Healing as Resistance

Megan French-Marcelin: We're gonna start by talking about why do we care about this work in the first place, why does it matter? What brings us to abolition, and what motivates our feelings about collective liberation.

Darren Mack: I think justice is probably a good place to begin that conversation and this includes an understanding of social justice, economic justice, racial justice, etc. And for me, that understanding started with a process of learning and unlearning a lot. A pivotal moment for me was during my incarceration at Rikers Island. I was 17 at the time, the population was over 20,000 people detained on Rikers Island at the time. And I was in a cell and got a letter from a cousin who had sent me like a tiny cut out newspaper article. And this article was about a distant relative named George Stinney Jr. who, you know, was falsely accused of murdering two young white girls, wrongly arrested, wrongly convicted by an all white male jury and given the electric chair. And George Stinney, Jr. was 14 years old. And when I learned about that, I wanted to know more about the story. And I started reflecting like, man, here it is, you know, I'm here on Rikers Island, you know, going to court and I take full responsibility for my actions that led me to that to my incarceration, but his only crime was being Black and he lost his life in the criminal legal system. So that kind of made me think what type of system would take the life of an innocent child to preserve white power. So that was a catalyst to understanding that justice would never come from the criminal legal system. And that led me on my journey, and I was eventually sent to the upstate New York state prison system to serve 24 years in prison. And this was at the sunset of higher education and in prisons, you know, throughout the country. You know, when the 94 Crime Bill kind of decimated higher education at that time.

Megan: Right, through the ending of Pell.

Darren: Yeah, but in 2006, I was transferred to Easter Correctional Facility. And they had the Bard Prison Program. And, you know, as soon as I got there,one of the first people I saw was a friend I did time with—he had the same sentence as me. He's like, “Yo, they got college here.” And I was like, “Okay,”and I applied with 125 other men. 30 people got to interview and 15 people got accepted, and I got accepted. I was on a history track, you know, and in that program, my professor/mentor, Dr. Delia Melis, she taught a US Women's History course. And we learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City, which killed over 100 young women and girls, and that kind of was a spark for me around the labor movement. It was young immigrant women who organized to improve the labor conditions that we now benefit from. And it struck me, these young, marginalized women could organize and build the power to change labor conditions in meaningful ways. That made me think that currently incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people can organize and build enough power to dismantle mass incarceration and that led me to truly believe in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. For example, look at poverty.When you have a place like New York City, which is the financial capital of the world, more billionaires and millionaires living in the city than anywhere else in the country, and at the same time, you know, we have poverty, but most people are not aware. And that lack of awareness is by design. That poverty is by design. It is in our policies that make and perpetuate that inequity. It makes me think about Tupac Shakur when he said, We got money for war, but can't feed the poor. You know, so. So yeah, that's kind of like, what got me to justice work.

Megan: It's interesting because I just had this flashback. I feel like the last time you and I were having a conversation like this one was during COVID. We had been slowly working our way through various liberation struggle books, and thinking about the aftermath of COVID where we haven't even really dealt with it, right? Like we haven't dealt with the fact of a global pandemic where working class and marginalized communities were just decimated, where the focus on recovery was to state agencies and the welfare of capital not the welfare of people. And yet, we also watched there emerge a new energy around labor movements that have come out of that. That feels exciting in a way just because I feel like we haven't seen sustained collective struggle in this country in a way that feels possible.

Darren: Yeah, yeah. And I like that terminology rather than movement, sustained collective struggle, that that can be replaced with.

Megan: You know, it's so funny, because I know you and I have talked about this before, but we both work in nonprofits and nonprofits are not movement spaces and yet there's the tendency among our comrades to say, “oh, in the movement, in the work, in the movement,” and I get that tendency to want to feel a part of something larger, especially since so many of us have read and grappled with the movements of our ancestors. But in a way, using that language in this moment dissuades us from understanding what we're actually doing in this work right now, because we're not doing movement work. There's no collective movement. Not right now. There's a huge amount of infighting and ego jockeying, and folks are operating on grant cycles and through deliverables—which just isn’t aligned with what I have come to believe movement work looks like. But when you think about sustained liberation struggles, we are not doing that work. We're not doing sustained political education. We're not, um, organizing around people's most basic material conditions. And rarely do we even operate as a collective. We operate as coalitions. As organizations. But not collectives. And so it's interesting to even think about, like, what brings you into liberation work because I'm not convinced that's what we're doing.

