In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on.
For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been aware of Nigeria’s potential.
Globally, this potential has largely been measured by the country’s natural resources, from relatively recent (and continuing) discoveries of rare earth elements, to crude oil, its greatest export commodity, and arguably also its greatest curse. Discovered some years short of independence from British colonial rule in 1960, oil has been the main cause of poverty and ecological degradation in the Delta region, often stagnating development in Nigeria’s other industries due to over-reliance on its “black gold”.
Then, there’s the potential of our country’s expansive 230 million-plus population, consisting of over 400 ethnic groups (or 500, depending on how they’re counted), with just as many languages. Equally important is our religious diversity, composed largely of Muslims and Christians, as well as practitioners of various traditional religions, the latter sometimes performed (quietly) alongside the Abrahamic faiths. Increasingly, if only marginally, there’s also a rise in irreligiosity and atheism among Nigeria’s youth, noteworthy because Nigerians are, on average, a deeply religious (pontificating and practicing) people.
There is also the potential of our diaspora. From the time of independence or even before it, the Nigerian diaspora has produced notable writers, artists, and musicians, a feat that has only grown as the country’s entertainment industries, especially in music and film, have exploded in the last decade. Notwithstanding the prevalence of a “scammer” stereotype, Nigerians in diaspora—especially in the West—stand out as among the most educated, flourishing immigrant populations across variouscountries. Last year, Nigerians abroad even remitted over $20 billion back to the country, exceeding its foreign direct investment. This statistic does more than simply demonstrate the economic success enjoyed by many Nigerians abroad; it offers insight into the intimate connections we have to the nation of our birth—or of our parents’ or grandparents' birth. It also shows that, where the government has failed to create economic conditions for the average Nigerian to meet their basic needs, Nigerians individually and collectively have offered the necessary support to fill the gap.
This, however, reveals a truth that has persisted from one generation to the next: Nigeria’s potential has not staved off its reality.
"I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential."
While the truth of any country exists beyond what data reveals, it cannot be entirely ignored. The numbers show that by most measures, Nigerians at home are collectively worse off than they were even a decade ago. Its GDP per capita, for example, has fallen to an estimated $835.49 this year; just four years ago, that figure was $2,057. Unsurprisingly, this has meant an exacerbation of extreme poverty, even as, notoriously, the combined worth of the nation’s five wealthiest people could put an end to it should they so choose.
Just as unsurprising is that Nigeria’s rate of unemployment remains high, despite the National Bureau of Statistics’ recent manipulation to arrive at the now low 4.3% figure, after surpassing 30% unemployment just a few years ago. Simultaneously, the cost of living in Nigeria has escalated to its worst in a generation, while rising security concerns, rife in different parts of the country for different reasons, have made it difficult to determine the sheer scale of crime nationally.
Put together, then, the potential of Nigeria is exponential. But the reality of Nigeria is we have a multigenerational kleptocratic political class with little interest in strengthening the nation’s institutions or improving the lives of ordinary people. Whatever improvements have been made—for decades—have been in spite of this class, and often by the sheer will of persistent individuals and grassroots community initiatives.
"Seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice."
You might not know any of this, of course, if you only frequent, or are attentive to, the country during its Detty December period, where the weeks-long partying never ends in the palatable parts of its Lagos metropolis. Even with hiked prices and complaints from Nigerians at home and abroad, who go less for the merriment than to visit family, the period shows no signs of easing. People anywhere, I believe, have a right to enjoyment despite whatever depths of despair we may find ourselves in. But when does this enjoyment start to become smoke and mirrors for the lack—and a desensitization to the lack—experienced by most Nigerians?
If it sounds like I am describing a country on the brink, my visits in the last two years, especially, have felt like I was witnessing it, too. This is the same country where many of our parents survived a late ’60s civil war and perennial eras of dictatorship through to the ’90s. And yet, the country today seems somehow less tolerable, because the last decade of governance has revealed even the smallest gains can be reversed; that this is not a developing country, but a regressing one.
Having frequently meditated on the state of the nation’s potential versus its reality, I’ve found myself inching ever closer to a resignation that what Nigeria may mostly have in my lifetime is potential—and a potential that will never even be minorly realized. What’s more is that the values that Nigerians ordinarily uphold—our ability to persevere, to get through, to make good of what is bad—is also ultimately what holds us back. Realizing this made me all the more hopeless, because how do a people resist over time and collectively when enough is never enough?
With all of this on my mind, last November, visiting Nigeria yet again, I was apprehensive; despite my own relative economic privilege, I’ve been enjoying my stays less, considering them more a labor of my particular family culture than a joyful homecoming. This visit, lasting less than 10 days, would be dominated by art and art makers across two cities—Lagos and Benin City. I’d also be making it to my ancestral hometown, Ughelli, in the Delta.
Yet for all my apprehensions, I found myself less fatigued by the state of the country than contemplative. While I would witness many swaths of society that spoke to the country’s regression, seeing the cultural and artistic production of Nigerians once again revived my belief that hope must be a practice.
Photographs from J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere's Hairstyles exhibit at MAMCO in 2001. (Photo courtesy of MAMCO / Wikimedia Commons.)
In its tenth year, ART X Lagos provided me with a swanky welcome as I encountered the who’s who of the Lagos art scene and beyond, the international fair now among Africa’s largest. Well-curated with numerous official and unofficial events, you would have to try to have a bad time. There were symposiums dedicated to the country’s different postcolonial art schools featuring the likes of Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye, founder of one of the largest art galleries in West Africa, named after herself. Then there was the live photography studio inspired by the late J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, who captured Nigerians’ hairstyles as an artistic process, reminding us of the great value of art as a cultural archive.
In the midst of craftspeople, visual artists, sculptors—upcoming and established—there was also hearteningly, programming for children, inviting them to be art makers at a young age. Away from ART X Lagos, the Fela Kuti: Afrobeat Rebellion immersive exhibition, ongoing since October, was a gratifying celebration of perhaps one of Nigeria’s most notable cultural icons. Savoring it all, the only reservation I had was a familiar one—that more than just well-off Lagosians and visitors deserve access to such things, too.
Leaving for Benin City shortly after—the old historic home of the once powerful Edo nation, famous for the Benin Bronzes—I attended the inaugural Black Music Art Festival, established by the artist Victor Ehikhamenor. The fair showcased exhibitions and a remarkable new Sculpture Park, all done in tandem with local Nigerians and featuring a plethora of young artists, including Osaru Obaseki. A multidisciplinary artist who won the surprise first prize on opening night, Obaseki stood out for many reasons, but most notably to me, for her incorporation of bronze casting, traditionally done by men. Between her work and that of her contemporaries, innovation was everywhere I looked, including in the mixed media installation Invisible Pedestrians by Seidougha Linus Eyimiegha, AKA Mr. Danfo, and a studio visit with artist Derek Jombo, who blends surrealism with classical realism in portraits of postcolonial Nigerians.
Osaru Obaseki. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)
On the way to Ughelli, four hours by road from Benin, I traveled with a colleague turned friend, Agohogo Otega, a photojournalist and artist whose work I was finally able to purchase after years of eyeing a particular piece showcasing our hometown’s sunrise. Once in Ughelli, I spent time with a cousin I don’t often see, who has turned his artistic vocations from music to visual art once again. He shared his work with me as he told me of his future plans of pursuit.
I had not wanted the best Nigeria has to offer to trick me into succumbing once again into narratives of our potential, and it didn’t. But what happened in spending time with the full range of artists—from those who have international acclaim to those who struggle to afford the most basic items for their practice—was a reminder that while I’ve never had much faith in the Nigerian political class, if I’m to maintain my ties to the country as a whole, I cannot afford to give up on its people.
"Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems."
This includes their many achievements despite the countless factors working against them. Aside from art, even with inadequate infrastructural support, everything from agritech businesses to renewable energy companies are still advancing, continually exhibiting to those that control the nation’s purse strings what the future could be, long before they’ve invested in it. Despite the very real partly religious conflicts and sometimes ensuing violence that has occurred in various parts of the country, for the most part, we also do more than tolerate each other: I was born in Ibadan, and if you’ve ever been there, you know that one’s neighbors are just as likely to be Christian as they are to be Muslim (or traditionalists) and celebrating each other’s festivities is part of the city’s ethos. There are many more Ibadans in Nigeria than not.
It’s why the characterization of Western (and Western-minded)politicians and pundits who don’t understand (or intentionally misunderstand) the complex dynamics of the nation—quick to weaponize “Christian genocide” rhetoric—are speaking out of turn; there are too many additional factors at play to oversimplify our national woes. It is true that Nigeria has an ethnocentrism problem that has seldom been adequately examined in the context of power and privilege, akin to racism. But for a people who still embody the memory of our once independent precolonial nations, that we have never really had many leaders keen to unite us—and in fact have leaders even today who weaponize our differences—my sense is we often belittle our everyday congeniality towards each other. A congeniality I would like to see more of in how we regard each other’s cultural expressions.
Derek Jombo. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)
Given all the tragedies of Nigeria, I remain astonished at the art and the artists the country produces. For a country that is in such dire straits, that quite frankly, has so much for its ordinary citizens to be attentive to, and where institutional support for the creative industries is dire, our artistic production feels like a small miracle. Beyond this, Nigerian families are notorious, if stereotyped, as discouraging their children from artistic undertakings, preferring they go into “practical” fields—medicine, engineering, or otherwise. Of course, there is also the wide gap of privilege: The difference between what a wealthy child is exposed to in Lagos artistically, and what a child from the working poor will be exposed to in Lagos, or Ughelli, or Benin, is great—a distance that ordinarily only exacerbates my despair. But I’d be lying if I didn't admit that it also gives me hope that Nigerians—and that is, ordinary Nigerians—refuse to sacrifice art at the altar of the country’s plethora of problems, as something only to be pursued by the elite.
It is here that Nigeria’s potential merges with its reality. Whether accompanied with other “practical work,” or disappointing their families, or restricting themselves to smaller towns and cities, Nigeria’s artists continue on. Many, without fame and certainly almost no fortune, continue on. And little else can explain why, other than because they can’t help themselves. It is something they must do, even with no fairytale ending in sight, because the art itself is the point. This, above all, is where the unexpected hope lies among a people obsessed with reaping the fruits of one’s labor: that even still, in spite of our condition, creating itself, and not its aftermath, is what matters most.
[post_title] => Where Nigeria's Potential Meets Its Reality
[post_excerpt] => In the face of the country's plethora of problems, its artists continue on.
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Looking back at the courage of activists in decades past can help keep you from falling into hopelessness today.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to quit “doomscrolling” at night.
It was going okay, until the Minnesota ICE raids accelerated in late January, and staying glued to my phone felt like all I could do to help from an ocean away. A few days later, there was news of yet another anti-trans bathroom bill passing, this time in Kansas, after over 600 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills were introduced across the United States last year. That same week, the Epstein files were released.
Previously ongoing for several years, my doomscrolling had instilled in me a sense of hopelessness that didn’t allow for any light to shine in. After I relapsed, I began to make nihilistic jokes about how dire everything felt, heavy bags under my eyes amidst my renewed nighttime habit. Instead of transphobic laws, anti-immigration sentiment, and sky-high rent existing as separate issues to be tackled with careful activism, all of the “bad” in the world morphed into one large, unintelligible blob, entitled “the horrors.”
Concerned about the possible damage I was doing to my brain, I sought advice from Melody Li, therapist and founder of Inclusive Therapists and Mental Health Liberation. They confirmed my fears were legitimate: According to Li, a “sense of despair” is one of the primary mental health impacts of doomscrolling.
“Social media feeds and the algorithm are designed to be addictive and to keep us scrolling to generate profit,” Li says. “[This] may manifest as feelings of depression, anxiety and hopelessness. When combined with loneliness—as these apps are designed to keep us isolated from community and real-world interactions—the despair may even heighten.”
