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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Guide to Abolition

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Guide to Abolition

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Created by cohort members from our 2020 summer institute!

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition is a creative and reflective dreamspace made by and for young people to imag... See More

Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition is a creative and reflective dreamspace made by and for young people to imag... See More

Connecting content to people.

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition is a creative and reflective dreamspace made by and for young people to imagine liberatory new worlds. What does it look like when our abolitionist visions for the world are realized? What did it take to get us there?

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Links to Reading Black Theory & Other Foundational Leftist Texts

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Links to Reading Black Theory & Other Foundational Leftist Texts

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Links to Reading Black Theory & Other Foundational Leftist Texts

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Resources (most of which are free!) on Vietnam, primarily from a leftist perspective in English, including but not limited to various books, articles, essays, documentaries, podcasts, and videos on the American war and socialism in present-day Vietnam. This collection is a work in progress; there…

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The Four Parts of Accountability-- Mia Mingus

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The Four Parts of Accountability-- Mia Mingus

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A google doc filled with Transformative Justice resources compiled by Cory Lira

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An essay about what Transformative Justice is and isn't created by adrienne maree brown

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I've been thinking a lot about transformative justice lately.

In the past few months I've been to a couple of gatherings I was really excited about, and then found myself disappointed, not because drama kicked up, which is inevitable, but because of how we as participants and organizers and people handled those dramas.

Simultaneously I've watched several public take downs, call outs and other grievances take place on social and mainstream media.

And I'm wondering if those of us with an intention of transforming the world have a common understanding of the kind of justice we want to practice, now and in the future.

What we do now is find out someone or some group has done (or may have done) something out of alignment with our values. Some of the transgressions are small - saying something fucked up. Some are massive - false identity, sexual assault.

We then tear that person or group to shreds in a way that affirms our values. When we are satisfied that that person or group is destroyed, we move on.

Or sometimes we just move on because the next scandal has arrived.

I'm not above this behavior - I laugh at the memes, like the apoplectic statuses. I feel better about myself because I'm on the right side of history...or at least the news cycle.

But I also wonder: is this what we're here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values?

What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there's no one left beside us?

I've had tons of conversations with people who, in these moments of public flaying, avoid stepping up on the side of complexity or curiosity because in the back of our minds is the shared unspoken question: when will y'all come for me?

The places I'm drawn to in movement espouse a desire for transformative justice - justice practices that go all the way to the root of the problem and generate solutions and healing there, such that the conditions that create injustice are transformed.

And yet...we don't really know how to do it.

We call it transformative justice when we're throwing knives and insults, exposing each other's worst mistakes, reducing each other to moments of failure. We call it holding each other accountable.

I'm tired of it. I recently reposted words from Ryan Li Dahlstrom, speaking about this trend in the queer community. But I see it everywhere I turn.

When the response to mistakes, failures and misunderstandings is emotional, psychological, economic and physical punishment, we breed a culture of fear, secrecy and isolation.

So I'm wondering, in a real way: how can we pivot towards practicing transformative justice? How do we shift from individual, interpersonal and inter-organizational anger towards viable generative sustainable systemic change?

In my facilitation and meditation work, I've seen three questions that can help us grow. I offer them here with real longing to hear more responses, to get in deep practice that helps us create conditions conducive to life in our movements and communities.

1. Listen with 'Why?' as a framework.

People mess up. We lie, exaggerate, betray, hurt, and abandon each other. When we hear that this has happened, it makes sense to feel anger, pain, confusion and sadness. But to move immediately to punishment means that we stay on the surface of what has happened.

To transform the conditions of the 'wrongdoing', we have to ask ourselves and each other 'Why?'

Even - especially - when we are scared of the answer.

It's easy to decide a person or group is shady, evil, psychopathic. The hard truth (hard because there's no quick fix) is that long term injustice creates most evil behavior. The percentage of psychopaths in the world is just not high enough to justify the ease with which we assign that condition to others.

In my mediations, 'Why?' is often the game changing, possibility opening question. That's because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetuating against us. 'Why?' often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness.

Also, 'Why?' makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances.

We don't want to see that.

Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our world views, which is why we have slavery, holocausts, lynchings and witch trials in our short human history.

'Why?' can be an evolutionary question.
2. Ask yourself/selves: what can I /we learn from this?
I love the pop star Rihanna, not just because she smokes blunts in ballgowns, but because one of her earliest tattoos is 'never a failure, always a lesson'.

If the only thing I can learn from a situation is that some humans do bad things, it's a waste of my precious time - I already know that.

What I want to know is, what can this teach me/us about how to improve our humanity?

For instance, Bill Cosby's mass rape history is not a lesson in him being a horrible isolated mass rapist. It's a lesson in listening to women who identify perpetrators, making sure those perpetrators are not able to continue their violence but experience interventions that transform them, make that injustice impossible. If the first woman raped by Cosby had been listened to, over 40 other women could have been spared.

What can we learn? In every situation there are lessons that lead to transformation.
3. How can my real time actions contribute to transforming this situation (vs making it worse)?
This question feels particularly important in the age of social media, where we can make our pain viral before we've even had a chance to feel it.

Often we are well down a path of public shaming and punishment before we have any facts about what's happening. That's true of mainstream take downs, and it's true of interpersonal grievances.

We air our dirt not to each other, but with each other, with hashtags or in specific but nameless rants, to the public, and to those who feed on our weakness and divisions.

We make it less likely to find room for mediation and transformation.

We make less of ourselves.

Again, there are times when that kind of calling out is the only option - particularly with those of great privilege who are not within our reach.

But if you have each other's phone numbers, or are within two degrees of social media connection, and particularly if you are in the small small percentage of humans trying to change the world - you actually have access to transformative justice in real time. Get mediation support, think of the community, move towards justice.

Real time is slower than social media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility.

Real time transformation requires stating your needs and setting functional boundaries.

Transformative justice requires us at minimum to ask ourselves questions like these before we jump, teeth bared, for the jugular.

I think this is some of the hardest work. It's not about pack hunting an external enemy, it's about deep shifts in our own ways of being.

But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren't the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species.

And so much more.

I want us to do better. I want to feel like we are responsible for each other's transformation. Not the transformation from vibrant flawed humans to bits of ash, but rather the transformation from broken people and communities to whole ones.

I believe transformative justice could yield deeper trust, resilience and interdependence. All these mass and intimate punishments keep us small and fragile. And right now our movements and the people within them need to be massive and complex and strong.

I want to hear what y'all think, and what you're practicing in the spirit of transformative justice.

Towards wholeness and evolution, loves.

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I've been thinking a lot about transformative justice lately. In the past few months I've been to a couple of gatherings I was really excited about, and then found myself disappointed, not because drama kicked up, which is inevitable, but because of how we as participants and organizers and people handled those dramas.

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Transformative Justice: A Brief Description

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Transformative Justice: A Brief Description

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An article briefly describing transformative justice written by Mia Mingus

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A Transformative Justice workbook created Nakita Mayfield, Cortney Calixte, Ha Tran, and Laura Chow Reeve of the Virginia Anti-Violence Project (VAVP) and the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance

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Miklat Miklat: A Transformative Justice Zine

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Miklat Miklat: A Transformative Justice Zine

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A Transformative Justice zine created by Lewis Wallace and Micah Banzant

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An article by Connie Burk on community accountability

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For nearly a quarter century, The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian, Gay Survivors of Abuse ( ) has worked to end domestic violence and create the conditions needed to support loving and equitable relationships. For much of that time, NW Network advocates have endeavored to develop a tenable practice of Community Accountability in activist communities.

We knew the need was urgent from our own experiences and from people who sought our services. We watched, over and over again, as the community mobilized unwittingly to defend abusive people. We sat in poetry slams while people who battered publicly degraded their partners in politically charged rants, the activist community swooning at their feet. We endured the petty power plays of batterers rallying activist groups to retaliate against networks of friends, other organizations, or our organization for helping their partner. We saw popularity and coolness dictate who would be salvaged and who would be savaged. We hoped that by building strong, transparent Community Accountability processes, we could confront some of these pernicious problems of harm and collusion as part of our long-term work toward transforming our communities into spaces that could foster loving and equitable relationships.

As we worked and struggled through the Community Accountability process, we noticed recurring limitations in the application of many of its central principles. Some of these limitations are discussed below.

The idea of 'holding someone accountable'

Community Accountability processes often center on a group holding an individual accountable for their actions. This has contributed to a distorted understanding of "accountability," i.e. the mistaken idea that accountability is at its most fundamental level an external process rather than an internal skill.

Accountability is not something that happens to bad people. Accountability is a human skill. It is a skill that each of us must commit to developing as an internal resource for recognizing and redressing the harms we have caused to ourselves and others.

The NW Network is a very survivor-centered place. We understand people who are surviving abuse to be agents - people who are the subjects of their own lives, not simply objects of abusers' control and exploitation. As survivors, we recognize that being able to think critically about our own choices, knowing that what we do matters, and being able to be accountable to ourselves for our actions (even while locating those choices within the context of abuse and exploitation) are hallmarks of "being in charge of one's own life." For survivors, being accountable to the people who are battering them is not a real option. Folks who batter use their partners' mistakes to further their own control: Who are you to talk? If they knew what you've done, they'd never help you! You can't leave me, you owe me. But, like all people, survivors need the products of accountability: release from guilt and shame and the reconciliation with oneself and one's community. Even when actions are wholly justifiable in their context, folks who have remorse or grief about their actions can benefit from accountability.

Accountability is not something that happens to bad people. Accountability is a human skill. It is a skill that each of us must commit to developing as an internal resource for recognizing and redressing the harms we have caused to ourselves and others. Cultivating deep skills and community investment in personal accountability also better equips us to respectfully request accountability from others and to be aware when someone is highly resistant to taking responsibility for their actions. As more people develop these skills, the community becomes better able to expect and support ethical, organic accountability processes.

As long as most people in our community have rotten accountability skills, people who abuse will be able to get away with their abuse. Their lack of accountability will not be particularly noticeable or interesting until is too late. Folks who abuse will manipulate others with their compelling sense of victimization and entitlement forever - or until the harms of their actions becomes absurdly blatant, or the community falls apart under the weight of defending or managing them.

Who is the abuser?

In heterosexual relationships, sexism privileges men's power over women and so it is likely in an abusive relationship between a person raised as a girl who is a woman and a person raised as a boy who is a man that the man is the abuser. However, this is not true 100 percent of the time and everyone should have more refined ways of identifying abusers. Nevertheless, if you only have one available predicting factor, the gender of the people in a heterosexual relationship would be the most predictive. This is not the case for queer relationships. Gender, on its own, is useless for predicting who is likely to be the survivor, or who is likely to have abused.

In activist communities, who is believed? And beyond that, what is the harm being addressed? Is it abusive power, control and exploitation? Is it certain violent acts? Is it the exercise (or simple presence) of privilege? A survivor of domestic violence is likely to use violent behaviors to resist the objectification of being abused. A person who is battering can report actions taken by their partners that are mean, cruel, scary, or confusing. Out of context, they could be seen as abusive. In context, they can be understood as resisting power and control. People have the mistaken idea that batterers are "bad" and survivors are "good." Battering is bad. Surviving battering is good. But, batterers and survivors are people. Understanding a given survivor's actions when they confound our notions of the "good victim" - or interpreting a given batterer's charming manipulations - is not simple. In our experience, folks in activist communities too often end up confused and mobilize against the survivor.

Activist communities are particularly susceptible to manipulation by abusers because we are most likely to have compassion for how abusers experience institutional oppression and to understand how they are victims of unjust systems.

People who batter can use their own vulnerabilities (such as their own experience surviving racism or homophobia, dealing with mental illness or a previous assault, or facing exploitation in their family of origin or in the workplace) to control and manipulate friends, lovers, family, colleagues and comrades. They set up loyalty tests. They believe that they are the victims. Often their vulnerabilities are real - and everyone's vulnerabilities matter and merit reasonable attention - but their sense of persecution and entitlement is devastating to their loved ones and the community. Activist communities may believe that we are immune to such manipulations, but that's simply arrogant and wrong. We are the least immune because we are the most compelled by the interplay of the individual condition with the systems of oppression operating in our world. Activist communities are particularly susceptible to manipulation by abusers because we are most likely to have compassion for how abusers experience institutional oppression and to understand how they are victims of unjust systems. Our empathy confounds our ability to see people who face oppression as people who could also be capable of, and should be accountable for, abuse.

On the ground, when choosing whom to support in a conflict, people tend to believe that their friend is in the right and that the person they are less connected to is in the wrong. For example, if my friend is screaming at their partner, I may reflexively identify with the anger that they are expressing and assign responsibility for it to frustrating behaviors from their partner, behaviors I may be more willing to consider as manipulative, exploitative or hurtful. On the other hand, I am more likely to see someone screaming at my friend as abusive, and may be less open to the possibility that the yelling could be a strategy of resisting abusive power and control. Choosing sides based on natural alliances is not sufficient.

People have the mistaken idea that batterers are "bad" and survivors are "good." Battering is bad. Surviving battering is good. But, batterers and survivors are people.

The ability to get clear about who has abused is additionally complicated by the fact that survivors often blame themselves for the abuse. Many batterers blame their partners for everything that goes wrong. Over time, survivors may internalize that blame and begin to hold themselves responsible for every problem, concern or mistake that comes along. When a survivor is willing to take responsibility, while a batterer is happy to blame their partner, an abusive situation can be even more confusing for the community to sort out and understand. That self-blame can feed into the batterer's attempts to mobilize the community to their defense.

Still, we know that even an accurate assessment of which person's behavior is abusive does not guarantee a positive outcome or an ethical process.

Framing community accountability primarily as an 'alternative to the criminal legal system' is a problem

Community Accountability has been presented in activist communities as an alternative to accessing law enforcement or prosecution in response to harms within the community. Some activists are interested in Community Accountability processes primarily as a rejection of the criminal legal system. "Not calling the cops" becomes a litmus test for radical realness. Community Accountability processes are rarely convened to address late rent payments, someone driving drunk, stealing or other such harms. Instead, these processes have been applied almost exclusively to "gendered" violence: sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, domestic violence. The mix of Community Accountability as a rejection of the criminal legal system and as a test of realness has at least two significant consequences: it creates the false idea that we can eliminate the harms of the criminal legal system through Community Accountability and it requires women to bear the brunt of the Community Accountability learning curve.

While the mainstream anti-violence movement has participated in the massive criminalization of intimate partner violence and developed an absurd over-reliance on the criminal legal system, most folks in every community avoid law enforcement and prosecution. For most people, whatever their circumstances, the criminal legal system will be consistent only in its stunning failure to meet survivors' needs or expectations. From our experience, most queer folk - activists or not - just don't expect the legal system to be safe, relevant, or useful. Across the board, folks are more likely to tell a friend or family member that they have experienced an assault than to seek police or prosecution, or even civil court remedies.

It's just that most of our friends and family fail at helping survivors, too.

Community Accountability tries to replicate the helpful functions of law enforcement (interrupting harmful acts) and prosecution (determining responsibility for and redressing harm), but outside the framework of the state. The thing is, good intentions are not enough to avoid replicating the harmful consequences of the criminal legal system - for victims or for those accused of doing harm. The criminal legal system is desperately flawed. But Community Accountability processes are humbling, for while in our experience it has proven nearly impossible to achieve the idealized outcomes of the legal system (justice, restitution, rehabilitation), it is fairly easy to replicate its "revictimization" of survivors. We have seen this happen again and again with Community Accountability processes: survivors are exhausted, the community divided and angry, and the folks who caused the harm suck up the attention, community resources and all air in the room.

Meanwhile, without the important protections of due process that exist in the criminal legal system - the right to face your accuser, the burden of evidence, the right to a timely trial, and other basic protections for defendants - it's easy to cause harm to the accused as well. Despite the limits they impose, no justice system process can function absent protections for the accused. In turn, though, those same protections make it difficult to substantiate charges of domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, harassment and stalking. The prosecution has the burden of proof, even if it is very difficult to prove that an assault happened when there are no eyewitnesses beyond the accused and the victim. The accused has the right to cross-examine evidence brought against them, even if that means a victim is re-traumatized by the public discussion of the violence committed against them.

Whether in our family room or in a courtroom, these harms are hard to prove and hard to prosecute. Another framework is needed. Instead of being used as a way to reject the criminal legal system, Community Accountability could be used to transform our friends', our families' and our own frail and sometimes harm-compounding responses to violence into something useful.

Community Accountability processes can feel contrived and imposed

People may experience the language, frameworks and priorities of these processes as drawing more from therapy or professional nonprofits (i.e. "middle-class ideas") than from diverse sources of knowledge. If we experience something as contrived and imposed, it's easy to attack or dismiss it, even if it has a lot of merit. But, when we attempt to salvage something more "authentic" from our various cultures of origin, we face challenges as well. For one, the various cultural practices for Community Accountability created by our diverse communities have been largely lost to the vagaries of assimilation. Perhaps trickier still, many of the cultural models we have for accountability were never fully realized in their original contexts. Many of the methods that communities have devised over time to curtail the harm caused by its members have been largely theoretical, and have had less success in practice than in establishing broad cultural perspectives on how accountability should be done. They may have been as flawed or aspirational or simply as mythical as the myth of the United States justice system, or the myth of activist "community accountability." Our hope is to find something usable, but we can be fairly certain that there is not much to simply revive and replicate.

We join most groups of people throughout time in being frankly mystified at how to get folks to do right, and in being equally confused about how to do right while trying to get folks to do right.

About 1800 years ago, these observations were codified in the Jewish canon; Rabbi Elezar said, "I would be surprised if there is anyone in this generation who is able to accept reproach." And Rabbi Akiva answered, "I would be surprised if there is anyone in this generation who knows how to give reproach." It's both chilling and oddly comforting that these words still resonate so powerfully today: chilling, because so many smart and committed people have failed at this task for so long; comforting because we can be assured that we are asking a meaningful and enduring question. All this to say: at least we join most groups of people throughout time in being frankly mystified at how to get folks to do right, and in being equally confused about how to do right while trying to get folks to do right.

Limitations in activist communities' anti-oppression analysis

While "reverse-isms" are not possible because of the lack of institutional power to subjugate folks in privileged groups, oppression (and the intersections of its various manifestations) does not operate in the linear or binary manner frequently represented in "power and privilege charts." This can present challenges to activist groups attempting to apply ideological frameworks when evaluating and responding to abuse in intimate relationships. The personal is political, but the personal is frankly a lot messier than our dogmas can articulate.

As our praxis learning around Community Accountability grew, we realized that we rarely designed, implemented or participated in processes that worked in the ways they were intended to or with outcomes on par with the huge input of time and energy and human endurance that they seemed to require. A satisfying, useful resolution was much rarer than generating a new hot mess that needed its own accountability process! Even with our best work, most critical thinking and deepest commitment to sound practices and fierce compassion, our attempts felt more like hauling millstones than creating liberation. We know that there have been some incredible triumphs through Community Accountability processes, but we found those successes very difficult to achieve reliably.

With a lot of love and humility, it became clear that our activist communities do not presently have the skills, shared values, and cultural touchstones in place to sustain Community Accountability efforts. Instead of continuing to struggle with (and frankly, suffer through) Community Accountability within these limitations, we have been experimenting with an alternative framework. This framework, which we will call "Accountable Communities," may be a precursor to Community Accountability models, or perhaps it will grow in a new direction that will result in different goals. We certainly hope that, as an idea or practice, it can also be helpful to current and future Community Accountability projects undertaken by our allies.

Accountable Communities: A different approach

Accountable Communities shifts the emphasis from a collective process for holding individuals accountable for their behavior, to individual and collective responsibility for building a community where robust accountability is possible, expected and likely.

An Accountable Communities approach promotes the individual and collective ability to assert choices (self-determination) and take responsibility for one's actions within their full context. To understand one's actions in their full context, a person must understand that systems of institutional oppression and privilege, personal challenges and aptitudes, and situational conditions profoundly impact the options s/he has to choose among.

The limitations themselves do not exempt one from taking responsibility. However, the context matters. The context shapes what it looks like to "take responsibility" for the choice.

How can we transform a violent world, call mighty governments to account, and repair generations of injustice when we are still unable to stop activists committed to liberation movements from abusing their partners, sexually harassing their comrades, or otherwise harming people in our communities?

A survivor of battering, for example, might evaluate her decisions to pressure her abusive partner to have sex. The tactic of pressuring her partner for sex may have prevented a violent attack by her partner, earned her money that she needed to pay for childcare, help her demonstrate her attraction to her partner and allayed accusations of infidelity, or stopped her partner from targeting someone else for example. The community and the survivor should understand that choice in its context of surviving abuse. But, there is no reason to minimize or deny it as a choice, or to minimize the possible cost to the survivor for having acted outside of her values, in this case by not respecting others' boundaries. Being "accountable to" the batterer is not a useful solution here. But, support for affirming her own values of respecting sexual boundaries and taking steps to create the conditions in her life that would allow her to act consistently with her values while staying safe might be.

Central to the Accountable Communities approach is the shared expectation that people develop their individual accountability skills as a precondition of collective accountability processes. Our work in conceptualizing an accountable community is still new and continues to evolve and challenge us.

Our work toward liberation challenges us to think and rethink our approaches to change. Revolution requires that we continuously ask ourselves what it would take to stay here, to work toward the liberation of the person across the room, across town, across the globe. Such revolution does start at home, where our beliefs are formed by the daily practices of our lives. At times, this work feels overwhelming: how can we transform a violent world, call mighty governments to account, and repair generations of injustice when we are still unable to stop activists committed to liberation movements from abusing their partners, sexually harassing their comrades, or otherwise harming people in our communities? Accountability, understood as a human skill, offers each of us a path forward when we miss the mark.

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For nearly a quarter century, The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian, Gay Survivors of Abuse ( ) has worked to end domestic violence and create the conditions needed to support loving and equitable relationships. For much of that time, NW Network advocates have endeavored to develop a tenable practice of Community Accountability in activist communities.

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Justice in America Podcast, Episode 20: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition

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Justice in America Podcast, Episode 20: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition

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Josie and Clint talk about prison abolition with Mariame Kaba.

On the last episode of Season 2, Josie and Clint discuss prison abolition with Mariame Kaba, one of the leading organizers in the fight against America's criminal legal system and a contributing editor for The Appeal. Mariame discusses her own journey into this work, provides perspective on the leaders in this space, and helps us reimagine what the future of this system could look like. Mariame's way of thinking about this system, and the vision of possibilities she provides, is an excellent send-off to our second season.
Additional Resources:
More information on Survived and Punished can be found .

Here's the website for Free Marissa Now , which fought to free Marissa Alexander after she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot to defend herself against her abusive husband. And here's more information about Nan-Hui Jo, who was arrested for child abduction after she fled the country with her child to escape her abusive husband.

And check out the other organizations Kaba mentioned, including California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Critical Resistance .

Faye Knopp's 1976 handbook, Instead of Prisons, can be found .

To learn more about Ruth Wilson Gilmore and her seminal book, Golden Gulag, .

As previous guest Sonya Shah did in episode 19, Kaba Howard Zehr, known as the "grandfather of restorative justice."

She also mentions INCITE!'s community accountability resources, found here, in particular their Creative Interventions Toolkit

Our email is justiceinamerica@theappeal.org

Transcript

Josie: Hi everybody. I am Josie Duffy Rice.

Clint: And I'm Clint Smith

Josie: And this is Justice in America. Each show we discuss a topic in the American criminal justice system and we try to explain what it is and how it works.

Clint: Thank you so much to everyone for joining us today. You can find us as always on Twitter at @justice_podcast, like our Facebook page at Justice in America and subscribe and rate us on iTunes, we'd love to hear from you.

Josie: Yes, thank you guys so much. Please email us at justiceinamerica@theappeal.org . We want to hear your feedback, we want to know what topics you'd like for us to cover in the coming seasons or words or phrases connected to criminal justice you'd like us to breakdown. We want to know anything that might be interesting to you that we could teach you a little bit more about here on Justice in America.

Clint: So, today is a big day and a sad day but also a wonderful and triumphant day because it is the last episode of Season 2. We're 20 episodes in. For me this is such a wonderful and generative process and I've learned so much and I feel so lucky to do it with my dear friend and we're so grateful for all the folks who listen. I think it's gotten greater listenership than we could have hoped for and we're so grateful for the teachers who use it in their classrooms, for the people coming to this work for the first time learning about the criminal justice system, people who are sort of coming to refine and clarify their understanding. What you should know is that we are learning right along side you and we're grateful for that.

Josie: Absolutely. I didn't realize we were going to learn so much when we were starting this idea of doing this podcast and I'm so grateful to Clint for his partnership in this and just, you know, we've just covered so much amazing and interesting stuff this season and I think I'm really excited about today because it is a way to shift the conversation to what is possible.

Clint: Definitely and we're doing something a little bit different because we are continuing the general topic that we discussed on our last episode in terms of reforms that would fundamentally change the entire system. So, restorative justice, prison abolition and those types of things.

Josie: Yeah, so last week we dug into restorative justice with our guest Sonya Shah, if you haven't listened to it, please do. Today we want to talk a little bit about abolition to help set up our guest Mariame Kaba, who is the director of Project NIA, the co-founder of Survived + Punished and a researcher in residence at Barnard Center for Research on Women. Restorative justice is just one way to rethink our criminal justice system and one way to rethink accountability. And in that same way abolition is another way to sort of rethink the possibility of our criminal justice system. But before we talk about how restorative justice and abolition are related, let's outline what prison abolition really is.

Clint: Fifteen years ago, Angela Davis wrote a book called Are prisons Obsolete? and in it she essentially outlines a case for prison abolition. She says, look, even people who care about this issue, who want to see real change to our system, have trouble imagining a world without prisons in it. But why would we assume that prisons are inherently necessary?

Josie: So, we know what you're thinking. Whenever you kind of say the words "prison abolition" to people, it can sound really extreme right? People tend to think that of course we must have prisons. There are people out there who are dangerous, and who have done some really really bad things. And those people need to be locked up.

