Coffee + Sativa: Narrating the Impossible
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I must make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
— James Baldwin
“Your silence will not protect you.”
— Audre Lorde
“A massive uprooting takes place—
you rupture the web of your genealogy,
your history, your people, your self.
La facultad is that capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa
This week has been heavy. We have walked through grief after a suicide, endured the ever-present surveillance of state and local authorities, and now witnessed the harassment of a Black graduate student—targeted by Alfred’s campus security and the Alfred Police Department. Told they were “unreasonable” and “lazy,” as though dignity could be erased by the violence of white-serving institutions.
I cannot and will not be silent. Silence is complicity, and complicity is how white supremacy keeps breathing.
What troubles most people is not the harm itself—for harm has long been happening here in the shadows—but that I am speaking it out loud. Secrets, after all, are symptoms of an unwell system. To expose them is to rupture the decorum that white supremacy depends on: a veneer of peace masking the rot of injustice.
And so I write. I tell the truth that has long been whispered, the truth that disrupts the polite quietude of empire.
Because the only way to narrate the impossible is to risk telling what power insists must remain hidden.
Counter-Hegemonic Living
At the Hull House, our resistance looks like this: we cook. We make a table for people. We hold space for stories. We practice the slow, counter-hegemonic work of weaving coalitions that outfox empire not through spectacle, but through sustainable, relational care—one meal at a time.
This is how we learn to untether ourselves from white-serving institutions: through the soft but unyielding practice of breaking bread, listening, refusing to let our stories be erased.
We do not need the approval of empire. We need each other.
A Courageous Refusal
Now is the time to resist in every way possible. To be unreasonable in the face of unreasonable violence. To be lazy in refusing to carry the burden of white supremacy’s illusions. To insist that the least of these are the first among us, the honored among us, the ones who show us the way.
The question before us is not whether empire will rage—it always does.
The question is: Will we have the courage to join the underside of history?
Closing Flare
And so we gather,
with pots simmering on the stove,
with stories cracked open like fresh bread,
with courage that smells like cumin and smoke,
with laughter that refuses to be surveilled.
We gather,
and in gathering,
we narrate the impossible—
not as dreamers,
but as builders of another possible world.
Ritual Exhale
Breathe in the courage it takes to tell the truth.
Breathe out the fear that silence demands.
Breathe in the underside of history.
Breathe out into the becoming we are making—
one meal, one story, one impossible possibility at a time.
Reflection Question
Where are the places in your own life where silence has been mistaken for peace, and what story of courage are you being called to speak into the world?