This weekend, millions of people took to the streets across the United States in what may become one of the largest protests in the country’s history. Under the banner “No Kings,” people gathered to reject authoritarianism and to insist that the United States is not—and should not become—a monarchy.

There is something powerful in that refusal. People are paying attention. People are mobilizing. But there is also something in the framing that I cannot ignore.

The idea behind “No Kings” rests on an assumption that is simply not true—that authoritarianism is new to the United States. That it arrives with a particular leader. That what we are witnessing now is a departure from what came before.

For many people—particularly Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and colonized communities—there is nothing new about this moment. The United States has always exercised authoritarian power—not as a deviation from democracy, but as a feature of empire. From its founding, the United States has functioned as an imperial project built through the dispossession of Indigenous land, the enslavement of Black people, and the expansion of its power through war, extraction, and global domination. What we call “democracy” has always existed within an imperial structure.

We do not have to look far back to see this.

Under Bill Clinton, the logic of empire was consolidated domestically through the expansion of the carceral state and the restructuring of economic policy. The 1994 crime bill accelerated mass incarceration, while welfare reform imposed new forms of economic discipline on poor families—particularly women of color—under the language of responsibility and independence.

Here, empire operated not through foreign invasion, but through internal regulation—managing populations through punishment and deprivation.

Under George W. Bush, these logics extended outward. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan projected U.S. power globally, while the expansion of surveillance, detention, and torture—Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention—made imperial authority explicit and publicly justified in the name of security.

Under Barack Obama, empire did not recede—it adapted. After the overt militarism of the Bush era, Obama’s presidency outwardly attempted to reclaim moral authority while continuing the same forms of violence that sustain imperial power. Drone warfare became a central tool of U.S. policy, enabling the projection of force across borders with minimal visibility and no meaningful accountability. In countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, entire communities lived under the constant presence of drones, where decisions about life and death were made through secretive, bureaucratic processes far removed from public scrutiny. At the same time, the administration oversaw record numbers of deportations, extending the reach of imperial governance inward.

Under Joe Biden, these patterns did not fundamentally change. The U. S. continued to project military, political, and economic power globally while maintaining systems of control domestically. The administration’s support for Israel amid the genocide in Gaza reflected a broader imperial alignment—the use of U.S. resources to sustain state violence abroad while framing that support as necessary or defensive. Again, immigration enforcement regimes remained firmly in place.

Different administrations. Different rhetoric. But the same system. The current administration is not a story of democracy interrupted. It is a story of empire sustained.

What has changed is not the presence of authoritarian power, but who is forced to recognize it. When imperial violence is concentrated in Black communities, in immigrant detention centers, or in countries far from U.S. borders, it is often rendered invisible—explained away as security, as necessity. But when it begins to disrupt the expectations of those who have been more protected from it, it is suddenly named for what it is—authoritarianism.

This is not because the violence is new. It is because the recognition of it is.

That is why the language of “No Kings” feels incomplete. We say we do not want kings, as if the problem is monarchy itself. As if what we are resisting is the idea of a singular ruler with too much power.

But what do we call a system in which one person can authorize war across the globe, expand surveillance, detain and deport millions, and fund state violence with the stroke of a pen?

We call it a U. S. presidency.

And within an empire, that presidency functions much like a king. The United States does not have kings in name. But it has them in practice.

None of this is to dismiss what happened this weekend. But if the analysis stops at rejecting a single figure, or even a single administration, we risk misunderstanding the very thing we are trying to oppose.

The problem is not kings. The problem is empire and the systems of power that sustain it, regardless of who holds office. The question is not whether we reject kings. The question is whether we are willing to confront what has been here all along.

We live in a moment saturated with the language of self-care. In popular culture, in activist spaces, and in everyday conversation, we’re encouraged to rest, to log off, to set boundaries, to protect our peace, and to withdraw from environments that cause harm. These practices are important. Survival often depends on our ability to create distance from the forces that deplete us. But much of the contemporary conversation about self-care assumes that harm can be avoided, or that threats can be managed simply by stepping away.

History suggests that these assumptions do not hold for everyone.

For many people—particularly those whose lives have been shaped by racial capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and state violence—harm is not something that can simply be avoided. It is structural. It is embedded in the institutions and systems that govern everyday life. In those conditions, the question of care becomes more complicated. What does self-care mean when harm cannot simply be escaped? What does care look like when survival itself is under threat?

Audre Lorde offered one of the most powerful reframings of self-care when she wrote:

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Lorde wrote these words while living with cancer as a Black lesbian feminist who understood that the state and the medical system were not built for her survival. Her insistence that self-care is political reframed care as a form of resistance.

But her words also invite some harder questions. If self-care is political warfare, what happens when care requires more than rest, reflection, or withdrawal? What happens when care requires defense?

We are often taught to think of violence as morally simple. Violence is condemned as inherently wrong, while peace and nonviolence are framed as the only legitimate forms of resistance. At the same time, states maintain a near-monopoly on violence while claiming that this violence exists to ensure public safety. Police use force in the name of protection. Prisons cage human beings in the name of order. Child welfare systems separate families in the name of care.

Yet when individuals or communities defend themselves against harm, that defense is recast as criminality or extremism.

In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, Kellie Carter Jackson challenges the familiar story that reduces Black resistance to a binary between Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s militancy. Through a range of historical examples, she shows that Black resistance has always included a broader spectrum of strategies, many of which were fundamentally protective in nature.

Enslaved people who revolted against their enslavers were not seeking domination; they were resisting brutality. Black women who fought back against sexual assault were defending their bodily autonomy in a society that denied them protection. Communities that armed themselves during Reconstruction and Jim Crow did so because the state either refused to protect them or actively participated in their terrorization.

In these contexts, force functioned less as a weapon of aggression than as a shield. It was a way of protecting families from lynching, safeguarding homes from night riders, and asserting that Black life had value even in a society structured to deny that truth.

Understanding this history rejects the narrative that frames all violence as inherently unjust. It suggests instead that self-defense has often been an expression of care—care for one’s body, one’s family, and one’s community.

Charles E. Cobb Jr. explored this protective tradition in This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed. His work reveals a truth often left out of civil rights mythology—nonviolent protest in the South was frequently sustained by armed Black communities who were prepared to defend activists and their neighbors. Movement workers slept in homes where shotguns rested by the door. Families organized patrols. Local people—many of whom would never appear in history books—stood watch. Nonviolence did not operate in isolation from violence. It was often possible only because others were willing to defend their communities and ensure that terror did not go unanswered.

In one of my favorite books, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon pushed this analysis further in the context of anti-colonial struggle. Colonialism, he argued, is itself violent—not only materially, but psychologically. It trains the colonized to internalize inferiority and submission. Under such conditions, resistance can take on a deeply psychological dimension. For Fanon, acts of resistance—even when forceful—could disrupt the internalization of inferiority and submission that colonial violence sought to produce. By refusing submission, the colonized could begin to reclaim a sense of agency, dignity, and collective power.

Fanon didn’t claim that violence was inherently liberatory, nor did he ignore the devastation violence can produce. But he insisted that when people live under conditions of constant domination, resisting that domination can be restorative. Resistance can break the psychic grip of oppression by transforming people from passive objects of violence into agents capable of shaping their own fate. For those whose lives are structured by humiliation, degradation, and threat, refusing domination—even forcefully—can become a way of reclaiming humanity.

These historical traditions are not confined to the past. Survivors of gender-based violence, for example, are often told that the only legitimate response to assault is endurance followed by legal recourse through systems that frequently fail to deliver justice. Yet many survivors who defend themselves in the moment—who fight back against an attacker in order to survive—find themselves criminalized rather than protected. The moral expectation of passivity persists even when passivity would mean continued harm.

Around the world, people living under military occupation face an even more extreme version of this dilemma. When entire communities are subjected to displacement, bombardment, and siege, the question of self-defense becomes unavoidable. Yet the violence of resistance is often immediately condemned, while the structural violence that produced these conditions in the first place remains normalized or ignored. Palestine is one of the clearest examples today, but it is not the only one. Across the world, people subjected to occupation and domination are routinely denied the moral language of defense.

These situations differ in many ways, but they share a common feature—the people most exposed to violence are often denied the legitimacy of protecting themselves from it.

In our current culture, self-care is frequently framed as a form of personal wellness that allows individuals to cope with stress while leaving the broader structures of power intact. But this is a narrow understanding of care.

Care can also mean protecting one’s body from assault, protecting one’s children from terror, protecting one’s community from annihilation, and refusing the inevitability of harm.

None of this is an argument for romanticizing violence. It is not a dismissal of nonviolent struggle, which has transformed the world in profound ways. But an honest conversation about care requires acknowledging the conditions under which many people struggle simply to survive. Self-care may sometimes involve rest and restoration. But it may also involve protection, resistance, and refusal.

If caring for oneself is an act of political warfare, then we must also confront the realities that such warfare entails. Not because violence is virtuous. But because survival is.

For our March and April reading, we turn to a book that asks us to continue rethinking one of the most policed words in political life—violence.

In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, historian Kellie Carter Jackson revisits the long history of Black resistance in the United States and beyond—not as a simple story of good versus bad tactics, but as a complex, strategic, and deeply human struggle over power. Rather than accepting the narrow scripts we’re often handed about how change “should” happen, she examines the many ways Black communities have confronted white supremacy, especially the leadership and intellectual contributions of Black women whose strategies are often overlooked.

This book feels like a natural next step in the path we’ve been tracing together. After reading Everything for Everyone by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, which invited us to imagine revolutionary transformation beyond capitalism, and sitting with the insurgent histories explored in Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton, we now turn to a work that interrogates how resistance itself is judged, categorized, and contained.

What counts as legitimate resistance? Who decides which forms of struggle are moral and which are condemned? Why is state and structural violence treated as normal, while the actions of oppressed people are pathologized?

As we continue our theme of revolution, We Refuse pushes us to wrestle with discomfort. If revolution is not a metaphor, then it cannot be reduced to slogans or sanitized narratives. It requires us to think seriously about power, strategy, risk, and ethics.

