WIDESPREAD FAILURES —
Texas’ “failsafe” generators failed, risking weeks-long catastrophe

Black start generators—and their backups—failed en masse during deep freeze.

TIM DE CHANT - 5/28/2021

Enlarge / A worker repairs a power line in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021.

Texas’ days-long power outages during last February’s deep freeze almost stretched into weeks or even months thanks to a string of failures at “black start” generators.

More than half of the state’s 28 black start generators, which are crucial for bringing a collapsed grid back to life, experienced outages themselves, according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal. Of the 13 primary generators, nine encountered trouble, as did six of 15 secondary generators acting as backups in case the primary backups failed. Some had trouble getting enough fuel to run, while others were damaged by the cold weather.

“Having had experience for almost two decades with utilities, it’s genuinely inconceivable to me—even in today’s massively deregulated environment—I cannot imagine how any regulatory oversight got itself into this position,” said Evan Wilner, who served as Delaware’s first public advocate representing utility customers.

While one black start generator is theoretically enough to bring a grid back to life, the process would take an exceptionally long time, which is why grids have many such generators standing by.

Five minutes from catastrophe

Early on the morning of February 15, Texas came within five minutes of needing its troubled black start generators. Fossil fuel generators began tripping offline and wind turbines were freezing, eventually causing more than 35 GW of capacity to become unavailable. Cold temperatures were driving demand higher, and the grid’s frequency began dropping dangerously.

FURTHER READINGTexas gov knew of natural gas shortages days before blackout, blamed wind anyway

Just before 2 am, as the frequency dropped to 59.4 Hz and then to 59.3 Hz, grid operators began “shedding load,” a technical term for cutting off power to portions of the grid. That action reduced demand, which brought the frequency back closer to the target of 60 Hz.

If grid operators had been unable to bring the frequency back up, the power plants that had been generating would have been forced offline to avoid damage to their equipment. Already widespread outages would have spread even further, plunging more of Texas into darkness.

If the grid had collapsed, Texas would have needed to turn to its black start generators to slowly bring each power plant back online. But when the state would have needed them most, many generators were unable to fulfill their duties. The black start generator at the massive 3.65 GW coal- and gas-fired W.A. Parish power plant was down for 17 hours on February 15, the day the outages began. Black start at another large generator, the 1 GW T.H. Wharton plant, was down for 84 hours that week because its air intake was frozen. The average length of outages across all black start generators in Texas during the deep freeze was 40 hours.

Black start power

Without working black start generators, power plants cut off from the grid have no way of getting back online. All power plants, including nuclear and hydroelectric, require electricity to jump-start their operations. Without power, pumps can’t feed water to boilers, and spillways can’t open to allow water to course through their turbines. Even the generators themselves require a small amount of electricity to excite the electromagnetic fields in their rotors. Larger power plants generally require larger black start generators, and those units may require smaller generators to get cranking.

Some power plants that provide black start services are finding the economics challenging, according to the WSJ report. One small hydroelectric plant in West Virginia says it spends $65,000 to comply with black start regulations but earns only $51,000 a year for the service.

Every North American grid has black start generators, but there’s no nationwide standard regulating them. Each state or grid operator decides how to operate the generators. Some use a mix of fossil fuel generators and hydroelectric dams. Hydro is particularly attractive because the fuel source is often more reliable—as long as there’s water behind the dam, the generators require just a small amount of power, either from a generator or a battery, to ramp up to full capacity.Advertisement

But Texas no longer has any hydroelectric black start facilities. All of its black start generators use natural gas as a primary fuel, and only 13 generators at six sites can use fuel oil as a backup. When natural gas supplies run short, generators without an alternate fuel source are unable to provide vital services to the grid. Plant operators are required to maintain a reserve supply of fuel, but it wasn’t clear during the February freeze that they were all fulfilling this obligation. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which manages most of the state’s electrical grid, is reportedly in the process of trying to recover some of the payments made to black start facilities that failed during the outage.

Myriad costs

Utilities in Texas may not have trouble recouping their costs, though. Texas lawmakers are on the verge of passing bills that would allow gas and electric utilities and cooperatives to issue state-approved bonds that would be backed by additional charges on customers’ bills, according to the Texas Tribune.

FURTHER READING Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold

Utilities and cooperatives ran up massive debts when ERCOT set the maximum wholesale rate at $9,000 per MWh, and natural gas prices spiked as supplies tanked. If the bills pass, natural gas utilities could issue $4.5 billion in ratepayer-backed bonds, and electric cooperatives could issue $2 billion in bonds. Retail electric providers could finance $2.1 billion for power bought but never received, and ERCOT would receive an $800 million loan from the rainy day fund to pay companies that are still owed money.

The financial toll is just a sideshow to the human costs of the disaster, though. While 151 deaths have been officially attributed to the outages, a new BuzzFeed News report suggests that the tally is likely closer to 700.

Black People Defeated Trump (The Movement for Black Lives)

We Win when we Follow Black Women (Showing Up for Racial Justice - SURJ)

Black People Defeated Trump (The Movement for Black Lives)
The defeat of Donald Trump and the building of grass roots political independent. 

