Hip-Hop Consciousness in Black Movements

Msia discusses the role hip-hop plays in Black movement work and women’s role in liberation and the nuance of sexualization in hip-hop music. Msia Clark is an associate professor of African Cultural and Feminist Studies at Howard University. Msia has written numerous publications including the texts Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City & Dustyfoot Philosophers, Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism, and the forthcoming African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora.


Transcript:

Intro:
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:
All right. So to start us off, I want to ask this opener question. So, Msia, how do you take care of yourself during this time? And I mean during this time of COVID pandemic, uprising, what have you been doing to take care of yourself?

Msia:
Well, it definitely helps that I love what I do. Class is sometimes like a healing session. So, this semester I’m teaching social media and political change and black women in popular culture. And so, we really get to read about and talk about what it means to be black in this world every day. So we get to come to class and just kind of talk about some of the foolishness that’s happening, how we feel about it, trauma, how to get past stuff and there’ve been more than one time that a student has kind of talked about their personal battles with things, with being black, with being a black woman. And so that I’ve found really, really helped me. And so, all of the struggle, beauty and possibility that comes with being black in this country, just being able to express that and work through that with my students has been amazing, but I definitely also take time for passion projects, for me time, TV time and regularly checking in with my black woman therapist. She’s awesome. So yeah, that’s how.

Rhiki:
I think it’s really great that you have a class where students are able to use this class as a way to get out their frustrations with what’s happening in the world. I think that’s really important and I’m really interested in this social media and political change class. If you could give me a brief overview of the type of conversations that happen in that class, I would love to hear.

Msia:
Well, the class, every fall is centered around the previous year’s kind of the movements that have really dominated social media. Black Lives Matter has continued to be a focus in this year, especially. And so we focus on the US and countries in Africa. So, we’ll look at Black Lives Matter. We’ll look at, SayHerName, we’ll look at Black Girl Magic as kind of more than just a hashtag, but we’ll also look at the total shutdown, the movement against gender based violence in South Africa, and other movements happening on the continent. We’ve added the hashtag Karen this semester to deal with white women in privilege. And so just really looking at how social media, because black people tend to use Twitter, for example, at higher rates than white people in America and just how we’re using it because our stories are not well represented in mainstream media. And so it that’s what the course deals with.

Trevor:
Yeah. I’m definitely one of those black people that use Twitter often. Black Twitter is my favorite thing. So.

Msia:
Yes, Black Twitter is amazing.

Rhiki:
So Trevor, go ahead and tell us how do you take care of yourself during this time?

Trevor:
Well, scrolling on Twitter is definitely one of the things I actually do… What else do I do? I’ve been watching a lot of basketball. That’s one of the things for me that’s like my go-to happy place, is just to sit down and watch basketball and my team is still in the playoffs. So, that’s been really good. I’ve also started getting back into reading a little bit more. I felt like this was the perfect time since we’re inside most of the time to really start to read again and pick up that love for reading. So, I picked up about six books over the course of the last week. So I’m really excited to just sit down and start grinding on reading. But yeah. Yeah. Rhiki, what about you? What have you been doing?

Rhiki:
Okay. I’ll answer that, but I’m really curious, who is your team?

Trevor:
Who is my team? Oh, I’m a Clippers fan.

Rhiki:
Really? [crosstalk 00:04:51] Clippers? Okay.

Trevor:
Yeah. I’m a Clippers fan. Well, the LA connection right there. What’s the Lakers? I don’t know what that is, so.

Rhiki:
Oh, okay. So the way that I’ve been taking care of myself during this time is very similar to you, Trevor. I’ve been reading a lot, really taking advantage of having all this free time and trying to use it to develop myself by reading texts that I’m really interested in. Also, I’ve been doing a lot of writing this summer in the form of poetry. And other than that, it’s mostly just Netflix. That’s how I escape the realities of what’s happening in the world is just by bingeing a Netflix show. So, that’s me. So let’s get started. So Trevor, can you tell the people a little bit about our speaker today?

Trevor:
Yes. So today we have Msia Clark, the associate professor of African culture and feminist studies at Howard University. She has written numerous publications, including the texts, Hip-Hop in Africa : Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers, Pan African Space: Essays on Black Transnationalism and the forthcoming, African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora. She is also a photographer and podcaster. She hosts a Hip hop, African blog and podcast at hiphopafrican.com, sits on the editorial board of the journal, Global Hip Hop Studies. So, a lot. Very accomplished. So welcome, Msia.

Msia:
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Trevor:
Of course. And one of the first questions that I have is what are your thoughts on the recent uprisings and global response around the world over police killings and the killing of black bodies in general?

Msia:
Well, I’m hopeful in terms of really seeing the turnout of folks globally. It’s definitely been… Seeing the different types of folks that are coming out. I think when I was going out this summer and looking around, I was like, “Wow, white people out here.” It was definitely more than I’ve ever seen. And I know I’ve listened to the podcast, your podcast before, and I know you guys have commented on this as well and just kind of like, “Wow.” So there’s definitely that hope. There’s also the fear of it. Like what does this mean? And realizing that the over-policing and killing of black bodies kind of feeds into a capital system that is really invested in its own survival. And the criminalization of black bodies is like this pillar of the prison industrial complex. The defunding of the police and transforming law enforcement in communities of color will be a blow to that prison industrial complex.

Msia:
So I’m like, “Okay, I know that it’s not going to be dismantled easily.” And so there is this fear of what is going to happen and not being sure what the future entails. We have never gotten this far. We’ve never heard defund the police coming out of the mouths of mainstream media. And so, it’s definitely very… There’s that fearfulness. But I also really want to shout-out one of my former chairs at the Department of Pan-African Studies at Cal State, Los Angeles, Dr. Melina Abdullah, who was one of the founders of the BLM, Black Lives Matter, Los Angeles chapter. She was really the one who really helped me understand how necessary it was to bring that struggle and integrate it into what I was doing as a teacher, and how important it was if you’re teaching black bodies, that you also have to understand that struggle that you’re participating out in the street that you have an obligation to also bring that into the classroom.

Msia:
And so being able to do that has been something I really, really learned from her and kind of seen the consequences, things that have happened to her because of that has also been something I’ve noticed and seen. But one of the things that have been a little bit disheartening is the responses by Europeans to Black Lives Matter movements in England and France. And so BLM movements there have been met with a lot more resistance, denial and even anger. And so the racism in Europe is just as ugly as it is here in the US but it behaves and moves differently. And so, if you go on YouTube and you look at some of the BLM movements in England, the comments and the responses are just really far more aggressive than they are here in a weird way, in the sense that there’s just this really kind of disbelief. It’s like, “Okay. Well, then leave. If you don’t like it, then leave. Most of you are the children of immigrants. So go, if you don’t like it here.”

Msia:
So that’s been interesting, watching folks in Europe stand up and say, “Yes, we’re also kind of dealing with these things and we’re going to turn this into a global movement.” And watching Europeans say, “No. No, no, we’re not going to let that happen.” So, these things have been interesting to kind of witness. And I was telling someone the other day, 2020, especially summer 2020 is going to be one that historians are going to write about. We’re literally living history in the making.

Trevor:
100%. And thank you for shouting out Dr. Melina Abdullah, like being from LA and seeing the work that she’s been doing for a long time. But over these past few months, I’ve got to see her at a couple of marches and see her speak. And yeah, she’s just so, so dope. And it really is the heartbeat of the movement out there in LA. So yeah, that shoutout was definitely well warranted for sure, for sure.

Rhiki:
And I also appreciate you talking about fearfulness and being vulnerable with that, because it’s true. Like I’m scared too, you’re right. We’ve come so far. We never come this far before, but because of that, the steps that we take after this will be completely new. How we go about this movement, working and bringing about change after this will be new. So it was just the high level of uncertainty, not only for what the future will hold, but how to go about doing it, how to go about organizing. So yeah, not to say that we shouldn’t, we should continue to move forward, but there is like a little bit of fearfulness there, because you don’t know what to expect next, and you don’t know the type of blowback that is awaiting us in the future. So, yeah.

Msia:
Exactly, yeah.

Rhiki:
So, my question is… Kind of to switch gears to Hip hop. Why is it important for us to bring Hip hop and pop culture into the classrooms and into other academic spaces?

Msia:
Well, one of the reasons I really started… Well, first off I’m a Hip hop head, grew up with it, kind of one of the… I don’t know, like a second wave Hip hop generation. I’m not quite sure how to define that, but so grew up with Hip hop. But then as I got more into cultural studies, kind of realizing the impact of cultural representations, that music, film, art, can be just as useful as a textbook in telling a people’s history, their struggle and their truths, and using Hip hop, I’ve been able to teach feminism and sexuality, youth perspectives on corruption and politics, the politics of language and identity. And I think Hip hop more than any other genre, especially when you take it back to its roots, makes it perfect for the classroom because of its honesty. And because of its roots as a tool for artists to tell their experiences and their views, we’re familiar with Chuck D’s quote that, “Hip hop is the ghetto CNN.” And there’s no filter.

Msia:
So as a result, Hip hop artists have been involved in social change and Hip hop music has often been the soundtrack for that social change. So, it really becomes just a great tool for learning a specific experience in a specific perspective.

Trevor:
I’m also a Hip hop head as well. I’m also an artist as well. So where do you see the roles of rappers, singers, actors, any type of artists during this time, during this uprising and how do you see them helping to push the needle forward to bring about change?

Msia:
Well, I think artists play different roles, and a lot really depends on their situations. And so I know when you look at Africa, for example, some artists live in countries where they can’t go into the streets and protest. And in the US, you have some African artists, for example, who because of perhaps their immigration status have to be careful about how they protest. And so, they use their voices in other ways and sometimes more subtle ways. And sometimes it’s through their music and through kind of the things that they say in their music. Some artists, however, are in the streets and some are with the protesters, side-by-side with the protestors. I know for example, in countries like South Africa and Senegal, as well as here in the US but specifically in South Africa and Senegal, the artists have been directly involved in kind of getting youths to vote, voting out of office leaders that they felt were corrupt or that they wanted to see regime change.

Msia:
And when you look at North Africa in Tunisia and Egypt, Hip hop artists were involved in the Arab Spring. So, artists have a huge role to play. The extent of that role really depends on the artist. I know that at the very least, artists have been able to articulate the grievances of those who were in the streets, at the very least. But at the other end of the spectrum, the artists are themselves in the streets with the activists.

Rhiki:
Yeah. Back when the protests were happening in various cities and stuff, I remember seeing social media posts where J. Cole was just out there in the streets with everybody else. And that was cool. But I also watch this video by Dave Chappelle, the comedian who was talking about the role of celebrities in the movement. And he was basically saying he chose not to comment about it or speak about it for a while, because he felt like the people didn’t need to see him, or they didn’t need to hear his voice. Like we just needed to see what was happening. Like we just needed to uplift the everyday grassroots organizers in that moment, instead of centering celebrities. So I just want to get your thoughts about that.

Msia:
Dave Chappelle it’s been… My kind of views and feelings about some of the things that he has said, it’s been like, “Ooh.” There are times I’m like, “Brother. Okay.” But that stand-up was probably my favorite stand-up he has done in a really long, since the days of the Chappelle Show. And so I think that 90% of it was right on point. And I definitely think that this idea that we have to put a mic in the face of celebrities to see what they have to say, I do think that, yeah, they should not be the barometer for how things are going. At the same time, I do think that we should expect them to do more than just kind of go on as if nothing is happening. And I think one of the things when you contrast in terms of sports, talking about basketball, I was looking at LeBron’s era versus Michael Jordan’s era. Jordan, and they played like everything was cool, like nothing was happening.

Msia:
In LeBron’s era, they were like, “Oh no, no, no, we’re not going out there. No, stop. Stop everything.” So, you can’t just act like nothing is happening. So yeah, no, I definitely understand where he was coming from.

Rhiki:
Yeah. Yeah. And I do appreciate the national basketball leagues really using their platform as an opportunity to display what’s happening out in the world, especially the WNBA. Like they’ve been on it. I’m just saying… Every time I see their shirts, I’m just like, “Oh.”

Msia:
Yeah.

Rhiki:
Yeah.

Trevor:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). One more question for me, I guess is just starting in the Bronx with young black men and then in Tanzania you said that it’s mostly from urban areas and the best are from the poorest neighborhoods. Now, in the US, Hip hop has become more materialized and capitalized and less about speaking on the experiences of the people. But how does that contrast with the music that’s coming out of the continent of Africa? So how does that compare?

Msia:
Yeah. So, Hip hop all over Africa almost always comes out of the urban areas. So, it’s just the nature of it. I think just like the US, that Hip hop in the US, kind of the strongest Hip hop scenes are in urban areas. Some of the first rappers though, did come from middle-class homes in Africa, just because they had access to the resources, but it was the youths in the ghettos in Africa that most identified with Hip hop’s inner city roots. But the battle between commercial rap and underground rap is strong across the continent. In some places it’s stronger.

Msia:
So you have some countries like South Africa where it’s a much stronger battle because the money at stake is much higher. So you do have artists that are… Like Johannesburg, the rap scene is much more commercial versus Cape Town where you have a really strong connection to the original elements of Hip hop and they take their hip hop much more seriously in Cape Town. Nigeria has been pretty much dominated, the scene has been dominated by more commercial artists like Davido, artists that are not necessarily rappers, but have kind of taken over and been labeled Hip hop. So, yeah, it’s definitely a very interesting thing. And so, you’re finding that battle, the same battle you have in the States, where the commercial… What you hear on the radio in the US is not a reflection of what’s happening in Hip hop in the US.

Msia:
So there’s just so many, like when you look at the… Well, people talk about Cardi B and Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, those are three women, but there are so many more women that are rapping in the US, that they’re just like literally three of dozens of women that I can think of that are out there doing their thing in the US Hip hop scene.

Trevor:
So, do you think that happens? Why do we tend to just focus on certain groups of artists? Like you said, Cardi B, Meg… Why do we tend to focus on them versus people like Rapsody or Chika, or all these other sort of female artists that are also doing great work as well? Why do we tend to focus on some more than others, I would say?

Msia:
I think the industry… I definitely think people my age talk about the golden era of Hip hop, the nineties where you had all this diversity and then in the US, you of course had this time period where the major labels really consolidated and bought up most of the independent labels. And then you literally had like three major labels at the end of the day. And so, it pretty much pushed everyone else out. And so you had to become an independent artist or play the game and rap about what they wanted you to rap about and market yourself how they wanted you to market yourself. And so it then became very, very difficult. And the idea was, “Well, we only need a few women on the scene. There’s not enough room for all of these other women.”

Msia:
And this is what sells. This is the formula that sales. We went through the gangster rap era. We went through the [inaudible 00:23:03] era. So these are the formulas that have sold. And so that is kind of… And it’s not even just Hip hop that that is applied to, there’s a really… I can’t remember the name of a good documentary. Oh gosh, it was on Hulu at one point that talked about this transformation of the music industry where corporations kind of took it over and created artists. So like we know Cardi B doesn’t write her own lyrics and that’s fine, I guess, but the creation of these artists… You got your makeup team, you got your choreographers, you got your writers and your auto tune and put them in the microwave, ding, you have an artist. And you play them continuously on the radio saying this is a hot new track. By the end of the day, you’ve heard it so much. You have said to yourself, “This is a hot new track.”

Msia:
So, it’s like this formula that does not leave room for creativity. So yeah, it’s about business and it’s not about music. It’s not about creativity and that’s unfortunate, but you do have artists that are out there, like Sha-Rock who’s an MC from BC. I think she’s based in Atlanta right now. One of the best MCs out there, but she doesn’t get the mainstream airplay that she deserves, but you do have like I know Insecure. Sometimes I watch Insecure and I’ll turn [inaudible 00:24:36]. And I’m like, “[crosstalk 00:24:41].” I’m like, “Who is this?” So yeah. That’s how sometimes you got to catch people because otherwise it’s like how do you hear about them? So, yeah.

Rhiki:
I do appreciate you bringing that up. Like how the music industry too is a part of this capitalistic society in which artists aren’t as free to have creative freedom, almost. Like they kind of have to appease the masses and sometimes that means doing stuff that isn’t necessarily what you want to do, but what you know will sell.

Msia:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rhiki:
And this also brings me to my next question. So I want to talk a little bit about feminism in Hip hop and how… Okay. So, you know how there is… I’ll just say it. So I’ve been hearing a lot of stuff lately about the new Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion song, WAP, whatever you want to call it. And like a lot of people have been saying as a artist or as a celebrity you need to be conscious of how what you’re putting out there is influencing the younger generation. So like this whole being a role model thing, but then there’s people saying, “Well, we didn’t get into this to be a role model.” And I just want to talk about the sexualization of black women in the music industry and what are your views on it as far as like, okay, so there’s this other divide where you know kind of stepping out of your comfort zone and being free, like sexually free, putting your body out there can be a form of feminism as far as you’re not going to repress my sexuality.

Rhiki:
But then also, there’s this thing like we’re more than just our body. So stepping away from the whole making it about our body and just our lyrics being about something completely different. Like what… Yes, what are your thoughts?

Msia:
That is definitely a tough one. I know that Hip hop feminism and the scholarship that came up around that was a reaction to black feminism and the respectability politics of black feminism. It was black women in Hip hop culture, that was a unique experience. And black feminism kind of had their respectability politics about these things. And that you were participating in all of these things, exploiting black woman and sexualizing black women and all of these things. But Hip hop feminism recognize that, but also kind of recognize this idea that what if as a black woman I want to express my sexuality in a way that society may say is inappropriate. And so, kind of the idea that because black women have been portrayed in these ways of being hypersexual and all of these other things that we know have their roots in slavery and everything.

Msia:
But if that is someone’s authentic self and they want to express themselves, then to tell them that they can’t is itself a form of oppression. So, there is that argument and then the furthering of the Hip hop feminism, there’s a newer version of like there’s a Crunk Feminist Collective, there’s Ratchet Feminism, which is something that’s come out as well. Folks kind of an offshoot of Amber Rose’s SlutWalk and kind of this idea of women being able to talk about their sexuality in ways that were frowned upon previously. So there is that, but there’s the other side of it that’s… When you look at, for example, the WAP song, the majority of the writers of that song were men. It’s like, where do you draw the… There’s no way to really know if this particular expression of black female sexuality. Is this woman’s genuine expression of her sexuality? Or is it a group of male executives who are selling, saying, “We want to sell your sexuality and in order for you to remain at this label, this is what you need to do?”

Msia:
So, it’s hard to know which is which, and so then we find ourselves… Yeah, it’s tough. It’s a tough one. And so some women decide to center their sexuality, but unfortunately some women are coerced into censoring their sexuality. I do say that one of the areas I do think that it’s been positive is kind of the representation of queer women. I think queer women have been more visible in Hip hop and more… I guess, able to express themselves in a way that maybe they weren’t in the past in earlier days in Hip hop. And I think that in the US and then even in Africa, in South Africa there is an artist, Dope Saint Jude, who is an out queer artist out of Cape Town. And for a while, women were in the closet, they couldn’t express themselves. So I do think that has been one of the positive areas of this kind of expression of female sexuality.

Trevor:
Yeah. When you were talking, it just kind of makes me think. I saw a tweet… Again, going back to Twitter, I saw a tweet and someone was like, “You all allow Lil Wayne to talk about Lollipop.” Like for all of this stuff. And all these men that just get away with just saying whatever they want being very, very sexual on a track, but then when women do it, it’s just a total… It’s like, there’s an uproar. Like, “You’re not a role model. You’re not doing this, you’re not doing that.” So it just constantly makes me think about that sort of double standard that exists within Hip hop that’s always sort of been there, whether it be like, women not being able to truly express themselves within the art form or just having that double standard of just like, men can say one thing, they can’t say the other thing.

Trevor:
So I don’t know. The controversy behind the entire WAP song to me is just like… It’s really stupid. It’s really stupid at this point just because men get away with saying the same exact thing, like literally down to a tee and don’t get in trouble and have no controversy behind it, so.

Msia:
That is true. I think a lot of times, male… I don’t know, fragility and ego, male ego sometimes, especially cis-heterosexual male ego can sometimes be a bit fragile and it sometimes feels threatened by assertive female sexuality. So, there’s also that.

Rhiki:
Yeah. I also feel like there is kind of pressures on male artists too, or at least Hip hop artists to present a certain persona, kind of like this toxic masculinity, like how they have to be hard and they have to have certain life experiences and they are expected to have those types of things in their lyrics. I think that is also there. But I was talking to one of my friends earlier this week, actually, Paige, who is a part of the podcast team. And we were talking about like, as far as the sexualization of women artists, women who primarily, only their music is only around their sexuality and their bodies. Like whether you can categorize that as sex work. And when thinking in perspective of Cardi B, how she also used to be a stripper, I don’t know. Just how to get people more aware of sex work and everything that kind of falls within that.

Msia:
Yeah. No. And I think one of the things is she’s… One of the ways she surprised people is that she actually has an opinion about politics. And I remember also when she went to Nigeria, one of the things that was interesting is she went to a strip club and actually spent quite a bit of money on some of the dancers that were there. And some people didn’t see the broader significance of that in her going there as someone who danced at a club, validating these women who probably had never made that kind of money and just… Because a lot of the times American artists go to Nigeria, they stay in their five-star hotels, they do their shows, they go home, but she went to a strip club and spent money and recognize these women and their work. And I honestly thought that that was pretty cool.

Trevor:
So, I have a question just switching gears a little bit. So you said you’re a Hip hop head, so I got to ask you, what are your go-to three albums?

Msia:
Well, that is a really tough question. So one of the artists that I really in terms of artists that are out now active, especially in the States, I really do love Kendrick Lamar. One of the things of being a black woman in Hip hop that loves Hip hop is there are the contradictions. So there are some contradictions in his music, but as a lyricist, I really, really do love his music. There’s an artist out of South Africa, Gigi Lamayne and I love her music. She’s a really, really dope lyricist and anything she puts out, I immediately just gravitate towards it. And then I listen to a lot of old school stuff. I think my very favorite old school artist that people are always surprised about, but MC Lyte. I love anything that she… She came out with her first… I’m not going to say what grade I was in, but I love her music. Her stuff was just… Yeah. So, those are… Yeah, the three, I would say just kind of off the top of my head, but there are definitely others whose music I love.

Trevor:
For sure. Sorry to put you on the spot there. I had to see where your head was at.

Msia:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Trevor:
All right. One more thing… Msia, are there any projects or publications that you’re currently working on, you want to plug anything or anyone to the people?

Msia:
Yeah. I’m actually working on a few things. I am co-editing a special issue of the Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture with the organization Words Beats and Life that I know Gilbert has worked with before, but we’re doing a special issue on Hip hop in South Africa. I have a few articles in a book project I’m working on. I still have a podcast. We just released an episode where I was interviewing an artist Moonaya from Senegal. And this semester we’re actually working on establishing an African Hip hop archive at Howard University. So, there’s one at Harvard and there’s one at Cornell and well, the focus is mostly on Hip hop in the States, but yeah, we’re trying to get that established. So we’re in the very, very beginning stages of that, but yeah, we’re hoping to get something set up at Howard.

Trevor:
Dope, dope, dope. So thank you so much, Msia for joining us today on the Radical Zone. You can check out Msia’s work at Msiak… How you pronounce this? Make sure I get your website down.

Msia:
M-S-I-A-K-I-B-O-N-A-C-L-A-R-K.com.

Trevor:
Okay, perfect. So you can check out her work at msiakibonaclark.com. And as we do always, we like to end with a quote and this quote is from the great, great Fred Hampton, “You don’t fight racism with racism. You fight racism with unity.”

Announcer 1:
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 [inaudible 00:38:28] for our graphics. Be sure to follow us on our Instagram, @arcuscenter . See you next week.

And We Are Back! Episode 0

Welcome to Season 2 of Radical Futures Now. Get the inside scoop about our rebrand and the reasoning behind it. Listen and get to know the members of the Racial Futures Now team. Learn about our roles, passions, and why we love to do this work. Hear about what guests and topics we have in store for you.


Transcript:

Rhiki:
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 a movement and how to build radical futures now. Now we wanted to do something really special for you all, so we’re calling this Episode Zero. In today’s conversation, we’re going to talk about some changes we made since season one. We’re going to give you the opportunity to meet our podcast team and learn more about us as individuals.


Paige:
Our old podcast name was called the Radical Zone. Which sounds like the corner in the office, where the diversity committee meets and the carpet is made out of liberal rainbows and sparkles and Angela Davis posters on the wall. But in all seriousness, we changed our name and vision to reflect our values as social justice leaders in the globally connected world. Our conversations uplift current movements and people power on the ground. The way we organize relate to each other and fight for change directly shapes the futures we want to live in. So we’re going to do a round-robin of the whole team and the first round will be, what is your name and role on the podcast team?

Rhiki:
So I’ll start us off. I don’t know if you are all familiar with my voice, but just in case, if you’re not, my name is Rhiki Swinton. I use she, her pronouns and I am the host, content writer and executive producer of Radical Futures Now.


Gilbert:
My name is Daniel Gilbert Bwette. I’m the audio editor and I use he, him pronouns.


Paige:
My name is Paige Chung. I’m the co-host, writer and producer of Radical Features Now. And I use she and they pronouns.


Nikki:
Hi, I’m Nikki. I’m the communications coordinator, and part-time co-host when Paige can’t either, and I use they, them pronouns.


Julie:
And I’m Julie Marron-Parker. I use she, her pronouns and I’m the relationship coordinator and in charge of logistics.


Rhiki:
So now I want to ask you all, what do you love about being part of this team and I’ll start us off. So I really love having deep conversations and being a part of conversations that aren’t afraid to take it there. And what I mean by that is I feel like whenever you’re talking about systemic oppression or systemic racism or capitalism, or what have you, having conversations at the surface level just doesn’t allow for the conversation to be as transformative as it could be.

Rhiki:
And, I get it diving into the depths of conversations around topics like that and the unknown can be scary. You don’t know what you’re going to say, there’s a fear of offending someone, but I think the fear is outweighed by what can really come through in a conversation like that. The learning, the understanding, the transformation that can happen. So I’m a risk taker, I’m always down to have a deep conversation. Plus I just love our team. This is the only team where, when I have a meeting for our team on the calendar, I’m not like, “Oh, another podcast meeting.” I look forward to our meetings because we have fun in them.


Paige:
Yeah. That’s my favorite part about being on this team too? I feel like our meetings are just super fun and we goof off a lot, but my family also calls me big mouth and big ears. And I just love talking to people. I love eavesdropping on conversations. So, being on a podcast just lets me do that.


Nikki:
So in the same kind of way, I think, I’m here and I love being a part of this team because I’m really drawn to intentional, meaningful and conversations that just feel bigger than you. And while you’re in them, you contingently feel yourself expanding almost. And those conversations just fill me and give me life and they give me hope for the future. So I love being a part of a team that, the whole point is to be here and to have these conversations.

And I mean, I get to do it alongside of literally some of the most thoughtful, fun, collaborative, and honest people I know. And that’s just an absolute joy that I get to love fully and trust fully my team and do something that feels bigger than us. And I really believe that this podcast will help at least myself learn to envision and build radical futures. And so I really believe that being a part of this team is going to help save me and save my community and the people I love and all of us. So I’m just really grateful to have a place in a role in it.


Paige:
Nikki, you’re going to make me cry.


Nikki:
Oh my God, don’t cry. I love you.

Paige:
I Love you too.


Julie:
I love doing the behind the scenes work. For me, this is probably the last time you’ll hear me on the podcast. I’m an introvert at heart. So my favorite part about this is reaching out to people that we’re in relationship with at the Arcus Center or that we building new relationships as well as sustaining the ones that we already have and bringing them into conversation, really intentional conversations that I look forward to listening to the episodes when they’re done.

Gilbert:
I think the best part of being on the podcast is to be a part of, for me, a global team. I remember when we started the podcast, the pandemic found me when I was in the U.S And then I was confined in the house. So it was a very big opportunity for me to actually start shifting ideas and conversation with different minds and also different mindset holding conversation. And the fact that I’m the editor I’m usually listening in the background, listening into all these different radical and changemakers from different parts of the world. So that gives me the opportunity to learn. And also being part of this team, you get to learn about what everybody’s doing.

So when I came back home, I’m always looking forward to our team meeting. Even with all these challenges of connections and what have you, but when you connect, you know that you’re part of this huge opportunity to make sure that you’re part of the team that brings the knowledge out there that brings people together is a huge opportunity.


Paige:
Okay. All right. This is our last round. What social justice issues are you passionate and focused on?


Rhiki:
Okay, for me, this is Rhiki talking to, for me being a black woman, it’s not a surprise that I’m really passionate about systemic racism and focusing on how it’s evolved over time. But I also am passionate about black feminism and I think black feminism is a great framework that will help people understand the intersections of identities and how to hold up multiple identities within a space and within a conversation. I think too many times when we have conversations, we want to just focus on just one issue or just one identity. And then people kind of get flustered or overwhelmed when we bring in other identities into the conversation, but it just deepens the conversations. And yet it’s hard to do sometimes, but I feel like we do need to learn how to master that because we’re not just one thing.

Another thing that I’m really passionate about is mass incarceration, because I feel there’s no true way to tackle the issue of racism without also talking about how people of color are constantly being surveilled, targeted and limited by our criminal justice system, a system that’s supposed to protect us. So that’s me.


Julie:
For me coming to the Arcus Center three years ago was my awakening to radical thinking. And I’m still grateful that I get to be in conversation and build relationships with people from all different places in the world that I get to learn from people about what’s happening for them and really deep diving into hard conversations. I am passionate right now about immigration and migration. I’m working on bringing Hostile terrain ’94 to the Arcus Center, which is an art installation. It’s a participatory art installation, which requires people to fill out toe tags that represent people who have died trying to cross the Arizona desert.


Julie:
It exposes the brutality and the inhumanity of the U.S border patrol policies. It calls us to recognize that these human beings have died because of these policies and to memorialize them. But it also calls us to action to start changing these policies that have led to the deaths of these people. So that’s where my focus is right now, but I am committed to being anti-racist in all the ways that racism shows up in myself, as well as in the world.


Paige:
For me, I think everything stems from two things, the first being stories. So I believe the power of language and art that can have profound changes within ourselves and within the world and the communities that we’re participating in. And then the second one would be relationship building, especially across generations. I try to make sure to visit my elders. I try to make sure to talk to the youth and also talk to people my age. And I think that’s really important in movement work. And then the last thing I want to say is my political consciousness was rooted in critical ethnic studies and organizing in the Bay Area with [A-Pink 00:10:28] . And especially in my writing, I try to explore all of these things. The stories, the language and relationship building.


Gilbert:
My areas of passion really lies around community, because most of my upbringing has been really around different communities, and the opportunities it presents to learn and to use the knowledge that gets from different corners of the community. But also, I’m also passionate about teaching young people, especially on the continent of Africa the ability to learn to tell their own stories, which has been one of the most problem especially on the continent with the young people, where we have to wait for other people to tell our stories.

So with a few tools and the skills that I’ve been able to get with also my knowledge from the [Hook 00:11:24] Foundation has given me that opportunity, but also that responsibility to keep on carrying on that responsibility to teach young people to use either photography, to use all these skills, especially in the indigenous hiphop culture to use those skill sets that they get from the culture tell their stories.


So it might be through the bread dance, through photographies, through MC, through spoken word, to make sure that you tell your own truth to the rest of the world. And then when I get the opportunity to travel to the outside of the continent, especially in America, is to also now use that opportunity to now share these stories to either academia to social justice circles, to the friends that I have and also connect with especially people of color in the Americas to also attract them to start traveling to come to, especially in Uganda.


If you can come to Uganda to start travel to any parts of Africa to get that exposure, because I really believe that, that also expands your best of knowledge once you start to travel and also maybe start to feel like you’re not a minority in the community where you… that there is that huge continent that have the people that look exactly like you, who probably think like you, and also when you travel, when you feel like you have now the opportunity to share the knowledge or the skill sets that you have that you probably have not gotten the opportunity to share them where you come from.


Or you feel like maybe that is less of what you have. The opportunity you have when you travel is huge and then the responsibility, the friendships that you make. There’s a huge gratitude points to carry on there. So that is for me, where my passion is to make sure that we use these skillsets, but at the same time to also speak into the political and systemic injustices that we face as young people.


Nikki:
How to follow that. Okay. So I think it’s really important to name that I’m a white, fat, queer disabled non-binary person. And all of those pieces that I just named have played a role in understanding who I am and who the world is and my relationship to it. And so I’m really, really deeply passionate and really oriented towards body liberation, specifically fat activism for me and who I am, but the idea of body liberation is just something that’s always just at the tip of my tongue, because I believe it’s a really important anchor to the work I do, and to the idea of a liberated and radical future.

So yeah, I would say that body liberation and fat activism is a big part of who I am. I’m also really passionate about disability justice. I want to clear everything up and I’m really, really also oriented towards the idea of just grappling with nuance and learning how to hold nuance as a way to reject binary thinking and just recognizing the complexity in our lives and ourselves as human while scraping every little bit of healing and hope I can out of my time. Is kind of how I spend my time and what I’m passionate about and what I think I can offer to this podcast. Yeah.


Paige:
I love you all. This was great. Hey, Rhiki, what should the listeners be excited for in season two?


Rhiki:
Well, Paige, we have some amazing guests coming. So we have Sammie and [Yuan 00:15:22] from A-Pink, which is your organization. We have Mia Henry, Shae Howell, Abeni Jones. We’re also talking about topics like time banking. If you don’t know what that is, then you definitely need to listen to that episode and radical community care.


Gilbert:
So, in this season we’re also going to have Baba Buntu, who is coming from South Africa, indigenously also called as Azania land. He is huge on centering people of color with African knowledge especially young boys and youth, like how do you grow up when you feel you’re not shaken by the systemic problems that are surrounding you within the community that you live in, but you feel like you have the path to move forward.


They have one of the biggest African library books in South Africa, and he also the CEO of a company called Ebukhosini Solutions where Baba Buntu and his wife go to different countries, empowering young people, especially young people of color on how to ground themselves and feel powerful in the community where they feel pressures of different kinds of things that are surrounding them. So I’m really excited to listen to the kind of knowledge that he’ll be sharing on this podcast


Rhiki:
And we also want to be intentional this time around about making sure our audience is able to get involved in some of the issue areas that we cover on our podcasts. So the way that we’re going to do that is for every episode, we’ll provide our audience with some resources and a resource list that they can click on to get the books that we talked about, or to get connected to the organizations that we named in our conversations. So be on the lookout for that. I’m really excited about it.


Paige:
So that’s us, our rebrand and what we have coming for you in season two. If you want to know more, you can go to our website, acsjlradicalfutures.kzoo.edu. That’s acsjlradicalfutures.kzoo.edu. Centering the radical now to build radical future.

A Conversation with Lisa Brock

Dr. Lisa Brock is currently the Academic Director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is the senior editor of the Praxis Center, an online resource center for Scholars, Activists and Artists. She serves as a Trustee on the Davis Putter Scholarship fund for radical student activists. Since the early 1990s, Brock has been researching and writing on African-American solidarity with South Africa and Cuba liberation struggles and important issues in the African Diaspora History. She also teaches courses on Black History, and is working on a book project entitled: Enslavement and Resistance in Two Black Atlantic Port Cities, Charleston and Havana. During her undergraduate career at Howard University, Lisa joined the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (DC). This led her to become active in campaigns, including being the chairperson of the Terrence Johnson Defense Committee, which supported Terrence, a 15-year-old victim of Police Brutality in Maryland. While getting her PhD at Northwestern University, she served in the leadership of the Chicago anti-apartheid movement and could be seen often on “Chicago Tonight”. Because of her anti-apartheid work both in Mozambique and after, she was invited as an honored guest to the African National Congress’ Centennial Celebration in 2012. Lisa and her husband, Otis Cunningham, became key coordinators of the Venceremitos Project which for many years sent children from the US to the Jose Marti Pioneer Camp in Cuba, which hosted thousands of children from over 40 countries each summer.


Transcript:

Tirrea Billings:
Welcome to the Radical Zone podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo College, whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building.

We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued. The inherent dignity of all people is recognized. The opportunity to develop ones full potential is available to every person and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

Rhiki Swinton:
Hey you all, thanks for tuning in. My name is Rhiki Swinton and I’m the Center Manager of the Arcus Center. I have with me my co-host, Tirrea Billings.

Tirrea Billings:
Hey everyone.

Rhiki Swinton:
Before we get started, I want to take time to acknowledge the recent current events that have happened in our society regarding police brutality in the deaths of unarmed Black people. We will discuss police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement in our BLM series in the near future, so be on the lookout for that. But today we want to take the time to talk with Dr. Lisa Brock, the Director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership about her journey into this work of organizing and activism.

Tirrea Billings:
Dr. Lisa Brock is a radical intellectual and activist. She holds a doctorate in African history from Northwestern University. She is the Academic Director and Acting Executive Director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College. Her articles on people of African descent in Africa and the Americans have appeared in dozens of academic journals and as book chapters. She is the co-editor of Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution with Digna Castaeda Fuertes. Faculty Ameritas at the University of Havana.

