Gather around. Because we need to tell another story.

And if you have been watching ideas that Black communities have held for generations get celebrated as new, visionary, and revolutionary, while the Black people who built them get framed as behind the times, too narrow, or not radical enough, this one is especially for you.

This is not a grievance. This is a record.

A note before we go further.

This section went through more edits than anything else I have written in this series. I rewrote it. I sat with it. I rewrote it again. I consulted AI. (I know… but I did.) Because I recognized somewhere in the middle of drafting it that I was doing the very thing this piece names. Trying to manage a narrative, calibrate a critique, and negotiate with myself about whose comfort I was protecting and why. That kind of self-reckoning does not have a clean resolution. It just has honesty. So what follows is my most honest attempt to name something I see happening in spaces I love and support, from inside those spaces, with full acknowledgment that calling it out from inside requires the same accountability I am asking others to bring. I am not above this. None of us are. That is exactly why it needs to be named.

Did You Know: Story Time on Black Progressive Politics

It is 1984. Jesse Jackson is running for president of the United States. And he is out here talking about universal healthcare. A living wage. Free college. Divestment from apartheid South Africa. Palestinian solidarity and a two-state solution. Anti-war foreign policy. Taxing the wealthy. Protecting workers. Environmental justice.

Rev. Jesse Jackson

^{Image: Rev. Jesse Jackson during an interview, Washington, D.C., July 1, 1983.
Public domain.
Source: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.}

All of it. In 1984.

Before it had its current branding. Before it had its current champions. Before it had its current moment of mainstream progressive visibility. Jesse Jackson was saying all of it. Black communities were living all of it. And the Democratic Party was doing what it has often done, taking the energy, softening the edges, and moving on.

He ran again in 1988. Said it louder.

Let’s go further back. Reconstruction. Black elected officials, many of them formerly enslaved, all of them navigating a country that had just fought a war over whether they were human, were building public education systems that extended to poor white children too. Were advocating for land redistribution. For labor protections. For public infrastructure. For the kinds of collective investment in public goods that people now call socialism as though that makes it foreign.

It was not foreign. It was Black political thought. It was what you advocate for when your community has been systematically excluded from every private pathway to dignity and survival.

The programs that built the American middle class, the ones celebrated as the foundation of economic security and upward mobility for generations, were themselves socialist in structure. Social Security, signed into law in 1935, initially excluded domestic workers and agricultural laborers, the occupations held overwhelmingly by Black workers, by deliberate design. The GI Bill of 1944 offered returning veterans education, housing loans, and economic opportunity that transformed white American family wealth for generations. Black veterans were systematically denied those same benefits, turned away from universities, refused loans by white-owned banks, and excluded from the suburbs the bill helped build. Farm subsidies and agricultural aid have flowed disproportionately to white-owned farms for decades.

The federal government has been in the business of collective economic support for a very long time. It just has not always extended that support equally. Collective investment for some. Austerity and accusation for others. And the communities shut out of every program that built everyone else's stability are the ones being told that asking for reinvestment is dependency.

Here Is Where That Tired Narrative Was Born

The one that says Black people want the government to take care of them. What Black people were actually demanding was reinvestment. A return on what had already been taken. For labor stolen. For land taken. For wealth extracted and never returned. The reframe from legitimate claim to dependency was built deliberately to discredit a debt that was real, and that has never been paid.

Fannie Lou Hamer Already Told Us

Fannie Lou Hamer stood before the 1964 Democratic National Convention and told the truth about what was happening to Black people in Mississippi. And in doing so she made the argument that civil rights are human rights. That the right to vote, the right to safety, the right to exist fully in your own body without state violence or economic terror are not special interests. They are the floor of what it means to live in a democratic society.

Fannie Lou Hamer

^{Image: Fannie Lou Hamer speaking before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 22, 1964.
Public domain.
Source: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.}

She was talking about bodily autonomy before that language entered mainstream progressive discourse. She was talking about economic justice, about the right to exist free of terror, about the connection between racial violence and economic exploitation. She knew. She had always known. Black communities had always known.

And she was also talking to everyone in that room, including the people who did not want to hear it. Because her point was never only about Black people. It was about what kind of country is possible when you build it by leaving people out. You are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free. That was not a plea. That was an analysis. And it is as true right now as it was when she said it.

Barack Obama did not emerge from nowhere either. He was a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, trained in a tradition of grassroots organizing rooted in Black and Brown communities long before it had national visibility. The community organizing tradition he came from was not a detour from Black political thought. It was an expression of it.

The Leaders Holding It Together Right Now

Current Black political leadership, from the Reconstruction-era legislators who built public education to Fannie Lou Hamer to Jesse Jackson to the Black women and men in Congress right now, has always held both the visionary and the immediate together. The long arc and the urgent now. The systemic analysis and the survival need. That is not a contradiction. That is the tradition.

And yet some of those same leaders, the ones holding both, the ones representing working-class Black communities navigating every material harm we have named in this piece, are being labeled establishment. Sellouts.

And look, are there Black political figures who have made compromises that deserve scrutiny and accountability? Absolutely. That critique is legitimate and necessary. That is not what we are describing here.

What we are describing is a pattern. A set of dynamics that deserve to be named clearly, because they follow a logic we have seen before.

The Pattern Worth Naming

Here is what the pattern looks like in practice.

A progressive framework arrives with genuine moral energy. It carries real analysis about economic inequality, corporate power, foreign policy, and the ways institutional politics fails ordinary people. That analysis belongs in the room. It deserves engagement.

And then something shifts.

The sharpest criticism, the loudest, most sustained, most algorithmically amplified criticism, lands heaviest on Black political leaders. The ones who have been in the fight the longest. The ones representing communities absorbing the most harm. The ones who will still be in the room fighting for voting rights, healthcare access, and basic survival long after the moment has moved on. They become the face of compromise, of establishment failure, of insufficiently radical politics.

Meanwhile, the people with the most structural power to sustain the harms being named, the ones with the resources, the institutional access, the ability to shape policy and move money, move through the conversation largely untouched, unbothered, and unexamined. That selectivity is the tell.

Because these leaders are not being criticized for abandoning progressive values. They are being criticized for carrying the weight of keeping people alive inside systems that are actively trying to destroy them. That calculus gets dismissed as compromise. It is representation. It is what it looks like to hold both the vision and the immediate survival need of people who do not have the luxury of choosing between them.

And here is what makes that dismissal particularly diabolical. The same leaders being labeled insufficiently radical on foreign policy, on war, on imperialism, on U.S. support for state violence abroad, are often fighting the same logic domestically. The militarization of Black communities. The use of state power to surveil, contain, and eliminate. The expendability of certain lives in service of larger political and economic interests. The fights carry the same logic. The enemy operates the same way. What differs is who lives closest to the harm and who gets to engage with it as an abstraction.

Dismissing Black leaders as not radical enough on foreign policy while ignoring that they are the ones naming those same dynamics at home is not a principled critique. It is a convenient one.

There is something else worth naming carefully here. Black working-class communities, the people many of these representatives serve, are somehow seen as only Black. As a racial category. Not as working-class people with the same economic anxieties, housing pressures, healthcare needs, and labor concerns that every other working-class community gets to inhabit as fully human economic and social subjects. The Blackness gets seen. The class gets erased. And so the representatives who speak to both, who name racialized capitalism and its specific impact on Black communities while also fighting for the broader economic justice that benefits everyone, get positioned as too narrow when they name race and too establishment when they name domestic policy.

That is not just political critique. That is a framework designed to silence the people most likely to name the full picture.

What Cannot Be Lost in This Moment

The notion that any sustained movement toward collective liberation, including the freedom of the Palestinian people, can hold while maintaining racial hierarchy at home carries a fundamental contradiction. The same logic that makes Black suffering acceptable as a background condition is the same logic that makes Palestinian suffering justifiable as an acceptable casualty of larger interests. These are not separate fights wearing similar language. They are the same fight. And a movement that has not reckoned with anti-Blackness in its own house does not carry the foundation to sustain the fight it claims to be waging anywhere else.

And Palestinian solidarity? The record is clear, and we are adding it to the citations below. What also needs to be named, briefly and directly, is this. As awareness of Palestinian suffering has grown, as that conversation has become more visible and more mainstream, Palestinians have continued to lose ground. Gravely. The elevated attention has not stopped the bombing, the displacement, the starvation, the destruction of hospitals and schools, and entire family lines. (See sources below.)

And something has shifted that we need to name carefully.