Reports from The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL); Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ); 

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL),

Black People Defeated Trump (The Movement for Black Lives)

Black people showed up, and we won. From Philly to Atlanta to Detroit, Black people defeated Trump, and pushed back against white supremacy. We proved that the majority of people in this nation support our fight for Black lives and oppose hate, bigotry and indifference.

Black people moved through so much pain and heartbreak to get to today. We’ve lost over 235,000 people to COVID-19, including a disproportionate number of our family and loved ones. We lost millions of jobs when we already face a precarious economic situation every day due to racial capitalism. And lawmakers across the country did everything they could to stop us from organizing, voting and building power.

We won anyway. This is a testament to the power of Black people and Black organizing.

This win is also a testament to the power of Black women. Black cis and trans women and femmes are at the forefront of our movement. Black women rejected the white supremacist agenda and mobilized our communities to turn out and vote.

But our work is not done. We have always said: the fight for justice does not stop at the ballot box. We have our first Black woman Vice President alongside many new Black women, trans and non-binary leaders who were voted into office across the country. Now, our job will be to hold these leaders accountable to the people’s demands.



We have a vision for Black lives and a plan for the first 100 days of the new administration.

We will champion the BREATHE Act to divest from ineffective, racist policing and invest in our communities. We will dig in on local defund the police campaigns all over the U.S. We will double down on our commitment to be about ALL Black lives including trans, gender nonconforming and intersex people, disabled people and immigrants.


Keep Showing Up With Us:


RSVP for our post-election roundtable next week. We’ll detail our plan for the first 100 days and beyond.


Join 150,000+ people and become a community co-sponsor of the BREATHE Act.


Stay ready, be alert and continue organizing to safeguard our communities against state and/or white supremacist violence and repression. The people have spoken and we must ensure the will of the people is respected.


Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to get and share updates using #M4BL and #TheWorkisNotDone.


Text POWER TO 90975 to receive our calls to action.

We must make Black lives matter after elections, too. And we must hold politicians accountable to the Black people who put them into office. We’re not going anywhere — Black movement was here long before this election and will be here long after.

In power and solidarity,

The Movement for Black Lives

[The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) formed in December of 2014, was created as a space for Black organizations across the country to debate and discuss the current political conditions, develop shared assessments of what political interventions were necessary in order to achieve key policy, cultural and political wins, convene organizational leadership in order to debate and co-create a shared movement wide strategy. Under the fundamental idea that we can achieve more together than we can separately.]

We Win when we Follow Black Women 

(Showing Up for Racial Justice - SURJ)



Today, we are all breathing a collective sigh of relief. The people of this country – led by communities of color – have voted out Donald Trump.

This win is a testament to the power of multi-racial grassroots organizing. These last four years we have again seen that People of Color, but most especially Black women, offer the vision, leadership, and organizing work to get all of us free.

I am so proud of how we showed up in this election. We knew white voters elected Trump and we took responsibility for organizing our own to get him out. We threw down in Georgia – a place the Democratic Party had written off and where Black women organizers have been leading the way. We joined partners on the ground in Georgia, including the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight, Working Families Party, and so many other groups that had already laid the foundation to flip Georgia because of their tremendous ongoing work to expand the electorate with more Black voters while keeping real solutions to working people’s problems front and center.

SURJ made over a million calls to white voters who we knew were suffering under this administration and who are infrequent voters. Over 3,800 SURJ members had 36,000 conversations with voters and secured 21,200 commitments to vote.

And it worked. The New York Times is reporting that Biden made major gains in majority-white counties among white people who didn’t attend college. That's who we called.

This is what it looks like to organize our own – and to do it at scale and in service of a vision set by Black movement leaders.

When we build multi-racial coalitions and invest in long-haul organizing, we win, y’all! And let’s be clear: defeating Trump was a movement win, not a win for the Democratic establishment. Years of powerful Latinx organizing laid the groundwork for progressive wins in Arizona. Black leadership paved the way to defeat Trump in Georgia. Grassroots organizers across the country built the people power to send visionary progressive candidates to the halls of Congress.

We know the road ahead will not be easy. Our movement is going to have to fight hard against a Biden administration – and we’re up against an emboldened Right. More white people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 and the Right will not let up for a single second. We’ve got our work to do to continue to organize more of our people away from white supremacy.

Today, we celebrate – and recommit to organizing alongside our partners for the long-haul.

We now know control of the Senate will be decided in Georgia on January 5th. Want to take action with us to help win? Sign up here and we’ll be in touch to put you to work after we’ve checked in with our partners and rested up

In solidarity and with hope,
Erin Heaney
SURJ Director

Showing Up for Racial Justice - SURJ
81 Prospect Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

 

‘Dancing jets’ from black hole reveal their immense power

New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans the Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes.

Curtin University

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image: 

The strong stellar wind from the supergiant star pushes the jets launched by the black hole away from the star. This causes the jet direction to vary as the black hole and the supergiant star move around their orbit.

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Credit: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)

New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans the Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes, confirming scientists’ theories of how black holes help shape the structure of the Universe.

 

In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, researchers found the power of the jets in Cygnus X-1 – a system comprised of the first confirmed black hole and a supergiant star – was equivalent to the power output of 10,000 Suns.

 

To record the measurement, researchers used an array of linked up telescopes separated by large distances to observe the black hole jets being buffeted by the winds of the star as the black hole moved around its orbit – much like how strong winds on Earth can push around water in a fountain.

