Author

Orisha Lamon

Violent Recollections: Memorializing Black Life

by Orisha Lamon 10/26/2025

written by Orisha Lamon

They were ruled as suicides.

Robert Fuller was a 24 year old Black man, from Palmdale California. He was a son, friend, and also brother to the late Terrone Boone who was also a victim of police murder shortly after Fuller’s death. Robert Fuller was found in June of 2020 hanging from a tree in the Palmdale City Square. Fuller’s death occurred during the height of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in response to the recorded police murder of George Floyd. Community pressure put the investigation on the map but even with the involvement of the FBI, the Sherrif’s Department remained steadfast in ruling Fuller’s death to be a suicide, shutting down any suggestions of foul play by loosely motioning to Fuller’s history of mental health concerns.

21-year old Demartravion Reed was first in his family to go to college, and was a responsible son and outstanding student. Reed was found lynched September 2025, at Delta State University in Cleveland Mississippi. The Cleveland Police Department, the Coroner’s Office, and DSU president announced that there was no foul play based on the autopsy and investigative reports. According to Afro News, The Black Media Authority, Reed’s mother was notified that he was found deceased in his dormitory, before the school disclosed that he was lynched on the DSU campus.

The intentional lack of investigative power and acknowledgement of Black death not only highlights the longstanding legacy of racial violence, and who falls through the cracks, but of one that sustains the imaginaries of white America.Valuable lives lost to a machinery that functions as it was created to do — to oppress and erase. In a heightened time of political activism ranging from the mobilizations against state sanctioned violence and kidnappings to the genocidal projects occurring in Congo, Sudan, and Palestine, there lays a connection to remembrance and how violence is often justified through state and settler memory. Bodies begin to pile up, in a system underpinned by the death of Black people, carcerality, and exploitation, and lives are either memorialized through the strength of community or commodified via performative platforming of Black struggle.

Trey’s site of lyching was just 35 miles away from the site of Emmett Till’s lynching site approximately 70 years ago. Whether or not they are acknowledged by the white world, telling stories of life and remembering them in times of contention allows us to remember in our own ways and resist. It calls us to ask how we define Blackness, as it is racialized and commodified but also antithetical within a world of whiteness. And within this world, there is increased proximity to death and the violence of a system that is informed and sustained off of racial and social differences.

Regardless of a ruling they were lynched. A violent, inhumane act that in a present day climate is glossed over by state actors that uphold this tradition of violence paired with minimal remorse, no reparation, nor active call to assess and investigate. Lynchings are not just historical forms of violence, they are present and tightly embedded within the mechanisms used to subjugate and attack Black people today. We have come to a point where even the ways in which death is carried out is normalized given that we are witnessing the death of an Black person. To recall, to memorialize, and to continue to live. The systems we interact with in need of safety and care will never fix the underlying issue of global anti-Blackness and racial violence that bleed into our systems of “justice”. To protect one another we must strive to be with the sights of nature and to build and organize community.

Rest in peace and power Robert Fuller and Darmatravion Reed.

10/26/2025 0 comments

Reflections on Poetry and Resistance

by Samantha Talbot & Orisha Lamon 05/16/2025

written by Samantha Talbot & Orisha Lamon

Harlem – Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Harlem by Langston Hughes is an extremely well-known poem, one often taught by English teachers during Black History Month to illustrate the resilience of Afrikans in Amerikkka in a way that is palatable to a non-Afrikan audience. Despite its simplicity, this poem has stuck with me throughout highschool and into college as one of my favorite poems.

Hughes opens the poem with the poignant question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”, and though the answer is never explicitly stated, it is clear what he believes the answer to be. It does not “dry up,” “fester,” “stink,” “crust and sugar over,” “sag,” or any other images of decay that Hughes presents us with. These descriptions call back to plantation life, with the planting of sugar cane, the untreated wounds of the slaves, and the “heavy load” that slaves were forced to bear both physically and mentally. Organic matter may suffer from decay, just as our own bodies will eventually, but dreams are not bound by time and impermanent flesh. Dreams are carried throughout generations, written down, spoken aloud, and carried in the soul rather than the body. Thus, when Hughes ends his poem with the question, “Or does it explode?”, we know the answer.