What began as a moral reckoning with the horror of what is happening in Gaza has in some spaces calcified into a political calculation. Challenging concentrated institutional influence and corporate money in politics is legitimate and important work. What deserves examination is what that framework consistently leaves untouched. The individuals with the most actual power to sustain this harm move through largely unexamined. And the sharpest criticism gets directed at the representatives who are often the only ones in the room willing to name anti-Black racism specifically. The only ones talking about voting rights under active assault. The only ones who will still be fighting to make sure that when universal healthcare arrives it does not reproduce the same racial hierarchies already operating in every doctor’s office and hospital ward that has ever treated Black patients as secondary or suspect.

Derrick Bell named the persistence of racism as something that adapts and reasserts itself rather than disappears. We cannot have the things we are fighting for, not durably, while that persistence goes unnamed and unaddressed. Universal healthcare that does not reckon with medical racism is not universal. Voting protections that do not address targeted Black voter suppression are not protections. Economic justice that does not name racialized capitalism is not justice.

A movement that has reorganized around one moral clarity while abandoning another does not build the foundation liberation requires. And the people who have always known this are the ones being told their concerns are too narrow to belong at the center.

That is not a new argument. We know exactly what it costs.

Visibility that does not disturb the racial and economic order that makes this possible is not solidarity. It is witnessing. And witnessing alone has never freed anyone.

And in this same period, Black communities in this country have also continued to lose ground. Rights stripped. Employment targeted. Healthcare access eroded. Black maternal and infant death rates remaining in crisis. HBCUs defunded. Political power systematically undermined. The elevation of these conversations, from spaces that have never fully reckoned with anti-Blackness or racial hierarchy, has not protected the people most harmed. It has in many cases provided cover for their further marginalization while performing solidarity with some and extracting the language and labor of others. And demanding loyalty in return. Because when it is convenient, everyone knows whose bodies and whose votes are the first ones called on and the last ones protected.

The Through Line

Black communities have consistently voted for democracy, stood against war, and advocated for fairness and equity that benefits everyone. That is precisely why we are so persistently targeted with deficit framing and false narratives. You target the people whose values and votes most threaten the consolidation of power.

Attacks on Black political power are not a Black problem. They are an everyone problem. Because the structural reality is this,

we need everyone to be doing well for any of us to be doing well. And the communities who have been most targeted, most surveilled, most excluded, and most organized in response to that targeting have consistently produced the political and legal frameworks that protect everyone. Weaken that. Silence those voices. Remove those representatives. And you have not just harmed Black communities. You have pulled the thread that holds the whole thing together.

This is about more than ideas and who said them first. It is about what we lose when we allow the narrative to bend toward marginalizing the voices most committed to naming the full picture. In the name of progress. In the name of coalition. In the name of a liberation that keeps finding reasons to leave certain people out.

The cracks are opening. We are all losing ground. And we cannot afford to pretend otherwise.

Next in Rooted: The Record, we are going back even further. Before defund the police was a slogan, before COINTELPRO was a footnote in a history class, before anyone called it a movement moment, Black communities were documenting, naming, and organizing against the militarization of public safety. The warning came from Black communities. That piece is coming.

In love and solidarity,
Rooted Narratives and Storytelling

Sources:

Fannie Lou Hamer, “Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,” speech delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1971. Available at: stjamesaustin.org; American Archive of Public Broadcasting, americanarchive.org; Library of Congress, loc.gov

Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Beacon Press.

Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.

Human Rights Watch. (2026). World report 2026: Israel and Palestine. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/israel-and-palestine

Al Jazeera. (2026, April 15). As world focuses on Iran, Israel ‘engineering starvation policy’ in Gaza. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/4/15/as-world-focuses-on-iran-israel-engineering-starvation-policy-in-gaza

Gather around. Because we need to talk about some things. And if you have been feeling like you are living in an upside-down world, where ideas that have always lived in Black communities are being presented as new discoveries, where positions Black people have held for generations are being repackaged and handed back to us like we have never seen them before, this one is for you.

This is not a lecture. This is a remembering.

We been knowing. And it is time to say so out loud.

Did You Know: Story Time on Mutual Aid

Let’s go back. Way back.

April 12, 1787. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two Black men, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, both formerly enslaved, both free, sat down and built something ( along with a whole community). They called it the Free African Society. Members contributed one shilling per month. The money went to widows, orphans, the sick, and the unemployed. Children got apprenticeships. The sick got care. The community got held.

This was not charity. Nobody was waiting on a grant. Nobody was waiting on the government. Black people built a system of collective survival because they understood something that is still true in 2026. The state was not coming. So they showed up for each other instead.

That is mutual aid. That is what it has always been. Not a hashtag. Not a movement moment. Not a new progressive idea that emerged in 2020. A practice as old as Black freedom in this country. A survival literacy that was mandatory long before it had a name that fit on a tote bag.

And it never stopped.

The Underground Railroad? Mutual aid. The most sophisticated community survival network this country has ever produced, food, shelter, routes, safe houses, exchanged across communities at tremendous personal risk because freedom required it. That included many, but was catalyzed and made possible by Black people. Including Black women like Harriet Tubman, who did not lead over a dozen missions into slave territory and free hundreds of people because someone handed her a system. She built the system. And she was not alone.

Black people teaching each other to read in secret when literacy was a crime? Mutual aid. Knowledge passed from hand to hand because the tools of liberation belong to everyone who needs them.

Pullman porters tucking copies of the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier into their uniform pockets and carrying them across state lines to Black communities who had no other access to news written for and about them? Mutual aid. Information as care. Connection as survival.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott sustained for 381 days through carpools, walking routes, church networks, and community funds. Mutual aid. An entire community showing up for each other so completely that a movement held. The dominant narrative still reduces this to a single woman on a single bus, erasing the collective labor, the organizational infrastructure, and the community-wide sacrifice that made those 381 days possible. The actual history is a community practicing mutual aid as a form of political resistance.

Black Twitter, building a decade of accountability journalism, cultural critique, and community connection that no algorithm fully understood until it tried to replicate it? Mutual aid. And HillmanTok, Black educators and scholars freely offering their knowledge to anyone who needed it during a pandemic that isolated everyone, misinformed everyone, and left so many people hungry for something real? That is the Pullman porter with a different pocket. Same practice. Same love. Same understanding that what one person has, another person needs, and that the exchange itself is an act of resistance.

And do not sleep on the group chat. Black people mobilized across digital spaces and group chats to help make Michelle Obama’s documentary number one on Netflix for a weekend, earlier this year. The digital infrastructure of Black collective care never makes the headlines, but it keeps people alive, connected, and informed every single day. Same practice. New technology. Same understanding that information shared in community is an act of love.

And it continues. In mutual aid networks activated during COVID and sustained long after. In Black churches, which are still serving as community anchors. In neighborhood networks and collective funds that never make the news but keep people housed, fed, and connected every single day.

Black Mama’s Bail Out, organized annually every Mother’s Day since 2017 by the National Bail Out collective, raises funds to bail Black mothers and caregivers out of pretrial detention so they can be home with their families. Founded by organizer Mary Hooks and rooted in the Movement for Black Lives, it has bailed out hundreds of Black mamas and caregivers across dozens of cities, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and Houston. In 2025 alone, partners granted over a million dollars in bail and provided nearly $200,000 in supportive services. Sixty percent of people in local women’s jails have not been convicted of any crime. They are simply too poor to pay bail. This is mutual aid as abolitionist practice. As collective care. As the community coming for its own.

The Okra Project, founded in 2018, began as a grassroots response to food insecurity among Black transgender people, hiring Black trans chefs to cook home meals for community members facing hunger. The name draws from okra’s history in the African diaspora: ancestors carried okra seeds through the Middle Passage as a source of survival and sustenance. Today, the organization has provided nearly three million dollars in direct mutual aid to nearly 10,000 Black and brown trans and gender-expansive individuals, including food, housing assistance, mental health support, and transportation. The tradition of feeding each other, of nourishment as political practice, carried forward into one of the most targeted and underserved communities in the country.

Cooperation Jackson, founded in 2014 in Jackson, Mississippi, a majority Black city in the poorest state in the country, is building a solidarity economy rooted in Black self-determination. Worker-owned cooperatives. Democratic governance. A Really Really Free Market where community members exchange goods, services, and skills without money. Drawing directly from the tradition of the Jackson-Kush Plan, the People’s Assemblies that organized Black political power in Mississippi for decades, and the long history of Black working-class organizing in a city that has always had to build what the state refused to provide. It is still building.

Mutual aid is human. Communities across cultures and centuries have practiced versions of it. But in this country, for Black communities, it was never optional. It was the architecture of survival. Built under conditions of legal exclusion, state violence, and deliberate disinvestment. Built because the alternative was to be left behind. Built, sustained, evolved, and still here.

