Monday Musing/Reflection: What Kwanzaa Means to Me
won't you celebrate with me
Friends, we made it! 2025 was quite the challenging year, in many ways, but also so filled with love, connection, renewal, and hope. Below are some reflections on the 7 principles of Kwanzaa that I wrote two years ago for The Cypher, an organizing collective based in the Bronx. It was started by my friend, auntie, and co-dreamer Lori-Kim Alexander. She invited me to write them for The Cypher’s newsletter, and having celebrated Kwanzaa with my family since I was a child, I relished the opportunity.
I haven’t changed much about them because a lot of it still rings true. But I will add a couple of sentences at the end of each with any new reflections I have from the last year. Ultimately, these words feel more possible and pregnant than ever. I find that reflecting on the principles at the end of every year is a powerful tool of self/community assessment. It is my hope, as always, that you find resonance in these words, and perhaps language to go forward with into the new year, grounded in purpose and faith.
Believe it or not, there’s a word limit on these posts lol, and my 2025 reflections ended up longer than anticipated. So I’m going to post days 1-3 below, days 4-6 tomorrow, and day 7 on January 1.
Introduction
won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. -Lucille Clifton
As we reflect on this year, we give gratitude for what has failed.
We honor the celebration of Kwanzaa as a tool for community building and discourse, spiritual upliftment, and pedagogical deconstruction. We hold the origins of this celebration and its founder with care and nonjudgment, while also recognizing the context in which this celebration was created. We must also be honest about how this celebration has been used to reinforce the colonial, patriarchal, white supremacist status quo.
Point blank: the celebration of Kwanzaa was not created with Black, Indigenous, Queer, trans, and all folks whose survival has been criminalized in mind.
In the syncretic tradition of our ancestors and all those who have lived in the margins throughout history, the reflections that follow blend the traditional Nguzo Saba (7 principles) of Kwanzaa with Black feminist wisdom from queer/trans/Black/indigenous women, femme, trans/nonbinary organizers, artists, and thinkers.
Each day throughout the celebration (December 26 - January 1), you are invited to sit with the reflections, resources, and gifts that have been co-curated with your liberation in mind. Each reflection is an invitation, containing links to resources, tools, and gifts of affirmation that we hope will support our understanding not only of the systems of oppression that seek to annihilate us, but also of our relationship with ourselves and the world around us. Some of these reflections maintain their traditional definitions, and others have been reworked and reframed through the lens of liberation, inviting us to experience these principles with more empathy, expansiveness, joy, and love.
With these reflections, we affirm the full breadth of our humanity: our blackness, our queerness, our transness, our relationships, our ambitions, our dreaming, our grief, our trauma, and our sorrow.
May these words, resources, and affirmations offer a source of grounding as we move into this new year together.
Our wish is that you are held by these words.
Our wish is that you find generosity here.
Our wish is that you find a renewed sense of curiosity here.
We are willing that these words meet you, dear reader, with care.
We are willing that through these reflections, the lived experiences of the poor working class, BI/QT folks, drug users, and all whose survival is criminalized are uplifted.
Asé.
Day 1: Umoja (Unity)
Definition: To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
Invitation
Is your load heavy, my dear? I know. It was not meant for you to carry alone, beloved. Can you find the permission to lay it down?
When did you first learn you had to do it alone?
For many of us, particularly those socialized as Black women, we learned from a young that our needs didn’t matter. Black women hold it down. Black women make sure everyone else is provided for before themselves.
We learned there was shame in needing. Needing help, needing care, needing money, needing food, needing clean needles, needing somewhere safe to use. To be human is to have needs. Yet so much of my upbringing as a queer, trans masc person from the Deep South taught me to be ashamed of the parts that need.
Could it be that our liberation is contingent upon our willingness to acknowledge what we need?
Looking at the examples of NYTAG during the AIDs epidemic, street economy, etc. … While the system left many of our queer and trans elders to die, Black, trans women and sex workers developed the strategies that would allow us to save ourselves by asking one question: What do we need?
WE SAVE OURSELVES.
What does it take to look need in the eye?
A willingness to be seen. Vulnerability. In the words of our comrades in ballroom, i clocked you, girlie. Meaning I see you. I see what you’re trying to hide.
What are the parts of ourselves we hide out of shame or fear of judgment?
When one’s survival is at stake, we cannot afford to pretend that we don’t have needs. We may still be holding tightly to our strong, Black woman. She is reliable. She is resourceful. She gets shit done. But for so long, our doing has come at the expense of her health, her finances, and her peace. The Strong Black Woman has seen to it that we have survived for this long. But she does not exist in a vacuum.
When they ask her how she did it, she cannot help but reply: “I had help.”
2025: I’ve been working my way through this book, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals, by Shane Claiborne. The first chapter is about The Lord’s Prayer. He writes a section on the first line, “Our Father.”
It’s a betrayal of “Our Father” to pray “my father,” for the prayer is not only a declaration of a heavenly parent, but it is also a commitment to a new vision of family rooted in the providence and authority of our heavenly parent. We cannot have God as Father if we deny the sisterhood and brotherhood we share with the rest of God’s children.
On the Monday before Christmas, I started going to AA meetings. I believe the first two steps are key to the concept of unity. 1. Honesty - We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives have become unmanageable. 2. Faith - We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
I wouldn’t have called myself an alcoholic before, but I am presently in acknowledgement that my use and abuse of substances was definitely giving “addict.”