I knew my anxiety and sense of hopelessness were increasing due to what was going on in the world around me. Unsure of how to stop it, however, I decided to turn to my work and community for guidance.
I am a queer journalist working on a long-term assignment about historic LGBTQIA+ activism, which includes researching movements led by queer British women. On one of my most fun work days, I read about a group of British women known as the Lesbian Avengers, who staged demonstrations against an infamous Thatcher-era law which banned discussion of LGBTQIA+ topics in schools. In 1988, as the law was debated in Parliament, the Avengers threw lengths of washing line over the House of Lords balcony, and abseiled into the chamber. They were immediately thrown out of the building, though some of the group were arrested and put in a “cell by Big Ben,” released several hours later. Despite their efforts, the law passed anyway, and was in place for 15 years until its repeal in 2003, but learning of the Avengers’ bravery and creativity in standing against it was galvanizing.
It also sparked a realization that I wasn’t achieving much by doomscrolling except augmenting my anxiety: If just one story could stir a hope I hadn’t experienced in years, what might learning about others do?
I began with two of the best-known examples of LGBTQIA+ resistance: the 1960s Stonewall Riots and Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in New York and California, respectively. Both were led by trans women and drag queens resisting police harassment and violence, inspiring Pride protests as we know them today. Wanting to better understand the wider movement, I decided to dig further into past and ongoing LGBTQIA+ demonstrations across the globe, and was astonished by the rich history that rarely ever makes it to the mainstream.
I learned, for example, about the prolonged fight for India’s Hijra (transgender and intersex, otherwise known as “third gender”) community to achieve voting rights in 1994. The campaign group, All India Hijra Kalyan Sabha, had already secured their right to vote after a decade of organizing, but in the 90s, “third gender” was still not an option on electoral rolls, forcing voters to choose between “male” and “female”. After years of further activism, the Supreme Court of India finally recognized “third gender” on official documents in 2014.
In Argentina, legal safeguards for LGBTQIA+ people were propelled by a group of twenty activists who stormed the Buenos Aires Constituent Assembly on August 27, 1996. The group carried large photos of Carlos Jáuregui, a gay activist who died of AIDS-related causes the week prior. Jáuregui was widely known for his HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns, for creating the LGBTQIA+ group Gays por los Derechos Civiles in 1991, and for attempting to sue the Archbishop of Buenos Aires for discrimination. He also organized the first ever Pride March in the city in 1992, which was made up of around 300 people, many of whom wore masks to avoid being recognized. (Buenos Aires Pride now attracts around a million people.)
During the August 27 demonstration, activists tracked down members of the commission, refusing to leave until they signed a statement of support for outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Days later, on August 30, the anti-discrimination clause was approved into the Constitution of the city of Buenos Aires, which became the first city in Spanish-speaking Latin America to legally protect LGBTQIA+ people from discrimination. Today, Argentina’s LGBTQIA+ rights are rated higher than the UK and the US due to their strong protections against hate crimes.
In Uganda, the LGBTQIA+ community continues to stand up against mounting discrimination with joy and courage, throwing “guerrilla-style” Pride celebrations despite some of the strictest anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in the world. At great personal risk, activists and allies alike have fought through several channels, including legally challenging the country’s anti-LGBTQIA+ laws. A group of Ugandan mothers of LGBTQIA+ people even took on the President in an open letter criticizing homophobic legislation, writing that it has been “horrific” to see their children “verbally threatened, physically targeted and abused for who they are and for whom they love.”
Especially touching to me while investigating these brave, public feats of political activism was the knowledge that they were so often preceded by decades of quieter community-based activism—like the lesbians in San Diego who stepped up to donate blood during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the “buddy systems” which paired people living with HIV with an ally who “provided care, support and friendship when many people turned their backs,” the communities who fundraised for their vulnerable neighbors, and the friends who acted as each other’s chosen families. Many of these past activists’ strategies mirrored anti-ICE action in Minnesota, like noise protests, sit-ins, and mutual aid, demonstrating that in-person organization and community continue to be effective and powerful.
To curb some of these negative consequences, Li suggests allocating time limits on certain apps, turning off notifications, and setting boundaries with friends who might send you “doom” content. They also emphasize engaging with our communities—offline.
“Being in community helps us build collective power and systems of care that center our voices and needs,” they explain. “Doomscrolling will spiral us into isolation and a sense of helplessness… We must resist these tactics by taking part in community, where we can share resources, organize, strategize, and make change together.”
Li’s advice on harnessing our collective power has been especially meaningful to me, though I do still find myself doomscrolling on nights I can’t sleep. But more than before, I’m able to ease the urge to give into hopelessness by gaining strength from the past. I remember the women who abseiled into Parliament, the people who risked their lives dancing in the streets for Pride, the community protesting for trans rights today, and those who have bravely faced, and continue to face, the “doom” head-on. They remind me that the opposite of doomscrolling is action, and I have begun to act—to volunteer with my local LGBTQIA+ community, to amplify marginalized voices, to join local protest groups. Because of their example, I am able to turn away from the cold blue light of the screen, and instead find the light in the community around me.
[post_title] => How To Quit Doomscrolling When the World Is on Fire
[post_excerpt] => Looking back at the courage of activists in decades past can help keep you from falling into hopelessness today.
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How women impacted by incarceration are building new futures for themselves and their communities.
This article originally appeared in Ms. magazine as “Breaking the Cycle,” a three-part series on how women impacted by incarceration are building new futures—from education and job training, to debate teams and book clubs inside jails.
For Women Leaving Prison, Education Can Be a Way Out
Standing at the bottom of the steps, waiting for her name to be called, Stephanie King took a deep breath. She was ready to walk across the stage at Tulane University and receive her diploma.
“At that moment, I knew it was a bigger deal than I had allowed myself to believe,” she told Ms.
King was 63 years old. She had spent 27 years, seven months, and 24 days in prison. She had never attended a graduation ceremony outside a corrections facility. As a teenager, she dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant. It would be 13 years before she obtained her high school diploma—and that was in jail.
“I just wanted to walk across that stage,” she says.
King was the first person to graduate from the college-in-prison program offered by Tulane University and Operation Restoration, a Louisiana-based organization that provides education, housing, and other resources to women impacted by the criminal justice system.
(Courtesy of Stephanie King.)
Syrita Steib, who herself spent nearly 10 years in prison, started the organization in 2016. Upon her release in 2009, she found no reentry resources specifically for women in New Orleans. She applied to college and was initially denied after disclosing her conviction. Two years later, she reapplied without revealing that history; she was accepted.
While completing her degree to become a clinical lab scientist, Steib applied for a lab assistant license. As part of her licensing application, she once again had to disclose her conviction history. But the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners considers each case individually and, fortunately, several of her professors were on the board. Her conviction was not held against her.
Female incarceration increased by more than 600 percent between 1980 and 2023. While women and girls make up approximately 10 percent of the nation’s imprisoned population, they have far fewer opportunities than their male counterparts—both inside and upon release.
For years, Louisiana was considered the nation’s “prison capital.” There, efforts to reduce incarceration largely focused on Black men and boys. Steib founded Operation Restoration to address this gender disparity, and it’s one of a growing number of programs across the nation serving women impacted by the justice system.
Steib graduated college. She became a clinical laboratory scientist. She started a family.
She also joined the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, a network of justice-impacted women advocating for state and federal policy changes. Through the council, she met Vivian Nixon, a formerly incarcerated woman and then-executive director of College and Community Fellowship, which works to help justice-impacted women in New York City pursue higher education, and assists formerly incarcerated women in other cities working on reentry.
Meeting women in these nonprofits gave Steib blueprints for how to create a nonprofit that addresses women’s incarceration in Louisiana in ways that are impactful, sustainable, and long-lasting.
Operation Restoration began with direct services, providing clothing for women returning home from incarceration and GED tutoring for women in jail and out in the community. By then, Steib was working in a supervisory role at a hospital. Whenever applicants checked the box disclosing their criminal history, she made sure to walk them through what to expect during the interview process and how to present themselves so that board examiners saw past their conviction.
From there, Steib’s organization grew to include a lab assistant training program open to women both inside prison and outside in New Orleans. It developed its Safety and Freedom Fund to post bail for people who could not afford it and to connect them with other resources needed while awaiting trial. The organization also joined advocacy efforts to remove barriers to reentry, including amending the question about criminal history on public college application forms.
In 2017, Operation Restoration began a partnership with Tulane University to offer college courses at the Louisiana Correctional Institution for Women in St. Gabriel, just south of Baton Rouge.
By then, King had already been imprisoned for more than 20 years. She had taken other courses at the prison, including a degree program offered by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. But she knew that when she finally did walk out of the prison gates, she needed as many skills and as much education as she could get.
“I knew that the answer to breaking the cycle that I had been going in since I was 15 was going to come through education,” she says.
But getting an education in prison has a unique set of challenges. Students struggle to acquire basic supplies, like pens, calculators, paper, folders, notebooks, erasers, and highlighters. Operation Restoration had to provide these—as well as textbooks.
Students cannot conduct their own research. Instead, they rely on Tulane students, who are sent lists of research requests written out on paper. Often what the women get in return isn’t what they were looking for. Once, King intended to write a paper about the disparity in educational programs in men’s and women’s prisons. But the materials she received weren’t what she needed, so she had to pivot to a different topic.
The actions of others, even if they aren’t enrolled in the program, affect the students as well. During a semester when students were studying movies and TV shows, a woman in the prison was caught watching a show on someone else’s tablet—a violation of the institution’s rules. In response, the prison removed movies from all prison tablets. The students and instructor managed to get through the rest of the class, but without access to the shows and films they had intended to watch and analyze.
In October 2023, King was released from prison. She had been in the middle of two classes and had nine more to go. Tulane allowed her to finish her classes online. Federal student aid paid for her tuition; Operation Restoration paid for her books and other materials. King, who was incarcerated in 1996 when beepers were the latest technology, had to learn 21st century tools.
Lacking a computer, King figured out how to use her cell phone to Zoom into classes and turn in her papers. The professors worked to accommodate her, but she no longer had access to the peer support system she had built inside prison, where she and five other students in her housing unit frequently turned to each other with questions or for support. Outside, and in Baton Rouge—far from Tulane’s New Orleans campus—she had to figure out everything on her own. Still, if not for Operation Restoration, King wouldn’t have had that opportunity at all. Now approaching its 10th year, the organization reportedly provided 22,650 direct services and worked with 2,058 women from 2020 to 2024 alone.
(Courtesy of Operation Restoration.)
M.D., who asked that only her initials be published, learned about Operation Restoration when her mother went to bail her out of jail. Members of the organization’s Safety and Freedom Fund paid M.D.’s bail. They also gave her mom information on the organization. When M.D. contacted them, she learned about the lab assistant program. (M.D.’s charges were later dropped.)
“I didn’t even know what [being a lab assistant] was,” she says.
Still, as a single mother, she knew she needed a career that paid better than what she earned as a restaurant hostess. Operation Restoration provided childcare, allowing her to bring her 3-year-old, who played while she learned.
M.D. says she was intimidated by some subjects, but her classmates motivated each other and the cohort learned together. After graduating, she was hired at a local hospital.
“She came in with green scrubs,” Steib recalls. “She was dancing, and she was so excited. That was such a drastic change from us bailing her out and her and her daughter living in this one room at her mom’s house.”
Later, M.D. was arrested again after her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend called the police on her. Operation Restoration not only bailed her out, but spoke with her hospital supervisors so that she didn’t lose her job.
They also spoke with M.D., encouraging her not to jeopardize the new life she had built.
“We had those tough conversations with her, like, ‘You can’t put yourself in that position for a man. You got to figure out how to control your emotions,’” Steib says. “She appreciated that we didn’t quit on her.”
