Image Credit: Screenshot from The New York Times review, “Bad Bunny’s Halftime History Lesson,” featuring Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance. Photo by The New York Times / Staff Photographer.

My thoughts on the superbowl win are that it’s so telling. Look at it from a spiritual standpoint. The spiritual, like archetypes. The spiritual Seahawk beat the colonial Patriot. Symbolically;

The Seahawk represents:

✨Panoramic vision

✨Emotional intelligence

✨Freedom of territory

✨& Diasporic Consciousness

The Patriot represents:

💥Colonial conquest

💥Settler entitlement

💥Land theft

💥Racial hierarchy

💥“Manifest Destiny” *THEOLOGY*

💥& Ownership of nation over humanity

It seems quite interesting and representative of what this year might turn out to be 🤭

Just something to think about

Qué actuación tan fantástica, Bad Bunny. La gente negra te ama, te ama jodidamente. Encendiste por completo el show del medio tiempo del Super Bowl e hiciste historia. ¡Sin duda! 🇵🇷✊🏾✊🏽✊🏻❤️🖤💚💛🌺🐚✨

Muchas gracias mi amigo 🫶🏾

It’s organized power crushing dissent for all people.

It divides us to conquer us.

It uses racism, but it’s bigger.

It thrives when we forget history & fear each other.

I wrote this so we could remember our Black & Brown roots. I wrote this to inform us, to help us resist.

Our stories are seeds of freedom.

#WeAreHumanBeings

#AntiFascism #MemoryAsResistance

My Dad transitioned in 2021. He went to his death bed without seeing my face. In life we had a contentious relationship because of the childhood abuse I suffered at his hands. But then later on, I learned he harmed my beloved as well. I didn’t learn this through direct observation but through discernment and hardship. I’d experienced and witnessed so much abuse at the whim of his raw, untouched emotions that I could not forgive him.

I wasn’t ready yet.

It wasn’t until after I started tapping into ancestral healing and requesting their intervention that I began to see the shift. I had the pleasure of working with an Ewe friend whose suuuuuper powerful ancestors worked with mine towards his ancestralization at my request. I mentioned her lineage because after having worked with people from various cultures from all over the world, particularly African and African American..I could see the difference in intensity between hers and mine. I could tell mine had been in the chamber of exile for some time; hers more grounded in African tradition. Yet I recognized a meeting place in the imagery I saw likely resulting from his mixed African, Indigenous American and European lineages. He came to me just before my move, things where I lived in GA had just gone stale and I was being called into the work I’ve been prepared for during the last 8 years. I woke up in the middle of the night one night at my lowest point and saw him on my wall. At first I thought it was one of my cats maybe, still disbelieving in Spirit my own self…and why I always seem to see or catch these things on camera…but I do. This one I’m sharing because it’s so pivotal to my own story. Core even. Both cats were in bed with me…and as you can see, a person would be seen as solid through the hole my cats tore in the blinds. My bed was in the center of the room at the time. The glowing light is my cat water fountain.

Having shared all of this and taking in the cosmogram above, it feels like this is in alignment for me to spend this Día de los Muertos in Playas de Rosarito, B.C. It feels like I was called here. In fact, I know I was called here to the lands of the Kumeyaay people. These lands are known for healing and protection. In fact when I first arrived here, one of the first things I did was to acknowledge the land, my maroonage and then I hand sculpted an altar of clay in honor of my ancestors who were tracked as being trafficked from as far as the Yucatán. This is one of many ways my ancestry is interwoven as Afro-Indigenous, and also through the Quechua and the Mapuche people from South America.

Life is a cycle—conception, life, maturity, death, rebirth. Ancestors return. Spirits come back. It seems that this year, they wanted me to be here and honor this land during my maroonage in this season. Give thanks!

“We’re not going to fight racism with racism. We’re going to fight racism with solidarity.”
 — Fred Hampton

Fred Hampton’s legacy has often been reduced to a single quote or martyrdom, but what he represented was a blueprint for revolutionary care, radical coalition-building, and a bold reimagining of political power rooted in the people. His work was not only about fighting oppression — it was about constructing a world where everyone could eat, learn, be protected, and thrive.

The Original Rainbow Coalition wasn’t just a metaphor. It was a living, breathing body made of people who had every reason to mistrust each other — and chose solidarity anyway. It brought together the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and working-class Black organizers. It was never about comfort — it was about power built in community.

