🐺 Jefferson, my Pashtun grandparents, and a wolf

⏱️ Reading time: 7 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly-ish newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for women of color in social impact navigating power, career, and change.

What's inside today's newsletter:

1. Not Just America's Story
2. A Radical, Contradictory Document
3. A Passport I Didn't Earn
4. The Math We're All Still Doing

I've been sitting with a phrase for the past few weeks: "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

Thomas Jefferson wrote that. One of the United States founding fathers. He wrote that line about slavery. He knew it was wrong. He also knew his family's wealth depended on it. So he named the trap and stayed inside it, and called the staying "self-preservation."

I keep coming back to that sentence because I think most of us are holding some version of the same wolf — no matter which country's founding myths we grew up inside, or outside of.

🌍 Not Just America's Story

This weekend marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, so the U.S. is where my mind has been. But stay with me even if this isn't your country's anniversary to mark — because I don't think this is really a story about America.

This is a story about what every empire does to the people who built it, benefited from it, and were crushed by it, often at the same time, sometimes in the same family. If your own family history touches the British in India, the Belgians in Congo, the French in West Africa, or the Spanish in Latin America — you already know this story. It just has different names in it.

I've spent the last year going down a rabbit hole on the American Founders — not to admire them, and not to cancel them, but because their contradictions explain something about where we all are now. A country that started as an experiment in self-governance, wrote its highest ideals in one document and its compromises into the operating one, and has been living out that gap ever since.

Neil Howe, an American historian, calls this a "fourth turning" — the idea that societies move through cycles of crisis roughly every eighty years, and that a lot of the world is due for one. You don't have to buy the whole theory to feel that something cyclical is happening right now, wherever you're reading this from. It rhymes.

But that's not really what I want to write to you about today. I want to write about the wolf — and why I think it's yours too, not just America's.

⚡ A Radical, Contradictory Document

Here's the part I don't think gets said enough, even by people who are deeply critical of America: the Declaration itself was genuinely radical.

Thirteen colonies looked at the largest, most powerful empire on earth and said, out loud, in writing, with their names attached — you no longer get to rule us, and here is the philosophical case for why any government that becomes tyrannical forfeits its right to govern at all. That was not a safe thing to publish. It was treason, dressed as philosophy, and it worked.

It didn't stay contained, either. Within a decade and a half, the same language of natural rights and the consent of the governed helped fuel a revolution in France. In Haiti, enslaved people took the words "all men are created equal" more seriously than the men who wrote them ever intended, and built the only successful slave revolt in history into the first Black republic on earth.

So hold both of these at once, because the Founders did: they wrote the most disruptive anti-tyranny document of their era, and at the exact same time, some of the very hands that wrote it held hundreds of thousands of human beings in bondage. Not before. Not after. Simultaneously. The radical liberation and the brutal oppression came from the same pen, in the same year, sometimes in the same paragraph.

And it goes further than slavery. That same Declaration — the one declaring "all men are created equal" — also accuses the King of unleashing what it literally calls "merciless Indian Savages" on the colonists. That line is still sitting in the founding text of American liberty. The land the experiment was built on wasn't empty; it was home to hundreds of nations who were already there, and the same document that broke from one empire quietly began building another — through treaties that were made and then broken, and through land simply taken where no treaty was offered at all.

I don't think either of those is a footnote to the story. I think they're the whole story.

🧭 A Passport I Didn't Earn

Here's why I'm telling you any of this: I think the wolf shows up for almost everyone reading this newsletter, in some form. Not the American version specifically — your version. The one where you've built a life, or a career, or a sense of safety, partly on top of something you have complicated feelings about. Keep reading with your own wolf in mind, not mine.

I'm the granddaughter of people who were never in the room when any of this was decided.

My great-grandparents were Pashtun, from Afghanistan. My grandparents grew up in India, before Partition redrew the map under their feet. My parents were raised in Pakistan and left it. I was born in the United States, a country whose founding mythology I did not inherit by blood — I inherited it by paperwork, by accident of birth, by the particular grace and violence of migration.