Before it had a hashtag. Before it had a moment. Before anyone called it new.

We been knowing…

Next in Rooted: The Record, Story Time on Black Progressive Politics. 1984. Jesse Jackson. Universal healthcare, living wages, free college, Palestinian solidarity, anti-war foreign policy. All of it. The policies being celebrated as visionary today have a longer history than the current conversation suggests. And the story of how Black political thought became everybody's political platform without always getting the credit, and what it costs when the roots get separated from the work, and someone else inherits the harvest. That story is coming. See you there!

In love and solidarity,

Rooted Narratives and Storytelling

Sources:

Free African Society, founded April 12, 1787, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones.
Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, philadelphiaencyclopedia.org; BlackPast.org; Zinn Education Project, zinnedproject.org; National Park Service, nps.gov

Black Mama’s Bail Out and National Bail Out Collective, founded 2017.
National Bail Out, nationalbailout.org; Dignity and Power Now, dignityandpowernow.org, 2025; Voting Access for All, votingaccessforall.org, May 2026

The Okra Project, founded 2018.
GLAAD, glaad.org, September 2025; WABE, wabe.org, 2026; The Okra Project, theokraproject.com

Cooperation Jackson, founded 2014, Jackson, Mississippi.
Cooperation Jackson, cooperationjackson.org; Public Seminar, publicseminar.org, November 2024; Bioneers, bioneers.org, January 2024; Dignity and Rights, dignityandrights.org, February 2023

Black Communities and Mutual Aid: Black communities have always known about mutual aid.
The Walrus, thewalrus.ca, September 2020

Andre Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.
New York University Press, 2020

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light.
Firebrand Books, 1988

EbonyJanice, All the Black Girls Are Activists.
Broadleaf Books, 2022

We want to introduce you to a few things we have been quietly building, all of it in time for Juneteenth, which feels exactly right. Juneteenth is about truth finally arriving for people who had a right to it all along. That is what this platform has always been about, too. So it felt like the right moment to open a few more doors.

First. We have a home.

Rooted Narratives and Storytelling now has its own website. A real one. Built to hold everything, this platform is becoming the writing, the books, the tools, the resources, the community we are growing together. We are building this as an independent publishing platform, rooted in our own work for now, and growing toward something larger. A podcast. Community tools. And in time, other voices we believe deserve a wider audience.

Come see it. Walk around. It is ours.

www.rootednarrativesandstorytelling.com

Second. We became a Bookshop.org Affiliate and opened our own shop.

We are now an official Bookshop.org affiliate, which means every book you purchase through our shop supports independent bookstores and helps sustain independent platforms like this one. It costs you nothing extra. It means everything to small, community-rooted spaces like ours.

And we did not just open a shop. We built a list.

Introducing The Rooted and Well Read Collection, our curated reading list rooted in the tradition, scholarship, and community wisdom that grounds everything we do here. You will find We Build Anyway there. You will find bell hooks, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Angela Davis, and more. Books that have shaped this work and books that belong in your hands.

But here is the thing. You can shop for all of your books through our store. Not just the ones we have written or recommended. Every purchase made through our Bookshop.org shop supports independent bookstores and helps sustain independent spaces like this one. So next time you are book shopping, shop with us.

Our Bookshop shop lives at bookshop.org/shop/rootednarrativesandstorytelling

Third. More is coming.

We are building out the collection in time for a freedom summer. New additions to the Rooted and Well Read list. Resources and tools rooted in the same scholarship and community truth that drives everything we publish here. And a few more things we will tell you about very soon.

This platform exists because we believe the stories we tell become the ground we stand on. The website, the bookshop, the reading list, all of it is an extension of that belief. Built with intention. Built in community. Built anyway.

Come see what we made. And come back next week. We have more to say.

www.rootednarrativesandstorytelling.com
bookshop.org/shop/rootednarrativesandstorytelling

Rooted Narratives and Storytelling

Gather around. Because we need to talk about some things. And if you have been feeling like you are living in an upside-down world, where ideas that have always lived in Black communities are being presented as new discoveries, where positions Black people have held for generations are being repackaged and handed back to us like we have never seen them before, this one is for you.

This is not a lecture. This is a remembering.

Did You Know?

Story Time on Mutual Aid

Let’s go back. Way back.

April 12, 1787. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two Black men, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, both formerly enslaved, both free, sat down and built something. They called it the Free African Society. Members contributed one shilling per month. The money went to widows, orphans, the sick, and the unemployed. Children got apprenticeships. The sick got care. The community got held.

This was not charity. Nobody was waiting on a grant. Nobody was waiting on the government. Black people built a system of collective survival because they understood something that is still true in 2026. The state was not coming. So they showed up for each other instead.

That is mutual aid. That is what it has always been. Not a hashtag. Not a movement moment. Not a new progressive idea that emerged in 2020. A practice as old as Black freedom in this country. A survival literacy that was mandatory long before it had a name.

And it never stopped.

The Underground Railroad? Mutual aid. The most sophisticated community survival network this country has ever produced, food, shelter, routes, safe houses, exchanged across communities at tremendous personal risk because freedom required it.

Black people teaching each other to read in secret when literacy was a crime? Mutual aid. Knowledge passed from hand to hand because the tools of liberation belong to everyone who needs them.

Pullman porters tucking copies of the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier into their uniform pockets and carrying them across state lines to Black communities who had no other access to news written for and about them? Mutual aid. Information as care. Connection as survival.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott? Mutual aid. It lasted for 381 days, through carpools, walking routes, church networks, and community funds. An entire community showed up for each other so completely that a movement was held. The dominant narrative still flattens this into a single woman on a single bus. The actual history is an entire community practicing mutual aid as a form of political resistance.

Black Twitter has built a decade of accountability journalism, cultural critique, and community connection that no algorithm fully understood until it tried to replicate it. Mutual aid. And HillmanTok, Black educators and scholars freely offering their knowledge to anyone who needed it during a pandemic that isolated everyone, misinformed everyone, and left so many people hungry for something real? That is the Pullman porter with a different pocket. Same practice. Same love. Same understanding that what one person has, another person needs, and that the exchange itself is an act of resistance.

And do not sleep on the group chat. Black group chats (and others) across the country helped make Michelle Obama’s documentary number one on Netflix for a random weekend, six years after its original release.

Now let’s talk about Bed-Stuy Strong. From March 2020 to June 2021, this mutual aid network rooted in Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of Brooklyn’s most historically significant Black neighborhoods, supported 28,000 people in Central Brooklyn through a volunteer and donation-driven grocery delivery program. Raised over a million dollars from the community, for the community. At its peak, volunteers were on every block of a neighborhood of 250,000 people.

Bed-Stuy Strong was not exclusively Black-led or Black-only. It reflected the demographic complexity of a neighborhood transformed by decades of gentrification, multiracial in its participation, shaped by both long-term residents and newer ones responding to a shared crisis. But it was operating within and accountable to a community whose survival traditions run deep. The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs. The block associations. The church networks. The long documented tradition of Black people in Bed-Stuy showing up for each other when no one else would. That history was the ground on which the network was built.

Bed-Stuy did not learn mutual aid in 2020. It remembered it.

Mutual aid is human. Communities across cultures and centuries have practiced versions of it. But in this country, for Black communities, it was never optional. It was the architecture of survival. Built under conditions of legal exclusion, state violence, and deliberate disinvestment. Built because the alternative was to be left behind. Built, sustained, evolved, and still here. And we can continue to carry it forward. Find one way this week to practice what Black communities have always known. Show up for someone. Share something useful. Hold somebody. The tradition continues every time we choose each other.

What This Is

This is the first post in Rooted: The Record. A series dedicated to making visible the understanding that how we hold each other’s stories, how we name what has been taken, and how we show up for the people closest to the harm are not soft concerns. They are the architecture of everything that follows.

You will notice threads from this piece running through other pieces on this platform. That is not repetition. That is intentional. We are connecting dots across posts, across histories, across policy areas because the pattern only becomes visible when you refuse to treat each harm as an isolated incident. We are refusing that. Consistently and on purpose.

Next up in Rooted: The Record, Story Time on Black Progressive Politics. Jesse Jackson was talking about universal healthcare, a living wage, free college, Palestinian solidarity, and anti-war foreign policy in 1984. Before it had a brand. Fannie Lou Hamer told us civil rights are human rights and that the right to exist fully in your own body is non-negotiable, decades before that language entered mainstream progressive spaces. And Reconstruction era Black political leaders were building the public goods that everyone now benefits from while being told their politics were too radical.

Come remember with us. Come back for the next one.

