Locs, Heels, and the Bible

In Georgia this spring, Adriana Smith  30 years old and pregnant - was declared brain-dead. But for over four months, the state kept her body alive on machines to grow a fetus, without her family’s consent, without Adriana's voice, and without Adriana's dignity. Georgia's six-week abortion ban was cited as justification. And just like that, a dead woman’s body became a battleground in the war over fetal personhood. The legal machinery behind this tragedy  was meant to control life. And it did. This is what happens when law eclipses love, and when compassion is a casualty of political performance. The scaffolding that holds up such cruelty is older than this moment. It is rooted in power, patriarchy, and the insidious lie that some lives are disposable if others are deemed more "worthy." We’ve seen this before in the silencing of enslaved women, forced sterilizations, and in the criminalization of miscarriage.  I chair the Committee on the Status and Role of Women ...

I have something to say about the gall of Western media to still approach formerly colonized nations with the smugness of a master quizzing a servant. The now-viral interview with President Dr. Irfaan Ali of Guyana was definitely more than just a conversation about oil and development. It exposed the festering wound of neocolonial arrogance that still believes it has the right to interrogate the dignity and direction of sovereign nations while refusing to reckon with the centuries of theft, murder, and dehumanization that built its own empires. Yes, England, I am talking about you! Dr. Ali was understood the assignment to a spade a spade regardless to who is holding the hand. What we witnessed was the spirit of resistance cloaked in a presidential suit. With unflinching clarity and righteous indignation, he named the historical theft of resources, the violence of chattel slavery, the deceit of colonialism, and the continued exploitation masquerading as investment and partnership. And s...

They didn’t tell my people that they were free, right away. Even after the ink dried on the Emancipation Proclamation, they didn't tell them. Not even after the blood spilled and bodies piled in the name of a nation supposedly united under liberty and justice were they told. Instead, the power-brokers waited and held freedom hostage behind borders of greed, ego, and entitlement. And on June 19, 1865 - two and a half years later - when word finally reached the shores of Galveston, Texas, it wasn’t because the enslaved had been seen as human. It was because their labor was no longer useful, their bondage no longer profitable, and their bodies no longer essential to the overall goal. The story of Juneteenth is that of a freedom which was announced late, thus postponing justice, and forcing liberation to find its own breath after being suffocated for centuries. Here we are in 2025 watching an administration strip away aid to vulnerable nations, criminalize immigrants, roll back civil r...