IT IS TIME TO FIND OUR POLITICAL HOMES!
How long can we hoard the truth that this is not how the world has to be?
There are alternatives within our reach where we die only in old age and not at the hands of state violence. War is not inevitable. Capitalism is not inevitable. White supremacy is not inevitable. The only inevitability is our liberation. Inevitably, all borders will fall and so will their violent defense. Inevitably, empires will give way to indigenous sovereignty. Inevitably, we will live as though we actually love and value life. Inevitably, all of our people will be free. So how long will we wait to find our political home, and begin the necessary internal struggle to find our place in our inevitable liberations?
Ms. Victoria at her farm in Sacramento where she runs her youth program Seeds to Skillet.
Liberation Rooted in Land
This vision of liberation is grounded in the land beneath our feet and the food that sustains us. As Leah Penniman reminds us in Farming While Black, "the land does not belong to us; we belong to the land." Food sovereignty and land justice are inseparable from our collective freedom. When we reclaim our relationship to the earth, we reclaim our autonomy from the extractive systems that have sought to starve us into submission. The struggle for land is the struggle for life itself.
How can collective power look?
Lately, I have been reminded that it is our revolutionary imperative to not absolve ourselves of our power. We create the inevitable reality of our liberation through ongoing political education and class struggle. We live in a material world that can be shaped, altered, and remade. And who can paint portraits of liberation better than us? Angela Davis teaches us that "freedom is a constant struggle," one that demands we refuse the logic of prisons, borders, and all carceral systems that cage both land and people. Abolition is not simply the dismantling of prisons — it is the reconstruction of society itself, rooted in care rather than punishment.
Salem, author, speaking at Feed Black Futures Spring Equinox Party in 2026.
Nothing is perfect in revolution and struggle
We don't have to have the images of our liberation perfected: perfection is white supremacy's lie to keep us from getting started. Audre Lorde knew this when she wrote, "there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." Our work for food justice cannot be separated from prison abolition, from indigenous land back movements, from the fight against empire. They are one struggle, woven together by the understanding that all our freedoms are bound up in each other.
And I would rather start here, imperfect and anxious, than never start at all. We owe it to one another. To our collective. We owe it to our ancestors who died for the preservation of our agency. Not for the children I may have, but for the people that already exist today and deserve to live full, dignifited lives.
Feed Black Futures revitalized the July Forward community garden in Sacramento, 2024. Ammon Jordan (Neighborhood Garden Initiative) is third from the left, Salem (FBF) is fourth, and Ms. Kesha Har is second to last on the right.
free them all
There are people today that need to be free. People facing occupation in western Tigray; repression in Sudan; executions in CA prisons; starvation in Congo; police bullets in ATL; genocide in Gaza. So if not today, when? It is never too late to begin. The only thing time will not allow is our fear. Everything else - our liberation, is inevitable.
Image source: ABC News, Internally Displaced People (IDP), fleeing from violence in the Metekel zone in Western Ethiopia, collect water from taps in a camp in Chagni, Ethiopia.
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Davis, A. (2016). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books.
Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press.
Penniman, L. (2018). Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Critical Resistance. (n.d.). Abolitionist frameworks and organizing materials. Retrieved from https://criticalresistance.org
Human Rights Watch. (2022). Ethiopia: Ethnic Cleansing in Western Tigray. Retrieved from https://hrw.org
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