In love and solidarity,

Rooted Narrative and Storytelling

Sources

Free African Society, founded April 12, 1787, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, philadelphiaencyclopedia.org; BlackPast.org; Zinn Education Project, zinnedproject.org; National Park Service, nps.gov

Bed-Stuy Strong COVID mutual aid network, Brooklyn, New York, 2020 to 2021. Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, Georgetown University, beeckcenter.georgetown.edu, 2022

Black Communities and Mutual Aid: Black communities have always known about mutual aid. The Walrus, thewalrus.ca, September 2020

Black Panther Party survival programs and community organizing history. BlackPast.org; Zinn Education Project, zinnedproject.org

Andre Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. New York University Press, 2020

HillmanTok and Black digital organizing. The Atlantic, theatlantic.com; BlackPast.org

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light. Firebrand Books, 1988

Something is happening that we need to name directly.

The ideas, frameworks, language, and political positions that Black communities built out of survival, out of necessity, out of a deep and documented tradition of collective care and liberatory imagination, are being celebrated, circulated, and amplified in ways that are increasingly disconnected from the people who built them. And at the same time, the actual Black voices still saying these things, still living these values, still doing this work, are being framed as no longer relevant. Too focused on identity. Too narrow. Not sufficiently visionary. Behind the times.

Let that land for a moment.

The words are being heard. The messenger is being discarded. The package has changed, and somehow that is being mistaken for the origin changing.

We are seeing a version of this play out recently in the excitement around AI-generated Lego Hip Hop diss videos. Black culture, Black voice, Black affect, Black rhythm, Black vernacular, all of it present and celebrated and shared widely. I bob my head too. Then I remember that actual Black artists, actual Black people using those same forms to say the same things, get called ghetto. Irrelevant. Too much. No message. The cultural form gets extracted and celebrated. The community it came from gets diminished.

And it is not limited to culture. It is happening in political spaces. In movement spaces. In the very spaces that claim the loudest commitment to liberation.

What the Record Actually Shows

The mutual aid networks being celebrated as new progressive innovations have roots in 1787 Philadelphia among free and formerly enslaved Africans. The universal healthcare, living wage, free college, anti-war, pro-Palestinian solidarity positions being packaged as a new political revolution were all present in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, decades before they had their current branding. And these were and are no-brainer positions for Black people. The theology of collective care, radical economics, and community accountability that animates current progressive faith-rooted organizing was named and built by James Cone, Howard Thurman, and a tradition of Black liberation theology that mainstream media spent decades distorting and dismissing.

And the calls to reimagine public safety and end the militarization of police have been coming from Black communities since before the slave patrol was the documented origin of American policing.

Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, named police brutality and militarized policing as a crisis years before it became a broadly accepted national conversation. The movement documented what Black communities had been living. That the Department of Defense 1033 Program, which transferred surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies at no cost, was disproportionately deployed in Black and Brown communities. That no-knock warrants were being used as tools of racial targeting. That the entire architecture of punishment-centered public safety was making communities less safe, not more. A charge pushed forward to the mainstream by many unnamed Black abolitionists, anti-violence activists, and advocates.

The response came, partially and inadequately, after Ferguson forced a national reckoning. In January 2015, President Obama issued Executive Order 13688, restricting certain military equipment transfers to local law enforcement, banning bayonets, tracked armored vehicles, and grenade launchers, and establishing oversight procedures. It was an incomplete measure. Black communities said so at the time. It is worth noting that the executive order was never the solution Black communities asked for. It was what became necessary when Congress repeatedly refused to legislate or codify real restrictions on police militarization. Executive orders are not law. They are what gets offered when Congress lacks the will to legislate. Every protection Black communities fought for through that route was always one administration away from disappearing. And it did.

Then, in August 2017, President Trump rescinded EO 13688 entirely, signing an executive order titled “Restoring State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement’s Access to Life-Saving Equipment and Resources.” Bayonets, grenade launchers, and military equipment immediately became available again to local police with no oversight requirements. President Biden reinstated some restrictions in 2021. President Trump rescinded those upon returning to office in 2025.

Breonna Taylor was killed in her own home in 2020, three years after it was rescinded by Trump, during a no-knock raid executed on a warrant for someone already in custody who had no connection to her or her address. The officers were not charged for her death. The accountability that followed produced Breonna’s Law in Louisville, a local ban on no-knock warrants born from a national movement born from decades of Black community advocacy that was consistently treated as a niche concern (for Black communities) until it wasn’t.

And now masked and militarized forces are conducting what legal scholars and civil rights advocates describe as extrajudicial detentions, not only in Black neighborhoods but in immigrant communities, at protest sites, and in public spaces across the country. The tactics are familiar to those who were never afforded the luxury of believing such power would not eventually be turned on them.

The warning came from Black communities. It came documented, researched, and evidenced. It came for years. And it came before the rest of the country was ready to hear it.

On the “I Told You So”

I want to name something directly before we go further. Much of what we do here is about honoring legacy, lifting voices, holding memory, and making visible the current work of people who often go unseen but who carry so much. That work is for everyone who finds their way to this space.

But this particular note is for those who sit in community with us. For those who share in the weight of what we are naming. For those who already know this history in their bones and have been watching it get extracted, repackaged, and returned to them without acknowledgment. For those who have been in rooms where their own frameworks were used to explain their own marginalization back to them. For those who have been told to wait. To be patient. To trust the process, while the process kept moving without them. This is me talking to you directly. I hope this space feels like recognition, affirmation, and accompaniment.

This is also for those who may not carry this history in the same way but who feel the weight of this moment and are genuinely open. Those who are paying attention. Who sense that something is being lost or distorted, even if they don’t yet have the full language for what it is. You are welcome here too. This is a space for honest reckoning, and we believe that reckoning is possible across difference when it is grounded in real care and real accountability.

This may be for some of you…

I understand that hearing what feels like a constant stream of “we told you this was coming” loses impact over time. It can feel like a posture rather than a point. Nobody wants to feel lectured. Nobody wants to feel like someone is waiting in the wings to say they were right. And I genuinely get that.

But I want you to look at what is actually happening right now.

Black Illinois towns with E. Coli in their drinking water as federal funds get cut. Voting access for older Black Americans being stripped through legislation. Military equipment flowing freely again to local police departments with no oversight after every restriction Black communities fought for got reversed. The same no-knock tactics Black organizers spent years documenting as lethal are now showing up in communities that once thought they were safely distant from that kind of state power. Even if you can not see yourself in the Black community, you have to see the connections and lineage. And why you must stop things at the root or cultivate understanding from it.

This is not an “I told you so.” It is an invitation to finally listen to the people who have been closest to these harms the longest. Because the track record is clear. And because the listening, right now, at this moment, still matters. It is not too late.

The Group Chat. Black Twitter. The Lesson.

Black Twitter shaped national conversations about race, justice, culture, and politics for over a decade, surfacing stories that mainstream media ignored, holding institutions accountable in real time, building community across geography in ways that no algorithm fully understood until it tried to replicate it. The group chat. The shared spreadsheet of resources. The neighborhood network, circulating information about which clinics are still open and where to find legal help. The digital infrastructure of community care that never makes the news but keeps people alive and connected every single day. I am a part of some rich community-grounded digital communities that fortify and sustain me in these times.

And do not underestimate it. Black people mobilized through group chats and word of mouth to make Michelle Obama’s documentary number one on Netflix for a weekend, randomly, 6 years after its original release. Imagine what we do every day with information that actually saves lives. We already are. We always have been.

This is the through line. The practice evolves. The commitment underneath it never has.

Why This Series Exists

None of this history is being raised to say we said it first, as though this is a competition. We are raising it because the erasure of these roots is not incidental to what is happening to Black communities right now. It is connected. When you extract the ideas and discard the people who built them, you do not just lose the credit. You lose the accountability. You lose the understanding of why these ideas exist, what conditions produced them, what harms they were built to address, and what communities they were built to protect.

You end up with the language of liberation being used to justify the marginalization of the very communities liberation was for.

That is not progress. That is the oldest trick in the playbook, wearing the newest clothes. And it is not coming only from one direction. It is coming from spaces that call themselves aligned. That is the part that requires the most careful and honest naming.

Black elected officials are often the only ones fighting for voting rights, for equitable access to healthcare, housing, and education in their communities. And to be clear, universal healthcare, housing affordability, living wages, and divestment from corporate control of policy decisions are all positions Black communities have long supported and continue to support. These are not new ideas for us. They are survival positions.

