Did you know that in physics, there is one thing the universe refuses to negotiate?

Every other measurement in existence is willing to bend. The entire structure of reality is relative, meaning it depends on where you are standing, what you are near, and how fast you are falling. Time will slow down, and mass will swell. Einstein looked at the cosmos and found that nothing stays the same when you change how fast you are moving or how close you are to something else

…except for light.

Light does not care where you are standing. It does not adjust for your position or your speed or your grief or your distance.

God said let there be light and it was the first thing He fixed into the world, before land, before water, before the names of anything. Before He built the sun or set the stars into their places, He established the constant. Everything else in creation would be defined in relation to it.

The speed of light is a physical law, and yet, every love language we have ever invented instinctively reaches for it anyway. Have you noticed that? “You are the light of my life.” “You light up every room.” “You are my sunshine.” “I found my light in you.” We have been saying these things for centuries, never stopping to ask why light is always the word we land on when we are trying to describe the one person who makes everything make sense. But I think I understand it now. I think we have always been trying to say: you are the constant. You are the thing that does not bend when everything else does. You are what the whole frame of my life measures itself against, orients around, and depends on to hold its shape.

I do not know you yet. I do not know your name or your sleepy voice or the particular way God has been shaping you in the years before we find each other. But I know that you will be that to me. My constant in this relative world.

Right now, my life runs on entirely relative terms. Everything I feel depends on the season I am in, the weight of what I have just survived, and how fast the world around me is moving. I am a frame of reference that keeps shifting… recalculating…

I believe there will be rooms where everything is loud, and your presence will make something in me go still. I believe there will be seasons where I am coming undone, and you will meet my threads in the knot and slowly help detangle. Not because you are perfect, but because God will have built something in you that is meant to be steady for someone like me, and something in me that is meant to be steady for someone like you.

I am writing this in the waiting, in the long, relative stretch of time before your gravity enters my frame. But I know what happens when a mass great enough finally arrives. Everything reorganizes, and time bends toward it. And all of this… the pain, the writing, the seasons of not yet, will not disappear but will simply find their meaning.

The way light gives meaning to the whole universe.

Your chest tightens. The conversation halts. There’s something almost physical in the hunt for the right language, a pressure that only releases when the word finally arrives. That sensation, the gap between knowing and retrieving, is one of the most disorienting feelings a healthy mind can experience. It lasts seconds… maybe a few hours if you’re unlucky.

Leonard Shelby lives there permanently.

Leonard has long-term memory intact and short-term memory destroyed. He knows who he is. He cannot know what he just did. The film runs on two timelines. The color sequences, Leonard’s present, play backward. The black-and-white sequences, his internal narration delivered on a phone to an unseen listener, play forward. These two strands converge at the film’s end, which is also its chronological beginning. Nolan described his intention as withholding from the audience what is withheld from the protagonist.

Watching Memento was disorienting. Each color scene ends with a revelation that the next scene explains, except you haven’t seen the next scene yet, because it comes before this one. It was like reading a book whose pages are shuffled. You can only make sense of each individual page.

There is a question buried in these notes I was taking: How can he heal if he doesn’t feel time? Neuroscience and philosophy have been circling this for decades.

We do not experience time the way a clock measures it. We feel time through memory, specifically through the accumulation and sequencing of events. Researchers studying time perception have found that our sense of how long something lasted is driven not by the clock but by how many distinct, retrievable memories the interval produced. A week filled with new experiences feels long in retrospect because it generated many anchors. A week of routine shrinks. This is why vacations feel both fast in the moment and long in memory. The density of events shapes our felt experience of duration.

For Leonard, this system is severed. He cannot form new episodic memories. New events cannot be encoded, sequenced, or recalled. Without that scaffolding, he has no way to feel the passage of time from within. He wakes into every moment as if it were the first one. He is, in a specific neurological sense, outside of time. Not physically because he ages, moves, and acts. But subjectively, he inhabits a permanent present with no accumulating past and therefore no felt future.

He lives outside of time not because the clock has stopped, but because memory is how we feel time moving, and his is broken.

Healing, in any meaningful psychological sense, requires what researchers call mental time travel: the ability to project yourself backward into a past experience and forward into a possible future. Leonard is stuck in grief because the cognitive infrastructure for moving through grief, memory, sequence, the ability to feel that something is receding, is unavailable to him.

What Leonard builds in place of memory is a system. Notes. Polaroids. Tattoos. He does not trust himself to remember, so he distributes the self across objects. His identity is literally external.

But here is what the film reveals: a system is only as honest as the person who built it. Leonard’s notes can lie. His tattoos can lie. And they do because Leonard himself lied. Teddy reveals, in the film’s climactic collapse, that Leonard’s wife did not die from the attack. Sammy Jankis is Leonard. Leonard accidentally killed his wife through repeated insulin injections.

He doesn’t want the truth, so he makes up the truth. He recreates his own reality, and then forgets that he did it.

This is the film’s deepest provocation. Memory constructs the self. We are not who we are, independent of what we remember. Leonard cannot bear the truth of what he did, so he assembles a different narrative: a villain named John G., a righteous mission, a wife still waiting to be avenged. Every time he forgets, he can be innocent again.

And then he chooses to lie to himself once more. In the film’s final sequence (which is the beginning of the story), Leonard deliberately destroys evidence that would tell him the truth. He manufactures a new John G. for himself to find.

The film suggests that what we call “time” is not just something we live in. It is something we quietly build out of what we choose to remember and how we arrange it. Leonard is an extreme case, but he makes the structure visible. When memory breaks, time does not disappear. It gets replaced.

And what replaces it is not always the truth. It is whatever allows the person to keep going.

Organizing by genre felt too generic, like sorting books by color instead of by what they actually say. Actors felt too much like glaze… I can barely remember their names anyway.

But directors… directors felt right.

When I was younger, every planner, every notebook, every set of class notes had a color system. Green for science. Red for math. Yellow for English. And always, in the corner, a little key explaining what each color meant. Understanding the person organizing the information reveals something that the information alone cannot. The system reflects a mind. I was learning how to think by sorting the world around me.

That is exactly what studying film through directors does. And the director I cannot stop thinking about right now is Christopher Nolan.

Nolan’s whole body of work is organized around a few obsessions that keep returning in different costumes. Time is unreliable, or at least non-linear. Endurance and struggle are heroic. Identity is a construction that collapses under pressure. And underneath all of it, there is always a man pursuing something so consuming that it begins to destroy the people closest to him. His casting choices are precise as well. He often returns to the same actors across projects because he is not looking for range in the Hollywood sense. He is borrowing the audience's existing relationship with his actors, then working with what those actors actually are, not just what they can perform.

His wife and longtime producing partner, Emma Thomas, said that everything Nolan writes is in some way pointing back to the Odyssey. Nolan first encountered the Odyssey at five or six years old. Years later, Warner Bros. hired him to direct Troy, the Iliad, the war that precedes Odysseus’ journey home. Then the studio took it back and handed him Batman Begins as a consolation prize. That consolation prize launched his entire career.

What is striking is that Troy and the Odyssey are in the same mythological world, so he never really left it. He spent two decades building a filmography while carrying this world beneath every plot. Then, after Oppenheimer won seven Oscars and grossed nearly a billion dollars, he brought the Odyssey to Universal, and it was greenlit almost immediately.

The journey to making the Odyssey was, in its own shape, an odyssey. A man who knows where he needs to go, repeatedly redirected by forces larger than himself, transformed by everything that happens in between, arriving finally at the destination with the full weight of the detour behind him.

This is what makes studying film through directors so disorienting in the best way. The movies stop being the main event. They become puzzle pieces. Evidence. The real object of study is the pattern underneath… the recurring tension.

I think about my own brief flirtation with that world. There was a period, deep in what I would generously call my artsy girl era, where I was genuinely obsessed with documentary work. I thought seriously about film school. But I realized fairly quickly that I loved the people in the story. My investment in the person outweighed my investment in crafting their narrative, which is maybe not the right temperament for a director. I wanted to help more than I wanted to observe. So I took the suit and tie route. Policy. Institutions.

Still, the desire stays with me. And so I asked myself… If I were a director, what would be my recurring tension?

I think it would be this: the moment when many things are true at the same time and neither one cancels the other out. The scene that does not resolve. The ending leaves you standing in the middle of it rather than watching it from the outside. I am drawn to complexity not as a philosophical position but as an honest account of how things actually feel to live through. The pursuit of understanding something completely, and then the slow recognition that complete understanding might not be available, and the decision to keep going anyway. That tension, between the desire for resolution and the refusal to manufacture one, is the thing I would keep returning to.

It shows up in how I think about most things, honestly. I love when different roads point toward the same truth. When disciplines that have no reason to agree with each other arrive at the same place through entirely different paths. As a Christian, my faith works the same way. It is not something I wear overtly. It lives more in how I move through disagreement, how I treat people I find difficult, how I apologize. Covert in expression but total in orientation. And I think that would be true of my films as well. There would be a singular God logic underneath the screenplay, not announced, just present. A logic that says multiplicity and unity are not opposites. That holding many true things at once is not confusion. It is actually the most honest way to see. After all, what is true cannot be threatened.

My films would not resolve because life does not resolve. The camera would linger one beat longer than feels polite, and the viewer would leave with the strange sensation that the film was about them. I would like the viewer to feel something in the theater that forces them to be different when they leave. Measurably, observably different. Furthermore, I’d like to see that difference.

That is probably why I went into policy instead.

I am gutted by what is unfolding in South Africa right now, and it is a disappointment that compounds in proportion to how much history you know. In hospitals across KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, vigilante groups have physically blockaded entrances, demanding that patients prove South African citizenship before receiving care. In Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town, businesses owned by African nationals have been looted and burned. People have been beaten. Two Nigerians have been confirmed killed. Children have been expelled from classrooms. A nationwide shutdown is planned for May 4, 2026, organized by groups whose messaging is, by their own admission, not ambiguous: “We are xenophobic. We want all foreigners, documented or not, out of this country as a matter of urgency” (Moneyweb, 2026). This is not a fringe position; it is a growing political movement, and the South African government is managing it rather than dismantling it.

The principal organizations driving this wave are Operation Dudula and March and March. Operation Dudula, whose name derives from the isiZulu for “force out,” was established in Soweto and has since expanded throughout the country. It emerged in the aftermath of COVID-19’s economic devastation, channeling public frustration about unemployment and strained public services into organized anti-immigrant activity. The group’s tactics have ranged from raiding properties to blockading schools and hospitals to threatening traders and demanding documentation from people on the street (Wikipedia, Operation Dudula, 2026). March and March have followed a similar playbook, and both organizations have recently moved into Gauteng as local government elections approach, their rhetoric intensifying in direct proportion to electoral opportunity (Daily Maverick, 2026).

