Dear Friends,

First – a huge thank you to everyone who joined us for our launch of Decompress! With our participants, incredible performers, and lively discussion, we created a powerful sound that has resonated all around Miami and the world. You can watch the full video from our Music is a Black Technology series below.

And what timing - a few days later, the Florida Board of Education introduced a new K-12 social studies curriculum that nefariously propagates the myth that chattel slavery ‘benefitted’ Black people. This decision comes after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Affirmative Action.

Florida has always been a testing ground for new policies that seek to turn the clock back 400 years on our hard-won civil and human rights. We know that any mention of slavery as being beneficial to the enslaved, though its sole purpose was to profit slaveholders, is an attempt to thwart victories on the horizon: reparations for descendants of enslaved people and essential labor rights that will fight to end slavery in every form as we fully enter the age of AI.

We are fighting narratives that are bigger than one single policy. At Data for Black Lives, we know the importance of being organized, and this means engaging and activating people from across disciplines and divides. We have created a movement laboratory to incubate new programs, new activations, and new ways of empowering people to reclaim data as protest, accountability, and collective action.

We invite you to join us this Saturday for Decompress presents Vanguards for a panel and performances with Black women and femme electronic musicians, artists, and activists from NYC, Philly, and Miami—tickets for sale at the link below.

See you Saturday!

Much love,

Yeshi