ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
YOU ARE NOW READING ABOLITION JOURNAL.
THE FULL ISSUE IS AVAILABLE BELOW WITH INFINITE SCROLL IN AN ORDER SET FORTH BY OUR EDITORIAL TEAM. YOU CAN ALSO DIRECT LINK JUMP TO ANY ARTICLE YOU CHOOSE FROM THE SIDE TABLE OF CONTENTS VIEW OR TOP MENU ON MOBILE. YOUR JOURNEY THROUGH ABOLITION JOURNAL IS UP TO YOU.
WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT.
GROW WITH US. DONATE TODAY.
IMPORTANT! TO MAKE A TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION: Visit our Abolition School Donate page. Be sure to click “I’d like to make this contribution in honor or in memory of someone” and write “Abolition Journal” within the Honoree Name box.
To sustain this endeavor, we are intent on raising and maintaining an annual budget of $60,000 for the committed creative labor of our contributors and editorial team. It’s important we name our dream as we grow the foundation. Our current plans for Abolition Journal with those resources center on platforming a quarterly-refreshed online outlet and annual print publication in partnership with Common Notions.THE FULL ISSUE IS AVAILABLE BELOW WITH INFINITE SCROLL IN AN ORDER SET FORTH BY OUR EDITORIAL TEAM. YOU CAN ALSO DIRECT LINK JUMP TO ANY ARTICLE YOU CHOOSE FROM THE SIDE TABLE OF CONTENTS VIEW OR TOP MENU ON MOBILE. YOUR JOURNEY THROUGH ABOLITION JOURNAL IS UP TO YOU.
WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT.
GROW WITH US. DONATE TODAY.
IMPORTANT! TO MAKE A TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION: Visit our Abolition School Donate page. Be sure to click “I’d like to make this contribution in honor or in memory of someone” and write “Abolition Journal” within the Honoree Name box.
We are not accepting further submissions at this time. For any other questions, feedback, and/or opportunities, reach out to us at abolition@wewinfromwithin.com. Please allow some time for our small but mighty team to get back with you. We note that we’ll be taking it slow this summer.
Cover Image: Heading to School, Karim Brown
ON DIRECTION:
For the pilot issue of the renewed Abolition Journal, we invited contributors to explore the everyday experiences that come along with trying to live out our politics: the daily victories and errands, reflections and runarounds, gestures and drama, habits and heartbreaks, setbacks and surrenders, excuses and evasions, breakdowns and breakthroughs.
This humble proof of concept took shape with the hands and hearts of many. We went from a belief that hosting seven pieces will do, to accepting and publishing 20+ offerings. All the while, we needed to everyday struggle with each other within the Working Group to find, no, invent structure, practice, care, and direction for the Journal. Structure, practice, care, and direction that would deepen existing movement knowledges and/both invite new audiences to irresistibly see themselves mirrored within this work.
Whole time, we won’t know if we got it right until you all read these pages. Or we can keep it more thurl than that: we won’t know if the work works until our liberation movements advance and endure. We ain’t just doing all this for the appreciation of good sentences. This Abolition Journal pilot issue is but a departure for a whole wide world of folks, grounded from so-called Philadelphia (Occupied Lenapehoking), seeking to arrive at the precipice of global transformation. Our words remain insufficient when bold actions are required.
Eduardo Galeano reminds us that utopia is on the horizon and on these pages, we simply are rehearsing our wins, doing our dance, performing our best kinda Philly two-step. Take this long walk with us. Join this electric slide. The point of facing EVERYDAY SH!T is this: to keep on a move.
Authored by Christopher R. Rogers, Project Lead of the Abolition Journal Working Group
ON POETRY:
The poems in this pilot issue of Abolition Journal take flight. They launch, observe, dive, and give us a reason to notice: How did we get here? Where are we going? When did we get wings? These poems are equal parts invitations to witness and calls to action. To resist and love. To reimagine and wrestle with what is difficult to sit with. In his 1963 speech “The Moral Responsibility of the Artist” delivered at the University of Chicago, James Baldwin said “An artist is someone who helps you see reality again.”. These poems are so specific to the vision of these poets that the reader will have to step out of their seeing in the name of addition. To make room for altering perceptions. To archive truths however stark and heartbreaking. To offer a word or a phrase for us to: hold, remember, acknowledge, and reconsider.
Authored by Gabriel Ramirez, Poetry Lead of the Abolition Journal Working Group
THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN PRODUCED BY THE ABOLITION JOURNAL WORKING GROUP:
- Kiian Dawn, Editorial Lead
- Andrés González-Bonillas
- TJ Holloway
- Sterling Johnson
- Gabriel Ramirez, Poetry Lead
- Christopher R. Rogers, Project Lead
- Farwa Zaidi
Content Notice: state repression, co-optation, counterinsurgency
Collective Mapping of Philadelphia’s Abolitionist Timeline Activity, Spring 2025, Abolition School
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” —Deleuze & GuattariAbolition is a brick—but does that mean it’s for building, or is it for throwing? To be clear, what concerns us are the very real courthouses that W.E.B. Du Bois had identified, in The Souls of Black Folk, as the “universal device” for the “reenslaving the blacks”—and which housed courts not of reason but of color, which in his words “settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge.” As in so many ways, Du Bois here provides a key bridge between abolition past—the abolition of slavery—and abolition present: the racialized apparatus of carceral power that emerged after the Civil War and has only gained strength and breadth in the 150 years since.
So what kind of a brick is abolition? This question gains a more specific and urgent weight in the aftermath of the 2020 rebellions, which launched the question of abolition into the political mainstream for the first time (or the second time, really). Insurgency brings counterinsurgency, and more often than not, this counterinsurgency takes two forms. On the one hand, and in the first instance, the system responds with brute repressive force. But increasingly, the iron fist wears the velvet glove of liberal counterinsurgency through infiltration and cooptation. 2020 saw both, but while repression is often easier to recognize—leaders and participants targeted for arrest or attacked by white vigilantes in the streets—liberal counterinsurgency can fly under the radar and even appear as a victory and accomplishment of our movements.
