Damon Williams: Welcome to One Million Experiments.
Daniel Kisslinger (Kiss): A podcast showcasing and exploring how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons. This is season two and we are so hyped to be back with you. I am Kiss.
Damon: We're back baby. It's Damon, I'm here.
[laughter]
Kiss: That was a many, many month buildup of return. We're so happy to be back with you, talking with-
Damon: Streets have been waiting, I know, it's been a drought. We coming back with the work.
[laughter]
Kiss: Here we are with season two. For those of you who this is your first time tuning in, welcome. We're so happy to have you. What we do here is, on each episode we talk with a different experiment, formulation, group, campaign, community that is experimenting and what does it mean to build safety for their people, for their communities, for their city, and for their futures. We got a great first season of those conversations. If you haven't checked those out, make sure you go back and tune in.
If you are a listener, welcome back, and you know that we don't do this alone. We have our special guest co-host, our partner in decriminalization, the one and only Eva Nagao from Interrupting Criminalization is back with us. Hello, Eva.
Eva Nagao: Hey, hey. Good to you back, y'all.
Kiss: Welcome back to the lab.
Damon: It is so good to have you.
Kiss: How has your hiatus been? Have you been doing anything particularly of note? Have you been traveling the world dreaming of season two? What does this time look like and what are you excited to be back in the lab with us doing?
Eva: We've got a lot cooking over at millionexperiments.com. For those of you who have been with us through this long journey, I think we started at 20 experiments or something that we were documenting on our little website, we've got a whole redesign going, we've got close to 100 experiments up, we've got a new Instagram account this year, we have a newsletter, so the cooks have been cooking. Damon, you reminded me earlier not to respond to how are you doing with what work you have been doing question.
[laughter]
Eva: I've been good, y'all. I've been really good. We took a breath in December and it was nice, especially over here in sunny California.
Kiss: Maybe you would be good just to give folks a little reminder, a refresher on who the partner orgs are on this year podcast.
Eva: Well, you see here on this year podcast-
Damon: We've gotten very country this season.
[laughter]
Eva: I'm here at the table representing a couple of orgs. We have Project NIA, One Million Experiments co-founder Mariame Kaba's project. Project NIA is actually ending, sunsetting this year in 2023. A lesson to all the amazing organizations out there, you can do amazing work and sometimes you can sunset that amazing work. Project NIA has been around for the past decade-plus, working to end incarceration of children and young adults, mostly by promoting restorative and transformative justice practices.
Mariame and I have been co-conspirators for a long time now, and I joined her on this latest venture with Andrea J Ritchie Interrupting Criminalization. It's an initiative that aims to interrupt and end the growing criminalization and incarceration of women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming, people of color. Over at IC, I am the creative director, and I get to convince people that we get to do cool projects like this year project with AirGo.
Kiss: Now that we know who the players are a little bit, Damon and I build conversations in Chicago and beyond with movement folks, people reshaping the culture of our city and world toward liberation, let's go ahead and get into who we're talking to on this first episode of Season 2. Eva, who we're going to be talking with?
Eva: We have the great pleasure of debuting this season with Makia Green from Harriet's Wildest Dreams. I actually got to meet Makia, which is rare for our work where we're talking to so many people from so many different places, but Makia came to a conference that we were throwing out here in California and is just the most vibrant, bubbling, amazing personality. If you ever have the chance to be in space with them, take it.
Harriet's Wildest Dreams is an organization that was put together, the co-conductors, the co-founders are really seasoned organizers in the Black Lives Movement ecosystem. This is something that came up around the 2020 uprisings and is now growing exponentially. They are a Black-led community defense hub in the greater Washington area. For those of you not from the area, we call it the DMV, which is DC, Maryland, and Virginia, not your hated local motor vehicle [laughs] department.
Their work centers around Black lives most at risk for state-sanctioned violence. It includes work around legal empowerment, political and civic education, mass protest, organizing campaigns, and community care that builds alternatives to oppressive systems. Harriet's Wildest Dreams has three main pillars, and we talk about some of those in this episode. There's the political defense pillar, or as they call it Ella's Emancipators. That consists of base building advocacy and budget and policy campaigns to change living conditions for Black people, from ending solitary confinement to decriminalizing drugs.
