A Year into Rigorous Political Study

Noah Tesfaye
4 min readMay 30, 2021

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 execution, what systems were responsible for killing Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Black people for centuries. I had every conceivable privilege last summer to just learn, study, and develop a politic that I could carry with me throughout my life. I was inside, at home, with light commitments, and an internet connection to begin to change my worldview. If not then, when would I ever just stop being entrenched and focused on electoralism?

For the better part of the last year, I’ve been finding the answers to questions I’ve always had in my life. Questions about Blackness, questions about capitalism and racialization, questions about my material conditions. I don’t think I’ve gotten answers to all of them, but in many ways, the answers I did receive about what direction I’m taking in life have been clarified. I know about the tradition of radical Blackness, a tradition of revolutionary struggle for Black liberation, of a history of constant resistance. This has…

--

--

Noah Tesfaye

Just someone trying to share my story and find who I am, one post at a time