Happy Black History Month.

I want to begin with love.

Love for those who came before us.
Love for those still finding their way.
Love across the diaspora, to African-descendant peoples in all our languages, cultures, rhythms, and lineages.

May this month hold us in remembrance and in motion. May it be a refusal of erasure in all its forms. May it be a recommitment to choosing life with intention, again and again.

January has been heavy.

For many of us, it arrived with exhaustion already in our bodies, with grief that hadn’t settled, with anger that had nowhere to go, with fear layered onto uncertainty. The world has felt loud, violent, and relentless. Some days, simply getting through felt like an act of courage.

And yet, we are still here.

Black communities have always known something about surviving hard seasons. About carrying on when the conditions are hostile. About finding one another when the world insists on fragmentation.

This knowing did not come from theory.
It came from lived practice.

Black resistance has never looked like just one thing.

It has taken the form of rebellion—open refusal.
Of resistance—staying when we were meant to disappear.
Of resurgence—returning to what was buried but never gone.
Of insurgence—building power where none was supposed to exist.

And it has also taken the form of re-existence.

Re-existence is quieter, and deeper. It is what happens when people decide to live anyway. To love anyway. To create beauty, community, and meaning in a world structured to erase them.

Re-existence is cooking and singing.
It is organizing and resting.
It is laughter that refuses despair.
It is memory carried in the body.

It is the everyday refusal to let life be reduced to survival alone.

We are here because someone dreamed.

I am here today because my ancestors dreamed of a future they would never see.

They imagined dignity where there was brutality.
Joy where there was erasure.
Futures where Black life was not only protected, but abundant.

That dreaming was not naïve.
It was revolutionary.

Across Abya Yala and Turtle Island, Black people were forced to build the foundations of the modern world through stolen labor and coerced expertise. Enslaved and exploited, surveilled and dispossessed, Black communities generated immense wealth and infrastructure for colonial empires, settler governments, plantation owners, financiers, and the institutions of racial capitalism, while being systematically denied the benefits of what we built.

As Exterminate All the Brutes by Raoul Pecks makes painfully clear, the modern world did not emerge through innovation alone, but through enslavement, dispossession, and colonial violence. Modernity itself was assembled through extraction of land, of labor, of life. 

We must hold this truth alongside another: these are Indigenous lands. Indigenous Nations have always been, and remain, sovereign. Naming Black contribution does not erase Indigenous presence; it demands the refusal of the colonial lie that pits our struggles against one another.

The world built here rests on intertwined violences: Indigenous dispossession and anti-Black enslavement. Liberation asks us not to compete over harm, but to practice relationship, accountability, and shared refusal of colonial domination.

Liberation is not assimilation.

Black thinkers, organizers, and elders have long reminded us that liberation does not come from assimilation into violent systems. It comes from reweaving life on our own terms—in relationship, in collectivity, in radical love.

It comes from refusing to separate culture from politics.
Joy from struggle.
Land from people.

This is where Afrofuturism lives, not as fantasy, but as practice.

Afrofuturism invites us to imagine futures where Black life is not organized around crisis, scarcity, or sacrifice, but around care, creativity, rest, and belonging. Futures where the planet is not extracted from, but tended to. Where communities have what they need to flourish. Where joy is not postponed until “after” justice, but is part of how we get there.

What this means for our work

At Greenpeace, we understand that environmental justice cannot exist without racial justice. The futures we work toward must be ones where Black communities are not left behind—and are actively shaping what comes next.

This Black History Month, I invite us into something simple and powerful.

We begin from a grounding truth: a liberated future is one where Black life is not only protected, but able to flourish. When Black life is centered, different questions become possible.

Questions like:

  • How do people organize care and respond to harm?
  • What counts as knowledge, and who is accountable for it?
  • How do we relate to land, time, water, and all the life around us?
  • What didn’t survive and why was it necessary to let it go?

These are not questions to answer perfectly. They are invitations to listen, to remember, to imagine differently.

A closing invitation

If you feel moved, I invite you to share a dream, a reflection, or a story. It can be something you’re holding, something you’re hoping for, something you want to protect or build.

We may not be able to respond to every message, but we will read them with care.

Because decoloniality is not an endpoint.
It is a continuous practice of delinking from harm, reweaving relationships, and remembering that life has always exceeded the terms imposed upon it.

We are still here because someone dared to imagine otherwise.

Now it’s our turn.

P.S. If you want a few things to watch and read this season, here are some offerings:

  • Exterminate All the Brutes (documentary) — a decolonial reckoning with how “modernity” was built through colonization, enslavement, and extraction.
  • Sinners (movie) — a genre-bending Black story that moves through history, horror, and desire.
  • Abbott Elementary (TV series) — joyful, sharp, and full of care in the everyday.
  • Octavia E. Butler (books) — Afrofuturist wisdom for surviving, transforming, and imagining otherwise.
  • One of Them Days (movie) — friendship, chaos, and tenderness under late-capitalism pressure.
  • Insecure (TV series) — messy, funny, intimate Black life with so much heart.

This blog post was written by Jessica da Silva, JEDIS & Integrity Specialist at Greenpeace Canada.