As we mark Black History Month, I want to name something clearly and carefully.

I have been as deeply shaped by Black history as I have by Indigenous history. My life, my thinking, and my capacity to remain oriented have been sustained—again and again—by Black women, through real relationships of care, protection, correction, and shared life. Because of this, I do not experience Black history as adjacent to my own story. I do not see Black issues as separate from mine.

I’m naming that because this moment is producing new pressures to separate struggles that were never separate to begin with.

One language that has helped me stay oriented is Terrenales—not as an identity, but as a way of naming a hemispheric reality: descendants of Black and Indigenous peoples across the Americas living with the ongoing consequences of enslavement, genocide, land dispossession, and forced continuity under multiple empires. It helps clarify how different communities can be shaped by different histories and still be positioned inside the same structural terrain.

I’m offering that only as orientation, because what I’m most concerned about right now is how resistance itself is being fragmented.

We are being pulled apart even as we try to resist violence. Immigration is framed as if it were not also shaped by Black history. Black struggle is treated as past tense while immigrant struggle is treated as present emergency. Communities facing the same state logics are subtly positioned as if they are competing for legitimacy, attention, or moral center.

That separation is not accidental. It weakens our capacity to respond.

In What You Are Asked to Carry, I write about how U.S. wars in Central America, the War on Drugs, policing, incarceration, and migration were never separate stories. They were part of a single political and economic project whose consequences landed unevenly, but jointly, on Black communities in the United States and on Indigenous and working-class communities across Central America. People were displaced in different directions, but by the same forces. Survival strategies diverged, but the cost was shared. Treating these histories as unrelated is not only inaccurate—it actively erases how deeply entangled Black and immigrant realities have always been.

There is also something that needs to be said plainly to white members of this community.

In moments of crisis, it is common for white people to move quickly into moral positioning—naming enemies, declaring clarity, and centering their own sense of awakening or outrage. That impulse may feel necessary. But historically, it has also been one of the ways resistance loses depth.

When opposition becomes primarily about moral identity—about being on the “right side”—structural harm is translated into personal conviction. Urgency accelerates. Attention rises. And the people who live closest to consequence are once again asked to absorb the strain.

This dynamic is showing up clearly in how immigration enforcement is being talked about right now.

I also want to name something that feels increasingly normalized and that deserves more care than it is receiving. The casual trashing of ICE as a shorthand for moral clarity may feel cathartic, but it often obscures how power is actually operating. Many ICE agents are themselves working-class people, recruited into enforcement because the federal government has made those jobs more stable, better paid, and more geographically accessible than most alternatives available to them.

That reality does not excuse harm or violence.
But it does matter if we are serious about resisting fascism rather than reproducing its logics.

When we collapse complex structures into disposable villains, we make it easier for the state to continue manipulating economic precarity, outsourcing moral injury downward, and insulating those who design policy from consequence. Coalition requires precision here—the ability to hold people accountable without turning entire classes of people into stand-ins for systems that were never under their control.

During Black History Month, I keep returning to how Black communities have learned—not perfectly, but persistently—how to stay human, relational, and oriented under pressure. That wisdom feels especially needed now.

As a companion to this note, I’m sharing an inspirational Terrenales playlist—music drawn from Black, Afro-Indigenous, Caribbean, and immigrant lineages that have learned how to hold coherence through rupture. This is not protest music or nostalgia. It’s orientation music—for grounding, strength without hardening, collective endurance, and joy that doesn’t deny reality.

I invite you to listen to this music slowly, as a practice of staying together when the moment is pulling us apart.