We are fighting for our lives
Photo: Olga Marina Segura, 2023
what is home/ freedom/ liberation in a burning world?
Every day there are threats against human life and dignity. Israeli anti-Palestinian raid in Jenin; femicide against indigenous women in Canada and women in the Dominican Republic; hundreds of Pakistanis dying while attempting to reach Greece last month; Haitian migrants trying to escape foreign created socio-economic crises on the island.
Transgender women and men and children face higher rates of murder, assault, and homelessness across the country. In 2023 alone over 75 anti-trans bills have been passed, and over 500 proposed. Billions of dollars are invested into already violently militarized police budgets and training facilities. Just last year US police killed over 1,000 citizens. This violence connects directly to police brutality seen in Israel and France.
Our nation’s militarization is also at the border, where children are sexually and physically assaulted, separated from families, and kept in cages. Activists across the country are calling attention to how migrants at the border are also dying because of our ecological crisis. Migrants are being bused across the country, away from Texas and other border states to “liberal” cities; yet these cities, like New York City under the Eric Adams administration, are failing to protect these women, children, and men, with many of them kept in conditions similar to those at the border.
Our world and country are on fire, and our planet keeps burning under empire.
Photo: Olga Marina Segura, 2023.
All of last month, the smoke from Canada’s climate change-fueled wildfires periodically blanketed North America in unclean air. Floods are on the rise, from the USA to India, where dozens were killed by the waters just this week. Poor, hazardous air affects millions, in Brazil to Korea to Algeria to Morocco to America. Last year, over 5 million acres of land were burned in wildfires worldwide.
People are drowning in a deluge of economic insecurity and ecological despair. We are in the midst of a 40-plus year-long process of organized abandonment, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, by both government and private industry. While company profits have soared to unprecedented rates, American workers earn less today than 40 years ago. Symptomatic of this abandonment, the United States entered the pandemic with 924,000 staffed hospital beds compared to over 2.3 million occupied prison beds. The state continues to disempower the disenfranchised, including the latest repeal of affirmative action and the federal refusal to cancel student debt.
Millions continue to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Black and Brown communities suffer from long COVID symptoms after struggling to get adequate care, vaccines, and boosters. Government aid for COVID is over, and in May the World Health Organization declared an end to the pandemic public emergency. This occurs just in time for the spike in disability claims activists have warned about for years.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
What We’re Doing at Religion in Revolt
We are not pundits. Pundits help maintain the fiction that knowing and feeling the right things are, in isolation, politically meaningful. They are part of an entertainment industry that divorces contemporary public life from grassroots political activity. They transform residents with material interests into fans with rooting interests.
We hope to cultivate an engaged community rather than an audience, one unafraid to deeply interrogate why we feel the fear, the depression, all the ills and signs of existing and trying to survive under empire.
We are committed to analyzing life under various oppressive systems and how these systems cannot be analyzed disconnected from our planet’s ecological crisis.
We are abolitionists, leftist storytellers, and historians. We will not just offer our media opinions or commentary—though much of our public writing does that already—we want to provide a way to build together, rooted in liberation theology and interfaith dialogue and action. We are focused on political education and community building. We are accountable to the communities we come from.
We are committed to doing this while rooted in local struggles and community practices in the Bronx and Hartford. As we build out the platform, these are the perspectives we will privilege.
Where Do You Fit In?
As Religion in Revolt unfolded over the years, we spent much time thinking—and writing—about the intersection between fascism and religion.
Fascism is a form of world-building of the sort that novelists engage in. Some people are heroes to be praised, and others are obstacles to be overcome. Still, others are villains to be obliterated to advance national fiction. The fascist promises his people deliverance from the ever-present internal enemy. The fascist tells his true believers, and soon-to-be converts that the Black, brown, queer, immigrant, disabled, Jewish enemy is to blame for the national decline. The desperation of the working class isn’t baked into our economic model, he assures them. They are success stories in waiting.
Politics aimed at liberating subjugated people is also a form of world-building. It is the only political orientation that provides the moral and political clarity needed to resist the fascist movement endemic to the United States. It is what we are all called to, especially at this moment. People of faith are great at world-building. It’s kind of our thing. But it’s only useful when it is in service of people’s struggles for justice—otherwise, it’s just escapism.
In solidarity,
Olga & Dwayne