Dear Becoming Ones: We have arrived at Friday, once again, and I’m writing about necropolitics and care. I hope you enjoy!
Friday Care Package
Exposing Necropolitics, Practicing Care in Collapse
“The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.” — James Baldwin
We are living in a time of overlapping emergencies—what some have named the polycrisis. Climate unraveling, war profiteering, surveillance capitalism, state violence against the poor and the marginalized, and the tightening noose of authoritarianism. To live right now is to breathe collapse.
But collapse isn’t just happening out there. It seeps into our bodies. We carry it in our anxious breath, in the tremors of our nervous systems, in the loneliness that empire manufactures and sells back to us in advertisements for safety, security, and belonging. We are told to obey, to keep quiet, to keep producing, while necropolitics—the politics of deciding who gets to live and who must die—maps its way across our streets, our schools, our borders, our hospitals.
James Baldwin said that to be relatively conscious in America is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time. Ta-Nehisi Coates reminded us that the Black body is plundered as a matter of tradition, that systemic violence is not a glitch but the program itself. The moral clarity they invite us into is not about despair, but about refusing to lie to ourselves. Refusing to look away. Refusing to call normal what is killing us.
So what do we do with this accelerating collapse? We put care where empire puts death. We put care into the cracks. Into the streets where unhoused neighbors are displaced again and again. Into the hospital rooms where bodies deemed disposable fight for breath. Into the borderlands where human beings are caged for seeking life.
Care is not sentimental—it is insurgent. It is an act of refusal. It is how we sabotage necropolitics with tenderness.
I don’t know what tomorrow holds. None of us do. But I know this: collapse is not the end of the story unless we consent to it. Another possible world is already breaking through in the small, faithful acts of care we choose. The question is:
Where will you put care today? Who will you extend tenderness toward in the midst of empire’s machinery of death?
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in rage.
Breathe out tenderness.
Breathe in collapse.
Breathe out care.
Closing Poem
We stand in the ruins,
and still we sing.
They script our deaths,
and still we breathe.
Empire wagers on our silence,
but we are the thunder,
we are the stubborn heartbeat,
we are the care that refuses
to be buried.
Well said!