The boys were fighting again. Not all three, just the six-year-old and the four-year-old, tussling over an action figure one had snuck into the convention center. The two-and-a-half-year-old pulled me in the other direction. He wanted everything. Every vendor table held another treasure to grab, another shiny thing that should be his. I watched him like a hawk.

We were at Heroes Con 2024 in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the nation’s premiere comic book conventions. It was mid-June, more than four months before Halloween, but the boys wore their costumes anyway for the two-hour drive up from South Carolina—Superman, the Hulk, and Captain America. We’d come partly for a family weekend, partly to support my wife Ebony’s work as co-host of the Ororo Comics Podcast. But Ebony was nowhere in sight, lost somewhere in the masses of Marvel fanatics and cosplayers.

“Oh my God, I need to find Sanford Greene,” she’d said 15 minutes earlier. “Wait here with the kids.”

Ten minutes turned into 20. Superman and the Hulk escalated from tussling to full combat. Captain America discovered that if he stood on his chair and jumped hard enough, he could almost fly. The convention buzzed around us like a hive, vendors passing collectibles to customers with frantic energy.

When I finally loaded all three boys up—one on my hip, the other two corralled by my sides—and ventured into the chaos to find Ebony, she was connecting with friends and colleagues. But she hadn’t found Sanford. Her disappointment hung in the air. My exhaustion made everything heavier.

 

 

It would be September before Ebony finally found Sanford Greene at a comic convention in Baltimore. I was home with the boys when she called, her giddy voice like a kid jumping on a trampoline in her minivan seat.

“He wants to work together!” she said. “He was so impressed. My science background, the healthcare experience, the ethnobotany stuff. It all connects to what they’re doing in Bitter Root.”

Over the next few months, I learned about Sanford’s work the way you learn about your partner’s passions when you only half understand them—bits and pieces absorbed through dinner conversations and late-night reading sessions after the kids were asleep. Over 15 years in comic illustration. Award-winning work for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image Comics. But the project Ebony kept returning to, the one she couldn’t stop talking about, was Bitter Root, a series Sanford co-created with David F. Walker and Chuck Brown.

The comic follows the Sangerye family, Black monster hunters in 1920s Harlem who battle people literally transformed by hatred. White supremacists become grotesque creatures, and Black victims of racial trauma transform into monsters too. The family fights them all using ancestral root medicine and hi-tech weapons.

I resisted picking it up at first. After years buried in dense academic texts and case law as a law professor, I wasn’t sure a comic would be worth my time. Then one evening in late fall, after the boys were in bed, I found myself standing in our kitchen with a collected volume of the comic series in my hands. I smiled as I took in gorgeously rendered 1920s Harlem—rich browns and golds and deep blues, Black folks smiling and dancing—until I saw the monsters. Twisted bodies and distorted faces, hunters in pursuit armed with futuristic-looking guns.

I kept turning pages and found something I’d never encountered in legal scholarship. I discovered a visual language for racial terror that refuses abstraction. Bitter Root makes visible what law systematically obscures: the visceral reality of hate, the debates about justice that never reach courtrooms, the impossible choices Black communities face under siege. This is why this comic matters for understanding law, history, and the future of justice itself.

This is how Bitter Root heals, through what scholars call Afrofuturism, using speculative elements not to escape history but to reveal it.

 

 

Art by Sanford Greene, reprinted in Current Affairs Issue 58, March-April 2026

 

 

Volume One of the collected comic series opens with two lovers walking through a park after a night at the local jazz club. They spot something in the darkness. We don’t see it yet, only their terror. The next day, the Sangerye family is hunting again. On a rooftop in Harlem, protagonists Cullen and Berg fight a monster—red skin, bulging muscles, yellow eyes, horns jutting from its head like a man merged with a bull. The beast is demoniacal, roaring with sharp teeth and long claws.

Several floors below, Ma Etta and her granddaughter Blink grind herbs and bitter roots to form a potion. As the story unfolds, we piece it together. The monster is actually a human infected with a peculiar disease, and the Sangeryes are trying to cure it. In defiance of her grandmother, Blink makes her way to the roof and joins the fight. She’s young, skilled with a staff, and unsympathetic to both gender norms and Ma Etta’s orders that she remain indoors. With her aerial assault, Blink, alongside Cullen and Berg, finally pin the creature down. After they inject it with Ma Etta’s Fiif’no serum, we see a confused and naked white man emerge on the page, cured of his sickness but unaware of where he is or what he has done.