Her latest book project is a comparative study of enslavement and resistance in Charleston and Havana at the turn of the 18th Century. As an historian and activist, Dr. Brock is an internationalist who views history as a way to enter contemporary discussions about race, class, gender and global inequalities. Living in Mozambique in the 1980s, she worked with Mandela’s African National Congress and in the 1980s/1990s was a national coordinator of the [inaudible 00:03:03] project in solidarity with Cuba. She has organized study trips to Cuba and South Africa. Welcome Dr. Brock.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Thank you very much. It’s good to be here.

Rhiki Swinton:
So, Lisa how have you been since COVID-19 and the start of the self-quarantine?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
It’s been tough. It’s been very tough trying to figure out how to reorganize and recalibrate the center virtually has not been easy. But I think the bigger issue has been watching people die in this country and the lack of any kind of real national leadership that would mediate some of these deaths and these issues. So I feel like people are dying in ways that they shouldn’t have to. And so that’s been really, really difficult as well. But we will survive. One of the things that’s helped me is I think about my grandparents and the Great Depression and Jim Crow and what they all went through and what our ancestors went through. And if they survived that, we can survive this.

Tirrea Billings:
Okay. So it’s my understanding that you’re the current Academic Director and the Acting Executive Director of the Arcus Center and that you were there from the beginning. So could you touch a little bit on the development of the center and the idea behind its inception?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Yes. I actually came, the center had been in operation for one year when I came. So I am the founding Academic Director, but there was an Executive Director for one year before I came. And we have a dual leadership and directorship model and that was important from the beginning. So the Arcus Center was developed by the former president of Kalamazoo College and Jon Stryker, who is the founder of the Arcus Foundation in New York City, and the Executive Director at that time, Urvashi Vaid.

And the three of them decided that the idea of having social justice within a liberal arts college was something that they thought was important for our times, and that Kalamazoo College could be a national and international leader on this issue of bringing social justice to the liberal arts. And so it came about with that discussion and the Arcus Foundation endowed the center at $23 million, in addition to $5 million for the first few years. And the idea of a building, a modern building that social justice was seen as a part of was also a part of the early discussions. And the first few years we did not have the building, but the building was finally finished in the fall of 2014.

And according to Gang Studios, the architectural firm and Jeanne Gang, the principal there, according to Jeanne, this is the only building that she knew of at the time that was built with the concept of social justice in mind. While there are other social justice centers around the world and religious justice centers around the world, those buildings weren’t built necessarily with social justice in mind. And so the Arcus Center is unique in many ways both in terms of what we do, and also the fact that we’re in a liberal arts institution and the fact that we have a building that’s won many awards because it took social justice in mind in the conception of the structure of the building.

Rhiki Swinton:
Yes, yes. So for those who are not familiar, the Arcus Center is located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and is a part of Kalamazoo College. The Arcus Center has not only improved the cultural climate at Kalamazoo College and the surrounding community, but it’s also had a national impact as well. Lisa, could you talk about some of the projects and / people that came through the Arcus Center and kind of the result of the work done with those people in the projects that it has in the broader community?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Yes. This has been so exciting. As you say, we’ve worked with student activists on campus to bring about a lot of change on campus, which has been great. And I should mention that most of that came through student protests. And I think with the social justice center here, we were able to offer them a kind of, I always like to say we are the wind behind their sails, and probably had we not been here they would not have found that wind. And so I think that we’ve been able to really, really assist in changing the climate here, but a lot of it did come from student’s own initiative and student protest.

In terms of the bigger picture nationally and internationally, we’re very proud of the kind of work we’ve been doing here. I mean, one person that was here before #blacklivesmatter was Patrisse Cullors. She came here as a part of our social justice leadership prize. Her organization, Dignity and Power in Los Angeles was a finalist for the prize and they came to campus and presented their work on campus. And that was in 2013. We invited Patrisse back in the fall of 2014 and between 2013 and 2014 that the Trayvon Martin case had inspired Patrisse and two other Black queer women to start #blacklivesmatter.

And in August of 2014, when Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson and left to lie on the street for over four hours, literally to bleed out in his community. I mean, can you imagine the community that you grew up in and the police shoot you and all the people that saw you grow up there can’t get to you because they’ve surrounded the body and allowed you to lay in the street for four hours. It was just outrageous. And so Patrisse came back in fall of 2014 and she credits the Arcus Center with some of her development. So we’re very proud because of course Black Lives Matter became a huge thing and she was one of the founders of that.

We also have had regional fellows and we’ve worked with faculty here. One of our regional fellows was Cosecha, an organization that works with undocumented people in the area. And they worked with a faculty member, Dr. Francisco Vegas and his students to develop a county ID program so that anyone who lives in Kalamazoo County can get an ID. A lot of undocumented people were unable to get driver’s license, and so they did not have an ID and this allowed them to have an ID. And they came up with a rubric that they were able to present to the county officials

And so undocumented folks, they bring in a bill, they bring in something that establishes an address and they can get a county ID. And so we’re very excited about that. We had a lot of community partners in the city, restaurants that would give 5% discount if you got a county ID so all of us can get a county ID, so you don’t have to be undocumented to have a county ID. So we all got a county ID in order to support our undocumented and our homeless population so that they could get an ID.

One final thing I’ll mention, and these are just three is we worked with native Americans who were regional fellows, and they were working on getting rid of racist mascots. That’s a big tradition in the US to call a sports team, the Indians, or the Redskins or things like that. And we managed just recently, the result of all that work, that the high school near us, Paw Paw changed their mascot from the Redskins because of that kind of wor

And probably the biggest thing was getting rid of a racist anti-native American fountain down in the major park of Kalamazoo through the work of regional fellows here in the city. We were able to convince the city commission to get rid of that fountain. It took a lot of organizing work, and we’re really proud that we were able to support that work and for that to actually have been the result. So I think having the center here, we don’t create the struggle, but we provide added value to the struggles that are going on by providing support, by providing education, by providing capacity building for people

Rhiki Swinton:
Wow. I think it’s just so cool to hear about like the different people Arcus work with. I know I love Patrisse Cullors and her book or their book on When They Call You a Terrorist is one of my favorites. So just knowing that Patrisse worked with Arcus is so cool.

Tirrea Billings:
Yeah, definitely second that.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
It is. It’s really cool.

Tirrea Billings:
So Lisa, you were heavily involved in the anti-apartheid movement and various efforts surrounding the issues of apartheid, specifically in Africa. And so based on that, can you talk about the work and how the apartheid struggle impacted Black Americans?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
It’s interesting. I’ll tell a story about my grandmother, mama Lou. So mama Lou, she’s not your sweet grandmother, even though she could cook great. She’s kind of the salty one, the one that if you don’t treat her right, she going to tell you about it. And if you don’t do right, she going to tell you about it. And she don’t want you messing around in her garden and that kind of stuff, all with love. But I remember telling my grandmother, she said, “What are you doing these days?” And I told her, I was working against apartheid in South Africa. She said, “What’s that?”

And I said, “Well, it’s a country in Africa called South Africa. They have a White minority, about 10% of the people are White people from Europe that settled there and they have taken all the power. They got all the guns. They set up a constitution in the country where only White people can vote. Only White people can own property. Only White people can have passports to travel and Africans are forced off their land and into the mines and are subject to a Nazi-like fascism.” So mama Lou said, “What? In Africa? Africa is Black people.” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “White people in Africa doing that?” And I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “That’s horrible.” She said, “I’m so glad your doing that work.” She said, “But be careful because you know White people here will kill you too.”

So I think the connection between South Africa and Blacks in the United States was very clear to people. And it’s actually not just metaphorically or philosophically clear. Actually South African studied Indian reservations to come up with the reserve system for Africans and the township system for … and the so-called homelands for Africans in South Africa. They literally studied the United States Indian reservations to figure out how to put Africans in reservations. So the connection was very direct.

And very similarly, I remember when we were organizing against the racist sports teams that had come here, we realized that they had studied Jim Crow for segregation as well. And that there were a lot of partnerships between segregationist and racist in this country and apartheid and they’re racist. And in fact, almost all of the Western government supported apartheid, which was why it was such a hard battle. It took so many people internationally to defeat because American, German, French, British, Dutch companies made a lot of money in South Africa. And Gold, De Beer Diamonds, JB Robinson, gold, uranium, platinum all of these kinds of things were sold to the west by the White apartheid government. They had a very, very tight relationship. So it took a lot, a lot of struggle to overturn that system for many years

A lot of people don’t realize that the African National Congress was actually founded in 1912. Mandela went to jail in the ’60s. He didn’t get out until 1990 and it wasn’t until 1994 that they had their first democratic election where everybody could vote. And all those restrictions of apartheid were finally overturned. A lot of people died. A lot of people struggled. It was a hard fight, but it was worth it. And it was so clearly wrong that it did garner the attention of the entire world and especially Black Americans who felt a special tie to South Africa because of the particular way that racism was structured there.

Rhiki Swinton:
I think it’s so interesting in what you said, like a lot of people, we like to think of America as this progressive country, but when you were saying that they actually studied our Indian reservations and studied Jim Crow to figure out how to oppress people in Africa, like that really hit.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things when we think about solidarity at the bottom, we always have to also think that there’s racist, capitalists, elitists, fascist solidarity at the top too. And if it wasn’t that then the power that they have wouldn’t be as stark as it is. And one of the things that always bothers me is people like President Trump will say like, he’ll stoke a kind of American nationalism as if we’re this great country, we’re going to make it great again and he stokes that among a particular set of Americans. When in reality the elite, and he gets his shirts from China and Mexico. I mean, the elite is always international and not nationalist. They’re not nationalists. It’s just a rhetoric to oppress people because they are cutting deals across the world all the time.

And like right now, this anti-China thing, I have to bring this in because people are led to believe that somehow China stole our jobs. China didn’t steal our jobs. Walmart and American companies went to China. So the fact that iPhones are made in China, it’s not a Chinese company, it’s Apple in China. So the issue is the goods in Walmart are not being made by Chinese companies, they’re made by Chinese for Walmart in China, because labor is cheaper.

I’ll say one more thing and I know I don’t want to belabor this too much, but I’ll go back to apartheid. I remember one of the big struggles we had in Chicago with the … well, there were all kinds, there was the labor movement against apartheid. There were churches against apartheid. There were all kinds of folks against apartheid. And in Chicago with the labor movement, we realized that, I think it was like 1981, ’82, they were shutting down the huge remaining steelworks in South Chicago that had employed for years, hundreds of thousands of workers from all over the world who had immigrated to Chicago to work in the steel mills.

And it had been whittled down over the years because they were getting steel from other places in the world and one of the places was South Africa. And I remember when the last of South Work Steel Works were shut down, I mean, literally workers went to work one day and there was a padlock saying we’re closed. And so they were fighting. It was like, I don’t know, 60,000 people fighting for their pensions, fighting in the courts, fighting for back pay, fighting for all kinds of stuff. And we realized at that time that downtown Chicago, the State of Illinois building, which is right across from city hall was being built and it was being built by South African steel.

So it was cheaper because of apartheid labor, which they were paying them nothing. It was cheaper to import steel from South Africa than to pay workers on the south side of Chicago decent wages to build that building. And that’s the way the international economy works. And so, one of the things we always say, if they’re exploiting workers somewhere else, it’s not going to be good for you. So if they’ve taken our jobs to China, then that puts workers out of work here. Its not China’s fault, it’s American companies fault.

Rhiki Swinton:
But the anti-apartheid movement, from what I know from talking with you and kind of reading up on some of the materials you sent us was not just a big movement with one organization, it was made up of a lot of small organizations who were working towards a common goal. So given your involvement in that movement and thinking about the successes of that movement, what advice could you give to Black organizers and just organizers and activists in general about what we can take from that movement and put towards our movements to better the racial climate in America?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
You see, I can go on about this stuff, ladies. That’s interesting. I think one of the things we understood back in the day, and I’m not quite sure … Well, one of the things we can learn is organizing. See, organizing is not just holding a rally. It’s not just putting out a petition, organizing is going to churches. I mean, we went to churches. We went to union halls. We went to synagogues. We went to all kinds of places and we presented the case about why apartheid was bad and why they should be joining us in this struggle against apartheid.

And so it’s that level of organizing that I think we need to kind of get back to. We need to go into places and start talking about racism. It’s really interesting because, or the lack of rights and begin to work to win allies and to win people over, and to get more people involved. And so, one of the things I love about the Arcus Center is that we’re not just involved in struggles for social justice, but in creating leadership so that people can go out and do that. Wherever they land, they’re going out to be a social justice leader and that’s what I think.

And by leader, I don’t mean someone who’s going to be up on the hill teaching the masses from it, like way up or talking from a podium or a pedestal. But someone who’s going to understand the way the system works, the way oppression works, the way racism works and can work with people to bring them along to change the system. And that’s what leadership is. Is working with people, providing them with some guidance. Providing them with information. Helping them become leaders in their own communities, and working with the leaders in the communities that are already there.

I mean, the Civil Rights Movement was a huge example of that with Fannie Lou Hamer and Septima Clark in Charleston, Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi. I mean, these are just regular sisters who became mega, mega leaders in their communities. And you have to be brave when you’re fighting this stuff. And that’s the other thing I think. I mean, when we were doing this work, I went to jail and it was frightening, but when you put yourself out there, these are the things you got to have to do. Dr. King went to jail. And I think when you start challenging systems, you have to really also give people courage and hope to come along, to work with you and to work towards justice.

One of the things I’ve found too about leadership and about struggle is that not everybody is going to stand out and be a leader on their own, but if you are prepared to work with them and provide leadership, they will definitely get involved and be a part of the movement. So I think leadership gives people, they say, “Wow, there’s somebody out there. If they’re going to do it, I can do it too.” And I think that’s the kind of hope. And so King kind of represented that. There were a lot of women around King that did a lot of organizing, but King represented something for people and made them brave enough and courageous enough to step out, to come forward, to get involved in the struggle. We need masses of people in the street when this COVID is over and we don’t need to go back, we need to stay in the streets. Yeah, so what do you all think? Let me ask you this, what did you all know about the anti-apartheid movement coming up or about apartheid?

Rhiki Swinton:
I honestly didn’t know much about it prior to meeting you, like the way it was described to me in school. Well, you already know the way history is taught in the school system is, it waters down a lot of the information. So it was basically taught to me as just the form of racism that people in South Africa were experiencing, but that’s all that I got, I didn’t really get to learn about it in detail. So yeah, prior to meeting you, I didn’t know much about the apartheid movement at all. I knew whom Nelson Mandela was, and I know he got locked up and I know apartheid was a problem, but that’s about it.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Well, one of the misnomers, I think, is that when they talk about Jim Crow or when they talk about apartheid, they call it segregation. Segregation was the result of oppression and fascism. I mean, if you spit on the ground in the south or you went to the white water fountain, you could get beat up, I call that fascist, you could get jailed. And I mean, it was physical harm if you stepped out of line. And sometimes physical harm, if you didn’t step out of the line in both places. And so it’s not just segregation, is that segregation requires social control. It requires repression. It requires the police and somebody to tell you to stay in your place.

And we see that right now with this young man who was shot jogging in Georgia. The fact that he did not respond to a regular White person as if he’s supposed to, is a part of our legacy, the legacy of what that period left on us.

Tirrea Billings:
Based on the video you sent us about the Kamoinge-Ferman scholarship, it seems as though South Africans are really connected to the transitional times in their history. So based on that, what are some ways Black Americans can better connect to American history?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Yeah, so interesting, is called Kamoinge-Ferman because a student of mine, Tery Ferman, African-American came to me and she says, she was actually a model and an actor. She had been in the original Miami Vice believe it or not, the TV show. And she had come back to school to get a degree in theater after actually acting and modeling. And she had lived all over the world and she said, “Lisa, so many people, African-Americans don’t get to travel and I want to do something about it. And can we work together to try to create a scholarship?”

And so the Kamoinge photographers, this was a group of activists, photographers that emerged in the 1950s and continues until today. And what we decided to do, she knew some of the Kamoinge folks and we decided to hold a huge auction of their work. I didn’t even realize how well known they were. And they gave us half the proceeds of the sales of their work. And we made about $30,000 in that one night to start this scholarship for … the way we framed it was for African-American students, and/or people involved in the African-American community or African-American studies.

And it still exists today at Columbia College, my previous institution where I worked, and it was a way for students to get funding to do international travel. Yeah. And so I took a group of students, the first time we used it was taking a group of students to South Africa. And it was great because they met a lot of the folks that I knew at the time from the movement who actually … I’ll never forget, we were on a bus. Keep in mind this is just the post-apartheid system like only two years after it was over. And we were on a bus with a White bus driver with this tour company that we had booked and he didn’t want to go into one of the townships where Black people live. It’s like going to Harlem or going to the West side of Chicago or the North side of Kalamazoo, right?

And he’s like, “Oh, we can’t go over there.” But I knew people there. We were going to meet with the activist in that community and he didn’t want to go. So I called the person I knew because we had brought him from South Africa. He was like a city commissioner now for the township. I called him up and said, “This guy won’t bring us there.” And he got on the phone with that guy and that guy was driving up in that township. So it was something to be there at that time because racism, the people who created and lived with apartheid were still there and still racist. You don’t change that overnight and it hasn’t even changed completely today. They don’t have power to do what they did before, but a lot of them still have the same ideas. So just like here.

Tirrea Billings:
From watching the video you sent us about the scholarship and its establishment, something I took away from it is that South Africans, just seem like they’re really connected to the transitional times in their history. And so I’m curious to know what you think about what are some ways Black Americans can be better connected to our American history, our African-American history?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
It’s a challenge because in the US until you get to college, you very often don’t even learn some of the counter narratives and alternative views. This sort of what we call history from below, or the fact that history has been silenced. Here you don’t learn any of that. And the vast majority of Americans, and in fact, a decreasing number of Americans are not even going to college where they might get a better sense of American history. So to me, the only way we are going to completely change this system is we have to have a massive overhaul of this system, because if we don’t … we have to change the power structure so that we can have control over the education system at the lower levels.

And I know there’s a history in the ’60s and ’70s of Black Americans creating small independent Afro centered schools. We used to call them Watotos, which is school in Swahili. And so people were doing that, but it is very difficult for those kinds of schools to educate the millions. You know what I’m saying? Can educate some, but in terms of educating the millions, it’s very difficult to do that. And that there’s a very tight rein on textbooks. They’re produced by a very small number of people, and the reason I believe is because I’ve always said, whoever controls the master narrative of history is going to control the way people turn out and the way they feel they belong to a society.

So I think Black Americans have to study on their own. I mean, one of the things that back in the ’60s and ’70s we did is we had study groups. We had book clubs. I used to hold a Saturday school for my son and his friends and some of the friend’s parents. They had special skills. They could teach, and we would teach them what they weren’t getting in school and that was Black history. So I taught Black history, another young man’s father taught Swahili. Another one taught painting and drawing, and we called it Saturday school. And so you can do that for a small number of people. But like I say, I think those are ways that Black Americans can better connect to American history.

And one of the things I love to do and is to go out and talk to groups about Black history because it’s just so much they don’t know. It’s just so much we don’t know. I was reading the other day, a friend of mine called me because he didn’t know … it was about Black history in Cuba. This poet, Placido in the 1840s was killed by the Spanish government. He was a poet, a Black poet. They said he was organizing a slavery vote and he got killed by the Spanish government because of his abolitionists activities.

But then Martin Delaney, this is in my book that I did with Digna. When the first African-American novel, considered first African-American novel was a novel called Blake. And it was about a Black man in Virginia, former slave, who goes all over the Americas to organize a mass Pan-African, Pan-American slave uprising. It’s fiction, but he launches the uprising in Cuba. And the poet Placido, reads one of his poems as the moment in which the revolution begins.

And so Placido lived in Cuba as a Black poet in the 1840s. Delaney is an African-American, wrote this novel in the 1850s. And so it shows you that there’s also this connection of Black people throughout the world that’s been in existence since enslavement and colonialism. Not everybody knows it because not everyone has access to it or not everybody was involved because not everybody kind of had the ability to know what was happening in other places, but a lot of people did.

Rhiki Swinton:
I think what you were saying about a lot of people don’t even have access to knowledge about Black history and like other facets of our history until college is so true. And then thinking about, it isn’t that it’s provided to you once you get into college, you kind of have to self-select into those courses. So yeah, history, at least the American history and my perception is just so … I don’t even know if I want to call it history because like the narrative has been so manipulated into what they want us to hear and want us to believe that it’s almost like it isn’t factual anymore.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
That’s right. And what I say too is that, it’s very easy to grow up as a White person to be racist in this country because you don’t know what Africans and people of African descent have contributed to humanity. I used to say about my son, my son studied Shakespeare, if he had done, was it Hamlet or Macbeth? I think it was Hamlet. He studied Hamlet in fifth grade. He studied Hamlet in eighth grade. He studied Hamlet in 11th grade. You see what I’m saying? Shakespeare. I mean, Shakespeare was a great writer of course, but what about Mansa Musa? What about all the African leaders that built kingdoms and built great stuff and left archives, or Timbuktu in Mali, one of the earliest libraries in the world.

But see people, they don’t know that. So by the time you’re an adult, White people say, “Wow, Black people haven’t done nothing, they’re just lying around.” And a lot of Black people, they know they’d done something, but they don’t have a counter-argument because they don’t have the details, they don’t have … And so until we deal with this kind of education system, I think we’re going to continue to repeat.

Rhiki Swinton:
So switching gears kind of back to Cuba. So for people who don’t know, Lisa has done work in various places, Cuba being one of them. So can you speak a little bit more about the work you do in Cuba and the issues that they’re facing there?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Yeah. Cuba, well, one of the things you should know is that as a social justice leader and I’m going to say it here. I’m a revolutionary. I just don’t believe we can get out of the traps of the past until we have a real revolution. Now, what that means, how incremental or overnight it is, how much military struggle would have to be or not, all of that’s in the detail. But when I say revolution, I mean a complete transformation of our power structure and what we value in the United States.

One of the things that has interested me both in Cuba and in South Africa, when the struggle was happening is I thought there were a lot of lessons that we could learn from their struggles here. And so some people say, “South Africa, Cuba, African-Americans, Lisa those seem like really different places and issues, how are you so interested in all those places?” Well, it’s because I’m a revolutionary and I’m interested in how we can make change. And I want to see the successes and the failures of all of these other struggles, so that as we move forward in this country, we don’t make the same mistakes and we can also learn from them.

Of course, every place is different. South Africa has a Black majority and a Black … they never lost their culture, their languages and all of that. And so that meant a whole lot difference for us in this country. In Cuba, Cuba is an American, Caribbean, Latin American country, an island of 10 million, 11 million people. It’s multiracial like us because its history is also the history of enslavement. So there’s a lot of similarities there. They have a majority people of color, Black and what they call mixed race there. The mixed race people there would be considered Black here, but there in Latin America is a little different, but they all considered themselves Black in the struggle against enslavement like we did.

And so the Cuban revolution was very interesting to me because here you got a country of 10 or 11 million people. And they had been colonized first by Spain and then as soon as they defeated Spain, the US intervenes and takes control. And so then they have a neo-colonial power that owns almost everything in Cuba, up until 1959 when the revolution happened. But they had a revolution. They changed the power structure. They changed the value structure. And I was like, dang, a country of 10, 11 million people defeat the United States, 300 million people with all the guns and the armaments.

And so I was like, I want to study that place. How did they do that? And so that’s kind of what got me involved in Cuba because I’ve always been interested also in the relationship between the past and the present, right? So I’m a historian, but I’m also involved in the present. History helps inform the present and you can see the present through history. So academically and scholarly, I’ve been very interested in history, but actually sort of in terms of where I put my commitments and my boots on the ground, it has been as an activist, a solidarity activist of these two places.

So Cuba actually has been very interesting to me because I mean, even right now, Cuba sending doctors abroad because they train some of the best doctors in the world. And so, one of the things that Cuba did, which I found so interesting is that they’re an underdeveloped country. They ain’t got no money. They ain’t got a whole lot of resources. They’ve been exploited like other colonies in the world. But one of the things they did, they said, “We’re going to put our resources in our human capital. We got human beings, don’t we? We can train them to be engineers. We can train them to be doctors. And that’s what is going to be our selling point in the world.”

And so they have engaged in what I call solidarity as foreign policy. They send engineers to Africa. They send doctors all over the world right now. They went into Italy. The Italians were clapping. The Italians have nominated the Cubans Medical Solidarity Corps, the medical Corps during this COVID, they’ve nominated them for a Nobel prize, peace prize. So Cuba has a different value system, it’s human and not material. So you can’t be rich in Cuba. You can’t, they won’t let you. The US sees that as repressive. The Cuban see it as spreading the resources evenly.

Some of their challenges that they face, they still have some elements of racism in the ideology, but they don’t have social inequities like we do here. They don’t have health disparities based on race. So this all kinds of things that they’ve managed to handle and change that I think we can learn from. So I think everyone who goes to Cuba is … They also didn’t have a history of segregation like us. So the first thing you notice when you go to Cuba is the neighborhoods are all mixed up. They’re not racially segregated. And you don’t have class divisions in quite the same way. They haven’t been able to solve everything. It’s just not the same way.

One of the challenges recently has been that most of the people who left Cuba, 94% of the folks who left because of the revolution were White, rich Cubans and they all landed in Miami. They’re very anti-revolution because they lost things because the Cuban said, “You can have one house, you can choose, but you can’t have five houses when we have homeless people.” So they seize property. They seized American property. They wanted to relate to Americans as country to country, not colony to colonizer. The US did not like that, they’ve been trying to destroy the revolution ever since.

And people often ask me, why does the US hate Cuba? So it’s a country of 10 million people, it’s not a military threat, it’s an ideological threat. And it’s a multiracial society. So anyone who goes to Cuba might see something different. So yeah, so Cuba is facing a lot of stuff. The US is trying to strangle. Literally under Trump, they’re seizing ships trying to go to Cuba and that’s illegal, but there’s no court in the world to deal with some of these things.

But I tell you, one thing is they’re bad now. They’re bad asses now. The Cubans ain’t going to let the US invade them. And one of the things that the US has not been able to do is to find a small group of people like there’ve been cultivating in Venezuela to overturn Cuba. They’ve tried. They’ve invaded. They’ve they engaged in biological warfare. US has done all kinds of things to Cuba, but the Cuban revolution has been strong. And they’d rather have a chair that they’ve had for 50 yeamight be broke down than to give up their soul for material goods. So they can’t be bought so far. Everything can be changed, but they can’t be bought.

And so the US has not been able to undermine them or to kill them. They’ve undermined them, but they haven’t been able to kill him yet. So I’m interested in how they’ve done that. I think that’s interesting. And we need to learn from them if we’re going to try to take power and change, fight oppression and end oppression in this country.

Tirrea Billings:
So, Lisa, I know that you went to the Howard University as a kid. Can you talk your time there and what encouraged you to become a historian?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Yeah, I loved Howard. I went there at my junior … at the end of my sophomore year. I initially went to Oberlin College. I’m from Cincinnati, Ohio. I had a good scholarship at Oberlin College. Also, I realize now looking back, I was a part of a big affirmative action experiment that Oberlin was doing. They brought in a lot of African-Americans and other students of color by a lot, I mean, like 100 in 1975. But the liberal racism on that campus just ate at me. I couldn’t take it. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to stay there.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
So I transferred to Howard and I did so because I wanted the blackest college in the blackest city in the country at the time because I was like, so sick of racism. I didn’t know what to do because I had also grown up as a minority in my elementary and high school places. Although I had kind of always been an activist, but. So I loved Howard. I’d learned a lot at Howard. Is so interesting, while I was fighting racism other places I had never really understood class within the Black community until I got to Howard. It was definitely some class stuff within the Black community that I was unaware of from my working class community back in Cincinnati.

But at least I didn’t have to deal with racism. And I had wonderful teachers and I had wonderful history teacher. So I became a history major. I had a wonderful teacher from Sudan. I had an African American teacher. I had a Jamaican teacher. People don’t realize that HBCUs are not just Black American, they’re basically, they’re international institutions and a lot of international people of color go there and have historically. So I just loved history. I loved it answered questions for me. If you’ve ever been curious it all starts with, why are we treated this way? Why aren’t we in history? Why don’t I see myself here? Why don’t we have this? Why did this happen? All of those were burning questions for me. And so that’s why I was attracted to history and continue to be because it answers questions for me.

I’d be sitting, looking at archives, I’d be like, wow, no, what, really. I’d be, so that’s the way I respond to history. So it’s like, Whoa, who would have thunk it? So I decided to become a historian there yeah, because of that. And then got my PhD at Northwestern in African history again to satisfy my desire, to know African history as an underlying basis to being a Black person in the world.

Rhiki Swinton:
So switching gears a little bit to talk about the pandemic that we’re in and facing currently what is your take on the current racial climate in America and its relation to COVID-19?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
What do you think? I want to hear from you two.

Tirrea Billings:
Oh, Rhiki’s on the spot.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. This is all going one way.

Rhiki Swinton:
I would say my perspective is it really is just, I think a lot of people, I don’t want to say we’re complacent, but some of the issues that we were trying to argue for in the Black community kind of fail. I don’t want to say fail silent, but it didn’t seem as pressing. And then when the pandemic came and when we saw who was being affected the most and why it kind of gave an opportunity for those conversations and those issues to be brought back up and to shed some more light on it so, yeah.

And then the whole thing of police brutality, but how we’re taking like a militarized approach to handling the self-quarantine that brought off some more issues that I feel like were falling to the wayside before the pandemic. So I think it’s just making people more aware, but then now we’re in a place where we’re aware of it and we’re trying to figure out how to move forward. And then as we become aware of it, there’re still those other people who want to say “Well, no, it’s not like people are being treated differently. We’re all being treated the same. And the reason why Black people are getting it more than everybody else, it’s just because they’re not self-quarantining,” or we’re doing something wrong and that’s why, and it’s like, no, that’s not true.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
That’s why history is so important because these patterns are the same patterns. It just says over and over and over again. Trayvon was killed by a White vigilante. Now we got Aubrey in Georgia. I mean, and then it was so interesting to me, Rhiki. I mean, listening to what you say, how all of a sudden, oh, African-Americans are dying at a higher rate, right? How did that happen? Why? The media was like, oh, we didn’t know that. Which of course, we didn’t know that. Why, why, why? And then they say, “Oh, it’s health disparities. They don’t have access to certain things. And so therefore they’re more susceptible because they have diseases at a different rate and that’s because of poverty and racism.”

And then you saw it switch to now it’s our fault, right? It’s our fault. And that same thing happens with every African-American that’s killed. All of a sudden everybody’s sad and then all of a sudden they dig up something before the person is even in the ground to try to diminish who they were as a human being. And we’ve been under that forever. And you’re right, this COVID has revealed it again that in terms of health disparities and other things, but the way in which the power structure responds is very similar.

And so we have these peaks and valleys of kind of, I want to say, well, maybe affirmation of the problem or a kind of clear vision of the problem. And then it goes back down again. And so we have to really figure out, to me when we come out of this, how to use this moment to continue to fight for … I mean, to me, universal healthcare, it should be a part of what happens at the end of this. I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but I think that’s what we need to fight for.

Rhiki Swinton:
I think another thing that I’ve noticed is I don’t want to say like an oppression Olympics, because that is not necessarily the term that I want to use, but it seems like when the conversation, when there is a spotlight put on racial disparities, there’s always somebody else that comes in and it’s like, no, we should really focus on the working class because that’ll cover Black people and poor White people, or we should focus on health disparities on everyone. It’s like, whenever we put the spotlight on racism, somebody else says, no, we should keep it broad because we’ll lose other people, if we focus just on race. And it’s like, no, if we focus on race, we’ll like help Black communities and people of color, and in doing so other people will benefit from that help.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
That’s right, you got that right. As they say it’s like Angela Davis says, “If Black women are free, then everybody else’s free.” Because if people who are oppressed the most are free, then it liberates everybody else from being a part of that oppressive relationship. It’s not a zero sum game. You’re right. It’s not like if one person becomes free, then somebody else’s less free. That’s when a lot of White racists think in this country, but we are a big country with enough resources to take care of everybody. That’s what drives me crazy. I see poor countries like Cuba struggling to spread that chicken around so everybody can eat because they have that value. And here, we got this hoarding at the top. That’s the American problem.

But to go back to your issue of the working class, I really think I mean, girl, I’ve been in this struggle for so long and that’s always been a fight on the left. To say the working class or to so-called deal with certain identities with that are oppressed in the country. And the issue is it has to be both. If you just say working class, you end up with sometimes with some of these White guys with the guns up here in Lansing. They’re working class, but they’re racist. We do not want a working class struggle that does not deal with racism within the working class. And that’s what a lot of people and I hate to say it, it’s usually White male working class folks who don’t want to deal with that.

And the issue is if I don’t want to be in your working class, if in fact I have to still deal with racism, I want the working class to be liberated from racism, and the only way that can happen is if people of color within the working class are able to fight for their power within that class, and fight against racism. If we can’t fight against racism within the working class, and the issue is what we’ve learned is if you don’t talk about racism, White people ain’t going to talk about racism. So you can’t trust White folks are going to solve the race question.

That’s one of the things that the Cuban revolution has taught us. It’s done some things, a lot of good things, but race is something that still, they don’t want to talk about like they should. And that’s one of the things transcultural transnational solidarity among Black people has been able to work in solidarity with Black Cubans around this question. And that’s one of the things that I’ve been able to do and vice versa. So in some ways the Cuban revolution has taught us about class struggle and we’ve helped to work with them on the racial struggle. You know what I mean? But you’re right. I mean, who wants to be in a society they’re still racist if the working class is racist?

Tirrea Billings:
Right. What have you seen happening in other countries compared to America around COVID and what are some things that could be like beneficial for America to implement?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
Well, we need a system that takes care of people. One of the thing that COVID has really shown us is that we do not have a people centered society. We have a profit centered society. And a people centered society, so for instance, in Cuba, every single Cuban has been visited by a doctor, every single Cuban because they have community clinics that are equal all over the country. Everybody in a neighborhood has a clinic they go to, a family doctor, they go to. Partly because Cuba made medical school free so you got a lot of doctors, right? We make medical school like this elite thing and very few people can become doctors. So we need more doctors.

And then those doctors need to be working like they work … doctors want to save lives and work with people, not to have insurance companies in the middle, not to be thinking about poverty. So I think we need systems like, we need a more socialistic system, medical system, like they have in Cuba, they have in Sweden, they have in the Scandinavian countries where public health is at the center of the work and humans are at the center and not profit and people trying to figure out how to get rich and make money off of somebody else and blaming the poor for being poor and those kinds of things.

So I think we could learn a lot from … and that’s why I was a Bernie supporter, because he talked about that, universal healthcare, free education. These are things that this society could pay for easily through our tax system. If the rich were taxed at a rate that they need to be taxed. And when I say socialistic, I’m not talking about the old style state communism thing. We’ve learned a lot since then. That didn’t work, it doesn’t work. But so there’s all kinds of ways you can have mixed economies, where the things that support humans are free for people. They’re not free because you’re paying for them through taxes and through the system, but they’re free. They’re when you need them, they’re there for you.

And then things we don’t need can exist in the profit, in the profit world, such as liquor and cigarettes and cars, and just a whole lot of other stuff. Those people can make some money off of it, but they should not make money off of people’s healthcare. They just should not or their education. Those should be right for us. But we have to change the narrative. Like one of the things I’ve been saying, Rhiki and Tirrea is, when people are saying that it’s the government’s money or the government shouldn’t give bail outs or payouts or welfare, that’s our money, that’s our money. We just need to keep that in mind. That’s the people’s money. That’s not Trump’s money. It’s not Mitch McConnell’s money. It’s not the elite’s money, it’s our money. And so we need to figure out ways to get our money back and take care of our human needs.

Rhiki Swinton:
So we are getting ready to wrap this up, but before we go, Lisa, just can you tell us about some projects that you’re working on now or what’s to come with the Arcus Center.

Dr. Lisa Brock:
It’s been tough because people’s energy levels are down. I’m struggling with what leadership looks like. How much I can press people to work, how much I shouldn’t. I don’t believe in pressing people to do anything. I want people to be excited and to do their passion work like we were doing before COVID. So I think trying to find our passion and our excitement in this period is the thing I’m going to work on the most for our staff while we help provide resources and information to our people out there in the college communities, the higher education community, the Kalamazoo community and the national and global world. And so just trying to figure all that out, like a whole lot of other places I think is what we’re all working on now.

And then I have a book project that I’m working on and some writing work that I’ve been doing. So I have a journal coming out soon that I edited on Black Cuban revolutionaries, so that’s what I’m doing. Yeah. I’m waiting, everything’s ready to go except a few little copyright agreements between Cuba and here. One thing I’ll say is that international solidarity among us and I mean, but I always have to think about our ancestors. I always say, it’s not for the faint of heart because you’re often battling these powerful international structures. So it requires a level of commitment that I think is important to remember. But there’s so many blessings that come out of it.

I’ll never forget when I first went to South Africa and Ahmed Kathrada, who was one of the Mandela eight, he had been in jail with Mandela all those years. He said, “Oh, I heard about you, Lisa Brock.” And he took us, he took my students to Robin Island himself, showed us his cell, put us in Mandela’s cell. Talked to us personally about his 27 years in prison. The people, when you engage in solidarity, people are really grateful, but that’s not the right word. They understand that we’re in this together and that you supported them in dark times when it was not easy. And the blessing is that they get that, they understand that. They say, thank you and there’s nothing like that really in the world.

Tirrea Billings:
And lastly, we just want to ask you, who inspires you to do the work that you do?

