28 days --- 56 ways to be Young, Gifted and Black: Alisha Sonnier

How do you spend your days?

I'm a student with a yearning for liberation in my heart so I spend most of my days reading, writing, studying, creating collective black spaces for black people and organizing around issues that black people face.

What brings you joy?

I'm at a really good place right now where most of the things I do bring me joy. Love brings me joy, black spaces and black people bring me joy, seeing this sort of black Renaissance we're in brings me joy, and the fact that people are refusing to quit and continuing to resist brings me joy.

What is liberation to you?

Liberation to me is love. Love is liberating. I want people to love themselves and others the way that the Creator loves us. A love so freeing that it makes it impossible for you to not have the audacity to exist as your truest self, and a love so full of substance that it's impossible for us as individuals to not see how interconnected our struggles are. Liberation is love, and sacrifice that rises above all things material, and shallow. Liberation is about people's refusal to not exist in their truest form, people not fearing death as something that happens when we stop breathing but realizing that in many ways we're dying now both individually and systematically, and to have the full autonomy that they deserve rather than zip codes, class status, gender, race etc. being the factors that decide our fate.

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