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“This Country is Broken”

by Hanae Noirbent
written by Hanae Noirbent

“This country is broken.” 

No. 

This country is functioning according to its design. Founded upon the labor of the enslaved and the displacement of the Indigenous, this land we call united was fractured from its very conception. The current administration is not a mistake in the history of this nation but rather a product of it. And yet, amidst the knowledge that the citizenship we hold dear is a stolen identity or one that has been given to us by force, we still find ourselves dreaming, wishing the fires erupting with vigor, the red lines drawing blood in the concrete of our cities, were all mere accidents.

We cannot avoid the truth of what this country was built upon nor the values which anchored its inception. Acknowledging those histories will bring us to our crossroads, where the climate crisis culminates to a state of emergency, where censorship becomes law, and where our bodies continue to be properties of a state willing to break them to meet its ends. But as I said, we are at a crossroads. We are at a pivotal moment where yesterday cannot be reversed but perhaps tomorrow could open new expectations. Ultimately, it is our inaction which will cost us our future. So then, where to begin? 

Let us begin right here, on this first page. Established in 1968, NOMMO was the first ethnic newsmagazine established on a public university campus. Its principles were anchored in an era where the rights of Afrikan peoples were virtually non-existent and in this critical moment, we find a specter of that movement reemerging. In that time when NOMMO was the space for our people to create with radical optimism and hope for the tomorrow, we persevered. And today, upon these pages, we ask you to do the same. Not to glance at news cycles without batting an eye but rather to sit in the discomfort and engage in our voice. Not to believe the work we have done is over but rather to understand that collective liberation is more than simply occupying spaces. We must interact with our environment, and question it to always keep the dynamism of change at the forefront. 

We invite you to keep engaging with us as we question our environment and our roles, as we extricate ourselves from our positions of complacency and admit to our agency. We invite you to find strength in yourself, to pick up your tools of creation and express who you are as change comes from within. We invite you to rest as well, and to know that the fight lives on and we will welcome you to join us when you are ready. 

There is no land of the brave or the free. But there are the people whose search for bravery and freedom inspire a vision that acknowledges our shared generational traumas and projects them into a commemorative work. We cannot change our past, but if we reclaim the principles justifying it we can alter the course of not only the next four years, but the next four hundred. So that the children of our children will know the Earth and their ancestor’s beauty and why they should protect it. 

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CommentaryHealthLifestyleNewsPolitical EducationU.S.World

Afrikan Agarianism – Subcultures 

by Bahji Steele
written by Bahji Steele

For over 400 years, our hands tilled the soil, not by choice but forced through our captivity in chains. Promises of reparations crumbled, leaving us landless in a country we built. It’s no wonder that when you hear “Afrikan Amerikkkan” and “farmer” in the same sentence, optimism feels out of reach. This is especially true in hyper-developed cities like Los Angeles, where many of our ancestors fled after emancipation, seeking freedom beyond the fields that once enslaved them. Denied our 40 acres, shut out from land ownership, and systematically displaced, we’ve been pushed further from the idea of cultivating our own ecological balance. But what if we reclaimed it? What if the soil was always ours to begin with? 

Tucked between two weathered apartment buildings, just off the roar of the 91 freeway and Rosecrans, lies Compton Community Garden—a hidden oasis of renewal and resistance. Here, in the heart of a so-called food desert, life blooms. Temu, a Compton native and horticulturist who helped bring CCG to life, poses a powerful question: “Compton has the most ideal weather for organic gardening, yet we’re still considered a food desert? How did we get here? Is this by accident? We have the chance to change the narrative—to restore balance, heal ourselves, feed ourselves, employ ourselves, and build collective wealth.” A garden may seem simple, but in a world designed to keep us disconnected from the land, it’s nothing short of revolutionary. It’s a space to nourish bodies, reclaim community, and cultivate a future rooted in self-sufficiency.

“For our ancestors, farming was not a symbol of oppression, but rather a symbol of resistance and freedom. Every time we plant a seed, we are committing an act of sovereignty.” 

These words from Leah Penniman, author of Farming While Black, reframe farming as a means of liberation. As each seed is planted, so is the possibility of a new reality—one where food justice, sustainability, and collective power take root in Compton and beyond.

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Building Futures in the Midst of Ecological Destruction

by Orisha Lamon
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?

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Black HistoryCommentaryCultureNews

God is Change

by Bahji Steele
written by Bahji Steele

Since the LA fires started, me and I’m sure many other readers of Octavia Butler’s Parable series felt a sense of déjà vu. The neighborhood of Altadena has a rich black history that began after the civil rights movement. Before civil rights, this neighborhood was full of white ranchers and business owners. When Black/Afrikan and brown families began to move in, many white families moved out during the period, a phenomenon commonly known as “white flight”. White families did not welcome diversity in their neighborhood and their departure left opportunities for the diverse Altadena community we see today to bloom and grow. Octavia Butler grew up in Altadena. Her mother worked as a maid in wealthier white homes south of Pasadena proper. Butler received her associate’s degree from Pasadena City College and studied writing, anthropology, geology, and much more at UCLA. This was the same route of schooling my grandmother took when she came to California for college to become a nurse which led my family to settle in Altadena. Butler attended John Muir High School the same as my mother and her brothers and ironically my college roommate, an Altadena native, and his mother and generations of black families like ours. This beautiful neighborhood in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains has always been home to my family. One thing that I always particularly loved about Altadena was seeing a thriving Black/Afrikan community in LA with an abundance of green space, something most black communities in LA aren’t so fortunate to have. Altadena was always a beautiful neighborhood with its overhangs of oak trees, beautiful, lush mountains, an abundance of hiking trails and waterfalls. Altadena was the only place I wanted to dream of settling in when I grew up.