Let us also remember the women who made this movement possible — organizers, spiritualists, strategists, and healers like Ericka Huggins, Safiya Bukhari, and Kathleen Cleaver. Black women have always stood at the helm of this work. We understood, and still understand, down to a cellular level, what it takes to survive and lead through impossible conditions. That is why we guard this altar. That is why we lead this time, too.

The Thread That Survives Us

We are not just inspired by these women — we are walking with them. Their stories echo in ours. They tended to communities in crisis while carrying their own grief. They faced violence and state surveillance while birthing new futures. Like us, they knew that their healing was not a private act — it was political. It was ancestral. It was necessary.

In 1969, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and the Black Panthers came together because their people were living through impossible conditions: poverty, systemic neglect, police violence, racial surveillance, underfunded housing and schools, and the criminalization of simply trying to survive. They were not connected by shared identity — but by shared abandonment. Their bond was not formed by comfort, but by crisis. They were tired of watching their elders die without care and their children funneled into the prison system. They wanted a future that didn’t require suffering as a rite of passage.

And now, more than fifty years later, we are living through those same conditions — some worsened by environmental collapse, economic precarity, and new forms of technological control. We are fighting to protect our elders while navigating chronic illness. We are raising children who are growing up with trauma before they even have language to name it. We are doing our best to breathe through air we cannot trust, to eat food that makes us sick, and to survive systems that were never built for our well-being.

The thread is unbroken because the harm is unbroken. But it does not have to remain this way. We are remembering the way. Not because we read it in a book, but because it lives in our bodies.

We must put balm on these cycles. We must interrupt the inheritance of pain. Our children deserve a world with clean water, safe neighborhoods, breathable air, and lives that are not spent healing in survival mode. We do this not out of bitterness — but out of devotion. Out of love. Out of memory. Out of duty to what comes next.

This is the thread. This is the bloodline of rebellion and repair. And it runs through me, too.

A Crack in the Veil

Yet, that multiracial blueprint spoke to my own breaking where the absence of coalition paved the way. I didn’t come to this work through books or workshops. I came through the violence of c. My entry into the spirit world wasn’t ceremonial — it was a mental health crisis. That was the breaking of the veil for me. My clairs — clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience — didn’t trickle in gently. They burst through all at once, unfiltered, intense, and terrifying.

I could see and hear everything. Spirits. Grief. Ancestral memory. And all of it came through the lens of trauma. The world around me said I was crazy. But I wasn’t crazy. I was cracked open. The moment arrived like a siren screaming clarity behind my eyelids and in that silence…every spirt was shouting and showing me everything that ever happened to me. I could see it like a movie I was forced to watch day and night.

In that cracked-open place, I ended up in an inpatient mental health facility. And it was there, inside a fluorescent-lit room full of strangers trying to hold their own brokenness together, that spirit made one of its clearest moves.

His name was Mickey. An older white man. Southern accent. Thick with bitterness. I could tell from the moment I saw him that he carried the residue of systems that had harmed me and my people, my Spirit tightened. Every time I walked into the community room and he was there, it was a push-pull in my spirit. I didn’t trust him. I avoided him. Especially when he ranted about Fox News and “illegals taking jobs.” We were both in inpatient care. Neither of us had jobs. The irony sat like smoke in the room. But I wouldn’t argue. I would just turn and walk out. Every time. And he noticed. He saw me leave. Again and again.

Then came the group therapy session. Mickey confessed something that shifted everything. In front of all of us, he admitted that he had been violent with his wife — and that after the last outburst, she left him. He said he felt like he deserved all the bad things that had happened to him. And then he cried. Not grown-man crying. He wept like a child. He reverted right there in that circle. I watched his spirit fold back into that wounded little boy he had once been. His shoulders gave way and he just collapsed into that plastic blue chair, tears streaming like raging rivers down his face. And in that moment, I saw through the layers: the hate, the history, the harm — it had all taken root in him long ago. And now it was crumbling.

And something else happened in that moment too. My grandmother, Mattie Lee Williams, came forward. Mattie Lee — Big Ma. I felt her in my spirit, clear and firm. She came to remind me of something sacred: that no matter how hurt I was, no matter how angry, I must not lose my humanity. That the moment I stop having compassion for another person’s sorrow, I have become like the ones who harmed us. That love — real love — is what keeps us from passing the hatred forward.

