Good morning, family. Welcome aboard Flight 995, nonstop service into the heart of today’s question: how do we find and protect safe spaces in a fascist climate? I’m your captain, Frenchie Davis, and this is What’s Going On? on WBAI 99.5 FM.
Please fasten your seatbelts, because the political turbulence is real.
The sitting President of the United States is sending troops into American cities on the pretext of crime control where crime has already been on the decline. In front of a confab of the Pentagon's top generals he said that America's military should be deployed into America's cities to fight the "enemy within" as "practice."
This administration has been throwing us into rough air: over 300,000 Black women forced out of the workforce, the Black unemployment rate climbing at double the rate of white workers, funding stripped from HBCUs, civil rights protections rolled back. Each of these is an engine failure in the fight for Black stability and wealth.
And yet—we’ve flown through storms before. Jewish communities under fascism built underground schools and secret newspapers. Enslaved Africans held hush harbor gatherings under moonlight, creating safe zones in hostile terrain. During Jim Crow, Black churches, fraternal lodges, and the Negro Motorist Green Book kept us alive on the road.
Today we must learn from those flight plans—because safety in 2025 isn’t guaranteed by the state. It’s created by us, for us.
As we prepare for takeoff, what does a safe space look like for you today? Where do you feel safe, and what turbulence have you faced trying to get there?
Seatbelt sign is lit, because we’re climbing through respectability turbulence—that pressure that says: ‘Be calm, be kind, be forgiving—no matter the harm.’ Tonight, we test that lie.
Cruising Altitude — Safe Spaces & Fascism
We’ve reached cruising altitude, and from up here we can see the storm patterns clearly. Fascism has taken aim at our wealth, our schools, and our rights.
- Black unemployment is rising even as the broader economy looks ‘stable.’ This is targeted economic turbulence.
- HBCUs, our Black flight academies for leadership and survival, are being defunded—jeopardizing the very pilots we need for the future.
- Civil rights protections are being stripped away. The guardrails that once offered recourse against discrimination in jobs, housing, and education are gone. The no-fly zones for injustice have been reopened.
We’ve got to think like our ancestors: when ships carried us as cargo, we still learned to navigate by stars. In Jim Crow, we mapped safe lodgings with the Green Book. In Europe, Jews passed coded papers hand-to-hand. Today, our survival kit must be as thorough as a pilot’s preflight checklist.
If civil war broke out, where would you go, and who would be your flight crew—your circle of trust? What’s in your go-bag?