The last line of Harlem is often dismissed as referring to riots. Though it is a valid interpretation, it can easily fall under the assumption that Afrikans are inherently violent. They will “explode” in anger and irrationality in the face of the perpetuated oppression they have dealt with. However, an explosion can be read in ways beyond acts of violence, such as “the rapid growth of a population and the breakdown of a misconception, as when someone or something “explodes” a cultural myth, fantasy, or deeply held assumption,” as is expressed by professor Scott Chanceller at the College of William & Mary. It can be an explosion of culture, arts, and expression like the Harlem Renaissance. It can be an explosion in that it reverberates across ethnic divides and impacts other marginalized communities.

One of my favorite aspects of Harlem is that it is so much bigger than Harlem. There were references to the Great Migration in Harlem in the original drafts of the poem, but I believe they were omitted because Hughes realized the universality of his statement. Afrikans everywhere have experienced “a dream deferred,” and many currently have dreams that are being deferred. In America, it seems that all of the promises that this flawed country has purported to us have been deferred since the beginning of the Afrikan American population. But therein lies the beauty of Harlem, a message that has resonated and will continue to resonate with Afrikans and speak to their resilience.

If We Must Die – Claude McKay

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; Then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Red Summer, 1919 was a time of bloodshed and white supremacist vigilante violence against Afrikan Americans across the United States. This era of anti-black (Afrikan) violence was scattered across the United States orchestrated by white hatred with the movement of Afrikan Americans across the Mid and Northeast United States looking for jobs within white dominated industries. As resentment rose, so did the self-victimization of whites as a rationalization for starting these terror attacks on working class and poor Black communities in their proximity. Structured as a Shakeperean sonnet, McKay’s words of resistance and militancy linger amongst the many movements for liberation. In facing suppression, besiegement, and death, the struggle against and defeating the common foe of subjugation is a struggle that is glorious and noble. This poems’ popularity is not one that is historic and timelined. These words ring loud with the Afrikan people facing genocide in Congo and Sudan, those facing the blockades in Haiti, Cuba, and neocolonialism throughout the Carribean and Afrikan continent, within the walls of penitentiaries and militarization in the imperial core, with the people of Palestine, with Refaat Alareer’s, prose on death and life, we will remain to honor the struggles of those before us and continue to their struggle til we defeat the common foe.

If I Must Die – Refaat Alareer

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself–

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

05/16/2025 0 comments

Culture Poetry

A Chance at Being Human

by Orisha Lamon 05/15/2025

written by Orisha Lamon

The human is merely a prop
The human is swung and tossed around
Bound by contradiction, uncertainty, and misguided ambition
Those deep into the ghettos of empire
And the other the ivory tower,
Groveling for a chance to cry out on the granite floors atop of pillaged bodies
To go back home, tell my children I made history, my tears convinced them!

The ivory tower,
Coated in excess and the paints of plunder
As much as despised, so heavily consumed, there is no antidote to the ill of wanting to be human.

The ivory tower,
These peeling walls of carcerality become exposed
These embroidered imaginations on skin
There once pulled and tugged
There through the chains and barbed wire
There peers the pure illumination of life
It’s explosive – dangerous.

In the ivory tower,
The humans are no longer of flesh
no longer described as blue, yellow, black while the white man ensures his racial sincerity.
The light that emerges is not one that is blinding.
It’s scary, it’s full, it’s colored, it’s dripping.

Drops of orbital energy leak onto the tiles of the tower
Its cosmological richness is impenetrable, is it too much? We have to clean it up.

Must the illumination of life be untouchable? unfathomable? unseekable?
Disregarded and sewn back up into the prop that is the human?
Must we go back to running away from the rabid dogs of violence from the calls to be inside before the streetlights are on?

There lies no facet of life, untouched by the blood covered hands of control, the illumination is invisible to the eye of such evil and complicity.

Too occupied with sucking and suppressing the sacred and romanticized magic that must be there to see the magical light.
But there is no magic, there is no inherent genealogical build
They know this, yet destroy luminous lineages in the search for sustaining the fantasy, that is to be human.

