These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.
These are stolen lands built by stolen people
“Anti-racist Check-in”
On January 28th, 2021, I offered a free Anti-racist Check-in Session. Below are the musings that I shared with the group as a love offering.
Anti-racism has become wildly popular and mainstream; this is a good thing, and this presents issues. I hope that these questions will poke and provoke you into deeper awareness, practice, and ethics. Please take only that which makes sense to you and leave the rest.
Is your anti-racism a practice or an identity?
I firmly believe that being an ally, an accomplice, or co-conspirator is a process and not an identity. It is not enough for us to be against racism. What are we for, and what are we willing to do to make it happen? There is no passive way to be a neo-Nazi, nationalist, or white supremacists. There is no passive middle of the road ethical practicing anti-racist. People who envision the rise of a white ethnostate build a practice around making this vision come true. They do not merely wish. If you are anti-racist, what are the practices that you are engaged in that help to ensure this world comes to fruition?
What roles does the land play in your anti-racism?
As humans living on this planet, we are experiencing an existential threat—the threat of an impending climate disaster. The doom is so scary and overwhelming that two of the richest men Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, are putting all of their energy and resources into colonizing space. The rich and powerful are abandoning Earth. We either save the planet, or there will be no future(s). These are our choices. If the planet is not freed or liberated, if lands are not given back to the Indigenous peoples across the globe, then we are screwed. We can no longer afford to drill and mismanage the Earth the way we are doing, nor can we afford to keep telling ourselves the lie that we have time. Denialism is a habit of white supremacy. Telling the truth and confronting the crisis is the antidote. All of our social justice fights must be rooted in the land. We must know the names of the people whose lands we are on, and we must align ourselves with their demands.
What is the moral center of your anti-racism?
If the moral center of your anti-racism is purely books, podcasts, and a well-curated Instagram feed, then I don’t trust it or you, fam. What holds your anti-racism together and makes it sticky? What is the gorilla glue that keeps your values and ethics fixed? Racism, premature Black Death, and engineered vulnerabilities are moral crises that require people with great moral fortitude and courage to do the hard work of divesting, dismantling, and disrupting white supremacy.
What is your anti-racism backed by?
My anti-racism is backed by therapy, tarot, astrology, Jesus, Vodou, the ancestors, my guides, Buddhism, Black feminist thought, Indigenous feminisms, woman of color femininisms, queer abolition feminism, Black anarchism, Black joy, creativity, imagination, The Haitian Revolution, and all that I cannot yet name. And yours?
Do you have an anti-racist safety plan? What will you do if/when the Nazi’s come for you? [link to the previous post]
Forgive yourself.
Have you done the work to reckon with the person you were before you got serious about practicing anti-racism? Have you forgiven yourself for being homophobic, transphobic, classist, a patriarchal terrorist, evading your whiteness, lying about your race, being a practitioner of respectability politics, a former Nazi, or whatever else? Are you in a constant practice of forgiving yourself for not being perfect? I do not think we can engage with transformative change while hating ourselves, the bodies we are in, and not being kind and ethical with ourselves. The world we are fighting for must make room for healing. Healing cannot be a luxury; it must be the prerequisite of our freedom-dreams and liberation struggles.
What are the growing edges of your sociopolitical ethic?
My current growing edge is DRUGS and how it plays into one's pursuit of pleasure and liberation. I have always believed in decriminalizing drugs and using harm reduction approaches. However, lately, I have been engaging Dr. Carl Hart’s ideas about drugs and liberty. In his new book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups (a book I have not read yet, but I have listened to him discuss), Dr. Hart introduces me/us to the radical idea that people have the right to use drugs because drugs are pleasurable. Equating drugs with pleasure in this way broke my brain. I am used to the pleasure associated with drugs wrapped up in debauchery and danger. He talks about our myths around addiction and what actually causes addiction. He talks openly about his use of heroin and how it makes him more forgiving and magnanimous. As a person who grew up in the shadows of the crack epidemic as a 90s kid, these ideas are forcing me to rethink my notions of drugs, sovereignty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is unsettling the ideas that I once thought were settled. Our politics must make us grow in ways we never even calculated.
8. Do you have strategies and tools for different kinds of situations and people?
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to inviting people to go deeper in their anti-racist analysis or attempting to bring a Qanon believer back from the brink. Disinformation is a severe issue in all of our families and communities. We must be practiced in how to talk to different people. We must become better anti-racist organizers.
