Over the years, many MANY people have asked me to talk more in depth about my love of K-pop and how it intersects with my pro-Blackness. People who have spent roughly 20 seconds with me, know that I am an avid K-pop listener, while also holding very clear and strong beliefs around the brilliance, creativity, and ingenuity of Black America. So, when we talk about K-pop and the appropriation of Black culture, we are talking about something multilayered and multifaceted, and I want to start with the question people ask least honestly: who’s allowed to enjoy K-pop.

I’ve watched people, often other Black Americans, ask other Black people how they can enjoy K-pop when K-pop is, at its foundation, a bastardized version of our art forms. The dancing. The rapping. The R&B. The fashion. The hairstyles. All of it traces back to something that originated in the Black American community.

My answer has always been the same. If it’s mine, I’mma enjoy it.

It’s rap. It’s R&B. It’s my dancing, my fashion, my culture, repackaged. A different wrapper doesn’t make it less mine. I recognize my stuff when I see it and when I hear it. We recognize our stuff. And recognizing it is exactly what gives us the right to enjoy it and critique it, no matter whose hands it passed through on the way back to us.

There is a shame people try to place on Black K-pop fans that I no longer accept. Underneath the shame is a simple claim: this is mine, and I’m gonna enjoy it (so, please stop asking me WHY I like it!).

The next question worth sitting with is what appropriation actually is. I’ve made this argument in a dozen conversations, so let me clear...

We’re in 2026. The internet is available to nearly everyone, and people can unlearn things when they choose to. So I’m not interested in giving anyone a pass on ignorance. I want to repeat that - I am not giving anyone a pass on their ignorance. But I am interested in accuracy. The Cambridge Dictionary defines appropriation as the act of taking something for your own use, usually without permission. Taking an idea, a custom, or a style from a group or culture you are not a member of and using it as though it were yours.

That definition is accurate. It’s also incomplete on its own, because it treats the transfer of culture as a clean, isolated act between two parties who meet on equal footing. Korea and Black America did not meet on equal footing. They met through American military occupation, and that context changes what we are actually looking at when we look at K-pop.

We cannot talk about K-pop’s relationship to Black American culture without first understanding the geopolitical and imperialist landscape that made that relationship possible.

The Korean peninsula was carved up in the aftermath of World War II and then hardened into two states by the Korean War, with the United States, the Soviet Union, and China all playing a hand in that division. I want to name clearly that I support the withdrawal of the United States military from Korea, and I support the reunification process that North and South Korea have periodically pursued, including policy proposals introduced in the South Korean legislature toward that end.

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The US empire has used South Korea as a strategic and imperial outpost since the 1950s, and that relationship was never simply protective. During the Korean War, the United States had a clear material interest in the peninsula: proximity to Japan, control of regional trade routes, and a forward position against Soviet and Chinese influence in East Asia. In exchange for those interests, the US offered military backing and a financial injection into an economy that the war had devastated.

That exchange came with a permanent price. South Korea became host to the largest concentration of American military infrastructure outside the United States, including Camp Humphreys (which I’ve visited), home of nearly 30,000 active servicemen and their families. The peninsula became a staging ground where the American war machine could run missile tests and military exercises with far less domestic political friction than it would face at home.

When the Korean War began in 1950, South Korean President Syngman Rhee (이승만) transferred operational control, OPCON, of his entire military to the American-led United Nations Command. In 1978, that authority moved to a new body, the Republic of Korea, United States Combined Forces Command, which to this day is commanded by a US four-star general, with a South Korean officer serving as deputy (this has, recently been brought back into the Korean legislator as the current occupant of the White House continues to pose a threat to the South Korean people, and all global peoples, with his incoherent, immature, lamblasting ways).

In 1994, after decades of pressure, South Korea won back peacetime operational control of its own armed forces. That was real, and it mattered. But wartime operational control, meaning who actually commands South Korean troops the moment a war starts, has never fully transferred back. It still sits with the American commander of the Combined Forces Command.

The US and South Korea have agreed, on paper, to complete that transfer multiple times. It was promised for 2012 under George W. Bush, delayed after North Korea’s second nuclear test. Promised again for 2015. Delayed again. President Moon Jae-in (문재인), pledged to finish the transfer by the end of his term in 2022. It didn’t happen. As of now, wartime OPCON still rests with a US general, which means that in the event of actual war, South Korea does not have final command of its own military. Seventy-plus years after the armistice, that has still not changed. South Korea’s sovereignty over its own military, in the one scenario that matters most, war, still runs through Washington. That is not a metaphor for the relationship between the two countries. It is the literal, operational structure of it.

But the US doesn’t only make demands of foreign militaries. It makes demands of atmosphere. Of comfort. Of familiarity. And this is where the cultural story starts.

Think about the Black GIs stationed in South Korea during and after the war. Culture moved with them, the way it always does when people are displaced into a place for years at a time. One of the simplest and most telling examples is fried chicken. Black American fried chicken and Korean fried chicken both carry global reputations now, and the reason Korean fried chicken exists in the form it does is because Black soldiers brought their recipes with them during the war.

That is a real and legitimate cultural exchange. War produces a lot of terrible things, and it can also produce genuine points of contact between people who would not otherwise have met. Fried chicken is one of the gentler examples of that contact.

But underneath the gentle examples was an unspoken requirement: assimilation to American norms, as a condition of protection. And the thing white America rarely wants to reckon with is that American culture, as exported globally, in music, fashion, language, style, is overwhelmingly Black American culture. So when South Korea, dependent on US military protection, absorbed pieces of American culture to make that arrangement feel more comfortable for the soldiers stationed there, what it actually absorbed was Black American culture, filtered through white American military presence.

Over decades, that relationship, as violent and convoluted as it has been, kept evolving. What we now see as K-pop is the current form of a cultural infusion that started with soldiers and fried chicken and has never stopped, because the underlying military and economic dependency has never stopped either.

I want to repeat something I said in the beginning, because it matters: I am not saying any of this to excuse appropriation, especially when it shows up as genuinely distasteful or disrespectful. I am naming the foundation underneath it so we can have a more honest conversation about what’s actually happening when a K-pop artist wears cornrows, raps, or picks up a lifestyle marker that did not originate in Korea.

South Korea’s military remains dependent on the American military-industrial complex today, in 2026, regardless of who occupies the White House. That dependency is still producing the same basic dynamic it produced seventy years ago: a country accommodating and assimilating to the United States because its own security still runs, in the moment that would matter most, through an American commander.

I don’t believe a Korean music executive sat down in 1992 and decided to strip-mine Black American culture on purpose. I think the appropriation of Black popular culture inside K-pop is a direct, structural result of decades of American imperial presence on the Korean peninsula, not a standalone act of theft invented by the Korean entertainment industry.

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And, I think there’s one more layer worth naming, even briefly, that reflects back the point of extreme capitalistic views in both nations: A real portion of the outcry from Black Americans about K-pop’s appropriation of our culture isn’t actually about cultural preservation. It’s capitalism wearing the language of preservation.

I’ve talked to enough people in my community to notice the pattern. Some of the same people upset about appropriation wouldn’t be upset at all if the money were flowing back toward us, if K-pop companies were funding music programs in Compton or church choirs in Atlanta. And I understand wanting money to follow the people who created the thing in the first place. That instinct isn’t wrong on its own.

But when the entire complaint is really about capital and not about the culture itself, the conversation about appropriation flattens. It stops being about protecting a people’s art and starts being about who gets paid. Not all Black Americans raising this issue are only talking about money. But enough are that it drains the nuance out of the larger conversation, and it’s worth naming rather than letting it hide inside the language of cultural preservation. Who is going to respect our culture, when we keep insinuating that, for the right price, it’s up for grabs?

I’m gonna close on something I’ve been circling without naming directly: cultural epigenetics. The idea that trauma, adaptation, and conditioning don’t just live in individual memory, they get passed down, embedded in how a people moves, protects itself, and survives, generation after generation, often without anyone consciously choosing it.

Black Americans and South Koreans are both, in our own ways, products of the same American military complex. It’s a shared inheritance, even though it produced two very different conditionings.

Black Americans inherited a conditioning that says the most important thing we can do with our culture is monetize it. That survival means ownership, and ownership means turning what we make into something we can sell before someone else sells it first. That instinct didn’t come from nowhere. It came from centuries of having our labor, our art, and our bodies extracted for profit that never came back to us. Of course capital became the language we reach for when we talk about protecting what’s ours. We learned that lesson the hard way, over and over.

South Koreans inherited a different conditioning. Theirs came from having culture, our culture, injected into their national identity as a condition of military protection, not something they chose or negotiated for, but something that arrived alongside the soldiers and the bases and the promise of security. That’s not a clean transaction either. That’s a people absorbing what they were given because their survival, as a divided nation still technically at war, depended on staying close to the country occupying their peninsula.

Neither of those conditionings excuses what gets built on top of them. I’m not interested in framing either people in pure victimhood, and I don’t think either group would want that either. But I don’t think we get to have an honest conversation about K-pop’s relationship to Black culture without holding both of those inheritances at the same time. We are two peoples shaped by the same empire, reaching for survival in the ways that empire taught us to reach, and running into each other in the process.

None of this is an excuse. It’s a foundation. And I’d rather build the conversation about appropriation on an accurate foundation, one that holds empire accountable for what it built into both of us, than a comfortable one that only asks who gets to be angry.

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For the past week, I’ve been thinking of something Aldous Huxley said. That the brain does not PRODUCE reality and consciousness. It REDUCES it. The brain is not a factory building reality from nothing. It takes something vast and narrows it down to something digestible. Something we can survive.

Humans can perceive roughly 0.0035% of the visible light spectrum. Not light in general. Just the visible slice, and then a sliver of even that slice. Sound works the same way. So does touch. We, as humans, are moving through a world built almost entirely out of frequencies we can’t register, and we call the tiny fragment we do register “reality.”

That word is doing a lot of work it hasn’t earned.

I don’t think what’s actually out there is solid. I think solidity is the compression. I think reality is closer to quantum than concrete, closer to probability than object, and that our bodies take that vastness and flattens it, compresses it, into something we can hold, something with edges, something that will not break us open just by looking at it. The body reduces the world so the world is survivable. That’s not a metaphor. That is, apparently, just physics.

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I should say what I mean by quantum, because I’m not borrowing it carefully. I’m not a physicist and this is not a physics paper. When I say quantum I mean the state before something has been forced to pick a shape. Possibility instead of object. Many things at once instead of one thing decided. Not yet collapsed into a single, nameable, touchable fact. Physicists have their own precise version of this word and I respect it enough to admit I’m not using theirs. I’m using it the way I use the word magick, as the closest available word for something that doesn’t have one yet.

I’ve always trusted my intuition. People who know me know I don’t just believe in magick, I practice it. And the more I sit with Huxley’s reduction, the more I think magick is not the exception to reality. It’s what happens when you stop letting the narrowing do all the deciding. It is reaching past the 0.0035% on purpose. Maybe that’s what intuition is too. Not a soft, feminine, easily dismissed feeling. But a signal from the part of you that never fully agreed to the reduction of reality.

It’s why some people see things others don’t. Why some people say they’ve seen a UFO and the room goes quiet and skeptical, like the thing that’s strange is the seeing and not the fact that the rest of us are boxed into a frequency range too narrow to catch it. I don’t think the sky got crowded all of a sudden. I think some people let more through.

It’s why astral projection makes sense to me as a technology and not a fantasy. It’s why I don’t experience time as a straight line, no matter how many calendars try to convince me otherwise. None of that requires abandoning science. If anything it requires taking the science more seriously than most people are willing to. The measurable, peer-reviewed fact of how little we perceive should have broken something open in the collective imagination a long time ago. Instead we built a whole civilization on the confident assumption that what we can see is what there is.

My husband and I talk about mushrooms a lot. Cannabis too, and other things, but mushrooms are the one that keeps coming up. Everyone wants to file the usage of them under escapism, like the only thing a mind-expanding plant could possibly do is help you leave. I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t think it has to be the whole story, either. Escaping into reality is still escaping into reality. The version most of us walk around in every day is the reduced one, the compressed one, and if a mushroom loosens that compression for a few hours, then what you’re escaping is the smallness, not the truth. You’re not leaving what’s real. You’re finally arriving at more of it.

And it’s worth naming what kind of substance we’re talking about. Not the lab-built ones, not the synthesized ones assembled to hit a receptor and nothing else. The ones that come straight out of the dirt. Mushrooms don’t need us to explain them to be real. The mycelial network under every forest floor is older than most of what we call knowledge, and it moves information through the earth in ways we’re only just starting to measure. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the plant with the deepest, oldest relationship to the ground is also the one that seems to know something about reality that we don’t. The mycelium is in the know. We’re the ones playing catch-up.

I don’t think that assumption is an accident. We’re taught, early and often, not to trust our intuition. We’re taught that anything quantum belongs in a lab or a movie, not in the body, not in a decision, not in the way you know something before you can explain it. I think that teaching serves someone. The rich, the powerful, whoever or whatever benefits from a species that only believes in what it can already touch. Maybe it’s people. Maybe it’s something we don’t have language for yet. Maybe it’s the systems we’ve built to think for us, like AI. I don’t think that possibility is separate from the rest of this essay. If intuition is a channel into the part of reality we’ve been trained to ignore, then something benefits from that channel staying closed.

Because if it opened, even a little, at scale, the shift wouldn’t stay personal. Collective reality would move. Collective power would move with it. Collective expression, the things we make and believe and demand, would move too. A population that trusts its own knowing is a population that’s harder to manage. I think the dumbing down is not a side effect of anything. I think it’s the point. Keep people small, keep people doubting the parts of themselves that reach past what’s provable, and you keep them from ever finding out how much of what IS they were never shown.

Here’s where it can be useful, though and not just strange. If most of what’s real is outside our current understanding, then we’re not just missing things. We’re standing in front of raw material almost no one has touched yet. Most people call an idea ‘new’ and mean it was assembled out of parts that already existed. I mean something else. I mean the kind of new that feels intangible when it first arrives, half-formed, more sensation than shape, because it’s coming from the part of reality we haven’t been trained to hold. It feels unreal because it’s still quantum. It hasn’t been reduced and compressed into something solid yet. That reduction is the price of it becoming usable, sayable, buildable. Most brains never get the practice of sitting with something in that unformed state long enough to bring it through. My brain has.

And there’s a strange knot in the middle of all this that I don’t want to smooth over. The body restricts what it can perceive, and consciousness is supposedly not separate from the vastness of what really IS, it’s supposedly in it too, made of the same quantum stuff as everything I’m saying we can’t see. So the restriction isn’t just about missing light or missing sound. It’s consciousness, limitless in its actual substance, being throttled and held without expansion by the very body it’s using to move through the world. The physical and the not-physical, tangled up in each other, one holding the other back from what it already is.

Even I find this hard to hold. I can imagine more than most people I know. I have spent years training myself to expand rather than contract. And it’s still disorienting to sit with the idea that there is more, right here, right now, close enough to touch, that I’m simply not built to register. Not far away. Not in another dimension in the way we picture dimensions. Here. Around me. Unseen because of what I am, not because of what it isn’t.

I understand why most people don’t go looking for the other 99.9965%. If I let myself feel the actual size of what’s outside the reduction and compression, it would probably be too much. Maybe that’s the trade the body made on our behalf, without asking. Give up almost everything, in exchange for a version of the world you can stand to live in.

I’m not sure I want that trade anymore. I never agreed to it, and I’m starting to break free of it (thanks mushrooms!). What IS is vast and infinite. Maybe our bodies can’t handle it, but our consciousness can, we just have to be willing to let it. And that’ll be the day we get set free.

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Nolan Wells was 18. He went to Horn Island on the 4th of July with a group of friends. He was the only Black person in the photos. By the time the boat came back, he wasn’t on it. Days later they found his body in the water. The sheriff said there was no foul play before there was any way to know that yet.