Clint: Perhaps you are even willing to concede that we could let 80 or 90 or 95 percent of people out of prison right now, and address wrongdoings other ways and it wouldn't have any repercussions for public safety. But you also may believe that we still need to have that 5 percent locked away, otherwise we would all be in danger.

Josie: Yeah for most people, it's difficult to imagine a world without prisons. It's difficult for me to imagine a world without prisons.

Clint: Yeah. Same for me. I think it takes a lot of proactive work and proactive imagining that isn't intuitive to the sort of society we live in. And it's just so foreign and the instinct is to say, 'this is the only way we can keep people safe, we should reform them and improve them and all of that, but we still have to rely on them.' And to believe that prisons have no role in society is to be unrealistic or to believe in abstractions and not to be dealing in the real world as it is.

Josie: Yep, exactly. But Angela Davis makes a very good case that this is not true. So, she says in her book, "The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor." And I just, I love that line, because I think it really encompasses what we're trying to do here.

Clint: And Davis' argument echoes that of other abolitionists, including Mariame Kaba, who we will talk to in a few minutes. And what prison abolitionists have long argued is that people in America have trouble imagining alternatives to the justice system precisely because ours is so monstrous. "We think of the current system, with its exaggerated dependence on imprisonment, as an unconditional standard," Davis says, "and thus have great difficulty envisioning any other way of dealing with the more than two million people who are currently being held in the country's jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigration detention centers."

Josie: And she acknowledges that there is not another humane system we could build to replace the current one, right? We could not house as many people as the current system does in any other system. But that's the point. We actually don't have to replace the prison system with just one thing. In fact, we don't have to replace it at all. Instead, abolitionists argue that getting rid of prisons, it would require an array of alternative solutions whose utility depends on the person, the wrongdoing, and the circumstances.

Clint: Those alternatives could include rigorous therapy, targeted treatment, housing, restorative justice, education, employment. There are countless possibilities, all of which could, as Davis phrases it, "crowd out" the criminal justice system. And its important to keep in mind that people who are prison abolitionists have a much larger intellectual and political framework for the way that they imagine prison abolition taking place. So it's not necessarily, and I can't speak on behalf of every prison abolitionist obviously, but its not necessarily letting all of the people out of prison right now, in this moment, and destroying the prisons with sledge hammers, although I imagine there are some people who do want that as well. What it's really about is saying, how can we create a set of social and systemic structures that make it so that we are diminishing the power of the prison, investing in communities where the realities of what put people on trajectory to prisons aren't the current social realities anymore? And so how can we sort of continuously diminish the need for and the power of this institution that we know continues to cause harm and harm and harm again.

Josie: And I think to that same point, this criminal justice reform community includes a lot of people who advocate for prison abolition. And in the meantime, what they are pushing for, is an end to new prisons, right? They are pushing for decarceration. They are pushing for proactive solutions that prevent people from going to prison in the first place. So, it's not that its abolition or nothing, right? It's that we think of abolition as the end goal, that we would really have a healthier society if we did not have to rely on prisons, or choose to rely on prisons.

Clint: And I think a helpful framework for me to remember is always the way that we think of what constitutes as something as radical or realistic and thinking about the sort of historical precedence of that. I always think for myself about slavery and I think about how you know I think in our minds we all think that all of us would be Frederick Douglass if we lived back in 1860 and what we have to remember is that there were very few people, like abolitionists were not at all reflective of the thinking of the sort of larger populous at that moment. Most people is you went and said, "I'm an abolitionists," they would look at you like you were crazy.

Clint: They would say 'that's unrealistic, the United States had never actually existed as an institution without the institution of slavery alongside it.' I mean, in fact slavery, you know, the US became the US in 1776, slavery has existed since 1619 so even more than 150 years prior to the United States becoming an official independent country we had had slavery here and so for so many people the idea that slavery would be abolished, the thing that was the sort of economic bedrock of not only the South but also the industries of the North, the idea that you would get rid of that seemed ridiculous to people.

Clint: And so I think it's worth remembering that when somebody calls for the abolition of a system that our country has never existed without, it is a difficult thing to wrap your head around our country existing without that institution but it is also important to remember that this is something that we have done before and it is important to remember that now we look back at the people who chose to imagine a different world and who chose to imagine a different system in the most positive sort of way and as reflective of the way that we would imagine ourselves to be. And so that's just a helpful framework and thing that I think is important to keep in mind as we decide what is ridiculous or what is not a ridiculous sort of policy initiative.

Josie: Yeah I think that is really true and I think part of this is imagining what a perfect world looks like. So often we get caught up in the legislative victory or the small policy victory and the way to see a path forward is to really see the end. And the end is a world without prisons, a world where people are safe without the American prison system. And you know for those who think this sounds absurd and impractical, I think it's worth keeping in mind that our current system is also impractical and also absurd. You know, people come out of our current criminal justice system worse, not better. And this is a feature of the system, it's not a bug. In other words, this is not a system built to make anyone better or to really rehabilitate them or to address the harm that they've done or focus on repair and healing. And in that way, you know, this is sort of what I think abolition and restorative justice have in common. They're both focused on not just addressing the situation at hand but really making people, healing them inside, their trauma, their hurt and insuring that they can have consequences for their actions but not in ways that destroy them.

Clint: Abolitionists argue that the system as it currently exists does more harm than good, and that you can't end violence, harm and destruction through a system designed to subject millions of people to violence, harm and destruction.

Josie: When you really think about it you can see that is really doesn't make much sense to advocate for maintaining a system that has basically proven itself worthless. And actually, worthless doesn't even do justice to the problem here. This is a system that causes actual harm to millions of people every single day. So the idea of prison abolition and restorative justice, these are some of the bold alternatives that people are discussing.

Clint: Just like last season, we're ending the season by interviewing someone that we admire, adore, want to be number in their fan club, me and Josie are fighting for the number one slot. Mariame Kaba, @prisonculture on Twitter, who you heard in the clip at the beginning of the show. She is brilliant, she is inspiring and she, I think, has pushed me and pushed my thinking over the last several years in following her and listening to her and reading her work in ways that I am deeply grateful for. Again just one of the most important folks working in the world of criminal justice today.

Josie: Right. I just feel that Miriame in particular makes me think about the system in a whole different way. Everytime I talk to her. And honestly this system is pretty much all I think about so that's kind of a big deal. So I'm excited for you all to hear our conversation with her.

Clint: Mariame, Josie and I spent some time together pretty recently up in New York where we discussed prison abolition, restorative justice, the criminalization of survivors and so much more. So stay tuned for our talk with Mariame Kaba and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Clint: Our guest on the show today is Mariame Kaba, who is the Director of Project NIA, co-founder of Survived + Punished, and researcher in residence at Barnard Center for Research on Women and just generally is a phenomenal writer, the best person you will follow on twitter and we are so grateful for the range of important work that she does and we're grateful that she's here with us on the podcast today. Thank you for coming.

Josie: So we wanted to start just by getting a sense of how you got interested and involved in criminal justice reform broadly and how you came to this work.

Josie: You're saying this is about the nineties.

Josie: And it feels like restorative justice, this is about the time that it becomes more of a, um, more defined. Is that fair? Do you think that'd be fair to say?

Josie: So for people who are learning what restorative justice is-

Joise: We have laid out the basics of the idea of a different sort of system that values coming to solutions versus over punishment. But I would like to hear from you more about what it was about restorative justice then and what it continues to be about restorative justice that you find to be such a important intervention for people who could end up like the students that you had or you know, are facing sort of the specter of the system kind of bearing down on them constantly.

Josie: So just to clarify, you're, are you? So transformative justice is now seen as part of restorative justice or the other way around?

Clint: You've mentioned that the framework of transformative justice and restorative justice before it becomes sort of co-opted by these systems of violence is not, some people use them as an alternative to punitive measures. An alternative to incarceration. But you reject that premise.

Josie: Incarceration. We're centering the system.

Josie: And it has to fit that that sphere.

Clint: It's not actually reimagining the, the idea of what constitutes as criminal behavior in the first place.

Clint: Right. There shouldn't be a transformative justice intervention for-

Clint: I'm interested in the way, you mentioned harm and that is what these frameworks represent, right?

Clint: They represent a means of moving toward healing.

Clint: From very real harm, emotional, physical harm that has been caused. And, and I'm interested in the idea of how one, how practitioners think of inviting those who are harmed, those who have committed harm and the ripple, you know, those who are harmed by nature of their proximity to what has happened, how do you think of inviting people into this space without notions of coercion, without, because people have to come on their own accord and I can imagine a scenario in which someone who feels profoundly harmed rejects the idea that like they should sit across the proverbial table from the person who did that harm to them. So how do you, how do you go about bringing these folks to the table in the first place?

Josie: Can I add onto that question? It's both, to me, that if have been harmed you might not actually want to engage in a different process, but also if you have harmed, you might not have the skills or language or even interest in addressing it this way.

Clint: I think that's a helpful addition.

Josie: Right. We talk often about how the criminal legal system is reflected and you know, has the same qualities as many of our other systems. And the cruelty of it is reflected in so many other ways. Right? And so thinking about what you just said about people being accountable for harm they've caused reminds me, even what we see talking about race today, which is that it's very hard for people to think that they can be racist because they think they're a good person. And part of that is because we have a system that tells you you're a bad person or you're a good person.

Josie: So when we think about transformative justice as a way of repairing harm, how does that reframe the way that we think about people?

Clint: And so this is a way of kind of probing into that and also leading into the next sort of questions and thinking about intimate partner violence, sexual violence and, and things that represent, as most acts of violence do, but, and especially in this context, represents far more than the sort of interpersonal, um, instance that took place, right? Like when you are dealing with issues of violence between partners you are understanding the sort of larger systems of patriarchy and misogyny and masculinity that shape often what is, not that it is singularly man to a woman, but often is. And so I'm, I'm curious how we think about transformative justice when let's say a woman and her child, feel a perpetual sense of fear or threat from an intimate partner who has physically and sexually and emotionally abused them. And how do we think about what, how does one protect a vulnerable group of people, um, in this context? And also reject the idea that the singular solution is to put this man in a cage? Um, so, so I guess this is a way of asking, you know, cause people often bring up public safety, right? Like how we think about public safety. And I think, you know, in many of these cases people aren't actually in danger even if it is someone who has committed harm because they are not a perpetual threat, but how do you reconcile those two things?

Josie: I would think the alternative is that people, if you're not trying to work stuff out, think about how painful it is to not have the tools to try to work stuff out in your personal life or in your family or you know. Um, so you co-founded Survived + Punished.

Josie: Which I wrote about a couple of months ago because there was a story in New Orleans about a woman who had been abused for many years by her husband. In 2003, shot him, um, in a moment, what people would call self defense, although I think that that is another simplistic framework that doesn't necessarily reflect the, but she, um, was sentenced to life without parole and she was recently given the opportunity to get a new trial. And when she was released on bail, she has, she has four kids and she finally gets to see her kids and she was released on $1,000 bail and the DA, you know, released a public statement saying 'we've left this violent criminal out.' And Survived + Punished I think is an organization addressing the wrongs of that situation from beginning to end, um, in a way that reimagines the system. Um, and so in terms of gender violence, which I think is where a lot of people get hung up on the safety thing, like Clint said, can you talk more about Survived + Punished and how you see it in the context of a situation like that?

Clint: So let's move into that. Let's think, uh, how do you conceive of abolition and like what is your framework for what that means, what that looks like? Because I think that that's a word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people that has a lot of historical significance, but at the same time that's also misrepresented, very purposefully in a lot of contemporary political discourse. So can you talk a little bit about how you think of what abolition is and how it fits into your sort of larger practice of work?

Mariame Kaba: Yeah. For me, prison-industrial complex abolition, prison-industrial complex meaning all of the interests that come together to imprison, surveil and police people, um, that P-IC abolition, for me, I came to it actually through the work of Critical Resistance, uh, which is a formation and organization that started in the Bay Area in 1998, so exactly 20 years ago, CR is celebrating 20 years this year of existence. And what Critical Resistance started talking about in '98 and had built on years of other people's thinking about this, you know, Nils Christie, um, you know, kind of a lot of the Scandinavian philosophers who had been talking about it in the 1970s. There's a very important kind of abolitionist, uh, statement and document that came out called Instead of Prisons that was put together in 1976 by Faye Knopp and a bunch of other people who called themselves abolitionists, prison abolitionists at the time, because in the '70s, people were talking about the end of prison. People were talking about prisons being over because we had numbers of people that have been in decline at that point. Um, and so there were already people who were talking about, so what's the system that we're going to build that will be the prison instead of prisons? At that period of time. But anyway, so what, uh, what you should think about when you're thinking about P-IC abolition is what Ruthie Gilmore, uh, talks about, Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about, which is that abolition is really more about presence than it is about absence. Abolition is a positive project that is focused on not just the dismantling of the current punishing systems, but also the building of something else. That abolition, that people who are usually kind of a thinking about P-IC abolition, something else that Ruthie says all the time, is that abolition is not just about changing one thing, everything. So it is like a philosophy, an ideology, a framework and a practical organizing strategy that asks you to think about all the different ways in which the systems that we currently have shorten people's lives. So it is about kind of reversing premature death ultimately. That what we have currently in our current criminal punishment system is to accelerate people's death in multiple kinds of ways and that that system is surrounded by many other systems that co-constitute that premature death. So you have to think of capitalism, you have to think about eradicating that. You have to think about the environmental destruction that we are under the climate, you know, destruction that we're currently dealing with and facing. What if you're doing work on climate change, you're doing abolitionist work. If you are working to make sure people have a living wage, you're doing abolitionist work and organizing. If you are working right now to ensure that people's education is actually a good one, that people have access to free quality education, you are doing abolitionist organizing. It's a systemic and structural view of how the world operates. It tells a story about how we came to be and what we need to do in order to be able to actually shift those conditions. So the other thing about abolition that I think people often ask me about is they say, 'I can't wrap my brain around the ends of prisons. I don't, I don't understand that.' And I'm always like, I make that sound because it's usually white people and white men. You do this to me on a regular basis. Um, so that was my white man voice. But um, that was very badly done. Sorry. But it's like 'I don't understand why?' And I'm always like, well then you can't wrap your brain around a world without exploitation and dehumanization. How sad is that? How sad is that? If you can't imagine a world without these things, then you cannot imagine a world devoid of that. And I, and I refuse to succumb to that. I can imagine a world without dehumanization and exploitation. And so therefore that project makes sense to me. And the last thing I'll say is that, um, the other part of abolition that makes to me a lot of senses, people also say like, 'how does that work? How could you do that?' And I'm always like, you practice abolition daily. It's a daily thing. And there are communities right now that are living in abolitionist present. There really are. There are places where you can travel and I came, I lived for over 20 years in Chicago and you can go to Naperville and you could go around and those kids have the schools they need with no metal detectors. All of them are going to college. They live in homes that are beautiful and have what they need. They have all the food they need to eat. They never see the cops except when the cops are called. They like that they are living an abolitionist present. The question I always have for people is why they can't see that for my nephew? Why that world is not possible for him when it is possible for many of the children of the people who tell me they can't imagine living in an abolitionist future? I'm like you're living an abolitionist present. So I don't understand what we're really talking about here. You're saying that there are some people who are never going to be allowed to have what your kids have. That to me is unacceptable. I refuse to acknowledge that as being something that's valid. So to me abolition is always present. We're doing it in so many different ways and the way we're trying to get there is often through these non reformist reforms that are the ways that give us a track to move towards that horizon. Um, and so for me, my organizing is very much determined by abolition as, as the thing that I want to hold true to. The questions I ask of any sort of policy reform or whatever are guided by that, are guided by an abolitionist framework.

Josie: To me, it feels like the opposite of the way of thinking that you have presented is the Ap-Eds you see from the ADA or the DA when there's like sentencing reform up, right? And you see the Op-Ed that says, like 'here was the case where this guy broke into the house and then he raped the woman and he chop her head off.' And you know, and for me, I find that like the deeper I get into this work and the more comfortable you have to get with stuff that is uncomfortable, right? And you'd have to stop talking about nonviolent and drug offenders and all of these sort of, and talk about people who have done things that have been really harmful.

Josie: This is such a hard fight because the Ted Bundy, right? Like people ask, you know 'what about Ted Bundy?' And I'm like, I've read Ted Bundy's Wikipedia page. I hate prisons and I also like don't want Ted Bundy coming into my house.

Josie: And that strikes me as like-

Josie: But it strikes me as not reflective, as speaking that framework as if it's the only one when it's not the only one.

Josie: And so I'm wondering what your sort of response is when people say that to you?

Josie: Right. Most of them are not.

Josie: Because we do that about everything else. We do that about politics, right.

Joise: So one of the things that sticks with me that I've heard you talk about that, for someone who does this stuff day in and day out, was very clarifying for me as a way of thinking about this and I was hoping you could just speak about it, is the difference between consequences and punishment and how we think about accountability. And this goes back to transformative justice, abolition and goes back to two to gender violence and how we think about punishment. And I think it's especially critical in this moment right now of #metoo where there is a reckoning and I am still worried that the reckoning has the potential to mostly be punishment based and not actually a reckoning with harm.

Clint: That is not what should be dictating public policy.

Josie: And maybe once you work through your needs in this process, your wants change.

Josie: So I could really talk to you for the next six hours. I already have like eight other things I would love to ask you about. We're both just so grateful that you came on and, you know, what we're trying to do here is give people tools to assess the systems around them, as accurately frame it the criminal punishment system, and I think being able to imagine something else is so important. Thank you so much for coming on.

Clint: We appreciate that.

Josie: That was Mariame Kaba, she's the Director of Project NIA, co-founder of Survived + Punished and a leader and advocate in rethinking what our criminal justice system could look like.

Clint: Thanks for listening to the second season of Justice in America. I am Clint Smith.

Josie: I'm Josie Duffy Rice.

Clint: You can find us on Twitter at @justice_podcast, like us on Facebook page at Justice in America and subscribe and rate us on iTunes, we appreciate all of your reviews.

Josie: And don't forget to email us at justiceinamerica@theappeal.org with feedback or show topics you'd like for us to cover in the coming seasons. Justice in America is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams and the production assistant is Trendel Lightburn.

Clint: We'll see you soon.

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Justice in America Episode 20: Mariame Kaba and Prison Abolition

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On the last episode of Season 2, Josie and Clint discuss prison abolition with Mariame Kaba, one of the leading organizers in the fight against America's criminal legal system and a contributing editor for The Appeal.

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Disability Justice - a Working Draft by Patty Berne

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Disability Justice - a Working Draft by Patty Berne

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In recent years, on websites and new media locales, on flyers and in informal conversations, I've witnessed people add the word "justice" onto virtually everything disability related -- from disability rights based services and access audits to disability scholarship -- while doing nothing to shift either process or end goal, thinking that the word change alone brings that work into alignment with disability justice.

Not so. So when Jane Dunham with the National Black Disability Coalition asked me to write "What Is Disability Justice" for the 2015 SDS Pre-Conference Disability and Social Justice Summit, even though SDS was demonstrating NO commitment to Collective Access for those of us who cannot pay, physically or financially, for ableist transportation, I appreciated Jane's valuing my voice and contribution, and her efforts struggling with the unspoken and passive aggressive liberal racism of the academe, so I agreed. Plus, I really like Jane ♥. I wrote the following also knowing that it would serve as a good draft for the upcoming Sins Invalid project writing a Disability Justice statement, which will certainly be different and better after being worked through by the crew here.

However, I wanted to put it on this blog to continue my individual process of decolonization from ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism which tells me to keep a low profile lest I be hurt. So, with the deepest thanks and acknowledgements to Aurora Levins Morales and David Langstaff for their words intertwined with mine, and with gratitude to Aurora Levins Morales, Cara Page, Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz, Stacey Milbern, Kiyaan Abadani, Micah Bazant, Leroy Moore, seeley quest, Ernie Cath, David Langstaff, Nomy Lamm, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Laura Hershey, Leah Lakshmi Peipzna-Samaransinha, Natasha Simpson, Lateef McLeod and so many others who have all held fierce conversations and sleepy eyed dreams of what we building together....

I'd like to start off with a quote from Aurora Levins Morales' book :
"There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate. Society has written deep into each strand of tissue of every living person on earth. What it writes into the heart muscles of five star generals is distinct from what it writes in the pancreatic tissue and intestinal tracts of Black single mothers in Detroit, of Mexicana migrants in Fresno, but no body stands outside the consequences of injustice and inequality...What our bodies require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies."
There was phenomenal and historic work to develop the disability rights movement in the U.S., and it had many successes in advancing a philosophy of independent living and opening possibilities for people with disabilities through the establishment of civil rights for people with disabilities. Like other movements, the current disability rights movement includes advocacy organizations, service provision agencies, constituency led centers, membership based national organizations, as well as cultural and academic spaces.

And, like many movements, it is contextualized within its era of emergence and left us with "cliff-hangers": it is single issue identity based; its leadership has historically centered white experiences; its framework leaves out other forms of oppression and the ways in which privilege is leveraged at differing times and for various purposes; it centers people with mobility impairments, marginalizing other forms of impairment; and centers people who can achieve rights and access through a legal or rights-based framework. The political strategy of the disability rights movement relied on litigation and the establishment of a disability bureaucratic sector at the expense of developing a broad-based popular movement.

While a concrete and radical move forward toward justice, the disability rights movement simultaneously invisibilized the lives of peoples who lived at intersecting junctures of oppression - disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.

In response to this, in 2005, disabled activists of color, originally queer women of color incubated in progressive and radical movements that did not systematically address ableism - namely, myself, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milbern, soon to be joined by Leroy Moore, Eli Clare and Sebastian Margaret - began discussing a "second wave" of disability rights and ultimately launched a framework we called Disability Justice.

Given the isolation enforced by ableism and classed boundaries, many of us have often found ourselves as agents of change from within our respective communities and isolated from in-person community with other disabled people of color or queer or gender non-conforming crips, finding "liberated zones" instead online. In many ways, Disability Justice is a nascent framework that some call a movement, still identifying the "we" - sometimes in fluid spaces and sometimes in each others' hoped and spoken words, touching each other through the echoes of those we mentor close by.

Given this early historical snapshot, I assert that Disability Justice work is largely done by individuals within their respective settings, with Sins Invalid, the NYC-based Disability Justice Collective, Seattle's Disability Justice Collective, and Vancouver's Disability Justice Collective being notable exceptions. Some voices may emphasize a particular component of the framework over another, as can be expected in early movement moments. However, what has been consistent is the leadership of disabled people of color and of queer and gender non-conforming disabled people.

Disability Justice activists, organizers, cultural workers understand that able-bodied supremacy has been formed in relation to intersecting systems of domination and exploitation. The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism, each system co-creating an ideal bodymind built upon the exclusion and elimination of a subjugated "other" from whom profits and status are extracted. 500+ years of violence against black and brown communities includes 500+ years of bodies and minds deemed dangerous by being non-normative - again, not simply within able-bodied normativity, but within the violence of heteronormativity, white supremacy, gender normativity, within which our various bodies and multiple communities have been deemed "deviant", "unproductive", "invalid."

A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them. We understand that all bodies are caught in these bindings of ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state and imperialism, and that we cannot separate them. These are the positions from where we struggle. We are in a global system that is incompatible with life. There is no way stop a single gear in motion - we must dismantle this machine.

Disability Justice holds a vision born out of collective struggle, drawing upon the legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance within a thousand underground paths, igniting small persistent fires of rebellion in everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority -- black and brown people -- share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know through our bones that there have simultaneously been disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, that values and celebrates us in all our myriad beauty.

From my vantage point within Sins Invalid, where we incubate both the framework and practice of Disability Justice, this burgeoning framework has ten (10) principles, each offering new opportunities for movement builders:

Like the above principles, Disability Justice shares two additional principles with other justice-based movements - an Anti-Capitalist Politic and a Commitment to Cross Movement Organizing. We are anti-capitalist as the very nature of our mind/bodies resists conforming to a capitalist "normative" productive standard, with the actual construction of "disability" derived from the exploitation of the body in an economy that sees land and human as components of profit, deriding the integrity of our very real crip labor. Necessarily cross movement, Disability Justice shifts how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, lending itself toward a united front politic.

This is Disability Justice, an honoring of the longstanding legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies or minds will not conform. Disability Justice is a vision and practice of a yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which every body and mind is known as beautiful.

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Disability Justice - a working draft by Patty Berne - Sins Invalid

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In recent years, on websites and new media locales, on flyers and in informal conversations, I've witnessed people add the word "justice" onto virtually everything disability related -- from disability rights based services and access audits to disability scholarship -- while doing nothing

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Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other's basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW! Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. Most mutual aid projects are volunteer-based, with people jumping in to participate because they want to change what is going on right now, not wait to convince corporations or politicians to do the right thing. A few critical concepts are inside this:

"Charity" is a framework that often means rich people giving a little bit to poor people to make themselves look better in the eyes of God or other people. Usually there are lots of strings attached to what they give: e.g., giving only to mothers, only to children, only to sober people, only to people of faith and other "deserving poor" models. This means that charity is often a strategy for controlling poor people. Charity also frames people in need as morally lesser than rich people-as if poverty were the fault of the poor rather than the fault of systems of racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, land theft and labor exploitation that make some people rich and keep other people poor. Charity looks like generosity from rich people, but actually upholds the systems that make most people poor for the benefit of the few.

Charity is the frame used for most social services delivery. Most social services blame poor people for poverty, operating on the idea that there is something wrong with people in need-they need to get sober, they need to get "housing-ready," they need to take parenting classes, they need to work harder. In reality, poverty is a result of capitalism, and people of color and women are the poorest people because of sexism and racism. Social service agencies typically employ middle and upper class people, often with race and educational privilege, and put them in the role of judging, punishing and controlling poor people. Sometimes they put "empowerment" in their name or mission statement, but the power dynamics are usually the old standards.