M.D. attended an expungement workshop, applying to remove the arrest from her record. (She is currently awaiting the judge’s approval.)
Kendreka, who asked that only her first name be published, has never been incarcerated. But her children’s father cycled in and out of jail, leaving her to raise their two sons. During one of his absences, she lost her job. A friend told her about Operation Restoration and its lab assistant program.
“I had always wanted to be in the medical field,” Kendreka told Ms. But drawing blood scared her, so she never pursued that avenue.
She enrolled in the eight-week program and became a licensed lab assistant. She stopped juggling three jobs and instead found a position at a local hospital. The schedule is still grueling—12-hour shifts for seven days followed by seven days off work—but having every other week off allows her to spend time with her sons, now ages 10 and 12.
“If it wasn’t for Operation Restoration, I don’t know where I’d have ended up,” she says. “It has set me up to be where I am now.”
Inside the DC Jail Debate Team, Women Find Their Voice
“I know of a woman who spent the majority of her first prison bid in isolation. She didn’t have access to any programs to help her heal from her childhood trauma, abuse, neglect and depression,” Chelsee Wright wrote in remarks she prepared for a February debate. “The lack of mental health treatment led her to self-mutilate and multiple suicide attempts.”
Wright is part of the DC Jail Debate Team. Started in 2024, it’s the first coed team of the National Prison Debate League. Each semester, up to 20 participants—many of whom have no previous debate experience—meet twice a week at the Washington, D.C., jail where they are incarcerated.
Each semester starts with a mini-debate on questions like “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” or “Is ice cream the best dessert?” From there, the participants vote on 10 potential topics related to incarceration and prepare for a debate against a university team.
Like people in prisons, those in jails do not have access to research materials. Law students at Georgetown University put together evidence packets—typically 200 pages for the affirmative and 80 pages for the negative. Each member of the jail debate team is responsible for reading the entire packet and coming to class prepared to discuss what’s missing and whether more research is needed.
London Teeter takes the stand to argue against mandatory minimum sentences. (Courtesy of Sarah Istel.)
“They’re really mastering the material,” says Sarah Istel, a cofounder of the debate program and volunteer coach. Once they’ve done so, they fill out their preferences for debate roles: affirmative speakers, rebuttal speakers or closers.
“There are different kinds of roles,” Istel notes. “Some require thinking on your feet more. Some require more lengthy [arguments] written in advance.”
Participants write the first drafts of their arguments and refine them through practice debates in class.
But conditions in jail are often unconducive to preparation. They cannot do their own research or type their drafts. They cannot have binders or paper clips to organize their notes. Cell searches scatter their papers. Still, students not only persevere, but support one another, encouraging and helping each other with their arguments.
Inside or out, coed classes carry the potential for male students to dominate at the expense of their female classmates. The coaches strive to ensure that women aren’t overlooked. At least two of each semester’s six speaking roles go to women.
London Teeter, now 22, joined the team after giving birth behind bars. She had spent her third trimester on the medical unit, where she was locked in her cell for 22 hours a day. Only one other woman was on the unit (their babies were born 15 days apart) and other than those two hours outside her cell, Teeter had nothing to do and no one to talk to.
At first, she didn’t want a speaking role in the debate. “I have really bad speaking anxiety,” she says.
But with her coaches’ encouragement, Teeter agreed to speak in the debate about mandatory minimums, laws that require judges to impose specific minimum prison sentences for certain crimes, regardless of the defendant’s circumstances. She asked for the closing, which, at 90 seconds, was the shortest role. Istel and the other coaches persuaded her to take on a larger role—and she did.
Teeter went through the packet and pulled out the most meaningful arguments. She also worked her own story into the materials.
“It was tricky because I’m not great at talking about myself,” she says. “I also wanted to make sure it included my team.”
London Teeter. (Courtesy of Sarah Istel.)
When she presented her first draft, her classmates were brought to tears. Last May, Teeter stepped up to the podium in the debate against Towson University.
“I currently face a mandatory minimum, as does every speaker on my team. And in total, our team faces a minimum of 198 years behind bars,” she began.
She went on to enumerate her arguments against mandatory minimums: their failure to prevent crime, their diversion from more effective resources, the devastation of families, the colossal price tag of long sentences, and prosecutors’ weaponization of mandatory minimums to coerce guilty pleas.
“Imagine being a 20-year-old woman, a first-time offender, no criminal background and 24 weeks pregnant when arrested. To exercise her fundamental right to trial, she faces a mandatory minimum of 49 years and even eventually was forced to give birth while incarcerated."
“This woman is me,” she said as she drew her argument to a close. “Before my team and I leave today, we ask that you remember, each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. Each of us deserves a chance to be considered as an individualized person, not a statistic, and it starts by abolishing mandatory minimums.”
The jail team won the debate.
~
The only time Chelsee Wright had ever attempted a public speaking role, she was so nervous that she stuttered.
Joining the debate team gave her an opportunity to overcome her fears. “I wanted to be able to stand up in front of a lot of people without stuttering,” the 31-year-old told Ms.
After she delivered her first speech to the group, her teammates gave her feedback: read slower, make more eye contact, emphasize certain words. She followed those suggestions, and by the time she read her final speech, she could look at her teammates and coaches and deliver a powerful argument. They gave her a standing ovation.
Wright’s sentencing was originally scheduled for this past December, but she requested that it be postponed so she could finish the debate program.
Wherever she’s transferred to serve her sentence, she plans to attend college.
“I didn’t attend [in jail] because I thought it was too hard for me,” she says.
The debate team taught her otherwise. Being part of the team, she says, “gave me confidence. It made me realize who I am and how far I can go, and that my voice can always be heard.”
At a February debate about solitary confinement, Wright used her voice in her closing remarks: “When her release date was near, she intentionally assaulted numerous officers. She needed more time."
“Three years later, she thought she was ready … but the outside world was intimidating. Now this individual is back in jail on a charge that could have been avoided if she had learned healthier outlets. Being home felt uncomfortable. You wouldn’t believe this, but solitary felt like home. Being controlled, degraded and caged in was what she was used to. They don’t feel deserving of freedom. No human should feel like this, to the point where human contact is frightening.”
She paused for a few seconds, then added, “And by the way … the woman I just described is me.”
At Rikers, a Book Club Is Helping Women Imagine Life Beyond Bars
In 2024, comedian Nora Fried started the Rosebuds Reading Collective, a monthly book club for women incarcerated at Rikers Island, New York City’s island jail.
After considering local volunteer opportunities, Fried set out to start a jail reading group to find a way to make a difference using literature as an outlet and a lifeline. She put out feelers about a book discussion group to several organizations and was surprised when the director of volunteer programs at Rikers Island responded.
Fried purchased copies of Tara Westover’s Educated, a memoir about a woman’s journey from a Mormon survivalist family in rural Idaho to earning her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, and in February 2025 she sat with nine women in a jail classroom to talk about it.
Rosebuds quickly became a popular program (22 women attended the last meeting). Discussions aren’t limited to the book. “Women cry, share personal stories about their cases,” Fried told Ms. “I always make it very clear that what happens in this room stays in this room.”
Jails are transitory. Each week, some women are sentenced and either transferred or released. Each day, new women arrive to await adjudication. Books must be approved and ordered in advance, and not every woman receives the book before the meeting. Fried estimates that 80 to 90 percent of attendees are new. But Fried, who performs stand-up, is used to reading and winning over an audience, a skill set she uses each month.
“I was looking forward to this all month,” Fried recalls multiple women telling her. “This is the only thing I had to look forward to.”
The women read Down the Drain, a memoir by actor Julia Fox. After the discussion, Fried tagged Fox on Instagram. Fox, whose brother was incarcerated at Rikers at the time, agreed to visit the group.
Although Fox had visited friends and family at Rikers many times before, this time was different. “I felt like I’d known these girls my whole life,” she says. “They are amazing, remarkable, intelligent young women [who] made mistakes. We’ve all made mistakes. Some of us are lucky enough not to get caught.”
Julia Fox facilitates a monthly creative writing workshop at Rikers Island. (Courtesy of Rosebuds Reading Collective.)
Fox learned that her book was a particularly hot commodity and that one woman’s copy had been stolen. Still, all were curious about how a girl like them had become a published author. The room resonated with laughter, from both the incarcerated women and the guards.
“It made me think to myself, I would do this every weekend. I want to come back. I love these girls,” Fox says.
“I’ve been there,” she recalls. “I have been in trouble with the law. I was facing a lengthy jail sentence if I didn’t turn my life around. … We’re cut from the same cloth, but I got really lucky. I want to make sure that they’re awarded the same opportunities and grace that I was given.”
After Fox’s visit, Fried added a 15-to-20-minute creative writing component. “A lot of women were really inspired by Julia’s book to start writing,” she notes.
Now Fox facilitates a monthly creative writing workshop. She had her own brushes with the legal system as a teenager. She says she found creative writing to be a therapeutic, cathartic release and she wanted to share that. Fox creates prompts from the books the group has read, such as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild about reinventing your life.
“You wake up in your dream life. What does it look like?” Fox asks the group.
Then, she encourages participants to read their writing aloud. Some stride to the front of the classroom. Others read aloud from their seats, while the shiest writers only allow Fox to read over their shoulders.
Fox is awed by the women’s willingness to share and show vulnerability, especially in a setting where vulnerability is often seen as weakness. She marvels at their bravery in standing before a group of near-strangers and sharing their deepest desires.
“My dream is that they each write something and we get it published somewhere,” Fox says. Reflecting on her own life, she adds, “For me, that was huge.”
That’s not the only goal that Fried and Fox have for Rosebuds. They hope to eventually expand, partnering with other organizations to offer more. For now they’re providing books and a safe space to dream of life beyond bars.
As Fox says, “Aim for the moon and land in the stars.”
Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana.
To get ahead of the odds against them—an unsympathetic media, a punitive legislature influenced by the American Christian right, and a public uninformed about biological diversity—the intersex movement in Ghana has had to get crafty.
In January 2025, the Ghanaian government announced a new constitutional review process, instituted by President John Mahama shortly after he was sworn in. Its main aims were to “propose reforms to enhance transparency, limit executive power, strengthen checks and balances, and improve judicial and local government structures."
In it, however, the intersex movement saw an opportunity: All of Ghana’s constitution could be reviewed. This included Article 17, which states that all are equal before the law and no one is to be discriminated against on the basis of race, place of origin, political opinions, color, gender, occupation, religion, or creed. If the movement could propose a review of Article 17, they reasoned, perhaps they could amend it to explicitly include that no one could be discriminated against based on their sex characteristics, or if they are of indeterminate gender (intersex).
It seemed like a solid plan.
After several strategy meetings, legal review, and input from constitutional law experts, however, the leaders of the movement realized it would not be so straightforward. Article 17 represented an “entrenched position," meaning a long-held view that was unlikely to change. As such, not only would it be difficult to convince the public of the importance of including intersex people for protection under the constitution, socially; legally, it would also require a referendum to pass.
The intersex movement already had only a few allies among the political class, and based on their findings, they also knew a majority of the public did not understand the concept of indeterminate gender—that someone may be born male with female sex organs, for instance, and should not be discriminated against for something out of their control. Making matters worse, the media also regularly conflated sexuality with gender in bad faith: A slate of investigations by friendly NGOs had revealed some major media organizations had even received funding from anti-LGBTQIA+ rights groups.
They changed tack.
Instead, the movement decided to seek an intervention through Article 28, which provides for the protection of children’s rights. They proposed that the provision be updated to explicitly ensure the recognition and protection of intersex children, who, in Ghana, are currently subjected to “corrective” and “forced” surgeries and medical procedures, according to firsthand accounts reported to Intersex Ghana, the country’s first intersex-led human rights organization.