I read that sentence and I already knew what would happen next. Not the facts of the case – the argument that would follow.

I was talking to a friend about it and something shifted in me mid-sentence. It wasn’t the grief. It was the familiar, exhausting work of having to defend my own read of the situation before I’d even finished having it. I’ve been here before. I know this game. It’s the same game I was forced into with previous bosses and partners and co-workers and ‘friends’. It’s on a much smaller scale, but it still plays the same; someone I trust does something that requires me to either trust my own perception or trust her account of herself. I choose to doubt myself first. I always choose to doubt myself first. That’s the part worth writing about.

What happens in that moment has a name, and when I learned it, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere. It’s called racial gaslighting. It isn’t a metaphor borrowed from bad relationships and applied loosely to race. It’s a documented mechanism, one built specifically to make a person doubt her own perception of reality, and its function is to protect a racial order by making the people who notice it seem unstable for noticing.

It works by eroding trust. Not just between strangers. Between friends. Between the people you let close enough to hurt you, because you believed proximity had earned you something. It doesn’t just make you doubt this one incident. It makes you slower to trust your own instinct and alarm the next time, and the next, until you’re not sure anymore whether you have good instincts or whether you’re the problem.

I keep coming back to the same question. If the cost of being close to white people is a tax on my own sanity, what exactly am I purchasing with it (cause anyone who knows me or reads this publication understands that my currency of sanity is running low…)?

What I actually sit with, some days for hours in contemplation, isn’t the big structural thing. It’s the smaller, more humiliating question underneath it. How do individual people relate to the whole? Because I know the history. I know the pattern is real, at scale. But I still have to walk into a room with one specific person and decide whether to trust her, and the history can’t do that cost/benefit analysis for me in these moments.

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I’m affable. I’m charismatic. I’m caring, and open, and vulnerable on purpose, because I’ve always believed that showing up fully was the thing that made real closeness possible. It is me living into my full humanity. I will call first, I will apologize and forgive first, I assume good faith before ill intention. And still, over and over, it has been white women, specifically (other non-Black POC women ain’t off the hook either though…) who have taken that openness and used it against me after they promised they wouldn’t. Not strangers. Not people I kept at arm’s length. People who knew exactly how much trust I was extending, because I told them, and who did the harm anyway.

So now I don’t know how to do this without it costing me my mind, body, spirit, and sanity. I’ve always trusted my read of people. It’s one of the things I’m proudest of. And I am watching myself lose faith in it in real time, not because my pattern recognition has been wrong, but because being right, again and again, has started to feel indistinguishable from being paranoid. That’s the cruelest part of this. The evidence and the symptom look the same from the inside.

I don’t want to become someone who can’t be read by anyone, or who reads everyone as a threat before they’ve done anything. But I also can’t keep pretending my hit rate is a coincidence. At some point trusting my pattern recognition has to include trusting the pattern.

And still. I don’t like where this logic ends. I don’t like the idea of wiping my hands clean of every white person in my life, like a decision I could make once and be done with. Some of these people are people I love. Some of this is genuinely mutual. I’m not trying to end up somewhere tidy. I’m just tired in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t had to keep doing the math on their own friendships. Their own relationships.

And I keep skipping over this part, but I don’t think I can afford to skip it anymore. This isn’t only a story about what is being destroyed. It’s a story about what was taken to build the thing doing the destroying.

Start with the labor. American capitalism does not have a slavery chapter tucked inside it. Economic historians have spent the last decade proving what should never have needed proving, that cotton picked by enslaved people was the collateral behind new financial instruments, the export that funded northern industrialization, the raw material that turned a narrow strip of tobacco farms into a continental empire in a single lifetime. The United States did not develop and then happen to use slavery. It developed because of it. Our labor isn’t a footnote to American advancement. It’s the capital of it.

Then look at the care. Black women raised this country’s children. Nursed them, rocked them, fed them from their own bodies, while their own children were sold away or left in someone else’s arms because there was no other option. That care was never given freely and it was never returned. It was extracted the same way the labor was, except this theft required more of us. It required our tenderness, not just our backs.

Then look at the genius. Blues, jazz, rock and roll, gospel, hip hop (things I’ve written about multiple times over). Every one of these was built by Black hands and Black grief and Black joy, and every one of these was taken, smothered over, handed to a white face, and sold back to the world as American culture with the origin quietly removed – as I like to say ‘white washed and boxed for mass consumption’. The pattern is so consistent it has its own literature. Black creation, white repackaging, white profit, and the people who made the thing never share in the recognition or the money.

And then love. The specific, exhausting, generous love it takes to keep choosing someone who keeps proving they don’t deserve it. We have loved this country and the people in it past the point of reason, past the point of reciprocity, and called it faith, called it patriotism, called it grace.

I don’t think you can be in real relationship with an entity whose evolution runs directly through what it took from you. That isn’t a metaphor for a bad dynamic. It’s the literal thing that is happening. White America’s wealth, culture, and comfort are not separate from what was extracted from Black America. They are made of it. You cannot repair a relationship born of extraction, by asking the extracted party to keep extending trust.

And if I’m being honest, my instinct is separate and to build something outside of whiteness. The instinct to build apart from white America isn’t new, and it isn’t mine. It’s the oldest answer Black Americans have ever given to this question, and it’s an answer that worked, right up until it was taken from us by force.

Seneca Village was a Black landowning community in Manhattan. Families owned homes there, sent their kids to school there, built churches there. The city took it to build Central Park.

Wilmington, North Carolina had a Black majority and elected Black officials in 1898. The day after an election, an armed white mob overthrew the government, burned the Black newspaper, and killed somewhere between a dozen and several hundred Black residents. It is the only successful armed overthrow of an elected government in American history, and it happened over a Black city that was working well.

Tulsa’s Greenwood district was thriving enough that people called it Black Wall Street. In less than 24 hours in 1921, a white mob burned more than a thousand Black homes and businesses to the ground.

Rosewood, Florida was a self-sufficient Black town. In 1923 it was burned so completely that almost no one who fled ever came back. Florida didn’t officially acknowledge what happened there until 1994, 71 years later.

I’m not listing these to educate anyone. I list them because I need to say plainly what they add up to. Every time we built something whole and self-contained, it was destroyed, and no one was ever made to answer for it. That isn’t ancient history reaching forward to explain a bad feeling I’m having this week. That is the pattern. It has simply never stopped being the pattern.

And what I don’t say enough? Staying in relationship with white America, extending the good faith, doing the labor of explanation, giving people the benefit of every doubt over and over, isn’t neutral. It isn’t free. It is a decision I make against a mountain of evidence, and it has a price, and the price is paid in my body. AND I’M TIRED.

There’s a name for this too. Researchers call it John Henryism, after the folk hero who beat the machine and then dropped dead with the hammer still in his hand. It describes the high effort coping style Black Americans developed to survive a hostile system, the relentless striving, the refusal to let it beat you. It’s not a character flaw. It is, by the data, a cardiovascular event waiting to happen. Higher rates of hypertension. Higher rates of depression. The body keeps the score that the mind is too disciplined to admit out loud.

There’s also racial battle fatigue, which researchers built directly out of combat trauma literature because the vigilance required to survive a hostile institutional environment resembles the vigilance required to survive a war. I want to sit with that comparison instead of rushing past it. We’ve built a clinical language that compares showing up to work, to school, to a friendship with a white person, to combat… (THINK ABOUT THIS!)

And still we show up.

The reality is: I don’t think white and Black America are compatible cultures. I think that reality has played out in every generation, at every scale, from a friendship to a nation, and I think we keep calling it a fringe idea because admitting it’s the throughline would mean admitting how much we’ve already lost trying to disprove it.

I know how that sounds. I know the reflex is to say I’m not thinking clearly, that grief has made me extreme, or that it’s racist… that this is the kind of thing you say in the space right after a funeral and walk back once the anger cools. But Black Wall Street wasn’t an accident. Rosewood wasn’t an accident. My colleagues and bosses weren’t an isolated bad match. Nolan Wells’s mother is not going to get a satisfying answer, and some part of every Black person watching already knew that before the investigation started, because we’ve seen this exact ending before.

Segregation is supposed to be the idea we’re not allowed to consider a valid answer anymore. I understand why. But I keep asking myself what, materially, we have gained by refusing to consider it, and what, materially, we lost every single time we built something whole and let ourselves believe it was safe.

I need to say this plainly, without dressing it up as anything more sophisticated than what it is.

I’m tired of talking about it. Tired of having to say, again, in a calm voice, that this was fucked up and it hurt me, like the hurt needs a permission slip before anyone will believe it happened. Tired of being told I make everything about race, as if race were some idle theory of mine and not a category invented specifically to justify slavery, then Jim Crow, then everything after. I didn’t write that story. I just keep living inside it.

I’m tired of being the squeaky wheel. Tired of watching people with actual power look directly at the dynamic and choose not to see it, because seeing it would cost them something. And I’m tired, in a specific and lonely way, of other people of color telling me to get over it, that everyone has it hard, as if hardship is a flat line and not a history, as if anyone else’s ancestors were bought and sold and bred and worked to death for centuries and then handed a hundred more years of engineered second-class citizenship on top of it. I am not asking for a hierarchy of pain. I am asking for this one to be named accurately instead of averaged down to nothing.

I’m tired. Not poetically. Not as a rhetorical device to close an essay. Tired the way you are tired when you’ve been carrying something heavy for so long you’ve forgotten what your arms feel like empty.

And here’s the honest, ugly center of it. I just want it to stop. And some days the only mechanism I can see for it to stop is removing white people from my orbit entirely, because I don’t know what else actually ends it. Not more conversation. Not more grace. Not one more chance. I don’t like landing there. I said that already. But I understand, for the first time, why my ancestors landed there too.

I don’t have a clean answer to this question, and I’m not going to manufacture one just to give this piece a landing.

I think about Christine Wonsley saying she keeps waiting for her son to walk through the door with his beautiful smile and a joke. I think about the version of me that sat with a friend and felt the floor of my own certainty give out from under me, over something so much smaller than a life.

I don’t know what Black people are still doing this for. I know we keep doing it. I know I’ll probably keep doing it too, tomorrow, with someone I love, because the alternative feels like giving up on something I’m not ready to name. But I’m done pretending the question isn’t a fair one.

…To what end?

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We were at our friends’ house during the kind of evening that asks nothing of you. The kids were somewhere being kids. We were laughing. Somebody said something stupid and somebody else said something worse, and the room was easy, the way rooms and spaces are easy when no one is performing.

Then I mixed up the names and schools of two of our students.

My husband corrected me. Gently. The way you correct someone you love in front of other people; soft enough that it isn’t supposed to land. And it didn’t land as the small thing it was. I felt the ordinary heat of being wrong in front of others, which is a thing everyone feels. That part was normal.

What happened next was a little more complex…

By the time he finished the sentence, my mind had already decided I should be gone. Not upset. Not embarrassed. Gone. Like, from the world gone. Gone. I sat there with my drink and my friends, and I built the plan, quietly, the whole architecture of it. How much easier it would be. How everyone would be spared the next time I fumbled, and the time after that, because there is always a time after that. I spent about ten minutes inside that thought. Then it passed. Someone laughed and I laughed and I finished my drink.

That is not my considered reaction. Not the reaction that happens from sensibilities…That is my first reaction. My first. To be gone.

And the part no one believes is that I know it’s not the answer. I’ve always known. I don’t want it to be the place my mind goes. I’ve never once wanted that. But wanting has nothing to do with it. The thought doesn’t ask my permission. It shows up the way a reflex shows up, before the part of me that knows better can get to it. So I spend the ten minutes arguing with something I didn’t invite and can’t evict. And then I get up and refill our glasses and move on.

There’s a name for this. Passive suicidal ideation. The clinicians draw a line between the passive kind and the active kind, between wishing you were not here and planning your way out. The line is real, and it’s thinner than they make it sound. For some of us the wish lives in the room all the time. It doesn’t always speak. But it’s always there, waiting for the smallest thing to wake it up.

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Call it what it is, but do not call it dramatic. Drama is for people who want to be watched. Everything in me is built so that you never see this particular thing. I’ve spent years learning to keep my face still while my mind is somewhere else entirely, deciding things about my life that I’ll overrule in nine minutes but have to live through anyway. Dramatic people perform their pain for an audience. I perform fine. I perform easygoing. That performance is the opposite of drama. It might be the most disciplined thing I do, and I do it every day, and the reward for doing it well is that everyone gets to keep believing nothing is wrong.

And I’m not crazy either (at least not for this reason). My mind isn’t more unstable than anyone else’s. If anything, it’s too stable. It returns to the same place with reliability. There’s nothing wild in it. That is the part that unsettles me, on the days anything does. The people who get called dramatic, who get called too much, who get called crazy, are so often the ones carrying the most with the least showing. The word is a way of not looking. You call it drama so you don’t have to ask what it is.

The thing itself is quiet. I’m not, however. I can keep my face still in the room, but I’ve never kept still on the page. I write the hard things down. I’ve always written them down, because I keep believing someone out there needs to know they’re not the only one. So don’t mistake a still face for a silent one. I don’t carry the fact of this quietly. I will tell anyone. I am telling you right now.

What I keep is the count. Not the subject, the frequency. I’ll write a thousand words about my own mind and never once mention that it came for me twice before lunch. The silence was never about whether this is real. It was about the number. The specific texture of a specific Tuesday. That part stays mine.

People talk about the weight of these thoughts. They don’t talk about the weight of holding the weight. The thought itself is fast. It comes and it goes. What stays is the labor around it. The low constant management. The scanning. The part of me that’s always slightly braced, the way you brace a hand against a shelf you know is loose. I carry that bracing into every room. Into work. Into mothering. Into an easy evening where nothing was wrong, where I still had to do the quiet work of staying…here.

No one sees the work. That’s the design of it. The better you are at carrying it, the more invisible it becomes, until the people who love you most have the least idea, because you’ve spent so much of your love making sure they never have to know. There’s a particular loneliness in being held by people who do not know what they’re holding.

So when you watch someone overreact to a correction, a deadline, a joke that didn’t land, understand that you’re seeing the surface of something you can’t see the bottom of. I’m not asking you to assume everyone is drowning. I’m telling you what it is to be corrected gently and have your own mind answer with Death. We might as well be careful with each other. Not because everyone is fragile. Because some of us are carrying something we have learned to carry so quietly that quiet gets mistaken for light.

And lately I’ve started to wonder about the shape of all of it. We didn’t arrive at these extremes alone. We were trained into them, over generations, by a world that runs on extremity. Economies that need us desperate. Wars that need us numb. Housing markets, warming coasts, a slow rolling back of every right women bled for. We live inside systems built on too much and never enough, and then we are surprised that our interiors, the internal nature of us, learned the same grammar. All or nothing. Everything or gone.

I can’t prove it. But I can’t stop wondering. If the world were gentler, if there were enough, if the ground under us were not always unsteady, would this wiring loosen its grip? Would the extremes soften out of us the way they were once trained into us? I don’t know. I’ll probably not live in a world that could answer it. But I think about it on the ordinary days, which are most of the days, when I am doing the quiet work of staying and wondering why staying has to be such work at all.

People want to fix this. They want to fix me. They mean well. They hear it and reach for anything, they think, will make it stop. Because a mind that works like mine reads like a mind that is broken. It’s not broken. It’s mine. It runs differently, the way some hearts beat differently and some eyes see colors mine will never see. I don’t need you to repair me. I need what everyone needs. Grace. Care. The benefit of the doubt. And a little softness from time to time.

I’ll probably always have the door in the floor. I’ve stopped waiting for someone to come and nail it shut. What I want now is people in the room who know it’s there, who don’t flinch, who keep handing me reasons to stay on this side of it. Not fixing. Just Company.