 

By knowing the power of the wind and measuring how much the jets were bent, the researchers could determine the instantaneous power of the jets for the first time.

 

In addition, they were able to determine the speed of the black hole’s jets – about half the speed of light, or 150,000 km per second – another measurement that has challenged scientists for decades.

 

The research was led from the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA) and the Curtin node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), in collaboration with the University of Oxford.

 

Lead author Dr Steve Prabu, who worked at CIRA at the time of the research and who is now based at the University of Oxford, said researchers were able to make the measurement using a sequence of images of the “dancing jets” – a term he used to describe the jets’ movement pattern as they were repeatedly deflected in different directions by the supergiant star’s powerful winds as the star and black hole moved around their orbits.

 

Dr Prabu said the measurement allowed scientists to understand what fraction of the energy released around black holes could be deposited into the surrounding environment, thereby changing the environment.

 

“A key finding from this research is that about 10 per cent of the energy released as matter falls in towards the black hole is carried away by the jets,” Dr Prabu said.

 

“This is what scientists usually assume in large-scale simulated models of the Universe, but it has been hard to confirm by observation until now.”

 

Co-author Professor James Miller-Jones, from CIRA and the Curtin node of ICRAR, said previous methods could only measure the average jet power over thousands or even millions of years, preventing accurate comparisons with the X-ray energy released instantaneously from the infalling matter.

 

"And because our theories suggest that the physics around black holes is very similar, we can now use this measurement to anchor our understanding of jets, whether they are from black holes 10 or 10 million times the mass of the Sun," Professor Miller-Jones said.

 

"With radio telescope projects such as the Square Kilometre Array Observatory currently under construction in Western Australia and South Africa, we expect to detect jets from black holes in millions of distant galaxies, and the anchor point provided by this new measurement will help calibrate their overall power output.

 

“Black hole jets provide an important source of feedback to the surrounding environment and are critical to understanding the evolution of galaxies.”

 

Other collaborating institutions included the University of Barcelona, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Lethbridge and the Institute of Space Science.

 

The paper, ‘A jet bent by a stellar wind in the black hole X-ray binary Cygnus X-1’, published in journal Nature Astronomy, can be found here.

Artist’s impression of the Cygnus X-1 binary system [VIDEO] 

 

The direction of the radio jet changes as the black hole and the star move around their orbit (shown in red).

Credit

International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR)

---

Journal

Nature Astronomy

DOI

10.1038/s41550-026-02828-3 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A jet bent by a stellar wind in the black hole X-ray binary Cygnus X-1

Article Publication Date

16-Apr-2026

C.R.T.

Black History Has the Power to Ignite Movements. That’s Why the Right Fears It.

The administration’s pre-emptive assault on history is a desperate attempt to stop new social movements from starting.

By Nicholas Powers ,

Truthout

November 29, 2025

A visitor browses an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on August 28, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong / Getty Images

Ilooked at the slave shackles in the exhibit. My ancestors wore chains like this one. A bone-deep sorrow hit. When I researched my family history, names began to vanish as I traced it to Indigenous and African slavery. Here, right in front of me was material proof of the horror they survived. What is my responsibility to them?

The Slavery and Freedom exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. is a soul-shaking experience. Going from the bottom level to the higher exhibits, visitors take the journey from slavery to freedom. I went years ago, and decided to go again with family and friends. During the government shutdown, the closed museum doors were symbolic of a larger right-wing attack. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have censored Black history, pulled Black books, removed Black Lives Matters icons, and led to a mass firing of Black federal employees.

The right wing suppresses Black history because it ignites social movements. Black history transforms rage into activism by putting racist events into a larger story of struggle against oppression. It shines a light on a hidden past. It exposes the hypocrisy of MAGA.

The right-wing attack on Black history is stupid, cruel, and futile. The logical end of censoring Black history is national suicide. Black history is a legacy with lessons that can heal the divides in the U.S. and repair our relationship to the world. Black history can free us from the right-wing image of the U.S. as a white Christian nationalist utopia, which never existed, and lead us to a clear-eyed radical realism. Black history bears a truth that makes it possible, finally, to create a future we can live in as liberated beings.


Trump’s War on Black America



Related Story

Interview |
Black History Testifies to the Impossible Creative Power of Black Resistance
Literary scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin discusses how Black yearning keeps surviving in the face of racist violence. By George Yancy , Truthout  February 23, 2025

Trump and MAGA are waging war on Black America. They have attacked it on three fronts; Black culture, Black economics, and voting rights. The attack on history is the most dangerous, because history gives birth to new protests.

Black history bears a truth that makes it possible, finally, to create a future we can live in as liberated beings.

In March, federal workers aimed jackhammers at the Black Lives Matter mural — blocks from the White House — and destroyed it. Less than a mile away, the African American Museum of D.C. was closed during the shutdown and has only recently reopened.

Trump came out the gate of his second presidency with a barrage of executive orders. One executive order titled “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” led to Black-authored books being yanked from school libraries run by the Department of Defense. Trump shut down diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. He terrified business leaders with possible DEI investigations. Black history month celebrations were cancelled at federal agencies.

