What happens when Chaos ensues?
The things I've been feeling lately, but haven't gotten around to saying. Happy Black History Month!
For a few moments, I allowed apathy to win. It’s taken much restraint not to join the chorus of finger-pointing media outrage that I’ve seen consume my feed over the past few days. We are all rightfully upset, and I’m sure you want to fuck some shit up. But after you get your point across and assign your blame—where do you go? Are you comfortable with sitting in panic, possibly joining in the chaos (which I’m indifferent to, as chaos is the only predictable thing these days)? Screaming about everything, yet doing relatively nothing to assuage the fear-mongering taking place?
I’ve found myself comparing this week to the first few days post 2024 election—a shock designed for good political theater that ultimately exposes a deeper truth: the division between class, cultures, and gender aren’t fallacious warnings projected onto American society, but rather interstices that serve a much larger and vital purpose to maintaining the success of the current administration. We have handed them both the gun and the bullet, with some individuals (personally knowing a few), willingly choosing to vote against their own interests, against my interests. And for what? Some morally superior complex that simultaneously renders their compassion useless?
I don’t get it.
Why was it so easy for so many to brush aside the REAL, tangible consequences of politics during the campaign cycle? Why did we normalize the rhetoric that equates maturity to passivity and indifference towards political action? We have become so jaded that, in a world where “Billionaires have become our gods,” who determine whether we get access to affordable healthcare, a ceasefire abroad, or lucrative climate reform (that doesn’t just funnel subsidies to their corporations), we’ve still found ways to absolve their crimes—out of some aspirational hope of someday joining the ranks.
Let me be clear: our chances of attaining mega-wealth in this lifetime is as likely as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Statistically, we are literally more likely to be struck by lightning. So then I ask again, why have we as a collective forsaken our communities?
To the 92% of Black women that voted against 47—I see you. I appreciate your dedication to preserving a semblance of hope. Yet again, you have been the silent ghost in the machine. But it should never remain solely our plight to make sure the machine doesn’t combust. It’s exhausting. And more than that, it reinforces the historical caricaturization of Black women—we are not your mammys.
A mammy, by definition, according to Dictionary.com is, “a Black woman engaged to take care of white children or as a servant to a white family.” Contrary to popular belief—despite the plethora of Black nannies power-walking with strollers, through the New York City streets—Black women are not the inherent wet nurses of the white majority. Constantly relying on our global mobilization as the pathway to change, while simultaneously erasing us and our contributions from the conversation exposes an uncomfortable truth: American neoliberalism has never really severed itself from its racist past. It has simply rebranded, disguising the grunt work and emotional labor as an inherent part of our identities.
It is 2025, and we’ve once again found ourselves having to remedy the fallout of the current administration's ambush of punitive executive orders. Consider the TikTok ban. Just after TikTok was reinstated, a collective of predominantly Black women and femme educators known as the “HillmanTok University,” organized to supply the TikTok’s vast student body with necessary lessons about Black History—a direct counter to the onslaught of legislation de-institutionalizing programs like critical race theory, and DEI initiatives. But this kind of organizing isn’t new. Black women have always been at the forefront, leading movements and shaping history, only to be written out of it.
Jodi Dean, in an article for The Nation, discusses the difficulty of accessing archives about the history of Black women’s contributions to communist activism stating:
I was teaching a course on socialist feminism and one of my students was looking for a text by Louise Thompson Patterson from the 1930s. She couldn’t find it, and then I started to look around and I also couldn’t find it. So I contacted Charisse, because Charisse has copies of everything—really an amazing archive—and it turns out she didn’t have it. Charisse started asking people and nobody had it, and at this point, it seemed like: OK, not only do we have to find this, but it shouldn’t be this hard. It shouldn’t be this hard to find writing by these really important Black, female, communist organizers. This needs to be a collection.
The historical erasure of Black women’s activism is not coincidental—it is very intentional.
Society depends on the labor we provide, yet refuses to acknowledge it. We are expected to be at the forefront of movements, meanwhile our contributions are made relatively invisible. And when the revolution is over? We are relegated back to the ‘slums,’ we came, until the next crisis warrants our energy once more.
If we can’t even mobilize to the ballot box for our local elections, we damn sure aren’t ready to sacrifice our comfort for national or even global organizing. So why assume that Black womyn are? Why conveniently center our struggles when it aligns with the broader struggle? When the regime begins to encroach on not just our rights, but the individuals who believed that their whiteness, maleness, and wealth, or proximity to it, could absolve them of institutionalized oppression, it becomes clear that you waited too long, and it is entirely too late.