 

 

Blink Sangerye fights a deadly Jinoo. (Art by Sanford Greene from Bitter Root, Issue 1)

 

This is a Jinoo: a white supremacist transformed by hatred itself, an evil that infects like a disease, turning the consumed into monsters that hide in plain sight until they strike.

That same night, in Mississippi, another Sangerye named Ford saves a Black man from hooded Ku Klux Klan members preparing to lynch him. Ford arrives heavily armed. Monsters emerge from under the white hoods, revealing green skin, sharp teeth, and drooling grimaces, as if the Incredible Hulk had children with a werewolf. Ford shoots them all dead without hesitation.

But hate isn’t the only force that transforms. Later, we discover the Inzondo, people transformed not by hatred of others, but by the trauma and grief inflicted upon them. While Jinoo are created by perpetrating violence, Inzondo emerge from enduring it, their pain and rage turned inward until it consumes them.

Standing in my kitchen that evening, I kept thinking about something James Baldwin once wrote, something I’d cited in my legal scholarship without fully grasping its significance: “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” Bitter Root gestured at difficult questions. How do communities respond to systemic violence? Can people be healed from hatred, or must they be stopped by force? What do we owe to those in our own communities who’ve been so traumatized by oppression that they’ve become a danger to themselves and others?

I’d spent years analyzing Afrofuturism’s relationship to law, tracing how Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower reimagines social contracts, how W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Comet reveals cycles of constitutional rupture and restoration. But I’d never seen the tradition work quite like this. Comics offered something my scholarly texts couldn’t, a visual vocabulary that made abstraction impossible. The monsters I’d been writing about theoretically were now in front of me, exploding from the page.

These questions had shaped my scholarship for years, buried in footnotes and case citations, hidden behind legal history and constitutional analysis. Critical race theory taught me how law embeds racial hierarchy, how formal equality can mask substantive harm, and how legal doctrine systematically disadvantages disempowered communities. But even the most critical scholarship works within the constraints of legal language: analyzing cases, deconstructing statutes, critiquing judicial reasoning, proposing reform. Bitter Root does something different. It visualizes the human cost of racial violence in ways legal analysis too often obscures. It reveals what hate actually does to human bodies, to families, to communities. It renders visible the monsters that law refuses to name.

Legal scholarship, even at its most critical, struggles to represent the visceral reality of racial oppression. We write about “badges and incidents of slavery,” “structural racism,” “systemic harm,” and “racial capitalism,” abstractions that gesture toward suffering without making us feel it. Bitter Root doesn’t allow that intellectual distance.

The Jinoo

 

The Jinoo are fictional monsters, but the violence they represent is a historical fact. The first volume of the comic is set in the 1920s, during what historians call the “nadir” or low point of American race relations. During this time, racial violence reached its peak and federal protection for Black Americans practically vanished. Between 1890 and 1920, thousands of Black Americans were lynched, often while law enforcement stood by or actively participated. Courts treated each killing as an isolated crime, never as systematic terror.

Investigative journalist and activist Ida B. Wells documented the assault in her anti-lynching campaigns, traveling the country with evidence, statistics, and public testimonies. She revealed lynching as organized racial terrorism designed to maintain a white supremacist social order and enforce Black subordination through the spectacle of public violence. Yet federal anti-lynching legislation failed repeatedly. Wells’s work exposed how the legal system treated each killing as an isolated crime. She revealed that racial violence wasn’t driven by individual pathology, but by social structures designed to maintain white supremacy through terror. Decades later, critical race theorists like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw would similarly demonstrate how legal doctrine systematically fails to recognize structural racism, lacking both the vocabulary and the political will to address how law itself embeds and perpetuates racial hierarchy.

Bitter Root visualizes this structural reality in vivid imagery. The Jinoo don’t appear as isolated madmen, but as a social movement multiplying across communities, their numbers growing, not shrinking. The evil operates like a disease that infects through hate, and when it grows strong enough, it transforms white supremacists into literal monsters. When Ford confronts the Klan in Mississippi, he doesn’t face one creature but many, their twisted forms emerging from under white hoods to reveal an organized collective. The comic shows police and government officials—the very institutions meant to protect people—harboring the monsters, perpetuating the hate that creates them.