Dr. Lisa Brock:
I had a lot of strong Black women in my life growing up. And it’s hard, probably hard for you all believe, but when I was in high school, Angela Davis was an icon of mine. And who would have known that I would have gotten to work with her and know her so well. And then there’s … so I really admire Angela. I admire, there was a woman named Charlene Mitchell who’s still alive, but in a nursing home. A woman from Harlem, an activist who took me under her wing. She was the leader of the National Alliance against racist and political repression of which I was a member of. She told me so many wise things.

And one of the things I think that’s so important right now, she told me something that stuck with me. When I was your age … okay. So when I was about your age I remember telling her, I’m not voting for anybody because I don’t like them. They’re horrible. They’re evil. They’re racist in terms of presidents, presidential politics. So when I was about 25, I was saying that to Charlene. Charlene said, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.” I was like, “What? What did you say?” She says, “That’s stupid Lisa.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because we live in this country that’s got a whole history of genocide, a whole history of racism, a whole history of enslavement and colonialism. The issue is once you know that, you shouldn’t be looking … If the system is the same,” like what she called boujoua capitalist politics. “Then the issue is you don’t vote for who you like. That’s very naive.”

It’s not about who you like. And it’s not about who you like and it’s just one lever. It’s just one little thing in the overall struggle for social transformation. So she says, “It’s just one little thing. You’re making it bigger than it is.” She says, “You vote for the person that will give you the most room to continue to organize for change. That’s how you pick your person.” And that may be a very low bar in terms of whether or not that person is the ultimate person. We are not going to elect a Mandela in this country the way the system is set up now. We are not going to elect a Malcolm X. We are not going to elect a Martin Luther King. We’re not going to elect a Fannie Lou Hamer in the way this system is set up now.

But is there some difference between the two candidates that will help you continue to struggle? And one thing I will say, it is no accident that Black Lives Matter happened during the Obama administration. Part of it is because we had more room to struggle. We had more room. If we go out in the street like we did back then with Ferguson, and even then tanks came out, right? Even then tanks came out. But if we try to struggle under Trump, the way we did back then, we may see something very different because the room for struggle has shrunk under his leadership.

And so Charlene Mitchell was very influential to me. I love her to death. She said a lot of wise things to me. And so I will be voting. I was a Bernie supporter, even though he was a White man. He was not the best on everything. He was the best of the bunch. And Biden now, I’m going to hold my nose and vote for Biden even though he says some wild and crazy things. He’s 78 years old. He has a racist past, but I think that he will give us more room than the path we’re going down now with Trump. So I’m going to vote for Biden, even though I don’t like him. And voting is not an endorsement, voting is simply voting for the candidate that will give you the most room. And that may just be a little room, but the most room to continue to struggle.

Rhiki Swinton:
Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for sharing with us and dropping that little touch of insight on why we should exercise our right to vote. Thank you all for tuning in to the Radical Zone podcast, where we center radical thinkers and their ideas. See you next time.

Tirrea Billings:
Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook at ACSJLKzoo, Twitter @ACSJL and Instagram at Arcus Center. For questions, comments and ideas for future topics, please leave responses on our social media platforms.

Transmasculinity & Being a Transformer

The transgender movement has come a long way in the last six decades, from very little visibility and support to growing awareness and acceptance. We speak with Willy Wilkinson, author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning book Born on the Edge of Race and Gender: A Voice for Cultural Competency, about his journey coming out as a young trans child in the early sixties. Now a sought-after public health consultant who helps organizations and institutions develop LGBTQ-affirming services and systems, Willy describes his work in the LGBTQ movement, the challenges he and other transmasculine people of color face, and the trans superpower he discovered as a father of three.

Resources:

Born of the Edge of Race and Gender: A Voice for Cultural Competency


Transcript:

Paige:
Turn of the head, I am ma’am, and back of the head, I am sir. And top down, I am what are you, and face on, I am no, where do you really come from? Shape shift eyes, no connection. Shape shift nose, misconception. Shape shift size, not deception. Shape shift, shifting perception. Flash of the voice, I am ma’am, and style of the threads, I am sir. And texture of skin, I am what’s your mix. And flash of the eyes, I am there’s something going on there. Shape shift, no attention, give them presentation, shift all those opinions. Shape your own damn dominion. Stories unseen, no connection, trans folks, misconception, mixed folks, no deception, gender fabulous, no correction, disability, shifting perception. Turn of the head, I am sir, and back of the head, I am ma’am. And top down, I am invisible, and face on, I am…

Rhiki:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world, and how various communities are impacted from activism organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you are probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, also known as ACSJL, is an initiative of Kalamazoo College, whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop one’s full potential is available to every person, and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all. 

Paige:
Hey, Willy, thank you so much for coming to the Radical Zone. I remember being so excited to be paired with you for the APIENC phone tree, because I found out you’re also a writer. It’s been really great to connect with you ever since.

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, great to connect with you. APIENC stands for Asian Pacific Islander Equality – Northern California. It’s a great organization, and doing such great work uplifting Asian Pacific Islander LGBTQ communities with a focus on trans and nonbinary gender expansive folks too. So, such a great, great community organization. 

Paige:
Yes, I agree, love APIENC. I wanted to ask you what’s been on your mind this week.

Willy Wilkinson:
What’s on my mind this week? Well, we are burning up in California, so we have not been able to breathe in the Bay Area for a… Or at least, I’m in Oakland, and yesterday we had a moment of some, well, decent air quality, a little bit above normal. So, I got to get my kids out and play outside, which was nice, because they’ve been stuck for the most part in the house for a week. Though, I did get them out to Half Moon Bay on Saturday, on the coast, where we had better air quality. That, and I don’t want to watch two minutes of the Republican National Convention because it is full of crazy ass lies. Can I say that? But last week, I did enjoy seeing Kamala Harris and others at the Democratic National Convention. So, that’s what’s on my mind.

Paige:
Oh my goodness. Yeah, I hope you and your family are safe. I’ve been checking in with people in the Bay Area. Yeah.

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, it’s really hard to breathe. If you go to purpleair.com, they update the air quality every 10 minutes, and it’s always changing. We do get some winds in the late afternoon and that helps sometimes. It’s transitory though sometimes when we have air quality that’s almost normal, and then it’ll go… Green is good, yellow is moderate, and then it goes to orange and red. It’s been in the red zone for most of this week, where very unhealthy for all people. Yeah, it’s been challenging because we got… It’s like one more thing, right? I was like, if COVID isn’t enough, right? Yeah, so a mask for the smoke and a mask for COVID, it’s intense. 

Rhiki:
What about you, Paige? What has been on your mind this week?

Paige:
This week, I’ve been good, I’ve been chilling. I’ve just been reading a lot of comics. I’ve been trying to find more gay comics or more gay material to read. I feel like I just didn’t really grow up reading a lot of that stuff. So, it’s been really nice actually, to read gay media. Oh, I’ve been reading Willy’s book a little bit too. I’m like 40 pages in, Willy.

Willy Wilkinson:
40 pages in, all right. Yeah, well, thanks for doing that.

Paige:
What about you Rhiki, what’s going on?

Rhiki:
Honestly, last week was a blur, so this week, I’m just trying to get my mind back on track. I don’t know. It’s like COVID, it just seems like everything that could possibly happen is happening right now, and it’s a lot of process. So this week, I really just been trying to be intentional about books that I’m trying to read. I think in the past, I read a lot of psychological statistical text, and now I’m trying to actually explore what reading for fun looks like. So, trying to get into some poetry books and things like that. So, Paige, I know you’re a poet, so if you have any recommendations, let me know.

Paige:
Yes. Yes, we’ll talk about that.

Rhiki:
Okay. So, let’s get into it. Welcome to the Radical Zone, everyone. Today, we will talk about transmasculinity and Asian Pacific Islander transness specifically. But first, Paige, can you tell the people a little bit more about Willy.

Paige:
So, Willy Wilkinson is an award winning Asian American transgender writer and public health consultant. He is the author of Lambda Literary Award-wining book, Born on the Edge of Race and Gender: A Voice for Cultural Competency, which illuminates trans experience from a Chinese-American and mixed heritage perspective, and transforms a memoir genre into a cultural competency tool. Willy was a key organizer of the API lesbian movement, and organized the first peer support programs for API transmasculine individuals and transmasculine people of color. He is also a father of three. 

Willy, one of the stories you told me, which I love so much, was the one about your child calling you a transformer. I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit today. I know you also wrote it in your book. Also, can we just talk about the cover. The cover is so like, wow.

Rhiki:
Right? I saw the cover and I saw the open shirt and I was just like, “Oh, what is this book about?”

Willy Wilkinson:
What did you think it was about based on the cover?

Rhiki:
It looked like it was going to be a sexy romance novel, and then I saw the title and I was just like, “This is interesting.”

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting how many people have… I mean, the reactions that people have to the cover, and that people think they know what’s in the book based on the cover, and that some people love it, and some people are offended by it. In fact, I did a training recently in a real conservative county in California, and I did get one evaluation, the first time I’ve ever gotten an evaluation like this, that the person thought that my cover was offensive, and that I look like I’m trying to be a porn star and that’s very tacky. So, I thought, okay that’s interesting. Then, I wondered, well then I thought about, well, I did a training once, because I do a lot of trainings for LGBTQ issues, with a focus on trans issues over the last three decades with various community health providers, broadly defined, and education institutions, businesses and others. 

So, I was working with one group that served families with young children, and caregivers that provide services for them and so forth. And they said, we can’t have the nakedness. I thought, oh, is there something in my presentation that has nakedness. Was there [inaudible 00:09:05] that I missed that I didn’t realize had some nakedness? Then, I realized, oh you’re talking about my cover. Then, they realized that they have pictures of shirtless men holding newborn babies, that’s a good bonding thing when newborns are born. Skin to skin is really, really important. So, they had pictures of shirtless men, and then they realized, oh, because I was trans, they thought it was naked. So, I think it’s interesting how people respond to it, and then I wondered it that person who thought it was tacky would have responded the same way if I wasn’t trans. 

But honestly, I’m just trying to be a badass trans person. I’m just trying to show people that you can be the thing that has been denied me. As an Asian person, as a transmasculine person, my masculinity has been denied me, so I’m saying, “Hey, this is who I am, be yourself.” That’s what it’s all about. I’m not trying to act like I’m so hot, right, it’s just kind of fun for me. I did it with queer amusement, but I think people don’t necessarily understand that. I’ve been judged all my life by my cover, but never so much until I became a book, so that’s been interesting.

Paige:
Right on, right on. 

Willy Wilkinson:
But I mean, to me, it’s just fun. I don’t even see it anymore, because it’s my book, I don’t see it. So, it’s funny how people have these different responses. I mean, I’m just saying, “Hey, this is me, what about it?” That’s really what it’s about.

Paige:
Right on. Yeah, I think when I saw the cover, it was after we had called a couple times and we had just met, so I was like, “Oh okay. Okay, Willy. With the leather jacket, the smirk, it’s a good look.”

Willy Wilkinson:
Well, thank you for that. So, I’m sorry, you has a question. Oh yes, okay, so the interesting thing was, okay, so I have three kids who are now in elementary, middle, and high school. And my oldest, when he was four, after we had gone through a walk in the woods and we played, goofed around in the woods, he had these questions for me. I mean, he was very inquisitive as children can be about a lot of things in nature, the redwoods, the moon. Then, he asked me, “Dada, are you a man?” And at that time, I had not medically transitioned. People would sometimes assume I was his mama, and I was wondering how that cp was for him. We’d had experiences where there was a neighbor, there was a little girl who was his age and the mom was cool, said, “Drop by any time,” and one time we dropped by to play, and her mother, the child’s grandmother just had an absolute look of horror at my presence, and said, “No, she’s not available,” even though the child was right there. 

So, I just wondered what those experiences were like. So, he asked me, “Dada, are you a man?” So, I thought okay, great, now we’re going to have this conversation, a continuation of the pride conversation we’d had about six months earlier about men who love men, women who love women, boys who really feel that they’re girls, girls who really feel like they’re boys. So, I talked about my experience that I’d always felt like a boy, but people didn’t necessary see me that way. Then, I said, “I’m transgender. Can you say that?” And he enunciated it well, and he thought about it, and he said, “You’re a transformer, but not only that you’re a person who transforms.” This is someone who he loved legos, he loved building things. We would find things around the house that he had built out of objects around the house, and dangling from a dresser, and hanging, and all these kinds of things. 

It was just something he really understood as someone who loved to manipulate objects and transform them, and he really got it. It was magical in a way, because I’d begin to realize after a lifetime of being shamed that I actually have a super power. So, that was a positive experience through a child’s eyes. Because I think children, they really get this stuff on a visceral level, and it’s interesting how they’re so free with gender before they get indoctrinated. Like, my little boys always loved pink when they were three, but by the time they were four, they had gotten the message that they shouldn’t love pink anymore. It’s in the air, it’s in preschool, it’s in the content that they’re watching, or whatever. So, I think it was a cool way of viewing my experience that I had not had before that, so it really was a gift.

Paige:
That’s like one of my favorite stories. 

Willy Wilkinson:
Oh, thank you.

Paige:
You said that you hadn’t medically transitioned at the time, but I’m wondering, had you just identified as a man at that time or were you announcing that using he/him pronouns?

Willy Wilkinson:
Well, as an old ass trans person, I was born in the early 60s before there was any conversation, visibility, community, resources, positive imagery of trans people. And so, I announced when I was four years old that I wanted to be white and male. I asked my dad, “Who are all these people on the money? Are they all white men?” So, I realized that was the way to go, that was the way to get power. But, I also really knew for the time I was preverbal that I really did not identify with the dolls and dresses that were being put upon me. So, I was throwing them back at whoever was giving them to me. But, when I was nine, I changed my name to Willy. That was a long, long process of really getting people to recognize my name change, my family, my school, my community. There was a lot of resistance, a lot of taunting around that. It took my mother 15 years to get with my name change. 

When I came out as a lesbian in the early 80s, there was no visibility or much awareness around trans experience. Though I have grief around not being supported as a trans child, I do no regret that I had the opportunity to come out into a lesbian of color community in the 80s and start organizing Asian lesbians in the early 80s. It was a very, very powerful experience. I mean, in order to do that, of I had to be female, so I had to… Even though, I really had seen myself as male all my childhood, without really being able to put it into words. I just changed my name and I just was who I was, and I think people understood me in a visceral way, but there was no language, there was no articulation, there was no support, there was no other trans person I knew of or had met, no out trans person I had met until I think I was about 29. No, maybe a little bit earlier than that. 

I started working on the streets of the Tenderloin during the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, so I did meet some folks like mid-20s. But, I had not met an out transmasculine person until I was about 29. So, it was a long journey for me I think. When the 90s hit, I was really excited that there was much more visibility around trans issues and mixed heritage issues, which I really felt my mixed heritage was inexplicably linked to my gender. I’d begin to identify as a third gender person in the 90s. Then 1995, when San Francisco got discrimination protections based on gender identity, then the community started to get really organized, and I got involved in the trans movement. But, what we call the FTM community at the time, female to male, there was expectation that if you were part of the community, you were on some journey between A to wherever. You were on the way from female to maleness. 

So, if you came to the meeting, you must have been interested in top surgery. So, I was actually just wanting community and resonance with people who I felt had a sense of what my experience was about. It’s why we find community. It wasn’t because I was at that time wanting to medically transition. So, for many years, I had one foot in the lesbian community and one foot in the trans community. But, it was something that was gnawing at me for a very, very long time. I would talk myself out of it. So, five decades of this, and finally at age 49, I was like, “Oh no, I am not going to 50 in this body,” and I did finally access medical transition, no regrets. At that time, so much had happened with the trans movement, and I had been out as trans for so long that a lot of people where just like, yawn, okay, great. 

No, but I mean, also what was really interesting was that people congratulated me, and I did not see that coming. I mean, I was in a relationship with a lesbian identified person, who was really not at all excited about me medically transitioning. So at the time, it was not celebrated, it was a burden. But, other people in my communities were saying, “Thank you for your courageousness,” and all these things that were like, what? I didn’t know people congratulated people on medical transitions. So, that was really, really positive.

Rhiki:
Willy, I love that you brought up how you started off your organizing career in lesbian spaces. Can you talk a little bit more about what it was like to, like how you said you had one foot in the lesbian community and another foot in the trans community? Can you talk about how your experience was being a part of those lesbian spaces but identifying as a trans male? And some of the, I don’t want to necessarily say pushback, but some of the pushback that you might have gotten from that, but then some moments of enlightenment that you were able to give to that community.

Willy Wilkinson:
Again, I did not identify as trans male at that time, I identified as third gender. I identified transgender, I identified as trans butch, and I was very much involved in a interracial butch/femme community. I think it’s an interesting evolution that happened in the lesbian community, which maybe now we would call queer women’s community. But at the time, the identity for folks in a lesbian community was, well, one, you had to be female to be a lesbian. It was about taking back power, it was about confronting the sexism, misogyny, and racism that folks were experiencing. So, while masculinity in female form was celebrated, it certainly was not otherwise. I think when I look back on it, there were certainly people I knew that I felt like, oh I see you. Just the other day, a friend of mine celebrated his 60th birthday, and we met at that first API lesbian retreat that I co-organized in 1987. 

I remember saying, “I see you my brother,” at this lesbian retreat. But of course, we did not have that language, we did not have that sense of… There was just that, oh… there was an unspoken kinship. It was in the mid-90s, 1995 that we began organizing API folks on the transmasculine spectrum, so people identified as butch and FTM at that time. Most of us had not medically transitioned. It was a small groups of folks we had, [inaudible 00:22:09] this, and we really just connected around support. I mean, I think there was a lot of resistance. We did educational work with the lesbian community, especially the API lesbian community in the late 90s. In the broader community, there were what they call the butch FTM wars, there was just a lot of animosity, which continues to this day, and a lot of… I mean, I think about lesbians of my generation or a little older, there’s certainly a deep transphobic thread among some of the folks in that generation that is harmful. 

It’s been a process I think of people opening their minds to different possibilities, but at that time, people were not… In the 80s and even in the 90s, I think people were not really understanding that someone might have a different gender identity from the sex assigned at birth, and that that was okay, and that you were still part of the broader LGBTQ, or that what became a sense of queer as a broadening concept, it took a while for folks to really get that that could include folks with varying gender identities. It was so very much, the lesbian, gay community, or gay and lesbian, white, gay men getting a lot of visibility and lesbians getting much less visibility, and that being very much the idea of what this broader community represented. So yeah, I would say it’s been a long process. Of course now, wow, and when you talk about an organization like API Equality – Northern California, APIENC, I mean, there is an example of an organization that is really getting the breadth of identity and experience intergenerationally across our community and the different ways that folks identify. That’s a beautiful thing. 

Whereas I was considered weird and one of only three people in the FTM community who identified in a way that wasn’t binary or who wasn’t pursuing medical transition in the 90s… There wasn’t really a community, there wasn’t really a sense of what that meant to identify in a complex way around gender. And now, wow, you can legally designate your gender as nonbinary in several states, and there’s a burgeoning community. And as many ways to identify, there are people who identify these ways. That’s a beautiful thing. I love that, I love the nonbinary movement. Even though my identity has shifted, and I do identify as a trans man now. But, prior to medical transition, it was a more complex identity. I mean, which is not to say that my experience is not complex, I’ve lived over time in these different experiences around my gender. So for me, identifying as a trans man means that I lived in a female body for five decades, so that certainly influences who I am as a trans man. 

Rhiki:
You said that your medical transition was fairly recent, and me and Paige were kind of talking about this the other day, so I’m just really curious, when you finally were medically transitioning, what was it like to realize, wow, I’m a male now, as far as the things that comes with maleness? 

Willy Wilkinson:
Well-

Rhiki:
So, I’m more so referring to how people view you from the outside as a male and the privileges they assume that you have from looking the way you do now.

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, I mean, I think for me, I was very strongly identified as a woman color, as a mixed woman of color. I think male privilege is phenomenal. Whereas if I were going to a store or something, it’s not problem if I have to wait some long period of time, but now with light skin privilege and with male privilege, I feel like I experience so much more privilege, where people are saying, “Oh, oh, I’ll be with you in a minute, sir.” Those kinds of moments, where I feel like the privilege is phenomenal in terms of how I experience the world. I think it’s an evolution of really coming into that experience because inside I’m still this quiet Asian girl that’s being afraid to speak out sometime. The experience in a world is that for me, as someone who does training with all types of folks with various knowledge levels around LGBTQ communities, I feel like that I got smarter and my money got greener. 

Somehow, what I have to say has more importance now. Even though I might struggle with the trappings of culture, where I might be afraid to assert myself or express my needs sometimes internally, externally to have the experience of being read… To have the experience of being assumed to have had male privilege all my life and the privilege that comes with that is really huge. It’s a process of recognizing that privilege and also battling the internal struggles that I have. I think that that is not just unique to me for transmasculine folks. We’ve lived as female, we’ve been subjugated our whole life, since the womb or whatever, and as female born individuals, as trans individual or gender expansive folks, and then to have that experience where you’re afforded these privileges, it’s pretty phenomenal, and that comes with responsibility absolutely.

Paige:
Yeah, I think listening to you talk about the different eras of what it meant to be trans is really interesting, because I feel like I still… Even reading and talking to people, I still really don’t understand what it was like before this time period. To me, it’s so normal that people are trans. Hearing you say that you hadn’t met another transmasculine person until you were 29 is like, wow, like, wow. 29 is late to-

Willy Wilkinson:
Right?

Paige:
[inaudible 00:29:42]. I can’t even imagine, yeah.

Willy Wilkinson:
Well, I mean, out transmasculine… although, I would say that I have known people who I felt like, oh, I see them, I get them. But, there were some people who were butch identified, but weren’t out as trans until later, or there was somebody that I grew up with who I don’t know what happened to this person, but I don’t think they even came out as queer even though to me, I thought this person was transmasculine in middle school. But, I don’t know what happened to that… I don’t know where that person journeyed. But, when I last saw this person, they were identifying as a straight woman. 

Paige:
It’s like, I see you, I see you. Come out. 

Willy Wilkinson:
Right?

Paige:
Yeah. I’ve been thinking also about the stigma of medically transitioning and how it’s changed over the years, and what goes into the decision of whether or not to medically transition, and whether or not your validity as a trans person changes too if you transition or not? Also now, with the support that you’re able to have with the resources is so different I think.

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting the drama in the community, when really I think one of the key messages of the trans movement is be yourself, live authentically, right? But then, I think there are people who resist others being themselves. So, it used to be a lot of pressure to medically transition, and there was no word or real community around what we now know as a nonbinary experience. There was no visibility around that, and that was considered not trans enough. When I was identifying in that way, although we didn’t use the term nonbinary, but in essence that’s the way I was identifying. Now, I think there are many trans men who feel like, oh, it’s not cool to be more binary identified or identify as male, what’s cool is nonbinary. Then, there was a moment in between that where people were like, those genderqueer people are fucking me up. 

It was really, those people are out there, and their presence means that other people will think that I identify that way. So, it’s kind of like, what, there is room for everybody. I think it’s really important that people figure out who they are and pursue the path that’s right for them. There are no rules. There are as many way to do this as there are trans and nonbinary, gender expansive folks. So, I don’t understand that. I feel like that’s a lot of noise, because if people really feel that medical transition is right for them, then the real question is can they access the procedures that they want to pursue. For so many years, trans people experience extreme discrimination in healthcare settings, denied a policy for being trans, denied transition related care, denied any service that was considered… such as sex specific services like trans men being denied gynecological care, transwomen being denied prostate screenings for instance, and denied coverage for any service that was related to being trans. 

The health insurance company would say, “Well, too bad you have a liver issue, you are on hormones and that affected your liver, we can’t cover that,” or “Too bad you broke your arm, we can’t cover your broken arm because your hormones affected your bone health.” So, for so many years, trans exclusions have really inhibited people’s access to transition related care, certainly not covered by health insurance. It’s only been since 2013-14 that we’ve started to get health insurance coverage in not even half the states. So, there’s a huge discrepancy in terms of healthcare access. So, it’s really a question of, can people access the care that they want, and can they get that covered by health insurance. That’s a struggle, and there are certain procedures that continue to be a struggle to get coverage for. So, I just feel like, hey, the fact that folks have been able to get coverage for, not just top surgery but genital surgeries, I mean in the state of California, that’s huge. 

I mean, and I personally have witnessed how that has been transformative for the mental health status of folks in the community. So, I really feel like we should be congratulating everybody on whatever path they choose. If folks are saying, “Oh, I figured out this is how I identify, I’m not interested in medical transition, I’m interested in social transition and this is who I am,” then hey, let’s celebrate that. It’s like, there’s no rules here. Folks should just do what’s right for them. 

Paige:
Yes, oh my goodness.

Willy Wilkinson:
You know?

Paige:
Yes, yes. I feel like-

Rhiki:
So, to stay on this topic of the healthcare system, what are some things that you think COVID-19 has been able to make more visible as far as health disparities affecting trans people, and trans people of color?

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I do want to say, when you asked me what was on my mind this week also, just Jacob Blake, Wisconsin, I mean just the horrible, horrible ongoing state-sanctioned violence against Black people. I am glad that there’s more visibility, there’s more people who are understanding this. It’s just an ongoing horror all that’s happening. And so COVID, well, thinking about Kamala Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention, a couple parts that I loved about that was when she said, “Let’s be clear, there’s no vaccine for racism, we got to do the work.” Then, she talked about how the virus has no eyes, but it sees how we treat each other. I think when you look at COVID and how it’s impacting Black and Brown communities, and you look at HIV/AIDS and how it impacted marginalized communities as well, and the lack of resources. Again, we’re seeing a pandemic impacting marginalized communities. 

Then of course, the Trump administration, on June 12th, the anniversary of the Pulse massacre decided to announce I mean, something they had been working on for a while, stripping discrimination protections from the Affordable Care Act, section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which is about sex discrimination, which has been interpreted to include people who are discriminated against based on gender identity, basically stripping discrimination protections from healthcare settings during Pride Month, during a global pandemic, right? That was the Friday. The following Monday, the Supreme Court decision recognized that quote unquote sex discrimination does include folks who are discriminated against based on trans status. So, it’s been a really interesting thing to see how the Supreme Court decision has impacted other federal statutes that are based on sex discrimination, so that has made that something that potentially we won’t experience, or at least Judge [inaudible 00:37:37] has said, “Wait a minute, let’s look at this Supreme Court decision here.” 

So, that whole thing of stripping discrimination protections from the Affordable Care Act, it’s just… There’s been so many attacks on trans people in housing, healthcare, education, the military, in the prison system, and immigration, for immigrants and so on. So, it’s just really there’s so many attacks on trans people, and I think when we look at how folks are impacted by COVID. I mean even trans lifeline that supports the mental health of trans folks, for and by trans folks, just in the first couple months of the pandemic, much higher incidents of suicidal ideation, workplace discrimination, domestic discriminated, substance use, prescription delays, postponed surgeries. Which, if you talk to mental health providers, they will tell you that has been significantly impactful. Although, some people are now getting transition related surgeries. I know a couple of folks who’ve just had transition related surgeries in August. 

But, loss of insurance, discrimination in healthcare settings, just much, much  incidents. When you look at LGBTQ communities, particularly trans communities, many folks worked in gig economies, many folks are working in industries that are much more negatively impacted with more exposure that people are more likely to experience a cut in work hours and income and not necessarily being able to access unemployment. According to data from the Human Rights Campaign, that people, LGBTQ folks more likely to feel that their financial situation is quote much worse than before the COVID pandemic, that folks are less likely to have insurance, and that folks are more likely to smoke and have chronic illnesses like asthma which can significantly increase complications from COVID infections.

Rhiki:
Yeah.

Willy Wilkinson:
But at the same time, what’s interesting in our communities is that LGBTQ communities have been more likely to actively learn about COVID and take precautionary steps, so maybe that’s because it’s not our first pandemic. But, I think we’re really seeing folks are at risk though, continue to be at risk because of economics, at risk of exposure, at risk in trying to make a buck, and at risk of loss of housing, loss of healthcare, and so many negative impacts. So, of course it’s devastating. It’s devastating on so many, and with the feds cutting unemployment checks significantly, it’s devastating.

Rhiki:
Yeah, it’s just a lot. I appreciate you saying how people are at risk for things that you can’t argue is a part of their DNA or their genetics or some time of immunodeficiency. They’re at risk for things that we can change and we can control, but we’re not. Yeah. So, I do have this one last impromptu question, so I hope you don’t mind me asking it. But, as a trans person of color, and who is also an organizer, what advice do you have for other organizers? And I’m thinking more specifically about the recent uprising and the movement for fighting against the killing of innocent Black people. But, in this movement, we see there’s a little tear or a little rift between how do we make the conversation go deeper, and it’s not just about Black males, but about Black females, and then about Black trans people. There seems to be some confusion about how to hold multiple things up and multiple identities up when organizing. So, what advice could you give to organizers about how to create a movement but also hold multiple things at one time simultaneously?

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, what a great question. And I don’t know that I have all the answer, but I mean, come on. None of us are free until Black trans people are free. I think that we really need to be able to hold all of those identity… or recognize that all that intersectionality. What’s interesting is I’ve been a part of various API communities in support of Black lives. I’ve been really happy to see that work that folks are doing around really understanding the issues and supporting the issues and doing the work around raising awareness in our communities as one aspect of the work. I also think that there is an incredible need to support folks’ mental health right now. Part of that work in the API community or API trans community that I’ve been doing with APIENC has been in co-facilitating workshops on asking for help and setting boundaries as part of sustainability in movement organizing. 

I think that’s really beautiful work that they’re doing and that they’re really reaching out to support folks’ mental health within the context of Black Lives Matter, and fighting against anti-Black violence, and also within the context of trans justice. So, I think we need to be strong and find that strength and resilience especially now so that we can continue that fight. So many people are recognizing that this century’s old state violence, it’s old and needs to stop, and it’s structural. It’s not just the bad apple theory or whatever, it’s structural and people really need to do that work to fight against those systems of oppression. So, I think people feel overwhelmed, and I think yes, the work, it’s huge. But, in order to do that work, we need to figure out, what is it that I can do and what do I need to do in order to be effective in that work. 

So, I think that’s the question is not getting paralyzed by how overwhelming it is, but figure out what it is that you can do. So, I don’t know if that really answers your question because it’s a really big question, and I don’t know that I’m the best person to answer that question. But, there’s so much work that needs to be done and there’s so many ways that we can all engage. It might be in talking to people who might vote against people of color’s rights, it might be people in our families, in our communities, it may be donating funds if you can, it may be working in collaboration with different movements. Another piece of this is the Disability Justice Movement too, and I don’t want to leave that out. I think there’s been great work over the years around disability justice. When I was first experiencing disability in the 90s, it was very white, male, straight dominated. 

There was no awareness around people of color in Berkeley. I mean, and Berkeley is the hub of the disability universe, and there was no awareness around these issues, which has really changed over time, and that recognition of intersectionality within disability justice movements, but also recognizing the wisdom of the Disability Justice movement and how we can access that wisdom now as we develop mutual aid networks and support elders and immunocompromised folks, folks who have sensitivities, these populations. I mean, there’s all of that, how can we really recognize these intersections of the movements, or even looking at the discriminatory care rationing around deprioritizing people with disabilities in healthcare settings and how Black and Brown folks are experiencing discrimination in healthcare settings yet more negatively impacted by COVID, all of that. We really need to be looking at all of these issues together and working toward systemic change. So, I think that question is, well what is it that we can all do? How can we all do that work? So, I think that happens in so many different ways.

Rhiki:
Yeah. Well, thank you for attempting to answer that question. It was a really big question, but I appreciate what you said because it can get overwhelming because there’s so many intersections and there are so many things. You want to include everybody, you want everybody to be visible, and that’s something hard to do. But, I think what you said about figuring out what you can do as an individual and where you fit into this work can help combat that overwhelming feeling, so I really appreciate that.

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a really good question. 

Rhiki:
So, before we close out, are there any projects that you’re working on currently that you want to uplift in this moment?

Willy Wilkinson:
I mean, I’ll just share, my parents are in their 90s, and my mom who is 98… One of the projects I’m doing is working on the final stages of getting my mom’s first book to press. It’s a collection of short stories of Chinese legends, tales, superstitions, things that were passed down through oral history over centuries, stuff I grew up learning about. So, that’s a project I’m excited about. I’m also thinking about a children’s book, but it’s still in the idea stage at this point. I’m just continuing to do the work that I do, of providing training and consultation to various entities, folks who work in community health, broadly defined, educational, mental health, folks who work in medical, mental health, behavioral health settings as well as public health and other settings, and educational institutions, everything from preschool to university settings, and workplaces, folks who are trying to create trans affirming workplaces and so forth. 

So, I really do love that work, and when the pandemic hit, I thought, oh, who’s going to want me to do training. I may have to reinvent myself. I may not be able to continue to be who I am. Then, I realized, oh people still have that need. For me, I’m always talking about racial justice within that context because when we talk about LGBTQ folks and trans folks, and we talk about the alarming statistics, well we’re talking about how Black and Brown folks are most negatively impacted. So, I feel like for me, that’s something we can do more of. Really doing organizational assessment around racism, around really looking about how we can create affirming services in whatever settings we’re in as well LGBTQ and trans affirming services. So, that’s work that I continue to do. Now, I’m doing this stuff on Zoom. It’s not the same as a live training, but it has really been interesting to engage with folks in those discussion around how people can create more affirming settings around all of those issues. 

I’m looking at how can I do more in that area as well. So, I think that’s’ really what I’m continuing to do is doing that work with folks to create more affirming care and services, educational settings and so forth. I just hope that folks are inspired to continue this work, that these recent uprisings weren’t just a blip, and that people continue that work as we move forward. And really that folks who may have recognized these injustices anew are continuing that commitment to do that work around uplifting everyone who’s marginalized. 

Paige:
I definitely always feel inspired when I talk to you or other people in APIENC. I think that for me has definitely been a political home to come back to and get resurged and energy for sure.

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah.

Paige:
Yeah.

Willy Wilkinson:
And that’s it, we got to uplift ourself so that we have the strength to do movement work. So, I think that’s a beautiful thing too, is finding those communities that support us, that see us, that give us strength and resilience, and that help us remember our ancestral wisdom, right? We do have that. And that we can take that strength in this particular moment and carry that forward, and continue to have hope even when there’s so many things that feel hopeless right now, to continue to have that hope and inspiration to carry on and celebrate your unique self and do the work that you can do to make systemic change happen.

Paige:
Such wise words.

Willy Wilkinson:
Thank you. Thank you so much. You ask good questions.

Paige:
Thank you again for coming on, Willy. So, you can check out Willy Wilkinson’s-

Willy Wilkinson:
My pleasure.

Paige:
Book, Born on the Edge of Race and Gender, and follow him at WillyWilkinson on Twitter. Is there anything else you want to plug in too?

Willy Wilkinson:
I’m not a big Tweeter though. [crosstalk 00:52:04] I have a Facebook author page though. I’m not super active on social media, but yeah.

Rhiki:

[crosstalk 00:52:15].

Willy Wilkinson:
Yeah, my book is out there, and if anybody wants a signed copy, you can certainly contact me through my website, I’d be happy to send folks a signed copy. Yeah, for sure, and I’m happy to be a resource for folks if they need to reach out. So, thank you so much for the opportunity, for the invitation to be interviewed by you all.

Rhiki:
Thank you for talking with us. It was a real pleasure. And if you enjoyed this conversation, remember that the conversation is not over. We will continue to keep bringing very intentional, very depth conversations to this platform. So, please check us out next time on the Radical Zone.

Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook @ACSJLKzoo, Twitter @ACSCJL, and Instagram @ArcusCenter. For questions, comments, and ideas for future topics, please leave responses on our social media platforms.

Movement Reflections & Pan-Africanism from a Black Panther

As the Black Lives Matter uprisings continue, we look back at our history and invite Charlotte Hill O’Neil AKA Mama “C” to speak on her triumphs and journey as a former Black Panther. Currently at the United African Alliance Community Center in Tanzania, where Covid19 is not prevalent, Mama C is living her best life: writing her memoir Hard Head and spending time with the community. She shares her insights on the parallels between the Black Panther movement and Black Lives Matter movement today.

Resources:

Mama C’s Soundcloud


Transcript:

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
I’m always urging young people and elders to live your life to the fullest. I’ve had several of my comrades pass away within the last couple of years, actually. And one of my aunts just passed away the other day. And it’s like the older we get, there’s more and more people who are making that transition. So I’m determined to realize my passion and to pass that passion on to everybody. 

And like I said in the film, my paramount thing is to spread peace and love in all communities. And when you’ve been on this planet for as long as I have … And I think I’m one of the elder people in here. Still young at heart. You’re bound to have experiences that you will never ever forget. Some of those things that make you want to just laugh with the memory. And those things that you might just want to keep tucked away to take a peep at through tears every now and again, but living long teaches us that it’s all good. It’s what makes us unique. Makes you you, and me me.

Rhiki:
Welcome to The Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo College whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building.

We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued. The inherent dignity of all people is recognized. The opportunity to develop one’s full potential is available to every person, and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

All right. Well, to start us off, I want to start off with an opening question. So Mama C, who inspires you to do the work that you do?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Ooh. So many people have inspired me, including my family. I was very close with my family in Kansas City. Mr. Sterling Hill and Ms. Theresa [inaudible 00:02:56] Hill. She’s passed on, but one of the other great inspirations in my life has been what I’ve learned as a member of the Black Panther Party. I joined the party when I was 18 years old in Kansas City. And this is where I met my husband, Brother Pete O’Neal. And he is most definitely the greatest, most consistent inspiration in my life. 

