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Education for Our Liberation
Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Summer 1964 SNCC Freedom School Program in Mississippi
“So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do,
how we are willing to say ‘no’ to withdraw from that system
and begin within our community to start to function
and to build new institutions that will speak to our needs.”
— Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Speech, 1966
Throughout the history of Black freedom struggles—both in the United States and globally—questions of self-determination have remained constant. Whether the battle was against Jim Crow segregation or the cultural remnants of colonialism, visions for new institutions that center the needs of marginalized communities have been extensive. These visions have radically imagined alternatives to socioeconomic disenfranchisement: pinpointing community-based, consciousness-raising education as a key tool for freedom.
In December 1963, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary Charlie Cobb penned a proposal for a summer Freedom School program in Mississippi to the SNCC executive committee, noting the need for some educational program that would supplement the lackluster and racist education Black high school students were receiving in the education system. Due to decades of racialized and gendered poverty, Black people in Mississippi had extreme barriers to educational opportunities. For instance, in the early 1960s, less than five percent of Black Mississippians were high school graduates (Strukey 2016). The SNCC executive committee approved the proposal, and a Freedom School was developed by members of SNCC (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:24).
While racialized violence and discrimination continue into the twenty-first century, it would be remiss of us all not to acknowledge the extensive work done by organizations like SNCC to combat anti-Black racism in their communities.
Context, Curriculum, and Elements
Centering the lived experiences of Black students in Mississippi, the Freedom School curriculum was created by a collective of educators and activists over the course of a two-day conference. In addition to providing the students with extensive academic and intellectual support, the Freedom School was first and foremost proposed to nurture students’ political consciousness and give them the tools to organize against racial injustice themselves (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:25). The curriculum contained a multitude of interdisciplinary elements:
- an academic component focused on developing reading, writing, and math skills,
- a citizenship component to encourage students to think critically about their community and draw connections between their personal experiences and the greater climate of white supremacy in the United States, and
- a ‘Guide to Negro History’ that explored the socio-political activism of Black people around the globe (SNCC Digital Gateway 2016).
By dedicating a large part of the curriculum to Black history, the SNCC Freedom Schools opened the path to a consciousness-raising model that stressed a connection with the greater African diaspora and affirmed notions of Black transnational identity for students. The schools themselves were attended by students voluntarily; Freedom School teachers knocked on doors in the community they taught in to explain the purpose of the school and invite students to attend. By relying on word of mouth, the Freedom School classes across Mississippi gained popularity among community members. By the end of the Summer of 1964, over fifty Freedom Schools had been created, reaching over 2,100 Mississippians both young and adult (Watson 2014).
SNCC’s leadership and teaching model was largely influenced by mentor Ella Baker, an organizer in the Civil Rights Movement who developed the educational pedagogy of ‘democratic education’ which aims to teach students “…about the emancipatory nature of learning and schooling” (Watson 2014). Due to this, the Freedom School curriculum was deliberately developed to invest in the leadership potential of all students and create a learning environment in which teachers and students were both co-creators of knowledge. SNCC recognized that the educational institutions in Mississippi were failing Black students in a multitude of ways, so the curriculum needed to be flexible enough to accommodate various student needs: as they studied the curriculum, teachers were told to discard it and to create, on the spot if necessary, activities and questions that responded to the needs of the students in front of them. The curriculum’s central premise, the importance of questioning, challenged the concept of a written curriculum. The Freedom School curriculum encouraged—in fact, mandated—that teachers improvise (Emery et al. 2004).
Although the majority of Freedom Schools started their day off with singing, each school differed in terms of its daily schedule and classroom content. While some Freedom School students wanted to spend the bulk of their day learning deeply about Black historical figures and events such as the Haitian Revolution or Harriet Tubman, other Freedom School students were concerned with improving reading/writing skills or learning French. Many Freedom School classrooms even focused on the Civil Rights Struggle waging across the nation and internationally at the time. Freedom School teachers pushed students to discuss among themselves organizing tactics and strategies for, for example, Black voter registration (Sturkey 2004). In addition to the use of discussion, Freedom Schools in Mississippi utilized a diverse range of artistic and literary methods to give students the tools needed to both push back on dominant white supremacist societal narratives and take pride in their identity as Black people.