The African Centre for Migration and Society’s Xenowatch project has documented that xenophobic discrimination is “deeply embedded in South Africa’s social and political landscape,” recurring in cyclical waves since 1998 (ACMS, 2025). The 2008 eruption killed more than 60 people, injured approximately 1,700 more, and displaced around 100,000 (African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 2026). The 2015 attacks were severe enough to require military intervention. The pattern in this decade is marked by something new: institutional ambition. These groups are not mobs. They are organizations with membership, social media infrastructure, political allies, and legislative demands. The Patriotic Alliance, ActionSA, and elements of the IFP and MK parties have all shared platforms with their leadership (Moneyweb, 2026). The violence is being cultivated within the system.

The people being expelled from South African hospitals come, in many cases, from the countries that once harbored South Africa’s liberation movement in their own hospitals, their own schools, their own cities.

This is where the history becomes morally unbearable to ignore. When the African National Congress was banned in 1960 and its leadership imprisoned or forced underground, the organization did not survive through its own resources. It survived because the rest of Africa showed up. Tanzania, under Julius Nyerere, housed thousands of ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress exiles and served as the ANC’s operational base for over a decade.

The Frontline States, including Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, and Lesotho, provided military training, logistical networks, and diplomatic cover at high cost to themselves (Anti-Apartheid Legacy, 2025). Nigeria was a financial anchor for the international anti-apartheid campaign. Guinea hosted the exiled leadership. These nations did not act from pure altruism. They acted from a shared political conviction: that the freedom of South Africa was inseparable from the freedom of the continent. Pan-Africanism, in this moment, was not just a slogan. It was a material commitment, paid for in resources and, for the Frontline States specifically, paid for in lives. The apartheid regime’s “Total Strategy” deliberately destabilized neighboring countries, sponsoring proxy conflicts that killed over two million people in Angola and Mozambique alone (Crgreview, 2024).

The people now being dragged out of hospital waiting rooms, whose shops are being torched in Johannesburg, who are being told by vigilante groups that they have no right to exist in South Africa, are the nationals of those countries. The Zambian president, in condemning this year’s violence, warned that xenophobic attacks could “destabilize African unity” and urged the South African Development Community and the African Union to intervene “before this xenophobia degenerates into full-scale genocide” (Amani Africa, 2019). He was speaking in the same register of continental obligation that once secured South Africa’s liberation. The irony is precise, and it should be said plainly: South Africa is expelling the continent that freed it.

The standard defense of the South African government’s conduct is that xenophobia represents a social problem rooted in genuine economic desperation, and that a government cannot simply legislate away public sentiment. Unemployment officially exceeds 32%, and expanded definitions push it higher still. Public services are under extraordinary strain. When people are desperate, they reach for explanations, and migrants, who are visible and vulnerable, become an available target.

South Africa initiated a National Action Plan to combat xenophobia, racism, and discrimination in 2019. As of a Johannesburg High Court ruling in November 2025, that plan had still not been implemented (UPI, 2025). The court, in the matter of Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia and Others v. Operation Dudula and Others, found that “the government’s unexplained failures to give proper effect to critical components of the NAP are an unconstitutional violation of its duties” and ordered compliance (SAFLII, 2025). The South African Police Service and the Department of Home Affairs were named as respondents, in part for allegedly colluding with or enabling Operation Dudula rather than restraining it (Power Law Africa, 2025). A court had to compel the government to implement its own plan. That is not a government struggling against a hard problem. That is a government that made a choice.

The choice becomes clearer when you observe what the government did do. In the lead-up to the 2024 national elections, senior political figures made anti-immigrant rhetoric a centerpiece of their campaigns, blaming foreign nationals for crime, unemployment, and strained services, in direct violation of the electoral code of conduct that all candidates are required to observe (Human Rights Watch, 2024). The ruling ANC, rather than confronting three decades of governance failures on service delivery, housing, and job creation, found it cheaper to validate the premise that migrants were the source of popular suffering. This is a well-documented pattern in comparative politics: when governments fail their populations economically, they redirect grievance toward a minority that cannot organize politically. In South Africa’s case, that minority is African nationals, and the government has been actively handing the match to the people who want to light the fire.

The International Commission of Jurists intervened as amicus curiae in the Kopanang case, urging South African courts to apply international law in protecting migrants from discrimination and xenophobic violence (ICJ, 2025). The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights issued a formal condemnation in April 2026, calling on the government to conduct prompt investigations, prosecute perpetrators, and “take decisive measures to dismantle and prevent the operation of vigilante groups” (ACHPR, 2026). Nigeria summoned South Africa’s envoy. Ethiopia’s foreign ministry issued a formal rebuke. The African Union Peace and Security Council convened a special session.

Structural analysis is not an alibi for the state. It is precisely the tool that tells us who is responsible. And it points directly at the government.

I want to hold this in tension with something I am genuinely reckoning with: what pan-Africanism asks of those of us who claim it from the diaspora. The hesitation I have seen in diaspora spaces is real. There is a reluctance to criticize an African government loudly, particularly in Western contexts, for fear of feeding narratives that have historically been used to justify interference and condescension. There is an instinct, shaped by hard experience, to keep internal African disagreements internal. I understand that instinct, and I do not think it is cynical. But I think it is being misapplied here.

Pan-Africanism has never been a politics of uncritical solidarity with African governments. Kwame Nkrumah built his entire framework on the premise that African states could betray their people. Julius Nyerere, who gave the ANC a home in Tanzania, spent years warning that political independence without economic self-determination and continental accountability was a hollow achievement. The tradition was built on solidarity with African people, not with the institutions that claim to represent them. The African nationals being expelled from South African hospitals and whose businesses are being burned are African people. Staying silent about their suffering, in the name of continental optics, is not pan-Africanism.

The objection I take most seriously is the one that says: you are condemning ordinary South Africans who have been failed by their own government and handed a scapegoat. My answer is that I am not. The unemployed person in a Johannesburg township who has been told, by politicians and by vigilante leaders, that his suffering is the migrant’s fault has been manipulated. The accountability I am calling for belongs to the political class that chose manipulation over governance. When African migrants are perpetrators of harm, the call for nuance and structural understanding rarely appears with such urgency. When they are victims, suddenly context is everything.

What accountability looks like here is specific. The South African government must implement the National Action Plan without further judicial compulsion. It must prosecute the organizers of Operation Dudula and March and March under existing law. It must remove from public platforms and electoral candidacy those politicians who have violated the electoral code with anti-immigrant rhetoric. It must provide material reparations to the documented victims of xenophobic violence. And it must reckon, publicly and institutionally, with the historical debt it carries to the nations whose nationals it is now expelling. African states with nationals at risk must move from diplomatic statements to coordinated economic pressure if those statements continue to be absorbed and ignored. The AU must follow its emergency session with monitoring mechanisms that have consequences, not just resolutions that age in an archive.

Pan-Africanism is not, and has never been, nostalgia. It is a living political framework that makes demands of the present. It demands that we hold states accountable to the principles they built their legitimacy on. South Africa built its post-apartheid legitimacy on the language of human dignity, constitutional rights, and continental solidarity. Holding it to them is not a betrayal of Africa. It is the only form of solidarity that means anything.

The continent did not free South Africa so that South Africa could become a country that expels the continent.

WORKS CITED

African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS). “Xenophobic Discrimination in South Africa: An Overview of Trends, Effects, and Responses, 2022-2024.” Xenowatch, 2025. https://www.xenowatch.ac.za/

African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR). “The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Deplores the Xenophobic Attacks and Vigilante Conduct Perpetrated on Nationals of Other African Countries in the Republic of South Africa.” Press Release, April 27, 2026. https://achpr.au.int/

Amani Africa. “Xenophobic Attacks Affecting Nationals of Other African Countries in South Africa.” Insights on the Peace and Security Council Session, September 2019. https://amaniafrica-et.org/

Anti-Apartheid Legacy Centre. “Activity Against Apartheid: African Continent.” 2025. https://antiapartheidlegacy.org.uk/

Chekenya, Nixon S. “Migrants and Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa: Theory and Evidence.” Journal of African Foreign Affairs 6, no. 1 (2024): 85-106. https://journals.sagepub.com/

Crgreview. “The Power of African Activism: How the ANC and Umkhonto We Sizwe Defeated Apartheid.” March 17, 2024. https://crgreview.com/

Daily Maverick. “March and March Moves into Gauteng as Anti-Foreigner Sentiment Swells Ahead of Elections.” April 29, 2026. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/

Ghanamma. “South African Government as Enabler of Xenophobic Attacks.” April 30, 2026. https://www.ghanamma.com/

Human Rights Watch. “South Africa: Toxic Rhetoric Endangers Migrants.” May 6, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/

Human Rights Watch. “World Report 2025: South Africa.” January 16, 2025. https://www.hrw.org/

International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). “South Africa: ICJ Urges High Court to Apply International Law Protecting Migrants and Refugees from Discrimination and Xenophobia.” July 8, 2025. https://www.icj.org/

Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia and Others v. Operation Dudula and Others (2023/044685). ZAGPJHC 1102. Gauteng Division of the High Court, Johannesburg, November 4, 2025. https://www.saflii.org/

Moneyweb. “Xenophobic Protests Escalate with Countrywide Shutdown Planned for 4 May.” April 2026. https://www.moneyweb.co.za/

openDemocracy. “Operation Dudula: Weaponising the Grassroots in South Africa.” February 17, 2023. https://www.opendemocracy.net/

Power Law Africa. “Kopanang Against Xenophobia and Others v. Operation Dudula and Others.” November 4, 2025. https://powerlaw.africa/

SIHMA. “Xenophobic Vigilantism and the Struggle for Migrant Rights in South Africa.” 2025. https://sihma.org.za/

UPI. “Anti-Immigrant Group ‘Operation Dudula’ in South Africa Ordered to Stop Actions.” November 5, 2025. https://www.upi.com/

Wikipedia. “Operation Dudula.” Last modified January 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dudula

I don’t know how to write about Marty Supreme without writing about myself. That’s the problem the film leaves you with. It doesn’t resolve or judge. It just hands you a mirror and walks away.

Let me try to be precise about what I mean.

Marty is a liar. A schemer. A man who sleeps with married women, abandons people in hospitals, makes promises he has no intention of keeping, and constructs elaborate justifications for every transgression. He is the kind of man the good Christian girl in me wants to dismiss cleanly, file him under “cautionary tale,” signal my disapproval, and move on.

But the film doesn’t let me do that.

He grew up in a home where manipulation was the native language. His mother Rebecca, played with almost unbearable precision by Fran Drescher, fakes an illness to pull him back into her orbit. She whispers instructions to a caretaker about what to say to him on the phone, coaching the deception in real time while he is on the other end of the line listening. His uncle, who employs him at the shoe store, promised him seven hundred dollars for his work and did not deliver when Marty needed the money to get to England. He spoke down on his dreams, treated his ambition as delusion, and when Marty took what he believed he had earned, his uncle called the police on him. The people who were supposed to be on his side used him as a piece to be positioned. Love, in his earliest formation, came with conditions and consequences. It looked a lot like strategy.

So when Rachel’s manipulation blows back on him later in the film and he says that is something his mother would do, he is not making an excuse. He is observing his own formation. The question the film refuses to answer is whether that origin absolves him of what he became, and I think the honest answer is that it neither absolves nor condemns. It explains. Explanation is not the same as forgiveness, but it is the beginning of understanding.

