My great grandmother was 36 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, outlawing discrimination on the basis of race and ending legal segregation in the United States. Born in Morton, Mississippi, she spent a quarter of her life in the American South, going to a segregated school, faced with the persistent threat and terror of institutionalized racism and structural violence. In 1954, when she was 26—a year older than I am now—my great grandmother moved across the country to Las Vegas, where black people lived in a segregated part of the city called Westside and for work she made hospital corners on beds she was banned from sleeping in. My great grandmother lived in Las Vegas for the next 65 years until she passed away in 2019.
I don't remember much about her, but I have hazy memories of visiting her house in Westside when I was a child, a house where my mom once pressed her small hands into the wet concrete sidewalks when she was just a girl. I don’t know many details about my great grandmother’s life, but I know she worked in linen control for thirty years and was an active member of a labor union, who used to bring her granddaughter—my mother—out on the picket lines with her. When I think about my great grandmother’s life and her legacy, I am reminded of her spirit of hope and resilience, her commitments to solidarity and consciousness, and how she resisted the dominant systems of control and capitalism that had tried to render her invisible.
I read in the newspaper that the landmass of Gaza is small—about the same size as Detroit or Philadelphia or Las Vegas. I think about the over two million people who live there, half of whom are children. I think of the pregnant women and babies, the sick and the elderly, the hospital and aid workers and journalists there now, caring for each other and struggling to survive in the midst of this war, under constant bombardment by the Israeli military, with extremely limited access to life-sustaining resources. I think about the complicity of the US government in all the death and destruction, through its money and its weapons. I think of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced, with nowhere to go, and those displaced long ago, unable to return. I think of the generations of families, denied basic rights and freedoms, subjected to discriminatory and segregationist laws, and persistent violence. And I am at a loss for words, which is when I look to my guiding lights: the women who came before me.
On GenZennial Girl, I am inspired and informed by Black feminist writers, from Audre Lorde to Toni Morrison, who showed solidarity with Palestine and liberation movements worldwide, and denounced the forces of imperialism, militarism, white supremacy, and extremism, which is the end of empathy and humanity. I have contacted my elected officials to call for an immediate ceasefire and donated to Doctors Without Borders. GenZennial Girl, although a platform about our ever-connected and increasingly digital world, is always also about the material realities of marginalized people in the here-and-now. My heart breaks for the Palestinian and Israeli families shattered during the recent escalation of violence and at the frightening rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism across the Internet and across the globe. I hope and pray for justice and equality, peace and healing for all.
Thank you for reading GenZennial Girl and for being a part of this community. As you might’ve noticed, there have been no posts since mid-October. A small update: I plan to start posting essays every other Wednesday, starting next Wednesday, November 22, rather than every Wednesday.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with a poem by the poet Naomi Shihab Nye and this video:
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