This week, I participated in the Michigan Statewide Environmental Justice AI Data Center Summit. Activists from around the state came together to share information, develop strategies and tactics, and to dream about the kind of world we have yet to create.

Techno-billionaires are telling us that massive data centers are necessary and inevitable. They tell us that these centers will provide thousands of jobs and do it all without harming the ecosystems on which we depend. 

This week I attended the 10^-year anniversary celebration of Detroit’s Community Benefits Ordinance. More than 100 people gathered to reflect on the grassroots movement that culminated in a victory over billionaire developers in our city. The event was hosted by the Peoples Platform and members of the Equitable Detroit City Wide Community Benefit Coalition that led the initiative.

Over the last few days, as Iran has suffered under US bombs and threats of extermination, I have been thinking about a winter evening in 1979. I was in Youngstown, Ohio, visiting my sister. It was in the midst of the Hostage Crisis, begun when hundreds of Iranian students swept into the American Embassy, ultimately capturing fifty-two hostages, holding them for 444 days. This action helped secure the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini and brought down the presidency of Jimmy Carter. But all of that had yet to unfold.

This week, I am in Harlem to join in the celebrations of the life and work of Dr. Vincent Harding. We gathered at Riverside Church to explore his contributions to peace, especially his role in helping craft Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, breaking his silence against the Vietnam War. King called for a radical revolution in values against racism, materialism, and militarism and for the creation of a new America, rooted in love and compassion. Over the years, Vincent worked to bring that vision to life. He encouraged and organized the intellectual foundations of Black Studies and helped establish the King Center, the Institute for the Black World, Veterans of Hope, and the National Council of Elders.

The United States has been unravelling for a very long time. The Trump drive for an American style Fascism is the latest step in this disintegration. Underneath these efforts at domination and control are long-standing patterns that depend on violence. Increasingly, that violence is being rejected as more and more people are being subjected to it or are witnessing the consequences of it in the lives of their neighbors down the street and across the globe.

Power outages in Detroit are common. I have experienced some disruption in electricity every winter for the last 50 years. Like many Detroiters, we have candles, flashlights, blankets, firewood, and emergency water tucked in corners, knowing they will be needed. This is just part of winter in Michigan.

The 20^th Century was marked by two world wars. The first Great War changed the world. The death toll was in the millions. Empires crumbled and new nations emerged. It was a war of arrogance, incompetence, and mass brutality. And it made some people very rich.

Within days after the US illegally attacked Iran, the war is escalating across the Middle East. The world is in a dangerous moment as small-minded men launch weapons of massive destructive power, simply because they can. This is soul-searing violence. It is being carried out with a level of callous disregard for human life that will have far-reaching consequences. There will come a reckoning. Chickens do come home to roost.

Somewhere, in dusty attics and cramped basements, there are postcards, tucked in shoe boxes or barely remembered family papers.  They are postcards of lynchings. From the end of the Civil War through the 1940s, the brutality of the Jim Crow South was captured in photographs. Centering on smiling white faces and brutalized black people’s bodies, these postcards circulated through communities. They were carried across the country by US postal workers, delivering messages about crops, children, and the folks back home. For some, the production and sale of these postcards became a “money-making venture.”

Tributes for Jesse Jackson have been flowing in from around the globe, in reverence for his life and good works. As Juan Gonzalez said, “Jesse was always there when people were fighting for some form of social justice. He could always be counted on to show up and express public support. And of all the U.S. leaders of the past half-century, I believe none had a more international view and a commitment to worldwide social justice as Jesse Jackson did. So, those of us who knew him will all be better for having known him, and it’s a tremendous loss that he’s gone.”

There was good news this week as Federal officials announced “a significant drawdown” of the 3000 ICE agents occupying the Twin Cities. For more than a month, people have been resisting masked men roamingthe  streets with guns, chemical weapons, and a lust for violence. These thugs are exhibiting disdain and open hatred of the people. They have used deadly force, abducted children, and gloated about it.

I have been unable to shake the twin images of Nekima Levy Armstrong. One is of what she actually is, a strong, confident African American woman speaking truth to power. The other is the AI doctored image from the White House portraying her as “hysterical — tears streaming down her face, her hair disheveled, appearing to cry out in despair. “ARRESTED” was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a “far-left agitator” who was “orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”

The murders of Alex Pretti and Renne Good have shaken the country.  We have come face-to-face with the violence that is required to keep the empire of racial capital going.  Much as the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner reverberated around the country more than sixty years ago, the violence that is such a part of our culture has been laid bare for all to see. And it has sparked outrage.

This week the Boggs Center hosted a conversation with Andrea Ritchie focusing on her newest book, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies. The book explores how the principles of emergence offer us new and imaginative ways of organizing towards futures that cherishes life.  It is a concise discussion of the foundational concepts of critical connections emerging out of practices rooted in adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and fractalization. It is a valuable book to study in this moment.

We have endured a year of cruelty, chaos, and corruption. Trump was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Day 2025. Many people acknowledged that grim irony.

Much of the globe is coming to terms with the reality that the US government sees no limit to the use of violence and deadly force in pursuit of its own interests. International law, sovereignty, and human rights were shattered with the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, by US military forces.