You’re not wrong for the need for some kind of belief; but I don’t apply mine to some rosy ideal that after all that’s been done, after 200 years of slavery and dehumanization, and then 200 more years of even more abuse, marginalization, and oppression (but legal under the constitution and bill of rights this time!), we’re somehow going to find a way to put all that behind us and skip merrily, arm-in-arm into the sunset. I apply my belief and optimism to the idea that one day, we’ll have a nation of our own, carved out of the guts of Amerika, hand in hand with our indigenous comrades. I have none for those who descended from this nation’s original settlers. My organizing is explicitly with the colonized.

I constantly watch the descendants fail to put their bodies on the same wheels and gears we’re forced to put our bodies on, day in and day out. I see them let Black bodies get slabbed out by pigs. I see them let Black children get stripped of their mothers and fathers, their parents condemned to carceral slavery, and those children mandated to a foster pipeline that will inevitably see them in the same prisons, likely abused into antisocial behavior-sets beforehand. I see them let Black would-be professionals get stripped of their inroads to the same successes that the whites are practically hand-gifted.

You’ll have to forgive me for not putting my faith in any of that; because I don’t see the settlers en masse adopting decolonial thought. The sheer vast weight of Amerikan cognitive dissonance will break at least (there was a much more harsh percentage here. Being charitable, we’ll say ‘half’) of them before they get there. I don’t see a society I want to be a part of in the settlers anymore, or that I’d want my family and community a part of; even if we assume the descendants were able to unlearn everything they’ve been taught.