Specifically, the group hoped to protect intersex children from “medically unnecessary, nonconsensual and irreversible procedures, intended to alter their sex characteristics.” These speculative procedures—sanctioned by doctors and parents without due consideration for the well-being of the child—can have lifelong physical, psychological, and even economic consequences, impairing the child’s ability to make a living in the future, says Lawrence Shone Edem Adjei, director of Intersex Ghana, over a video call.
"At age 14, I have undergone more than six surgeries after non-consensual procedures were performed on me at birth. I feel like the doctors used me for studies,” intersex advocate Emmanuella Kwarteng shared in one testimonial.
Kwarteng’s experience is not an uncommon one, and Intersex Ghana has had to intervene in a number of medical cases gone awry. In one particular case, Adjei recounts that a child had gone through up to eight surgeries over a span of ten years. Initially, their testes were removed, and the child was identified as female. Years later, doctors realized their initial procedure had caused the child to begin bleeding internally during menstruation. An additional surgery then had to be performed to remove the child’s womb.
“It's like just trial and error," Adjei says.
To make the case for intersex children in front of the constitutional review committee, and to prevent this from happening again, the intersex movement put together a murderer’s row of accomplices. Alongside activists like Adjei, this included two doctors, three lawyers, a High Court judge, and families with intersex children who could share their lived experiences.
It was a particularly precarious time: The intersex rights movement was working with significantly fewer resources than it had ever had. Intersex Ghana and other NGOs had been depleted by the U.S.-led funding cuts to pro-LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy groups all over the world, and philanthropic support had dried up.
The movement was throwing everything it had left at this case. Before the constitutional review committee, it had a few propositions. First, that the Ghanaian government provides an additional gender “I” (or intersex) on its Birth and Death registry upon discovery at birth that a child is not identified with one gender. Second, that the Ghanaian government outlaws and criminalizes forced surgeries to deter doctors from performing them, regardless of the demands of the child’s parents. Controversially, by Adjei’s own admission, “We are not in favor of the parents serving consent.” Instead, the movement proposed that the intersex individual be allowed to develop naturally. When the child is of age, they can then make an informed decision on their own bodies.
The advocates made their case to the constitutional review panel, drawing precedent from a case in Kenya. In the 2014 case, Baby A v Attorney General, an intersex child was denied a birth certificate because their sex had been marked with a question mark, effectively barring them from participating in civic life. The court, hedging, declined to admit a human rights violation, but still ordered the state to issue the birth certificate and begin the slow work of collecting data, developing medical guidelines, and contemplating a legal framework for intersex people. As a result of the case, the Kenyan government is now mandated to collect data on intersex individuals, and consider legal reforms and protections for them more broadly.
This landmark court case eventually resulted in an Intersex Persons Bill in 2024 which, among other things, guaranteed the “prohibition of harmful medical practices” against intersex people—including children.
The advocates argued that Ghana should follow Kenya’s example and recognize intersex people as a distinct legal entity, allow for intersex markers in civil documentation, include intersex persons in national census and data gathering, and establish a national commission for intersex individuals. They further argued that the condition of being “intersex” is not in conflict with Ghanaian cultural values by demonstrating support from religious and traditional leaders.
After months of deliberation, which included hearing from anti-intersex and anti-LGBTQ+ groups opposed to the proposed changes, Ghana’s constitutional review committee reached a decision. They recommended to the government that the constitution be amended to “provide for the right of every child to bodily integrity, including freedom from irreversible, non-consensual medical or surgical interventions that are not strictly necessary to preserve life or prevent serious and immediate harm; that the best interests of the child shall override social, cosmetic, cultural or expediency-based justifications for invasive medical procedures; for protection for intersex children, recognising their distinctive vulnerability to medically unnecessary ‘normalising’ interventions carried out before informed consent is possible.”
The movement was thrilled.
Their excitement, however, was short-lived. Soon after the committee submitted its recommendations, anti-intersex rhetoric started appearing in the press. On a national news show, Ghanaian legislator Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah called the proposed protections the “most crucial” part of the constitutional review, claiming the changes would “transform our constitution”—but not for the better.
“We know that these things can be the entrance of LGBTQ,” Awuah said, repeating a common trope widespread in the media that conflates sexuality with gender. “You want to sneak this into the constitution!”
Awuah was not accusing anyone in particular with his statement, but turned to fellow guest Oliver Barker-Vormawor, an activist and lawyer involved in the constitutional deliberations. In response, Barker-Vormawor defended the committee’s recommendations.
“We're saying that these are medical decisions that must be made, not parents using cultural basis to demand for surgeries to be imposed on children,” Barker-Vormawor said, reiterating their intentions.
In reality, the intersex movement in Ghana has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the LGBTQ+ movement as a safety and security strategy. It is also one of the biggest criticisms the movement faces from its potential allies. When an anti-LGBTQ+ bill was first introduced in Ghana in July 2021, intersex advocates campaigned tirelessly for the removal of intersex persons from the law, which included recommendations for surgery and hormonal treatments to “correct” them. Later that year, Intersex Ghana sent a memo to the Ghanaian legislature’s Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, asking for the bill to be thrown out in its entirety. But overall, the movement continues to tread the line between distinction and solidarity with its LGBTQ+ allies as best it can.
Still, some argue the two movements are ultimately inseparable because of their intersections: There are people who are intersex and trans; or intersex and gay.
“The movement has become too medicalized,” intersex and trans activist Awo Dufie Fofie says.
Dufie, assigned male at birth, later discovered she was intersex in her 20s, and initially went great lengths to reverse the growth of breast tissue in her body. At some point, she was taking fifteen pills a day. Upon meeting a queer elder—who had also been born a hypereffeminate male, but had socially transitioned to female in the 1950s—Awo stopped blocking estrogen in her body and instead let her body develop as it would without pharmaceutical intervention.
The intersex movement often has to make its case through visual aids of intersex bodies, Dufie argues, and as such, she believes it has created “a system that becomes a bit puritan about who can rightfully call themselves intersex and who is intersex enough to represent the community.” When Awo decided to transition, she was even advised by a fellow advocate that if she made it public, it would make the intersex movement “look bad."
"It is my sincere hope that intersex advocacy…adopts a much more decolonial framework and approach which embodies and centers the entire experiences of intersex people, such as their everyday lives,” she says. “Not only what medical conditions we have and how much intersexphobia we experience.”
Adjei acknowledges the catch-22 the intersex movement finds itself in, and understands why it believes it has to advocate for itself by providing distinctions between sexuality and gender. But she also believes it must also be in solidarity with the queer movement because of their overlap and intersections—including continued discrimination. “Ghanaians will not differentiate between an intersex person walking by and an LGBT person,” Adjei says. An effeminate but masculine-presenting intersex person is just as likely to be attacked—as has happened in many cases across the country—as a gay man expressing himself in a way that might be considered feminine.
“I was not seen as human growing up… because I had two genitalia,” Comfort Bugre, an intersex person, shared in a testimonial presented to the review committee.
“Growing up, I was isolated from people due to my intersex condition. I was relocated because people found out and started calling me names,” Elorm Enne, another intersex advocate, shared in a separate testimonial.
Currently, the hard-won constitutional review recommendation is in the implementation stage, and the Presidency has set up a committee to see how proposals may be effected.
The intersex movement is counting on seeing three things: First, large scale research on intersex people across the country, both to shed light on the quantitative heft of these protections, and to better understand the prevalence and diversity of intersexuality. Second, mass sensitization and public education across the country’s 16 regions on the harms of corrective child surgeries, in partnership with key institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Civic Education. And perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of intersex as its own gender, and protection for all intersex people in the country.
The movement is tempering ambition with pragmatism. Advocates are also preparing for an outcome where the recommendation is struck down, or isn’t implemented, either in whole or in part. But if this comes to pass, the movement—with whatever funding it has left—plans to play its trump card. There are a number of government agencies and offices that should be involved in protecting intersex children: medical boards, the Attorney General’s office, the Ministry of Health, local government administrations.
It plans to sue all of them.
~
Additional Research by Nyameye Kiki Akumia.
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A new-ish community gathering, happening May 2026.
We’re back with another Conversation Club event, and you’re invited! Conversation Club is a friendly discussion group spotlighting some of our favorite stories through hosted conversations where our writers can answer your questions and share more about how their stories came to be. It’s kind of like a book club, but you don’t have to read a whole book!
Join us Friday, May 29th, when we’ll be discussing Leila Seiitbek's recent piece, “We Must Hold the Line,” about rising global authoritarianism and billionaire-driven power. Leila is a human rights activist and lawyer from Kyrgyzstan who has spent years representing political prisoners, journalists, and activists at risk. (You may recognize her from our podcast episode on kleptocracy—same Leila!) She will chat with our Executive Editor Gina Mei, sharing what she’s learned about authoritarian repression and what we can do together in this moment to combat it. She will also answer questions from the community, including readers just like you.
Read the article, come with questions (or not—just bring your mug of tea if that’s what you’re feeling), and be in community with us. It’s an inclusive space to stay curious, informed, and connected with fellow Conversationalist readers.
You can RSVP to our next Conversation Club below, and read Leila's piece right here. We can’t wait to be in conversation with you. See you there!
How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.
In 1979, as the Iranian hostage crisis played on American television screens 24/7, the television producer, librarian, activist, and intellectual Marion Stokes began recording the news broadcasts on tape. The live coverage—across all channels, at all hours—launched what we now recognize as the never-ending, ambient flow of media. Simultaneously, Stokes recognized a shift in the narrative America was telling about itself, and the role of media manipulation toward pro-American policies. So, for the next 30 years, she recorded any and all TV news broadcasts, commercials included. All of it was then archived, stacks of VHS tapes quickly accumulating in her Philadelphia apartment, as portrayed in the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
This kind of project by an individual who operates outside of an institution was a radical endeavor: When Stokes began, broadcast channels didn’t archive their own material, often erasing tapes so they could reuse them due to cost. But Stokes’ project and its often innocuous content would also foreshadow the long-term value of guerrilla archives, both in preserving an accurate historical record and holding the media—and government—to account. Activist archives began as a practice in the 1960s, when organizers filled in the historical gaps where universities and institutions could not. These, however, were collective efforts; Stokes operated individually, until eventually, her son donated the recordings to the Internet Archive, where digitized selections are now available online. “By [Stokes] having that collection, it means the scholars, artists, and researchers have access to the information without paying for it,” says Shola Lynch, filmmaker and Professor of the Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. “Because when our history is bound up in commercial hands, that's problematic.”
Stokes’ practice of recording any and all materials resembles the history of what is now called “memory work,” or individuals who preserve the photographs, documents, and ephemera of a community. A relatively recent tradition, this form of archiving has taken on new meaning in a digital era where data sets can be wiped and personal data sold, seemingly without consequence. Following the start of the second Trump presidency in January 2025, more than 2,000 datasets suddenly disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S.’s government's data portal. Since then, the Trump administration has overhauled even more data, including entire web pages and important coding tools for researchers and climate scientists.
Over the last five decades, open source tools and government data have been integral to preserving the historical record and maintaining public infrastructure in the United States. According to America’s Essential Data, New Orleanians received smoke alarms because fire departments used American Community Survey (ACS) data to identify neighborhoods most in need. School districts could (previously) make the case for increased teacher salaries using the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) to highlight underpaid teachers. Residents could avoid scams in their community based on federal Consumer Sentinel data. Now, these records are liable to disappear from the internet, possibly forever.
The government is ultimately responsible for preserving a record of its own actions. But when federal agencies are unable to preserve all their data, or willfully choose not to, it begs the question if this work is best done by civil society and those outside of the government. Guerrilla archives—whether digital or analog like Stokes’—are generally nonpartisan acts of preservation to serve the public good. There’s the Internet Archive, which has been archiving the web and other cultural artifacts since 1996, and Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which provides the most comprehensive chronicling of evening television news broadcasts in the world. There’s also the End of Term Archive—one of the largest of these projects in progress—which downloads all government information at the end of each presidential term. It’s a grassroots alternative to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which notoriously did not receive all of the presidential records from the first Trump administration in 2021 as mandated under the Presidential Records Act. (Trump promptly fired the head of NARA when he re-entered office in 2025.)
