Right now, for me, it’s this question:

From what source do we derive our power?

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As a Black and Jewish (European) mixie, two genocides mark my recent ancestry. One of them is relatively uncontested. Holocaust deniers exist, sure, but it would be difficult for most Americans to look at my Opa’s identification papers from the 1930’s, see Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald written in old-timey script, and still insist that my relatives were not systematically starved, gassed, hanged, and burned in ovens, with the stated intention of ridding the world of Jews.

The approach to the question of Black genocide in the United States, though, is different. Systematic anti-Black state violence is more commonly labeled an atrocity, a violation of human or civil rights, or a category of racist oppression.

The United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

“In whole or in part.” This has been the subject of debate and disagreement, even among those who consider themselves experts.

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I’ve been repotting plants lately. I know. No small feat for me. The first time I tried to adopt a seedling — a small, cheery nib of basil for my kitchen — I gently piled it and some good soil into a Mason jar, placed the quasi-terrarium on a windowsill, and tiptoed giddily away to give them privacy. When my best friend came over, saw it, and cackled, I half defended the effort, but yes: within a week or two, the match had failed, and the basil had died.

This all went down in the more recent past than I care to admit; but at least my knowledge and technique have improved since then. Still, the process of planting feels foreign to me, and a little… I don’t know… artificial. Essentially another version of retail therapy. Buy the plants, get the soil, scrounge some containers, and put it all together. Homemaking, yes, the making of a home — a chronically undervalued form of labor. Always fraught and menaced by the hallucinatory expectations of the white capitalist nuclear family, or what Coates calls “The Dream.” Like food these days, homemaking is something we need, and also something marketed to us in combinations that make us go ‘Yum’ and later feel sick, or hollow.

I’m not completely sure, but it seems like we — I, my housemates, and my larger political community, amorphous as it is — are trying to do something different with homemaking. And within the sphere of homemaking we have a range of different relationships to plant life. (As well as to home, land, homeland, and many other sub-tunnels.)

Part of what’s on my mind is: How do we continue in this era of climate change?

How do we continue, knowing that the sixth mass extinction is devastating us, and so are evictions, police killings, transphobia, and imperialism?

How do we reckon with the ‘new’ peril of climate disaster (not so new to those who whose waters have long been dammed and poisoned) that not only condemns the present (our greed, waste, violence, alienation), but also dooms the future?

What does it mean to be squeezed from both sides in this way?

Black feminist sci-fi writer Octavia Butler seemed to think it means: time to learn how to grow food and use a gun. Or: hope that pseudobenevolent alien colonizers swoop in to ambiguously save humankind from itself. Either way, shit is getting very real, very fast.

From what I understand, people in the U.S. used to similarly fear and dread nuclear escalation. Practiced hiding their small skulls under classroom chairs, at intervals. Knowing that this was a joke, mostly. Chairs can’t defend you from radioactive particles. Desks can’t protect your flesh, or your plants, soil, air, water, rain.

Now some middle-class people bike to work. Eat Paleo, Whole 30, local, whatever’s in style. Protecting not just our heads, but our lungs, our guts, our digestive bacteria.

Maybe it’s helping. I’m finding it hard to understand, these days, what helping means.

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