When I look at the background that he came from and how he was transformed from being a member of the Black Panther Party and what we have continued to do here, even though he is in exile, we have carried on the work of the Black Panther Party. So I have to say that being a Panther marked me and continues to inspire me.

Rhiki:
Thank you so much for sharing that. Paige, what about you? Who inspires you to do the work that you do?

Paige:
What a good question. Recently, I think it has been my community members, just people that I organize with, mostly APIENC, Asian Pacific Islanders Equality-Northern California. I think they’re going to rebrand soon, which I’m actually excited about because that name is so long to explain, but it’s a group in the Bay Area, queer Asian radicals. And every single time I talk to the elders or I talk to youth, I feel really inspired by the work that we do together. What about you, Rhiki? Who inspires you?

Rhiki:
So I think for me, it would have to be like you, my community members. I come from a very small impoverished town, Albion, Michigan, super small. It was like everybody knows everybody, but we supported each other and worked together to get what we needed to do, get it done. And I carry that with me. It helped me with team building and working in groups. I’m a community person. I need to be surrounded by people, and I need that support, and then I want to give that support.

So coming from that small town has really shaped how I go about organizing and doing work regarding collaboration or whatever you want to call it. But my community has definitely been a big inspiration to me.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Can I add a little bit to what I feel about being so inspired about having been a member of the Black Panther Party? Is that okay?

Rhiki:
Yes.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes. Yes. So when I was a teenager, that’s when I first really started learning about African history, or back then we were calling it black history. And that step led me to becoming a member of the Black Panther Party when I was 18 years old. But the thing that has stuck with me and that has made me so comfortable during my walk in the world is the fact that we were taught that we are members of the global community. And I continue to care that in my heart.

And I am comfortable interacting with people of all races, all ethnic backgrounds, everything, all languages, even though I just speak Kiswahili and English, but that continues to inspire me. The fact that I was almost branded to be a member of a global family. And to me, that gives us so much strength. You always hear people talking about a minority and all that, but when you really think about it, we are not a minority. We are not. 

And once you get that in your head and in your mind, and once you have been politically educated about what is happening in the world, it makes you comfortable in your own being. And I love that. And that continues to inspire me. And I try to pass that on to the youth that I work with.

Rhiki:
I really appreciate you sharing that. Thank you.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Karibu. That means welcome. You’re welcome. 

Rhiki:
All right. So let’s get into it. Welcome everyone to The Radical Zone Podcast. It’s Rhiki and Paige here. And Paige, how about you tell the people a little bit more about our special guest, Mama C.

Paige:
We have Mama C today, also known as Charlotte Hill O’Neal. She is an internationally known writer, poet, visual artist, musician, healer, filmmaker, and longtime community activist, with more than three decades of experience. She’s the co-founder and program director of the United African Alliance Community Center, which is located outside of Arusha, Tanzania, and a member of the Black Panther Party. 

She launched her first book of poetry, Warrior Woman of Peace in 2008. And her second book of poetry, Life Slices, a Taste of Magic in 2016. She is currently working on her memoir titled, Hard Head. Welcome, Ms. Mama C.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Thank you. Thank you. This is my great pleasure to talk to you all young folk. I guess you all are young.

Paige:
I hope so. I’m [inaudible 00:08:56].

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Younger than me. It’s so funny because I am definitely a hip hop head, and I love all kinds of music as long as it’s positive and conscious. And at the concerts, I’m always the oldest one, but it’s all good.

Paige:
Nothing wrong with that.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Nothing wrong with that. I’m very comfortable with young people. Very, very … I think that being around young people and working with young people, and interacting with young people, it always recharges my batteries. And it keeps me young, because I’ll be 70 in March, and that shocks me. I can’t believe it, because I don’t feel like that inside. I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel when you’re almost 70. But I’m not feeling it.

Rhiki:
That’s good. Very good. 

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes.

Rhiki:
So to start off, I want to ask you, what’s happening where you are with the whole pandemic and everything?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Well, it’s like life is just going on normally. I’m one of the few people who is still masking when I go out, and that’s because my dad lives with us and he’s 93. And my husband, Brother Pete is 80. And them being elders, I have to make sure that we take all kind of precautions, but it never really shut down here. And the president was saying that it was the prayers of people and the good vibes that are going through communities that has kept the pandemic on a low level here. It can’t even be called a pandemic here. 

So as I said, life is just going on normal. Now, the border is still not opened up with Kenya yet. And Kenya has reported many, many cases, but Tanzania hasn’t. And people have different theories on that. But the hospitals are not overwhelmed here. The stores are open, the schools are open. And of course, the churches in mosque and then the markets. Everything is going on as usual. So I pray that it will continue like that. And the good thing about being here at the center, the center is on almost four acres of land, so we have plenty of opportunity to be outside.

And I read a theory recently that perhaps that’s why rona isn’t so prevalent in Africa is because culturally we spend most of our time outside. And you go in the house to eat or to go to bed or whatever. So perhaps that’s why. Perhaps that’s why. And I do believe in the power of prayer. So, that might have something to do with it also. So when I read and look at the news and see the horrors that are going on in the States, and our two children are there, and my husband has other children there, my relatives, it’s such a scary, terrible situation, but it’s not like that here. It’s not. 

We live in a village. We’re in the countryside, so that’s even better. We’re not stuck in a city somewhere. And I really believe that places where there are large cities and where people are packed together, of course it’s going to spread. Of course, it’s going to be coming out of the woodwork, but it’s not like that here in Arusha, Tanzania. So we’re blessed with that. We’re blessed with peace. We’re blessed with good food. We’re blessed with a good life situation for most people here. So I give thanks for that. 

And we have more and more people from the diaspora who are coming to Tanzania, and I would guess in other parts of the country. People are trying to get out of there, you all. Out of America. And it’s all rumors that people are going to have hard time getting passports. And I know people from America aren’t welcome all over the world because of rona, because of the virus. That’s my assessment of the situation here. Life is going on. Everything’s normal.

Paige:
I wanted to ask you. Earlier, you were talking about the Black Panther Party and your experience with it. I was wondering, what’s the process of actually joining the Black Panther? Because I feel like I’ve read about what people do when they were in the Black Panther Party, and talking to elders and stuff like that. But I actually don’t know what the process of joining it was like. Could you talk-

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes. Well, we were required … There was a book list that we were required to read and be conversant in. So it was almost like the test almost. You had to show that you’re very serious. You had to be a person who would present themselves to community in a good manner. We had to learn the 10-point party platform and program. And you had to be able to work. So actually, even when I was a senior in high school, I was skipping school to go over there. I was. And I would do that so that I could participate in not only the rallies that were pretty frequent, because this was in the time where we were trying to free Huey P. Newton who was one of the founders with Bobby Seale of the party.

But also I was attending the political education classes. And that’s something that you had to do. And there were so many people who joined, whose reading level might’ve been real low, but because they wanted to participate in the political education classes, that brought their reading up to a higher level. And you had to understand that party members came from all stratas of life. Some were people from the streets, some were college students, some were even teachers and lawyers and medical people.

So we have a lot to contend with and a lot to learn. And we did it together. The comradery, not only in our chapter, but all over the country. And indeed in other parts of the world that were influenced by the Black Panther Party was something that is amazing, and it continues to this day. If somebody knows that you are a party member, you are welcome right off the bat, because we had so many experiences together, both good and bad. And the thing that was the hallmark of being a Panther was the community service. 

And there are still party members who are elders like me and even older who are still doing some kind of community service, the same way we are here. What we do here in Tanzania at the center is a continuation of all the philosophy of community service that we learned and lived as members of Black Panther Party. Once a Panther, always a Panther. That’s something that we all say, and it’s true.

Paige:
I love that.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes. Yes. 

Paige:
I didn’t know that there was a required reading. I think that makes so much sense, because whenever you talk to a Black Panther, obviously the political education and the consciousness level is through the roof. What kind of books did you all read?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Well, I know Frantz Fanon, all of his books. One of the things you might be interested is The Little Red Book by Chairman Mao. That was definitely required reading. And I can remember some of it to this day. And one that sticks out in my mind is never still a needle or even a piece of thread from the people. And of course, some of the authors from Africa, people from Cuba. Even Kim Il Sung who was North Korea. The reading was very, very international in its scope.

And the people that were heroes to us were also very international in that case also. And just think, here I was 18 years old and learning all these things that were just new to me. That’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing that a young woman or a young man could experience. And I know that there are cadres of people, old in America who are still trying to teach the youth about history. Not only African history, but history of people fighting for liberation all over the world.

And then when we went to Algeria, that gave me even a more window into international living because where we were in Algeria, which was international section of the Black Panther Party, that was the hub of liberation movements from all over the world. So we met and interacted with people from North Korea, from Vietnam, from South Africa, you name it. Wherever people were fighting for their freedom, many of them ended up there in Algeria.

Rhiki:
So, Mama C, going back to what you said about how things happen through an international lens and even the readings in which you all used to educate yourself were from all over, can you explain this concept of international solidarity? How would you define it, and why do you think it’s important for more black people to adapt this type of lens?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Oh, yes. That is so very important. I had mentioned earlier that when you put yourself in a international vision, international way to live, it empowers you. It empowers you. It lets there are people on the planet who are also fighting for freedom who have very, very similar philosophies, who have had very similar lifestyles. Many people were inspired by the Black Panther Party. And even in India, the Dalit people there, they formed a Black Panther party. People in New Zealand formed a Black Panther party. People in London formed a Black Panther party.

I’ve met some of the comrades from New Zealand at the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. So it just expands your whole focus. It rips off those blinders that so many people, especially in America are wearing, and they don’t even know it. When I go to the States and I look at the news, everything on the news is very, very local. And I think that that is by design. They don’t want people to know about what’s happening in the rest of the world, because if you know what’s happening in the rest of the world, when you relate to other people, you feel a sense of unity, and that strength.

And that’s the thing that many in the government there in America, they don’t want that. They don’t want people to be unified. That has always been their Achilles heel. Am I using that right?

Paige:
Yeah.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Achilles heel. Yes. Yes. Because in unity, there’s strength. That’s very, very simple. It’s not a complex philosophy at all. And it just opens your mind. It expands possibilities. It gives you confidence knowing that you’re not the only one out there. And that’s a good thing.

Paige:
I’m just so in awe of what you’re saying. I’m just thinking about what it means to be in international solidarity. And so much of the work that people do when they leave and come back. And one of my friends is in Thailand right now, and he keeps telling me that I have to go out to Asia at some point and just learn about freedom fighting all over the world. So I’m [crosstalk 00:23:12] right now.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes. Is your heritage Chinese?

Paige:
I’m Vietnamese.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Oh, Vietnamese. Because I went to China for two months. I found it to be very invigorating, because there were very, very few black people or African people in Shanghai when I was there. This was 2015. So when I would walk the street, people would stare at me. And the first couple of days it made me uncomfortable. But after a while, it just empowered me because I realized that I’m a African woman. And because I realized I learned so much from China from Chairman Mao.

And I was a little disappointed that everybody wasn’t walking around in their Chairman Mao suits. People had on miniskirts and was dressing like people do in the States. That was a little disappointing, but I had a beautiful time there. And I was walking down the street one day and this young man passed by me. And to say hello in the Chinese language, you say ni hao. And he said, ni hao yo. Yes. I just loved it. 

I said, he has been exposed to hip hop. He has been exposed to some of the language that Africans in the States use. And yes, indeed. I went to a hip hop concert there in Shanghai and Talib Kweli was there, and-

Paige:
What?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Mos Def was supposed to be there, but he had some problem. He was in South Africa and couldn’t come. But those Chinese youth knew all the lyrics to the songs. And hip hop to me is universal, and I love it. You can go to a village, you can go to a city, you can go probably in the Amazon forest, and young people will know something about hip hop. And I just love that. I love the power that’s in hip hop. And that’s another thing that I love about and uplift about hip hop, it’s international. It’s a international language. And it has been able to grow unity all over the world. I’m telling you. That’s the way to go, being a internationalist.

Paige:
I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you some questions about the Black Lives Matter movement that we have right now, if it’s okay.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Sure. Sure. Please.

Paige:
I was wondering, what are some of the parallels between your experience with the Black Panther movement and the Black Lives Matter movement? I think specifically about media. I read a quote the other day that said, the Black Panthers were not interested in mainstream press or general public approval. They had their own newspaper design, art directed, heavily illustrated by Black Panther Party artist and minister of culture, Emory Douglas. It showed images-

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Who was a very dear comrade.

Paige:
So I’m just wondering, with the Black Lives Matter movement, it literally started with a hashtag in social media as a rallying cry. And I’m just wondering your understanding of the different approaches to media in each movement.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Well, one thing that you all have that we didn’t have was this powerful thing called the internet. We were using mimeograph machines, and I bet a lot of your listening audience probably have never even heard of a mimeograph machines, where we would have to-

Paige:
I don’t even know what it is.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
t’s a big old, clunky machine that you had to put ink in, and you had to actually manually turn the handle to put out our leaflets and our memorandums, and all that kind of thing. You all have such a great organizing force in the internet. And yes, there are definitely parallels between the way the media depicted us and the way the media is depicting the Black Lives Matter movement. They depicted us as Panthers as wild and undisciplined and just interested in carrying guns and marching and all that where they didn’t want to report how we were feeding thousands of children all over the country every day.

And many of us were young people, teenagers. Some the oldest were in their thirties, but we were doing this when the government wasn’t doing it. And because we had these breakfast programs and health clinics and all this, I think it embarrassed the American government. And that’s when they first started these programs like Head Start and things like that. But when I look at how the Black Lives Matter movement has grown, and the way it too has become international, then I say, “Wow, these young people really get it. They really get that it’s unity that strengthens us to the point where we can do just about anything and changing things in our community.”

I look at some of the visuals now, and I see all these white kids … Not kids, but white young people and Asian young people, and of course, brown people and black people marching together. And this is the way it was in the ’60s and ’70s. We had something that all of us could rally around, of course trying to get the real practice of human rights and civil rights for black and brown people. But we also had the Vietnam War that drew in so many people from all communities, and that was a rallying cry to build unity.

So the press is going to always vilify people who are trying to come together to rebuild, to reconstruct, to really change things. And I love this thing about defunding the police and making sure … I can’t remember which point it was, and I used to have it all memorized. But it was that we needed to have police from our own community who are helping to keep order, for lack of a better word, in the community. And that’s something I experienced as a child in Kansas City. You didn’t have all these instances of police brutality. You didn’t have it like that because the police were from our community.

They went to school with our parents, they partied with our parents, they went to church or the mosque with our parents. And the same thing with the teachers. The teachers came from our community. They knew the culture. They knew people in the community, and they pushed us to excel. But when you have people coming from outside the community who knows nothing, but maybe the negative things they have heard in the news media, they come to look at it as us against them. It’s almost like wars. It’s like a occupying force, and that is something that has been such a detriment to black and brown communities in particular.

Paige:
I think there is definitely such a historical relationship between the Breakfast Program and the Black Panther. I think you can definitely still see that today. Like in Oakland, they do the Breakfast Program still. And I think the remanence of the Black Panther Party are still definitely here with us all the time. And I know for me, reading about the Black Panther was part of my radicalization. And I know part of Trevor’s too.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Oh yes. I want to mention that, as you said, some of these programs are still going on. I was in Seattle. That was one of my last stops right before I came back home here in Tanzania. And the comrades there took me to a hospital, or maybe it was large, large clinic. I don’t know how you designate the differences, but this was the regional clinic that was established by Panthers back in, I think ’68 or something like that. It’s still going on.

And like I said, also in the beginning of our conversation, once a Panther, always a Panther. So even some of the elders are now focusing on the many political prisoners who have been locked down for decades, and they are still feeding the community. There’s a comrade in San Diego, and I saw some of the work that they were doing there. They’re still mentoring people. And I have to emphasize sisters, that we’re doing the same work here in Africa. And one of the things that is of paramount importance among Black Panthers is that we continue to set a positive example. We continue to mentor young people. 

Paige:
Right on.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes, yes. So, that’s something that will never change. If I reach to be a ripe age of a hundred, I dare say, I’ll still be doing some kind of community work.

Paige:
Not [inaudible 00:34:22].

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
That’s right. Yes. And did you know that phrase, right on, comes from the Panthers?

Paige:
Oh my goodness.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
A lot of people don’t know. Yes. Yes. It’s widely used now, but that’s where it comes from. Right on.

Rhiki:
I did not know that.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
It was really a special time in history. My husband says it was like some enlightenment of the planets that was sending down some kind of energy field that affected so many people. And I think the same thing is happening now. This is the age of enlightenment. It’s happening you all, and I’m just so happy that we have been blessed to live to see this, the new age of enlightenment.

Rhiki:
I do have a question. So considering your extensive experience with organizing, I want to get your thoughts on structures of movement. So what is your thoughts on decentralized movements versus movements that have centralized leaders? And then if you could just share which one you feel fits best for the times now?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Well, I think both of them fit best. I think that there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I wonder where that phrase came from. I’m going to have to look that up on the internet, but I think there’s a place for all of it. There’s a place for small cadres of comrades to do something. And then there’s a place for these thousands of people marching together. There’s not only one way. You can have leaders, but the thing about having leaders is the powers that be, and I don’t like to use that phrase, but we know of them talking about.

It’s easy for them to target leaders who are out there on the front line, so you got to have backup. You got to have people who you wouldn’t even dream are a part of the movement. Clandestine operatives. So I can’t say that one is better than the other. We need them both. We really, really do.

Paige:
Well, I think one thing about the different structures in leadership is when we talk about the ’60s, I feel like there’s a discussion now about how one of the difficulties with the movements in the ’60s is that the leaders were so … You could point to them; Malcolm, Martin. And with our movements now, I’ve heard other elders talk about, “Because it’s so decentralized, it’s harder to pinpoint a specific …” There are obviously leaders, but it’s … How do you call it? The movement doesn’t die because one of the leaders has died. What do you think about things like that?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
I think that that’s very correct. And that’s why I say you got people who are out there on front street, but you’ve got also people who are more silent in their activities. And that’s why it’s so important to have small groups also. What we call cadres, who can go out into the community and who can influence people, who can teach people, who can lead people, but on a smaller scale. Everybody’s not going to be out there on the front lines, and that’s not even desirable that the leaders are targeted like that.

So you need some people out there who can fire people up with their enthusiasm, with their ideals and all that. But you also need people who are more, what we call, underground. So I think both are … I’m sorry.

Paige:
Would you say that you’re more of the underground person or the person at the rally who fires people up? What was that like for you. Mama C?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Do you mean when I was a active Panther?

Paige:
Yeah.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Is that what you mean?

Paige:
Yeah. When you were an active Panther or now. 

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Well, right now I think that I can fire people up through my example. Through my positive example. When people see the work that we do here, it inspires them to do work also. It inspires them to do what they can to uplift their community. It inspires them when they see the spirit of volunteerism, which was also one of the hallmarks of what being a Panther is about.

My thing, when I go on tour, I try to present the most positive, uplifting messages that I can to whoever I speak to. Because with all of these terrible things that are happening there, the police brutality, the pandemic, all these things that’s happening, we got … And I always tell people this, you can’t let them take your joy, because joy is one of the things that also fuels our batteries. So even in the midst of all this terrible thing that’s going on, you’ve got to have some way to experience joy.

I think that’s one of the important things that I bring to communities wherever I go, joy and blessings. Everybody’s not going to be able to pick up a gun, or to throw a Molotov cocktail, or even to protest. True. There’s something that everybody can do. And one of the things that I think is my calling as a healer, as a spiritual person, a spiritual being is to make sure that that joy keeps flowing.

Rhiki:
I do have a question. So since you got into the party at such a young age, at 18, how did you go about finding and developing your voice? Being that I’m also young and trying to get off into this organizing world. How did you develop your voice?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Well, I’ve always had a very strong sense of self, and I’ve always been a very confident person, even though I wasn’t … I used to be soft-spoken. My husband says I was shy, but because I had this confidence, because I had learned so much as a member of the party, because I had so many examples around me, it was easy for me to find my own voice. And I can even equate that to the present when I have my own voice in my music and in my poetry, whatever I do. To me it’s, I don’t like to be a copycat or anything like that.

So, that’s of paramount importance to me. Whatever I do, I’m going to do something that people know that’s coming from Mama C, and she’s not copying anybody else. We all have our own voice. But the thing is, you got to have confidence. You got to grow confidence to be able to express that voice in whatever your creativity is, in whatever your talent is. And I think everybody will eventually find their voice. That’s why it’s so important that we mentor young people.

I like to give the example of working with some of the youth here in the village who might have never experienced what they experience here at our center, at UAACC. And they’re all shy and withdrawn. But as soon as you put a microphone in their hand, as soon as you let them know that, “Hey, your words are powerful. Your words mean something. Your words are important,” they just change. They walk change, they start walking with confidence. They start speaking with confidence. So it’s so important that we have people who can continue to uplift our young people. And as elders, that is one of our most important jobs, to guide, to uplift. And through that upliftment, we empower people. That’s something we’re supposed to do, especially as elders.

Rhiki:
So speaking of your center, the United African Alliance Community Center, can you tell us a little bit more about what the center does and the purpose behind the creation of a space like that in Africa?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes. Yes. Well, Brother Pete has been an exile since we left, and he continues to be in exile. And he can’t go back to the States, because if he did, he would immediately go to prison. And we’ve always carried that favor and fire of being a Panther. So to give you just a little quick background, when we first came here in 1972, we became homesteaders. We became farmers. We had to learn all that. We had to learn appropriate technology that allowed him to build windmills when we didn’t have any electricity. That allowed us to learn how to actually build our home with a CINVA-ram machine and using termite mound material.

And the elders in the community saw all this hard work that we were doing, and they actually gave us a plot of land. And that’s where we built the first center there in Maji Ya Chai. And we arched, and it had a stage, it had classrooms. And teachers from some of the primary schools would bring their youth there. And we’d have all kinds of programs. And then we saw it was more convenient and would be more effective if we built classrooms here at what was our homestead. When we did that, and the first class was teaching young people about computers. We didn’t have any internet.

And this was those big, giant computers and the monitors with little tiny screens. You all probably have never even seen anything like that. And then the elders in the community, they said, “Will you all teach English.” And so we started teaching English. And when I say we, all of our teachers have always been volunteers, many of them from Tanzania. And then we started teaching all kinds of arts, design and making this and music. And then we got the studio, and it just grew and it grew organically.

And then people started expressing that there were children who didn’t have parents. And this was when AIDS was really bad here in the community. Many of them had lost parents and were being raised by grandparents. And that’s when Brother Pete founded the Leaders of Tomorrow Children’s Home. And we’ve been raising 28 children for the last 11, almost 12 years, I guess. And the classes have become very, very well known. Now we had to close down when the corona came, but we’re slowly opening back up.

And we built a new studio, and these youth are champing at the bit. But I think that I can truthfully say that the reason the center became what it is today, an internationally known place of peace and learning is because of our experiences as Panthers. We’re just carrying on the community service that we always have done. And our motto here at UAACC is sharing knowledge for community development. Still doing it. Can’t stop, won’t stop. One of our comrades, Brother Cello Whale used to say, he said, “We’re going to bop till we drop.” And we are. That’s right.

Rhiki:
So Mama C, you have this community center, you’re a writer, you’re a poet. You do a little bit of everything. How do you balance it all? And what are some tools or coping strategies you utilize to help keep you mentally stable during this time?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Ooh. I think I’m a very calm person, usually. I’m blessed like that. I’m also a Pisces, so I’m a dreamer, and I have a very artistic way of looking at the world. And also initiated to Oshun, who if you all know anything about Orisha culture is also someone who can pour honey on the enemies and turn them around. But also, I eat well. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 26 years old and here I’m going on 70. And recently I embraced an alkaline lifestyle, which keeps me very, very energized. 

I don’t even drink coffee anymore. Yes, yes. And being in a loving atmosphere. I think that … I know. Not, I think. I give out a lot of love. And when you do that, it comes back to you like a boomerang. And the fact that me and my husband have been a unified force for 51 years, that keeps me grounded also, but being an artist, that is one of the greatest blessings in my life. And I know that it’s in my DNA because so many of my relatives are also artists. And I got a divination reading that revealed to me that my ancestors from way back were also artists, and community workers, and diviners, and healers and all of that. So it’s in my blood. I don’t think I could be anything other than who I am.

Paige:
Mama C, I know you were talking about being an internationalist and the importance of people learning about global politics and freedom fighting. And I’ve also heard this from folks who have gone to Africa and studied abroad there, who are black Americans. I’m wondering, why do you think it’s important for black people to visit, specifically black Americans to visit and connect with the continent, and the concept of back to the source?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
And that’s what it is, that back to the source. It energizes you. It energizes you, it gives you confidence. When you know who you are, when you know that you have brothers and sisters and cousins and grandparents here on the continent, whether you know them or not, when you know your ancestry is so strong and that people here still embrace you, that empowers you. I think it’s very, very important for especially young Africans who are in the States to come to Africa to experience a different way of life. To know that the lives that they live where they’re so oppressed and down-pressed by the police, by the government, by the food deserts.

All of that, if they can see that, it turns their whole mindset around. And we have experienced that. We used to have exchange programs with youth, especially in Kansas City. And these are some youth who had never even been out of their own communities. And they came here and they were able to be immersed in the community here for even a short time, like a month or something like that. And able to meet young people their age, who might not have had much financially, but they were living their dreams. 

And when they see that and when they saw that, it turned them around. It lets people know that they can dream, and that they can make their dreams a reality. It’s very, very important for, especially Africans who live in America to understand more about their true history and their true selves. And not that everybody was a King and queen here, because that just not true. But knowing that there’s a value in being a farmer. There’s value in being an artist. There’s value in being a servant of the community. So they better come home.

Rhiki:
I really appreciate you saying that, because me and my friend, Denette was actually talking about this the other day, about how, for some reason, black people here feel the need to call themselves kings and queens. And I think it’s really just to let people know that they are important. But I appreciate you saying you don’t have to be a king and a queen. And the reality is everybody wasn’t a king and a queen. And that still doesn’t take away your importance.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
That’s right.

Rhiki:
You can just be who you are, and you’re important. You can still be recognized by others. So I appreciate-

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes, yes. That’s so true. And I think that so many people have lost the sense of the value of working on the land. It’s like people are ashamed to do that, or the value in knowing how to be a plumber, or knowing how to be electrician, or a tailor, and things like these. These are practical things that could turn someone’s life around if they could learn them. And there are so many elders out there who have this knowledge, who have the skills. The youth just got to get with them, ask them. 

There’s probably elders, they’re sitting in their living room saying, “Man, I got all this knowledge. I wish somebody would come and ask me to teach them.” People have to understand the value of being able to work with your hands or being a creative being. Shoot.

Rhiki:
So Mama C, we really enjoyed this conversation with you so much so that we don’t want it to end, but I want to be mindful of your time. So I’m going to just ask you one more question before we close out. So is there any projects or music or publications that you’re working on that you want us to uplift and use this platform to uplift in the moment?

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Oh yes. It’s really something. With me not traveling now as extensively as I used to, I’m able to do all kind of … This Zoom and podcasts, I love. One of the latest projects is with Collective in South Africa that I just completed with Emma Maasai, which is a brother who was … He was a student here, and he developed the confidence to become a filmmaker and a musician. 

I just did a big thing with University of Milwaukee. And different collaborations with musicians. That’s why I love the internet, you all, because we can exchange them MP3s and MP4s, and all of that. So I’m going to send you some links. And if anybody among your listening community would like to do some collaboration with me or some of the artists here, hey, bring it on.

Paige:
I would love to. I write poetry too, so I would love to get together. Yeah, let’s do it.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
That would be beautiful. Let’s do it.

Paige:
Oh, Rhiki writes poetry too. 

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Oh, hey. 

Paige:
So does Trevor.

Rhiki:
I’m a new poet.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Hey. Well, we got a cadre going already. I’ve enjoyed this conversation with you all, and I’m very proud of the youth who are taking the reigns of the movement, not only in America, but worldwide. And dealing with the environment, and dealing with the injustices, and dealing with the political prisoners that are still locked down. And I say big-ups to all of you all, and keep on pushing.

Paige:
Thank you, Mama C. 

Rhiki:
Thank you. 

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Yes. Yes.

Paige:
Good afternoon. There it’s morning. Thank you so much for your light and your beauty. Thank you. Thank you.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Oh, I give thanks to you all, and I send you all many blessings and love from here, Tanzania.

Paige:
Okay. I’m going to end on this quote, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives,” Audre Lorde.

Charlotte Hill O’Neal:
Ooh, I love that.

Paige:
So thank you again, Mama C for joining us today at The Radical Zone. You can check out more of Mama C’s work … 

Rhiki:
Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook, @ACSJLKzoo. Twitter, @ACSJL. And Instagram, @arcuscenter. For questions, comments, and ideas for future topics, please view responses on our social media platforms.

Emergent Strategies & Pleasure Activism

With American current socio-political climate, The Radical Futures Now t team had a conversation with adrienne maree brown to discuss emergent strategies and pleasure activism. In this episode, Adrienne breaks down their life’s work in activism with various communities adrienne maree brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: | Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is the co-host of the How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit. 

Resources:

adrienne maree brown’s website
Pleasure Activism book
Emergent Strategy Book
Octavia’s Brood Book
How to Survive the End of the World Podcast


Transcript:

Intro:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. 

The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, also known as ACSJL, is an initiative of Kalamazoo College whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop one’s full potentially is available to every person and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

Rhiki:
Okay, so this time I want to start off with a question. adrienne, what has been your positive obsession this week?

adrienne:
Hmm. Thank you for that question, and thanks for having me as a part of the Arcus podcast. I think my positive obsession this week has been transformative justice and abolition, and really sitting in some big questions around how do we do justice well, and how do we do justice in ways that are satisfying to us and don’t replicate state processes, white supremacist processes, capitalist processes, but then how do we really center survivors and make sure their needs are met as we’re in this transitionary phase from that state justice to something that we’re now co-creating? 

I feel positively obsessed. I keep finding myself waking up, and thinking about it, and dreaming about it and writing about it. And yeah, I also feel positively assessed about rest. I’m trying to figure out like how do I get more rest. Yeah. 

Rhiki:
Do you take a lot of naps? 

adrienne:
I’m not really a napper. If I happen to sit down in the middle of day to watch something, I might fall asleep, but I tend to have very full days once my work starts for the day. I have like quiet mornings where I do a lot of reflecting, and then once my day starts I’m kind of all in, going, going, going.

And I think that’s the case for a lot of us, that like between the pandemic and the uprisings, and ongoing work, and constant adaptations, and trying to make it work in an unlikely circumstances, and trying to navigate, I’m used to living alone, and for this quarantine I’m living with three other people, who I care about very much, and love very much and want to be in a relationship with.

There’s just a lot of pieces to navigate in a day and I keep being like, “Oh, right. I was supposed to sleep a little later, maybe that would have helped or something.” But I also find, and I find this to be true amongst a lot of people that I’m talking to now, that we’re waking up in the middle of the night and reflecting, thinking, processing.

And I think I’ve always felt like some of that is when I am most available to spirit and most available to those voices that are harder to hear when you’re in this sort of non-stop news cycle and social media cycle and all the other things. Sometimes I’m like, well, that’s when I’m quiet enough for them to talk to me and I don’t want to ignore those messages, but I also don’t want to walk around with bags under my eyes and so I’m trying to strike that balance. Yeah.

Rhiki:
Paige, how do you find rest during this time? 

Paige:
Oh, that’s such a good question. I’ve been taking a lot more naps. During school, I would take a nap, but I’d be kind of nervous to not wake up in time for my next thing, whereas now if I think a three hour nap, it’s not as … The stakes aren’t so high. Yeah, and I feel like I rest a lot by listening to … I’ve been on this kick of like NPR, Tiny Desk Concerts and just listening to a lot of good music. Yeah, have you listened to those?

adrienne:
That helps a lot. Yeah, I love those. I mean, the way I listen to music is very active. It’s not a sleepy time. I actually tried to put on a jazz list to relax to the other night and I was just up the whole night, like, “Wow, I love this. I love how this is sounding. I love the choice that they made with that horn,” and so I was like, “Okay, that’s not my sleepy time stuff.”

I do have a really great … I use the Insight meditation app, and there’s sounds on there that I know once I put those on I can get to asleep. So it’s more like finding the actual literal time in a day to do it, and it’s different as life feels very, very full right now.

And I think there’s also the constant wrestling. I think we’re all also doing this of like what is urgent and what is not urgent. And it’s hard to track that as cleanly when there’s so many different things to be held, and that all need to be held well. Yeah, it’s a lot. 

Paige:
Right. And I think jazz too, I always try to put jazz before I go to sleep, but it’s actually like very vibrant. 

adrienne:
Jazz is very cerebral. It’s very vibrant. It’s very alive. Even the slower stuff with the … I’m a vocalist and I like to listen to vocalists. But even if I put on the instrumental, I’m just feeling like I am still fully engaged. John Coltrane is one of my very favorites. And I’ll put on John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and then it’s a different thing.

It’s my brain going to a different place, which can also be restful. If I have been in conversations or meetings all day, switching into a place of letting my brain roll down a jazz path can be really useful, but it’s not necessarily restful. I think that’s a big thing that I’m trying to hold the distinctions around. It’s like there’s rest, and I do know I’m good at rest, but it’s finding the time.

Paige:
Positive obsession this week, Rhiki?

Rhiki:
My positive obsession. I tend to find rest, not like sleep rest, but rest in food. I don’t know why. I’m a foodie. Food can make my day, and so it can be really bad if I’m obsessed in something that’s not healthy for me. But lately, I’ve really been enjoying kind of diversifying my palette with some healthier snacks. I’m really into dried mangoes right now and I’m really into rice cakes.

And it’s not for the taste. I don’t know, it’s really weird. I just like chewing them. Dry mangoes, it’s kind of like chewing leather. It’s really weird. But I don’t know, my mind finds it satisfying. And then rice cakes, again, it’s not the best taste and it’s more like chewing styrofoam, but for some reason, I like chewing things and that’s what I’m positively obsessed with right now.

Paige:
Nice.

Rhiki:
Let’s get started. Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, and to another episode of our BLM series. It’s Rhiki and I’m joined here with Paige. And today, we have the pleasure of talking to adrienne maree brown about her take on activism and organizing.

Paige:
Yeah, adrienne maree brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. adrienne is rooted in Detroit. I wanted to share a story today actually. I actually remember meeting you in Arcus, I think, 2017 or 2018. I was a sophomore.

And I had walked into the office and I was just like, “Oh, hey. I’m Paige.” I knew you weren’t someone who had worked in the office because I worked there. I thought you were a student, and I was like, “Oh, okay. Cool. There’s this student visiting,” and then you said, “I should probably go get started,” and I was like, “Oh, she’s like the facilitator for the night.”

adrienne:
Ah, yes, I remember that.

Paige:
But yeah, since then, I read your book both Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism.

adrienne:
Thank you. 

Paige:
And I also remember reading in the first couple of chapters of Emergent Strategy to be like, you’re like, “If you haven’t read Octavia Butler, stop reading this book, go read that book.” 

adrienne:
I still feel that way. 

Paige:
I know a lot has changed for you in the last few years. I’m wondering like how you’re feeling about just your journey since the release of your first book and your upcoming project going on.

adrienne:
Well, yeah, a lot has changed. And it’s interesting because Octavia’s Brood was not my first book. I put out a book back in 2003 that I think is not in print anymore,
but it was called How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. And it feels relevant, more and more relevant every day. 

But it was in the same vein of other work that I do which is trying to uplift lessons from a variety of voices around how we do something that the media or government might try to make us think is mysterious. And rest and pleasure, and creating change and all of those things are in that realm. And Octavia’s Brood felt like the first effort that was like I had this vision, I had this dream. I partnered up with someone who shared that vision, shared that dream, shared that analysis.

And that experience was super satisfying. It’s really satisfying to find people who do share obsession with you, and who can meet you there, and be positively obsessed and see something unfold. And what I feel has shifted a lot is since Octavia’s Brood came out. When Octavia’s Brood came out, I was very much like, “This is going to be a specialized taste. This will be for other people who are really nerdy and willing to even possibly consider that science fiction has something to teach us strategically,” which is what I really felt, and really feel that science fiction is a way that we practice the future together.

And that we are futurist, that we are science fiction writers and thinkers when we are organizers, because we are putting ourselves in direct relationship to and trying to shape a world to come which we have never actually experienced. And that’s all fiction really is, it’s like I’m crafting something that I haven’t quite seen but maybe I know emotionally, or I know some piece of it and I want to deeper dive, deeper understanding.

And then when Emergent Strategy came out, we had built a following. We had built supporters in Octavia’s Brood who were willing and open to the ideas of Emergent Strategy. And I felt blessed around that, that people were like, “Okay, you want to talk about how ants could be strategic now? Cool, let’s talk about it.” And then the people who read Emergent Strategy, they showed up in droves for Pleasure Activism, and so Pleasure Activism ended up showing up on The New York Times Best Seller list in the first week of coming out. 