Now to be clear, the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly interested in abolition was an accomplishment of our movements and a measure of our power in the streets. But, understood dialectically, it’s also much more than that. Of course, it’s a good thing that everyone was suddenly an abolitionist, but when this everyone includes liberals and nonprofits, professors and universities, we naturally have questions to ask, and one question most of all: what do we meanwhen we say abolition? Against contemporary attempts to water down abolition, to co-opt it in the service of power, to render it harmless, reformist, or gradualist, and to make it compatible with the status quo, we need to be clear: the brick of abolition is definitely not for building courthouses—the recent trend of electing radical district attorneys notwithstanding. When it comes to courthouses, abolition means smashing windows and more, dismantling the very foundations.
“But here’s the weird thing: smashing windows is the easiest thing, which is why it’s only the smallest of first steps. Abolition means tearing down the whole building, prying it apart brick from brick.”But here’s the weird thing: smashing windows is the easiest thing, which is why it’s only the smallest of first steps. Abolition means tearing down the whole building, prying it apart brick from brick. And the closer we get to the foundations, the higher the wreckage piles all around us, something peculiar happens. It becomes clear that we have more than just two options, and that the relationship between destroying and building is not one of simple opposition: not all bricks are for courthouses—we too need to build. The question is what to build and how, and how to build without abandoning the need to also throw bricks. Abolition is a brick that needs to do both. This is the clearest lesson that abolition present must learn from abolition past: that abolition will inevitably fail if it is not also an ambitious and far-reaching process of social reconstruction.
Spring 2025 Abolition School Leadership Team (from left to right): DJ Graves, Intern; Christopher R. Rogers, Facilitator; Geo Maher, Coordinator; Ant Smith, Facilitator; Talia Charidah, Fellow; Nneka Azuka, Fellow.
Enter the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, or Abolition School. In Philadelphia, the 2020 rebellions lasted not days but entire months—reignited in October by the murder of Walter Wallace Jr. in West Philly—and shook the city to its worm-eaten core. We saw both forms of counterinsurgency up close: much of the city remained under National Guard occupation for weeks, and several of those present—including our own Abolition School facilitator Ant Smith—were targeted and ultimately jailed by the Feds. But we also saw the flood of nonprofit and university money dedicated to watering-down the language of abolition in the service of the status quo—leading even many revolutionaries to wonder whether the language of abolition is even worth the trouble.
Both forms of counterinsurgency conspired to demobilize the people, by picking off leaders to make an example of, and by reframing a threatened hegemonic narrative to convince us that we had gotten out of hand and demanded too much—and particularly amidst a Covid-era spike in violence in the city, this argument gained significant traction.
So we confronted two challenges:
- the perennial question of what to do after the upsurge, in the moment of downturn, with those energies and people who had been mobilized; and
- the more specific question posed by the mainstreaming of abolition, which demanded new debates around precisely what abolition means and what would be required to make it real.
At the Du Bois Movement School, our answer to both is the same: political education as political organization. We pursue this according to four rough principles: we are abolitionists, which we understand to always also be a process of reconstruction; we are internationalists, because the systems we confront are global and our best resistance is solidarity across borders; we do intersectional education, because we know that capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy emerged together through colonial expansion; and we do participatory education because our goal is to train those movement intellectuals capable of leading the struggles on the horizon. This is not education for education’s sake: as we often insist, we study the world to change it.
“This is not education for education’s sake: as we often insist, we study the world to change it.”For us, this project responds to both of the challenges posed above. First, it catches and gathers those mobilized by abolitionist struggles, bringing aspiring organizers together from struggles across the city and beyond, thereby building intersectional and international solidarity in practice through the hard work of studying together. Secondly, it does so with an eye toward clarifying and sharpening our understanding of abolition into a fundamentally revolutionary approach, grounded in global anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, with reconstruction serving as code for the ongoing struggle to rebuild (and defend) community from the wreckage capitalism has wrought worldwide. Against those who either seek to neutralize abolition in the service of the status quo, or who reject it as insufficiently radical, we respond with an educational practice that ensures it remains faithful to its most intransigently revolutionary roots.
In the year of my birth, Audre Lorde famously wrote that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”—a phrase that has been used and abused ad infinitum since. Perhaps the best indicator of the perils of cooptation is the way that this phrase, meant as a warning against the institutionalization of radicalism in academia and the watering-down of Black feminism by the status quo, has been transformed so thoroughly into a neoliberal proverb to be deployed against any and all collective resistance. The reality is that tools are tools, that they change meaning dramatically when stolen away from the master, and that the master’s house is nothing more than a pile of bricks.
Abolition finds its truest and most radical meaning when it is firmly in the hands of oppressed communities in struggle. Only then will it be the brick we truly need.
“Abolition finds its truest and most radical meaning when it is firmly in the hands of oppressed communities in struggle. Only then will it be the brick we truly need.”Geo Maher, Coordinator, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction
Geo Maher, Ph.D., is a writer, organizer, and popular educator who has taught in colleges and universities, in prisons, and in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela—learning an immense amount from his students in the process. Growing up poor in the Maine woods, he was taught at an early age to despise oppression, and found early inspiration in local and global struggles against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy—and in the revolutionary internationalist vision for a new world that those who fight continue to carry in their hearts. He is the author of five books, including A World Without Police and Anticolonial Eruptions.
after Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere”
here, on the grindstone / of each other’s confidence / we sharpen our tongues / and when sparks fly / there is no burning / of Black flesh. / out there we made ourselves larger / by tearing something down / but here, we only destroy to make room / for self-esteem to blossom. / when you grace this bench / and they say / i love you / cuz we go way back / like ya hairline / inches rush back to your crown. / and when they tell you / yo lips fire hazard ashy / moisture returns to your mouth / like a springtime homecoming. / here, we welcome. / Black boys can be the bull / and the china shop. / Black girls who hate cooking / will still flambé any fool / raw enough to approach. / here, every binary expired. / here, everybody’s pronouns are these/hands. / here, reality is pure marble / chiseled by our wit. / yesterday, i told this boy / the yellow glare off his teeth / could halt traffic / and next to us / the bustling line / of tray-toting students / screeched to a stop. / when he responded / saying my breath was / kicking like kung-fu, / every one of those students / was sent flying / soon as they got a whiff. / and then me and the boy laughed. / and then we all laughed. / and laughed.