Using poetry, plays, academic essays, roleplaying, and short stories, the 1964 Freedom Schools worked to reconstitute and refigure a Southern Black identity outside of the racism that historically marginalized and defined the life of a Black person in Mississippi. The Freedom School curriculum challenged the reductive 1960s imaginations of the so-called Southern United States as simply a poverty-stricken area and recognized (through art, performance, literature, etc.) that the censuring of Black history in standard textbooks minimized the traumatic history of enslavement and the Black experience in Mississippi. Moreover, many Freedom Schools published newsletters that included the art and writing of Freedom School students as well as news from the Freedom Summer voting registration organizing work (Emery et al. 2004). These newsletters voiced political consciousness and activism to an audience that went beyond the Black students and SNCC volunteers involved in the Freedom Summer campaign.
Funding
Teachers were not paid, so they had to arrange their own room and board in the (typically) small, rural town they’d be teaching in. The budgets of the Freedom Schools were nearly non-existent, so Freedom School teachers were also expected to crowdfund supplies for the classrooms themselves. For example, before the start of the Freedom Summer Campaign, all volunteers were expected to ask companies to contribute books and equipment. Freedom School teachers relied heavily on the communities they lived and worked in for support. While a small budget was calculated for each town, the communities themselves generally provided a place for the classes—e.g., in a church basement—and donated equipment like tape recorders or projectors (Emery et al. 2014).
The Legacy of the 1964 Freedom Summer Schools
The Freedom School program started in 1964 summer was explicitly designed to develop the power of Black Mississippians: the schools pushed to deconstruct the U.S. public educational system that operated (and continues to operate) by maintaining elitist, eurocentric standards of intellect. Through its cultural and educational work, the Freedom Schools created spaces that supported and empowered Black people in a society that did not readily supply that knowledge. For many students, the Freedom Schools served as an entirely new opportunity to dream and envision a future beyond the constraints of exploitative sharecropping or racial terror.
The Freedom School educational model, of providing alternative education as a means of pushing back on dominant narratives and unapologetically claiming the human right to decent education, continued to influence activists beyond just the sociohistorical moment of Freedom Summer. After the summer ended, some Freedom School volunteer teachers decided to stay in Mississippi and continued to facilitate classes into the fall of 1964. Depending on the community, Freedom Schools served as community hubs for tutoring young Black people after school, held nighttime classes for Black adults and the voter registration effort, or continued classes for “children whose regular public school classes had been suspended for cotton-picking” (Emery et al. 2004).
As the Black Freedom Struggle continued, notions of ‘democratic education’ remained present in the ideological framework of the Black Power era institution-building (Carmichael 1966:53) and contemporary freedom projects such as the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School Program which “…serve[s] children and youth in grades K–12 in communities where quality academic enrichment programming is limited, too expensive, or non-existent” (Children’s Defense Fund New York) or the Gaza solidarity encampments on college campuses globally throughout the Spring of 2024 that offered public, political education programming. Although institutional racism and race-based school segregation remain a serious problem (Hale 2014), dozens of freedom schools in the United States today identify the 1964 SNCC Freedom Schools as an influence. Liberation struggles across the globe, from Turtle Island to Palestine, continue to push for change by employing similar educational strategies to inspire others to fight for collective liberation.