But when I heard that, what I thought was, those are Emergent Strategists. Those are folks who have been kind of following along this journey, because to me, all the thinking is very related. It’s like, how do we learn from nature? How do we get in right relationship with each other? How do we get in right relationship with our bodies? How do we get in right relationship with being visionaries? 

It’s all very related to me. And now, it’s been this interesting period of time where I’m like, “Okay, I’m listening for what’s next, and what’s next is a book on facilitation and mediation.” And I’m really excited about that because it draws most directly on the work that I’ve done for the last 20 plus years, and it feels really necessary right now. 

I feel like we really need to openly encourage each other to be developing a skill set around creating ease when we’re together, so that we can turn and face the hard work we have to do together, because it is hard. There’s a lot of hard changes coming, so yeah. 

Paige:
Right. 

adrienne:
And the world has changed completely during that time, so now I feel like movements talk very openly about needing to center joy and pleasure and making movement irresistible. And I feel a part of that, and I also feel like the stakes have changed and what we’re able to change is becoming bigger and wider and more bodacious every day. And it’s exciting to be a part of that even though this is a pretty terrifying time to be alive as well, so it’s all happening,

Paige:
Right. Yeah. I remember talking to some of my elders and they say that specifically about about centering joy and how our generation does that a lot more than the previous ones when they organized. Yeah.

Rhiki:
I do want to switch gears just a little bit and talk about your Pleasure Activism book. There was a line in there that I kind of just want to get your thoughts on and want you to expand a little bit more on. Because Pleasure Activism is new to me, so when I think of-

adrienne:
Me too.

Rhiki:
… when I think of what it means to model activism, usually they tell you, you got to have the language, you got to know the common language, you got to have a historical analysis. You just have to be well-versed in the past and kind of upbeat with what’s happening currently. Be in conversation with other organizers.

But the way you talk about modeling your pleasure and modeling your joy is so different, so I just want to get your thoughts on this line. In your book it says, “It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong.”

adrienne:
Hmm. Is that from Audre Lorde? 

Rhiki:
Yeah. 

Adrienne:
I feel like this Audre did a lot of good work in her writing, in her thinking, and I feel like has taught a lot of us. And I feel like when she writes about women suppressing ourselves, suppressing our desires, what she’s saying to us is that we were trained that suppressing our desires is what will make us palpable to the world around us, survivable to the world around us, and it takes so much of our power away from us. And I feel like her essay is an invitation for us to come back to our power, to return to it. What did you hear in that line?

Rhiki:
I was trying to decipher it, so I did kind of look into it a little more. And I came across a book reading of yours where you were talking about, not this particular line, but that section of the book and what it means to have that erotic awakening and experience your full free self.

adrienne:
Yes.

Rhiki:
And I don’t know, it was just really hard for me to grasp it because I think some of what you said is somewhat true. I don’t think when I walk into rooms, I don’t think I’m like as joyful as I could be, so is that affecting the way I’m modeling this work? Yeah, there’s just certain things that I feel like I haven’t thought about and wondering if that is affecting how I do this work, my imagination in kind of considering what could be trying to envision a world outside the context and confines in which we live now.

adrienne:
Yes.

Rhiki:
Yeah.

adrienne:
Yeah. I feel like this piece, and she says it so well that when we don’t know how to experience our own aliveness, that it’s easy to get us to settle for any old thing, right? Any old thing that someone comes along with, we’re just like, “Okay, I will self-negate.” She talks about that. They will settle for self-negation and self-denial. 

And I remember the first time I read this piece of hers, it was so far over my head I can’t even visualize how far, because it was so far from what I understood to feel. At that time, I think most of my personality was inauthentic. My orgasms were authentic. My sense of vision and having a right to vision was inauthentic. And then I read this piece and I was like, “Well, she just woke me up. Who am I serving with all this inauthentic participation? I do want to be free.”

And I kept trying to behave in the right ways, the ways that I thought a revolutionary should behave, but I wasn’t actually practicing freedom. And then for me, it was awakening in my body, awakening inside of relationships with other people as it had to do with my body and as I had to do with my time, that I started to feel my freedom.

And when I feel out of touch with my freedom, almost always it means I’m out of touch with my body. And if I want to get back to it, then I have to drop in. And not always for pleasure, sometimes it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed.” Since this pandemic started, I’ve been randomly itching. And I keep trying to figure out what’s the source of this itching, am I allergic to something? 

And I keep coming back to, “No, it’s just a distressing time. I’m actually feeling so much. And I have to just honor the fact that this is a stressful time for me.” I can’t pretend it away and it helps to be in my pleasure practices. But my pleasure practices will not give me an escape from this moment, this moment has to be contended with. 

And Pleasure Activism for me is the way that I was able to awaken that, “Ah, I actually have the right to be fully awake and alive inside all of these different kinds of emotions, and all of them are instructive. It’s really important that I’m able to feel my anger.” And for me, orgasm opened my path to feeling my anger. It opened my path to being able to feel my disappointment in others.

It opened my path to recognize when I was lying to myself and others about what satisfied me. And this is another thing that really blows my mind still is how many of us are in movement with no sense of what is satisfaction. We are making demands, and sometimes those demands are met or partially met, at least waive that. And we have no idea if that satisfies us or not.

Immediately, we either turn around and start the next campaign or we bring the complaint around it, but there’s not a lot of practice in us around victory, winning, recognizing when we have a moment and we should be celebrating what we’ve done. And I think that learning satisfaction from the inside out for me has been a really helpful practice. 

And I do think for where Audre was writing from that she’s writing for women who have so often been denied the right to feel the space to be our whole selves and be recognized and honored for what we’re feeling, what we need, what we experience.

And today, I think a lot of what she’s writing is highly relevant for trans communities. We always need to be paying attention to which are the next communities that have been unseen, that have been invisibilized, that have been told that their pleasure doesn’t matter.

And I think trans communities, I think disabled communities, I think immigrant communities are the communities that still get held and looked at as if their pleasure and their joy don’t really matter, that they should feel lucky that they’re getting to survive and lucky that they’re not being attacked all the time, lucky that they get to be in this country.

All kinds of things that are like, but that is not. That’s not liberation. That’s not solidarity. If we’re in movement with each other, to me, we have to always think, “Who here is still being denied their right to pleasure, the right to peace, the right to calm, the right to rest? And how do we organize ourselves around making sure that, that rest and joy and pleasure become possible?”

Paige:
Yeah. I’m wondering like how you understand facilitation. I actually just had this conversation recently with a friend, like, how do you think about teaching and how do you think about facilitating as like maybe not necessarily like different things, but what is possible to be accomplished?

adrienne:
I think they’re pretty different. And it’s one of the things that I feel like it took me a while to understand that when I’m in teaching mode, I am taking very seriously that there’s something that I have experience in that I have to share, that I need to make sure people understand. And my job is theo make it as compelling and interesting as possible, but I also have to really deliver something.

And it might be this popular education teaching that I have been involved in where I believe that what I want to help people see is something they already have inside of them. And then there’s other times where I’m like, “I need to help you see something that you don’t have access to yet. You haven’t had experience yet.” This is often true around issues of race, class and privilege that I’m like, “Ah, I’m helping you. I’m trying to teach you to see something radically differently from how you were trained to see it.”

And I feel inside of that facilitation is when you’re saying, “There’s not something that I, standing in front of the room, have to impart on those of you who are here in the space, instead, there’s something that you in the space are trying to do, trying to make happen that you believe is necessary, that you’re trying to find a way for. And my job is to help remove any obstacles to being able to do that work and to help you hear each other, feel each other, see each other, honor each other, respect each other and stay in the conversation, stay in the relationship long enough to get that work done.”

I do believe that the work we have to do together is very complex. And so I also think that the work of the facilitator is to help people understand what is the conversation that this particular group of people needs to have to move our very complex work forward. Often we get in the room, and because the work is complex, we try to address everything at once, right? 

So it’s like we have to address every aspect of our identities, and every aspect of oppression, and every aspect of class, everything else all in the same moment, and that’s how we move forward. And it’s like actually, that’s not possible. Literally in time, space continuum, that’s not how things change and that’s not how things work. 

So really figuring out like what is the next elegant step we can take as a community to grow our learning, to grow our strategy, to turn and face what is ours to face. And I really deeply believe in facilitation. I think our movements needed to be done and done well. And I’ve gotten to be a part of some incredible facilitation that I can see has supported movement to go far.

There’s also a big part of the book that is about mediation, which is another distinction is like holding space for conflict, holding space for hard conversations. And it’s another piece that I feel like our movements need to get both good at doing and good at asking for like understanding that, “Oh, that’s an option I could have. I could be mediated. I could be held in this conversation. I don’t have to try to move through this conflict without support,” which I think so often just exacerbates our conflicts. So yes, I’m excited about it. I feel pleased with what’s in there. I think it will be of use.

Paige:
Wow, that sounds amazing. Yeah, I’m looking forward to reading that book as well. Yeah, I think that will be really good. 

adrienne:
Thank you.

Paige:
Yeah. I think just listening to you in the last few moments has changed my ideas about facilitation. I think for a really long time I had conflated them together. Yeah, so thank you for that. Yeah. I also recently went to the Movement Generation’s last session. [crosstalk 00:28:18]

adrienne:
Oh, yay.

Paige:
Yeah, your introduction, your facilitation was really moving-

adrienne:
Thank you. 

Paige:
… and the way you, I think, you kind of introduce like moving through the imaginative space and the possibilities of being in 2050.

adrienne:
Yes.

Paige:
How do you return to your future building and the way that you … How did you prepare for that, or like how do you do that?

adrienne:
How do you time travel? 

Paige:
How do you time travel?

adrienne:
I mean, I feel like there’s a couple of tricks for me for time travel that really help me to go into it and then to return, one is I think about my age now and the moment that I’m in now and really let myself landing in that. In this moment today, 2020, I’m 41, about to be 42. And it’s easy for me to look back and say, “Oh, I’ve changed so much in the last 10 years, in the last five years. I’m a different person. My ideas have evolved. My way of being has evolved, and who I’m in relationship with has evolved.” And so when I’m time traveling forward, I try to release holding onto the way that I am now, and I try to make a possible to me that I could change very radically and that I’m in community that will also change very radically. And I try to let myself be interested in that changing rather than only committed to staying exactly the same forever.

I feel like we need to, there’s a teacher that I really respect named Lama Rod Owens, who is a black Buddhist teacher who actually has a book out now called Love and Rage, which I think is an important piece of work. But he talks about the responsibility we have to be prophetic and to be willing to really name what is as a part of looking forward at what can come and what can be. And that’s what I think Octavia Butler did for us. She was prophetic. She was willing to say, “Well, given how we behave, we can draw some conclusions, and we can see that this is our most likely next step or most likely next phase.” Now, I deeply believe that what we put our attention on grows, and I feel like I’ve seen this over and over again when I’m facilitating in a room. 

If the group really becomes obsessed with all the ways that they are not fully aligned yet, then they can become stuck there and it can become almost unimaginable that they could find a way towards each other. But if they instead are asked to bring their attention to the places where there is alignment already, even if it’s small, and sometimes it’s quite tiny, but if they’re asked to bring their attention there, what I find happening is the people are like, “Oh, we’re actually not that different or that distant. Maybe we have different starting points, different frameworks, different … ” often it’s different political starting points. 

And we make a lot of assumptions about each other that make it hard to understand that we actually come from very different contexts; our experience of class, our experience of race or experience of citizenship. These things really matter in how we see the world. The process by which we get politicized really matters. So when I’m doing time travel, I really think, “How do I bring myself and others into a space that is really open ended really possible, and that allows for their cultural and political shaping to be present as well as mine, and allows for something to grow between us that in this moment right now in history might not even feel possible?”

There’s certain groups that I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know that they can even imagine themselves visioning together. But if I create an open enough space, then maybe they can imagine a future in which they not only coexist, but co-vision and where there’s some kind of peace between them,” and so I try to bring my attention to that.

Now, with Movement Generation, there’s a blessing, because I know that people who are showing up to Movement Generation have been thinking about just transition, and have been thinking about getting in right relationship with the planet. And so we’re not starting from scratch when it comes to finding some common vision and common language, so it’s a little bit of a cheat for that. I know that there’s some shared vision there, and all we’re doing now is trying to add some specificity to that vision. And it also really helps to track if you’re still able to get excited by other people’s visions and ideas. 

This is something I think we can lose, especially in the process of education, that we start to get very committed to, “This is my dissertation. This is my idea. This is mine,” and forget that the most interesting thing about being a human is actually how many different ways there are of understanding this world and finding paths that serve as many of us as can be served, and that really start from and include as many of us as can be included, which I am still ambitious enough to think is almost all of us. I haven’t figured out where racists can fit, so I don’t leave room for them in my visions, but everyone else has a seat at the table.

Rhiki:
Thank you for that. I really like what you said about as time traveling, like creating this open space in which everyone can see themselves and just creating the possibility to have different levels of understanding about certain things and how we co-exist with each other. I have kind of a big question for you, but I feel like you’re the perfect person to ask this to because of how open-minded you are and how expansive your imagination is. 

I watched the video on you kind of giving some insight into your Emergent Strategy book. And you said in the video that Emergent Strategy is learning to be interdependent, fractal, decentralize, also adaptive and ever evolving. My question is, how can we use this concept of Emergent Strategy and apply it to movements of today in an effort to end a problem and issue systematic racial oppression that’s also just as highly adaptive and ever evolving as our movements are?

adrienne:
I love this question. This is one of the things I talk about with Emergent Strategy because people are like, “Ooh, nature, she’s totally peaceful,” and I’m like, “No.” There are predators in nature and prey, and there is unfair situations in nature. There are unfair situations in nature. There are natural disasters in nature. There are toxic poisons in nature. I think one of the things that really helps me is to understand that in nature there’s very little that is willfully harmful. Where we are willfully harmful, that’s the place where I often am like, “How do we get ourselves back in right relationship with the natural world?”

Creatures don’t hunt for things that they’re not planning to eat, but humans do. And creatures don’t attack or tear each other down if they’re not worried about their actual survival and being able to have the territory for survival that humans do. And a lot of what we think of as justice is vengeance and harmful, and it doesn’t actually break the patterns of harm. 

And those are the places I think where humans can benefit the most from Emergent Strategy. When it comes to racial oppression, I think one of the most interesting pieces is how do we continue to believe that people can change along the lines of racism? And how do we continue to believe that this can be shifted, healed, responded to, eradicated? And right now I think a lot of people are like, “This is just how white people are, and it’s the only way that they’ll ever be.” And I think Emergent Strategy says everything is constantly changing, and this too can change. How we change it actually really matters. Some of the efforts that I am most excited about are those where white people are taking on a certain level of responsibility for doing their own work. Emergent strategy works best when people feel a sense of responsibility, collective responsibility. That it’s not my duty to go and change someone else, but it’s my duty to play my best position inside of this ever-changing world. I see a lot of white people now who are turning and saying, “I actually have to change. It’s not enough to point the finger at other people.”

I think this is one of the most crucial aspects of changing around race, is understanding that there are aspects of racism, aspects of internalized anti-blackness. These things get inside of us. They get into our beliefs of ourselves and they make us think, “I can never rest. Nothing I do is good enough. I constantly have to be overworking. I’ll never be paid enough. I have to monitor myself. I have to compromise my values. I don’t get to be the person who articulates the future, I just get to be the person who helps someone else manifest their dream.” There’s things like that, that are insidious beliefs that get into our systems. There’s what white people need to do and then there’s what the rest of us need to do in healing our own relationships with ourself, our racial relationships with ourselves, and our racial relationships between ourselves. 

One of the things we learned, last year we took Emergent Strategy into a variety of different communities in the form of these events we called immersions. And each community got to shape a lot of their own immersion, right? They got to say, “Here’s who should be in the room to practice Emergent Strategy together, and here’s the conversations that really matter to us.” And several of the spaces said, “We actually need a BIPOC space. We need a space where we get to come together just as people of color and work on the anti-blackness, and the assumptions and stereotypes that we’re making amongst each other.” And having white folks in the room can really flatten the racial conversation, because people think it’s all about the black, white dynamic.  But anti-blackness works in so many more ways than that. And there’s a lot of ways in which other people of color have been turned against black people, and the black people have been pit against other people of color. That we have been trained to compete against each other, to be more than minorities, or to try to get jobs from each other.

All these different things, there’s healing needed along all these front lines. Being willing to take the room to say we actually need some BIPOC space before we come into that larger multi-racial space with white people, that was one of the things we learned. Another was Emergent Strategy happens at the level of bringing our attention into relationship and interdependence, and putting people into situations where they actually get to relate to each other human to human, story to story outside of the starting point of like, “Here’s all my stereotypes and here’s all yours.”

So we had gathering after gathering where people would come out. I never thought I could experience a white person that way or experience a man that way, or experienced an able-bodied person that way, where we were de-centering those with privilege and recentering those who had struggled more as the teachers, as the guides in the space. And a lot of people who are waking up and realizing that they have more privileged than they need or deserve, or should have, a lot of those people are looking for opportunities to put themselves in a different position in relationship to power, but we don’t have great options for it yet. Right? 

Mostly we’re still pretty angry, and justifiably angry, and so it becomes hard to find those places to be in practice ground with each other. And I think Emergent Strategy has a lot to offer there for people to get to practice being human with each other, and being in community with each other, being of service to each other.

Rhiki:
I love that. And I really like what you said about having space where we can kind of work out some of the things that we’ve internalized. For example, so I’m like been going through this internal kind of battle with my ideas around code-switching, and if I should continue to do it or not. It’s so hard because I’ve been socialized to like it’s almost automatic.

And I’ve been trying to turn it off, and it’s so hard, because I want to get to a space where I can be my full self, speak the way I naturally speak, which isn’t American standard English all the time. And people don’t associate the way I speak with me being illiterate. I kind of want to disrupt some of those perceptions, but it’s so hard because I’ve been doing it for so long it’s almost like I have to train myself to not do it.

adrienne:
Hmm. That’s a really good noticing, a good self-awareness. Something that helps me is I think of those things as artifacts of white supremacy that are still in me, that have gotten into my system, and where can I be mindful? And for me, I’m a mixed race woman. My mother is white, my father is black. 

And I grew up without even a concept of code-switching, it was just like, there’s just many ways to talk, and many ways to be and many ways, and I just move between them. It wasn’t until much later that I had a sense of like, “Oh, I’m racializing, I’m shifting, I’m adapting, and a lot of it is for my survival.” And I think that is one of the hard parts is, it’s not just, in many of us, it’s not just any sense of like, “Oh, this is my preference,” or, “This is what I think they’ll enjoy,” it’s literally in our blood, in our DNA, in our memory, in our ancestral memory, this is how I will be safe. 

We learned it for a reason. And so what we have to learn now is that safety has not actually shown up and it will not show up because of us speaking a certain way or not speaking a certain way. There’s actually nothing that we do as black people, or indigenous people, or Latinx people or Arab people, there’s nothing that we do that justifies the harm that gets done to us. 

And there’s nothing that we can undo or practice that will protect us from the hatred that fuels racism. Once we realize that, for me, at least it becomes a lot easier to just be my full self, and have my full self without an expectation of safety externally, and my full self with a sense that I have to keep safe what is fundamentally myself.

That’s the best work I can do by myself is to actually fully be myself and create conditions where people have to contend with that. And that’s all of me. I think one of the things that’s been interesting is for those of us who have been educated in white schools, or have white parents or white community what do we do with the white cultural shaping that’s also there. And I think we’re on the precipice of being ready for some of those conversations.

I don’t know that everyone actually is yet, because right now there’s such a need to push away from that shore of whiteness, and to get clear on how much of white culture is swollen and co-opted and all the other things. And then to also experience a lot of what we call whiteness or experience as whiteness currently is actually just what it means to be human outside of constant persecution, and access to, “I can talk how I want to talk and dress how I want to dress, and go where I want to go,” and other things.

It’s like that’s actually not whiteness, that’s just being a free human being, and that’s what we want to guarantee for all human beings. And the de-centering of whiteness in our mouths, in our hearts, in our communities, the de-centering of it allows for everyone to actually experience their full humanity.

Rhiki:
Thank you for that.

adrienne:
So good luck.

Rhiki:
I’m just like kind of is taking it all in, a kind of awestruck moment. But I do want to-

adrienne:
We’re the freest that we’ve ever been. I think this is an important thing to notice too, is like we’re able to wrestle with these things that our ancestors didn’t necessarily get to wrestle with in the same way. It’s like I’m super excited to hear that you’re wrestling with it, thinking about it, taking it seriously, and the practice ground is all around you. Every conversation you get to say, “How am I showing up authentically? How am I contorting? And who benefits from my contortion?”

Rhiki:
… Yeah, and I agree. I feel like it is a different time now where we can … What’s the word? Kind of like politics of respectability is kind of like our past, and so we get the opportunity to kind of make a choice on how we want to show up regardless of how we may be affected. 

adrienne:
Yeah.

Rhiki:
So yeah, I’ve been trying.

adrienne:
I really try hard also to not deify my ancestors in a certain way. Like, not go back and try to rewrite who they were in history, but also not go back and judge them. I’m like, I think that our ancestors did what they needed to do to survive and now there’s more options. Because of them, we have more options, and so how do we live fully into those additional options? Yeah.

Rhiki:
I want to be mindful of your time. Do you have time for one more question?

adrienne:
Let’s see what time it is. One more we can do. Yeah. 

Rhiki:
Okay. Paige, go ahead with the next question. 

Paige:
I remember at the beginning of the conversation you were talking about transformative justice and dreaming about it. And I’m wondering how can we be intentional about bringing a transformative justice lens into the work around this moment with the Black Lives Matter uprising, the defunding the police and ending the police brutality? 

adrienne:
Yeah. This one it feels like I’m really actively in and learning around, but a big part of it is understanding that we have to break with our commitment to punitive justice. And what does that actually look like when we’re so deeply steeped in it? At every level of our society, we punish our children and they go into detention, suspension, expulsion.

And so often punishment looks the same at different age ranges. When you’re a child or an adult, it’s about being removed from community and othered, and made to feel as if you are uniquely bad, uniquely don’t belong and shamed, and then from that place trying to affect some kind of change that makes people feel like, “Okay, I’ll get better.”

Sometimes there are definitely instances where it’s like, “This is rape. This is molestation. This is murder. This is egregious harm,” and there needs to be some way to create a boundary between the harm that, that person seems to be committed to doing in the community. And I feel like we need to figure out like, well, what are the ways we do that without the state? Because so far the state puts people into prisons, death penalty, solitary confinement, but it doesn’t actually end the cycles of harm. We know that, that method of separating people from community and sort of setting them apart someplace to feel ashamed and disappeared doesn’t actually work. And we’re still in that middle ground where we don’t yet know what all the other options are.

Part of it is seeing yourself as experimental ground for what is possible for us as a species. And I think it starts at the level of interpersonal conflict, right, when you just are like, “I’m having a fight. I’m having a beef with someone.” How can we show up in a more principled way to be in those arguments in ways that don’t engage the state, but also don’t go straight towards blame and punishment frameworks? How do we stay curious? How do we say we actually are holding a difference of opinion? That’s okay. It’s actually important. We need to hold differences of opinion.

That’s what a healthy ecosystem actually looks like, is different ways of being. To me, I think that’s a starting place for it. And where I think I’m still in my own learning is how do we center and make sure that survivors are cared for all along that process. And I think it’s a place where we’re still struggling to figure it out because it actually takes a lot of resources to really be there for the time it takes in an unrushed way to recognize what harm has happened, and name it and figure out what would actually be a satisfying and healing consequence.

And I’m excited that people are turning to face it. I think it’s helpful that we’re starting to understand that even restorative justice practices as a framework are about restoring the conditions that existed when the harm happened, which means some fundamental aspect of what needed to change often has not shifted. 

I think about this metaphor of someone being hungry and stealing a purse. And maybe they serve prison time, or they do community practice or apologize, but if we haven’t addressed the underlying economic disparity that led to their hunger in the first place, it’s only a matter of time before another purse is stolen or more something else material is exchanged, or that, that person is driven to the mechanisms by which capitalism has always functioned, the sale of illegal substances or trading of what we have, which is often our bodies, ourselves.

I think the question is, well, then how do we actually get in right relationship with what it takes to transform the underlying conditions? What would it look like to live in a society where we had a living wage and nobody had to worry about that, where we had a right relationship with our abundant food cycle? And so that there weren’t people who were walking around hungry or that we had a sense that because you were alive you had access to your basic needs and healthcare instead of having to work for them, which is an assumption that capitalism makes feel innate, which is not innate. There’s things like that, that for me when I think about transformative justice is very much in line with what does it take to abolish the system of imprisonment that is left over to us from slavery, and what does it take for us as a community to take responsibility instead to take accountability for each other and for ending these cycles of harm.

Rhiki:
adrienne, thank you so much for agreeing to talk with us. This was awesome.

adrienne:
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate your questions, they were super thoughtful and engaging.

Rhiki:
You all know how we do, we want to leave you with a quote. And this one is actually by adrienne, and it says, “I believe that all organizing is science fiction, that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” And I think this quote is so important, because like we said in our conversation today, the imagination is a very powerful tool and it’s very important, because it helps us envision the world we want to strive towards, and that vision helps us figure out what direction we’re going to go. It’s really important that we really actively use our imaginations. And if you’re having trouble doing that, there are writers like Adrienne, like Octavia Butler that you can read some of their works and they can help guide you in utilizing your imagination. And also think about it this way, we are living in someone’s imagination right now. This is the product of the imagination of the one percenters or those group of white males that have all the power to kind of take their imagination and make it tangible. So let’s actively use ours and envision a better world. 

Paige:
adrienne, thank you so much for being with us and gathering here today. Please go check out her book, Octavia’s Brood, Emergent Strategy or Pleasure Activism. They’re all amazing. She also has a podcast called How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables anywhere you listen to podcasts. Thanks for coming to the Radical Zone with Rhiki and Paige, and we’re out till next week.

Defunding Police & BLM Organizing in Canada: BLM Series #4

With everything on right during this pandemic of covid19, Black people and people of color have to continue to fight for their rights and systemic injustice especially in America. In this BLM Mini series, we got a rare opportunity to talk with Toronto-based organizer of Black Lives Matter movement to share her thoughts about the contrast and similarities between Canada and United States Of America with regards to Black people and systemic relations with the state. Sandy Hudson is a Toronto-based organizer, communication specialist, political strategist, writer, and abolition activist a founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement presence in Canada, The Co-founder of the Black Liberation Collective- Canada & Helped to found the Black Legal Action Center.

Resources:

Sandy & Nora Podcast

Black Legal Action Centre

Sandy Hudson’s Webpage


Transcript:

Nikki Giovanni:
Black Lives Matter, not a hashtag. I’m not ashamed of our history because I know there is more to come. I’m not ashamed of slavery neither bought nor sold, because I know there is another answer. I’m not ashamed of dark or light skin, straight or curly or nappy let’s call it that, hair. I’m not ashamed of thick or thin lips nor the time we waste singing and dancing. We taught the white folks to sing and dance too. I’m proud of Simon Cyrenian, nobody made him help Jesus he did his part. I’m proud of the woman who moaned on the ship at the 10th day for admitting, if not defeat, then certainly change. I’m proud of the rappers who rap. And most especially, I’m proud that black lives matter, we do, we honestly do.

Intro:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radicals Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo college whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop one’s full potential is available to every person and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

Rhiki Swinton:
Hey all. What’s up? Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Radical Zone Podcast. And thank you for joining us again on our BLM miniseries. Today we have a very, very special guest. I am so excited to talk to this person today about what’s been happening in the racial climate in America and the world. But before we get into that, I would like to introduce Tirrea who’s our co-host. What’s up Tirrea?

Tirrea:
Hello, everybody.

Rhiki:
Tirrea, tell the people a little bit about our speaker for today.

Tirrea:
Today we have with us the amazing Sandy Hudson. Sandy is a Toronto based organizer, communication specialist, political strategist, writer, and abolition activist. Sandy is the founder of the Black Lives Matter movement present in Canada. She is also the co-founder of the Black Liberation Collective in Canada. And she also helped found the Black Legal Action Center. Welcome and thank you so much for being with us today, Sandy.

Sandy Hudson:
Hi, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Sandy, we want to start the conversation with this question. What is some, ish is what I call it, or some shenanigans that has caught your attention this week?

Sandy Hudson:
Oh, this week? I’ve been doing a lot of organizing in Toronto, even though I’m in LA because I’m a law student at UCLA right now. In order to do that well I have to be a voracious consumer of the news. And so I’m going to start with Toronto and then I’ll finish off with Portland because how can we not mention Portland this week? This week in Toronto, a police officer was charged with a Mother’s Day shooting, a woman who is just going to visit her son, he shot her in her stomach. And she survived, thank God. But, it’s very rare that police officers are charged when they harm citizens, so it was a big deal. And then the cops made this big deal about being, well, this person is a former police officer because they resigned. They resigned like five minutes before they were charged. 

So anyway, there was that. And then more bad news out of Toronto. There’s an investigation against Toronto Police Service for some police officer is potentially being involved in a human trafficking ring of underage girls. Some more awfulness afoot. And then of course, just watching what was happening in Portland, it just seems like so much people take for granted about how our society works is it’s being proven false right in front of our eyes, in front of our screens even as too little media is following what’s happening. It just seems like anything that we imagined to be true in what should be a free society has come crashing down in Portland.

There’s lots afoot I’m sure I’ve missed. Biden apparently thinks that Trump is the first racist president. I don’t know. There’s just lots going on. Those are the first things that come to mind on this Saturday afternoon.

Rhiki Swinton:
Wow, that’s a lot. Tirrea what is some ish that you’ve experienced this week?

Tirrea:
Oh, shoo, Rhiki you put me on the spot. A woman I don’t know what state this is in but she was charged with setting her boyfriend’s car on fire. And there’s a video actually, when she put the gasoline in the car and then she lit the fire, it exploded in her face and she flew back. 

Rhiki Swinton:
I heard about that.

Tirrea:
Oh, man. That’s the best ish that I have found very amusing this week.

Rhiki Swinton:
Surprisingly, I was going to say the same thing. It was unrelated and it was about the lady setting the car on fire.

Tirrea:
Really?

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah. 

Tirrea:
I’m going to go ahead and start off with the first question. Rhiki and I were having this conversation about Black Lives Matter, not really being a centralized movement. We want your opinion as far as what makes this movement different from the movements we’ve seen in the past. Most movements that I’ve seen personally, especially in the United States have been super unified and everyone is in the know, and really unified as far as how to strategically move. And I feel like with Black Lives Matter, there’s so many more smaller moving components, like individual groups that are doing what they can, but it’s really more sparse. It was worth to know your take on the differences that you’ve seen with this movement compared to others.

Sandy Hudson:
One thing that I think is really powerful is how much of the organizing is local and it scales up. There isn’t a national body that’s really telling people what to do, in fact, it’s the other way around. And that the strength of that local organizing makes it so that it’s not one of these formal movements that’s led by one central figure. It’s in fact, led by so many people who are demanding change in their very communities. Another thing that I think is very, very important about this iteration of the black liberation movement is that, I think that previous iterations had a really intense fixation with seeming a certain way, with presenting themselves in a certain way strategically to try to get people to care about injustice that black people experience every day all over the world. And that meant, people would dress a certain way and present a certain leader figure who could be appealing to so many people. 

And I think that this iteration is unapologetically saying, no, we’re throwing that respectability aside, and we’re saying that it doesn’t matter how we present, black people everywhere deserve justice and deserved liberation. And I also think we’re saying that by changing who we centralize as leaders. In fact, we’re saying we’re going to start with the most marginalized amongst us. It’s going to be the folks, the trans women, the gender non conforming folks. It’s going to be the folks with disabilities who are going to be running this show, who are going to be the leaders, the face of this movement, and you all are still going to have to listen to us like this. We still deserve justice despite the fact that those of us who you marginalize the most are going to be out here on the mic, taking charge and leading this movement.

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah. Sandy, I’m so glad you brought up the topic of what is the term for? I think it’s the politics of respectability, about how in the past we had to present ourselves as these upstanding citizens with no infractions just for people to see us as human and worthy of justice and compassion. And I actually found myself in like a Facebook, I wouldn’t say feud. But we’re in this time now where you’re deciphering through which of your white friends are actually your friends. There was this post that somebody who, I’m not going to say any names, but who I considered a friend was just the whole all lives matter thing.

And they were basically were saying if you put a color in front of lives matter, then maybe you’re the racist, and I’m just like, “How could you say this? Why is me uplifting black lives matter, such a problem.” And then we went into a little debate but it eventually got to the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement or the recent uprisings have been those of what people want to call looting or riots, and how there’s some people out there that have some views about what’s the best way to push the needle forward.

And I’m just like, at this point does it really matter the way in which we protest? The main objective is that this thing is happening, we’re trying to make you see it, we’re trying to make it visible. We’re trying to get a message across and really all you’re doing is just finding a way to justify the fact that you don’t want to support the Black Lives Matter movement. But yes, those are just my thoughts.

Sandy Hudson:
100%. That is 100% it. I can’t tell you how many people in the last few months has said to me, “Well, I would support you, I would. But when you say defend the police, or when you say abolition, it’s too much. You need different words, you need a PR strategy.” Or when you guys are out there on the street stopping traffic or ruining property. It’s you guys need another tactic because that way more people will support you and more people will know about what’s happening. And it’s, “Hello, this is the largest global movement that has ever happened around the world.” People are having protests daily, weekly, it is imaginable that this has happened in a way that it has during a global pandemic in the last three months. The way that culture has shifted so enormously to worldwide, start questioning the way that we engage with black people, the way that we try to create safety and security in our communities. 

It has never been done before. This is unprecedented. Don’t tell me that we have a publicity problem, don’t tell me that we have a PR problem. There is never been a more successful movement in terms of reaching people, changing the minds of people on the ground in terms of grassroots support. All the stuff that these people are saying it’s not borne out in the way that people are supporting us. And as you say, there’s only one other reason I can think that people wouldn’t be rummaging around in their heads to try to find something bad to say about the movement. That’s because they need some justification as to what makes it reasonable that they won’t support it. Yeah.

Tirrea:
We are dying to know, I just feel like with the United States and our individualism I personally don’t really know or I’m educated with what’s going on outside of the US. We really want to know, what is the police infrastructure like in Canada? And how does it differ from that to the United States? And what are some of the efforts as far as defunding the police? How is that looking in Canada as well? 

Sandy Hudson:
Well, a lot of the things are quite similar, people would maybe not be surprised to know that a lot of our police forces go to the very same conferences that happened in Florida, or I know that there’s some special relationship between the LAPD and the Toronto Police Services and how they exchange ideas and so on. Much like anything else that happens in North America, there’s a lot of cross border strategizing and organizing building from their end. But there are some particularities that people should know about. Number one, in Canada, we have so little right to information when it comes to anything that the cops do. For example, there is a memorial happening in Toronto for Regis Korchinski-Paquet and this is being recorded on July 25th, who was someone who was experiencing some mental distress her parents called or family members called the police to get support and she ends up falling from her balcony. After the police show up there’s some struggle, they push her mother out of the room. She’s screaming, help mommy help and she falls to her death over 20 stories and is left outside for over six hours.

We have no idea which police officers were there and we won’t probably for like another three years when there’s some public inquest because we don’t have access to any information. When I spoke earlier about a police officer shooting a woman on Mother’s Day, we only know that police officer’s name because they’ve been charged now but it’s so rare that they get charged. But we didn’t know who it was for so long. Journalists don’t have the right to this information even if they file a, Freedom of Information Request, we have a very similar process for doing that in Canada that exists in the US. But we have no right to any information. We can’t check if a police officer who killed somebody has had a series of negative interactions with the public in the past. If there’s 911 call, we don’t get it. If there is a video footage, we don’t get that either. We have no right to anything. There’s typically some private investigation that is done with either a body that’s very, very friendly to police officers or another police unit. And 97% of the time, they find that no charges are warranted. 

That’s a big thing that we struggle with in Canada, is that we just have no access to information, no data, nothing to help us understand these issues that we know are going on in our communities. We have to rely on academics who take on those fights on their own. But just recently after these weeks of protests, Stats Canada, Statistics Canada, which is our federal body that collects data has announced that it will now start to collect data with respect to race when it comes to policing. And then another really big one is one that is a big issue in the United States to policing in schools. And again, we just suffer from a lack of information when policing, the special resource officers are in schools in Canada, what we found is that they’ll enter the school district, but it’s not across the entire public school district, it’ll only be in the schools where there’s a larger proportion of black students, because it’s very anti black practice. But they won’t give us lists of where exactly they are, we have to find out ourselves.

Often parents don’t even know that police are in the schools with their kids. And all of this lack of information, obviously, is designed to make it very, very difficult for us to challenge anything that’s going on. Like in Toronto, we didn’t even have access to the line by line budget of the Toronto Police Service until yesterday, they never published it. And that was fine. Every other public institution has to publish publicly what their line by line budget is, it only make sense, except the police. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Wow, that’s insane. I didn’t know that. Okay. I know if they have the video cam on their cop car, that isn’t being released. But are you able to pull out your phones and record a negative interaction with the police and release that? Or are there things that prevent you from doing that?

