I was born the son of a locksmith with a sixth grade education and a teenage mother. I never lived at the same street address for a calendar year until I was 8 years old. I saw the cold, hard face of what systems of white supremacy and racial oppression can do to people.

Then, when I was 15, I read the autobiography of Malcolm X cover to cover in one night. I couldn't put it down. And because Malcolm had been in such dark places—places that I also bore witness to—and he came out of them. I wanted what Malcolm had.

So I went to my high school library and I checked out an English translation of the Qur'an and I read that book cover to cover the next night. By the end of the week I had converted to Islam and started schooling myself on the resistance tradition of black and brown revolutionaries.

Since then, I've been a lifelong activist and educator specializing in the history of empire, colonialism, genocide and revolution. For the past two decades, I've put scholarship in service of the people, especially in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as the George Floyd murder in 2020.

I've organized teach-ins, community education curricula, and other activist and organizing initiatives.

More broadly, I've been working as a public intellectual, activist, artist, and organizer, supporting communities across the country and around the world to challenge imperialism, ethnic cleansing, and endless war, and to build sustainable, just, peaceful alternatives rooted in African, Indigenous, Abrahamic, and alternative traditions.