“We Begin with Play,” Kai Lumumba Barrow Gallery of the Streets is a network of autonomous artists, activists, and scholars committed to abolitionist movement-building. Led by queer Black feminist politics, our work is created by people who live, love, fight, work, and play in … Read more
Can you hear me now?
“Hello Ahmed, can you hear me?” I half-shout into my laptop, which is precariously balanced on two couch cushions. Our geriatric mutt, Tucker, is gently snoring in the background, only his two grizzled ears visible against the red and black blanket. I see Ahmed, a … Read more
You Say You Want A Revolution?
There is a centuries-long conversation on how best to achieve transformational change, taken up here in a dialogue between authors with insight and ideas for today’s political revolutionaries. Almost 150 years ago, the Farmers Alliance organized two million people in the United States by rallying … Read more
So You Got Teargassed? Herbal Self-Care After Exposure to Chemical Weapons
If 2020 brought anything to my hometown of Portland, Oregon, it was the opportunity to be exposed to chemical weapons. Protesters, residents both housed and unhoused, bystanders, and workers throughout the city have been caught off guard by law enforcement’s prolific deployment of tear gas, … Read more
Dispatch from Portland’s Protests
Sarah Mirk is a comics journalist, author, and teacher. She works as an editor at The Nib and as a digital producer for Reveal. Her most recent book is Guantanamo Voices: True Stories from the World’s Most Infamous Prison, available here. This is her documentation of the … Read more
Mutual Aid Top 5s
What are your top five things that have brought you comfort and/or joy during the past year? It can be anything: foods, movies, people, animals, thoughts, books, records, yoga positions, a particular hike, a new pen, an old friend, whatever! Sam Smith Perspectives copy … Read more
Undrowned, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (AK Press, 2020) and The Deep, by Rivers Solomon (Gallery/Saga Press, 2019) It begins with breath. That is, it begins with the planetary cycle of respiration connecting forest, ocean, air, and every creature. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist … Read more
Power Within
“We are in such an unprecedented moment of global uprisings that fall against the backdrop of a global pandemic which is against the backdrop of institutionalized and historical racism and racialized oppression in this country and across the world. In the midst of that, we … Read more
Fundraising Anarchy
“Put in very blunt terms, they had taken power – not by simply changing the names of existing oppressive institutions but by literally destroying those old institutions and creating radically new ones… Social revolutionaries, far from removing the problem of power from their field of … Read more
The Power of Solidarity and Mutual Aid: Decolonizing Puerto Rico
In memoriam Matilde Rodríguez Pérez (1934-2020) Qe los cuentos de la abuela de “en aqeyos tiempos de ante” son los tiempos de aqí alante disfrasaos con ropa nueba. –Joserramón Melendes1 Marcelino and the Never-ending Work Shift In 1918, tobacco represented the second most important … Read more