David A. Gaines (he/they) is a writer, director and actor born and based in Philadelphia. His work examines Blackness, masculinity, Christianity and mental health through an intersectional lens.Dave’s films have screened at film festivals such as the BlackStar Film Festival, Gary International Black Film Festival, National Black Arts Festival and the International Video Poetry Festival.As an award-winning, nationally touring poetry performer and Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County, his work has also been featured in several publications including The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, VICE Media, Button Poetry, among many others.When not writing, performing or orchestrating films, you can find Dave teaching poetry in Philly public schools, spending time with nature and attempting a conversion to morning personhood.
Content Notice: policing in education, childhood trauma
Falling Star, Melody Yang, DE-MIL-I-TA-RISE Dissenters Portfolio, Justseeds
Devante’s mother sighed. After 30 minutes of listening to a table of people share why her son’s behavior wasn’t working in school, she appeared ready to be done. This was his care team. A principal, vice principal, school counselor, climate manager, behavioral therapist, and classroom teacher. All making the case for how they cared about her six-year-old, chocolate-skinned boy in what felt like a trial. Mother and son sat side by side on the witness stand.
We all testified one-by-one. “He just won’t stay in class.” “He is constantly running around the building.” “He’s a safety risk to himself and others.” She sat silently taking it all in, and her eyes seemed to say Did you know that I’ve heard this speech before?
After everyone shared efforts that had been made to support Devante, we looked to her for a response. We were hoping for some magic words that would give us insight into what could be done about her son. And she delivered, just not in the way I expected.
She calmly met the gaze of her child’s first grade teacher, my gaze, and said with absolute clarity, “Devante knows you don’t like him.”
Suddenly, all eyes were on me. The room that was just moments ago buzzing with voices, now only echoed with the sound of my pounding heart. Body frozen and face hot. New sweat stains formed in guilty rings around my underarms, and my mouth filled with cotton.
You see, I was an aspiring abolitionist teacher. I had peace corners instead of timeouts, created community agreements instead of classroom rules, and encouraged conflict resolution over punishment. I thought I was doing right by my students. But, her words exposed a truth I hadn’t even let myself believe.
In that moment, I realized how deeply I had fallen into the trap of carceral thinking— a mindset that views punishment and exclusion as solutions to “bad” behavior. This perspective shapes how schools act as extensions of the prison system that frames discipline as a necessary response to harm. Just as prisons remove individuals from society, effectively making them disappear from their communities, I found myself doing the same thing to this child. The act of disappearing him–– withdrawing my attention, care, and acknowledgement— had become the discipline itself, a subtle punishment for his behavior. I had prided myself on rejecting this way of thinking, but somewhere along the way I had stopped recognizing his needs and instead only saw the disruptions he caused.
I had lost sight of the very child I was meant to support and nurture.
As I held Devante’s mother’s gaze, I knew that she knew that I knew she was right. And in that moment, I began to understand that abolitionist teaching required more than just alternative disciplinary methods. It demanded a fundamental shift in how I viewed and valued each child in the classroom.
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In the beginning of the school year, Devante flew under the radar. He followed directions well and kept to himself. He had big wandering eyes and a squeaky voice that we rarely heard.
But, in October his behavior changed. One day, I was transitioning the students into an activity. He was trying to get my attention and I told him to wait while I tend to the rest of the class. In the few minutes I took to focus on the others, time likely passed more slowly for Devante, each moment amplifying his sense of being overlooked. By the time I was ready to center his needs, he was gone. He physically left the classroom. It was as if to say since you won’t acknowledge me, then I will go somewhere that will. I immediately called the office and he was brought back safely to class.
I worked diligently to understand what could have happened to warrant him wandering around the school over staying in the room. I spent my prep periods meeting with the counselor to gain insight on his behavior. Over time we learned that Devante was experiencing challenges at home, so I wanted to approach his needs with patience. I wanted to know how I could support him.
However, as time passed, his needs continued to grow, while my capacity to empathize with those needs began to wane.Over the next several months, Devante began leaving the classroom on a regular basis. This behavior initiated a vicious cycle: the more he left, the less he was seen as part of the community, which led to increased rejection from his peers. As he seemed less connected to his classmates, he engaged in more disruptive behaviors, such as running around the classroom, hitting other students, and ripping up work– in what seemed like a cry for attention, or perhaps, connection. The less Devante abided by the standards we had established for our community, the less he was accepted as a member, even by me.
I became increasingly agitated with him and soon only viewed his presence as a disruption. On one occasion, Devante had left class for the third time that day. Normally, I would have alerted the care team immediately of his absence, so he could be returned to class. However, on this day, wanting to savor in the peace of his absence, I waited. Ten minutes went by before I dragged myself to the phone again. Eventually, a climate worker brought him back. Upon seeing him come inside, I let out a slow, heavy breath and looked down on him. “Are you actually going to stay this time?” I asked, not even trying to conceal my annoyance to him or the rest of the class.
He didn’t.
By March, I had all but given up on him, and he knew that.
٭ ٭ ٭
“Devante knows you don’t like him.” Three years later, I still feel where those words sit in my body. They crash-landed into my gut and brought me back to reality. I looked at Devante sitting next to his mother and realized that I had forgotten how small he was. When was the last time I wondered what was behind those wandering eyes?
The care team made a plan. For the next month, he would have a goal of staying in class for small increments of time. For every 30 minutes he stayed, he would earn a sticker. If he earned five stickers, then he would receive a prize. He could choose between a variety of incentives: fidgets, ipad time, positive phone call home, or lunch with the teacher. He chose lunch.
Later that week, we had a particularly challenging day and Devante had left the classroom for over an hour. He came back in right as we were lining up for lunch. My immediate thought was how disappointed I was, because he had not met his goal at all that week and was nowhere near it today. As I looked at him, I thought what if that didn’t matter? “Devante, I missed you this morning in class”, I began. He turned away prepared for the speech. “Since you weren’t here, I was wondering if you would like to have lunch with me and tell me all about how your morning went.” His eyes lit up. “Really? But I ain’t even reach my goal” he squeaked with a mixture of confusion and excitement. “That’s okay, I just want to spend time with you.”