Good behavior exists, in many respects, behind the paywall of security. When you grow up with enough stability, enough options, enough cushion between you and catastrophe, you can afford the luxury of playing by the rules. The rules, after all, were mostly written by people who could afford to follow them. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent much of his career showing how social position shapes not just what people do but what they can imagine doing, what options feel available, and what futures feel real. Marty moves through the world like a man for whom the standard routes were never genuinely on offer. His ambition is the survival technology of someone who looked at the legitimate pathways and calculated, correctly or not, that they led nowhere he needed to go.

The problem is that survival technologies have a way of outlasting the conditions that made them necessary. Adaptation calcifies into character, and by the time the film finds him, Marty’s hunger has become something that consumes everything around it, including the people he is ostensibly trying to liberate. He dreams of pulling his loved ones out of poverty while neglecting them in the present. The philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote about what he called the “not-yet,” the orientation toward a future that doesn’t exist yet but feels more real than the present. Marty lives entirely in the not-yet. It is why he cannot show up for the people in front of him. It is why he leaves Rachel at the hospital to go to Japan. The dream is always more real than the person.

The scene I keep returning to is the one with the pen company owner, a man whose wife Marty has been sleeping with, who delivers the line that I love: “Marketing is theater”. Marty has just lost a match that made his opponent a national treasure, and the owner wants to capitalize on the fanfare at the expense of Marty’s pride. Marty declines. This was when I realized it was never about money. Money is just a mechanism to him. What Marty wants is something closer to proof that the fire inside him was worth something. The refusal of the shoe store promotion makes sense here, too. Despite the money, he felt he was bigger than that job.

Then there is Rachel. She is the most structurally interesting character in the film because she does what no one else manages. She outscams the scammer. She stages being hit by her husband so that Marty will care for her, and it works. The one person in the entire film he genuinely sacrifices his present for is the one who lied to get there. He has spent the entire film doing exactly this to other people, and the moment he is on the receiving end, he cannot see the parallel. That blindness is the mechanism by which ambition insulates itself from accountability. He has appointed himself the moral auditor of other people’s survival strategies while quietly exempting his own. His schemes have a noble end, he believes. Hers is just chaos.

Often, the aspect of what people love about you exists at the opposite extreme expression of that same trait. The magnetism and the destruction are not separate features. They are two sides of the same coin.

This is what the film means, I think, when it shows you the dog. An animal running from smoke at a gas station, a living thing caught in consequences it had no part in creating. The image is small on purpose. Destruction follows Marty not in the form of spectacular ruin but in the form of accumulated small violences. The people left waiting. The promises that dissolve. The things scared off by a fire he started and didn’t stay to put out.

And then the pig scene. There is a moment, right before Marty refuses, where you see his humanity in a way the rest of the film barely allows. He is standing there, about to be made into a spectacle, and you feel the full weight of what that costs a person who has already paid so much to be in that room. I felt embarrassed for him before it happened. I felt the specific ache of watching someone put everything on the line and feel it start to crumble in their face, and then something shifts. His pride enters. And he does something most people, if they are honest, would never do. He has no guaranteed way home. He has no assurance of payment. He has nothing except the conviction that he will not let someone else write the final scene of his own story.

The film ends unresolved. He travels home. He meets his son for the first time and weeps. What those tears mean, I genuinely cannot tell you. The film doesn’t tell you either. Because this is not a story about redemption and it is not a story about condemnation. It is a story about sitting in the mess of ambition, about what it produces and what it costs and how impossibly difficult it is to separate the two.

I am an ambitious woman. I have lived many lives, made many mistakes, and felt the particular hunger that Marty carries. The sense that you are meant for something larger than where you started, and that the distance between where you are and where you need to be justifies a certain ruthlessness in how you move. I have not done what Marty does. But I want to be honest that my socioeconomic circumstances saved me from some of it. In a different world, under different conditions, with the same fire running through me, I don’t know what I would do.

The ego in me wants to resolve that uncertainty cleanly. It wants to file Marty Mauser under narcissistic lost cause and walk away with its conscience intact. But the human in me, the one who entrenched herself in this piece of fiction and felt something shift, is reckoning with the reflection. Not because I am Marty. But because I recognize the fire.

The natural instinct at the end of any story is to reach for a conclusive judgment. We want enough data to make a verdict. This film withholds it deliberately. So I sit with this question instead: whether the fire that drives you and the fire that destroys you were ever two separate things.

“It’s human nature, Eren. When it’s all said and done, government policies are a reflection of our fear.”

What a line! Cue the fireworks in my brain.

Because if government policy is a reflection of fear, then whoever controls the reflection controls quite a lot. They decide which fears get named and which get managed into silence. They decide whether the fear points outward, toward the walls, toward the unknown, toward the titans, or whether it might, under different circumstances, point inward. Toward the food distribution. Toward who lives in the interior and who lives at the edge. And here is what I keep returning to: a government that derives its authority from fear has every incentive to ensure that fear never goes away, and maybe even manufacture more of it.

However, the fear inside those walls is not irrational. People die in the first episode, graphically, including Eren’s mother.

Something exists beyond them that kills people. A real threat and a politically managed threat are not mutually exclusive. In fact, a real threat is the most useful kind, because when fear is grounded in something true, it becomes very difficult to ask who is benefiting from everyone staying afraid.

I’m only five episodes in, and I want to be careful not to arrive at conclusions the show hasn’t earned yet. But I’m noticing things.

I want to note something about the episode titles themselves. Episode one is called “To You, in 2,000 Years: The Fall of Shiganshina.” ... hmm. Episode two is “That Day,” which is exactly what collective trauma becomes when it gets distilled into a single point of reference. Episode three, “A Dim Light Amid Despair,” and episode four, “The Night of the Closing Ceremony,” both carry managed hope… a dim light. And episode five: “First Battle: The Struggle for Trost.” The word struggle is doing real work there. The titles alone tell you this is a world in which survival is perpetual.

What I can see so far is a world organized around three concentric walls.

Wall Maria is the outermost ring, where the poor and the agricultural population live. Wall Rose sits behind it. Wall Sina is at the center, where the wealthy live, where the royals live, where the Military Police is stationed. The monarchy has absolute authority over its population’s placement, and the people who govern the threat live at maximum distance from it. The people who absorb the first contact with any breach are the ones the system has already decided are most expendable.

What is also worth noting is that the show gives us almost no information about where the Titans actually came from. The citizens inside the walls are told they appeared roughly 107 years ago and nearly wiped out humanity. That is the official story. I am not going to speculate beyond what has been shown, but I will say that a world in which the origin of the central threat is unknown to the people most endangered by it, and in which seeking that knowledge is illegal, is a world where someone has decided that the question itself is dangerous. That is tellingggggg.

The episode four detail that I cannot move past is the one about military placement. The top ten graduates, the most skilled titan fighters produced by the entire training system, are the only ones eligible to join the Military Police and live inside Sina, furthest from any titan. Everyone ranked below them gets pushed outward toward active combat. The system takes its most effective fighters and moves them away from the thing they were trained to fight. The government has persuaded the people that their hardship is due to the titans, and uses that persuasion to justify the militarization of society, but the militarization is carefully arranged so that the most capable soldiers are absorbed into the center before they can become a problem for it. What remains at the front is everyone who had fewer options and more belief. This is what a meritocracy looks like when its actual function is to protect the structure that produced it.

Which is why Eren matters as a character in a way that goes beyond his rage and his grief. He is the ideal volunteer.

Traumatized, morally certain, desperate for the cause to be bigger than his loss. He doesn’t need to be conscripted. He runs toward the wall. The system does not need to force people like Eren into danger because people like Eren have already decided that fighting is the only response that gives their pain meaning. The titans give everyone a common goal, and Eren has internalized that goal so completely that he disciplines himself. It is exactly what the political structure requires from the people it needs at the outermost edge.

Then there is the detail about the information. What is outside the walls is not merely unknown. It is illegal to know. There is a moment in episode five, a flashback that arrives while Eren is quite literally inside a titan’s throat, where we see Armin as a child showing Eren a book about the outside world.

He describes vast oceans filled with saltwater, land that stretches beyond what anyone inside the walls has seen, a world that is not only survivable but abundant. And Eren cannot hold it. You can see it in how he receives the information, with wonder but also with a kind of cognitive resistance, as though his mind has no shelf to put it on. He has lived his entire life inside a world where outside means threat, where the unknown means titan, where beyond the wall means death. Freedom of movement is physically constricted for most citizens, but the more durable constraint is epistemic. The wall that matters most is not made of stone. That connection, between manufactured ignorance and manufactured consent, set off its own round of fireworks in my brain. Because I have seen this before… just not in fiction.

The world beneath the plot is a city organized so that the poor absorb danger and the powerful observe it from a safe distance. A military system that rewards excellence with removal from the front. A young man whose grief has been converted into fuel for a war the government needs to fight. A population that cannot imagine the outside because imagining it was made a crime.

This show sits at the intersection of many things I find myself thinking about: power, governance, who gets protected, and who gets placed at the edge. I came in hot, and I know that. My natural instinct is to interrogate the system before I trust it, which means I was already asking questions about the walls before the titans even finished breaking through them. So yes, I believe the titans are real, for now. But I am watching very carefully who benefits from everyone staying afraid of them.

See you at my next explosion.

3:33 AM

The world has stopped asking me for things. No name in anyone’s mouth, the world has released its grip on me.

Just the dark, which is generous in the way it fills every space and lets you be inside it.

My face is clean. I have washed off the day. The water was warm. I looked at myself for a moment longer than usual. Examining the consequences of last night's all-nighter.

The ideas come like they’ve been waiting for the noise to leave first. They were standing outside the door all day, and finally, finally, I let them in. They settle around me like old friends. We get to work.

I write things in my journal that I’ll be embarrassed by tomorrow. Good. That means they’re true. The pen moves faster than my second-guessing. I let it.

This is also when I go back. Not to fix things. Just to look at them.

The sentence I said at 2 pm… did it land wrong? Was I too much? Was I not enough? Both, probably. I was both.

I replay the moment someone laughed, and I don’t know why. I replay the moment I went quiet, and I know exactly why.

I am my own cross-examination at 3:33 in the morning, and I am not gentle but I am not cruel either. I’m just trying to understand myself while the world isn’t watching.

And somewhere in it all, a quiet wondering… what are you doing right now, at this same hour? Does the world feels just as wide to you?

I don’t do anything with this. I just hold it. 3:33 am is the only place I let myself hold it.

And then the dark shifts, almost imperceptibly, the way it does when morning is still far away but has started thinking about coming.

The ideas slow. The pen stills. My body remembers it has weight. I become the kind of tired that finally feels earned.

I close my eyes.

3:33 am

To future Jacks,

I'm currently a few minutes into a new day, and I’m sitting at my desk in my grad school apartment. I keep thinking about how a year from now won’t look anything like this. I’m at the stage in life where nothing feels final or constant. I flirt with variations of the future constantly.