In recent decades, charity and social services have been privatized and contracted out to what critics call the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Non-profits compete for grants from corporations or philanthropists to address social problems or serve poor people. This means that rich people and corporations get to decide what strategies should be funded. They also get to protect their money from taxation if they give it out to non-profits. Non-profits are mostly run by rich white people with graduate degrees, they have steep pay scales in which upper class people and white people get paid more, and the people most effected by the issues they claim to address have no say in what they do or how they work.

Mutual aid projects depart from these norms of charity, social services and non-profitization in several key ways that often include:

An understanding that it is the system, not the people suffering under it, that creates poverty, crisis, and vulnerability

Governance/control by people who are most effected (can mean having a membership base of those most effected, or being formed in ways that ensure those providing the aid are from the same group as those giving the aid, or models that allow allies to participate but focus on accountability to those being served)

Transparency about how they work, any money they use or manage (many mutual aid projects are not funded and are all volunteer run)

Open meetings and pathways for new people to join and participate

Political education within the organization to help those working in the project to expand their awareness of experiences that are not their own, to build solidarity, and to make the project supportive and welcoming to marginalized people

Humility and willingness to accept feedback about how to make the project more useful to the people it serves

Long-term commitment to provide the aid the project works on

Connection to and solidarity with other mutual aid projects and other transformative work

Commitment to dignity and self-determination of people in need or crisis

Consensus-based decision making rather than majority rule

Readings & Videos Examples of Mutual Aid Work and Descriptions of Mutual Aid

8 Black Panther Party Programs that Were More Empowering Than Federal Government Programs, article by Nick Chiles illustrating some of the BPP's radical mutual aid work.

The Lincoln Hospital Offensive, article about when the Young Lords took over Lincoln Hospital in 1970 to expose racism and abuse, and set up mutual aid programs that changed the hospital and the community.

Mutual Aid entry on Indigene Community site, discussing mutual aid in relation to the Constitution of the People of the Longhouse confederacy six nations Haudenosaunee (Rotinosaunee) and Kropotkin's writing.

Mutual Benefit entry in The Making of African American Identity, Vol. 1 1500-1865, describing the role and work of mutual aid societies formed by free black people.

Interdependency, article by Mia Mingus, 2008

Now Is the Time For Nobodies, interview with Dean Spade about the need for mutual aid projects in the Trump era.

Here is an outline for a training about the relationship between direct survival support work and transformative social change, inspired by insights in Harsha Walia's book Undoing Border Imperialism.

Charity, Mutual Aid and Class Struggle, article by Phil Dickens 2010

What is Mutual Aid? 6 minute video addressing the concept as key to anarchist thought, 2016

Critique of Non-Profits, Charity and Social Services

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is a very useful anthology about the problems with the non-profit industrial complex and how groups have developed some alternative approaches. You can read the introduction here.

From the Bottom Up: Strategies and Practices from Membership-Based Organizations is a study done by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project of nine organizations, looking at how they are implementing the critiques of nonprofitization and social services in their work. It has concrete ideas for building organizations that are accountable to the people they serve.

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare is a classic book about why charity was developed to help control and manage poor and displaced people, stigmatize poverty, and keep labor cheap for the owning class. It's a pretty academic book but there are summaries available online.

The NPIC and Trans Resistance is an article about the problems with the Nonprofit Industrial Complex in the context of queer and trans resistance. It discusses why the Sylvia Rivera Law Project became a collective in order to do its work providing free legal help to trans and gender nonconforming people.

This series of videos explores how nonprofitization impacted queer/trans movements in terms of priorities, strategies and leadership, and what some alternatives are:

Queer Dreams Part 1: What are We Fighting For? from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues Part 2: How Do Rich People Control Our Movements? from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues Part 3: The Nonprofit Hamster Wheel from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues Part 4: Who's in Charge? from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues Part 5: Basebuilding from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

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Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other's basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW!

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The Politics of Care: From COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter

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The Politics of Care: From COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter

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From the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare. Its results are the failing economic and public health systems we confront today-those that benefit the few and put the most vulnerable in harm's way.

Contributors to this anthology insist there is another way: a new kind of politics-a politics of care-that centers people's basic needs and connections to fellow citizens, the global community, and the natural world. Imagining a world that promotes the health and well-being of all, they draw inspiration from public health, philosophy, economics, literature, and the examples of activists, from ACT UP to Black Power. Together they point to a future in which no one is disposable.

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From the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare.

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Publisher: Seven Stories
Binding: pb
Pages: 128
Released: January 4, 2003
ISBN-13: 9781583225813

A short, impassioned, argument for abolition. Davis eloquently points out that mass incarceration has had little or no effect on crime, how disproportionate numbers of the poor and minorities end up in prison, and the obscene profits the system generates. Who needs it!
"In this extraordinary book, Angela Davis challenges us to confront the human rights catastrophe in our jails and prisons. As she so convincingly argues, the contemporary US practice of super-incarceration is closer to new age slavery that to any recognizable system of 'criminal justice'..." -Mike Davis

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A short, impassioned, argument for abolition. Davis eloquently points out that mass incarceration has had little or no effect on crime, how disproportionate numbers of the poor and minorities end up in prison, and the obscene profits the system generates. Who needs it!

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Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

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Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

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Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Here are strategies for accountability beyond the criminal justice system.

Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries. However, in the putative atmosphere of contemporary criminal justice systems, they are often marginalized and operate under the radar. Beyond Survival puts these strategies front and center as real alternatives to today's failed models of confinement and "correction."

In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing practices and marking paths forward. They use a variety of forms-from toolkits to personal essays-to delve deeply into the "how to" of transformative justice, providing alternatives to calling the police, ways to support people having mental health crises, stories of community-based murder investigations, and much more. At the same time, they document the history of this radical movement, creating space for long-time organizers to reflect on victories, struggles, mistakes, and transformations.

Featuring writing, tools and interviews by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kai Cheng Thom, Amita Swadhin, Audrey Huntley, Amanda Aguilar Shank, Janae E Bonsu of BYP100, Philly Stands Up (Esteban Kelly, Jenna Peters-Golden, Qui Dorian, Bench Ansfield and Beth Blum), Creative Interventions, Trans Lifeline, Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Oakland Power Projects, SOS Collective/Audre Lorde Project, Icarus Project/ Fireweed Collective, Raquel Lavina, Chris Lymbertos, RJ Maccani, Nathan Shara, Staci Haines, Georgia Latino Alliance For Human Rights, MIJENTE, Monica Sehovic Bowen Forrester, Elene Lam, Chanelle Gallant, Elisabeth Marie Long, adrienne maree brown, Adrian Cole, Yalini Dream, Shira Hassan, Mariame Kaba and Mimi Kim.

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, consultant, and political strategist with twenty years of experience organizing within racial justice, LGBTQ, transformative justice, anti-violence, and economic justice movements. She is the Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting where she partners with organizations to build their capacity and deepen the impact of their organizing strategies. Her essay, "Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation," is featured in the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the Lambda Award winning author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap, Love Cake, Consensual Genocide and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. A lead artist with the disability justice collective Sins Invalid, she is a longtime cultural worker, educator and organizer within disability and transformative justice communities.

Praise For Beyond Survival:

"Beyond Survival is a book for anyone yearning for transformation within themselves and across communities. If I had this book when I first began organizing, I would not have felt so alone and lost when seeking ways to confront conflict, harm and violence without policing and punishment. As our movements evolve, so must what we consider as essential reading - Beyond Survival is clearly essential reading." -Charlene A. Carruthers, author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

"Somewhere between a call to action, a love letter, and a prayer, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the TJ Moment is a gift to those of us working for justice. The voices in this collection are strong and compassionate, and their reflections are honest and open-hearted. Readers will feel challenged, inspired and held by this critically important book. It will surely inspire change." -Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation

"I've been waiting for this book for so many years. Gritty, unsentimental, blunt, compassionate, and visionary, the wildly varied voices, insights, and experiences collected in this exceptional - and essential - anthology help chart new pathways through the harms of violence in its interrelated interpersonal, vigilante, and structural forms. Appearing at precisely the moment we need them most, these visions, questions, and practices will stir your imagination, fuel your own radical dreams, and open your heart to the possibility of transformed futures for us all." -Kay Whitlock, author of Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics

"Beyond Survival arrives just on time. Through the combined brilliance of Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha we are offered a beautiful invitation: away from any quick and easy solutions that don't ever do what they purport and towards a fundamental rethinking of what safety is, and a lifetime practice learning, relearning and creating it through community with all the messiness it entails. This book is truly making the road by dreaming and I'm so grateful for it." Tourmaline, filmmaker, Happy Birthday, Marsha and Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones

"Beyond Survival is full of grounded, practical wisdom based in brave, thoughtful, collaborative efforts. It will be immensely useful to people trying to respond to the real crises our communities are facing with creative solutions that actually build healing and safety. This is the collection that so many of us have been waiting for, capturing the knowledge generated by grassroots experiments undertaken by bold, imaginative activists working to respond to and prevent violence. We will be using this as a reference book for building community responses to harm and violence for decades to come." -Dean Spade, author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law

"If you're serious about toppling the pillars of white supremacy in the United States, start by reading Beyond Survival ... Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha have provided a blueprint, featuring some of the brightest minds making transformative justice a reality. While many articles and essays have highlighted the "why" of transformative justice, the question of "how" persists. Now, Beyond Survival boldly answers. Ejeris and Leah, along with the featured writers, have propelled transformative justice into today's stagnant policy discourse ... With interviews, stories of success, and unadulterated realness, Beyond Survival shows us how to keep going, how to keep pressing forward, how to survive until we are beyond the injustices of today." -Eric Ward, Executive Director of the Western States Center and Civil Rights Strategist

"A unique contribution to an ongoing discussion about emerging Transformative Justice processes for building safe and equitable communities, especially in the context of the 'defund the police' movement. While municipalities across America struggle to respond to incidents of police brutality, Beyond Survival offers writings from three dozen TJ practitioners as well as a plethora of principles and examples of community practices for responding to violence without relying on police." - Toward Freedom

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Beyond Survival Afraid to call 911, but not sure what to do instead? Here are strategies for accountability beyond the criminal justice system. Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on puni

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Dreaming Disability Justice

Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative "collective access" -- access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure -- in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour.

Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.

Leah knows that the world we deserve is a world shaped by the honest, messy, skillful genius of disabled queer femmes of color. Reading this book allows you to live inside the gorgeous, uncomfortable, emergent, compassionate world that disabled femmes of color have been making all along. Leah cares for us all with this work, but not in the apologetic, default, mommy mode you may be trained to expect. This care is the survivor-sourced, survivor-accountable, saltysweet truthtelling we need to (guess what?) SURVIVE. -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive and Spill, co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has written a brave and brilliant book that captures the messy gestation and wildly liberating vision of disability justice. With passionate integrity, she tells the collective story of a movement that transforms the idea of care into a force capable of unraveling all the braided injustices of our lives. -Aurora Levins Morales, author of Medicine Stories and Kindling: Writings On the Body

Page after page, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha documents the necessity, power, and sheer brilliance of disability justice. Be prepared for her words, stories, and political thinking to shake up what you know about care and access, revolutionary dreaming, and present-day resilience. -Eli Clare, author of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile

We have mad crip dreams. In those dreams there exists a decolonized, liberated future in which none of our bodies and lives are disposable. With Care Work, Leah LakshmiPiepzna-Samarasinha reminds us that turning these dreams into radical practices have already been done, are happening right now within disability justice movements, and will continue to build a future where we are all free. This book is a touchstone for our journey. -Qwo-Li Driskill, author of Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory

An instant classic, Care Work is equal parts on-the-ground dispatch from the disability justice movement and practical field guide to liberatory access. Rather than something to be begrudgingly tacked on, accessibility, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha shows us, might be joyous and collective. - Smithsonian Magazine

As a Black disabled activist, cultural worker, and collector of art, books and music by people of color with disabilities for more than twenty years, I'm excited and thirsty for Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work. As one of the original thinkers of Disability Justice, I'm overjoyed that artists and activists like Leah are writing books like this one that helps water the roots of Disability Justice. This book is coming from the bed, the streets and on stages that Leah has spoke, taught, performed and struggled on -- thats why it's so accessible and brings lived knowledge into our outdated, stiff institutions and activist movements. In this era of hyper capitalism, toxic hypermasculinity, and White supremacy, we desperately need Care Work. -Leroy F Moore Jr. , co-founder of Sins Invalid, co-founder of National Black Disability Coalition

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice is a collection profoundly necessary at this moment . .. the essays share a fundamental hypothesis: to achieve social justice, ableism must be destroyed. Personal narratives and accounts of organizing are voiced from Black and brown and queer disabled people, radically reimagining the ways our society is structured, uplifting visions and models for care webs that create collective access. - Broadly (Best Books of the Year)

Leah writes brilliantly about sick/disabled/mad/neurodivergent genius, collective care work, and all-too-familiar patterns of abuse and trauma that happen even/especially in radical spaces/marginalized people's communities. Care Work is a necessary intervention for those in queer/trans people-of-color spaces and white disability spaces alike, but more importantly, it's an offering of love to all of us living at multiple margins, between spaces of recognition and erasure, who desperately need what Leah has to say. This book is an invitation to dream and to build and to love, as slowly and imperfectly and unevenly as we need to. -Lydia X. Z. Brown, co-editor of All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism

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Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian NonfictionIn their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah ...

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The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century

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The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century

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The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century a book by Grace Lee Boggs, Scott Kurashige, and Danny Glover

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The Strategist’s Best Books About Asian American Identity, New York Magazine The pioneering Asian American labor organizer and writer’s vision for intersectional and anti-racist activism. In this powerful, deeply humanistic book, Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in A…

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A support network and media project by and for people who experience the world in ways that are often diagnosed as mental illness

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Get all the goods on NYC Icarus events and news, maybe you can even lend a helping hand.

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A worker-owned cooperative that creates handmade stationary

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A New York City based, worker-owned cooperative dedicated to equity, social justice and collective liberation

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Youth workers are essential parts of our communities. We are committed to supporting the capacity, wellness and care of youth workers now, while making sure our young people have what they need. Help us support Integrate NYC's Youth Aid Fund!

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Collective Courage: A History of African American Economic Thought and Practice

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Collective Courage: A History of African American Economic Thought and Practice

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Watch Jessica Gordon Nembhard on GRITtv with Laura Flanders discussing the history of cooperative economics in the movement for civil rights.

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois's 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes' Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing.

To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops' articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation's history.

"The word 'pathbreaking' should not be used casually, but this is, in fact, a pathbreaking book. There is nothing like it. Jessica Gordon Nembhard's study of Black cooperatives opens a door on a critical aspect of Black history in general and cooperative history in particular-a door very hard to open, given the challenges and difficulties with records and sources. What she has found behind the door is subjected to inspiring yet tough-minded analysis. The long trajectory of development Gordon Nembhard describes and the direction she illuminates offer profoundly important guidance as we enter an era of increasingly difficult economic and political challenges."

"Collective Courage is an important addition to the body of work examining efforts to achieve economic development by African Americans. This book represents the culmination of Jessica Gordon Nembhard's long-standing and pathbreaking research in this area. The publication of Collective Courage will be warmly welcomed by scholars and community activists searching for development strategies that circumvent increasingly globalized predatory economic networks. The historical and contemporary examples of cooperative ventures discussed in the bookwill unquestionably serve as useful models for pursuing sustainable approaches to community development."

"Jessica Gordon Nembhard's excellent book provides a refreshing antidote to the straitjacket on our imagination of better ways to organize our economic lives. Our economic lives can be both just and productive. Gordon Nembhard cogently demonstrates that black cooperative models offer a non-utopian route toward meeting both goals."

"Collective Courage makes a very strong case for the historical and continuing importance of cooperatives as a strategy for African American economic, social, and political development. Given the emphasis on pooled resources, cooperative economic development is an approach that gets around the constraints of limited wealth among African American individuals and families. Moreover, this volume clearly demonstrates that cooperatives have 'joint outputs'-that is, in addition to producing a particular good or service, a cooperative frequently produces other valuable social services, civic involvement, leadership development, and managerial expertise that is transferable to activities beyond the particular cooperative enterprise. Jessica Gordon Nembhard concludes that cooperatives have been successful in the past and also present the opportunity for expanded self-reliance in the future.
"The originality of this book is substantial. I am unaware of any similar work. This volume shows that Gordon Nembhard is a leading scholar on the role of cooperative economic development activities among African Americans. This well-organized text will be useful to general interest readers, undergraduate and graduate students, policy makers, and practitioners."

"Though the cooperative movement in the United States is one of the largest in the world, it is routinely ignored or marginalized by observers, particularly in the academic world. This book, based on years of multidimensional research in many sources by Jessica Gordon Nembhard, fills a particularly glaring gap in our understanding of that movement. It carefully documents how many African Americans have explored the cooperative option over the years, in the process making a major contribution to the fields of cooperative studies and African American studies."

"In her inspiring book Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard has compiled the most complete history to date of the cooperative economic struggles of African Americans from early times until now. Following in the profound footsteps of W. E. B. Du Bois, she has illuminated the historical roots of African American economic cooperation and thus made a vital contribution to the knowledge so badly needed today for African Americans and all people to come together in mutual aid and, by their common efforts, rise above all economic obstacles."

"[A] fascinating history of African American cooperatives."

"Collective Courage is truly a book to be celebrated and not merely reviewed. A book to read and re-read, one that gives voice to a long neglected and embattled history, and which can contribute massively to new and far more democratized and humane forms of social and economic life than those to which we are accustomed or resigned."

"With the 'free market' increasingly predatory toward poor and working poor people, seeking to turn poverty itself into a profit center, Jessica Gordon Nembhard's book couldn't be more timely. If cooperative economic arrangements have any future we must first learn their vital past."

"[Collective Courage is] full of suggestions and lessons that can be used by any group seeking to empower itself through cooperative organization. The range of concepts covered-from the Antigonish method of development, the needs of cooperative development and the impact of co-ops on community development-gives the book applications well beyond the badly needed African-American cooperative history.
". . . The history of African-American cooperative practice, as documented in this volume, clearly demonstrates how a group of oppressed people, in the face of pain and grief, persisted relentlessly to provide themselves economic independence, and political freedom, but also, thankfully, a model, and lessons of development, inclusion and diversity that can benefit all of us."

"This elaborate historical portrait of the cooperative movement in the African American community is an important academic reference. Nembhard articulates a business model rooted in the values of a community, which will resonate well with those who work to create community-centered enterprises. To do so, the author delves into the past of the movement that generated this model, documenting the historical experience of a community working hard to create an economic base to support long-term growth and social mobility. The book illustrates how social structures and deliberate acts frustrated or destroyed early attempts to create this economic base rooted in the community's values, and it also extends this historical chronicle to the present to help readers understand why the economic base of the community is still so fragile. For those wishing to turn back the page of history to explore collaborative, community-based economic development, this book will offer a window of insight, a template for action, and a framework grounded in African American culture and values. 'Lift as you climb,' a traditional phrase reflecting one of these many values, serves as a powerful call to readers for past and future community empowerment and growth."

"This work encourages readers to view African American economic and political history through a new lens. Information from primary source materials provides a unique perspective on a critical but underexamined aspect of African American resistance to economic arrangements that have created and perpetuated racialized disparities in wealth and points out that this resistance began well before the Civil War."

"A book worth reading. Those who are interested in the social and historical context of African American struggle for equal rights and social justice, political struggle, the role of women in social change, heroic leadership, and in grassroots activism will find some precious nuggets of information. In short, Nembhard makes an important contribution to African American economic history that should interest educators and economists alike."

Jessica Gordon Nembhard is Associate Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College, City University of New York.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Continuous and Hidden History of Economic Defense and Collective Well-Being

Part I: Early African American Cooperative Roots

1 Early Black Economic Cooperation: Intentional Communities, Communes, and Mutual Aid

2 From Economic Independence to Political Advocacy: Cooperation and the Nineteenth-Century Black Populist Movement

3 Expanding the Tradition: Early African American-Owned "Cooperative" Businesses

Part II: Deliberative Cooperative Economic Development

4 Strategy, Advocacy, and Practice: Black Study Circles and Co-op Education on the Front Lines

5 The Young Negroes' Co-operative League

6 Out of Necessity: The Great Depression and "Consumers' Cooperation Among Negroes"

7 Continuing the Legacy: Nannie Helen Burroughs, Halena Wilson, and the Role of Black Women

8 Black Rural Cooperative Activity in the Early to Mid-Twentieth Century

Part III: Twentieth-Century Practices, Twenty-First-Century Solutions

9 The Federation of Southern Cooperatives: The Legacy Lives On

10 Economic Solidarity in the African American Cooperative Movement: Connections, Cohesiveness, and Leadership Development

Time Line of African American Cooperative History, 1780-2012: Selected Events

Notes

References

Index

Introduction:

A Continuous and Hidden History of Economic Defense and Collective Well-Being

Courage: Every great movement started as we have started. Do not feel discouraged because in our few months of life we have not rivaled some long established Co-Operative venture. Each successful Co-Operative enterprise has taken much time and energy and sacrifice to establish. Nothing worth accomplishing is ever achieved without WORK.

-Baker (1931d, 2)

No race can be said to be another's equal that can not or will not protect its own interest. This new order can be brought about once the Negro acknowledges the wisdom in uniting his forces and pooling his funds for the common good of all. Other races have gained great wealth and great power by following this simple rule and it is hoped some day that the Negro will do the same.

-Wilson (1942c, 1-2)

We can by consumers and producers co-operation, . . . establish a progressively self-supporting economy that will weld the majority of our people into an impregnable, economic phalanx.

-Du Bois (1933b, 1237)

We have a chance here to teach industrial and cultural democracy to a world that bitterly needs it.

-Du Bois (1940, 715)

African Americans have a long, rich history of cooperative ownership, especially in reaction to market failures and economic racial discrimination. However, it has often been a hidden history and one obstructed by White supremacist violence. When there is a narrative, the history is told as one of failure. The challenges have been tremendous, and have often been seen as insurmountable. The successes are often anecdotal and isolated, little understood, and even less documented-particularly as part of an economic development strategy and a larger economic independence movement. My research suggests that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the history of the United States, much like their counterparts around the world. This book documents these practices and experiences, as well as the various philosophies behind the strategy of cooperative ownership among African Americans.

Considering the broad aspects of cooperative economic development in African American communities over the past two centuries, my research shows that cooperative economic thought was integral to many major African American leaders and thinkers throughout history. These include known figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, E. Franklin Frazier, Nannie Helen Burroughs, George Schuyler, Ella Jo Baker, Dorothy Height, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis, as well as lesser-known figures such as Halena Wilson, Jacob Reddix, W. C. Matney, Charles Prejean, Estelle Witherspoon, Ralph Paige, and Linda Leaks; and organizations such as the Young Negroes' Co-operative League, the North Carolina Council for Credit Unions and Associates, and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. This study attempts to show how these individuals and organizations contributed to the development and philosophy of the African American co-op movement. I consider the various organizations' agendas and strategies over time, as well as the kinds of impact cooperative practices have had on Black communities. There are lessons to be learned from the history of cooperative economic models that can be applied to future discussions about community economic development in communities of color.

What Is a Cooperative?

Cooperatives are companies owned by the people who use their services. These member-owners form the company for a particular purpose: to satisfy an economic or social need, to provide a quality good or service (one that the market is not adequately providing) at an affordable price, or to create an economic structure to engage in needed production or facilitate more equal distribution to compensate for a market failure. The International Co-operative Alliance (ICA), a nongovernmental trade association founded in 1895 to represent and serve cooperatives worldwide, defines a cooperative as "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise" (ICA 2012b). Cooperatives range across the globe from small-scale to multi-million-dollar businesses. There are more than one billion members of cooperatives throughout the world (ICA 2012a). According to the ICA, in 1994 the United Nations estimated that "the livelihood of nearly 3 billion people, or half of the world's population, was made secure by co-operative enterprise" (2012a)-and the cooperative movement has continued to grow since then. Moreover, the United Nations designated the year 2012 "the international year of cooperatives," with the theme "cooperative enterprises build a better world" (UN 2011), recognizing the viability of the model in addition to its widespread use. Although they were not a well-publicized economic structure before 2012, cooperatives are a significant force in the world economy. Building on the successful year of cooperatives, the ICA and UN have now declared the following ten years to be the international decade of cooperatives.

Cooperatives are classified into three major categories, depending on the relationship between the member-owners and the co-op's purpose: consumer-owned, producer-owned, or worker-owned (or some combination of the three). Consumers come together and form a buying club or cooperative retail store in order to pool their money to buy in bulk the kinds of goods and services they want, and the quality they want, at an affordable price. Consumers establish a grocery cooperative, for example, if fresh produce and natural and vegetarian foods are not supplied elsewhere or are very costly. Consumers also come together to buy electricity, financial services (as in a credit union), environmentally friendly fuels, pharmaceuticals, or child care, for example. Cooperative retail enterprises such as natural-food grocery stores and rural electric and energy cooperatives, together with credit unions, are the most common and successful examples of consumer cooperatives. Credit unions offer financial services and loans to a specific group of members (affiliated with a union, a workplace, or a church, for example) or to underserved communities, and keep financial resources circulating in the community. Housing co-ops expand home or apartment ownership to more people, addressing both financing and maintenance issues, and often build in long-term affordability.

Producers also form cooperatives to jointly purchase supplies and equipment or to jointly process and market their goods. Here again, cooperative economics facilitates the pooling of resources to supply producers or to help produce or enhance their product, to standardize procedures and prices, to increase the selling price, or to decrease the costs of distribution, advertising, and sales. Agriculture marketing and craft cooperatives are the most common form of producers' cooperatives.