We’ll spend March and April reading this book together, with prompts and reflections along the way, and then we’ll gather at the end of April to discuss.

I hope you’ll join us as we continue asking harder questions about liberation—and about what refusal makes possible.

Plus: Register for our February 24th Zoom Discussion of Everything for Everyone

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I have played Jill Scott’s new album To Whom This May Concern daily (multiple times per day, really) from top to bottom since she released it earlier this month. On my first listen, it immediately felt like a special project. I’m a longtime Jill Scott fan, and more broadly, a longtime Rhythm and Blues (R&B) fan with a particular admiration for the sound that emerged in the late ’90s and early 2000s, what many call neo-soul. Genre labels can be tricky. Some of the era’s pioneers resisted the term. D’Angelo, for example, pushed back against being labeled a neo-soul artist, insisting he simply made Black music. But that tension is part of the point. The music of that period was distinctly rooted in Blackness. “Neo-soul” may be imperfect, but it evokes a recognizable sound and texture. For lack of a better term, I’ll use it here.

I’m an early ’90s baby, and growing up, the sounds of neo-soul surrounded me. I remember being at my uncle’s house in Silver Spring, Maryland, pressing play on his CD player and hearing Erykah Badu’s album Baduizm fill the room. I loved the heavy bass of “Other Side of the Game.” My memories of getting my hair done on Saturday mornings are inseparable from songs like Jill Scott’s “The Way,” Bilal’s “Soul Sista,” and D’Angelo’s (a fellow Richmond, Virginia native, I might add) “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”

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I am grateful to have grown up in a household and family that adored and appreciated music. It is something I carry with me deeply into adulthood. My grandmother played piano and insisted on me taking piano lessons as a child. I woke up to Nina Simone playing on Saturday mornings. My mom and I would belt the lyrics of Aretha Franklin’s “A Rose Is Still a Rose” on the way to school so much so that she affectionately called me Rosebud. And my dad, who plays jazz guitar, was constantly playing jazz and funk classics in the house like Dianne Reeves, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Herbie Hancock. While I appreciate those artists, even more now than I did as a child, neo-soul felt like the music that elders played around me that I also actually chose for myself. One of my first concerts was an Erykah Badu concert. She performed outdoors during a summer series in Richmond, and I begged my mom to take us. The tickets were a splurge – not in her budget, but it felt worth it to both of us. And wow, was it.

Looking back, I think as a young Black girl I was drawn to the sounds of neo-soul because they expressed a profound love for Black people: Black women, Black men, and Black culture. Artists like Jill Scott and Erykah Badu wore natural hair and head wraps, embraced Afrocentric themes, loved on Black people in their music videos, and sang of hardship and love in the context of Black culture. Their music felt removed from the desire to go mainstream or appeal to broader audiences. It was music meant to breathe life into Black people by reflecting ourselves back to us, regardless of respectability, all in the context of a world that tells us to be ashamed of Blackness. I attended mostly white schools growing up, and as a dark-skinned Black girl, I was constantly being told, expressly and subliminally, to be ashamed of who I was. These artists provided a foil to those experiences. They were beautiful and proud, and deep down I knew I should be, and was, too.

Returning to Jill Scott’s latest project, To Whom This May Concern. The album dropped on February 13, 2026, and when I first saw the release date, I was expecting more of what I love from Jill Scott — her beautiful songs about love. And she did generously give us that. But what also became immediately clear to me is that Jill dropped this album very intentionally on the 13th, the day before many of us celebrate love and during Black History Month. This album is a love letter to Blackness and to Black people. While the album is solidly an R&B project, Jill honors the breadth of contributions Black Americans have made to music and the variety of Black musical traditions that exist throughout her 19 songs.

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She travels to New Orleans and celebrates brass bands on “Be Great,” which features New Orleans legend Trombone Shorty; “Beautiful People” invokes a call-and-response format with choruses of “yessss;” “Pay U on Tuesday” feels like a continuation of the blues of the Mississippi Delta; she travels to the West Coast with a feature from Too $hort on “BPOTY;” “Lifting Me Up” embodies the go-go sounds of Washington, DC (my current home); and “Right Here Right Now” brings us to Chicago, the birthplace of house music created by Black queer folks. Of course, the album also incorporates classic elements of neo-soul, where a love and appreciation of hip-hop and R&B fuse together on tracks like “North Side,” “OffdaBack,” and “A Universe.”

It is also an album that envisions freedom and liberation for Black people as a real, tangible possibility — and, importantly, a necessity. Jill Scott honors the contributions of Black folks who have come before us, making our lives possible in “OffdaBack,” and in doing so, she reminds us that we also have the responsibility now to make the way for those who will come after us. In “BPOTY,” she provides a sharp critique of forces that exploit our communities and keep us impoverished, like exploitative preachers, asking instead for systems that support and sustain communities: “Where’s the universities? Where’s the food for free?” On “Ase,” perhaps one of my favorite songs from the project, she reminds us that joyful freedom belongs to us.

Undergirding Scott’s project is a concept of love: the love that our ancestors had for themselves, and in turn for us (“they did it for themselves, but ultimately they did it for us, thank you”) and the love that she has for herself and our people, which means that we also must fight for our people to experience freedom and care.

It has been lovely to witness a treasure like Jill Scott release a new, fresh project at 53 years old, more than 25 years into her career. And it has been especially moving to listen to the album during Black History Month. The first time I heard it, I knew the timing of the album was intentional and an act of love. What’s more, to truly love Black people means to understand and work toward a vision of the world where all Black people experience love, care, and ultimately liberation. It’s also been insightful to listen to the album while reading Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. The book makes clear that abolition is a politics of destruction, but one that is incomplete without a parallel politics that seeks to “preserve, liberate, and to lift up” new possibilities for living. Similarly, Black music has always done this work, preserving our histories, affirming our humanity, and sustaining us in ways that make freedom feel both imaginable and necessary. It keeps us rooted while also making us restless enough to challenge and dismantle the structures that harm us.

In my last Substack post, I made the point that art can encourage us during dark times. It can remind us of our humanity and, importantly, why it is necessary to resist domination and oppression. Jill Scott’s To Whom This May Concern is certainly art that is needed for the times we are in.

Thank you, Jilly from Philly.

Reminder: We’ll be gathering on the 24th to read Everything for Everyone together, joined by one the book’s authors, M. E. O’Brien, to imagine what a new world could look like and to talk about how we might actually get there. Register here.

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I’m not a voracious reader. I’ve never been the kind of person who moves through a stack of books every month or always has three books going at once. Like a lot of people, it can be hard to carve out the time and focus that deep reading requires. Life crowds it out. Work crowds it out. And reading has never felt like leisure to me.

But this year, I’ve been trying to be more intentional about my political education—not just skimming articles or reacting to the news cycle, but slowing down and sitting with the kinds of books that shape how we understand the world and what’s possible beyond it. So this month, as we’ve been reading Everything for Everyone, I decided to return to a book I had read before but didn’t think I had fully absorbed: Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton.

Reading them together, I’ve been struck by the connections that exist across time. One looks back at revolutionary struggle in the 1960s. The other looks forward to a world after capitalism has fallen. Reading them side by side feels less like comparison and more like a conversation. One asks what it will take to get free. The other asks what freedom might actually feel like.

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In Revolutionary Suicide, Newton refused both despair and fantasy. He wrote about what he called reactionary suicide—the slow death that comes from accepting humiliation, powerlessness, and the inevitability of suffering under oppressive systems. And then he offered another choice:

“It is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.”

For Newton, revolution wasn’t spectacle. It was a commitment to live with dignity—even when the cost was high. He clarified:

“We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.”

That framing is important because it reframes revolution not as destruction, but as insistence—insistence for a better world. And for the Black Panther Party, that insistence took material form. They didn’t separate theory from practice—their politics showed up as survival programs: free breakfasts, clinics, legal aid, transportation, childcare. Survival itself was the ground on which revolution became possible.

Everything for Everyone picks up on the other side of that struggle. Instead of asking what we must endure or risk, it asks, What happens after we win?

The book is structured as an oral history, told through many voices rather than a single protagonist. We hear neighbors remembering how they seized food depots, opened hospitals, transformed housing, and built new forms of collective life. Food is shared. Care is organized together. People begin to heal through participation rather than punishment. It doesn’t read like utopia. It reads like practicality. What happens when profit and policing are no longer the organizing principles of society?

What remains isn’t chaos. It’s care. It’s shared responsibility. It’s the slow, everyday work of keeping each other alive. In that sense, the world it imagines feels less like speculative fiction and more like the Panthers’ survival programs in full operation, extended across an entire society.

Reading these two books together, especially during Black History Month, makes clear how much today’s abolitionist imagination grows out of the Black radical tradition. Newton asks, What must we risk to end this system? The commune answers, Here is what becomes possible when we do. Newton describes the courage required. The novel shows us the world that courage might create. Newton grounds revolution in the material work of survival. The commune begins in that same place—food, housing, and care. Both center ordinary people acting together. In both, revolution is not heroic. It is communal.

Black History Month is often framed as remembrance—a looking back. But the Black radical tradition has always been forward-facing. Newton’s writing wasn’t meant to be a memorial. It was meant to prepare people for struggle. Speculative fiction like Everything for Everyone does something similar. It stretches our political imagination and helps us picture worlds we’ve been told are impossible. Both forms—autobiography and fiction—help us rehearse freedom before it arrives. That’s part of why Toward Liberation exists. Not just to understand what has been, but to practice imagining what could be.

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If there’s a shared lesson running through both books, it is that revolution doesn’t begin with collapse. It begins with care—with people meeting each other’s needs, sharing resources, and building structures that make the old systems unnecessary.

The question isn’t whether a different world is imaginable. These books make clear that it is. The harder question is, What are we building right now that prefigures that world? Where are our survival programs? Where are we practicing collective care? How are we making punishment and profit obsolete in our own communities?

Because the future imagined in Everything for Everyone doesn’t appear out of nowhere.

