Shea Howell discusses everything Detroit. Shea has organized, as one of the founders of the Grace Lee Boggs Center, developing intergenerational relations, within the Council of Elders, and so much more. She is currently working in the water struggle in Detroit and celebrating the most recent win to pause the water bill during the covid-19 pandemic.
Transcript:
Paige:
Welcome to Radical Futures Now. On this podcast, we connect with Social Justice leaders around the world to talk about how to organize, how to be in movement and how to build radical futures now.
Rhiki:
What’s up everybody? It’s Rhiki here. And today, we’re going to have a conversation with Shea Howell, and we’re going to talk specifically about Detroit organizing and the building of the Grace Lee Boggs center. I’m so excited for this.
Paige:
So when I was preparing for our interview, I learned about the National Council Of Elders, which you’re on Shea and I read the Greensboro declaration and it was really beautiful and touching. And usually when I do research in movement history or I learn about elders, it’s sort of painted with this idea that our greatest leaders always die and they’re assassinated and persecuted by the Government. With Malcolm, Martin, Assata, to name a few.
Paige:
It’s true that most of the people who are the leaders of the movement are persecuted so that the movement dies down but, I think there’s really so many elders still among us today. And I think they still deserve a lot of visibility and just because they didn’t have as many well-documented arrests or more press coverage. And yeah, so I was really quite moved when I saw the National Council Of Elders.
Paige:
They reminded me of my own work with APIENC at the Dragon Fruit Network, where we try to meet Queer and Trans Asian Pacific Islanders and build intergenerational relationships. So I was wondering a little bit about where did your activism start? And can you talk a little bit about what that means to you, The National Council Of Elders?
Shea Howell:
I can, I want to talk just for a minute about The National Council Of Elders, because I think it’s really important that people are able to think about being a part of the movement for your life, as opposed to something you do for a little while and then move on. When I first came to Detroit in 1972, I think. I came as part of Angela Davis’s organization, which was then called The National Alliance Against Racist And Political Oppression. And it was shortly after Angela had gotten out of prison and then found not guilty for murder. And when I came to that conference here in Detroit, two things happened.
Shea Howell:
One is, I walked into a room and I must’ve been 23, 24 and I’d been active for about 10 years. And for the first time I was in a room where a lot of people had gray hair and I stopped dead at the door and looked and I vividly remember thinking, “Oh my God, people do this for a lifetime.” Because the movement had been so aged segregated in the white movement. Certainly not in the African American movement, but in the white movement, it was very age segregated. And so to see people who had done this forever, for their whole lives, changed my thinking about what was possible for my own life.
Shea Howell:
So it’s not an accident that young activists don’t know that people are constantly engaged in these struggles. Second thing I thought about when I saw Angela Davis speak, was she was welcomed by John Conyers, Coleman Young, Irma Henderson, Charles Diggs, the first black Mayor or black Congressman and the first black woman City Council President.
Shea Howell:
And they not only welcomed her to the city, but they gave her the keys to the city and said “We’ve got your back.” And that was at a time when particularly white America demonized her. So to see a city where you had emerging black power embrace someone because of their movement’s struggle, made me say, “That’s a city I want to be part of.” So I came to Detroit after a couple of decades of activism as a young person in the 60s. And I’ve been here ever since.
Paige:
I think that’s really beautiful, the way that you understood that the city was going to back up Angela Davis and I think that speaks to why you’ve been there for so long.
Shea Howell:
Yeah. Although I often say Angela Davis got me to come to Detroit, but Grace and James Boggs got me to stay. Because shortly after I got here, I ran into some people, particularly a woman named Pat Coleman-Burns, who were part of a study group that Jimmy and Grace were doing around their book, Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century. And so I joined that study group, got an understanding of revolution that changed how I thought about what it would take to change this country, particularly moved by their distinction between a rebellion, which was where I was, and a revolution.
Shea Howell:
Because they talked about a rebellion as the righteous uprising of people to create a response to oppressive conditions. But a revolution was not only against something, it was for something. And I had never asked myself, “What am I really for? What do I want the country to look like?” I knew what I didn’t want it to look like, but the invitation for Grace and Jim was to think about revolution as what advances our humanity. Yeah. So that’s how they got me to stay.
Rhiki:
What was the name of that book again?
Shea Howell:
It’s called Revolution And Evolution In The Twentieth Century. It was republished about 2012 or so, maybe 2014. And it’s got a new introduction by Grace Boggs. It’s one of the last things she wrote before she passed. And it looks at organizing in Detroit in the 21st century. It’s a really good book. And we organized something called the National Organization for an American Revolution, based on that book actually. That was our primary text.
