I haven’t posted in weeks—frankly, because I’m exhausted. Trump-tigue, I call it. Ironically, it hasn’t even been a full month yet. Much of what we’re witnessing is smoke and mirrors, designed to destabilize. A key implementation tool of Trump-tigue strategy is watching a muskrat plot and implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems—ones designed to strip human connection, empathy, and even our right to determine our own well-being. Veiled in racist, classist, and elitist ideology, these systems will devastate marginalized communities—including white Americans who don’t yet realize what’s coming and the impact to them in particular. So what changed?
Super Bowl Sunday happened.
Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance—both direct and subliminal—reignited the fire in me. And visiting with my father the following day reawakened memories—the five-year-old girl who walked the grounds of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a place of revolutionaries and free thinkers. The call to resist echoes through history—from the Free African Society of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen to slave hush harbors, to Reconstruction, Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance, the Freedom Riders, the Black Power movements, and every protest movement Black people have sparked and Black women have upheld. So many I haven’t named, but all carried the same message: Resist.
The Motherist in me—the one who nurtures, orders, reorders, builds, rebuilds, and creates structures—came alive again. Not just for my village. Not just for my daughter. But for my grandchildren—especially my granddaughter—who remind me why I must remain unmovable, unshakable, unrelenting for the sake of humanity—for Black women’s humanity.
This struggle—both global and local—demands all of us. Whether we acknowledge it or not, inaction is a role, just as much as action is. A Motherist sees injustice and begins her work—on every level, in every way necessary.
Calling Congress matters. Using our voices matters. Staying engaged—by any means necessary—matters. Whether through faith-based groups, support networks, think tanks, girlfriends, or prayer circles—it all matters. Engagement is what will save us. It’s what will keep us human.
And whether America wants to admit it or not, Black Americans—especially Black women—will be the ones to remind this nation of our shared humanity. Black Motherists—willing to heal, willing to risk it all, willing to die.
So I ask myself: What am I willing to die for?
And the answer remains—America, the home of the free and the brave.
#Kendrick Lamar
#Black History
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