It grows out of us. Out of the everyday work we choose to do together. Out of the ways we care for one another now. Out of the political education that helps us see beyond what this system insists is inevitable.

This is another reason Toward Liberation exists. Not just to analyze the world as it is, but to read, study, and imagine together—to learn from the long lineage of abolitionist thinkers, organizers, and dreamers who have always insisted that something else is possible.

We read writers like Huey P. Newton not as history, but as instruction. We read books like Everything for Everyone not as fantasy, but as rehearsal. Because imagining freedom together is part of building it.

Alan

Join us on February 24th at 6:00 PM Eastern to discuss Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, with special guest, co-author M. E. O’Brien.

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Happy Black History Month! Since Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926, this year marks 100 years of taking intentional time and space in February to honor the history and contributions of Black Americans.

With a sense of awe, pride, and hope, we remember that between 1740 and 1834, Southern slave states enacted anti-literacy laws, prohibiting anyone from teaching enslaved and free people of color to read or write. Despite these laws and the severe penalties that came with breaking them, throughout our history in the Americas, Black people excelled at producing written work that has inspired, entertained, challenged, and pushed us toward liberation. Because, Still We Rise! (Word to Maya Angelou.)

Below we have shared the selections from Black authors on our Toward Liberation bookshelf. You can also find our complete bookshelf by year. It was quite a trip back down memory lane! If you’ve been on this journey with us, please leave your favorite TL selection in the comments.

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As always, thanks for rocking with us! And if you are a recent subscriber, welcome! We look forward to meeting the newest members of the TL community at the upcoming discussion of: Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi on February 24th at 6pm EST. Co-Author M. E. O’Brien will be joining us!

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Black Authors on the Toward Liberation Bookshelf:

Assata An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

Selections from Hammer & Hope:

• Framework to Help Us Understand The World by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò | a selection from Hammer & Hope

• After the Uprising, What Is To Be Done? by Keeanga Yahmata-Taylor, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Derecka Purnell

Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnic

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Let This Radicalize You | Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne marie brown

Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea Ritchie

Parable of the Sower (Graphic Novel) by Octavia Butler; Adapted by Damian Duffy; Illustrated by John Jennings

The Day God Saw Me as Black by D. Danyelle Thomas

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton

Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination by Mali D. Collins

The Complete Toward Liberation Bookshelf

2023:

Assata An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition by Alan Dettlaff

Selections from Hammer & Hope

• Framework to Help Us Understand The World by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò | a selection from Hammer & Hope

• After the Uprising, What Is To Be Done?, Keeanga Yahmata-Taylor, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Derecka Purnell

Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick

2024:

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall

Let This Radicalize You | Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand

2025:

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne marie brown

Parable of the Sower (Graphic Novel) by Octavia Butler; Adapted by Damian Duffy; Illustrated by John Jennings

Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea Ritchie

The Day God Saw Me as Black by D. Danyelle Thomas

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton

Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination by Mali D. Collins

2026:

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

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BONUS….Toward Liberation’s Origin Story

From Alan:
When I was Dean of the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston, I began the “Dean’s Social Justice Summer Reading Series.” Each summer, I selected a book and invited our incoming MSW students, as well as our faculty and staff, to read together. This first “assignment” was our way of initiating a journey of critical thinking and action related specifically to racial justice.

In December 2022, I was removed from my position as Dean due to the university administration’s concerns over my abolitionist views and the abolitionist direction in which I was leading the college. As a result, I wasn’t able to select a summer read for 2023 and the “Dean’s Social Justice Summer Reading Series” was no more.

This was the spark that created Toward Liberation. Just because I was no longer Dean didn’t mean we couldn’t still read together and continue to grow as a community committed to justice and liberation. I asked connease to join me as she had always been a critical voice in selecting each year’s book and in developing the messaging behind the series.

2016: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

2017: The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs

2018: Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

2019: Heavy by Kiese Laymon

2020: Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Citizen by Claudia Rankine

2021: Bird Uncaged by Marlon Peterson

2022: Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World by Dorothy Roberts | Also in 2022, though not technically part of the series, the entire college was gifted copies of Becoming Abolitionists by Derecka Purnell.

Thank you as always for reading! We look forward to seeing you later this month. In the meantime, enjoy Black History Month! Let us know who you are celebrating in the comments!

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January at Toward Liberation set our tone for the year, inviting you not only to think about revolution theoretically, but to engage with what revolutionary politics and abolitionist imagination look like in practice, critique, and community. Below are some highlights from the three posts we published last month with key excerpts and reflections you won’t want to miss.

Revolution Is Not a Metaphor

We kicked off the year with something that needed to be said—revolution is not a poetic trope; it’s a material, political project.

As Alan argued:

“History shows us that abolitionist futures are not granted; they are wrested into being through rupture. Through revolution. And revolution, if we’re honest, carries implications that are unsettling, including confrontation and violence, not because we desire harm, but because systems built on violence rarely dissolve peacefully.”

This piece invited you to confront how mainstream culture often neutralizes radical thought by flattening it into symbolism. Revolution requires clarity—not metaphorical gloss—and a willingness to confront power on its own terms.

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2026 with Toward Liberation

Our mid-January video post offered a community update and a look forward into the year ahead. Centered on shared struggles, collective wins, and what’s next for our learning group, the piece grounded our abolitionist practice in the present moment.

As connease shared:

“It’s important for people to ground themselves in the fact that even though it seems that this administration is more violent, more blatant, these things are part of a continuum. And that’s why it’s important that we read. That’s why we’re doing what we do in Toward Liberation, to help ground people in a historical perspective, and even more importantly, to learn about tools of resistance.”

connease also shared news on a recent win, as we welcomed home Marie “Mechie” Scott, after 52 plus years of incarceration that highlights the importance of organizing, coalition building, and a relentless belief in each other and the struggle for liberation.

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Revolution Without Politics: On One Battle After Another

Most recently, we turned our attention to how revolution is depicted in culture—in this case, through the widely discussed film, One Battle After Another. This was more than just a review of the film; rather, it challenged the film’s lack of any coherent political vision.

As Maya wrote:

“To say it plainly, this is not a film about revolution. One Battle After Another is a film that uses the aesthetics of revolution to empty it of politics, discipline, and purpose. In doing so, it reinforces the idea that radical movements are incoherent, unserious, and ultimately futile.”

The post argues that when revolutionary imagery is divorced from political substance, it risks reinforcing the very power structures it claims to challenge.

January’s posts put forward a shared insistence that revolution must be treated as something concrete, political, and lived rather than symbolic or rhetorical. Each piece, in its own way, pushes back against the softening of radical language — the tendency to turn liberation into metaphor, aesthetic, or spectacle. Instead, they call us back to substance; to the hard work of building collective power, sharpening political clarity, and staying rooted in community. Whether we are critiquing how revolution is flattened in popular culture, reflecting on the everyday practice of organizing together, or naming the limits of reformist imagination, the throughline is the same. Liberation demands more than feeling or sounding radical. It requires commitment, analysis, and shared struggle. January invited us to ground our hopes in practice and to remember that abolition is not an image or a slogan, but something we build with one another, step by step.

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Looking Ahead

In February, we’ll keep building on these conversations through our ongoing community study. We’re continuing our collective reading of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, a text that invites us to imagine abolition not simply as critique, but as presence—as the everyday textures of life after capitalism, after prisons, after policing. The book helps us stretch our political imagination beyond what exists now and into what could be built, offering a vision of liberation grounded in relationships, care, and shared responsibility.

We’re also excited to be joined on February 24th by co-author M. E. O’Brien for a live conversation about the book and the broader questions it raises about strategy, storytelling, and revolutionary possibility. We hope you’ll read along with us and join the discussion. As always, Toward Liberation is less a publication than a gathering place—a space to think together, learn together, and practice the kinds of political community that liberation requires.

Register for February 24th Discussion

In solidarity always,

Alan, connease, and Maya

I’ll start by admitting that I have only seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (OBAA) once. I thought about rewatching the movie to write this but then I considered the first 30 or so minutes of the movie, and decided I couldn’t sit through that again. Much has been said about Teyana Taylor’s character, Perfidia, and Junglepussy’s character, Junglepussy, so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about that. For now I’ll just say that I found both characters to be tragically underdeveloped and lazy caricatures of Black women revolutionaries, especially given some of the inspiration for these characters was the late Assata Shakur, which is just frankly, offensive. If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis of these portrayals, Ellen E. Jones’ piece in The Guardian is thoughtful and worth reading.

Photo credit: AP

Instead, I want to spend time interrogating what this film (and the public reception of it) reveals about how revolutionary and left politics are understood, flattened, and misrepresented in our current political moment. To say it plainly, this is not a film about revolution. OBAA is a film that uses the aesthetics of revolution to empty it of politics, discipline, and purpose. In doing so, it reinforces the idea that radical movements are incoherent, unserious, and ultimately futile.

We meet the revolutionary group, the French 75, who the movie follows in the opening scenes of the film. They are working on freeing migrants who are imprisoned in an immigrant detention center. At the end of the closing scene, we see migrants being loaded into the truck and are to assume that they have been freed, but we don’t spend enough time on this to really understand what happens to the migrants themselves. In other scenes, we see the French 75 is responsible for blowing up a public official’s campaign office because the official does not support abortion. And, in another especially violent scene, we see the French 75 rob a bank to get money for ammunition. As Junglepussy proclaims during a monologue about what Black power looks like she says, “Your money pays for my artillery.”

These moments suggest guerrilla warfare, but they are never anchored in political strategy, theory, or vision. We are left to assume the French 75 are “left-leaning” or “radical,” but the film does not meaningfully interrogate what they believe, what they are building toward, or how they understand liberation. Violence appears unmoored from politics, as if it exists for its own sake.

The film then fast-forwards to center the remainder of the story on Ghetto Pat, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his daughter, Willa, played by Chase Infiniti. Willa is Perfidia’s daughter but her mother has abandoned her. We quickly learn that Willa is under threat of being captured by a white supremacist (who is her biological father), and in an effort to protect her, Pat must reengage the French 75. From here, the film becomes even less about any collective struggle and more about individual redemption and paternal rescue.

