A Year into Rigorous Political Study

I’ve spent the better part of this past week trying to think about how I could frame what the last year has meant for my political education and praxis. I’ve thought about the readings I’ve done, the comrades I’ve met and actions I’ve worked on, and the constant discussions taking place in my apartment or virtually. But what remains a through-line, what has ultimately become central to my approach is this: my care and love of Africans, for Black people, is what will forever guide my work in life.

For a lot of my adolescence, as I began to become politicized and grow angry at the world, my mom sometimes would ask me why I cared so much. Of course, I think that the onslaught of grieving and anti-Black violence/terror that is essential to the function of this empire, and scrolling Twitter at times would not help me there. But in many ways, it’s been my ideological growth over the last twelve months that has allowed her to sympathize with that feeling. For much of those years where I’d come but into a random conversation about how something horrific happened, I had no context or thorough understanding about why certain events were taking place.

It was the uprisings in Minneapolis that were the last point that I ever wanted to feel unaware and uneducated. I did not just want to feel lost and upset without knowing what systems were complicit in his police…