References
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Location:
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"article":
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"title" : "Education for Our Liberation: Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of the Summer 1964 SNCC Freedom School Program in Mississippi",
"author" : "maya finoh",
"category" : "essays",
"tags" : "history, justice",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/education-for-our-liberation-reflections-on-the-60th-anniversary-of-the-summer-1964-sncc-freedom-school-program-in-mississippi",
"date" : "2024-09-05 21:47:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/sncc-thumb.jpg",
"excerpt" : "“So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do,how we are willing to say ‘no’ to withdraw from that systemand begin within our community to start to functionand to build new institutions that will speak to our needs.”— Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Speech, 19661 Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” Voices of Democracy, University of California at Berkeley, Oct. 29, 1966, www.voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/carmichael-black-power-speech-text. ↩ ",
"content" : "“So that the question stands as to what we are willing to do,how we are willing to say ‘no’ to withdraw from that systemand begin within our community to start to functionand to build new institutions that will speak to our needs.”— Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” Speech, 19661Throughout the history of Black freedom struggles—both in the United States and globally—questions of self-determination have remained constant. Whether the battle was against Jim Crow segregation or the cultural remnants of colonialism, visions for new institutions that center the needs of marginalized communities have been extensive. These visions have radically imagined alternatives to socioeconomic disenfranchisement: pinpointing community-based, consciousness-raising education as a key tool for freedom.In December 1963, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary Charlie Cobb penned a proposal for a summer Freedom School program in Mississippi to the SNCC executive committee2, noting the need for some educational program that would supplement the lackluster and racist education Black high school students were receiving in the education system. Due to decades of racialized and gendered poverty, Black people in Mississippi had extreme barriers to educational opportunities. For instance, in the early 1960s, less than five percent of Black Mississippians were high school graduates (Strukey 2016)3. The SNCC executive committee approved the proposal, and a Freedom School was developed by members of SNCC (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:24)4. While racialized violence and discrimination continue into the twenty-first century, it would be remiss of us all not to acknowledge the extensive work done by organizations like SNCC to combat anti-Black racism in their communities.Context, Curriculum, and ElementsCentering the lived experiences of Black students in Mississippi, the Freedom School curriculum was created by a collective of educators and activists over the course of a two-day conference. In addition to providing the students with extensive academic and intellectual support, the Freedom School was first and foremost proposed to nurture students’ political consciousness and give them the tools to organize against racial injustice themselves (Chilcoat & Ligon 1995:25)4. The curriculum contained a multitude of interdisciplinary elements: an academic component focused on developing reading, writing, and math skills, a citizenship component to encourage students to think critically about their community and draw connections between their personal experiences and the greater climate of white supremacy in the United States, and a ‘Guide to Negro History’ that explored the socio-political activism of Black people around the globe (SNCC Digital Gateway 2016)5.By dedicating a large part of the curriculum to Black history, the SNCC Freedom Schools opened the path to a consciousness-raising model that stressed a connection with the greater African diaspora and affirmed notions of Black transnational identity for students. The schools themselves were attended by students voluntarily; Freedom School teachers knocked on doors in the community they taught in to explain the purpose of the school and invite students to attend. By relying on word of mouth, the Freedom School classes across Mississippi gained popularity among community members. By the end of the Summer of 1964, over fifty Freedom Schools had been created, reaching over 2,100 Mississippians both young and adult (Watson 2014)6.SNCC’s leadership and teaching model was largely influenced by mentor Ella Baker, an organizer in the Civil Rights Movement who developed the educational pedagogy of ‘democratic education’ which aims to teach students “…about the