Sandy Hudson:
Yeah. We can do that on our own, but if it gets confiscated, obviously, we can’t. If it gets confiscated they can take it and then we’ll never see it unless there’s an inquest, or unless there’s a public trial, and oftentimes there’s not. I’m talking about not necessarily when someone’s watching. You know cops, they try to cover up any person who is making their own video of a situation, they try to block those cameras. But I’m talking about, in the instance of a man named Andrew Loku who was killed in Toronto in 2015, after again, going through some mental distress and police showed up to his apartment building and shot him within 20 seconds of arrival. There were cameras in his apartment building, security footage. And the police went and messed with the security footage. Regardless of whether they did that or not, you’d think that the public would have access to seeing that. The journalists would be able to publish, okay, so here’s the officer who shot him, and here is what the footage looked like that night. We had no right to that information but we knew that it existed.

Rhiki Swinton:
It just makes me think about what else, what other differences are there between the experiences of black people in America and black people in Canada or Toronto specifically. From your perspective I know being an American, we have an individualistic type of way of thinking where we don’t see things outside of our safety net that is America, so we just assume that our experiences are the experiences of other people across the globe. I’m going to be honest, when I think about anti blackness and black people’s experiences, I typically, if I’m not thinking about America, the only other thing I think about is Africa, if I’m being just as honest as I can possibly be. Enlighten me what are some of the things that black people face in Canada?

Sandy Hudson:
It’s very much the same, it’s what people are experiencing in the United States. Obviously there’s local particularities, but let’s be very clear about what America is and what Canada is. There’s a line between the two countries that some colonizers decided was the right… very straight line to separate those who were loyal to the queen and those who were loyal to the flag. You know what I mean, that is the difference between the history of our two countries, is two differing ideologies of loyalty to a different white supremacist way of colonizing a place. That’s not that different. They still in Canada had 200 years of enslavement, though, there have been politicians and people who said, there was no slavery here. 

They pretend Canada is just a really great PR, a nation of just general public relations exercise that pretends that nothing bad ever happens there. But it’s all very much very, very similar. Much of how we experience anti blackness comes from the denial of our institution saying, one, we don’t have anti blackness here. Two, we don’t have racism here. And three, gosh, black people aren’t even really here, so why are you talking about this. That’s how it is expressed. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. So much of what you hear about happening in America also happens in Canada. And it’s just very frustrating that both our news and your news and global news never really focuses on it, partially because Canada has this reputation. The ways that this was so stark to me, it was in 2016 when, I can’t remember the name of the law, but there was a law that was changed in the United States that affected a lot of Haitian refugees who were in the US as a result of the earthquake.

And the fact that it was really dangerous to live in Haiti and so a lot of Haitians came up to the US and came up to Canada, as a result of that, the devastating impacts of the earthquake. And in 2016 or 2015, Trump decided to change a law that allowed some temporary amnesty for Haitian folks who were in US as a result of this earthquake. And people in Canada, people in the US were like, “Trump, terrible man has done this terrible thing, has ended this status.” It was going to affect tens of thousands of people were going to be deported to Haiti, to a place where that still hadn’t recovered from the earthquake and wasn’t going to be able to sustain that many people coming back home. And of course, it should have been roundly criticized and roundly condemned, because that was a terrible, terrible thing that Trump did, and that Justin Trudeau had done two years earlier, and nobody said anything about it, it’s like okay. And then so what happened? 

What happened was because people didn’t know tens of thousands of Haitians started crossing the border from the US to Canada, not at official ports of entry, but unofficial ports of entry and trying to claim asylum. Because people don’t know that we have the very same issues with migration in Canada we do in the United States. They did not know that they would be arrested, detained, children arrested, detained. Children separated from their families, put in different places than their families. It was the same stuff that you see happening in the US in a much greater scale, of course, because Canada’s only 30 million people. But is this that little line that makes one place Canada and one place the US doesn’t really change a lot of the sensibilities of white supremacy colonial place that is trying to that… That is designed so that people who are black are always constrained in terms of movement and how we are able to live a life of dignity.

We experienced so much of the same stuff, unfortunately, our policymakers, our people in power tend to get away with a lot of it, because our white supremacist media also refuses to really engage with the disgustingness that we see here on this side of the border or, you live in LA but over in Canada. And it’s much more likely that Canada is willing to say, “Well see, look at all those bad people down there in the United States, we’re better.”

Tirrea:
It’s interesting that you bring that up because, like you said, Canada to the public eye just seems like the safe haven, or this safe space, especially for black people when problems arise in the United States, especially ones dealing with racial identity and racial tension. Like you said the line that separates the US from Canada doesn’t necessarily stop the same issues from crossing the border. 

Sandy Hudson:
No. And in fact, one thing that I should mention, I try to mention this wherever I can. One thing that I was shocked to find out when I was doing my master’s degree, where I was doing a lot of work on anti blackness and origins and so on and colonialism. I read a piece by Dr. Afua Cooper who is a historian at Dalhousie University. She reveals in this historical record that the Fugitive Slave Acts that spurned the Underground Railroad where people were moving upward to Canada in an attempt to flee these jurisdictional acts that would really endanger their liberation were also in place in Canada. And as a result, there are people who are fleeing southward also to try to move from these places, St. Catharines, Windsor to the northern United States to escape the jurisdictional acts in Canada. There was actually a flow of people in both directions and trying to escape the jurisdiction from one bordered place to another bordered place. I just thought that that is such a fascinating history and so fascinating that we don’t hear about it. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah, I never heard of that. And I think I’m so glad I asked you this question. There’s this joke going around, I think in most of America, but really Michigan. We say all the time, we say if Trump gets elected for a second term we’re just moving to Canada type of thing. Sounds like a joke but it’s also somewhat we’re serious, we’re about to leave. But I think we just never really heard about… Like you said, there’s not a lot being publicized on the issues, I think that’s happening in Canada, so I just don’t hear a lot about it. So we just assume it has to be better. 

Sandy Hudson:
And it’s just not. In Toronto, and like I said, we don’t have a lot of Canada wide data so this is hard. But the Ontario Human Rights Commission did a large scale study. And that’s a legal body here in Ontario, the province where Toronto is, and discovered that a black person is 20 times more likely to be shot and killed by a police officer in Toronto than other folks, 20 times, yeah.

Rhiki Swinton:
Wow. Sandy, because of your extensive experience with organizing, I really want to ask you this question now that we’re in this global pandemic and people are confined and isolated to their house. What does organizing look like when you’re confined to your house? I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff on what you can do, how you can support the movement and a lot of it is geared towards white people. It’s the basic level stuff. Is the stuff that for people who are new to the movement they just recognize that race is an issue and it’s educate yourself and challenge your family and your friends. And just these very… I don’t want to say simple steps because there are important steps when you’re new to this movement, but it’s not geared towards me. It’s not geared towards a black person who’s been doing this for their life. What can I do to organize and support and bring awareness to the issues, but also do so in a way that where it doesn’t require me to be exposed to COVID, potentially?

Sandy Hudson:
Right. Well, this is such a hard question to answer, because who really, really knows what the answer is? There is no expert out there who is an expert in organizing during a pandemic. This is a very new thing that we’re dealing with right now. But I can tell you what I’ve been doing. Did I go to a couple protests? Yes, I did. Because I did some research about how being outside is less risky than interacting with people inside. But for those of us who are maybe immuno compromised or high risk, that might not be a reality for folks. What else have I been doing? Quite a lot. And I think that for us one thing that I think is so important is to be focused in what we’re talking about, in what we’re trying to do. It’s like the, “Hey, sign this petition and say that you’re against racism.” Or, “Put up a black square.” Okay, I get what people are trying to do, they’re trying to say, I feel bad about this, but it’s not enough to feel bad about it. Yeah, feeling bad about it should lead you to do something about it. 

And for me, being focused means I think now is the time to defund the police. I think now is the time to be asking ourselves the question, why do we have police? And the more that we can educate ourselves on that topic, on how the police get the money that they get, how it is that we can shift where that money is allocated? And maybe it’s the city council if it’s done on a city level. Maybe it’s the state, if it’s done on a state level. Or the province if it’s done on a provincial level or federally. How do we get that money to be reallocated elsewhere? How do we truly create societies that have options for safety and security and stop this money drain, this billion dollar money drain into these anti black institutions that are literally designed to just stop black people from living a free life, like that’s what it is. 

It is much easier to say, “Oh, man, racism sucks, I hate racism,” than to say, “I realize that one of the most massive ways that racism manifests in this system is through the policing department and so I realized that we need to give that up if we are to create a truly anti racist society. And I think that focusing there… there’s so much that’s been written on this over the years, and it’s all coming to fruition now, which I love, do some reading. And if you’ve done that reading and you realize that you need to make this more accessible to other people, do some writing, translating it for folks. I worked on this website called defundthepolice.org. I encourage people to check it out, which helps to distill that information down into really digestible pieces of information so that people can educate themselves, but also go forth and talk to other people, whether it’s family members, or maybe you’re part of some religious congregation, or maybe you’re in school. 

They can take that information and deliver it elsewhere to wherever else they are organized in the world. We, through creating that website, hired a bunch of researchers who are looking at the numbers in cities across Canada and the United States, and it’s due for an update this week. Where we can say, “Hey, did you know that in New York, they spend more money on policing than they do on transit, on the housing, on shelters, all combined, combined.” That doesn’t make any sense. Perhaps, perhaps people would be more safe if they knew where they were putting their heads at night. Perhaps people would be more safe if they found themselves in a domestic violence situation, they knew that they could go and access a shelter. These sorts of things are so important, and we need to be calling for that on a local level, wherever we’re at. 

We need to be calling for that. We don’t need to be out in the streets to do that. But we do need to make sure that we’re educating ourselves and focusing our message. It’s not enough to feel bad. Feeling bad is not going to stop the police from killing people.

Tirrea:
I agree 100%. I appreciate the gestures like the black square, the renaming of streets to Martin Luther King or BLM or whatever it may be, or all the murals and things that have been happening, all of those things bring awareness and attention to the issue. But we need to do more than that, like you said. We need to be really strategically organizing and demanding these resources and these initiatives to really truly make a lasting change and difference. And so switching gears a little bit Sandy, you have a podcast, Sandy and Nora Talk Politics, which I listened to a couple of episodes, and they’re really awesome. And I love all the topics are… Yeah, I love it. 

What advice can you give us and the people listening about how to have conversations for change? And specifically, how to move those conversations past the surface level, past the safe conversations, and conversations that may be a little more uncomfortable and may lead towards action?

Sandy Hudson:
Well, one thing that I think is very important that I think we shy away from a little bit in a society where social media is so big, where we all have our own platforms that we’re curating to show everybody perfect the lives that we lead. I think that one thing that we lose in this world is the ability to have generative arguments. I love, I love a good political argument. I love a good political argument because I think that it really, really clarifies my own principles and where I stand on an issue. And it helps me be invigorated to move forward with the types of action that I want to take.

Nora and I know each other from… we were active in the student movement in Canada, in around 2007, 2008 era. And we ended up working in an office together at the Canadian Federation of Students, Ontario, I was the chairperson, she was the Government Relations Officer or something like that, I don’t know. But we would argue about everything. It was any type of strategy that we had around tuition fees, or student debt, or whatever campaign we were working on, racism in higher education. We would get into these really passionate arguments about how to move forward on an issue. And I loved that, I lived for them and so did she, because we were really clarifying our own positions. 

And it usually turned out that it wasn’t that we were on to very different sides of an issue. Because what happens when you are forced to justify your position, you can see where the weaknesses are in your own thinking and maybe even change your thinking to some compromise with somebody else. Or you see that if you can’t justify your position, then maybe your position is just wrong. And if the other person can… There’s so much value in having a really robust political argument, and I have them all the time. Nora and I, we talk weekly to do the podcast. My cousin [inaudible 00:38:15], who is an activist who I live with and we argue almost every night about something. And I think that we have lost the ability to do that at least publicly, people tend to want to agree with one another and only talk about things that are so easy. It’s obviously, you’re on this side of an issue unless you’re a piece of shit, white supremacist, racist. But let’s deal with those really hard things to talk about. 

I had an argument a couple weeks ago about voting and the value of voting and whether or not people should spend time engaging in the vote. And it was just such a robust argument that really, it clarified things about my principles and my position for me and same with the other person. We didn’t come to a conclusion either of us, but the argument itself was so useful in keeping us ready for whatever needs to happen next, as we move into a new election season. 

Rhiki Swinton:
I’m so glad you brought this topic up because… Okay, I’m working at Arcus now. But before that I was a master’s student and just a college student for a long time.

Sandy Hudson:
I hear you, I’m with you. 

Rhiki Swinton:
I really couldn’t stand being in classes that were supposed to talk about race and diversity and the ethnic studies classes and the social justice classes that, there was always… they throw this term around a lot in higher ed, it’s called trigger warning. But I can understand trigger warnings for classes where you want to talk about rape and different things like that that can be triggering to someone who experienced that type of trauma. But whenever you throw a trigger warning in reference to a class that’s talking about race and diversity in African American history or whatever it may be, it’s really just giving I feel like people who are uncomfortable with having this conversation an excuse to not engage, or to keep the conversation very basic, very surface level. I even had a teacher in one of our classes told us to write questions on the wall of things we want to discuss in the class. 

It was a higher ed class, so I wrote on there, I want to talk about how to dismantle the current higher education system because it’s a racial system. When that teacher read over my question, they’re were like, “Oh, that’s too big of a topic. There’s no way we’re going to get anywhere with that, so we’re just going to brush over that question.” And I’m just like, “Yes, it’s a big topic, but we’re never going to get close to the answer if we never tried to engage about it, because we’re so intimidated by how big it is.”

Sandy Hudson:
Yeah, I feel you. I’m currently in law school. And it’s just the biggest… the biggest frustration to go from my last… I did my master’s in a program called Social Justice Education, which is really just like an interdisciplinary program that looks at different aspects of how our world is shaped, and how it should be changed. And it’s done at an education school, so it has these principles of how to teach and how to engage with students and how students are just as important to the topic and to shaping a topic as a professor. That’s not what I’m getting right now in law school, it’s very different. The pedagogical approach is terrible. I hate it. And in my criminal law class, I remember in law school, they do this thing called the Socratic method where they’ll just call on a student randomly, and they’ll be here’s a question you need to answer.

And we read theories of punishment and the professor calls on me and says, “Sandy, what’s your favorite theory of punishment?” I don’t have a favorite theory of punishment because I believe that we can live in a society where we don’t engage with crime and law with punishment. I think there are other ways to resolve problems and so I don’t have one. And he literally said, he was like, “Oh, you sound like you might be some abolitionists? Is that what you’re saying?” It’s like, “Yes, yes, I am.” He literally responded with, “Well, see how you feel when we get to the rape cases.” Okay, moving on. And I was like, “Man, as if I had never thought about that before. Come on. Do you want to engage that, engage with me. Engage me on the question,” but now he just shut me down and moved on. And I really, really, really dislike that. You know what, I love that you brought up trigger warnings too, because I have had that political debate with someone. And it was very clarifying. 

I have never believed in trigger warnings. I don’t like them. I understand why people want them but my position on them is that we have always had trigger warnings in our society. You’d be watching the news when you’re younger, or watching a television program that says, “This television program might be dealing with sensitive topics that may not be appropriate for some viewers.” That is a trigger warning. It’s not called a trigger warning, it’s called a warning because that’s when it makes sense to call it. I think that sometimes in social justice and activist spaces, we come up with terms that actually in you using them, says something more about us. I am a part of this group of people who knows to use this term, to call out or to say something about something that’s about to happen.

And what it tells you is who I am, it doesn’t necessarily tell you that there is like something terrible that’s about to happen. The proof of that to me is if I go to my mom and dad and say, “Oh, trigger warning, I’m about to tell you something.” They’re going to be like, “What the hell are you talking about? What did you just say? What is these words that you strung together? Trigger means one thing, warning means another thing, but we don’t understand them in a context like you put them together.” So it actually isn’t helpful to everybody. It’s only helpful to a very select group of people who are part of a certain type of culture. And if we are out here trying to change the world in a mass way, I don’t think that that’s helpful. That’s not helpful. 

Do I think that we should be decent humans and tell one another when we’re about to have difficult conversations and prepare people for difficult conversations? Yes, I do. Do I think that trigger warning do that? I don’t really think that it does. I don’t. Putting TW before you post something on Facebook isn’t going to help my mom who’s on Facebook more than me apparently. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah, I agree. And then it’s like when we’re having a racial conversation specifically it’s like, “Okay, what about talking about race is going to trigger you?” Because let’s be honest, this is not for the people of color in the classroom, it’s for the white people in the classroom. How is this going to be triggering, or if it is triggering, it’s probably you that could trigger anything by saying something blatantly racist, or saying something-

Sandy Hudson:
Or crying and making it about yourself. If that’s the philosophy, then what we need to do is when I wake up my eyes in the morning, I need to have TW written on my ceiling so that I can just see it, so that I am just prepared for the day because living in this anti black world, okay. 

Tirrea:
Sandy, lastly, we just want to ask you, what are some of the current projects and or initiatives you’re working on right now?

Sandy Hudson:
Oh, my God, I feel like I’m doing so much all the time. But I’m always working on the podcast, I’m always writing. You’ll see, I have a bunch of stuff that I’ve written in mainstream media, some things that I’ve written in academic stuff. I’m always writing. And I’m always thinking about ways that I can engage the public in different things. I’m thinking about putting together a book about some of the experiences of how we organize. I’ve released a book with a couple other organizers earlier this year about being black in Canada, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada called Until We Are Free. I’m thinking maybe to do something that’s more along the lines of how to organize and the lessons that I’ve learned over the years of being an organizer. And then I’m always working with BLM to try to shift where we’re at in society. I think that we’re in this place where we’ve done so much education around the police that we really have the ability to shift some public policy positively.

In the last couple of weeks, there’s some school boards that have announced they’re done with police in schools. I see what’s happening in the States, Minneapolis voting to abolish police. Oakland, getting rid of weaponry for frontline police officers. And I’m just like, we can do these things too. I’m really trying to bring that to the fore. And then I’m trying to finish this law degree, who knows what we’ll do with it afterwards but we’re almost halfway there.

Rhiki Swinton:
Well, power to you for tackling that monster. I once thought about a law degree, and then I was like, nah. We don’t know what the future will hold for me. I’d like go with the wind when it comes to what I want to do next.

Sandy Hudson:
I hear you. But just for me, it’s wherever we can, wherever we see that we can have an impact on the power that shapes the world that’s where I’m trying to be. I feel like maybe I could have an impact with having that JD credential, we’ll see if I’m right about that. But that’s why I’m here.

Rhiki Swinton:
We were having a conversation the other day, about how to create change, and the ways in which we can do so. And we had this conversation about infiltration. Definitely, you need the pressure from the outside to change the system. But you also need like minded people on the inside working to change the system from the inside. So then we were starting to talk about politics, specifically, and how we need more government officials who think the way we do and I totally agree. But if you asked me to be that person, to get that law degree to be that, that candidate that runs for this thing, I’m like, nah. I don’t want to be that person. What are your thoughts about that?

Sandy Hudson:
Oh, I think that makes perfect sense. I think everything that you just said makes perfect sense. I think that we need people wherever power resides. And power resides everywhere. We’re going to need people on the ground organizing grassroots communities. And we’re going to need people who can tell us, whisper in our ears, “This is what Trump’s about to do.” Or who can tell us, “Okay, we can make an impact in this place and they’re not watching here. So let’s do this.” We need people everywhere. And quite frankly, for someone like me, I’m really talented on the ground. I’m really, really good at choreographing an action on the ground. I’ve been doing it for years, I know how it’s done. I’m just really good at it. There might be a time where I’m no longer good at it, and I’ll have to move on to something else. But for now, it makes no sense for me to take all of that talent, throw it away and go sit and be someone’s representative at City Hall, where half the time I’m talking about streets and how wide they are. 

It makes more sense for me to be able to have the ability to do that stuff on the ground, because that’s just where my talent is. There’s other people who have different talents who are going to be amazing at doing the formal politics thing or maybe they grow out of the type of organizing that they were doing. Maybe it doesn’t make sense anymore, maybe social media world isn’t something that someone who’s a little older can engage with in the same way, and so wants to move into another realm of being effective at poking power, and does it in a different space as a bureaucrat, as an academic as something else. And I think that that’s totally fine. And that makes sense. We shouldn’t just be relegated to either the streets for academia, which is where it seems like some people think is the only place to be as an activist. And I think that that’s just wrong, we need to be everywhere, we need to be in all the places that we can be. But we shouldn’t force ourselves to be places where we don’t fit either.

Rhiki Swinton:
I feel that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. We really appreciate it.

Sandy Hudson:
My pleasure. It’s like a homecoming because I used to work with the Arcus Center. 

Tirrea:
I know, it’s so cool. When I think about the different people that Arcus has touched, I’m just like, “Wow, why wasn’t I here earlier? So I could have met Sandy and [inaudible 00:51:39]. I guess if you would just do the honors and the pleasure of closing us out with something that you think, whether that’s a quote that you said, or something that you’ve read, that sticks out to you that can really help us and keep us inspired during this time.

Sandy Hudson:
Sure. Here’s something that came to me in the last couple of weeks. It made me feel little good. We are going to win this fight, we’re just going to win it. We’re going to win it, the fight to get rid of police, which is what my fight is. And I believe that we’re going to win it. And the reason why I know this, I have such a deep conviction about it, is because it’s like, “This situation can’t go on forever.” The one thing that we know that’s constant is change. And the situation where black people are fighting the police isn’t going to go on forever, at some point it will end and there are a couple options, right? One, they get rid of all of us, they’ve been trying that for years, and they’ve been failing. 

I’m going to go with they’re going to continue to fail at that. Option number two, is that we all just stop fighting for the end of the police harming us or being around as this ineffective institution. And that’s also not going to happen. We’ve been fighting against it in different ways as the institution of anti blackness generally. And now we’re really focused on the police. I don’t think that’s going to change unless it’s just not going to change. That one’s not going to work out. And the only other option is that we win. This won’t stop until we win. 

I do believe that there’s going to be a time where we look back, hopefully, maybe 20 years from now, we’re a little older, and we get to look back and say, “Yeah, we had this really weird institution that would go around killing black people, show up to people’s houses when they needed help. They’re in some mental distress and end up killing them. And only ever solved less than 15% of burglaries and thefts but we kept it up for, we don’t know why.” And think, that made no sense. I wonder why we did that back then. I just have such a strong and deep conviction that with all the things that we know about this institution, of all the things that we know about the movement for black lives and the different forms that it’s taken over the last 600 years. And all of the things that we know about the police.

There’s no other way that this ends than with us winning. It’s inevitable. It is an irredeemable institutions, it’s not going to be reformed. And that type of eventuality, that inevitability gives me so much inspiration because I’m just like, here we are, we’re living it, we’re bringing it and we’re going to be the ones to do it. And that that is one of the most inspiring and motivating things that came to me in the last couple weeks.

Rhiki Swinton:
I really appreciate that, that I think we need to hear that sometimes. Because sometimes we just think it’s never going to end, we’re going to be fighting forever, but no, we’re going to win. Well, thank you all for listening to this episode of our BLM miniseries. Remember that the conversation is not over. If you like this episode, please let us know by commenting on our social media platforms and be on the lookout for what’s to come next on the Radical Zone. 

outro:
Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook at ACSJLKzoo, Twitter at ACSJL and Instagram at Arcus Center. For questions, comments and ideas for future topics, please leave responses on our social media platforms.

Grassroots Organizing & Student Activism: BLM Series #3

This time around, we take time out to focus on localized grass root organizing & activism. We talked to Majyck D in our #BLM mini series to understand how what has been happening in Kalamazoo Michigan lately. The Killing of George Floyd resulted in protests and demonstrations in cities across the nation, with Kalamazoo Michigan being one of those cities. We also learned about the relationship between Kalamazoo Public Schools and the community and discussed what measures are being considered to end police presence in Kalamazoo Public Schools and policing students in general.


Transcript:

Sound Bite:
Each and every one of you for being here. We cannot stop. We cannot wait. We cannot be patient. We want our freedom every morning, now. I said to each and every one of you, do what you can. Do what you can and change America.

We can do it.

We can do it. You have the power to do it. And some of you should get out there and organize like you’re organizing. And so I said to you, never give up. Never give up, never become bitter or hostile and never hate. Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. That goes for all of us.

Amen.

Intro:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, also known as ACSJL, is an initiative of Kalamazoo college, whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building.

We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop ones full potential is available to every person, and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

Rhiki:
Hey, you all it’s Rhiki. Welcome to another episode of the Radical Zone Podcast and another episode of our BLM mini series. Today I have Trevor Loduem Jackson with me as a cohost. Trevor, tell the people a little bit of something about yourself.

Trevor Jackson:
What’s up, everyone? Happy to be here. I’m currently a rising senior at Kalamazoo college. I work within the Arcus Center as a student liaison, and I’m just happy to be here. And thanks, Rhiki, for allowing me to do this.

Rhiki:
So for this episode of the BLM mini series, we have the pleasure of introducing DJ Majyck, also known as Majyck D who is a local organizer in the Kalamazoo community.

Trevor Jackson:
Majyck is a media cultivator community organizer, videographer, mentor. They also serve as board president of PACCT board, or the Promised Advocacy for Children and Community Transformation in Kalamazoo, created an internet radio station and creates video content that advocates for positive change to the disenfranchise. So, welcome Magic.

DJ Majyck:
Yes, thank you so much, everyone for having me.

Rhiki:
To start off, I just want to talk about everyone knows the killing of George Floyd resulted in protests and demonstrations in cities across the nation with Kalamazoo, Michigan being one of those cities. So, Majyck, what has been your involvement with what has been happening in Kalamazoo related to the recent uprising?

DJ Majyck:
A part of it, myself and the group that I work with, PACT and Michigan Liberation, we’ve been out in the streets, just like some of the other peaceful protesters, and it’s all about, enough is enough. I think, really, it’s not like George Floyd was nothing new, unfortunately, but I think what happened with George Floyd and just how it was shown in the media and just the outward display of ignore someone’s cry, I think that really tugged on a lot of hearts and brought out a lot of rage for a lot of people, as far as seeing what exactly racism looks like. So really what happened with George Floyd just really ignited what was already simmering.

Rhiki:
Yeah. I agree with that. So, what organizations have you been involved in and what resulted from the demonstrations that has happened in Kalamazoo specifically?

DJ Majyck:
So again, working with PACCT, also with Michigan Liberation, that is actually the main hat that I wear as far as organizing, I’m the Collinsville County director for the Michigan Liberation for the West side of the state. So working with other people of color, black and brown leaders in the community, there have been sets of demands that have come out of protesting and meeting those demands with action.

So just bringing more attention from the protest, working with BLM, some other groups that have started up, I want to say Uplift Kalamazoo has come out of this, and just continuing that direct message. To the folks that want to uphold the white supremacy that’s going on here in Kalamazoo, that we are tired of it. And all of us are pulling our knowledge and resources together to fight against this.

Trevor Jackson:
Did this feel different? This organizing around George Floyd and then the other death that happened over the past few months? Does this feel different than organizing in the past and different things like that?

DJ Majyck:
Yeah, for sure. That’s a good question. I don’t know what it is, but it just seems like this unfortunate murder of George Floyd has really… It’s like this synergy. There’s something that’s going on in the universe where things are just aligning people’s trauma and harm, aligning. And I think really with the pandemic that’s going on, you putting some of those things and it too, so there are people that are disconnected from their resources.

So what I’m saying, there’s a lot of white people are feeling and starting to experience where black people live every day. So having that, and then seeing, we’re actually seeing in the news, I think really helped ignite this movement, this energy, this deep burning to transform the racism that’s happening, just abolish it. That’s what’s going on here, in Kalamazoo. This is America, period.

Rhiki:
Yeah. I was actually talking, I think it was, I was talking with my mom a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about this very thing, the trauma of the pandemic and how I think she thinks because people are forced to sit down and isolate and be within their home, it’s making it where you have to see what’s happening. You can’t just like go about the rest of your day and ignore it. You don’t really have too much else to do. So you have to sit, you have to see this and visualize this and think about what’s happening and how you play a role in it. And I think that’s what her perspective was on why you see more white people getting involved. What are your thoughts on that?

DJ Majyck:
Now that you were saying that, it almost seems like a solitary confinement, even though it’s involuntary with social distancing, but you still have to put yourself in a space where you having things to entertain yourselves, whether it’s music or news. So if we are in a space where we are surrounded and inundated with media that is showing over and over again, the same thing, those same negative messages about what is wrong in America, folks aren’t able to necessarily escape from that.

They’re not able to get out and put that on the back burner by going to hang out with their friends because there’s no places to go. So, I agree with your mom, people have to marinate in their feelings because more people are online, they just have access and more time to watch a lot of these disparities and trauma that’s happening right in front of us.

Trevor Jackson:
Switching gears a little bit. So I work in the juvenile home in Kalamazoo. So I get to see a bunch of tips coming in and out of their work with the CO’s and everything like that. So I’m wondering what’s the relationship like between Kalamazoo, public safety and the community, and then within that, the police presence within Kalamazoo public schools and policing students in Kalamazoo in general. So what’s that like, and how does that all work?

DJ Majyck:
So, yeah, so right now, PACCT, actually it originated, the work that we’ve been doing, organizing around education and juvenile justice, started doing our work with SEE Change, which stands for Social Economic Educational change. And that was working on the [inaudible 00:09:04] pipeline and all those different things, from suspensions, unwarranted suspensions, to qualify parents and caregivers not able to access the school. So starting that work with SEE Change and then, when we’re working and as impacted folks, impacted people, our lives change, our capacities change. So with the capacity’s changing, some of the folks have changed. I am one of those persons that was from See Change that has taken the groundwork, the work that was done and moved it over to PACCT, where the current folks that are on that team, renamed the work and the work is more focused.

So, when we talk about PACCT and the police, one of the things that we know historically that we’ve been trying to share with the district is that the historical context that police have with slavery, and one of those things that has come up, and actually with the curriculum, the social studies curriculum, and how black history is pretty much watered down and cut out in a meaningful way that will give some depth to the real contributions of black history. So our black and brown youth that are more traumatized and harmed, just social, economically in the community. So you have police that are in the community. These people are normalized that they’re in these children’s lives every day. So this is something they see every day. So when you take that presence of the police and transfer it over into the school setting, that is something that is normalized for many black and brown students.

Some of those students don’t have a problem with the presence of police, but there are many students that do have a problem with the police and the trigger mechanism that it has and the negative outcomes that they’ve experienced, or they’ve seen their peers experience. So PACCT currently has an online petition right now, demanding that a public school district eliminate their contract with Kalamazoo police department. Now, right now that contract is not in effect. It expired June 14th, but it is in review. So the district does have an option to review that.

In that petition, there are things that we are asking for them to take that money that will be used for an SRO and put those resources back into the school as informed of trauma informed trainings, hiring behavior specialists, hiring counselors or social workers. But that is the main argument that we’re seeing with the district is that police makes our schools safe for everyone and our compelling narratives and the compelling research that we have brought forth to the district and still been met with resistance.

We’ve talked with the Kalamazoo board township trustees about police in Kalamazoo central school, and obviously Kalamazoo public school trustees or Lori NORCs, and the sense that they are very resistant. There are a few people that bind police safe in the schools, but even if there’s a small number of family and students that don’t feel safe with the police being in schools, that is not being considered and being disregarded. So, that is definitely a fight that we’re working on because research has shown that students contact with the police are at increased because the contract that the police have with the school districts in the language of the contracts, the job description part of it is for them to police, by any means necessary, arresting, detaining.

So if we have that same practices in our community that are in our schools, how is that making our children safe? And some of these students were teargassed during a peaceful protest in late May, early June.

Trevor Jackson:
Wow, thank you for that. Also, going along those same lines with COVID and everything, how does KPS look like in the fall? Are the plans to return to school, or how do you feel like that can be done correctly or safely if possible?

DJ Majyck:
So the school district just a few weeks ago, they had a series of community listening sessions, where they were asking for input from stakeholders in the community. So actually, this coming up Thursday at the board meeting, we are going to get the results of those community listening sessions. Just to share my own personal sentiment, I strongly believe that staff and students should not be returning to school in the fall. A lot of parents and students that I’ve spoke with in the community do not feel safe returning to school in the fall. So the question for us is how equitable is that going to look for the students that were already behind before this pandemic started and what equitable lens is going to be used to prevent students from falling further behind and what are they going to do to make sure they stay engaged?

So those are some of the main things that we’re asking. And then for the students that want to go back to school, what does that look like for them? The district is talking about a budget shortfall, which there is, we’re talking about 6 to 8 million dollars and this is coming from the state. So the district is trying to figure out how to use less money, but we still have parents that are essential workers that have to go to work. And there are some students that want to go to school. So how do you accommodate that? Those are the questions that still need to be answered.

Rhiki:
Yeah. I was actually talking about this the other day and we were talking about how for some students and some families, not only do they need school because they have to work. So that helps them where they don’t have to find a babysitter, but also in school, that’s where some of those kids get a meal, that’s where they’re able to eat every day, especially if they’re from a low income, impoverished household. So it’s like, I also don’t think we should open schools back up, but then how can we meet the needs of those students in replace of them not being able to go to school and get some of those needs met already?

DJ Majyck:
Right. I think this is the exact examples of where we have to, I think, shift our paradigm of trying to be reformists and try to work into a system that don’t work. The students are going to continue to get their breakfast and lunch. They go to the distribution sites, they’ll still get that. So what if we had no school and we increased the amount of food that we’re giving to the families because growing kids, especially boys, they eat a lot of food, right? Increasing that. But one of my other concerns is, how long are the students expected to sit in front of a screen each day, and how healthy that is. Because just as an adult, and having meetings, I know what it can do to the body when there’s not movement.

So, we leave a whole bunch of concerns from in-person schooling to now we’re going to be open up the can of worms for a whole nother set of possible outcomes that are going to need to be dealt with. So, thinking outside of that, I think one example that comes to mind is, I don’t know if you’re familiar with a group of parents out at Interface apartments, low income, subsidized, apartment complex in Kalamazoo, it’s called Aims Kidz. Talked with one of the lead persons that organized it. They have about 80 kids a day that attend that summer camp. That’s a school right there. It’s a matter of how to take the resources that are being put into a system that don’t work for our students and creating, designing structures that will work for us.

So part of that is the emergent strategies, right? Thinking outside of the paradigm of what we live it. And one of the things that I think is slow about that is a lot of fear. A lot of people want to go back to normal, whatever that was, before this pandemic, but normal was racist. Coming out of this, moving out of the pandemic, more people are able to, their lens is not as blurred. They can’t deny the overt racism that’s happening right now. Another concern that I have, which brings up the online learning, black and brown students, especially boys, are disproportionately suspended more than white students just based on their behavior.

So with online learning, there are going to be new ways of tracking students. So one of our concerns as PACT is that none of our students, especially ones that are not able to engage in the standard that the district puts out is that they are not harmed, then they are not held responsible for any harm that is caused. So what I’m saying is, if they’re not able to get online, do whatever requirements they are for their coursework, that they will not be suspended or any type of way dealt with in a harmful or a punitive way about not doing the homework, because they can’t engage in a meaningful way, according to someone else’s standards.

Rhiki:
Yeah, I agree with you when you say we have to think outside the box and realize that the old normal is not possible anymore and work towards something different and being intentional, that that something different doesn’t have some of the racial stigmas and implications that the old system has, but staying on this topic of the school system, I want to talk specifically about school board candidates and what you think people should pay attention to when becoming familiar with different campaigns.

DJ Majyck:
Yeah, the school board definitely an important campaign to vote on in November. But one of the things that you have to be mindful with the school board, with any politician, are they speaking to your values? Are they doing what they say that they’re doing? And that there are some folks that are getting ready to announce their candidacy. I believe one person announced her candidacy yesterday. She is someone that I know that works within the school and works with students. So being mindful of people that you may know, or you think would be good for those roles would be awesome. Just because of the work that we’ve been doing in the community, we know that we have to have people that share our values, when they get into office, that we’re going to support them.

Part of the problem is it’s like one done deal. When we get our people in, we think that they’re going to be able to change the world, transform things. They can’t, they still need to have us behind them and echoing what they’re saying. So being mindful, who is currently on the board and checking their track record about what has not been done. So I say, for example, we have a problem with suspensions in black and brown students still disproportionately suspended. If there are school board members on there that are ignoring the concerns of parents and students, and they are still on the board, I would say that those folks are ineffective and those folks needs to go.

So a lot of people that aren’t familiar with PACCT, you can get familiar with some of the things we’ve been working with. And as far as keeping our trustees accountable, you can hear their responses. So if we are still dealing with some of the same stuff we’ve been dealing with with decades, I would say that those people that are on the other side of that table are ineffective and we cannot continue to listen to reformist language. We cannot continue to let these leaders pass it by us with silence and think that we are going to continue to talk and not escalate because that’s the next steps is what does that look like when you escalate?

Trevor Jackson:
Magic, you definitely bring up a good point of following a politician that needs to fit your values and what you believe in, but also at the same time, not just doing lip service, is what we get a lot of nowadays, is just lip service. All talk no back, for the communities that they’re supposed to represent. And I do think that that next action is going to be something different. It’s going to be past trying to listen to reformists, and as college students, I guess, myself, when people were around, we tend to think of ourselves as catalysts for change because we’re at these institutions.