In a perverse kind of trickle-down racism, Trump’s attack on Black Lives Matter became a permission structure for increased on-the-ground bigotry. White influencers proudly wore blackface for Halloween. Politico exposed a Young Republicans’ chat where they gleefully traded racist comments. Black comedian W. Kamau Bell has painted a portrait of a right-wing shift in standup performances in which anti-trans jokes and anti-Black slurs have become commonplace. This is not a series of isolated events: FBI statistics on anti-Black hate crime, consistently the most common form of hate crime, spiked during Trump’s two terms.

Side by side with the cultural attack is an economic one. Remember Elon Musk proudly waving a chainsaw at CPAC? Well, it worked. Black women’s unemployment leapt from 5.9 percent in February to 7.5 percent in September. Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce and attacks on “DEI” forced 300,000 Black women out of their jobs. Put that number next to the 2003 statistic that 64 percent of Black families are led by a single parent, most of whom are single mothers, and the effects are devastating. Women are now trying to hold families together without work or health care.

When seen in that light, a closed history museum may seem to be at the bottom of the list of things to worry about. Yet a living relationship to history has the power to create a political consciousness for resistance. The ripping up of Black Lives Matter’s art, the censoring of Black books, the effort to whitewash Black history — all are part of a desperate attempt to stop a new social movement before it starts.

The Past Transforms Us

Emmett Till’s casket was right there, and no one could speak. I stood with visitors to the African American Museum in D.C., and the “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom” exhibit that highlights the Civil Rights Era weighed on us. To be in the presence of history, to be inches away from the casket that Emmett Till lay in, was dizzying.

The ripping up of Black Lives Matter’s art, the censoring of Black books, the effort to whitewash Black history — all are part of a desperate attempt to stop a new social movement before it starts.

Trump actually visited the museum in 2017 and in a somber tone, said, “This museum is a beautiful tribute to so many American heroes, heroes like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass.” Eight years later, in August 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” Well, that’s a 180-degree turn.

Why the change? Two events upset Trump’s first term: COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. Protests against police brutality have been ocean tides in the Black Freedom Struggle, of which BLM is the most recent wave.

Black protests against police brutality go far back. We see it in Abolitionists fighting the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and we see resistance in the Red Summer of 1919. Racist brutality sparked the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. In 1991, the police beating of Rodney King led to the L.A. riots. In 1999 the police murder of Amadou Diallo and the 2006 killing of Sean Bell launched marches. Wave after wave reached higher and higher. In 2020, BLM became a tsunami of protest, the largest in U.S. history — and it was also strong enough to carry voters to the polls and throw Trump out of office.

The Black Freedom Movement has more power than any president or any system. Trump knows this. MAGA knows this. This is why they erase Black history. The past transforms us, it fires up dormant desires. It realigns us with our ancestors. Black artists and intellectuals always documented the dramatic effect of learning about Black history.

Assata Shakur wrote in her 1988 autobiography, Assata, “I didn’t know what a fool they made of me until I grew up and started reading real history.”

Malcolm X wrote in his 1965 classic, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “History had been ‘whitened’ in the white man’s history books and the black man had been brainwashed for hundreds of years.”

From Frederick Douglass to Dead Prez, Ida B. Wells to Alicia Garza, knowing one’s history has always been the key ingredient to activating Black consciousness.

The Black thinker who systemized this transformation is Dr. William E. Cross in his 1971 essay, “The Negro-to-Black Conversion Experience.” Cross had a front-row seat to the 1968 climax of rebellion. He repeatedly saw apolitical brothers and sisters sparked by the revolution; they shed old lives, old fashions, and old ideas, and re-emerged in the street, wearing afros and bright pan-African colors. They went through stages like a butterfly molting in a cocoon, flying out, free as themselves.

Black history is the cocoon; it is the stories and imagery, the feeling of ancestors, it is the site of transformation. When millions upon millions undergo that change, like during the George Floyd protests, it becomes a historical force. A meteorologist, trying to show how interconnected all things are, once said that a flap of a butterfly’s wings can set off a tornado. It’s true. Why? The more that racists try to repress our history, the more we use it to explain what is happening, and how to fight back. The next social movement is already beginning, like a tornado.

As Pressure Builds, More Will Find Our History

When I finished my tour of the African American Museum, I was at the top floor. Sunlight came through the windows. The building is designed to recreate the journey from slavery to freedom. Standing at the top, I felt deeply moved.

Black history is the cocoon; it is the stories and imagery, the feeling of ancestors, it is the site of transformation.

The power of history, especially at a museum, is that right there under glass is evidence of our past. Flesh fades to dust. Bones crumble. Yet here are real things touched by real people. This is why the African American Museum in D.C. is the crown jewel of a large network of Pan-African historical sites. In New York, there’s the African Burial Ground. In Boston, there’s the Black Heritage Trail. In Tennessee, there’s the National Civil Rights Museum. In Ghana, there are slave castles and the heart-wrenching Door of No Return. The interconnected network of sites creates multiple transformation zones, where people enter and come out changed. When we leave, we take this history with us.

The tragedy of this moment is that Trump and MAGA have succumbed to a juvenile, cartoon version of history. If they turn back time, they believe, the joy of unlimited power will be at their fingertips. The harder they push for total control, the more pressure they place on masses of people. The government shutdown worsened hunger. People in the U.S. are facing even more unpayable health insurance. Rage at ICE builds in neighborhoods as masked agents separate families.

