“… yours is a false idea of freedom,” you said to the crowd, glaring in defiance at them. Meeting as many of them in the eye as possible. Daring them to try you this day. “Counterfeit liberation. You want comfortable revolution, nothing too inconvenient. Just enough to make your lives a little easier. You want to feel safe, though you have no real idea what it means to truly not know safety. Only what fears you conjure in your imagination.

“I want true freedom. For everyone, not just the affluent. But I don’t want to travel that road with allies who recognize my voice only when it is time to further their aims. When it’s convenient for them. I don’t want to travel that road with allies who want to use me as window dressing so that they can make a show of inclusivity. You support a system designed to oppress and disempower, but as long as you get yours, you think you’ve made progress. I neither want nor need allies like that.”

They cut off your mic. Prepared for that, you activated your inducer, which tapped directly into their broadcast system.

“In my work, too few of you wish to collaborate. You do not share resources, choosing to operate in your own silo, afraid that anyone else represents a threat to your revenue. Massa’s got you trained real good. You do not celebrate the achievements of any who look like us. On issues that matter to us, you are strangely—but not surprisingly—quiet. You weaponize your tears or cut off our mic”—you glared at the security making their way toward the stage—“to shame or silence us. Your counterfeit liberation is part of our oppression. We don’t have a seat at your table, though you expect us to rejoice whenever you brush a few crumbs from it in an attempt to appease us. Don’t now be upset that we said, ‘Screw your seat,’ and built our own table. You are in tacit collusion with our oppressors, using your privilege to cloak it.

“I reject your brand of liberation, and I reject you. Asante sana.”

You managed to escape the stage before their security reached you. Part of you wondered if you should have let them grapple with you and forcibly drag you away. Those holovid images would’ve played all over your linknet. You needn’t have worried: The media devoured you. Friends and enemies alike took turns shredding and disavowing you. But Camara Xola stood in front, defending you. Checking anyone who came for you. He even reached out to you directly, to see if he could meet with “the young Muungano troublemaker who disrupts every space she enters.” Because, he said, “someone like that would be the best sort of dinner companion.”