emancipatory nature of learning and schooling” (Watson 2014)6. Due to this, the Freedom School curriculum was deliberately developed to invest in the leadership potential of all students and create a learning environment in which teachers and students were both co-creators of knowledge. SNCC recognized that the educational institutions in Mississippi were failing Black students in a multitude of ways, so the curriculum needed to be flexible enough to accommodate various student needs: as they studied the curriculum, teachers were told to discard it and to create, on the spot if necessary, activities and questions that responded to the needs of the students in front of them. The curriculum’s central premise, the importance of questioning, challenged the concept of a written curriculum. The Freedom School curriculum encouraged—in fact, mandated—that teachers improvise (Emery et al. 2004)7.Although the majority of Freedom Schools started their day off with singing, each school differed in terms of its daily schedule and classroom content. While some Freedom School students wanted to spend the bulk of their day learning deeply about Black historical figures and events such as the Haitian Revolution or Harriet Tubman, other Freedom School students were concerned with improving reading/writing skills or learning French. Many Freedom School classrooms even focused on the Civil Rights Struggle waging across the nation and internationally at the time. Freedom School teachers pushed students to discuss among themselves organizing tactics and strategies for, for example, Black voter registration (Sturkey 2004)3. In addition to the use of discussion, Freedom Schools in Mississippi utilized a diverse range of artistic and literary methods to give students the tools needed to both push back on dominant white supremacist societal narratives and take pride in their identity as Black people.Using poetry, plays, academic essays, roleplaying, and short stories, the 1964 Freedom Schools worked to reconstitute and refigure a Southern Black identity outside of the racism that historically marginalized and defined the life of a Black person in Mississippi. The Freedom School curriculum challenged the reductive 1960s imaginations of the so-called Southern United States as simply a poverty-stricken area and recognized (through art, performance, literature, etc.) that the censuring of Black history in standard textbooks minimized the traumatic history of enslavement and the Black experience in Mississippi. Moreover, many Freedom Schools published newsletters that included the art and writing of Freedom School students as well as news from the Freedom Summer voting registration organizing work (Emery et al. 2004)7. These newsletters voiced political consciousness and activism to an audience that went beyond the Black students and SNCC volunteers involved in the Freedom Summer campaign.FundingTeachers were not paid, so they had to arrange their own room and board in the (typically) small, rural town they’d be teaching in. The budgets of the Freedom Schools were nearly non-existent, so Freedom School teachers were also expected to crowdfund supplies for the classrooms themselves. For example, before the start of the Freedom Summer Campaign, all volunteers were expected to ask companies to contribute books and equipment. Freedom School teachers relied heavily on the communities they lived and worked in for support. While a small budget was calculated for each town, the communities themselves generally provided a place for the classes—e.g., in a church basement—and donated equipment like tape recorders or projectors (Emery et al. 2014)7.The Legacy of the 1964 Freedom Summer SchoolsThe Freedom School program started in 1964 summer was explicitly designed to develop the power of Black Mississippians: the schools pushed to deconstruct the U.S. public educational system that operated (and continues to operate) by maintaining elitist, eurocentric standards of intellect. Through its cultural and educational work, the Freedom Schools created spaces that supported and empowered Black people in a society that did not readily supply that knowledge. For many students, the Freedom Schools served as an entirely new opportunity to dream and envision a future beyond the constraints of exploitative sharecropping or racial terror.The Freedom School educational model, of providing alternative education as a means of pushing back on dominant narratives and unapologetically claiming the human right to decent education, continued to influence activists beyond just the sociohistorical moment of Freedom Summer. After the summer ended, some Freedom School volunteer teachers decided to stay in Mississippi and continued to facilitate classes into the fall of 1964. Depending on the community, Freedom Schools served as community hubs for tutoring young Black people after school, held nighttime classes for Black adults and the voter registration effort, or continued classes for “children whose regular public school classes had