Stability is something I keep grabbing for and then letting go of. Like I don’t fully trust it, or it doesn’t fully trust me. I’m still figuring a lot out, more than people would guess. We’ve always worn overwhelm well. Made chaos look like intention and control.

But it’s not always that.

And sometimes, just to step outside of how uncertain everything can feel, little Jacks and I think about you. Just long enough to feel like there’s somewhere to go.

Who are you now?

Do you still love pink? Do you still sit and finger coil every strand of your hair, gently, patiently, like it deserves that kind of care? I keep thinking you probably look even more like Mom now. You have her eyes in your youth, but I wonder if they rest the same way in maturity. If they soften and slant when you laugh as hers do. I wonder if your nose still scrunches like Dad’s when you laugh too hard. The deep laugh that takes over your whole body until you’re in tears.

I hope life feels different in your body. I hope you’re easier on yourself.

I hope being beautiful is the least interesting thing about you. I hope it’s like finishing the carton of fries and thinking you’re done, only to reach back in and find a few more at the bottom. Not the main thing, just a small, pleasant surprise.

I hope you picked up things along the way. Hobbies that aren’t about being impressive. I hope you let yourself be bad at things and kept going anyway. I hope you collect small things. Objects, ideas… moments.

I want to believe you grew into someone sexy and mysterious. But I also know you. I think you're probably still the kind of person who pulls over because the sunset is too beautiful to ignore. Who ends up in a twenty minute conversation with the waiter because they were nice. Who exchanges life stories with the stranger sitting next to you on the plane.

I hope you feel warm to people. I hope being around you feels like a place where people can loosen their grip a little. Where they do not have to edit themselves mid sentence or second guess how they are being read. I hope people leave you feeling more like themselves. Not because you fixed anything or gave them answers, but because you held space without tightening it.

I hope you’re a strong woman of faith in the quiet, daily ways, and that makes others want to know Jesus by way of your light.

I hope small irritations don’t stay with you long. That road rage doesn’t follow you home. That the perfect comeback doesn’t replay in your head all night. I hope things just pass through.

I hope you take your time when you speak. And that you listen in a way that makes people feel like they matter in real time.

I hope you’re loved. Deeply. I hope someone is drawn to how your mind works. Who adores when the light in your eyes sparks up when you get excited. And I hope you still get excited about everything. Please still be excited about things. I don’t want you to lose that. I don’t want life to become something you already understand too well. I hope the giggly, slightly unpredictable parts are still there.

And more than hoping you are loved, I hope you are love. I hope love abides in you.

I hope you still think deeply. Still question. But I hope you don’t let it stop you from moving anymore. I hope you learned how to keep going even when things aren’t clear.

If you’re not all the way there yet, I hope you’re closer than me. I hope you kept going.

Love,
Jacks

I have written a lot about my fascination with language, particularly how it shapes our perception of the world around us: love, time, identity. If you want to read those pieces, they’re called “Black Culture Across the Diaspora: Why Our Languages Shape Global Expression” or “Looking for Language and Finding History: How Language Functions as a System of Identity, Conflict, and Inherited History.” I never thought that this fascination would lead me to the doorsteps of my other hyperfixations: God, healing, existential thought, and space. But here we are. All of them intersecting in a kind of harmony that feels like fireworks going off in my brain every time I find a new connection. Arrival set off a lot of fireworks.

Okay, so boom: alien vessels arrive at twelve locations around the world.

A linguist named Louise Banks is brought in to communicate with them.

The aliens, the heptapods, do not use sound. Their written language is circular, non-sequential, released all at once rather than built word by word. Louise has to learn to think in it. Simultaneously, the whole world is on the brink of war because countries cannot decipher the level of threat the aliens possess.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which the film invokes directly, holds that the language you speak shapes how you cognize the world. Not just what you can describe, but what you can perceive. Different languages don’t just encode different words for the same reality. They encode different assumptions about what reality is made of, what counts as an event, where time begins and ends. The implication the film draws out from this is radical: if language shapes cognition, and a new language restructures cognition completely enough, then a new language could restructure your relationship to time itself.

This is what happens to Louise. As she internalizes the Heptapod script, she begins to experience time non-linearly. The scenes that read as flashbacks to a daughter who has died are not memories. They are perceptions. She is looking across rather than backwards, the way you might glance from one side of a room to the other without one side being more real or more present than the other. The Heptapod language does not give Louise new information. It gives her a new aperture.

Now here is where the film connects to something I have noticed running through other science fiction. There is a mode of communication these stories keep reaching for, a register that sits beyond ordinary language. It is never transmitted through speech. It arrives through matter: bodies of water, earthly vibrations, sand, dirt.

In Dune, Paul Atreides does not receive his visions through language or even through thought in the ordinary sense. I think of this as seismography logic. A seismograph does not hear a tremor. It registers it through felt movement and translates that registration into legible record. The instrument becomes a body that absorbs what language cannot carry. The result is a form of communication richer and more thorough than speech precisely because it bypasses the bottleneck of articulation. It does not describe the thing. It transmits it.

The film codes the heptapods this way deliberately. Their mode of knowing is presented as closer to a structure underneath the structure of ordinary human experience. And films that want to represent communication with something larger, something closer to truth, something that various traditions would call God, consistently reach for this same register. It is the same register Jesus reaches for when he teaches through nature and through parable: the fig tree, the sower, the seed. He is not explaining a concept. He is gesturing toward a structure and letting the structure do the work. You do not understand the parable by decoding it. You understand it by entering it. When you are tapped into even the slightest bit of that feelings-based logic, you have the intelligence to hear yourself across multiple times.

Which is why Louise becoming frantic as she understands more is not a narrative inconsistency. It is the film being precise about what it would actually cost a human mind to hold that kind of knowing. The earthly state cannot contain the vastness of a time outside human conception. The more she perceives, the less her humanity can metabolize what she is perceiving. She is being enlarged beyond the capacity she was built for.

This is where the film’s theology becomes the most interesting to me, and where I have to follow the fireworks.

There is an argument in Christian theology about why the devil’s rebellion is structurally unforgivable.

Not because God withholds mercy by disposition, but because forgiveness requires a specific architecture of time to function. Repentance requires the capacity to have been one thing and to become another, to experience the gap between the self you were and the self you are choosing, to move through consequence and emerge changed on the other side. Forgiveness is not just an emotional event. It is a temporal one. It requires before and after to mean something. The claim is that the devil sinned outside of linear time, in a condition where the structure that makes transformation possible does not operate the same way. The environment of the act does not admit the ordinary mechanisms of repair.

That blows my mind because the heptapods exist in exactly that kind of environment.

Outside linear time. In a space where past, present, and future are not a sequence but a simultaneous condition. When the film represents them as beings from beyond our experience of linear sequence, it is reaching for something astrophysics already gestures toward. And when theology describes a rebellion that occurred in a timeless void, it is reaching for the same thing from a different direction. These frameworks keep arriving at the same place: a category of being that operates outside the architecture that makes transformation possible.

Louise is not that.

Louise is the specific miracle the film is interested in. She gets something partial: a porous awareness, a capacity to feel across time while still remaining inside it. She can perceive non-linearly, but she still moves through sequence. This is what makes her choice meaningful in a way it could not be for the heptapods. She knows everything. And she chooses anyway. Choosing from inside time, with full knowledge of the cost, is what the film identifies as the highest available human act.

She saves the world with language. She calls a general whose number she learned from a future version of herself. She speaks to him in his own register, quotes his dying wife. He stands down. The weapons are lowered. She reached him where logic could not because she reached him in the register of loss, of the particular, of what holds meaning for the specific person in front of you. She knew something that could only be known from outside the sequence of the moment, and she used it to intervene in the moment anyway.

Arrival is not interested in resolving anything philosophically. It is interested in what it looks like to live inside the tension.

I keep finding Genesis in these films. Stories that take seriously the existential dimensions of being: time, memory, choice, loss, what we owe each other across vast distances, are drawing on the same deep grammar that the foundational narratives drew on. Language and time. Feeling and truth. The structure underneath the structure. Not because everything is secretly the same thing, but because some questions are structural enough that they surface wherever the thinking goes deep enough.

That is what this series is for. Experiencing the fireworks, locating where the fuse started, and following it into the deep.

See you at my next explosion.

West Africa is hemorrhaging its educated people. Doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers, academics. The numbers accumulate into something that would be a state of emergency in the West. Ghana loses roughly 500 nurses a month during peak migration periods, and in some years over 40% of newly licensed nurses seek opportunities abroad within a short period of certification. Nigeria has trained a generation of physicians now practicing in London and Houston. As of the early 2020s, over 9,000 Nigerian-trained doctors were registered in the United Kingdom alone, with thousands more in the United States. The UK employs more Ghanaian nurses than Ghana does. These are outcomes.

There is a word Nigerians use now for leaving. Japa. It means, roughly, to flee. The word implies something important that policy language does not: the recognition that what is happening is not a choice made freely, but a choice made under duress.

The standard explanation is familiar. Poor governance. Low wages. Weak institutions. If African states would only invest in their people, their people would stay. This is not wrong, but it is radically incomplete. It describes the fire without asking who lit it or who keeps the exits locked.

I believe brain drain in West Africa is not a symptom of underdevelopment, it is a mechanism of it. The West actively engineers the conditions that produce emigration, and West African states remain complicit in maintaining those conditions, not from incompetence alone, but from arrangements that serve the political class well enough that reform carries no urgency.

Let’s start with how the pipeline operates. The United States, United Kingdom, and Canada do not passively accept West African doctors and nurses. They recruit them. The US has visa pathways structured to attract foreign-trained medical graduates, and over 60% of foreign-trained physicians in the United States come from low- and middle-income countries. The UK has run active international recruitment schemes targeting shortage specialties for decades, with the National Health Service increasingly dependent on foreign-trained staff. What is striking is not just that these recruitment systems exist, but that they operate simultaneously with multilateral lending conditions that have historically capped public sector wages in the very countries being mined for labor. Under programs supported by the International Monetary Fund, many countries have been required to limit public sector wage bills, often within a fixed share of GDP, constraining hiring and salary growth in health systems already facing shortages. You cannot argue that those two facts are unrelated and still claim to be taking the question seriously. West Africa trains the professionals. The Global North covers the cost of recruitment and pockets the return on human capital it never paid to develop. Sub-Saharan African nations lose an estimated 2 to 3 billion dollars annually in training costs for doctors who emigrate.

Then there is the question of what remittances actually do. In 2022, West Africa received nearly thirty-four billion dollars in remittances, more than double the combined total of official development assistance and foreign direct investment for the region. Nigeria alone received over 20 billion dollars annually in recent years, making it one of the largest remittance recipients in the world. This is typically presented as a lifeline, even a development success story. It is neither. When diaspora labor becomes the primary mechanism by which West African families access healthcare, education, and basic stability, the state has been relieved of its obligation to provide those things. Remittances do not supplement state capacity. They replace it, quietly, one transfer at a time. The family becomes the welfare system that the government refuses to be. And because that substitute system functions well enough to prevent total collapse, the political pressure that might otherwise force reform dissipates. The diaspora is subsidizing the conditions that make leaving necessary.