But I think it was Angela Davis said a few weeks ago that college students shouldn’t center themselves in the movement. It should be people who are on the front lines doing this work. So what advice do you have for students who are in college, who wants to start getting into organizing work, or even high school students who wants to start getting into organizing work? What advice do you have for them as they start to participate in these movements?

DJ Majyck:
That’s a great question. Part of it is, a lot of young people, they want to do something, but they just don’t know what to do. So a lot of us, a lot of you all will attend a protest and you’ll hold a sign up. And it’s like, “Okay, I feel good.” But it’s not just about feeling good. It’s like, what can you do? And I would say, if your community doesn’t have a grassroots organization that’s on the ground, that’s doing the work, and I’m talking about the work that’s talking about changing the policies. For this stuff to change, the policies have to be transformed. So that means having conversations with politicians. So I would say to someone that really wants to get into organizing, like protesting, there’s a difference between attending a rally and organizing.

And organizing, you’re going to bring people into the work, you have the shared language, you have shared actions, to make transformation. When you just go into a rally, you are just being enlightened with some information and you holding up a sign and you chanting. But there has to be more than that. So after you hold your sign up, having conversations with people outside of your circle, reaching out to organizations that are doing work, that you may want to get into. And that may be you having to look outside of your community. You may have to create that yourselves. It just starts with one person attracting that energy.

So I would just say, look for like-minded folks that share your values and you create something, or look within your community on the ground to see what organizations, even checking out the universities, because there’s always student organizations that are working on social justice projects.

Trevor Jackson:
Thank you for that.

Rhiki:
I would also like to add to that. I think I agree with Magic as in you can’t just show up to a protest, hold up a sign, and then walk away and be like, “Good job, work. I did my part.” And I think also having conversation amongst your friends are important, but a lot of times if you’re friends with those people, they’re already like-minded. So, I’m not saying don’t have conversations with your friends, but you’re not really changing anything outside of that friend group, if you all already are on the same page and in the know with what’s happening. So really going into the classroom, being bold, having conversations with people that you know may not see things the way that you see things, and then also being self-aware of your realm of influence, I think is important.

So, I don’t think people utilize their social media platforms as much as they probably could, or the different things that you’re involved in as a college student, whatever platforms you may have, whether that be social media, or if you have a YouTube channel, or if you do have a podcast, and really being intentional about using those things in a way to add to the momentum of the organizing that is happening and move the needle forward a little bit, is really important. But yeah, it’s more than just protesting and the public stuff. It’s more than just the stuff that’s out front. It’s a lot of behind the scenes work.

DJ Majyck:
Yeah, I agree with that. And the main important thing is shared language. You brought up a good point, if we’re in our circle and we’re talking with our friends. Yes, we’re friends because for the most part, we have the same values, but sometimes we may not have the same definition of a word. I would say, for example, like struggle. My struggle is going to be different from everybody else’s struggle, right? But it’s still the word struggle. So a person that still has resources, their struggle is going to look different from someone that’s living in transition. So everyone’s experience is different.

One of the things that I see that we can’t get past this reformist living or this vision is because the educations of our children, there’s no vision, there’s no planning seeds of a world that looks different than what they’re used to. So if you can’t imagine anything outside of what your reality is, no, you’re not going to be able to imagine a reality without policing in the schools. You’re not going to have a reality without police in your community. You’re not going to have a world that doesn’t exist the way it exists with racism. This is all we know.

So if you don’t have the tools and the language for us all to move in that transformational way, we’re going to continue to spin our wheels and be right where we are.

Trevor Jackson:
So, switching gears just a little bit. So I’m a writer, I’m a creative person, I make music, do all this other stuff within the arts. So can you talk about how the creative arts, whether that be music, drawing, painting, photography, writing, shift consciousness and really help the movement or the voice of the movement. Can you speak about how the arts influences movements?

DJ Majyck:
Oh, yeah. Most definitely. Just over the consciousness, just the age of just blackness, just to different kinds of arts, the black Renaissance artists, all those different artists like poets, music that speaks to what’s going on in the world at the time, black and brown people’s interpretation of what the world is, what their experience to trauma is, regardless of it’s in an abstract way. And then those folks that are observing it, how they interpret that.

One of the things that many movements have used is art and music. And one of the things that we really do when whenever we have events is utilize art from black and brown folks in the community. Some of us may be silenced where we cannot speak, but our creativeness comes out in different forms. So it’s very important that we are able to use our art to still push our message and our agenda to the world that also expresses beauty in the creativity of what we create, but also taking that harm and being able to express it in a way that shows the world too, without having to speak it. Does that make sense?

Trevor Jackson:
Yeah, most definitely. I feel as if, when speaking about art in movement, I always place a song or a genre that just fits with the movement. So when I think of the black power movement back in the seventies, I’m always thinking of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, I’m thinking of these artists that spoke for the times. When I think about 2015 with the uprisings in Baltimore and in Ferguson, I’m always thinking about Kendrick Lamar, and some type of butterfly. So I always think of movement with music and art along, and you’re right, it just helps with that expression.

And do you think that art in general makes movements mainstream? Do you think it makes it easier for the people who aren’t living those realities every single day to understand it a little bit more?

DJ Majyck:
Yes. I think this is, again, sometimes we’re able to see the disparities and our resources, how just to keep it real, because there are a lot of white people, that culture, are able to take in art and appreciate that. So being able to take artwork from a struggling black person, I don’t know, it says a couple of things. For one, it shows the creativity of that young person, but it also, sometimes, I like to see the reaction on their faces because they’re in disbelief. They cannot believe that this brown person, this black person, created this work of art, and is just so expressive.

And I have art hanging up in my studio now from some local artists, Calvin Green is actually one of them had his art and it’s so Afrocentric, his art. And it’s so texturized. The art and music, the music keeps the energy going. It keeps the movement, the flow. So it’s like, without music and the art, things are silent. Even locally, here in Kalamazoo, we have all the black lives matter art, all the love on black and brown folks that have been murdered or killed in some kind of way by violence or police violence. That art is shown throughout Kalamazoo. Not all of it was created by black artists, but it’s still part of the movement of what is currently going on right now.

Rhiki:
I remember Angela Davis, I watched this webinar. It’s been a lot of webinars, but Angela Davis was in one of them and she was talking about not only the importance of art to make people who wouldn’t be aware, more aware of the reality of black and brown individuals, but also it’s that thing that can help us think outside the box. It’s that thing that can paint a picture of a new world and give people an example of what abolishing some of these systems could look like. What are your thoughts on that?

DJ Majyck:
Yeah, I definitely agree. That’s just about going back to imagining what you see, even if it’s creating this utopia type picture, in order to dream it, someone has to see the vision and put that out there to the people. So if the vision is not put out there, then no one can see that vision. So the more we bring people into that vision and have that shared language, we can all move toward what it is that we’re tying to abolish, what we’re trying to create.

Rhiki:
Well, Majyck, I just have one more question for you. So what are some projects or things that you’re working on that you want to uplift in this moment to get people more active and aware of what’s happening in Kalamazoo?

DJ Majyck:
Oh, for sure. Definitely want to uplift the life of Cornelius Frederick, 16 year old that was murdered here in Kalamazoo at Lakeside Academy. There’s an online petition for him, asking for a number of things, for Lakeside to be shut down, just a number on things. So tomorrow we actually have our second of five listening sessions around Cornelius Frederick and Lakeside staff that are going to share on what to do with Lakeside. So the question is, should Lakeside open the way it was not with sequel, obviously. Some sort of residential housing for youth, or should it be repurposed into something else? So that’s part of it.

Another project that we’re working on is our petition with police in schools. We are still working on that. Again, where we at with that, that’s probably some escalation. Another what we’re working on, and this is a community demand as well, is demands for the Kalamazoo police department and how they treated peaceful protesters and a number of other things that we have demanded that the city do. And they started to come around and they’ve done a couple of things, but that’s not good enough. So those are the immediate things that we working on, as well as the school board candidates, making sure that folks are aware of who’s going to be running and the importance, making sure that we get the right candidates on the board. So those four things that are priority.

Rhiki:
And Majyck, I know you’re known for videotaping and getting footage of the protests and things that are happening just in general, that is uncensored, unfiltered. It’s just real, raw, what’s actually happened. Where can we go to find some of that stuff?

DJ Majyck:
Been slow to share it out, but you can actually go to my social media page and check that out. I don’t know if you want me to spell it out, but it’s on my social media page and also have a YouTube account that it’s on there as well. And magicradio.com is my internet radio station. So you’ll be able to keep up with those things as well there.

Trevor Jackson:
Dope, dope. Majyck, so glad though we could talk with you today. Thank you for your input and just breaking things down for us of what’s going on in Kalamazoo and how we can help. And for those listening, please remember that in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. So thank you Majyck, so much. We definitely enjoyed having you.

DJ Majyck:
I appreciate you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Rhiki:
So thank you again, Majyck, and we hope you enjoyed this episode of our BLM mini series. If so, please let us know on our social media platforms. And if you enjoy this conversation, remember that the conversation is not over. We have more coming, so be sure to join us next time on the Radical Zone.

Outro:
Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook at ACSJLKZoo, Twitter @ACSJL, and Instagram at Arcus Center. For questions, comments, and ideas for future topics, please leave responses on our social media platforms.

Electoral Politics & Immigration Rights

The COVID-19 pandemic has made things complicated around the world, and America has been equally affected by this global health crisis and the impact it has had on society. The Radical Futures Now Podcast brought back professor Jason De LeĂłn to help us understand and decipher immigration rights and electoral politics in America. In this episode, we dive deep into issues of diversity and differences between various minority groups in America in context of the political build up towards the upcoming national election. Jason De LeĂłn also provides his professional thoughts and opinions about the re-opening of universities and other academic institutions amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Resources:

Undocumented Migration Project webpage

Hostile Terrain 94 webpage

Land of Open Graves book


Transcript:

Intro:
Welcome to The Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo College, whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued. The inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop ones what potentially is available to every person and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.  

Rhiki Swinton:
So welcome back to another episode on The Radical Zone Podcast. My name is Rhiki Swinton, and I will be your host. Today, I brought in Paige, who was a former student staff member of the Arcus Center. Paige, tell the people about yourself a little bit. 

Paige:
Hi everyone. I’m really excited to talk to Jason De LeĂłn today. I recently graduated from Kalamazoo College. I’m a writer and organizer. I mostly do creative writing like poetry and plays. I also volunteer at APIENC, a queer and trans Asian Pacific Islander group out in the Bay Area. Shout out to APIENC and you can check out my writing at miublue.com, M-I-U-B-L-U-E. And follow me on Instagram @miupaige, M-I-U-P-A-I-G-E. 

Rhiki Swinton:
So like Paige said, we’re bringing back Jason De Leon, who is an anthropologist and executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project. If you haven’t heard our first episode with Jason, please go back and listen to that. You can hear more information about his work and the projects that are coming out of his organization. Jason, thank you for coming back to The Radical Zone. We’re so excited to talk with you.  

Jason De LeĂłn:
No, my pleasure. Thank you for having me again.  

Paige:
I was recently just telling Rhiki actually this morning that I used to live in, Nogales, Arizona, which is a border state. I’ve been thinking a lot about that as we prepared to talk to you today. And so I’m really excited to learn more about your work. And I just want to start off by asking, what’s been on your mind this week, Jason?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
This week is kind of a busy week for me because we are launching our global exhibition Hostile Terrain 94. We have our virtual launch on Friday in Santa Fe and actually that exhibition is physically up as well. I believe that people can go see it. They are working on social distancing protocols that allow people to visit the gallery space one at a time. So we’ve got a whole bunch of events developed around that, that are happening this week. So that’s sort of been on my mind, but then also, I’ve just driven from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh. So I’m here in Pittsburgh now in my in-laws house. And I was telling Ricky before we started that we camped the entire way. We did basically primitive camping so we could avoid all people as much as possible to get here.  

And it was just very interesting and I knew this was going to happen. It was just to see the differences in people’s responses to COVID by state. I went to Arizona and getting gas in Arizona, for me, a typical Arizona occurrence where the gas station clerk is not wearing a mask, but is wearing a gun. So pretty kind of indicative of how Arizona has approached COVID-19, New Mexico was a complete opposite, every single person I ran into had a mask on and they were very conscious about that. Every time I went into a gas station about whether or not people had masks on and if they didn’t, they weren’t allowed to come into the store and then getting into Missouri, which looked a lot like Arizona people just being very, very nonchalant about this whole thing.  

And so I’ve just been thinking about, coming out of California and coming out of Los Angeles where I feel like despite some people not taking it seriously, for the most part, my neighbors and people I would run into at the store and stuff seemed to be really serious about the spread of coronavirus. And that’s, I think very much a bubble. I think there’s other parts of this country that like many issues, whether it’s immigration, police brutality, healthcare, this variation in how people are responding to this stuff. So for me, it was a little sad to see that, it doesn’t really matter what California does right now, or Los Angeles, because there are huge parts of this country that aren’t taking things seriously. And I think you could say the same thing about immigration, about politics, voter fraud. I mean, whatever kind of political or social issue that’s kind of on our minds right now, there is a huge variation across this country, which says a lot about, I think our future.  

Paige:
Yeah. I think that’s an interesting choice that you made to drive out to Pittsburgh and then primitive camping. My friend actually recently drove also from Los Angeles, I think, to Boston, but he chose to stay in hotels. What was going through your mind? I know you had talked a little bit about wanting to have as least contact as possible. What else also going into that decision making process for you?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Yeah. I mean, I have no desire to be around strangers right now, especially considering that most, I think that I just assume that everybody has COVID-19 and that they’re all acting irresponsibly. And I also don’t know if I have it and so I really want to be cautious and I want this pandemic to end as soon as possible. And I think the only way that that’s going to happen is for people to take that kind of responsibility and not be this, so selfish about, I want to go to the bar, I want to go out and do stuff. I’m like, you know what? No shit, I want to do all those things too. But the more you keep doing it now, the longer it’s going to be before we get to do those things again.  

And so for me, it’s trying to be a good citizen, but also trying to set a good example for my kids, who are with me and teaching them about social responsibility and trying to instill those kinds of values. But even just like, bars and restaurants had been open at for a little bit in L.A. and I just remember, driving by people are sitting outside eating, and if your waiter is wearing a hazmat suit, why would you want to be in that place? I really, I just, I don’t understand it. And I get the being stir crazy thing, but it’s this idea that it’s just going to go away if we ignore it, I think is a very much an American. Americans, we’re irresponsible about so many things or either irresponsible or negligent or ignorant of many major social issues. And so we just choose to ignore things and hope that they’ll go away.

So we can ignore COVID-19 and hope it’s going to go away. We can ignore Black lives matter and hope it’s going to go away. And so even when I’m seeing now, I think it’s representative of where we are in this country at this moment. But for me, the decision to avoid people. I mean, we’re here in Pittsburgh, we’re going to sit in the house. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to come here and, I can see my in-laws, but I have no desire to go out and do anything, especially now in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh had been doing very well and is now surging.  

Paige:
I’m glad that you and your family were able to make it to Pittsburgh safely. And I think, I’m also in Los Angeles right now with my family and yeah, going to restaurants and seeing someone with a hazmat suit is like, why would you? Yeah, I totally agree with what you were saying for sure.  

Jason De LeĂłn:
I mean, It’s really disheartening when I go out and people are not following social distancing rules right. They’re not keeping six feet apart or they could walk into a grocery store and everyone’s wearing a mask except for them. And they can just think that that’s totally okay. It’s very, this thing is very, I’m trying not to get angry about it, but it’s kind of mixed reaction to this whole thing is very infuriating. But yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I just think that people are going to learn the hard way, unfortunately,  

Rhiki Swinton:
I liked what you said earlier about how our mixed reactions across various states and across the nation is also somewhat symbolic of our mixed reaction when it comes to immigration specifically. And I remember reading in your book this point where you talk about how you think people have this kind of historical amnesia, basically around the way they view early European immigration compared to the way we view immigration now. So can you tell me a little bit more on basically what you think, can you talk to me a little bit more on this idea of historical amnesia and kind of point out the parallels between early European immigration and immigration that we see today?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Sure. I think that we, as a country are very selective about what we remember. We live in a White patriarchal, heterosexual society that privileges those particular narratives, overall others. And I think that that viewpoint dominates what we talk about in the current moment. And it sure as hell dominates how we remember the past. And anyone that has a romance about the past, I am skeptical of because we know that our history is so incredibly complicated. And so to think that it was better then than it is now, let’s make America great again, the new… now it’s keep America great. But when we reflect, if someone reflects back and goes, yeah, the 1960s were great or the 1860s were great, that was when America really was America, those aren’t people of color saying those sorts of things. 

But unfortunately, the people who have that viewpoint are the ones who control the narrative and who find themselves in positions of power. But we do, I mean, Americans oftentimes too, we really Whitewash how we think about the past. And one of my kind of favorite examples of how waves of immigration or generations of the more you are removed from that kind of first generation of landing in the U.S. the more kind of twisted, I think your viewpoint is of those times. And there was a sociologist named Herbert Gans who had written quite extensively about different generations of immigrants. And he would say, generation number one is, they come to this country, they’re demonized, they’re given shit jobs. They don’t speak English very well, they’re ghettoized. 

And then he says, then they have kids. Those kids grow up in the U.S. they grew up speaking English as the primary language. They try to distance themselves from the generation of their parents, because they know that they were experiencing so much discrimination. And so they’re kind of more American than Americans. And then you get this third generation after them that then now hasn’t really experienced any kind of discrimination because of their background. And I’m talking mostly about European Americans. And so a third generation Irish person can be Irish and proud and not have to worry about being excluded from a restaurant or being beaten up by the police or this kind of stuff. They can romanticize the kind of Irish past, and they can embrace that identity because it doesn’t negatively impact them on a daily basis.  

And so Gans talks about this idea of symbolic ethnicity, where this third generation is able to wear the ethnicity of the home country as window dressing. So you can be a proud Irish American, or a proud Italian-American, and you don’t have to worry about discrimination. I mean, we aren’t demonizing Italian-Americans like we are demonizing African-Americans or Latinx folks or Asian Americans. But so the people who, and you never hear, well, occasionally you do, but you most, when someone says, why don’t these filthy immigrants come here and be like my grandparents who worked really hard, who learned English, who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and lived the American dream, the people who were saying those things are White. These other people of color, they recognize that it doesn’t matter what generation you are of you’re still facing this discrimination.  

And so I think that the historical amnesia we have is very much a White American historical amnesia, because I think people of color recognize that 1860, 1960 and 2020, you can see parallels in the things that are happening, the lynching of Black people has continued up until present day. It doesn’t matter what decade or century we’re in the violence that has been perpetuated against African-Americans by people like the police has continued to exist forever. And so there is no historical amnesia for those groups, but I do think that’s White America loves to forget about those things. And whether it’s the treatment of African-Americans, the treatment of native Americans, Asian Americans, the people who tend to control the narrative are the ones that want to paint themselves in this kind of, in a better light.  

And that’s when I was just listening to an interview the other day with the native American author, Tommy Orange, he’s talking about his book, There There, and I forgot the woman’s name who was interviewing him, but it was very interesting because they were talking about Thanksgiving and about Native American history. And one of the things that this interviewer had said to him was, I’m increasingly thinking that it’s not so much that me as a White person needs to learn more about Native American history. I need to learn more about what my White ancestors did to Native Americans, how they created these structures. And like, what was my part in this whole thing, which I think is a radically different kind of perspective for a lot of White people who think that just because they can learn a little bit about history that then suddenly that makes everything okay. Just because you’re educated about this thing, then everything is much better now, or educated in a way that makes you feel okay about being educated, as opposed to kind of owning up to the legacy of things like White privilege.  

Rhiki Swinton:
I agree with what you said about the whole education thing. I think, honestly, in my opinion, people educate themselves enough to be able to define and use, those sorts of buzz words and conversations that allow people to know that they have done some research that they have educated themselves a little bit, but I don’t think they really educate to understand the gravity of the issue or educate themselves to really learn how they could become an organizer or become an ally and actually do the work to move the issue forward and to move the ball a little bit further along. I really think it is just a kind of, I don’t want to say performance, but being the good White person, if that makes sense. Just know enough where you’re conscious that these things are happening and you know the language and you’re able to engage in conversation but not educating yourself past that point, I think I see a lot.  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Yeah. I mean, especially in the universities, I mean, as a faculty member, there is a lot of performance of diversity or people say that, Oh, I’m all for diversity. I’m all for embracing people who are not like me, being more inclusive. And I think so much of that is very empty. And as a person of color who gets asked to be on these diversity committees, I mean, that’s not my job to make this thing diverse. It’s other people’s jobs, as far as I’m concerned the people who are in power and who benefit from the structure, it’s up to them to dismantle this thing or to make it more inclusive. And I think there is a lot of lip service but I am also hopeful. I do feel like in this current political moment, people are fed up. 

I mean, I love seeing all the stuff on Black Twitter where it’s things like it doesn’t matter if you can stop calling the bedroom in the house, the master bedroom that doesn’t, I don’t care about historical language of slavery being changed. I care about major, defunding the police, major structural changes, none of this, the lip service that we give, oftentimes, because it’s so much more work to actually to make real changes. And I do feel like people are really pushing back on that now. And really it’s uncomfortable. And I think it’s uncomfortable in a really good way. I love this whole thing where people say, I don’t care if you’re not racist, I want to know that you are anti-racist, which is a very different kind of thing. 

And also a very different kind of language that we’re using now than we have in my lifetime. I mean, I think at this point we are talking about race and inequality in ways that we haven’t seen in over a generation. And that does give me hope because it’s making a lot of White people take stock of who they are and their privilege and making a lot of people really uncomfortable. And I do think that it’s going to have to be uncomfortable before we make any change. And I remember to myself in 2016, after Trump was elected thinking, okay, things are going to get bad. How bad will they get? And will they get bad enough that things will have to start to change? And I’m optimistic that we’re starting to see the beginnings of that. It’s of course not pleasant and it’s really difficult, but I think no good change is easy. If it was easy, we would’ve done it a long time ago.  

Paige:
I was thinking about what you were saying earlier about the difference in generations. I think something that I’ve been listening a lot about for the upcoming election too, is that people should focus more on the Asian American vote. And one thing that is heavily looked over with the Asian-American people in the U.S. when it comes to elections, is that a lot of people aren’t talking, politicians aren’t talking enough about immigration. And I think that’s one thing that a lot of Asian-Americans can unite behind. I’m just thinking about your commentary about difference in immigration generationally. I think there’s definitely a process of assimilation that I think is discussed in the Asian-American community. And I don’t really know what I want to say about it, but you’re definitely bringing up a lot of interesting thought provoking things.  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Well, I would even go further and say this idea that people are finally recognizing that the Asian vote is important. I think one of the problems with that is that a lot of people don’t understand the diversity of who Asians are. And I think that growing up in Los Angeles, I grew up in Long Beach with huge Vietnamese and Cambodian population who those are people who have fundamentally different kinds of immigration experiences than say people from China or Japan. And I think there’s a lot of work that can be done. I mean, there’s so much coalition building potential, I think between the Vietnamese and Latinx folks, Cambodians that share very similar experiences that might be more aligned with Latinx folks, with Filipinos than perhaps with the people from China.  

And politicians of course, I think are not very, they also think that all Latinos are from Mexico. And so not recognizing that diversity either. But I do think, I hope that if people are smarter this election year and into the future it’s recognizing that diversity is really important and those individual identities are oftentimes radically different and we can build different kinds of coalitions by thinking beyond, maybe it’s not Asian-ness that unites people, but maybe it’s immigration issues that the parallels are incredibly striking. And unfortunately, you can know that growing up in California because you see it so much, but people in the Midwest perhaps don’t necessarily have that kind of understanding about, what’s the difference between a Mexican and a Guatemalan or a Honduran or Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese. That nuance oftentimes is completely lost on the general public. And I think also lost on politicians.  

Paige:
Yeah, definitely. I’ve been thinking about that as well, the possibility space of solidarity amongst Asian and Lanitx racial groups in the U.S. and the upcoming election. And that actually brings me to this quote that we prepared for today. And something that I’ve been thinking about too, Angela Davis actually talks about how we can’t create radical consciousness by focusing on a single issue. And she goes on to talk about intersectionality. But instead of talking about the intersections of identity, talking about the importance of recognizing the intersections between our struggles and if our struggles can intertwine, then we’d be more likely to do cross movement building.

And something that also I’ve been thinking about. I just re-read this recently, yesterday. I was rereading he Combahee River Collective statement, which was written in 1977, which was the founding document of contemporary Black feminism and expresses, not only that political stakes and urgency of a movement that seeks to intervene in all systems of oppression, but also the analytical insight that systems of oppression are interlocking and must be addressed at the site of their multiplicity and not one at a time. And I was just wondering, how you see, cross movement building within your work, Jason, with immigration and with hostile terrain and your book. So I was just wondering how you’ve been thinking about cross movement building, especially in this moment.  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Well, I think you can’t do any of this work in a bubble or a vacuum. And I think people in general have to understand that the Black lives matter movement is not just for Black people. I think, it’s a global issue and it’s one that affects all of us. And I think people have to understand that these movements, we are a part of them, we’re either contributing to the trauma that they create or we’re actively fighting against them. And sometimes it’s really hard to get people to recognize that their voice is important in these things, how to be an ally, how to be part of a movement without being the straight White male in the room who then suddenly talks, aloud us and takes over this whole thing. It’s how can people from different backgrounds be a part of these movements in a kind of healthy way, but then also explaining to people that they need to be a part of this.  

If we’re going to push for equality and positive social change, it can’t just be of color doing this. And I think with my own work, like with Hostile Terrain 94, this is this global exhibition that’s going to happen eventually 130 plus locations around the world on six continents. And the fact that this exhibition, which is about migrant death in Arizona, which is largely Mexican and Central American deaths, we’re putting this exhibition into places that are not in Latin America, or aren’t on the U.S. Mexico border. So Europe, Australia, Asia, places where people are dealing with their own immigration issues. And we see this exhibition as a way to kind of stand in solidarity, globally with migrants and refugees from around the world. And so we actively partner with nonprofits and NGOs that work on these issues.  

Our first European show is slated to happen in Lampedusa, Italy. And we are anticipating working with largely refugees from Africa, whether it’s West Africa or North Africa who land in Lampedusa and are detained there before being sent elsewhere in the EU. We will be working with those refugees to build that exhibition there. And for us, that’s an important moment of solidarity with these other folks who are going through the same issues, but just happens to be in the Mediterranean and not the Arizona desert. And so part of this project really is about connecting with migrants and refugees globally.

But then also trying to find other ways to show parallels with the issues of things like structural violence that people experience in the desert and how they experience it in other places. One of the first shows that signed on was Flint, Michigan, and very early in our conversations with Flint, Michigan, we wanted, and they wanted to find ways to think about how this structural violence that affects Brown bodies in the Arizona desert is similar to the structural violence that affects Black bodies and Brown bodies because of the water crisis in Flint. And so we have been letting all of our exhibition hosts determine what type of programming we’re going to add to this exhibition, who they’re going to invite to talk and how they’re going to best connect this issue of immigration to the things that are most important in their community. 

And it might be that the most important thing in the community is immigration, or it could be something else that’s related. And that impacts people in different kinds of ways, but is running in parallel, or we can see a kind of a helpful comparison of these different kinds of experiences. So, with the current exhibition, I mean, that’s one of our big goals is to have it be inclusive and completely collaborative so that our hosts can tell us, this is what’s important for us, and this is how we think we can connect the immigration issue to other things that are impacting our communities directly.  

Paige:
So I know you have a background in anthropology and archeology, reading about your work with Hostile Terrain and the artwork. I was wondering a lot about what was the intention and the thought and the choices that you were making when you made to center the violence in the death of those who crossed the Sonoran Desert. I think to me, it’s very obvious that that experience of migration of the journey through that terrain is hostile. I think that’s obvious. And I’m wondering what choices you were making when you chose to center that and the art pieces.  

Jason De LeĂłn:
You mean why migrant death? 

Paige:
Yeah.

Jason De LeĂłn:
It’s an issue that I’ve been working on for about over 10 years now, and whether it’s, the forensic work that I’ve done on migrant death in Arizona, working with the families of the missing and of the dead. So it’s something that I’ve written about extensively. It’s something that I’ve researched extensively, but with the exhibition, I really wanted to draw attention to the fact that 1,000s of people have died migrating, people continue to die every single day, and we oftentimes forget or ignore that this is actually happening. And so my initial thing was, coming up on this election, I want it to recenter. I know immigration is going to be a big issue in the fall, but I want people to also be thinking about the historical depth of the migration crisis in places like Arizona that have claimed the lives of 1,000s of people. And so I really wanted to find an exhibition that would directly engage with different publics in hopes that people would have a more nuanced understanding about what it is that happens along the U.S. Mexico border. 

And when we talk about border security and we talk about undocumented migration, that it’s not just as nameless, faceless statistics that we might see on the news, but people with names and lives that have been cut short by border policies. And so I wanted to find a way to directly connect with people on this issue and in hopes that they would walk away from it with more knowledge and perhaps with a better understanding about this issue, but then also about what they can do next, who to vote for, how to discuss these issues, how to perhaps have a counter narrative when someone talks about invading immigrants or building a wall, and someone can come back and talk about, well, what about the 1,000s of people who have already died because of other policies. So that really has been the goal is to kind of change some of the conversation away from the things that Donald Trump wants us to focus on in regards to immigration, and think about more of the realities that migrants actually experienced on a day to day basis.  

Paige:
Yeah, I think hearing about your goal and talking to you right now is really insightful. I think to me, I came up in ethnic studies and read Gloria Anzaldua’s, Borderlands and read Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead. And so to me, I’ve mostly heard about these things through stories and storytelling and language, and I hadn’t seen it in this form of art before. So I think it was really thought provoking when I had encountered your work and talking to you today.  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Yeah. I mean, I’ve just been experimenting over the years with different formats, whether it’s writing articles or books or making documentary films. I’ve been working on exhibition work since about 2013. And I find that it’s a good, it’s a different kind of project that I think reaches different kinds of audiences, as opposed to the people who will read my next book or watch a documentary film that I make. I think the exhibition, especially the exhibition that we’re doing now, which is really about collaboration with communities. I mean, for us to realize these 130 plus shows around the globe, it’s going to require 1,000s of volunteers to help us build these exhibitions. And for me, that seemed like a new and exciting audience that I could engage with who maybe would never read a book about migration, or would never watch a documentary film, but perhaps I can get them to engage with this issue through the construction of an exhibition. And so we’ll see. I mean, I’m hopeful that we will connect with different audiences, but this is a complete experiment that we’ve been running for now going on 16 months.  

Paige:
It sounds like to me, when you say you’re hoping different audience will engage with it, that wouldn’t maybe pick up your book and read about it on their own. Are you hoping that people… I’m guessing, I’m wondering who you imagine your audience to be when they see these exhibits? Are you hoping, say a Trump supporter would come in and have different thoughts about immigration after seeing the art piece?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
I’m not so concerned about Trump supporters anymore. I mean, there was a time where I felt like we needed to extend a hand across the aisle, but I think if you’re still supporting Donald Trump in 2020, there’s nothing that I can say to you that’s going to change your mind. And I don’t even want to change your mind. There’s nothing I can say to you that would allow us to have a rational conversation. I think for me, I’m more interested in people who have never really thought one way or another about immigration. It’s easy to get to pro immigration people, people who are very sympathetic to migrants, that’s easy to get them into the door to have to work on this exhibition. I think what’s harder is to get people who have never tried, who have never thought about engaging with this issue.  

And that for me, is a much more important audience. This audience that is only now starting to really think about these things. And I think Trump in a lot of ways has forced our hand, or at least forced the hand of a lot of Americans to now kind of pick a side. And things like his indifference or his hatred of immigrants is seeming hatred of people of color, of Black people, his indifference to the murder of African Americans. I think in a lot of ways that has been good for a certain segment of the population who is now kind of standing around going, Oh my God, am I going to be that person? Is that who I am? This person who doesn’t care about the lives of others, who’s indifferent to these things, or am I seeing so much hatred and violence in the world now that I no longer have a choice to kind of stay quiet? 

And that’s really the audience that I’m most interested in connecting with, because I feel like they’re open to learning new things. And that’s all I can hope to do is to try to teach people something new about the world in hopes that they can take that information and go out and do something good with it.  

Rhiki Swinton:
So I want to backtrack just a little bit to what you were talking about as far as parallels. And I think you mentioned some great parallels between Latinx folks and migrants with other communities, but I think some other parallels that we can draw from immigration and the uprising that’s happening today in the Black community is the criminalizing of Black and Brown folks. I think police brutality is a result of social profiling and the way in which Black bodies are viewed, but also think ICE and the policing of the border is a direct result of the way in which we view migrants. So can you talk a little bit more about policing Brown bodies, specifically migrants across the borders and how that impacts the way in which the world views them?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Yeah, I mean, I think for good reason, we’ve been so focused on police brutality in the U.S. but a lot of people don’t know that the border patrol ICE, we’ve been brutalizing people of color for decades, and there’s way less oversight with that organization than there are even with the police. And this is largely because the folks that they’re brutalizing are undocumented and they don’t have a lot of rights, they don’t have access to, oftentimes to legal representation. And they’re in these incredibly vulnerable positions where they can be taken advantage of more so than a lot of other folks. And people are already starting to talk about the defunding and the abolishing of ICE and of the border patrol, because we know that the assaults, the murder, those things have been happening for a long time.  

There’s lots of footage of migrants being killed by the border patrol and nothing has come of it. And that system is structured in such a way that it’s kind of a perfect storm to allow the police to continue to do these things that go unchecked. So as we’re thinking about police reform or defunding or whatever, this new moment’s going to look like the next turn, then we’ll be also to think about what’s happening with ICE and with the border patrol. But it’s definitely an important issue to think about. And also the fact that we incarcerate so many migrants and they are put into detention centers that are typically privately run, poorly managed, no oversight. And so the abuses that happen in detention centers too are mortifying. 

And yet there’s very little that has been done because this stuff happens behind closed doors. And it happens to people who are so disenfranchised that they just have no voice oftentimes, to raise awareness about these things, which means that other people have to step in. And we’ve got so many different fights that have to happen, but I definitely see the Black lives matter and this movement to do abolish ICE as being very much interconnected and very much part of the same struggle.  

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah. So I’m really curious to get your thoughts on this next question. It’s a little bit off the topic of what we’ve been talking about, but I just think it’s crazy. So I don’t know if you heard Jason, but the Trump administration announced his intent to pull out a rule blocking international students from coming to, or remaining in the United States if their courses are taught entirely online. So I’m just curious, have you heard about this new thing that’s been happening and how do you think it’s going to affect immigration or just, yeah. How do you think it’s going to affect immigration in the United States and what will it mean for us moving forward if we’re not allowing this open education to happen as well?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
Well, I think that universities are going to fight this tooth and nail and find all kinds of work arounds. And I say that not because I think universities really care a lot about international students. I think universities care about the tuition that international students are paying, and that’s why they will pick up this fight. And that’s why I think Trump is picking on international students because he knows that it’s a way to try and force these universities to hold classes. I mean, that’s really what they want. They want to open up the economy at the risk of the American public, especially at the risk of poor people, people of color, these populations that are more directly impacted by COVID-19. This is a way for Trump to really push the hand of these universities.  

And you’re going to see the universities do everything they can to keep the students in the U.S. and paying tuition. I wish it was for more, I wish they had better intentions, I do want to believe that there are some people who care about international students, and I have many colleagues who do, but I do think at the level of like these large corporations, these universities, they care much more about the money because you’re not seeing them stick up for undocumented students who are enrolled in college. They’re sticking up for these international students. And that’s because the undocumented students, they don’t contribute as much money to these systems. And yet they’re even more vulnerable and have been ignored by many places or marginalized on campus.  

But I do think that you’re going to see a lot of this getting tied up in the courts. And I don’t think they’re going to be able to keep out these international students. I think the universities are going to find work arounds to do it. But it’s just going to get very ugly and just be so time-consuming. I mean, it just, we’re wasting our time fighting with the administration that should be working to make everything better. I mean to be taken care of us as a people, as opposed to pushing their own political and economic agendas. I mean, this is just one more kick in the ass by the Trump administration to get what they want at the cost of everybody else.  

Rhiki Swinton:
So Jason, you’re a professor. So how do you think with what we know about the pandemic and the fact that it’s not going away as quickly as we might’ve hoped, how do you think institutions should have moved forward with the whole going back to school thing in the middle of a pandemic?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
I think they should have just been cautious. I mean, people are foolish to think that we’re going to reopen in the fall and anyone, I’m not going back, I’m on leave, so I don’t have to go to campus, but if I wasn’t on leave, I sure as hell wouldn’t be teaching any courses on campus. I don’t think students should go back. My kids aren’t going to school in the fall. So why would I, I can probably, no offense to college-aged students, but having been a college-aged student, I wasn’t the most responsible person. And I don’t think that I would be someone who necessarily would be as diligent on campus with all these regulations that people think are going to work. I think we are foolish to think that any kind of reopening in the fall is going to be good for us.  

I think we should have, in the beginning, just called it all and said, everything’s going to go online and virtual until this thing is solved because we’re going to keep trying to open up, it’s going to crash again. We’re going to keep doing it again, as opposed to just saying, let’s just do the hard work once, as opposed to doing it three different times and just admit that we need to get tougher on ourselves until this thing has passed, and then we can do it because we’re just… look at Texas, Arizona, Florida, that’s what you’re going to get with places that want to reopen in the fall is, Oh, everything’s fine and then crash, here it is again. I’m lucky my institution, UCLA, everything’s online for the fall.  