But here is what gets lost when these conversations happen without a specific and unflinching racial analysis. The general progressive framing of these issues does not automatically address the particular. Redlining was not just a housing policy. It was a mechanism of Black wealth extraction whose consequences are still measurable today in homeownership rates, generational wealth gaps, and neighborhood disinvestment. Universal healthcare as a concept does not automatically dismantle the documented reality that Black patients receive inferior care, that Black women are dying in childbirth at rates that have not meaningfully improved, that Black people are still being undertreated for pain based on myths that have no biological basis. Mass incarceration has not receded. Black maternal mortality remains a crisis. Health disparities persist across nearly every measurable metric despite decades of supposed progress. These are all things that Black elected officials surface and address as they are being marginalized.

What this means is that you can adopt all of the language of progressive policy, healthcare for all, housing justice, economic equity, and still leave anti-Blackness completely intact underneath it. The language without the commitment to specifically naming and dismantling anti-Blackness does not transform the conditions. It rebrands them. And a rebranded harm is still a harm. It is just harder to name because it is now wearing the costume of liberation.

This is why the use of Black political language and frameworks without a genuine commitment to deconstructing anti-Blackness is not just an oversight. It is a continuation of the extraction we have always experienced, now operating inside the spaces that claim to be building something different. And it is why Black communities who have been here, doing this work, holding this analysis, deserve more than to have their frameworks borrowed, while their specific conditions remain invisible in the very policy conversations those frameworks were built to address.

Black communities vote reliably and consistently for democracy, for policies that benefit immigrant communities, women, LGBTQ communities, and working people of all backgrounds, including people who do not vote for them in return. No matter what algorithmically elevated voices suggest about Black communities shifting, fragmenting, or losing relevance. The record says otherwise. And we are here to make sure the record stays visible. If some of what you are reading here feels familiar from other pieces on this platform, good. We are threading these arguments deliberately across everything we publish because the connections are not incidental. They are the whole point. We want you to see the pattern. We want it to become impossible to unsee. That is what narrative resistance looks like in practice.

The Four Threads

Over the coming weeks, we will be tracing four threads in this series. All of it grounded in a Black feminist ethic of care, the understanding that how we treat each other, how we hold each other's stories, and how we name what has been taken are not soft concerns. They are the architecture of everything that follows.

The first is mutual aid and the ethic of care, from Richard Allen and the Free African Society in 1787 through HillmanTok and the group chat. The practice of collective survival that Black communities have always called simply showing up for each other.

The second is Black progressive language and policy positions, from the Reconstruction-era Black political platforms through Fannie Lou Hamer's insistence that civil rights are human rights and that bodily autonomy is non-negotiable, through Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama's community organizing roots, and current Black political leadership. Tracing the Palestinian solidarity thread that Black communities have held for decades, while being told they have abandoned it. And naming the through line between Black political tradition and every progressive position on healthcare, housing, economic justice, and the right to exist fully in one's own body that is now being celebrated without its source.

The third is the long documented history of Black advocacy for reimagining public safety, from the slave patrol origins of American policing through COINTELPRO, the 1033 program, Breonna Taylor, and the reversal of every protective executive order that accountability demanded, to where we are right now in 2026.

The fourth is Black liberation theology, from James Cone and Howard Thurman through the deliberate distortion of Jeremiah Wright to the faith-rooted organizing happening right now. And the through line between Black theological tradition and every progressive value currently being celebrated without its source. That tradition is not only historical. It is living. Writers and scholars like EbonyJanice, whose work in All the Black Girls Are Activists roots Black girlhood, faith, and activism in a liberatory framework that centers the fullness of Black women's spiritual and political lives, are carrying and expanding that tradition right now. The erasure of Black liberation theology from the progressive values it seeded is not just an intellectual oversight. It is a spiritual one.

We are not going backward. We are going to the root. Because that is the only direction from which forward is actually possible.

Come with us.

In solidarity,

Rooted Narratives and Storytelling

Something is happening in progressive spaces that I think we need to talk about.

The Language We Built

There is a vocabulary that Black feminist thinkers, Black liberation movements, abolitionist organizers, and Black progressive communities built over generations. Words and frameworks that emerged from specific struggles, specific harms, specific visions of what a world built on genuine care and collective dignity could look like. Intersectionality. Abolition. Mutual aid. Collective care. Transformative justice. The reimagining and reorientation of policy toward human flourishing rather than punishment and profit.

That language did not come from nowhere. It came from communities who needed it to survive. Who built it because the existing frameworks could not hold the fullness of what they were experiencing and what they were reaching toward.

And I am watching that language get picked up, repackaged, and deployed in ways that feel increasingly disconnected from the communities that built it. In ways that use the architecture of liberation while quietly removing the people liberation was for from the center of the conversation.

I said in a previous post that this is what I call the gentrification of liberation. I want to go further now. Because what I am describing is not just cultural appropriation of language. It is something more structured than that. More intentional. And it is showing up in places I did not expect it to show up.

The Grief Underneath This

Before I go further I want to name the grief in this. Because it is real and it deserves to be acknowledged before we move into the analysis.

It is grievous to watch the frameworks our foremothers and fathers built for our survival be used to obscure our survival. It is grievous to watch the language of liberation become a tool for the very marginalization it was designed to resist. It is grievous to sit with the possibility that spaces that called themselves aligned with Black communities are quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, recentering away from them.

And it is grievous because we have been here before. We have watched coalitions form and dissolve. We have watched our issues get folded into broader frameworks and then quietly deprioritized when the political calculus shifted. We have watched our voices get celebrated as inspiration and then sidelined when we named something inconvenient.

The grief is not weakness. It is information. It is telling us to pay attention.

The New False Choice

Here is the specific thing I am naming. There is a framing taking root in some progressive spaces that positions engagement with existing institutions and systems as evidence of complicity with those systems. That frames anyone who speaks to the immediate, material, survival needs of communities navigating those systems right now as defenders of the status quo. That constructs a false choice between visionary systemic transformation and the unglamorous, urgent, daily work of keeping people alive inside systems that were designed to harm them.

Black leaders and organizers have always held both. They have always understood that you do not get to choose between the long arc and the immediate crisis when your community is living inside both simultaneously. The visionary and the practical have never been opposites in Black political tradition. They have always been the same work at different scales.

What concerns me is watching a structured messaging effort use the language of radicalism to other Black voices that hold both, to position leaders who speak to both liberation and survival as somehow insufficiently committed to transformation. To suggest that naming the immediate, material, disproportionate harm being done to Black communities right now is a distraction from the real fight rather than the definition of it.

I want to be careful here. I am not naming specific people or specific organizations. I am naming a pattern. A narrative shape that I am seeing repeated with enough consistency that it no longer feels accidental.

And I want to say plainly that there is a colossal privilege embedded in the assertion that engaging with systems as they are is the wrong move. That privilege belongs to people who are not the ones most deeply and disproportionately impacted by those systems right now. And I want to be honest that this includes some of us who are part of these communities but who carry a level of economic, educational, or situational privilege that affords us, even if incompletely and impermanently, a measure of distance from the most immediate weight of those systems. The question of whether to engage or not can become theoretical when you are not the one whose water is poisoned, whose vote is being stripped, whose body is most directly in the path of state violence. That distance is not a character flaw. But it is something we have to name honestly, especially when we are in rooms making decisions about communities whose daily reality we are not fully living.

The Communities Who Cannot Wait

Let me be specific about what I mean by immediate survival. Because this is not abstract.

There is a Black Illinois town living with E. Coli in its water as federal funds get cut. That is not a metaphor for systemic failure. That is people turning on a tap and being poisoned. Right now.

The SAVE America Act is threatening voting access for older Black Americans. That is not a theoretical erosion of democratic participation. That is specific people in specific communities losing specific access to a specific right. Right now.

Data centers are being built in Black, Brown, and rural communities, in places like Tennessee, offloading their environmental costs onto the people with the least political power to resist them. The air, the water, the land of communities that have already borne the disproportionate burden of environmental harm for generations. Right now.

These are not sidebars. These are not the unglamorous details we set aside while we have the bigger conversation. These are the bigger conversation. And the communities living inside these realities do not have the option to engage with them as abstractions. They are navigating shape-shifting, hostile systems every single day with the full weight of that navigation on their bodies and their communities.

To tell those communities that engaging with those systems is complicity is not radical or progressive. It is abandonment wearing the costume of progressive radicalism.

And here is what I keep returning to. What we want has always benefited everyone. The fights Black communities have led, for clean water, for voting rights, for environmental justice, for healthcare, for safe housing, for schools that see children as whole people, these have never been narrow fights. They have always pointed toward a more livable world for everyone. The communities closest to the harm have always carried the most accurate map of where the harm is heading next. We saw this with Breonna Taylor. We see it now.

No Democracy Without This

I want to say something that I believe deeply and that I think gets lost in the noise of the current moment.