Workers form cooperatives so as to jointly own and manage a business themselves, to stabilize employment, make policy, and share the profits. Worker cooperatives are often established to save a company that is being sold off, abandoned, or closed down, or to start a company that exemplifies workplace democracy and collective management. Worker-owned businesses offer economic security, income and wealth generation, and democratic economic participation to employees, as well as provide communities with meaningful and decent jobs and promote environmental sustainability.

Cooperative businesses must operate democratically, according to a set of principles that include open membership, equal voting rights for each member regardless of how much is invested, returns based on use, continuous education, and concern for the community. According to the ICA, "co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity" (ICA 2012b), as well as accountability and transparency. Cooperatives operate on a "double bottom line"-paying attention not just to good business practices and producing a surplus but also to good functioning of the association and to member and community participation (democratic participation) and well-being (Fairbairn 2003; Spear 2000). Because many cooperatives also address sustainability (both economic and environmental), they are often seen as addressing a "triple bottom line": economic (business), social (mutuality and participation), and ecological sustainability. Fairbairn argues, however, that making distinctions between social and economic sustainability is reductionist because it suggests tradeoffs instead of synergies. A more integrated approach recognizes that "social and economic functions come together" and that economic activities achieve social goals (Fairbairn 2003, 4). This is not an either/or relationship in which one goal has priority over others.

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Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice By Jessica Gordon Nembhard

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In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois's 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives.

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The New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives (NYC NOWC) is the trade association for worker cooperative businesses in the NYC metropolitan region.

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Based in the South Bronx and serves immigrants and communities of color--We build, grow, and sustain worker-owned green businesses to create a strong, local, and democratic economy rooted in racial and gender equity.

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Our Mission Green Worker Cooperatives is a South-Bronx based organization dedicated to incubating worker-owned green businesses in order to build a strong local economy rooted in democracy and environmental justice.

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Online legal resource library supporting worker-owned businesses

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At Co-opLaw.org, we continue to grow our online resource pages that provide legal information, best practices, and supporting tools for cooperatively owned and operated businesses and organizations. There is so much information on Co-opLaw.org, even state-by-state guides! So take a gander. Peruse and enjoy all of the resources we've built with friends, comrades, and allies around the country.

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U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives - Work it. Own It.

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As a grassroots member-led movement, our membership is our power and our strength. The USFWC welcomes membership from worker cooperatives, other democratic workplaces, cooperative developers, and allied organizations.

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The largest worker-owned cooperative in the nation, we train over 600 low-income women every year to provide home care services to New Yorkers who are elderly, chronically ill, or living with disabilities in their communities.

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Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) is a nationally recognized, worker-owned home care agency in the Bronx. CHCA was founded in 1985 to provide quality home care to clients by providing quality jobs for direct-care workers.

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Equal Exchange | Fairly Traded Coffee, Tea & Chocolate

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Food is a for-profit industry with corporate profits coming at a direct cost to farmers, consumers, and the planet. Join Equal Exchange as a Citizen-Consumer and build the alternative trade economy with us.

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Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square 

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Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square 

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Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square / Edition 1|Paperback

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This book amplifies the distinct, intersecting, and coalitional possibilities of education in the spaces of ongoing movements for Native and Black liberation. Contributors highlight the importance of activist-oriented teaching and learning in community encampments and other movement spaces for...

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Click to watch the full recording of our session!

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Introduction to Mutual Aid - Mariame Kaba

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Words by our brilliant cohort, graphic by Emily Simons, @inkyantics

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Credit goes to Jayda Shuavarnnasri, @jayda_kissed on Instagram

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Credit goes to Jayda Shuavarnnasri, @jayda_kissed on Instagram

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Credit goes to Constanza Segovia, @veoveodesign

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Credit goes to Constanza Segovia, @veoveodesign

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Facilitated by Mariame Kaba

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" Mutual aid is a term to describe people giving each other needed material support, trying to resist the control dynamics, hierarchies and system-affirming, oppressive arrangements of charity and social services. Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable." - http://bigdoorbrigade.com
INTRODUCTORY FRAMEWORKS
The Strategy of Mutual Aid (Ayni Institute) - webinar videos. Other resources from Ayni Institute.

"We Keep Us Safe: The History and Principles of Mutual Aid" (Highlander Institute) - watch the webinar: Watch the Zoom Recording and Watch the Facebook Live

"Mutua Aid: How To" (Highlander Institute) watch the webinar Zoom Recording.

Why community is our best chance for survival -a lesson post-Hurricane Maria (Christine Nieves)

Solidarity vs Charity Mutual Aid Blog from BigDoorBrigade.com

Collective Care is our Best Weapon from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Mutual Aid vs Charity podcast from Rebel Steps
HOW-TO TOOLS How to Create A Mutual Aid Network Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit
Creating neighborhood pods
Neighbor Support Network NYC Mia Mingus speaks about pod mapping
Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid (Rebel Sydney Black)
Safety Practices for Mutual Aid Food and Supply Distribution During the Coronavirus Pandemic OTHER RESOURCES:
Building Accountable Communities Video Series: here and here.
Beyond Prisons COVID-19 Resources For Incarcerated People
Mutual Aid Hub - https://www.mutualaidhub.org

Longer article about Mutual Aid by Dean Spade

This #COVID19 Know Your Rights Document has updated information on your rights while doing Mutual Aid and updates around protest rights and #stayathome orders. bit.ly/KYRights2020

Ujimaa Medics
Chicago Community Bond Fund Activities with Students:
How to Make a Mutual Aid Map (Created by Dr. Laura McTighe)

Dean Spade's Mutual Aid Course Syllabus and reading questions for mutual aid class

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" Mutual aid is a term to describe people giving each other needed material support, trying to resist the control dynamics, hierarchies and system-affirming, oppressive arrangements of charity and social services.

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Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Format: Book
Binding: pb
Pages: 262
Released: October 30, 2018
ISBN-13: 9781551527383

In this collection of essays, longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.

Care Workis a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.

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In this collection of essays, longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.

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26 Ways to Be in the Struggle, Beyond the Streets

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26 Ways to Be in the Struggle, Beyond the Streets

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26 ways to be in the struggle, beyond the streets. (a list)

June 2020 updates

Ejeris Dixon, Piper Anderson, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Ro Garrido, Emi Kane, Bhavana Nancherla, Deesha Narichania, Sabelo Narasimhan, Amir Rabiyah, and Meejin Richart. Design by Alana Yu-lan Price. Accessible version adapted by Alejandra Ospina and Akemi Nishida.

Please note: Authors gave consent for it to be republished on the Disability Visibility Project

***
This list is designed to celebrate the all ways that our communities can engage in liberation. For a variety of reasons there are folks who cannot attend rallies and protests who contribute to ending police and state violence against black people. People seek justice and support liberation in an array of ways, yet their bodies, their spirits, and their lives may not allow them to be in the streets. We believe that we will win and we need everyone's contributions to win. We affirm that all contributions are political, militant, and valued. By and for those in our communities who can't be in the streets, we offer a list of concrete ways that we can and do support liberation every day. We uplift you. We are you. See you in the struggle.

Host or attend a Know Your Rights Training to educate yourself, your loved ones, and your community on their rights when interacting with the police. You can find links to a list of orgs that host these trainings here: http://tiny.cc/BTSresources

Give money, fundraise online, or donate business proceeds to organizations that are doing work for Black liberation and against police violence. You can also give money to individual Black activists and organizers for rent, food, medicine and more via Venmo or Cashapp. Check out this link for a list of places to donate and more: http://tiny.cc/BTSresources

Spread the word about rallies, actions, events, and demands through social media, text, email, phone, and in person. Use hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #DefendBlackLives to amplify the message on social media.

Offer to be an emergency contact for people attending marches and rallies. Get the person's full name and date of birth, medical information (if they feel comfortable sharing), along with the contact info for anyone they want you to alert should they be detained or hurt. Make sure you know the numbers for the National Lawyers Guild (www.nlg.org), Central Booking, local precincts, and local hospitals. Check in by text once an hour so that you're aware of their whereabouts and current protest conditions.
This document is a helpful guide to playing this role and what information it's helpful to collect. Please note that if you use it, do NOT store people's personal information online on Google - they will turn over this information if subpoenaed! Instead, it's best to print this document and write these details in.

Attend planning meetings or strategy calls for anti-police violence and anti-criminalization groups. Share and attend events that address anti-Black racism. Always consider who holds power and leadership within an organization or group before uplifting their work, and prioritize those that center Black voices and leadership.

Support, attend, or organize healing justice events. Adrienne Maree Brown, Adaku Utah, and Leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha and susan raffo have created a list of healing practices to sustain care in protest; you can find a link to it by going here: tiny.cc/BTSresources.

Cook a pre- or post-march meal, or pack food for people attending protests, marches, and events. If faraway or trying to maintain physical distance during the pandemic, offer to order food delivery or pay for groceries to help people recuperate post-event.

Coordinate or provide childcare for protestors and those supporting at the frontlines. Because we're in a pandemic, figure out if doing childcare is a good role for you - this carries risk of spreading the virus since you'll be in direct contact with a group where people in it are spending time in large crowds and possibly arrested/detained by police. If you do childcare, try to keep groups small (like not more than a few families together) so that we're limiting cross-sharing in case anyone in the group gets infected with COVID. You'll also want to have a plan and prepare for any extenuating circumstances, like arrests. It might not make sense to do childcare unless there's a strong relationship between the person doing childcare and the kids, just in case kids are separated from a parent or caregiver for longer than planned. It's helpful to plan for childcare in a home, rather than at street actions themselves, just in case anything happens, or overnight arrangements need to be made. You'll also need to consider any legal implications in case a parent being arrested could jeopardize custody in any way, and how that shapes a plan for who can do childcare.

Create art, music, poetry, stories, graphics, and videos that speak on issues relating to police violence, criminalization of Black communities, and which focus on social justice: stories and images of resistance, solidarity, and resiliency. Create new chants, make signs, reach out to organizers to see what they need designed. Uplift and support the work of Black artists and people of color who are impacted by these struggles. Fund and invest in Black artists, cultural work, and ideas. This can expand audiences, share the work, and support Black artists to continue their creative practice. Cultural work is resistance!

Create a homebase for the evening, where folks who are protesting can take physical and emotional breaks indoors with others. Homebase can also be a great space to gather people working as emergency contacts or doing other types of remote support for protesters. Because of the pandemic, you might not be able to offer your literal home as an in-person homebase. You could instead support via online communication, be someone's emergency contact, hold health info, bail money, legal information, family/loved ones' information in case of emergency.

If you're white, or a non-black person of color, continue to reflect on your identity, and the history of racism and of aspiring ally-ship or solidarity, between your folks and black communities. Find like-identified folks to workshop with, and have conversations with family, friends, co-workers, and community members to help build awareness and solidarity in ending anti-black racism. Directly invest and re-distribute resources to Black people in your lives, Black organizations, Black-led justice initiatives, Black artists, and bailouts including those specifically focused on supporting Transgender, Nonbinary, Migrant, and Undocumented Black people. Utilize your online media to reflect black perspectives that are being impacted. Be a conduit on social media where black activists are speaking, engaging, agitating, and showing up. Showing up as a non-black POC means supporting to multiply the message.

Be a grounding or self-care buddy: speak and listen with someone before they leave for the march. Help them create a post-march grounding plan. Give them regular text check-ins from your home, and friendly reminders to drink water, breathe, etc. Remind and support them in taking care of their personal needs. Send emojis, memes, or whatever else would help the person, and ask that person to text you when they're home from the action. Here is an Herbal First Aid Aftercare guide for All Who Have Experienced Police Violence. (Created by several collaborators, affiliated with MASHH - Medicine For All Seeking Health and Healing.) If you are able to grow and brew plant medicine, use these important skills to increase its accessibility for those needing support (especially immune and respiratory systems) as they take critically needed action in the streets during the pandemic.

For friends who have physical pain, varying mobility, or mental health challenges and want to participate in the street actions, offer to help create a safety plan: what they might need before and after, what medications to bring (perhaps 2-3 days dosage), familiarize each other with the route, support them to have 2-3 contact people in case of emergencies or bail. Include self-care boundaries such as pre-determining amount of time spent on the street, what might help prevent or delay pain or anxiety, what signs to beware of re: onset of pain or mental health challenges, agreeing ahead of time to give themselves permission to exit early upon first signs of onset, what they will do/where they will go if triggered or hurt, what will definitely be comforting post-march that could be set up ahead of time. Additionally, in the case that pharmacies and stores close down, offer support with medical needs and assessments. If you can afford or can spare medical supplies, back up assistive devices, masks, &/or medications and share them with Black people and those deeply affected.

If you have a spiritual practice or practice community this is a great opportunity to come together and set an intention for your work together toward supporting the movement. That could look like opening the space up for others to join you in meditation, prayer, chanting, singing, centering, Jo Kata, altar making, etc. If you have physical space where you practice could also include opening the doors to invite in protesters who need rest, water, food, warmth. During COVID, consider hosting a socially distanced space where you provide food, emotional support, masks, hand sanitizer, gloves, etc.

When groups on the frontlines are using most of their resources to get people out on the streets, they need volunteers to provide IT support, collect supplies needed for demonstrations, answer phones, do data entry, upload, organize, and archive documentation. Check with groups about volunteer opportunities and organizational needs. If you have a car or bike, consider being a transportation hub for supplies, food, materials, and emergency supplies.

If you're an experienced educator, write curriculum and support other educators in talking about these issues. Host a conference call with teachers to strategize on how to talk with students about what's happening and how they can get involved. Pay and invest in Black lives, have Black community featured in your events and class if they are interested. Listen to Black students and be attuned to Black youth organizing efforts.

Use your skills. Are you experienced in organizing demonstrations, training security or marshalls, de-escalating conflict, providing jail support, being a legal observer, hosting trainings, designing social media graphics or doing other digital organizing? If so, you can create educational documents and support people one-on-one in building their skills before they head out to the streets.

Hold space to process for black, queer, trans, disabled, elder, undocumented, and migrant community members who are unable to attend protests for any reason, but are still deeply affected and policed. This includes sick, disabled, and those who struggle with mental health within black community.

Hold space and/or organize events centering the experiences of black people on probation or parole to talk about their experiences of over-policing and surviving state supervision, incarceration, and state violence.

Skype, zoom, call, text, visit, and show love for those who are in pain, injured in protest, and/or managing trauma from tear gas, police violence, physical, and emotional violence. Follow up with them regularly by affirming their needs and creating support networks. Remember that state violence impacts our spirit.

Help amplify the protests by circulating breaking news or visuals of actions, protests, and events from those in the streets, so they can reach a wider audience. Try to be extremely mindful to not share images of people's faces unless given permission to do so. The police can use both the image and the metadata produced by it to track down protestors, often with deadly results. If you need to, blur identifying details by using a clone stamp or covering their faces and identifying features with emojis. If you need to post a picture, take a screenshot of it and post that instead of the original in order to avoid metadata transferring with the image.

Translate documents and media, and support circulation about protests to non-English language press if you are multilingual. If asked, serve as an off-site spokesperson or media contact for protests. Offer to help write advisories and media releases, if needed.

Support access for people who are blind, deaf, and hard of hearing, along with neurodivergent people and those with a range of learning styles and disabilities. You could write captions for images to convey messages in photos and footage, and take other steps to make materials accessible.

If you have the skills or can do some research ahead of time, help your community plan to combat digital surveillance while people are on the streets. Learn how to safely use encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Jami, and walk people through how to install and use them. Get fabric and create DIY faraday bags to give to those heading out to the streets, talk people through disabling FaceID/Fingerprint and replacing it with a 6-digit PIN, help people disable iCloud or Google data syncing, and more. If you can, host a training or create social media-friendly guides to digital security at protests. While digital security is not foolproof and won't address the most pressing needs in this struggle, implementing some basic measures can be meaningful in countering surveillance by the state and others who wish to harm our movements.

Have conversations with those close to you. Discuss and take steps to implement plans for ending criminalization and state violence against black communities in your workplace, school, library, religious community, or family. Lean on your relationships of trust in those groups to shift conversations and change material conditions through changes in policies and power distribution within those spaces. Take risks and give up power in order to have these conversations and keep at it even when it's hard.

Take care of yourself! Self care is a revolutionary act. The criminalization of black communities, police violence against black people, and the devaluing of black lives is traumatizing. All of it can not only cause trauma but bring up vicarious trauma and sap our individual and collective energy to work for liberation. Step away from the computer, social media, or the tv and take time to remember what we're fighting for: the people we love and call community. Allowing yourself to feel and express rage, cry, and experience joy and pleasure in these times is not only critical but essential.

For more info and links to resources, go to http://tiny.cc/BTSresources.

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26 ways to be in the struggle, beyond the streets (June 2020 update)

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26 ways to be in the struggle, beyond the streets. (a list) June 2020 updates Contributors Ejeris Dixon, Piper Anderson, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Ro Garrido, Emi Kane, Bhavana Nancherla, Deesha Narichania, Sabelo Narasimhan, Amir Rabiyah, and Meejin Richart. Design by Alana Yu-lan Price. Accessible version adapted by Alejandra Ospina and Akemi Nishida.

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I wrote an essay almost a decade ago based in reflections of my own experiences with overwork and burnout and the experience of people I was supporting in various organizations. I never published it, always thinking there is more work to do on it. I keep going back to it and realized now is as good a time as any to share the excerpt below that I hope is helpful to people who are being impacted by their own burnout and overwork or that of someone else.
Symptoms and Feelings of Overwork
Below I describe some of the symptoms and feelings that emerge with overwork. Some I experienced, and some I have heard others share. Many are very closely related and intertwined, but I have bulleted them for the ease of those who are more likely to skim than read.

A desire to take on tasks and responsibilities in order to "be important" to the group or control outcomes.

High stress when thinking about tasks being performed by someone else who might do it a different way, or the group coming to a different decision that I would make.

Feelings of resentment: "I've done the most for this organization" or "I work harder than anyone else." Can include creating a damaging organizational culture of competition and hierarchy about who overworks the most.

Not respecting group agreements or group process because I feel above the process as the founder or director or hardest worker.

Feelings of competition with other organizations that are actually politically aligned or with other issues that I perceive are better supported or other activists I perceive as better supported.

Feelings of martyrdom.

Desire/need to endlessly be given credit for my work.

Taking on more and more work to feed the cycle of martyrdom, shut-down, and resentment.

Depression and/or anxiety.

Overwhelm and fear.

Close to anger and/or close to tears regularly-staying in a constant heightened state, never feeling relaxed.

Feeling like I "have to" do all these things, cannot see any way to do less work or have less responsibility.

Inability to let others take on leadership roles.

Hoarding information or important contacts so that others cannot rise to the same level of leadership, usually rationalized in some way.

A life or death feeling that it must be done the way I do it. An extreme version of this can result in leaders sabotaging the organization or project rather than recognizing that it might be time to step back and share leadership or take a break from leadership.

Paranoia and distrust about others in the organization or other people working in this kind of work. Feelings of being alone. Feelings of "me against [members of the organization/staff/everyone]."

Believing that if I don't do it, it won't get done (by coworkers/the organization/other organizations) so I have to accept more and more work.

Tension or anger that results in giving the silent treatment to others in the organization or former collaborators.

Exhaustion.

Overpromising and under-delivering, which can lead to feeling fraudulent and afraid of being caught so far behind.

Feelings of scarcity driving decisionmaking: "There's not enough money/time/attention."

Feelings of emptiness, anxiety, depression or aimlessness only alleviated by working. Not knowing how to do anything besides work. Not having fun or feeling relaxed on vacation or days off.

Having no boundaries with work-working all the time, during meals, first thing upon waking and last before sleeping, during time that was supposed to be for connecting with loved ones.

Dismissal of the significance of group process and overvaluation of how the group is perceived by outsiders such as funders, elites, and other institutions.

Low quality work product including under-serving vulnerable people seeking help from the organization.

Defensiveness about all of the above and unwillingness to hear critique. "I'm doing so much, I'm killing myself with work. How can you critique me? I can't possibly do any better/more!"

Shame about experiencing all of the above.
These feelings and behaviors, of course, are reasonable results of the conditions under which we do our work. We are steeped in norms of capitalism and white supremacy that encourage us to compete, distrust, hoard, hide, disconnect, and only understand our value as based in how others see us. Our work is often under-resourced in important ways. Many of us come to the work because of our own experiences of violence or harm, and doing this work can be emotionally triggering and exhausting. We come to the work to heal ourselves and the world, but we often do the work in ways that further harm ourselves and impede our contribution to the resistance. In the context of professionalized non-profit social justice "careers" there is rarely room to process our triggering experiences or admit what we do not know how to navigate our roles in organizations. We also carry around fallback attitudes and behaviors that can undermine our principles, especially when we are stressed out and over capacity. These are the times when we might act out gender privilege, race privilege, class privilege, and forms of authority based in status distinctions like educational attainment. Many of the symptoms and behaviors listed in the bullets above can correlate to systems of privilege.
Addressing the Impacts of Overwork and Burnout in Organizations
When we are experiencing toxic feelings and acting out, or when someone in an organization we are involved with is struggling in this way, there are things we can do to address what is going on. One thing that helps is having a language for what is going on and realizing it is not about one person being "bad" or about whether the organization will be run by this person or others, but instead recognizing a set of dynamics that are impacting the group and impeding the mission of the organization and the principles of the person or people who are struggling. When we realize how common these dynamics are, sometimes we can move away from shaming and blaming ourselves and others and toward acknowledging what is going on and supporting change. It is often hard to confront another person about behavior that is harmful, and it is often hard to be confronted about harmful behavior and listen to what is being said. The ideas below do not change that, but they may help individuals or groups create concrete steps to address the problems. My own experiences with these issues are based in horizontal organizations that operate using consensus decisionmaking, so they may be most appropriate to those situations. In my view, horizontal and consensus decisionmaking models are the most conducive to creating accountable, sustainable organizations that build lots of people's leadership and have the capacity to address the causes of burnout.
Steps Toward Balance for Organizations

Bring more attention to addressing the organization's internal problems. The organization cannot do its important work if it is falling apart inside, and it cannot do its work well if it is promising to do work it does not have the capacity to do. The internal concerns cannot wait until later because the giant need the organization exists to fill is probably not going to be reduced in the immediate future. This does not mean the organization's work needs to stop, but it might mean calling a moratorium on new projects and commitments so that the problem does not worsen, and so that people can carve out time for working on the internal problems. Organizations working on internal problems might seek any of the following resources:

Training on decisionmaking and consensus

Facilitation training

Facilitated discussions and training about how racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, trans phobia, classism and other systems of meaning and control impact organizational development and culture

Active listening training

Strategic planning provided by trainers using grassroots social justice-centered, not corporate, approaches

Reviewing workplans and job descriptions to figure out how to assign work fairly, assess workload and plan for reasonable workloads

Conflict mediation between particular people or groups with an outside facilitator who understands the organizations values and who the people in conflict trust and/or see as relatively neutral

Work on building transparency in the organization so that people know what each other are doing and members, clients, peer organizations and other partners know what the organization is doing

Training on giving and receiving direct feedback to reduce or avoid gossip and trash-talking and increase responsiveness and accountability to each other

Creation of regular evaluations systems where people can hear from each other about what is going well and what needs work early and often, rather than only when someone blows up or a controversy emerges

Make sure that new people who are entering the organization are being welcomed, given full background about what is going on, and clearly understand that they are being asked to fully participate in all decisions and ask any questions they need to in order to do so. Ensuring that everyone is getting access to what it takes to co-lead is essential to building leadership in more people. The organization and the people in it will be healthier if lots of people are leading, not just one or two.

Establish mechanisms to assess the workload and scale back. How many hours is each member working? Is it beyond what they are supposed to or can do healthfully? Did they actually track their hours for a week to make sure they are really aware of how much they are working? Assess the workload and scale back projects until it is under control. Create a moratorium on new projects until capacity expands. Enforce the moratorium-no one can unilaterally take on new work for the group or for themselves as a member of the group.

Focus on facilitation. How can the group's meeting culture foster well-being, good will, connection between members? Eating together, having check-ins with interesting questions about people's favorite foods, plants, movies, or politicizing moments may feel silly at first but makes a big difference. Bringing an attention to wellness into the organization means helping members be there as multi-dimensional people, rather than just as work machines. People need to build strong enough relationships to actually be able to talk about strong feelings and dynamics that come up in the work, or those dynamics will fester. The organization needs to build a culture that can cultivate supportive relationships.

Is everyone trained on how to facilitate meetings in ways that maximize the participation of all members of the group? Whenever there is a danger that just a few people will dominate an important conversation, use a go-around rather than having people volunteer to speak. Quieter members speaking can really change the dynamics.

As a group, recognize the conditions creating a culture of overwork. It is not one person's fault, and everyone may be feeling the pressures. Have one or many facilitated discussions about the pressures and dynamics that lead to overwork or to individual's dominating or disappearing. Create a shared language for the pressures the members may be under so they are easier to identify and address moving forward.

Include time and space for evaluation of how the group is operating regularly. This can include filling out questionnaires that allow people to provide feedback that may be hard to say in an open meeting, as well as having group discussions. Ask questions like: Do you feel clear about your role in the group? Is your workload manageable? Do you feel welcomed by and connected to the other members? What would improve your relationship to the other members and to the group as a whole? What kinds of support do you need to help you participate in this group? Are you noticing any dynamics that we could improve? What is going well in the group from your perspective? What are our greatest strengths?

Make sure that facilitation of meetings rotates, including agenda-making and other key leadership tasks.

Addressing Burnout and Overwork in Our Own Lives
In addition to creating organizational approaches to burnout, we can take action in our own lives when we recognize symptoms of overwork and burnout in ourselves. This requires us to work on changing behaviors that may be causing problems for us and for people around us. It also means we have to be willing to examine the root causes of our impulses to over-commit, to control, to overwork, and/or to disconnect. This is healing work aimed at helping us be well enough to enjoy our work, make sustained life-long contributions to the movements we care about, and receive the love and healing that is possible in communities of resistance. Above all, we must take a gentle approach to ourselves, avoiding judgment, recognizing the role of systemic violence in producing these responses in us, and patiently and humbly experimenting with new ways of being.

