BY ASHIA AJANI

Amidst all my paolo santo and lavender water, the wounded child in me keeps calling for forgiveness. We are all on our own journeys towards healing- mine is not complete and I do not know if it will be complete in my lifetime. But here are some books by authors of color that have changed the way I think about myself, the world, and all our heavenly interconnectedness. Happy reading.
 
This Bridge Called My Back – multiple authors, compiled/edited by Cherríe Moraga y Gloria Anzaldúa
 
Solidarity is hard. And creating linkages between people of color in a capitalistic, racist, heteronormative society proves difficult at each turn. In the forward to this incredible collection, Moraga and Anzaldúa lay out their goals for this book: 1) to radicalize people of color into action as they themselves have been radicalized into producing this book, 2) to become required texts in all women’s studies courses, 3) to raise the consciousness of white women surrounding issues of misogynoir and racism, and 4) to create ties between “our colored sisters” by using this book as an educator and agitator.
 
I read this book on the train ride back from the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam, where Black women truly bodied the competition. I attended workshops on healing, on queerness, on solidarity and needed to keep that energy going. Compilations of essays, stories, poems by Native women, Black women, Asian women, Latinas, queer and straight, worked their way into my bloodstream. What a beautiful feeling! No narrative dominants another: they are all given their proper space to thrive. During moments of despair in my life, when horizontal aggression I have faced from my fellow Black and brown folk rules my psyche, and I am unable to envision a world when we all are committed to a process of healing and collective understanding, I think back to this collection, and I am renewed. As expressed by Moraga and Anzaldúa, “the revolution begins at home.”
 
“ ‘Alienation’ and ‘assimilation’ are two common words used to describe contemporary Indian people. I've come to despise those two words because what leads to ‘alienation’ and ‘assimilation’ should not be so concisely defined. And I generally mistrust words that are used to define Native Americans and Brown People. I don't like being put under a magnifying glass and having cute liberal terms describe who I am. The ‘alienation’ or ‘assimilation’ that I manifest is often in how I speak. There isn't necessarily a third world language but there is an Indian way of talking that is an essential part of me. I like it, I love it, yet I deny it. I ‘save’ it for when I'm around other Indians. It is a way of talking that involves "Indian humor" which I know for sure non-Indian people would not necessarily understand.” - Excerpt from “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like An Indian From the Reservation” by Barbara Cameron
 
Don’t you just love free resources? Enjoy!
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e2/Moraga_Cherrie_Anzaldual_Gloria_eds_This_Bridge_Called_My_Back_Writings_by_Radical_Women_of_Color-Kitchen_Table_Women_of_Color_Press.pdf
 
All About Love: New Visions – bell hooks
 
Read this book after heartbreak. After you have lost love and do not know if you can love again. Read this book when you are thinking about the state of our world. When the heart is a lone cry wailing into the night. It will change you. It will change your perception of love. It will encourage you (especially if you are a woman/femme person) to demand more of the love you receive. And hopefully, it will expand the love you feel in your day to day life.
 
I can’t just do one quote from this book - there’s too much yummy stuff so here’s a couple of my favorite excerpts:
 
“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.” - All About Love
 
“Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.” - All About Love
 
“When I speak of the spiritual, I refer to the recognition within everyone that there is a place of mystery in our lives where forces that are beyond human desire or will alter circumstances and/or guide and direct us. I call these forces divine spirit. When we choose to lead a spirit-filled life, we recognize and celebrate the presence of transcendent spirits.”
 
God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
 
I love, love, love me some Arundhati Roy! Hands down one of my favorite authors. So, I have to give honorable mention to a couple other crucial Roy pieces: Ministry of Utmost Happiness (which is one of the first fiction books about trans identity I read that was not exploitative or uselessly tragic, and I must say that this was a close, close second to God of Small Things), The End of Imagination, and Power Politics. This novel, wrought with generational pain, resistance and palpable imagery, was one of the first love stories I read that wrenched my heart to pieces. While some may critique the pervasive use of the caste system in her novels, and with good reason, she is an incredibly lyrical writer with such a command for language. The translation of love through mysticism, class, color and generation to such an emotional degree is a skill that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. Definitely take the time to familiarize yourself with Arundhati Roy’s writing. If you are someone who doesn’t really like, or has a hard time making it through non-fiction writing, Roy’s lyricism and command of language may convert you.
 
