Across eight weeks, BLE will pair written contributions with performances and other creative work examining the city's politics and culture.

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Oakland has raised generations of Black organizers, artists, and families whose relationships to the city reach well beyond the neighborhoods where they grew up. Among them is writer, editor, and organizer Amber Butts, whose maternal grandparents were Black Panthers and whose paternal grandparents brought their Black Baptist traditions from Alabama to Oakland in the 1970s. Her upbringing was shaped by people who understood that political commitments came with responsibilities to their neighbors, expressed through the resources they shared and the relationships they cultivated. As Oakland commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, their histories offer a way to examine the city that nurtured these traditions and the communities responsible for them.

 

For its third issue, Black Life Everywhere asks: How has Oakland fed you?

The question comes with a contradiction we cannot ignore. Oakland celebrates its Black political history while many of the residents responsible for that history can no longer afford to live here. Among them are former Panthers and other elders who spent decades organizing neighborhoods and establishing community institutions, yet now struggle to secure housing and essential services in the city they helped transform. A mural can preserve someone’s likeness for decades, but it cannot pay their rent or guarantee an accessible home as they age. What does it mean to belong to a city that has become financially inaccessible to you, and who gets to decide whether someone is still part of Oakland after their address changes? We must confront how a city can celebrate the culture and political history of Black Oakland while making it increasingly difficult for the communities responsible for that history to live there.

Across eight weeks, BLE will pair written contributions with performances and other creative work examining the city’s political and cultural life. We invite contributors to engage Oakland as a place of deep attachment and ongoing struggle, shaped by generations whose experiences deserve attention beyond the familiar narratives of its most celebrated movements. The issue will culminate in an in-person symposium and vendor fair, bringing artists, organizers, and community members together to discuss the Black Panther Party’s influence and the future of the city. We will also collect food donations ahead of Thanksgiving for distribution within the broader Oakland community.

We begin with Butts, whose video reflection accompanies her essay, Mutual Aid, Fascism, and the Politics of Care, published by the Black Youth Project in March 2026. The essay examines mutual aid as an abolitionist practice, drawing from her family’s political traditions and the community support she received during overlapping medical crises. Her video brings those experiences into conversation with the question guiding this issue, locating her understanding of collective responsibility in the Oakland communities that raised her.

On both sides of Butts’s family, neighbors organized rent parties, prepared meals, sheltered families, and helped raise one another’s children. These practices belonged to distinct traditions of Black political and religious life, connected by an understanding that solidarity required material commitments. Years later, while advocating for her child with a rare epilepsy diagnosis and navigating her own cancer diagnosis, Butts experienced the significance of those relationships from a different position. Asking for help meant trusting others with intimate parts of her family’s life, and the support they offered affirmed that needing assistance did not diminish her dignity or authority.

Her reflections also invite a more expansive understanding of the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, whose efforts to address hunger, medical neglect, and educational inequality challenged the distribution of public resources and the institutions responsible for meeting community needs. Disability justice brings further questions into this history, particularly concerning whose knowledge informs medical decisions and whether disabled children are recognized as capable of shaping decisions affecting their lives. Butts approaches these questions as a mother whose family has depended on medical institutions and community relationships, each with different understandings of responsibility.

The Party’s 60th anniversary offers an opportunity to examine the responsibilities that come with inheriting Oakland’s political traditions. Its history deserves recognition, but the people who shaped it deserve more than commemoration. The children growing up here today deserve a future in which they can participate in decisions affecting their lives and imagine their own contributions to the city.

Watch Butts’s video reflection below and read her original essay for a fuller exploration of the experiences and political commitments informing her contribution.

Author

  • Amber Butts is a writer, organizer and educator who believes that Black folks are already whole. Her work centers Black children, Black mamas and Black elders. It asks big and small questions about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance and joy while living in a world reliant on our terror.