It was Big Ma who made me speak. Not with softness, but with clarity. I told him there was still a path for redemption. That he didn’t have to leave this world full of the same hate he had been handed. That spirit was still available to him. That breaking could be a beginning — and that he deserved and was worthy of love. He never deserved what he got as a child, and he was so grateful to hear that from me.

He looked at me through tears and nodded. He thanked me. Genuinely.

The next day, I walked into the dayroom. He was sitting there again. When he heard I was leaving, he greeted me warmly. And from between the cracks of pain be whispered his thanks. He expressed his sorrow at my departure — and then, softly and with tears in his eyes, he sang: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” He sang it not for performance, but from something real. A final offering between spirits. A moment of recognition. I walked out in tears.

Because I knew — this is what Dr. King meant. You don’t fight hate with hate. You meet it with truth. With spirit. With love. Not because it’s easy. Because it’s necessary. Because what we don’t heal, we pass on.

And that’s what Big Ma was telling me. Don’t you ever lose yourself. That’s what the elders are here for. That’s why the women are the gatekeepers. We hold the memory. We don’t let the fire of our grief become the fire of our hatred. We don’t forget who we are, even when the world tries to erase it. Even when we are cracked wide open.

Learning to Stay in Proximity

This work is not about fixing everything. It’s about presence. It’s about honoring the space between us. It’s about learning to live through hardship — side by side, without erasing one another, without domination or denial. This is what I call proximity.

I created Roots & Rebellion Too because I wanted to make a spiritually grounded space for those of us who are healing while holding memory. A place where our nervous systems could exhale. Where we could live the rest of our lives not in retreat, but in peace. Not in hiding, but in honesty.

I didn’t come to this work to be a teacher. I came to it because I was unraveling. Because I saw too much, felt too much, remembered too much. Because the spirit world wouldn’t let me go. And I realized — there are others like me. Other people whose gifts and grief came together in a storm. Who were called, not groomed. Who are here now because they survived and now feel called to weave that wisdom into stories and salves for the next generation and our peers.

Roots & Rebellion Too is for the survivors who still believe in community. It’s for the spiritualists and empaths and organizers who are exhausted but not done. It’s for the optimists who believe there is a better way and the dreamers who need others to dream along with them. It’s for the ones who are ready to live the rest of their lives with a different kind of peace. A peace built on truth, clarity, reverence, and chosen kinship.

This is not a cult. It’s not a perfect space. It’s a place of reverence. It’s a container for memory and devotion to our future generations. And it is guarded — because it must be.

If this resonates, light a candle tonight. Offer your wound and your breath in query of whether this is the right space for you. Complete the form if it does align, not as a symbol but as an opening.

CLICK HERE FOR FORM SUBMISSION TO JOIN US!

There is a cotton bud in the field that is still wet with blood. You can’t see it from the road, but it’s there — buried in the rows, hidden in the hush between memory and myth. That cotton remembers.

Our hands remember too. The calluses passed down like inheritance. The aching backs, the joints that don’t quite sit right. Our fatigue is ancient. Our breath still catching from labor we didn’t consent to. We carry the imprint of a nation built on our consumption.

America Was Built on the Consumption of Human Beings

Long before corporations, before Wall Street, before the language of GDP, this empire was conceived in war. Not war for freedom. War for possession — of land, of bodies, of breath. From the first shackles tightened on African soil to the railroads built on Chinese bones to the genocide of Indigenous nations — every so-called triumph of this nation has been a ritual of blood.

We don’t call it that. We say: progress, defense, national interest. But what we mean is: acquisition.

The enslaved were not just workers. They were currency. Cotton was not just a crop. It was a commodity that fed the entire global economy — and it was watered in blood.

America has not stopped consuming. It simply found new names.

War as Business, Empire as Ritual

If you plot the timeline of this nation’s wars — you’ll find a near-unbroken line of conflict. Wars of expansion. Wars of distraction. Wars of economic interest dressed up as security threats. Every generation, a new enemy. A new justification. A new wound for Americans to grapple with.

