Every year in recent memory, we’ve witnessed escalating global violence and emboldened interlocking systems of oppression. And every year, our resolve for justice and community strengthens. With the ongoing genocide in Palestine, looming climate disaster, a rise in militarized policing that harms communities of color, worker exploitation and corporate greed, censorship, and a massive undoing of reproductive rights, we look to the fearlessness of those dedicated to showing us where we can go to achieve justice and maintain hope. 

Movements are sustained by people with a shared vision of what the world can be. Diligent organizing, protesting, solutions-building, and collective action show us that the more just and equitable world we believe in is possible. Prism is a coalition of journalists, readers, organizers, and community members who are activated by this shared vision of a better world. Building on the momentum of justice movements in recent years, we’ve looked at our communities’ engagement and listened to you about what issues you were most involved with and committed to in 2023. 

Here are the five movements that mobilized you in 2023.

Growing collective labor movements, workers’ rights, and unionization

In October, Senior News Reporter Alexandra Martinez asked, “Why is everyone going on strike?” In 2023 alone, more than 453,000 workers participated in 312 strikes in the U.S. Major unionization and strike efforts coalesced at UPS, Dunkin’ Donuts, Kaiser Permanente, United Auto Workers, and Hollywood writers and screen actors guilds. 

Service workers—especially those toiling away in the South where wages are lowest and protections are most insufficient—are facing multiple crises: extreme heat, health disparities, and flagrant safety violations, to name a few. In this Q&A with Prism, Union of Southern Service Workers member Mama Cookie discusses the uphill battle of fighting for labor rights and protections in North Carolina. Also in North Carolina, Editor-at-Large Tina Vásquez’s award-winning investigation into the experiences of H-2A farmworkers draws the unbroken line from the economic conditions developed to protect chattel slavery to the legal structures that allow for the abuse and exploitation of migrant farmworkers today.

The way we work is changing radically, and it’s not just major corporations exploiting workers whose toxic workplaces are getting called out—it’s progressive organizations like Color of Change and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, too. Across industries and sectors, we owe our thanks to the growing labor movements and organized workers pushing for a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Dismantling colonialism and imperialism, borders, and displacement

“Core to any imperialist project is the dehumanization of the people who are displaced, colonized, and oppressed,” write Saba Keramati and Kimberly Rooney 高小荣 in their op-ed, “Why are newsrooms manufacturing consent for Palestinian genocide?” 

Settler colonialism is the practice of establishing colonial power by moving to permanently displace and replace an existing community with a society of settlers. It’s different from purely extractive colonial practices, which involve conquering territory and utilizing indigenous communities as cheap or enslaved labor. Despite the best efforts of conservative politicians censoring educators teaching students about race, slavery, and Indigenous histories in classrooms in Texas and Florida, we acknowledge that settler colonialism is not a system of the past. 

Centuries of thriving colonialism and imperialism have led us to this moment of living in a country defined by exploitation, mass displacement, poverty, and homelessness. 

The U.S. is a nation that produces its power and global capital through colonization—today. Bills like House Bill 273 in Georgia threaten to disenfranchise and displace the Geechee people, descendants of enslaved Africans from Sapelo Island, where they have lived for 13 generations. In May, undocumented people in Florida braced for the passage of Senate Bill 1718, known as the “anti-illegal immigration bill.”

But through decolonial education and looking to Indigenous organizers, we can envision a world beyond settler colonialism. 

In this Q&A with Prism Climate Justice Reporter Ray Levy Uyeda, NDN Collective CEO Nick Tilsen discusses the “liberation framework” of the LANDBACK movement. He states plainly, “I don’t believe in weaponizing what has happened to us historically through a holocaust or the American genocide to use it as a way to oppress other people in the present. I do not believe in those as fundamental values or principles.” 

The state of abortion rights and reproductive justice post-Roe

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion. Fifty years of abortion rights down the drain. But was it really?

Vásquez writes, “We can’t ignore the tension that is often missing in how we report on Roe. Yes—the Constitutional right to abortion gave people a powerful tool for freedom. But Roe was also the floor, built on a shaky legal foundation and so easily overridden that sizable swaths of the country—namely in the South and the Midwest—only had a theoretical freedom.”

While experts in the abortion rights movement navigate the post-Roe hellscape differently, there are essential understandings to take from their honesty and their commitment to continue fighting. In the series, “One Year Post-Roe,” Vásquez spoke to 13 reproductive health and justice advocates about the devastation and the future of abortion rights. 

