What Extremism Takes From Artists...and What We Give Back

By the spring of 2025, I had built something real.

Not just a career — though I had that too, hard-won and intentional. I had built a life that reflected my values: a body in motion through dance, a mind sharpened by writing and speaking, a community anchored in Black-Asian solidarity. In March 2024, I earned nearly $13,000 in a single month from public speaking alone. I was curating art, beginning my pointe journey, organizing the Blasian March — a protest that had grown into a nationwide effort to build solidarity through art, culture, and education. I flew to Mexico City, one of my favorite places in the world, and felt the particular joy of someone who bet on themselves and won.

April 18, 2025 was my last day of work. I have not found steady employment since.

What happened to me is what authoritarian governance does to the people it most fears.

The Trump administration did not defund arts and education in a vacuum. It was calculated to target infrastructure that sustains critical voices — the festivals, the publications, the institutions that commission people who ask difficult questions. Two of my highest-paying news outlets folded. Gigs were cancelled. The pipeline I took years to build collapsed within months.

Cultural suppression arrived as a funding cut, a terminated grant, a festival that didn't come back next season. The people most likely to document, challenge, and resist were the first to lose their economic footing.

History is consistent on this point. Extremist governments deliberately target climate advocates, educators, political opposition, journalists, lawyers, and artists — and I am at least three of those things.

No one prepares you for the social dimension of financial precarity, particularly in a city like New York.

Poverty has an interpersonal cost that compounds the material one. You stop receiving invitations when you can no longer show up. Community, in cities built around consumption, becomes something you can quietly lose without anyone explicitly taking it from you.

There is a particular shame in watching your network thin out, not from conflict or distance, but from an inability to participate in the rituals that sustain it. You can definitely tell when people stop hanging with you because you're broke. You get less and less invites. Eventually, you have to recognize that you're no longer part of the community because you can't spend.

I have spent weeks confined to my apartment, working through nights and into mornings, searching for opportunities in a job market with little use for someone with forty publications, keynote addresses at Yale and Harvard, and speaking engagements at the University of Tokyo — because I am also an organizer. I am outspoken. The same qualities that cost me work in the dance world have followed me everywhere.

The worst of it: the days when getting out of bed feels impossible because the rent is due, the unemployment benefits have been pending since August 2025, and the only job advertisements are positions with ICE or contracts to train AI. One an instrument of the very regime dismantling your livelihood, the other an accelerator making the work that defines you obsolete.

There have been days when I did not think it was worth living in a place like this, if at all.

And then there are the other days.

The days I remember that the community I spent years building is also holding me. That people are patient, and generous, and understand that keeping me housed is keeping the organizing alive. That mutual aid — networks of reciprocal support built outside of state infrastructure — is a survival model, one of the most durable forms of resistance ever developed.

Mutual aid has helped people survive fascist regimes across Argentina, Haiti, Germany, and beyond. Disability justice organizers like Mia Mingus have given us frameworks like pod mapping to cultivate community safety networks before crisis arrives. These networks are not spontaneous. They are built over years, through the unglamorous work of showing up consistently, of being present before anyone needs anything.

The Blasian March — that small protest I organized without any plan for it to become anything — has been, without my fully realizing it, how I've been building my pod for six years. The community I thought I was serving has become the community sustaining me. Collective survival works exactly like this.

To be an artist under an extremist government is to be reminded, repeatedly, why art threatens power. It documents. It imagines alternatives. It creates connection across the divisions that authoritarian politics depends on to function.

I think of Toni Morrison's insistence that she could not be distracted by racism from her duty — that engaging with the machinery of oppression only on its own terms cedes too much ground. The work is the resistance. The community is the infrastructure.

My dreams did not survive 2025 intact. But I am still here. Still organizing. Still writing. And if history has anything to teach us about governments like this one, it is that they do not last — and the people who kept creating, kept connecting, kept building, are the ones who carry the culture through.

That work still matters. It may, in fact, matter more now than it ever has.

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