And always, bodies at the center. Brown ones. Black ones. Poor ones. Bodies in uniform. Bodies in cages. Bodies denied medicine. Bodies detained at the border. Bodies demonized, then forgotten. As my spiritual insight grows, I’ve come to realize this:

Each bomb dropped is a tithe, a blood offering to the machinery of war. This sacrifice made not for protection, but for profit and dominance. War is the dark ritual — where human lives are the currency. Each detention center is a temple to profit. This is not just policy. This is spiritual warfare.

America Was Founded in War

From its birth in 1775, the United States has fought in wars driven not by ideals — freedom, democracy — but by wealth, power, and economic dominion. Each conflict strengthened commerce, expanded markets, or protected profits.

The Revolutionary War (1775–1783) emerged not just from calls for liberty, but from colonial resistance to British trade restrictions and taxation — a fight over who would control the economy of this land.

The War of 1812, framed as defense of national honor, was layered with economic motivations: British interference with American merchant ships, impressment of sailors, and barriers to agricultural exports — an economic embargo repackaged as patriotism.

The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and Spanish-American War (1898) weren’t grand battles for democracy — but for land and empires. They expanded plantations, railways, and shipping, extending U.S. economic dominance across hemispheres.

The Civil War (1861–1865) was often called a war over slavery — but underneath, it was about economic systems: the agrarian, enslaved South versus the industrial, wage-labor North. Post-war industrial boom — railways, coal, steel — depended on that victory.

The Banana Wars (1898–1934) weren’t just “interventions” in Latin America — they were invasions to protect U.S. agribusiness interests like United Fruit and to secure the Panama Canal.

In World War I, the U.S. joined late — but crossed the Atlantic not just for democracy — but to sell arms, food, and raw materials to Europe, reinforcing its emerging economic empire.

World War II supercharged military-industrial expansion: wartime spending ended the Great Depression, while new industries — aircraft, chemicals, electronics — became pillars of the U.S. economy.

The Cold War, and its proxy conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, functioned as economic containment strategies. Government spending fueled technological growth and built out military infrastructure — always with the profit motive front and center.

After 9/11, the War on Terror ensued — not as moral response, but as an economic bonanza. Pentagon budgets surged, private military contractors bloomed, and trillions were spent in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond — $8 trillion and counting.

And now: the war with Iran

On June 21, 2025, President Trump launched airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, to “degrade enrichment” — but the stakes are bigger than nukes.

These strikes followed decades of economic pressure: sanctions that collapsed Iran’s oil exports, checks on European trade, and attempted regime change via economic isolation.

Now, as missiles fly, global oil markets tremble. A shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz could see crude prices jump from $75 to over $110 per barrel — pushing inflation, squeezing consumers, and pressuring central banks.

Behind the headlines: this is a war to protect U.S. energy dominance, uphold dollar hegemony, and secure profit in a multipolar world. (see Michael Hudson article, linked below).

The Thread That Doesn’t Break

We talk about it in code. We give it clean names: “antebellum,” “domestic labor,” “plantation economy.” But we must name the unrelenting truth: Chattel slavery commodified the Black woman’s womb. It didn’t just chain her body.It mapped her uterus into the economic future of a nation. She became a producer of producers. Not a mother. Not a woman. A mechanism of wealth.

This is the same womb from which they later extracted the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks — without her consent. Cells that built billion-dollar cancer research, while her descendants couldn’t afford a doctor. Cells that cured others, while Black people still die of curable diseases.

That’s why the cotton still bleeds. It bleeds through the womb. Through the cervix they experimented on. Through the surgeries they performed without anesthesia — just to see what the Black body could endure. And they are still doing it. Today.

Doctors still refuse to name what’s happening in Black women’s bodies.
They delay diagnoses. They let conditions become chronic — until bones twist, bodies break, and lives are lost. They say they don’t know why. But we know. They take more blood than needed. They take more tissue than required. And they never say what’s done with what they take.

It’s written into the fine print. Buried in the forms. It’s called consent — but it’s coerced. It’s called care — but it’s containment. It’s called Medicaid. It’s called Medicare. It’s called help. But it is a continuation. It is the Tuskegee experiment by another name. It is state-sanctioned violence with a billing code. The thread has never been cut. Not from the cotton field. Not from the stirrups. Not from the clinic to the lab to the prison to the grave. The wound is not only historical. It’s generational. It’s cellular.

Even our children are denied safety inside our wombs. Even there — even there — they are not protected.