Despite having distributed its data more digitally over the last 20 years, the government has not issued any dedicated preservation or access strategy for its information. Additionally, the current laws and policies around government data preservation are outdated and inadequate. This hole in the system has compelled librarians to join the race to copy digital federal archives, beginning in 2016 with the Data Rescue movement, which drew over 1500 volunteers for dozens of hackathon-style events throughout the year. “Distrust re-orients care,” researcher Laura Rothfritz wrote in her analysis of these early efforts for Big Data & Society. When a public distrusts a system and a possible threat is identified, however, anxiety can be mobilized into producing future forms of infrastructure.
As the situation becomes more dire, these efforts have only expanded. Today, the Public Data Project runs within the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, collecting and authenticating all federal datasets, more recently including the Smithsonian Institute’s public domain data. So far, they have downloaded the entirety of Data.gov, copied it, and digitally signed it with a provenance mark to authenticate its origins. The project launched in early 2025 as part of Harvard Law School’s repository system, which dates back centuries.
“I think a lot of us in the library and technology communities are sort of waking up to the fact that we need to have a strategy in place for the preservation and access of government data beyond what the government provides,” says Molly Hardy, the Project Lead for the Public Data Project. Their team also works closely with the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots nonprofit preserving massive data sets and consisting entirely of volunteers.
“Public data infrastructures have long been considered essential components of democratic governance, scientific accountability, and civic participation,” Rothfritz continues in her Big Data & Society piece. Much like our city’s infrastructure, however, we don’t recognize its value until it's broken. It is the invisible fiber that holds democracy together, from our roads and postal service to job numbers and environmental data. Increasingly, its preservation is also a task that has been left to individuals and communities. In October 2025, the nonprofit organization Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth web page on its most popular service, the Wayback Machine, an initiative that allows users to find web page screenshots from specific dates. It has become an essential tool and digital service for independent organizations and guerrilla archivists alike. (The largest archive on the internet, dedicated to “universal access to all knowledge,” has not been without its setbacks however: In 2024, it suffered a data breach affecting millions of users and a copyright infringement case over its digital lending library.)
The Invisible Histories Project, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina, has been preserving the digital history and cultural memory of LGBTQ+ life in the South using tools like the Wayback Machine. “We could no longer trust institutions to protect marginalized histories,” says Maigen Sullivan, the Co-Executive Director of Invisible Histories. She recalls a community effort at the start of last year to preserve government and university pages with references to diversity offices, along with flyers and photos. According to Sullivan, by August and September 2025, when universities returned to term, about a quarter of those pages were already gone. “This is the only evidence, other than what individuals might hold, that exists,” she says.
Invisible Histories has also built its own server because of mistrust in corporations like Google and Microsoft that store and hold onto their data, another issue facing digital archivists. The organization has endured two cyberattacks—one in 2023, and the other in 2025—since its founding in 2017. Because of this, they’ve considered cybersecurity training and increased security for potential threats against the archive. “If you feel like you're hopeless and helpless and have nothing to do, archiving is a tool of resistance and anyone can do it,” says Sullivan.
These examples of digital mutual aid have become essential for documenting history, and are one way to combat historical revisionism. Activist archives also continue to challenge which institutions have a say in the historical record, nationally and beyond. Zakiya Collier, a Brooklyn-based archivist, says individual archives preserve more than just data. “I think that memory work has a liberatory capacity to it,” she says. “I use that term because it calls on a legacy of people who dedicated their time and energy to preserving history in their homes, communities, churches, attics, and basements. They decided something was important to document and keep.”
Collier, who has worked as the digital archivist in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library, now works with the organization Archiving the Black Web, which trains archivists to document a more inclusive history of the internet. Its potential to create more live archives and documentations of the web aims to contribute to a more equitable historical view of how we catalogue our lives online.
As data and information is getting purposefully disappeared from the internet—an increasingly fertile ground for fascist ideology—archiving becomes increasingly necessary, or else, the public cannot bear witness to itself. In April 2025, the National Park Service erased references to Harriet Tubman on its webpages. The following month, Trump issued an executive order sanitizing federal cultural institutions by accusing the Smithsonian Institute of promoting “race-centered ideology” in its exhibit, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” The USDA ended its annual survey of hunger in America two weeks before the government shutdown in October 2025, affecting the distribution of food stamps.
Data is information and has become a weapon in the digital age. But both individuals and communities are not powerless to fight back. With the rapid monopolistic takeover of mediaplatforms, it’s no surprise that users are beginning to archive their own data and leaning towards physical media. Sales of vinyl are up, print book sales are rising, and DVD collections are in.
“All archives create futures,” says a voiceover in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, as news broadcasts and infomercials from Stokes’ archive flash in rapid pace onscreen. The organization of information by the lay person may help overcome barriers of the institutionalized index and history, as the threat of excessive online information and its disappearance still looms large for activist archives. But this work has become even more critical, not only for deciding how the past will be remembered, but how an imagined future might pull from its past to mobilize this kind of anticipatory care in the present.
[post_title] => On Guerrilla Archives in the Disinformation Age
[post_excerpt] => How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.
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How samba schools in Brazil are teaching Black history through the parades at Carnival.
The torrential rain couldn’t stop Unidos da Tijuca, one of the oldest samba schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from rehearsing in the streets. On an evening in early February, dancers flooded the Morro do Borel community, moving their bodies in unison as a crowd cheered them on, shouting their loyalty to the samba school and dancing alongside them. The crowd had been waiting for hours for the rehearsal to begin, drinking beer and barbecuing, the evening already a celebration. Now, the sound of snare drums, quick and sharp, moved each spectator to sing along to the music, as the year's anthem began to play. The performance had officially begun.
Though the parades in Rio are world-famous, attracting a global audience for Carnival each year, the greatest show in the world still belongs to these communities, where the parades—a pivotal part of the season’s festivities—originated. It is also here that these samba schools work hard year-round to honor the parades’ original purpose: bringing marginalized histories that aren’t taught in Brazilian schools to the national stage.
“Since the 1930s, samba schools have been addressing themes closely related to Brazilian history,” historian Luiz Antonio Simas tells The Conversationalist. “This created a tradition in which Brazilian history, important figures from Brazilian history, and the country's natural beauty became recurring themes [at each parade].”
Leonardo Carrato
Founded in 1931, Unidos da Tijuca is one of 12 samba schools that compete during Carnival, each putting on a parade built from scratch that highlights a different piece of forgotten Brazilian history. For this year’s parade, Unidos da Tijuca chose to tell the story of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Black Brazilian memoirist, poet, composer, playwright, and best-selling author, most known for her book Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, published in 1960 and translated into 14 languages. Last year, the school chose to tell the story of Logun-Edé, an orisha of the Black Brazilian religion Candomblé, and the year before, the influence of Portuguese folk tales on Brazilian samba music.
Other competing schools chose different figures to celebrate this year: Acadêmicos do Salgueiro paid homage to Carnival designer and professor Rosa Magalhães, a samba school legend who won six Carnival championships in the 1980s. The samba school Paraíso de Tuiuti performed a parade about Afro-Cuban religious practices, with a whole chorus written in the Yorubá language. And the 2026 winner, Unidos do Viradouro, honored Moacyr da Silva Pinto, or Mestre Ciça, the school's legendary percussion conductor.
In telling these stories, Unidos da Tijuca and other samba schools aim to make marginalized histories—and Black history in particular—more accessible through popular culture, allowing them to keep these histories alive. The construction of the parade is a year-long process that starts again right after Carnival ends, beginning with each school democratically electing a theme, running a song competition, and translating history into a visual performance through choreography that involves hundreds of dancers.
But while the parades are a joyful culmination of the schools’ efforts, for the communities each samba school represents, it’s the lead-up to the final performance that often most solidifies the history being celebrated.
Leonardo Carrato
That rainy Sunday was Unidos da Tijuca’s last street rehearsal before the official parade at the Sambadrone, and party dwellers excitedly gathered to watch an intimate preview of what would later earn the school 7th place in the official competition. At 6 PM, onlookers dressed in the colors of Unidos da Tijuca—blue and yellow—waited outside of the school, a tall building painted in yellow. The energy was high as people gathered, and the song composed for this year’s parade played loudly through speakers at the closest bar, along with songs from previous years: "Logun-Edé - Santo Menino que Velho Respeita" (“Logun-Edé - The Holy Child Old Men Respect”) and "O Conto de Fados" (“The Tale of Fairies”).
As the time for the performance neared, people began singing along to the story of Maria de Jesus, one that mirrors the stories of many Black women in Brazil today. A single mother of three, Maria de Jesus lived in the favela of Canindé in São Paulo, where she spent her time picking up recyclables to sell, taking care of her children, and writing about her day-to-day life. One of her notebooks from this time would eventually become her first best-selling book, Child of the Dark, which sold 10,000 copies in its first week of publication in 1960—an achievement that was unheard of at the time, and still rarely met in Brazil now.
But the majority of the community was unfamiliar with these details of Maria de Jesus’s life before Unidos da Tijuca chose to tell her story for the 2026 parade. “It’s essential that we talk about a person who has been made invisible by society and by the Brazilian people,” Mariah Dantas, one of the principal dancers, tells The Conversationalist. “Almost nobody remembers her importance, or how impactful she was at the time, and how important she is today. Because many women still live in poverty like she did… This isn’t just about telling Carolina’s story, but also about highlighting that Black women still live like that, and that this needs to change.”
Many of these same women also live in Morro do Borel, and saw themselves reflected in Maria de Jesus’s story for the first time. “It was the perfect choice,” Carlos Batata, member of Unidos da Tijuca and president of Unidos da Tijuquinha, a version of the samba school for children, tells The Conversationalist. “The story was unknown, [but] with time, people got to know more about Carolina’s work, and now people sing the samba song and relate and cry to it, because there are parts of the lyrics—a phrase, a chorus—that represents each woman’s story here.”
Leonardo Carrato
To accurately tell Maria de Jesus’s story, Unidos da Tijuca worked with an academic consultant on everything from the writing of the samba song’s lyrics, the design of thousands of costumes and five floats, and even some of the choreography. (The practice of hiring a consultant is relatively new across samba schools, a union of institutional education and popular education that only began around 10 years ago.) This year, Unidos da Tijuca collaborated with researcher Fernanda Felisberto, a literature professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is a part of an editorial committee that has salvaged, re-edited, and published Maria de Jesus’s work in recent years.
“For a long time, we used to say that there are histories that traditional schools don’t tell, but that Carnival will tell those histories, almost as if they’re in opposition to each other,” Felisberto says. “But in reality, we are building a process that goes hand-in-hand, especially because hiring consultants has become more and more common for samba schools. So, samba schools today are learning from these traditional sources of knowledge. The challenge for Carnival is to translate that knowledge in a way that reaches more people.”
The act of performing in community is a large part of this translation, and in Morro do Borel, it is what has brought Maria de Jesus’s story back to life. “Sou a liberdade, mãe do Canindé / Muda essa história, Tijuca / Tira do meu verso a força pra vencer / Reconhece o seu lugar e luta / Esse é o nosso jeito de escrever,” both members of the samba school and party dwellers alike screamed at the top of their lungs during the street rehearsal. (“I am freedom, mother of Canindé / Change our history, Tijuca / Get the strength to win from my verses / Recognize your place in struggle / This is our way of writing.”)