Again, there is a name for it. Passive suicidal ideation. I said it once already and I’m saying it again, plainly, because words like these deserve to be said more than once and without anyone lowering their voice. It’s real. It’s not rare. There are people reading this who felt the floor open at something small this week and told no one. There are people you love doing the quiet work of staying right now, beside you, and you have no idea. We’re not a tragedy waiting to happen. We are here. We have been here the whole time. We’re only tired of carrying it where no one can see.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing suicidal ideations and don’t have any resources or help, please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention Crisis Support Line or visit Open Counseling for a list of all International Suicide Hotlines.

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There are moments when I’m mid-thought, reaching for an exact word, the exact vessel for what I know to be true, and I can feel it. A gap. The place where language should be and isn’t. I spent years believing this was a personal problem. A writer who often can’t find her words. Ironic. But lately I’ve been sitting with a different possibility: that the gap is not mine. That it was made. That what I experience as inadequacy is actually the sound of a tool being forced to do the opposite of its original purpose.

I write in English. I think in English. I dream in English. I love and grieve and rage in English. And English was built, in significant part, to manage me and people like me.

It feels like there’s a secret hiding in plain sight inside the language.

To spell a word. To cast a spell. These are not two separate things that just share a name. They’re the same root, the same ancient understanding that to arrange symbols in a particular order is to call something into being. To manifest. The letters of the alphabet are called characters, the same word we use for figures in a story, for marks that carry meaning, for the nature of a person’s soul. The word grammar traces back through Old French to the Greek graphein, to write, and shares its foundation with grimoire, a book of spells. A text. A textbook.

The architects of written language knew something that maybe we’ve been trained to forget: that words don’t simply describe reality. They participate in it. To name a thing is to reach into the world and rearrange it. Every sentence is a small act of conjuring.

Which means every sentence is also a small act of consequence.

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The last few weeks, I’ve been reading Kenyan novelist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He serves as an important figure in East African literature. His work highlights the Modern African experience, though varied. I believe his work resonates because there are moments when he toggles between English and Gĩkũyũ. Where English is insufficient in its meaning and in describing his thought or concept, he returns to his native language for a more accurate reflection. He could go back to Gĩkũyũ because Gĩkũyũ survived. And he wasn’t severed from it. That door existed. He walked through it, regularly.

That door was taken off its hinges before my great-grandmothers were born.

The Middle Passage did not just impose a language. It removed the one underneath so completely that there is no name for what it removed, no map to where it was, no living connection back. I’m not weighing the colonizer’s tongue against my mother’s. I am standing in the rubble of my mother’s tongue, reaching for it, writing in the only language the rubble left me.

The English language has no word for the theft of a mother tongue you never knew you had, and it never will, because it was built by the people who orchestrated and benefited from that theft. The absence was designed. And the word that would let you name what was taken, was the first thing they stole.

So when words fail me, when I reach and feel the gap, I have to stop calling it inadequacy. I’m asking the tool of my erasure to describe what it erased. The ME that strains against this language is partly constructed from that theft. The hole is not beside me. It’s inside me. It’s a load-bearing, identity forming hole.

There are others who know something about this. The immigrants forced to leave their homes for various reasons and see language assimilation as a bedrock of belonging in their new land. A transracial adoptee severed from their birth culture, holding the real and legitimate grief of what they can’t access because that particular system of trafficking required them to be malleable to those who purchased them. The list goes on. Often, however, at minimum, there is an awareness of the language that was taken. People can point to a language on a map. Can attempt to study it. The learning is on them, and that is its own particular loneliness, AND the thing still exists for them. It has a name. It has living speakers. There’s a ‘there’ there.

My ‘there’ was dismantled.

Not metaphorically. Structurally, physically, and across generations, with the full apparatus of chattel slavery working to ensure that no ‘there’ remained to return to. Even my siblings in the diaspora, descendants of the enslaved peoples in Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, retained threads. Yoruba in Candomblé. Fon in Vodou. The linguistic traces in the Creoles. The threads are frayed but they still exist. Black Americans, particularly the descendants of the domestic slave trade, were subjected to something unusually thorough. The most complete erasure of the tie that bound us to our homelands.

Which is how I ended up here. Fluent in the language of my oppressors. No roadmap for anything else.

And yet.

This is the part that breaks my chest wide open and puts me back together at the same time, and I mean both of those things, the breaking and the reassembling, equally.

We made something.

In the rubble of the theft, inside the tongue that was handed to us as a tool of our oppression, Black Americans built a counter-language. AAVE/Ebonics is not broken English. It’s grammatically sophisticated, is governed by rules, and operates as a living system with its own internal logic that linguists have spent careers documenting and that Black communities have always known, even without the academic validation, to be real. Signifying. The dozens. The blues. Spirituals with coded geography of escape routes disguised as praise songs. We took the grimoire given to us and rewrote it from the inside. We made English carry things it was never designed to carry. We bent its syntax until it could hold Black humor, Black grief, Black joy, Black stories.

Toni Morrison said that oppressive language is not merely a representation of violence. It IS violence. And then she spent a career making that same language into something that could hold what violence tried to destroy. That’s not a small thing. That’s an act of collective genius and resistance so sustained and so generative that the culture built on top of our oppression has been stealing it back, and profiting from it, ever since.

I hold all of this as true. And I hold something else equally true.

The grimoire is still active.

Every time we speak our unworthiness in this language, we’re not describing a condition. We’re producing one. We’re reading from the book. And we have no other book. The counter-spell was taken first, before everything else, because whoever built this system understood that you can’t dismantle a curse from inside the language that cast it. We are fluent in our own harm. We have been, for hundreds of years, native speakers of the hex against us.

I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not sure there is anything to do with it except know it. Except feel the full weight of what it means to open your mouth. To type out your thoughts.

So I do what Black writers always do. I reach in. I write toward the things the language can’t really hold. I spell, knowing I am spelling, and I try to mean something different by it.

Whether that’s enough, I honestly don’t know.

But it’s what I have. And it was made from what was taken. And somehow, impossibly, it’s still something beautiful.

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I’m writing this from Thailand, surrounded by people who have probably never had to wonder if the world was made for them. Because, at home in Thailand, this is theirs.

A jury just watched a 14 year old Black boy run for his life on video and decided no one was responsible for his death. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was shot in the back. Over water bottles he didn’t steal. By a man, of Chinese ancestry, who built his livelihood in a Black neighborhood, in a country Black people bled to make livable, and still saw a child running away and chose to end his life.

I’ve been reading about it (again, as the murder happened in 2023) for 24 hours, since the verdict was announced. I can’t stop. I don’t know why I keep reading, except that stopping feels like abandoning him, and Black people are very practiced at not abandoning each other, even when everyone else does.

I keep coming back to the fact that we, as Black Americans, don’t belong anywhere. Not to anyone but ourselves.

America, the country we built with our bodies and our grief, kills us and calls it self-defense. Africa, the motherland we were violently separated from, greets us with disdain and mockery for our longing. And every other culture on this planet has been so thoroughly propagandized into believing the worst about us that they consume everything we create and still cross the street when they see us walking their way.

There’s a particular grief in the motherland wound that I don’t think Black Americans are allowed to say out loud. Africa was supposed to be the answer to American rejection. When this country makes clear it will not protect you, when the jury comes back and the verdict reads not guilty, there is supposed to be somewhere to turn, some ancestral belonging to reach for. And the truth is that Black Americans have been so severed from that root, so violently re-routed through the Middle Passage and chattel slavery and hundreds of years of America, that we arrive in Africa as strangers. We’re not welcomed home. We are seen as American first, which is to say, we are seen as not African. We were taken from a home and then told we could never return to it, and then told our grief about that was embarrassing. We belong to a place that no longer recognizes us. Or we belong to a place that functions on its deeply held hatred of us. That is its own specific kind of homelessness that sits underneath everything else.

And what do I mean when I say everyone consumes us (because during American chattel slavery, they literally consumed us… there are cookbooks)? I mean that Black American culture is the underpinning of global popular culture, full stop. The music - jazz, blues, rock and roll, hip hop, R&B - all of it originated in Black American genius and got picked up, repackaged, and sold back to the world with someone else’s face on the cover. I mean the slang that migrates from Black Twitter into mainstream advertising within 18 months. The style, the swag and aura, the aesthetic - the way Black people move and dress and carry themselves that becomes a trend the moment a non-Black body puts it on. The hair, natural and braided and locked, that gets called avant-garde on fashion runways and is mocked on Black heads. K-pop is the most recent and clearest example. An entire industry built on the architecture of Black American music, wearing our aesthetics like a costume at a party we weren’t even invited to. But, let’s be clear, it’s not the only example. It’s just the one that’s most present in my life as someone who has lived in various Asian countries the last 2 years (Korea included) and as a very outspoken Black K-pop fan. Every culture on this planet has taken something from us. Our creativity, our resilience, our grief, our joy. All of it extracted, aestheticized, monetized. We’re the blueprint that nobody credits. We’re the source that everyone draws from and no one protects. The most imitated people on the planet, and the least defended.

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Ok, I’m gonna try to be really careful here because being careless would betray my argument. I’m not talking about every Asian person. I’m not talking about a monolith. Asian is not a culture. Asia is a continent and a diaspora and a hundred distinct peoples with their own histories, their own relationships to Blackness, their own complicated positions inside American racial hierarchy and within geopolitics. I know this. I live this with many of my closest friends…Korean American, native Korean, Iranian…women I love with my whole chest, women who contain multitudes. I’m not indicting them. I’m not indicting everyone.

What I AM doing is naming a pattern. A documented, measurable, cross-cultural pattern of anti-Blackness that shows up in East Asian beauty standards built on colorism, in South Asian caste systems that have their own investments in distancing from Blackness, in the way Black Americans get treated in immigrant-owned businesses in our own neighborhoods, in the verdicts that keep coming back not guilty. It’s not every person. It’s a structure that many people participate in without examining, because the world rewards them for it and penalizes us for noticing. The problem is not Chinese people. The problem is not Korean people. Or Vietnamese people. The problem is a global racial hierarchy that was built by European colonialism and has been so thoroughly internalized that people who have never set foot in America have still absorbed the lesson that Black lives are worth less. That’s the problem.

I say this as a woman who lives the life I live and has the friends I have. Friends that know my whole heart, and me, theirs. I’m not speaking in abstractions. I’m speaking about the people I share my life with.

And even now, I can’t make myself call them.

Not because they wouldn’t show up. They would. Not because they don’t understand - I know they do. I know they are sitting with the weight of their own identities and how all of this lands inside them. I know they’re upset. I know they’re angry. I know that if I called, they would hold me without flinching.

And I still can’t do it. I don’t fully understand why, except that knowing what I’m feeling right now lives in a place that even the people who love me most can’t quite reach. It feels unreasonable. It feels like I’m punishing them for something they didn’t do. Maybe I am. Or maybe there’s a specific frequency of Black American grief that only resonates with people who carry the same particular fear. The fear that your child, your 14 year old, could be Cyrus. And there’s no amount of love across difference that can fully tune you into that fear.

I don’t know how to ask for what I need when I’m not sure anyone has it to give.

We showed up for HMart Gate. We show up when ICE tears apart Brown families. We show up because we know what it is to be targeted, to be made into a threat by the simple fact of existing. We show up because that’s what we do. We’ve survived the worst that humans can think up - the Middle Passage, chattel slavery (that included rape, murder, forced incest, forced breeding, cannablism, and other horrific torture…), Reconstruction’s betrayal, a century of lynching, the school-to-prison pipeline, Trayvon Martin, Latasha Harlins, and now Cyrus Carmack-Belton - and we still show up for other people’s children.

What I want to know, what I’ve always wanted to know is: when do they show up for ours?

And I gotta sit with that question longer than is comfortable, because underneath it is something that makes me angrier than almost anything else. Black Americans, as a collective, have not done anything to these people. Not a single thing. We didn’t drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities. We didn’t destabilize Southeast Asian governments for oil and ideology. We didn’t carve up the African continent at a conference table in Berlin. We did not colonize, did not extract, did not invade, did not impose our language and our religion and our economic systems on people who didn’t ask for them. We didn’t do any of the things that have actually, materially, historically harmed the communities that have contempt for us. We survived those things. We were the ones those things were done to.

And yet here we are.

The people who did do those things - who built their wealth and their world order on the bodies of Black and Brown and Indigenous people everywhere - somehow don’t attract this particular quality of disdain. They don’t catch the smoke. White supremacy, which has harmed every single person on this planet (yes, including white people themselves), gets a kind of pass that Blackness doesn’t. White people colonized your country, extracted your resources, rewrote your history, and you have still absorbed their lesson about us. That’s not an accident either. That’s one of the most sophisticated tricks imperialism ever pulled: convincing its victims to aim their anger sideways, at the people on the next rung.

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And, of course, there’s complexity here. Everything has nuance. I know that anti-Blackness within communities of color is not simply imported from white supremacy, that colorism and caste have their own long histories, that the Black community has its own blind spots. I know it’s more complicated than a single story. But I also know what I see. I know who gets the benefit of the doubt and who doesn’t. I know whose child gets to run and whose doesn’t. And I know that the rage that should be aimed at the people who actually built this burning house keeps landing on us instead, on the people who have been trapped inside it the longest, on the people who have done nothing to deserve it.

People ask me how I still find joy in K-pop, in Korean culture, in the very aesthetics built on the bones of what Black Americans created. And I want to give them a clean answer. I want to say, “I’ve absorbed the contradiction of it all.” “Joy is resistance.” But the honest answer is that I’m not really sure if what I’m doing is radical wholeness or a very covert form of self-betrayal. I genuinely can’t tell you. I’m a Black woman who loves things made by people who have, in documented and measurable ways, contempt for my skin. I love the music. I love the cultures and the exchange that has the potential to transform and expand minds. I love my friends. And I’m watching a jury acquit the man who shot a Black child in the back. These things are all happening at the same time, inside the same body, and I haven’t found a philosophy that makes them sit comfortably together. I’m not sure one exists.

What I DO know is the joy doesn’t cancel the harm. And the harm doesn’t cancel the joy. They just live together like weird uninvited roommates and I’ve learned to function around both of them without ever fully figuring out who actually belongs here. Maybe they both do…

So, I keep returning to the question I can’t answer: is community across difference actually possible? Not as a theory. Not as a value I hold in the abstract, not as a line in a grant proposal about coalition building. I mean as a real, lived, daily practice between people whose communities have asymmetric stakes in each other’s survival. Is it possible when the grief is this one-sided? When we keep showing up for everyone else’s emergencies? When I look at my closest friends, women I love without reservation, and still cannot call them because I don’t need to be held but to be joined in a grief that I’m not sure anyone outside of this particular experience can fully enter?

I want community to be real. I’ve built my life and my work around the belief that it is. But right now, in Thailand, reading about Cyrus Carmack-Belton, I’m not sure I believe it. I’m not sure it’s possible to build genuine solidarity across lines of difference when one side of the line keeps dying and the other side keeps deliberating about whether that death was justified.

Maybe the question isn’t whether community is possible. Maybe the question is what we are owed before we extend ourselves toward it again. What Black Americans are owed- in acknowledgment, in action, in showing up - before we’re asked to keep being the ones who extend the hand first.

My children will need to know this. Not because I want to fill them with bitterness (I really don’t). But because Cyrus was 14. My oldest daughter is 14. The jury watched him run away and get shot in the back. I need my children to understand that the world will not protect them the way it protects other children, and that this is not their fault, and that they are loved absolutely, and that they must still find a way to live joyfully inside that truth. I don’t know how to teach that. I’m still learning it myself. Still trying to understand it. It reminds me of an Andre 3000 quote:

I have to ensure my girls understand the beauty and sadness of that truth.

I don’t have the answer to any of this. All I have is grief, and joy I can’t surrender, and friends I can’t call right now, and a 14 year old daughter, and a murdered 14 year old Black boy, and the exhausting, relentless, unfinished work of figuring out how to belong to a world that has never quite decided whether we’re welcome in it or not.