There is no democracy without this being named. There is no arrival at collective freedom, no genuine progressive future, no liberated world worth building while misogynoir and anti-Blackness remain acceptable background noise even in spaces that call themselves radical or progressive. While the deeply unjust ways communities are treated get framed as asides. While the survival needs of the most impacted get positioned as distractions from the real work.

The deeply unjust treatment of Black communities is not a subplot. It is the through line. It is the canary. It is the most reliable indicator we have of whether a movement, a coalition, a political project is actually committed to the values it claims.

And I am watching, with concern, a structured messaging machine, operating on what we might think of as the more aligned end of the political spectrum, work to other voices that hold both the visionary and the immediate. To construct a political common sense that says caring about the specific, disproportionate, ongoing harm done to Black communities is somehow in tension with caring about systemic change. That is not a new argument. It is the oldest argument. It has just found new language. And no matter how many algorithmically amplified voices on the internet suggest otherwise, Black communities have consistently voted for democracy, stood against war, and advocated for fairness and equity that benefits everyone. That is precisely why we are so persistently targeted with deficit framing and false narratives. You target the people whose values and votes most threaten the consolidation of power.

We have seen this before. We know what it costs. And we are naming it now, while it is still early enough to name it clearly, because that is what narrative resistance requires.

No matter the story you tell about us. No matter the frame. No matter whose language gets borrowed to construct it.

We will not be left behind. We have never been left behind without a fight. And this platform exists to make sure that fight is named, documented, and carried forward with clarity, with care, and with the full weight of the tradition we are standing in.

In care and solidarity,

Rooted Narratives and Storytelling

What You Can Do Right Now

The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026 gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This is not a moment to scroll past. Here is where to turn and what to do.

Know who is fighting

• The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has been at the forefront of this case and cases like it for decades. They argued before the Supreme Court in Callais. They are not stopping. Visit their site, read their analysis of the ruling, and consider supporting their work. naacpldf.org

• Sherilyn Ifill is one of the most important legal minds and truth tellers on voting rights, democracy, and racial justice in this country. She is on Substack. Subscribe to her newsletter and read everything she writes right now. It is essential. sherilynaifill.substack.com

• Stacey Abrams has spent years building the infrastructure of voter registration, voter protection, and civic engagement in the South. Visit her work and the organizations she has built. The groundwork she laid matters more than ever right now. staceyabrams.com and Fair Fight, fairfight.com

Connect locally

• Find your local NAACP chapter. Find your local voting rights organization. Find the progressive groups in your community and the traditional civic organizations too — the churches, the fraternal orders, the block associations. They hold knowledge, relationships, and infrastructure that cannot be replicated from the outside. Show up.

• To find your local NAACP chapter: naacp.org/find-your-local-naacp

Stay informed from trusted sources

• Capital B News covers Black communities with depth, specificity, and accountability. Read them regularly. capitalbnews.org

• The Campaign Legal Center has published a clear breakdown of what the Callais ruling means and what comes next. campaignlegal.org

Read the dissent

• Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in Louisiana v. Callais is worth reading in full. It is a clear, documented account of what has been done and what it means. Share it. supremecourt.gov

Talk to people

The group chat is mutual aid. Share this article. Share the resources. Have the conversation with people in your life who are not paying attention. That is also the work.

— Assata Shakur

Let’s start there. Because that single statement does something that most policy analysis never does. It refuses the premise. It does not ask what is wrong with the people that the system has failed. It does not look for the deficiency, the dysfunction, the cultural pathology that might explain the gap between what communities deserve and what they receive. It locates the problem exactly where it lives. In the system. In the structure. In the story, the structure tells about itself and about the people it was designed to exclude.

That refusal is where this platform is rooted. And this piece is our attempt to make that framework visible. Not as an academic exercise, but as a living practice. As a way of reading the world that we will return to again and again in this space.

The work here is rooted in years of research and community practice. The founder’s doctoral studies on the power of narrative in U.S. policy formation, with a particular focus on Black women as architects of democratic policy design, shape how we read policy, how we name harm, and how we understand the counter-story as a tool of power. The scholarship informs everything here. But it does not lead. The community does.

The Myth of Neutral Policy

We are told that good policy is neutral. It is evidence-based, data-driven, and objective. It rises above the messiness of politics and identity to deliver rational solutions to documented problems. And that the numbers don’t lie.

But here is what that framing obscures. The numbers are always collected by someone. The evidence is always selected by someone. The problem is always defined by someone. And the someone doing the defining brings assumptions, interests, and inherited stories to that work, whether they name them or not. Neutrality is not the absence of narrative. It is a narrative that has learned to make itself invisible.

When a policy is described as neutral, what that usually means is that its underlying assumptions are so thoroughly accepted, so deeply embedded in institutional culture and public common sense, that they no longer feel like assumptions at all. They feel like facts. They feel like reality. And that is precisely when they are most powerful and most dangerous.

The work of this platform begins with making those assumptions visible again. By asking not just what a policy does but what story it tells. What it assumes about the people it affects. Who it imagines as deserving. Who it imagines as suspect. And whose interests are served by keeping those assumptions invisible.

This is not a departure from evidence-based thinking. It is evidence-based thinking taken seriously enough to examine its own foundations.

The Narrative Battleground

Policies are never just policies. Every piece of legislation, every administrative rule, every institutional practice carries a story inside it. A story about who matters. Who belongs. Whose pain is real enough to act on and whose requires further study, further proof, further documentation before anything can be done.

These stories are constructed on a battleground. On one side is the dominant narrative, the story told by those with the power to define the problem, control the data, and determine whose experience counts as evidence. On the other side are the counter-narratives, the stories told by the communities most affected, the organizers, the scholars working from the margins, the people whose lives have never fit neatly inside the dominant frame.

The dominant narrative does not win because it is true. It wins because it has resources, repetition, and institutional legitimacy behind it. It wins because it gets taught in schools, reported in news, embedded in law, and eventually internalized by the very people it harms.

But it has never gone uncontested. And that contestation, that persistent, creative, community-rooted refusal to accept the dominant story as the only story, is what we are calling narrative resistance. It is what this platform is committed to practicing, documenting, and building on.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things…

Before we talk about what deficit framing does to Black communities specifically, we need to talk about what it does to everyone. Because this is a point that gets lost when the conversation stays only at the level of racial harm. And it is a point that Heather McGhee makes with devastating clarity in her work on what she calls the drained pool effect and zero-sum logic.

When public pools were integrated in the mid-twentieth century, many white communities chose to drain and close their public pools rather than share them with Black people. They sacrificed a public good that everyone used and everyone needed rather than extend it equally. And that choice, repeated across public institutions, public education, public healthcare, public housing, and public infrastructure, has produced a country where the collective capacity to care for anyone has been systematically dismantled.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Not because resources don’t exist. Not because it isn’t possible to build systems that work for everyone. But because the narrative that Black communities are unworthy of care made it possible to justify disinvesting in care altogether. And once that disinvestment became policy, it affected everyone across race, class, gender, and geography.

Take welfare. The dominant narrative constructed welfare as a Black program. It put a Black face on poverty and attached to that face every available story about moral failure, laziness, hypersexuality, and dependency. The image was deliberate. The politics were deliberate. And the reality it obscured was just as deliberate. Most people receiving welfare benefits were and are white. The program was never what the narrative said it was. But the narrative did not need to be true to be effective. It needed to be believed. And it was believed deeply enough that white working-class communities voted in large numbers to dismantle the very safety net they depended on, because the story told them it was for someone else. Someone undeserving. Someone who didn’t look like them.

That is not a footnote. That is the entire mechanism. The narrative about Black unworthiness was the tool used to convince people to vote against their own children’s healthcare, their own community’s infrastructure, and their own economic security. The pool got drained. And everyone got wet.

The narrative that framed Black poverty as moral failure, Black families as dysfunctional, Black communities as dangerous and undeserving, created the political and cultural permission to stop investing in the public goods that a functioning society requires. Empathy got reframed as weakness. Care got reframed as enabling. Collective responsibility got reframed as socialism. And the people who absorbed those reframes most deeply ended up voting against their own access to healthcare, housing, education, and economic security because the story told them those things were for undeserving people. People who didn’t look like them.

This is precisely why the Black feminist ethic of care that grounds this platform is not a soft or secondary concern. It is a direct challenge to the narrative infrastructure that made collective disinvestment possible in the first place. To insist on care, on the inherent worthiness of every person, on the collective responsibility to build systems that reflect that worthiness is to challenge one of the most powerful and destructive narratives this country has ever told.