Darren: Yeah, I would agree. There's some clarity about the limitations of the nonprofit sector field in the work for collective struggle. And I guess that kind of leads to where we are with abolition. I learned from Dr. Joy James, when she talks about the fact that if you asked ten abolitionists what they define as abolition you would get ten different answers. Some may talk about abolition as the abolition of jails and prisons, and then some might talk about abolition of police and and then, and even fewer go further and include capitalism or neocolonialism and imperialism. And so what is it about challenging neocolonialism or say imperialism that keeps those structures from being talked about within the abolitionist framework? And why is it that even fewer think about what systems are we building in the place of these systems and agencies? So, Dr. James I believe correctly defines abolitionism, you know, in the plural, because people have various theoretical and practical practices around abolition that make it challenging to reach a singular framework. Like Frederick Douglass, you know, we, everybody will agree that he was an abolitionist, right? And his primary work or his lane was about abolition of slavery. He went around the country to speak about the horrors of slavery and the urgency to abolish that system. Harriet Tubman, I don't think anybody would disagree that she was an abolitionist, sneaking into prisons—I mean—plantations helping people…

Megan: Freudian slip.

Darren: …helping people escape, you know, that's abolitionist work. John Brown was clear that he knew about his people better than others and abolition was not going to happen. Not without violence and bloodshed and the Civil War proved him right. So he was an abolitionist. So people have different paths and theories when we use words like abolition. And today, I would argue, the work has been heavily focused on agencies and institutions of the state like police, like jails, like prisons, and not the state itself, you know. And so, that is a critique I have had about the state of the work.

Megan: I think that's right. I think that's tied to us all being in nonprofits. Because it's tied to fighting the visible, and inevitably, the safest enemy. And those are the the agencies of the state, but that we focus our energy there means we've missed out on a critique of the way state power operates and the durability of state power, and in fact, the shape shifting nature of state power, where half the time what we do in our in our nonprofit advocacy spaces, is actually simply stretch the boundaries of what the state is already doing. We are making reforms at the margins that the state is able to absorb and maintain while retaining unchecked power. I've thought about this a lot because I am teaching this semester. I've told students if there's one book that you need to read, ever, it's Wretched of the Earth. And so now, I am watching students grapple with the fact that Fanon says quite explicitly that you can't destroy colonialism, imperialism, systems built on capitalist exploitation, without violence, and without revolution, and I have asked students - what does that mean? Does it mean we should stop working on the margins? Do we have no faith in incremental progress? How do we grapple with that and how do we grapple with the fact that within that, we know that violence corrodes us? Right? And how do you protect against that corrosion when in a conversation about healing? How do you balance revolution on the one hand with our need to protect and model a humane way of living?

Darren: Yeah, absolutely. Even. Even amongst those who are on the left who want some radical change, abolition is more palatable than revolution. You know, one of the pieces that Dr. Joy James wrote, I think the title was “Airbrushing Revolution for the Sake of Abolition” kind of speaks to that phenomena whereby people who engage in abolitionism work, like the energy is directed to institutions to agencies rather than state because it's not, you know, revolutionary.

Megan: I've also thought about it as a symptom of our time. We live in this neoliberal era where the mainstreaming of abolition is actually a way to dilute and undermine its revolutionary promise and allows for the claim to abolition to be absorbed by the state. Now you can signal your abolitionist politic with a tweet, but it's not linked to any collective action. And the deep individualism that nonprofits require undermines collectivity even further. And in a weird way, at this point, certain conceptualizations of abolition as they are put forth actually align with capitalism, and that makes it almost impossible to think that abolition, in the way it has been mainstreamed, will ever lead to revolution.

Darren: Yeah. I agree. We have substituted tweeting for the actual groundwork and base building and mass mobilization that needs to be done.