I know this because I lived it. Thirty-four years ago, when I was giving birth to my son, they inserted a fetal monitor directly into his scalp — while he was still inside me. Without warning. Without care.

That moment broke something sacred. His first touch wasn’t mine. His first contact was with the system. That bond, that holy thread, was pierced. And I have been holding that grief in my bones for decades.

This is what they do. They breach the womb. They violate the sacred. And it is still happening. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Right now.

We name them both.

🔗 Read Adriana Smith’s story — a Georgia mother. Adriana Smith was undergoing a medical emergency and was denied care, despite pleading for help. She died after being turned away.

🔗 Read the story of Jessica Ross — the Georgia mother whose baby was decapitated during delivery at Southern Regional Medical Center. Months later, the doctor who performed the autopsy posted a video of the infant’s remains to social media.

These are two mothers. Two wounds. Same system.

How the System Holds: Medical Containment, Border Enforcement, Labor Extraction, Pharmaceutical Profiteering

This is what connects all of us.

What they call “care” is often just medical containment dressed in sterile language. Hospitals do not merely treat; they test, extract, and bill. Black women are overdiagnosed with some conditions, underdiagnosed with others. We are believed too late, treated too little, and studied too much. Our blood, our wombs, our cells, and even our compliance are all monetized. This is the afterlife of Tuskegee. The repetition of Henrietta Lacks. The sterilizations inside ICE detention centers. The non-consensual surgeries on incarcerated women. The fetal tissue collected in silence. They call it research. They call it help. But we call it what it is: legal experimentation.

Meanwhile, border enforcement pretends to be about safety — but it’s really about regulating the supply of labor. Those who flee violence, hunger, and climate collapse end up in the very same fields our ancestors once toiled. They work the land, pack the goods, clean the slaughterhouses. They pay taxes. They raise children. They feed this nation. And still, they are called “illegal.” But how can you be both illegal and taxable? How can your presence be criminal while your labor is profitable? These questions go unanswered because they reveal too much. Border enforcement isn’t about protecting borders — it’s about protecting capitalism. The same blood, the same sweat — just spoken in another language now.

And when you zoom in on labor itself, the truth remains unchanged: from the plantation to the prison to the packing line, the labor never stopped. Labor extraction never ended — it simply changed uniforms. The 13th Amendment rebranded slavery as punishment. And now, the same amendment used to justify mass incarceration is left intact while conversations about reparations are floated in headlines and campaign speeches. This is the contradiction: the nation wants to offer symbolic repair without stopping the harm. It wants to pay restitution for slavery while continuing to practice it — under a new name. Incarcerated people are now leased out to build furniture, fight wildfires, clean highways, and pack goods — for cents. States and corporations profit off bodies that are warehoused, discarded, and reactivated when convenient. This country doesn’t need slavery to be legal; it just needs it to be renamed. Probation. Detention. ICE hold. It’s all the same mental conjure.

And if we are not careful, we are setting the table for this to happen to all of us. When we fall into the narrative that says we are at war and those people — Muslim people, migrants, refugees — are the enemy, we participate in the same conjure.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963:

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states.I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

This is why we must reclaim sovereignty over our own thoughts, our own perception. We must guard how we are made to see. Because when systems and structures tell us that certain bodies don’t matter, that certain people are threats, that certain communities should be watched, expelled, or silenced — we must ask why. Who benefits from that spell?

Every generation, a new scapegoat. A new reason to forget someone’s humanity. A new justification for violence. And we are being shown again, right now, what that structural conjure looks like in real time.

Then there’s the pharmaceutical machine. Pharmaceutical profiteering is perhaps the most silent of all these violences. They do not need to cure disease — because disease is the business. They extract cells like Henrietta’s. They trial drugs on Medicaid patients. They comb through our digital records under the guise of innovation. And then, when a breakthrough finally comes, they gatekeep it with impossible pricing. If you can’t pay, you can’t heal. If you’re poor, your pain becomes instructional. This is not healing. This is not medicine. This is extraction with a patent. The same logic that fueled slavery now fuels Big Pharma: your body is profitable. Your death is billable.

So we say it again. The cotton still bleeds. It bleeds in hospitals. It bleeds at the border. It bleeds in prison labor. It bleeds in denied medications and mutilated births. It bleeds in places where grieving mothers hold their children with skulls cracked open by bombs, launched in my name by a government that never spoke for me. It bleeds because the thread was never broken — only rebranded, rewired, and rewritten into policy. And until we name it, until we confront it, until we stop confusing containment for care, it will continue to bleed.