Our foremothers knew this. bell hooks wrote about love and care not as sentimentality but as political practice. Audre Lorde named self-care as warfare in a context designed to grind you down. The Black feminist tradition has always understood that how we treat each other, how we imagine each other’s humanity, is not separate from the policy battles we fight. It is the ground on which those battles are fought.

Deficit Framing and Who Constructs It

Let’s name the mechanism directly. And let’s be clear about something from the start. Deficit framing is not simply a list of false beliefs about Black people. It is a constructed narrative. Someone built it. Someone maintains it. Someone benefits from it. And understanding that is essential to understanding how to dismantle it.

Deficit framing begins with a gap, a disparity, a harm, and locates the cause inside the community experiencing it. It asks what is wrong with these people. What are they lacking? What behavior, what culture, what value system explains why things are the way they are? It treats the community as the variable and the system as the constant. And in doing so, it makes the system invisible, unquestionable, and permanent.

Derrick Bell’s framework of interest convergence reminds us that those constructing harmful narratives are not simply misinformed. They are often serving specific interests. Policy changes when those interests align with justice, not simply when justice demands it. The narrative is always working for someone. We need to ask who.

We see it in criminal justice, where the narrative of Black criminality has made over-policing feel like public safety rather than what it actually is, the management of a population the economic system excluded and the political system abandoned. We see it in housing, where the narrative of blight framed deliberate disinvestment as natural decline. Redlining was a policy. Urban renewal was a policy. The narrative made those choices feel like responses to conditions rather than creators of them. We see it in healthcare, where the myth that Black people feel less pain, that Black women need less care, has a documented body count. It is not ancient history. It is operating right now in emergency rooms and obstetric wards. The narrative is infrastructure. And it kills.

Gun violence does devastating harm in Black communities. That is real, documented, and deserves real resources and real policy that addresses the conditions making any community vulnerable. We can hold that truth fully. What we refuse is the use of that truth to criminalize an entire community while making the broader crisis invisible everywhere else. The majority of gun deaths in this country are white. Most are suicides. Most mass shootings are carried out by white men. We can acknowledge a truth without weaponizing it. And we can refuse the myth that obscures harm in one place while performing outrage about it in another.

And perhaps nowhere is the cost of dismissing Black women's voices more clear than in what we are living through right now. Black women and community organizers have spent decades naming the lethal consequences of punishment-centered public safety. They organized against no-knock warrants. They documented the expansion of paramilitary police tactics into neighborhoods the state had simultaneously abandoned through disinvestment. They argued, with evidence and with urgency, that enforcement-centered approaches did not make communities safer. They transferred the capacity for violence from community actors to state actors while removing accountability. Those voices were dismissed, discredited, and defunded.

The 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor made the cost of that dismissal undeniable. Taylor was killed in her own home by law enforcement officers who broke down her door in the middle of the night. She was 26 years old. She was sleeping. Her partner fired in lawful self-defense, believing their home was being invaded. In the accountability that followed, or more precisely in its absence, the officers were charged not for Taylor's death, not for the bullets they put in her body, but for potential harm to occupants of a neighboring apartment. A white family. The racialized calculus was not subtle. Breonna Taylor's life generated no criminal consequences. Her Black body, in death, was worth less in the eyes of the law than the potential discomfort of a white neighbor who was never harmed. But the law was wrong. And the people who loved her, mourned her, said her name in the streets, and refused to stop saying it. They have always known what the law could not bring itself to record. That she mattered. That she still matters.

And now the country is confronting a broader iteration of precisely what Black women forewarned. Masked and militarized forces are conducting what legal scholars and civil rights advocates describe as extrajudicial detentions, not only in Black neighborhoods but in immigrant communities, at protest sites, and in public spaces across the country. The tactics are familiar to those who were never afforded the luxury of believing such power would not be turned on them. What is new is that others are beginning to recognize what Black communities have long understood. A public safety architecture built on the logic of disposability has no durable limit on whose lives it renders disposable.

This is what it costs to silence the people closest to the harm. Not just their communities. Everyone. The warning was always there. It came from Black organizers. It came from the margins. And it came with evidence. When we build policy without those voices at the center, we do not just fail Black communities. We lose the most accurate map we have of where the harm is heading next.

Where We Start Instead

This platform starts from a different premise. It starts with Assata.

There is nothing wrong with the people.

That is not a feel-good statement. It is a political and analytical position. A refusal to accept deficit framing as the starting point for understanding what is happening to Black communities and to all communities that find themselves among the sacrificial wages of war, whiteness, and greed. There is nothing wrong with the people. Starting from that premise changes everything about the questions we ask. It shifts us from asking what communities lack to asking what has been taken, what has been denied, what has been deliberately withheld, and then blamed on the people who never received it. From deficit to asset. From pathology to possibility. From the story the system tells about communities to the stories communities tell about themselves.

Black communities have always told those stories. Stories that refused the premise, named the system, and located the harm exactly where it lived. That tradition is what we are working in. Counter-storytelling is not just a rhetorical device. It is a claim about what counts as knowledge, whose experience counts as evidence, and what becomes possible when we center the stories the dominant narrative has worked hardest to suppress. The very act of unpacking narrative as a tool of policy is itself an act of storywork and narrative resistance. This platform is not just analyzing power. It is practicing its redistribution.

And it is holding firm to the ethic of care our foremothers gave us. Not as sentiment. As strategy. As the reorientation of policy, community, and movement toward a premise that has never stopped being true.

There is nothing wrong with the people.

That is our anchor. That is our ground. That is the soil everything here grows from.

We are glad you are here. Come make meaning with us.

In peace,

The Rooted Narrative and Storytelling

In the last post, I mentioned the history of economic reframing as a narrative strategy. And I want to go there, because I don’t think we can talk about the gentrification of liberation movements without understanding the strategy that made it possible. And I don't think we can talk about either without naming, directly and from the start, what is always underneath it all. Anti-Black racism. Not as a side conversation. Not as one lens among many. As the specific, persistent, and structurally embedded force that every reframe we’re going to talk about has worked, in some way, to obscure.

The Strategy Is Not New…

After the Civil War ended, something remarkable was happening in the South. Black men were voting, holding office, building schools, and constructing the infrastructure of a genuine multiracial democracy. W.E.B. Du Bois documented this period with extraordinary precision in Black Reconstruction in America, naming it not as a failed experiment but as a radical democratic achievement, and naming its destruction not as inevitable decline but as a deliberate, coordinated counterrevolution.

Because that is what it was.

The Redeemer movement didn’t lead with race publicly. It led with economics. With the argument that Reconstruction was corrupt, wasteful, and a burden on hardworking taxpayers. That the real issue was mismanagement and money. But here is what was happening simultaneously, in the same soil, at the same time as that economic narrative was being constructed. Black people were being terrorized. Lynched. Driven from land they had legally acquired. Political leaders were being assassinated. Churches were being burned. The entire infrastructure of Black civic and political life was being systematically dismantled through organized racial violence. Compared to what is happening today, it is eerily similar, including “ousting the radical Republicans.” They were the woke ones then. They didn’t all necessarily believe in the equality of Black people, but many of them supported the abolition of slavery. They were the progressives then… well, in the eyes of the Redeemers.

The economic narrative didn’t just minimize that violence. It ran cover for it. It gave people who knew better a way to look away. And looking away from anti-Black violence, finding a framework that makes it possible to see the economics but not the bodies is not a neutral act. It never has been.

Then came the Lost Cause…

By the time the Lost Cause narrative fully took hold, enshrined in monuments, textbooks, and popular culture, the Civil War had been reframed so completely that generations of Americans genuinely believed it was about states’ rights and economic sovereignty. Not the preservation of slavery. Not the insistence on the right to own Black people. Not the violent defense of a social order built entirely on anti-Black dehumanization. It's wealth and economics, they said. But look at who is sacrificed in that framing. Look at who pays the cost for that narrative to hold. And even if the economics argument carries some truth for some people, we have to ask, what is that truth for the enslaved? What is that truth for the people who bore the full weight of that social order in their bodies, their labor, their families, their lives? You cannot center the economics and leave out the people the economics were built on. The narrative did what it was designed to do. It made the specific, targeted, structural nature of the harm disappear into abstraction. Into economics. Into heritage.

And the violence continued. Quietly held by a story that said it wasn’t really about race.

The Strategy Evolves, And the Violence Remains…

During the Civil Rights era, as the movement gained moral ground that was increasingly difficult to dismiss publicly, a new version of the reframe emerged, this time, notably, from some quarters of the left. Race is being used to divide the working class. The real issue is class solidarity. And again, there is truth woven into this. Economic justice matters. Class solidarity matters. This is not an attempt to dismiss those truths.