Most tellingly, the evil itself is depicted as an otherworldly, demonic force from Barzakh, another dimension, suggesting that white supremacy operates as a system larger than any individual, a corruption that infects through social structures rather than spontaneous individual moral failure. Bitter Root makes it impossible to ignore what Wells documented and the law refused to name. White supremacy is a sickness that, when allowed to intensify unchecked, perpetuates itself through the continuous production of monstrous hate.

 

 

The portal between Earth and Barzakh opens. (Art by Sanford Greene from Bitter Root, Issue 6)

 

For centuries, legal doctrine has treated Black people as a threat to civility, bodies that need to be surveilled, contained, and controlled. From slave codes to Black codes, vagrancy laws, stop-and-frisk policies, and the school-to-prison pipeline, law has been premised on the fiction that Black persons and groups are inherently dangerous, inherently monstrous. Both comics and horror fiction have reinforced these narratives too. Horror films like Candyman turned a Black lynching victim into a supernatural threat, while mainstream comics spent decades either erasing Black characters or portraying them as savages and criminals, the “dangerous Black brute,” until the Black Panther appeared in 1966.

Bitter Root upends this racial logic entirely. The white man who shows up as a Jinoo on that Harlem rooftop and nearly kills Cullen is offered something the legal system rarely extends to Black victims of racial violence: the possibility that the perpetrator was sick, that transformation is possible, and that the real enemy remains hidden.

Baldwin understood this when he wrote that white Americans invented “the Negro problem” to avoid confronting themselves, and that “this problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them.” The Jinoo visualize Baldwin’s insight: hatred as self-destruction, racism as a disease that consumes its host.

And then there’s Ford Sangerye, standing over the corpses of Klansmen in Mississippi, his futuristic gun still smoking. He didn’t try to cure the Jinoo. He killed them. The comic offers both approaches—Ma Etta’s cure and Ford’s kill—and refuses to tell us which is right. Maybe there is no right answer. Maybe it depends on the scale of the threat, the resources available, or how much danger your community is in. Maybe the real question isn’t what to do about individual Jinoo but what to do about the political, economic, and cultural systems that keep producing them.

 

The Inzondo

 

But the Jinoo aren’t the only monsters the Sangeryes face. By the end of Volume One, the Black families are fighting one another. The Sangeryes face Dr. Walter Sylvester, a Black man transformed into an Inzondo. Where white supremacists become Jinoo through hate, Black victims become Inzondo through trauma, their grief and rage turned inward by systemic violence with no outlet for justice. Sylvester towers above the Sangeryes, filled with rage that has turned him into a muscular giant with discolored skin, long claws, a long beard, and superhuman strength. When they call him a devil, pleading for him to stop attacking innocent people, he declares:

 

I am not the devil. It was the evil that made me what I have become[...] You saw the hell unleashed in the summer of 1919[...] I lay buried in rubble, next to the corpses of my children, and amidst the fire and smoke and blood and tears, I was born again. I was given purpose.

 

 

Dr. Sylvester didn’t become a monster by hating others. He became a monster because of what hatred did to him. The “hell” of 1919 refers to the Red Summer, dozens of race massacres that erupted across the United States that year. But Dr. Sylvester’s transformation would be complete in 1921 when white supremacists burned Tulsa’s Black Wall Street to the ground. His children died in the rubble, and the legal system never prosecuted the perpetrators. His transformation came from wounds turned inward, from grief and pain that couldn’t be witnessed or remedied. After his transformation, events spiral further. When the Sangeryes kill Dr. Sylvester’s partner, Miss Eliza Knightsdale, in their confrontation, he vows to avenge her death and destroy them.

Volume Two, titled “Rage and Redemption,” reveals the deeper roots of the hate infecting American society. The comic takes us to the 1850s, where purple monsters chase runaway enslaved people through the jungles of Maryland. A younger Ma Etta is among them, learning how to hunt and cure Jinoo on the Underground Railroad. We’re taken to Barzakh, a liminal space in Islamic cosmology reimagined here as a gateway realm between Earth and Hell, where those who have been battling white supremacy for centuries—Black, Asian, Native alike—are trapped, the only ones keeping dark forces from invading Earth. Here, the comic’s Afrofuturist vision becomes cosmic, recentering people of color not as victims awaiting rescue but as guardians who have held the line across centuries, their labor and sacrifice keeping the world intact while remaining invisible in dominant historical narratives.