05/15/2025 0 comments

Arts & Entertainment Culture Political Education

DOOM and Dilla: White Consumerism, Commodification, and Interpersonal Social Currency On Contemporary Pioneering Hip-Hop Artists

by Orisha Lamon 03/10/2025

written by Orisha Lamon

MF DOOM and J Dilla are some of the most influential artists and producers of all time. Praised for their innovative approaches to music through lyrical storytelling and profound mixing, they are a main point of reference for contemporary artists. Both artists still have posthumous releases that come in the form of features, remixes, and revisited recordings. The current state of musical consumption especially from Afrikan artists performing for marketability and white capital has left subversive genres at risk of being co-opted and fetishized. Which may happen at a far more parasocial level given the personalization and “underground” nature that provides a space for white exceptionalism and the development of primarily non-Afrikan cult followings. Sadiya Hartman in Formations of Terror, creates a context of Afrikan suffering through something of a spectacle: consumable, commodified, intended for white capitalization. Hartman’s focus is on John Rankin’s letters on American slavery, however, examined and translated through contemporary shows of performance for a white audience, this cannot go unnoticed as acting as a “vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment”. The reaction to popular Afrikan musical artists’ centering their music around ambiguously liberal and racially progressive strides toward Afrikan cultural aesthetics is generally regarded as an almost vitriol performance, when in its essence is inherently consumed and marketed via frames of voyeurism, primitivization, and fetishization. There is entitlement over these artists and their performance that is curated intentionally toward white capitalization. This may tread grounds of reductionist discourse toward Afrikan performance as spectacle. However, white entitlement and forms of racial exceptionalism can arguably be examined as a modality of furthering the contemporary pathologization of Afrikan conditions and white and colonial acquisition.

Why are MF DOOM and J Dilla in question? These two artists are notoriously known for their cult followings, composed of white males and hip-hop heads who look toward DOOM’s lyricism and villainous characterizations and Dilla’s heavily regarded genuineness as a hip-hop production pioneer. In this context we need to ask: What differentiates the fans of these “underground” artists from their industry counterparts and why do fans often focalize this point as a means of having an understanding of something alternative, subversive, underappreciated, and misrepresented? Perhaps looking toward how despite the subcultures of subcultures, whiteness as a mode of commodification, in its current context, informs how folks associate certain audiences to certain demographics and asserts the ever-growing cooptation and commercialization of Afrikan art and labor that is created out of the stories of Afrikan personalization and artistic experimentation ranging from childhood to accounts of the experience of a dehumanized being. Looking at the way both these artists passed at the hands of systemic debt and medical inadequacy furthers the distinct disconnect with behaviors of white consumption toward Black suffering and the material and physical detachment of a community of spectators who leverage their proximity and almost anthropological expertise in this production and artistry and in turn disregard how the performance is informed by structural and captive systems they actively participate in and uphold.

**white consumption is broadly defined in this context: anyone can be a white consumer socialized within the structural confines of racialized whiteness such as class and systemic infrastructure and power relations which allow this racialism and proximity to such community detachment and fetishization to occur

03/10/2025 0 comments

Commentary Health News Political Education U.S.World

Building Futures in the Midst of Ecological Destruction

by Orisha Lamon 03/10/2025

written by Orisha Lamon

The destruction that ripped through the populous Los Angeles Basin tied with the improper governmental response is nothing but a repeat of unpreparedness for numerous environmental catastrophes that results from the ruling entities’ failure to properly assess the crumbling infrastructure of the LAFD, climate change response, and lack of social services for the needs of the people. The decimation of structures, homes, and memories, in one of the most influential cultural hubs in the world has received a devastatingly inadequate response from the City of Los Angeles that has in turn bolstered community-oriented and mutual-aid-centered engagement holding up the societal infrastructure before its entire demise. As we plunge deeper into a christo-fascist and sensationalist state given the current political representatives, there is a greater need for disciplined community building, protection, and practice.

