Extraction…

extraction of indigenous persons from their lives, land, and culture – forced to march and die on trails wet with their blood and tears to strange lands from which they would later be extracted through lies and false promises for the unseen wealth below the soil that also would be extracted

extraction of Africans from their homelands and from their beloved families; chained as objectified chattel, whipped and tortured and lynched – the enslaved people who built a nation that saw them as three fifths human

extraction of people of color from economic, educational, and political opportunity – reminded of their place by signs and redlines, the gun and the rope, and flags and monuments of bigotry; extracted from their families by the bullet, the knee, or the chokehold of those in uniform or through imprisonment by a system that continues to discriminate and segregate

extraction of trees from the forests, life from the oceans, and wildlife from the land; extraction of fossil fuels and minerals from the earth that poison our water, air, and bodies; extraction through the removal of mountaintops and shaking of our homes; extraction from rivers whose waters no longer flow to the sea; and extraction of a livable climate from our common future

extraction of work from the poor, stripped of their labor’s value for the profit of the powerful, praised as essential in wars and pandemics, yet treated as expendable in practice; extraction of money and health from the impoverished to fund the militarized enforcement of the relentless extraction

…extraction…death.