9. Who are your people? Who do you organize with? Who keeps you accountable?
Anti-racism cannot be practiced alone. Accountability is a communal love language, learn it and seek to be proficient in it.
10. What are your freedom dreams? How often do you engage in rest, play, and your imagination?
Free individuals create free worlds. We must visit with our freedom often and somatically pick it up and practice making decisions from a free place. We also must ask ourselves, are we afraid to be free? Are we afraid of freedom?
11. Does your anti-racism live only between your ears, or is it somatic?
I want somatic allies, co-conspirators, and accomplices. I want to be with comrades whose bodies know how to humanize and be with my body. A somatic practitioner of anti-racism knows how to be human with other humans no matter their bodies.
12. How deep does Black Lives Matter go in you?
Are there Black bodies, identities, and intersections that you struggle to be in solidarity with or see the fullness of their humanity? No matter your race or ethnicity, this is a question that must be answered over and over again.
13. Does your life bear fruit of your politics?
If your life were a silent movie, could I, by watching you surmise that you are a person who is deeply committed to racial justice?
14. When was the last time you took a walk through your mind and visited with your inner colonizer and your problematic thoughts?
If you are afraid to confront your ugly, problematic, unpopular thoughts, you will be unable to engage them outside of yourself. It is through becoming intimately aware of the ideas within me that were formed by white supremacy that I can do the work of uprooting its roots. People who are aware of their racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, classist thoughts, etc., are better able to ensure that their unconscious biases do not leak into their human interactions.
15. Where are you stuck?
To be anti-racist is to be engaged in a constant state of undoing and learning. It's a dynamic practice and way of life. If you are stagnant and if you are stuck, you are both vulnerable and potentially dangerous.
16. Are you engaging in the healing of your ancestors?
How has white supremacy, colonialism, or anti-Blackness harmed your family? Who in your family tree needs healing? How are you engaging them or this information in your anti-racist process and practice?
17. When it comes to your anti-racist practice and praxis, resist easy answers and the books and people that push them.
VIEWINGS AND READINGS:
Police Abolition 101: Messages when Facing Doubts [LINK]- This is a great zine that will help you deepen your understanding and engagement with police abolition.
Caste Does Not Explain Race Boston Review [LINK]- “Caste neither illuminates nor speaks to the origins, exigencies, or urgency of our time. Its celebration in the mainstream media is cause for concern because it reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over the realities, needs, and struggles of ordinary people. It is akin to books such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Race—books that emphasize white peoples’ emotions and behaviors as the source of inequality, thereby circumventing fundamental issues such as resource allocation, labor exploitation, and economic dispossession. This re-centering of dominant voices and desires comes at the expense of those whose marginalization is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.”
Turning Towards Each Other A Conflict Workbook by Jovida Ross & Weyam Ghadbian [LINK]- A conflict workbook from a social justice standpoint because we need tools!
For Black Creatives Who Have Considered Leaving IG Because It’s Racist AF [LINK]- Dr. Yaba Blay and Sonya Renee Taylor are two Black women with sizable Instagram followers. They are discussing the racism baked into Instagram’s algorithms and how they get deployed on Black creatives. This Instagram live conversation is essential for those who want to understand racism in the digital space.
Left of Black: Black Girl Magic in Young Adult Speculative Fiction with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas [LINK]- This interview is a great conversation between two scholars about YA novels and Blackness in the speculative space.
Why ‘White Passing’ Is White Supremacy Three Reasons White-Latinx Need to Identify as Just White by Joey Pierre [LINK]- “And why have we allowed White Supremacy to strip us of our human nuance and complexity? Instead of honoring Anglo-white people by claiming to pass as them, let’s honor Black people by admitting we are white — because we already are white! Let’s stop playing the same gaslighting games Anglo-whites love to play. Instead, let’s ally our Black communities in these emotionally exhausting and painful race-related conversations and stop perpetuating ‘white-passing supremacy’ and anti-Blackness.”
Jazmine Sullivan: Tiny Desk (Home Concert) [LINK]- Heaux Tales is Sulivan’s new album that I love so much and this performance was EVERYTHING
Cori Bush: Can She Bring the Movement for Black Lives to Congress? [LINK]- ‘The election season fervor over Black women has mixed them all together: T-shirts, articles, and memes circulate lists including Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and Kamala Harris, celebrating Harris's historic appointment as the first Black woman vice presidential pick for a major party. Charlotta Bass was actually the first Black woman nominated as VP, who ran on the 1952 Progressive Party ticket and advocated for military budget cuts, universal health care, labor, and civil rights. Tubman was an abolitionist, nurse, healer, and mutual aid organizer. Hamer was a plantation worker and revolutionary freedom fighter who believed in democracy and direct investment in the most economically exploited people. Chisolm was a champion for gender and racial justice causes, and bragged about not being backed by any corporate interests during her presidential run. Harris, a former prosecutor, breaks from these traditions of progressive and radical Black women. She backed Representative William Lacy Clay, an establishment Democrat who held his father’s seat for 20 years, over Bush in the primaries. When I ask Bush about her legislative priorities, they sound much closer to the causes championed by Bass, Tubman, Hamer, and Chisholm.’