In this volume, Eliza Knightsdale has reincarnated into a new monster, a far more powerful form of Inzondo she calls an “angel of salvation,” transformed by grief and rage into something beyond what Dr. Sylvester has become. One of the most haunting scenes shows the reborn Eliza bringing Walter face to face with a lynched child in Georgia. She urges him to feed himself from their pain, to embrace that suffering and let it complete his transformation into a stronger Inzondo and join her in seeking retribution.

The more we learn of Walter’s story, the more we understand how he was consumed not by hatred of others, but by the accumulated weight of trauma inflicted upon him. Unlike the Jinoo, whose transformation comes from perpetrating racial violence, Dr. Sylvester’s transformation comes from enduring it.

Throughout the volume, Berg Sangerye endures his own struggle. Infected while hunting the Jinoo, Berg battles to resist the transformation. The Sangerye family desperately attempts to save him from becoming an Inzondo, but he struggles against the fear, grief, and loss he has witnessed. He internalizes the deep sorrow and pain of white supremacy’s victims, and it begins to change him too.

 

 

Dr. Sylvester, transformed into an Inzondo, seeks revenge. (Art by Sanford Greene from Bitter Root, Issue 5)

 

The Tulsa Massacre didn’t merely kill Dr. Sylvester’s children. It destroyed something in him. The legal system responded not with prosecutions, not with reparations, not with federal intervention, but with silence and erasure that made the wound permanent. Toni Morrison wrote in Beloved about stories that are “not to pass on,” too painful to remember yet too dangerous to forget. The Inzondo embody that reality. They’re people crushed under the weight of a history they didn’t create but cannot escape, trapped in a present that continues to inflict the same wounds their ancestors suffered.

Legal frameworks assume harm can be remedied through compensation or punishment. But how could you possibly compensate Dr. Sylvester for watching his children burn in Tulsa? How do you punish perpetrators when most were never prosecuted? How do you prove criminal intent when massacres are publicized by the media, photographed by onlookers, and even surveilled by law enforcement while no one is held accountable?

Even critical race theory, which reveals how law embeds and perpetuates racial hierarchy, tends to focus on harm inflicted from the outside, through discriminatory statutes, biased enforcement, and unequal protection. The Inzondo reveal something harder to conceptualize: the way oppression turns inward. What media pundits cynically label as “Black-on-Black crime” may be better described as people who are both victim and threat, damaged so severely by systemic racism that their pain endangers their own communities.

Berg Sangerye’s infection makes this threat personal for the family in ways the Jinoo never did. When you fight a white supremacist transformed by hatred, the moral calculus is relatively clear: cure if you can, kill if you must, protect the community at all costs. But what do you do with Berg? He’s not the enemy. He’s family. His transformation comes from witnessing too much suffering, from feeling too deeply the pain of those around him, from the accumulated weight of fighting monsters year after year with no end in sight.

Bitter Root doesn’t present the Inzondo as obvious villains. Dr. Sylvester’s rage is legitimate, born from grief, pain, and the ongoing struggle to survive racial oppression. But the comic also doesn’t sentimentalize their transformation. The Inzondo are dangerous, not because they attack Black communities indiscriminately, but because their philosophy of retribution puts them at odds with those pursuing different strategies. Where the Sangeryes seek to cure the Jinoo, Dr. Sylvester and Eliza believe they must be destroyed. And they’re willing to eliminate anyone who stands in their way, including other Black families who disagree with their approach.

While their danger comes from a place of pain rather than hate—a distinction that matters morally and politically—their willingness to kill both Jinoo and those who would cure them makes them no less of a threat. The legal system has no vocabulary for this kind of harm, no remedy for wounds that compound across generations, no way to address trauma that the law itself helped to create and then refused to acknowledge.

Three Ways to Fight Monsters

 

Volumes Three and Four of Bitter Root, “Legacy” and “The Next Movement,” bring us face to face with the deeper issues at stake. For generations, the Sangerye family has fought to save the world from being destroyed by the Jinoo. Yet they and others in the Black community remain divided on how to overcome the hate that transforms people into monsters.

Ma Etta, who has been fighting Jinoo since before the Civil War, and her granddaughter Blink remain convinced that their job is to purify the infected with medicine. Ford believes that not all threats can be cured, and that they must kill the monsters before the monsters kill them. Berg and Cullen emphasize training the next generation and building communal strength before grief and trauma have time to transform more people into Inzondo.

These aren’t just character traits or family squabbles. They’re dramatizations of real philosophical and political debates that have shaped Black resistance movements since the antebellum era.