It implicates not just Western governments and multilateral institutions but the African political class itself. The people most likely to organize, litigate, strike, run for office, and demand accountability are disproportionately the ones leaving. Their departure is useful to the stability of entrenched political arrangements. A population with fewer institutional tools is a population easier to manage. When Nigeria’s former president Buhari needed medical care, he flew to London. The doctors who treated him were among the thousands of Nigerian physicians who had left a system his government never adequately funded. He had no incentive to fix what he could exit. Neither did the class of elites around him. This is a governance structure optimized for a political class that has already opted out of the systems everyone else depends on.

There is no clean ending here. That is the point. Brain drain is a relationship between states that extract and states that hollow out, between political elites who benefit from the arrangement and families who absorb the cost of it. The diaspora did not cause this. But we are woven into it. Every transfer that keeps a household afloat, every school fee paid privately that the state should cover, is also a transfer that reduces the pressure on the systems producing the crisis. That is not an argument for sending less money home; it is an argument for naming what we are actually participating in.

Works Cited

• World Health Organization. Global Health Workforce Statistics Database.

• World Bank. Migration and Remittances Data; World Development Indicators.

• Migration Policy Institute. Immigrant Health-Care Workers in the United States.

• General Medical Council. The State of Medical Education and Practice in the UK.

• United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Brain Drain and Human Capital Flight in Africa.

• International Monetary Fund. Program Documents and Public Sector Wage Bill Analysis.

• NHS England. Workforce Statistics and International Recruitment Reports.

Taken by one of the Artemis II crew members through Orion’s window as the capsule pushed toward the Moon, and we grew smaller behind them.

I have seen this image before. Everyone has. But there is a version of seeing something, and there is the version where it lands, and this time it landed with everything I had been carrying for weeks already opened and raw and available to receive it. And what it told me, what I understood in my body was this: I am in that photograph. You are in that photograph. The boy who broke your heart is in that photograph. Your best friend, the one you met on a wild night when neither of you was being particularly careful, is in that photograph. The strangers who built the pieces of technology that made it possible for you to read these words from someone you have never met are in that photograph. Every grudge, every argument about borders, every flag we have ever sewn and planted and died defending. All of it. All of us. All at once, in one frame.

I was lying on my bed in the middle of the afternoon when the rocket left the ground.

Just lying there fatigued from carrying too many things for too long — my desires, problems without clean solutions, dreams with no promise of fruition. I had my laptop open. The NASA livestream was running, and then the Space Launch System rocket lit the sky over Florida and lifted four human beings off the surface of the Earth.

I watched until the rocket stage separated and fell back toward the ocean, and the sky swallowed them.

Christina Koch. Victor Glover. Reid Wiseman. Jeremy Hansen. Four people in an Orion capsule, climbing away from everything humans have ever built and known, on their way to fly around the Moon. The first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit in more than fifty years. In the hours and days that followed, I went down a rabbit hole I did not plan and could not stop.

I always joke that in my next lifetime I will be a science girly.

In this one, I yap about the sociopolitical and economic state of the world *Jaden Smith voice*. But every so often, the work I do finds a window… an intersection that leads to something so much larger than the work, and I lose myself in it completely. This was one of those moments.

Consider who they sent. Reid Wiseman, a decorated Navy test pilot and former chief of the entire NASA Astronaut Office, commanding the mission as a single father. Victor Glover, a naval captain who flew more than forty aircrafts in combat deployments before becoming the first Black astronaut ever to travel to deep space. Christina Koch, an electrical engineer and physicist who holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days, and who helped lead the first all-female spacewalk in history. And Jeremy Hansen, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel making his very first spaceflight, becoming the first non-American ever to fly on a lunar mission.

The Apollo crews were exclusively white American men, almost all with military backgrounds. Fifty years later, humanity sent these four.

I learned that the Artemis II crew are not just passengers on this mission. They are the experiment. Before launch, each of them donated blood. Scientists extracted bone marrow stem cells from those donations, placed them onto chips the size of a USB drive, and flew those chips alongside the crew into deep space. When the chips return, researchers will sequence the DNA inside them, looking for what radiation does to the body at the cellular level, and what deep space does to the immune system. The astronauts gave their own cells to the question. They are both the scientists and the subject.

I sat with that for a bit. The willingness of it all. The surrender of it all.

Inside the Orion capsule, tucked into a ten-pound flight kit, was a one-inch swatch of muslin fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, the original aircraft from the day humans first left the ground.

One hundred and twenty-three years of flight history, folded small enough to carry to the Moon. They also brought a flag originally packed for the Apollo 18 mission that never launched, finally making its first journey into space on this one. On the morning of the lunar flyby, the crew woke up to a recorded message from Jim Lovell, the Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 commander, who had recorded it for them before he died in 2025.

The man who once said “Houston, we have a problem” from the far side of the Moon spoke to them from beyond his own life, across time. And then, 252,000 miles from Earth, while peering through Orion’s windows at craters no human eye had ever studied this closely, the crew spotted two unnamed features on the lunar surface and proposed names for them. The first, they called Integrity, after their capsule. The second, they called Carroll, after Reid Wiseman’s (one of the astronauts) wife, who died of cancer in 2020 and left him to raise their two daughters alone.

Jeremy Hansen’s voice cracked as he announced the name to Mission Control. Wiseman wept.

All four of them held each other, floating in silence, farther from home than any humans had ever been. Mission Control confirmed it back: “Integrity and Carroll Crater, loud and clear.” Joke’s on them, I had already planned to cry that day.

And then I learned about these names.

Apollo. Artemis. In Greek mythology, they are twins, born of Zeus and Leto, inseparable yet opposite.

Apollo is the god of the sun, of light and reason and day. Artemis is the goddess of the moon, of the wild places, of the hunt, of the boundaries between night and day. Apollo represented the sprint: short missions, urgency, competition, a race to be first. Artemis represents the endurance: sustainability, long-term presence, building something that lasts. NASA named its first lunar program after the brother who charges toward the light. It named the return after the sister who moves through the dark.

I found all of this almost unbearably poetic— I’m a sucker for anything poetic.

I was, by this point, a complete mess. Emotionally compromised in my bedroom on a Wednesday afternoon, reading about Greek deities and bone marrow chips and orbital mechanics. The intersections between my work and science do something to me. When I think about God. When I think about solar panels carrying photons ninety-three million miles to power a family’s evening in sub-Saharan Africa. When I think about all of us on this floating rock conducting our very serious arguments about whose jollof rice is better, the scale of it all keeps interrupting me, and I keep letting it.

I spent an hour listening to the astronauts talk about humanity, about Christ, about unity, about what it feels like to look back at the place you came from and see it whole.

Christina Koch said there is nothing that prepares you for the breathtaking aspect of seeing your home planet. Jeremy Hansen said humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it is your hopes for the future that carry us now. I just could not stop crying.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim had a name for what I felt. He called it collective effervescence. The phenomenon where individual consciousness temporarily dissolves into something larger than itself. He first described it at religious ceremonies and communal gatherings: that electric, overwhelming sense that the boundary between you and everyone else has gone briefly, beautifully thin. That you are not a self having an experience but a point in something continuous.

Space does this to me. Every darn time.

This is not my typical essay. You are used to me tracing the structural exposure of African economies to decisions made in Washington and Brussels, unpacking how the beauty industry extracts from Black women’s insecurity, arguing that Africa’s non-nuclear status is a managed condition and not a sovereign choice. Those analyses matter to me deeply, and I will keep writing them.

But I need to write this one too. Because I think the awe is not separate from the analysis. I think it is what the analysis is for.

Here is what I keep coming back to: every grievance I carry is real. Every structural injustice I document is real. The extraction is real, the poverty is real, and the managed exclusion of entire continents from the institutions that govern the world is real. I am not suggesting we dissolve those truths into cosmic optimism and call it healing.

But technology is manmade. Infrastructure is manmade. Governments are manmade. Debt architecture is manmade. Borders are manmade. Every system I have spent my life analyzing was invented by people, which means it can be changed by people, which means it was never inevitable. The categories that sort us do not appear in any image taken from 252,000 miles away.

The Earth does.

What are you and I in the grand scheme of interstellar space travel but a point in time?

I mean this not as a reason to stop fighting but as the only honest orientation from which to fight. If you understand the scale, if you have ever let the scale actually land on you, then the question of what kind of world we are building on this rock becomes unbearably urgent. Not less urgent. More.

I want to believe that we are capable of the world the astronauts described from inside that capsule. I choose to believe it. Not because I am naïve, but because I have looked at that photograph and felt what it does to the noise in my chest, and I think that feeling is data. It is telling me something true about what we are, underneath all the things we built on top of what we are.

Maybe, in my next lifetime, I will be the science girly who understands the orbital mechanics, and I grieve that a little. Because I know that what I feel watching this, the awe, the tears, the inability to find words large enough, is only the outermost layer of what there is to feel. Somewhere beneath my comprehension, in the mathematics of alignment and the physics of light bending across 252,756 miles, there is a revelation I cannot reach.

But in this lifetime, I am the girl who watches it and weeps and writes about it, who tries to explain the depths of its significance without all the proper terminology, and lets that be enough.

Right now, four people are hurtling home through the dark on our behalf. They went for all of us. The ones with the flags and the ones without them. The ones who will never know their names and the kids with posters, who are in awe that someone who looks like them can achieve this. We did not all go, but we all felt it. That is what collective effervescence is. That is what it does. It makes the boundary between you and everyone else go briefly, reminding you that you were never as separate as you thought.

I am not just a citizen of the Black diaspora. I am a citizen of the universe, and that changes the way I look at strangers. The person in the grocery store, the driver in the next lane, the face on the other side of a TikTok panel debate I am certain I am winning — they are all in the photograph. We are all in the photograph.

The Artemis II crew is on their way home now. I will be right here, on my bed, watching.