What the compulsive worker, over worker, control freak might need:

I need trusted friends who I can talk to about what is going on, who I can ask for honest feedback about my behavior, and who can help support me and soothe me when I feel afraid of doing something in a new way. For example, these people might remind me that even though someone else in the project will do this task differently, it is better to let them do it so they can build their skills and I can do something else with that time that has been missing from my life. These people might help remind me that it will be okay if I say no to a task or project. These friends can help me give love to the wounds underneath my compulsive, competitive, or controlling behavior, reminding me that I am worthwhile and my value does not hang on what the organization does, how much work I do, or what other people think of me.

I need supportive friends who can also point out compulsive, competitive or controlling behavior or ideas when they hear them from me or see me engaging in them. It can be difficult to receive such feedback, but it is truly a gift.

I need to attend to my defensiveness. When I get feedback from friends or collaborators about concerns they have, I need to resist the impulse to defend myself or critique the way they delivered their message. This feedback, including any anger they express while sharing it, is likely a sign that others are identifying my leadership. They are doing the hard and uncomfortable task of raising a concern because they see me as a person with influence. I can remember that, no matter how it is delivered, this feedback is an investment in me and in our work, an act of love. I can seek out a friend separately to process the difficult feelings that receiving this feedback brings up. The need to avoid acting out my defensiveness, or taking on a victim narrative, is especially important when I am in a position of privilege of any kind and/or have more developed leadership in the group or project.

If I hate everyone I'm working with or feel like I am going to die or like I have to stay up all night working, this is probably about something older or deeper in my life, not about the current work/workplace/organization/coworker. If my heart is racing, if I feel threatened, if I feel like I can't get out of bed, if I feel like I can't speak to my coworker or I'll explode, I am probably experiencing pain rooted in deeply in my life history. To get out of this reactive space, I need to devote resources to uncovering the roots of my painful reactions and building ways of being in them that don't involve acting out harm to myself or others (including the harm of overwork). The first step is recognizing that my strongest reactions may not be entirely or primarily about the work-related situation directly in front of me, and being willing to slow down and explore what is underneath.

I need a healing path for myself if I want to be part of healing the world. What that looks like is different for everyone, and could include individual or group therapy, 12-step programs (including Workaholics Anonymous), exercise, bodywork, spiritual exploration, art practice, ritual, and building meaningful relationships with family or friends. Whatever it is, I have to be in it in a loving and gentle way and be careful that it doesn't become another thing to try to be perfect at or to try to be the leader of. A healing path can, in addition to other things, help me increase kindness to myself, trust others, trust processes, and avoid scarcity mentality. It can be a place to practice doing things because they feel good rather than to accomplish something.

I need to stick around. It may be tempting to disappear altogether from a project or organization if relationships have gotten difficult and I am experiencing negative feelings about myself and others. If I want move toward a more balanced role in the organization, or even transition out altogether, I need to do so gradually and intentionally. I need to transfer relationships and knowledge and skills that I hold and make sure that my transition is done in a way that ensures the organization is healthy and my coworkers are supported.

Healing can happen, even inside relationships that have become difficult, if I am willing to admit to the dynamics that exist. This can be very hard if things already feel adversarial with coworkers, but it is really worth it to push past the fear. People often want to forgive, and having the truth of the dynamics acknowledged will create space for healing and forgiveness. It is okay to admit mistakes.

If I am in leadership and someone is yelling at me, it is likely that part of what they are saying is true. I don't have to believe all of it, and I can reach out to my support network to help process how it feels to be yelled at, but the most important thing for people in positions of privilege (like being staff rather than volunteer, or being a long-time leader or founder, or having privilege in a social identity) in an organization to do when someone is yelling at them is listen for the truth of the person's experience and feelings and acknowledge it. Just listening, rather than denying, defending or minimizing, is the first step to resolution.

If I have particularly strong feelings about one of my collaborators in the project or organization, if the dynamic with them is particularly tense, there is probably great love and respect in the relationship. This relationship may be the most charged because of how I admire this person for particular traits, because their articulation of what is going wrong in the organization or relationship are hitting home for me and I am feeling afraid. These relationships can heal, and it can help to try to remember what I love about this person, why I was drawn to collaborate with them, what I admire about their work in the world, why we both ended up in this kind of work, and what I might like our relationship to be like in the future.

Working with Joy
It is not surprising that most of us have distorted relationships to the world of work, including activist work. The conditions and systems we live under make work coercive, create severe imbalances in who does what kinds of work for what kinds of compensation and recognition, and make work a matter of survival. Working to change the world is extremely hard because the conditions we are up against are severe, we lose people from our communities regularly, and we are battling monstrous apparatuses of violence. We cannot blame ourselves for having distorted relationships to our work, even though we understand that healing from distorted relationships to work is vital for our movements and for our own well-being and survival. We must be compassionate to ourselves and each other as we practice transforming our ways of working together.

One of the most significant sources of suffering people face the communities I live and work in, which often exacerbates other forms of scarcity and vulnerability, is isolation. When we do work together to build resistance movements, we often break this isolation and experience the healing of being heard by others about our experiences, of helping each other out with basic survival needs, and of sharing inspiring imagination and little experiments with building the world we want to live in. Our connection to each other is vital for us as we experience the grief, heartbreak and rage of living under brutal conditions, witnessing and experience harm and violence, and enduring setbacks in our work for change. We need each other badly to share what is hard about the overwhelming suffering in the world and the challenge of doing work for change in dangerous conditions. Even in the face of the pain that being awake to contemporary conditions causes, I believe that all of our work for change can be rooted in the comfort and joy of being connected to one another, accompanying one another, and sometimes being inspired together or by each other. Rather than our resistance being rooted in connection, often our organizations struggle with cultures of overwork based in capitalist, sexist and racist norms of scarcity, fear, competition, insecurity, and disconnection. Putting more attention toward how we work together, and what it means to be together in new ways that defy harmful norms, is essential to building the huge, strong, inspiring, joyful movements we need. Reflecting deeply about our own orientations toward work, what it feels like to participate in groups, what ideas we are carrying around about leadership and productivity, is crucial to building a practice of working from a place of connection, inspiration and joy. This means intentionally creating ways to practice a new relationship to work with each other, and diving into the psychic structures underlying our own distorted experiences of working and finding methods of healing that create new possibilities for how we can be in our work lives.

Some useful resources for further learning about horizontal organizations and consensus decision making can be found here.

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Burnout: What It Is and Some Ways to Address It In Ourselves and In Organizations

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I wrote an essay almost a decade ago based in reflections of my own experiences with overwork and burnout and the experience of people I was supporting in various organizations. I never published it, always thinking there is more work to do on it.

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Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next)

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Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next)

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Praise for Normal Life:
"Should be read by everyone who is interested in challenging capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy." - Angela Y. Davis

"An invaluable resource not just for rethinking gender justice, but for rethinking how we do social justice organizing in general." - Andrea Smith, author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide

"This original, visionary, urgent, and brilliantly argued book significantly advances political theory and social movement criticism." - Urvashi Vaid, author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation

"Sharply political, deeply intellectual, broadly accessible, Normal Life is exactly what we need right now." - Lisa Duggan author of The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy

"This street-smart and theoretically sophisticated little book should be required reading for all would-be radicals looking for practical ways to build a better future." - Susan Stryker author of Transgender History

"Spade's book is personal, practical, and theoretical. It lays out a framework for a critical trans politics, and gives fresh analyses of immigration, legal reform, wealth distribution, and lesbian and gay politics-all buoyantly and optimistically aimed at a repaired world." - The Progressive

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Mutual Aid by Dean Spade: 9781839762123 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Praise for Normal Life: "Should be read by everyone who is interested in challenging capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy." - Angela Y. Davis "An invaluable resource not just for rethinking gender justice, but for rethinking how we do social justice organizing in general."

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The Chicago Locals Treating Gunshot Victims

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Care Not Cops: Youth Safety in a World Without Policing Session

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Care Not Cops: Youth Safety in a World Without Policing Session

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Click to watch the full recording of our session!

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Care Not Cops: Youth Safety Planning in a World Without Policing

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Shit's Totally FUCKED! What Can We Do?: A Mutual Aid Explainer

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Created by facilitator, Santera Matthews

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You may feel many of the same emotions-anger, fear, and shame-adult survivors do when disclosing to loved ones or reporting sexual assault. But if you're under the age of 18, there may be unique disclosing and reporting processes to consider because you are still legally a minor.

To talk this through disclosure and reporting with someone who is trained to help, you can connect with a support specialist on the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673) or chat online at online.rainn.org (y en español rainn.org/es). We're here to help you.

How do I decide if I should report what happened to me?

It's okay to feel nervous or scared about reporting assault. And whether or not you decide to tell someone what happened is always up to you. It's natural to worry about how it will affect your family or friends, how much you might have to retell your story, or to feel intimidated by interacting with law enforcement.

You also might have conflicting feelings about reporting the perpetrator, particularly if they were a family member, friend, or romantic partner. You might be worried about damaging other relationships in your life by reporting. Only you can decide what is best for your situation, and learning more about the reporting process can help you make an informed decision.

If you learn about the reporting process and decide that you're not ready to talk about what happened to you, that's okay. You do not need to feel guilty. Each person's experience and healing is unique, and what is right for others might not be right for you.

It's also important to know that, for minors, once you tell an adult, reporting may be out of your hands. Particularly, if the person you tell is considered a mandated reporter.

Who are mandated reporters?

A mandated reporter is an adult who is required by law to report to law enforcement or child protective services when they think that a minor or other vulnerable person may be experiencing abuse.

Though it's true that often teachers, medical professionals, and foster care workers are mandated reporters, the laws about who is a mandated reporter are different in every state. To find out what the laws are in the state where you live or where you experienced abuse or assault, go to RAINN's state law database. Select your state in the left box and select "Mandatory Reporting: Children" in the right box.

What is the reporting process like?

The short answer is that the reporting process is slightly different in every state. If you contact a local sexual assault service provider, they can give you more information on the laws in your state and resources available to you. Below are some questions you may have about the reporting process.
Does my parent or guardian have to be involved in the reporting process?
The laws about whether your parent or guardian will be notified when you file a report vary from state to state. However, if an investigation is opened based on your report, your parent or guardian will likely be notified.
How to report?
If you decide to report what happened to you, you have a few options to consider. It is important to pick a way to report that feels most safe for you.

Call 9-1-1. If you are in immediate danger, dial 9-1-1. Help will come to you, wherever you are. At that time, law enforcement may intervene if they believe you are in danger. They also may begin an investigation at that time depending on the events, and what you are able to tell law enforcement when they arrive.

Call the National Child Abuse Hotline. You can report what is happening to you directly through the National Child Abuse Hotline at 800.422.4453. They may direct you to call law enforcement in order to make the report.

Tell a trusted adult who will help you report the abuse. If the adult you tell is a mandated reporter, such as a teacher or a nurse, they will know how to report the abuse to the proper authorities. If the adult you choose to tell is not a mandated reporter, they might find more information on reporting to be helpful. Even if they aren't a mandated reporter, it could still be helpful to talk to a trusted adult to get their help with reporting. To brainstorm how you might have this conversation with a trusted adult in your life, reach out to RAINN through the online hotline.

Do I need to get a medical exam if I want to report?
No, you should not need to have a medical exam unless you choose to have one. However, there have been rare instances when a parent has consented to their child getting a forensic exam, even when their child has not consented to it. Parents have the legal right to make medical decisions for their children up to a certain age, and the exact age varies from state to state. This legal right also means that if you want an exam but your parent does not consent, you may not be able to have one. You can contact your local sexual assault service provider to learn more about the laws in your state.

There are two kinds of exams that investigators may want to have you do. One is a sexual assault forensic exam, in which they collect evidence from an assault that has occurred within the last 72 hours to be analyzed by a crime lab. The other is a pediatric medical exam, where a doctor is looking for other forms of evidence that they can collect-such as signs of injury or long-term abuse-even if it's been longer than 72 hours.
If I get a sexual assault forensic exam, do I have to report?
If you're under 18 and get a sexual assault forensic exam, the nurse is likely going to file a report of the abuse if she is a mandated reporter in your state. However, the report may not end up being investigated or continued further.
Should I get a sexual assault forensic exam, even if I don't want to report right now?
Sexual assault forensic exams are important for gathering DNA evidence that could be used later on if you choose to report. However, these exams can be physically invasive and emotionally difficult. You can usually only get a sexual assault forensic exam done within 72 hours of experiencing assault, so if you think you may want to report later on and feel that you are okay to undergo the exam, then it may be something to consider doing.
Can I bring someone in the room with me during a sexual assault forensic exam?
Yes, it is federal law that you are allowed to bring in a victim advocate with you during the exam. A victim advocate is someone who can be with you during the exam to make sure your rights are not being violated, and to help you understand the process. Some medical facilities may say that you can't bring anyone with you, but you can assert your right to have an advocate. You can ask your local sexual assault service provider to assign you an advocate for free.
If I report, will I be taken away from my family or foster family?
Again, this varies by state and also depends on how much physical danger the incident put you in, your relationship with the perpetrator, and whether the perpetrator is someone you live with. As a minor, if you report sexual abuse, law enforcement will decide whether they think it is safe for you to stay in your home during the investigation. For instance, if you are reporting abuse from someone you live with, they may try to find somewhere else for you to stay.
How many details do I have to tell?
You never need to share more details than you are comfortable with. However, the more you tell when reporting, the more likely it is that law enforcement will be able to move forward with the investigation. During an investigation, you will be asked to discuss details and repeat your story multiple times, and this process can be extremely uncomfortable and upsetting. It can help a lot to write out what happened to you beforehand so that you don't have to recall and relive as much in the moment when you are talking with law enforcement. You can also call the National Sexual Assault Hotline 800.656.4673 or chat online at online.rainn.org (y en español rainn.org/es) if you want to practice sharing your story anonymously before doing it with someone you know or with law enforcement.
What if I report and nothing happens?
It can be a difficult and frustrating experience if you go through the reporting process and do not receive justice for what happened to you. Remember that this doesn't invalidate what happened to you, and doesn't mean that you did anything wrong.
What if drugs or alcohol were involved?
Drug-facilitated sexual assault occurs in two ways: when the perpetrator takes advantage of a victim's voluntary use of drugs or alcohol or when the perpetrator intentionally forces a victim to consume drugs without their knowledge. This can lead to a lot of issues related to reporting, such as a difficult time remembering details, feeling at fault for what happened, and fears of getting in trouble for using drugs or alcohol.

What if I willingly used alcohol or drugs, and then was assaulted? If you used drugs or alcohol before experiencing assault, that doesn't mean you chose to be sexually assaulted. Whether these substances were in your system or not, you deserve to feel safe and to be able to make choices over what happens to your body. You cannot give consent if you're incapaciated by drugs or alcohol.

Will I get in trouble for using drugs or alcohol if I report? It's natural to feel worried. People may ask you questions about any drug or alcohol use that make you feel like it's your fault. But remember, using drugs or alcohol as a minor doesn't mean you deserved for this to happen. There may be some protections in place to prevent you from getting in trouble for drug or alcohol use if you report-such as patient privacy laws in medical facilities-but there have still been instances in which individuals who reported have faced consequences for using drugs or alcohol as a minor. Your local sexual assault service provider may have a better idea of how these laws are enforced locally.

What if I don't remember everything? It is normal for it to be difficult to recall details of any sexual assault, particuarly a drug-facilitated sexual assault. Though memories of what happened might be fragmented, you can still report what occurred. Fewer details can sometimes make it less likely that an investigation will be opened, but evidence of drug-facilitation can sometimes be collected through a sexual assault forensic exam.

What if I want to disclose to someone before deciding if I want to report?
Telling someone that you've experienced sexual violence is 100% up to you. There is no one-size-fits-all that applies to survivors-each person's story and healing journey are unique. Remember, deciding to tell your story doesn't have to mean sharing every detail-it's your decision to tell as little or as much as you're comfortable with. You can find more information and resources about disclosing on RAINN's page on telling loved ones about sexual assault.
What if someone reacts badly when I tell them?
You deserve to be listened to and supported when you choose to tell your story. However, the reality is that sometimes the conversation will not go the way you hope. Even with the best intentions, someone may not know how to react. That's why it can be useful to practice how you want to tell someone about what happened. We can also help you think about who might be a safe person to talk to. To talk through your options with someone who is trained to help, you can connect with a support specialist on the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673) or chat online at online.rainn.org (y en español rainn.org/es).

Reporting can be an uncomfortable process, and may not be something you want to pursue right now-and that's your decision to make. You may hear positive or negative stories from other survivors about their reporting process. But just remember that each person's story is different, and what was right for them might be different from what's right for you. There is no one healing journey, and whether you choose to report now, later, or never, is up to you.

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You may feel many of the same emotions-anger, fear, and shame-adult survivors do when disclosing to loved ones or reporting sexual assault. But if you're under the age of 18, there may be unique disclosing and reporting processes to consider because you are still legally a minor.

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from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective

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Introduction to Restorative Justice Session 

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Introduction to Restorative Justice Session 

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Click to watch the full recording of our session!

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Learn how to get involved with the Solitary Gardens

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TransformHarm.org | A Resource Hub For Ending Violence

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TransformHarm.org is a resource hub for ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. You can use what is here, and submit recommendations.

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We send a few emails a week with information about jobs in restorative justice, RJ in the news, new web resources about RJ, and upcoming RJ events in New York City.

Sign up here and let us know what you don't want to get. And you can always update your preferences later.

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Books About Restorative Justice - Restorative Justice Initiative

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We send a few emails a week with information about jobs in restorative justice, RJ in the news, new web resources about RJ, and upcoming RJ events in New York City. Sign up here and let us know what you don't want to get. And you can always update your preferences later.

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Credit goes to Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, @radicalroadmaps

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Credit goes to Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, @radicalroadmaps

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Credit goes to Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, @radicalroadmaps

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Credit goes to Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, @radicalroadmaps

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Credit goes to Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, @radicalroadmaps

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Credit goes to Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, @radicalroadmaps

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Created by facilitator, Bilphena Yahwon

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Over 50 texts and books for thee free free!

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By our Intro to RJ facilitator Bilphena Yahwon!

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By folx from the cohort! *tears*

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Credit goes to Emily Simons, @inkyantics

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Jeanne: Welcome to Queering Left, a podcast from Crossroads Fund. I'm Emmanuel Garcia. I'm Jeanne Kracher and we are the hosts of Queering Left. Crossroads Fund is a public foundation in Chicago. We provide funding to community organizations, activists and movements who are working for racial, social and economic justice. For more information, please visit our Web site: crossroadsfund.org.

Our guests on this episode of Queering Left are Eisha Love and Benji Hart discussing the carceral state and organizing efforts towards defunding and dismantling the prison industrial complex.

Eisha Love is a Black, transwoman from Chicago's Westside who was incarcerated in Cook County Jail for nearly four years after being arrested for defending herself in a violent confrontation.

Benji Hart is an author, artist, activist and educator living in Chicago. He was most recently an adult ally organizer with the No Cop Academy Campaign.

Eisha and Benji discuss the violence of the carceral system, the experience of being criminalized, and what building a healthy community free of police and prisons would look like.

Eisha: My name is Eisha Love. I identify by pronouns as she and her.

Benji: My name is Benji. Thank you so much for having me, for having both of us. I'm a really big fan of everybody at the table and I go by any pronouns said with respect and identify as a Black,gender non-conforming, femme person.

Emmanuel: And just a little follow up to that. When did you first start identifying as either trans, queer, gender nonconforming,

Eisha: Well, a woman that happens to be transgender. I started identifying as trans, maybe more so I'd say queer because I was discovering myself. And when you're discovering yourself more so, you kind of like finding out who you really are, what you want to be, who is this person inside that you're trying to discover, you know, who you're going to become? I will say I was queer in my younger days but as I got older, I kind of discovered that I wanted to be this beautiful, bright, Black transwoman. So that's how I came about my transition.

Benji: I came out as gay when I was 14, so ninth grade, and I actually don't know when I started using the term queer. I know that sort of as as I grew in my identity and began to see my identity as more political and not just individual, gay became less and less relevant and queer felt more empowering to me. As I began to explore my attraction of other people, I realized I wasn't just attracted to cis men. So that also became an important part of identifying as queer for me but my gender identity also came a lot later. I've really only been identifying as gender nonconforming or not cis for three years or four years. So it's been like a much later part in my process as well, that I actually started questioning my gender identity. I think I was questioning my sexuality pretty early on but that's the language that I had been exposed to at that time. So I think it took some growth and some moving through the world and through other circles to be like, oh, I think there's more going on here than just my sexuality or just my sexual identity.

Jeanne: We decided to do this this series, these discussions with with queer activists, with queer folks who are working in struggle around lots of different issues because of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. One of the things that we'd like you to talk about if you can, is when did you first learn about Stonewall and how did it impact you when you heard about it?

Eisha: Recently, I've become a fan of watching the Marsha P. Johnson documentary. It kind of opened me up to understand more because people is like, OK, this is this person. I'm like, wow, I never knew she was. But learning about her and see her publicized on the internet and things like that. She kind of opened a door up to me to kind of understand what Stonewall really was how was this was discovered. I don't really know too much since then I'm interested in trying to figure out what was really going on within a documentary. I'm saying because now then today's times, you've got to really kind of do your research and I kind of know that now. I'm saying you just can't really say things. You've got to go into research and finding out what it's about and like what went on in those times. So, yeah, that's when I really found that, I'm saying there was a lot of people were really trying to stand up for their identity, as was going on today. As trans women, we kind of going through situations and seeing similarities. So, yeah, that's what I feel like I kind of discovered where it started from.

Benji: Again, similar, I think coming out at 14, there was so much history I didn't know and just so much about the larger queer world that I didn't know. Definitely, I have a lot of early memories of feeling like being Black and being queer were diametrically opposed to each other and feeling like I couldn't be both at the same time and. That to be one was to negate the other. It was very confusing to to be navigating that as a very young, Black, queer person. It was actually voguing in the ballroom scene was the first time that I realized not only that Black queer people existed but that we exist in large numbers and have our own culture and have our own community and have our own history. So for that reason, ballroom was really revolutionary for me to discover or learn about for the first time around around when I was 16. I really didn't learn about Stonewall until years later. For me, it was like a similar kind of a feeling, I think, as when I first learned about the ballroom scene but on like an even larger scale where I was like, oh, this Black, queer trans thing goes back even further than I thought. The roots go even deeper than I thought. This event that I kind of vaguely knew about as like queer people fighting for their rights and beginning the the gay rights movement actually was started by Black, immigrant, brown, trans and gender nonconforming people in the same way that the ballroom scene was and actually our history is at the core of all this stuff, not just this one part of it, but literally at the center of all of it, I think was so empowering and so exciting for me to learn as a as a young Black queer person.

Emmanuel: How do you see your own liberation, activism work connected to the participants? I mean, you mentioned Marsha P. Johnson and the ballroom scene. Like, how do you see your life connected to that?

Eisha: Certain situations, us as trans women, we go through so many obstacles in life, just the ups and downs, just finding ourselves, just being who we are. Getting criticized, getting ridiculed, people not liking us and just all the things that I think that people misunderstand that we are still human, that we tend to lash out and do some crazy things. I would definitely say today, I did lash out as a Black, trans, angry trans woman, you know, of just being tried, of being tired, of being tired, of just people is picking on me for me just being me, you know? So I think that's something there that I think there's going to always have a connection because a lot of girls, they always say to me, like, well, Eisha, I understand what you go through because I'm saying I have those moments. I'll be so angry and I just don't know. You just get ticked-off. I want girls to understand it's ok because we went through so much. Sometimes people just don't understand you get tired and you just lash out on a person and you don't understand it. We need counselling, you need someone to talk to, soothing you a little bit. I think that's the connection I think that we will always have.

Benji: My story is very different than Eisha's, which will get into, I'm sure. I think for me in some ways, it's really painful that things that Marsha P. and Sylvia Rivera were standing up for in 1969, we're like still fighting for and still lacking and still, you know, needing mass organizing around. At the same time, it makes me feel very rooted and very grounded to be like we are part of a tradition. We are part of a legacy. We're also carrying a fight forward and not letting it drop and not letting it fall or be forgotten. I think part of what's important about coming into your identity as a queer person is that I think queerness pushes us to understand our identities, not just as individuals and not just it's not just about me being myself or getting to live my life freely as an individual. But for me, as a queer person and gender nonconforming person, a Black person, a femme person, like when you start layering everything onto it, for me to be free, for me to live my life in a full, healthy, happy way which I deserve, which I have the right, all of these systems have to change. By me as a multiple oppressed or a multiply marginalized person to demand freedom actually brings freedom for millions of people. It is actually the demands that I'm making, the demands that you're making, while they might be about our individual personhood. When we understand them through a queer lens, it's like, oh, but by me getting this thing, everybody's getting this.

Eisha: So like, you're helping others. I identif by putting myself on the line to help others. I get what you're saying. I definitely understand. Definitely. That's right. Because that's how it goes, in a sense.

Jeanne: Eisha, you mentioned and we know as part of your life story that you are a formerly incarcerated person. Can you explain, as well as you can in this brief time that we have together, how the police and criminal justice system failed you and failed to protect you or serve you justice?

