The Revolution is Being Televised

_{Courtesy of Alice Walker’s Garden}

EDIT/Update: Watch this 7 minutes and 41 seconds of truth from a South Asian woman body of culture. This is a Black experience, which is to say this is a shared experience of rebellion within colonial capture. This young woman likely does not identify as Black. This is the headline that Alice Walker’s Garden chose. However, her experience holds the solidarity and complexity of global anti-Blackness, colorism, shadism, colonial control, and anti-immigrant experiences. Her rebellion and embodied revolution is amplified with her stance. She begins her speech with a declaration of solidarity with Black, Indigenous and people of color who are experiencing the racialization of white supremacist, settler colonial terror.

I am here. She is we.

Our collective liberation is here in the confusion. And here I find clarity.

After watching this video, I felt so much fire in my belly and room in my nervous system. I experienced resonance with the parts of me that freeze and collapse when I can’t use my voice.

Speaking up and out when all signs of danger tell you “NO!,” is a revolutionary act.

Asking if the school-corporations wielding power through silencing and gaslight to listen, is a revolutionary act.

The parts of me that learned to hold my rage and grief inside until I numb up are ready to try something new. Something revolutionary.

As I look forward to a life beyond survival, I am excited to follow the lead of the young revolutionaries. These are the students of truth who dare to be seen, heard, and recorded. For history will remember their courage.

Today, our bodies are experiencing an overwhelming flood of confusion. We are being told what we are seeing is not real. For survivors of any form of trauma or abuse this experience is not uncommon. It feels old and familiar. For me, it triggers anger and exhaustion. I can feel defeated before I even try to advocate for what I believe. So, watching the news can render me functionally incapacitated.

I see Gazans being genocided everyday and find myself so disoriented by fear the words I use to describe what my eyes are seeing will be wielded against me. This is gaslight. This is terror. My body remembers.

What helps me orient mySELF is the awareness that we are experiencing a daily deluge of disinformation campaigns called news media. These are stories and narratives that shape how we can safely talk about what we are experiencing. Notice I used the word safe. If you don’t feel “safe” to talk about your experience, you learn not to talk. You learn to suppress.

This is a pattern. A trauma response. Pay Attention.

I am grateful for all of the alternative forms of storytelling, independent media, and radical journalism. If I were to solely rely on the disinformation and manipulated narratives of corporate news, I might continue to distrust my body.

Gil Scott Heron famously said, “The revolution will not be televised.” I believe we are seeing and experiencing the revolution on television right now.

You just have to know where to find the tapes.