I worry about what this film says about revolutionary politics. I think criticism of the left’s effectiveness, especially in this moment, is needed. I do think we have been out-organized and we largely are unsure of what to do in the face of growing authoritarianism and fascism in this country. But, the film doesn’t engage in an instructive critique of leftism, instead it portrays the movies’ revolutionaries as in sum incompetent, lacking any sort of coherent political vision. They also lack principles. Snitching is a core part of the movie; Perfidia snitches on her other French 75 members to save herself. And it’s naive to pretend as though betrayal doesn’t happen in political groups, but these very complex themes require more attention and care than OBAA allows for.

Photo credit: Pirkle Jones and Ruth Marion Baruch

Back to the bank robbery scene: Perfidia shoots a Black security guard at point blank range who is posing little to no threat to them. I am not sure what true Black revolutionary group would shoot a Black man who poses no threat without a thought about the implications or contradictions. And this is part of the issue: we are to understand Perfidia and the French 75 more broadly as a group who do big things but mostly to fuel their own hedonistic desires for a type of nihilistic violence.

I can’t help thinking that this is also what the film makers want us to think about revolutionary politics (and political violence) generally. In another instance, Pat attempts to reengage with the French 75 and calls what is essentially their command center. The person on the other end of the line insists that Pat provide a passcode before sharing sensitive information. Understandably, given the history of COINTELPRO and other state led efforts to dismantle revolutionary groups, the French 75 member who Ghetto Pat speaks with refuses to give Pat the information without a specific passcode. This is good actually, a sign of someone who wants to fiercely protect their organization. But the film portrays the French 75 member as annoying and overly concerned with procedure. I was left understanding that we are supposed to perceive principles, code words, and other safeguards that keep political groups safe from infiltration as annoyingly pedantic.

Photo credit: Warner Bros

This is especially dangerous in a political moment like ours. ICE is literally terrorizing communities right now. Keith Porter Jr. was just murdered by an ICE agent in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve. Renee Nicole Good was also murdered by ICE just last week. ICE agents in Minneapolis are going door to door looking for people who are out of place, enacting racialized terror and surveillance in communities. And, of course, the type of violence we are facing transcends borders as it always does. The Trump administration just abducted Venezuela’s president in an effort to expand U.S. hegemony and the genocide in Palestine continues on.

Photo credit: Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Yet One Battle After Another offers a version of revolution that is politically empty. In a time like this where we desperately need radical political organizations and actions, it is careless to engage revolution, Black radicals, and guerrilla warfare in this way. Worse, it invites audiences, especially liberal and conservative ones, to punch down on “incompetent” leftists. The film flirts with a shallow “both sides are extreme” logic, creating false equivalence between fascist violence and liberation struggle. In doing so, it is ultimately counter revolutionary. If revolution is incoherent and the right is dangerous, then stability (however violent) becomes the default.

Photo credit: Ann Arbor District Library

The film ends with Pat’s daughter, Willa, leaving the house for a protest. The message here being that Willa is following in her parents’ legacy (I guess). But again we don’t know if she’s part of a political group or even what her politics are. It’s a politically empty ending for a politically empty film. And if anything is true, it’s that we have mistaken going to a one off protest with no platform or demands or voting as the end all be all of our political action.

There’s an argument to be made that we should not look to a Hollywood film to make sense of our current political moment. This is true, but we don’t live our lives in vacuums. So, we should have the tools and political analysis to know when a film is propagandizing us to disengage in sustained, collective political action. I do believe that film, music, literature, and other art forms help us make sense of the world around us. They give texture and voice to feelings we carry but don’t have the words for. They inspire us to build a world worth living in. But art also has the power to narrow our sense of what is possible, to distort what is worth our time, and to make organized political action appear futile, incoherent, or naïve. Liberation will require one battle after another and we will win some and lose many more. In times like these we need art forms that push our collective thinking and capacity for political action forward. We need art that expands our capacity for collective action, not art that trains us to expect its failure.

Toward Liberation is an abolitionist reading group that meets bi-monthly to study radical literature with the goal of moving from theory to praxis. Together, we explore ideas about abolition and liberation, and what it will take to actually get us there. If you want to seriously engage with questions of liberation, join us on February 24th for a discussion of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072. The book stretches our political imagination, asking not only what is possible, but what it would take to make it real. Sign up here!

It is also worth saying: I found the film to be entertaining, and it is unarguably beautifully shot. This is not a criticism of the mechanics of its film making. I also recognize that Regina Hall’s character, Deandra, comes to save Willa—a profound action of political commitment. Pat is able to rescue his daughter because Sergio St. Carlos, played by Benicio del Toro, runs what I assume is a highly organized network for migrants. And yet, even here, the film stops short. We are not given insight into why Sergio does this work, what political commitments animate him, or what becomes of the migrants he is supposedly protecting. Are they safe? Is this network part of a broader movement?

Register here for our discussion on Tuesday, February 24, 2026 with special guest M.E. O’Brien, one of the authors of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072.

See you soon!

For some time now, I’ve been convinced that the world we’re working toward—one without cages, borders, family policing, or organized abandonment—will not be delivered through the familiar channels of protests or electoral politics. Those tools have mattered, but they have never been enough. History shows us that abolitionist futures are not granted; they are wrested into being through rupture. Through revolution. And revolution, if we’re honest, carries implications that are unsettling, including confrontation and violence, not because we desire harm, but because systems built on violence rarely dissolve peacefully.

This recognition isn’t meant to frame revolution as something to fear. It’s meant to be clear-eyed about what we’re up against. Carceral systems, racial capitalism, and empire have proven extraordinarily adaptable. They absorb dissent. They professionalize resistance. They promise reform while preserving power. If abolition is our horizon, then we must be willing to imagine transformation at a scale that radically exceeds reform—and that necessarily means the dismantling of capitalism itself. An economic system built on extraction, disposability, and inequality can never be reconciled with collective care, mutual flourishing, or liberation.

And yet, even when we name all of this, a persistent question remains: How do we get there? What does life actually look like on the other side of capitalism? How do people survive the collapse of one world while building another? What kinds of relationships, conflicts, mistakes, and experiments emerge in the aftermath of revolution?

That’s why we chose Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 for our January–February reading. Rather than offering a blueprint or manifesto, this book invites us into a speculative future through an oral history of the New York Commune, decades after a successful uprising. We hear from people who lived through the insurrection, the uncertainty, and the everyday work of building a new society. The book refuses easy answers. It doesn’t sanitize struggle or pretend that liberation is tidy. Instead, it gives us something arguably more valuable—a textured, human account of what it might actually take to undo capitalism and construct collective life beyond it.

In addition to sharing our next read, I want to share a small but important shift in how our group will move forward. Beginning now, we’ll be taking two months to read each book instead of one. Many of you—and honestly, all of us—have shared that the monthly pace has been difficult to sustain. Slowing down feels aligned with the kind of movement culture we’re trying to build—one that values care, depth, and accessibility over constant acceleration.

I’ll end with this invitation. Imagining abolitionist futures can be frightening. It asks us to let go of the familiar, even when the familiar is harming us. But it’s also an act of courage and collective hope. The kind of radical imagining this book offers isn’t escapism—it’s preparation. If we are serious about moving toward liberation, then we have to practice imagining worlds that don’t yet exist, together. I hope you’ll join us as we do that.

In solidarity,

Alan

P.S. At the publisher’s website (here), a digital copy of the book is available for only $5.00.

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It’s hard to put into words what this year has been like. I think I share the feelings of many when I say that the world feels overwhelming and heavy and full of grief. We’ve watched a genocide continue on relentlessly, the continued destruction of life in Haiti, Sudan, and Congo, Donald Trump is once again president, ICE feels more outwardly violent than ever, and the ongoing, everyday violence of racial capitalism and the carceral state churns forward. I’m always looking for ways to understand the circumstances we find ourselves in, in a pursuit of uncovering new potentialities for how we might live better lives. Working with my dear comrades connease and Alan on upEND and Toward Liberation are ways I find what I am looking for. This work helps me see and contribute to what often feels impossible to imagine given our current realities: the big and small movements that are being made to build something better. I hope Toward Liberation is a space where others too find understanding and possibility in the midst of a far too cruel and chaotic world.

We are approaching the end of the year, and this time of year welcomes reflection. Thinking about the conversations we’ve had in community with those of you who attend our meetings, I feel hopeful and grateful. We’ve wrestled with big questions like what is violence and who gets to use it? How do we support those on the inside? What conditions make a revolution more imminent and how do we work towards them? How do we learn from Black mothers and their efforts to protect motherhood and their children? How can we engage in more liberatory faith practices? And how do we practice new worlds? We’ve been joined by inspiring abolitionist thinkers: Orisamni Burton, Andrea Ritchie, Mali Collins. They have generously lent us their time and ideas, pushing us to think deeper about how abolition becomes more possible.

So as the year closes, Alan, connease, and I wanted to leave you with a few reflections about the year we’ve had, the conversations we’ve enjoyed with all of you, and what we are thinking about as we enter 2026. — Maya

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This year has been difficult for many of us. With the rise of authoritarian and fascist movements globally, it can feel like the left is losing ground. As you reflect on 2025, how are you making sense of the political moment we’re in?

Alan: When I try to make sense of this political moment, I keep returning to the words of George Jackson, written from a prison cell in the late 1960s:

What stays with me is not just his warning about what was coming, but his insistence that fascism was not a future threat—it was already present, already killing people who could be saved, already producing what he called “butchered half-lives.”

That framing helps ground me today. While many people now experience authoritarianism and fascism as something new or unprecedented, for Black, Indigenous, and other historically oppressed communities in the United States, this has long been a lived reality. State violence, mass incarceration, family separation, forced displacement, and premature death are not recent developments; they are foundational features of this country. Remembering this doesn’t make the present any less frightening, but it clarifies what we are actually facing and how long people have been resisting it.

