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Untitled Poem – Akouavi Abok

by Akouavi Abok
written by Akouavi Abok

My nose 

My eyes 

My lips 

I look…

Covered in imperfections 

But only I can find the perfection 

Created in God’s image 

I find a way to judge 

Created to fit God’s perception 

I search for an answer 

Only to arrive at a misconception 

Who am I 

A tapestry woven with threads 

Of joy, sorrow, and everything in between 

In the mirror I gaze 

A stranger in my own skin 

My hands 

My legs 

My body 

Lost in a bewildering maze 

Within this struggle of lies 

A glimmer so faint 

For I have committed a sin

For I have used my hands to paint 

An image unlike me

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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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Arts & EntertainmentBlack HistoryCulturePolitical Education

Friend or Foe: Blaxploitation

by Nadine Melanesia Black
written by Nadine Melanesia Black

Before the 70s, it was rare for an Afrikan person to go to the theater and see a widely distributed movie that had a cast of all Afrikan people that did not center a white protagonist. The exploitation of Afrikan bodies in cinema allowed for Afrikan people to move up within Hollywood and receive representation, but also led to the damaging distribution of harmful Afrikan stereotypes. This genre was labeled “blaxploitation”, with the NAACP officially coining the term alongside the formation of the Coalition Against Blaxploitation. The NAACP, backed by other critics, flagged these movies for perpetuating harmful stereotypes about the Afrikan community in amerikkka.

Although originally produced by Afrikan people, featuring Afrikan people, for Afrikan people, the greed within Hollywood took advantage of what they saw as a profitable genre to exploit, leading to white influence seeping into the production of afrikan films: blaxploitation. Despite the exploitation from white Hollywood, Afrikan stories were somewhat finally able to be told to a larger audience through these films, including Afrikan social issues that were previously censored from mainstream media which was monumental for the 70s. 

As a sacrifice for working in these roles, Afrikans had to depict stereotypes in these movies, which was then fed to the rest of Afrikan amerikkka, who undoubtedly were drawn to these movies as they were the only representation at the time. This perpetuated an endless cycle of creating these movies to please the audiences, and the audiences only being able to turn to these films for representation.

Despite being impactful in terms of pushing Afrikan actors into the spotlight and giving actors roles that extended beyond subservience to their white counterparts, it did so by exploiting Afrikan stereotypes using Afrikan labor. Blaxploitation assisted in using harmful stereotypes for entertainment, essentially forcing Afrikan actors into another role of servitude. This time, the role of servitude is one that is disguised and repackaged to be sent off to Afrikan moviegoers.

Acknowledging its controversial impact in amerikkkan culture, we must also accept that this allowed for cinema to reach a new audience. The featuring of Afrikan actors as the lead characters in movies such as Super Fly and Blacula, influenced more Afrikan people to turn to the cinema for entertainment. The question we must ask is if this “inclusion” was harmful or helpful to shaping our futures, imaginations, and capacity for struggle.

The controversy surrounding blaxploitation reveals a deeper issue within Hollywood, a fundamental contradiction that allows for a severe lack of representation and an inability to be free within a “creative space.” Hollywood was never meant for everyone. When blaxploitation began to become more popularized, it came at a time when Afrikan actors could hardly find work in the industry. Afrikans were able to be featured in movies in roles that weren’t second to their white costars and could be featured in a film with only other Afrikan people.

Blaxploitation generated inspiration among the Afrikan creative community, specifically in terms of its cinematic style, with future generations leaving behind most of the heavy harmful stereotypes and adopting a focusing on Afrikan life. 

To move forward from the harmful representation of Blaxploitation, we must divest from the external validation of white Hollywood. We must create room within our own communities that allows for Afrikan producers, directors, and actors to pursue work that is meaningful and tells real and raw stories, helping to influence future generations of Afrikans. Hollywood is not responsible for saving us as the mainstream entertainment industry and media function to legitimize the state and the status quo: oppression, degradation and violence against Afrikan people. Understanding this, we are provided with new opportunities to recenter ourselves and redefine what creativity, success and storytelling should look like within our own communities.

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Arts & EntertainmentCulturePolitical Education

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

by Orisha Lamon
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

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CommentaryHealthNewsPolitical EducationU.S.World

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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Arts & EntertainmentBlack HistoryCultureOpinionPolitical Education

Uprooting Language

by Xavier Adams
written by Xavier Adams

*This article provides a detailed guideline in deconstructing language; this is to be used both as an offering to ongoing discussions and as an interpretive tool to reshape how we interact with language*

I.