Rhiki:
I really appreciate you bringing up the fact that, that book helped you think about what you wanted the world to look like. I think a lot of young people that want to get involved in movement have that same type of thinking where they know what they want the world not to be, or they know what they don’t like about our world, but they have yet to form a vision of what they want the future to look like. And I think a lot of people are in the place where they’re trying to do that work, that visioning, envisioning work, that imagining work of, “If I am working for something, what does the end goal look like?”
Shea Howell:
Yeah. And that’s really important these days. I was talking to some people at The Boggs center this morning and we were saying that probably the movement in general is in a healthier, stronger place than it has been in maybe 25, 30 years. And in part that’s because there’s been so much reflection on practice, particularly since the killing of Trayvon Martin and the evolution of the movement for black lives, but that has held within it, this thinking about what kind of future do we want. And some of that I think is because of the wonderful work of Afrofuturists, who are really inviting us to think about the future in the broadest most glorious kind of ways.
Shea Howell:
And so I think that’s helpful, but I think the other thing that’s been really helpful is the platform of the movement for black lives, the development of the Green New Deal, the development of The Leap Manifesto. These are all efforts to give us a picture of what the future could look like. And they’re detailed enough that can see ourselves in them, but they’re expansive enough that we still have lots of room to create and imagine. So I think it’s a great time to think about the future and what we want.
Paige:
Yeah. I wanted to return to what you were saying about you know, meeting Grace and meeting the Boggs, really. And you were mentioning that the primary texts for your organizing was one of their books. And I find that really something that sticks out to me that you were studying and that you were engaged in deep studying in reading and community. That to me is one of my passions, is trying to get the community to read together.
Shea Howell:
Yeah. Grace always talked about how in times of intense activism, it’s important to stop and read and think, and it’s very easy for us to get caught up in the moment. I know I’m great at that myself, but coming out of the early 70s, there were a lot of questions about, what had we learned from 1955 to 1970? That’s a long time. And there’d been a tremendous growth, tremendous pain, terrific gains and losses. And so we had to have some way to think about that.
Shea Howell:
And the other thing is creating new ideas isn’t easy. There’s so much effort to keep our minds narrow and small and one of the great strengths of Jimmy and Grace was that they were able to see beyond the moment and to ask us to really imagine what the world could look like if it was based in justice and peace and ways of living that protected the earth. So it was an invitation to study, not only to build community and learn about each other, but to study in order to think collectively about the kind of future we wanted. So it’s very important and I would really encourage people to do studying now because there’s so much fine work out there to read.
Rhiki:
Well, Shea, we’re so glad that you joined us today. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself before we hop in to the rest of the conversation?
Shea Howell:
Oh, a little bit about myself. Sure. Rhiki, I can do that. I’m 74, squinting at 75. And I like to think I have been an activist for about 68 of years. I was born in a little coal mining town up in Southwestern, Pennsylvania. And I was left-handed, which turned out I had not realized, to be a problem when I went to school. So my grandfather had lived with us and he had lost his use of his legs in a mine accident. And so he spent a lot of time with me because he couldn’t go anywhere else. So by the time I was six, I could read and write and I could write cursive. So I went off to school and they had these block print letters on the board and I quickly wrote them. And while I’m writing them, the teacher smashes my hand with a ruler and says to me that “Left-handedness is the work of the devil.”
Shea Howell:
So that happened two or three times over the next couple of days. By the third day, I said, “I don’t need to go to school. I can already read and write. Clearly they have bad ideas.” So every morning I’d leave home. And instead of going up the Hill to the school, I go down the Hill to hang out with what we called the Hobos. And they taught me how to fish, they taught me how to make coffee over an open fire, they taught me how to make biscuits on a stick. And so early on, I learned that there was a great difference between schooling and education and that people in authority don’t know what the heck they’re doing often. And those were lessons that I have carried through my life I hope. So I got politically active from the time I was in elementary school and I had the good fortune of being in school, elementary school and high school during the civil rights movement.
Shea Howell:
And that helped shape my understanding of the need to work for racial justice. And then of course the Vietnam war came along and clearly working for racial justice meant opposing that war. And then in the mid 1960s, late 1960s, I was in college and we invited Dr. King to come to our college to speak. And because of that, I got involved in the Poor People’s Campaign. And after that, I ended up in Chicago and after that, working with Angela Davis and then with the Boggs’. So I’ve spent a lifetime in trying to figure out what kind of country we can become to become our best self.