Under this pressure, many are forced to ask questions. When they do, they will find answers waiting for them. They will find our history.

Expect more tornados to come.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nicholas Powers
Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.

Black women have always moved this country forward. On Election Day, we won’t be stopped


OPINION: By voting on Election Day, our collective power will continue to move America closer to its promise for all.

Black Women’s Leadership Collective |
Nov 5, 2022

(Getty Images)

Black women are a voting powerhouse. When we show up at the polls, we bring our communities with us and decide elections. In 2020, we turned out in record numbers and helped change the direction of our country. We made it clear that nothing and no one could stop us. In this 2022 midterm election season, our futures, our livelihoods, and basic freedoms are on the ballot. It is again time to organize and mobilize every man, woman and young voter in our communities and vote.

Also Read:
Black votes do matter — if we vote

As leaders of the Black Women’s Leadership Collective — an organizing hub for Black women’s organizations, advocates and supporters representing over 19 million Black women across America — we know just how strong our power is. Together we helped elect Kamala Harris as the first Black woman vice president. By electing President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris, we made it possible for their administration to implement a COVID-19 recovery plan and get vaccines into our communities, lift 716,000 black children out of poverty, give young people up to $20,000 in student loan debt relief, lower prescription drug costs with a $35 cap on insulin and change federal policy on marijuana possession. And, after fierce organizing throughout Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination process, Black women helped her take her rightful seat on the nation’s highest court. But that’s just the start, so together we must make it clear: We won’t let anyone stop us now.

While the country has begun to make progress on a number of issues, there is more work to do to create sustainable change and equity for Black women, our families and our communities. From criminal justice reform, codifying voting rights, help for families including access to affordable child care, getting weapons of war off our streets, to strengthening our democracy at every level, the solutions aren’t going to come from right-wing politicians — they come from us and the leaders we elect and hold accountable. And, with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and strip away our freedom to control our own bodies, we must elect leaders who will codify reproductive freedom, including access to abortion. There are some who want to pass a national ban on abortion on top of the extreme new measures we are seeing across the country that criminalize women and their doctors. We remember a time when our bodies were treated as property; some said we were less than human and that we couldn’t be trusted with freedom. We are not going back.

(Getty Images)

Not surprisingly, a recent poll from Higher Heights Leadership Fund found that Black women are highly motivated to vote in the 2022 midterm elections with 80 percent saying that we have the power to make change on issues that matter most to our community. We also know how important it is that we make a plan to vote and then encourage our family and friends to do the same. Making a plan is easy; start by deciding if you will vote by mail, early in person or in person on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 8. Visit vote.org to make your plan to vote right now.



The Higher Heights poll also found that a large majority of Black women agree that while we have made great strides, Black women are still underrepresented in the halls of power. In fact, while we are the largest voting bloc in America, there are currently no Black women in the U.S. Senate or serving as governor, but there are Black women running for both as well as elected office up and down the ballot. Fortunately, a record number of Black women are running for office across our country in 2022, and we have the opportunity to elect more Black women to every office from mayor to city council to state legislatures to governors, Congress and the U.S. Senate. You can learn more about the Black women running for office in 2022 here. Electing more Black women means more spaces where our lived experience is represented and part of the decisions that get made on the issues that directly impact our lives.

Also Read:
Oprah delivers November surprise, endorses Fetterman over Oz

Together in this 2022 midterm election, our collective power will continue to move America closer to its promise for all. We won’t be stopped.

This op-ed was written by three leaders of the Black Women’s Leadership Collective (BWLC) – Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Bishop Leah Daughtry, co-convener of Power Rising, and Karen Finney, CNN political commentator.

Black History Testifies to the Impossible Creative Power of Black Resistance

Literary scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin discusses how Black yearning keeps surviving in the face of racist violence.

By Farah Jasmine Griffin, George Yancy 

February 24, 2025

Source: Truthout





There is a powerful traditional saying within Black cultural spaces, one that speaks of “making a way out of no way.” This saying captures the resilience, agency and creativity that Black people have embodied within the context of mightily resisting the pervasive and systemic anti-Blackness in the United States. The saying conveys how Black people have developed the approaches necessary to create space for impossible passage through impassable barriers, despite the obstacles designed to keep us “in our place.”

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin reminds us that Black history “testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.” And Cornel West builds on this idea when he points out that Black people have been terrorized, traumatized and brutalized for 400 years and yet are still able to create so much beauty. Even as our Black bodies didn’t belong to us legally, we danced; even though our family relationships were violated, we found togetherness; even though our voices were repressed, we sang; even though we were deemed intellectually “inferior,” we articulated prose and poetry that was nothing less than sheer genius. Collectively, we are a protean people who refuse to be silenced, oppressed and dictated to by the machinations of white supremacy, which includes its current iteration in the narcissistic, neofascist tendencies of Donald Trump.

