In a way, I grew up with WWAV, distributing condoms and sterile needles through street-based outreach with my family and holding house parties where we’d talk about safer sex practices and harm reduction around substance use.

THIRTY YEARS AGO, Women With A Vision (WWAV) was just an idea, thought up by a collective of Black women on a front porch in New Orleans, Louisiana. The year was 1989, and the so-called War on Drugs had already been raging for nearly two decades. Black women were increasingly being demonized as “welfare queens” in order to justify the total gutting of the social safety net, just as sensationalized stories about “crack babies” were used to criminalize Black mothers and users in a rapidly ballooning prison industrial complex. The impacts of these policies were lethal.

Black women are being denied the resources, and the right to live and raise our families with dignity—and without state interference.

We’re working to topple oppressive systems because we deserve so much more. The end of these systems is just the starting point. I’m looking toward a future filled with pleasure and joy and community, one where we are free to create art and dance and share our talents. I’m looking forward to a world that looks a little like Mardi Gras. 

Some have argued that Louisiana’s abortion ban is a throwback to the antebellum period, when enslavers profited off the forced reproduction of the enslaved. Landry’s comments, however, highlight how the ruling class still believes they have an unalienable right to control racialized bodies, and when we resist we must be “[brought] to heel.”