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I believe capitalism is a death machine.

I think policing as we know it was never designed to protect us. I use words like “abolition” and “restoration” in regular conversation and mean them sincerely. I am, by most measures, that person: the Black progressive, the futurist, the one who sees the world as it could be and has a hard time pretending the world as it is is acceptable.

And I’m here to tell you: we’ve got a problem.

Not the white moderates. Not the respectability politics crowd. Not the people who haven’t “woken up” yet. Us. The ones who know better. Because knowing better and doing better are two completely different things, and we’ve gotten very, very comfortable living in between the two.

—

A few years ago, when I was working at a progressive organization that specialized in providing support and safety nets for people experiencing domestic and sexual violence, I met a woman I’ll never forget.

She came to the progressive organization, one that loudly proclaimed its commitment to restorative justice, prison reform, and healing-centered care. She was experiencing domestic violence. And she didn’t want to call the police. Not because she wasn’t scared. But because she was also thinking about him, a Black man, and what the police would do to him. She wanted something different. She came to us because she believed we had built something different.

We hadn’t.

At the end of the conversation, after all our values and frameworks and language - we told her to call the police for a restraining order.

I’ve sat with that moment for these handful of years since it happened. Because that woman didn’t fail us.

—

And that’s the thing about us, isn’t it?

We are spectacular at diagnosis. Brilliant, even. We can explain the school-to-prison pipeline, the racial wealth gap, the way capitalism commodifies community and turns neighbors into strangers. We are fluent in the language of what’s broken.

But fluency in diagnosis is not the same as having a cure.

And somewhere along the way, a lot of us started mistaking the map for the destination. Started acting like naming the problem was the work. Started looking sideways at people who couldn’t imagine the future we were describing - as if the failure of imagination was theirs.

But the truth is you can’t ask people to leap when there is no bridge. And we’ve spent a lot of time telling people to jump.

—

And when people can’t make that leap with us? When they look at our vision and say “that’s nice but I still need to pay rent, stay safe, feed my kids” - we don’t often meet them with humility. We meet them with disappointment. Sometimes with contempt.

We unfollow. We whisper. We sort people into categories: conscious and unconscious, woke and asleep, free and colonized — as if liberation were an IQ test that some people pass and others fail. As if the woman who called the police on her abuser because there was literally nothing else available to her had somehow betrayed the movement, rather than the movement having failed to build something for her to use.

It’s a well-known secret that elitism is living in the cracks of progressive spaces. It wears the language of consciousness and care, but it functions like every other hierarchy, deciding who belongs, who’s evolved enough, who gets to sit at the table of imagining more. And it is particularly insidious in Black progressive spaces, where we have every reason to know what it feels like to be counted out, talked over, and deemed unworthy of a livable future.

We do it to each other anyway.

The person who still votes because they’re scared of the alternative - talked about like they’re naive. The woman who stays in a harmful relationship because she has nowhere safe to go - quietly judged for not knowing her worth. The community member who calls the police because there is no trained community response team - side-eyed for participating in a harmful system, as if they had a better option we forgot to build for them.

This is the bait and switch. We tell people the system is broken and make them feel broken for depending on it. We offer diagnosis without cure, and then have the nerve to be condescending when people can’t heal themselves on our vision alone.

That’s not progressive.

—

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But we also have to talk about something that doesn’t get said enough in these spaces: the particular difficulty of being a Black progressive inside a Black community that has been, in many ways, shaped to resist exactly what we’re proposing.

The Black church did not save us and also didn’t free us. It held us together through the unsurvivable and it also handed us a conservatism so deep it feels like DNA. It told us to pray for our enemies and endure, to keep our skirts long and our ambitions respectable, to trust that God’s plan included our suffering and that disrupting the order of things was dangerous; maybe even sinful. And so when you show up talking about abolishing prisons, redistributing wealth, reimagining gender and family and safety - you’re not just offering a political alternative. You are threatening a theology. And that is a much harder fight.

Then there’s the other religion in our community, the gospel of excellence. Work twice as hard. Get the degree. Own the home. Sit at the table. Beat them at their own game. This also kept people alive. This also carries real dignity and real sacrifice. But it also means that a lot of Black people have invested everything - their labor, their identity, their futures - into the very structures we’re saying need to be dismantled. And when you’ve given your whole life to climbing a ladder, in making space in the only world and system you’ve known, the last thing you want to hear is that the ladder was always the problem. That feels like betrayal. So they push back. Hard.

And then there’s the fatalism. The quiet, heavy certainty that people are just too selfish to share. Or that men will never genuinely submit to women’s leadership. That some people are simply evil and deserve to be caged forever. That the future we’re imagining is beautiful but naive; a fantasy for people who haven’t been hurt enough yet to know better.

This is not ignorance. This is injury. Trauma. This is what happens to a people who have been promised futures that never came, who have extended trust that got weaponized, who have been failed so fully and so repeatedly by every system and institution that hope itself starts to feel like a liability. The fatalism is rational. It was earned. And it lives in our grandmothers and our uncles and our oldest friends and sometimes, honestly, in us.

But here’s what it does to those of us who still insist on imagining: it makes the critique lonelier and louder. Every time we’re met with “that’ll never work” or “you’re being unrealistic” or “you sound like a white liberal” - something in us hardens. We double down. We get more strident, more academic, more sealed off in the company of the few people who speak our language. And in doing so we confirm every suspicion - that we’re disconnected, that we think we’re better, that we’ve forgotten where we came from.

The chasm grows. And we let it, because the alternative, staying in the discomfort of being misunderstood by your own people, is its own kind of grief that nobody really prepares you for.

—

And the part I keep coming back to - it’s not all arrogance. Some of us are just built for the big picture. We’re wired to see across time, to hold the vision of what our species could become, to refuse to accept the present as permanent. That’s a gift. The movement needs people like that.

But a gift without humility becomes a weapon.

Because if you’re a visionary who cannot be in honest, respectful conversation with a builder - someone who thinks in the practical, the immediate, the what-do-we-do-on-Tuesday - then your vision stays a vision forever. And real people keep making do with real systems that are really hurting them while you refine your framework.

The builder may not be able to see as far as you can. That’s okay. You need them anyway. You need their groundedness, their practicality, their insistence on the possible. And they need your horizon. But that exchange only works if you show up to it without superiority, if you can share what you see without making them feel small for asking how to get there. Most of us don’t do that. Most of us, if we’re honest, have confused the ability to imagine the future with the moral authority to look down on the present.

That’s not vision. It’s ego with good politics.

—

And then there’s mutual aid.

Mutual aid used to mean something. It still does, in the hands of people doing the quiet, unglamorous, one-to-one work of keeping each other alive. But somewhere between the pandemic and the aesthetic, it got flattened into a back-to-school drive. Which - the drives are good. The drives matter. But we have to be honest about the distance between collecting and filling backpacks and sitting with a mother who needs to leave a violent home without calling the police. One asks very little of us. The other asks us to be genuinely responsible for another person’s safety, to put something of ourselves on the line, to stay in it past the point where it’s convenient or comfortable.

That is what real mutual aid actually is. And most of us have not been willing to go there.

I’ll tell you something I don’t usually say: I hold back. I have ideas about what it would actually take to build the future I believe in, and I don’t share them freely because I already know how they land. Because the honest version of this conversation includes telling people that yes, your grocery bill might need to go up a little to help feed your neighbors. That yes, you will have to give something - time, money, comfort, convenience - to be genuinely responsible to the people around you. That the future we want has a cost, and we are going to have to pay it together.

And I know what I’m asking. I know that right now people are furious and exhausted and barely keeping their heads above water. The government is a disaster. Everything costs too much. There’s a war. People are angry in a way that makes complete sense, and in that anger a certain selfishness takes root, not because people are bad, but because survival does that. It makes the ask of “give a little more for your neighbor” feel more than hard, it feels offensive.

So I go quiet. And I suspect I’m not alone in that.

And that’s the vicious loop: the conditions that make it hardest to build community are the exact conditions that make community most necessary. The more expensive it gets to live, the more we need to be feeding each other. The more the government fails us, the more we need safety infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the government. The worse it gets, the more urgent the building becomes AND the more impossible the asking feels.

I don’t have a clean way out of that loop. I just think we have to name it, and then build anyway. Imperfectly. Incrementally. With full knowledge that the timing will never be ideal and the ask will never be easy.

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—

And then there is the question of what we do with the system while we’re building something to replace it.

Because some of us - and I am including myself here, and my husband, who actually served in the statehouse for two years - believed for a while that the answer was to get inside it. To learn its language, run its plays, and redirect its resources toward people it was never designed to serve. To change it from the inside. It sounds reasonable. It sounds strategic. It sounds like the mature, pragmatic alternative to standing outside yelling.

But here’s what nobody tells you before you walk through that door: your entire job becomes collaboration. Not collaboration with your values, or your community, or the future you’re trying to build. No. It’s collaboration with the people and structures actively working against all of those things. Every day. As a condition of participation. And when your job is to find common ground with people who do not believe in the inherent dignity of all human life, something happens. Either you compromise yourself slowly enough that you don’t notice, or you notice and you leave, or you stay and you fight and you win small things while the large machinery keeps running exactly as designed.

I announced a city alderman run and pulled back before I ever filed. My husband served. We both arrived at the same place: the system is not broken. It is working. And working within it, however nobly, is a way of saying it deserves to keep working.

I understand the other side. I do. People are suffering inside this system right now, today, and if you can win a school board seat and keep books on shelves, or sit on a city council and redirect some funding toward people who need it, that’s real. That matters to real people in real time. I’m not dismissing that.

But I think we have to be honest that it is also, in a very specific way, a form of defeat. A sophisticated, well-intentioned, sometimes genuinely helpful form of defeat; but defeat nonetheless. It says: this is the structure we have, and so this is the structure we will work within, and maybe improve at the margins, but not fundamentally challenge. It legitimizes the thing we claim to be fighting. And it absorbs the energy, the brilliance, the fire of people who might otherwise be building the on-ramp to somewhere genuinely different.

It is all so deeply, genuinely fucked. And I think that’s the honest place to stand - not pretending we have the clean answer, but refusing to pretend that running for office inside an illegitimate system is the same thing as building a new one.

It isn’t. And most of us, somewhere quiet inside ourselves, already know that.

—

So. Enough.

Enough diagnosis without construction. Enough imagining the future without doing the embarrassing, unglamorous, deeply unsexy work of actually building toward it. And I include myself in this completely. I’ve been guilty of holding my ideas loosely to the point of holding them uselessly, telling myself they don’t matter until they’ve been tested and agreed upon collectively, which is noble in theory and convenient in practice because it means I never have to be wrong about anything I never fully committed to.

So let me commit to some things.

I think more of us need to know how to protect each other. Physically, tangibly, without outsourcing that protection to a system that was never designed to protect us. That means firearm training. It means understanding how to move through a neighborhood in a way that centers the most vulnerable people in it. The elders, the children, the women, the ones who can’t afford to call for help and have it go wrong. It means men in community being trained and ready to intervene when another man is causing harm. Deescalation first, presence always, accountable to the people around them and not to a badge. It means having an answer, a real one, for the woman who walked into that office and asked us if we had built something different yet.

We need to know our neighbors. Not follow them on socials. Know them. Know that the woman upstairs is alone and that the elder down the block can’t always make it to the trash. Know who on your street is a nurse, who is a mechanic, who has a truck, who knows the law. Know this before something goes wrong, because community built in crisis is fragile. Community built in ordinary time, over borrowed sugar and carried trash bags and conversations on the sidewalk or in a driveway, that’s the stuff that holds.

And we need to feed each other. I mean that literally. Seven households, one cooks dinner for all seven, rotating every day. It sounds almost too simple to matter until you realize what it actually makes. Rhythm, obligation, familiarity, trust. The kind of trust where you already know who to call before you need to call them. Food is not just food. It is the oldest infrastructure we have, and we have let individualism convince us it’s just a personal matter.

None of this is the whole answer. I know that. But the whole answer has been the enemy of any answer for too long in these spaces. We keep waiting to have it perfectly figured out before we start building, and in the meantime real people are doing the best they can in systems that are really harming them, while we talk ourselves in circles.

The future we keep describing is not impossible. But it won’t arrive because we named it correctly. It’ll arrive because somebody, somewhere, got tired of talking and started building - something small, something imperfect, something real enough for a woman in crisis to actually use.

Let that somebody be us.

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“Yet, hope — the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are — dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die.”
— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

There’s an interesting kind of reckoning that happens outside the heat of an argument. In an ordinary moment when something someone says reveals everything you didn’t know you needed to know.

That moment came for me recently. And it revealed something about me. About what I had been carrying, and what was, maybe, never offered to me in return.

I had been extending the benefit of the doubt. Quietly, consistently, even when I was furious. Even when I had every reason not to. I held the belief that my friend was trying. That their intentions, however clumsy or harmful in execution, were not malicious. I showed up to hard conversations with open hands. I showed up believing in the possibility of a different outcome. That is what I do. It is, I now better understand, what I’ve always done.

And then came the moment. A comment, laced with suspicion, that made me question whether I’d ever been seen that way. That while I was busy believing the best, the deficit of the doubt was being extended to me. Not the benefit. The deficit. The assumption that I would cause harm. That I could not be trusted. That I needed to be monitored, managed, suspected.

— — —

I’m gonna pause here and name what these two things actually are, because I think we move past them too quickly, sometimes in conversation.

The benefit of the doubt is an act of imagination. It requires you to hold open the possibility that a person is more than your worst fear of them. It asks you to look at incomplete information and choose, consciously, to fill the gap with something generous. It is not naivety. It is not weakness. It is a discipline. A chosen position toward another human being that says: I will not decide who you are, in this moment, before you have had the chance to show me.

The deficit of the doubt is its opposite. It is the assumption, often unconscious, that the worst is already true. That the gap in information should be filled with suspicion. That the person in front of you is probably guilty of whatever you fear most. It doesn’t announce itself. It hides in a loaded question, a side-eye, a hesitation that reveals what someone actually believes about you underneath the civility.

And what does that type of revelation do? It reframes everything. Every interaction you thought was neutral suddenly has a shadow over it. You realize you were never being received the way you were showing up. That your openness was being read as something to be decoded and managed. That your trust was not trusted back.

That’s not a small realization. It’s paramount. Because it means the relationship was never what you thought it was. You were in something alone.

— — —

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There’s something else I want to say about the deficit of the doubt, and I want to say it clearly: it is never really about the person it’s projected onto. It’s a confession. And it’s a confession of two things.

The first is fear. When someone assumes the worst of you, before you’ve been given the chance to be anything in that moment, they are revealing the architecture of their own fear. Their own unexamined bias. Their own inability to see past what they’ve already decided is true.

The second is something more unsettling. The deficit of the doubt is also a map of the other person’s moral imagination. When someone assumes you are going to betray them, they are telling you what they would do. When someone assumes you are out to cause harm, they are disclosing what lives inside their own repertoire. They’re not reading you. They’re projecting themselves onto you and holding you accountable for a crime that exists only in their own imagination because it’s something they themselves are capable of.

You tell on yourself when you expect the worst of others. The deficit of the doubt is not a verdict on the person receiving it. It’s a disclosure of the person holding it - their fears, absolutely, but also their potential for the very thing they’re accusing you of.

That doesn’t make it hurt less. But it does make it mean something different. You’re not being seen. You are being mistaken for someone else’s shadow.

— — —

Because here is what I know about the benefit of the doubt: for Black people, for people of color, it’s not optional. It’s survival strategy. It’s the thing we extend - to white colleagues, to institutions, to systems that have never extended it to us - because the alternative is to be consumed by what those relationships actually are. We extend grace as a matter of necessity. We choose to believe you mean well because believing otherwise, and acting on that belief, has consequences we cannot always afford.