After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, a Black philosophy graduate student sent me a text asking what they should do. They felt the dystopic moment. I immediately communicated the history of Black suffering under the maliciousness of white power in the United Sates. My point was clear: “Don’t be surprised. We’ve been here before!” We’ve seen this before in the White Citizens’ Councils, Alabama Gov. George Wallace, Eugene “Bull” Connor — you name it. I then very quickly reminded the student of the indefatigable spirit of Ida B. Wells-Barnett who, in the face of racist threats, fought against the gratuitously violent spectacle of white mobs lynching Black people. My point was to emphasize that we are a people who refuse to accept white tyranny, that we are prepared to resist in the name of freedom, and that we are a proud and audacious people who will continue to make a way out of no way.

Our capacity to be otherwise than what whiteness dictates is what drew me to interview Farah Jasmine Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University. Griffin’s most recent book is entitled, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature. Griffin beautifully speaks to the power of Black yearning, showing how Black people continue to transcend to greater heights of creative expression, despite the obstacles that have been used to deny Black humanity. Griffin’s scholarship communicates with such clarity how Black people embody a profound and indomitable spirit of self-determination, self-worth and self-inventiveness in various forms (aesthetic, somatic, literary) amid pernicious and ongoing threats to our very being.

Black History Month continues to be an important moment to shine a spotlight on the achievements of Black people. That spotlight should teach the world, as Griffin argues, about what it means for a people to continue to fight for “perpetual achievement of the impossible.” That is an indispensable Black History Month message to the United States and to the world.

George Yancy: In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, you state, “Following the path opened by [Toni] Morrison, many contemporary Black writers posit death as the central marker, the major experience of Blackness.” This is an important place to begin when theorizing Black existence. Black people in the U.S. understand death and dying as constitutive of what it means to live precariously within a country founded upon anti-Blackness. However, you also discuss in your book In Search of a Beautiful Freedom how as a child you discovered Billie Holiday. You write about how her voice communicated a certain longing and yearning that you couldn’t find the words to express. You write, “To long for something you will never have, to aspire for a destination you will never reach—that is what I heard in Billie Holiday’s voice.” Black death and Black yearning are two important existential motifs that constitute Black life. Say more about the power of Black yearning. What is it that sustains Black yearning under conditions of continued Black oppression?

Farah Jasmine Griffin: What a fascinating question. The two are related, I think. They both speak to the prevalence of Black death in our tradition of writing, our death at the hands of racist violence, our foreshortened life chances, the lack of possibility and the power of Black yearning, which constitute our persistent ability to imagine freedom, and to project ourselves into an imagined future where such freedom might exist. It involves our capacity to imagine that place other than the one we presently occupy and to keep reaching for it. It’s a yearning that fuels our constant creativity and innovation whether it be in music, dance, language or style. What is, is never enough. How do we make it better, make it not just more bearable, but more desirable, more beautiful, worth getting through another day — worth reaching for and creating something viable for those who will follow? It’s in the longing for a home that we never knew, and the yearning for a future where we are safe from violence and want. It’s as if we know the process of transformation is in the very act of longing itself.

What I find fascinating is that Black people in fact create under haunting conditions of social death. Despite the reality of social death, Black people experience embodied joy and deep ecstasy. In Read Until You Understand, you quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, where he writes, “We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not.” Baldwin, of course, isn’t describing “Black stereotypes,” but Black social life. When I think of Black music, I think of the active sense of Black musicking, Black joy expressed at those cultural sites called juke or jook joints, the power of Black bodies in motion and modes of Black agency. In her powerful text, To ’Joy Our Freedom, historian Tera W. Hunter writes, “In slavery, blacks were denied ownership of their bodies.” Talk about how Black resistance, claiming of Black embodiment, is embedded within Black musicking.


James Baldwin reminds us that Black history “testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.”

What a powerful Baldwin quotation! He also says, “We sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.” Within the limits, within the conditions of oppression we find each other, and we have “no need to pretend to be what we are not,” and we find a freedom close to love. I love that Baldwin quote. It encapsulates so much of what has driven my work. I am always seeking those moments, identifying, explicating and trying to theorize them. They are often found in moments of Black sociality. That love and joy is deeply embodied. Music is central to those moments and so is love and laughter. So much of how we experience music is in our bodies. It isn’t only cerebral, though it is that as well. It is in the tap of our feet, the sway of our hips, the nod of our heads, a feeling deep in our hearts, the very beat of our hearts; it’s an embodied knowledge carried at the cellular level. It is a sonic and movement vocabulary that informs gesture and speech. I was watching a clip of a young Aretha Franklin singing on a television show and Darlene Love was one of her backup singers. They were singing a pop tune, “It’s in His Kiss.” One of those girl group pop tunes that Aretha transformed into something soulful and transcendent. The person who posted the clip, the writer Brandon Ousley, pointed out a moment when Darlene, in the middle of background singing and choreography is so blown away by what Aretha does vocally that her body does a small back bend without losing a beat and she turns and smiles in Aretha’s direction before waving her hand like one might do in church — all in time. A soulful, sisterly gesture of love, appreciation and recognition in the midst of a broader performance. It is a moment of embodied musicking with and against the grain of mainstream American popular music, which is what Aretha and her generation of soul artists did. They brought the body in, refused to separate it from the brilliance, the genius.