Leonardo Carrato
For this year’s parade, Felisberto says the school intentionally focused on lesser known works by Maria de Jesus, like the music she composed and recorded, and the plays she wrote, which remain unreleased to the public. They hoped to show Maria de Jesus was more than her biggest successes, in part so that she is recognized for the breadth of her creative work, which never got as much exposure as her first book. “We want people to understand that Carolina was a multidimensional artist,” Felisberto says. “Child of the Dark constructed an image of Carolina that spotlighted precarity, which is how people see her today. The challenge was to humanize her, show her failures and successes beyond a narrative around her best-selling memoir.”
Like Felisberto, many view the Carnival parades not just as a celebration marginalized histories, but as a collective experience with a lasting impact. “I consider samba songs by samba schools to be historical documents,” Simas says, adding that in his 30 years working as a history teacher in public schools in Rio, he has used samba songs as pedagogical sources. “It’s a tool to start debates, we can analyze the lyrics, study the trajectory of some historical characters who are less talked about in formal education.”
For Unidos da Tijuca member Douglas Coutinho, studying samba songs even helped him to pass his university entry exams. “My history teacher used the samba song from 2008, ‘João e Marias’ by Imperatriz Leopoldinense, [in class],” Coutinho says. “The samba song helps teachers teach, and it helps students understand the material that is being taught.”
Leonardo Carrato
Perhaps most importantly, in telling and preserving these stories through samba parades, communities are able to reclaim the narrative from the dominant classes, which tend to dismiss or downplay the importance of marginalized histories. Sometimes, it also allows these stories to become the dominant narratives—at least, during Carnival, when the media’s attention turns to the communities these samba schools represent.
“Samba schools will tell us stories that are important for the people,” says Iara Cassano, a member of Acadêmicos do Salgueiro and a samba teacher. “The dominant narratives will tell histories that are important to the elites… Carnival gives us autonomy to tell our own histories.”
[post_title] => A History Lesson Through Samba
[post_excerpt] => How samba schools in Brazil are teaching Black history through the parades at Carnival.
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We’re kicking off a new gathering for our community, and you’re invited! Starting in February, we’re launching Conversation Club, a special new way to spotlight some of our favorite stories, by hosting conversations where writers can answer your questions and share more about how their stories came to be. It’s kind of like a book club, but you don’t have to read a whole book!
Read the article, come with questions (or not—just bring your mug of tea if that’s what you’re feeling), and be in community with us. It’s a casual, friendly discussion group and an encouraging space to stay curious, informed, and connected with fellow Conversationalist readers.
Our first Conversation Club will feature our Executive Director Erin Zimmer Strenio’s recent piece “A Helping of Something Hopeful”, about her weekly neighborhood potlucks and how they've nourished her community on multiple levels. How did she get the potluck up and running? How did she keep it going? How can you get one started in your own community? Erin will chat with our Executive Editor Gina Mei, sharing what she’s learned and answering other questions from the community, including readers just like you.
You can RSVP to our first Conversation Club below, and read Erin’s piece right here. We can’t wait to be in conversation with you. See you there!
How committing to a weekly neighborhood potluck has both fed and strengthened my community.
There’s a certain serendipity that happens at a potluck. Foods that have never mingled together find themselves side by side: jambalaya in a crockpot, a cardboard pizza box, a plastic tub of Trader Joe’s hummus, a platter of gluten-free brownies. None of it really makes sense when scooped together onto a plate, but all of the flavors blend like fast friends—and if you’re lucky, oftentimes, the people do, too.
It’s another Monday night, which for me, means another neighborhood potluck. Every week, a group of us meets in the same grassy area by the bay in our neighborhood outside of Providence, Rhode Island. This week, I brought a pesto pasta salad with random veggies I found in our fridge; last week, it was leftover ribs my husband made over the weekend; the week before, a bag of chips and salsa. As we set up shop on a foldout table, I can see the curious faces of people driving and biking by, wondering what the heck is going on. But for us, it’s just another Monday night. People start trickling in around 5:30pm and stay until the sun goes down. We catch up on each other’s lives, and watch the kids run around while helping ourselves to a second plate. Then, we pack up our things and say our goodbyes, knowing we’ll see each other again next week.
While these gatherings now feel like a staple in my life, I first learned the magic of weekly potlucks a few years ago, in my old neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was 2022, and we were still feeling a bit socially raw, fresh out of our Covid bubbles. A neighbor friend started a group text, inviting us to gather every Monday at the playground for a whatever-you-have-lying-around potluck dinner and a good hang.
At first, the weekly cadence sounded like… a lot. Weekly? Really? Could my social battery handle it?
Yet after the first few months, it started feeling like an important ritual, and after the first year, it felt like a sacred space. The regular cadence was key. It allowed us to check in on each other and get to know our week-to-week rhythms. I could ask how Jen’s doctor’s appointment went last week, or if Joel had recipe-tested the chicken and dumplings he was planning for his upcoming popup restaurant. When I wanted someone to be my accountability-buddy to do that yoga class I kept swearing I’d do, I could ask if anyone else had been looking for an accountability-buddy, too. And with the standing weekly gatherings, all of this could happen in an intentional way, our commitment to a weekly meal slowly blossoming into something more.
After spending a couple of years social-distancing and mostly avoiding group gatherings, our neighborhood potlucks also felt like a joyful and much-needed form of social fitness, something scientifically proven to be just as important to our well-being as physical exercise. Maybe you’ve heard of Harvard's 85-year happiness study? It started in 1938 and followed 724 participants from their teens to old age. The participants regularly answered questions about their health and habits, their income and relationships, their joys and disappointments. The study also incorporated insights from their spouses and 1,300 of their descendants.
What did the study find to be the most important factor in determining a long and happy life? Strong, supportive relationships. Not cholesterol levels, or how many kettlebells you’ve lifted (although those things are important, too!)—but genuine human connection. It was a stronger indicator for happiness than even genetic predispositions, social class, or IQ.
This was also precisely what many of us were so starved for back in 2022. As the weeks went by, it felt like we had cracked the code to maintaining a genuine closeness with our neighbors. I also realized it wasn’t just the shared meal that was feeding us and allowing for deeper relationships to grow: It was our commitment to having it in the first place.
In New Orleans, I experienced the fruits of this firsthand. A group of us kept showing up, kept checking in on each other, kept extending the invite to other neighbor friends, and kept feeling the goodness of our Monday merriment spilling into the rest of the week. It was something to look forward to, something that consistently got our weeks started on a hopeful note. The Sunday scaries felt almost cured by the Monday potluck magic.
It was also a weekly reminder that, no matter what else was happening in the world, we were all still here, still showing up, and still feeding each other—with food, with friendship, with community, with care.
This commitment never felt burdensome, but instead, like a newfound necessity. In the age of TikToking your way down the street and scrolling in bed until you fall asleep, people are overconnected but undercommitted. Relationships, however, are built on commitment—and at least according to the Harvard study’s findings, that means our happiness is built on commitment, too. It’s a muscle to exercise like any other, and when we allow it to atrophy, our communities tend to suffer. But when we put the effort into consistently exercising it, our relationships and our communities begin to bloom.
It still impresses me that we managed to meet up every week for over a year, even with small kids and busy jobs and all the rest. I believe a big part of this was probably the fact that we met in a public space (the neighborhood playground), that was walking distance for all of us (no driving required), which also meant that nobody had to host (no need to clean your house).
The not-hosting part felt especially important. Nobody had to stress about people coming over and nobody had to deal with washing the dishes since we BYO’d our own plates and cutlery. We also never felt the pressure to bring anything fancy, a rule we established early on. One week it might be a bag of chips and the next it might be leftover birthday cake and maybe the next it would be homemade enchiladas if you had a little more time to cook. It all evens out in the potluck wash. And when everyone brings something, everyone leaves full.
When I moved to Rhode Island in 2024, I knew I had to keep my potluck muscles active in order to keep this little bit of magic alive, too.
I started a Whatsapp group and kept adding new neighbor friends to join as I met them. I scheduled the first potluck as a test run, just a couple months after we’d moved into our house. Given the big turnout (close to 40 people), I knew it could be a regular thing, so we started it up in earnest in the summer when the weather was more reliably outdoor-friendly. My husband and I began sending out a reminder on Monday mornings. And for the regular crew that started showing up each week, and telling other people to join, the potluck magic alchemized just as it had in New Orleans. I felt especially proud when I started seeing people I didn’t recognize who had heard about it through the neighborhood grapevine.
Every Monday, we’d arrive at the park with our foldout table and gingham tablecloth (adding a tablecloth instantly makes any gathering feel more special). For a quick second, I’d worry that nobody would show up. I’d feel a bit self-conscious, then I’d remember that even if nobody came, I’d still be outside eating with my family, which is a gift on its own.
I wouldn’t take it personally if people couldn’t make it (although a younger version of myself probably would have). But sure enough, people always did, and a mishmash of dishes would start appearing on the table. Hot dogs and mini quiche? Sure, why not! Barbecue ribs and a mountain of edamame? I mean, yeah, let’s do this! The neighborhood kids would run around on the grass and inevitably start piling on top of each other, like a Polaroid snapshot from 1995. No iPads or AI or any other tech-y shenanigans. Just some good ole wholesome potluck fun.
After a full summer of weekly potlucks, however, it became clear that one major difference between New Orleans and New England is, well, winter. In New Orleans, we could keep the weekly cadence humming along for most of the year. The summer heat and storm season did force some cancelations, but in Rhode Island, the days started growing dark by 6 p.m. and it was puffy coat season by Halloween, so we had to “close for the season” in October.
“I really miss our Monday potlucks,” neighbor friends have told me recently. Some have even offered to host in their homes, but this feels like breaking a key tenet. Removing the hosting pressure is a big part of what keeps our potlucks running so smoothly and solidly, so inclusively and so stress-freely.
While I know it’ll come back in full force once the weather warms up and the sunlight stretches back into dinner hours, I can still feel my potluck muscle craving exercise. We’ve been looking into community spaces that might be willing to host us during the winter, such as the library or the masonic center a few blocks away. Or the old-school bowling alley, which has some tables in the back. We’ve also been brainstorming other ways to stay connected during the colder, darker months. Perhaps a weekly walking club around the neighborhood? Or a soup swap (like a cookie swap, but for soup)?
But I also know that rest is important when it comes to exercise, too. And it’s during this wintry off-season that I’m discovering how much the seedlings of our summer potluck friendships have sprouted. People are still texting each other to check in, still asking each other for HVAC repair advice and babysitter recommendations. And thankfully I still have my accountability buddy checking in on how we might move our bodies this winter — she just suggested a 30-day “gentle burn workout” with short daily videos, asking if we could text each other once we’ve finished each as motivation and a healthy bit of peer pressure.
A potluck, of course, isn’t the only way to nurture and maintain our relationships, but it’s one that’s made me feel particularly hopeful. Commitment begets commitment, and makes the muscle stronger, something we can feel even when it’s not in use.
Bringing people together on a regular basis is also a reminder that small rituals can add up to something much bigger. In the months since our last potluck, our Providence community has been deeply hurting following the horrific mass shooting that took place at Brown University in December. We’ve been checking in on our neighbors, and feeling a wide range of emotions: grief, sadness, anger, anxiety, and heartbreak. But as we continue to grieve, our commitment to holding space for each other gives me hope that we’ll live another day, and share another meal, and continue to show up for each other, again and again.
[post_title] => A Helping of Something Hopeful
[post_excerpt] => How committing to a weekly neighborhood potluck has both fed and strengthened my community.
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How door-knocking for Mayor Mamdani restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money.
The thought of knocking on a stranger’s door once filled me with dread. It sounded uncomfortable at best, and potentially humiliating, or dangerous, at worst. What if someone slammed the door in my face or said something memorably vicious? I’m a 43-year-old white woman, raised in an upper-middle-class home in Buffalo, New York. My parents, respectively descended from Eastern European Jews and Sicilian Catholics, discussed politics and occasionally attended protests, but knocking on strangers’ doors wasn’t a big part of my childhood.