“But what was there to say?
 
Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.
 
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.” – God of Small Things
 
Seam – Tarfiah Faizullah
 
Talk about an emotional series of poems. Faizullah, the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, explores the devasation of the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, specifically focusing on the narratives of just a few of the two hundred thousand women that were raped during this traumatic period in time. It is a heavy, heavy piece of writing. But more than that, Faizullah seeks to return agency to survivors- tragedy cannot be reduced to numbers, and narratives cannot be forgotten. On the painful journey, Faizullah creates space for this stories to not only be preserved, but venerated. Through sharp imagery and longer philosophical anaylsis, Faizullah weaves her own tales of trauma to those of survivors, formulating a chain of collective healing we desperately need.
 
 I read this book during a time in my life when I was recovering from sexual trauma. The universe sometimes just knows what you need, no?
 
“I admit that when the falling hour/ Begins to husk the sky free of its/ saffroning light, I reach for anyone/ willing to wrap his good arm tight/ around me for as long as the ribboned/ darkness allows. Who wants, after all,/ to be seen too clearly?” - Excerpt From Dhaka Nocture

A House of My Own – Sandra Cisneros
 
WOW. Another author who changed. My. Life. The first piece of writing I read by Sandra Cisneros was a short story called , unpacking Latina identity and notions of shame surrounding menstrual cycles, eventually coming to terms with and embracing the things that make us (cis) women. I delved into her poetry with a fervor, letting her rhythm influence my own writing, making my way through My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Loose Woman and Woman Hollering Creek until I finally came to A House of My Own. In this compilation of essays, Cisneros bears pieces of herself not revealed in her poetry and short stories. She takes the reader on a journey through la vida de Sandra; not only does she make peace with her youth, but she venerates her attained wisdom. Through stories like “Que Viven Los Colores!” y . What does it mean to be a woman, alone and independent? How does one come to know themselves through family, through ancestry and indigeneity, through rebellion and heartache and purposeful isolation? How do we formulate connections to land we are not familiar with, but are nervertheless part of our bloodline and ours to reclaim?
 
(Side note: I met her and my soul lit on fire What a beautiful, hilarious, wise human being:  “books are medicine. And the medicine you need may be different than the medicine I need. But always take your medicine.”)
 
“I do want to inherit the witch in my women ancestors- the willfulness, the passion, ay, the passion where all good art comes from as women, the perseverance, the survivor skills, the courage, the strength of las mujeres bravas, peleoneras, necias, berrinchudas. I want to be una brava, peleonera, necia, berrinchuda. I want to be bad if bad means I must go against society- el Papá, the boyfriend, lover, husband, girlfriends, comadres- and listen to my own heart, that incredible witch’s broom that will take me where I need to go.” - excerpt from essay “I Can Live Sola and I Love to Work”
 
The Kitchen God’s Wife – Amy Tan
 
Mo’fkn unnnnnn talk about a problematic fave. Forget what you heard for an afternoon and take the time to read this book all the way through in one sitting. I wonder if a lot of my love for this novel stems from the fact I read it out loud to my mother on a road trip to college (we drove all the way from Colorado to Connecticut with a couple of brief detours in Michigan and Mississippi). I did read it once before, but returning to a book you loved after a long break is a bit like coming home. Like most of her books, the mother daughter relationship is the most prevalent aspect of The Kitchen God’s Wife, but like Roy, Tan is able to weave in mythology, generational trauma, international relationships (specifically between Japan and China in a World War Two context) and class/colonial struggles into one piece of writing. Talk about talent. This book shows just how much our mothers have hidden, and how sometimes we cannot recognize their strength until it is too late.
 
