I first read this quote when I saw it shared in reference to the u.s.-isreali war on iran. It put words to the growing, crushing feeling I’d been having of all my grief and rage colliding. The feeling I had when I heard about a member of our community being kidnapped was the feeling I had when I heard about a bomb striking my cousin’s neighborhood was the feeling I had when I heard about a school being bombed in iran was the feeling I had when I heard someone was murdered while doing ice watch on my old block. While this is all a feeling, I hope it also speaks to the ways in which all of our struggles against empire are intertwined. I believe that was James Baldwin’s sentiment when he first wrote these words voicing his opposition to the vietnam war, describing how his own experience as a Black man in america laid the white supremecist logic of the u.s. empire bare. Here is a more full version of the quote:

Let us attempt to face the fact that we are a racist society, racist to the very marrow, and we are fighting a racist war. No black man in chains in his own country, and watching the many deaths occurring around him every day, believes for a mo­ment that America cares anything at all about the freedom of Asia. My own condition, as a black man in America, tells me what Americans really feel and really want, and tells me who they really are. And therefore, every bombed village is my home town.

All my love to those fighting this dying empire. In the same breath we pray for its end, I can hear a new world on the tips of our tongues.