It also sharpens my understanding of where fascism comes from. The danger isn’t Donald Trump or any single administration. Those are symptoms, not the source. The deeper problem is the United States itself—a political project built on genocide, slavery, racial capitalism, and imperial violence. As long as those foundations remain intact, authoritarianism is not an aberration but a recurring feature, repeatedly taking new forms.

Part of what makes this moment feel so destabilizing for many people is that, for a long time, certain forms of violence were kept at a distance—buffered by privilege, proximity, or illusion. What feels like a sudden descent into fascism is, for others, the expansion of conditions they have always lived under.

Naming that isn’t about shaming; it’s about clarity. It reminds us that the task before us is not to return to a safer past, but to confront a system that has never been safe.

connease:

I’ve struggled deeply with the realities of this moment. The brazen nature of terrors unleashed no longer bothers to throw up even a shoddy veneer of pretense. The casual cruelty wrought by White Supremacist fascists has been gut-wrenching to witness. And the assaults against the most vulnerable are relentless. Even knowing that cruelty is the point and a strategy to keep us scattered and frayed psychologically and emotionally. The gloves are off in a way they haven’t been in modern history.

It’s difficult to look upon that brazenness and recognize it as a gift. However, the violence that has always been hiding in plain sight is now on full display. Trump is but a true-to-life caricature of the racist, xenophobic sentiments that the two-party duopoly has sought to obscure with political decorum. The quiet, unspoken violence is now being shouted from the rooftops at the highest levels of U.S. government, from POTUS and his cabinet to Congress and SCOTUS. The gift in it all is the clarity needed to form a mass movement of resistance. As groups are targeted one by one, I believe and pray it will become ever evident that the 1% has the same death-making plans for all but themselves. And I hope that evidence spurs us into action.

It has been exhausting to understand the depths to which a lack of political education is hampering our collective progress.

And yet, I have been encouraged by the abundance of increasingly sharp analyses that connect the present with our shared histories across identities and continents that all point to the same root cause: White supremacy, settler colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, and every other ism that obscures us from our shared destiny.

Amongst the ruins of this year, I cling to an abiding hope.

Maya: For me, the hardest part of the year has been this overwhelming feeling that what we are up against is vast in both power and strength, and that we on the left are neither organized nor aligned enough to make a meaningful dent in it. Things feel like they are moving full steam ahead, and it often seems as though there is little we can do to slow, let alone stop, the momentum. I’ve felt this especially as we witness the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the U.S.’s continued support of Israel. Many of us have made space for political education, contributed funds to efforts on the ground in Gaza, shared information, pressured politicians, attended protests, and boycotted companies, yet none of this feels like enough. The genocide continues, even as the media speaks of a “ceasefire.” That feeling of helplessness, or of simply not doing enough, has been overwhelming.

It has also become clearer than ever that there is no real political resistance to fascism within mainstream politics. Democrats have largely responded by moving rightward. And when those on the left attempt to hold politicians accountable for their spineless positions, liberals respond by accusing us of wanting “purity politics.” It’s been deeply frustrating, and that’s an understatement.

But what this political moment makes overwhelmingly clear to me is that we’ve reached a point of no return. There is no viable path back to how things used to be. Making sense of this moment means recognizing that we need strong, unapologetic left political movements, and that we can no longer afford to elect right-wing Democrats who create the very conditions for fascism to thrive. If anything, 2025 has clarified that we have to be committed to doing things differently than we have before.

Veteran Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin says it plainly:

This is something I’m thinking about recurrently. We haven’t fully adapted to the modern political landscape we’re up against, particularly in how we think about what resistance looks like. I don’t think we can afford to organize mass protests with no demands and no plans for how to mobilize people afterward. We have real work to do to modernize our political strategies if we want to win.

What’s one moment (good or bad) that felt particularly instructive for you this year?

Alan: One moment that felt especially instructive for me was the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione (which occurred in the final weeks of 2024, but dominated political and social conversation well into 2025). What struck me most was not the act itself, but the response to it. There was no universal outrage or shared consensus that this violence was incomprehensible. Instead, many people—across political, racial, and class lines that rarely align—expressed a sense that the act was understandable, even justified, given the immense harm caused by the private health insurance industry.

I found this moment instructive because it exposed a widening rupture between official narratives of legitimacy and people’s lived experiences of harm.

When institutions are so clearly organized around profit at the expense of human life, faith in those institutions erodes. The public response suggested that corporations, courts, and the law are increasingly understood not as neutral arbiters of justice, but as systems that normalize slow, bureaucratic violence while criminalizing responses to it.

For me, this underscored a long-standing abolitionist insight that resistance does not always look polite, orderly, or sanctioned by the state. It often emerges when people recognize that the systems governing their lives are fundamentally unresponsive to their survival. That doesn’t make violence inevitable but it does mean we should pay attention to what people are saying when they refuse to defend institutions that have consistently failed them—and consider what that refusal reveals about resistance.

connease: One word: Chicago. Chicago’s response to ICE raids. I stayed attuned to the developments on the ground by closely following long-time organizer Kelly Hayes through her Facebook page and Organizing My Thoughts newsletter. As a quick aside, in the dearth of credible mass media, it is essential to seek voices that illuminate truth and tell stories uncorrupted by corporate interests, which is to say the interests of empire. Co-author with Mariame Kaba of Let This Radicalize You (a 2024 TL selection), Kelly’s experience as an activist, combined with a clear, pragmatically hopeful voice, continues to be a gift to the movement and is so very necessary for this moment.

But even mainstream social media told stories of Chicago’s resistance to the terror ICE unleashed on Chicago’s communities. In the hometown of Fred Hampton, people joined together to obstruct ICE with ever determined and creative means.

Chicago showed the world what is possible with organized resistance. Many put their bodies on the line to protect their neighbors, friends, and even strangers who were being hunted like prey. Chicago’s residents didn’t stop every arrest, but undoubtedly they thwarted many. The vast majority seemed unified in delivering the message that ICE was unwanted in their city, successfully branding ICE agents social outcasts barred from restaurants and city property.

Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, responded to demands from the community to increase efforts to protect Chicagoans. And in a rare show of support for community activism from the highest level of government, he often and unapologetically verbally sparred with the Trump administration, validating what boots-on-the-ground activists were doing and, from a political platform, elevating the importance of resistance. As the terror wore on, it was both shocking and refreshing to hear a sitting mayor call out the complicity of capitalism in what was happening and name-check economic resistance as a solution.

Maya: On the left, responses to those demanding that politicians stop capitulating to Israel clarified for me just how deep-seated American individualism really is and how much work it will take to overcome it. There are many people who hold progressive politics but still fundamentally believe we have to worry about “us” first, or that we can’t care about Palestine, Sudan, or Congo if people here are struggling to afford food. I’ve also been struck by conversations about how it’s a “privilege” to boycott (Starbucks and Target, of all things).

To me, all of this reveals just how entrenched and corrosive American individualism is. On a basic human level, many people do not feel a responsibility for the consequences of U.S. actions abroad, nor do they believe that what happens elsewhere has implications for life at home. That realization has been deeply instructive.

If anything, this year has made it clearer than ever that internationalism as a grounding political principle is essential to growing a coherent political movement.

What’s something that has reminded you that abolition is possible?

Alan: Here I’ll return to my first response. For me, the clarity that fascism is the long-standing project of the United States doesn’t lead to despair. It reinforces why abolitionist study, organizing, and collective imagination matter so deeply right now. If fascism is not new, then neither is resistance.

And if this moment is stripping away illusions about what the state is and has always been, it may also be opening space for more honest, collective, and transformative ways of being together—and fighting for a world beyond the one we’ve inherited.

connease: Maybe it’s the poet in me, but I see the possibilities of abolition in the natural world.

I see the answers in the trees, the way they bend and adapt, the determination to grow in the most unlikely spaces, spreading roots sideways at the edges of sidewalks, using the space available. On days clouded by overwhelm and amid so much suffering, I see an unending hope in the examples of adaptation found in plants and even in what has been labeled as weeds.

Nature is always calling and speaking to us, demanding our attention, whether through another climate catastrophe or through the seasons, though changed, continuing through the cycles of birth, growth, and death. The only question is how we will continue. What choices will we make?

In the very beginning of 2025, fires raged in Southern California, ominously echoing the prescience of Octavia Butler’s work. We read Parable of the Sower with a keener awareness of the solutions she offered in that instructive text. We were reminded of the importance of community and the enduring nature of human resilience. Parable of the Sower showed us that, even in the face of a world being dismantled from what we knew, change is inevitable. The only question is how we change. What will we abandon and what will we build?

Abolition is possible if we build a world where it can exist. Our charge is to take the opportunity to change in the direction that supports life and the natural world.

against all hope
you are here again
turning slowly
nature as chameleon
all life change
and changing again
awakening hearts
steady moving from
unnamed loss
into fierce deep grief
that can bear all burdens
-bell hooks from Appalachian Elegy (quoted in Black Liturgies)

Maya: There have been many moments this year that have reminded me that abolition is indeed possible and the current state of the world is not inevitable. I’ve been grateful to witness glimpses of abolition throughout the year: pooling funds together for loved ones, talking with students about where they see moments of possibilities, and to seeing the national conversation continue to shift on family policing. These actions, conversations, and shifts remind me that people are communal and eager to support one another.

One moment in particular that I’m also thinking about is the recent government shut down, which was the longest shutdown in U.S. history, lasting 43 days. During this time, many people lost access to government benefits—notably access to food assistance (SNAP). People came together, some creating small food pantries in their yards with “take what you need” policies. Others deepened their support of mutual aid. Households handed out canned goods and other food items in addition to candy and treats on Halloween, recognizing that many of their community members might also be hungry.

I come back to each of these moments when I think about our capacity to suspend individualism and think of one another as human beings that we are deeply connected to. These moments remind me that we know and will meet each other’s needs without being asked to.