He raced downstairs to be first in the lunch line, arriving back in class out of breath. He sat down right at my desk and spread out his Wawa chocolate milk and chicken tenders. There was a moment of silence that passed between us, neither of us really knowing what to say and hoping the other would start. I pulled out my lunch and began with my blueberries. As I popped one in my mouth, his eyes followed. “Did you know that you gotta wash blueberries before you eat them?” I chuckled and responded that I did know and that I had in fact washed these before eating them. He offered another fact. “Did you know that you can eat blueberries both hot and cold?” I plopped another handful in my mouth and he watched closely. “Wow you sure know lots about blueberries!” I said. “Yeah, because did you know that blueberries are my favorite food?” he said, begging me to take the hint. “Would you like some blueberries, Devante?”
He took a small handful while trying to contain his pride in having accomplished his mission. Throughout our lunch, he began opening up. We had been learning about ocean animals in class and unbeknownst to me, he absolutely loved this topic. He stumbled over to the display shelf and reached his blueberry dipped finger tips to grab The Big Book of the Blue, a book all about sea life. “This is my favorite”, he whispered excitedly, and revealed a page devoted to sea turtles. When he left class that morning, he had missed the entire lesson, which was coincidentally all about sea turtles. “When you weren’t in class, we actually read this page! Would you like to go over it together?” He put one sticky thumb up in the air to signify he was ready.
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The chocolate-complexioned boy with big eyes reminded me that care is a practice. Carceral thinking teaches us that an individual’s deservingness of care is connected to how they exist, how they maintain order. We practice this way of thinking everytime we enforce punishment. But, abolition offers an alternative. It dares to imagine that we deserve care because we exist, in all our wild, wonderful, and sometimes messy ways. Just as I embodied carcerality in my thoughts that showed through my actions, that is where our abolition needs to be practiced as well.
This realization didn't come quickly or easily. It took Devante’s mother’s words for me to understand his language. When he left the room, his actions seemed to say I am here. So, the halls became a much more welcoming place for him after awhile. It was here that he could run and someone would acknowledge him when my actions responded, I do not hear you. Abolition asks that we listen differently, to hear the unspoken needs beneath the behavior. It demands that we recognize care-seeking in all its forms, even when it doesn’t align with our expectations.
I wish I had not taken all year to hear him and I wish that I learned just in time and everything was perfect after this realization. It wasn’t, but it did get better.
Devante only met his goal a few times in the remainder of the school year. However, we did share many more lunches. That initial meal was a reminder that Devante was just as deserving of care when he left the room as he was when he stayed. It underscored that our duty to care isn’t contingent on how that care is requested, but on the fundamental worth of the person before us.
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I don’t know how Devante is doing now. I often debate calling him to apologize for failing him or perhaps even just to see how he is doing, to form a deeper relationship that I wished I had done with him three years ago. But this debate always ends with a reckoning of how selfish this would be. So, instead I send a happy first day of school message to his mother each fall and secretly hope that instead she reads this as I’m sorry.
Devante is in third grade this year. A grade where the School District of Philadelphia has determined that he is old enough to be suspended, formally disappeared from a community. I hope that his teachers hug him instead of watch him leave. I hope they kneel to meet his gaze, instead of speak down to him. Show him that their arms are strong enough to carry the weight that no child should have to, instead of watch him struggle to lift it each day. Praise instead of punish. Welcome him in, instead of showing him that teachers do hold grudges.
And I hope they have all learned how much he loves blueberries.
Alexandrea Henry (she/her) is a former SDP elementary teacher who misses it everyday. She believes in and is committed to the formation of worlds where prisons cease to exist in any form and where every child is free, from the River to the Sea. She is currently a PhD student at Stanford University, studying how our youngest learners make sense of power and belonging in the context of school discipline. She also loves documenting the world through film photography, sweet poems, and long conversations at dusk. Alexandrea is currently reading works by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Rasheeda Phillips.
Staring uncarefully at the corners
At the memorial’s candles and flowers
I want to call every time I’ve ever fired a gun a black dahlia
Yellow numbers present inner-city-mountain time
momentum of skin
roosting in firing pins
I deny the united states exists
Did fingers do all of this low-pitch feasting?
Where spitting up a little blood
Is like tasting a little food
And I was forced into the common images of a prison society
Hail, whitey-petit-bourgeois waxing over cornered people
the Madonna now white and male
on the moon
the Madonna now white and male
on the moon
I noticed the legs first
I mean, my home has finally hosted a welcome
An approach to the body
the political brothering of a corpse
mass voicings of copper jackets
refugee tent on the living room tile
Then the unfinished shortenin’ bread on the table
Bent spines rolled into one lovely street being
I sense God now
Yellow aura of the furniture, I’ve controlled the sun for a week
Attica bragging, the color of the cop-killer don’t matter
Return to the torso part of fear or the body temperature of ink
A current for bones
Watch me meditate My daughter reading Marx to my ashes
I sense her tears now
This chapter is pleased and flowering for other worlds
Family is physical law
And every poet belongs in Gaza
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco on May 20, 1980. He received a BA and MA in African American Studies from Columbia University. Eisen-Martin is the author of Blood on the Fog (City Lights Publishers, 2021), which the New York Times’ listed among the Best Poetry of 2021; Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Publishers, 2017), which received the California Book Award and an American Book Award; and Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). A poet, movement worker, and educator, Eisen-Martin’s latest curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the United States. In 2021, Eisen-Martin was appointed the eighth poet laureate of San Francisco. In 2024, he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Content Notice: genocide, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, settler colonialism, state repression, medical racism, maternal mortality, reproductive justice
Masjid al Aqsa. Al-Aqsa is known as one of the holiest sites for Muslims worldwide, a place where the Prophet Muhammad experienced a night of enlightenment.
As I write this, it’s April 11th, and we are on day 552 of the current iteration of genocide in Gaza and surrounding areas. Of course, this is as well as 75+ years of occupation, settler violence, and torture that Palestinians have endured at the hands of the Israeli state. Part of what originally led me to my abolitionist values was my passion for Palestinian sovereignty. You can’t recognize the violence of incarceration and policing without recognizing the violence of occupation. And in Philadelphia, there are even more threads that connect us all.