Eisha: Well, that's a compound question. You said, how did the police fail to protect me first? Let's get into that. Well, they failed to protect us on many situations. Just off the strength of just they really don't follow the guidelines of how they treat us like. Sometimes they always go off already having a pre-understanding of how to go about treating us based off already not liking us. So they just like go off being ignornant. How you been this person of the law and having me and want me to follow the rules of what you demanded me to do but you treat me a certain type of way. You know, so I just feel like overall I'm saying we mistreated in a sense of justice off my identity because of how I choose how I want to identify myself as, that's already cruelty. It makes me feel a certain type of way off the bat. I feel like the mistreatment came about is just them not respecting me for who I am. That's one now to say how the criminal justice system failed me. Well, I will just say for one, I'm sitting in prison for four years without a trial is a lot. I think for an average case, they say that you should be sent to jail to find some type of understanding of something coming about within your case within 18 months, in a sense. But for me, four years. Within those four years of me sitting there, I wasn't really aware of what was going on while I was in there and I've been saying on and on and it's supposed to be in a memoir or a book of telling my insight of what happened in prison. Now, me being in prison, I have multiple, multiple public defenders. I had four public defenders within four years. How is it either one of those public defenders going to really go in to defend me the right way if they're not really on my case for a long period of time? So it was like I kept consistently coming in getting different public defenders, different public defenders, different public defenders. So within a sense of my eyes, I had no hope. I feel like they failed me in multiple ways because in a situation of having a public defender, it was a situation in the midst of in my case that they tried to say that they upgraded my case. Let me just break it down for everyone, I had a court appearance to come to court and it was just out the blue. So later I come to find out, me having a lawyer that took my case pro bono, Dan Cohen. I love this man so much. Thank you. He came in and took my case and he came and gave me a detail and say, you know what Love, they told you that you had a court appearance on that situatio but come to find out, he was the reason why his leg was amputated So he he was the particular reason why in this situation his leg was amputated but they pinned it on me. Well, she don't know, so let's upgrade the charges. For them to do that, it made it look like the states and the justice system, really don't really have hope for no one. They just looking for any small thing to hold you down, in a sense.

Jeanne: I know you've been involved, Benji, with abolition movements. How as a queer activist, how do you sort of see those connections between what's going on for queer folks, transgender folks in the system and how abolition main intersect with that? Could you talk about some of your work around that?

Benji: I'm thinking a lot right now about Lillian Blanco in New York. Tomorrow, from the day that we're recording, tomorrow, November 14th, is Trans Day of Resilience. This year I wrote a poem for that event, that national event, in honor of Layleen Polanco, who is a Dominican afro-latina transwoman who was found dead in her jail cell in Rikers Island this past Pride month in June of 2019. Her story is so incredibly painful cause she's gone and was taken from us by the prison system. Again, thinking about how all our identities layer together and how when we demand justice for the for the most marginalized folks, it blows open the system in ways that actually create justice for everybody, not just for one particular small group of people.i Layleen was held for two months in Rikers in solitary confinement because she didn't have five hundred dollars for bail. She got picked up on a misdemeanor, but they held her because she had previous prostitution charges that she hadn't shown up to court for and so they said, oh, because you miss these other court dates, we're holding you. She had epilepsy so it is believed that she had an epileptic attack while she was in solitary and that's how she died. A Black, queer, trans immigrant woman, who did sex work, was a part of the house scene, she was in the House of Extravaganza, disabled, dies in the prison system. It's actually incredibly predictable as painful and fucked up as it is at the same time. It's incredibly predictable. The bond system failed her. The way we criminalize sex work failed her. Poverty and gentrification in New York failed her. The overfunding of prisons and the defunding of housing and schools and all these other resources that support folks failed her. For me, I don't just see trans liberation as like a part of or connected to prison abolition. Again, I see it as the core of prison abolition. Stonewall is such an important example of that. It's like actually, you know, the queer liberation movement in this country begins with people fighting the police, begins with people rioting against the police and saying who I am, existing as I am, is not a crime. Folks weren't just asserting that about their identities as the trans women of color. They were also asserting it about their identities as sex workers. They were also asserting it about their identities as poor and street based and unstabley housed folks. Folks were asserting all their personal identities and being like, it's not a crime to be who I am and it's not a crime to be struggling through the things that I'm struggling through. I think for me, as a queer person who very strongly identifies as an abolitionist, I do think for me that's something that's still missing in a way from a lot of the conversations that we're having and a lot of the organizing that we're doing is talking about how abolition is inherently a queer project and how queer and trans people are at the heart of abolition from jump, from day one. Sometimes I feel like we have to assert or remind people that abolition is queer work and I think it should be the other way around. Especially given how many folks impacted by the system and how many folks who are actively organizing and struggling against the system are trans and queer people, specifically trans and queer people of color. I think a lot of us who are doing the work know that in the back of our minds that it's queer folks who are running this. But how often do we actually say that and how often do we actually acknowledge that? How often do we actually say to fight against the police and prison system is inherently to do queer work? I think for me that's missing from a lot of the conversations that we're having.

Eisha: I think that I don't like the fact that they only give one girl a platform. I want all girls to have platforms. I want any girl that have a situation where they have been impacted by the justice system or went through a situation that they felt like it was wrong, share it. That says a lot, you know, as you you you you. All of these you's create a bigger you, you know. I think that's the impact. So I don't like the fact that I was given just a platform, the fact that everything I have went through, I understand that situation. I'd like to give us the other girls. I want what you went through to be expressed too. I don't want, well, her story was more glorified than yours so you're not really, no. We all have situations. We all go through a situation in life and we feel like we want someone to understand what we're going through. So I really think that's a project that someone needs to do. I think I need to really get into it with all of the girls that I really click with, you know, share their stories. I really think that's dope. It would say a lot to the justice system looking at that, like, well, these girls wouldn't just be saying they went through these situations, like now we need to re-evaluate ourselves.

Benji: And your story is so important. Stories like Lean's are so important, like we need to tell those stories and we're so blessed to have you here to tell it. You know what I'm saying? And I feel you, because at the same time, it can also create this culture of like, wow, this horrible thing happened to Eisha rather than like I mean, this is happening everywhere.

Eisha: That's what I'm trying to make the point of.

Emmanuel: Benji, I think you're talking a little bit about this question that we've been asking different people. We've asked it of immigrant rights activists, anti-Blackness, youth activists, around how different movements fail to look at intersectionality in some ways. They either scorn queer and trans activists and don't think of queer and trans activism as a very specific thing and that's by the mainstream LGBT community. Right, like gay marriage, same sex marriage, things like that. How do you think the prison abolition movement can kind of take on what I think that what you're talking about, which is to see the struggle as a queer and trans struggle.

Benji: I think part of that we're already in the right place and having the right conversation, because I think part of that is actually teaching history and teaching queer and trans history as abolitionist history and the other way around. If we're talking about the history of the police and prison system, we're talking about homophobia and transphobia. If we're talking about the history of queer and trans liberation, we're talking about struggles against policing and incarceration. So I think always asserting that is a really important part of the political education that I think is not not there. Like there's no reason we should be having conversations about queer and trans identities that aren't talking about policing and incarceration. There's no reason that we should be having conversations about abolition that aren't talking about how trans and queer people are are impacted and have always been impacted by the police and prison system. I think there's a lot to unpack in sort of why some of those conversations are missing. I feel like I don't even have a full answer myself. I'm thinking a lot right now of the No Cop Academy campaign, which is the campaign that I was a part of and really proud. The 18 month long campaign here in Chicago to shut down the construction of the ninety five million dollar police academy that folks are still trying to build in West Garfield Park. A thing that we've debated with each other or discussed a lot with each other behind the scenes, was was that a queer campaign or not? We never called it that. We never said, this is a queer campaign. This is a queer led campaign. This is a coalition of queer folks fighting the construction of this cop academy but it a thousand percent was. Every adult ally who was at the core of that campaign was queer and/or trans and damn near every youth organizer. The youth who were were at the front and leading that campaign were all damn near, I don't want to speak for everybody's identity, but damn near all of them were queer and trans youth.A lot of folks, the first thing they're gonna say is not oh, it was a queer and trans led campaign. I would argue that it was but a conversation that we struggle with behind the scenes is well, how do we call it that in retrospect? Why didn't we call it that in the moment when we were organizing it? How do we understand that, now that the campaign is over and wrapped up, what are our reflections on it as the queer and trans people that organized it and that we're a part of it, did we do enough to name it that way? Or why didn't we name it that way? I think we have our own reflecting as a coalition on that to be like, yeah, this was gay as hell, like this campaign was very gay. Why didn't we call it that or why doesn't everybody necessarily know that about it?

Jeanne: It's interesting because when we did the little segment with the Act Up folks, there was this whole part of the discussion where they were saying, you know, it kept being called this queer or gay movement but we didn't think of it as a queer or gay movement because we were dealing so much with intersectionality and how HIV effected women and how it effected different communities differently. The media always called us gay activists And it was much broader than that. The intersectionality wORD didn't really exist back then. So it's kind of interesting that you raise the opposite of that a little bit. You also very clearly both talked about the beginnings of Stonewall and who were out there fighting and who started it, who were out there fighting in the streets: transgender people of color. This idea that that is really the spark for the contemporary, whatever you want to call it, gay liberation, queer movements, the things that sort of got people activated and in the streets. We're still dealing with, as Manny talked about, a community that at the fiftieth anniversary celebrates those people but every other day of the year still sort of rejects those folks in the sort of broader gay community. How do you sort of discuss or how do you reconcile bringing these issues, these other issues, whether it's prison abolition or violence against transgender folks, or how do you reconcile that with how the direction of the gay movement?

Eisha: I think what we're doing now is bringing more awareness is one. Like I said previously, just sharing our stories, as I say, as Black trans women. Of those situations that we consistently keep going through as far as being murdered, I guess, being aware of your surroundings. Who you have around you, who you keep in your presence, in a sense of being safe. Just to bring more awareness. I will say more so just consistently keep speaking on it and just kind of keep awareness about it. I think that's something I can really just say the most.

Benji: I think I would add that, because I think about this a lot. I think we often talk about it as a disconnect. Like, how can we be celebrating Stonewall and we're still calling the police on sex workers? How can we celebrate Stonewall and we're still kicking poor, Black, queer and trans young people out of Boystown. How does that make any sense? The older I get and the more I observe those discrepancies or those contradictions, the more I'm like, oh, this is actually on purpose. It's actually not like people are overlooking. It's actually a way of sanitizing and of actually taking away the radical potential of really understanding that history. I think about this with Martin Luther King all the time. People love to put Marin Luther King's name in their mouth but they don't love to talk about how he was actively anti-capitalist and that he was advocating for poor folks. He was not advocating for the middle class. All the people who are calling his name out to fight for people who have privilege. Martin Luther King was talking about abolishing capitalism. Martin Luther King was talking about ending U.S. imperialism. He was deeply anti-war. Martin Luther King was fighting for poor folks, not just Black, poor folks, but all poor folks. Where is that in the legacy that we're celebrating? I think it's actually on purpose that people want to uplift these radical figures without actually talking about what they was talking about because you actually take away the power of those stories when the original storytellers aren't there to keep you in check. Which is again, why think like your story and you actually being here to tell it is so important because I could put your name in my mouth and be like, you know, Eisha has this amazing story and in Eisha's name, I say we should do this. You aren't there to be like, I'm not about that. Do not speak for me, Benji. You know what I'm saying? So I think piggybacking off of what you saying that I think the story is important. The history is important but also who's telling it is important and to what ends because we could actually be talking the same history but trying to take it in really different directions. I think the intentionality of how we share the history is so important.

Eisha: It should go in all different directions as well. Because history gravitates to people in different ways.

Benji: That's true.

Emmanuel: The people who benefited from those struggles and that radical struggle. They benefited from it and then they look back and they don't actually see what the radical struggle was. They just see that they benefited from it and then they sanitized it. Then there's a whole new group of people who are marginalized, who are struggling to get more and they forget about that. You recently wrote, Benji, about the Laquan McDonald case, specifically writing about Jason Van Dyke, who murdered Laquan McDonald. That his conviction is not a step towards prison abolition. Could you explain more what that means or what you meant by that? I mean, people can read it, by the way.

Benji: I really appreciate this question because it's, I think, one of the most complicated questions in abolition, frankly. And it's one that I'm still struggling with and I feel like I don't have a clear answer on, but I'mma try and dig into it anyway. I did write this piece, the one that you're referring to, about specifically convicting Jason Van Dyke of the murder of Laquan McDonald. And what does it mean to be an abolitionist and like fighting for people to go to jail? Like, what does it mean to say you're a prison abolitionist and be fighting to get certain people, in this case, police officers who have killed black people to get locked up? I think this is one of the biggest points of tension in, at least a lot of the abolitionist circles that I'm in, and it's not a question that I think we debate in the open enough because I think we actually need to debate it. I think we actually need to hash it out. For me, I think where I come from it it's really hard for me on an emotional level to like really rally myself to organize to lock somebody up even when I think they have done something incredibly violent and incredibly harmful. For me, there's also actually a political strategy in saying I'm not going to use my energy to try and lock up every individual police officer that's caused harm. I'm going to use my political energy to organize for the abolition of the police system because even, I think, even if we lock up every police officer that's ever done something harmful or violent, if that were possible to do, if we could lock up every single one, the system that empowered them to do those things actually remains untouched. Even in some ways is further empowered because people believe the system works. If you do some wrong, you get locked up when we know overwhelmingly, that's not actually what's happening. So that's where I come from in my personal value or at least personal struggle with fighting for convictions, even for police officers. I will say that this is a conversation that I have had with other Black folks, specifically Black women, Black femme and queer organizers who feel very differently than me and who would wholeheartedly disagree with me. A lot of what those folks bring to the table is, well, what about honoring what family wants? What about honoring what community is demanding? What about creating justice with the means that we have? Yes, we're fighting for a world without police and prisons, but we don't have that world right now and there needs to be consequences for the harms that are being done to the most oppressed among us by this oppressive system. I think for me, a really important lesson in that was when I wrote that piece before the conviction came down and the day that Jason Van Dyke actually was convicted, Black Lives Matter put out a call and was like, you know, we need people to come downtown and support. I was free that day and I was like, you know, let me go downtown and support. I went to city hall and I marched with folks through downtown and it was this incredible moment of Black joy because so many Black people, specifically Black young people, fought hard for there to be justice for Laquan McDonald with the means that they had and with the systems in place and just feeling the joy of that moment. It was a historic moment. It was like the first time in 15 years or something that a police officer in Chicago had been convicted of murder. No one could deny that that was a historic moment and that it was Black organizing that made it happen. Just feeling the energy of that moment and seeing the support, especially from other Black folks in the city, that that moment brought, I really had to be like, OK, you know, who am I fighting for? Or, you know, whose demands am I listening to as an abolitionist? That, like, really challenged me and is still challenging me. Even though that's my answer is I cannot or at least I have a hard time getting excited about fighting for convictions. I also can't deny the other frameworks and other values that other directly impacted people, other Black folks, other folks in the abolitionist movement are bringing.

Emmanuel: Eisha, when you're interviewed, you usually get asked about incarceration and your advocacy work. What are some things that you'd like people to know about you outside of those kind of narratives?

Eisha: Well, first. I want them to know that I'm an Aries, a very kind hearted and caring person. I stay to myself. The things I was saying before I became really having the platform to be advocate and share my voice, to share my story, really, I think I was really into modeling. I was really confident with who I was. Mom always told me I'm saying, you know, if you was whoever you're gonna be to, she was the mother that was kind of like, well, I know what you is but I don't know how to deal with the situation. She said, whatever you is, you best to be the best that it. Always hold your head up high, proudly of what you're doing. So as a model, I felt like that was me. I stood proudly of who I was, so I always wanted to be a model. I just love fashion. I love fashion. I'm not into fashion as much now because I got a lot of situations and things going on right. I think that that's really it, outside of the things that I really stay focused on now because I really think sharing my story is a main thing that I think I need to continue to do more of.

Jeanne: So, Benji. You're known for your time in Chicago's ballroom scene as an excellent vogue dancer and you also have an amazing academic credentials. Can you talk a little bit about how you kind of make sense of the academic credentials and the spaces where people don't have maybe the same access or educational backgrounds and just talk a little bit about how you navigate all that?

Benji: I'm suburban kid, I grew up middle class in the suburbs in western Massachusetts. So I come from a privileged background, from jump. I started actively going to the ballroom scene in New York and participating in New York when I was 18, right after I graduate high school. So it's kind of thrown into that environment. Pretty young and just a lot of things were thrown at me that as a very new to the game 18 year old, I was not ready for. I'm lucky I'm still here because I tell people all the time I could have gotten into a lot more trouble in those early days than I did. I'm lucky that I'm standing here before you in one piece. That being said, I think, I was in the ballroom scene before I went to college. I was I was voguing and I was going to balls and in the scene before I was a student in college. In a lot of ways, ballroom was teaching me some things before I had the academic background but then I kind of had to mix those two things together as I went. I think academic training, no matter what your identity is, because I'm a middle class person but not everybody who's middle class or wealthy has, you know, there are folks of all class backgrounds that have access to academic training and vice versa. So I think academic training is privilege and it's like any type of privilege you need to mitigate it and you need to whenever you come into any space, it needs to be like aware of it and check yourself about whether your voice is getting more weight than someone else's just cause of a credential that you have. Because that's all it is, is a credential. It doesn't mean you know anything more than anyone else or you understand.

Eisha: Yes, I could definitely speak on that.

Benji: OK, so now I'm definitely going to have to loop back to you. Something I think a lot about is Miriame Kaba says that we actually need lived experience and political education. That in some circles we kind of fetishize or hold up people with the knowledge and the training and the big words. But in other circles, we can hold up people with lived experience who haven't actually had opportunities to put their lived experience into a political framework or a larger historical context. And actually you need both.

Eisha: Could you stop and repeat that once again. For the world, for the people, you know. The activist that's out here in the world that say there we are for the other young and up and coming.

Benji: Okay. See? It is really complicated because I think, and this is what Miriame is really talking about, both can be harmful, potentially. That to kind of say, oh, you know, we're only centering people who know all the big words and have all the fancy degrees and credentials, can lead to some really fucked up and harmful and misguided dynamics, misguided organizing. But so can you sort of centering folks who are survivors or centering folks who are the direct recipients of harm or directly impacted communities without political education and without framework and without clarifying as an organization or as a coalition, what are our values? What are we channeling these experiences towards? How are we understanding these experiences in the larger context and the larger political fights that are happening and that actually we need both. So all that is to say, I think, my academic background is a privilege. When we're aware of both the the privileges or the resources that we bring and the things that we're lacking, which like I've never been incarcerated, so like I'm lacking that experience. I have no idea what life is like on the inside so I cannot speak that in any type of way. When we come to the table with an awareness, both of the resources that we're bringing and the resources that we're lacking, then we can actually piece together like, OK, you have some lived experience that I cannot speak to, I have studied some things and have some experience reading, learning, and talking about some things that I can bring to help kind of make some sense of that. Let's bring it together.

Eisha: We both bring something to the table.

Benji: We both bring something to the table rather than thinking whoever has the most academic training, that's the person who should be at the front. Nope, that's not how it should work.

Eisha: Well, that's what's common. I'm just a survivor here to tell my story and connect to some of the people that can understand where I'm coming from. You're here to share your story and whatever else you entail, whatever your partial, whatever you want to tell, for people to connect to you. That usually, what I would think, I'm saying we come together for groups and organize. That's how I feel this should be. I For a person that having went through a situation, can sometimes sympatheize like I can just imagine. Despite, if you would have had help, how far you probably willing to go. Sometimes it's not always just to be just looking as a person just should be just criticize off that in a sense.

Benji: And for me, I think you're hitting on the head because, we say it a lot but I don't think we actually practice it a lot, that everybody has things to learn. Everybody has things to bring to the table but also everybody has things to learn. I think that's like a very simple, very simple cliche, even, thing to say. But how are we actually practicing that and how are we actually coming to the table with the humility to be like I have, however many degrees and I have things to learn.

Eisha: That's called humbleness. Not a whole lot of us are humble. This is a sad thing to say. I'm humble because I went through so many trials and tribulations in life. I'm just blessed to be here. Just continue to tell my story, Lord, and help others and maybe even grasp the situation that they don't have to go through, a situation like myself. That's I'm just good for that, you know. I continue to keep doing it despite how others look at me and judge me. Look, I'm here to help the people that's not judging me, OK? Looking at me and as a blessing, not something I have to be this high, mighty God because ain't nobody God, you're ain't God because you tell them the story. You get some. Come on baby.

Emmanuel: I think some of it too is like I just kind of what you're both talking about, for me, it's about representation. How in these moments when you see more people of color being represented and, you know, our first Black president and you have our first Black lesbian mayor, there's all these ways in which representation can mask class or privilege, what we know and what our political education is, what our lived experience is. We don't openly talk about that. I think if we do that, then we can identify who is on our side. Who is in our movement? Who is part of our movement? Who do we want in our movement? All of those kind of things.

Benji: Cause Lori Lightfoot is a Black, queer woman who needs some political education. As someone who shares a lot of identities and is lacking self frameworks, these needs to do some works out and has all the credentials.

Emmanuel: In the beginning. We talked about violence against trans women, the Rikers Island murder by the system. How are some ways that we can address violence against trans women, particularly trans women of color, Black and brown women?

Eisha: For me, I think in a sense, a lot of trans women kind of go into the sex work and situations. I feel like if there was programs or just giving them other allies. Other things to do besides just like the norms of what they normally doing, it would kind of open up doors for them to fit into normal society, how to do normal things. I feel like in a sense, that's why some of them are probably getting murdered in situations and sometimes just not being aware of your surroundings and who you have around you. You should trust no one because I don't want anybody. I feel like it's a lot of things around, just kind of like just setting up safety. A lot girls don't set up they safety in the right matter. They just feel like, OK, well, I'm this girl. I'm just content with myself. You can't be that way all the time. You got to know there's some people out here that doesn't like you. There's some people out here that kind of look at you and want to kill you at time so you gotta always be aware and always be watching your surroundings. Then sharing more stories, like the sharing part is OK to me but I think some time to sharing so much of us consistently keep dieing says a lot to the community say, well OK, it's cool for us to do this to these trans people. Let's keep seeming to keep doing this because society only wants to highlight it. Once it consistently keeps happening and people kind of think it as normal. Like if I kill her ain't nothing gonna happen to me, in my eyes. That's how I look at it and keep highlighting because it does make it look good because we're losing girls rapidly. Then in other eyes, it would look like, if I'm a man out to do harm to someone then this is on the news all day. So if I kill her today, then they probably won't be looking for me because in certain murders like this, in my situation, from what happened on my case. The trans girl I was with, Dante Goodman, Tiffany. Rest in peace. RIP. Let's remember trans women that have been killed. They never even made any research on her case. They never looked and investigated more. I have gotten the news when they came and told me when I was in prison that she was murdered and where she was murdered, they say that she was tortured. So this woman was tortured and I'm telling you the situation how everything transpired with this young man discriminated against me and this woman was tortured. Don't you see this as a hate crime? It is the things about it that they didn't really go and investigate. They burnt the building down. It's just a lot of it shows, like he was saying earlier, like the justice system really is here sometimes to fail you in a sense. OK, we don't want to put too much highlight on it than we really care because in actuality, they really don't. So I just say just to end this whole part about how I think we'll bring more awareness and safety, is you have to be more knowlegable with what's going on in your surroundings. I think because I keep no one around me. I stay to myself. Look, you sit over there, I'm just gonna sit here just to watch you. Just get a feel of you. I ask a lot of questions. Sometimes people are like you talk too much, you want to know too much. Listen, to know more about you, who is in my house.

Jeanne: I just want to ask you both about, it's a popular culture question. There's kind of more awareness in mainstream media these days about transgender people. Pose is one of the examples. I mean, we obsessively talked about it in the Crossroads Fund lunchroom. Can you just talk a little bit about how that kind of thing complicates or helps or hurts or just maybe run down a little bit about that kind of popular culture thing in having more people have access to characters.

Eisha: I think that that's a wonderful idea. Give us the platform now to really be ourselves. Like I say, earlier. Sometimes we need that type of introduction to just being in the real world because we not really acknowledged as being humans in a sense. I feel like I'm just saying when I'm come in a room, all eyes on me like I'm just this weird person who came in and sometimes I feel uncomfortable. You come into a room and you want to feel okay, I'm just as normal as anybody else. I'm just human being that just chose a different sexuality. I think that's a wonderful thing. For us being underground for so long because I think in a lifetime, when I was growing up, this wasn't kind of like publicized so it was very underground. It wasn't lot of things happening like that, in my eyes. I wasn't probably seeing it in the news or publicized as much in my days. I didn't see a lot of transwoman every single day. If they do say they might wrongly identified about this male dressed in, you know, it wasn't as much as it is now. I think that's a wonderful thing. Putting us on a platform of just being just normal peoples in a world like we can do acting and we can do model and we can do whatever. Like Marsha P. Johnson said, I want people to be aware that I was here. I don't want to feel like I'm saying I'm an outsider. You want people to just be aware and like, I'm here.