The Stone That Speaks: The Washington Monument and the Inversion of Power

There are symbols we walk past every day, forgetting they were once sacred.

The Washington Monument is one of them. Rising like a pale spine in the center of the capital, the obelisk is modeled after ancient Kemetic pillars meant to honor the sun deity Ra — symbols of regeneration, resurrection, and divine order. Traditionally carved from red granite, these sacred stones were embedded with fire energy, grounding divine will into the Earth and pointing it skyward toward Source.

But the Washington Monument is not red granite. It is white marble. Cold. Lunar. Bleached of blood memory.

It stands directly aligned between the Capitol (where laws are spoken into being) and the Lincoln Memorial (a site of national mourning and illusioned liberation). Its tip is encased in aluminum, a high conductor of energy — broadcasting intention. And every word spoken at the Capitol podium travels outward in the shadow of this inverted pillar, imprinting the grid of the land beneath it.

An obelisk is supposed to activate the solar plexus, align the will with divine order, and energize the flow between root and crown. But what happens when its purpose is reversed?

What happens when it feeds an empire?

“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending against all hazards.”
 — George Washington, during the Masonic cornerstone-laying ritual for the U.S. Capitol

This was not metaphor. The foundation of American law was literally laid in stone — by ritual, by design, by those who believed architecture could channel power.

The inverted obelisk becomes a siphon. It pulls sovereignty into hierarchy, feeds power upward, and disconnects the collective root — leaving the people disoriented, exhausted, at war with themselves. It is no coincidence that those of us with wombs, with neurodivergent nervous systems, with chronic illness and ancestral memory, feel it first in our guts. We are the seers. We are the ones who notice when the current reverses.

But we are also the ones who can reclaim the current.

Each stone in the Washington Monument can be inverted or used manipulatively if intentionally imbued with distorted energy:

• Marble (Crown/Root): If used with harmful intent, it could cloud spiritual insight, create religious dogma, or distort divine will — disconnection from Source.

• Granite (Root/Solar Plexus): Can instill false grounding, fear-based control, manipulation of willpower, or compliance through trauma memory.

• Bluestone Gneiss (Third Eye/Throat): Could block intuition, cause miscommunication, mass confusion or cognitive dissonance, or implant deceptive visions or timelines.

Does this seem familiar to you?

Reversal: A Call to Reclaim the Grid

To counter the inversion, we do not need to bomb a building. We do not need to beg the system to see us. We need to retune the field.

This is a time for spiritually based strategic planning. Not reaction. Not spectacle. Not distractions dressed as movement. We must lead from the soul.

We must elevate our spiritual insight beyond doctrine. We must trust what we feel before we trust what we’re told. The same way the body compensates when an organ goes weak — we must spiritually self-regulate, balance the collective body, and tend to the organs of truth that are under attack.

In an age where people are told to follow gurus and online spiritualists, we choose something else. We choose decolonized leadership. Leadership that is collective, not performative. Reciprocal, not extractive. Rooted in spirit, not branding.

Here are just a few forms of leadership we might honor:

• Eldership through lived wisdom, not age alone

• Spiritual midwifery that honors life transitions and thresholds

• Community councils rooted in listening and shared accountability

• Ancestral guidance discerned through prayer, divination, and silence

• Neurodivergent seership that speaks in symbols and patterns empire cannot decode

We do not need to overthrow an empire with weapons. We undo it with frequency.

Here is how we can begin:

• Change the music you listen to. Rhythm carries spells. Choose wisely.

• Watch your circle. Who feeds your field? Who drains it?

• Be mindful of the platforms you follow. Empire speaks through algorithms.

• Shift how you participate in systems — buying, voting, speaking, working. Even small resistance is real.

• Detect distortions in your own life. Destroy them gently or swiftly.

• Cover your crown — physically with cloth, spiritually with prayer, psychically with intent.

• Speak clarity into your water. Bless your feet when they touch ground.

This is not paranoia. This is energetic hygiene. This is what sovereignty looks like in practice.

The Cotton Still Bleeds — But So Do We

Not from weakness. From witnessing.