“We had fire today” reads a February 1st, 2025 diary entry in Butler’s Parable of the Sower. In the story, Lauren, a girl from the LA area living in 2024, is forced to live inside a community gated by large walls to protect herself from desperately poor starving people and a band of criminals high on a drug called pyro causing them to have arson addictions. Looking back at this story now is haunting as we enter only a few days into 2025 and the Eaton Fires have leveled the majority of the Altadena homes. The childhood home of Butler, where her grave, minimally burned in the fires. 

Earthseed is the community that Lauren dreamed of, the sanctuary not only physically safe from the harshness of the outside world and the fires but a spiritual space for people. Altadena was my Earthseed, as my grandpa was escaping gang violence in Watts and my grandmother an abusive orphanage in Boston, they both came to settle in Altadena for refuge, similar to the many Altadena residents that found their way escaping the Jim Crow South. This neighborhood was a sanctuary for us and it lives on. These fires have come as a result of long-standing climate injustice and extractive practices of capitalist consumption that do not engage with the Earth in regenerative ways. However, I believe the soul of the community members of Altadena will not so easily be turned to ash.

Etched in the gravestone of Butler reads the famous quote from Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” In the pulse of Altadena, Los Angeles, and beyond, the world now breathes the change she foresaw—a change that echoes through the shifting climate, the very manifestation of Butler’s prophecy. Written in 1993, her vision stands, astonishing in its clarity. Renowned for grounding the realms of Afrikan/Black science fiction and Afrofuturism, after the tremors of early 2025, one cannot help but ask: Is this fiction—or the future? She is the living word, embodying NOMMO, and with each story, she wields the griot’s power—the power of the word, the power to shape reality.

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CampusCommentaryNewsOpinionPolitical EducationU.S.

“The First Become the Last”

by Nicole Crawford
written by Nicole Crawford

Journal Excerpt: – 9 January 2025

It is Thursday, January 9th, 2025 and more than 35,000 acres of “Los Angeles” is on fire. More than 35,000 acres of Tongva/Gabrielino Indigenous lands have erupted into flames, not due to circumstance, but as a result of the ever-growing expansion of capitalist greed, corruption, and violence throughout the globe. Los Angeles is merely a looking glass. For years, the beast that we call Amerikkka has bombed, robbed, raped, pillaged and abused the lands and imaginations of the Indigenous people of this world. Those in Afrika, the Middle East, Skid Row and the Caribbean have been slaughtered, martyred and erased from our collective memory as a sacrifice for the insatiable thirst that this beast holds for the consumption and conquest of our lands. 

Mother Nature regains her autonomy in moments like these, forcefully and without remorse. Today, she remembers our apathy to the violence enacted against the poor, the unhoused, the immigrant, the diseased and the disabled. We are all responsible for the pacification and justification of this violence. We are all responsible for our blindness to the gravity of deprivation, dehumanization and disenfranchisement that the most oppressed have faced, and known intimately, for as long as we have lived. This violence is one of displacement, one of hollowed memory, of intentional menticide and distractions to keep us surprised and saddened at the smell of singed flesh. We have tasted and seen ash and coppered blood before, but it is our dishonesty that uncovers shock within us instead of activity and the capability of creating tangible solutions that disentangle us from the dependent, nauseatingly abusive relationship that we have with the state. 

Instances like these remind us of who is disposable to the state. Pay attention to the lengths at which they go to erase and minimise the gravity of violence we are subject to. We do not know of the destruction of the most oppressed, we do not understand what it means to feel ash within your every breath with no means of escape or solace, whether this be in Palestine or Afrika, or Los Angeles. Those who are left behind in prisons and on the streets are not an unintended consequence, but evidence of the irredeemability and psychosis of the state. Know your reflections. None of us are immune to this sickness. The plight of the disregarded today, is a warning for what we will all face tomorrow. The first will become the last. Your dreams of falsified allegiance to them will swallow you whole. 

