In New Orleans, locals frustrated by an unaccountable energy utility are building a network of community resilience hubs. At the heart of the project is a question: How do we organize power?

The signature project of Biden’s “Reconnecting Communities” grant program envisioned a freeway cap over Interstate 5 in Portland, Oregon. Transportation planners are using this investment to justify freeway expansion, while Black community leaders are seeking to rebuild a neighborhood that was displaced decades ago. Both goals are threatened by Trump’s budget cuts.

As part of our series of conversations, two scholars — a geographer and African American Studies scholar, and a public historian and archivist — discuss activism in Oakland, California, from the era of the Model Cities Program to the present, and consider the preservation of “illegitimate” histories for future use.

We fall back into an outdoor daytime darkness that’s hard to read, deepening into black between gnarled branches and dense leaves.

And if, as Franz Kafka believed, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” then fairy tales, and dreams, and Virginia Woolf stories, and riddles told by little girls, and opening flowers, must be the keys to the cupboard that houses the axe. 5 And also the sea, a sea sometimes frozen by trauma. Some call it a self.