“That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.” - The Kitchen God’s Wife
 
Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo and Me - Ana Castillo
 
The first book I read by Ana Castillo was So Far From God, a collection of interwoven short stories about people living on the borderlands of Arizona and Mexico. It is certaintly evident that she is true to her heritage; even beyond that, she breaks down not only the trauma of being a Brown woman in American, but the trauma of raising Brown children in America. We travel throughout her life, her heartbreak, her upbringing, the lines between Mexico and Chicago, and (thank God) her queerness. If you are in need of some good nonfiction storytelling, Castillo is definitely one to look towards.
 
“thought of the countless people in the world who were born to live and die in anonymity, playing out lives no better or worse than anyone else’s and no one noticing. Sometimes we give others who don’t make a big mark in some way a moment in the limelight in fiction. Our novelists’ eyes and ears say to our readers, “Look here, please. Listen. This existence mattered, too.” That” - Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo and Me
 
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
 
Another author with a lot of identity to unpack. And despite the fact that she believes makeup is used to hide beauty rather than enhance it, Zadie Smith knows how to tug at the heartstrings. Drawing upon her own mixed race heritage, she is able to unpack the romanticization of interracial relationships, noting the lives we must give up and the things we must let go of, whether we want to or not. I don’t want to give too much of the storyline away, but imagine, for a moment ,that you are a Black woman living in Britain with your white Professor husband and your half white children...and then learn your husband cheats on you with a white woman. How does that look? What does it do to your family? And what does that do to your self-image, as a Black woman in a predominately white space?
 
How do we perceive beauty, in relation to each other, to the world, to ourselves?
 
“Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.” - On Beauty
 
Homegirls and Hand Grenades – Sonia Sanchez
 
How to be Black and poor and depressed and woman in America and survive and survive and survive and survive!
 
“Your face like/ summer lightning/ gets caught in my voice/ and i draw you up from/ deep rivers/ taste your face of a thousand names/ see you smile/ a new season/ hear your voice/ a wild sea pausing in the wind.” - “Poem for Jessie”
 
There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé – Morgan Parker
 
THIS IS THE BOOK OF POETRY I HAVE BEEN WAITING ALL MY LIFE FOR !!! Thank you, Morgan Parker, for unpacking all of my feelings about Blackness, about womanhood, about depression and resilience and heartbreak. Parker, with the bold title There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, explores Black pain, identity and the notion of self through the lens of such folks like Beyoncé, imagining her in a therapists office, breaking down Obama’s existence as Black, as mixed race, and creating personal narratives in poems like “Hottentot Venus”, “Afro”, and “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl.”
 
You can access the first few pages for free through this link: http://tinhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/There-are-More-Beautiful-Things-Than-Beyonce-Preview.pdf
 
“I don’t know/ when I got so punk rock/ but when I catch/ myself in the mirror/ I feel stronger. So when at five in the afternoon/ something on my TV says/ time is not on your side/ I don’t give any/shits at all. Instead I smoke/ a joint like I’m/ a teenager and eat a whole/ box of cupcakes./ Stepping on leaves I get/ first-night thrill./ Confuse the meanings/ of castle and slum, exotic/ and erotic. I bless/ the dark, tuck/ myself into a canyon/ of steel. I breathe/ dried honeysuckle/ and hope. I live somewhere/ imaginary.” – Excerpt from “Another Another Autumn in New York”
 
 

Toluwanimi Obiwole is a Nigerian-born, Colorado-raised poet and performer. She is a Brave New Voices international slam champion, a Denver city slam champion, and author of multiple chapbooks. She has been a member of the Denver Minor Disturbance youth poetry team, and was a member of the 2015 Slam Nuba poetry team. As part of her craft, she also creates music. In 2015, she was announced as Denver's first Youth Poet Laureate. ​

Yikes, you tell me. I'm still figuring it out. I'm still heartbroken, and the only thing I'm learning is to be in it, to honor that heartbreak, to feel my grief completely, get up underneath it, and go through it. The only way out is through. Self care and love is great, but not a cure, the only way not to allow my heartbreak to conquer me, is to square up and go through it. ​

Write and write and keep on writing. Write for you, write out the parts of yourself you want to know more. I know it seems more tantalizing to hit bars and have popular art, but all of that comes and comes deeper when you're more connected to yourself. When you connect to yourself, it's so much easier to connect to the rest of the world, and to really understand how you feel about things. ​

THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI is the author of six books. His novel, Haywire, won the Members’ Choice Award, given by the Asian American Writers Workshop. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, Medgar Evers College and the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

​Read his TRACK//FOUR piece, "Seeing the Light," in VOLUME TWO // ISSUE TWO here. 

