax incentives 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 “essential functions” of the job in order to be hired.

According to a 2024 Labor Department report, 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 are trying to follow the dialogue. 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.

Sensory break rooms 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 large body of research 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 positive, informal interactions with diverse peers 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 those individuals performed the same or better than their peers who did not.

Research published by Harvard Business Review found many advantages 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 The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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 just six families. 

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 large private foundations 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 a $100 million partnership with NDN Collective and Nexus Community Partners to close the racial wealth gap.

Each organization received $50 million to launch five-year initiatives that address the systemic wealth disparities among Black and Indigenous individuals across Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. In addition, the Bush Foundation increased their regular grantmaking programs by $50 million.  

These “acts of power sharing,” as the Bush Foundation describes them, can be as simple as sharing a grantee newsletter. Or it can be increasing current commitments to have a bigger impact, as the MacArthur Foundation and a few other supporters of NDN Collective have done in recent months. 

Resourced Movements Yield Real Change 

Philanthropy’s reluctance to invest deeply in grassroots organizations often stems from risk-assessment models that fail to grasp the realities of systemic oppression. Wealth-holders, many of whom are disconnected from marginalized communities, frequently lack the lived experience to judge what is or isn’t a risk.

During the 2024 election cycle, many movement organizations experienced a funding cliff that affected their ability to proactively engage with communities and develop political education strategies. This denial of funding requests left organizers without financial support to provide critical safety and security measures for staff and community members against politically motivated attacks like doxxing attempts. 

Foundations are too often focused on investing in reactionary initiatives that lack a real community-based lens and approach, which only amplifies the “white saviorism” trope so often displayed in social justice spaces. Instead of perpetuating these hierarchical dynamics, funders should trust those closest to the work to determine how resources are best used.

The fight to free Peltier is a striking example of the power of an adequately resourced grassroots movement. Peltier’s release this year was a testament to the persistence and resilience of Indigenous organizers and their nearly five decades of unwavering advocacy. During Peltier’s most critical time of need, grassroots organizers, movement and nonprofit leaders, policymakers, and community members stepped up and came together, determined to change the conditions of one individual who had the U.S. government stacked against him. 

We are aware that our movements will remain under political attack, facing more intensity with the current regime. However, we also know that together we have the power to create the conditions needed to set new precedents. Imagine what could happen if that same multigenerational, coordinated energy is applied toward the goal of our collective liberation from an authoritarian state. 

Breaking Free From Performative Philanthropy

Providing long-term grants is an important starting point; true support requires actively engaging with grantees. Meaningful relationships are built through regular conversations, site visits, and opportunities for collaboration. Funders must also be good guests in the space of grantees, being present and respectful to listen, learn, and seek to understand. Indigenous organizing relies on engaging in meaningful ceremony, where the offerings of wisdom and consensus are received by a collective to envision a better path forward. 

NDN Collective is dedicated to building the collective power of Indigenous people while dramatically increasing philanthropic investments into Indigenous-led organizations and initiatives. In determining how to distribute funds, NDN Foundation uses specific tactics to help us fully understand our relatives and their concerns, while informing our approach as an accessible community resource.

Our staff members regularly attend city council, tribal council, and school board meetings; go door-to-door to gather data; host town halls, direct action, and safety-related trainings; and gather frontline narratives. This informs our wealth rematriation strategy, which has moved $107 million since NDN Collective’s founding in 2018. 

Organizational staff such as program officers can play key roles translating grantee stories to the board, advocating for grantee needs, and leveraging additional funding in a foundation. Now more than ever, we need program staff and leaders to advocate for their grantees, appeal to their boards, and most of all, to be reliable.

In a time of increasing authoritarianism and social fragmentation, philanthropy must rise to the occasion. Foundations must ask themselves: What would it look like to relinquish power and control over wealth that was built through the exploitation of Black and Brown people? How can we use our resources to support movements that are already working toward collective liberation—and currently managing to do so with only table scraps? 

The path forward requires financial support as well as a willingness to stand in solidarity. True commitment means embracing uncertainty, taking risks, and staying the course even when victory seems distant. 

The far-right’s dedication to sweeping change has shown the effectiveness of long-term, large-scale investment. It’s time for philanthropy to match that commitment in service of justice. The future of our communities depends on it. 

After they eloped, the couple, who are interfaith, sought the district court’s protection from their parents and broader society. Imran is a Muslim man and Neha is a Hindu woman in a country that has always frowned upon interfaith relationships, but they are even more vulnerable now due to rising religious extremism. The court instructed police to mediate between the couple and their families, leading Imran and Neha to relocate to a safe home.

