I brace my body in the short moments before it happens. Concentrating on the syncopation of heartbeat and breath, I remind my body to unfurl and relax. I wonder if you can see it – how your words cut the warmth of our discussion to sew my mouth shut. Do you see how this flippant colloquialism makes me retreat? The way eurocentrism shrouds around your analogy and buries me alongside my people's history.
Don’t drink the Kool-aid.
You said it with the same ease lovers reach across a short distance to entwine their fingers in one another's. Casually, as if Jonestown was a sleep away camp where the slumber was too delicious a respite from everyday life. As if the lives lost were only White. American. Valuable.
Don’t drink the Kool-aid.
I’ve heard this phrase throughout my whole life. When I zig zagged across playgrounds on sandaled feet, my teachers would caution us on peer pressure. When uncurled atop a well-worn couch or velvet theater recliner, celebrities and sitcom scenarios offered this as a word to the wise. It spilled out in lectures during evening seminars and quotidian interactions with loved ones, colleagues, strangers, and manifestations of popular culture.
I will not offer you a brief history. I will not lecture or ameliorate your discomfort with a teachable moment, or accept performative platitudes on not knowing – or even worse, that you were just joking. I should not have to tell you your glib reference comes from the largest mass murder-suicide in American and Guyanese history – that this massacre happened in my mother’s home.
I should not have to remind you that I am Guyanese or evoke examples of other massacres and violence to offer me the same courtesy. I will not play the oppression Olympics and do the labor of forgiving the tension and displeasure of your chagrin. I will not paint pictures of the Peoples Temple, Jim Jones, or the 300 minors murdered under the guise of salvation.
I will not offer your absolution.
I can only offer the truth. You must do better.
Kristian Contreras
More on the blog
Keynote address delivered at the New Jersey Women's and Gender Studies Consortium’s Undergraduate Colloquium at The College of New Jersey on March 27, 2026.
Free Palestine.
These last few days have left me with more questions than answers and deepened my commitment to thinking, living, and creating beyond binaries. What we are witnessing with the escalation of violence in historic Palestine moves beyond “conflict” and reductive colonial logics. This violence is rooted in 75+ years of an (illegal) Israeli military enforced occupied apartheid state and over 16 years of Palestine existing as an open-air prison. I have grappled with the right words, the right resources, and how I understand solidarity and accountability beyond identity politics.
I am sitting at the seat of empire as a documented citizen of the United States of America and live on unceded land shepherded by the Tigua Pueblo peoples – right on the border of the United States of America and Mexico. The dehumanization and criminalization of immigrants along this border feels echoed in the nonchalant admission from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Palestinians are “human animals”, and the normative framing of whose lives are grievable – who we deem innocent and the communities who are disposable. There are no clean equations for human rights and what one’s right to liberation looks like. There are no clean and neutral definitions that make “condemning violence” simple.
Today I became a doctor and I am SO proud of myself - all that I survived, created, achieved, and let go in a journey that took so much from me. Without my people, I would not have made it to my final graduation stage. To my people, I love you:
Explore this collection of resources meant to nurture our mental health and wellness needs. The university works to disappear and exploit Black women intellectuals and I want us to survive the journey in one piece and in peace.
*It's important to note that the design and intention of this thread, originally developed for the Our Sistren's Garden Discord, is not meant to operate in place of mental health professionals and/or services.
This thread on the Our Sistren's Garden serves as a place to share anything "audio" that you keep on repeat or listen to as a reminder of who you are in spite of American academia's commitment to keeping us at the figurative bottom. Maybe its Tina Turner's entire discography (a personal fave), a podcast you love, spoken word, or something in between - share your soundtrack to this season of our lives as emerging scholars!
Please enjoy our playlist, Soundtrack to the Season - a compilation of songs that got us, the sistren of the study, through the journey when we needed inspiration, a pick me up, or an invitation to dance it out.
The Our Sistren's Garden's #communityIRL thread acts as ahub to share/discuss community resources in real life and on the web - organizations and groups may offer services or a place for support as Black women navigating this chapter of life. The degree and the process are only one component of the full lives we're meant to lead - so grow your community!
A collection of funding opportunities that I've compiled over the course of my doctoral journey. This feels especially important considering how challenging it is when we don't receive full-funding and trying to be well can sometimes feel impossible when we are not paid living wages. Have suggestions? Holler at me here!
The Our Sistren's Gardens Discord server is our slice of the internet that heavily draws inspiration from the life & legacy of bell hooks and Alice Walker. I’m interested in curating spaces for us – educators, dancers, scientists, creatives, activists, dreamers, disruptors, and artists – to “talk back” as Black women, femmes, and non-binary folks.
The universe 🪐 threaded us together, tightlywoven like my favorite hand-me-down sweater. Our friendship holds me tighter though, with a softness that rivals the finest silks. Though ‘friendship’ feels incomplete, and the syllables of ‘sisterhood’ makes far more space for who and what we are to one another. One year has passed since we first linked up and I’m so very grateful that the magic of our ancestors and mentors stitched us together. With you, this patchwork quilt, my sistren, of kinship brought me much solace and laughter in one of the most challenging chapters of my life.