The second pillar is legal defense or Ida B. Free, and is committed to building local power through transformational direct actions. They do this by organizing, strategizing, and responding, and they work to decrease the power of the carceral state and oppressive systems. The last pillar is the community defense pillar or Harriet's Responders, which we go into in some detail. This pillar is committed to building local power through transformational direct actions and is a part of a larger coalition called the DC Safety Team.
Kiss: You can find out more about their work at harrietsdreams.org. With that, why don't we go ahead and hop into the lab for this conversation?
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Damon: All right, we are back. We are hopping in the lab and heading out to DC and very excited to be in community. Welcome to One Million Experiments. We have Makia Green, everybody.
Makia Green: [laughs] Thank you for having me. Hi, everyone.
Damon: Hey, thank you so much for being here. I'm going to tell you the truth, I wasn't having the best morning, and then I start preparing for this conversation and I got really excited. Yes, thank you for your time. We're going to get started with our two-part question as we always do, and it's centered around time. In this time, whether that be this hour, day, season, or lifetime, in this time, how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world, Makia Green?
Makia: Oh, thank you. Hey everyone. My name's Makia. I use all pronouns and people love to call me Kiki. I'm a co-founder of Harriet's Wildest Dreams. The world is treating me-- I would say the white supremacist world is trying to take us out. However, the world of love, of Black love and fellowship, I feel really good. I was able to spend time with my people last night for Fenty Bowl and [laughter] we hollered, we danced, we sang, we cried, the full range of emotions. I'm feeling very loved in that sense.
Damon: For posterity's sake, for people listening this years and years in the future, learning the amazing work of Harriet's Wildest Dreams, this weekend, there was a football game and the highlight was at the center of it. Rihanna performed at halftime, and seemed to reveal also new things to come.
Kiss: I have one Rihanna question. Did you expect Pon de Replay?
Damon: Whoa, there was no Pond de Replay.
Makia: There was no Pond de Replay. Everyone expected it. It was like her first song. She was quoted, she said, "You're trying to fit 17 years of a catalog into 13 minutes. It's tough.
Kiss: To be fair, about 10 of those years had no new songs. It's not--
[laughter]
Makia: Oh, that confirms for me what kind of space I am in.
[laughter]
Damon: No, no, no, Damon does not represent the space completely. This is a 50 household over here.
Kiss: That's a fact.
Damon: You're exaggerating. That's hyperbole.
Kiss: Okay. It's hyperbole.
Makia: Yes.
[laughter]
Kiss: Let's get back on track here. I'll see myself out. You can take it from there.
Damon: Yay, man, Kiss, you throwing off my Rihanna-plus-one car. There's going to be trouble in my household if this goes out. We're going to have to edit this episode. [laughs] I'm trying to maintain peace and sanctity here.
[laughter]
Kiss: For the sake of the work, I'm going to move forward.
[laughter]
Kiss: We have this very tenuous and fraught metaphor that we use throughout this One Million Experiment show, which is the scientific process, which neither of us, one, are experts on, two, really fully understands even at this point. We do know that it starts with a hypothesis. For you and the work of Harriet's Wildest Dreams, when you go back to the origins, what was the hypothesis of what the work would be and what it would make possible?
Makia: Harriet's Wildest Dreams, we found each other in 2021, so we are about to reach our two-year mark, and we had a breadth of experience. I'd been organizing in DC since 2015, and similar from my other co-founders. We were trying to maybe ask a question, but in a way, also answer a question that we felt like 2020 opened up for us. Some of it is like when it comes to abolition, what could we win? What could be possible? What can we do together that we cannot do alone?
I think that was a key piece from 2020. We are also trying to find what does community defense look like with a diversity of tactics. We came out of a mass protest, a highway protest, Black Lives Matter, moments of organizing and then decided we really need a political home for abolitionists in the DMV region; DC, Maryland, Virginia, and we also need to be able to have this diversity of tactics, not people working in silos, but us with thousands and thousands of different experiments of work.