And they’ve been very cautious about when staff can go back, when faculty can go back, when students can go back and just basically saying, look, we need to play it by ear. And the best we can do right now is to be overly cautious. I wish everybody else was doing that because when I see people say stuff like, Oh, we’re going to open, or we’re going to open with some hybrid model. If I was a parent, I wouldn’t send my kids to those schools. And if I was a student, I wouldn’t go to those schools. I would just try to find some other place that seemed like it had my best interest in mind, more than the bottom line in terms of, how do we make money off of this thing? I mean, and that’s really what it is. It’s all about money. It’s not about people’s safety, because if it was about people’s safety, we would have shut down everything a long time ago.  

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah. Paige, I have a question. So as a student or as a recent graduate, let’s say you didn’t graduate and you did have to go back to school in the fall. What will your thoughts be if that was the case?  

Paige:
So I relate to Jason. I would not go back to school. As a public health stance, it just doesn’t make sense at all. I wouldn’t go. Yeah. I just wouldn’t go. I would definitely go to school online. Yeah. I think college students, especially, even before Corona virus became what it is, as we know it now in the U.S. when things started to really become more apparent to us in March. I remember it was the last week of winter quarter and all of my friends and I were like, Oh, we need to stop seeing each other. And it was very difficult because up until that point, that’s a very difficult concept to grasp quickly to stop seeing everyone that you know on campus when you’re so used to seeing everyone and especially on college campus, a lot of your family and your community that you depend on are your friends.

And so I think it will be very difficult for students if they have to go back in person in the fall, because the community between students is so tight, everyone wants to see each other all the time. I think that’ll be very difficult. And that’s not even to talk about parties or any of the social gatherings that’s just on a community basis.   

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah, that’s true. Now that I think about it, especially being a person of color on college campuses, your community are your fellow people of color, and it’s already hard enough being at an institution where you don’t really see yourself represented in the staff and the faculty, but to go through that and be in a pandemic and you can’t really gather a community of support because it’s kind of dangerous to do so, it’s really hard to kind of fathom what that will be like.  

Paige:
Yeah. You’re already in isolation in the sense that you’re at a PWI as a person of color. So our last question for you Jason today is because of the pandemic and everything that we’ve talked about so far people who can socially distance, places like prisons and detention centers are at very high risk. And I’m wondering, what are ways people can learn more about the organizing that’s happening at the border and how can we support the children at the detention centers?  

Jason De LeĂłn:
That’s a good question. I don’t really know because it’s notoriously hard to get access to the [inaudible 00:44:46] anyway, and now that things are shutting down and they’re decreasing visiting hours and that kind of stuff, we don’t really know what’s happening behind those closed doors, which is very, very scary. I’m worried that we’re going to hear these horror stories long after they’ve happened. And we’re already hearing them in terms of people being deported back to Central America with COVID-19 showing symptoms, spreading those diseases now back into these little communities that have very little health infrastructure. I think there’s a lot of stuff that’s happening right now in prisons and in immigration detention centers that we just don’t hear about. And it may be a while before we do hear about, so I don’t really have a good sense of how.

And people are talking about it. I mean, there are organizations I think that are trying to at least raise awareness about these issues. But I couldn’t name one right now that I could point people to that said, here’s a place that’s doing really good work to help folks because I feel like everyone’s struggling just number one, to wrap their head around what is actually happening. And then number two, how does one get access to these things that are notoriously difficult to get access too? What I would say is at least to be thinking about those folks and to just, this is a moment where the news cycle doesn’t always pick up on these issues, but you can find some stories. So just trying to be aware of these things and keep an eye out for moments where people can actually be helpful.  

I think there’s so much chaos happening right now that it’s like a million fires, and we don’t know where to put our energy which is making it difficult, I think, to get anything done. And we’re even seeing now, as things are crashing in different parts of this country, because of COVID-19, that’s slowing down some of the Black lives matter movements. I mean, things are kind of hibernating. They’re going to come back again. I think at this point, the best thing people can do is to just be aware of what’s going on in their community. And then also to just be thinking about the election. How do we vote out politicians who are creating this chaos and who are not having our best interests at heart? 

And so it’s getting out to vote. It’s helping people to register to vote, just being aware of the issues that are going to impact the election in the fall. Because I don’t think until we get an adult, a high functioning, just even a semi functioning adults in the White House, we’re going to be dealing with this chaos for a while.  

Rhiki Swinton:
Well, Jason, thank you so much for talking to us again. We really appreciate you taking even more time out of your schedule to be a part of this podcast.

Jason De LeĂłn:
My pleasure.

Rhiki Swinton:
And Paige, thank you too, for the people who don’t know, like we said before, Paige recently graduated. So this is just more work that Paige is doing to help out the Arcus Center and we really appreciate it. So if you really enjoyed this conversation, please let us know. And by commenting on our social media, and remember that the conversation is not over, we will continue to talk about different issues like migration, police brutality, racial reconciliation in the episodes to come. So please be on the lookout for those and join us next time on The Radical Zone. 

Outro:
Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook at ACSJLKzoo, Twitter @ACSJL and Instagram @ArcusCenter. For questions, comments, and ideas for future topics. Please leave responses on our social media platforms. 

Prison Resistance & Narrative Change: BLM Series #2

The Radical Futures Now team got an opportunity to have a conversation with a special guest Amani Sawari to participate in our Black Lives Matter mini series and discuss the recent Uprising and its relation to Mass Incarceration in America. Amani Sawari is a writer, founder of the site sawarimi.org, coordinator for the Right2Vote Campaign, the Good Time Campaign to Repeal Truth In Sentencing and a 2019 Civil Rights Fellow with the Roddenberry Foundation. She graduated from the University of Washington with her Bachelor degree in both Media Communication Studies and Law, Economics & Public Policy in 2016. Her visionary publications, including the Right2Vote Report and Motivate Michigan newsletter, aid in distributing messages and building community among participants in the prison resistance movement on both sides of the wall. Learn more, take a listen, and be a part of this conversation.

Resources:

Amani Sawari’s Webpage


Transcript:

Intro:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radical Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo College whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop one’s full potential is available to every person, and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

Rhiki Swinton:
Hey everybody, what’s up. It’s Rhiki again here, and thank you for tuning into the Radical Zone. Joining me today is my co-host, Tirrea Billings.

Tirrea Billings:
Hello everyone.

Rhiki Swinton:
So we have the pleasure of bringing special guest Amani Sawari to participate in our second episode of the BLM mini series to discuss the recent uprising and its relation to mass incarceration. So we don’t just want to focus on the police, because the police is just the first layer of a much larger and more jacked up system. So we want Amani to kind of break this thing down and talk a little bit more about the criminal justice system and mass incarceration overall.

Tirrea Billings:
Amani Sawari is a writer, founder of the site sawariMi.org, coordinator for the Right to Vote Campaign, the Good Time Campaign To Repeal Truth In Sentencing, and a 2019 civil rights fellow with the Roddenberry Foundation. She graduated from the University of Washington with her bachelor’s degree in both media communications studies and law, economics and public policy in 2016. Her visionary publications, including the Right to Vote Report and Motivate Michigan Newsletter aid in distributing messages and building community among participants in the prison resistance movement on both sides of the wall. Welcome Amani, and thank you for being with us today.

Amani Sawari:
Hi, both of you, thank you for the warm welcome. I’m happy to be here.

Tirrea Billings:
So Amani, how are you? And what’s happening in Detroit?

Amani Sawari:
I’m doing very well. And what’s going on in Detroit? I think that Detroit is sort of a microcosm of what’s going on around our entire country. When you talk about the recent uprising and the BLM movements that have reinvigorated recently, I think what’s happening in Detroit. It’s a reflection of what’s going on all across the nation, but more specifically, there are movements to expand what we think about when we think about Black Lives Matter to include and be inclusive of people in prison. So I’m really excited to talk about that, and what’s going on on both sides of the coin as it relates to BLM.

Tirrea Billings:
Speaking of Black Lives Matter and the protests and everything, what are your thoughts about the recent uprisings and what has been happening specifically like in your community in Detroit?

Amani Sawari:
So specifically in my community, there have been protests somewhere every single day, whether it’s downtown, where there are hundreds of people that come together, usually peacefully to just stand and take up space and hold up signs, or smaller groups that are above the highways, like in 10 or 696 with their signage showing support for the family of George Floyd, as well as others that we have lost to police brutality. And then on street corners as you’re driving through the city, or even in the area where I am more specifically in Southfield, there are people on the street corners holding up signs every day. And so it’s exciting to see that people are looking for opportunities and creating opportunities to get out and be in front of people and make sure that the momentum continues to build around this fact that Black Lives Matter.

And then more recently I was able to go to the unveiling of Malice Green’s mural on Juneteenth. So that was exciting. And that was a mural of Malice Green. He was killed by police in the early 90s, and he was one of the earlier cases of police brutality in our region, in our area, and he was holding a scroll that was infinitely long with names of other victims to police brutality like Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, the list goes on and on and on of all the people that were included on the scroll. So it was a very beautiful monument and there was a rally going on there as well.

Rhiki Swinton:
Now Amani, you have a media company called SawariMedia that works to build community between prisoners, their families and future advocates. So can you talk to me about how you got started in this work and how that work led to the development of a media company? I just kind of want to know like why media, and Tirrea, you can probably speak to this too. 

Amani Sawari:
SawariMedia is my media company that was created a little bit after I’d already gotten involved in the prison resistance world. As was said earlier in the introduction, I studied media communications in college. So I looked at the relationship between the media and the way that people are represented in the media and the way that they’re treated in society. And more specifically the way they’re treated legislatively by the laws that are written, and executively by the police with the study of law and economics with that. 

So that was something I’d always been interested in, just looking at how does the media represent black men and women, and what is the impact that that has on black men and women. Because the mass majority of the media that we watch and consume isn’t created by us. So it’s telling stories about us that are creating a ripple effect in our communities that we, I believe don’t have much control over as it relates to like the television, what we hear on the radio and things like that. So that’s what initially sparked my interest in college.

And then with the new Jim Crow that has come out, Michelle Alexander’s book, I was in a class called race crime and law, and that was one of the assigned texts. And so being one of the only minorities in the classroom, I studied in Washington state where the percentage of black people is just 3%. So being one of the only black students in a class about race, crime and law, I felt the responsibility of having to understand and explain how it feels when you’re represented in a certain way in images, by the media. And then what we see happen in our communities, being a girl, a black girl from Detroit, knowing people who’ve been locked up, sent to prison who the people in my classroom would think about in a different way if they just saw the story. So that’s what kind of made the connection.

And then when it came to founding SawariMedia, before SawariMedia existed, I was working with a group of grassroots organizers on an event called the Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March. And so they’d recruited me to write a monthly newsletter that would go to their inside support base and let them know what was going on around the country in preparation for this march. And so that’s how I built a following on the inside. Once that march was over, I thought to myself, I want to keep doing this. I don’t want to just drop this support base. I don’t want them to stop knowing about what’s going on in the movement. So I put together another newsletter, the subscriptions expanded from there, and I just began to cover voting rights and felony disenfranchisement more specifically, but politics broadly.

Tirrea Billings:
That’s amazing. I’m definitely have seen this over the course of like my undergrad and my graduate career, the power of media and the importance of like storytelling and using media and film and video and as a tool to offer a visual representation of the movement and the issues that we’re currently enduring, and also a way to like kind of document what’s been happening and show people, like I said, a visual representation of everything. And so you were the spokesperson for the National Prison Strike. Can you tell us a little bit more about the strike and what events led up to it?

Amani Sawari:
So I’ve just mentioned the Millions for Prisoners March. The group that organized that march, that was in August 19th of 2017 is when the march happened in Washington DC and in sister cities like San Jose, California, New Mexico, Albuquerque, different partner, sister cities had marches on that day too. All of that was organized by a incarcerated group of inside activists named Jailhouse Lawyers Speak.

So at that time they recruited me to just put their newsletter together. They would send me a statement to put in there and I’d write an article. When the following year came, 2018, in April of 2018, there was a, what some would call a riot at the Lee County Correctional Institution in South Carolina, I would call it a massacre because the staff instigated conflict by having a lockdown for several months at a time. And when people began to fight, the staff did not intervene in order to save lives, and nine lives were lost that day.

So when that happened in April, 2018, later that month, a member of JLS contacted me and asked again if I would be their spokesperson for a new event which would be the 2018 national prison strike. And they said that they wanted that because they wanted to go about it that way instead of just a march, because they knew that the conditions that led to what happened at Lee County, the massive loss of life that day could happen at any prison at any time, in any part of the country, because those are the conditions that we have for our prison system right now. And so I was happy to participate and to uplift their message and to coordinate on their behalf on a national level, which further expanded the newsletter and the right to vote report is what was born out of that.

Tirrea Billings:
How were the demands met following the strike?

Amani Sawari:
There are 10 demands of the national prison strike, and they’re kind of in order of what the people on the inside have felt was the most achievable. First, being more all inclusive, all the way down to the last one, being more specific, their national demands. So some states have different policies that are already met in the demands and other states don’t. So for example, with demand number 10, the right to vote, wanting every single person, regardless of their criminal history or their incarceration status to have voting rights, and to be able to participate in the election.

There are States like Maine and Vermont, where people in prison can already vote. So demand number 10, that wasn’t necessarily something that they’d be striving for, but in the vast majority of our country, that’s still something that we’re striving for. So just to key in on that specific demand, which ended up being the overriding demand of all of them, other demands included repealing the prisoner litigation reform act, which doesn’t allow people in prison to use their right to sue for grievances. If they’re attacked, if they’re sexually abused, if they’re assaulted while in prison, they have to go through an internal grievance process and have all their complaints resolved by potentially their perpetrators, which a lot of abuses go under the rug. So that was the demand.

Another demand was for prisoners to be paid a living wage, and for them to be paid the minimum wage, the prevailing minimum wage in their state, as well as to repeal truth in sentencing, allowing for people in prison to have more access to earn credits, to earn time off their sentences. So these were all things that they wanted, but the overriding demand number 10, the right to vote was a pathway that would allow for all of those demands to be met, had that one been given.

And so that was the demand that got a lot of seen. The following year in 2019, there were 17 States that introduced legislation towards ending felony disenfranchisement. And even right now states like California, they were a part of our right to vote cohort or are, and they are a part of the right to vote cohort. And their bill is just past the house, and so now it’s on the Senate side. And so a lot of states are still making headway when it comes to giving people’s voting rights. They’re fighting for voting rights for people who are on parole in California, because people can vote while on probation, but not parole. We’re trying to make sure that we can eliminate all of those nuances to better serve and create a more inclusive democracy for everyone.

Rhiki Swinton:
So I’ve been doing a lot of reading, some of which includes The Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil, and also some articles that talk about this movement towards the use of technology in prisons and how it’s changing the prison system as a whole. So just to be more specific, there seems to be like a movement towards utilizing GPS tracking and ankle bracelets so that we get to a point where people can be confined within their home rather than a prison cell.

Now some would say that this is prison reform, but others like media justice for change would argue that electronic monitoring threatens to become a form of technological mass incarceration known as E-Carceration. So Amani I just want to know what are your thoughts on the technological advances around prisons and prison systems?

Amani Sawari:
So the first thing I’ll say is that there is no way to reform oppression or… A lot of prisoners would tell me there’s no way to reform hell. So if prison is already created to be over punitive, there’s no way to add reforms to something that has that explicit purpose, because it has to achieve that goal of being punitive over everything else, over rehabilitation, over keeping families together, all of those things.

So E-Carceration is a term that I definitely subscribe to and agree with. It’s a new form of incarceration that allows for people to still be exploited, monetarily, to be monitored by the state. They have to pay for those ankle bracelets. They have to pay for their parole officer. They have to pay fees that are attributed to maintaining these technologies. And so that’s a way that continues to exploit people that are already fighting against a system that is biased against them. And it further helps to expand the system as well.

And so I definitely don’t think that giving people ankle bracelets is going to be the solution to mass incarceration. Instead of mass incarceration, yes, we’re going to see mass E-Carceration because it’s a more convenient way to monitor people and exploit people. It’s a more convenient way for the state and for us. And we don’t actually see that E-Carceration is helping with the growth and development of an individual. We see a lot of things that impede a person’s life as a result of being under E-Carceration monitoring. For example, having the check-ins, having to make sure to check in. Well, if they don’t check in on time, they’re still threatened to be incarcerated. There’s always that threat of being incarcerated.

A lot of people are forced to be on E-monitoring pretrial, because they’re not trusted to show up to court on time, maybe because they’ve missed a court date. So it’s already been an abusive measure that we’ve used in an abusive way. I don’t think that it’s a proper reform. I think that the system that we’ve created needs to be completely restructured. But if we do allow for E-Carceration to replace the system, we’re going to see more people under E-Carceration than what we see people that are mass incarcerated. The same way that we see people, the more people who are mass incarcerated today than what we had slaves when there was a chattel slave era, I think it’s just going to help the system expand and for it to be more convenient for the state to exploit us.

Tirrea Billings:
And honestly, I, like with this quarantine, being in the house for a couple of months was hard. And even when, like I still can go outside to go to the grocery store and do certain things, but like being confined to your home is pretty tough, especially like I’m thankful that I was able to work from home and like I have access to certain technologies that allow me to reach out to family and reach out to friends, but with someone who doesn’t have those resources and they can’t get a job because they can’t leave the house and they can’t contribute to the family and the way that they want to did, like it’s tough.

Amani Sawari:
I agree. And I think that if we’re constantly looking for ways to reform the system, that’s making it a stronger system instead of tearing it down and putting our energy into building something that actually works. We already know that our criminal justice system is biased. We already know that it exploits people, it exploits their labor, it exploits them monetarily. And so we’re continuing to reform those aspects of an already broken system instead of putting energy into tearing it down and building something different.

Tirrea Billings:
Absolutely. So now I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about police reform versus police abolition. And so police reform, for our listeners who may not be aware, believes that the system has cracks and that rehabilitation and proper training can fill those cracks to create a better system versus police abolition approach, believes that since the entire system was created with racist intentions from its inception, the system has, as a whole is the problem and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. So Amani, what are your thoughts? Do you support more of the police reform approach or the police abolition approach?

Amani Sawari:
I’m definitely an abolitionists to the core. We already see and there’s already a ton of evidence that shows that the system that we have today is just an evolution of, like you said, the slave catching system. So why are we keeping it in place? And why is it what we spend most of our budgets on in our states? Why is it something that we depend on in every aspect of life, whether it’s, Oh, we need to call the police because our daughter ran away or we need to call the police because there’s someone that’s been sitting in this restaurant too long. It’s so ingrained in so many aspects of our society.

We lean towards reforming it because of that. But think that that’s definitely not the right answer, trying to reform a system that from the start was created to be oppressive and abusive and exploitative. There’s no way to reform that. We definitely have to abolish it completely. And more recently, with all the attention on police brutality, there’s a new hashtag. I’m not sure if you all have heard of it, have y’all heard of hashtag eight to abolition?

Rhiki Swinton:
No, I haven’t heard of that. 

Amani Sawari:
So there’s eight aspects that have been focused on in this method to completely abolish the system that we have today. And those eight points are one, deform the police. Two, demilitarize communities. Three, remove police from schools. Four, free people from prisons and jails. Five, repeal laws, criminalizing survival. Six, invest in community self-governance. Seven, provide safe housing for everyone, and eight invest in care, not cops. And so those are like eight points that have been identified that as a community, people are saying, if we attack these eight things, we can properly remove police from being such a central part of our society so that we can abolish that system entirely.

Rhiki Swinton:
So, I kind of want to revisit something that you were talking about earlier with the national prison strike and one of their demands being the right to vote. So I too read the new Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It is a great book. If you have not read it, you should definitely read it. But in the book, the main takeaway that I got from it was the detriment behind the felony label, the prison label, and how that label affects people, even after they leave prison and in a way, so that kinds of strips them of their human rights, one of which being the right to vote.

So as Amani mentioned earlier, Maine and Vermont are the only state in the U.S. that allows inmates to exercise their right to vote. But it isn’t uncommon to do that. So like half of European countries allow all of their incarcerated people to vote. So Amani can you just talk a little bit about how this prison label could be a tactic of voter suppression for communities of color?

Amani Sawari:
Yes. I definitely agree with that statement that there’s two labels, one of two labels that you could get after serving a sentence or being convicted of a crime, and that’s a felony or misdemeanor. A misdemeanor is more swept under the rug. You can still exercise your right to vote. You might still be able to purchase a gun depending on what the crime was. If you’re labeled a felon, you certainly can’t exercise your right to vote anymore. You’ve probably had to serve extensive amount of time in comparison to someone who had a misdemeanor and probably didn’t have to serve any time. And then in a lot of cases, you can’t find housing, you can’t get a job. So there’s all of these aspects of society that you don’t have access to anymore because of this label from your criminal history.

And even after you’ve served your debt to society, you’ve served your time, you still have this label that’s usually on you for years and years until you have the funds to afford an expungement, if you qualify in your state. And so that’s one highlight when it comes to voting rights, it’s such a core aspect of democracy that if we can attack that and make people think about why is it that we choose to strip people of this core aspect of what our system is when we say that everyone has a voice here in America, we forget about the felon or the inmate, or the person who’s behind bars that doesn’t have a voice in this society.

So that’s why it was so important that we expose that and that the prisoners themselves were the leaders in exposing that and making a strong statement, saying, we want our voice back for those of you who think that everyone has a voice here, we do not, we don’t, and we want our voice, and we deserve to have it.

Tirrea Billings:
Yeah. And I think it’s just really important to make sure we always iterate this fact and iterate like the importance of allowing everyone to have the right to vote. I think a lot of people will talk mostly when they talk about prisons and trying to change things, they talk about sentence reducing. And I think that is important too. But even if we reduce the sentences, sometimes they can still leave with that label that still keeps them from operating in the world as a full citizen with agency, with the right to have a voice. How do you think capitalism plays a role in the prison industrial complex, and what can we do to combat that? 

Amani Sawari:
Capitalism fuels the prison industrial slave complex, because we have a democracy that relies so heavily on capitalism and consumerism. We, as a nation, are dependent on free slave labor. We always have been since the first ship came and we began selling people amongst one another as slaves, our country was dependent on the system. It grew exponentially as a result of having this free labor class.

So now we’ve gotten to the point where we’re a world power, we’re still a capitalist democracy. We’re still a nation that’s really focused on consumerism. We have to have a class of people that we can call on and use and exploit for little to no cost. And that is the prison class, the men and women who are behind bars. And we see this time and time again, we already know that in Michigan people in prison make license plates and they train seeing eye dogs. And we look at it as, Oh, they’re serving society, they’re doing good, but a lot of people were put off when we didn’t have enough masks for everyone that was working in the medical field in the height of the coronavirus pandemic. And we recruited people in prison to make those masks and they weren’t even allowed to use them for themselves.

Then people were like, “Oh, wait, this doesn’t look good.” Also, when we didn’t have enough hand sanitizer in Georgia, people in prison were recruited to bottle hand sanitizer, but they’re not even allowed to have hand sanitizer because it has alcohol in it. So they can’t have it themselves. And we see this time and time again throughout our history that we call on whether it was slaves in the earlier centuries to indentured servants, to the convict leasing system, to today’s prison class, inmate of the state, property of the state. We have to have a free labor source. So capitalism fuels the industrial prison complex are being so dependent on that free labor source.

Tirrea Billings:
Absolutely. And I was like doing some reading and it’s so shocking how many industries rely on prison labor. Industries you wouldn’t even think about. I didn’t know like McDonald’s, Victoria’s Secret, AT&T. These are just a few of the many corporations that really rely on prison labor, which is super disappointing. I feel like every time I find out about a new place, it’s like, “Oh, I got to stop shopping there. Oh, I got to start shopping at like Walmart and Home Depot.” And it’s like, “Oh my gosh, is there any corporation that doesn’t rely on prison labor?” There’s so many. And it’s most of the big ones that are more common that everybody use are the ones that really exploit prison labor.

Amani Sawari:
Yes. And I’m one of those people I’ll search for something. And then if I see that it’s only at Walmart, the cheapest prices at Walmart, I really don’t care. I can’t go there. I can’t go to McDonald’s and Wendy’s and the places that use prison labor to make their products, their uniforms, because in my mind, I am paying the price, or the prisoner is paying the price of not getting a fair wage. That is why they can sell 10 McNuggets for five bucks. That’s why Walmart has the cheapest couch, the cheapest leather couch that you can buy because they have this labor force that they’re not paying a living wage. And these are the companies that have gotten so huge that they can compete during a pandemic like this and go on for three months without paying anybody or having much of a workforce because they have all this money that they owe to people in prisons who have been breaking their backs to get their products on the shelves at pennies per hour to the dollar.

A competitive wage for someone in prison is 20 cents an hour. That’s a very competitive wage. And in States like Washington, half of your wages are deducted as a restitution fee. So there’s not even much of an incentive to work, even if you have little to nothing, because you’re not going to make much. And the jobs are so competitive. There’s only so many spaces of people who can work in the program. So if you’re not feeling up to doing what you’re supposed to do today, or if you’re not working fast enough or getting it done the way we like, there are 10 other people waiting, and it really is operating like a human warehouse, like a slave ship.

Tirrea Billings:
That’s so sad.

Rhiki Swinton:
I want to backtrack to something that you said a little bit earlier in the hashtag eight to abolition, one of which was invest in care, not cops. So this is around the topic of defunding the police. I just want people to kind of like understand how much money is being allocated to police and to militaries. I came across this webinar, it was through the movement for black lives. It had Angela Davis on there. Natania, just a lot of great individuals. But one of the things that was said was that allocation to police budgets can take up half of the municipal city budgets and the federal privatization of militaries can take up half of the discretionary budgets allocated by Congress.

So I just want to get your thoughts on the allocation of money as far as when we think about what we use our money in different cities for, and then the allocation of our money when we think about nationally, what most of our money goes to and how we can take this information and use it to help us in this fight to defund the police.

Amani Sawari:
In Michigan, for example, we spend billions of dollars, over $2 billion on prison system. Our state prisons are taking up more than a third of the entire state budget, just the state prisons themselves, not to mention like people on parole, the cops and all of that stuff, just for people to languish in prison costs billions of dollars. And it costs… A life sentence, for every person that has a life sentence, that’s a million dollars. That’s $45 some per year, just for someone to sit in prison.

So we can see how it’s become such an expensive system. And it’s what we as tax payers pay into to have all of these people sitting in prison. But then companies get to make contracts with the prisons and exploit their labor. They don’t pay for the person to eat, the person to have clothes, these are mothers and fathers and even sons and daughters that send their incarcerated family member money to survive in prison while the company exploits their labor and the taxpayer pays for the facility to exist and for them to have the bare minimum three meals a day, and the uniform.

So the company is getting all of the profits and we’re investing so much and getting nothing out of it. We don’t feel safer. We don’t feel like the system is working to create better people. And survivors don’t feel like people are coming out and being better. They don’t feel like the system is working, but they get a bad rap for making sure that sentences stay longer. It’s prosecutors. Survivors want a better system. Survivors of crime want a better system. Families want a better system. The prisoners themselves want a better system, but the state facilitates, and it’s more focused on making sure that the system is fueled by capitalism and serving corporations. That’s what we see in our society as a whole.

The eighth point on eight to abolition is one of the points that I am most frustrated with. I think all the points are awesome, but I feel like point number eight could have been much more specific because it says, invest in care, not cops. I wish it would have said something like invest in education, not incarceration, or invest in rehabilitation, not cops, or invest in something specific aside from cops. Because I think in this movement, we have a hard time of envisioning how the system could be different.

We know how it’s not working. We see other alternatives around the world. We see how other structures might work better, but it’s hard for us to think of what we would replace the system with. So I think that that’s a more broader conversation, but I just want to point that out that the word care, we need to be more specific when we’re having these conversations about what we need to invest in instead of.

Rhiki Swinton:
One thing that I remember someone saying is that, kind of to what you were saying, that we pay more tax money to house an inmate than we do to go to like housing in impoverished communities or better the housing of black and brown low income communities. So maybe if they would’ve did something like that, I don’t know.

Amani Sawari:
Yeah. And it’s a trend, because we wait to invest that money into the individual until they’re in prison. Why can’t that $45,000 be moved directly into the community and spent on them prior to when they get locked up? For example, if the company like Victoria Secret that’s willing to pay prisoners to sew up garments. If they were willing to pay prisoners 20 cents an hour or so to sew up garments, if they were willing to have a factory in the ghetto and pay people minimum wage, they probably wouldn’t have ended up in the prison anyway, but they would rather wait to allow these people to be incarcerated and in a position to be exploited rather than actually investing in the community where they’re from, or into them as an individual prior to that moment.

And so that’s the corporations. They’re making that choice. And we, as citizens can try to invest in our communities. But when we look at these corporations, we need to hold them accountable to, okay, you use prison labor for 20 years to become this great Starbucks that you are because you let prisoners package your coffee for years, now you are one of the biggest coffee branches in the world. What are you going to do to invest in low income communities? Or what are you going to do to invest in people in prison? Maybe start a university partnership in a prison, or bring an even better equipment for the workout room or the gym in the prisons that you’re working in.

Like there’s a way that they could invest in the people. It’s just a simple choice of the corporations that we pay for that we consume from, we go to these places, our dollar is our vote. We chose for this corporation to exist. But we need to make better choices about which places we support and basing that off of how socially responsible they are when it comes to the prison industrial complex, is a great way to do that.

Tirrea Billings:
Amani, what should people know when going to the polls this year?

Amani Sawari:
This year, people should be signing up for an absentee ballot, they shouldn’t be going to the polls. And hopefully everyone has signed up to receive a ballot in the mail so that they can reduce the threat of the spread of the coronavirus and really just stay home and make it more convenient because we don’t know what our polls are going to look like in November. We don’t know how many polling locations there are going to be. So we really do need to be aware of voter suppression and how that’s going to work and filling out an absentee ballot is the first thing people should know, just do that, get your ballot mailed to you so that no matter how far your polling location might be, because they’re reducing a lot of locations, you can still have your rights exercised.

But another thing that people need to keep in mind is that all the information isn’t out yet. And we still have many months until our election. And I feel like a lot of people are disgruntled with the choices that we have thus far, make sure that you vote in the primaries, make sure that you exercise your right to vote. And don’t just look at the two parties. Don’t just look at the two main candidates, or the main people on the ticket. Take a look at third-party options. Take a look at the other alternatives to what’s presented before us and right in our face, because we can definitely make a statement about what changes we want to see in our system, even if the numbers are low.

When we lift up candidates that aren’t necessarily the front runners, and we just lift up their message, like what we saw with Bernie Sanders. When we just lift up their message, a lot of the other candidates that are actual front runners will take on those messages and hijack those messages just because they see the public is amplifying them. So make sure, regardless of how things look that you amplify the messages and the perspectives that resonate with you, even if it’s from a candidate that you don’t necessarily think has the chances of winning, it’s okay.

Rhiki Swinton:
Is there anything that people should know about policies and stuff affecting inmates that they should be aware of when they go to the ballot or absentee ballot?

Amani Sawari:
Yeah. And they get their absentee ballot. At this point, we don’t necessarily know what’s going to be on the ballot, but there is a great potential that we see in Michigan. A question around repealing truth in sentencing, we don’t know what the language is going to look like, but just to give a brief overview, truth in sentencing is the current sentencing structure that we have in Michigan. And just because it’s called truth in sentencing doesn’t mean that it’s the best sentencing structure. What it means is that people in Michigan have to serve a hundred percent of their minimum sentence before they’re allowed to even be eligible to be seen by the parole board, which is a double sorted edge, because usually in States where you have to serve a hundred percent of your sentence, there is no parole board. You just serve your a hundred percent and you go home.

In states where you can earn time off is where you can go to the parole board because you’ve earned time off, and that time needs to be approved. And so Michigan, people end up spending on average 120% of their time in prison. Even more time sentenced in prison for similar crimes in other states where people will serve 65 or 85% of their sentence. On a federal level, people only have to serve up to 85% of their sentence and they’re able to go home.

So we’re trying to bring Michigan in line with the majority of other states around the country and in our federal system by allowing people to earn time off of their sentence while they’re incarcerated, because we believe that there is no real truth in the way that we sentence people. There’s no way that any judge or jury can look at a person and determine factually when they’re going to be fully rehabilitated. It’s up for that person to have at least the opportunity during the period of their incarceration, opportunities to grow and develop, and they should be rewarded for behavioral professional and academic achievement while they’re incarcerated.

And we should be looking for opportunities to allow people to go home. Like our system has already bursting at the scenes. People are dying right now. We have over 60 people who have died in Michigan’s department of corrections due to the coronavirus. Over 2000 people have contracted the coronavirus. People are calming down about COVID-19, but it’s still very real and very threatening behind the wall. So right now is the time to really be looking for ways to restructure our sentencing system so that it’s not so crowded in Michigan state prisons. 

Tirrea Billings:
I’m curious about your thoughts on… So I’ve been reading Just Mercy. And recently I read probably the hardest status chapter called All God’s Children. And it just talked about these incarcerated youth that were sentenced to die in prison for non-violent offenses. And I’m just wondering how, like truth in sentencing, how it impacts youth in prison. And if you have been doing anything to kind of combat this issue around youth imprisonment, or how it may differ from adults being in prison versus youth and the policy around that?

Amani Sawari:
So Just Mercy is a really hard read, but it’s a very rewarding read. It’s a very good book. So when you think about youth in prison, it’s really sad that that’s even a thing that we put children behind prison bars and in cages. And I want to point out the fact that we didn’t start off doing that, prisons were not created for women or children, they weren’t created for white men either, but when the system exists, it’s easy for the lines to become blurred. When I was in Washington state working as a poetry mentor, I worked in King County’s juvenile detention center. So I worked with young people between the ages of 11 and 17.

And they were really young elementary kids that were being sentenced to spend years incarcerated. And it all would start off with just the fact that they didn’t have anyone at home, and they would run away, or whatever the case may be. And then they got addicted to drugs. So we see a normal trend, especially with children who are incarcerated. So for me personally, I think that what we allow for adults is going to bleed over into what we do in the juvenile system. Though juveniles do have more resources when it comes to schooling and things like that. They’re still being kept in cages and some are even given life sentences like you said.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the juvenile lifers that were sentences to spend life in prison as juveniles in Michigan. Michigan just recently made sentencing a person under the age of 18 to life in prison unconstitutional, it was ruled as cruel and unusual punishment. And that happened two years ago, in the 2018 election. 

So with all of this people who were sentenced to life in prison as juveniles, they had to be resentenced. And so a lot of people have gotten released. People like Earl Burton, who is a fellow with Michigan liberation. And Kimberly Woodson, who has her own nonprofit called Redeeming Kimberly, they were sentenced to spend life behind bars, and now they are community organizers. And they’re serving and doing food drives and clothing drives and things like that.

So for me, I don’t think anyone should be sentenced to life in prison. But when we think about our juvenile system, a lot of people lean towards young people are more deserving, resources, they’re more deserving of opportunities. But if we don’t create those for the adults, then we’re not going to have anything for the young people either. Both systems bleed into one another. And so we need to make sure to think about both. A lot of my work focuses on adults. But that’s because I know that when we raise the bar for how we treat adults, it’s going to raise the bar for how we treat young people too.

Rhiki Swinton:
Absolutely. So Amani what projects are you currently working on now? And what should we be on the lookout from SawariMedia?

Amani Sawari:
So what I’m working on right now, I’m coordinating the good time campaign to repeal truth in sentencing laws. I’m also working on the right to vote report, which is a quarterly report that goes out to hundreds of people imprisoned in 30 states across the country, keeping them abreast of the movement and felony disenfranchisement and other pieces of legislation that impacts people in prison on a state level. And with the good time campaign, I have a monthly newsletter that goes out to people incarcerated in 30 facilities across the state of Michigan. 

So with both of those, if you’d like to subscribe a loved one, you can go to Sawarimi.org to subscribe someone on the inside, they are free reports. They don’t have to pay anything for receiving them. And they can subscribe to one or the other or both. So that’s SawariMedia. I’m also in the midst of a collaboration with Reflect Media doing storytelling, a storytelling media program with people in prison at Gus Harrison Correctional Facility. So that’s really fun. 

I’m also working with university students at Kalamazoo College on creating a book club and divestment program for incarcerated people in the state of Michigan, making sure that they can get books and work with students on getting resources like articles and research from student databases. So it’s really exciting. My main goal and focus is to make sure that people in prison have outside resources that they can use to develop their political power. And so making sure that they are informed politically is one of the things that I focus on as well. 

Tirrea Billings:
Amani, thank you so much for joining us today and begin conversation about your work and the reform that needs to happen around mass incarceration and prison reform. We really appreciate your input. To those listening, please remember that the law is meant to be my servant, and not my master, still less my torturer, and my murderer, to respect the law in the context in which the American Negro finds himself is simply to surrender his self respect. And that’s a quote from James Baldwin.

Rhiki Swinton:
So thank you all for tuning in. And remember, the conversation is not over. This is just episode two of our BLM mini series. So please be on the lookout for further conversations. We plan to continue to talk about the current events happening in our society, with other organizers on the ground. So if you wish to hear more, please join us next time on the Radical Zone.

Outro:
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