@foodlabdetroit
A writer, strategist, and cultural worker whose work lives at the intersection of food, equity, and memory. Currently exploring the role of Black abstraction in processing grief and legacy. Detroit-made, globally engaged.
The billionaire class has never been bigger.
Supercharged by Trump-era tax cuts and other policies that favor the rich, America’s wealthy minority has more power over the country than at any time in the last century.
What will the U.S. look like as it is shaped by the needs & beliefs of the top 1%?
The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951. Ms. Lacks’s cells have been used in groundbreaking research: develop vaccines for polio, Covid-19 & treatments for cancer.
From “I AM A MAN” to “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES,” from Memphis sanitation workers to a Black congressman standing in a chamber full of people pretending this history is behind us.
This is the practice of Black History Month: see the pattern, refuse to look away & honor the courage in real time! ✊🏾
Under Jim Crow & its afterlives, white women - denied many forms of male power, were granted authority over racial boundaries in schools, neighborhoods & “moral” life. Meaning, they could be marginalized by patriarchy & still wield power over Black people’s bodies.
Different era. Same function.
That’s 1927. And here we are in 2026, still having the same conversation — not because the evidence isn’t there, but because the systems that benefit from the lie have no incentive to let the truth circulate freely.
A hundred years later, that’s still the assignment.
Woodson created Negro History Week not as a celebration but as an intervention. He was saying the truth has to leave the building. It has to get into schools, communities & the public consciousness —because the people who benefit from ignorance aren’t going to distribute knowledge on your behalf.
Race as a biological hierarchy was debunked. And Carter G. Woodson looked at that and said essentially: so what? If it stays in the journals, if it stays in the conference rooms, if it stays in the academy, it changes nothing for the people who are living under the weight of the lie. 1/3
The timing is extraordinary — 250 years since the Declaration & 100 years since Carter G. Woodson said these truths will have little bearing if they are left in the state of academic discussion. Woodson wasn’t just creating a week of celebration. He was insisting that truth has to live in public.
He has a deep, special hatred of Black women. I suppose that’s one of the core beliefs that hangs this whole cabal together…
Malcolm X looking past the camera
Today marks the day Malcolm X was assassinated and his words about Black women still rings true:
“The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman.”
Because that is the Black Gen X inheritance. We were raised Post–civil rights. Pre–post-racial myth. Educated, ambitious, credentialed — but navigating erasure.
Rev. Jackson’s clothes said:
“I know where I come from.”
“I know where I’m going.”
“And I refuse to shrink to make you comfortable.” /n
“His clothing choices were an emphatic expression of identity in protest of a history of erasure.”
Because for Black Gen X, we grew up in an era where presentation was political and we understood early that clothes could be:
armor, amplification, diplomacy, protest and prophecy. 1/2
Operation Breadbasket, which started in Atlanta, leveraged boycotts to urge corporate America to implement equal opportunity hiring practices for minorities. It would become a model for urban activism, expanding on Dr. King’s lessons from the Montgomery bus boycott.
Rev Jesse Jackson’s Holiday Greeting Card (1987) - a moment where Black political life and Black social life met in the language of elegance and possibility. Not casual. Not ironic. Intentional. Aspirational. Almost ceremonial.
The way we were.
It’s nostalgia, pride, grief & history all at once.
Rev. Jackson wasn’t abstract history — he was on the TV in my living room, at the dinner table, part of the soundtrack of my childhood. He made possibility feel real in real time. He helped me believe my dreams belonged in public, in power, and in the future of this country!
Black History Month is not only about remembering the past. It is about deciding whether we will continue the work. Today, the work feels heavier. But it also feels clearer. Like grief itself—not a weight that lifts, but one that teaches you how strong you actually are.
Rest well, Rev. Jackson. /n
If Jesse Jackson spent his life speaking in futures, then the assignment he leaves behind is simple and impossible at once: keep speaking in futures. Keep building coalitions. Keep choosing neighbors. Keep believing that dignity belongs to everyone—even when the world insists otherwise. 2/3
Rev. Jackson was never just a person to me. He was part of the soundtrack of the world I was raised in. If you grew up Black in America in the late 20th century, his voice lived in your nervous system. His cadence. His refusal to shrink his imagination about who we could be. He spoke in futures.
Kendrick & Bad Bunny use the flag to diagnose two different faces of the same empire.
Kendrick shows the flag as broken from within; Bad Bunny shows the flag as contested from the outside—two performances that make “patriotism” impossible to read as innocent when the political ground is empire.
When you don’t have the range. A show built on sugarcanes, a power grid, a sovereignty flag & diaspora gentrification will read as “culture”. But those symbols are politics: land, labor, extraction, infrastructure, displacement—how power moves through Puerto Rican life under U.S. colonial rule. /n
The real story here is the interpretive failure of newsrooms that have hollowed out their range—by shedding (or failing to elevate) the very journalists, editors, and historians of color who can recognize when a performance is making an argument in symbols instead of slogans. 1/2 😒
The way Bad Bunny bridges the academic/public divide without dumbing it down. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Puerto Rico: A National History is scholarship. Putting its sensibility into mass culture is basically a new distribution channel for historical consciousness—outside the gatekeeping of elite institutions.
The way Bad Bunny bridges the academic/public divide without dumbing it down. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Puerto Rico: A National History is scholarship. Putting its sensibility into mass culture is basically a new distribution channel for historical consciousness—outside the gatekeeping of elite institutions
The way Bad Bunny bridges the academic/public divide without dumbing it down. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Puerto Rico: A National History is scholarship. Putting its sensibility into mass culture is basically a new distribution channel for historical consciousness—outside the gatekeeping of elite institutions.
It mirrors what art historians often point out about Wifredo Lam’s *The Jungle (La jungla)—that the “jungle” is actually cultivated sugarcane, not wild nature, and that cane functions as a symbolic structure for the plantation system and its afterlives. 3/3
When Bad Bunny opens the halftime show in a sugarcane set, he’s basically dropping a plantation economy into the center of U.S. spectacle: the field is staged to “look like a sugar cane field” as a visual homage to Puerto Rico. 2/3
Bad Bunny’s sugarcane staging isn’t “tropical” scenery—it’s plantation architecture: monocrop extraction made visible. Like Wifredo Lam’s La Jungla, the cane turns “nature” into a colonial system that encloses bodies and memory, then gets repurposed as critique and declaration. 1/3
She stands as a counter-narrative to erasure: a Black woman not erased, but celebrated. Not silenced, but amplified. Not merely surviving on the margins—but dominating in a space never designed for her. Happy Black History Month! #ErinJackson
This guide focuses on the Island, in a cluster of generally safe and well-populated coastal neighborhoods — Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Lekki, and Lagos Island — with thriving arts and nightlife scenes.
Haiti is a case study in how the powers that be will never cease punishing you for fighting & winning your freedom. Power punishes freedom because freedom shifts the frame. It refuses charity & demands change. And when we do that—whether through art, policy, data, or food—the backlash always comes.