The dangerous magical thinking of ‘this is not who we are’ [LINK]- “Embedded within this description is an attempt to isolate those who descended on the Capitol as a hillbilly malignancy when, in fact, this was a mob spanning lines of class, religion, education and athletic ability. This sort of specious distancing is so common I refer to it as TROT, as in “Those Racists Over There.” The TROT, fundamentally, is a figment of white imagination and absolution, a tool to avoid reckoning in any meaningful way with The Problem We All Live With.”
The Science of Spiritual Narcissism [LINK]- “Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool us into thinking we are evolving and growing, when in fact all we are growing is our ego. Some psychologists have pointed out that the self-enhancement that occurs through spiritual practices can lead to the “I'm enlightened and you're not” syndrome and spiritual bypass, by which people seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological “unfinished business.” In my recent book Transcend, I call it "pseudo-transcendence"— transcendence built on a very shaky foundation.”
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America And Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own a conversation [LINK]- Watching Dr. Eddie Glaude and Dr. West talk about their love of James Baldwin is the palette cleanse you need.
The Secret Internet of TERFs [LINK]- “For years, r/GenderCritical, the group Fain joined, was the internet’s largest and most recognizable anti-trans space, known on Reddit as a “major pipeline” into TERF ideology. That abruptly changed in June, however, when r/GenderCritical disappeared from Reddit. The cataclysmic events of 2020 had pushed all major social-media platforms into content-moderation crisis mode—compelling them to adopt a new dedication to removing misinformation and hate speech, adding friction to prevent harassment and viral conspiracy theories. Reddit responded to pressure from its users in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests by introducing an overhauled content policy that contained specific rules about hate speech. Its implementation resulted in an automatic ban for r/GenderCritical.”
LUTZE SIGHTINGS:
Feminist Hotdog Podcast: S4 Episode 5: The Social Justice Doula [LINK]- I had the pleasure of being on the podcast of a recent former coaching client of mine. This was a very thoughtful conversation between two feminists.
decomp. [LINK]- I guest-edited a literary zine titled: Twin Futures Black Resistance and Indigenous Sovereignty
LISTENING:
The Songs My Mother Taught Me [LINK]-is a Spotify playlist of Fannie Lou Hamer singing songs she learned from her mother. Hamer used song as an organizing tool, and we are infinitely blessed to have these recordings at our disposal.
Chez Baldwin[LINK]- This is a Spotify playlist made up of the vinyl records found in the Venice home Baldwin.
Lolita Podcast [LINK]- This is a podcast based on the book Lolita written by Vladimir Nobokov. It is a smart, well-researched feminist reading of the tragically misunderstood book. I am slowly making my way through it, and I am enjoying it immensely.
My Gothic Dissertation [LINK]- This is the first dissertation made in podcast form. The author uses 19th-century gothic literature to contextualize the plight of a grad student in pursuit of a Ph.D. It does an excellent job of talking to grad students and the general public at the same time.
From Woke to Work: Why Empathy is Not Enough w/ Dr. Chandra Prescod-Weinstein [LINK]- I am smitten by Dr. Prescod-Weistein’s brain, and I tend to listen to her and read her whenever I can; this is a timely conversation.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
A video of a Black girl being violently slammed to the ground by a school resource officer has been viewed over 70k times. This harm happened in Osceola County, which is three hours away from Miami. My comrade/accountability partner/ sister-friend, who is also the Executive Director of S.O.U.L Sisters Leadership Collective Wakumi Douglas and members of her team spent part of their Black futures month protesting, advocating, and caring for the community and the young people harmed by this state violence.
My ask is simple, please give to the family directly and give to S.O.U.L Sisters Leadership Collective. We must fund Black futures and healing!
Funds go directly to the family: Cashapp: $MuffinNana / PayPal: Jameshabracey@yahoo.com
S.O.U.L Sisters Leadership Collective: DONATE