Farah, it is not lost on me that the root meaning of the name Aretha comes from the Greek word, Arete, which means excellence. It is Aretha’s genius that generates creative excellence and that produces that which is both soulful and transcendent. Part of the historical process of anti-Black racism was not only to deny Black people the capacity for creativity, but to legally and politically repress their desire for intellectual flourishing. In fact, in North Carolina (in 1831), there was a slave code that read: “Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to . . . produce insurrection and rebellion . . . any free person who shall hereafter teach or attempt to teach any slave within this state to read or write . . . shall be liable to indictment.” As you know, for Frederick Douglass, reading and writing were forms of freedom, self-worth and yet anguish. Speak to the importance of encouraging robust reading and writing among young Black people in the U.S. As I ask this question, I am aware of the cowardly and despicable anti-democratic reality that right-wing conservatives are banning books, which is an attack on critical thinking and knowledge production, and which speaks to a form of toxic anti-intellectualism.

Right-wing conservatives are banning books at the same time that American children across the board have lost ground in reading ability. The children of elites will be fine, but non-elite children of all races will continue to suffer. We are increasingly an illiterate society, which is why we are increasingly an anti-democratic one. For generations, Black people knew that literacy was an integral part of our quest for freedom. And while African Americans insisted that schools teach children to read, they did not solely rely on these institutions. I think that in the current moment one of the greatest things we can do is to instill a love of reading in our young people. Reading expands their sense of the world, their sense of what is possible and their sense of themselves and the universe to which they belong. Reading stretches them back into a rich past and forward into a dynamic future that they can help to build. Reading fuels their imaginations and their critical thinking abilities. For young people, we can ask them, “You love Kendrick?” Now suppose we also encouraged them to read everything that Kendrick read for a particular album?

Reading together also helps to create intergenerational, loving bonds of community. We need to create reading communities. We are in a very dangerous period. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jamelle Bouie have brilliantly pointed out, the current administration is hell-bent on destroying the entire civil rights infrastructure of the last 60 years. It is what Bouie calls the “segregationist intent” of the administration’s policy. Banning books is only the start. We will have to address this on multiple fronts. But as our forebears knew, literacy will be central. That’s why they created Sabbath Schools and Freedom Schools for children and for adults. Over the past 50 years, Black people have produced an extraordinary body of literary and scholarly work. It’s time to create or utilize existing spaces for sharing and teaching that material. There is also an important move to translate some of that work into beautiful, lovely children’s books. I’d like to see more of this. Books for Black children have always been part of our tradition. Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and other literary greats wrote for children. However, the genre of children’s books also produced wonderful writers who wrote only for young readers, like Muriel Feelings, Virginia Hamilton, and others. Recall that it was W. E. B. Du Bois who edited the monthly children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book and later, in 1973, the Johnson Publishing Company produced, Ebony, Jr! (Recently Karida L. Brown and Charly Palmer published the exquisite New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families.) The point here is to say that as a community we historically centered our children’s literacy and took it on as a community responsibility to teach them to learn and love to read. It’s time to do so again. We can utilize new technologies to assist us in introducing children to reading and to lead them into long-form works beyond the quick satisfaction of scrolling on a screen.

You have mentioned that your father would write notes in books he gave you. In one of those books, he wrote, “Baby, read it until you understand.” Being only in the third grade, what did you make of that powerful message? It is diametrically opposed to anti-intellectualism.

I adored my father, and reading was one of the things we did together. We went to bookstores and libraries, and for me that was daddy/daughter time. It could have been anything — fishing, sports, cars, whatever… I just enjoyed the time with him. So, I would read and then he’d ask me about what I read, what I remembered and what I thought. It wasn’t like a test, it was like a game, playful and fun. It was also the way I learned to listen to and love Black music. He taught me the alphabet, he taught me to read, he taught me scales, he taught me to read music. He bought me small instruments and he bought me books. Time spent with my father was precious time spent learning about our people and their genius and it was an adventure. But then shortly after writing that note, my father died, so the note took on a sense of urgency and became a lifelong project. I’m not sure that would have been the case had he not passed away at that time. In fact, had he lived, I might have rebelled at some point. But in his absence, it became a way of keeping him close. It kind of takes us back to where we started this interview. It became a way of trying to fulfill my yearning for him. My intellectual pursuit was an effort to fulfill a yearning for something I would never achieve — connection with my father. But my, what a rich life I received along the way. Yes, one that is diametrically opposed to anti-intellectualism. And one that is committed to seeking justice as well.

It is Black History Month. Please share a few book titles by Black authors that you think are necessary to read during this time and why those titles?

Toni Morrison’s Paradise because it is a challenging take on the attempt to create a Black utopia.

Edwidge Danticat’s most recent collection of essays, We’re Alone, which is a series of meditations on history, politics, immigration and environmental/climate disaster.

Joshua Myers’s Of Black Study, which is a brilliant take on the thought of five Black intellectuals and their critique of Western knowledge. It is a compelling work for anyone wanting a deeper engagement with Black thought.

Since we spoke about Black children’s books, two of my favorites:indigo dreaming, by Dinah Johnson is a gorgeous book about a young girl on the coast of South Carolina dreaming about a possible relative, also a girl, on the shore of West Africa. It encourages a wide-ranging diasporic imagination in young readers.
Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond. This book will inspire dreams, storytelling, vocabulary and new art. It is joyful.

You Can’t Murder Liberation

Ron Jacobs

 February 21, 2025
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Image by JD Doyle.

