// Posts by Nikesha Elise Williams

Finding the Freedom to Love Through Faith
While faith is not often considered a hallmark of progressive values, you can be a person of faith and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. As historian Blair Imani noted in her TED Talk, these identities are neither mutually exclusive nor do they need to be reconciled. However, hardline readings of religious texts – be…

Art is at the Heart of Disability Justice
An estimated 7.5% of the adult population in the United States is now living with long COVID, the long-term or chronic effects of a COVID infection, or reinfection, in children and adults. Artist, teacher, and HIV organizer Pato Hebert is one of them. In January, Hebert spoke with Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, who lives with both HIV…

Changing the Conversation Around Reproductive Justice
“Reproductive justice” was first coined in 1994 by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice and defined in 1997 by Sister Song (a formal outgrowth of that group) as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” To…

SxSW 2023: A Place for Narrative to Thrive
Two weeks ago, I descended into Austin, Texas for week two of the SxSW conference and festival. It’s a real-life gathering of folks who embody the saying “Revenge of the Nerds.” Politicians and thought leaders, activists and entrepreneurs, tech heads and gamers, cinephiles, bibliophiles and music aficionados; all who arrived were welcome. With my interactive…

Fleshing Out History
Throughout American history, efforts to bring the stories and lived experiences of people of color into the broader American narrative have been met with fierce resistance. When SNCC and a broad group of educators organized to make Black studies a feature of the curriculum, states sought to ban — and defund — the teaching and…
“Money is Medicine”
Back in June, I moderated a panel at Alight, Align, Arise, the inaugural conference on reparations hosted by Decolonizing Wealth. The panel focused on the narrative history of reparations, a history that began well before the end of the Civil War as keynote speaker and author Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed during his opening night fireside chat…