When Reconstruction granted formerly enslaved people formal freedom in 1865, the question immediately became clear. What does freedom actually require? Booker T. Washington argued for gradual reform, emphasizing education, economic advancement, and opportunities to demonstrate Black humanity toward eventually securing rights. W.E.B. Du Bois insisted on immediate political and civil rights, not second-class citizenship with the hope of future change.

Others, following in the footsteps of David Walker, whose 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World called for enslaved people to violently resist their bondage, and Henry Highland Garnet, an abolitionist minister who urged enslaved people to rise up and strike for freedom, insisted that white supremacy would never voluntarily relinquish power, and that freedom must be taken by force. Still others focused on building strong Black institutions independent of the existing power structure.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency established in 1865, embodied the reform approach. It provided formerly enslaved people with education, healthcare, land, and support, but faced violent white resistance and was defunded within seven years. Frederick Douglass articulated the revolutionary position in 1857: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” After emancipation, when white supremacists launched their campaign to restore Black subordination through terrorism, some Black communities took up arms in self-defense. Meanwhile, countless Black communities built churches, schools, and mutual aid societies.

Ma Etta, Ford, Berg, and Cullen embody all three traditions. Ma Etta’s root work and her insistence on healing rather than killing represents the reform tradition’s enduring hope that transformation is possible, that even those infected by hatred can be healed. Her willingness to risk proximity to danger, to test if the cure will work, represents a faith in the possibility of redemption and change.

Ford’s position—killing Klansmen in Mississippi without hesitation—represents the revolutionary tradition’s recognition that liberty cannot be achieved through moral persuasion or gradual reform. White supremacists preparing to lynch a Black man aren’t open to dialogue. They’re an immediate threat requiring an immediate response.

Berg and Cullen’s work training the next generation, maintaining the family’s root-working knowledge, keeping the practice alive, represents what scholars call the Black radical tradition. It’s the long view that understands neither individual cures nor tactical kills will end the production of monsters in a system that demands structural transformation.

This refusal to choose among these strategies reflects Afrofuturism’s temporal politics. Rather than a linear narrative of progress, from accommodation to militancy to revolution, Bitter Root insists all three approaches must exist simultaneously, in tension. This rejects the Western temporal logic that says communities must move through stages, that one strategy replaces another. Instead, the Sangeryes demonstrate what African diasporic resistance has always known. Survival under siege requires holding multiple temporalities at once, honoring ancestral knowledge while building new futures, healing when possible and fighting when necessary.

 

 

 

Ma Etta prepares an antidote. (Art by Sanford Greene from Bitter Root, Issue 1)

 

Bitter Root shows us the toll this work takes. In one haunting scene, Cullen is attacked by a tree that has become a monster—red eyes dotted across its bark, branches morphed into claws and teeth, bodies hanging from nooses on its limbs. Toni Morrison once observed that “the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” The tree scene visualizes this reality. Even as Cullen escapes, he fears that something greater than individual monsters has begun to infect the land itself. The burden is consuming his whole life.

Meanwhile, Blink urges the families of the oppressed to work together. “For generations now, all of our families have fought for the same thing, but we haven’t agreed on how to fight,” she says. “Some use herbs. Others use magic. Some rely on weapons. But one thing none of us has done is stand together against the evil that infects the soul.”

Volume Four, “The Next Movement,” takes us to 1964, showing how the next generation continues the fight. The volume opens with a school bus full of teenagers heading south to Mississippi—evoking the Freedom Riders—attacked by a Jinoo whose tentacles burst from his chest. In one desperate moment, one of the Sangeryes transforms into an Inzondo to save a potential victim, blurring the line between protector and threat. An older Dr. Sylvester returns, still advocating for destroying the Jinoo rather than curing them.

Toward the end, the Sangeryes realize that even when confronted with a race massacre that levels an entire town, government leaders remain determined to blame the violence on the Black community and preserve racial segregation, the true monster in the saga.

 

Why Comics Matter

 

When I teach the Reconstruction Amendments in my legal history seminar, I can explain the 13th Amendment’s promise to abolish slavery’s “badges and incidents.” I can lecture about structural racism, about how inequality persists through facially neutral policies. I can assign critical race theory that deconstructs how these mechanisms operate. But I can’t make students see what racial terror looks like. I cannot make them feel what racial violence does to families, or witness the impossible choices communities face under siege.