A revolutionary is not a victim. In fact, a revolutionary fights against victimhood past, present and future. When a movement fighting the racism and brutality of police forces uses a slogan like “Hands up, don’t shoot” it is emphasizing its potential victimhood and denying its power. Without power, there can be no long-term victory in the struggle against police brutality, police murders and the white supremacist system police in the US are enlisted to protect. Former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army (BLA) member Dhoruba Bin-Wahad not only understands this truth, he preaches it and he lives it. A new book titled Revolution in These Times: Dhoruba Bin-Wahad on Antifascism, Black Liberation and a Culture of Resistance examines the above statement, both in terms of history and the present moment.

Indeed, another of the points made by Bin-Wahad is that a movement resisting the capitalist state must know history; the history of the struggle and the history of the system the struggle is fighting. While Bin-Wahad lauds the spirit of the BLM protests and the numbers involved in the mobilizations after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, he also criticizes its leadership as a leadership that at best minimized their historical knowledge and focused instead on Floyd’s (and others murdered by police) victimhood at the hands of the police. The criticisms are not made in a manner that diminishes the importance of the movement or the protests, but as a means to understand why they ultimately failed. To those who might argue that they didn’t fail, a few statistics should clarify the truth of that statement. According to Statistia.com and other sources, every year since 2020 has seen an increase in killings by police. Furthermore, the rate of killings of unarmed Black men by cops is more than double the rate of killings of the dead classified as Hispanic or white. These statistics are affirmed in a variety of other sources, including the Washington Post, which no longer keeps track of these murders as of January 1, 2025. The termination of the Post’s keeping track is suspicious if only because of its occurrence after the newspaper’s owner Jeff Bezos groveling before Trump, who was ready to send in the army against the aforementioned protests in 2020.

Revolution in These Times is a collection of conversations, interviews and talks featuring Bin-Wahad. These forums took place over the past ten years or so. Many of them are (edited for clarity) transcripts of conversations held on Black Power Media, an alternative media undertaking founded by Kalonji Jama Changa that describes its politics as Pan-Africanist, internationalist, and socialist. The topics addressed include the history of white supremacy and the resistance to it, the nature of US capitalism and the political system it commands, the nature of reform under that system, and the history of the Black Liberation Army, the New York Black Panthers, COINTELPRO and other counter-intelligence programs run against Black liberation and other radical left organizations by the US government. The result is a book filled with history and political theory examined and discussed by those who have learned from books and from praxis. The understandings expressed within these covers provides both a basis and inspiration to create a way forward in a time when what Bin-Wahad calls “democratic fascism” is removing any of its remaining democratic elements ever more quickly.

One of the crucial features of the current US political system is one Bin-Wahad calls encapsulation. Bin-Wahad describes the process as “the tactic and strategy of war and repression.” (126) The fundamental components include appropriating the language and occasionally even the so-called leaders of a movement into the elites’ political system of elections, lobbying and NGOs. Meanwhile, the actual substance is removed and replaced by often meaningless legislation or the exact opposite of the movement’s intentions. A couple recent examples of this process include the transformation of the moment against the US war on Iraq into a campaign to get Barack Obama into the White House. The war not only continued, it expanded into places not even Dubya Bush and Donald Rumsfeld had sent forces into. Another more recent example is the so-called Black Lives Matter movement. Using the small city of Burlington, VT. (where I live) as an example, the results of the protests against police brutality and racism in that town has resulted in an increase of the police budget and the creation of more police positions that essentially operate as a kinder gentler nightstick. Bin-Wahad brings up similar examples while simultaneously pointing out that this doesn’t mean the protests were a failure, but were focused on victimhood, not on gaining power. In other words, movements against war and the police state must be movements for popular power because those currently in power have no reason to change the way things are.

This juncture is where history becomes ever more important. If those fighting the powers that be today are unaware of the history of their struggle—unaware of its militancy and ts revolutionary politics—they are unlikely to consider such politics for themselves. Instead, radical reform becomes the end goal not merely a place to pass through on the trail to liberation. Like Bin-Wahad and his host remark, if BLM stood for Black Liberation Movement and not Black Lives Matter, then there could be some hope for our future. The focus of movements against fascism and its manifestations should be about building power in the community, not latching on to already existing power structures. This latter phenomenon is one reason the movements Bin-Wahad calls hashtag movements fail.

Dhoruba bin Wahad is legit. Revolution in These Times is a book about history and power. It’s about the powerful erasing history and about having power and fighting for power. It’s about rejecting the identity of victim and learning to be a revolutionary. Like Dhoruba’s life story, it’s also about the determination required to maintain the focus required to oppose the ever more pervasive nightmare the modern world of billionaires and the governments they own. In its telling, the authors go after those who profit from the movement—the folks the Black Panthers called pork-chop nationalists and the self-appointed leaders, and the politicians who talk the game but play for the other side. This aspect of the book is perhaps unforgiving, but it is done with a clear focus on who and what should not be forgiven. Their ultimately regressive role in history is crucial to not repeating that history.

(The title of this review comes from a speech by Black Panther Fred Hampton, who was killed by a FBI-led death squad on December 4, 1969. “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can run a freedom fighter around the country but you can’t run freedom fighting around the country. You can murder a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation.”-Ron J)

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com