A similar scenario played out for Suhana Begum*, a Muslim woman who lived with her family in Bharog, also near Ambala. Her parents forcibly confined her to their house in 2019 after she told them she loved a Hindu man named Rajiv Saini* and wanted to marry him, despite the difference in their religious backgrounds. 

“We met at my aunt’s wedding where he worked as a DJ operator,” Begum, who is 32, says. “He gave me his number through friends, and a few months later we started talking to each other.” But when her family discovered their relationship, they held her captive to prevent her from communicating with Saini. “For two years, we couldn’t speak to each other, let alone see each other,” she says. Since their villages are close to one another, she would hear news of his well-being from mutual contacts. 

After being confined for four years, Begum persuaded her family to allow her to join a polytechnic school in the village so she could enroll in a grooming and beauty course. That’s when the couple decided to elope and seek refuge at the Ambala safe home, where they would both have police protection.  

Begum joined Arya Samaj, a Hindu temple that conducts legally valid Vedic wedding ceremonies without elaborate rituals or caste restrictions, and converted to Hinduism in order to marry Saini. “Our parents were upset with us when we ran away from our homes,” she says. “We were scared that they might come after us, so we decided to seek legal help. One of Rajiv’s friends had also had an intercaste marriage, so he helped us get married and get police protection in the safe home.” 

Begum says she endured taunts and mockery from Saini’s village community and his family for being a Muslim. “But eventually, everyone calmed down,” she shares. “We moved to Ambala right after we got married. … Initially, it was difficult to get everyone to love us and respect us. But slowly, they have come to terms with our marriage. Everyone in his family calls me Khushi since I changed my name to Khushboo after our wedding.” 

Begum and Saini never considered religion a barrier to their love. Now, even her own family agrees that Saini is the best partner for their daughter. “It doesn’t matter that his religion is different,” she says. “He is a good person, so I fell in love with him.”

How Haryana Became the First Indian State With Safe Homes

In the early 2000s, people in Haryana scorned and actively attacked intercaste and interfaith couples, as well as couples from the same Gotra (clan), village, or adjoining villages because these were considered incestuous relationships. Their resistance to these couples helped give rise to honor-based killings. The families of these interfaith and intercaste couples—or an unlawful village council, called a Khap Panchayat—socially ostracized, harmed, or killed their relatives for wanting to marry people of their own choosing rather than those chosen by their families. 

Thanks to concerted efforts from social activists, socially conscious law-enforcing agents, and the judiciary, in 2010 the High Court of Punjab and Haryana directed police in Haryana and Punjab and the union territory of Chandigarh to create operational safe homes for runaway couples. Since Haryana had a deeply entrenched tradition of honor killing those involved in self-choice marriages, the then Haryana government became the first state to establish these safe homes.

Jagmati Sangwan, a member of All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and an active campaigner for safe homes, remembers how the honor killings of several couples pushed AIDWA to call for safe homes, an idea favored by Haryana’s government at the time. 

“These safe homes have been instrumental in saving so many couples from being mercilessly killed, and it allows space for runaway couples to rebuild themselves to face society together,” says Sangwan. However, as Sangwan notes, “After the safe homes were formed in Haryana, we pushed for a law against honor killing, but that was never enacted.” 

It is difficult to ascertain accurate data on honor killings because they are grossly underreported, and in most cases, the families of the couples, the Khaps, and the village community hide such killings until they are reported by the media. “The bride’s parents faced a lot of social pressure, so they would coax the newlywed couple to come to the village and meet them,”  says Vikas Narain Rai, retired deputy general of law and order of Haryana. “That’s when they would kill them, or if they see them in the market then they would murder them.” 

In 2000, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) 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 as many as 20,000 honor killings worldwide each year. By June 2024, Haryana had already reported three honor killings with one in the Jind, Sirsa, and Hisar districts, respectively.

Given these statistics, Rai explains there has been a “barrage of petitions from young couples seeking police protection,” so “the High Court ordered that the couples be given protection in the initial period until the pressure from their families is tapered and they can figure out their life forward.”

Hindu Supremacy’s Influence on Interfaith Couples

Aside from social disapproval of self-choice marriages, India is seeing a growing trend of brutal attacks on interfaith couples, particularly Hindu–Muslim couples, by Hindu supremacists and Bajrang Dal members—the youth wing of the Sangh Parivar, which is the ideological branch of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. “The opposition against interfaith marriages has become more aggressive than ever before,” Rai says. “It’s gone beyond the families in the current scenario.”