Paige:
I love that story you shared about becoming politically conscious at the age of elementary school. Usually when you ask people, how did you become politically aware? Politically conscious? They mentioned usually College or an incident when they were very, very young. So I think children really do know really early on what that feels like without having the language that we have for it now.
Shea Howell:
Yeah, I think so too. I think that’s why education in the real sense is so important. One of the things that we have created in Detroit is the Boggs school and it’s named after Jimmy and Grace, but it’s a school that’s dedicated to seeing that children actually look at the world and think about how to make it better. And so we’ve developed something called Place-based education that engages young kids from first grade to eighth grade in the question of, “How do we solve the problems that you see in your community.” And the kids call themselves Solutionaries because they’re thinking about how to make solutions to problems because they see what we see and they are thinking about it in ways that are in some cases, much more imaginative than our own.
Paige:
Can you talk a little bit more about why that’s important to you about kids being Solutionaries and people being Solutionaries for their own neighborhoods?
Shea Howell:
Well, aside from my own experience where I learned that there’s a distinction between schooling and education, a lot of my work has been with young people and particularly in Detroit in the 1980s. We experienced a tremendous amount of violence with young people really killing each other. And you may remember or know about the formation of a group called S.O.S.A.D, Save Our Sons And Daughters, where we had lost over 40 young people in one year to death by gun violence. And the Mothers of those children formed an organization called Save Our Sons And Daughters with the idea of helping children find a way to peacefully live with each other.
Shea Howell:
Out of that experience, we began to see a couple of things. One is, there’s something radically wrong with a country where young people kill each other. And secondly, much of what was wrong with those young people were their experiences in schools. At the time, as much as 40% of Detroit high school kids were dropping out, that is they were voting with their feet against the kind of educational system they had.
Shea Howell:
So if going to have a future with young people who are healthy, creative, expressive, confident, joyful, we have to change the way they experience themselves in this world. And you can’t expect to create creative, compassionate adults. If you say to children, “Don’t look at what you see when you walk down the street. Don’t pay any attention to those people over there who don’t have a house. Don’t pay any attention to that place that’s fallen down.” Actually, what we want to say is, “Do look, do see and think about what can we do to make this different.”
Shea Howell:
And it was out of that spirit, it was S.O.S.A.D, that we created a program called Detroit summer. And that was a program that took young people from in the city and around the country and put them together with community-based leaders to do projects that actually developed and advanced the community. And you may know the, the descendant of Detroit Summer. And that was a program that took young people from in the city and around the country and put them together with community based leaders to do projects that actually developed and advanced the community. And you may know the descendant of Detroit Summer, something called The Allied Media Conference and The Allied Media Projects. That had its Genesis in this idea that young people have solutions to the crises we face. We’ve just got to find ways to translate those solutions into action. So that’s how I got involved in young people.
Paige:
I was actually reading a book by Dick Gregory. He wrote The Natural Diet For Those Who Eat. And he mentioned something really similar to what you had just said about, If young people are told not to look at the people on the street or look at their neighbors, then they become this sort of environment where it’s really violent. And it reminds me of also the story you shared about being able to go down the Hill instead of up the Hill and talk to the… what you called Hobos and how much you had learned from them and how much they had taught you. Anyway, in the book I was reading, he was talking about how, If rich people had seen how people in the ghetto live, then they would feel appalled about how much money they had and what that means that there’s such a… I’m not really quite sure what that is. Almost like a disconnection to other humans and to humanity?
Shea Howell:
Yeah. Dick Gregory is one of my heroes and he does capture in much of his writing this sense that the dominant culture wants us to not identify with each other, it wants us to not feel compassion or pain or despair. And so every time we move beyond those boundaries, we’re able to do a little bit of altering the direction of the culture itself. Every time we acknowledge each other as humans, what that is in essence an act of resistance.
Paige:
I’m trying to decide if I want to ask the question that I had originally planned, because you have taken me into a new place in this conversation where I haven’t been before.
Shea Howell:
Well, let’s go there then.
Paige:
I know, it’s like, “Wow.” I’m trying to think of all these new things that you’re bringing to me. I also have a new question about earlier, I wonder if there’s something behind that segregation between ages in movement work and activism. And I wonder what funnels into that segregation and that separation? Because I found it quite difficult at least not because they’re elders or because of the age-ism problem that people usually think of when they think of intergenerational movement work. But it’s quite difficult just to reach out to elders and to find where they are and how to support them and how do we talk to each other in our different languages. And, yeah, so I’m still thinking about that, that you had mentioned a little bit earlier with the National Elders.
