They're not your typical 'preppers' — but thousands look to them for survival tips
15 June
Zani Sunshine was inspired by COVID to move to New Mexico where she built a homestead with her husband and child.
Shortly after the November election, Zani Sunshine filmed a TikTok video for her more than 400,000 followers about “what you need to do in order to be prepared for the madness.” With her long blonde braids tumbling over a simple gray zip-front pullover, Sunshine then outlined the fundamentals of what is widely known as “prepping,” or the work of proactively preparing for disaster, whether natural or manmade.
This story was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson of The 19th. Meet Jennifer and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.
In her post-election video, the veteran off-grid prepper emphasizes the need to gather shelf-stable food, store water, have a first aid kit and a trauma kit, take firearm lessons and prepare for an emergency exit, which requires a go-bag for each family member with enough personal supplies to last them 48 to 72 hours.
As of today, the nearly 2-minute video has been viewed 1.6 million times.
“The current political climate is definitely bringing people to my account,” said Sunshine, who often appears on her social channel in colorful, comfortable clothing. “People are really scared and my predominant demographic is Black women because Black women are like, ‘OK — what can I do to prepare my family? To think ahead?’”
A Black woman who lives off the grid with her husband and youngest child surrounded by greenery and birds in rural New Mexico, Sunshine may not fit the stereotype of a survivalist or prepper. Her easy, calm demeanor exudes through her popular videos in which she makes jokes with her husband or gathers eggs from her chickens. A self-described introvert, she playfully parodies TikTok trends as she shares preparedness advice and promotes her books, which focus on risk assessment, self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
A quick search for “prepping” on social media will turn up countless accounts detailing plans like those Sunshine discusses in her post-election video. The majority of these accounts are run by White men, often with military-adjacent aesthetics: Men with sweeping beards dressed in camo model their tactical gear in their doomsday bunkers.
But there are more and more people who do not fit that mold. Beyond those first search results are a small — but growing — community made up of people who look very much like Sunshine: Black women who are gaining social media prominence by influencing on preparedness, especially for an audience of other Black women. And given the current political climate, this audience has never been bigger or more invested.
In the r/preppers community on Reddit, the conversation is largely dominated by worry over whether President Donald Trump’s tariffs — amid the chaos of international talks and court rulings — will cause shortages of everything from toilet paper and toothpaste to basic food items. On this platform, people who have never prepped before describe loading up their SUVs at Costco, trying to anticipate what they most need in imagining a world with empty shelves. But for women like Sunshine, thinking about being prepared happened long before Trump took office for a second time — even if his reelection has also meant a marked increase in interest in her content. For the Black women who have been involved in prepping since before November 5, 2024, nothing about this moment feels surprising — it’s literally what they have been preparing for.
Sunshine is from Atlanta originally, and began making moves into prepping in the lead-up to the 2016 election between now-President Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Feeling “that something was going to happen in society and that we weren’t going to be prepared,” she started doing the kinds of things she now advises her followers to do — buying an extra bag of rice when they go to the grocery store, picking up an extra flat of bottled water.
Five years later when COVID-19 hit, she felt compelled to make even bigger changes. She and her husband bought a travel trailer and with their youngest son, then 8, drove from Atlanta to New Mexico — where her husband is from — and bought land where they constructed a homestead. They now have their own septic system, a large solar system, a bigger, two-bedroom, full bathroom travel trailer, an additional guest trailer for visitors and a chicken coop.
Sharon Ross is another Black woman — and seasoned survivalist — who was thinking about preparedness well before Trump took office. Online, she is known as the Afrovivalist, a persona she often deploys as part of her preparedness consulting business.
Ross said that through her work, she is hearing from a lot of people of all races, ethnicities and ages who are reaching out for preparedness information. “White people saying, ‘I didn’t know this was going to happen. I shouldn’t have voted for that president,” she said of many of these calls from those newly concerned about shortages.
For Ross, the wake-up call was Hurricane Katrina: She was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time and found herself glued to the news as the storm decimated New Orleans, and in particular the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood. She watched as survivors — including many Black women — said they regretted not preparing and not thinking that anything was actually going to happen. She decided she needed to start preparing — stockpiling rice and beans and building up her supplies — for whatever might happen next. “It opened up my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t ready for something like that.”
Preparing for the next disaster — of any kind — feels even more imperative today, according to Ross. She remembers after the 2016 election when Trump’s “followers were so proud. You can obviously tell who was racist and who wasn’t. People started coming out of the woodwork,” she said, as she heard more and more racist slurs. It was what first inspired her to get firearms training.
And like Sunshine, the pandemic also changed everything for Ross.
As a member of the state of Oregon’s radiological emergency response team, Ross was required by her job to take the new COVID vaccine. She wasn’t comfortable doing so. “I woke up on my 57th birthday, prayed about it, and said, ‘I’m leaving my job.’” She bought land in rural Washington state and started establishing a homestead. Today, she has 66 acres of land, a chandelier hanging in one of her cabins — she has built several herself, in addition to a pantry and prep house — on her property. Her grandchildren are going to spend time on the land this summer, she said, to start to learn how to homestead themselves.
In her online life today, Sunshine sees the kind of fear she sensed during the pandemic. “With this new administration, people are even more scared and they actually ready to start getting prepared now, especially urban people, Black people, people of color — because traditionally, preppers have been White, you know, and other communities weren’t even really thinking about it. But now everything has changed and people are really, really deciding to do something about it.”
Sunshine said that on social media, she hears from a lot of people — namely Black women — who say how inspiring she is to them, women who reach out and share that because of her, they also bought land or developed a food storage system — and feel more secure and empowered for it. With her message that prepping is for everyone — that it can be accessible, doable, and not scary — she’s built a loyal and diverse audience who eagerly look to her for advice and guidance. They tell her that compared to other prepping accounts they encounter, hers helps them feel more calm and secure instead of scared.
It’s a different perspective than that of White preppers, Ross said. “We as people of color have went through the struggle, we knew, we saw it was coming, we believed every word that that person said about what he was going to do, but everybody else was too mixed up with the whole, ‘I don’t want a Black woman telling me what to do.’”
Sunshine said that since Trump’s reelection, she is encountering more racist comments on her social media channels, too. “People feel more emboldened,” she said. The kind of racism and “nasty comments” she encounters online are part of the very dynamic that she thinks is bringing even more Black women into prepping. “It’s just a different climate overall and people don’t feel safe … The unknowns have increased. The potential for everything going off the rails has increased.”
“As a Black woman, I am vulnerable,” Ross said of the climate today, especially in the predominantly all White rural community in which she lives. “If this continues, I feel like we're going to be hunted in the future — you know, back to slavery days.”
It’s part of why Sunshine said she wants more Black women to be knowledgeable about prepping — and realize it is for them, the same as she wants it to be for everyone, too.
“It provides a level of security. It decreases stress when you’re worried about everything that’s going on in the world, when you know that if everything were to go crazy outside your doors, that you can hunker down in your home for an extended period of time and have everything that you need,” Sunshine said. “So it’s not about being scared. There’s this hashtag I use for my business #preparednotscared — it’s all about decreasing the fear.”
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