“We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

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News

Black Panther Party: 10-Point Program (1966)

by Nicole Crawford
written by Nicole Crawford

Below is the 10-Point Program, first published in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panther Party. Please review the following excerpt and discuss the questions below. As you read, please consider how these points are still relevant today: in our intimate relationships, in the educational system, in the fight towards liberation…

10-Point Program:

  1. We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.
    • We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
  2. We Want Full Employment For Our People.
    • We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man
      employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American
      businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be
      taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the
      community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
  3. We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.
    • We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the
      overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised
      100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will
      accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
  4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.
    • We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black
      community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that
      our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
  5. We Want Education For Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent
    American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.
    • We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
  6. We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.
    • We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to
      defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other
      people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White
      racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of
      the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
  7. We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.
    • We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black
      self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist
      police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the
      United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.
  8. We Want Freedom For All Black Men Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.
    • We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
  9. We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In Court By A Jury Of
    Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.
    • We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
  10. We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.
    • When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve
      the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among
      the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and
      nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that
      they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Discussion Questions:

How are these demands still relevant today?

Which points are most important for you and your community?

What are your wants and demands for your community?

How can you help your community in meeting these needs? What do you need?

Who is a part of your community? Locally? Globally?

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CampusCommentaryNewsWorld

Hypocrisy and Censorship

by Nadine Melanesia Black
written by Nadine Melanesia Black

An oppressive silence fills classrooms when students bring up topics surrounding Palestine and the encampment to almost any UCLA educator, dancing around the topic anytime it is mentioned in relation to what we are learning in class, which has left me puzzled as this is a glaring contradiction.

On Sept. 5 UCLA outlined a “Four Point Plan for a Safer, Stronger UCLA” that claims to focus on “enhancing community safety and well being, fostering a culture of engagement, learning and dialogue across difference, prompting freedom expression in line with University of California policies, and continuing to evaluate how to support our diverse community.” Through these four points, UCLA admin is further repressing students’ freedom of expression by regulating how one expresses themselves under the guise of creating a “safer campus environment.” Even within UCLA’s mission statement they claim to want to “ensure freedom of expression and dialogue, in a respectful and civil manner, on the spectrum of views held by our varied and diverse campus communities” and to have an “open and inclusive environment that nurtures the growth and development of all faculty, students, administration and staff” through debate and critical inquiry.

The hypocrisy of the facade that UCLA puts on for admitted students who are eagerly awaiting to attend a university to have fulfilling discussions and debates on current topics in comparison to the reality of silencing their student population is jarring. 

How is it that Palestine is a central part of the current global political discourse, yet this is rarely talked about in the classes of the Amerikkka’s “#1 public university”? In emails regarding the encampment, why is it that the former Chancellor Gene Block dedicated only a measly sentence about the immense suffering of Palestinians but claims to not take a side?

Students are being punished for exercising what they have learned at this school, including ideas surrounding how social norms can be challenged to gain more rights for marginalized people, with courses relaying acts of resistance throughout history via both physical and online spaces. The absence and censorship of educational safe spaces for conversations surrounding Palestine disallows for any growth or learning for students.

Monitoring and censoring what is being said in classrooms won’t stop student’s ideas and hunger for change, but only further highlights UCLA’s compliance with the mass killings in Palestine.

UCLA admin cannot continue to ignore the pleas of their students. Cries against the oppressive system of white supremacy that UCLA benefits from are drowned out in favor of maintaining the UC’s tidy and rule-following facade. If this school wants to truly comply with their mission statement, they would need to allow for students to express themselves in and out of the classroom.

At the bare minimum, discussion and dialogue around Palestine is essential in educational spaces, and banning this exchange just shows what UCLA stands for, whether they explicitly say it or not. However, a conversation alone is not enough to elicit true change against an oppressive system. Continuous resistance against the status quo and forcing the administration and government to hear our voices must be practiced as a collective community.

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Technology is Never Neutral

by Bahji Steele
written by Bahji Steele

The adoption of generative AI presents both significant challenges and potential benefits for Pan-Afrikan communities in the United States. A recent McKinsey report, The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier*, highlights the technology’s global economic impact, which could reach up to $4.4 trillion across industries. However, as organizations begin to explore AI’s applications, concerns are rising about its effects on Afrikan employment, particularly for Afrikan men.

A separate McKinsey report, The Future of Work in Black America, paints a grim picture of AI’s potential to disproportionately impact Afrikans in America. The report finds that Afrikan workers are overrepresented in jobs at high risk of automation and underrepresented in roles more likely to remain secure. Due to state and institutionalized racism, the job market has historically been harder for Afrikan men to succeed and make a living. It also reveals that half of the top 10 occupations held by Afrikans pay below the federal poverty line for a family of four, and all pay less than the national median salary of $52,000. Many of these jobs, predominantly held by young Afrikans without college degrees, are also among the top 15 occupations most at risk of AI-driven job loss.

The racial wealth gap further complicates the situation. A 2016 study by the Corporation for Economic Development and the Institute for Policy Studies found that, if current economic trends persist, it would take 228 years for the average Afrikan family to accumulate the same wealth as the average white family.

Yet, if approached with an equity lens, AI has the potential to help close this wealth gap. By investing in reskilling workers for non-automatable roles and promoting emotional labor jobs over physical or manual ones, AI could create new opportunities for Afrikans in Amerikkka. Furthermore, generative AI holds promise as an educational tool, a crucial factor given that a lack of higher education is a significant barrier to upward mobility for many Afrikans. If implemented thoughtfully, AI could be a catalyst for economic inclusion rather than exacerbating racial disparities.

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