"Seeing the Light," is based on my experience—it’s an “autobiographical” story. I grew up a biracial child in rural Pennsylvania. My mother is Chinese, and my father was Polish-American. In high school, I worked on a farm for pocket money. I often went fishing.

This was an earlier time, and Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan was a big thing. I liked the idea of achieving higher consciousness through exotic substances. In my story, the boy uses tea made from a burdock plant to get high. I doubt burdock has any mind-altering properties, but I had to make things up to fit the story.
I rely on memory for source material, but one’s memory is imperfect. Scenes appear as I reimagine them, not necessarily as they happened.
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I collect images, pieces of dialogue, actions—I make notes—and then look back at them to see how they might form a story. When I see some kind of a story, I add to it or cut from it until it has a working shape.
I tend to put things in chronological order—I rarely use flashbacks. This approach is to compensate for the fact that there are gaps—missing explanations or exposition—in my stories. My idea is to create a kind of cinematic effect: “flashes of light in darkness,” as someone once said.

I try to bring both parts of my identity—the Chinese part and the Eastern European part—into my writing. When I write about my childhood, I draw on what my father and mother said or did. My mother still speaks with a slight accent (her native language is Mandarin), while my father was proud of his Polish roots (his parents spoke Polish).

I haven’t spent much time in either Poland or China. I visited Poland once, for lunch. A host of a Berlin poetry festival gave me a ride to Frankfurt on the Oder River, then across the bridge to Słubice, Poland. I remember dozens of men walking over the bridge from Poland into Germany to go to work. The traffic was slow at the border, and I was told that people became poorer as one drove east. In Russia, driving was risky, because of bandits. We went back to Berlin that afternoon.

I’ve visited Hong Kong a few times and Singapore once to attend writing festivals. I was excited to be in my mother’s home country (parts of Hong Kong are on the mainland)—I finally made it there, and I want to go back.

​There’s another angle to this topic: how I’m perceived by people. I’m often seen as the “other,” and the other can be anything. My Medgar Evers College students, most of whom are of African descent, see me as Caucasian. Many Asians also see me as Caucasian. But Caucasians see me as Asian, Latino, Hawaiian, Native American, etc. Few people see me as Eurasian, which is what I am.

I believe that revision almost always makes a piece of writing better, though it is possible to over-revise. I revise in order to “re-see” the story. The revision can be of each line, each sentence, to make the voice or tone consistent, or it can be a more substantial, structural change. If I’m not getting a good response from readers or editors, I know it’s time to revise.
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It often helps to let the work sit a few days (or longer), to let your mind get away from the circular pattern of being close to the work. When you go back, you might see the text with a fresh eye.

Some of my greatest non-literary inspirations would be places I’ve visited, whether those places are far or near, recent or in the distant past. I’ve been fortunate that my mother still lives in the village where I grew up. When I visit her, I remember things about my childhood, and I see places that remind me of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. I’m also something of a traveler; I always like to see new places and discover what happens there.

I’m also inspired by animals and nature—I grew up in the country. I’m interested in how we relate to nature, and how we share things with animals. I care about how animals “think.” This tells us something about how we think. Some of my works are solely about animals, with some humans thrown in.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my family: my wife and daughter, who I live with in Manhattan. Daily life is the reality; but there are moments of hyper-reality. Those are the moments one wants to “write down.”

