It all started with three dollars and ninety cents. On August 15, one Metro ride in Washington, D.C. became the pretext for police to slam activist Afeni Shakur to the ground, mace her in the eyes, and drag her away in handcuffs. The video of her arrest—eyes shut tight against chemical burn and wrists bound behind her back—has since gone viral, sparking outrage far beyond the Metro station.
Something tells me this isn’t another viral 15-minutes of fame. For Afeni Shakur, the woman at the center of the footage, that night was the spark that lit the flame. But she’s been striking that match for years.
Who is Afeni Shakur?
I know what you’re thinking; no, this is not Tupac Shakur’s mother. But these two women share much more than a name. They share a fire. Afeni Shakur of the 1970s Black Panther Party fought with fearless conviction, and the Afeni Shakur of today, @factsandfire on Instagram, carries that same blaze forward on the ground.
Afeni’s activism journey started young, and in the same way many of ours started: through tragedy. At 14 years old, she survived a sexual assault that left her isolated and, as she wrote in “Ari: A Short Story,” “treated like a volatile science experiment” by her classmates. The trauma followed her, staining her school years with anger and despair.
By her late teens and early twenties, Afeni was turning her pain into practice. At a training with the Mass Liberation Project, she found herself cracked open like an egg, years of grief, shame, and suicidal ideation oozing out through her broken down protection. Her story is not one of straight lines or easy victories, but most of us don’t have a story like that.
Through healing-centered practices with the Mass Liberation Project, her philosophy of leadership began to evolve. For her, leadership is not about avoiding mistakes but about “being checkable and adaptable,” working on behalf of the collective and not the ego.
Online, Afeni has sparked many viral conversations, most recently in the event of her detainment.
The video of Afeni’s arrest has received over 120k likes and thousands of reposts, not for the violence she endured, but for the courage she showed. With her vision clouded and her body in pain, she chose to keep calm and send a message. This is the kind of resilience that can define a movement.
But what really happened?
The incidents leading up to the arrest are confusing to piece together. In a now deleted tweet, DC Metro Police claimed that Afeni committed a transit fare evasion, but TikTok users quickly circulated alternative accounts of the arrest, suggesting she was filming police to protect young people from harassment when officials turned on her. The video posted does not show the initial takedown, but even if the police’s claims were true, the punishment far outweighed the alleged offense.
Her arrest immediately sparked protest. The community she had spent so much of her time pouring into flooded the sidewalks of county buildings rallying for her release. She was freed the same day.
The Voice of the Generation?
“Being a leader means actively listening, communicating with clarity, and making decisions that are both thoughtful and objective,” Afeni wrote in her piece. Leadership, as she showed us, is not about the hero worship we’ve so often seen with politicians lately. Leadership is about reflecting the struggles around you and amplifying their voices.
Leadership is important work, but we cannot individualize the work of collective movements. We cannot place the weight of a movement on one pair of shoulders, no matter how fearless or inspiring. Afeni’s courage is extraordinary, but movements endure because ordinary people step forward again and again. To idolize one figure risks flattening their work into spectacle, turning resilience into a performance instead of a shared practice.
Afeni’s voice is not the voice of our generation, but she is the person holding the microphone right now, reminding us what we too are capable of. In her words, “Our hope is rooted in our healing, our justice in our transformation, and the power to achieve these goals already exists within us.”
As historian Howard Zinn once wrote, “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
Afeni’s arrest showed us one more example of the cost of resistance, but her resilience showed the promise of it. She is OK. She is louder than ever. The question shouldn’t be whether Afeni Shakur is the voice of our generation, but whether we will make our voices heard.