Bitter Root performs that work through its visual art. You can’t skim past a Jinoo transformation the way you might skim lynching statistics. The twisted body, grotesque face, violence etched in color and shadow. You cannot look away. When the Sangerye family argues about strategy around their kitchen table, the panel layout shows you who’s isolated in their own frame, who’s sharing space, whose voice dominates the composition. When Berg or Cullen treats a Jinoo with Ma Etta’s serum, the sequential art makes you feel the painstaking slowness of the work, the risk they’re taking, the love that motivates it.

One of the most fascinating elements of Bitter Root is the back matter at the end of each volume. Edited by John Jennings—artist, professor, and director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels centering the experiences of people of color—each volume concludes with essays and interviews with Afrofuturist writers and artists. Reading essays by scholars like Kinitra Brooks, Regina Bradley, and Qiana Whitted expanded my understanding of the cultural themes woven into the storylines. Interviews with writers and activists like Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Brandon Massey helped me link the work to important cultural works in the horror and speculative genres.

I even got to witness my wife Ebony join the team and become an interviewer for Volume Four. This multilayered approach—visual narrative, historical references, scholarly essays, artist interviews—creates something more than entertainment. It creates a form of public scholarship, making critical ideas accessible to readers who might never pick up an academic journal but will spend hours with a comic book.

The back matter also confirmed what I’d been sensing. Bitter Root isn’t just a comic. It is part of the Afrofuturist intellectual tradition I’ve been studying in my own work on law and literature, a conversation among thinkers using speculative fiction as a method of social analysis.

Law schools teach students to reason through precedent, looking backward at past decisions. But what if those precedents systematically excluded certain experiences from the record?

Bitter Root embodies the Black radical imagination. It takes the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, typically remembered for jazz, literature, and cultural flourishing, and asks a different question. What if we also remember it as an era of monsters? What if we don’t separate the joy in that Harlem club from the Jinoo being fought on a nearby rooftop? This is the methodology at Afrofuturism’s core, not escapism into fantasy futures, but using speculative elements to make visible what dominant histories obscure.

While the Sangerye family’s root-working isn’t law in the formal sense, it functions as law. It establishes norms, creates procedures, grants authority, and determines life and death. Their debates about how to eliminate the evil that drives the Jinoo and Inzondo parallel contemporary debates about criminal justice reform versus abolition, about whether systems can be redeemed or must be dismantled.

 

 

That convention in Charlotte felt like a failure at the time. Three boys in chaos, no Sanford Greene, exhaustion everywhere. I knew how much finding Greene meant to my wife, but I didn’t quite understand why. Now I see how that moment began an exploration into the way comics provide a unique lens for rethinking our world’s future. I wasn’t in Charlotte to find Bitter Root. I was there to support my wife in finding Sanford Greene. But in that journey, I found so much more.

Ebony and Sanford are building something together now, a creative partnership grounded in a shared vision of what Black storytelling can do, what it can teach, and what futures it can imagine. She is part of the Bitter Root team, contributing to the back matter, joining the conversation she’d been following from the outside. Her success is a reminder that cultural conversations are as crucial as political and legal dialogue in the journey toward social transformation.

When I think about what this work means for my three Black sons, I hope it not only fosters a love of reading but also challenges them to lean into their imaginations as a vehicle to think critically about the world around them. Bitter Root shows young Black readers they can be protagonists of justice stories, not just victims. It shows all readers that the categories we take for granted—who counts as human, who deserves protection, what counts as harm, whether transformation is possible—are constructed, and can be contested and changed.

Bitter Root’s very title captures something essential about justice work. Roots work slowly, underground, building networks that sustain life even in hostile soil. They draw nutrients from the past while reaching toward new growth. They connect, stabilize, and persist across generations. Justice movements require this too. Not one-time radical transformation but sustained commitment to creating the conditions where human dignity flourishes. The Sangerye family doesn’t defeat all the monsters or solve the problem of racism by the end of Volume Four. They survive another day, heal another person, train another generation to maintain the work.

As we exited the convention center that day and headed to our minivan, my three sons ran ahead: Superman, the Hulk, and Captain America. They are the ones who will confront the demons that plague society tomorrow. I hope they learn not only the importance of law in establishing justice in courtrooms but also the critical need for radical imagination in revealing the bitter roots of our current challenges and painting a bold vision of a brighter future.

In the meantime, the monsters are still out there. The debates continue. The work goes on. But so does the imagination that makes that work possible, the creativity that refuses to accept the present as inevitable, the stories that show us what law cannot yet see.