Damon: Yes. It's exciting to see in just doing the first pass of research in your work, just how many interconnections and coalition-style projects encompass all of what y'all do. There was a word that you used, and that's very prominent in how y'all name yourself, that I want to dig deep in. That's defense. I want to do the practice of it, the theory and the practice. That is a historical relic of our movement, the notion of defense as language, but then also the practices of what it actually looks like to show up and to defend against the numerous uncountable harms that our people are susceptible to.
Yes, talk to me about the choice to use the word defense, how that shows up, how you think about it. Has there been any change in that loose 50-year arc of how I'm naming it, 60-year, damn. Yes, talk to us about defense.
Kiss: To be fair, you weren't there at the beginning.
Damon: I wasn't there. I do imagine myself, I was in it, [laughter] my previous me.
Makia: Named after Harriet Tubman, we are a Black-led abolitionist community defense hub centering all Black lives and most at risk for state-sanctioned violence for the greater Washington area. The word defense comes in a couple of different ways. One, we want to recognize that our opposition is on the offense, that this is not solely a conversation about theory, but this is real lives being impacted by harmful policies, harmful institutions, practices in all the isms of the world, and that it is our job to be active in our defense of our folks.
It also gets into the ancestors that we follow in our work. We're named at the Harriet Tubman, long known as a conductor of the Underground Railroad. We also follow Ida B Wells, a investigative journalist and speaker that was one of the first people to actually really document what was happening with [unintelligible] for Black people.
We also follow Ella Baker, a lot of times considered the strategist behind the Civil Rights Movement, from building up Black Futures, through the creation of SNCC, through supporting with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and just for me, one of the first times I saw and listened to a Black woman talking about civil rights, but also internationalism. That was really big for me. I actually follow her in my work with base building.
I bring up those three women because we believe that they were folks that were defending our right to life, our right to survive, our right to thrive and to build new communities, and folks that in many different ways, through base building, through public speaking, through literally getting our people out of cages in different tactics, they were all defending the community. We put out a call to folks to get active. As we call on the Freedom train, we call ourselves conductors. We are trying to conduct a freedom train that has space for everyone to get on.
Kiss: I love the way you named those direct lineages and the ways that you build not just on their names or their historical significance, but the processes that they use and the frameworks that they brought to the work. I think one of the unique things about diving so deep into that type of lineage is that you learn things about the people that you've known their work, but you haven't necessarily gone as deep.
For any of those three folks, or anyone else who you see yourself in lineage, as you've gotten a deeper understanding of what they did, have there been things that you've learned that you feel like in general-- even people who are involved in movement or who know those names maybe don't know?
Makia: Let's see. I can start with Mama Harriet. One of the things that I really love about her is the fact that people know, okay, Harriet Tubman, she got to freedom and how she would constantly be going back for her family. That was her main goal, was to try and take care of her family. With each trip, she saw more and more how many other people had to come with her. Harriet Tubman wasn't the only person to run away to freedom, but for a lot of folks, she was a symbol of freedom. They called her Moses. They didn't even know her name, Harriet Tubman.
It was the idea of her, the story of her that inspired hundreds of other people to seek freedom, it inspired people to join the abolition movement. At the end of the day, her main goal was getting her parents to freedom, finding her sister, at one point, getting her husband to freedom. For me, if we want to talk about abolition, how are we talking to our family members?
What are we doing about the folks that are the closest to us, our cousins that are currently locked up, our friends that are dealing with the medical industrial complex and all of these things, and that some ways of trying to free ourselves as she tried to feed herself, and free our family members, our politics deepen, our experiments get stronger. I think as a mode of organizing, it's very inspiring to have that kind of mustard seed faith to inspire other folks to empower their families.
Damon: That's so beautiful. I want to use that framing and that relationship to time to project forward a little bit. The beauty of how I understand Harriet is not only the direct material freedom that she brought to living beings, it was what that freedom-making made possible in the contemporary sense, like in her time, that allowed for new literature, that allowed for new workshops in popular education, that allowed for the mobilizations that then became the Civil War. There's also what it did to future imaginations because the way we understand and imagine Harriet's work in the Underground Railroad as an infrastructure is that that is how we got free.
