If you want to know what the slow, grinding death of an unjust status quo looks like, you only need to read the morning wire. In Mississippi, a state long written off by comfortable coastal consultants as an unshakeable fortress of reactionary politics, Democrat Scott Colom has claimed a historic victory. Let that shatter the cowardly myth that the Deep South is beyond redemption or organization. When working people are given a real alternative to the austerity and racial resentment that have poisoned governance for generations, they take it. Colom’s win is not an anomaly; it is an indictment of every political strategist who ever advocated for abandoning marginalized communities in the name of safe electoral math.
At the very same moment, thousands of miles away in Massachusetts, Harvard University is finally returning the skulls of two enslaved people to Brazil—remains hoarded for generations in the vile service of pseudo-scientific eugenics. It is impossible to overstate the grotesque entitlement of our elite institutions, which built their endowments and intellectual reputations on the literal desecration of Black bodies. While university press releases will inevitably frame this repatriation as a triumph of moral introspection, let us be clear about what it actually is: a belated, forced concession wrested from an institution that should be on its knees begging for forgiveness and paying reparations, not expecting applause for surrendering stolen human remains.
These stories are not disconnected dispatches from an indifferent universe. They are chapters in the same ongoing, necessary fight against a system that has always viewed human life as expendable capital. You see that same cold arithmetic in the dust clouds of New York City, where a building collapsed today, killing one person and shattering the bodies of a dozen others. We are routinely told by municipal bureaucrats and real estate lobbies that regulations are burdens and code enforcement is red tape. Tell that to the workers crushed beneath structural rot. Landlords extract obscene rents from aging, unmaintained properties while city governments cut inspection budgets to protect corporate tax breaks. That is not an accident of urban life; it is state-sanctioned negligence.
We live in a culture that would rather consign history and human dignity to the depths than confront its own decay. Consider the SS United States, a rusting mid-century leviathan of American industrial pride, now slated to be sunk off Florida to serve as an artificial reef. The metaphor is almost too clumsy to write: our grand monuments to twentieth-century supremacy, left to rot, stripped of utility, and pushed beneath the waves because nobody in power wants to invest in genuine renewal. It is far easier for the ruling class to let the past sink—or lock it away in a museum basement—than to do the hard, expensive work of transformative repair.
Even in our cultural anxieties, the establishment betrays its utter lack of faith in the human spirit. When an African literary prize spent weeks aggressively interrogating whether an award-winning story was generated by artificial intelligence—only to find zero evidence of digital trickery—it revealed the deep, patronizing rot at the heart of global gatekeeping. The immediate instinct of the literary establishment was to suspect fraud rather than accept brilliant, authentic African art. Technology does not threaten to devalue humanity nearly as much as the cynics and gatekeepers who assume creativity is a commodity to be hoarded by the privileged.
None of this is permanent. That is the lesson we must take from Mississippi, and that is the mandate we must carry into every organizing room, every picket line, and every city council meeting. The structures that oppress us—whether they are centuries-old eugenics archives, dilapidated urban tenements, or the gerrymandered voting maps of the American South—only survive as long as we concede to their inevitability.
The old world is crumbling from its own toxic weight. Our job is not to shore up the cracked foundation or weep for the ships we scuttle. Our job is to clear the wreckage, demand full accountability for the lives broken along the way, and build an uncompromising, radically just future in its place.
Octavia Stern