Hi, friends and readers!
For however long I have been writing in this blogging space, I have been using it primarily as a way of expressing my interests and really trying to find my own role within the movements that I have admired for the latter half of my life.
See, as I have probably mentioned before, I grew up around parents who always wanted us to embrace being Black and African yet emphasized assimilation as a way of proving ourselves and staying safe in our predominantly white environments. In turn, I was taught how to question things in a way that didn't threaten whiteness and what we knew as our reality. For anyone that knows me, this wasn't always easy and as I've grown up and realized the ways that this doesn't actually protect Black and other oppressed folks but is complicit in our harm, I've moved towards something more transformative.
Everything happens in the time that it is supposed to. My background of striving and surviving within academia taught me one way to look at the world and what I had to offer it. There is oftentimes no flexibility within our current academic framework for learning to be an accessible tool able to change the world outside of the constraints of a traditional and individual career.
Something I think that our traditional education around movement oftentimes gets wrong is how collective our movements have been and how they directly oppose individualism. We focus on leaders, extroverts, protesters in photos... we want to be able to identify that there is just something 'different' about them. In the same way, we want to be able to identify one cause, usually individual, to social problems. It's not the concerted effort between pharmaceutical companies to overprescribe opioids, it's just "abusers". It isn't the fact that healthy food and green spaces to exercise are inaccessible to poor folks who oftentimes don't have the time to engage anyway, it's that they just don't know how to be healthy or rather, don't even want to be.
We try to ascertain collective problems to individuals and raise individuals as our collective solutions. Our saviors. Our giants. While I am ALL FOR elevating the people who did the work in the past, I fear that if we place too much emphasis on them as being extraordinary people, we miss out an opportunity to be radically collective and see roles and space for everyone within our movements. We talk about Martin Luther King Jr without talking about the many Black folks, especially women and queer folks, who organized with him tirelessly to create change. We focus on the protest without focusing on the demand and how their rebellion threatened something that their opposition cared about. I want to make sure I am being clear. I don't want to sound contradictory. We must honor and give flowers to all those who came before us AND learn from their work as we build on it. But if we make people out to be Gods or saviors, we will never be able to see us continuing their work. We will also miss out on how healing, transformative, and participatory this week can truly be when you're really connected to it.
Image by Ricardo Levens Morales
What I've been able to learn is that THIS is organizing. It's how we change our material conditions. There isn't one way to do it. Actually, there are infinite ways. But the beautiful thing is that it is a co-created movement and that we get to define what that looks like.
When I say Black radical collectivism, I mean the belief that we all can experience something transformational by being in community and in spaces that affirm us. I know that I did this past weekend. I also know that as someone who never had a strong and healthy sense of community within my life, that it has become essential in my own personal praxis (the combination of practice and theory).
Where does abolition fit into my personal praxis? I wondered about this for a while in the wake of George Floyd's murder. It manifests in the way that my loved ones have been subject to dehumanization, profiling, and harmful institutionalization at the hands of police. The ways that I have seen police and cages used as THE way to address everything from refugees to mental health emergencies and how the language of incarceration infiltrates my own spaces is why I see abolition fitting into my own framework. Many intelligent and passionate abolitionist scholars and organizers have shared the sentiment, "Abolition is less about what you are losing and more about what you gain".
For someone who values access to education, healthcare, and healthy and fulfilling spaces, we have lost so much of that because of the Prison Industrial Complex. Public health, the field I care so deeply about because of its potential for improving life in under-resourced communities, continues to have little to no impact in part by funding allocated to police and prisons.
Image by Ricardo Levens Morales
I want to strip away the reasons why we tell ourselves that we cannot fight against our collective oppression. I also want to be clear about this. I know I have a lot of nice white folks who read my blog and I appreciate y'all so much. I also know that you should not feel as if you need to be at the forefront of our movements. I want white folks to be co-conspirators and do this work with oppressed folks but never try to fool themselves into believing that you will fully understand.
I had a mentor just tweet: "If you're looking for someone to save, look in the mirror."
Class oppression impacts the 99% and in case you were puzzled on that math, that probably includes you!
Our systems of oppression do not want us to have the information to start to capitalize on our collective power. To even recognize it is a radical practice. I want to decolonize knowledge and interrupt the ways that we are told it is a privilege to learn. To us who are marginalized, it is our right.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom, comrades. I hope to be an aid in making this practice accessible for all those oppressed.
Cover image by Ricardo Levens Morales. Please view their work at https://rlmartstudio.wordpress.com/
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