Louisiana State Penitentiary, aka Angola, sits on land that was once a slave plantation named Angola, after the African homeland of the majority of the enslaved people forced to work on it. After the Civil War, the state replaced slavery with "convict leasing." Turning the plantation into a state prison in 1901 and forcing mostly Black men to labor in the same fields, under the same brutal conditions. It earned the nickname "the bloodiest prison in the South" and remains the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S., holding over 6,000, mostly black, men today. This image isn't ancient history. It's a direct visual line from slavery to convict leasing to mass incarceration. To be black in America means you have to ask yourself how growing up in a country like this has shaped you, because if you haven't unpacked that yet I promise you it's still shaping you. Integration was a mistake. I can totally understand how Jewish people could become Nazis because I see black people everyday believing they're Americans. I'm a colonized person, descended from ancestors who were stolen away to this place, and I'm still stolen. I'm still being abused. My people are still being locked away and forced to labor. if we don't accept being wage slaves they make us prison slaves. If we won't follow the rules in the open air prison that is America they'll make it even worse for us behind one of their locked walls. I don't aspire to whiteness. I love myself. I love everything about me that white supremacy says I should hate or be ashamed of. It's daily work, because my treatment in the world reflects that others believe these things about me. Part of what's so triggering for others is in their mind I shouldn't have any love for myself and belief in myself, primarily because they think they're somehow better than me and yet they don't possess these beliefs. "How can SHE be happy and I'm not happy?" I'm happy because I know myself. Because white supremacy, capitalism, and Patriarchy aren't shaping me anymore. Black people in this country have to accept that white workers do not care about us, and asking them to care is weak af. We're not begging anymore for our lives to matter. If they matter we must establish that as fact by defending ourselves like our lives matter. It's not ok to let our community be locked away in these concentration camps. It was never ok.