Ashutosh Kumar* married Alfia,* a Muslim woman, in June 2023 after meeting on Instagram and feeling instantly connected. They lived less than one mile apart from each other, so they decided to run away from their families to seek protection in the Ambala safe home for seven days. Now, nearly two years later, Alfia’s parents don’t speak with them, though Kumar’s parents were on board with the marriage.

“We were in a relationship for about two and a half years before we ran away to get married,” Kumar shares. “I’d started saving up money for a year because I knew she would call me any day to say that she had run away from her house and then I’d have to run too.”

When the two landed at the Ambala safe house, Alfia had nothing with her. However, Kumar had taken a friend’s advice and withdrew more than $175 (Rs15000 in his own currency) from his bank account, so they were able to begin rebuilding their lives. “One doesn’t need phones to pass the time,” Kumar says. “We were accompanied by five [other] couples, so everyone would share their stories, and that’s how we spent our time away from everyone at the safe home.” The couple made friends with others in similar circumstances. “We continue to stay connected,” he says.

The couple eventually left the safe home and married at Arya Samaj temple, after which they stayed with different relatives and friends for more than a month before returning to Kumar’s home. However, it wasn’t a smooth journey for the couple, as Alfia’s parents kept intimidating and invoking fear among Kumar’s family and distressing the couple. 

Meanwhile, Kumar benefited from being a Hindu man marrying a Muslim woman and was able to gain a Bajrang Dal member’s support. When the scenario is reversed and Hindu woman marries a Muslim man, right-wing agents call the pairing a “love jihad,” an unverified conspiracy theory in India that alleges Muslim men lure Hindu women into relationships to convert them to Islam.  

Asif Iqbal, founder of Dhanak for Humanity, a nongovernmental organization that helps interfaith couples register and legalize their marriage without religious conversion, says it has become an increasingly common practice for Hindu men marrying Muslim women to approach a right-wing organization and persuade them into intimidating their families into accepting the marriage.

Runaway Couples in Haryana

Between 2018 and 2021, 10,736 couples took advantage of the shelter offered by safe homes. A female guard at one of Haryana’s safe homes tells YES! that most couples consist of young women between the ages of 18 and 21 while most of the young men are between the ages of 21 and 24. “The highest numbers are that of intercaste [couples,] but interfaith couples also come, and about 10% are from the general category or same-caste couples,” says the guard, who asked to remain anonymous. “Once the couples arrive at the safe home, they are not allowed to step out even to the verandah of the building but they are free to roam around inside. We are responsible for them so we have to ensure their safety.”

Couples from the neighboring state of Rajasthan also use safe homes in Haryana because there are none in their state. However, as more couples seek safety in these homes, the homes themselves are facing a major funding challenge. As a police superintendent who asked to remain anonymous explains, “The police department doesn’t have an additional budget for the maintenance of the safe home.”

There is a 2018 apex court directive for all 22 Indian states to implement safe homes. As a result, there are such facilities in Punjab, Maharashtra, and New Delhi. However, neither the state governments nor the central government has passed a law to implement the directive. 

In current-day India where interfaith unions are increasingly under state-sanctioned assault, Dhanak for Humanity’s Iqbal points out the need for political will to be used to expand Haryana’s model and make safe homes a part of the legal system across the country. “The future for safe homes is bleak, and it will continue to be a makeshift arrangement unless an act is brought in to formalize it,” he adds.

Despite the challenges, safe homes are critical to the security of runaway couples and help reduce incidents of honor killing in Haryana. “Safe homes are a very good thing for couples like us,” Kumar concludes. “People should not look at love marriages negatively. Whether parents choose or the boy and girl choose, ultimately, it is the couple who have to live together, right?”

* The names of some people have been changed to safeguard them from potential abuse and harassment.

In the United States, with legal protections for LGBTQ people in jeopardy and violent incidents of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia on the rise, it has become clear that the world we currently inhabit is broken and deeply unjust.

We now see the world before us more clearly. And this new clarity brings with it an urgent longing to deconstruct and reconstruct the world, to try again, to experiment with radically alternate ways of being, to build the world otherwise.

Before we can build the world in alternate ways, however, we need to be able to envision alternate worlds. Works of science fiction and other forms of speculative art have long been at the forefront of efforts to build new worlds through imagination. Worldbuilding of this sort is never a neutral endeavor; designing the world anew always entails resisting or reinforcing (sometimes simultaneously) existing structures of power.