Works Cited

1. NASA. “Artemis II Flight Day 6: Lunar Flyby Updates.” NASA Blogs, 6 April 2026. nasa.gov

2. NASA. “Artemis II Flight Day 6: Crew Wraps Historic Lunar Flyby.” NASA Blogs, 6 April 2026. nasa.gov

3. NASA. “Artemis II Flight Day 6: Crew Ready for Lunar Flyby.” NASA Blogs, 6 April 2026. nasa.gov

4. NASA. “Artemis II Flight Day 5: Crew Demos Suits, Readies for Lunar Flyby.” NASA Blogs, 5 April 2026. nasa.gov

5. NASA. “Artemis II Crew Both Subjects and Scientists in NASA Deep Space Research.” NASA, January 2026. nasa.gov

6. NASA. “NASA’s Artemis II Mission to Fly Legacy Keepsakes with Astronaut Crew.” NASA, January 2026. nasa.gov

7. NASA Science. “AVATAR: Avatars for Astronaut Health to Fly on NASA’s Artemis II.” NASA Science, December 2025. science.nasa.gov

8. Callaway, K.R. “How NASA’s Moon Mission Could Help Transform Space Medicine.” Scientific American, April 2026. scientificamerican.com

9. Chang, Kenneth, et al. “Artemis II Begins Its Journey to the Moon: Highlights.” CNN, 1 April 2026. cnn.com

10. CNN Staff. “Artemis II Astronauts Break Records and Take in Unprecedented Views in Historic Moon Flyby.” CNN, 6 April 2026. cnn.com

11. TODAY Staff. “Artemis II Astronauts Dedicate Moon Crater to Commander Reid Wiseman’s Late Wife.” TODAY, 6 April 2026. today.com

12. Dinner, Josh. “Moon Memorial: Artemis 2 Astronauts Name Lunar Bright Spot After Mission Commander’s Late Wife.” Space.com, 6 April 2026. space.com

13. Orbital Today. “From Greek Myth to Space Mission: Why NASA Named Its Moon Program Artemis.” March 2026. orbitaltoday.com

14. Space.com. “Who is Artemis? Meet the Goddess Who Inspired NASA’s Return to the Moon.” April 2026. space.com

15. Fox News. “Artemis II Astronaut Victor Glover Shares Easter Faith Message.” 6 April 2026. foxnews.com

16. ABC News. “Who Are the Astronauts on the Artemis II Mission to the Moon?” April 2026. abcnews.com

17. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 1912. Trans. Karen E. Fields. Free Press, 1995.

I love when you giggle. When something catches you sideways and the little boy gets loose for a second, the one who had to grow up before he was ready, who learned that softness was something he could not carry openly. I know he is still in there. Every time you feel safe enough to be silly, to be unfinished, to let happiness exist outside the shape society cut for it, I am watching.

I also love your steeze. That specific quality of cool that was there before anyone renamed it for a marketing campaign. It is just yours. And the creativity that lives right next to it, that is yours too. I have watched you locate the soul of a thing before you even knew you were looking. I have watched you make something out of close to nothing and then move on like you did not just do that. Like it was not extraordinary. It was extraordinary.

East coast, West coast, Lagos, Accra, Kingston, Houston, Oakland, New York. The diaspora written into the jaw line, the cheekbones...

Twists that hold a whole cosmology at the crown. Locs that carry the weight of intention, every one of them a decision to root. Waves so clean they look like the ocean took notes.

God was not being casual when he made you. He was being specific. Taking his time. The evidence is in the way the sun always finds you to reflect off of. Nature is intune with you. God’s signature is written all over it. Lord, does it show.

You are worth more than your productivity. More than your output, your endurance, your capacity to absorb what would break other things. You were worth something the day you arrived, before you had proven a single thing, and that accounting has not changed.

I know you made the terrible things funny because what else do you do with them. You got the message early that being moved by what moves you was a luxury you could not afford. But your wounds are not a punchline you owe anyone, and the fact that something happened to you does not mean you are not allowed to still be shaken by it.

A black man raised me. I am still learning the full shape of what that means, how it lives in the way I recognize strength, in what I know about presence, about dignity that does not ask for permission. I carry that forward. And I am waiting, with something close to reverence, for the bloodlines of black men that will come from me. I want more of you in the world. I am requesting you, by way of my own life, in every direction I can.

We need each other the way sun needs rain, the way day needs night. Not transactionally, but as the thing that makes the other one legible. And I know the world has worked hard to make you feel like a problem it is managing. I know what it costs to exist fully in spaces that would prefer you smaller.

But there are many of us watching. Seeing you in the specific, the particular person inside the particular life, not the symbol, not the category. We see you. And we are not going anywhere.

So let us love each other. With all the history between us and all the things we are still learning and all the weight we are both putting down slowly. We are not just healing. We are rebuilding something that was taken before either of us arrived to protect it.

We are restoring Eden.

And you, black man, were always supposed to be here.

Sincerely,

Black Woman

Little one,

I have been thinking about you lately. I get glimpses of you when I stare into Rachel’s eyes, when they hold something she has not found the words for yet. She reminds me a lot of you.

You used to sit with questions burning in your chest the same way. You always felt like you were meant for more space than you were given.

It felt like your life was trying to happen, but the container was too small. Nothing is wrong with you for feeling that. You were not too much. The space was just too small.

I know there are voices that find you in the in-between moments, when you just want to move through a room unbothered. They get inside before you can close the door. They make you question yourself. They make you shrink. I need you to know those voices are not telling you the truth. You are not a problem to fix. You are a person learning how to hold a very full world. You are so young to be holding so much, and you are doing better than you think you are.

There are things living in your chest right now that I am still sitting with, still turning over, still trying to find the right language for. You do not need to understand everything yet. You are allowed to be in process. You are allowed to not have the words.

On top of that, you are navigating worlds. More than one. More than anyone thought to prepare you for. There is the one inside you that is always asking. Then there are the ones outside, each with their own rules and expectations of who you are supposed to be when you walk through their particular door. It makes sense that you feel stretched. It makes sense that you feel out of place sometimes. Nobody gave you a map for that. You are drawing it yourself in real time, and you are not behind.

One day, you are going to be in a room where people are saying important things. Real things. Things that matter to the shape of the world. You are going to feel that same fear you feel now, but you will stay. You will realize you belong there because you did the work. Your presence will make sense to you in a way that no one else’s opinion could have given you.

You are going to travel. You are going to stand on cobblestone streets where history actually happened. The things we only read about will suddenly have texture, weight, and smell. You are going to fall in love with other contexts of living. You will notice the way people build their days differently, love differently, and make meaning differently. It is going to make you larger without making you less yourself. It will rearrange something in you.

And we are beautiful, little Jacks. I need you to know that. Those lips that gave people something to say, the ones you learned to press together so they would take up less space, people are filling theirs up to look like that now. You do not wear makeup most days. You just leave. You walk out into the world in your natural face and hair. You do not think twice about it. That is one of the quietest and most radical things about us.

You are learning how to be delicate with yourself. One day, you will walk into rooms without second-guessing every word. People will listen when you speak. They will stay with what you say. You will not feel the need to question whether you deserve that. You will believe it, and it will be true.

You are going to be hungry for ideas your whole life. That is not something to be embarrassed about. It is not too much. It is not annoying. It is a gift. The right people will not be drained by it. They will be drawn to it.

And they are coming, little Jacks. The friends. The ones who choose you back. The ones who let you be complicated and brilliant and soft at the same time. I know it feels like they do not exist. I know it feels like you are always just outside of things, like you are almost there but not quite. That feeling is temporary. You are not hard to love. You are just early.

Oh, and girl, you are going to love. Fully and sometimes without knowing how to protect yourself yet. You are going to feel things deeply. That is not your weakness. You will learn how to stay open without losing yourself. You will learn that something can be real even if it does not stay. You will learn that being chosen does not determine your worth. That is a hard thing to learn when consistency is the thing you want most. When being chosen and kept is the shape of love you are hoping for. That lesson is going to cost you something. I will not pretend it does not. But on the other side of it is a kind of freedom that I wish I could hand you early.

You are going to become love in a way that does not need an outside source. You will stop waiting to receive it and realize you were generating it all along. The people you find along the way, even the ones who are yours briefly, will stay with you. They will live in the way you move through the world.

The dreaming is not going to stop. Every single thing you are turning over quietly in your mind, the things that feel too big to say out loud yet, too ambitious, too much, those things are still alive where I am standing. We are still in the middle of them. Still curious. Still asking why. Still convinced the answer matters. The curiosity never leaves. It just grows a longer stride.

I love you. I love the way your mind moves. I love the way you ask the question underneath the question. I love that you are serious and strange and tender all at once. I love that you are still dreaming even when the world is loud and unkind, and the easier thing would be to go quiet.

Do not go quiet. Nothing about you needs to disappear to make life work. You are safe with me. Keep going. Everything you are hoping for is real, and you are not too late for any of it.

I know because I am already there, and I have been saving you a seat.

The United Nations General Assembly is the main room where all 193 member states sit together as equals. Every country gets one vote. It is the closest thing the world has to a global government. When something goes before the General Assembly, it is going before the entire international community at once.

Now here is the part people often do not know. Resolutions passed by the General Assembly are not legally binding. They cannot force a government to pay money, show up in court, or change a single law. What they do is put the world on record. They establish what the international community collectively believes to be true and what it believes should be done. They get cited in legal arguments. They build the foundation for future enforceable agreements. They create documented proof that a global consensus exists. Think of a General Assembly resolution as the world writing something down in the official ledger and signing its name to it.

Ghana asked the international community to formally declare the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime ever committed against humanity (Link to Resolution). 400 years of forced removal of 12.5 million people from the African continent and the deliberate construction of a racial economic order whose consequences are still measurable today.

It asked member states to engage in dialogue on reparatory justice (reparations), including full and formal apologies, measures of restitution, financial compensation, rehabilitation, and guarantees of non-repetition. It called for changes to laws and programs that continue to produce racially disparate outcomes. It demanded the prompt and unhindered return of cultural artifacts, artworks, monuments, museum pieces, documents, and national archives to their countries of origin, free of charge. It asked for investment in educational endowment funds and skills training for communities still bearing the weight of slavery’s aftermath. It asked, in the most formal diplomatic setting in the world, for acknowledgment that what was done was wrong and for a structured conversation about how to fix it

The resolution was passed. 123 countries voted yes. Three voted no. Fifty-two abstained. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted no. The United Kingdom and every EU member state abstained.

I am not going to spend too much time on this part because it is exactly what anyone paying attention would expect. These are the nations that built their wealth on the slave trade. Britain ran it for over a century. France enslaved and then charged Haiti for the inconvenience of freedom. They are also actively perpetuating neocolonialism across Africa & Caribbean. The United States built its antebellum economy on chattel slavery, fought a war to preserve it, lost, and then spent another hundred years enforcing a legal apartheid that continued extracting value from Black life through other mechanisms.

The US deputy ambassador explained before the vote, as reported by UN News, that Washington does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred. The EU cited concerns about the retroactive application of international law. The nations that wrote international law are now hiding behind it… selectively. The United States has no problem with retroactive application of international frameworks when the outcome serves its interests. The same country that voted no on this resolution paid reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II in 1988, four decades after the fact, under the Civil Liberties Act, because Congress determined that an injustice had occurred and that time did not erase the obligation to repair it. Justice for everyone except Black people… Typical.

I want to talk about what is happening inside the diaspora.

Alongside the expected Western opposition, something else has been circulating in Black American spaces online and in conversation since the vote. The argument goes like this: Africans sold Black Americans into slavery. Why should African nations receive reparations for a crime they participated in? Why is Ghana, of all countries, leading this charge?

African rulers and traders did participate in the transatlantic slave trade. This is documented. African partners including rulers, traders, and military aristocrats played a direct role in the trade, selling captives acquired from wars or through kidnapping to European traders. Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that around 90 percent of the Africans captured and then sold into the transatlantic trade were enslaved by fellow Africans before being sold to Europeans. Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders, the slave trade would have been impossible at the scale it occurred.

