“Our survival is at stake,” says author and organizer Andrea Ritchie.
“Our survival is at stake, and so, let’s think about all the best things that can help us better understand how we can ensure the collective survival of as many of us as possible,” says author and organizer Andrea Ritchie. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Ritchie and host Kelly Hayes discuss organizing, solidarity with Palestine and why activists cannot defer the work of practicing new worlds.Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity.
And that’s what I’ve learned over the last 30 years, and had the privilege of learning from organizers at Critical Resistance, at Incite!, from people like you, and Mariame, and Beth Richie, and Mimi Kim, and Shira Hassan, and Paula Rojas and kai lumumba barrow, and Rachel Herzing, and just so many other folks who have been my teachers for such a long time as Black feminists, as women of color abolitionists, and queer and trans people — abolitionists who have been practicing abolitionist...
And we have to be willing to try those things at this point, and extend beyond what we’ve been doing, to really embracing any tool that could possibly bring us closer to the abolitionist futures we long for.
Not that we just make a five-year plan, assuming that we can understand every iteration of every set of conditions, and then execute it with complete fidelity to the minute details of that plan.
And I think what emergent strategies have taught me is how we each can take actions individually, as well as collectively in a networked, decentralized way across time and space in ways that can shift the systems, the larger systems, that we’re part of. And I write at one point that it brings abolition into the realm of the actionable, into something that we can practice every single day.
And because they are so different from the idea that we normally have around how we build power and how we build resistance, and I think, certainly, decentralization offers some protection against the violence of the state or white supremacists.
I think it really is this question of speaking from a place that recognizes that our struggles are truly linked with each other, and that we have to recognize the way that that is the case, that we have to recognize where solidarity lies, and where our shared interests lie, and where the parallels are, and where the very real connections are among the forces that are enacting unspeakable violence in Palestine and Gaza right now, and the forces that would enact unspeakable violence as they have...
The other thing people can be doing right now is continuing to talk about what’s happening and the history and the context, and offering a counter-perspective to the hegemonic, imperialist, dominant narrative in this moment. And that emergent strategies teach us that that is actually how people shift their understanding of the world, which is what organizing is.
The idea that, in the face of extreme grief and loss, or in moments when we feel horribly wronged, we should be spared any interrogation of the violence being done in our names, or with our tax dollars, is extraordinarily dangerous. We are living through an era of climate chaos. As the suffering the U.S. imposes militarily, and through the violence of capitalism continues to compound, crisis is outpacing our collective empathy.
So my answer would be yes, I believe that we practice interdependence and relational grounding in our direct actions, and that communal exchange is ultimately what makes protest an experience that I consider sacred. And I think we say those words, but we don’t always think about what that means. And we think that, “Oh, yeah. Maybe I’ll go to therapy on my own or do some healing work on my own, or we’ll do a healing circle or we’ll do some healing justice practices.” But really that’s not where the work is, and I certainly have been guilty of that myself. And when a comrade of mine, P.G. Watkins, the first thing I said was, “Well, what do you think about abolition and emergent strategies?” P.G.
And we just need as many spaces as possible to exercise the muscle that racial capitalism and settler colonialism have deliberately atrophied in our psyches, have deliberately extracted, frankly, from our psyches, which is the capacity to imagine otherwise, and then to practice otherwise. And we do some exercises sometimes. Imagine what you want the headline to be in five years. Imagine the community you want. Imagine what safety feels like, tastes like, is like.
And that imagination is essential to, as you say, make the jailbreak from where we are to where we want to go. And so, I included fiction written by other people. And then, I thought, “Well, if I’m going to say that people need to engage in practices of imagination, I might need to model that myself.” So, there’s the first published fiction I’ve ever written in this book.
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