Reproductive justice advocates have been sounding the alarm for the impending fall of Roe for decades. The dismantling of hard-earned reproductive rights is an ongoing, bipartisan effort. In Louisiana, Senate Bill 342, which banned abortion in all instances, including rape or incest, was authored by Democratic state Sen. Katrina Jackson. 

But there is still hope—these U.S. states are protecting gender-affirming care and abortion access. OB-GYNs filed a brief debunking the Florida attorney general’s anti-abortion rhetoric to support the citizen-led ballot 2024 initiative campaign Floridians Protecting Freedom, which will let voters decide whether to make a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights.

Abolition as healing and reparations for the past, resisting oppression in the present, and building the future

An often-cited quote by Ruth Wilson Gilmore states: “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” 

Since the uprisings in 2020 after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, abolition has gained the attention of the mainstream. As more people identify as abolitionists, we become part of a long history of committing to efforts that both challenge the proliferation of mass incarceration, the police state, and the militarization of the police and build communities of mutual care and aid. 

The need for abolition is increasingly urgent as we witness a terrifying rise in violence enacted by the carceral police state. In Atlanta’s notorious Fulton County Jail, the death of Noni Battiste-Kosoko, who was being held on misdemeanor charges, exposed the “repulsive” conditions incarcerated people have to survive. Crime, Reform, and Abolition Reporter Tamar Sarai investigates how, for more than 20 years, Dr. Albert Kligman experimented on incarcerated men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison—and those who profited have yet to redress the harm. At least 600 people who have been sterilized against their will in California are now eligible for compensation, yet the state struggles to locate the victims. 

There’s perhaps no clearer warning of the far-reaching, devastating consequences of a totalitarian police state than the vision for Cop City in Atlanta—a widely rejected proposal to raze a forest and build a police-training facility that plans to host and train Israeli Defense Forces and share genocidal tactics. All of the mounting resistance efforts serve the goals of abolition and building an abolitionist future. 

In her impassioned op-ed remembering the life of Jordan Neely, lynched by a white, former-military vigilante in May, Prism Editorial Director Lara Witt writes, “Neely deserved to be saved, he deserved money, and he deserved food and water. Neely deserved warmth, community, and tenderness. Neely deserved to live.” 

Abolition can shape this future in which people can live.

Climate justice is an intersectional, interwoven movement in all liberation struggles

Climate disaster is here. Each year, we pass another indicator that our global ecosystem and climate are nearing the point of no return, with unprecedented heat waves, freezing winters, and floods and fires abound. Our world, for many reasons, is becoming increasingly inhabitable. Radical change is needed, and climate justice efforts must be linked to other growing freedom struggles like labor and workers’ rights, immigration justice, art and culture, abortion access and reproductive rights, abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty and the LANDBACK movement. 

The origins of #StopCopCity began as a warning from Atlanta community members about the environmental damage caused by building the police training facility. #StopCopCity has now grown into a full-throated abolitionist movement seeking to challenge the police state that kills and maims people for profit and control instead of valuing all life on the planet. In Texas, Kwaneta Harris writes from prison on the state’s refusal to install air conditioning and the experience of being incarcerated during 100-degree weather. Climate disaster kills the most vulnerable, including incarcerated people. 

Intersecting with labor movements, migrant workers and farmworkers are also particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures and climate-related deaths. In a recent piece, Vásquez reports on two farmworkers who died from heat stress this summer in North Carolina and the rumors of other deaths that swirled, sparking questions about what happens when migrant workers die working in American fields. Addressing the issue head-on, organizers in Miami-Dade have pushed for the nation’s first county-wide heat standard for outdoor workers. 

Also in Miami, archaeologists at the ancient Tequesta site report getting sick and are at risk of cancer due to the 2,500-year-old site being the former location of Standard Oil refinery tanks. Concerns about the possible presence of harmful chemicals like cancer-causing benzene have led to an opening for archeologists to lobby for increased worker safety protections. Even with reports on the hazardous working and living conditions and the historical site designation, plans for building developments are still moving ahead.

Uyeda sketches the far-reaching potential of climate justice, looking to youth organizers in Montana who won a historic climate lawsuit and Indigenous leaders who seek to address the root cause of climate change with the LANDBACK movement. They write, “After centuries of displacement and genocide of Native peoples, settler-colonial governments that have accelerated the climate crisis must return Native land to its original stewards.”