And it’s not only race. Women know this, too - particularly in professional spaces, in partnerships, in rooms where the power has never been evenly distributed. The expectation that women will be gracious, accommodating, charitable toward those who hold authority over them, even when that grace is never returned, even when their competence is assumed to be less, their anger assumed to be irrational, their ambition assumed to be threatening. The benefit of the doubt tends to flow upward. The deficit flows down. It pools at the feet of those who already have the least ground to stand on, where there is a power imbalance in identity.

And so we give. And give. And give.

What I’m sitting with now is the weight of that asymmetry. The realization that my generosity of spirit - this thing I thought was a strength, this hope I dig out of the mud each morning - has often been met with something like suspicion. That my openness has been received as something to manage rather than something to honor. That I have been offering a gift that was never acknowledged as such, because the person receiving it didn’t fully understand that I was capable of giving it freely.

That’s not just painful. That is theft.

— — —

And let’s be clear about what’s being stolen. Not just trust. Not just the relationship. What gets taken, slowly and then all at once, is hope. The particular hope that things between people (across difference, gender, race, power…) can be different. Better. That we can show up for one another in ways that history hasn’t ever really modeled for us.

I have staked something essential in me on that hope. It’s threaded through everything I do, everything I write, everything about the way I live my life. It’s the belief that we can be better for one another. Not because history suggests it, but because I’ve chosen to believe it anyway. Every day. Even when the evidence is thin and the mud is thick.

But that hope isn’t just personal. Losing it is not just my tragedy.

Hope is the precondition for change. Not optimism. Optimism is a passive disposition. A comfortable belief that things will probably work out. Hope is active. Hope is the thing that makes you act as though a different world is possible before you have any proof that it is. Hope is what allows us to imagine something we have never seen and then build toward it anyway. It’s the engine of every movement, every act of resistance, every moment where ordinary people decided that what had always been did not have to be what would always be.

And the people most committed to that change - the ones who have the most reason to abandon hope, who have been given every historical justification to stop believing - are often the ones carrying it most fiercely. Black women especially, who navigate both racial and gender dynamics simultaneously, are expected to extend the benefit of the doubt in every direction at once, and who receive the deficit in return from multiple sides. If that hope gets stolen- if the constant deficit of the doubt chips away at the very people whose hope is doing the most structural work - then it’s not just a personal loss. It’s a loss for all of us. It’s the silencing of the moral imagination we need most right now.

— — —

And I’m angry that holding that hope has made me vulnerable to this. I’m angry that my belief in people’s capacity for good has been dismissed. Unseen. Met with its opposite.

I’m angry. And I’m sad. And I am still NOT willing to let it go.

That last part is confusing, even to me. Why hold onto something that keeps leading to disappointment? Why keep digging hope out of the mud when the mud keeps winning?

…because it is mine. Because it’s not theirs to take. Because hope - the real kind, the kind that persists not because the world has earned it but because you have chosen it - is an act of resistance. Of humanity. And I will not be stripped of my sovereignty, of my humanity, by someone else’s inability to see me clearly. By someone else’s deficit of imagination.

So, I hold it. Cracked open and clear-eyed. Still believing we can be better. Still indignantly furious that most often we aren’t.

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In many ways, I’m done with men. Not as a performance, not as a theory to test out in my writing. As a real considered position, arrived at slowly, through years of evidence. The manosphere has handed a megaphone to the worst impulses of masculinity and called it a movement… and it has been effective. It has radicalized boys in their bedrooms, given cover to abusers, and built a political climate where the control of women’s bodies is policy. It has made the world more dangerous for women, for gender nonconforming people, for anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow mold it worships. I didn’t arrive at my exhaustion carelessly. I’ve earned this fatigue.

Honestly? My husband is also done with men. We’ve talked about it. He gets it. He understands - in his bones, not just intellectually - why matriarchal structures exist, why they have always existed, and why the world could use a lot more of them right now. He’s not defensive about this. He’s not the guy who needs to be reassured, “…not all men”. He knows what men, as a collective, have done. What they continue to do. And how they have benefitted from all of it. And he has spent his life trying to be something different.

Today is his birthday (May 12th), and I want to say some true things about him - not to hold him up as proof that men are fine (because whoa boy are they decidedly NOT fine), but to name what it actually looks like when one gets it (mostly) right. Men seem to be handed two scripts: the red-pilled alpha who takes what he wants, or the performatively woke guy who’s read the right books but still centers himself in every room. My husband is neither. He is something rarer. And as a Black American man, where the world has decided, loudly and in advance, exactly who he is supposed to be - everything he is, he has chosen deliberately, outside of every paradigm built to contain him.

He understands my rage. Not tolerates it, but understands it. He knows why I don’t want men in my life, why my trust has edges. He understands why I can get mean when it comes to interactions and conversations - that safety is first, and autonomy is a close second, and if I feel either starting to be compromised (physically, emotionally, or otherwise), there’s a justified feminine rage that emerges. He doesn’t take it personally, because he knows it isn’t personal. It’s structural. And he has spent his life working against those structures; in domestic violence work, in sexual assault advocacy, in the halls of a state legislature where he fought to get basic needs met for people whose lives he would never fully understand and never pretended to. In an era of men who govern women’s bodies while knowing nothing of their lives, that distinction matters.

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We lead this family together and what that looks like shifts. Sometimes it’s equal weight, both of us at the table. Sometimes one of us steps forward and the other steps back, and we move between those positions without ego, without scorekeeping. He trusts my instincts, my intuition, even when I’m deep in my magick and witchy side and he can’t fully follow where I’m going. He follows anyway. And when he leads, I trust him the same way. That fluidity - the ability to hold authority loosely, to pass it back and forth as the moment calls for - is quietly radical in a cultural moment that is working overtime to put women back in their place and call it natural order. Most men are too afraid of what it means to not always be in front. To not always be seen as the head. He never has been.

He loves all of my crazy (and I mean that clinically). There are episodes. There are nights that require him to hold me, physically, until they pass. He does. And the next morning he shows up with the same love, nothing diminished, nothing held back. I will never fully understand what that type of constant costs him, and I will never find the words to explain what it means to me.

He is still learning and he knows it, and he is okay with that. He can be corrected without his ego crumbling. He can hear a position that might make another man defensive and sit with it, turn it over, actually listen. He apologizes when he’s gotten something wrong, and he means it. This is rarer than it should be. In a political moment built on the fantasy of male grievance, on the idea that men are the ones being silenced, corrected, displaced, a man who can receive correction with sincerity and grace is not just a good partner. He is a small, steady argument against everything the manosphere is selling.

He spent 18 months as a stay-at-home dad while we traveled Asia and I was the one working - and felt no sting toward his manhood for it. Now the roles have reversed; I stay home and write while he works, and he carries that just as easily. He moves through these arrangements the way a person does when their identity was never built on who’s bringing home the paycheck. He is soft in all the ways men are told softness is weakness - with his children, with his friends, with himself - and (as far as I can tell) he has never once seemed to believe the lie of who he is ‘supposed’ to be.

He is a father to two girls. He does their hair. He buys period products without ceremony. He talks to them (REALLY talks to them!) about their bodies, their autonomy, about boys, about how sex can be used (and often is used) as a tool of power and how it doesn’t have to be. He is raising them to know that their yes and their no belong entirely to them. All this at a time when that knowledge is under legislative attack, when the bodies of girls and women are once again being treated as public property. He is building women, people, who know what they’re worth. In this climate, that’s an act of resistance. It’s also just good parenting. He manages to make those two things the same.

He understands that investing in people - in children, in community, in the quiet labor of keeping a society functioning - rarely pays off in ways you get to see. You plant seeds because it’s the right thing to do. Someone else harvests. The manosphere has no patience for this. It wants immediate returns, visible dominance, a world arranged in its favor right now. My husband has always been more interested in what he can leave behind than what he can take. He shows up anyway.

So today I want to celebrate him: loudly, publicly, without qualification. Not as a symbol or a counterargument or a reassurance to anyone. As himself. A Black American man who looked at every script the world handed him and decided to write his own. A husband who holds me through the dark and leads beside me in the light. A father raising daughters who will know, from lived example, what a good man actually looks like. A person who is still becoming, still listening, still showing up - and doing all of it with more grace and more love than the world ever asked of him or gave him reason to expect.

I am still, mostly, done with men. But I chose this one. I choose him every day. Happy birthday to the man who taught me the exception doesn’t disprove the rule, it just shows what’s possible when someone refuses to follow it.

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This was supposed to be a different essay.

I had one ready. I’d written after a handful of weeks of contemplation; in the particular feverish way you write something when it’s been living in your chest too long. It was about Black women and white women. The intimacy and the injury, the way those relationships can hold so much care and love and so much unexamined harm in the same hand. It was true. It was real. It was vulnerable in the way that cost me something.

And it was also, if I’m being honest with myself …mean.

Not wrong. Not untrue. But mean - the way things can be mean when they’re written for someone even if you insist they’re for everyone. I know the difference between a piece that’s ready and a piece that’s still settling. That one is still settling. So it goes back in the drawer, and I come to you with what’s actually happening right now.

My dad has been sick all year (stroke, pace-maker, other stuff…). My stepmom died. This past weekend, my mother was hospitalized.

I live in Thailand.

I want you to sit with that geography for a moment, because I’ve had to. The distance isn’t just miles, either. It’s time zones that mean your phone rings at 3am. It’s WhatsApp voice notes you play over and over trying to read tone. It’s the particular discombobulation of learning something terrible while standing in a place that is beautiful and foreign and entirely indifferent to your grief.

And it’s also important to recognize that I chose this. I chose to build a life here, in a place that is genuinely beautiful, while the people I love most are back in a country that is, right now, experiencing its own laundry list of crisis. My friends are navigating societal unrest and governmental failures that feel, from here, both very far away and completely inescapable. I am not complaining about my life. I am not performing gratitude either. I am just trying to be honest about the full picture, because I’m always gonna be honest about what IS and because, right now, what IS, is complex. And because I think you already know that “living abroad” is a phrase that contains multitudes.

I am my mother’s only child. And I am very, very far away.

People, well-meaning and loving people, keep asking me some version of the same question: Shouldn’t you go home?

What they mean, underneath the words, is: Don’t you owe them that?

And I’ve been sitting with that, because I think that word, OWE, is doing a lot of work that we’ve never asked it to account for.

We treat filial obligation like it’s a law of nature. Like the debt is simply there, self-evident, pre-installed. You exist because of your parents, therefore you owe them: your time, your proximity, your sacrifices, your choices. The math seems so clear and easy.

But I’ve been sitting with that word in the 3am dark, and it doesn’t hold the way I was told it would. Because owing implies a transaction. It implies a contract. And most of us, especially those of us raised in cultures that sanctify parental sacrifice, who are Black and were told that our mothers carried us through everything, never got to sign that contract. It was signed for us. On our behalf. Before we could speak.

What do we do with a debt we never agreed to?

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And the thing that never makes it into that question: I have a husband. I have children. I have a life here, in Thailand, that is also full of people who love me and are watching me come apart at the seams from the inside.

If I owe my mom and dad my presence, what do I owe them? What does it mean to be physically in a place but hollowed out by the pull of responsibility of somewhere else? My girls don’t need my body at the dinner table. They need me actually there, eyes forward, able to laugh at something, able to be curious about their day. My husband didn’t sign up to hold me together indefinitely from a distance of only 12 inches.

The debt doesn’t just run one direction. It runs everywhere. And when you start to follow all the lines of debt outward, what you find is that someone is always going to come up short. The framework guarantees it. You cannot fully pay everyone at once, and so you are always, by definition, in default somewhere.

That is not a personal failing. That is what happens when you try to run love like a balance sheet.

I want to be clear about something: I am not arguing against caring for parents. I am not constructing an elaborate philosophical escape for my own guilt, though the guilt is real and present and sitting right next to me.

What I’m questioning is the framing. The difference between: I want to show up for my mom because I love her and I must show up for my mom because I owe her my presence. Those sentences feel similar. They can produce the same action. But they come from completely different places inside a person, and I think the difference matters.

One is love navigating complexity. The other is a ledger.

And when I look at the lives of so many Black women I know, the ones who moved back home, who paused careers, who swallowed their own lives to sit at bedsides, I notice that the ledger framing doesn’t actually make them feel better. It makes them feel trapped. Like the debt can never quite be repaid. Like care becomes duty becomes resentment, over years.

I don’t know what I’m gonna do, yet. I’m watching flights. I’m holding two truths that don’t resolve cleanly into each other: I am someone who loves her parents fiercely and I built a life that is not in the same country as them, and both of those things were choices, and choices have weight.

But I also built a life with a man who chose me back, and children who need a mother who is present and not simply accounted for. And I cannot pay everyone. I cannot be everywhere. I cannot make the math work.

So I am trying to let go of the math entirely.

I refuse to carry any of this as debt. I want to carry it as love.

I’m learning the difference. Love asks what’s actually needed. Debt just pays.

The other piece will come when it’s ready. Some things need more distance before they can find their form.

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Klay Thompson had a woman who cooked Thanksgiving dinner for his entire family. Who held him down through what she described as his “horrible mood swings” during basketball season. Who was, publicly and unapologetically, in it with him. He had Megan Thee Stallion. And he cheated anyway: then told her he wasn’t sure he could be “monogamous,” as if that were some exotic requirement she’d invented.

What happened in response to the news has been leaving me wondering about the real issue with men and women in relationship to each other.

The male section of the internet didn’t cringe. They cheered. They went digging for receipts on Megan. They resurfaced old videos. One man said plainly: “Megan ain’t sh*t to an NBA n*gga.” Like her talent, her loyalty, her grief - all of it is reducible to her usefulness to a man.

These responses made me stop asking how or why Klay would do that to Megan, and I started asking a question that runs a bit deeper:

Do men actually like women?

Not want. Not desire. Not need. Like. Do they find us interesting when we’re not being useful? Do they actually enjoy us: not what we provide, but who we are?

And I want to be clear here: I'm talking about straight-presenting men. Not because queer men are exempt from harm or patriarchy, but because the specific performance of heterosexual masculinity is its own thing and it's the thing I'm watching play out in these comment sections.

Because I’m not sure they do. And I want to talk about why. But I also need to be honest with you about where I sit in this argument, because this question has a trap in it, and I’m not sure I can avoid it.

I’m a Black woman. I grew up in the American South. And from the time I was a little girl, I understood, before I had words for it, that my role in the world was relational. What are you to your mama? To your grandmother? To your community? To your church? To this man, one day, and these children?

Because we carry the relational weight of entire communities on our backs while also being told (implicitly, explicitly, constantly) that we are the least desirable, the least protected, the least worth showing up for. We are socialized to give everything and positioned as the ones least likely to receive anything back. Megan Thee Stallion is one of the most famous, successful, educated, beautiful women alive and grown men spent the weekend deciding she wasn’t enough. If she’s not enough, what exactly is the standard?

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with: boys and girls are not just raised differently. They are raised toward completely opposite ideas about what it means to be a person in the world.

Boys are raised toward the self. Make something of yourself. Provide. Don’t let anyone have power over you. Accumulate. A man’s worth is measured by what he can build and defend alone.

Girls are raised toward the we. Who are you to other people? How do you take care of them? We are taught to locate ourselves in relationship and if we want too much, need too much, take up too much space, we get corrected. Fast. I learned that early. Most of us do.

The research on this tells the same story. Carol Gilligan, a psychologist and philosopher, spent years studying how boys and girls develop and found that when you ask women to describe themselves, they describe their relationships. When you ask men, they describe what separates them from others. And Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, Black women who were doing this intellectual work long before it was fashionable, went further. Collins mapped how Black women have always operated from community and care not because we’re naturally saintly but because our survival demanded it. We never had the luxury of the individual. hooks wrote about how the refusal to genuinely see another person is baked into the same systems that produce white supremacy and patriarchal capitalism. It’s all connected. It has always been connected.