Shea Howell:
Well, when shortly before Margaret Mead died, so she was at the end of her life, Grace and I went to hear her speak and it was really great because Margaret Mead came out with this staff. Big, long stick and clopped out onto this big stage. And I don’t think she was two feet high at that point. She was just a very small person, very old. And actually, she might not even be as old as I am now, now that I think of it. But anyway, at the time I thought she was very old, but she said, “The reason young people need old people is because young people need to know you can survive tragedy and change.”
Shea Howell:
And I think about that when, I’m just reading now about, Yesterday’s Times had an article about all these young folks in Las Vegas that are committing suicide because of the isolation and the despair they’re feeling being essentially as part of the pandemic. And so part of why that connection between young and old is important, is to give young people to sense that how it is right this minute, isn’t how it’s always going to be. And I think a good expression of that was when there were all the gay suicides and all of us queer folk did little cute videos that said it gets better, but it does get better.
Shea Howell:
And people often find it’s difficult to believe that where you are. So hopefully that’s one thing our existence says to folks, but the other thing, I have said we have maybe five or six, certainly not a decade left, of people of my generation who have experienced the last of the organic communities in this country. And that experience is critical for how we imagine the future, because some of that was obviously limited and nasty, but some of it was also very good and it spoke to values of connection and care and compassion that we see through this pandemic, we really need now.
Shea Howell:
Things like looking after each other at the street neighborhood block level, which was very much a part of my growing up. But by the time you got into the 1980s and 90s, anonymity in both urban and town and rural areas had expanded, so you didn’t have that organic connection. And so the memory of community that we still carry, I think in my generation is something that people need to have available as they re-imagine the future. So that’s what I think on what you’re raising Paige.
Paige:
Yeah, definitely. I love these stories that you’re sharing.
Shea Howell:
Oh, thank you. I love to share them.
Rhiki:
So I want to shift focus a little bit more into the work that you done in Detroit specifically. So I want to talk about how you’ve been working on Water Security. Could you explain a little bit more about what the term Water Security means? And can you give us some insight into what’s been happening in Detroit as far as the shutoffs and the differential water rate.
Shea Howell:
Water security in Detroit is a major issue. We’ve actually just had a bit of a victory thanks to the pandemic. We were able to get the Governor to put a Moratorium on water shut offs, and that was about to expire and because of a lot of pressure on the Mayor, the Mayor then put a Moratorium on water shut offs for two years, which will allow us to move to a real water affordability plan. Now I don’t have a lot of faith in our Mayor, but the water struggle in Detroit has been going on for almost 20 years. And the Genesis of that struggle is that Detroit sits at the edge of the great lakes, which is 20% of the world’s fresh surface water goes through the great lakes. And yet mass numbers of people in our city do not have access to fresh running water in their homes because of escalating water rates.
Shea Howell:
Now the short version of why there are escalating water rates is that the water system in Detroit was built to cover almost a million and a half people and major industries. And by 2010, Detroit had 700,000 people, roughly less than half what the system was designed to support. But the trouble with all infrastructure is that even though you had about half the people, you had the same number of pipes, you had the same size water plant, you had the same number of pumps. So the fixed costs of running that system had to be born by half the number of people. And most of those people, roughly 40 to 50% are people living at the poverty level. So you had a situation happening in Detroit where water rates were fixed and escalating and the number of people trying to pay for that big system or smaller and smaller and smaller.
Shea Howell:
So the city’s response, particularly during the bankruptcy crisis was to shut off the water to everyone who owed $150 or more. That turned out to be over a 100,000 people. That’s almost one in five people in the city, was having their water shut off. And we struggled against that for years unable to really move the city administration until the pandemic. When it became clear to everybody that if you have a city where people can’t wash their hands, where they can’t have clean clothes, where they can’t look after basic sanitation, you are ripe for a pandemic to spread. We had done independent research to show the city that there were public health risks, pre-pandemic. That contagious diseases were highest in the zip codes where people had their water shut off in larger numbers.
Shea Howell:
And the city was unmoved. It wasn’t until the pandemic that we were able to move the city. And that was largely because we were able to the Governor. So the water struggle in Detroit has had two basic concepts behind it. One is, that water is a human right. And the other is that water is a sacred trust. And based on those two concepts, in 2005, the precursor to what became the People’s Water Board, put forward a water affordability plan that said the city should charge for water based on a percentage of income. The United Nations says that water should generally cost people between two and four percent of their annual income. In Detroit, people are paying as much as 20% of their annual income for water. So this idea of water affordability and a plan to implement that was created in 2005, it was passed by the city council, but the city administration refused to implement it.