I do not think that we can mutual aid or crowd fund ourselves out of hunger, homelessness, and the like. But I do believe that these actions and moments help us strengthen our collective muscle to care for one another. And strengthening that collective muscle makes another world more possible.

What’s one conversation we’ve had this year that you keep returning to?

Alan: The conversation I keep returning to is our discussion of Tip of the Spear with Orisanmi Burton. That conversation has stayed with me because it pushed us to think seriously—and historically—about what resistance actually looks like, rather than what we’re taught it should look like.

As you can probably tell from my earlier reflections, I’ve spent a lot of this year thinking about resistance—who gets to define it, which forms are celebrated, and which are condemned.

One of the thoughts that I keep returning to is the recognition that state institutions—prisons, police, family separation, forced institutionalization—are not neutral or passive. They are forms of normalized violence. When that reality is taken seriously, the question shifts. It is no longer simply whether violence should be rejected in the abstract, but whose violence is rendered invisible and legitimate, and whose resistance is criminalized and punished.

What Tip of the Spear helped clarify is that resisting state violence may require disruption—actions the state will inevitably label as “violent.”

That conversation reminded me that abolitionist study is not just about learning history; it’s about unlearning the moral frameworks that make state violence appear natural and justified, and about taking seriously the difficult questions that resistance forces us to confront.

connease: For the better part of 2025, I’ve been talking about and recommending Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton to anyone willing to listen. By the time Dr. Ori graciously joined our meeting in August, it served as the exclamation point to many revelatory experiences. First was the recognition that we are, and have been, in an active state of war. The reframing of what I thought of and understood to be oppression was soundly turned on its head. Oppression does not begin to capture the urgency invoked by war. Beginning in the intro, Burton makes the case that we are engaged in warfare and that the experience of being Black in the Americas is to exist as a prisoner of war.

Recasting liberatory struggle as a response to a continuous war waged against us expands the conversations and possibilities for how we conceptualize it and engage with it. Warfare as a framework conveys a sense of greater urgency while challenging the false dichotomy between violent and nonviolent resistance, particularly as projected through the lens of Empire.

Historically, nonviolent protest has been encouraged through social norms and swift retribution from the carceral state for other forms of resistance. Yet dismantling the logic of nonviolence as a strategy through the lens of warfare reveals both its limits and the advantages it confers on the state. The cultural insistence on nonviolent resistance hypocritically obscures the depths of systemic, acceptable violence by the state. Tip of the Spear opens a necessary conversation and recasting of how we conceptualize and understand violence in the context of both domination and struggle.

Without a doubt, Tip of the Spear and all of the thoughts and conversations it spawned in 2025 forever changed how I think of resistance, struggle, and our distinct role as prisoners of war.

Maya: We’ve had incredible conversations this year, but I can’t stop thinking about our conversation with Orisanmi Burton, discussing his incredible work Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. I voraciously took notes throughout the entire conversation and I have not stopped returning to these notes yet. What sticks with me the most is the way his scholarship clarifies the situation we are in and what that means for us: we are at war and we must push ourselves to take seriously what that means. This helps me (us) understand how and why our efforts to advance change through laws and policy often fail. And why the terms of our conditions are always changing. This is something I continue to think about deeply and will continue to use as a grounding principle moving forward in 2026.

What are some ways you’ve kept yourself whole this year? What do you want to do better next year?

Alan: I’ll be honest: I’m not very good at this. Keeping myself whole is an ongoing struggle, and this year was no exception. Much of my energy in 2025 went into writing a new book—a memoir about my years as a family policing agent—and while that process was intense, it also felt clarifying in a way that surprised me. I’m excited for it to come out in 2027, not because it feels like an accomplishment in the conventional sense, but because I hope it becomes useful to the movement.

That writing didn’t feel like “work” in the way we usually mean it. It felt more like an act of reckoning and offering—an attempt to tell the truth about harm, accountability, and transformation in a way that might help others make sense of their own relationships to systems of punishment. In that sense, writing became one of the few ways I stayed grounded this year, even as it demanded a lot from me.

At the same time, I know that staying whole can’t only happen inside movement spaces or through political work, no matter how meaningful that work is. Looking ahead to 2026, I want to be more intentional about practices that center my body and my health—things like meditation and yoga—not as self-improvement, but as ways of cultivating presence and care outside the constant urgency of struggle. My hope is that tending to myself more deliberately will make it possible to stay in this work with greater steadiness and capacity for the long haul.

connease: Without a doubt, nature proved to be a source of refuge this year. I am proud that I leaned into urges to go outside and gaze at the trees, or consider the flowers, or sit in my car for 30 minutes watching a squirrel find a place to bury her treasure.

Many times, I fought back the capitalist tendency to rush or to tell myself I didn’t have time to indulge what my spirit and even my body felt drawn to. I listened.

Midyear, I began to focus on my health. I was intentional about deciding to take my walks outside device free, though I felt pressure to count steps and track my progress. Instead, I protected the opportunity to listen to the sounds of wind and birds, and freed my other senses to smell new grass and wild onions, and witness the sights of a burgeoning spring, a summer in full bloom, and a fall marked with the deepening palette of change.

My inclination to seek the solace and wisdom of nature is a spiritual urge to reconnect to that which racial capitalism steals through time, or the mistaken assumption that reveling in nature is frivolous or inconsequential. Yet before White supremacy and settler colonialism established their foothold in the world and our consciousness, we moved with the flow of the seasons and the earth. Thus, any move toward that which we’ve lost is a critical act of resistance.

I believe in living.
I believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs.
And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.
– from Affirmation by Assatta Shaku

Maya: Something I did well this year was being more disciplined about journaling and sitting in discomfort. I think it’s easy for me to just keep going and moving through hard feelings instead of really sitting with them, and this year I pushed myself to slow down quite a bit. Relatedly, I spent the last few days of the year in the mountains and stayed off of my phone for the most part. Those days were a reminder that I need to do this more regularly. Moving my body, pushing myself on tough hikes, dealing with sweat and rain, and being completely aware of each step—making sure my foot isn’t on a loose rock, staying alert for bears or other creatures—is a practice in being fully present in my body and of working with, rather than against, nature. Each step, each breath, each push, and each moment of ease is fully felt.

Even if I can’t get away from the city frequently, I can work to create more moments of stillness in my life, appreciate both human and non-human forms of life, and be more aware of the time I’m spending on my phone. I recently read that social media makes time move faster because phone use dulls our awareness of our surroundings and weakens our memory of the present. Simply put, scrolling impairs our “awareness of the present and your memory of the past.”

Time moves more slowly in a way that makes me feel less anxious when I’m not scrolling my time away. It gives me space to sit with my feelings, thoughts, and discomfort instead of scrolling past them.

I don’t do this enough and I’d like to do more of this in 2026.

What’s one hope for 2026? Something you’d like to see more of from movements on the left?

Alan: One hope I carry into 2026 is not a renewed faith in electoral politics, but a clearer set of political expectations. I no longer believe elections, on their own, will bring about the kind of change we need. At the same time, the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York felt instructive—not because it restored my belief in the system, but because it signaled a shift in what is considered politically possible.

What stood out most was Mamdani’s unapologetic support for Palestinian liberation, and the fact that this position was not treated as disqualifying by voters. For so long, solidarity with Palestine has been framed as an electoral liability, something to be softened, hidden, or abandoned in the pursuit of “viability”—something we saw play out very clearly in last year’s Presidential election. Seeing that narrative fail—seeing a candidate win without retreating from a clear anti-colonial stance—felt like an important crack in the logic that has disciplined the so-called left for decades.

My hope for 2026 is that this becomes a baseline rather than an exception. I want to see support for Palestinian liberation—and a commitment to ending U.S. support for Israeli violence—become a litmus test for anyone claiming the mantle of the left. Not a symbolic statement, not a vague call for peace, but a clear refusal to participate in genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism.

That shift wouldn’t mean elections suddenly save us. But it would reflect something deeper and more important: movements forcing clarity, refusing moral compromise, and making it impossible to build political legitimacy while standing on the side of empire. For me, that’s where hope lives—not in the ballot itself, but in the pressure movements apply to redefine what is acceptable, sayable, and possible.

connease: My one hope for 2026 is the same hope I had for 2025, that we will galvanize a mass movement to slow the gears of racial capitalism. I hope that there is more widespread education and acknowledgement that our capital and labor are assets we can effectively leverage. Though the level of coordination and sacrifice can feel overwhelming at times, I am hopeful that examples like the sustained boycott of Target give people more faith in collective action.

That is my audacious hope, even as the 1% increasingly tightens its grip on resources and hastens the extractive mechanisms that drive suffering. I hope, while also observing the calculated efforts to distract us through media campaigns that utilize AI and bots to foment outrage and pit groups against each other.

I hope we realize, sooner rather than later, that the solutions lie in uniting against our common enemy in solidarity and striking back by withholding our dollars and labor against the greed and inequality that threaten us all.

Maya: I think we have a tough road ahead in this country. It’s only been a year of the current administration, and it already feels like three. At the same time, I’m witnessing a broader rise in conservatism. People are re-embracing “traditional” values; young people are returning to religion in ways that feel tied to conservative politics; slurs are resurfacing; and homophobia feels increasingly normalized. Right-wing content is ubiquitous across social media platforms, and it often feels like any hobby or interest can become an expressway to an alt-right pipeline.

I am deeply concerned about the political and social direction we are heading in. And alongside that concern is a growing realization that we lack the political analysis and collective consciousness needed to meaningfully push forward. Many people are still asking, “What if Kamala had been president?” I worry that this question reflects a desire to return to what felt familiar or comforting for some, rather than to move toward real structural change.

To that end, I want to see real strides in our collective political analysis. I want mass protest grounded in rigorous analysis and strategic action. I want our ability to evaluate elections and candidates to move beyond where it is now. And more than anything, I want political education to be centered, not as an afterthought, but as a core practice of building power.

Below, we’ve compiled a list of causes, organizations, and funds we’ll be supporting in 2026 and beyond. We hope you’ll support what you can too.