Benji: I really fucks with Pose and I really fucks with not just the show itself, but the team of people that's involved from the actors to the writers to just all the kind of folks that are behind that project cause so many of them are actually Black trans people and so many of them are members and former members of the ballroom, which I also really think is special and unique about that project. So I really fucks with Pose. I do think that visibility initiates conversations, gives people something to point to, gives people a reference that can make sort of other kinds of conversations and education more accessible, which I think is great. I think the work of having the conversations and the work of doing the political education and the political organizing still has to come after. That's what I think a lot of times doesn't happen. For me as a Black person that feels so important to underline because people have been consuming Black culture since forever and that hasn't taught people to love Black people. People have been literally since this country's inception, consuming the images of Black people and consuming the art and the culture of Black communities and that has not taught people to love, to share, to protect Black people. So we know from decades, if not centuries of Black visibility that having the person on the pedestal doesn't stop violence from happening to the community. I think it's the same with any other oppressed identity. So just having a visible person, just having a TV show, a politician, doesn't actually in and of itself translate to the valuing, the protecting, and the structural shifts that we need to actually fight for and protect Black trans people. SO I would caution against, and again, one of the reasons that I fucks with Pose is because I think everny and any person involved in that project would actually understand this, that there's a lot more work to be done than just putting people on a TV show. I think that project actually comes from that base of knowledge, which is one of the reasons why I fucks with it. Also, going off of what Eisha has said about sort of like what do we need for Black trans people, for Black and brown trans women to be loved and protected and fought for? I think, and this is more of a personal or an intercommunity conversation, but I feel like within the Black community, we do have a lot of work to do around education and around talking about this is actually part of our community. It's always been a part of our community. This is not new. These are ancient identities and we need to not just accept people but like understand that Black, trans and queer people are actually bringing us back and rerouting us in our history as colonized and enslaved people. They're actually taking us back, we are taking us back to our roots and not the other way around. We're not deviating from them. We're reconnecting with them. I think we have a lot of work in the Black community to really make that felt. I also think that so much of the violence that Black, queer and trans people face is about all these other, again, intersecting systems, because it's not like Black people are the only ones with the transphobia problem. Transphobia is definitely a universal issue. I think also a lot of the violence that we face within the community is about the other emergencies and the other kinds of harm and trauma that we're all swimming in as Black people. I think we need to talk about, again, thing about intersectionality. I think we need to talk about all kinds of supports and all kinds of structural shifts and reparations for Black communities writ large that all Black people, including trans and queer people, will benefit from. I'm thinking a lot about this very historic decriminalization hearing that just happened in D.C. D.C. had a bill on the table to decriminalize sex work and just the fact that the bill was on the table was a huge a huge deal. It was overwhelmingly Black, trans and queer sex workers that had got that bill even on the floor to be discussed. Folks like sadly, the National Organization of Women, flew in membership from around the country to stop this bill from happening that was specific to D.C.. So you have local Black, trans and queer people in their city sayin this is exactly what we want. We need this. People of wealth, people of means who are not even from that region of the country coming in to stop it. I think we could do a whole podcast on sex work. I think sex work is a really important and complicated conversation we need to be having right now. That was a crucial moment for me where I was like, even if, like, I believe sex work is work. I believe if you want to do sex work, you should be supported to do that in the safest way possible, even if you're somebody who disagrees with me on that or doesn't feel me on that, for you to be flying in to take resources away from sex workers is like, what are you really about then? Even if you're somebody who's like, well, I think sex work is bad and people shouldn't do it, then you should be fighting for affordable housing. You'd be fighting for a living wage. You should be fighting for universal health care. We know all the reasons why people go into sex work. If you really about that life, if you really don't want people doing sex work, then all these other resources need to be provided to support people. So we're actually fighting for the same thing. You show your hand, you show your values, when you want to stop the decriminalization of sex work but you're also closing schools and clinics and gentrifying people out of their neighborhoods and taking away shelters from homeless folks, you show your hand. If you really cared about marginalized and oppressed communities then you'd be fighting for resources, not taking them away.I think we need to question whenever people say they are fighting for somebody while they're taking resources away from them and while they're taking protections away from them, we need to look behind the curtain to see what's really going on there. For me, that's an important question about how we fight for Black, trans people because so many of the people who say they're fighting for us are the same ones taking resources away from us. You can't actually be fighting for somebody and taking the support systems they need to survive away from them. So for me, the question about trans liberation is really questions about structural shifts that redistribute resources to the most oppressed people, which I think Black, trans people absolutely fall into that category.

Emmanuel: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Eisha and Benji: Thank you all so much for having us.

Jeanne: Thank you for listening to this episode of "Queering Left". The organizers interviewed represent just one example of the fearless movement building in Chicago that Crossroads Fund is proud to have supported since 1981. Please visit our website for photos, videos and other media related to this episode. For more information on Crossroads Fund and the organizers featured in this interview, please follow "Queering Left" on Facebook and Twitter and sign up to receive email alerts of new interviews at our website: crossroadsfund.org.

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Jeanne: Welcome to Queering Left, a podcast from Crossroads Fund. I'm Emmanuel Garcia. I'm Jeanne Kracher and we are the hosts of Queering Left. Crossroads Fund is a public foundation in Chicago. We provide funding to community organizations, activists and movements who are working for racial, social and economic justice.

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Where Do We Go From Here: A Fundraiser for Black Lives

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Where Do We Go From Here: A Fundraiser for Black Lives

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Where Do We Go From Here: A Fundraiser for Black Lives

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Support

The Pocket Healing Zines are made free and accessible thanks to a strong community of supporters who supplement the cost of printing, production, and delivery.

Note: The Pocket Healing Zines are protected by copyright © 2020, Bria M. Royal. The Pocket Healing Zines are a community resource and may be photocopied and distributed EXCLUSIVELY for educational purposes only. The resale and commercial usage of the Pocket Healing Zines is prohibited. For permission requests or questions regarding the use of the Pocket Healing Zines, contact info@briaroyal.com

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The Pocket Healing Zines are made free and accessible thanks to a strong community of supporters who supplement the cost of printing, production, and delivery. Note: The Pocket Healing Zines are protected by copyright © 2020, Bria M. Royal. The Pocket Healing Zines are a community resource and may be photocopied and distributed EXCLUSIVELY for educational purposes only.

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Credit goes to Emily Simons, @inkyantics

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To Heal Traumatized Communities, Fight Oppression by Erica Woodland

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To Heal Traumatized Communities, Fight Oppression by Erica Woodland

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Many have watched horrified as the Trump administration escalated its attack on undocumented people. Some 800,000 young people, the vast majority of descent, will be affected by the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This and many of the other human rights violations - the Muslim ban, gutting of the Affordable Care Act, increased militarization of police, open support for white supremacists, and the list goes on - committed by the current administration have led, by many measures, to an increase in anxiety, , and depression since the election.

In this political climate, undocumented people, people of color, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and low-income people - many of whom are survivors of trauma and live with its effects daily - are exposed to even more traumatic events with a shortage of resources to heal. As a mental health practitioner who specializes in trauma in marginalized communities, I cannot keep up with the frequency and level of trauma surfacing in both my professional and personal life.

How do we get to the bottom of the issue of trauma in our society with so few mental health resources? We won't be successful until we address it at the root.

Uncompromised, uncompromising news

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Inequity and oppression are at the root of what we now codify and understand as "trauma." A stressful or threatening experience becomes traumatic when we become overwhelmed and are unable to integrate or make sense of the experience. One of the biggest protective factors to prevent a threatening or stressful experience from developing into trauma is the love and support of our family and community. When our communities are resourced, whole and healthy, we are more likely to have the resilience to withstand tragedy.

In what can be considered a vicious cycle, oppression itself - racism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia - can cause trauma. Black psychologists are among those who have conducted research and written about the traumatic effect of racism on Black Americans. Dr. Monnica Williams' work on race-based stress and trauma and Dr. Ken Hardy's work on healing racial trauma, substantiate what we already suspected: White supremacy is a traumatic experience.

Most people are aware that women and LGBTQ people experience high rates of violence, harassment and yes, trauma. One of the most overlooked communities - people living with disabilities - suffers from violence, its effects multiplied as it intersects with other systems of oppression. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics most recent data, people with disabilities are 2.5 times more likely to experience violence than their non-disabled counterparts.

For marginalized peoples, family and community are two of the most important protective factors to counter the effects of trauma. Family stability and nurturing relationships can provide us with the container to heal from threatening and stressful experiences. These connections can literally mean that a person will not experience the long-term effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) even after living through violence, abuse and tragedy.

Mass incarceration and mass deportation very clearly seek to destroy our ties to family and community. Earlier this year, a story in The Hill about the physical and mental health impacts of mass deportation revealed that three-fourths of undocumented parents reported their children had symptoms of PTSD. With the repeal of DACA, mental health practitioners are organizing to respond to the increase in trauma that is sure to follow as families prepare for the worst.

There have been a number of public conversations about how inaccessible mental health resources are in general. But especially for people of color, queer and trans people, people with disabilities and poor people, the cost of mental health treatment can be out of reach. Moreover, marginalized communities continue to lack providers of mental health treatment from their communities. For those who do have access to treatment, many reported negative experiences from providers, unable, because of their training and personal biases, to relate to and treat clients dealing with the trauma of oppression and inequity.

To be sure, there will continue to be instances of tragedy and stress that do not appear to be directly related to oppression, such as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and their aftermath. And yet, many who are calling for a Just Harvey Recovery are aware that the impact of natural disasters is not doled out equally and neither are the resources needed to recover. This reality means that even trauma caused by changes in climate are also inextricably linked to oppression, and unequally affect those who live in the most vulnerable or dangerous of circumstances.

We will never see an end to trauma until we recognize that oppression not only increases our risk of experiencing it, but also interferes with our ability to recover from experiences that are compounded by that oppression.

While investing in culturally relevant and trauma-informed care is an important step to eradicate the prevalence of trauma in our society, it will only apply a Band-Aid to a wound much deeper - the ways systems of oppression are engrained in our institutions and in the very ways we communicate and relate.

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To Heal Traumatized Communities, Fight Oppression

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Many have watched horrified as the Trump administration escalated its attack on undocumented people. Some 800,000 young people, the vast majority of descent, will be affected by the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

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Skin, Tooth, & Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People by Sins Invalid

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Skin, Tooth, & Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People by Sins Invalid

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Check out Sins Invalid by Dancers' Group!

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Aurora Levins Morales was born in rural Puerto Rico in 1954, of Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Jewish parents. A lifelong feminist and radical, artist and activist, storyteller and historian, her writing bridges the gap between the intimately personal and the global, between sensual experience and theory. In Kindling she explores the meanings of sickness and healing, suffering and pleasure, through the story of her own body, of all our bodies, of the body of the planet.

Kindling is a collage of prose poetry, poems, essays, performance pieces and memoir, exploring the rich complexity od living in a physical and social body. From 19th century bomba dancers to the environmental causes of epilepsy from eugenics to the Cuban health care system, from the sexuality of the chronically sick and tired, to a broader interpretation of taking back the night, Levins Morales writes with passion and insight, self-revelation and global,historical perspective.

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Kindling: Writings On The Body|Paperback

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Aurora Levins Morales was born in rural Puerto Rico in 1954, of Puerto Rican and Ashkenazi Jewish parents. A lifelong feminist and radical, artist and activist, storyteller and historian, her writing bridges the gap between the intimately personal and the global, between sensual experience and...

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Healing Justice: Building Power, Transforming Movements

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Healing Justice: Building Power, Transforming Movements

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This is a critical moment for the world and for our movements. Heightened anti-immigrant, anti-Black, misogynist and anti-LGBTQI violence; increased government surveillance and policing; and the closing of civil societies are all part of an intense conservative backlash that calls on us to respond on all fronts.

Frontline organizers are facing daily attacks on the dignity, safety and basic survival of their people. How do we hold depression and grief from the deportation of loved ones or the loss of community members to police violence? How do we work through generational trauma from oppression and war? How do we confront and transform histories of medical abuse on queer, trans, disabled and incarcerated bodies? The list of state and communal violences perpetrated on communities goes on and on. As survivors of violence, many movement organizers are working to discover what transformation can look like when we center political, spiritual, physical, emotional and psychic wellbeing as integral to our communities, movements and the world we are trying to build.

Over the last decade, we at Astraea have witnessed and been moved by the emergence and rise of healing justice work-resiliency and survival practices that center the collective safety and wellbeing of communities-as an integral part of our fight for collective liberation. We have learned from our grantee partners how these practices and traditions can be tools for building power, and how they can deepen and sustain the long and hard work of movement-building. Rooted in their wisdom, we continue to work to integrate healing justice as a core aspect of our grantmaking and accompaniment to organizations and movements, both in the U.S. and globally. We are also increasingly working to support the holistic security -integrated strategies for physical, digital and psychosocial wellbeing and collective care-of grantee partners. Both frameworks hold wellness, resilience and sustainability at their core, with holistic security specifically intervening on safety and healing justice seeking to confront and transform generational trauma. They differ but are inextricably intertwined. While this publication focuses on healing justice, we include some information about holistic security as it resonates closely with this work.

Healing Justice: Building Power, Transforming Movements doesn't seek one answer or definition of healing justice, but opens the door for there to be a multitude of ways for it to be understood and applied-always rooted in place and grounded in cultural and political context. We spoke with grantee partners, community advisors and peer funders to harvest what has been learned and what can be gained from this work. We lift up their brilliance, resiliency and creativity in elevating and sustaining it over so many years. From their stories and learning, we hope that we as funders can grow and learn ourselves-unpacking and unraveling our assumptions of what healing and safety can look like within movements, and better equipping ourselves to answer the call of resourcing this work for the long haul.

Together with our partners at Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, we are deeply honored to offer this report as a resource for our funder colleagues to learn more about healing justice work. It is an invitation to each one of us to step more fully into it.

In solidarity,

Brenda Salas Neves, Senior Program Officer
Cara Page, Program Consultant
Sarah Gunther, Director of Philanthropic Partnerships

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This is a critical moment for the world and for our movements. Heightened anti-immigrant, anti-Black, misogynist and anti-LGBTQI violence; increased government surveillance and policing; and the closing of civil societies are all part of an intense conservative backlash that calls on us to respond on all fronts.

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Created by facilitator, Adaku Utah

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Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software - Canva

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Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software - Canva

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Credit goes to Emily Simons, @inkyantics

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Credit goes to Emily Simons, @inkyantics

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Credit goes to Emily Simons, @inkyantics

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Credit goes to Emily Simons, @inkyantics

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A Love Story About the Power of Art as Organizing

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A Love Story About the Power of Art as Organizing

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A love story about the power of art as organizing | Aja Monet and phillip agnew

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Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley

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Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley

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The Black Radical Imagination
By Robin D.G. Kelley

Beacon Press, 9780807009772, 264pp.

Publication Date: June 15, 2003

* Individual store prices may vary.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of seven books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original and Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America.

"A bold and provocative celebration of the black radical imagination in the 20th century."
-Laura Ciolkowski, The New York Times Book Review

"Based on Kelley's belief that to make a better world we must first imagine it, this brilliantly conceived and written book recounts the accomplishments of black activists and thinkers over the past century who have been committed to remaking the world."
- Library Journal

"Through this masterful book of black radical history and philosophy, I can look past the dreariness of our unfree world with the binoculars of the imaginary, learning from those female and male 20th century activists Kelley chronicled, who refused to let any oppressor stop their movement dreams of a free life, of a free world."
-Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped From the Beginning

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Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination | IndieBound.org

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Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for...

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Credit goes to Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps, @radicalroadmaps

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Apply to receive up to $1,000 to support your actions! The money can be used for supplies, safety equipment, trainers, medics or anything needed to help you plan your actions.

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Action Fund

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We are excited to announce the launch of our new Action Fund to support protestors on the ground. Apply to receive up to $1,000 to support your actions! The money can be used for supplies, safety equipment, trainers, medics or anything needed to help you plan your actions.

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It's Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission

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It's Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission

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On Saturday, July 7, social media was flooded with images of an event in Chicago that was advertised as a shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway to protest gun violence. Led by celebrity-pastor Father Michael Pfleger and co-sponsored by half a dozen local groups, 3,000 people marched onto the expressway, at first only occupying two lanes, with the permission of state police. After about an hour, Pfleger announced that state police would be shutting down all four lanes of traffic.

Some celebrated the protest as a powerful act of resistance. In Chicago and elsewhere, some of us who do the work of direct action and community organizing were far less impressed, and a few of us openly expressed that we found the event misguided and harmful to ongoing organizing and resistance efforts. As such, we have received some questions about why we feel the way we do. We, too, have questions - questions we feel we should all be asking ourselves about any direct action in which we consider participating. We are sharing some of those questions here to hopefully build a more honest, accountable and ethical practice of solidarity with all those who would take action with us in the streets.

What Is the Demand?

A direct action is an attempt to leverage, seize or demonstrate power. So, the question is: To what end? If you lead 3,000 people onto an expressway for a duration of time the state has agreed to, you have successfully mobilized people but have not created any leverage in a power struggle. If we unpredictably hold space and disrupt the flow of business as usual and the powerful must respond to the disruption, then we are challenging power and the status quo. In Saturday's event, we saw conditions that could only occur with a political insider at the helm, including a blessing by the mayor and other officials. While some argued in the days leading up to the action that the event was youth-led, there could be no confusion about who was in control on Saturday. Father Pfleger led the march and negotiated every crowd maneuver with the police in detail - even turning to the crowd at one point and declaring, "You always try to negotiate before you demonstrate!" This assertion - that groups should always ask for permission before attempting to disrupt and take power - is demobilizing, ahistorical and consistent with Pfleger's longstanding support of Rahm Emanuel.

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What Power Is Being Shifted?

If you are simply asking the state for permission to express yourself and acquiescing to its rules, you may be taking some form of action, but it is not direct action. Those words have a specific meaning. The modern concept of direct action was inspired by a vision in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension ... that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

Of course, nonviolent direct action is just one form of action. As grassroots organizer L.A. Kauffman writes: "'Direct Action' can refer to a huge variety of efforts to create change outside the established mechanisms of government." In its various forms, direct action happens when we step outside of society's preset or typically prescribed solutions in order to challenge state and other power.

Direct action happens when we step outside of society's preset or typically prescribed solutions in order to challenge state and other power.

When we say that something is not direct action, we are adhering to poet Solmaz Sharif's admonition to "let it matter what we call a thing." We are striving for clarity rather than condemnation. Having a permitted march is not inherently bad, but, like petitions or calls to our elected officials, these are less about disrupting power than they are about appealing to it. People representing institutions with systemic power have adapted to the impact(s) of these socially prescribed appeals - if they feel the impact at all. In some cases (not all), people doing the work of direct action have already attempted every preset solution, such as talking with their elected officials, to no avail. Direct action is often an escalation and a tactical response to a system that is not offering acceptable outcomes. With direct action, we draw outside the lines. If authority sanctions that, we are not really outside the lines but considered inside the tent.

It's important that the distinctions between these types of events be understood, and that one not masquerade as the other. If a powerful person like Father Pfleger wants to hold a large event with the permission of the state, that is his right. But he should do so honestly, rather than attempting to market his state-sanctioned event as something it is not. The new people who have been mobilized to join such events need to understand their nature. Not every event must be a risky endeavor, and not every event will directly shift power or require any capitulation from the state - but no event that is not an attempt to shift power should be portrayed as direct action.

Saturday's march movements were co-directed by Pfleger and the police. This should not be confused with direct action, and it is in fact dangerous to compare these actions or results with those generated by actions that do aim to shift power. Challenging power often puts people at risk. It is dishonest to compare the risks or results of actual civil disobedience with a parade orchestrated in concert with structural power - in this case, a mayor who benefited significantly from Saturday's events.

By endorsing Pfleger's march, Rahm Emanuel was able to create a counternarrative to his troubled relationship with protesters, who have often been abused while objecting to the murderous brutality of his police. By making some phone calls to facilitate Pfleger's march and throwing his support behind it, Emanuel offered the public a different story than the one they've been given about his regard for the First Amendment - one punctuated with a humorous tweet.

Who Directly Benefits and Who Doesn't?

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Twitter exchange with Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner is a clear demonstration of who truly benefited from Saturday's "shutdown" event. Rahm's quippy response to Rauner received nearly 7,000 retweets at the time of writing. This is some of the best PR the mayor has gotten in a good while, and in an election year, no less. It was also a good day for neoliberal policy advocates and all those who want to see the police operate with impunity, our schools shuttered and our community resources redirected to harmful institutions like prisons, because a leader who is unapologetically committed to those ends was briefly seen as a "man of the people."

Direct action is often an escalation and a tactical response to a system that is not offering acceptable outcomes.

Politicians are often happy to support events that make no concrete demands of them. What did Rahm Emanuel commit to by supporting the march? What demand did he give way to? What resources did he release or agenda did he embrace? Historically, political leaders in vulnerable positions - in this case, Rahm Emanuel - often give out concessions to maintain social order and frankly, their own legitimacy. In fact, as writer and organizer Charles Preston pointed out on Twitter, the irony is that some of the people who were marching were demanding the reopening of clinics closed by Emanuel himself.

All of this, of course, was by design. It is not a coincidence that a friend of the mayor, who has helped to prop up Emanuel's leadership, created an event under the guise of a resistance moment that has now elevated that mayor. The leadership of an event informs the character of that event, and to expect otherwise is to expect a miracle.
Some local organizers saw a pro-Emanuel narrative on the horizon in advance of the event and acted accordingly. On Sunday, Frank Chapman, a South Side organizer and the director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, shared a reflection on the march with friends in the Chicago organizing community that included these words:

Unfortunately some of our friends had asked us to endorse this march to shutdown the Dan Ryan. We choose not to. Why? Because we will not be a part of any unholy alliance to get Rahm Emanuel re-elected. We will definitely not be a part of any discussion of ways to curb the city's gun violence that fails to mention the [Chicago Police Department's] unwarranted use of deadly force, murdering Black and Brown people.

Who Is the Driving Force Behind the Action?

To be sure, there were individuals marching on Saturday who want real and urgent change in their communities. Individuals impacted by various forms of violence are in pain, are grieving, and are looking for access points and outlets. The march was in mainstream local news headlines for days leading up to the event, and a sense of safety was promised by Pfleger and leading organizations with his "nonviolent" rhetoric and a subsequently heavily marshalled (by Illinois State Police) march. However, it would be irresponsible to let these individuals present at Saturday's march be used as human shields, deflecting any critique of the march's leadership which was seriously questionable, opportunistic, and strategically lacking a real sense of what is actually needed to bring true transformation in Black and Brown communities.

When an event purporting to be addressing gun violence does not center the violence of policing itself, then we have to be suspicious of its aims.

Political figures with questionable, self-serving platforms will often surround themselves with sympathetic figures. But the presence of well-meaning, well-intentioned or even beloved individuals will not overwrite the leadership of people whose self-interested words and philosophies would park our efforts firmly within the status quo.

When the mayor and a "top cop" like Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson throw support behind a protest of gun violence, yet heavily disinvest in and heavily criminalize the communities most directly affected on a daily basis, we have to stop, question the fruitfulness of the action and quickly lift the veil. When an event purporting to be addressing gun violence does not center the violence of policing itself, then we have to be suspicious of its aims.

Is the Event What It Purports to Be?

Civil disobedience does not always result in the arrest of those participating, but an act committed with the explicit consent of police is not "disobedience." We do not say this to demonize any act of cooperation with authority, but words mean things, and an action that does not unfold without the step-by-step permission of law enforcement officials is not civil disobedience. Characterizing it as such is harmful to those who would actually enact such resistance, because it gives people a false impression of what such acts will and should look like.

Community members who participate in genuine acts of civil disobedience in Chicago will be negatively impacted by Saturday's events, as unfair expectations and comparisons between their actions and Saturday's "shutdown" are now inevitable. Because, for many, Saturday's "shutdown" imparted the false lesson that there is a "right way" to disobey (that doesn't actually involve disobeying), and when bad things happen to people who are being disobedient in the future, some will point to Saturday's event and say that there's a way to be disobedient and that those who are jailed and brutalized simply did it wrong.

People who have won great victories in liberation struggles have not done so by getting the step-by-step consent of their oppressors.

Pfleger's event also served to bolster the image of Chicago police, with Father Pfleger marching arm-in-arm with Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and praising him for making the march possible. The violence and racism of Chicago's police are infamous, as is the culture of impunity that facilitates their harms. And yet, at this event, people were seen taking selfies with Eddie Johnson, who has famously claimed that in all his years as a police officer, he has never witnessed misconduct. This obviously aids in no one's liberation.

How to Tell Something Is Not a Direct Action

Writers and scholars like Dean Spade, Peter Gelderloos and others offer us useful questions and frameworks for assessing whether particular tactics, reforms or forms of resistance are recuperative or liberatory. These are questions that help us in determining whether something is actually direct action or a parade to reinforce the power of the state. Recuperative tactics, reforms and forms of resistance actually succeed in legitimizing harmful institutions. They can give them cover and expand their power to harm.

Inspired by their ideas, we offer the following guiding questions for assessing whether you are actually organizing direct action:

Is your action legitimizing harmful institutions? Or as Dean Spade asks: Does it legitimize or expand a system we are trying to dismantle? For example, what does it mean to cooperate with cops as part of organizing your action? If the goal is to shrink the power of policing, why are you thanking them for their presence rather than calling for their removal?

Peter Gelderloos asks: Does it have elite support? If it does, then your action is probably not liberatory.

Is the action colluding with power or resisting it?

Is there a clear demand that will improve the lives of the most marginalized?

Years ago, writer and movement facilitator adrienne maree brown wrote a blog post titled "a perfect action," that captures the spirit of direct action. (You can watch video footage of the action adrienne describes here.) The action described was an escalation with a clear message challenging police power. It was the antithesis of Saturday's expressway "shutdown."

Ultimately, no system of injustice will consent to its own overthrow and the system will never indict itself. People who have won great victories in liberation struggles have not done so by getting the step-by-step consent of their oppressors. They took strategic risks, and often suffered for them. There is nothing in our current historical context that exempts us from the realities of power or history - and anyone who suggests otherwise is not working in furtherance of our liberation.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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It's Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission

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On Saturday, July 7, social media was flooded with images of an event in Chicago that was advertised as a shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway to protest gun violence. Led by celebrity-pastor Father Michael Pfleger and co-sponsored by half a dozen local groups, 3,000 people marched onto the expressway, at first only occupying two lanes, with the permission of state police.

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Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People--Mariame Kaba

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Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People--Mariame Kaba

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On the political power of relationships and why knowledge is built through struggle

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Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People

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From Ella Baker to Septima Clark, history is rife with examples of Black women whose tremendous legacies in the world of political organizing are accompanied by a relative absence in the dominant narratives we tell ourselves about the times in which they lived. They say that fortune favors the bold

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Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People

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Prisons and Class Warfare: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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Prisons and Class Warfare: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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This interview was published in French at Période. It first appeared in English on the Historical Materialism
Clément Petitjean: In Golden Gulag, you analyze the build-up of California's prison system, which you call "the biggest in the history of the world." Between 1980 and 2007, you explain that the number of people behind bars increased more than 450%. What were the various factors that combined to cause the expansion of that system? What were the various forces that built up the prison industrial complex in California and in the US?
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Sure. Let me say a couple of things. That description, the biggest prison building project in the history of the world, I actually found in a report that was written by somebody whom the state of California contracted to analyze the system that had been on a steady growth trajectory since the late 1980s. So it's not even my claim, it's how they themselves described what they were doing.