These are real facts. They belong in an honest accounting of this history.

But the conclusion that is being drawn from them, that African nations are therefore disqualified from seeking reparations, is where the argument collapses. Before we even get to the economics, we need to address something more basic. The countries we are talking about did not exist. Ghana did not exist. Nigeria did not exist. Senegal did not exist. The Ivory Coast did not exist. These are 20th century constructions, borders drawn by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 without a single African representative in the room. What existed in West Africa during the slave trade were kingdoms, empires, and ethnic confederacies, the Ashanti, the Dahomey, the Kongo, the Oyo, the Fante, etc. When we say African nations participated in the slave trade, we are retroactively applying a national identity that European colonialism itself invented.

There is also the question of identity. As noted by the Statistics LibreTexts collection of scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade, there did not exist a common shared African identity among African peoples during the early stages of the trade. When traders from West African kingdoms sold people to European traders, most would have understood themselves as selling outsiders, prisoners of war, people from different ethnic groups who spoke different languages. The concept of a unified African people, a continental identity that would make selling a Yoruba person into slavery feel like a betrayal of self, is itself partly a product of the diaspora experience. The Pan-African consciousness that frames this as Africans selling Africans is, in historical terms, an anachronism.

Understanding what happened requires understanding the structural conditions on the ground. The gun-slave cycle documented by economic historian Warren Whatley of the University of Michigan fundamentally restructured the incentives facing every kingdom on the West African coast. European traders arrived with guns, gunpowder, textiles, and manufactured goods that were otherwise unavailable to African societies. The balance of power that had existed shifted. A kingdom that had held its own was now outgunned by a neighbor. As documented by the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative at the College of Charleston, European traders formed military alliances to instigate fighting and increase the number of captives, and shifted trade locations along the coast to follow African military conflicts. Kingdoms that refused to participate could not acquire the weapons that kingdoms that did participate were accumulating. Refusal was a military disadvantage in an environment that Europeans had deliberately made dangerous. This is not an exoneration of every African ruler who participated. It is a structural explanation for how a continent was reorganized around a demand that came from entirely outside it. The demand was European. The ships were European. The plantation system was European. The racial ideology that converted human beings into heritable property was European. Some African elites fed that system. The system itself was not theirs.

Here is the part that matters most practically. Even if you hold African elites fully accountable for their role in the trade, the conclusion that Black Americans should therefore oppose African-led reparations efforts is strategically self-defeating. Only member states can bring resolutions before the United Nations General Assembly. Black Americans are not a member state. They are citizens of the United States of America, a country that just voted no. America is not going to bring a reparations resolution on Black Americans’ behalf. If Black Americans are going to have their specific suffering recognized at the level of international governance, their best and possibly only pathway runs through an African or Caribbean nation willing to name it. Ghana’s resolution explicitly did that. The text, as reported by UN News, affirmed the importance of addressing historical wrongs affecting Africans and people of the diaspora and emphasized that claims for reparations represent a concrete step toward remedy. The resolution was not only about the continent. It was about everyone the trade produced. Black Americans are covered under that language.

Ghana has also demonstrated, repeatedly and with policy, that it considers Black Americans part of the family it is trying to gather back. In 2000, Ghana passed the Right of Abode Act, granting any person of African descent in the diaspora the right to live and work in Ghana indefinitely, without a visa. In 2019, as reported by Quartz Africa, the country declared the Year of Return, commemorating 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, and granted full citizenship to 126 African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans in a ceremony at the seat of government. By 2024, as reported by multiple diaspora news outlets, Ghana had granted citizenship to 524 members of the Black diaspora, the largest single cohort since the Year of Return. Since 2019, according to The Conversation, at least 1,500 African Americans have received citizenship rights in Ghana and approximately 5,000 have made Ghana their permanent home. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s founding president and the father of Pan-Africanism, made the Black diaspora central to his vision of African liberation from the moment the country gained independence in 1957. W.E.B. Du Bois is buried in Accra. Maya Angelou lived there. Ghana has been extending this invitation for seventy years.

The talking point that Africans sold Black Americans and therefore do not deserve reparations does the West’s work for them. It fractures the coalition that would need to exist for any of this to gain traction. The people who designed the international legal system that is now being used to block this resolution are not worried about African participation in the slave trade. They are worried about accountability. When members of the diaspora repeat that talking point, they are relieving that worry for free.

The diaspora’s pain and Africa’s pain come from the same wound. The ship that left the coast of what is now Ghana or Cameroon or Senegal took someone’s child and destroyed two worlds at once, the one they were taken from and the one they were taken to. We do not have to resolve every complexity of African participation in the slave trade to agree that the nations who built the plantation system, the colonial occupation that followed, and the international financial architecture owe something to everyone that system destroyed. When we argue against African reparations, we are not protecting ourselves. We are protecting them.

Ghana stood in front of the world on March 25 and named all of this. 123 countries agreed. The nations that built their wealth on the trade said no or said nothing. Some of us, from inside the diaspora, echoed them. This international system has always told us, clearly and consistently, that African life does not count the same way.

Big ups to Ghana. We know what the record shows. One love.

Works Cited

Abbey, Nels. “No, ‘Blacks’ Did Not ‘Sell Blacks into Slavery’.” PoliticsHome, 17 October 2022. politicshome.com/thehouse/article/blacks-did-not-sell-blacks-into-slavery

Ablakwa, Samuel Okudzeto. Statement by Ghana’s Foreign Minister on the UN Resolution on Slavery Reparations. United Nations General Assembly, 25 March 2026.

Daut, Marlene. “200 Years Ago, France Extorted Haiti in One of History’s Greatest Heists and Haitians Want Reparations.” The Conversation, 17 April 2025. theconversation.com/200-years-ago-france-extorted-haiti-in-one-of-historys-greatest-heists-and-haitians-want-reparations-254550

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Quoted in Wikipedia. “Slavery in Africa.” Wikimedia Foundation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

Konadu, Kwasi. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade Is the Gravest Crime Against Humanity: Why the UN Declaration Matters.” The Conversation, 26 March 2026. theconversation.com/the-transatlantic-slave-trade-is-the-gravest-crime-against-humanity-why-the-un-declaration-matters-279218

Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. “African Participation and Resistance to the Trade.” College of Charleston. ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/introductionatlanticworld/african_participation_and_resi

Mahama, John Dramani. Address to the United Nations General Assembly on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. United Nations, 25 March 2026.

Quartz Africa. “Ghana Granted Citizenship to Over 100 African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans as Part of Year of Return.” Quartz Africa, 2019. qz.com/africa/1757853/ghana-gives-citizenship-to-100-african-americans-year-of-return

Statistics LibreTexts. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” African American History. stats.libretexts.org/Courses/Remixer_University/Username:_jhalpern/Workshop_Copy_of_African_American_History/02:_The_African_Slave_trade_and_the_Atlantic_World/2.02:_The_Transatlantic_Slave_Trade

Thornton, John, and Linda Heywood. Quoted in Wikipedia. “Slavery in Africa.” Wikimedia Foundation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

United Nations News. “UN Resolution Urges Reparations for Slavery’s Historical Wrongs.” UN News, 25 March 2026. news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167199

United Nations Press. “General Assembly Declares Enslavement of Africans Gravest Crime against Humanity, Debates Legal Implications.” UN Meetings Coverage and Press Releases, 25 March 2026. press.un.org/en/2026/ga12755.doc.htm

United States Congress. Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Public Law 100-383, 10 August 1988.

Whatley, Warren C. “The Gun-Slave Hypothesis and the 18th Century British Slave Trade.” Explorations in Economic History, vol. 67, 2018, pp. 80-104.

Whitfield, Harvey Amani. “Africa Is Getting Renewed Attention from Washington and Some African States Are Courting African Americans.” The Conversation, 2023. theconversation.com/africa-is-getting-renewed-attention-from-washington-and-some-african-states-are-courting-african-americans-203882

Wikipedia. “Atlantic Slave Trade.” Wikimedia Foundation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

So you want to get to know me?

Come in, then.

But understand this is not a hallway.

There is no quick walk-through,

no polite tour,

no part where I smile and say that’s everything.

There is no everything.

There is only more.

I will warn you once:

I think in full paragraphs at 3am.

I care about things the way the weather cares about coastlines,

which is to say I reshape what I touch

and I do not apologize for it.

I have been told I am a lot.

I received that information

and did nothing with it.

Because a lot compared to what?

Your comfort?

Your previous experience with women who made themselves easier to hold?

I am not interested in being easier to hold.

I am interested in being impossible to forget.

So yes.

Come closer.

Ask me what I believe.

Ask me what I want.

Ask me what I think about power and faith

Let’s get deep in thought

I will answer you.

All the way.

And somewhere in the middle of it, you will realize

This is not what you expected when you said

I’d love to get to know you better

over whatever drink in whatever room you thought was the beginning.

That was not the beginning. This is.

And I am watching to see if you lean in

or find a reason to check your phone.

Most people find a reason.

You might be different. I am genuinely open to that.

But you should know what getting to know me means.

It means staying when the conversation gets uncomfortable.

It means asking the question underneath the question.

So.

Still want to get to know me?

Good. Start talking. I’ve been waiting for someone who actually means it.

Tell me you thought about what I said

After you left.

That is the only opening line

I have ever wanted.

Not you’re beautiful.

That’s lazy.

Not even I’ve been thinking about you.

Thinking about what I said.

The argument. The unfinished thing.

The place where I went quiet

Because I hadn’t worked it out yet.

That kind of attention

Does something to me.

I want to be tracked.

Followed the way you follow a river,

Not to get somewhere but

Because you need to know

How it moves.

I have sat across tables from people

Who looked at me the whole time

And understood nothing.

I have been known

In half a sentence

By someone who wasn’t even trying.

One of those felt like desire.

The other was just dinner.

What I am describing is not rare

People are just incurious.

It is rare because it requires

Something most people will not offer:

The willingness to be changed

Not persuaded. That’s easy.

Persuasion is transactional.

It ends when someone wins.

Changed means you go home

And my thoughts are still moving in you.

It means you argue with them at 2 am when I’m not there.

It means something in you has been rearranged

And you are not entirely sure

You want it back.

That is what I am drawn to.

The residue.

The unresolved tension

a person leaves in you

I do not want to be agreed with.

I want someone who pushes back

Without pulling away.

Who follows the thread

Even when it frays.

Who finds my half-built argument

And sits down inside it with me.

That is intimacy.

The intellectual kind.

The kind I have wanted longer than I knew the word for it.

And if you have read this far

Thinking about someone,

You already know

Exactly what I mean.

It happens when they get quiet in a way that feels different from their normal quiet. Time stops, and everything around you starts to move slowly. Now they’re talking, and their voice is soft in that carefully hesitant way. You’re nodding, saying, “mhm, yeah, I hear you”, except you aren’t hearing anything but your own heartbeat. The saxophone gets louder, your stomach sinks, your body gets warm, and somewhere behind your eyes, you’re already bracing for impact.