Whilst being in in-patient care for the second time in my life, I had the overwhelming realization that some shit had to change. I had to change. I couldn’t fully be with others and serve others because the addict in me only cared about themself. Even when I was drinking and smoking, several people told me that I had the gift of presence and that they experienced me as a very grounded person. But inside, I was a hot ass mess and my capacity was limited.
I’ve thought of The Lord’s prayer before, if we all prayed this prayer with this acknowledgement of the inextricable link between the self and the collective, we could change the world. I believe that even more now at the end of this year.
Day 2: Kujichagulia (Self Determination)
Defined: To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
- Zora Neal Hurston
The principle of self-determination has been made to mean one’s propensity to persevere or ability to assert one’s will over a situation. As with all ways of being framed in colonialism, these definitions draw a harsh line between our bodies and the ecologies that shape them. It is a fractal trace of the anthropocentrism that is a characteristic ethos of modernity.
Question for reflection: Where do you find yourself forcing your will on a situation that is out of your control? What is in your control and what is not? Can you be okay with both?
Today’s principle is an invitation to remember to look in the mirror speak aloud to yourself: I accept myself.If we are moving in an ethic of harm reduction, it is necessary to confront the parts of ourselves that feel shame when we have needs. Do not turn away from it. There is information there.
The survival of Black Indigenous Queer and Trans people has been criminalized, reducing the material conditions of our lives to the consequences of our supposed savagery.
They tried to tell us we were beasts.
They experimented on us.
They legislated against us.
They denied us care… Under the presumption that we deserved it.
When the AIDs epidemic emerged, it was sex workers and trans women who resourced one another and organized needle exchanges, clothing swaps, and potlucks when society turned its back on those who’d fallen through the cracks. During the crack epidemic, it was groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords sponsoring methadone clinics, free hepatitus screenings, free breakfast programs that fed their communities when government subsidies had supposedly dried up.
These organizers and groups looked on their communities with care and strategized ways to restore dignity to their survival, rather than perpetuate the shame and violence inflicted on us.
Kujichagulia affirms that we have the right to exist, to feel affirmed in our bodies. That we deserve access to dignified, gender-affirming care. That we get to stand up for ourselves. We get to have boundaries. We get to be in spaces that make us feel safe. We get to dislodge our shame. We get to be flawed. We get to be enough.
2025: Kujichagulia has a lot to do with integrity, which is Step 5 - We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human, being the exact nature of our wrongs. In order to have self-determination, we/I must have integrity. The dictionary definition of integrity is being honest, having strong moral principles, and acting with wholeness and consistency.
The word wholeness sticks out to me. I’ve written in previous posts about how capitalism conditions us to lie — not in the sense of moral failure, but by leaving pieces of ourselves behind just to survive. How self-determined can I be if I say x and do y? Addiction was getting in the way of my ability to move in integrity. Addiction has caused me to harm myself and others in ways that I didn’t intend.
This year, I was brought to my knees. In that posture of submission, I began to understand what it meant to set boundaries, set limits, and be aware of my capacity. It’s deeper than “pouring from an empty cup.” It’s learning that my cup has a rim and that I would do well to mind it.
Day 3: Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
Defined: To build and maintain our community together and make our siblings’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
Invitation
You are worthy, beloved. Without having to do anything else, know that you are worthy. Because you are. Worthy Of joy Of abundance Of compassion Of being seen Worthy Of being heard Of care Of trust Of love
There can be so much grief here. But this is where queer alchemy does its work. The outcasts make homes in the cracks in a holy act of defiance. This queer magic of home and place-making grounds our resistance and our relationships.
The material stratifications of our lives make it hard to live and work together. Race, class, gender, patriarchy, whiteness - these phenomena are constantly telling us that we are better off by ourselves, on our islands. That is how we should strive to live our lives to prove our independence and our worth.
Over here on the side of liberation, we believe that only we can save ourselves! History has shown us that the state and its many institutional apparatuses have shown us time and time and time again that they would sooner watch us die than give us what we need. Holding this truth at the center of our collective work is crucial.
This is our collective work: To reduce the risk of systemic, economic, and social harms that would impede us from living abundant and dignified lives.
We look to the examples of trans folks, sex workers, and people making their living in the street economy who looked after one another during the AIDs crisis and the crack epidemic and recessions by sharing meals, sanitary products, clean needles, living room floor mattresses, condoms, and clothing.
None can save us but ourselves.
We look to the examples of Liberatory Collective Work organizations like STAR, ACT UP, the National Harm Reduction Coalition, the Young Lords, and the Black Panthers, who asserted and affirmed the right of their communities to be free from illness, premature death, and incarceration. Who bit their thumbs at the suits and white coats who refused them the care they needed, refused them housing, refused them health care, denied them access to fresh produce.
2025: I learned so much about Collective Work and Responsibility on the farm. Pretty much all my posts in the last year have been me singing praises to the farm and the work that I get to do there. Farming by its very nature is not a solo endeavor. I am co-creators with a farm team, my fellow chicken tenders, the soil, the compost, the weather — it’s a beautiful symphony! I feel like I’m my best self when I’m at the Farminary.
Last post, I wrote about the final paper I wrote for my Old Testament and Exegesis class. I got to think really deeply and critically about the first two chapters of Genesis, which to me, is a beautiful vision of collective work and responsibility. Genesis 1-2 renders to us a God who creates freely and imparts that same freedom to God’s creation. And not a selfish freedom, not freedom to (i.e., to do whatever we want), but freedom for. We are free for creation. We are free for each other. We are free for love. We are free for the collective act of worship, in all the shapes that that takes.
Snapshots from 2025