Shea Howell:
And that’s what led us, a decade later, to the crisis around bankruptcy and literally a 100,000, almost 200,000 people being shut off of water. And that’s what led to tremendous mobilization in the city to have water turned back on. And for the creation of some new plan. If people are interested in the water struggle, there’s an article that I wrote with Mike Doan and Ami Harbin called Detroit To Flint And Back Again: Solidarity Forever, in Critical Sociology. And there’s a wonderful organization in Detroit called We The People Detroit and they are primarily engaged in the water struggle and it produced terrific research and policy papers.
Shea Howell:
And then there’s The People’s Water Board, which emphasizes policy and water affordability and has held, I think, the first international summits on a global water policy here in Detroit. So there’s a lot of activity, but the critical thing for people to think about is if we believe water is a human right, and a sacred trust, how do we then enact that, in ways that protect people who cannot afford to maintain this massive system and how do we ensure that water itself is protected for everyone? I hope that helps with the water struggle thinking, we’ve learned so many lessons from that struggle. It’s been really critical in the city.
Rhiki:
That blows my mind to think about Michigan and in proximity how close we are to one of the largest fresh water resources. And yet we still see so many problems in our state with people’s access to clean water. That just blows my mind.
Shea Howell:
And it should blow your mind because it is such an example of the crudeness of capitalism, of the idea that water is something that should provide profit for a few people at the expense of all of us.
Paige:
I want to know how long the- What is the Moratorium? How do you say this word?
Shea Howell:
The Moratorium is a… Currently, it will be two years and it just happened maybe two months ago, maybe November they announced it. So we have a good two years and there is someone working from the Mayor’s office with community groups to try to create a real water affordability plan. The reason for my limitation of joy, terms of the Mayor’s office is, even while he announced the extension of the Moratorium, the mayor still pays lip service to this idea that what we ought to do is create a fund that will pay the differential of people’s water bills.
Shea Howell:
Now, if you can’t afford your water bill, it’s like an act of charity that will give you some money to cover your bill this month. And that’s bad thinking for a lot of reasons, but part of it is, it evades the structural problem that we face with this large infrastructure. And so we’ve long advocated to use a percentage of a person’s annual income as the way to pay for water. So the Moratorium will last for two years now until end of 2022, I think.
Paige:
Congratulations on that win.
Shea Howell:
Yeah. Yeah. It is a win.
Rhiki:
What you say reminds me of what our former Academic Director, Lisa Brock, used to say, when thinking about what a radical lens looks like. As far as what you were saying about the Mayor and just trying to throw money at the situation for right now. She used to use the analogy that if you’re trying to combat hunger, a soup kitchen will only be a temporary solution but the actual problem won’t go away. So if you actually want to fix the problem of people being hungry in our country, we actually have to look at the structures that are in place that continue to allow those people to go without having food. So I appreciate you bringing that up.
Shea Howell:
Yeah. And that lesson is very deep in Detroit because one of our strongest contributions to the future, I think, is our urban gardening movement and urban gardens emerged out of the necessity of people to get food. And now we’ve got almost 2000 easily documented, vibrant, urban gardens, providing food for families and neighborhoods. So that sense of looking at a crisis and asking, “How do we respond to this in ways that advance our humanity, our ability to be self-determining our ability to be productive, our ability to make meaningful choices.” If we look at a crisis that way, the solution is very different than if we say, “How do we get some food to folks?”
Rhiki:
Yeah. So our last couple of questions are more geared towards Detroit and the history of Detroit.
Shea Howell:
Yeah. You want to know something about the history of Detroit over time? I often give tours of the city of Detroit through the Boggs center. And the place we start is in an area called Elmwood Cemetery and the reason we start there… there’s really two. One is, it’s the only place left in the city that has been untouched by industrial development because it was a place of the dead that was the last sacred moment in Detroit. So people didn’t slaton it and turn it into a high rise.
Shea Howell:
So you still have the contours of the land that looked the way the land looked and feels the way the land felt before the Europeans got here. So that’s one reason I start there. But the other reason I start there is Bloody Run Creek is the site of Chief Pontiac’s victory over the British Imperial army in 1763. And I like people to think that one of the first Anti-imperialist struggles in the world happened in Detroit at Bloody Run Creek.