In mid-2024, Talia Charidah and Nneka Azuka were chosen to be fellows of the W.E.B. DuBois School of Abolition and Reconstruction. Alums of the second cohort, which met earlier that year, Talia and Nneka were brought on as supplemental instructors who would advance their political education further than taking the course. As part of the fellowship, Talia and Nneka signed up to visit Palestine in December 2024 with the Eyewitness Palestine delegation. As Talia and Nneka put it, the aim of the delegation is to get a first person view of Palestinian life. In fact, Nneka told me that:
“[The delegation] is to bear witness, to make connections, but it's also to feel the humanity of the Palestinians that we met. They're not a group of people who are just dying. They are people with real full lives, who are victims of an occupation. They're people first, occupied second. Not occupied and oppressed first and then people second.”
I sat down with Nneka and Talia to discuss their trip, the everyday routines they witnessed, and what, if anything, reminded them of Philly in Palestine.
Although we witness the horror in Palestine on our phones and on social media daily, it can sometimes be difficult to visualize Palestine as a place we can visit. Talia’s grandparents were expelled during the Nakba, and Talia was the first person in her family to visit Palestine ever since. She viewed and experienced the trip as a homegoing. When I asked Nneka if she ever imagined visiting Palestine prior to the trip, she admitted that she had feared that “there wouldn’t be a Palestine left to visit.” The fact that both Talia and Nneka were able to go is nothing short of miraculous, especially since we can all learn from what they saw and experienced.
The ways Palestinians are forced to move in their homes and otherwise is all controlled by the Israeli state and the IOF1. While we take for granted small things like walking to CVS, picking up our medications, gardening, and decorating our houses, all of these things are prohibited for Palestinians. Of course, this also means that Palestinians have learned how to care for themselves amidst such a harsh level of surveillance. Talia says that:
“We got to watch the sunset over Safad, a city in the north of Palestine where Talia’s family is from. Almost all of the villages in Safad were ethnically cleansed in 1948. The old city of Safad is now an orthodox settlement. This was the most beautiful sunset.”
“Palestinians are innovative and crafty and there's ingenuity in the way that they move through life with so many barriers. You have to be creative. That's why when I think of everyday shit, it's them knowing where to dodge settlers, or knowing where you can mess with them! It’s them making a playground out of the rubble, or the aunties being able to communicate to each other through the windows of their homes– because the homes are inches together in some of the camps– when the occupation is coming in. Everyday shit is literally every man in the camps being in one Telegram group chat, and just knowing what's happening in and around the camp. That's something I've always appreciated about my people. You need to survive, and you figure out how to do that by any means necessary, right?”
Something I learned over the course of our conversation is that Palestinians aren’t even allowed to do indoor home renovations without the permission of the state. Many of them are forced to repair their plumbing under cover of night, in order to avoid getting caught. If they do, they are fined and sometimes, imprisoned. “Talk about everyday shit,” Talia said, “they can’t even take a shit!”
Healthcare disparities in Palestine are exacerbated by Israeli surveillance, policing, and checkpoints. Nneka remembered a story she heard about the difficulty that emergency vehicles can have getting across checkpoints. If they are let through, then allowed to retrieve the patient, there’s always a chance the checkpoint could be “shut indiscriminately” by the IOF, resulting in sick people succumbing to their injuries or illnesses inside emergency vehicles. “So many women have died in childbirth because of the checkpoints,” Talia said, while Nneka nodded somberly.
This is something that’s painfully relatable in Philadelphia, and the US as a whole. According to the Philadelphia Maternal Mortality Review Committee, between 2013-2018, there were 110 pregnancy-associated deaths of Philadelphia residents — an average of 18 deaths per year. Nationally, according to the CDC, 4,066 women died of pregnancy related deaths between the same years.
Because Eyewitness Palestine is a BIPOC delegation, there were a lot of different viewpoints and life experiences in Talia and Nneka’s group. They talked at length about the excitement of the group while visiting the African Quarters in Jerusalem, and how much they enjoyed learning from the communities there. Talia said she learned that around 500 years ago, families from Chad came to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage to Al-Aqsa Masjid2, and never left. Nneka says that:
“The Africans in the quarter and in Jerusalem are known as the guardians of Al-Aqsa, because during that time [that they arrived in Palestine] and during the Nakba, they were an integral part of the resistance against the Zionist militias, particularly in Jerusalem.”
I was fascinated to learn this, but even more so to learn that despite their history with Al-Aqsa, Black Palestinians are still often denied entry into the masjid. Nneka shared a story about one of the delegation members, Larry, a Black American man, who she said was accosted while trying to enter. Members of the IOF drew their batons, and there was also a gun drawn at one point. When the delegation shared this experience with the Palestinians in the African Quarter, they were unsurprised.
“They were like, yeah, that happens to us all the time. And sometimes it does come from the Palestinian guards as well, that the Afro-Palestians get pushed back. Sometimes they let them into Al-Aqsa, sometimes they don't, but they're also getting extreme racism from the IOF soldiers who are guarding Al-Aqsa.”
We have an Al-Aqsa Masjid of our own in Philadelphia, and while it is open to all, it lives in a city with a history of stop and frisk policies, some of which have made a comeback under Mayor Parker’s administration. It isn’t unbelievable to assume that what happened to Larry outside Al-Aqsa Masjid in Jerusalem could also happen to someone who looks like Larry in the neighborhood of Philly’s Al-Aqsa Masjid.
The joy of Palestinians is also something we witness on our phones and through people such as Bisan Owda. Talia and Nneka confirmed that this joy is intrinsic in all Palestinians. Nneka compared some of the family dynamics she witnessed in Palestine to Black families she’s been around in the US:
“Palestinians have a strength of culture that Americans don't have. But thinking of Black families that I know, I feel that we are more alike. Where my mind is going with this is that life's hard, but then you're in the house, you're at the barbecue, and nothing's wrong. ‘We're all fam here’ and there's a connectedness. There’s lots of ‘no, I don't care if we're in a refugee camp: you're gonna eat well! You're gonna be taken care of. We're gonna chat with you.’ And it's just those interactions, those engagements, being taken into people's houses like we were, where I just forgot where I was for a second. And then when I walked out of the door, I realized how strong those family ties are, how strong that culture is, and how that is withstanding, in its own way, the occupation that's happening right outside their doors.”
