Sonya Massey, Genocide and Soul Death

We weren’t done grieving the loss of yet another child in our community, Ryan Gainer, to the hands of the overfunded and militarized police force. Never have we forgotten a single name, from Trayvon Martin to Eric Garner to Philando Castile to Sandra Bland, but now we expand our hearts to hold Sonya Massey. Sonya Massey, like every written sibling, was murdered by the Illinois police that she called in search of safety. A Black disabled woman murdered during Disability Pride Month by the same forces who train to brutalize our siblings across seas is not lost on us. We feel rage, and while the time will come for us to transmute this to power and justice–we know the difference and can honor our true and unabashed heartache. 

Living in the belly of imperialism leaves us in a state of eternal grief, consistently longing for our loved ones and making ancestors of our freshest breaths. All foot soldiers of oppression both here and overseas are actively eradicating any hope of Reproductive Justice through genocide. Amidst pieces of light, and symbols of Justice emerging over the headlines, we are struggling like many to resist soul death and retain a hope as militant as the opposition.  Repro advocates and movement partners alike know so intimately that our struggles are inextricably linked. We know Reproductive Justice is at the heart of every movement, the birth of everything we go on to fight for. 

We know that governmental overreach begins at the womb (despite aiming lately at the bedroom) and in its own right bears new terrors for us to awake to. This is why we continue to watch footage of women murdered at home, in their robes, asleep. This is why we are seeing our children slaughtered and forcibly removed from our homes by systems here in America. This is why we are seeing mothers, and folks who bleed going without period products. We know that governmental overreach stops at nothing. This is why we see Black and Brown populations of DC still fighting for statehood while waiting for the US to leave and return Landback to Hawaii, to those indigenous to all of Turtle Island and Puerto Rico. With countries looking to the West and drawing their alliances in blood, this is why we are seeing the IDF storming folks in the places of desperate necessity, where the bread arrives, where the doctors mend. This is why our siblings of Sudan are in the largest displacement and famine of our time while the military industrial complex flourishes. This is why we are seeing the Congo be bled for cobalt. At every turn, America undermines liberty wherever it tries to exist.

We seek reproductive freedom for all, regardless of administration or location, we seek clean drinking water and nourishing meals at iftar, we seek safe travels from point a to b, we seek landback, we seek accountability from the US around its role in inhibiting access not just for its own people but our own people abroad without exhaustion. We name the blockades to measurable outcomes and to reproductive justice in an echo chamber with many of our advocates without struggle and until our voices are horse, until we are all free. We do this from our dimmed but never dampened hope. We do this from our spiteful joy. We do this in our dreams during peak resistance in rest. 

This living statement serves as both a place to honor what we are forced to continue losing, and to remind our partners that genocide of every kind will remove our goal post entirely from reach.