Shea Howell:
And it happened where Indigenous people, Indigenous leaders, gathered together one of the strongest coalitions of diverse nations in order to prevent the European expansion. And it was a tremendous victory for Pontiac. So in some ways, Detroit has this long history of resistance to European Imperial efforts. And that, that resistance is clearly marked in the waters that still flow in Bloody Run Creek. The other thing which I think is really critical right now is that, like many cities in the North, Detroit was shaped by the African-American migration from the South to the North.
Shea Howell:
And it has become the largest African-American city in the United States. And it brings with it a critique of the dominant culture that is essential as we move toward creating a Multicultural Democracy, because rooted in that critique is an understanding of the degree to which America has always lied to itself about who it is. And until we are able to look at those lies and recognize that we never were a Democracy, that we never lived up to the things we said we wanted to live up to. Until we look at those really thoughtfully and wholly, we’re not going to be able to create the kind of future we all really want. So the resistance in Detroit has flowed from, in this last 60 years, that emergence of black power that has really demonstrated the capacity to make America reckon with itself again.
Paige:
I’m wondering, you mentioned about how Detroit has this history of having the most African-American people now. Can you talk about what can other cities learn or take away from Detroit history and how do you envision the future too?
Shea Howell:
Well, I think Detroit is an organized city. I like to say it’s a movement city, virtually every major movement that has had an impact in the United States has been influenced by both the practical organizing activity in Detroit and the theoretical ideas of social change and revolution. And so there’s this unity of theory and practice that is part of Detroit, is something I think other cities can learn from. But I also think the strength of Detroit organizing is that it has shaped the electrode or political powers that are emerging.
Shea Howell:
Just as an easy example, this year we are establishing the Detroiters’ Bill Of Rights as we write a new City Charter. And that Bill Of Rights has flowed from, the tremendous neighborhood and grassroots organizing that has been emerging in the city over the last 40, 50 years. And it’s able to put forward ways of thinking about policy, that embody values that protect people. So for example, one of the things in the Detroiters’ Bill Of Rights is that people have a right to education, a right to water, a right to live in a clean, secure place and establishing those of as human rights is critical. If we’re going to think about what kind of policies matter for the future.
Paige:
Thank you so much. I was interested if you have anything more that people want to learn more about the Detroit movement, who is a person or organization that you direct listeners to? I would guess that it was Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs though.
Shea Howell:
You can definitely go to The Boggs center.org. People could definitely look at We The People Detroit, they could look at the Detroit People’s Water Board. They could look at the Detroit People’s Platform. They could look at the Eastern Michigan Environmental Action Council. They could look at the Detroit Independent Freedom Schools. And most recently I’ve been working with the Coalition For Police Transparency And Accountability. So those are some things that people could look at right away. Oh, and the Detroit Black Food security Network and people could join the emerging food co-op.
Paige:
Oh man. That’s amazing all these great organizations.
Shea Howell:
There’s a lot going on.
Paige:
Oh, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate all your insight and listening to your stories.I love talking to elders.
Shea Howell:
Oh, well, thank you.
Rhiki:
So, Paige, what did you take away from the conversation today?
Paige:
I think talking to Shea Howell today, I was really reminded of the power of intergenerational relations, especially in my work with APIENC that comes up really often, but listening to her and knowing that she was in our larger movement together, but in a different part, in Detroit based organizing, yeah. That theme just comes up over and over. Intergenerational relations, making sure that we build relationships with our elders and our youth. And I also just love learning about the council of elders, I think that’s so sweet and really thoughtful for them to gather and organize in that way so that we know that there are people before us organizing and thinking about the same critical issues and that our struggles are lifelong bites towards liberation. What about you? What reflections or thoughts are you having after this conversation?
Rhiki:
I think Shea really has me pondering over organizing and specifically its connection to the land and the resources that the land provides. For some reason I just never thought about the efforts that we typically fight for in our movement work, in our organizing work and how they’re really fights for access to basic human rights. And basic human rights are often tied to having access to the land and the resources that the land provides. So I think the way in which I think about organizing moving forward, I will always think about the roots of what I’m fighting for and try to see if it’s connected to the land and think about land and the way in which we occupy it more intentionally.
Rhiki:
And that’s it for our episode today, The Radical Futures Now podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo college. Special thanks to Trevor Loduem-Jackson for our music and Elioenai Quinones for our graphics. Be sure to follow us on our Instagram at Arcus Center. See you next week.