Talia and Nneka explained to me how politics inherently fits into everyday shit for Palestinians. “[In Palestine,] everything is political, and everything is dictated by the occupation,” Talia said. For me, this felt tied to how, for so many of us, the personal is the political. There’s no way to untangle our personal and social lives from the fact that we live under racial capitalism. It is our duty to learn from the Palestinian people how to act in ways that break down these systems of oppression in everything we do.
“It is our duty to learn from the Palestinian people how to act in ways that break down these systems of oppression in everything we do.“
Talia and Nneka felt so honored to visit Palestine, and I felt so honored to hear them talk about it. “I have to ask,” I said at one point in the conversation. “What was one moment in Palestine where you felt like, ‘this is so Philly?’” We all laughed while they tried to remember the moments that stood out to them. Suddenly Talia had a lightbulb moment.
“Wait- all the kids doing tricks on bikes! How could I forget the kids doing tricks on their bikes? That was so Philly.”
Nneka and Talia near the mountains right outside of Jericho.
1In recent years, many folks have replaced saying IDF with IOF, because calling them an occupying force is more accurate than a defense force.
2Al-Aqsa is known as one of the holiest sites for Muslims worldwide, a place where the Prophet Muhammad experienced a night of enlightenment.
Talia Charidah, MPH, is a public health researcher and poet whose work has focused on the impact of displacement on identity formation and mental health, particularly for refugees and immigrants from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region. She is interested in the ways in which those who are displaced cultivate community and connect to their ancestral homelands, transcending borders. Currently, she is a Project Manager in The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements and Population Health Equity, collaborating on a project focused on illuminating structural racism in the healthcare industry. Rooted in her commitment to collective liberation and international solidarity, Talia is excited to continue learning alongside her comrades and work to dismantle all systems and structures of oppression, from Philly to Palestine.
Nneka Azuka is a North Philly-based organizer who focuses on community support and defense, community garden development, and international class solidarity. Relationship-based organizing is key to her political philosophy because she knows that building trust is key to learning and the practice of overthrowing capitalism. A former healthcare industry worker, Nneka became increasingly disillusioned with the systemic inequities she observed, leading her to embrace organizing as a means to challenge and dismantle the very systems that perpetuate oppression. She’s interested in understanding the historical precursors that shape our current world and developing a materialist understanding of social conditions grounded in Marxist theory. She hopes to foster solidarity and build collective consciousness through community education. She knows that organizing happens at the speed of trust and uplifts working class communities and revolutionary praxis that is grounded in the love we have for each other and the land
Content Notice: genocide, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, settler colonialism, state repression
A hand-painted poster with a prayer by @Bitterillegal translated into four languages by Jess X. Snow and @Bitterillegal. Arabic translation by Stephanie Najjar. Included as part of the Justseeds Palestine Will Be Free Graphics Package #2 and Artists Against Apartheid.
“But if we are bound together in our oppression, we are also bound together in our liberation. Because their fight is our fight. Their liberation is our liberation. Because when they rise, we rise. When they resist, we resist. When they refuse to be broken, they teach us how to be unbreakable.”
My friends, my family, sons of self-determination and daughters of liberation, my brothers and my sisters in the ongoing fight for a better world—hello, salaam alaikum.
I stand before you today not only to speak to you all as a community educator but also as your sister in grief as our collective heart bleeds for the people of Falestine. In a time where those at the highest forms of government continue to use their power to demolish your rights, feed their greed, and flippantly discuss ethnic cleansing, where the very act of stepping out here to march with us today puts your own livelihoods at risk, as they call you everything from delinquent to terrorist, I commend you all for your courage, your resolve, your refusal to give into their threats and your ability to see through their lies. Thank you for being here with me today.
In Abolition School, we teach that abolition is not just the destruction of prisons, police, and carceral systems—it is the abolition of a global system of oppression. A system that exploits, murders, and extracts wealth from the many, and does so for the benefit of the few. A system that shackles our minds as well as our bodies. A system that cages our people, whether in the jails erected on our soil or the open-air prison that is the West Bank.
As abolitionists we are also internationalists, because we understand that all of our struggles, from Philly, to Sudan, to the Congo, to Palestine are all inextricably linked. That the fight against police brutality in West Philadelphia is the same fight against military occupation in the West Bank. That the same police who terrorize our neighborhoods train under the same brutal military that enforces occupation in the Palestinian streets. The same hands that demolish their villages gentrify our neighborhoods. The same bullets that kill our brothers, sisters, and children in Philadelphia are manufactured by the same corporations profiting from the massacre in Gaza. This oppression is a web—interconnected, intricate, insidious, that we must endeavor to understand so that we can work to destroy it . To win against a global system of oppression, we must counter it by building a global system of solidarity and resistance.
Because colonialism, slavery, and capitalism are global systems, we know that abolition is a global project. When we say we want to abolish prisons, we mean prisons everywhere. When we say we want to abolish policing, we mean all policing—whether in the form of a cop attacking a brother on his walk home from work accusing him of being a criminal for just existing or an occupying soldier laughing as they terrorize the children like lambs for slaughter in a refugee camp.
When I visited Palestine this past December, I witnessed firsthand the unimaginable brutality of occupation. But more than that, I witnessed the unwavering resistance of the Palestinian people. I met a woman, Faduah, who told me, “Even though we are occupied, you Americans, you too are occupied.” She reminded me that our governments, our institutions of power, our very cities—are occupied with Zionists the same way the Palestinian streets are. We are crushed under the boot of the very same oppressor that both profits from their genocide and our suffering.
But if we are bound together in our oppression, we are also bound together in our liberation. Because their fight is our fight. Their liberation is our liberation. Because when they rise, we rise. When they resist, we resist. When they refuse to be broken, they teach us how to be unbreakable.
Our fight is not just about ending repression; it is about creating something new. Abolition is not just about tearing down; it is about reconstructing a world where all people can live freely, with dignity, without fear. A world where Palestinian children are free to play without drones hovering above them. A world where our own children do not live in fear of being brutalized by the police just because the system sees them as a threat. A world where land is not stolen, where resources are not hoarded, and where life is not disposable.
We have a duty to fight. To hold these so-called leaders, these criminals in suits, whose hands are drenched in blood, accountable! We have a duty to fight to abolish the institutions that protect and fund them. To take the power from the billionaires who profit from genocide, from eviction, from imprisonment, from war. The IDF, the KKK, PPD, the forces of this city and the forces of this nation that control them - they are all the same —they are one enemy! And they will fall!