Miss Always Almost. Not unwanted, never exactly that. Appreciated. Interesting. Worth talking to, worth staying up late with, worth almost. Always the almost. Realizing you’re someone’s almost again feels like grief for something that was never fully yours to lose. And then you’re left holding all these pieces of a person who is now a stranger. My 2 am voice somewhere in them, their favorite song somewhere in me, none of it going anywhere useful. At some point, you start wondering about the cost of that. How many pieces of me do I actually want out there?

I really don’t want to know another favorite color. Another dog’s name. Another love language I’ll learn fluently and never get to speak again. I don’t want to know. Except I do. I want to know everything, and I want to be known back, and that’s the part that won’t leave me alone. Not the rejection, but the wanting that survives it. Every time. Embarrassingly intact.

I've asked God what version of me deserves what I crave. Is it this one? Did I miss the window, or not do enough of the work, or does it not work like that at all? I know it doesn’t work like that at all. I’ve watched people receive love in their most unassembled state. No arc, no preparation, just someone there choosing them, door wide open. So it’s not a reward. Love doesn’t get distributed on merit. Which means there’s nothing I could fix or finish or become that guarantees the door is unlocked when I get there. Which means I keep arriving anyway. Bags packed. Ready.

The funny part, the part that feels almost cruel, is that I am a lover. Genuinely, embarrassingly, a lover. I believe in love the way I believe in things that don’t require my permission to be true. I will love again. I know that. Not because I’m trying to be hopeful, but because I haven’t figured out how to stop yet. I’m just tired of the cost of it going somewhere that can’t contain it.

There’s nothing neat to say at the end of this. I showed up every time, present and open, and genuinely trying. I don’t think there’s something wrong with me (maybe). I think I keep arriving at a door that isn’t mine yet. I’m tired, and I still want it, and I don’t know how to make those two things stop being true at the same time.

That’s where I am.

A protective style is any style meant to shield your natural hair from daily manipulation and environmental damage. The idea is to reduce breakage and keep the hair underneath healthy. The theory is sound. The practice is where things get complicated. What a lot of women are actually doing is keeping styles in for months, neglecting the hair underneath entirely, and cycling straight into the next install before the scalp has had time to breathe. The protective style has become a permanent state.

Layo, a popular British podcaster, was asked in a recent interview how she feels about her natural hair. She described her 4C hair as the tough, difficult kind and explained how she cannot be bothered to deal with it. On her social media, you can see her spending hours and hundreds of dollars on wigs, wig care, and makeup. The quiet part everyone is starting to say out loud is that she has been taught to find her own hair more exhausting than the hours and money it takes to replace it. She is not unusual. She is representative of a psychology so thoroughly internalized that it reads as a preference.

I could spend a thousand words on that psychology. But all of it has been said, from every angle, with every possible level of compassion. What has been said less clearly is this: the psychology is profitable. There is an entire industry that depends on Black women believing our natural hair is a burden. I want to talk about the system that built that belief and the machine that keeps collecting from it.

Black women spend an estimated $7.5 billion annually on beauty products. We spend nine times more on hair care than any other ethnic group. We represent 11.1% of total U.S. beauty spending while making up roughly 14% of the population. That means we are spending at a rate that outpaces our own demographic size.

And when it comes to hair extensions specifically, we drive over 70% of global sales. The hair in that wig or your boho pieces did not come from nowhere. It came from women in India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and China, many of whom sold it out of poverty, sometimes for as little as three dollars. Hair extensions in the U.S. can retail between $500 and $2,000, while the woman whose head it came from may receive only a fraction of that. According to traders and industry researchers cited by the Hustle and documented by Al Jazeera, the industry refers to raw human hair as “black gold” because its value has increased nearly twelvefold over the last decade, driven almost entirely by surging demand.

In 2020, U.S. Customs seized shipments of human hair products linked to forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, where Uyghur detainees were reportedly put to work in hair factories, a story investigated and reported by CNN. As anthropologist Emma Tarlo documents in Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, the supply chain is deliberately kept opaque at every level, making it easier to exploit the laborers at the bottom while consumers at the top remain unaware. The insecurity of Black women in America is generating demand that is being filled by the desperation of women on the other side of the world. And for that to keep working, one thing has to stay true.

That thing is this: that Black women feel their natural hair is not enough. Not professional enough. Not manageable enough. Not beautiful enough. The moment that belief weakens, the spending weakens with it. The industry has never had any incentive to affirm natural Black hair. Affirmation is bad for the bottom line because insecurity is the product.

The pricing confirms it. A 2023 peer-reviewed study published in the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology found that natural hair products designed for coily and curly textures are priced significantly higher per ounce than straight hair products from the same brands, with one leading manufacturer charging over 40% more for products targeting Black hair textures. The researchers called it what it is: a minority hair tax. The industry does not need to keep Black women from caring for their natural hair to profit.

To understand why Black women keep spending, you have to understand what our hair has been made to cost us.

Black women’s hairstyles exist within a rigid set of racial and class signals. Straightened or loosely textured hair reads as professional, ambitious, and opportunity-adjacent. Not because it is. Because it looks closer to whiteness. And in a system where whiteness sets the standard, proximity to it has always been social currency. Natural 4C hair, coily and tightly kinked, the hair that most Black women actually grow, has historically been coded as undisciplined, unrefined, or radical. Wigs, braids, and weaves occupy a complicated middle ground, able to perform either whiteness or glamour depending on texture and cost. This is reflected in the data.

Research from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business found that Black women with natural hairstyles received lower ratings on professionalism and competence from evaluators, both white and Black. It does not stop at the office. Research on dating and desirability shows that straight textures are broadly preferred and that Black men’s preferences are shaped by the same Eurocentric socialization. A 2014 survey of 529 Black women published in the Open Journal of Social Sciences found that Black girls learn from a very young age that their hair is tied to romantic desirability, and that the texture most desired is not the one most Black women naturally grow. The Perception Institute’s Good Hair Study found that the majority of participants, regardless of race, showed implicit bias against Black women’s textured hair.

The bias is not coming from one direction. It is coming from everywhere.

The very styles we adopted to survive a system that punished our natural hair are destroying it. Traction alopecia affects approximately one-third of Black women. The condition can technically occur in anyone, but research published in Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology found that Black women are disproportionately affected above every other demographic. Its highest-risk styles are tight braids, weaves, extensions, wigs secured with tension, and cornrows. The foundational vocabulary of what we call protective styling. The condition can begin in childhood, progress silently over years, and in chronic cases lead to permanent follicular scarring. Once that scarring occurs, no product reverses it. The only intervention is surgical.

And beyond the tension damage, a 2023 study by researchers at Silent Spring Institute found that 100% of synthetic braiding hair products tested contained at least one carcinogenic chemical, with substances including benzene, styrene, and heavy metals like lead present across every sample. The chemical exposure does not stop there. A relaxer is a chemical treatment applied directly to the scalp that permanently breaks down the protein bonds in natural hair, restructuring it from coily to straight. The active ingredient in most relaxers is sodium hydroxide, also known as lye. This is the same compound used in industrial drain cleaners, calibrated down to a concentration the scalp can technically tolerate. A 2023 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that women who used chemical hair straighteners more than four times per year had more than double the risk of developing uterine cancer compared to women who never used them. A separate NIH-funded study found associations between frequent relaxer use and increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Black women are the primary users of these products.

The full loop reveals itself when you lay it out plainly. Society manufactured a standard that made natural Black hair feel like a liability. We bought alternatives to survive that standard. Those alternatives, worn too long and too often, damaged the hair underneath. So we bought products to address the damage. And when those products cost more per ounce for our texture than for anyone else’s, we paid that too. The industry collected at the point of insecurity, at the point of damage, and at the point of repair. There is no version of this loop where we win, and they do not.

There is also a more fundamental question worth sitting with. Our hair grows from our bodies. The human body has had millennia to adapt to its environment. Black hair, in all its coily density, is the result of that adaptation. The logic that this hair, God-given and body-grown, requires near-constant covering to survive deserves scrutiny. When we accept without question that our natural hair is a problem requiring management, and that management requires a purchase, we buy into the business model.

This does not mean every woman who wears a wig has internalized self-hatred. Wear your wig and do what you want… but consider the ratio. We have normalized covering our natural hair the majority of the time and calling it protection, while the hair being “protected” goes months without being seen, touched, or cared for. We spend hours maintaining a unit while simultaneously arguing that the reason we cannot care for our natural hair is time. We spend more money on someone else’s hair than on the inches quietly growing from our own heads.

The natural hair movement has done something real. Relaxer sales fell by over 26% between 2010 and 2015. Seventy percent of Black women say they wore their natural hair at some point in the past year. The cultural ground is moving.

Supporting Black-owned brands is not a complete answer, but it is a structurally meaningful one. Money that stays inside a community compounds differently than money that leaves it. Pushing for federal passage of the CROWN Act removes a documented coercive incentive that is actively shaping Black women’s economic behavior.

Our hair was systematically designed to be and stay a problem. The industry that profits from our self-hatred is not neutral, and it is not going to dismantle itself. Until we understand our buying power and reject the solutions being sold to us, we will keep paying. In dollars. In missing edges. In the quiet acceptance that a piece of us does not deserve to be loved.

The conversation about Black natural hair always ends at the individual woman. At what she is responsible for doing. But before it ends there, I want to stop at the institution. This is the conversation I want Black women to sit with. Not whether your choice is valid. It is. But whether the discomfort that drove it was ever really yours to begin with. Understanding the difference between a genuine preference and a preference that was engineered for you is the beginning of actually having a preference at all.

Statistics and research in this piece draw on the following sources:

Nielsen IQ, “Black Consumer Spending in the US Beauty Category,” 2024

Dove and LinkedIn, CROWN Workplace Research Study, 2023

Perception Institute, “The Good Hair Study: Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Toward Black Women’s Hair,” 2017

Koval, C.Z. and Rosette, A.S., “The Natural Hair Bias in Job Recruitment,” Social Psychological and Personality Science, Michigan State University and Duke University, 2020

Duke University Fuqua School of Business, research on natural hair bias and professional evaluations, 2020

NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Natural Hair Discrimination FAQ, 2024

StatPearls, National Institutes of Health, “Traction Alopecia,” 2023

Billero, V. and Miteva, M., “Traction Alopecia: The Root of the Problem,” Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology, 2018

Aguh, C. and Okoye, G.A., “The Art of Prevention: It’s Too Tight — Loosen Up and Let Your Hair Down,” Dermatology and Therapy, 2021

Ohly, N. et al., “Minority Hair Tax: Pricing Bias in Haircare Products,” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 2024

Barnett, E. et al., “Chemical Characterization of Synthetic Hair Products Used for Protective Hairstyling,” Environmental Science & Technology, Silent Spring Institute, 2023

Byrd, A. and Tharps, L., “Hair It Is: Examining the Experiences of Black Women with Natural Hair,” Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2014

CROWN Act of 2022, H.R. 2116, 117th Congress, Congress.gov

Ranen, A., Black Hair, documentary film, 2006

Market.us, “Black Hair Care Market Report,” 2024