Description
A vital path home. Employing African epistemologies and an embodied African beingness, this book embraces the revelation and miracle of Blackness.
Creating a world worthy of our children requires recalling the dignity and distinction of the African way of life.
This book is not written for settler consumption. Kindred Creation is a call and response to dream and design better worlds rooted in African lifeways: a path to Black freedom, a love letter to Black futures, and a blueprint to intergenerational Black joy and dignity—all (and always) on Black terms.
Author, organizer, and designer Aida Mariam Davis explores the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, making explicit the ways that extraction, oppression, and enslavement serve the goals of empire—not least by severing ancestral connections and disrupting profound and ancient relationships to self, nature, and community.
Structured in three parts—Remember, Refuse, and Reclaim—Kindred Creation is a philosophical guidebook and a vital invitation to power and reconnection. Davis employs parable, poetry, theory, memory, narrative, and prophecy to help readers:
- Remember: By unforgetting the unending and cascading violence of settler colonialism and other forms of domination and exploring the ways that African land, language, lifestyle, and labor are stolen, distorted, and repackaged for colonial consumption to extract capital and sever ties to ancestral knowledge, lifeways, and dignity
- Refuse: By rejecting and interrupting death-making institutions and relationships and choosing kinship and self-determination in the face of settler colonial violence
- Reclaim: By revealing that freedom is within us—and within reach. Davis shares how the reader can birth new worlds and relationships and offers strategies for reclaiming land, language, lifestyle, and labor.
The colonial violence and dispossession of African land, language, and labor is inflicted intentionally—and by design. Reclaiming African lifeways and remembering what was forcibly forgotten must be by
creation: a re-membering of our interconnectedness and kinship.
About the Author
Aida Mariam Davis holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and African American studies from the University of California, Berkeley in addition to a Master’s from the University of Southern California in Public Policy and Public Administration. Davis is currently the Chief People Officer of the Sierra Club. Davis founded and led Decolonize Design, a boutique consulting firm with clients spanning the nonprofit sector, philanthropy, and Fortune 500 companies. She created the Belonging, Dignity, Justice, and Joy (BDJJ) framework as an alternative to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industrial complex. Her writing can be found online and in print at various publications, including Stanford Social Innovation Review, World Economic Forum, Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, and UC Berkeley Diaspora Magazine. She teaches a class on social innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. Davis currently resides in California with her husband and two children.
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