Megan: I think part of what has constrained us in nonprofit sectors, but also just in justice work writ large, is the fact that we've done very little imagining outside of a racist capitalist state. I ran a workshop a couple of years ago with really amazing and powerful leaders at Free Her. We did this activity where we asked people to imagine liberation. Mind you, the people in the room were all working toward the end of incarceration for women and girls. But I was struck, and I include myself in this, that the visions for liberation that folks came up with were always in opposition to something. So it was “not this, not that”, but it was never generative or something that simply stood outside the current power structures or something that was constituted solely from a place of community. And part of that is because we've been so indoctrinated by the state to assume that our livelihood is tied to the state that we can't imagine anything else. Even those of us who call ourselves abolitionists or say we're engaged in liberation struggles, whatever that truly signifies, because I, again, I don't think we are engaged in liberation struggles. But even we cannot imagine a world that simply is, because we are still so entrenched in our daily struggles with capitalism and its attendant racist structures. Palestine is engaged in a liberation struggle. That we cannot imagine what alternative structures for society might look like. What it might be, even when you know, even when we're asked to imagine those things, we can't. And that seems to be something that is linked to the way that the state controls us, right? It's like our imaginings are better quality schools, better transportation, and those things are important, but that the state can offer those concessions slowly and surely and still maintain hegemonic power.

Darren: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a great point. When people talk about freedom of dreams, you know, it is hard for people to imagine something outside our current reality and systems. And the struggle because, you know, is how do we have freedom dreams, or these visions of liberation when people actually live in captive nightmares, so at the moment and that's what we know. People want to address, you know, what is directly in front of them, what they can see. I understand the ideological struggle around that…

Megan: And I, I don't know what the what the pathway is for that because you there are ways where it feels profoundly hopeless to to think about where we go from here, especially, I think as we watch moments where there seems to be a an opening, and we watch it come and go and, and get absorbed by the state. And, you know, I'm thinking about the summer of 2020, where there seemed to be a moment…but that nevertheless got absorbed. And it is almost like we are in a pressure cooker right? And that pressure cooker has a valve controlled by the state. And when the state turns the valve, it legitimates a certain amount of protest to take the pressure off true state power, and so we march, and are out in the streets, and all we have done is expend energy that the state can actually absorb.

Darren: Absolutely.

Megan: But then that moment has passed. And you have to look at not only what did we not gain but what did we potentially lose? Because when the State offers concessions, it is often a mask for greater repression. It is that the handout is often the deadly pill or greater repression.

Darren: Yeah. There's always throughout history, these moments that kind of catapult people to mobilization around various issues. I think that's why that points to why it is important to like to build a movement? Because the movement needs to capitalize on these moments to build a broader movement and shore up mass mobilization, and moments sometimes, if we are paying attention, can create organization. But usually, that's not sustainable because it's reactionary, it is creating a structure to respond to something urgent but not necessarily to sustain struggle. We need to use moments to build out proactively. To seize the time and build a movement, build mass mobilization, and to build out true organization. There's definitely a distinction I think, between what we have been doing and what the pathway is to collective liberation. The nonprofit sector has limitations within that broader struggle, and that's not the pathway to collective liberation. I think it's more about building political organizations.

Megan: Yeah, that's something I've talked to James Kilgore about—the difference between organizations, an organization in the nonprofit sense, and what political organization actually means when it's put into practice, and that kind of organization can never be sustained by nonprofits because fundamentally nonprofits are informed by and nurtured through capitalism and state power.

Darren: Yep. The IRA was a political organization. The ANC was a political organization. You know, I think that's the avenue to collective liberation, but we have to build it.

Megan: You and I have had many conversations about the ideological struggle for liberation movements over many, many years. And what strikes me now, I don’t know if we have ever talked about healing. If we have, it definitely has not been a prominent part of our conversations. We definitely don’t talk about healing in liberation spaces. And, I think, at least for me, that what I have seen be called healing feels very individualistic. In the last five years, and in a backlash to capitalism, everything's become about self care. But self care and healing aren't the same thing. To me. Self care is deeply aligned with capitalism. The concept of self care as it has been promoted most readily actually asks us to engage in the practice of capitalist consumerism. It's getting a massage, it is having a fancy dinner, all good things, things I want to be doing. But that's not healing to me, because healing is a collective process. The ways we have been told we can engage in self care end up being an addendum to capital, not truly in opposition to it.