Palestine's children are our children - no matter what any leader, any zionist, or any president, says.
And that is why we will not stop marching. We will not stop fighting. They have tried to break us. They have tried to silence us. They try to make us afraid and make us give up the fight. And they will continue to fail.
We will not rest until Palestine is free, and its children can return home. Until every prison is torn down. Until every system of oppression is dismantled. Until every stolen dollar, every stolen home, every stolen life is returned to the people.
And so we say today, with one voice: We will not be silenced. We will not be made afraid. And we will not falter.
Liberation for all!
All power to the people!
All glory to the martyrs!
Long live the global intifada!
From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free!
All power to the people!
All glory to the martyrs!
Long live the global intifada!
From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free!
After “An Independent Palestine State” by Richard B. Doubleday
On January 29, 2024
no Peppa, no potty she says
while she hardens her eyes, drops
her mouth’s softness to stone grimace.
she will not go
though she must.
no Peppa, no potty when i remind
that she can watch as i do her hair,
our morning ritual, love in tender brush.
the tangles releasing to the oils in my hands
i offer her this lesson:
i support and celebrate
her ability to choose
even her own body’s work.
always I honor her right, but protest
for free life.
should i tell her about the girl
in the bombed out car, her family dead
around her. how she called for help,
the pleading of many tongues
يساعد1
ע ָזרה2
help
fleshy to its tooth breaking pit
all she received was her body’s retrieval when the bullets stopped gutting metal. how to cut the wisps of my daughter with this, a name, hind rajab, which means not only gentle deer but tender. a name, which means
respect, to awe, to fear.
gentle to awe. the feared deer.
fleshy to its tooth breaking pit
all she received was her body’s retrieval when the bullets stopped gutting metal. how to cut the wisps of my daughter with this, a name, hind rajab, which means not only gentle deer but tender. a name, which means
respect, to awe, to fear.
gentle to awe. the feared deer.
how to feed my daughter on fat and lean of new words:
atrocity and devastation and genocide
i tell her about the children
without running water
without light or food
or cupcakes
she is 3
atrocity and devastation and genocide
i tell her about the children
without running water
without light or food
or cupcakes
she is 3
what should i tell her about how the killers use
the cries of children to call the people out
to explode the bombs in their tanks
the gathering of limbs to bury wrapped in white
how one body becomes the communal body
not this
there was a picture of a little girl
in a graduation gown
behind her delicate tulips
The color of hair bows set in the silk of her hair, pastels the color hair bows should be
maybe she wanted to be a doctor
like my daughter
like the two ambulance workers who died
trying to save her
she was 5
335 bullets were fired into that car
my daughter has just learned to count to 12
no Peppa, no potty a first protest
i tell her we must stand for something
we can sit, too, for something
protest for a life
a protest is a way to help
even a child can do
we must protest for the good of people
protest to live
live out a gentle
awe
without fear
my daughter wants to be a healer
someday
but today she learns her body
can be a protest
and must
1yusaeid (Arabic for help)
2ʿezrá (Hebrew for help)
Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a member or fellow of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, Obsidian Foundation, The Watering Hole. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She teaches at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine.
The kids are a mirror across this plane, cheap wood desk
The kids join me on Tuesdays, carrying reflection
To a hospital-lit room, the kids are a surveilled walk
To workshop, the kids are a lot of laughs, say
Yea, we don't really like Black people, but let me explain
And the kids emerge, me an explanation, birthed
From a system’s grift, they are generations
Factory-packed into a hell of a detention camp
And I don't get it, but I get them, yet I don't
But like, yea, I too have been a boiling pot
I have been taught to cut first
Just so I don't have to cut back, I have been
Taught prevention as if it were a constant avoidance
Of funk flying past someone's stank teeth, instead of the root
Cause of the smell, get past me
We’re growing in love with our own
Watering mouths, the kids are a thirst for their own
But conflate water for drown, for wade, for
Gone, for lonely, for of course, a white flag
And I am also not a fan of surrender, yet I am
Frantically waving all that I have learned of letting go
Across this desk, into a story that don't match mine
But when we speak our shit, honestly
It's pretty much the same
Alyesha Wise is a poet, teaching artist & TEDx speaker from Camden, N.J. Alyesha currently resides in Los Angeles where she is the co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement - an organization providing poetry education and extensive programming for poets, and The Director of Program Development for Street Poets - a non-profit mostly serving juvenile injustice-involved youth. Alyesha served as the Da Poetry Lounge slam team head coach from 2017-18, co-coaching both teams to final stage at The National Poetry Slam. She also served as the Get Lit-Words Ignite youth slam team co-coach from 2014-2017. Wise is a 2-time Women of the World Poetry Slam finalist and has been featured on different platforms and publications such as OWN, BET, Huffington Post, Afropunk, PBS, LA Times, Buzzfeed, Free Speech TV and more. She has collaborated with The Nantucket Project, the ACLU of Southern California, Brave New Films and additional major platforms, having featured in the Google Interstellar Project, in conjunction with the hit film Interstellar. Ron Howard once wrote about Alyesha's work, "Very Powerful."
Content Notice: consumerism, economic boycott, extractive capitalism, economic deprivation
“Have faith in the uncertain timeline of liberation. It is unfolding every day.”
I want to start by echoing the sentiments of Angela Davis — that freedom is a daily struggle — and the familiar proverb that you have to make the best with what you’ve got. This is the framework through which I understand the Economic Blackout of February 28, 2025 — a mass, one-day boycott of all purchased goods to protest corporate greed, imperialism, and the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. This action gained widespread attention and mobilized organizers locally and beyond through social media. While flawed just as we are, the directive was clear: resist consumerism and refrain from buying anything for just one day, in hopes to cause enough inconvenience to the political, financial, and military elite and pressure them towards our demands. Our bargaining chip: as the working class and primary consumers within capitalism, we hold the leverage to disrupt the market through our behaviors, investments, and purchasing power.
