how much change might erupt in a generation if most, or many, or even just enough babies heard sweet abolitionist words and anti-racist songs while nestled in loving caregiver arms. 

These songs could be hummed while cooking, feeding, walking, playing, eating, gardening, dancing, sleeping. These whispered words would rustle noxious, colonial air – so full of lies and mistruths, based on hierarchies of belonging, constructed from the myth of a thing called “race.”  

Some babies, despite the songs and humms and sweet abolitionist swaddling, would still surrender to the atmospheric poison. These bodies would grow to live in a calcified, numb, false content in need of constant validation and incessant consumption.  

Other babies would absorb enough of the melodies, words, and rhythms to develop resistant nervous systems. Anti-racist antibodies would flood their systems, pulsing vagus nerves with secure belonging, echolocating entanglement, and detoxifying colonial contagions.

These babies would grow into bodies able to step up to authority, step into communities with ex-colonizer x-ray vision to see the invisible threads woven into institutions, the cords binding social systems to cruel cultural mistruths.

Imagine being sung to in the womb, swimming in anti-racist amniotic fluid and decolonial ether of the amnion and chorion sac. What kinds of developmentally love-centered, cognitively courageous, emotively steady, and deeply ecologically entangled nervous systems could these songs manifest? 

These songs might manifest scientists dedicated to creating anti-racist microbes to detoxify urban water systems. Aquasonic, gender non-conforming love warriors igniting decolonizing ions into clouds and rainstorms. 

Or they could manifest culture-jamming millennials hacking into digital spaces, altering every mindfulness music soundtrack to include lyrics of secure attachments to the planet, ecological entanglement with other than human beings, and fiercely anti-capitalist colonial resistance:

Whale sounds and the cries of dying white supremacy

Fluttering flutes and falling fascisms in all iterations

Birdsong and stories of John Brown and Lydia Maria Child

Waterfalls whispering tales of people refusing enclosure of land and gender

Bells, chimes, and abolitionist dreams of midwives birthing future ancestor accomplices

Imagine the nervous systems of these bodies, floating in nanoparticles of anti-authoritarian, probiotic possibilities, developing vocal cords and ear canals resonant with anti-colonial clarity and conviction, anti-racist imaginations, guts and hearts ready to dream, do, resist, and revive. 

Imagine the collective power and creative force generated with nervous systems that are ready to do small steps of collective action. Every day in ordinary ways. 

Picture the kinds of delicious dance parties that would emanate from these kinds of bodies. The songs, the stories, the games, the memes, the party themes, dance playlists, dinner parties, picnics, the institutions, systems, buildings, the art shows, paintings, the schools, theater productions, dance moves, and music classes…imagine…the delight, the joy, the ability to be here now and to dream there now. Just imagine the futures those bodies could dream. 

Then manifest…