apocalypse and the birth of a culture

This is the first in a collection of pieces highlighting what’s possible when communities use the apocalypse to turn toward each other and midwife the new world.

The Estuary Stories

Estuaries, as liminal spaces of transformation, hold their own transitional ecosystems. Right before the river meets the ocean, a new, third place emerges. A place alive with its own rules, rhythms, and possibilities. In apocalyptic times, oppressed peoples have been that river transforming. Drawn toward the promise of the ocean, we’ve built entire worlds from our estuaries. In the Black radical tradition, we understand apocalypse not simply as destruction, but as revelation, the death of an old reality, or an unmasking of what was hidden, but ultimately, the arrival of collective clarity. Apocalypse is and has always been a painfully transformative coup de grâce.

So here we are now, as we have been before: at the estuary between the world as it has been and the world as it will be. In these essays, I invite you to engage with the estuary as a historic moment that’s guiding us into its brackish waters. Help me excavate from our history the ways of being, lessons, and ecosystems of care that emerge from upheaval.

How did communities transform, heal, and rebuild after apocalypse? What new cultures, systems, and ways of being in right relationship with each other and the planet have emerged? How were their imaginations primed for activation at the point of transition? What were their failures and challenges? What belief systems anchored them? What can only happen here?

Now, I am not the first person to examine apocalypse and its generative creative potential. I follow in the footsteps of Black feminist thinkers like Octavia Butler, bell hooks, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, adrienne maree brown, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, to name a few. I’m not sure any of these essays will ever be finished — as I learn more from you and others, expand my thinking, and make additions to this repository of lessons, the essays themselves will transform. Please consider them imperfect, living, breathing pieces of writing. Like others, I come to this practice as an architect of equitable ecosystems, rummaging through our stories for our collective inheritance.

The first story is aptly about Hip Hop, on its birthday, and how it came to us through the birth canal of a burning borough. Marked by DJ Kool Herc’s ‘Back to School Jam’ held at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, August 11th, 2025, is Hip Hop’s 52nd birthday. Considered to be one of the most complicated, loved, and influential genres in the world, Hip Hop is arguably one of the most prominent examples of what happens when the world ends, and we turn toward each other, tending to what wants to be born.

The first time I read about the Bronx burning and the birth of Hip Hop was in Jeff Chang’s Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. At the time, I was an irreverent 16-year-old who still thought of the South Bronx as home, despite having lived most of my life in Boston. Can't Stop, Won't Stop was an invitation to think critically about the conditions in my neighborhood and how they, too, were shaped by systemic violence. It became the foundational text— alongside Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed— that bridged the gap between my street-kid sensibilities and my future as a community organizer (and later, an elected official). The story I tell in this essay is based on the book’s retelling.

The Fire of ‘Benign Neglect’

“The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.” — Governor Daniel Moynihan

After the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway devastated the South Bronx. What was once a vibrant, diverse community was scarred by the seven-mile clearing that cut from the east into the South Bronx toward Manhattan. Robert Moses’ destructive vision — to transform Manhattan into New York’s financial nucleus — was threatened by the 60,000 Bronx residents who called the future site of the highway home. Aided by the ever-present undercurrent of capitalism and white-supremacy, Moses would press on, undeterred, and usher half of the white population out of the South Bronx, along with 600,000 manufacturing jobs, while ushering in a drop in annual income to just 50% of the City's average and a youth unemployment rate of 60-80%. Then, the fires started.

Preceded by cutbacks in fire, sanitation, and police services, a struggling economy, a rise in crime, and a white flight that left the city's poorest behind, the complete economic collapse that came after the systemic disinvestment in the South Bronx caused the arson epidemic; responsible for the loss of 97% percent of buildings in seven census tracts and over 50% in forty-four more. Once landlords realized they could maximize profit by denying tenants basic services, evading city taxes, and profiting from insurance policies that benefited both them and the insurance agents, arson became their final act. Between 1970 and 1980, 80% of the South Bronx burned.

In 1970, then Democratic Governor of New York, Daniel Moynihan, sent a letter to President Richard Nixon, citing the data on the fires. In his memo, he stated, “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.” President Nixon agreed, and benign neglect became policy, rationalizing the removal of up to seven fire companies in the South Bronx. In the mid-seventies, austerity measures resulted in the layoff of thousands of firefighters and fire marshals. The result was the loss of 43,000 housing units weekly.

The people of the South Bronx were consumed by what Jeff Chang called “the fires of abandonment” — left behind to survive the end of the world.

Forged from the Fires

After the fiscal crisis cut funding to music programs in public schools, young people made do with what they had. Neighborhood gangs like the Ghetto Brothers transformed from Latin-funk bands into community organizations that brokered truces across the borough. Many of the early house parties credited with growing Hip Hop’s popularity took place in abandoned and condemned buildings. Later, those gatherings moved to schoolyards, giving birth to the block party and reclaiming public space once deemed unsafe or unlivable. Kool Herc’s experiments with extending the “breaks” in records gave break dancers room to create something entirely new. Grandmaster Flash refined turntable techniques into an art form. Afrika Bambaataa turned his former gang, the Black Spades, into the Universal Zulu Nation, integrating the value systems of the time through his seven Infinity lessons. The coalescing and expansion of the four pillars serve as a testament to emergence's role in creating culture.

Hip Hop is a product of the collective—multiracial, multilingual, polycultural—imagination.

Strategies From the Ashes

Every apocalypse leaves behind more than destruction. Often, as I hope to highlight in this series of essays, they leave behind blueprints for a not-yet-defined future. From the fires of the South Bronx, we inherited networks of mutual aid, value systems, and cultural technologies that continue to sustain us in this moment of fascism, structural collapse, and democratic decay. If we concede that—for the people of the global majority—the world has ended many times over, we can meet our endings audaciously and with a learning posture.

So, how, in the midst of the end of the world, did these originators use the ashes of the apocalypse as clay? Below are some strategies from the burning borough:

Polyculturalism: In a time of identity politics that fracture, true solidarity comes from building across difference. Blend traditions and influences freely; let cultures meet and evolve, with respect. Our identities are more porous than current discourse would have us believe. If we’re going to build the world we deserve, we’re going to build it, as we always have, together.

Organize beyond the state: Tenant associations, building takeovers, and CDCs proved that communities can create their own housing and economic systems. When official systems failed, new life-affirming, community-led ones took their place. Sometimes, the best course of action is to do it your damn self.

Center youth leadership: I love beating this drum! We often forget that some of our most prominent civil rights leaders were young people emboldened by crisis. They were the architects of Hip Hop’s form and function, and investing in their vision transformed an entire culture. Let the youth lead.

Joy as survival technology – Music, dance, and art are not luxuries; they are essential tools. Make the work boisterous with joy.

Trust in emergence – Let. People. Influence. You. Let the culture evolve organically; the interplay of people, places, and events can produce something greater than the sum of its parts. Build collectively.

Hip Hop’s origin story reminds us that the estuary is not a place we visit once—it is a condition we return to again and again. We are here now, inheritors of these lessons. The South Bronx showed us that when the old world collapses, we can turn toward each other in the in-between and transform what's left into something alive. The estuary demands that we are rooted in what we know and willing to let the current shape what comes next. What we make of that possibility is, as it always has been, up to us.