While previous social media advocacy campaigns — like the Black Squares Instagram Failure of 2020 — have been since critiqued as performative activism, this more recent boycott turned political intent into real-world action through a burst of economic resistance. There were, however, caveats and permissions to this effort. For example, participants could buy at small or local businesses (in cash), particularly for necessities and emergencies. However, this did not sit well with critics who found it counterproductive and hypocritically convenient. Not only did they argue it lacked the specificity to have notable direct impact, but it also allowed unnecessary concessions to engaging with capitalism, contradictory to its intention. Many questions arose: who will be disrupted and by how much; what is the intended outcome; is one day too short for real transformation; will this become another misguided effort in an age of instant gratification or can it evolve into a sustained movement?
I was there among the many of us reposting and committing in solidarity. As an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace, I am no stranger to actions, demonstrations, and other ninja missions. However, I am also fallible – a complicit patron of Amazon, and its exclusive, hyper-convenient, membership and universe. I, too, am an informed participant of such controversial luxuries, even as I remain divested from Starbucks, McDonald’s, Target, and other problematic corporations. It is clear that we are in the midst of a global hegemonic battle, with historically extractive countries operating as monopolies and oligarchies of a colonial enterprise. These states, alongside equally powerful corporations, compete for the extraction and domination of nations, peoples, and ecosystems in the pursuit of ever-expanding wealth and power. Indeed, we are living in a contemporary dystopian classic, one shaped by real-life supervillains wielding seemingly unchecked control over a suppressed global majority. Tariffs, deportations, occupations, recessions, surveillance, and deception – all orchestrated by governments puppeteered by the highest bidders – define the conditions of our present moment; not entirely unfamiliar, but undeniably unprecedented.
But that doesn’t make inconvenience less tempting to assuage with one swift click or swipe. I wanted to order food that day; I had been too busy cogging in the wheel to make myself dinner. I had to convince myself, somehow, that I did, indeed, have food at home – even if it was just the ingredients for yet another pot of black bean soup. So I made the soup (for the second week in a row), and while it was no pad kee mao, it was consistent, quick, and ultimately satisfying. Likewise, I almost ordered a rideshare to a poetry event at Blk Ivy nearby, but opted instead for the trolley, paid for with my pre-loaded transit card. I even wondered about ordering a book from Amazon the next day but reminded myself to redirect to Bookshop.org. A day without purchasing can be inconvenient, but not impossible. And while the call was only for 24 hours of divestment, it served as a rehearsal for a lifestyle rooted in mindful consumption.
Organizers of the Civil Rights Era and the Black Liberation Movement prepared for the violent consequences of racist backlash, from intimidation to physical assault, through regular training, political education, and practice. The seminal Montgomery Bus Boycotts would not have lasted 381 days without intentional preparation and collective discipline. As with fitness, boundary-setting, or any other form of personal growth, resistance requires repetition. Just as our politically conscious predecessors prepared for constant struggle, so too must we submit to the humble, daily work of building our muscles of resistance if we are to move closer to liberation. It is naive to expect a mass mobilization on the scale of past movements without first developing our political consciousness and cultivating a practice of mindful spending. To assume we are all at the same point in our journey lacks grace, nuance, and understanding. Still, encouraging sustained efforts can spark residual effects in the broader movement.
“Just as our politically conscious predecessors prepared for constant struggle, so too must we submit to the humble, daily work of building our muscles of resistance if we are to move closer to liberation.”
In fact, several companies experienced noticeable declines in web and foot traffic – key indicators of potential revenue loss. Forbes reported that Target’s web traffic decreased by 10.9%, foot traffic dropped by 10.7%, and app fell by 14% compared to the previous Friday. Similarly, Walmart’s online traffic fell by 6.5% and Amazon saw a 4.6% decrease in web visits. Contrary to this trend, however, Costco — having thus far maintained its DEI commitments — saw a 22% rise in web traffic, an increase of roughly half-a-million visits. Moreover, data from Earnest Analytics indicated a 7.4% year-over-year decline in debit and credit spending on February 28, with specific sectors like restaurants and wholesale clubs seeing notable drops. These trends suggest that the blackout had tangible economic effects, whereby companies perceived as more equitable saw measurable gains while those complicit in political violence or regressive policy lost potential revenue. While the long-term financial impact remains uncertain, additional boycotts have already been announced.
- March 7-14: Amazon Boycott
- March 21 and 28: Nestlé Boycott
- April 7-14: Walmart Boycott
- April 18: Economic Blackout
- April 21 and 28: General Mills Boycott
- May 6-12: Amazon Boycott
- May 20-26: Walmart Boycott
- June 3 tonight: Target Boycott
- June 24-30: McDonald's Boycott
- And perhaps others I haven’t noted...
Thus, the economic blackout of February 28 wasn’t merely a one-hit-wonder, but rather, the intro to an emerging mixtape of working-class harmonies. Critics argued that a single day of action was insufficient for sustained economic disruption, citing a lack of clear demands, direction, and strategy. And they’re right. We must become increasingly principled in our advocacy, organizing, and revolutionary efforts. That might look like canceling the Prime membership altogether, building cooperatives, unions, and mutual aid networks, or joining a political organization to build collective power. The reality is that not all of us have the privilege of divesting without significant consequences. That tension is part of our daily discernment. Still, we have witnessed a moment in modern history where leveraging our collective purchasing power made a tangible impact on major corporations.
“One-day economic blackouts are surely not the end goal; they teach restraint, discipline, and offer a glimpse into longer-term practice. They urge a shift from passive protest to active divestment, from the symbolic to the material, from social media to real life.”
One-day economic blackouts are surely not the end goal; they teach restraint, discipline, and offer a glimpse into longer-term practice. They urge a shift from passive protest to active divestment, from the symbolic to the material, from social media to real life. Day by day. I believe this is the framework of abolition: the dismantling of carceral, predatory systems and their replacement with reparative justice, accountability, and community care. This is how one day becomes one week, and one week becomes a turning point, and that turning point leads to transformation.
Have faith in the uncertain timeline of liberation. It is unfolding every day.
Saskia Kercy is a scholar-activist, educator, and writer from Philadelphia by way of Haiti. A master of economics with accolades in research and poetry, she has been published across newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. Saskia currently serves as an adjunct professor of economics, research consultant, organizer, teaching artist, and creative writer. More from this eldest daughter @saskiakercy and bysaskia.co.