It's a slow, dreadful realization that even you aren’t beyond the sinister grasps of the American cleansing. I urge everyone reading this: never allow yourself to go numb. In the wise words of activist and laureate Toni Morrison, “I am never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time.”
But most importantly, to Black women—I urge you despite all opposing forces, to never become docile. The rise of apathetic sentiments among Black women on social media, is concerning. I’ve had to take a step back and assess the credibility of this apathy. I myself have felt it. In many ways, it is valid. In fact, I believe our aversion to intervening with the state of our country is warranted.
However, for the sake of preserving our liberation efforts, we must resist becoming passive observers of our own destruction—especially those among us who still have the most access and vitality to fight. Because ultimately, it is Black trans women, Black immigrant women, Black disabled women in low-income, resource scarce communities that’ll bear the brunt of these punitive policies. Our liberation is bound up with theirs, and the necessity for our collective efforts cannot be overstated. (Go read my manifesto if you need to better understand how this is.)
As Charisse Burden-Stelly writes in The Nation:
Importantly, they did that not only because of some identity reductionism, whereby they said, “I’m in this Black woman’s body, so listen to me.” [They also] did analysis, wrote reports, and debated with their comrades. I think that that’s one of the broader lessons to take away.
I urge this not because I believe we owe our labor to anyone, but because we owe ourselves our liberation.
To everyone else: do better at listening to us. Make a genuine effort to be in community with us—not just those of us that fit your criteria for belonging. To commune is to relinquish all preconceived notions and engage with the spaces, voices, and ideas of others. It means venturing outside of your comfort zones, investing in each other, and building lasting connections that go beyond convenience.
It looks like reading literature of all kinds about topics of theory, intersectionality, mobilization, and activism. It looks like engaging with Black (women’s) art, as it tends to serve as a reflective mirror for our socio-political climate. It looks like sharing resources to your story, instead of stoking the rage cycle of shock and awe politics. It requires recognizing patterns and criticizing when systems of oppression are being replicated—even those from which you benefit.
At every opportunity, you must choose to act on behalf of us all.
Resource List (Books, Movies, Media pages, Art, Theorists):
Anthology: “Friday Black” - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Film: “Watermelon Woman” - Cheryl Dunye, Alexandra Juhasz, Barry Swimar
Resource Page: Black Feminist Collective on IG
Resource Page: Black Women Radicals on IG
Podcast: “Theory & Philosophy” - David Guignion
Podcast: ‘Black Girls Texting” - Chelsea Pinky, Glynn Pogue, Sade
Horror Novel: “Ring Shout” - P. Djèlí Clark
Poetry Book: “This Crown ain’t Worth Much” - Hanif Abdurraqib
Resource Page: “African Archival” on IG
Resource Page: “Hillman University” on Tik Tok
Resource Page: “TheAngryBlackBoy” on IG
Historical Video Essayist: “Intelexual Media” - on Youtube
Novel: “Ain’t I a woman” - Bell Hooks
Queer Novel: “Giovanni’s Room” - James Baldwin
Queer PanAfricanist Novel: “Under The Udala Trees” - Chinelo Okparanta
Book on Theory: “Black Marxism” - Cedric Robinson
Book on Theory: “Double Consciousness” - W.E.B. Dubois
Book: “Cultures in Babylon” - Hazel V. Carby
Film: “Nickel Boys”
Film: “Daughters of the Dust”
Historical/Sci-fi Novel: “Kindred” - Octavia E. Butler
Podcast: ‘Black Girls Heal” - Shena Lashey
Youtube video: “The Psychiatrist Who Started A Revolution”- Sissyphus 55
Solyana on Youtube
Poem: “Quilting the Black Eyed Peas (We’re going to Mars)” - Ralph Lemon
Works Cited:
Alford, N. S. (2024, November 6). Exit polls show majority of black men and women voted for Kamala Harris. Click here to refresh. https://www.aol.com/exit-polls-show-majority-black-135515400.html
Asare, J. G. (2023, May 9). The erasure of black women’s contributions: From past to present. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2021/10/08/the-erasure-of-black-womens-contributions-from-past-to-present/
Asare, J. G. (2024, August 1). How current events are impacting black women. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/07/29/how-current-events-are-impacting-black-women/
Forde, M. (2022, November 9). The obscured and forgotten history of Black Communist women. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/history-of-black-communist-women/
JDavidson. (2024, June 13). Want to start a revolution? black women radicals confront the Red Scare. Zinn Education Project. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/dayo-gore-on-want-to-start-a-revolution/
YouTube. (n.d.). https://youtu.be/IVemKfIVqWhttps://youtu.be/IVemKfIVqWY?si=qQGIFhn2hUfypArphttps%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FIVemKfIVqWY%3Fsi