And then, in my twenties, I left the country that raised me and spent most of my adult life in the Global South — West Africa, then Central, then East. South Asia. Southeast Asia. I have now spent more of my adult life outside the U.S. than in it. I currently live in Puerto Rico, which is its own American paradox — a place that "belongs to, but is not part of the United States" and is also, unmistakably, a defacto colony.

So when I read about the Founders, I don't read as an heir. I read as someone who has spent twenty five years watching how empires — old and new — decide who gets to be a full person under the law, and who gets counted as three-fifths of one, in whatever the modern version of that math looks like.

Here is what strikes me most, going back to the archives: the Founders knew. George Washington wrote that he didn't think his generation had more wisdom or virtue than the ones to come. Jefferson called slavery "a cruel war against human nature" — and then owned six hundred people and freed almost none of them. They weren't confused about right and wrong. They were doing the oldest human math there is: what do I owe my children's security, versus what do I owe justice for someone else's.

I don't think that math went away. I think we're all still doing it.

The Math We're All Still Doing ⚖️

Something I don't see us talk about enough — in social impact spaces, in activist spaces, in spaces full of people who look like me — is how exhausting and how real that math is for people of the global majority specifically.

We are, so often, one or two generations removed from real precarity. We are the ones sending money home. We are the ones who cannot afford to be radical in the way our ideals demand, because radicalism has a cost that lands differently on us than it does on people with more distance from the edge.

And at the same time — we are not innocent bystanders in the systems we critique. The phone in my hand runs on cobalt often dug by hand in the Congo, sometimes by children, for wages that wouldn't cover lunch here. The grants that keep our organizations alive frequently come from the same corporations whose supply chains and carbon emissions are quietly displacing the communities we say we serve. We take the funding. We fly the flight. We build our organizations, sometimes, on the very extraction we're trying to name.

I don't say that as an accusation. I say it because I think pretending we're outside the wolf's jaw is its own kind of dishonesty, and I'd rather be honest with you than pure.

What I keep noticing, studying both the Founders and the civil rights movement in the same season, is that the people who moved things forward — really forward, not just rhetorically — were rarely the ones who waited until their hands were completely clean.

Fannie Lou Hamer didn't wait. A Mississippi sharecropper's daughter who was beaten nearly to death for trying to register Black voters, and who went on to help lead the U.S. civil rights movement from the ground up. The people who built freedom schools, mutual aid networks, and the Underground Railroad — the secret network that helped enslaved people escape to freedom before slavery was abolished — didn't wait for a version of the system that asked nothing of them. They used what the system gave them to survive it, and built something else entirely to actually get free. Not the master's tools repurposed. New tools, built in parallel, owned by no one but themselves.

Audre Lorde was right that the master's tools were never built to free anyone, only to maintain you. Survival buys time, not liberation; the compromise only counts as honesty if something free is actually being built alongside it.

That feels like the more useful inheritance than anything in the Constitution.

Questions I'm Sitting With 🕯️

I don't have a tidy conclusion this week. I have questions I'm actually sitting with, and I'd rather bring them to you honestly than tie a bow on something that isn't resolved for me yet.

• Where in my life am I calling something "no choice" when it's actually a choice I haven't wanted to look at directly?
• What is the difference, for me, between protecting my family's future and protecting only my family's future?
• Whose labor — visible or hidden — is quietly underwriting the parts of my life I'm proudest of?
• And when I finally do build something of my own, will it look like the Declaration — beautiful, aspirational, poetic — or will it hold up as the actual operating document, the one nobody reads out loud but everyone lives under?

I'd genuinely love to know where you land on any of these. Hit reply if something here is sitting with you too.

Wishing you a weekend of rest, and maybe a little bit of reckoning.

Warmly,
Maya 🧡

P.S. If "the math we're all still doing" piece especially landed for you — worth vs. rate, self-preservation vs. justice — join me July 15th for a FREE 90-minute workshop, Money, Love, and Power: A Financial Reality Workshop. We'll name your money story and leave with one real move. Register here →​

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