Boys and girls grow up in genuinely separate social worlds. Different friendships, different ideas about what connection is for. Then we grow up and pair off and act shocked when something doesn’t work.

I don’t think they can. And I think the internet’s reaction to Megan proves it. Her loyalty wasn’t admirable to them. Her vulnerability wasn’t courage. Her relational investment - all that cooking, all that holding down, was processed as something she owed him. Expected. Unremarkable.

That’s not a Klay Thompson problem. That’s a what-we-made-of-men problem.

And here’s where I have to stop for a few moments.

Because I can feel my own bias in all of this, and I think it would be dishonest not to name it.

I was raised to believe that community is the point. That taking care of each other is the whole thing: the reason we’re here, the thing that makes us human. So when I look at the way men are socialized toward the individual and call it lesser, I have to ask myself: is that actually true? Or is that just my socialization talking back at theirs? Am I examining a broken system or am I just a woman who was trained to value one thing looking down at men who were trained to value another?

I go around this loop more than is healthy.

And I think the loop matters. I think the willingness to stay in it is actually part of what I’m trying to say - because the alternative, the confidence that I’m right and they’re wrong, feels a little too easy. A little too much like the same certainty that got us here.

But then I come back to this: one of these orientations is currently burning the world down. The worship of the individual over the collective; the accumulate, dominate, compete & take framework is the engine behind climate destruction, economic inequality, the gutting of care systems, the epidemic of male loneliness, the cheering when a man hurts a woman who loved him well. That’s not a bias talking. That’s a pattern. And patterns can be named even by people who aren’t neutral.

So yes, I was socialized toward community. And I think community is more right. I’m trying to have an intellectually honest conversation and have to hold BOTH of those things, at one time.

Now here’s the part that I think gets missed when we have this conversation.

You don’t have to like somebody. That is actually fine. Not everybody has to be for everybody. That’s a real thing, and I mean it. What you don’t get to do is not like someone and still demand access to them.

Because that’s what’s actually happening. Men who don’t respect women, don’t find us interesting, don’t value our way of being in the world - they still want the cooking. Still want the sex. Still want the emotional labor and the softness and the forgiveness. They want every benefit that comes from a woman who is fully invested, without the basic dignity of actually giving a damn about her as a person.

That is not indifference. That is entitlement playing dress-up as indifference.

And here’s what tells the whole story: women who are done with men tend to actually be done. They build something. They find community. They go on and make something beautiful. Black women especially have a centuries-long tradition of building full lives when men failed to show up (Yes, we recognize there are moments outside of our community’s control as to why our men may not have been able to show up). The church mothers. The sister circles. The we’ll figure it out ourselves brilliance that has held whole communities together. That is not bitterness. That is genius born out of necessity.

Men who claim they don’t need women, don’t like women, don’t find women worth basic respect? They will not leave us alone. They are still here. In our mentions. At our doors. Wanting something from the very women they claim to have no regard for.

So let me ask the question the other way, because it’s only fair.

Do women actually like men?

I think a lot of women - if they were being really honest, not socialized-to-be-kind honest, would have to sit with that one for a minute (or maybe not…). How many of us have been with someone we didn’t particularly like? How many of us made ourselves smaller, quieter, easier, because the full version of who we are was apparently too much? How many of us were performing the whole time? Performing fine, performing low-maintenance, performing I don’t need much because we’d already learned what happened when we stopped?

That’s not liking either. That’s its own kind of not-liking, just pointed inward.

If men have been socialized away from the tools they’d need to genuinely like women, women have been socialized into performing a version of themselves that makes it easier for men not to have to try. Neither of those is liking. Both are just people trying to survive inside something that was never built for any of this to actually work.

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Men did not sit down at seven years old and design a system to hollow out their own capacity for connection. The isolation, the emotional illiteracy, the not knowing how to ask for help or admit fault- that damage is real and I’m not dismissing it.

But men didn’t just inherit these systems. They built them. And they maintain them; every day, in boardrooms and courtrooms and living rooms and comment sections. You can be shaped by a system and also be its primary beneficiary. You can be harmed by something and also be the reason it keeps running. That’s actually how the whole thing stays intact - it gives the people enforcing it just enough to keep them from walking away. To keep them from questioning it.

Racism works the same way, and I can’t talk about any of this without naming it. Black men get the most brutal version of this conditioning, don’t be soft, don’t need anything, don’t connect, and get the least back in return. Harmed by patriarchy and weaponized by it at the same time. That’s not a side note. That’s central to how deep this goes.

And the men who have enough power to actually change something, who are close enough to the levers to pull them: most of them don’t. That is a choice, made fresh every single day.

I don’t have a resolution. I never did.

What I have is the question. And the honest answer, as best as I can give it from inside my own loop, inside my own particular experience of being a Black woman raised in the South to care and keep caring even when it cost her…

I can’t give you a clean diagnosis or a prescription. But I can tell you that a world organized around the individual at the expense of the collective is a world that is failing and the evidence is everywhere. In the loneliness epidemic. In the way we treat the earth. In the cheering when a man burns down something a woman built for him.

We’ve been asking why can’t men and women get along, as if it’s a communication problem. As if the right book or the right therapy or the right conversation could fix it. And maybe those things help at the margins. But the gap isn’t a communication problem. It’s a values problem. It’s a socialization problem. It’s a structural problem. Capitalism needs the individual. Patriarchy needs hierarchy. Racism needs fracture. None of these systems benefit from men and women genuinely recognizing each other as full human beings.

Klay Thompson allegedly couldn’t stay faithful to one of the most remarkable women alive. And the men who cheered weren’t broken or uniquely terrible. They were just formed. By the same thing that formed him. By the same thing that formed all of us.

I don’t know if men like women. I’m not sure women fully like men either, underneath all the performance of it.

But I know this: you don’t get to not like someone and still demand everything from them. You don’t get to dismiss someone’s entire way of being in the world and still show up at their door wanting to be fed.

That’s not dislike. That’s something else entirely.

And I’m going to keep saying so, even if I can’t fully untangle myself from the thing I’m critiquing. Even if my conviction and my conditioning are so wrapped around each other I can’t always tell them apart.

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We are living in a strange moment in human history. A moment in which we’ve built tools so sophisticated that we have begun to confuse their sophistication for wisdom. The proliferation of artificial intelligence has not simply changed the way we work or communicate; It has begun to quietly reshape the way we think, or more explicitly, if we think at all.

The question worth asking is not whether or not AI is impressive. It is. The question is whether its overwhelming presence in daily life is moving us closer to knowledge, or further from it. There is a growing argument, one that deserves serious consideration, that we are not advancing toward deeper understanding, but retreating from it. That each automated response pushes us further into stupidity as a species (and when I look around, it’s hard to deny the stupid).

We seem, as a culture, to have drifted from valuing intelligence as an internal condition toward rewarding it as an external performance and mimicking. The appearance of ‘knowing’ has become more currency than the actual possession of knowledge. We celebrate the fast answer over the considered one. We reward productivity over reflection. And now we have built machines that are the ultimate expression of that value system, entities that can perform the act of intelligence without any of its substance.

But is there actually a difference between performing intelligence and possessing it? I don’t think this a trivial question, and it’s one that no one, has really been able to answer – not even the most forward-thinking minds of ancient or contemporary philosophy.

Consider this: if someone can produce a correct answer without understanding why it is correct, have they demonstrated intelligence? And is the opposite true? If someone possesses deep knowledge but never applies it, never acts on it, never engages with the world through it, is that intelligence? There seems to be something missing in both directions.

A Three-Pronged Definition & And What We’re Losing

Intelligence, properly understood, cannot be reduced to data retrieval or task performance. It requires three things working together in concert.

The first is accumulation - the gathering of information, data, and knowledge. This is the most basic tier, and the one our tools have mastered. AI can accumulate and retrieve at a scale no human can match.

The second is action - the appropriate application of that knowledge. This is where many people stop when defining intelligence, and where AI appears most convincingly capable. It can act on information in ways that look, from the outside, indistinguishable from human reasoning.

But the third (and this is the one I think matters most) is contextualization. Specifically, the contextualization of history and lived experience. To truly understand a piece of knowledge is to understand where it comes from, what it displaced, what it cost, what it means inside the entirety of human history. It means feeling the weight of consequence, not in the abstract, but as something that has moved through you personally. This is not a function of processing power. It is a function of having been present. Of having suffered something, chosen something, lost something.

AI does not have this. But that by itself is not the crisis.

The crisis is that technology, AI in particular, is teaching us that we do not need it (the ‘it’ being contextualization) either.

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Lived experience has always been difficult. It is slow. It’s often painful. It is uncertain. And now, for the first time in human history, we have tools sophisticated enough to help us route around it. We can simulate conversations we are afraid to have. We can receive emotional support without the vulnerability of asking another person for it. We can make decisions guided by the recommendation of an algorithm rather than sitting in the discomfort of not yet knowing. We can consume curated versions of reality so seamlessly personalized that we are rarely confronted with anything that truly challenges us.

Experience, in other words, is being outsourced. And more than outsourced, it’s being discouraged. The entire architecture of modern technology is optimized for frictionlessness, for speed, for the removal of discomfort.

When we remove friction, remove challenge, when we hand our uncertainty to a machine, when we let an algorithm decide what we read, who we connect with, how we interpret what we feel - we are not just saving time. We are skipping the experiences that would have taught us how to think, how to feel, and how to understand what our knowledge actually means.

Contextualization can’t be downloaded. It can’t be prompted. It accumulates through years of making choices and living inside their consequences. It is built from the specific texture of living a life - from grief and error and joy and surprise. And if we are not having those experiences, if we are outsourcing or bypassing or optimizing our way around them, then we are not simply failing to develop the third prong of intelligence.

We are losing the capacity to develop it at all.

Without all three, what you have is not intelligence. It is an imitation of it.

The Transcendentalist Challenge

There is an older philosophical tradition of thinking about knowledge that becomes newly radical in the age of AI - Transcendentalism. Rooted in the belief that human beings can arrive at truth not only through reason and empirical observation, but through intuition and direct personal experience. Transcendentalism proposes something that no algorithm can easily accommodate: that we are connected to a larger consciousness, a kind of divine knowing, simply by virtue of existing in and as a part of nature.

If that’s true (even a little true), then intelligence is not merely computational. It is, in fact, relational. It is the product of being alive, of suffering and wondering and loving and failing. It is inseparable from the experience of being a creature in the world.

By that measure, AI cannot be intelligent. Not because it lacks processing power, but because it lacks nature. It wasn’t born. It doesn’t die. It has no stake in the answers it produces. And this raises a question worth sitting with: how much manipulation of natural resources, how much human engineering and intervention, must occur before something loses its claim to being natural at all? A beaver builds a dam. Is the dam natural? Natural elements have been manipulated but the dam doesn’t occur naturally. The dam, while not occurring naturally, is often seen as something that is a part of nature; much like the beaver, itself. AI is something different, it is nature’s materials arranged, in complexity, in the complete service of humanity, with no nature of its own.

This is why the name itself is a problem. Artificial Intelligence is, at its core, a misnomer. What is present is not intelligence. What is present is a mirror, an extraordinarily detailed, responsive, and often useful mirror, that reflects back the patterns of human thought without any of the context and LIFE that makes thought meaningful.

What We Have to Acknowledge

For the first time in recorded human history, we are watching a generational cognitive decline that cannot be attributed to disease or disaster. Generations Z and Alpha are demonstrating measurably lower cognitive capabilities than their parents. This is not because they are less capable as human beings, but because the tools built to assist them have, in many ways, begun to replace important muscles that intelligence requires. The muscle of critical thinking, like any muscle, atrophies without use.

We have to acknowledge that.

Not as an indictment of technology. Not as nostalgia for some imagined purer past. But as a clear-eyed reckoning with what we are trading away, and whether we have consented to that trade.

When we outsource the performance of intelligence, we don’t free our minds. We hollow them out.

The Question That Remains

So, what is intelligence? It is the accumulation of knowledge, yes. It is the action that knowledge demands. But above all, it is the hard, human work of contextualization. Of placing what we know inside the full weight of history and experience and asking, honestly, what it means.

AI can do many things. It can search and synthesize and generate and perform. But it cannot sit with uncertainty the way a human must. It cannot feel the gravity of being wrong. It cannot understand, in any lived sense, what is at stake.

That is not a flaw in its design. It is simply what it is.

The flaw would be in forgetting what WE are, as humans.

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I need to tell you something true: what I feel and what I know are at war with each other right now. And I’m writing this anyway, because writing is one of the things keeping me upright.

I have BPD - Borderline Personality Disorder. If you know, you know. If you don’t, the short version is this: my nervous system processes abandonment, loss, and fear at a volume most people never experience. With such intensity, it can be crushing. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not drama. It’s a neurological reality I’ve spent years learning to live with. And mostly, I do. Mostly, I’m good at it.

This last month has been a test of everything I’ve built.

* * *

My two daughters and I are in Malaysia right now. We live in Thailand, but to get our long-term visas sorted, we had to leave the country. My husband was back in Thailand for the first three weeks: work, logistics, life. It was just me and the girls.

And then, one by one, things started falling apart.

My business partner told me she was taking a different path. And while it wasn’t entirely a surprise, surprise has nothing to do with it when your brain has spent its whole life waiting for people to leave. My abandonment wound lit up like a flare. I was already away from home, already parenting solo, already tender. And now this.

Then our cat died. We’d rehomed him when we left the US in 2024. It was a decision that already carried guilt, the quiet ache of having chosen something over someone. When I got the news, what I felt wasn’t just grief. It was the specific, crushing grief of: I left him, and now he’s gone, and I wasn’t there. Another failure to add to the pile I was already building in my head.

And then my stepmother died. Suddenly, unexpectedly. My dad had been sick since new year’s – I’d been so worried about him - and then she was just gone. She and I were estranged, and I want to be clear: that was right. That estrangement was the right thing for me. I don’t carry regret about it. But none of that insulates you from shock. None of that means the ground doesn’t shift when someone is suddenly, permanently no longer in the world. Grief doesn’t require a perfect relationship. It just requires that someone existed, and now they don’t. She existed. And now she doesn’t. And I was in a short term rental in another country trying to hold that, and trying to help my daughters hold their own grief; something big and new for them, the first real loss close enough to feel, while I could barely hold my own head above water.

I needed someone to hold me, and there was no one there to do it. Not home in Thailand. Not back in the States with family. Just me, and my girls, and the weight of all of it.

* * *

When my husband finally arrived, I fell apart on him. Completely. The kind of falling apart that scared him. That scared me. I split. In BPD terms, splitting is when the emotional regulation breaks down so completely that the world becomes black and white, all or nothing, and the person in front of you becomes the target of everything you’ve been holding. It is not rational. It is not fair. And it is real.

He didn’t want to be in the same room as me for a time. And I - I didn’t want to be alive. Not in a planned way. In a drowning way. In a I cannot understand how to carry this, everything is crumbling, and I am failing everyone way. I scared myself badly enough that I was happy that I’d made the decision to move our rental from the 30th floor to the 6th.

I hadn’t split in over three years. And once I could hear him again, once I came back, it took hours, not the 5-7 business days it used to take.

That matters. That is growth, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment. Even if the shame that comes after splitting is its own kind of weight I’m still carrying.

* * *

Here’s where we are now: my husband got his visa. He has to go back to Thailand next week because work starts again. Me and the girls are still waiting. The embassy keeps asking for documents that weren’t on the original list, and the latest thing they need can’t be provided until the 16th, because his job is on break. So we wait. We spend money on a second place to live in another country. We eat out. We wait some more. And all I want, with every cell in my body, is to go home.

I do all the things I’m supposed to do. I write; like I’m doing right now. I read. I drink water. I puzzle. I stay present with my girls as much as I can. I reach out to friends when I need to talk. I journal. I listen to and watch K-pop. I do everything in my toolkit, and I still find myself weeping once an hour. I still feel helpless and stuck and like I keep failing.