But watch what is happening simultaneously. While this argument is being made in movement spaces, Black communities are being surveilled, infiltrated, and dismantled by COINTELPRO. Black leaders are being assassinated. Black neighborhoods are being deliberately destroyed by urban renewal policies that everyone involved knew were targeting Black people specifically. Black women are being forcibly sterilized. The specific, targeted, anti-Black nature of state violence is overwhelming and documented.

And the “class not race” framework, whatever its intentions, consistently produced the same result. The specific experiences of Black people got reframed as divisive. Naming anti-Black racism became the obstacle to unity. The demand to be seen fully, in the specificity of what was happening to Black bodies and Black communities, became a problem to be managed rather than a truth to be centered. This pattern is not unique to this moment. The demand to defer, to wait, to subordinate a specific experience to the "larger" struggle has been used to silence the most marginalized voices inside liberation movements themselves, again and again.

Audre Lorde saw this clearly. In Sister Outsider, she named, with precision, the ways liberation movements reproduced the very hierarchies they claimed to dismantle, and how Black women, in particular, were expected to defer their specific experiences to a universal that was never actually universal. The erasure wasn’t incidental. It was structural. And it was a form of anti-Blackness operating inside spaces that called themselves free.

Then came the post-racial moment. The Obama era reframe was perhaps the most seductive version yet because it used a single, extraordinary exception to foreclose an entire conversation. Race was over. Or close enough. Those who kept naming anti-Black racism were clinging to grievances that a new America had moved beyond.

Meanwhile, I need us to sit here for a moment. Black people were being killed by police at rates that were being documented, filmed, and still explained away. The wealth gap was widening. The school-to-prison pipeline was/is operating at full capacity. The maternal mortality crisis for Black women was and remains catastrophic. The specific, targeted, anti-Black nature of these harms was visible to anyone willing to look.

The narrative made it possible not to look.

And now, the DEI dismantling. The executive orders. The institutional reversals. The reframe is almost identical to the Redeemer narrative. This is about fairness, not race. It’s about merit. It’s about not dividing people by identity. The harm being done gets reframed as the solution. The people naming the harm get reframed as the problem.

And let’s name something else clearly. Black people have been saying this out loud for months, for years, for generations. The disproportionate impact has been documented, lived, and testified to. The silence from people and institutions that call themselves allies, that have proudly claimed the language of equity and liberation, is itself a data point. When the reframe serves a convenient purpose, the silence is not neutral. It never has been. This is the class vs. race argument in real time.

A social construct created 400 to 500 years ago that has functioned virtually uninterrupted doesn’t stay a construct. It grows roots. It becomes infrastructure. And the strategy for protecting that infrastructure has always been the same. Find a frame, economic, post-racial, meritocratic, that makes it possible to see everything except the anti-Blackness. And then defend that frame as the reasonable, sophisticated, unifying position.

This is what that strategy looks like when it gets inside the movement itself.

When the Strategy Gets Inside the Movement…

Everything I’ve described so far is a strategy deployed against liberation movements from the outside. What I want to name now, carefully and with love, is what happens when the strategy gets inside the movement.

The gentrification of liberation is what I call it when the frameworks, language, and intellectual architecture that Black communities built for Black liberation get absorbed, repackaged, and slowly recentered around other experiences. And I want to be precise. This is not a metaphor. It is anti-Blackness. Operating inside spaces that call themselves liberatory.

Kimberlé Crenshaw developed intersectionality to name the specific ways Black women fell through the cracks between race and gender analysis, rendered invisible by frameworks that couldn’t fully hold them. It was a framework built from and for Black women’s experiences of compounded, specific harm. When intersectionality becomes a general synonym for “multiple identities” that no longer centers Black women, that can be applied to any combination of marginalized identities without naming anti-Blackness specifically, that is not an evolution of the framework. That is the erasure the framework was built to resist, happening inside the framework itself.

How you show up in liberation movements is itself a narrative. It tells a story about whose pain is the entry point. Whose framework gets credited? Whose community gets resourced and whose gets mined for language and then left behind? Whose humanity anchors the movement and whose gets added as an afterthought or a coalition gesture.

Liberation cannot be gentrified and still be liberation. And a movement that subordinates anti-Black racism to any other frame, however sophisticated, however well-intentioned, is reproducing the oldest strategy in the playbook. Inside the house this time. But the same strategy.

What Solidarity Actually Requires…

I don’t want to end with only critique because I think we sometimes use the complexity of these questions as a reason to stop moving.

So I’ll say this simply. Solidarity requires that the roots travel with the work. That you ask yourself whose experience is centered in the coalition you’re building, and whether the people most affected are leading or decorating. Every reframe we’ve talked about today, from Reconstruction to now, has had a body count. And whatever allows us to fight vehemently for the lives of some while making Black suffering invisible or secondary is a thing worth examining. A thing with roots. A thing that does not disappear because our intentions are good.

The soil shapes all of us. The question is whether we’re willing to examine what has been planted in it.

I’m going to go much deeper on what solidarity actually requires, and what it could look like in practice, in the next post. Because it deserves its own full space.

For now, I’ll leave you with this.

When have you watched anti-Black racism get made invisible, inside a movement, a coalition, a framework, or a conversation that called itself liberatory? And what did it cost to name it?

Sit with it. I’m sitting with it too.

In love and solidarity,

Rooted Narrative and Storytelling

Like, I can almost see it. Someone, somewhere, smart and well-meaning or maybe not so smart or well-meaning, started pulling on that thread, well, actually, if you think about it economically... and a revisionist narrative that has been used to minimize, distort, and delay justice ever since was born. These things don’t start as lies. They start as reframes. And reframes, once they take hold, become the soil in which we build foundations.

And here’s the thing, racism does work as a tool of division precisely because people be racist. That’s not a throwaway line. The mechanism only functions because the belief is real, the behavior is real, and the harm is real. You can’t separate the tool from the hand holding it and call that analysis.

And there is truth in the statement. I want to name that clearly. Race was constructed. It was designed as a tool. And yes, economic exploitation is part of the architecture of how it has functioned. That's real. But here's what I keep sitting with, a social construct created 400 to 500 years ago that has functioned virtually uninterrupted, doesn't stay a construct. It grows roots. It shapes institutions, bodies, communities, and generational memory. At some point, the origin story of a thing and the living reality of that thing are not the same conversation.

What worries me most right now is watching this particular reframe gain ground with young Black brilliant people, who I love and respect deeply. And I get the intellectual appeal. It feels like you’ve seen behind the curtain. But I want to sit with what we might be giving up when we accept the framing that the racism we actually see, feel, and live is somehow secondary to the “real” fight.

Because here’s what I keep coming back to… You cannot build a fight for the acknowledgment of one group’s full humanity while treating another group’s dehumanization as a footnote. That is not coalition building. That is not intersectionality. And it is certainly not liberation. We don’t get to pick which constructed harms count.

And again, yes, race is a social construct. But in 2026, racism is also absolutely, undeniably a thing. Constructed systems produce real consequences. Ask anyone who has sat in a doctor’s office and not been believed. Ask anyone who has been followed in a store, passed over for a loan, or watched a neighborhood “change.” The construction of the harm does not dissolve the harm.

Which brings me to something I’ve been turning over in my mind. A question I think we need to start asking more seriously.

We have broadly, and rightly, accepted the framework of generational harm and epigenetics when it comes to Black people in this country. We understand that trauma doesn’t just live in memory. It lives in the body, and it moves across generations. The research is there. The lived experience confirms it.

So why are we not asking the same question about whiteness?

What has the intergenerational internalization of whiteness produced? What does it mean to inherit a self-concept built on dominance, on the erasure of others, on a story of superiority that has to be constantly defended? What has that done, generationally, psychologically, relationally, to the people who carry it? And how does that show up in liberation movements? This isn’t an accusation. It’s a research question. And the fact that we rarely ask it out loud is itself a narrative choice worth examining.

I'm naming all of this because I'm in it too, still working through it, still asking the questions, just like you. I’m naming it because the narratives we accept shape the policies we tolerate, the coalitions we build, and the futures we can imagine. Narrative clarity is not a detour from liberation. It is the work.

This is what Rooted Narratives and Storytelling will be doing, naming what’s in the soil. Asking the questions that get deflected. Sitting with the discomfort long enough to see what’s actually there.

This is just the beginning. I’ll be following up with a deeper dive into the history of economic reframing as a narrative strategy, where it comes from, who it has served, and what it has cost us. And I want to hear from you. What are you noticing? What narratives are rooted in the soil right now that feel worth examining?

We’re just getting started.

In solidarity,

Rooted Narratives and Storytelling