Yet in the last eight years, as I’ve gotten older and more politically active, I've begun to grasp the value of pushing through that discomfort. In April, before the summer’s Democratic primary, I started knocking on doors for then-New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and continued through Election Day in November. Altogether, I knocked on approximately 2,000 doors, usually with a partner, which was more fun and comfortable, if less efficient, than going alone.
Door-knocking shifts for Mamdani regularly drew dozens of New Yorkers, even in terrible weather, and on Monday and Tuesday nights, when fewer people are motivated to go out after work. I mostly knocked on doors in Brooklyn, where I live, but my fellow canvassers came from all over the city. Some were ideologically motivated, while others had concrete, pragmatic reasons for showing up, like the woman I met who joined a canvass because “the bus I took to get here took 40 minutes to make two stops.” (Making buses fast and free was one of Mamdani’s signature campaign promises.) Or the 40-something Afro-Latino couple who said they came out for the sake of their children’s future, because “right now, things aren’t looking so good.” Other first-time canvassers I encountered included a soft-spoken young woman named Fatima, a heavily tattooed, outgoing 20-something Asian-American guy, a shy middle schooler with her immigrant dad, and a young white man who praised the campaign's “immaculate vibes.”
One reason Mamdani means so much to so many New Yorkers is that he assembled a 100,000-person volunteer army—the largest in municipal history, and one of the most diverse. His volunteer base included young and middle-aged progressives of all stripes, and a substantial subset of Jewish New Yorkers, South Asians, and Muslims. Getting to know my fellow canvassers for hours and months at a time as we worked to expand that coalition was an extraordinary project in a perilous time for democracy. It demonstrated the hope that tens of thousands of us still feel, and how hard we are willing to work to make life better for ourselves and our neighbors.
Given how many doors we knocked throughout the city's five boroughs, the New Yorkers we reached were even more varied than the volunteers. During one general election canvassing shift in Kensington, a young Black woman opened the door to me and my friend Tania, who is Jewish. Although she didn’t initially recognize Mamdani’s name, as we went into our spiel, she realized he was the candidate her boyfriend had urged her to vote for. “Normally I wouldn’t tell a woman to do what her boyfriend says, but in this case, he’s right!” Tania said. (Our new friend smiled.)
Another striking moment came when an older man in South Brooklyn’s Sunset Park unsmilingly asked if I were Mamdani’s daughter. He seemed to be trying to determine why I was volunteering for a man to whom I had no apparent ethnic or religious ties. Why else would I be doing this? Mamdani was not, in fact, my father, I explained, but I believed so strongly in his agenda that I was volunteering anyway. The man kept his face blank. I wondered when someone had last knocked on his door.
Another day in Sunset Park, an older Spanish-speaking woman thanked me and my partner, who also spoke Spanish, for volunteering. She invited us into her home, where she and a small circle of relatives were celebrating her 90-year-old father’s birthday with balloons and cake. I’ll never forget the warmth and intimacy she offered us as total strangers.
In the last eight months, I’ve met Mamdani fans from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Canada. None could vote or contribute to the campaign, but some shadowed canvassers and interviewed volunteers, most commonly because they belonged to left-wing political parties and hoped to reproduce his success at home. Although he often emphasized that he was running a local race to benefit New Yorkers, it was clear Mamdani was also inspiring admirers around the world.
In addition to many happy, surprising, and rewarding encounters, I had my share of the awkward, unsettling, and agitating. There was the woman who saw my “New York Jews for Zohran” shirt and pretended to retch; when I moved toward her, thinking she might need help, she screamed, “That was about you, because you want my children dead!” There was the super who ordered us out of his building because we were supporting a candidate who, he falsely believes, “wants to kill all the Jews.” Another woman called my friend Allie “Nazi scum” and said she should just “put on the burqa [Mamdani will require] right now.”
Moments like these were reminders of the ugly racism our politics so often exposes. They shook me: I am rarely around people who would speak this way to anyone, let alone a stranger. But they also strengthened my resolve to work for and with people who lead with love, respect, and decency, and model those traits for others.
As of last week, New Yorkers have made one such person our mayor.
Just before the polls closed on Election Night, Tania and I met a man with two little girls with him on the street in Park Slope. He hadn’t planned to vote and realized he couldn’t make it to his polling site in time with the kids. After he left, I joked that we should have offered to babysit: “We can start delivering on Mamdani’s promise of free child care right away!” We were giddy with pre-election anxiety, and desperate to turn out every last vote.
A short time later, once it was clear Mamdani had won, my friends and I experienced one of the happiest moments of our lives. We were weeping and hugging and singing and cheering at what we’d accomplished together. All the neighbors we’d met on the ground were reflected in the voting blocs he’d won: older, moderate Black voters; young voters, including but not limited to white socialists; and immigrants, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. I’d knocked on doors before, but Mamdani’s campaign showed me just how powerful it could be.
Later, I wondered if we’d ever find a way to recapture that feeling and use it to drive ourselves forward in less happy and hopeful times. Could we love each other enough to keep doing the work that only occasionally produces such moments, even in times when there’s no end, and no payoff, in sight?
I’m still not sure how we’ll navigate this fundamental challenge of organizing. But being part of a political project that attracted the passionate support of New Yorkers in all five boroughs, and sympathizers around the world, has restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money. And although a huge part of Mamdani's appeal is that he ran on improving New Yorkers' daily lives, he also showed that grassroots campaigning works—and that contemporary politics can be a joyful and loving project that brings people together, rather than an ugly spectacle that thrives on negative attention, exploits our fears, fills us with anxiety, turns neighbors against each other, and leaves us feeling empty, sad, bitter, and alone.
In canvassing for Mamdani and other DSA-backed candidates, I saw how much people are craving community, connection, and fun. We need to create more opportunities like this—to move joyfully toward something, rather than slogging through a sales pitch for a mediocre candidate who’s better than their opponent in hopes of slowing what feels like an endless parade of horrors. In the last year—still emerging from the long shadow of a global pandemic—I’ve embraced more near-strangers than I had in the previous five. Now, there’s a bracing sense of possibility in the air—the unfamiliar feeling that good things can still happen, and we can make them.
[post_title] => Knocking On Hope's Door
[post_excerpt] => How door-knocking for Mayor Mamdani restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money.
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How women crab farmers along India's coast have linked their livelihoods to environmental conservation.
A soft current ripples near Jamdulwadi Island as 15-year-old Prachi Santosh Acharekar guides her canoe through the gnarled trunks of a mangrove forest.
The afternoon sun warms the surface of the water, revealing a familiar scene to local communities around India’s Konkan coast: clusters of mud-covered crabs, basking on branches.
As she approaches them, she slows her boat. Prachi, a 10th-standard student, doesn’t just see mud crabs: She sees her future. Her focused gaze and deft handling of the boat are part of her autodidactic training, a testament to a burgeoning passion that runs deep within the Acharekar family.
Prachi Santosh Acharekar navigating her canoe through the mangroves, a part of her crab farming training.
Champions of the Mangroves
In Achara village, where she lives, crab farming season typically runs from October to May. When Prachi is fully inducted into her family’s business in about three years, during this time, she’ll be busy with preparations, stocking seed, feeding the crabs, and folding boxes to safely transport them once they’ve been harvested.
All of it will also formalize her role in a grassroots movement, led by women from India’s coastal belt: In Sindhudurg, women fisherfolk have become champions in linking their livelihoods with environmental conservation. Through crab farming, they’ve created a strong incentive to protect local mangroves, which serve as critical nursery habitats for mangrove crabs. The benefits of this are both economical and ecological: Alongside generating sustainable income for the women, the mangroves’ preservation stabilizes shorelines and mitigates erosion, enhancing coastal resilience against the impacts of climate change.
At the heart of this enterprise is Prachi’s aunt, 55-year-old Sonali Sunil Acharekar, a proud entrepreneur and leading member of Konkansparsh, one of Maharashtra’s pioneering women-led self-help groups (SHGs). Like all women of this SHG, for her, the mangrove is not just an ecosystem, but a dynamic marketplace.
“Be it dolphin safari, trekking, birdwatching, or traditional fishing, we do it all at Konkansparsh,” says Sonali, sitting in a charpoy at her home, surrounded by a vast area of mangroves. “But crab farming is our speciality. It is something we feel deeply attached to.”
Sonali and other leaders manage the entire crab farming supply chain, from feeding and harvesting the crabs to selling them. The process is meticulous but straightforward. Crab seeds are carefully placed one-by-one into fiber boxes. Each box is then deployed within the protected mangrove territories of Sindhudurg district, which boasts 6,940 hectares of mangroves perfectly suited for farming. Sonali also feeds the small raw fish stock twice daily, in the morning and evening. Then, once the crabs are ready, they’re harvested, boxed, and sold.
Sonali Sunil Acharekar in the backyard of her home in Achara village.
Overseeing the entire operation in this way has significantly enhanced the women’s access to resources, as well as to the market. The payoff is also demonstrable, including as a sustainable model: Last year, the Acharekar family, a seven-member unit that works in tandem, generated an impressive 150,000 INR ($1,706 USD) from the sale of 180 crabs. They also earned an additional 130,000 INR ($1,466 USD) from running mangrove safaris.
“It feels so good to partake in the process,” says Sonali. “This year, we intend to maintain 200 boxes fully. More boxes mean more business and more business means more prosperity.”
Their success also reinforces a crucial ecological benefit: According to research published in the Marine Biological Association of India, mud crab farming is not only a sustainable—and profitable—livelihood, but an essential strategy for mangrove conservation, supporting the region’s climate resilience through ecosystem protection. The mangroves provide a conducive natural habitat for raising mud crabs, or green crabs, commonly from the species Scylla serrata, which are indigenous to the region. By breeding and harvesting crabs, and building and tending to crabs pens in mangrove creeks, the women have both created a financial incentive for the mangroves' protection and helped to increase the local crab population.
In coastal areas, crabs are considered an economically significant species due to their huge demand. The crabs themselves can also tolerate a wide range of temperatures and salinities without destroying local ecosystems. But over the years, sand mining, saltwater intrusion, and rising water temperatures have contributed to a declining mud crab population, and are just a few of the ongoing stresses and trends that fisher communities have dealt with, and that local SHGs hope to tackle.
A wild baby crab crawls on the trunk of a mangrove tree.
In other coastal communities like Kerala, Maharashtra’s neighboring state, crab farmers who once caught wild juvenile crabs and had plentiful stock are grappling with rising costs and dwindling returns, as crabs have become scarce and stressed. Their annual incomes have dropped by 50,000 INR to 100,000 INR (around $600 USD to $1,200 USD) due to poor water quality, causing frequent disease outbreaks, pushing many farmers to downsize or cease operations altogether, largely due to reduced harvests linked to environmental degradation.
Sustainable crab models in coastal communities in Maharashtra aim to address the pressing problems of overfishing, habitat loss, and food insecurity through long-term economic stability. But without such practices, crab harvesting may yield fleeting profits, triggering ecological collapse and harm to a region’s inhabitants.
In addition to boosting the economy, this is part of why the SHG’s endeavors have been such a great boon to the area.
According to Kedar Palav, Livelihood Specialist at Sindhudurg’s Mangrove Foundation, women-led groups comprising 40 women have been active in Sindhudurg district during the 2024-25 crab farming season. “Our aim,” he notes, “is to facilitate strong livelihood opportunities for the women.”
Sonali Sunil Acharekar (left) and her niece Prachi Santosh Acharekar (center) in conversation with Mayur Pansare (right), a Project Assistant for the Mangrove Foundation.