Social Work for Palestine

Letters for Liberation

#JusticeForKemari

East of The River Mutual Aid

PrisonCulture’s Giving Circle

Welcome Home Fund for Marie Mechie Scott

Support Sheena King’s commutation efforts with the purchase of her book Submerged: On Healing from Abuse While Navigating a Lifetime of Imprisonment

We know it’s been a while since we’ve been in touch, so we wanted to send an update and an invitation to join our virtual discussion of Scrap Theory: Reproductive injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination, which will now be on November 17th from 6:00 - 7:00 PM ET. We’re very excited and grateful that Mali Collins will be joining us and we’re looking forward to seeing many of you as well. We hope you can join us!

REGISTER FOR 11/17 BOOK DISCUSSION

After we meet on November 17, we’ll take a break over the holiday season and then we’ll regroup in January with a new book, and some new energy after a much needed break for all of us.

We know this year has taken a toll on all of us and we’re very grateful to each of you for being part of our community - a community that endures through difficult times because our work toward liberation is what sustains us.

We hope to see many of you on November 17 and if you’re not able to join us, we look forward to re-engaging with you in January 2026.

In solidarity always,

Alan, connease, & Maya

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It is my heartfelt belief that all the people on this earth deserve justice: social justice, political justice, and economic justice. I believe it is the only way that we will ever achieve peace and prosperity on earth. — Assata Shakur

Source: Hood Communist

With the passing of great Black freedom fighter and revolutionary Assata Shakur (may she rest in eternal power), we have gained another ancestor. Shakur has long been venerated among those who engage in political struggle and rightly so. For many of us her political consciousness, actions, wisdom, and steadfast commitment to Black liberation provide inspiration for what it means to engage in principled struggle against oppression. There’s much to say about Assata, but what follows are a few of my reflections on the lessons and legacy she leaves us in her transition.

On the terms of war

I find myself returning to one of Assata’s famous offerings, To My People (1973), which she wrote from prison after being shot by the police on the New Jersey Turnpike. Pulled over for a busted taillight, Assata was ambushed by the police. This incident resulted in the murder of Assata’s comrade, Black Liberation Army member Zayd Malik Shakur, and a life sentence in prison for Assata for killing a New Jersey police officer. This ambush was a violent act that can absolutely be understood in terms of war. In To My People Assata writes of war. Her opening paragraph states:

“I am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied.”

Assata saw herself as at war against the state because she understood that the state had already declared war against her. Her life experiences proved this point. To be Black in America was to be targeted by state violence. By the time she was incarcerated in 1973, she had already witnessed the FBI’s COINTELPRO program assassinate several Black Panther Party members — and that same year, after the state murdered her comrade Zayd Malik Shakur, she became a lifelong political prisoner.

It is instructive to understand our current conditions in terms of war. This also reminds me of last month’s discussion with Orisanmi Burton, author of Tip of the Spear (2023), who likewise insists that we are at war with the state. Burton explains that this “war” framework reminds us that oppressed communities cannot expect the state to abide by its own laws, because what we are up against is not a series of isolated inequalities but an ongoing state project of domination. Reading our conditions through war, as Assata, Burton, and others urge, clarifies both what we are up against and what we must fight for. This means that there is no law, policy, political figure, or campaign that can secure liberation for oppressed people. This is particularly important to understand in our current political moment, as both mainstream parties embrace fascist policies. The fight is for liberation — not for a nicer, kinder, gentler cage or oppressor. And, if war clarifies what we are up against, then Assata’s writings also help us reject the false categories through which the state defines us and our struggle.

Source: AP Photos

Reject frameworks given to us by the state

Writing as a so-called “criminal” from prison, Assata proclaims:

“It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals. It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa.”

She situates the death and destruction the United States inflicts upon countries around the globe as criminal violence. This analysis is valuable, particularly as the U.S. remains responsible for orchestrating violence worldwide. Political leaders want us to believe that the carnage in Haiti, Sudan, Congo, Palestine, and elsewhere are not crimes of war, but rather a necessary and acceptable price to maintain Western hegemony. Assata continues on to speak about the violence inflicted upon Black people by the state:

“They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people.”

This too reminds me of last month’s conversation where Orisanmi Burton spoke with clarity about violence, describing the state’s violence as one-sided violence. That is to say that the state attempts to monopolize violence, telling us what is and is not violence and what is and is not criminal. Assata also offers us a different theory, too rejecting the state’s claims: we are the victims, not the criminals. This is not to say that we are helpless but it’s to more accurately dislocate the state as a neutral actor. It’s helpful to continuously deconstruct what we see as violence: Houselessness and the commodification of land are violent, hunger is a violent output of capitalism, pollution and environmental harm is violent.

Communities and individuals trying to survive under these conditions is not a similar type of violence. And, resistance against the state (although at times violent) is not synonymous with harm or criminality. State definitions of what is criminal and what is violence often entraps us in cycles where we begin to see each other as the enemy, taking the focus away from the state. We demonize certain types of political action, we become scared of Black youth and police one another, we fight to protect our property instead of embracing collectivism. As Assata also said, “Only a fool lets someone tell them who the enemy is.” We should instead focus our attention on ending state violence and the conditions that allow it. When interpersonal harm occurs in our communities, we deserve responses to harm that don’t deepen violence through policing or incarceration.

Our struggle for liberation is about the fight to live

My final reflection is about life. Articulating how Black life is constituted by death under our current conditions, Assata writes,

“Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born.”

I understand Assata to be, at least in part, articulating reproductive violence. Death surrounds what it means to be Black in this country so much so that the beginning of life is often marked by death. This reminds me of what reproductive justice thinkers and organizers teach us about what reproductive violence is: the inability to raise one’s children free from state harm and violence. The violence that Black parents face while bringing life into this world can be understood as reproductive violence: neglect from the medical system, the devaluing of Black doulas and midwives, separating children from their parents at birth. This reproductive violence extends to Black children’s later years through state violence. Here, I’m thinking about Samara Rice and other countless Black parents who have had to witness their babies be murdered by the state. I am also thinking about Black parents who are forced to “share” custody of their children with the state, parenting children that are locked in cages. (More on this as we continue reading Mali Collins’ Scrap Theory next month).

Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. — Assata Shakur

Beyond reproductive violence, I’m also considering all of the ways the state makes life unlivable. We often understand things like addiction, depression, and suicide to be individual hardship, but to what extent are they structural ones? The other day I watched a TikTok where a young Black person was speaking about their battle with suicidal ideation, saying that they are unable to journal away the stress of having no money. They articulated the weight of feeling as though they’ll never escape the constant anxiety of having to make money to live a decent life but being unable to do so. That their life will feel this way for the foreseeable future was unbearable.

People often turn to drugs to escape the violence that constitutes life under our current conditions, or to suicide to escape a world in which they feel isolated and hopeless — a world they feel is often not worth living in. This, too, is a form of state violence: murder by a system that makes life impossible.

At it’s core our struggle for liberation is a struggle for the ability to live fully, to resist not only the bullets and cages of the state, but also the slow deaths it imposes on our minds and spirits. And because of this, to believe in liberation is to believe and fight for life. As Assata said:

“Revolution is love because my undying love for the people compels me to fight so that the people can finally have some peace, so the people can feel loved.”

We honor Assata and our ancestors by continuing to fight for life. The struggle is long, but Black life is a struggle worthy of our commitment. Finally, I’ll leave you with this, perhaps one of my favorite writings by Assata:

Rest in Power and Love, Assata. Free them all!

A scheduling note: The past few months have been challenging for all of us, including the Toward Liberation team. To give ourselves — and you — more time to sit with each book, we are shifting to a bi-monthly reading and meeting schedule. This means our conversation on Scrap Theory with author Mali Collins will take place in October, and we’ll reconvene for our following selection in December. Stay tuned for the updated date for the Scrap Theory discussion.

As it seems the world is being dismantled, this moment calls upon us to think more expansively, to think beyond laws and the justice it claims to administer. We are being called to grow, even in the midst of uncertainty and absurdity.

And while it cannot be argued that the tactics of the current administration are some of the most blatant and unapologetic displays of terror in the name of White Supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, racial capitalism and everything Empire holds true and dear, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have lived versions of this current reality for centuries. And Black, Brown and Indigenous women and children especially have borne the brunt of Empire’s brutality.

This September, we invite you to read with us a text that uses the expansiveness of archival history to reckon. To reckon with the then so that we might be better equipped to understand and RESIST the now.

About Scrap Theory by Mali D. Collins:

“Reproductive justice debates have often focused on the right to not have children, but rarely do they address the right to remember children lost to violence. Turning her attention to visual and written works by Black women documenting mother–child separation, Mali D. Collins invites us to deploy a theory of “scraps” to understand the ways that the lives of Black mothers and children are documentations of centuries of racialized and gendered torment.

Focusing on creative works from the late twentieth century through the present, including the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Edwidge Danticat; the critical activism of Erica Garner; and visual/material art by Samaria Rice and Elizabeth Catlett, Collins argues that Black women’s creative work should be recognized as memory work that plays a crucial role in the cultural processing of racial and maternal trauma. By centering creative scraps—interstitial, fragmentary, or discarded elements—of maternal dispossession, Scrap Theory brings together theories of archival injustice and reproductive injustice to illuminate how the archival erasure of Black motherhood is an urgent concern for the movement for reproductive justice.”

Read with us in September and join us for a special conversation with TL and Dr. Mali D. Collins on Tuesday, September 30th at 6pm ET.

Register for 9/30 Zoom Discussion

Yours in faith, love, and resistance,

The TL Team

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As a Gen-Xer growing up in the 1980s, I was a devoted fan of Sinéad O’Connor. But looking back, I now realize how her music played a role in shaping my political consciousness. She was not just an artist I admired—she planted some of the earliest seeds that would later grow into my radicalization.

On her 1990 album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got—still one of my favorites—an image in the liner notes stood out—a photo of Colin Roach at what looked like a vigil attended by his parents. The grief on his mother’s face was apparent. Beneath it, Sinéad added the caption: “God’s place is the world but the world is not God’s place.”