So what happened is that the state of California, which is, and was, an incredibly huge and diverse economy, went through a series of crises. And those crises produced all kinds of surpluses - including workers, who were laid off from certain kinds of occupations, especially in manufacturing (not exclusively but notably). It produced surpluses of land. Because the use of land, especially but not exclusively in agriculture, changed over time, with the consolidation of ownership and the abandoning of certain types of land and land-use. It produced surpluses of finance capital. And this is one of the more contentious points that I do argue, to deadly exhaustion. And that is to say that while it might appear, looking globally, that the concept of surplus finance capital, at that time, in the early 1980s, seemed absurd, if you look locally, and see how especially investment bankers who specialized in municipal finance, which is to say selling debt to states, were struggling to remake markets - then we can see a surplus at hand.

And then the final surplus, which is kind of theoretical, conjectural, is a surplus of state capacity. And by that I mean that the California state's institutions and reach had developed over a good deal of the 20th century, but especially from the beginning of the Second World War forward. It had become incredibly complex, with fiscal and bureaucratic capacities to do certain things. You know, those capacities weren't invented out of whole cloth, they came out of the Progressive Era, developing from the the turn of the 20th century. In the postwar period they enabled California to do certain things that would more or less guarantee the capacity of capital to squeeze value from labor and land. Those capacities endured, even if the demand for them did not.

And so what I argue in my book is that the state of California reconfigured those capacities, and they underlay the ability to build and staff and manage prison after prison after prison. That's not the only use they made of those capacities once used for various kinds of welfare provision, but it was a huge use. And so the prison system went from being a fairly small part of the entire state infrastructure to the major employer in the state government. So the reason that I approached the problem the way I did is because I'm a good Marxist and I wanted to look at factors of production, but also to make it very clear, and this has to do with being a good Marxist, that these factors of mass incarceration, or factors of production, didn't have to be organized the way they were. They could have become something else.

Therefore I begin with the premise that prison expansion was not just a response to an allegedly self-explanatory, free-floating thing called crime, which suddenly just erupted as a nightmare in communities. And indeed, in order to think about crime and its central role, in any, in California's incarceration system, I studied, like anybody could have, what was happening with crime in the late 70s and early 1980s. And not surprisingly, it had been going down. Everybody knew it. It was on front pages of newspapers that people read in the early 80s, it was on TV, it was on the radio. So if crime did not cause prison expansion, I asked myself, what did?
So what was happening more specifically in California? How did those surpluses come together to create this mass prison system?
Well, they came together politically. In a variety of ways. During the 1970s, the entire US economy had gone through a very, very long recession. It was really a depression. It was at the same time that the Vietnam war was ending, and the US lost that war. It was the time when stagflation became a rule rather than an unimaginable exception - which is to say there was both high unemployment and high inflation. And in the context of all of that, throughout the United States, not only in California, people who were in prison had been fighting through the federal court system, the US central government court system, concerning the conditions of their confinement, the kinds of sentences that they were serving, and so forth. And these lawsuits, many of which were brought by prisoners on their own behalf, slowly made their way through the courts, and eventually, as was the case in California (and many other states also) in the late 60s and again in the mid-70s. The federal courts told the state prison system: "Do something about this, because you're in violation of the Constitution."

So, you might wonder what stagflation, the end of the Vietnam war and all of these things have to do with this very specialized question, about whether or not prisoners' constitutional rights are being violated. And the answer was: "Directly, not that much." But indirectly, building prisons and using crime as a default strategy to legitimize the state that had become seriously delegitimized due to political, military, and economic crises. Prison expansion became a way for people in both political parties to say "The problem with the United States is that there is too much government. The state is too big. And the reason people are suffering from this general economic misfortune is because too much goes to taxes, too much goes to doing things that people really should take care of on their own. But if you elect us, we will get rid of this incredible burden on you. But there is something legitimate we can be doing, which is why you should elect us, and that is that we will protect you from crime." So the default legitimacy became "We'll protect you from crime, we'll protect you from external threats." And people were elected, and re-elected on the basis of these arguments. Again, even though everybody knew that crime was not a problem.

It's pretty astonishing to me. I lived through this period and went back and studied it later. I found in the California case and I currently have students who are studying other states - and we keep coming across similar patterns: economic crisis, federal court orders, struggles over expansion, the increased role of municipal finance in the scheme of prison expansion. In California, for example, people who had come up through the civil service, working in the welfare department, or working in the department of health and human services, eventually were recruited work on the prison side because they had the skills to manage large-scale projects designed to deliver services to individuals. And they brought their fiscal and bureaucratic capacities over to the prison agency in order to help it expand and consolidate. We actually see the abandonment of one set of public mandates in favor of another - of social welfare for domestic warfare, if you will. And I can't say, nor should anybody, that the reason all this happened was because of a few people who had bad intentions distorted the system. Rather we can see a systemic renovation in the direction of mass incarceration starting in the late 1970s when Jerry Brown, a Democrat, was then, as he is now, governor of California. And then taking off enormously in the 80s under Republican regimes. But never going down. It didn't make any difference which party was in power. And the prison population did not begin to go down until elaborate and broad-based organizing combined with a long-term federal court case (again!) compelled system shrinkage in the last several years.

In the book, you argue that that prisons are "catchall solutions to social problems." Would you say that the rise of the prison industrial complex illustrates, or means, deep transformations of the American state, and marks the dawn of a new historical period for capitalism, one where incarceration would be not only the legitimate but the only way of dealing with surplus populations?

Honestly, fifteen years ago, I would have said yes. Now, I say "pretty much, but not absolutely yes". But this is why: it's almost worse than the way you framed the question. Rather than mass incarceration being a catchall solution to social problems, as I put it, what's happened is that that legitimizing force, which has made prison systems so big, has given police - including border police - incredible power, increasing amounts of power. What has happened is that certain types of social welfare agencies, like education, or income support, or social housing, have absorbed some of the surveillance and punishment missions of the police and the prison system.

For example in Los Angeles, a relatively new project (about ten years old) focuses on people who live in social housing projects. Their experience has been shaped by intensive policing, criminalization, incarceration, and being killed by the police. Under the new project they have opportunities for healthcare, tutoring for children, all kinds of social welfare benefits if and only if they cooperate with the police. In the book Policing the Planet, my partner and I wrote a chapter that goes into rather exhaustive details about that case.
What about a possible new historical period for capitalism?
This is a tough question, as you know, for a bunch of reasons. One is that we've all learned to lisp: "globalization," and now everybody says "neoliberalism," and people are more or less talking about the same thing. My major mentor in the study of capitalism is the late great Cedric Robinson, who wrote an astonishing series of books, but the one that completely changed my consciousness is Black Marxism. Robinson argues that capitalism has always been, wherever it originated - let's say rural England - a racial system. So it didn't need Black people to become racial. It was already racial between people all of whose descendants might have become white. Understanding capitalism this way is very productive for me.

Thinking about the present, one issue is what's happening with racial capitalism on a world scale, and the second issue is in the context of particular political economies, especially those that are not sovereign, like the state of California. How does political-economic activity re-form in the context of globalization's pushes and pulls? Certainly, California's economy continues to be big. It's one of the world's seven largest. It moves up and down a little bit, but if it were a country, it would be in the top seven. However, the mix of manufacturing, service, and other sectors has changed over time. There's still a lot of manufacturing in the state, although it tends to be more value-added, lower-wage manufacturing, sweatshops and so forth. And far less steel, and producer goods, and consumer durables. How, then, should we do to analyze in order to organize in places like California, New York, Texas, with their various and variously diverse economies, characterized by organized abandonment and organized violence? How can we generalize from the racist prison system, to a more supple perception of racial capitalism at work? To understand and intervene in places where states no less than firms are constantly trying to figure out how to spread capital across the productive landscape in ways that will return profits to investors as quickly as possible?

The state keeps stepping in while pretending it's not there. And here I'm not talking about private prisons, which are an infinitesimal part of mass incarceration in the USA, nor of exploited prisoner labor, which also doesn't explain much about the system's size or durability (which, as we've already seen, is vulnerable). Rather, I am talking about, for example, how unions that represent low-to-moderate wage public sector job, which have a high concentration of people of color as current and potential members, might join forces with environmental justice organizations, and biological diversity and anti-climate change organizations, and immigrants' rights organizations, and others to fight on a number of fronts against group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death - which is what in my view racism is. And if that's what racism is, and capitalism is from its origins already racial, then that means a comprehensive politics encompassing working and workless vulnerable people and places becomes a robust class politics that neither begins from nor excludes narrower views of who or what the "working class" is.
In the book, you develop a perspective strongly influenced by David Harvey's critical geography. What does this perspective reveal specifically about mass incarceration?
I became a geographer when I was in my 40s because it seemed to me, at least in the context of US graduate education, it was the best way for me to pursue serious materialist analysis. There are so few geography Ph.D programs in the United States. And I'd been thinking that I was going to train in planning. Because it seemed the closest to what I wanted to do, which is to put together "who," "how," and "where" in a way that did not float above the surface of the earth but rather articulated with the changing earth. I actually stumbled into geography. And then I happened to come across Neil Smith, at a Rethinking Marxism conference, and was really taken by his work. Not only had I not thought about geography, I hadn't taken a geography course for three decades, since I was 13. So at the last minute, instead of mailing my application to the planning department at Rutgers, I mailed it to the geography department there. And the rest is kind of history.

Enrolling in geography brought me into the world of Harvey's historical geographic materialist way of analyzing the world. I took very seriously what I learned from David, what I learned from Neil, and a few other people, and tried to build on it, having already had a long informal education with people like Cedric Robinson, Sid Lemelle, Mike Davis, Margaret Prescod, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, and many others. And I think that had I not been trained in geography, or beguiled by geography, maybe I would not have thought as hard as I did about, for example, urban-rural connections - their co-constitutive interdependencies. And I know I wouldn't have thought in terms of scale - not scales in the sense of size, but in terms of the socio-spatial forms through which we live and organize our lives - and how we struggle to compete and cooperate. And I certainly would not have conceptualized mass incarceration as the "prison fix" had I not read David's Limits to Capital and thought about the spatial fix as hard as I could. We're colleagues, now, David and I. We enjoy working together and debating toward the goal of movement rather than having the last word.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "prison fix" compared to Harvey's "spatial fix"?
What I mean in my book is that the state of California used prison expansion provisionally to fix (to remedy, as well as to set firmly into space) the crises of land, labor, finance capital, and state capacity. By absorbing people, issuing public debt with no public promise to pay it down, and using up land taken out of extractive production, the state also put to work, as I suggested earlier, many of its fiscal and organizational abilities without facing the challenges that were already mounting when the same factors of production were petitioned for, say, a new university.

The prison fix of course opened an entire new round of crises, just as the spatial fix in Harvey displaces but does not resolve the problem that gave rise to it. So in the case of communities where imprisoned people come from, we have the removal of people, the removal of earning power, the removal of household and community camaraderie, you name it - all of that happened with mass incarceration. In the rural areas where prisons arose we can chart related destabilizations, and rather than, as many imagine, rural prison towns acquiring resources displaced from urban neighborhoods. The fact is the two locations are joined in a constant churn of unacknowledged though shared precarious desperation - which was the basis on which some of the organizing I described above took form.

In other words, infrastructure materially symbolized by the actual prison indicates the extensively visible and invisible infrastructure that connects the prison and its location by way of the courts and the police, the roads for families to visit and goods and incarcerated people to travel back to the communities of origin, expansively incorporating the entire intervening landscape. One of the things I tried to do in the book, framing it with two bus rides, was to give people a way of thinking about what I've just said that's more viscerally poignant. Thinking about the movement across space and the movement through space gives us some sense of the production of space.

The purpose of Golden Gulag was not to make people say "Oh my God, we've all been defeated!," but rather to say "Wow, that was really big, and now I can see all the pieces." So perhaps instead of thinking there's nothing to be done, what I recognize is there's a hundred different things that we could do. We can organize with labor unions, we can organize with environmental justice activists, we can organize urban-rural coalitions, we can organize public sector employees, we can organize low-wage, high-value-added workers, who are vulnerable to criminalization. We can organize with immigrants. We can do all of these things, because all of these things are part of mass incarceration. And we did all that organizing!
That's a perfect transition to another set of questions about organizing against mass incarceration. Are there resistance movements within prisons comparable to what happened in the 1970s, with the 1971 Attica uprising for instance?
While I can give you some thumbnail sketches of organizing inside prisons, my area of expertise doesn't happen to be on that. Orisanmi Burton is someone who is doing fantastic research on that question.

Of course, one the things that's happened in California prisons, particularly the prisons for men, is that their physical design, as well as the design of their management system, were deliberately aimed by the Department of Corrections, starting in the late 1970s, to undermine the possibility of the kind of organizing that had characterized the period from the early 60 to the mid 70s. So the actual structure of new prisons, especially the ones called 180s, or level 4 - those are the high-security prisons - they're not panopticons, but prisoners can't evade being under surveillance. There have been not only automatic lockdowns, but also the reduction not only of education and other in-prison programs but even places where people in prison can gather - such as day rooms, classrooms, gyms, places where prisoners could do the time with some, however modest, ongoing sense of self. All of the design changes were intended to undermine prisoner organizing and solidarity.

One hugely notorious thing that happened in the California system, that may or may not have happened in other systems, is that the Department of Corrections, in the late 1970s, was experimenting with ways to keep prisoners from developing solidarity with each other and against the guards. And, notoriously, California prisoners had, in the early 70s, declared "Every time a guard kills one of us, we're going to kill one of them until they stop killing us." And there were seven incidents over some years. A guard killed a prisoner, prisoners killed a guard. Not necessarily the guard who killed the prisoner, but somebody died because somebody died. So the department, right before its big expansion began, was trying to figure out what to do. And it came up, not surprisingly, with a solution that they designed to foster inter-prisoner distrust. The managers declared that certain categories of prisoners belonged to certain ethnic or regional gangs, and then fomented discord between the gangs. In a time when desegregation was becoming the law of the land, the department of corrections started segregating people in prisons according to the gangs and then to racial and ethnic groups (this is all well documented, there are case files and lawsuits, and an incredible archive, still to be thoroughly read and written about, though I do hope one of my newer students will take on that task). And there were hearings and hearings and hearings about this practice throughout the 1990s. I sat through hours and hours and hours of testimony, in which the department insisted, and has until this day: "No, we were just responding to what objectively existed." Whereas others who testified, including former wardens of prisons, said: "No, this didn't exist: you made it. You created it."

What it was the department "created" led to the development of something called the security housing unit (SHU), which is effectively a prison within the prison. The first one in California opened in 1988 and the second in 1989. In the latter, called Pelican Bay State Prison - to go back to prisoner organizing and prisoner uprising - people in the SHU had staged several hunger strikes beginning in 2011. And some of the people in that security housing unit, segregated according to their alleged gang affiliation -- some of whom had been in that prison within the prison for more than twenty years - had accepted and projected the rigid ethnic, racial, and regional differences as meaningful and immutably real. But as they were trying, as individuals, to sort out a way for them to get out of the prison in the prison and go back to the general prison population, they became increasingly aware of what had happened historically; a dire reform of which that they were the current expression. And so in recent years, these people in four "gangs" eventually declared that the only way to solve the problem inside was, to use their word, to end the hostility between the races. Which is an astonishing thing. I've been inside a lot of prisons, including Pelican Bay. And the transformation of consciousness from what I learned from interviewing people in prisons for men about their conditions of confinement in the early 2000s compared with the organizing and analysis that emerged in the last five or so years is astonishing.

I also want to add something about the prisons for women. In the prisons for women, the level of segregation was never as high - to the extent, for example, that they had not separating out people who were doing life on murder and people who were doing a year on drugs. Whereas in a prison for men, people are segregated according to custody level (what people are serving time for having done), plus segregated in a number of other ways including race and ethnicity. And so, in part because of the social and spatial organization of the prisons in the period that featured the crackdown on organizing in prisons for me, there was a high and growing level of organizing among the people in prisons for women. So during the last fourteen-fifteen years, as the state of California was trying to build fancy new so-called "gender responsive" prisons for women - to allow mothers to be locked up with their kids, for example - people inside the prisons for women, however they identified in terms of gender, wrote and signed "Don't do this for us, because that's just going to expand capacity to lock people up. It's not going to make our lives better." Three thousand people did that organizing in prisons for women, and their self-determination and bravery occurred at great personal risk to themselves because locked-up activists are wholly at the mercy of guards and prison managers.
And what about the organizing outside of the prisons? And in particular in communities directly affected by mass incarceration?
The organizing outside has been quite rich and varied over the years. In my experience, some of which I write about in Golden Gulag (and more that I'll write about in a new chapter to the second edition that should come out in about a year), people who at the outset started doing work on behalf of one person in their family or even maybe two people in their family, thinking this was an individual, or at the greatest scale, household problem, came to understand through their experiences - working with others, mostly women, most of whom were mothers - the political dimensions of what they originally encountered as a personal, individual, and legal problem. That's one kind of organizing that has persisted for many years now, 25 years of more.

There's also the organizing that we, meaning the groups Critical Resistance and California Prison Moratorium Project, helped to foster between urban and rural communities, under a variety of nominal issues which I described earlier: biological diversity (we took up on behalf of the lowly Tipton kangaroo rat), and environmental justice (air quality, water quality for instance). We managed to develop and wage campaigns bringing people together across diverse issues and diverse communities in rural and urban California, so that they could recognize each other as probable comrades rather than presumed antagonists. And that has happened over and over again.

So, going back to the fact that the number of people in prisons in California has gone down in recent years: the public explanations for that, the superficial or above-the-surface explanation, is that the state of California lost yet another lawsuit, and was ordered to reduce the number of people held in the department of corrections' physical plant (33 prisons plus many camps and other lockups). The lawsuit (Plata-Coleman) demonstrated that approximately one person in prison a week, every week, was dying of an easily remediable illness because of medical neglect. During the two decades between the beginning of the legal campaign and its resolution, some of the original litigants had long since died. Ultimately, the right-wing Supreme Court of the United States (the court that handed George W. Bush the presidency in the year 2000) could not deny the evidence. There were just too many bodies. In its final judgment that court agreed with lower court rulings, affirming that California could not build its way out of its problem. But the question that few people who have followed this story ever asked themselves is "How come California, that had been opening a prison a year for 23 years, suddenly slowed down to almost a halt and only opened one prison between 1999 and 2011?" And the answer is all that grassroots organizing that I described earlier. We stopped them building new prisons. We made it too difficult. And we showed in our campaigning that whenever the department built a new prison, allegedly to ease crowding, the number of people in prison jumped higher than the new buildings could hold. The new relationships on the ground, organized by prison abolitionists though the vast majority of participants themselves were not necessarily abolitionist - compelled these courts, who had never summoned any of us as serious witnesses for anything, to say that California could not build its way out of its problem and that it had to do something else.

So now a lot of anti-physical-plant expansion activity in California has shifted to jails, not prisons. (Just to clarify, jail is where someone is held pending trial or if their sentence is only a year or less. Prison is where someone is sent to serve a sentence for a year and a day or more. There's a lot of murkiness to be sure, but that's the line distinguishing jails and prisons.) The jails are now expanding because once California complied with the Supreme Court ruling, the state, in order to reduce the number of people it locks up, made resources available to the lower political jurisdictions - the counties - to do whatever they wanted in exchange for retaining people convicted of certain crimes locally rather than sending them to state custody. (This adjustment is called "realignment.") The counties could have taken those resources and said to convicted people "Go home and behave yourselves." They could have taken the resources and changed guidelines for prosecutors so there would be fewer convictions. They could have put the resources into schools or healthcare or housing. But - and this gets back to the nagging question of state capacity and legitimacy we talked about earlier - a little more than half of the state's 58 counties have thus far decided "We'll just build new jails and we'll put convicted people in them." But then we see in reverse the phenomenon I discussed earlier, about welfare state agencies absorbing surveillance and punishment agencies. The sheriffs, who run the jails, now insist that they need more and bigger jails for reasons of health: "We have to supply mental health care and counseling to troubled people. We need to deliver social goods, and the only way we can do it is if we can lock people up." So the new front is fighting against jails-instead-of-clinics, jails-instead-of-schools, and so on. The work brings new social actors into the mix, and, as we discussed earlier, it enables the broadest possible identification of purpose in class terms.

That's kind of the big picture of what's been happening in California. I'll give you a few other examples of the kinds of solidarity that we managed to bring into action over time. There was a prison that was supposed to have opened in 2000 but we delayed it, we slowed it down. We didn't manage to stop it, but as I said, after opening a prison a year up to 1998, there were none opened between 1999 and 2005. That prison was scheduled for construction by a member of the Democratic party who had just been elected governor, and he was paying back the guards' union, who had given him almost a million dollars to help with his campaign. So then we got busy and organized as many different ways as we could, and one of the ways we could organize, it turned out, was with the public employees, the California state employees association, which is part of an enormous public sector union in California. And they represent all kinds of workers in the prisons except the guards, because the guards have their own stand-alone union. And much to our surprise, the members of state employees union were willing to go up against the guards and oppose that prison. And it was really surprising to us. When they finally agreed to meet with the abolitionists they said: "Look. The guards get whatever they want. What we do, as secretaries, school teachers, locksmiths, drivers, mechanics gets squeezed more and more. We see the lives of the people in custody getting worse and worse and worse, with no hope for when they get out - as most people do - getting back to a normal life. And the union that we're part of represents people who work in the public sector, in housing, healthcare, so on and so forth, in the cities and counties as well as at the state. So if we recognize who our membership is and what they do, there's no reason for us to support this prison. Even if we might lose a few members who would have the jobs in the new prison, there's more to our remit, as a public sector union." That completely surprised me, and for a heady political moment we had half a million people throughout California calling for a prison moratorium. And it's hard to keep those kinds of political openings lively, but it lasted long enough to interrupt the relentless schedule that the prisons in California had been on since the early eighties.
From an outsider's perspective it seems that the Black Lives Matter movement gave a new impetus to debates around prison abolition in radical circles. What does it say about the history of the abolition movement? What's the current balance of forces? What do strategic debates look like?
It's true that Black Lives Matter has got people thinking about and using the word "abolition." That said, the abolition that they have helped put into common usage is more about the police and less about the prisons. Although of course there is a connection between the two as we discussed earlier. It's been amazing to me and many of my comrades to see left-liberal politicians, or magazines like The Nation or Rolling Stone, seriously ask whether it is time to abolish the police. The ensuing debates tend to be the obvious ones: insofar as abolition is imagined only to be absence - overnight erasure - the kneejerk response is "that's not possible."

But the failure of imagination rests in missing the fact that abolition isn't just absence; as W.E.B. Du Bois showed in Black Reconstruction in America abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently. Of course, that means many who are abolition-friendly falter at what the practice is. All the organizing I've described in our conversation is abolition - not a prelude, but the practice itself. There was a recent attack on abolitionists by some historian who decided, without studying, that abolitionists are a deranged theology. He knew a little, for example, about the Plata-Coleman case, but zero about the on-the-ground moratorium organizing that realized the Plata-Coleman theory ("overcrowding") as sufficient cause for which the remedy would not be more of the same. Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something. I've mentioned Du Bois: He shows, in exhaustive detail, both how slavery ended through the actions and organized activity of the slaves no less than the Union Army. But also - since slavery ending one day doesn't tell you anything about the next day - Du Bois set out to show what the next day, and days thereafter, looked like during the revolutionary period of radical reconstruction. So abolition is a theory of change, it's a theory of social life. It's about making things.
What does the central role of mass incarceration in maintaining the status quo imply in terms of class struggle strategies? Does anti-incarceration struggle and abolition organizing play a more strategic role today?
Here's a way of thinking about that in the US context. In the United States today, there are about 70 million adults who have some kind of criminal conviction - whether or not they were ever locked up - that prohibits them from holding certain kinds of jobs. In many types of jobs, in other words, it doesn't make any difference what you allegedly did: if you've been convicted of something, you can't have a job. So just take a step back and think about that for a second, just in terms of sheer numbers. If we add the number of people who are effectively documented not to work, with the additional 7 or 8 million migrants who are not documented TO work, the sum equals about 50 percent of the US labor force - mostly people of color, but also 1/3 white. Half!

So it seems that anti-criminalization and the extensive and intensive forces and effects of criminalization and perpetual punishment has to be central to any kind of political, economic change that benefits working people and their communities, or benefits poor people, whether or not they're working, and their communities. This should be a given, but often it's not. In part that's because "mass incarceration" has, unfortunately, but for understandable reasons, come to stand in for "this is the terrible thing that happened to Black people in the United States." It is a terrible thing that happens to Black people in the United States! It happens also to brown people, red people ... and a whole lot of white people. And insofar as ending mass incarceration becomes understood as something that only Black people must struggle for because it's something that only Black people experience, the necessary connection to be drawn from mass incarceration to the entire organization of capitalist space today falls out of the picture. What remains in the picture seems like it's only an anomalous wrong that seems remediable within the logic of capitalist reform. That's a huge impediment, I think, for the kind of organizing that ought to come out of the various experiments in worker and community organizing that can produce big changes. Everything is difficult in the USA right now, for all the obvious reasons I won't waste space on now. That said, I look with hope for all indications of ways to shift the debate and organizing. The answer for me is to consider in all possible ways how the preponderance of vulnerable people in the USA and beyond come to recognize each other in terms not just of characteristics or interest, but more to the abolitionist point, purpose.

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Prisons and Class Warfare: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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This interview was published in French at Période . It first appeared in English on the Historical Materialism Clément Petitjean: In Golden Gulag, you analyze the build-up of California's prison system, which you call "the biggest in the history of the world."

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Kelly’s podcast on activism and organizing. Episodes cover a range of organizing topics and include transcripts.

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Kelly Hayes connects with activists, journalists and others on the front lines in this Truthout podcast.