To me, healing is, you know, acknowledging how traumatized we all are. I've thought about this a lot… the people that I know that are good at this work, we're all… we all come from trauma. And we perpetuate that trauma even when it gives rise to powerful advocacy. It operates as a double- edged sword to a degree because it's what makes us good at what we call the work. It gives us credibility, or authority, or it makes it possible to operate organically in certain spaces. And yet there is almost the idea that to remain in radical struggle, to sustain that struggle—and I'm using that loosely—you have to remain unhealed. Because it is that unhealed space, that keeps us in struggle. And I've thought about this a lot because, you know, I've worked with people where part of the power of the work that we did was in the trauma bonding that we did, and I do believe it was powerful work. And then I think about the people who are truly fighting liberation struggles, and I have noticed that we ask our leaders to stay unhealed. We ask that of them because it keeps them at the vanguard, and it keeps all of us in the struggle.

Darren: Yeah, I totally agree. When we think about leaders that are struggling against systems of oppression, from Frederick Douglass, who had to detail the horrors of slavery over and over again to you know, people today, family members who lost loved ones on Rikers Island. They have to share their stories over and over again, dozens of times reliving that trauma and that sadness and that anger, and each time is traumatizing in and of itself. You know? We do not, as people in struggle, do enough to stand with them and hold that trauma with them, to support what that sharing does to people and to their souls. And often that is because the state is striking blows at us, often since birth, and so sometimes the need to heal gets put aside by the need to duck and cover. But as you said, we need to heal, we need to rest. And there's been a lot of emphasis on that, but it has manifested as something that won’t actually heal our wounds - not the individualistic rest or the individualistic self care. I think that collective healing, you know, looks different. I personally can't disconnect my individual healing from the collective healing because [how could I not see] others struggling in trauma and not be engaged with trying to facilitate more collective healing. But then I always think about Malcolm X, who was asked by a reporter, don't you think the Negro in America has made some progress and he was like, I can’t call it progress if you stick a knife in nine inches and pull it out one, you can’t call that progress. You have to pull it out all the way and then allow some progress. And right now, the state isn't even acknowledging the knife.

Megan: And I think it's like at what point do we decide that healing actually could be part of a liberatory practice. And I use practice because even if we're not in a movement phase, maybe we can practice those things. Because I think about it. What we're doing to ourselves and to one another is actually quite traumatizing. And I think about that trauma, as it is operating in non profit spaces—where competition and ego are so prevalent as a result of the way we are funded—as counterproductive to whatever liberationists visions we could bring about. We're all running around so fucking unhealed with trauma coming out, right, left and sideways. And how often do we pause and ask people what they truly need in those moments? Or even begin to conceptualize what we, as a collective, need? I think instead there's a kind of common thought that if you can't keep your trauma in check, why are you in this space? And then people show up poorly and inflict new trauma. And we are so insistent on charismatic leaders and that those leaders can maintain in traumatized space, that we don’t think about what a collective process of healing might look like. I feel like I always go back to the end of Toni Morrison's beloved where, you know, they've been able to vanquish this ghost of slavery, but it's only in a collective moment, through a collective process. And there's like this idea in that to heal trauma we cannot pass on it. We won’t heal by trudging forward in struggle. To heal trauma, we can't just pass on it. We can't keep it moving. We have to focus on it. We can't consistently pass on these sort of traumatized places. So I think the question is what place does healing have in liberation struggles and what happens if—and this is my personal impulse and I think a lot of people's impulse—if we say healing can't happen till the revolution happens.