But even those with formal careers are drawn to the potential. Sonali’s 32-year-old son, Omprakash Sunil Achrekar, an engineering graduate, has embraced crab farming full-time; and Manish Tari, 22, an undergraduate in fisheries science, launched Manish Agro & Seafood with his father during the Covid-19 pandemic, specializing in vertical crab farming.
“We deal in red and green crabs,” says Tari. “A single piece per kilo can go up to 2,400 INR. It’s very lucrative.”
Navigating the Tides
Despite the economic potential, the journey is not without profound risks and hurdles. The most immediate occupational hazard, however, is theft.
“Theft of crabs is a big problem here,” says Sonali. “Sometimes diseases can spread in the backwaters, as well…A mortality rate of 20 percent is considered normal.”
It’s a challenge that has historically forced some farmers out of business. Samiksha Gaonkar, 50, from Pirawadi village, recalls being part of Sindhudurg’s very first crab culture group, which operated between 2014 to 2019. Despite each group member earning around 5000 INR per month, they were forced to shut down.
“Our crabs got suddenly stolen,” says Samiksha. “We could not keep a check on the thefts and then we had to pull out.”
Anagarajan Joshi, 58, a former crab farmer, at her friend’s home in Pirawadi village.
Another hurdle is the scarcity of crab seed. According to Palav, there is only one hatchery in India: the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Aquaculture (RGCA) in the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu.
Sanjeevni Santosh Mithbavker,43, a member of the Vedoleshwar SHG, says crab farming has become more difficult as a result. “We lack seed,” she says. “If the supply of seed becomes easy, we can take this business forward.”
Despite the scarcity, Sanjeevni sold crabs worth 60,000 INR last season. But while business is “great,” seed still costs 25 to 30 INR for a single piece—makings it an expensive venture for the average crab farmer.
A Wave of Resilience
To counter these challenges, government and non-governmental efforts have actively focused their support on the most vulnerable communities, placing women at the forefront.
Government initiatives such as the Mangrove Conservation and Livelihood Generation Scheme, alongside international projects like Enhancing Climate Resilience of India’s Coastal Communities (ECRICC), have been instrumental in fostering local interest in Sindhudurg’s coastal villages, including Achara and Hadi. As part of the Mangrove Foundation’s intervention, women’s groups also receive substantial training and support, including expert talks, presentations, and hands-on workshops that offer extensive practical training.
On the ground, additional support comes from 34 Sagar Mitras—fisheries graduates who act as vital resources for the women. Mayur Vinayak Pansare, Project Assistant with the Mangrove Foundation, sees themselves in a family-like role. While they occasionally help fix issues, like crabs breaking through fiber boxes, he says, “It’s heartwarming to see these women coming forward and taking steps towards self-reliance.”
Sanjeevni Santosh Mithbavker, 43, mends nets at her home in Hadi village.
The financial assistance is also significant: The Achrekar family, for instance, received a substantial 90 percent subsidy from the Department of Fisheries and the Mangrove Foundation. Between 2021 and 2025, larger initiatives like the Pradhan Mantri Machi Sampada have backed an additional 124 fisheries projects, with women as a remarkable 60 percent of beneficiaries between 2021 and 2025, says Bahar Vithala Mahakal, Sindhudurg District Program Manager at the Fisheries Department.
This focus is clear across other programs, too: The Sindu Ratna Samrudhi Scheme saw a 70 percent rise in female beneficiaries in a single year, between 2022 and 2023.
Planting the Future
Women’s presence as crab sellers in Sindhudurg’s main fish market signals a generational shift in the industry: They’re taking center stage in an otherwise male-dominated marketplace. For Dakshita (who asked we only use her first name), her presence here is about more than selling her own yield—she’s also reclaiming a little more of herself.
“What is the need for middlemen when I can run my own business?” she says, waiting for customers.
Dakshita, 50, sells green crabs at the Malvan fish market in Sindhudurg.
In Prachi’s case, the journey towards self-reliance began slowly. She initially “harbored no interest in crab farming.” But witnessing her family’s dedication and serving as a guide for tourists through the vibrant backwaters transformed her perspective, converting her initial disinterest into a passion.
In the shifting tides of the Maharashtra coast, Prachi represents the strong voice of a younger generation, seamlessly blending tradition with science to carve a new path forward. For them, crabs are the ‘green gold,’ promising economic returns.
While elder members strengthen their place in the market, Prachi is now articulating a dream that links her environment to her education, which she plans to pursue further by studying Marine Science.
“By protecting the mangroves, my crabs thrive,” she says. “The mangroves in return protect my family from storms, erosion, and the rising sea.”
A view of a mountain village in Sindhudurg.
In the nearby pond, Prachi and Sonali have also started to plant new mangrove saplings. Other efforts at sustainability have only grown. In 2017, scientists visited the area and told local crab farmers that in order to have a better catch, they needed to maintain cleaner water. To boost women’s participation in local water and pond management, women farmers are now being trained to regularly flush water through the crab ponds for freshness, monitor water quality, and prevent overcrowding. Since then, they’ve seen the return of many new birds in the area, from cattle egret to common sandpiper and Indian pond heron.
The tides speak louder than people in Sindhudurg’s coastal communities, and for these powerful women, mangroves stand like guardians along the coast. The more they nurture the mangroves, the more the mangroves give back to them, too. It’s a quiet partnership in nature, this connection between crab farmers and the mangrove forests, and a small step in healing the Earth.
[post_title] => Guardians of the Mangroves
[post_excerpt] => How women crab farmers along India's coast have linked their livelihoods to environmental conservation.
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As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.
“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.
For months, I thought coming to New York City was a mistake. I’d accepted an unpaid internship in the city, leaving my home in Bogota to try living abroad. I dreamed of going to Broadway shows, dining out at different restaurants—enjoying all the fun New York had to offer. But instead, in addition to my internship, I ended up taking another job, just to afford rent. I worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week, with little time to socialize. I was burned out and deeply lonely. Then, one day, my friend Carolina suggested we go out after our internship and do something fun.
“We should go rollerskating at Rockefeller Center,” she said.
I used to skate for fun back in Colombia—my home country—when I was a teenager, but hadn’t gone in years. Still, I thought it was a great idea. Carolina was a talented skater, and we had so much fun looping around the rink that I was reminded of the joy skating had once made me feel.
For the first time in months, I was completely at ease. Then, as we were leaving the rink, I fell. When I looked down, my arm was shaped like the letter “s”: I’d broken my left wrist. Carolina, somehow, found the strength to pull me up, call an Uber, and take me to the nearest hospital. She waited with me for hours in the emergency room, where I learned I’d need nails and a cast to fix my broken bones.
As my arm healed, Carolina took the subway with me to work every day, protecting me from accidental bumps. She brushed my messy hair, pulled down my pants so I could pee, and dressed me up again; all things I’m not sure I’d ask even my closest friends to do for me back home.
At the time, we had only known each other for four months.
~
I once read an Instagram post that said being an immigrant is like becoming a dog: one year as an immigrant equals seven years of life experience. Friendships, then, become intense and profound more quickly than they might back home. Sometimes, out of necessity, they become deeper than our friendships back home, too.
Adult immigrants often find themselves profoundly alone. Our families and closest friends usually remain in our home countries, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The friendships we form in our new lives, then, become everything to us: our support network, our first call, our emergency contacts.
In an unfamiliar city, we also seek familiarity. As immigrants, we tend to connect more deeply with people from similar cultural backgrounds, something especially meaningful when we suddenly become the “other” after a lifetime of living in a country where we are the “norm.” Sharing a language, traditions, and social cues lowers the barriers to intimacy: When someone understands the way you were raised, you don’t have to justify or over-explain everything you do.
Carolina was from Bogota, too, and had started at the same internship a week before I had. We had a lot in common: We both came from Catholic-conservative backgrounds, needed to be very mature at a young age, identified as feminists, had issues making friends, and wanted to start life from scratch in the city. We shared similar experiences growing up, and similar experiences since coming to New York. But our friendship deepened after I broke my wrist: I knew then that we could rely on one another. That if something ever happened to me again, she would take care of me—and if something ever happened to her, I’d take care of her, too.
Carolina isn’t the only immigrant friend I’ve felt this immediate intimacy with. One day, I was hiking with Nicol, a Peruvian friend. The trail was rocky and we had to march in rhythm just to move forward. Suddenly, a memory popped into my head: In primary school, I used to march like a soldier with the rest of my classmates. Military culture is deeply ingrained in Colombia because of our near century-long history of war and internal armed conflict. It felt silly, but I decided to share my memory with Nicol.
“Oh, yeah, we did that at my school, too,” she said. “It was so ridiculous. Our parents would come watch us march in squared formations.”
Of course. Peru, too, has a history of armed conflict, and military culture was a part of her primary school indoctrination as well. She didn’t make fun of me for what I thought might be a strange confession. Instead, she took my memory and treated it with care—turning it into something funny and shared.
I immediately felt closer to her, something unusual for me. I’ve always considered myself introverted. During my undergrad years in Colombia, I experienced severe social anxiety. I was trapped in an internal monologue that told me I was boring, strange, and hard to love. For nearly two years, I didn’t make a single friend. I built high walls around myself that kept everyone out. After a while, I made meaningful connections that have stayed with me, but I’d never found it easy.
When I migrated, I assumed I’d again struggle to make friends—especially since, on top of everything else, I now had to add “not fluent enough in English” to my long list of self-demeaning adjectives.
But when I started grad school in the States, I made friends within the first two weeks. At the time, I thought maybe I had changed somehow; become more at ease within myself, more confident. But looking back, I can see it was something else: My deep, human need to belong—and the comfort I felt around other Latin American students—had activated parts of me that had been frozen.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon with María, a friend from Mexico. Before coming here, I had never had friends like her—extroverted, party lovers, heavy users of dating apps, full of energy. After a long conversation about how Latina diet culture has shaped our relationship to food and our bodies, I realized our friendship had grown strong, in spite of our differences, because it was rooted in something larger than us. Like with Carolina, and Nicol, and countless other immigrant friends, we were united by our need to resist a homogenizing environment. We were united by our shared confusion about U.S. social cues. We were united by our warmth, our humor, and our overlapping memories, even if we didn’t grow up in the same country.
“I’ve noticed you’re literally like my younger sister,” she told me. “The good girl who wants to fit in and carries the weight of your lineage. We’re very different, but there’s a strong emotional connection between us.” I realized then that she is, indeed, a lot like my older sister, too.
I’ve been in the U.S. for almost two years now, and I still find it hard to make American friends. Sometimes, people make xenophobic comments to me in the streets. When I meet people who grew up in the States, I quickly find myself running out of conversation topics, unable to find much common ground—something that still makes me feel out of place. But my immigrant friends are part of the reason I still want to stay, to put down roots.
At the end of the day, home is where you feel safe, loved, and cared for, rather than where you grew up. If I have friends who look after me, who resist the harshest expressions of discrimination and exclusion by my side—then here, I’ve found a place to call home.
Don’t get me wrong: I have beautiful, loyal friendships in Colombia, too. But my friends there don’t need me to survive. In Colombia, if I got sick, I could call my parents or sisters, and they would drop everything for me. But there, I had never been anyone’s emergency contact. My friends back home already had someone else to call—their own parents, siblings, partners.
In contrast, my friendships in New York became lifelong within months. I’m now the emergency contact for two friends. I’ve been the caregiver for one of them coming out of a medical procedure that needed anesthesia. Here, my friends and I depend on each other to be each other’s version of family, to be a shoulder to cry on, to be someone reliable for medicine delivery; as a party plus-one, a caregiver, a babysitter (or cat sitter!), among many other things.
The need to survive, to resist, to belong, and to be comforted—that’s what first pushed us together. But it’s the care, love, and familiarity that’s kept us bonded.
[post_title] => Emergency Contact
[post_excerpt] => As immigrants, my friends and I depend on each other in ways I've never needed back home.
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