been suspended for cotton-picking” (Emery et al. 2004)7.As the Black Freedom Struggle continued, notions of ‘democratic education’ remained present in the ideological framework of the Black Power era institution-building (Carmichael 1966:53)1 and contemporary freedom projects such as the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School Program which “…serve[s] children and youth in grades K–12 in communities where quality academic enrichment programming is limited, too expensive, or non-existent” (Children’s Defense Fund New York)8 or the Gaza solidarity encampments on college campuses globally throughout the Spring of 2024 that offered public, political education programming. Although institutional racism and race-based school segregation remain a serious problem (Hale 2014)9, dozens of freedom schools in the United States today identify the 1964 SNCC Freedom Schools as an influence. Liberation struggles across the globe, from Turtle Island to Palestine, continue to push for change by employing similar educational strategies to inspire others to fight for collective liberation.References Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” Voices of Democracy, University of California at Berkeley, Oct. 29, 1966, www.voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/carmichael-black-power-speech-text. ↩ ↩2 Charles Cobb, “Prospectus for a Summer Freedom School Program in Mississippi (Excerpt).” HERB: Resources for Teachers, www.herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1158. ↩ Sturkey, William. “The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.” Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Historical Society, May 2016, mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/403/The-1964-Mississippi-Freedom-Schools. ↩ ↩2 Chilcoat, George W., and Jerry A. Ligon. “‘We Will Teach What Democracy Really Means By Living Democratically Within Our Own Schools’ Lessons From the Personal Experience of Teachers Who Taught in the Mississippi Freedom Schools.” Education and Culture 12, no. 1 (1995): 24-42. ↩ ↩2 “Freedom Schools.” SNCC Digital Gateway, SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, Dec. 2016, www.snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/culture-education/freedom-schools. ↩ Watson, Marcia. “Beyond Slavery And The Civil Rights Movement: Freedom Schools And Transformative Education.” African American Intellectual History Society. Oct. 16, 2014, www.aaihs.org/beyond-slavery-and-the-civil-rights-movement-freedom-schools-and-transformative-education. ↩ ↩2 Emery, Kathy, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Reid Gold. “Introduction: Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools.” Education and Democracy, The San Francisco Freedom School, 2004, www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/A_02_Introduction.htm#_edn16. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 “New York Freedom Schools.” Children’s Defense Fund New York. Children’s Defense Fund, www.cdfny.org/programs/cdf-freedom-schools/new-york-freedom-schools. ↩ Hale, Jon N. “The Forgotten Story of the Freedom Schools.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, Jun. 26, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/the-depressing-legacy-of-freedom-schools/373490. ↩ "
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Culture Must Be the Moral Compass That Geopolitics and Economics Will Never Be",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "essays",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/culture-must-be-the-moral-compass-that-geopolitics-and-economics-will-never-be",
"date" : "2025-07-15 16:14:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_Opposing_Nazism_1.png",
"excerpt" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.",
"content" : "The widespread cultural rejection of Nazism in the West did not emerge spontaneously from humanity’s innate sense of right and wrong. It was not simply that people around the world, and especially in the West, were naturally alert and to the moral horror of fascism.Rather, the transformation of Nazism from a nationalist ideology admired by many Western elites into the universal symbol of evil was a story of narrative engineering and the deliberate construction of collective memory. It is a story that reveals a larger truth: culture has always been the moral compass that geopolitics and economics cannot, and will not, provide on their own.And at this moment, it is crucial to understand and use the power of culture to shift geopolitics, and not the other way around.Understanding this history matters today more than ever. Because if it was possible to turn Nazism into the ultimate taboo, it is equally possible to reposition other violent ideologies and state projects—such as Israel’s ongoing system of apartheid and settler colonialism—as morally indefensible. But to do so requires acknowledging that cultural reckonings don’t simply arrive; they are made.Pre-War Ambivalence: When Fascism Was FashionableContrary to the