Darren: Yes. Some people, you know, some people take that position. Um, you know, it feels like I'm like leaning towards that, because, you know, how can we heal when the blows of patriarchy are still striking and how can we heal when the blows of white supremacy still striking, when the blows of all these oppressive systems, you know, are still striking us? We need to be, well we need to cut off the hands that strike us? How do we heal amid that and I think that's your point. That's something we need to have more conversations about and build the spaces for, you know, collective healing. Yeah, so your point about self care seems more individualistic, rather than healing which is more collective and I think we should add the term collective healing to that. You know, these oppressive systems of patriarchy, white supremacy and racism- they are so prevalent and they feel like we are never getting close enough to cut off that hand. And maybe right now we need to figure out how to do both. Because right now, we are like soldiers in a war. You know, he might get wounded, and he goes to a medic to get the most immediate treatment he needs, but then he goes back into war. He puts on antibiotics, he covers the wound. And he fights again. a I think that's kind of like the process that we use when it comes to like any form of healing.

Megan: Yeah, we are doing triage work. It's very hard for me to believe that we can defeat the apparatus of state violence without a complete eradication of those systems. And yet, we've watched people in this work, not just be assassinated, right, but die prematurely. Over and over and over again, because of what this work does to people's bodies and to their minds. And I wonder what that untaken path would be if we were intentional about the preservation of our comrades and also how you balance sort of the collective need for grace, because and I feel like this is both a tendency in what we imagine movement to be but also in nonprofit spaces. Where do we balance ideological purity with the fact that human beings are fallible, we are imperfect, and, by extension, liberation struggles are imperfect.

Darren: Yeah, that's a great question. You know organizations have contradictions, are fallible and have limited capacity. This that's me too, but one of my mentors always says, Dr. Millis, she always says we're walking contradictions. And like one example that she always brings up is W.E.B DuBois. He began with conceiving of the talented tenth. He propagated it, pushed it, advocated for it. And then later on, he had almost every political ideological perspective that's out there. You know, respectability politics that was funneled through the NAACP to communism. So that is a giant in history, but it speaks to human nature to change and shift and grow and contradict. It also requires us to work outside of our organizations and the nonprofit space toward radical struggle and true liberation. And that is where, at least on some basic level, collective work becomes more meaningful. Outside of work, I support the work of freeing political prisoners. Many people know who Assata Shakur is but not as many people know who her comrade and the father of her only child is: Kamau Sadiki. So Sadiki, who's currently incarcerated, a veteran Black Panther arrested on trumped up charges, and we are fighting for his release. So that's work that I support, collective work that I support. And then I work with Jailhouse Lawyer Speaks, which is the largest prison led collective. They fight for prisoners' rights. They organize the 2018 national prisoners strike in 2021, and the Shut them Down demonstrations—we actually did one here in New York. So that is radical collective work to get engaged with. And then there is work to close Rikers. And I work with a coalition of survivors of Rikers of and families who lost their loved ones on Rikers. And it's a coalition that consists of organizational partners, you know, from various parts of the political spectrum on the left, you know, like organizations who are engaged in struggles for housing for mental health for reentry, and we are addressing conditions at the same time as demanding closure. And I support this work, you know. But individuals, we only have so much capacity to do this work, and that brings us back to the healing piece. We have to do a better job of creating space and attending to the healing of people who engage in this work. And like you said, give people grace man when people don't show up 100% All the time.

Megan: I've thought about this a lot this year, because it's been a tumultuous year. And so I've been thinking both about the ways that I preserve my own reserves. But also show up with more grace for others, but also with more grace for myself. How do I ensure that I'm taking care of myself, like how many of us just don't eat because we have determined the work to be more important? I just think there's ways where leaning into practices of care, collectively insisting on the centrality of that, is an anti-capitalist anti-imperialist project. And there are ways to strip the sort of culture of self care that's arisen to what it is really calling for. Strip away the sort of capitalist tendencies that I think are in that and create something far more communal, that actually ends up beginning to mimic alternatives, alternative ways of being and seeing and developing collectivity.

Darren: Yeah, yeah. Even in our daily practice, I know people are reluctant to say in a meeting, Hey, I haven't eaten and I need to. Something as simple as that.

Megan: But that's, that's what's problematic in the way that we currently operate because we're operating on funding cycles and dependent on the whims of foundations. And because we are, our work is dependent on us putting our hands out to work that they will fund right, and we are not asking foundations to fund the revolution. And they would not. It would be to their own destruction.

Darren: They are funding the counter revolutions though.

Megan: Yes they are. So we have a long way to go in our work. Just to be free, let alone be liberated.