Introduction Often we forsake the past, but the past has yet to release its grip on us. In the exhausting quest to overcome, many have sought to view our respective struggles as beautiful merely because we're doing the work for change. A wound is still a wound no matter the quality of the cloth you use to dress it. The seemingly endless oppressiveness of the world around us has created conditions that regularly make us miserable. These unresolved problems make overcoming appear almost impossible to the point that just surviving is both a day-to-day goal and an accomplishment for many. Let us make this much clear. Survival should not be our goal: thriving should be. And with that being said, in order for things to change, our approach to transformation must change first. Many would agree that things have been feeling worse despite the symbolic victories that have been secured by many well-meaning people over the past several decades. The neoliberal structures around us have worked hard to replace words like "revolution" and "resistance" with the word "reform." This hasn't been a coincidence: these reform movements have duped much of the public into believing that what we're facing are negotiable evils instead of non-negotiable wrongs that threaten our very existence. However, what we're facing does not need reforming, it needs uprooting. It is our intention, in writing this text, to make clear what we have come to understand as truth regarding these matters based on what we've learned about the world around us. Both of us Black, in a variety of different ways, came together with the desire to create words to make the unbearable no more and the best, a reality. After two-years of regular conversation through the ups and downs of the world we want versus the world we live in, our ideas began to take their necessary shape. So, were working here. Not because the work is something that's essentially beautiful, but because we have to for the sake of what we want. Our words here may be ugly, scary, or even hurtful but we have surely written them out of a desire for the true freedom of oppressed people worldwide. We do not operate under the mythology of absolute truths, but instead we write according to the lessons of every yesterday before today. In this determination, we believe we can find our freedom, which is hard to define because Black America like many other peoples around the world have never truly experienced it. Therefore, based on what we know freedom certainly is not, we can begin to understand what we indeed believe that it is. Excerpted from As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation by William C. Anderson, Zoé Samudzi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
