Moving From Ally to Accomplice in the Anti-Racist Fight: An Afrozilla Resource List

For Black History Month every February, Afrozilla—the diverse, global community of Black Mozillians, which includes Pocket employees—creates a slate of programming for Mozilla that focuses on Black joy, not Black trauma. This year, however, this focus is made more difficult with the recent release of footage of Tyre Nichols’ murder by yet another racist police institution.

Our membership collectively hurts and grieves for the loss of yet another of our brothers by those sworn to protect. We grieve for his mother, who will for the rest of her life juxtapose the beauty of her son’s birth with the tragedy of him calling for her as he tried to make it home. Once again, we find ourselves saying THIS HAS TO STOP, fully aware that Tyre will likely not be the last. However, in the words of Dr. King, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

How to Show Up

If you are an accomplice in the fight against racism, now is also the time to consider how you show up in solidarity. Now is not the time for “allyship,” a concept that makes it easy to separate your freedom from ours. Today and every day, we need co-conspirators in the fight, people who are actually doing the work of banishing anti-Blackness, who know that our fates are tied, who have skin in the game. If you truly are an accomplice or a co-conspirator, live it. Show, don’t tell.

Action Through Learning

To get you started, we’re offering a list of relevant media—handpicked by the members of Afrozilla as an internal resource, and now shared publicly. We hope you’ll intentionally read up on the recent killing of Tyre Nichols and countless other victims of police brutality around the world. We hope you’ll spend time looking into the other challenges associated with what it means to be Black in white-majority societies. Most of all, we hope you treat this as a starting point—not a line item to check off, but a muscle to keep limber. We hope that this stays on your mind long beyond February.

Warning: some links may contain graphic content. Image by Lucy Garrett / Stringer.