comforting myth that the world naturally recoiled from Nazism, in the 1920s and 1930s many influential Americans and Europeans viewed Hitler’s Germany with admiration. American industrialists like Henry Ford openly praised Hitler’s economic management and fierce opposition to communism. Ford even funded antisemitic propaganda through his publication, The Dearborn Independent. British aristocrats, including the Duke of Windsor, flirted with Nazi sympathies, seeing Germany as a model of discipline and order.It was only when Hitler’s ambitions clashed with the strategic interests of other nations that fascism became intolerable. And even then, many major US and UK companies maintained their business interests with the Nazis, including Ford, IBM, GM (Opel), Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil), Chase Bank, and of course Coca-Cola, who famously created the brand Fanta so that it could break the boycott and do business with Nazi Germany.This distinction is critical: condemnation of Nazism began not as a moral imperative, but as a political necessity. Germany’s aggression threatened the European balance of power, British imperial security, and eventually, American economic and military interests. The moral narrative would only come later, after the fighting was over.It is important to learn from the past and see that only culture can shift perception, and to use culture to shift the economic realities that would otherwise wait to be shaped by politics.Wartime Shifts: From Enemy State to Symbol of EvilWorld War II did not instantly transform public opinion. For many Americans, the war in Europe remained remote until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Even then, the decision to fight Nazi Germany was entangled with power politics: Hitler declared war on the United States first, effectively forcing Roosevelt’s hand.Nevertheless, the war provided fertile ground for a reframing of Nazism. Wartime propaganda efforts by the Allies recast the Nazi regime as a brutal, alien threat to civilization itself. Hollywood joined in: The Great Dictator (1940) ridiculed Hitler’s delusions of grandeur, while Casablanca (1942) romanticized resistance. Images of goose-stepping soldiers, swastika flags, and shattered cities circulated widely.As the Allies advanced, they encountered the first concrete evidence of the Holocaust: ghettos, mass graves, and emaciated survivors. Yet even then, much of this evidence remained unknown to the general public. It was only after liberation that the full horror became impossible to ignore.Post-War Revelation: The Holocaust and the Cultural BreakThe turning point came in 1945, with the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trials. The images and testimonies from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen revealed the industrial scale of genocide. Millions murdered with chilling efficiency. A systematic attempt to erase an entire people. For the first time, the abstract notion of “Nazi evil” was grounded in visceral, visual evidence.Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander describes this phenomenon as the cultural construction of trauma. Atrocities do not automatically generate collective memory; they must be narrated, documented, and ritualized until they become an inescapable moral reference point. The Nuremberg Trials played this role by broadcasting confessions and evidence to a global audience. Schools, museums, and the press reinforced the narrative: Nazism was not simply defeated; it was unmasked as pure, irredeemable evil.Cold War Myth-Making: The Free World Versus FascismThe Cold War further cemented this narrative. To build legitimacy against the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies positioned themselves as the moral victors of World War II, the saviors of Europe from fascism. In reality, many of the same powers—Britain, France, and the United States—continued their own brutal colonial projects and enforced systems of racial hierarchy at home.But the cultural story was powerful: the West stood for freedom; the Nazis had embodied totalitarian darkness. School textbooks, popular films, and Holocaust memorialization institutionalized this story, forging a shared moral identity that could be contrasted against communist “evil.”This process was neither accidental nor purely altruistic. It was a strategic use of culture to consolidate power, project moral authority, and deflect scrutiny of the West’s own violence. The lesson is clear: collective memory is not a neutral mirror of reality. It is built, contested, and leveraged.The Sociological Core: Why Public Opinion ShiftsTo understand how an ideology once admired by many became the universal emblem of inhumanity, we must look beyond military defeat. Several mechanisms combined:Symbolic Association: Nazism transformed from a nationalist experiment into a symbol of mechanized genocide and racial supremacy.Cultural Trauma: The Holocaust became a shared wound that redefined moral frameworks across the West.Visual