Ruha Benjamin

Welcome back, sowers!

The last few weeks have been A LOT. Each day brings some fresh cruelty flooding our feeds. Amidst so much sorrow, it hasn’t been easy to carve out space for bloomscrolling, especially since this latest wave of doom hits so close to home.

On February 25, 2016, I sat in a hole in the wall nail salon on Embarcadero Street, in San Francisco, staring mindlessly across the shoulder of a nail technician while she clipped my grubby cuticles, when I read the tv news ticker scrolling by: Gunman Kills Three at Kansas Factory Before Dying in Shootout. 

“This is America,” I thought, echoing the song by Childish Gambino, “Guns in my area, this is America.” Little did I realize, my sister-in-law, Renee “Randy” Benjamin, was among the slain, just six months into a new job she loved in Hesston, KS.

Since then, our nation has witnessed 101 mass shootings and counting – Buffalo #98, Laguna Woods #99, Chicago #100, Uvalde #101. Connected incidents affecting all of us, including 58% of USians or someone they care for have experienced gun violence. I write about these connections more in Viral Justice, but for now I’ll just say—

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

These are the words of poet Mary Oliver, reminding us that bloomscrolling isn’t about turning away from sorrow or closing our eyes to the deadly machinations of those in power. Instead, it is about recommitting ourselves to transform this antisocial society— one supermarket, one place of worship, one school at a time. <>

OUTTAKES & ARCHIVES

This section previews some of the stories in Viral Justice.

So let’s bear witness to the sweetness and stings of the world.

At the end of the day, I am student of the late-great Octavia E. Butler. At the start of the pandemic, as many people began to read or re-read her apocalyptic tale, Parable of the Sower, my family and I decided to try our hand at beekeeping, inspired by Butler’s words:

Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. 

As a former pop locking b-girl who grew up breakdancing in LA, becoming a bee-girl wasn’t a great leap! And one of the first things I learned was that these little creatures actually dance, or “shimmer,” to ward off predators. They come together as a hive and raise their abdomens in sync, up and down, to form a curtain in what looks like coordinated choreography.

Over the last two years, I’ve become fascinated by bee sociality. Above all, these musical creatures, famous for producing sweetness and painful stings, have a lot to teach us about collective power and creativity in the face of incredible odds:

“If a person sees a beehive, and has not seen one previously, he will become bewildered because he does not understand who made it,” observed 13th century Arab cosmographer, Zakariya al-Qazwini. “If he then learns that it is the work of the bee, he will be bewildered again by how this weak creature makes these hexagons, the likes of which a skilled engineer would be unable to make with a compass and ruler.”

This incredible world-building capacity isn’t the result of few brilliant bees with fancy pedigrees. It is born of collective effort and strategy to maintain an ecosystem in which all creatures, small and large, can thrive. Fellow beekeeper Mia Birdsong reflects,

“Our survival depends on connection to family and community. Think about the American Dream, how we think about success and leadership: its about lone wolves and entrepreneurs, self-made people. As a Black woman,” says Birdsong, “I can see that’s a bunch of B.S. That model doesn’t work for anyone who experiences any kind of marginalization. It doesn’t work for anyone, really.”

In fact, the idolization of lone wolves is directly tied to a culture of isolation and destruction—an antisocial ecosystem— deadly for all. But, what if we learned from our apiary kin?

EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

Community as Rebellion

Lorgia García Peña & Ruha Benjamin

Trenton Free Public Library (hybrid)

On Wednesday June 15th at 6:00pm, I will join Lorgia García Peña to discuss her new book, Community as Rebellion! Join us in person or tune in online for this hybrid event.

Angela Y. Davis calls Peña’s book "A life-saving and life-affirming text.” Cornel West adds, "Lorgia García Peña is one of the few courageous and brilliant intellectuals grounded in rigorous and visionary grassroots education.”                        

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.

García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.

ORGANIZATION HIGHLIGHT

Each month I spotlight an organization or initiative seeding justice in a locale where I’m speaking, virtually or in-person. Looking ahead to the event above, I want to shout out Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund (LALDEF), based in Mercer County, New Jersey. LALDEF was established in 2004, and their team works to defend civil rights of immigrants. LALDEF facilitates access to healthcare, education and legal representation, all with the intention of creating a more just society for all through supporting the incorporation of immigrants.

By focusing on the root causes of the injustices that immigrants face, Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund “seeks to empower immigrants to reach self-sufficiency and thrive by showing them how to navigate the system and find the resources they need.” LALDEF works with local, state and federal government agencies to facilitate access to legal services in order to seek relief on behalf of those without legal status. Along with their advocacy work, the LALDEF team facilitates educational programming about rights and responsibilities to immigrant families.

To support Latin American Legal and Defense Education Fund, click below!

ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Welcome to Seeding the Future, a monthly musing where I share stories and experiences that didn’t make it into my forthcoming book, Viral Justice. I also shine a light on organizers, artists, educators, and groups who motivate me in the everyday work of world-building.

Together, we grapple with Baldwin’s words, “I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I’m forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.” For me, this isn’t toxic positivity, but a stubborn, insurgent hopefulness.

Subscribers and sowers are the first to know about upcoming events, book giveaways, and free resources like discussion guides, syllabi, and other material that you can adopt and adapt however you see fit! If you aren’t subscribed yet, you can do so here. If you are, I would love for you to share with friends, colleagues, and comrades as we strive, day by day, to make justice contagious. 

a luta continua,