January 9, 2026

Accountability did not become synonymous with annihilation by accident. That belief was planted—deliberately—by American racism, enforced through collective punishment, public spectacle, and the constant threat of social and physical erasure. But what keeps that belief alive is not the seed itself. It’s the soil. Decades of psychological damage shaped how we learned to tend our communal ground, and season after season, we’ve repeated the same methods—methods rooted in trauma, surveillance, and fear—while expecting different results.

The land is not cursed. It is responsive. And right now, even when harm is clearly visible—harm done by us, to us—we continue to harvest the same unusable crops using the same tired tools:  Defensiveness instead of repair, pile-ons instead of accountability, silence instead of clarity, loyalty tests instead of shared values, scorched-earth takedowns instead of collective care. This is not a tragedy, but a crisis in stewardship and in community care. The healing we need is not found in denial or blame, but in choosing—urgently and deliberately—to tend the land differently so it can finally produce what we need to survive and sustain ourselves.

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What often gets lost in these conversations is that Black people are not new to stewardship. From the moment our ancestors were forcibly removed from their homelands in Africa and brought to this continent, they carried with them deep agricultural knowledge—patience, precision, and an intimate understanding of land, climate, and cultivation. They knew what to grow and how to grow it, and that knowledge made this country wealthy. Cotton, sugar, tobacco—entire economies were built on Black agricultural expertise. At the same time, our ancestors cultivated what sustained themselves: food and medicine that healed bodies, treated ailments, and fortified resilience in the face of constant terror. This dual cultivation—for the system that exploited them and for their own survival—established a legacy of skilled stewardship that has never disappeared.

That very competence, however, was always perceived as a threat to white power. American racism moved quickly to distort and discredit Black skill, patience, and productivity, labeling Black people as lazy and unproductive—a lie made all the more grotesque by the reality that stolen people were forced to labor, for free, on stolen land that white colonizers were unable or unwilling to cultivate themselves. This inversion was not rhetorical; it was strategic. Over time, these distortions became tools of psychological warfare, reshaping how Black labor, judgment, and authority were perceived—and eventually, how they were internalized and weaponized within our communities. It is within this context that American racism planted the seed that correction equals danger, and that visibility invites punishment. 

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Once American racism planted those seeds of terror—through enslavement, surveillance, punishment, and distortion—it didn’t stop at controlling Black bodies. It moved deliberately into the psyche. The land our ancestors worked was never neutral. It was a site of constant threat where expertise could invite punishment, where visibility could provoke violence, where autonomy—no matter how skilled or disciplined—was met with force. Over time, this produced a relationship to land shaped as much by fear as by knowledge.

That psychological damage altered how Black people related not only to the literal land beneath their feet, but to the figurative land we now call community. The same dynamics that governed plantations—hypervisibility, external judgment, collective punishment, and the constant demand to perform usefulness—became internalized frameworks. Land was no longer just something to steward for nourishment and sustainability; it became something to manage under watch, something could invite hostility and worse, brutal retaliation if mishandled, or something where mistakes carried outsized consequences.

These conditions did not erase ancestral skill. They redirected it. Patience became vigilance. Observation became surveillance. Correction became risk assessment. The communal instinct to maintain health and balance did not disappear, but it adapted to a world where error could mean annihilation. Over generations, this shaped how harm was addressed, how conflict was navigated, and how power was interpreted within Black communities themselves.

What followed was not a collapse of values, but a faithful repetition of what had been learned. We tended the soil as we were taught—carefully, defensively, and often under imagined watch—because those methods once meant survival. The problem is not that these practices were irrational; it is that they were formed under conditions of terror that no longer need to dictate the future. Yet without intervention, inherited methods persist. Not out of malice. Not out of forethought. But because inheritance, when unexamined, feels like tradition.

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Over time, we have symbolically harvested the weeds and unusable parts of the harvest for ourselves, just as our ancestors did literally to survive. Psychologically, this looks like defensiveness, pile-ons, silence, loyalty tests, scorched-earth takedowns, and more—tactics we deploy even when the evidence of harm being done by us, to us, is clear. Often, we employ these strategies when the harm benefits a few at the expense of many.

Social media has intensified this pattern. The harm is now highly visible because we make it so. The patterns are predictable because we are guided by misplaced loyalty to those who benefit. And the outcomes are consistently useless: circular arguments for and against accountability trap us in standoffs where nothing changes, mainly because we have learned to associate accountability with symbolic death.

We pick the weeds for nourishment and wonder why we aren’t thriving the way our ancestors intended. The soil is fertile. The skill is within us. But the methods we inherited, formed under conditions of terror, have made us harvest in ways that feed fear rather than growth.

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Healing requires that we steward the soil differently. The land itself is not broken, and the skill to tend it is still within us. What must change are the methods: the ways we respond to harm, the ways we engage in correction, the ways we maintain community. If we can cultivate with intention rather than reflex, we can plant crops that actually sustain us—trust, accountability, care, resilience—rather than feeding cycles of fear, defensiveness, and symbolic annihilation.

This means learning to distinguish between accountability and annihilation, to recognize when corrective action is rooted in survival or service rather than ego or spectacle. It means tending the community like we once tended the land: patiently, skillfully, and with attention to what nourishes the whole. It is deliberate, it is generational, and it is within our power. By choosing what to plant and how to care for it, we can finally harvest the fruits of our ancestors’ knowledge and labor—outcomes that strengthen us, rather than exhaust or divide us.

But tending the soil is not just about action—it is also about rest. Trauma produces hypervigilance, and not every response or reaction is harmful; sometimes it is the nervous system responding to conditions long ingrained. True discernment requires stepping away, allowing the body and mind to recover, so that we can return with balance and clarity: able to recognize when accountability is necessary and when a response is being driven by fear, overwork, or avoidance of reality.

When we pair intentional stewardship with restorative rest, we create conditions for growth that are sustainable and generational. Trust, care, resilience, and genuine accountability can take root because we are no longer operating out of reactive cycles of fear. This is a mind state that our ancestors did not have the benefit of. By learning to pause, reflect, and return with clarity, we can break the cycles of hypervigilance and exhaustion, and finally cultivate outcomes that strengthen us rather than exhaust or divide us.

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Too many of us have been taught—through generations of psychological harm—that someone outside our community knows better than we do when or how to act. We cannot wait for white acknowledgment or permission; the power to heal, cultivate, and transform lies entirely within us.  

Our community can visualize and bring to fruition a future that nourishes and sustains because we are the ones tending the land. This requires observation over reaction, patience over spectacle, care for the whole ecosystem, and a refusal to accept weeds simply because they were once demanded by the master. By choosing what to plant, how to nurture it, and when to rest, we reclaim our capacity for discernment, resilience, and genuine accountability. The harvest is ours to shape—one that strengthens, rather than exhausts or divides, because we remember who we are, whose knowledge we carry, and that the land responds to the care we give it.