The cultural stakes inherent in worldbuilding have been made particularly clear through creative and scholarly work around Afrofuturism and Black speculative worldbuilding. As performance studies scholar Jayna Brown argues in her writing about Black mystics and musicians, structures of white supremacy have placed Black communities into a “bleak and bloody dimension we are taught to call reality.” In response, Brown calls for “build[ing] alternative worlds, in this dimension and in others,” as a way to “practice alternative ways of being alive.”

In addition to turning to fiction, art, and music to find the speculative worlds that inspire us, there is another media form we should be taking closely into consideration when we look for these “alternative ways of being live”: video games. Video games have often been derided or dismissed precisely because they seem disconnected from the “real world.” Yet, in truth, the relationship between video games and the world around us is much more complex than these critiques would suggest.

As many game studies scholars have argued, video games are intimately bound up with the real world; they shape and are shaped by the conditions of their production and reception. At the same time, video games offer opportunities to inhabit worlds that differ from our own. Indeed, we can understand video games themselves as alternate worlds.

In their own ways, they are each models for other ways that the world might operate. They offer us opportunities to “question the order of things,” as the disability studies scholar Robert McRuer writes in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, 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 discriminatory attitudes toward race, sexuality, and gender. At the same time, games themselves offer powerful opportunities to experiment with strategies for rebuilding the world we currently live in, one where many forms of oppression currently reign.

Yet, through games, we can see that building (or unbuilding and rebuilding) the world necessitates a revolutionary redesign of the foundational logics and underlying operations of the world we inhabit.

Through video games, I theorize a practice that I term queer worldbuilding. Queer worldbuilding is not the same thing as building worlds that feature queer stories or communities, though such worlds themselves have immense value. Instead, queer worldbuilding describes the practice of constructing new worlds through methods, frameworks, and tools that can themselves be understood as queer. 

In this spirit, I analyze video games to offer as examples of building worlds through a process that itself challenges or rewrites norms around sexuality, gender, identity, and desire. In them, we find tools for both building queer worlds and queering the world around us.

Every Video Game Is a World

This alternate vision of worldbuilding is premised on understanding video games themselves as worlds. When we think of video games and worldbuilding together, it is common to think of large-scale, expansive, story-focused games with extensively developed narratives. These games, certainly, are worlds. But so are all video games, regardless of their content. Small games are worlds. Abstract games are worlds. Puzzle games, mobile games, experimental games, absurdist games, games with no characters: All of these video games are worlds, in their own right.

Video games do sometimes contain games, but what they are, above all, is worlds: universes in miniature. Reframing video games as worlds opens up new opportunities for making sense of the cultural meaning that games contain. 

If games are worlds, then the importance of competition, achievements, and technological prowess fades into the background. In its place, what comes to hold meaning in a video game is its qualities as a space for existing. In this game world, who has power? Who is afforded freedom, and who is placed under constraint? How do beings connect with one another?

The spirit of video game worldbuilding has much in common with the spirit of queerness. Both describe a mode of imagining alternate ways of being in the world. As I and my fellow queer game studies scholars have argued elsewhere, video games are rich sites for locating and expressing queerness. While some video games (whether mainstream or independent) contain the presentation of LGBTQ identities, a great many more contain queer meaning—offering themselves as opportunities for exploring queer play, engaging with queer design, or undertaking queer analysis.

Insisting on the queerness of video games, in its many forms, is a way to reclaim a medium that has long been exclusionary to queer people. To say that video games can model queer worlds is to expand on this reclamation, to move beyond making a place for queer people in the world of video games by insisting that video games can aid us in making the world itself more queer.

There are many ways in which queer worlds manifest themselves in video games. Multiple AAA games of the sort that engage in elaborate narrative worldbuilding now prominently feature queer characters. One high-profile example is The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020), which includes a lesbian protagonist and a transgender side character and was the recipient of a 2021 GLAAD Award for Outstanding Video Game. 

Beyond the sphere of mainstream video games, the rise of queer avant-garde game makers has brought with it an explosion of indie video games whose worlds are directly structured around queer experience. Mattie Brice has noted that white designers were centered in the early days of the queer games avant-garde, which began to take form at the start of the 2010s. Today, a growing number of these games are being made by, about, and for queer people of color. 