BY ASHIA AJANI

This article is the first in series on POC culture and politics by our new contributing blog editor, Ashia Ajani. 
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​“Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.” ―Bell Hooks
 
We need more stories about how people of color relate to one another. More stories about how people of color love one another. Because we can, and when we do it is a beautiful thing. There is no other way to put it.
 
This is not to say that mixed race folks who are part white do not deserve to have their stories told. These folks have a unique experience navigating our world, especially America, which does not make space for such transnational blood to exists without question. But why is it when we say “interracial” we immediate imagine a white person and a person of color? Probably because as people of color, especially in America, we are always thinking about our relationship to white people. Most of us descend from a colonized people, either exploited or massacred by white hands. As we delve deeper into the “post-colonial” world, we are constantly aware of our positionality, oftentimes centering whiteness in order to better understand ourselves.
 
And what of stories? I can list off so many books that portray white/person of color romances. On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Kindred by Octavia Butler. How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps by Laura Yes Yes. Most Amy Tan novels (though I will note in The Hundred Secret Senses there is a brief marriage to a mixed race Hawaiian and white man, but this romance ends in tragedy in a way the white love interests in her other books do not). The list goes on and on. And it’s understandable. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a gross amount of erotic novels that center race, but not in a way that is productive. Try fetishitic on both ends, a serious exploitation of women of color, jungle fever, yellow fever, you name it. And if I read another erotic novel that describes a woman with my color skin as chocolate….
 
Our society is entering an era of increased mixed race identity: in 2013, 9 million Americans chose two or more racial categories when asked about their race, so we can only assume the numbers have increased since then. So what of the stories brewing in the souls of those of Korean and Mexican blood, rapidly growing in number because of the proximity of Koreatown and los barrios in California? What of the Afro-Latinx youth, constantly misplaced, misnamed and misunderstood? The Jamaican-Chinese immigrants, undoing levels of colonial trauma and internalized racism we can only begin to understand? As Americans, whether we care to admit it or not, we are obsessed with dominant-submissive tales. Though horizontal aggression is a real phenomenon and readily needs to be addressed, not only in our stories but in our interpersonal interactions, there are so many things that connect us. And that is not interesting, There is no tragedy to unfold, no plantation dreams to exploit and fetishize, and there are no colonial stories to be told without a center on whiteness.
 
The first book I read that dared formulate an interracial romance that did not feature white people was The House on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. Jamie Ford himself is a mixed race son, born of a Chinese father and white American mother, so one can assume that the concept of love as a melting pot has been on the forefront of his conscious for a while (he’s also a Cancer, so you know, hopeless romantic from the start). This book told the story of two children, one Chinese and one Japanese, who fall in love during World War Two. The Chinese boy, Henry Lee, falls in love with a Japanese girl, Keiko Okabe, and this experience changes the way he views himself as a Chinese person during Seattle in World War II. His father, who does not speak very good English, makes Henry wear a pin that says “I am Chinese” so he will not face the ridicule endured by Japanese citizens and residents. As he begins to fall more in love with Keiko, Henry realizes that his silence will not protect him, and that he has a duty, as another marginalized person to align himself with her struggles. This is the first introduction I had to the concept of “throwing in” with other marginalized group, a practice that perhaps possesses more optimism Even outside the scope of romantic love, Henry is good friends with a Black saxophone player, Sheldon, a good number of years older than him, exploring transracial solidarity and how we oftentimes inherit biases from our predecessors.
 
Henry and Keiko are separated by the war, then find each other years later, both in their sixties and their respective partners deceased, and we catch a glimmer of hope. This is the happiest happy ending I have read regarding interracial romance between two people of color.
 