Los Angeles is widely discerned as a capitalistic foreground for gentrification and dispossession. This area of over 9 million has cultivated some of the most influential cultural and political communities and stances. The destruction of such space caused by wildfires, mudslides, torrential rain and pressing environmental and state-sponsored destruction creates a clean slate for landowners and private property management firms that prey on the devaluation of Afrikan and marginalized communities. The city’s vision of serving the people throughout the most notable Eaton and Palisades fires was through the mass-deployment of police officers to prevent looting, and preventing folks from being able to see their homes. The historic area of the Afrikan middle class in Altadena may never recover. The homes of folks who have been there since the Great Migration are gone and likely never to be rebuilt due to the lack of state resources. This mass displacement of a majority Afrikan community has prolonged and will greatly influence the confinement and racialized banishment of Afrikan folks in America. As evacuation shelters, like the Pasadena Civic Center, begin to book events such as America’s Got Talent recordings and award shows, not even 2 months after destruction leaves these folks displaced with municipal support dying down. I would like to ask: Where were these health concerns for the ongoing pandemic? For the Afrikan elders? The unhoused? For the poor air quality? For serving the community material resources? Diapers, medications, proper PPE? That was all thrown together by community members impromptu, nonprofit, and political organizations. The criminalization of such movement of essential resources and tools of organization is a threat to the current regime of surveillance in Los Angeles. Mass displacement and resource isolation, similar to the actions taken toward the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the failed state response, ties into the intentionality behind structural barriers of justice and support. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the South, displacing almost 1 million people with 40% of evacuees from Louisiana unable to return to their homes. Thousands are still recovering from the ecological degradation and trauma associated with loss alongside a lack of social safety nets already foretold the inadequate state response to disasters that impact the most marginalized. With displacement the Afrikan community of the Katrina impacted South faced white vigilantism coupled with lack of health infrastructure, prompting the conservation of a declining Afrikan population. This is not to present comparable figures looking at Katrina and the Los Angeles fires but serves as a call to our conditions. We must adapt and restore using material and tangible changes. Today we stand and ask where are we to go from here, from pessimism to revolutionary optimism, smashing imperialism, to practice, to pedagogy, to discipline, to care, to love. In reflection I ask: What are some starting points we can use to create community organization and begin our struggle toward an Afrikan revolutionary praxis?

03/10/2025 0 comments

Health Opinion

The Declining Afrikan Population

by Orisha Lamon 11/10/2024

written by Orisha Lamon

The Afrikan population in Los Angeles has been undergoing a decline at the hands of state violence and repression. From suggesting mask bans to the criminalization of unhoused folks it all ultimately impacts the livelihood of Afrikan residents and increases the criminalization of poverty and existence as an Afrikan. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) proposed fiscal budget for 2024/25 is more than 2 billion dollars with a net increase of almost 13% from the previous year. This proposed budget has almost $4 million directed toward “homelessness support” and technology requests that amount to 13 million dollars. Such technologies that are meant to ‘ensure public safety’ are often manifested through the methods of mass surveillance, weaponry intimidation, and violence — virtually having no use in protecting the Los Angeles community from its biggest issues which coincidentally stem from the same structure of municipal regulation. The LAPD budget presents a dramatic disparity between the police entity and social services. The issues that the Afrikan population in Los Angeles County faces come from inadequate health and housing resources that have deprived folks of the ability to survive in the vast geography. It doesn’t help that there are community figureheads spouting capitalistic and white supremacist talking points that infiltrate and convince the greater Afrikan community that racial representation and solidarity are synonymous; a strategic tool to further suppress Afrikan organization and mobilization for better lives and survivable wages, healthcare and insurance, social services and benefits, and true liberation.

The state targets Afrikan existence at all stages of life. In the United States, infant and maternal mortality disproportionately affects the Afrikan community. Afrikan pregnant people are nearly 3 times more likely to die compared to non-Afrikan pregnant people due to birth-related complications. As deadly as childbirth is, Afrikan childbirth and violence against Afrikan mothers in the healthcare system has been historically maintained. The state also outsources its violence against Afrikan and disabled people by using infectious disease as a tool for eugenics. As seen with COVID-19, scholar Maritza Vasquez Reyes presents that “approximately 97.9 out of every 100,000 African Americans have died from COVID-19, a mortality rate that is a third higher than that for Latinos, and more than double that for whites and Asians.” COVID-19 exposure contributes to the decline of elder Afrikan populations and endangers disabled and immunocompromised people as repeat infections and inadequate public health infrastructure lead to the spread of misinformation and violent repression of masking and COVID-19 protocols. As elders wear surgical masks tucked underneath their noses in an attempt to protect themselves, readily available and effective personal protective equipment has been shelved, overpriced, and no longer reaches the communities it needs to without the efforts of community organization.

Possible solutions to these disparities are based in organizational and community efforts that not only reach out to folks but provide material and personally tailored alternatives for communities experiencing the harmful impacts firsthand. Material changes and local impacts can have international implications and reach. Mutual aid and education efforts inform the community and will help us to develop an understanding of the true nature of being Afrikan in Amerikkka. Our collective efforts must focalize deconstructing the ever-changing suppression of the empire which acts as a tool in shaping racial-capitalist infrastructure and systems based upon the depravity of the poor.

11/10/2024 0 comments