"If One of Us Is Chained, None of Us Are Free"

I’ve been struggling with what to say here.

Not because I’m at a loss for words.

Not because I’m unsure what I think.

Not because I’m hesitant to speak.

But because I know how loud this moment is—and how volume often replaces substance. I know how easily conversations turn into shouting matches, and how quickly empathy gets drowned out by anger and cruelty. Anyone who truly knows me knows that racism, bigotry, and dehumanization are not abstract issues to me—they are triggers. They are personal, and I do not engage with them lightly.

Some of us have been warning about these days for quite some time. We were openly mocked then. We are still mocked now. Yet many of the things we feared are no longer abstract. They are unfolding in real time, shaping policies, shaping discourse, shaping how safe—or unsafe—people are in their own communities.

On the night of the 2016 election, my tears were never about a candidate losing. They were about what I knew was coming. The tone it would set. The permission it would give. The fractures it would widen. It felt like watching a storm form on the horizon while others insisted the sky was clear.

But this is not about one administration or one election cycle. It is about how we got here. Decades of policies, cultural narratives, and choices—large and small—that built the conditions we are now living inside. We cannot talk honestly about the present without reckoning with the past. And if we are going to be honest about history, we cannot ignore the fact that it was founded on land taken from Indigenous peoples we deemed “less than.”

That dehumanization is not a footnote. It is part of the foundation. When a nation begins by deciding who counts as fully human and who does not, that logic does not simply fade with time. It echoes. It resurfaces. It evolves. But it remains recognizable. And it eventually expands.

The stories we inherit—and the ones we avoid—matter.

A nation does not become divided overnight. It becomes divided by habit, by omission, by the stories it tells about itself and the ones it refuses to hear. We are not facing something entirely new. We are facing patterns we have seen before—patterns rooted in who we have been willing to exclude, dismiss, or sacrifice in the name of comfort, power, or progress.

There’s a song by Solomon Burke that has stayed with me for years: “If one of us is chained, none of us are free.”

Freedom is not a personal possession. It is collective. The moment we decide that someone else’s rights are expendable, we relinquish our own—whether we recognize it immediately or not.

Soon, there will be no community untouched by what is happening. The question is not whether we will all be impacted, but how we will respond when our neighbors (when we) are. Our response will reveal what we truly value—comfort or courage, convenience or compassion, silence or integrity.

To those who see things differently from me: Disagreement does not excuse cruelty, and “just politics” does not erase the impact on real lives. I am not interested in debates that dismiss entire communities as exaggerations, inconveniences, or collateral damage. Conversation requires mutual recognition of humanity. Without that, it isn’t dialogue—it’s rationalization.

My life has always been rooted in care. My creative work and my values aren’t separate things. I cannot remain silent while laws, policies, and public rhetoric determine whether people are safe, fed, housed, heard, and free to exist as they are. Being human—and free—requires protecting all lives, treating none as expendable.

What will it take for us to move forward differently?

The courage to confront what we’ve normalized.

The willingness to name injustice even when it costs us comfort.

And the understanding that neutrality has never been neutral.

I will not stay silent—because I want a future where no one is erased, threatened, or dismissed. Silence has never protected the vulnerable. It has only protected the comfort of the privileged.

History will remember what we allowed.

Let it also remember what we refused.