I REMEMBER MY GRANDMOTHER STANDING OVER THE STOVE, STIRRING A POT OF SOUP LATE INTO THE EVENING. The same soup appeared on our table the next night, thinner but still enough. Cornbread was breakfast, then dinner. There was always a way to stretch what little we had, and the phrase “made enough” was more hope than fact. We laugh about the watered-down juice and reused foil, the way scraps became the centerpiece of a meal, but I think the laughter sometimes covers the ache of what we endured. Beneath our pride in resourcefulness and creativity is the fact that generation after generation, we’ve mastered the art of making do in situations we should never have been forced to accept.

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Capitalism trains people to confuse endurance with success, especially Black people whose labor has always been positioned as endlessly available to someone else’s bottom line. From plantation economies to domestic labor, agricultural work, service industries, care work, warehouse floors, classrooms, kitchens, and offices, Black effort has been used to build wealth we were never meant to fully inherit. I’ve seen that inheritance in my own family, in how people work themselves tired, make meals stretch, send money where needed, and still call it “getting by,” as if getting by isn’t already asking too much. We’re praised for pushing through, for “making something out of nothing,” for remaining productive while grieving, underpaid, displaced, sick, exhausted, and overworked. Our ability to withstand harm becomes evidence of our value instead of evidence that harm is occurring. Capitalism depends on this arrangement

because it can function without Black communities flourishing; it just needs us to keep producing.

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A system built on extraction has no incentive to ask whether the people sustaining it are nourished. It only asks whether we’re still available, still laboring, still consuming, still adapting, still making life inside conditions that should’ve already provoked collective outrage. I think about this every time I hear somebody say, “I’m tired,” and laugh immediately afterward. Black people know that laugh intimately. It arrives when fatigue has become so ordinary that naming it feels borderline embarrassing. I’ve heard it in kitchens, on phone calls, in group chats, and from people I love carrying entire lives on bodies that have been asking for rest for years. We joke about burnout while our bodies deteriorate. We call ourselves hustlers, grinders, and people who “just get it done.” Throughout our diverse journeys, many of us inherited the belief that rest must be earned through depletion instead of understood as part of being alive.

Endurance is not freedom. It’s proof that something has managed to continue, often under conditions that should’ve changed long before survival became the standard. A people can endure violence and still not be free. A family can endure food insecurity and still not be free. A worker can endure exploitation and still not be free. A community can withstand displacement, over-policing, environmental racism, wage theft, underfunded schools, inaccessible healthcare, and chronic instability and still not be free. Black survival is sacred, brilliant, and full of evidence that our communities have always built life in places that expected death. Still, survival shouldn’t be mistaken for the highest expression of liberation.

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One of capitalism’s most successful tricks is convincing people that surviving the system well is the same thing as escaping it. We’re taught to aspire toward proximity to wealth instead of asking better questions about the structure itself. We’re told that if we work hard enough, sacrifice enough, and endure enough hardship with the right attitude, we will eventually arrive somewhere safe, stable, and whole. For many Black communities, the so-called promised land keeps moving. A degree doesn’t guarantee housing security. A promotion doesn’t guarantee rest. A salary increase can disappear into rent, groceries, debt, childcare, elder care, transportation, and the cost of staying alive. Homeownership is framed as the reward for discipline, while land and property remain shaped by generations of theft, exclusion, lending

discrimination, and market speculation. The ladder keeps extending upward while the ground beneath us keeps shifting.

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Freedom can’t only mean surviving inside systems that harm us. Freedom must also include the conditions necessary to live well, to rest, to eat nourishing food consistently, to access land safely and sustainably, to experience slowness without punishment, to age with dignity, and to have bodies that are not constantly carrying the physiological consequences of instability. This is where Black food sovereignty becomes inseparable from freedom. Food is never just food. It reveals who has land, who has options, who has time, who has clean soil, who has a grocery store close enough to reach without a second commute, and who has been expected to turn scarcity into ritual for far too long.

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When Black communities fight for food sovereignty, we aren’t just talking about access to fruits or vegetables. We’re talking about governance, self-determination, memory, sustainability, and collective survival that isn’t dependent on exploitation. Black growers are reclaiming relationships to soil that colonialism, slavery, migration, dispossession, and policy violence all tried to sever. Gardens become infrastructure. Kitchens become memory. Land becomes a place of healing, and food remains one of the oldest languages our people know. I think again of that soup on my grandmother’s stove as a form of evidence. It held skill, love, scarcity, invention, and the question of what might have been possible if abundance hadn’t required so much strategy.

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I often think about the relationship between nourishment and imagination because people who are depleted all the time struggle to imagine beyond the next demand. It’s structural. A nervous system trapped in survival mode becomes oriented toward immediacy: getting through the day, making rent, avoiding collapse, and managing crisis after crisis. There’s dignity in surviving, and there’s grief in realizing how many Black people have rarely been offered the conditions necessary to imagine lives beyond recovery. What does it do to a people when rest feels unfamiliar? What does it do to a community when tenderness feels unsafe? What does it do to the body when exhaustion becomes identity? What does it do to the spirit when every version of success still requires self-abandonment?

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These questions aren’t separate from land justice, food justice, labor justice, housing justice, disability justice, educational access, or healthcare. They’re connected by the same central question: What would it look like for Black people not merely to endure, but to flourish? Flourishing requires infrastructure, and systems accountable to human well-being rather than extraction. It also requires investment in Black-led institutions, community governance, and the protection of Black farmers, growers, organizers, educators, healers, and land stewards whose labor sustains possibilities beyond corporate dependence. We have to refuse the lie that every solution must come through the market because capitalism will happily sell us self-care while preserving the conditions making us sick. It’ll package rest as luxury instead of necessity, monetize wellness while workers remain underpaid, celebrate Black culture while destabilizing Black communities, and applaud resilience while depending on it.

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Many of us feel this contradiction in our bodies before we have language for it. We feel it when we’re too tired to taste our food, when our elders work themselves into illness, when joy feels scheduled instead of lived, when community becomes difficult to maintain because everybody is overextended, and when we realize we’ve mastered endurance but can’t seem to remember the last time we actually felt safe. Still, I remain hopeful, because our people have never waited for permission to build otherwise. My hope comes from us: the organizers building cooperative food systems, the growers reclaiming relationships to land, the elders preserving agricultural wisdom, the aunties feeding entire blocks, the mutual aid organizers redistributing resources while governments fail, the storytellers documenting what systems try to erase, and the people insisting that Black life deserves more than constant recovery.

I think freedom begins there, in the radical understanding that Black life should have room to rest, eat well, move slowly, gather safely, imagine freely, steward land, and belong without always having to recover from something. These should be ordinary conditions of Black life, not rewards reserved for the fortunate few. Endurance may keep us alive, but freedom asks harder and more honest questions. What would become possible if Black communities no longer had to spend most of our energy surviving? What would we build if our bodies weren’t always recovering from depletion? What would our children inherit if nourishment, land, rest, and self-determination were treated as necessities rather than privileges? What kinds of institutions would we create if Black flourishing, not Black endurance, became the measure?

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I don’t want our communities to be remembered only for what we withstood. I want us to be known for what we made possible when survival was no longer the offering on the table. I want the pot to stretch because we chose abundance, not because scarcity demanded another miracle.

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