At the time, I had no idea who Colin Roach was. This was before the internet, so I went to the library and sifted through microfilm until I pieced together his story.

Colin Roach was a 21-year-old Black man living in Hackney, East London. One night in 1983, while riding his scooter home, he was stopped by police who, after observing him, confidently decided the scooter must be stolen. Some time later, Colin lay dying from a gunshot wound inside the foyer of the local police station. Police immediately claimed he had shot himself.

The story quickly unraveled. The coroner debunked the suicide claim, witnesses contradicted official accounts, and community outrage spilled into the streets. Protesters demanded inquiries, accountability, and justice. None came. Instead, the state closed ranks, stalled investigations, and Colin’s death remained “unresolved.”

Now the lyrics from the fifth track, Black Boys on Mopeds, on the album made sense:

“England’s not the mythical land of Madam George and roses,
it’s the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds.”

By 1992, Sinéad was already internationally famous. But her performance on Saturday Night Live in October of that year changed everything. After she performed an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War” with new lyrics she wrote about child abuse, she held up a photo of Pope John Paul II, ripped it to pieces, and declared: “Fight the real enemy.”

The backlash was immediate and severe. She was booed off stages, blacklisted from radio, and ridiculed in the press. Her career never fully recovered.

Most people never understood what she was trying to say. In 1992, the world did not yet know the full extent of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. It would be nearly a decade before Pope John Paul II publicly acknowledged it, and longer still before the global scope of the abuse—and its cover-up—came to light.

But Sinéad knew. She was a survivor of abuse herself. She saw the Catholic Church not simply as an institution harboring “bad priests,” but as the structural cause of the abuse. The Church protected abusers, silenced victims, and wielded its authority to preserve itself at the expense of truth.

Her protest wasn’t about one pope or one scandal. It was about the system itself. She was telling us—the problem is not individuals, the problem is institutions—hence her call to “fight the real enemy.”

We live in a time when our attention and blame are constantly misdirected. On the right, immigrants, refugees, and trans people are relentlessly cast as existential threats. On the left, the threat is Donald Trump and his supporters. Both narratives miss the larger truth. Trump may be dangerous. So may the far right. But neither represents the real enemy. Removing Trump from office—or electing Democrats in his place—does not alter the structures of violence and exploitation that shape our lives.

The real enemy is the political and economic system that drains public wealth to fund endless wars, that normalizes mass surveillance and policing, that strips the earth for profit while pushing us toward climate catastrophe. The real enemy is the oligarchic class—the billionaires, corporate executives, and empire-builders—who will accept environmental collapse and even nuclear annihilation if it means preserving their power.

This enemy depends on misdirection. If they can convince us to hate immigrants or trans kids, they’ve succeeded. If they can keep us obsessing over Trump while the same policies of war, austerity, and surveillance continue under Democrats, they’ve succeeded. Anything that keeps our eyes off the structures of empire—capitalism, imperialism, militarism—is useful to them.

If this wasn’t obvious before October 7, 2023, it should be now.

The United States has spent decades claiming to be the global champion of freedom, democracy, and human rights. Yet today we are witnesses to history’s first live-streamed genocide, carried out with U.S. weapons, funded with U.S. dollars, and defended with U.S. propaganda. The United States is a country that is actively supporting genocide. This is the most important fact to know about the world right now. It is being shown to us in plain sight every day.

For the first time, perhaps in its history, the United States government is telling you the truth about itself. This is hard to see for many of us because we have been raised in what can only be called a psychologically abusive relationship with the state. From childhood, we were taught to see the U.S. as benevolent, to equate obedience with freedom, and to believe elections could solve our problems. We were conditioned to see “bad presidents” as the problem and to believe swapping out one capitalist, imperialist politician with another is the solution.

For many people who become radicalized, this process starts when we begin to understand that the government has been lying to us. But today we exist in a very different reality. Today, our government is telling us the truth. Our government murders children. And the state and capitalist institutions work to censor and destroy anyone who criticizes this.

We do not live in a free society, and we haven’t for a long time. But the problem is not Donald Trump. The problem is not even “the Republicans.” The problem is empire. And once we know that, we cannot unknow it.

Sinéad O’Connor’s protest against the Catholic Church and her demand to “fight the real enemy” were not random acts of defiance. They were warnings about how power works, and about what happens when we fail to see through the distractions.

Today, the stakes are higher. The empire is on open display. Its violence is not hidden, it is broadcast live. Its propaganda is less convincing, but its grip remains tight.

The first step toward liberation is the same one Sinéad tried to show us—learn to name the real enemy. Not the scapegoats. Not the figureheads. But the structures of empire itself. And once we name it, the work begins—dismantling it, so another world can take its place.

The work of dismantling empire can feel overwhelming. The daily images of devastation in Gaza are unbearable, and it is easy to feel powerless in the face of so much destruction. But we are not powerless. Empires fall when ordinary people make deliberate choices that weaken their foundations.

We have already seen the impact of organized resistance through the BDS movement. Now we must escalate. Starting today, August 21st, a Global Strike for Gaza begins. Every Thursday, we are called to act in two simple but powerful ways:

1. Buy nothing. Make no purchases of any kind.

2. Avoid fueling, charging electric vehicles, or using public transportation*.

   (People who must use public transportation are urged to use fare cards or otherwise pay in advance.)

This is how we strike at empire’s core—its economy. When governments ignore our voices, we can disrupt the systems they depend on. Even a single day of collective withdrawal sends a measurable shock. And when we do this week after week, we demonstrate our strength—the very power they have dismissed as inconsequential.

This is not a work strike. The organizers know that many of us live paycheck to paycheck and cannot risk our jobs. But every one of us can make choices about where our money goes—and when we refuse to spend, we make a difference.

The urgency could not be greater. We cannot wait for governments to act; we must act ourselves. Join the strike and spread the word.

To learn more, listen to the call from Palestinian journalist Biswan Owda and visit @globalstrikegaza for details.

In solidarity always,

Alan

What an honor to discuss Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt during Black August, a month dedicated to remembering Black political prisoners and studying the history and enduring legacy of Black resistance and radicalism. We are looking forward to discussing this essential text with author, Orisanmi Burton, and our TL community.

As a reminder, if you haven’t finished the book or even if you haven’t cracked it open yet, please don’t hesitate to join us. Your presence is welcomed as we will be coming together in community to commemorate an important month for anyone interested in our struggle for liberation.

For a nice primer to ground you in the text we will be discussing, check out this podcast featuring Orisanmi Burton.

See you soon!

Join us on Wednesday, August 20 from 6:00-7:00 PM ET to discuss Tip of the Spear with Orisanmi Burton!

REGISTER FOR 8/20 ZOOM DISCUSSION

"2025 a number another summer…"

Riffing on the Public Enemy classic Fight the Power because that's the energy and mood needed in this moment. And yesterday, and in 1989, when the song came out, and in the decades before that.

And yet the awakening of the masses has been slow. Or, as Tip of the Spear so brilliantly illustrates, slowed down, quelled, and almost eradicated. Almost. But the spirit and the voices documented in the text prevail. We need them now.

It's tempting to get frustrated with the less radicalized or even with ourselves, as a great number of us seem to be frozen watching the predictions of some of our most fervent freedom fighters unfold. In a recent Rolling Stone article*, political prisoner Mumia Abbul Jabal said:

And that’s exactly what the summer of 2025 has been showing us—terror in real time.

From the ongoing genocides and forced starvation of people in Gaza, Sudan, and the Congo, we're left to endure the trauma of watching rampant and brutal war crimes brazenly committed, devoid of consequences.

To the immigrants; our neighbors and friends hunted, kidnapped, and disappeared by ICE, 2025’s Gestapo. This terror shows us that the promise of due process is an option dictated by the whims of a racist, xenophobic administration. Again, Mumia Abu-Jamal makes it plain:

The torture cages rapidly constructed and dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, a moniker gleefully promising death by horror, the jokes and laughs from officials to the tune of utter inhumanity, the pictures proudly shared in front of the sign, and the Alligator Alcatraz merch being shamelessly peddled all demonstrate a depravity that seems to know no end.

But no matter how long the list of horrors, for us, the answer has always been the same: RESIST.

Tip of the Spear does the deep work of excavating the history and voices that make clear that resistance is always possible. If the warriors who orchestrated the Long Attica Revolt summoned their wits, will, and strength while in the bowels of cages, under the daily deprivation and cruelty scarcely imagined, so can we. But we must understand our position.

Understanding ourselves as capable of inhabiting the roles necessary to combat the rapidly expanding authoritarianism and fascism that threaten us daily, hourly even, is critical to our ability to RESIST and to our very survival.

Tip of the Spear equips us to Fight the Powers that be. Word to PE.

Join us on Wednesday, August 20 from 6:00-7:00 PM ET to discuss Tip of the Spear with Orisanmi Burton!

REGISTER FOR 8/20 ZOOM DISCUSSION

As we were preparing, it felt appropriate and necessary to postpone tonight’s discussion. Tip of the Spear is the kind of book that warrants a lot of time to digest, and with everything going on in the world, many of you might appreciate more time and space to read. Typically, we encourage everyone to join the discussion even if they haven’t completed the book. And that is always true. But this time, we want to allow everyone ample opportunity to delve into this text.

Graciously, author Orisanmi Burton has agreed to reschedule and will join us for a discussion on Wednesday, August 20th, at 6 pm ET. Fittingly, this also allows us to commemorate Black August by centering those the month is meant to honor.

If you have already finished reading Tip of the Spear, stay tuned! We will be sharing supplemental material highlighting some of the incredible voices that appear throughout the text. We’ll also be sharing some of our thoughts, particularly how this text shapes our understanding of everything happening now.

Thank you for being part of the TL community. We hope you can appreciate the decision to pivot and focus on Tip of the Spear for the entire summer. It is a phenomenal book, a must-read for anyone interested in our collective liberation.

REGISTER for the 8/20 Zoom Discussion