That is true, but it's also true that it was only about 1% to 5% of the population of enslaved peoples that actually got free on that passage. We imagine it as if that's how we got out. Using that imagination, what do you hope future centuries or future decades understand about now? Even if we're just getting a few dozen or a few hundred folks free, what do you hope people know about this time or imagine about this time when they look back? Because you are a Harriet of today.
Makia: The way that I understand your question is also like what kind of ancestor do I want to be? I want the folks in the future to know that we loved them, that we cared deeply for them, that our choices were intentional. It just happened that way. Trump just happened to get elected, we just happened to protest, we just happened to teach masses about white supremacy and capitalism, but that every choice we've made was an intentional step towards love and wanting them to have a better future.
That we will build everything that we need to build, that we will defend what we need to defend, and that we are committed to this, whether we see the freedom that we talk about or not in this lifetime. I just want the folks in the future to know that I loved them on purpose.
Kiss: That's beautiful. In the scale and the scope of what that work has looked like, as Damon mentioned earlier, I think one of the things that really struck us in learning about y'all's work is, as it probably should be, how many of the branches in the campaigns of the work that y'all do are in deep collaboration with other folks in your region? I know that sounds a little like, "Of course, we should be in coalition, in collaboration," but for people who have done this, they know it's not always the easiest thing, or always, for some folks, the first thing that they choose.
I know this came out of 2020 uprising, and so there was some of that was just what happened, but how intentional has that choice been, and what have some those lessons been around learning how to do this work together with people who are maybe outside of your closest sphere?
Makia: I think it comes with an understanding of power, that we are trying to build power for our people, and without people there's no power, we are stronger together. I think that's a huge lesson you got out of 2020. Also, if one of us had the answers to freedom, we'd be free already. It's like a necessity. There really isn't much that I can do alone, so it's more so we need to support people in creating coalitions in a way that is healthy, in a way that does not lend us to burnout, in a way that brings people closest to the pain, closest to power.
It is something that we do really in our area, of bringing different folks together, whether bringing harm reductionist with abolitionists to organize to decriminalize poverty, but also to train folks on how to be rapid responders in their community. Trying to bridge policy experts and folks who are all in the criminal justice policy space that maybe they're not abolitionists, but bringing them to the table to train them on abolition. You don't have to be in here, it's wildest dreams, but what you won't do-- We want you to know what we're doing, we want you to be in community with us so that you can understand the things that we're fighting for.
We have a bunch of different coalitions that are working on different work, from, like I said, we have our DC Safety Squad trying to really bring in the skills training. We can talk a lot about theory, I talk a lot about policy, but what I love DC Safety Squad, and it's also named after Harriet Tubman, it's helping people with material conditions. If you want to be on that freedom train, you have to go get skilled up, have a tangible thing to do in your community, whether that's being a legal observer, whether that's learning how to give out Narcan, whether that's being mental health responder in your family, that's pushing people to be skilled up.
We're learning from folks across the district who are experts at that. We do some coalitions with court watching. Qiana Johnson, who's one of our co-conductors talks about how injustice happens in empty courtrooms, and a lot of times our people are going into these courtrooms and they're alone and there's so much happening.
While we're outside protesting around the police, once someone has been arrested, we really cannot leave our folks alone in that journey, and so we have a citywide DC court watch coalition, where folks of different organizations are all committed to keeping data around what's happening in the courts, fostering and mobilizing volunteers, and then continuing that understanding and learning to literally get our people out of cages. It's some of the coalition work we're doing.
Damon: It's really amazing. I want to stay with this court watching thing because this is a space I think that, as you've named accurately, abolitionist movement needs to have much more focus on. I want to shout out in our space in Chicago, Chicago Torture Justice Center and the Chicago Community Bond Fund really opened my perspective to what's happening just on a day-to-day basis.
What do people need to learn about how harmful the court proceedings are? Because I think there's a disconnect. We understand the cop and then we understand the prison guard, and I think we miss this other cloaked in honor indignity symbol that is really one of the main power players in carceral violence. In the DC space, which also is really unique, how are you seeing the harms of the court be re-understood through this defense work?
Makia: That is one thing that I love because there are people who come into the work and they're like, "I'm down, I'm curious about it." Then when we bring you into being a court watcher, you actually need to sit with and be in solidarity with folks as you see it happening in front of you. There's a different type of learning that happens there.