And here’s something I almost didn’t include, because part of me thinks it sounds ridiculous given everything else: I’m really sad about potentially missing a concert. One of my favorite K-pop artists is performing in Bangkok on the 26th. I got tickets (miraculously, genuinely miraculously!) and if we can’t get home in time, I’ll miss it. I’ve already spent the money. And I am grieving it.

I started to write why does that even matter, started to shame myself for caring about something so small when real, heavy things are happening. But I stopped. Because here’s the thing:

* * *

This is what mental illness looks like. Not the version that gets shared once someone is safely on the other side of it, cleaned up and resolved. This is the live version. The version happening right now, in real time, in a rental in Kuala Lumpur with my two girls laughing down the hall.

It looks like this:

I hold shame for splitting on my husband AND I also know that coming back in hours instead of days is three years of hard work showing up when I needed it most.

I feel like I failed my business partner AND I also know that a partnership ending is not always someone’s fault, even when my brain insists on making it mine.

I am hurt that my cat is gone, that I wasn’t there, that I left and couldn’t go back AND I also know that I made the best decision for him with the choices I had in front of me at the time.

I am carrying grief for my stepmother - real, genuine, unexpected grief - for a woman I was estranged from for the right reasons. Both things are true. Grief doesn’t need a perfect relationship to show up uninvited.

I am trying to hold space for my daughters through something big and new for them, while barely holding space for myself AND I am showing them, whether I mean to or not, that feelings don’t have to be hidden to be survived.

I am exhausted and stuck and spending money I’d rather not spend, waiting on a government that keeps moving the goalposts, desperate to go home to the life I’ve built. And I’m still here. Still going.

I am sad about a concert. I needed that joy. I deserve that joy. That is allowed.

And I am a mess. A functioning, feeling, fighting mess, doing every single thing in my toolkit, weeping once an hour, and putting one foot in front of the other anyway.

I know the difference between what I feel and what’s true, and it’s still this hard.

This is not failure. This is the work.

What I feel and what I know are still at war. But I’m still showing up to the fight. And maybe, today, that has to be enough.

I’m not writing this from the other side. I’m writing it from the middle, because if you’re in the middle too, I want you to know that someone else is there with you. Doing the things. Weeping anyway. Choosing to stay.

This is what it looks like to live with a loud mind and keep going. It’s not pretty. But it’s real.

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On a random Tuesday, it looks like this:

You’re sitting across from someone you love, a friend, a parent, a partner, watching them move through their routine. Work, home, sleep, repeat. And something in you wants to grab them by the shoulders, not out of anger, but out of something closer to disbelief. Because the world is doing something to them, something visible and systematic and ongoing, and they have simply... accepted it. Filed it under that’s just how it is. And moved on.

And you sit there, alone in a room full of people, wondering: when did this happen? Was it one moment, or a thousand small ones? When did they stop reaching for more?

This is not loneliness. You may be deeply loved. You may have people. This is something else.

There is a reason Plato’s Allegory of the Cave has lasted as long as it has. He described prisoners chained inside a cave, watching shadows on a wall, mistaking those shadows for the whole of reality. The allegory is usually taught as a thought experiment - abstract, ancient, safely philosophical. But some of us don’t experience it as a metaphor. Some of us live with the persistent, disorienting awareness that we are in the cave, watching the wall, and that most of the people around us have stopped questioning whether there is anything beyond it.

That is cognitive isolation.

Not madness. Not arrogance. Not the delusion that you alone have access to some hidden truth. It is the specific, chronic experience of perceiving something clearly that the people around you cannot or will not see. Of holding an awareness that has nowhere to land. Of being fluent in a language most people have been systematically discouraged from speaking - so long ago, so gradually, that many don’t remember being discouraged at all.

And the isolating part, the part that is hard to explain without sounding insufferable, is that you keep pointing anyway. You point at the wall and say, “there is more beyond this”. You say it at dinner, in conversations, in the things you write, in the choices you make. You say it because you cannot unknow what you know. And people get tired of it. Sometimes you get tired of it. There is a particular exhaustion in being the person who won’t let it go, who keeps returning to the same observations, the same questions, the same insistence that things do not have to be this way.

The danger, and this is the part that requires real honesty, is that the isolation becomes its own kind of cave. That the experience of not being heard curls inward until you stop reaching toward people entirely. Until the witness stops testifying, not because the truth changed, but because the silence became easier than the distance. Than continuously being misunderstood. Unheard. That is the tension at the center of cognitive isolation: staying awake without letting wakefulness become its own wall.

The question worth sitting with is not why can’t they see it. That’s a lonely question and it leads nowhere useful. The more honest question is: what happened? What does it take to convince an entire society to accept the bare minimum and call it enough? The answer is not sudden or dramatic. It’s more slow and deliberate. Built from systems that benefit from resignation, that are sustained by it, that require it. When people stop imagining more for themselves, they stop demanding more. That’s not by accident.

And the wall keeps getting updated, because it has to. It is not only the old shadows now: the routine, the resignation, the quiet acceptance of less. It is also the new ones, the sophisticated ones, carefully engineered to satisfy just enough so that the deeper questions never quite surface. Not enough to free you. Just enough to quiet the part of you that might have started asking. A treatment that addresses the symptom without ever naming the wound. A social feed that gives you the sensation of being informed without the discomfort of being moved. A technology that feels like advancement, but is really detachment. These are not accidents or side effects. They are features. Someone is running the projector, and they are very good at their job. The cave did not evolve on its own. It was renovated, deliberately, by people who understand that a distraction that feels like relief is far more effective than one that feels like the cave you’re in.

It’s not that these things are purely evil (whatever that means). That would be too simple. It’s that they are very good at mimicking arrival. At making you feel like you’ve addressed something when you’ve actually just quieted it.

But here is what I want to ask you, not as a challenge, just as a genuine question, one worth sitting with:

What would it take for you to start asking bigger questions? Not to have all the answers. Not to burn everything down. Just to begin. To let yourself want more than what you’ve been handed and to ask, out loud, why the ceiling is where it is.

Is it that the questions feel too large, too destabilizing? Is it that the cost of seeing clearly seems higher than the cost of not seeing? Do you really believe that the wall is all there is? Or is it that what I’m describing sounds like a different language? One that was never made available to you, and so it lands as noise rather than a signal?

Because that last one matters. Cognitive isolation is not about being more awake than someone else. It is about the distance between two people who are both trying to make sense of the world, but were handed entirely different tools for doing it. That distance is not fixed. Language can be learned. Questions can be borrowed. The wall can be named, even by someone who has spent a lifetime taking it for granted and at face value.

You don’t have to arrive anywhere in particular. You just have to be willing to look up and wonder.

The flicker at the center of all this is not hope as a feeling. It is imagination as a choice. The refusal to accept that resignation is natural, or neutral, or inevitable. The refusal to accept what has been handed to us as truth or ‘the only way’. Not being satisfied with ‘...just the way it is’. The Underground Railroad was not built on the certainty that slavery would end. It was built on the refusal to behave as though it was acceptable while it existed. That it could be all there is, because that’s all there was!

Some of us sit with the awareness of the cave and keep asking how and why. Not because we have answers, but because asking the questions is itself a form of staying awake. And we keep pointing at the wall, not to exhaust you, not to be right, but because we genuinely believe there is more beyond it. For you. For us.

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My stepmother died suddenly and unexpectedly yesterday. And we had a very complex relationship.

So my grief, is complicated. It is complex. For the last six or seven years, we have not really been in contact with each other. And that’s okay. I think that’s probably what was best. For me, to preserve some semblance of self, of healing, I needed that distance. And I believe that maybe she was better not having me as, I don’t want to say a burden, but as another thing to think about, to worry about, to consider. It wasn’t good, for a lot of reasons. I’ll own whatever my part is in that. And this isn’t about guilt, regrets, or ‘what-ifs’. I don’t hold those things in this relationship.

But none of that means grief doesn’t exist here. It doesn’t mean grief isn’t real here.

Donna bought me my prom dress. She had a huge, instrumental part of my late adolescence and early twenties. I could tell her things I couldn’t tell either of my parents. That was real. I needed it when I needed it, and I know it mattered.

I also know that our relationship was complicated because she was white. And I know a lot of people are going to say that doesn’t matter, but it did matter. It does matter. It mattered in how we were able to relate to one another, or not. It mattered in how we approached problem-solving, conflict resolution. It shaped the things I felt comfortable saying, and the things she maybe shouldn’t have felt comfortable saying.

A Black man and a white woman building a family in the United States, there is historical weight in that. Weight neither of us could fully put down, even when we tried to set it aside. I tried not to put it at the forefront. But it was always there, underneath everything. And I think a lot of where our differences lived, where our disagreements lived, where the chasm between us grew - I think so much of that was cultural. In ways that maybe neither one of us fully understood. Or if we did understand, we never said it out loud. We never addressed it head-on.

I’ll hold my part in that, too. I could have tried. I don’t know how it would have been received, but I could have tried. Things don’t get better if you don’t try, I suppose.

She loved my daughters. She loved her grandbabies. She did. And they love their Nana. And my heart is breaking for them right now; trying to navigate grief for the first time, grief for someone close to them, while knowing that my own grief is sitting somewhere more complicated.

The idea of a stepparent, a bonus parent, already comes with its own intricacies. There is no clean script for those relationships. You are loving someone across a threshold you didn’t choose, building something without a blueprint. And when you add onto that the cultural weight - Black and white, in America, with all of the history that lives in that - it becomes something that most people don’t have language for. I’m not sure I do either.

I don’t really know how to feel. What I know is there is a tight ball of grief sitting in the pit of my stomach. I haven’t slept. I got really drunk last night trying not to feel so many things at the same time out of fear that they will consume me.

I know I am hurting for my younger sister. We have a complicated relationship too, mainly because she is her mother’s daughter, as she should be. I don’t blame her for that at all. She should be. But I am floating right now, untethered from what I’m supposed to do with any of this.

I don’t know what to do with this grief. This is, for better or for worse, someone who served as a parent for me. And I was not prepared for how much space that would take up.

I don’t even know what I need to write about it. But I know that if I hold it in, it gets bigger and darker and messier. So all I know to do is write. And I know it is okay to wrestle in this. We get to have complicated feelings about people. We get to have strenuous relationships with people. We get to carry tension, and still get to grieve. I do know that. I know it.

I don’t know what my allowance of grief is. I’m not sure that’s even a thing I should be calculating. But it’s there. And I am trying to hold it.

What I know is she loved my children. Those were her grandbabies.

What I know is she took care of my dad. Even in times when he probably did not deserve to be taken care of.

What I know is she loved my younger brother, and my younger brother’s brother; neither of them her child, the second one not even my father’s child. And she loved him, too. That tells me something about the size of her heart.

What I know is she has been in my life since I was fourteen years old. And I am forty-one.

And I know she bought me my prom dress.

All of that matters. I don’t know what else to say. But all of that matters.

What’s becoming abundantly clear is that most people and I do not share the same definition of liberation. And even when we do, when there’s a mutual nodding of heads and a shared vocabulary, their understanding tends to stay theoretical. There’s knowing it in concept and then there’s living it. My entire life has become the practice of this work. The daily, unglamorous, sometimes terrifying practice of it.

I don’t hold that against people. I can’t. Most of us were never taught to do anything other than understand things from a safe distance. To study the idea of freedom without ever actually stepping into it. The discomfort of not knowing, of releasing control, of genuine freefall, most people can’t quite stomach it. And I keep using that word, freefall, because it’s the closest thing I have to describing what this feels like. But even that isn’t entirely right. Freefall implies chaos, danger. What I’m living is something more like surrender - an intentional, eyes-open release.

Recently, my husband has started telling me that the problem with my messaging is that it feels too ‘woo-woo’. Too mystical. I talk about the cosmos and magic and communing with what nature has for us. I talk about loosening the grip, because we cannot get free with our fists clenched around the illusion of control. And that message doesn’t seem to land.

So I’ve been trying. Reaching for the tangible, the tactical, the steps you can write down and follow. But every time I do, something gets lost. The truth gets watered down into a listicle, and what we’re actually talking about (the profound regression of how we’ve been taught to understand our own lives) gets buried under the need to make it digestible. We have been conditioned to quantify everything, to over-organize, to manage and control and contain. And all of that is just fear dressed up in productivity language.

I don’t experience life that way. I can’t anymore. It is magical. It is a kind of freefall. And it requires a shit ton of trust.

But here’s what that trust actually is - because this is where people get it twisted. Trust is not naivety. It’s not passivity. It’s the grounded recognition that we have very little control over most of what we exhaust ourselves trying to manage. The things we can (and should) control are the very things we tend to neglect the most: who we allow into our proximity, how we build and tend to community, how we let our emotions and thoughts dictate our actions. Outside of that? It’s all magic, baby. And sitting in the truth of that reality - that is liberation.

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Everything else we try to manipulate is ego. It is the regression of our higher, more connected selves.

It’s the breaking of the tether to a distorted reality. To use a reference that’s become almost too popular to carry its own weight: it’s accepting the Matrix. Seeing clearly the stupid, elaborate barriers it constructs to keep us from what we’ve already inherited simply by existing on this planet. And whiteness, white supremacy as a structure, as a psychology - is the most sophisticated propaganda machine that distortion has ever produced. So sophisticated that its most devoted participants can’t even catch themselves slipping. They build their own prisons and then defend the walls like they designed something worth protecting.

But here’s the part that really gets me, it’s not just the ones who don’t know. It’s the ones who do. The ones who can cite the scholars, who show up to the conversations, who post the infographics and nod along in the workshops and say all the right things about harm and complicity and systemic violence. Those people. Because knowing, actually intellectually knowing, and then still waking up every day and choosing the comfort of the familiar, choosing the path of least resistance, choosing not to disrupt their own lives in any meaningful way? That might actually be the more insidious thing. At least ignorance has an excuse.

You can describe exactly how the bars were forged, who forged them, the history of the forging and still won’t walk out the damn door. Because the cage is comfortable. Because the cage is familiar. Because real freedom asks you to give something up, and that something usually turns out to be control, proximity to power, or the performance of goodness without the cost of actual change.

And that’s the prison white supremacy is most proud of. Not the ones it built for the people it was designed to crush, but the gilded ones it built for its beneficiaries. The ones people choose to stay in, every single day, with full knowledge of their imprisonment.

So I have to keep moving. When I encounter someone imprisoned, especially someone I’ve genuinely tried to walk toward freedom, or tried to help walk themselves there, I have to keep moving. I cannot wait at their gate indefinitely.

And even sitting here writing this, I’m confronted with something uncomfortable: maybe that’s just some people’s lot. Maybe not everyone gets to be sun-kissed with their eyes on the stars and their feet still planted on the earth. Maybe some people, some groups of people, are meant to stay where they are. Because that is what this particular turn of the universe has for them. That’s their just-do.

I have to hold that as a real possibility. And honestly? It makes the way I’m living that much more precious to me.

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Here’s what I know to be true: liberation is not a destination you arrive at clean and composed. It’s not a framework or a five-step plan or something you can create a comprehensive agenda for. It is lived. It is felt. Some days it looks like clarity and expansion and being so present in your own life that it damn near brings you to tears. And some days it looks exactly like chaos - like you have no idea what’s coming and nothing solid to grip. Both of those things are true at the same time. Both of those things are the point.

The freefall is real. The not-knowing is real. And the trust it requires isn’t the easy, soft kind. It’s the kind that asks you to open your hands when every instinct says hold on to the ways of being that feel most comfortable, most stable, most controllable. But when you do, when you actually let go, what’s waiting on the other side of that surrender is the most beautiful, expansive, fully yours life you’ve ever known.

That’s not woo-woo. That’s the whole point.