Storytelling: Images and films, rather than mere text, anchored the horror in the public imagination.State Rebranding: The Allies used anti-Nazism to build a postwar myth of moral superiority, even as they pursued imperial ambitions elsewhere.These insights are not simply historical trivia. They are a roadmap for how cultural shifts happen—and how they can be deliberately engineered.Israel, Palestine, and the Next Cultural ReckoningToday, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—systematic dispossession, apartheid laws, and repeated military assaults—remains largely protected in Western discourse. Politicians insist on Israel’s right to defend itself. Media narratives default to framing the violence as a “conflict” rather than an occupation. Solidarity with Palestinians is often smeared as antisemitism.Yet history shows that moral consensus is not fixed. With enough sustained exposure, narrative work, and cultural pressure, the global imagination can be reshaped. Just as Nazism’s legitimacy eroded, so too can the idea of Israel as an unassailable “victim-state.”This is not a call to equate the Holocaust with the Nakba—each is historically distinct. It is, however, an argument that the techniques which made Nazism morally intolerable—trauma visualization, reframing language, relentless storytelling—are tools available to any liberation movement.Here is how such a transformation could unfold:1. Narrative InversionIsrael’s founding story must be contextualized: a state born from the trauma of European antisemitism that, in turn, created the dispossession of another people. Exposing this contradiction—survivors becoming occupiers—breaks the simplistic binary of oppressor and victim.2. Visual Culture and TestimonyJust as photographs of emaciated bodies in camps forced an awakening, so too can images of bombed Gazan neighborhoods, amputee children, and anguished families. Digital archives and survivor testimonies can anchor these experiences in collective memory.3. Linguistic ReframingTerms like “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” and “ethnic cleansing” shift perception from tragic conflict to structural violence. Legal frameworks—UN reports, ICC filings—can fortify these terms with institutional legitimacy.4. Media SaturationBypassing corporate media gatekeepers requires a multi-platform strategy: TikTok clips, Substack essays, livestreamed trials of Israeli policy, viral documentaries. Saturation is what makes denial unsustainable.5. Global RealignmentPositioning Palestine within global struggles—Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-colonial movements—expands solidarity. When the Global South embraces Palestinian liberation as part of its own decolonization, moral isolation will deepen.6. Cultural Institutions and EducationJust as Holocaust education became standard in Western curricula, Nakba education can be mainstreamed. Museums, memorials, and fellowships can institutionalize remembrance and scholarship.7. Policy Pressure and Legal ActionPublic consensus is the soil in which policy change grows. Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, coupled with legal prosecutions of war crimes, transform moral clarity into material consequences.8. Making Occupation a LiabilityWhen supporting Israel becomes politically and financially risky—akin to defending apartheid South Africa—corporate and governmental alliances will fracture. Reputational risk can be a powerful motivator.Conclusion: Cultural Reckonings Are EngineeredIt was not “natural” for the West to reject Nazism. It took defeat, trauma exposure, and decades of cultural labor to enshrine anti-Nazism as a foundational moral principle. Similarly, it is not inevitable that the world will recognize Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as an urgent moral crisis. It will require strategic, sustained, and courageous cultural work.Culture—more than geopolitics or economics—sets the terms of what is morally acceptable. It is the compass that can point humanity toward justice. But only if we are willing to pick it up and use it."
}
,
{
"title" : "Neptune Frost",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman",
"category" : "screenings",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/eip-screening-neptune-frost",
"date" : "2025-07-12 16:00:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/netune-frost-movie-poster.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Thank you for all who joined the special screening of Neptune Frost, with exclusive introduction from writer/director Saul Williams. Stay tuned and become a member for our next edition of our EIP monthly screening series.",
"content" : "Thank you for all who joined the special screening of Neptune Frost, with exclusive introduction from writer/director Saul Williams. Stay tuned and become a member for our next edition of our EIP monthly screening series.Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region’s natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends."