Granted, I haven’t read many interracial romances solely featuring people of color- I wonder why that is - not for lack of trying. Fast forward to junior year of college. I read White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan. I want to give honorable mention to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which features the story of Oscar’s mother, Belicia, a dark-skinned Dominicana who loves and loves and cannot make love stick to her in return (I feel you girl). What do all of these stories have in common? Tragedy. In White Teeth, a plus sized Black (young, Caribbean mother and old British father, so levels there) girl, Irie,  tries to love two Bangladeshi twins, Mallit and Magid (whose father has an affair with a white woman he finds more attractive than his conservative Bandgladeshi wife, so more levels) into loving her, has sex with both of them and then gives birth to a dual-fathered and fatherless baby. In Beauty is a Wound, the story takes place in post-Dutch occupied Indonesia centers around the life of a mixed race but Dutch passing sex worker, Dewi Ayu, who mothers four daughter by four different men, all of them either Japanese, Indonesian or some mix of both. Most of these girls experiences are shaped by sexual assault and colonial trauma- the youngest daughter, who is black as can be, is portrayed as ugly, unattractive (more levels), yet her name is Beauty, given to her ironically. Though all of the daughter die in some unfortunate manner, Beauty’s fate somehow is more tragic, as she meets someone who finally will love her and he is ripped away from her almost as soon as he is introduced into her life.
 
Why must we always portray love as tragic? Why must love never work out, never be empowering, but disenfranchising? What does it mean for our general psyche when the only stories we can think to tell are of heartbreak and betrayal?
 
When we understand each other, we can better understand ourselves and our relation to this earth. Realizing that love is sacrifice, is strength and courage combined with overcoming fear, is an essential part of our spiritual and cultural growth. When we tell stories about our relationships to other brown people, we are affirming that indeed, there is a cultural revolution brewing, and yes, we are capable of looking our differences in the face while simultaneously embracing what connects us.
 
I myself am a hopeless romantic. I love me some good old fashion love stories. I love imagining romance as supportive, engaging and revolutionary- the way love is meant to be. There is strength in numbers, there is strength in radical love. In the era of Trump, of climate change and automatic weapons and all the other bad vibes floating around our fragile universe, shouldn’t we stress loving each other, linked through ancestral trauma and ancestral strength? Where there is diasporic angst, there is also the potential for a radical love outside the scope of whiteness. Let us demand not only more of our literature, but of ourselves. 

TRACK//FOUR is pleased to announce our nominations for Sundress Publication's 2017 Best of the Net anthology!

Poetry:
"Leticia was a Less-Dead Ghost" by Sergio Ortiz
"The Teenage Girl as Velociraptor" by Aline Dolinh
"Wick" by Farah Ghafoor
"Scene" by Christina Im

Fiction:
"Creation Myth" by Lily Zhou

Nonfiction:
"Nanjing" by Carissa Chen
"Operations" by Jordan Harper

As a fairly new indie journal whose merit and potential are communicated largely via online posts and the occasional bout of word-of-mouth communication, I believe that TRACK//FOUR can only benefit from acknowledging magazines and booklets of similar status and/or motive. That is why I've compiled a brief list of collected and individual works that I've been reading as of this week that can be slotted into that category. With so much stellar art by and for people of color going unnoticed because of bigoted publishing practices and the general scrutiny that seems to tail marginalized people in every aspect of daily life, there can never be a bad time to acknowledge and uplift our work.

This past weekend, the world watched as an estimated 2.9 million people came together to form the largest one-day protest in U.S. history, and while the event itself will no doubt be remembered as a landmark moment in Washington’s long record of reactionary marches and protests, the Women’s March was not without flaws. One of the largest complaints-- voiced overwhelmingly by women and gender non-conforming people of color-- was that in refusing to accommodate the concerns of queer and/or disabled nonwhite people, and promoting cissexist Second Wave feminist rhetoric, the march alienated the people who will be most affected by Trump's administration while praising for their “efforts” those who have the least to lose: cisgender, middle-class, able-bodied white women.
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The truth of the event is that for many people, it will be a one-time commitment; an unfortunate reality is that not everyone is willing (or able to) invest the time and energy that on-ground protesting necessitates. Thankfully, there are other ways to support the necessary activist work that marginalized people are doing that go beyond the limits of physical labor. Amidst rumors that Trump plans to cut funding for the NEA and NEH, making a commitment to fund the artistic aims of nonwhite people will be especially important in the next four years. Here I've compiled a list of organizations to support, with special attention given to two collectives for trans women. A larger list can be found at the bottom of the blog post.