These range from The Black Trans Archive (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2021), which wrestles with the erasure of Black trans people from documented histories, to the upbeat roller derby “rhythm ga(y)me” Skate & Date (Geneva Hayward, 2020). In Skate & Date, players skate to a musical beat in the role of Maggie, a Black femme roller derby team captain with a crush on a woman from a rival team. A game like Skate & Date creates its own vision of a queer world: a world where femmes are, as a matter of course, powerful physical competitors who romance other femmes.

Queer Video Game Worlds

Queer video game worlds also manifest themselves as queer communities. Many queer and transgender people have shared stories about using online role-playing games to explore their identities and connect with others who share similar experiences: a way of forming queer games worlds while using game worlds to understand oneself as queer. Beginning in 2012 and 2013, events like GaymerX and the Queerness and Games Conference built temporary worlds where queer people who made, studied, or simply loved video games could come together to play.

At the same time, many video game worlds that do not appear queer can be understood queerly. These worlds are places where the norms that we often mistake for universal truths—our unquestioned beliefs about how the world works, both socially and physically—are sidestepped, rewritten, or overturned. Indeed, the relationship between video games and queer worldbuilding goes deeper than the queerness of any individual game world.

Video games serve as opportunities to transform queer world-making into something concrete. They offer us playgrounds where we can reach out and touch, as trans studies scholar Susan Stryker writes in describing the process of transing, “the material truth of a potential for worlding otherwise.” They show us world-making in action.

Certainly, the queer worlds we find in video games offer us a critical entry point into imagining how we might queer the world around us. Like all queer works of art and ways of living, they are messy. Queer video game worlds are often silly, improbable, or impossible, ecstatic and joyful but also broken or mournful, posthuman and nonhuman, postapocalyptic, counterhegemonic in some ways and complicit with dominant structures of power in others.

Queer video game worlds balance the longing to fix worlds and the hunger to destroy them. These worlds are many things at once. They are an invitation to remake the world through play. They are whole universes, shrunk down to the scale of tiny dioramas, galaxies under glass. Video game worlds challenge us to question how the universe—our universe, any universe—functions.

Games will not fix a broken world. They will not save a world on the brink of collapse. But they will inspire us to explore new ways of rebuilding our world. And, when necessary, they will remind us that some worlds cannot be saved.

This excerpt, adapted from How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding Through Video Games by Bo Ruberg (New York University, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

The women, both in their 40s, worry about the Trump administration’s ongoing funding cuts to a multitude of programs and services that they—like many other Americans across the country—depend on. “Trump is taking away everything,” says Lewis, a part-time cashier at a discount store who earns minimum wage. Siebold, also a part-time cashier, delivers air filters at a second job to make ends meet. 

On Saturday, Mar. 22, Siebold and Lewis took a ride-sharing service to Arizona Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani’s district to see Sanders speak at Catalina High School’s football stadium. The two women were among thousands of people who braved long lines in hot weather to hear what the self-described democratic socialist had to say. 

The independent senator launched his nationwide tour in February 2025, in the absence of a united Democratic Party against President Donald Trump’s dizzying dismantling of legally funded federal agencies and programs. Texas Democratic Rep. Greg Casar and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at the Tucson rally. Ocasio-Cortez has partnered with Sanders in several other cities including Denver and Las Vegas. 

Sanders, 83, has attracted large crowds at rallies in cities across the U.S. as he pushes against the ever-growing influence within the federal government of billionaires—part of the so-called 1% of the nation’s population. “At the end of the day, 99% is a hell of a bigger number than 1%,” Sanders said during his address, noting the huge crowds attending his rallies. 

“Brothers and sisters, don’t let them divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our religion or sexual orientation,” the senator told an ebullient audience. “Let’s stand together as one people. Proud people. Let’s take on Trumpism and defeat it.”

A two-time presidential candidate, Sanders has long railed against billionaires in politics, often bringing attention to wealth inequality in the nation. These days, his message is soundly resonating with voters alarmed by the novel role of tech billionaire Elon Musk as the executor of Trump’s sweeping cost-cutting mandates.

In the Democratic stronghold that is Tucson’s Pima County, the progressive politicians found a friendly crowd. The mere mention of Trump and Musk elicited a chorus of boos, and when Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez denounced the men’s actions, chants and cheers reverberated throughout. 

Sanders decried the Trump administration’s possible cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as education funding and veterans’ services. Americans, said Sanders, wouldn’t stand for losing those and other social-safety programs and benefits meant for “the working class of their country in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires.”

Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd that federal budget cuts are not just about reducing costs, but also a fight over the values that define the nation. “Trump handed the keys of government to Elon Musk and is selling the country for parts to the richest people on the planet for a kickback,” she said, in reference to Musk’s oversight of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The New York representative also spoke about her own financial struggles as a former waitress, saying she empathized with the challenges facing working-class people. “When the system is stacked against you, it’s hard to feel like anything you do matters, that we matter in a democracy.”

It’s common sense, not radicalism, says Ocasio-Cortez, that when someone gets sick in the world’s wealthiest nation, “They shouldn’t go bankrupt.” 

She encouraged audience members to get involved in their community by joining block associations, neighborhood groups, and other local organizations. Building community “is the tissue and the infrastructure” paving the way to victory, she explained.

Meanwhile, Casar emphasized that it’s time to take on Trump and the ultra-rich. “They want you to feel powerless because they are afraid of the power on this field. They are afraid of the lines of people wrapping around this high school.”

That kind of people power, the Texas representative said, has Republicans running scared rather than holding town halls in their own districts. Around the country, constituents angry over budget cuts are demanding answers from their congressional representatives, and Tucsonans are no exception. Hundreds have held protests at the office of Rep. Ciscomani, who represents southern Arizona’s Congressional District 6.

Casar encouraged the crowd to stay hopeful. “On our darkest days, I want you to remember there can be a world that is better after this. There has to be a better world after this.”

Siebold and Lewis walked out of the roughly three-hour rally a bit more optimistic that life could indeed get better. “It definitely gave me hope to fight for a possible future where we don’t have to have two jobs and where we can actually be able to afford groceries,” Siebold says. “It feels like we’re being heard.”

While Siebold rents an apartment that she pays for with wages from her two jobs, Lewis, who says she has asthma and a neck injury, sleeps on her parents’ couch because she can’t afford her own place with the $500 she earns every two weeks. The government food assistance she got helped, but it stopped recently. “They told me that I made too much money,” she says.

Lupe Mora, a grandmother who attended the rally with her daughter, Annie, and grandchildren Alex, 16, and Marc, 10, traveled to Tucson from the Arizona border town of Douglas to see Sanders. She and her family were excited to shake his hand after he spoke. 

“He’s been my hero since 2016,” Mora says, referring to the year Sanders ran his first presidential campaign. “I like his progressive views and everything he said here. We would be such a great nation if he had become president.”

Support for veterans undoubtedly would be stronger under Sanders’ brand of politics, Mora maintains, and seniors would not be panicking about the possibility of having their Social Security benefits cut. “I don’t feel very happy that Trump’s in control,” she says.

Neither does Steve Brown, a retired educator who was at the rally with his wife, Alice. “I just dread to pick up the papers or turn on the news,” he says. He thinks it is “insane” that the Trump administration is cutting funds for public schools. He likes Sanders’ suggestion that public school teachers who dedicate their life to educating children should get paid what they’re worth. And although he says he supports the senator, Brown doesn’t fully espouse a democratic socialist society. 

“Democratic socialism is a complex ideological and political system that has pieces that I admire and other pieces that I think could be done differently,” he says. “But what’s really important is for all of us who believe in the truth, in honesty, authenticity, integrity and love, to stand together and elect people who will embrace those values.”

For Rousel Orozco, the rally served as a reaffirmation that democracy can prevail in challenging times. “After the last election, I completely lost hope,” he says. The microbiologist says he has a difficult time accepting Trump’s election to a second four-year term. But the Republican made significant gains with other Latino voters, particularly men, in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I have a friend who’s gay, immigrant, and Latino,” Orozco says. “He voted for Trump because he thought that as soon as he took office, his wages were going to go up and the prices were going to go down. And it is unbelievable to me that people had that vision.”

Orozco agrees with much of what Sanders said at the rally, but he doesn’t see democratic socialism ever taking root in the United States. If it had, “It would have served to balance the current ideology that’s out there,” he says. 

Seibold and Lewis figure that if the country had gone down the path Sanders favors, their quality of life would be better. They envisioned having basic necessities and peace of mind. 

“Can you imagine not having to worry about what’s for dinner, how much is the rent, how much you have to pay in utilities, or how much is my doctor bill?” Seibold asks. “So many people live in survival mode on how we’re going to get to the next day.”

Lewis nods in agreement. Then the friends head to a nearby city bus stop, strolling on a sidewalk running parallel to the school. Across the street, a house yard sign perched on a prickly pear cactus urges: Deport Elon.