}
,
{
"title" : "Uranus & The Cycle of Liberation",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "",
"tags" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/uranus-and-the-cycle-of-liberation",
"date" : "2025-07-11 16:25:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Uranus.jpg",
"excerpt" : "I’m definitely not an astrologer. I don’t even know where Uranus is in my chart. But I do know how to read systems and translate them to the public. What I’ve learned, through years of designing for social and environmental justice, is that history doesn’t just unfold. It cycles upwards. And if we learn to pay attention to those cycles, we can prepare—not just to resist collapse, but to shape what comes after.",
"content" : "I’m definitely not an astrologer. I don’t even know where Uranus is in my chart. But I do know how to read systems and translate them to the public. What I’ve learned, through years of designing for social and environmental justice, is that history doesn’t just unfold. It cycles upwards. And if we learn to pay attention to those cycles, we can prepare—not just to resist collapse, but to shape what comes after.Even if you don’t care about astrology, the timing of these celestial movements provides us a way to examine macro trends that we can learn from. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it does echo.Uranus—the planet astrologers associated with upheaval, rebellion, and technological transformation—entered Aries in May 2010 and stayed there until 2018. That cycle coincided with a surge in political uprisings, many of which redefined our understanding of mass resistance in the 21st century.The Arab Spring began in late 2010, starting in Tunisia and erupting across the Middle East. It wasn’t just about corrupt regimes—it was about reclaiming voice, land, and dignity after decades of foreign interference, neoliberal decay, and post-colonial repression. From Tahrir Square to Pearl Roundabout, these movements were leaderless, fast, and media-savvy.Occupy Wall Street followed in 2011, challenging the violent inequality embedded in late capitalism. In 2013, Black Lives Matter emerged after the murder of Trayvon Martin, later exploding into a global uprising in 2014 and again in 2020. Standing Rock (2016) reminded the world that Indigenous resistance was not only alive but visionary. #MeToo (2017) became an international reckoning with patriarchy and sexual violence, a reminder that personal testimony is political terrain.Across these years, protests were decentralized, digitized, and visual. Social media moved from a personal tool to a frontline of collective witnessing. Livestreams replaced press conferences. Memes became political language. Design itself became a protest, and Slow Factory built the visual language for it.This was not coincidental but archetypal, because Uranus in Aries, even symbolically, tells the story of radical ignition, collective fire, visionary unrest.And yet, none of it was sustained. What followed was a backlash: fascist resurgence, climate denial, propaganda wars, and intensified state surveillance. We saw mass demobilization, media fatigue, and widespread disinformation. Many of the movements that sparked global hope were either crushed, co-opted, or burned out.So now, as Uranus moves through Taurus (2018–2026), the terrain has shifted. Taurus is about materiality, land, value, and stability. It demands we not only rise up, which is crucial, but to build. We are asked to not only critique systems, but replace them. Not just “burn it all down”, but radically imagine what’s next.This is the political and spiritual context I hold as I continue my work.At Slow Factory, we spent the past decade offering free education, cultural strategy, and ecological design rooted in climate justice and human rights. And with Everything is Political, we’re building an independent media platform not beholden to corporate donors or foundation filters—a place where movement memory, critical analysis, and cultural clarity live. If we don’t design the next phase of liberation, someone else will design it for us.This work isn’t about virality. It’s about continuity. We are here to hold political memory. To protect the intellectual commons. To ensure that the next generation doesn’t forget who stood for truth—and who profited from silence.The ask is to build the very systems we are all looking for, and for that we deserve the time, energy and support to imagine, design and co-create as a community. We can’t delegate our liberation to politicians, and we certainly won’t see startups capitalizing on the changes our society needs. Perhaps we will witness the hyper privatization of every single service our communities need, but we must strategize for during and after collapse. Funding structures will have to be challenged, as they are designed to sustain themselves and uphold status quo. However, we are witnessing the collapse of every industry: media, education, banking, all industries we rely on, will be challenged. We are going to need to rely on our creative skills and our ability to build true solidarity across our communities towards a common goal outside of dogma and division. It’s a cultural moment, and we are here for it.Resistance isn’t just about protest. It’s about imagination. And imagination requires discipline, community, and space.We are creating that space right here. And together we can co-create together if everybody puts in effort and care. For now, we are imagining what systems of mitigation amidst systems collapse will look like. Will we outsource our infrastructure to highly funded Silicon Valley funded platforms feeding off of public data feeding ads markets and Ai learning in real time from our work? Or are we truly invested in building sovereign media? I personally invest in the latter, and hope you all join us. Because we are the majority, and truly if we align we are unstoppable."
}
]
}