Every dime given to empire feeds the inversion. But every breath reclaimed in truth, every altar lit on stolen land in honor of our ancestors — undoes it.

So let the marble tremble. Let the monument know we remember.

The cotton still bleeds. But so do we. And this time, the blood is not for empire. It is for return.

Further Reading & Sources

• The Guardian

• Michael Hudson, “The War on Iran Is About Maintaining U.S. Unipolar Control.”
   Published June 22, 2025, in Geopolitical Economy Report.
   https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/06/22/michael-hudson-war-iran-us-unipolar-control

• Adriana Smith’s story — NBC Atlanta

• Southern Regional jury verdict — The Guardian

• TIME: Black maternal mortality in the U.S.

• Fetal Scalp Electrode Use in Labor: Who Gets It and Why — Study shows disproportionate use of invasive fetal monitoring on women with public insurance, including Black mothers.

I’ve worked inside these systems. I’ve advocated in policy rooms. I’ve shaped language and listened across divides. But no matter how deep I went, no matter how fluent I became in their terms, their timelines, their tactics…I remained unseen.

I’m writing this because I no longer accept the trade: my presence in exchange for my silence.

I live at an intersection that was never meant to be survivable.
I am Black.
I am Indigenous.
I am chronically ill.
I am disabled.
I am a survivor.

I hold spiritual gifts that institutions cannot name without trying to consume them.
Too often, those same institutions rely on chronically ill people to volunteer their insight, labor, and care — offering no support in return.
They praise the medicine but ignore the healer.
This is not inclusion. This is extraction.
And that extraction feeds the very cycle of depletion that worsens our conditions — turning our sacred labor into an unpaid toll on the body.

“The impact of racism, sexism, and ableism begins at the structural level of our society. This means that the biases occur throughout varied institutions and within society. Black folks deal with bias day-to-day — through social intersections and even our perspectives of ourselves, our culture, and our experiences. This cause-and-effect breakdown can be applied to all experiences of discrimination at the institutional level, particularly systemic racism.”
 — Zuri White-Gibson, “Navigating Chronic Illness and Black Womanhood,” Healthline, September 29, 2022

Recently, I witnessed a familiar pattern play out, one that continues sidestep those of us who live inside it. Too often, institutions choose voices that feel safer, more distanced, more palatable, instead of the ones shaped by lived experience.

I’ve been there before. During the height of the pandemic, I offered labor in justice spaces — at first unpaid, then modestly compensated. My sessions were long, layered, and emotionally taxing: three hours including prep, facilitation, and follow-up. And over time, the asks grew. The scope expanded. The stories stayed the same.

I was invited to speak on equity, but the frame rarely included the everyday violence Black women face in the healthcare system. The conversations stopped at police brutality — rarely touching the slow, clinical betrayals happening in hospital beds, waiting rooms, and denied claims.

Meanwhile, there I was working behind the scenes, barely held, barely seen.

That was my breaking point. Ultimately that was work I needed to walk away from work as it was entangled in the very systems it claimed to disrupt. I saw that play out in the world around us and it became clear that harm dressed as progress is still harm.

This isn’t a theory. This is lived.

This is what it means to be rendered invisible while they extract your energy, your culture, your labor, your body, your story and hand it to someone else to interpret, to narrate, to profit from.

I am no longer interested in giving language to institutions that refuse to speak mine.

I am not angry. I am clear.

This letter is not a bio.
It is not a cry for recognition.

It is a signal to those of you who are being erased inside systems that say they want your healing but demand your containment.

It is a reminder to those of us who move between worlds.
Your intersections are sacred, not liabilities.
Your discernment is protection.
Your refusal to be extracted is not resistance, it is remembrance.

And it is a declaration:

I will not volunteer to be unseen.
I will not trade truth for visibility.
I will not labor for justice spaces that replicate the very violence they claim to oppose.

To my ancestors those who walked through fire, through water, through silence, through survival I hear you. I carry your clarity. I do not walk alone.

And to those who feel erased in rooms that claim to hold space for you,
I see you.
I honor you.
We are not anomalies. We are evidence.

“In the wealthiest nation on earth, it is a disgrace that millions of Americans are one illness away from financial ruin. Access to health care is not a privilege. It is a human right.”
 — Senator Bernie Sanders

End legalized erasure.
And let the healing that is truly revolutionary begin inside us, and beyond them.