Empires do not fall quietly. They fracture. They grow erratic. They lash out. As legitimacy erodes, violence increases, not because the people are suddenly more dangerous, but because power is losing its grip. America in 2025–2026 is not experiencing random instability; it is living through the predictable convulsions of an empire in decline.
Read MoreTina Strawn lives in Costa Rica. She’s an early riser, which makes our long-distance meetings easier to schedule. My afternoon is dark and humid; her morning is bright with sun. Her house is about an hour from the coast, and I can almost see the warmth through the computer screen. It reminds me that the humid heat of the tropics feels like a mother’s embrace
Read MoreLast month, early on a Saturday morning, I volunteered at a food distribution in Brooklyn.
My body protested that I stayed in bed, but my mind was triumphant, and I made my way out the door. By the time I arrived at Fulton Plaza around 10 a.m., the air was frigid. The 14 degrees were sharp enough to make me question why I am still living in New York. I expected to be among the first to arrive. Instead, I was surprised to find several volunteers already there.
Read MoreI have had the pleasure of running a lifestyle brand that creates and sells clothing and other merchandise rooted in thoughtfulness, social consciousness, and the lived pains and experiences of marginalized people. And it might be because of this that I encounter myself in a paradox.
I’m writing today from a place I never seek out, but one that finds me anyway, just often enough to sting every time. That place is seller’s remorse. Like the first bite into a fresh grapefruit, the tangy sweetness is followed by the unavoidable bitterness.
Read MoreTrump has been clear about setting his eyes on Greenland. With the melting of its ice caps and its strategic positioning, Greenland has become an increasingly attractive objective for the US president.
In AHUS’ January 12 publication, Zinthia Álvarez Palomino spoke about the toppling of the Venezuelan government and argued, “it enables a more rigorous analysis of how sovereignty, justice, and legitimacy are unevenly distributed across global power relations rooted in the historical subordination of Abya Yala, especially to the United States.”
Read MoreRecognizing that United States intervention in Venezuela responds to a colonial logic does not deny in any way the profound harm, the pain, suffering, killings, or violence inflicted by the Maduro regime, nor does it invalidate the other feelings that emerged after the “apparent removal” of that regime or imply defending its continuation in power. Rather, it enables a more rigorous analysis of how sovereignty, justice, and legitimacy are unevenly distributed across global power relations rooted in the historical subordination of Abya Yala, especially to the United States.
Discrediting those of us who raise these concerns by labeling us naïve, “red,” or dreamers, while simultaneously claiming that only U.S. military intervention could have brought about the fall of the Maduro regime, reproduces what thinkers like Aníbal Quijano and Frantz Fanon described as the coloniality of being. This reasoning once again frames us as subordinated bodies, incapable of self-determination and in need of outside intervention, discipline, and correction.
Read MoreReconocer que la intervención de Estados Unidos en Venezuela responde a una lógica colonial no implica, en absoluto, negar el dolor, el sufrimiento, los asesinatos ni las violencias producidas por el régimen de Maduro, y en ningún caso invalida el sentimiento devenido tras la “aparente eliminación” del régimen.
Tampoco supone defender su continuidad en el poder. Hacer esa lectura limita y bloquea el análisis y lo reduce a una posición que, lejos de justificar un régimen autoritario, intenta complejizar una realidad atravesada por relaciones históricas profundamente desiguales entre Abya Yala y Estados Unidos.
Read MoreAmerica is a nation in denial about its wounds. The traumas that shaped this country—slavery, genocide, segregation, displacement, mass incarceration—have never healed because they have never been acknowledged. Instead, we are told to “move on,” to “look forward,” to “let it go.” But you cannot heal a wound you refuse to name. And the longer it festers beneath the surface, the more it poisons everything it touches.
Read More