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I’m sitting here in Thailand, (yes, Thailand) and the sun is doing what it does, my body feels good, my kids are singing and laughing nearby, and I had a massage earlier today. And somewhere between the mango sticky rice and a long walk listening to the birdsong, I felt something I haven’t felt in years (if ever…): peace.

And then, right on cue, the guilt showed up.

Here’s the thing about being someone who has dedicated their life to liberation work: you don’t really get a job description, but you get a feeling. The feeling is that you are always on. You are always reading, always organizing, always showing up, always holding people with care and softness, always making sure people know where the resources are, always thinking three steps ahead about what freedom could look like. It is a calling that asks everything of you, and for a long time, I’ve given it everything I have.

So what does it mean to step back? When you step out? When you step across an ocean?

I’ve been sitting with that question, and I want to think through it out loud because I suspect I’m not the only one.

I left the United States two years ago. I live in Thailand now, and the honest truth is: my nervous system has exhaled in ways I didn’t know it was holding. The day-to-day stress of navigating American anti-Blackness, the constant state of bracing for impact - that particular weight is not on my body in the same way anymore. I’m not naive about where I am; being an immigrant comes with its own stress, its own bureaucratic indignities, its own moments of “you just don’t understand what it’s like to exist here.” But it is a different register of stress. A different frequency. And my body knows the difference.

So I live differently now. I spend two or three hours a day on work. I take walks. I read. I write. I eat well. I’m present with my kids and in my home. My love and patience with and for my husband has evolved. And I’m aware enough to know that this is a kind of luxury; one I did not stumble into accidentally, but one I built, deliberately, over the last 14 years of curating a life that centers living over producing.

Black women have always been the spine of liberation movements. Ella Baker built the infrastructure that made SNCC possible, quietly, without needing her name on the marquee. Fannie Lou Hamer showed up to testify before the Democratic National Convention after being beaten nearly to death, looked the cameras in the eye and said I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. Ida B. Wells documented lynching at personal risk when no one else would. Harriet Tubman went back. Again. And again.

What we rarely talk about is the cost. The toll on their bodies. The years taken. The fact that many of them died exhausted, undervalued, and still fighting. The fact that some of them, Assata Shakur among them, eventually had to leave. Had to step away from the immediate front lines of American violence to survive it. Assata recently died in Cuba. She had been there since 1984. And the movement didn’t end when she crossed that water. Her presence, physical and symbolic, still matters. Her voice still carries.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

I’m 41 years old. And I catch myself wondering if my voice is still the right one for this moment. Whether someone younger, someone on the ground, someone whose body is absorbing the daily shock of what America has become right now should be the one speaking. We celebrate youth in movement work, and we should - young people are always seeing the future that the rest of us have to stretch to imagine.

But I also know what 41 feels like. It feels like hard-won understanding. It feels like pattern recognition. It feels like having been wrong enough times to know what humility looks like, and having been right enough times to know what strategy feels like. I don’t think I should be the loudest voice in the room. But I think I should be in the room.

And maybe the room doesn’t have to be in the United States.

Here’s what I know about what’s happening at home: I know it’s bad. I know we are descending into fascism with alarming speed (actually, I think the decent is complete ATP). I know people are being pulled off streets by ICE. I know institutions that were never perfect - institutions that were often designed to exclude Black people and further marginalize anyone else deemed ‘other’ - are being dismantled anyway, and their loss is creating a chaos that disproportionately falls on the most vulnerable. I know all of this.

What I don’t know is what it feels like on a body, on a Tuesday morning, in an American city right now. And that gap matters. It means I have to hold my prescriptions loosely. It means I have to ask more than I tell. It means I have to stay connected to the people who are in it in ways that aren’t performative. That’s not just so I can stay relevant, but because the work requires that I understand what’s actually true on the ground before I say anything about it.

That’s not a deficit. That’s rigor. It just requires me to be honest about what I’m working with.

There’s something I’m still trying to name clearly, and I think the word is exile.

Not just “living abroad.” Exile. The kind that Black Americans have understood throughout history (James Baldwin in Paris, W.E.B. Du Bois in Ghana, Assata in Havana). There is a long tradition of us leaving, not because we stopped caring, but because surviving was a prerequisite for everything else. Because sometimes you have to get your body out of the violence to be able to think clearly about how to dismantle it. And I remind anyone who will listen that ‘you can’t heal in the place that made you sick’.

I don’t want to overstate my own circumstances. I’m not fleeing direct political persecution in the way some of those names were. But I am a Black woman who left a country that was becoming increasingly unsafe for people who look like me and think like me and say what I say out loud (if you know my history, you know what I’m talking about). And exile - even chosen, even comfortable exile - comes with its own grief (I wrote about that HERE!). It comes with the disorientation of watching your people struggle from across the world, with the guilt of your own peace, with the question of whether distance is betrayal.

I don’t think it is. But I understand why it feels that way.

So here is where I’m landing - not with certainty, but with something closer to an orientation:

I am in exile and I am resting and those two things are not the opposite of liberation work. They might be necessary conditions for it. I cannot give what I don’t have. The movement does not need more burned-out Black women grinding themselves to dust in service of a freedom they never get to experience. It needs people who are thinking clearly, who have some peace in their bodies, who can see the longer arc because they’ve stepped back far enough to see the whole curve. Who can sit in dreamscapes and dare to imagine something greater, something more for us all (the movement needs a lot of other things, too!).

I don’t know exactly what my role looks like from here. I’m still figuring that out. I know it involves writing. I know it involves strategy. I know it involves staying connected to people doing work on the ground and following their lead when they’re the ones who know the terrain. I know it means not pretending that distance hasn’t changed my vantage point, and also not pretending that vantage point has no value.

I know this: I’m not done. I’m not out. I’m not irrelevant, though I’ll need to keep earning that by staying humble enough to learn and honest enough to say when I don’t know.

I’m just doing it from Thailand.

And the mango here is really, really good.

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Turning 41 feels different than turning 40. Last year carried the weight of milestone celebration, a decade marker that seemed to demand acknowledgment. This year is quieter, more introspective. Perhaps it’s where my family is right now, or it’s simply that 41 doesn’t announce itself the way 40 does. Either way, I find myself in a philosophical space, wrestling with questions about centeredness and purpose.

I believe deeply that I have a purpose in this world. I believe we all do. But I want to be careful here, because “purpose” has been weaponized by capitalism and hustle culture, twisted into a justification for endless productivity. That’s not what I mean.

My purpose, as I understand it, is to help liberate people - to liberate myself and others. Yes, there is work involved in this. I have a literal job that aligns with this purpose. But here’s the tension I’m sitting with: just because my work aligns with my purpose doesn’t mean my purpose is to work.

The work I do - helping people understand liberation, ensuring we all have what we need to survive and thrive - doesn’t feel like “work” in the traditional sense. It feels human. It feels like what we’re supposed to be doing for each other. And yet, it is labor. It takes time and energy. It exists within systems that often contradict the liberation I’m working toward.

So how do I navigate this? How do I honor my purpose without falling into the trap of believing that my worth is tied to my productivity - especially when I work in liberation? The more productive, the better, right??

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This tension isn’t new, and it isn’t just mine. As a Black American woman, I carry the weight of a particular history, where my ancestors’ labor was stolen, where Black women’s work has been simultaneously devalued and exploited, rendered invisible while being essential to everyone else’s comfort and survival.

The expectation that Black women should labor endlessly for others’ liberation while neglecting our own rest, our own joy, our own right to simply be, that’s not revolutionary. That’s just the same exploitation in a different font.

I think about how we’ve been conditioned to believe that suffering is noble, that struggle is the only path to meaning. But what if existing is enough? What if I don’t have to earn the right to enjoy this life? I exist, so I get to enjoy it. Others exist, so they get to enjoy it. Full stop.

In this 41st year, I want to practice not complaining (and to be clear, I’m not talking about the necessary venting that happens as your process a tough situation). I want to appreciate what is, even when it’s not exactly where I want it to be.

How do I honor what is, this Earth, this life, these people, this moment, while still working toward what could be? How do I maintain hope and vision without letting hope become a critique of what’s good and necessary in the present?

This feels particularly urgent right now. We’ve collectively created a world where some people have access to food, housing, shelter, the ability to live with their needs met, while others don’t. That’s insane. It doesn’t have to be this way. We, as a species, have made choices that led us here, and we could make different choices.

Every day I wake up existing as a Black American woman, and it’s hard. Not every moment of every day, but the underlying reality of it - the weight of navigating systems designed without me in mind, the knowledge that others are suffering in ways I have the privilege to step away from - it’s exhausting.

And yet, even from outside the immediate struggle, I feel the pull of my purpose: to help everyone enjoy life. To work toward collective liberation.

I realize I’m operating with one foot in 2026 and one foot three years in the future. I can see what could be. My goal is to help us get there. But I’m learning that I can’t sacrifice my present-tense humanity to some future vision of liberation.

I don’t have all the answers. But I’m spending this year sitting with the questions, practicing gratitude, and learning to enjoy this existence - not because I’ve earned it, but because I’m here.

And that, perhaps, is enough.

Happy Birthday, to Me!

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venmo: @emerald-anderson-ford

These are my questions for this 41st year:

• Can I separate my purpose from my work, or are they inherently intertwined?

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I was born into a larger body. Yes, even as a baby - eight and half pounds and 12 inches. And I’m a Black woman. Was born a Black girl. So you add in the weight of it all, the height of it all, the deeply melanated-ness of it all, and I was born into a body that was always going to draw eyes.

I wonder sometimes how I’ve made it this far without more bodily harm. Because when you carry the weight I carry, the height I carry, the woman-ness and Blackness I carry, people think they can take advantage of you and your body. They assume you don’t love it. They assume you’ll be grateful for any attention it’s given. Which is wild, because they don’t really want to give you attention anyway. They were raised to hate your body; raised to hate everything about you.

The stigmas come at you from every direction.

Fat bodies are lazy bodies. Black bodies are threatening bodies. Tall women are too much, too loud, take up too much space. Every magazine, every movie, every doctor’s office waiting room tells you that you should be smaller, lighter, less. To make yourself digestible. To shrink.

And for years, I tried. I carried those stigmas like stones in my pockets. Wore them heavy. Let them add to weight I was born to carry.

But here’s what I’ve learned as this year comes to a close:

It’s about looking at every lie they told you about your body and deciding, ‘no, actually, I’m going to believe something different’ or my personal favorite, ‘that ain’t got shit to do with me’.

Folks were socialized to hate my body - to hate how I look in it, to hate how clothes fit me, to hate how it moves and jiggles. But more than anything, they were socialized to hate their desire for my body.

And once that realization hit? It became a source of power for me.

They don’t hate my body because they hate my body. They hate my body because they still want it. They still want me. Even the most fit girls still want an ass, still want some tiddies, still want to be seen as comfortable when their partner or their kids or their cat lays their head down and finds the nice soft part of them.

I don’t have to worry about whether people will find a soft part of me. They will. They’re going to get nice and soft and comfortable right here with me. What people hate about me is that they can’t have me. They can’t have this body. And more importantly, they can’t have my compliance with their shame about my body.

The stigma said I should hate myself. Self-actualization said, “Or what?”

The stigma said fat girls don’t deserve love, don’t deserve to be seen, don’t deserve to take up space. Self-actualization said, “Watch me do it anyway.”

The stigma said Black women’s bodies exist for consumption, for labor, for everyone else’s comfort but our own. Self-actualization said, “This body is mine first.”

So instead of hiding it away, I’ve decided to love it fully and out loud. To love being a fat girl. To love the way my clothes sit on me. To love how strong my shoulders are, how thick and strong my thighs are, how I can carry my thirteen-year-old child if I need to. The strength in my arms. The curve of my hips. The slope of my nose. The fullness of my lips.

I have learned to love my body because I was born into a body people were always going to stare at. A body that goes against everything they’ve been told is right in the world- everything they’ve been told is white in the world. A body that represents the reality that I cannot be controlled.

As I step into this new year, I’m not making resolutions about changing my body. I’m making a commitment to deepening my relationship with it. To unlearning more of the poison. To being aware of the propaganda being pushed in our faces about what is chic or beautiful or healthy. To treating the stigmas like the lies they are: loud, persistent, but ultimately powerless against my joy.

Because here’s the thing about stigmas: they only work if you internalize them. They only work if you agree. And I’ve decided to disagree. Loudly. Disruptively. Completely.

This past year taught me that self-actualization isn’t a destination. It’s a practice. It’s choosing yourself every single day, even when the world gives you a thousand reasons not to; when the world tells you to abandon yourself. It’s looking in the mirror and seeing yourself clearly - not through anyone else’s lens, but through your own.

So, if people are going to stare at my body no matter what…

I might as well give them something to look at.

Here’s to a new year. Another year of fighting for space for ALL of us. To disrupting the tyranny of fascism and hate. To caring for our big ‘C’ and small ‘c’ communities. To imagining and building a better future for all of us!

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I’m writing this from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where something remarkable is happening. In a country where Islam is the official religion and Muslims make up the majority, Christmas decorations cascade from every shopping mall, carols play in restaurants, and massive illuminated trees dominate public markets and squares. But here’s what struck me most: my Hindu tour guide enthusiastically pointed out the best light displays. Muslim shopkeepers have decorated their storefronts with Santa and snowflakes. Buddhist temples sit peacefully beside mosques, both near churches preparing for Christmas services. No one here seems confused about their own faith, they’re simply celebrating together. Watching this unfold, thousands of miles from home, I can’t help but think: this is what we need more of in America right now.

As I continue to sit and consider what I’m witnessing and how it impacts the quality of life here, it has become abundantly clear to me that coexistence and sharing in life with one another might be the real key to a society’s cultural success and longevity. For many of us, we feel like we have to hold closely our traditions, as if sharing in the beauty of diversity somehow dilutes our own. That’s never more clear than during the Winter holiday season.

Here in Malaysia there is an emphasis on celebration across differences. I’m seeing Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists enthusiastically participating in Christmas festivities. This is not because they’ve abandoned their own faiths, but because there’s a cultural understanding that joy is meant to be shared. This isn’t assimilation; it’s genuine cross-cultural celebration. That’s a compelling model for American communities where we often stay siloed in our own traditions.

Malaysia’s diversity isn’t just tolerated, it’s economically and socially embedded. There is an economic and social interdependence happening here that lends itself to authentic and intuitive community building. When a Chinese Malaysian business hangs Christmas decorations, a Malay Muslim neighbor stops by to admire them, and an Indian Hindu family joins a community event, it’s because their lives are genuinely interwoven. The same is true of us in the U.S. We thrive when we recognize our interdependence rather than emphasizing separation.

Malaysia isn’t perfect, and neither is any model of multicultural life. But standing here during the Christmas season, watching people of different faiths genuinely delight in each other’s celebrations, I’m reminded that division isn’t inevitable - it’s a choice we can actively counter.

But here’s the rub - we have to want to counter it. We have to decide that we want to do something different than has been forced on us. Nationalism and individualism has been shoved down our throats, without consent and against our wills. We’ve been stripped of the dignity that comes along with the growth and learning that coexistence brings. We’ve been told (mostly by people who hold a shit ton of power, resources, and privileges) that we should side-eye and not trust our neighbors. That our differences are too great to overcome and thus, must result in disdain and intolerance. But we need one another. People of all backgrounds and religions and ethnicities and beliefs and food preferences and races and gender identities and sexual orientations and education levels and… and… and… We all need one another to survive and thrive and build the future we deserve.

The infrastructure for multiculturalism isn’t built by governments alone, it’s built by people like you, in communities like yours. It’s in the daily choices we make about whose stories get told, whose holidays get recognized, and who gets invited to our tables. Malaysia shows us it’s possible. Now we need to ask ourselves: what would it look like if our community made celebration across difference not just an ideal, but a practice? That’s the spirit I hope to bring home this season. And it’s work that starts with you -it’s work that starts with us.

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**this has been modified from a piece written for ***