What is language? As the facilitator at the “social center of gravity,” language functions as an intersubjective process of articulating one’s relationship to the world, thereby producing a unique, autonomous identity–a requisite for resistance. 

II.

One remarkable aspect of algorithmic technology is its aptitude to shatter tradition: the amazing pace at which images are uprooted from its soil and spread to a global audience creates a haze of multiplicities that drown out the origin. The doors to the past are closed; shut out, one must start anew. 

III.

A walk through modern history illustrates the continuous commodification of afrikan bodies. From the enslavement of afrikan bodies through sharecropping and up to mass incarceration, the physical commodification of the afrikan body is a tale inseparable from the modern era. What about the often overlooked image: commodification facilitated not through physical bodies, but through representations?

IV.

As far as the jurisdiction of digital spaces stretches, the image reigns supreme as the chief manifestation of commodification, whether it be through fashion, music, or, most importantly, language. It is the image of afrikan language, that articulation of a unique existential experience, that becomes commodified in digital spaces. Here, one enters a practice of fetishization–a process of obsessive consumption of images that, while exploiting the represented bodies, simultaneously frames the viewer’s experiences–a natural consequence of commodifying images. The simple act of consuming such images situates the viewer–who may be Afrikan as well as non-Afrikan–as an agent of fetishization.

V.

One does not need to spend much time on social media to get acquainted with the “ironization” of AAVE: between phrases such as “type shit” and “woke,” it is not uncommon to find another deploying such phrases for a purely humorous effect. This “ironization” is effectively an alien encounter: with the pace of algorithmic technologies bent on uprooting, to encounter AAVE in digital spaces is to “translate” it to one’s own language, to attribute it a fresh meaning, divorcing race from language, shattering the tradition of language–that unique articulation of one’s relationship with the world, that autonomous identity melts away (generalized as “Gen-Z slang”), along with the potential of resistance.

VI.

With the doors to the past now sealed, without that autonomous identity offered by language, and without appealing to an origin, how are we to start anew? What new language can be articulated to regain an autonomous identity necessary for resistance? These are the discussions we must enter in our struggle toward reimagining a liberated world.

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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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Political Education

Prisons: Abolition and Resistance

by Nicole Crawford
written by Nicole Crawford

Read the following excerpts from Tip of the Spear by Orisonmi Burton and discuss the questions.

Section 1:

“Queen Mother Audley Moore explained that Green Haven’s imprisoned men were
enduring “re-captivity”. Offering an analysis made popular by her political mentee
Malcolm X, she argued that prison walls made visible a condition of incarceration
that is constitutive of Black life in America. Black people are a “captive nation”; the
physically imprisoned had therefore been captured “doubly so”. Moore then
explained that it was not the captives, but the White Man who was “the real
criminal.” She reminded her audience—comprised of people variously convicted
of robbery, assault, rape, murder, and drug-related crimes —that none of them
had ever stolen entire countries, cultures, or peoples, or sold human beings into
slavery for profit. Although some of them had tried to imitate the White Man, she
continued, they had never really stolen and neither had they ever really murdered.
“Have you taken mothers and strung them up by their heels?” she asked. “And took
knives and slit their bellies so that their unborn babies can fall to the
ground?…”Have you dropped bombs on people and killed whole countries of
people, have you done that brothers?” Given that American empire is constituted
through apocalyptic violence and incalculable theft, Moore argued that “crimes”
committed by the human spoils of war were necessarily derivative of the
organized crime of the state. “

p. 1-2

Explain why Moore argues that imprisoned Afrikan people are enduring a “re-captivity”.

How do we “imitate” the White Man?

Section 2:

“The aim of the White Man’s science (white supremacy), was to “denature”
African people: to crush their spirits, destroy their cognitive autonomy, and
transform them into obedient “negroes” with no knowledge of their history
or will to resist”

“Tip of the Spear argues that prisons are war. They are state strategies of
race war, class war, colonization, and counterinsurgency. But they are also
domains of militant contestation, where captive populations reject these
white supremacist systems of power and invent zones of autonomy,
freedom, and liberation.”

“Within and against captivity, rebels employed diverse methodologies of
attack: political education, critique, protest, organizing, cultural
production, litigation, subversion, refusal, rebellion, retaliation, hostage
taking, sabotage, armed struggle, and the intimate labor of care. Like
Moore they saw prison walls not as boundaries between freedom and
unfreedom, but as material demarcations of different intensities of
captivity, vulnerability, and rebellion.”

p. 2-4

What is the aim of white supremacy? How does this show up in your life/relationships?

How can we resist/attack white supremacy?

What is the function of prisons for the oppressor? For the oppressed?

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