One thing that you'll see when you engage in court watch, led by Qiana Johnson and Frankie Seabron in Harriet's, is first, we need to reveal the actions of the prosecutors because the police arrest folks, sometimes the police are arresting people for things that are not "illegal." I say illegal in crime in quotation marks because we know that it is all relative to white supremacy.
Then you have the prosecutors and what they decide to be able to charge people with. You have the judges. You have their decisions on whether to keep our folks in cages or to send them home, whether they're putting our folks under surveillance. One of the things that's can be so heartbreaking is the number of children that are going through this system, but really are not prepared. It's really hard to prepare yourself to be in this situation, but we work with so many folks that have no knowledge of who are the people in the room that are making decisions about their life, how anti-blackness is actually coming into play.
For us, we call our folks loved ones, so we don't say defendants or things like that. We say our loved ones, they're whole human beings, we help them build out a social bio packet and help them advocate for themselves to get their folks out of cages.
Damon: What was that word? Social bio packets?
Makia: A social bio packet, yes. A social biography. A social bio pack is really just to show the prosecutor and the judge that this person is loved and this person is a whole person, to see them beyond just a number or just a check mark on a list, whether very tangibly of our people are put on gang databases or just ideas within the mind of when they see our folks and they're just like, "Oh, I've seen this person before. I don't have to dive any deeper into this."
Our folks are just not treated with the humanity, and so we do work with them to create social bio packets and then help them in getting community service and doing whatever we have to do to save them from being in a cage. Those two programs for participatory defense goes hand in hand with the court watch program. A lot of times we do only talk about police in the prison guard, we don't talk about the prosecutor, we don't talk about the judge, you don't even talk about the person who you pay to bail someone out. Someone who's a civil servant, not a lawyer, not a police person, but also makes the decisions right there on whether-- they're like, "Oh, you got to give me 10%," or "You got to give me 100%."
For folks that don't know the bail process, maybe you have a $10,000 bail. The clerk can say, "Okay, I just need 10% of that. Then if you give me 10%, you can be released and then you have to make your court date and you'll receive that money back." The clerk can decide, "Actually, I want 100%, actually I want 50%." It's just based on that day and whatever-
Damon: Arbitrary power.
Makia: Exactly, it's that. There are a lot of people at play that have been increasing and strengthening mass incarceration, and there's no transparency or accountability for those folks. One thing that's also really important for work that is happening, like court accountability work, is that our work is led by formerly incarcerated folks. It's really important that folks who have direct lived experience with courts be a part of this process, if not leaders, in the accountability and the organizing when it comes to courts.
Kiss: Can you speak a little more to that? What are the particular, in some ways, intangibles that people have been in that situation bring to that conversation? Is it about the trust with the other loved ones who are going through that moment in connection? Is it the lived experience of seeing how one thing leads to another? What unique possibilities have you seen come because that's who's been leading that piece of the work?
Makia: It's so all-encompassing, that like, "Okay, how do I dive into the specifics?" Even just the fact that we used the word community loved one, that came from folks who were like, "I'm really tired of being called a criminal or defendant. These words are to dehumanize me." That is some of the reasoning why we use the word community loved one in all of our testimonies and our writings, to not only force ourselves to change that carceral language, but also when we go and advocate, we're also pushing the elected leaders to get rid of that carceral language. That truly just comes with having lived experience, to know how that feels and the impact of it.
Kiss: That's a beautiful language intervention that I have a feeling we may borrow, if that's okay with you, and maybe bring to our spaces here.
Damon: Again, that is so powerful. I also imagine in my experience, there's also an expertise that folks who have survived carceral spaces have just in the legal lexicon of-- There are a lot of folks who I think surpassed even the technical detail of like attorneys often time when they have been in solidarity with folks who have been experiencing court systems for decades now. That's something that I also think about.
I'm really moved by the intentional use of language, and community loved ones, and the tool that is the social bio packet, because that feels like something that everybody could benefit from, and could help in the school systems, could help in mutual aid programs, can help in all institutions of like, "This is my community, this is how I'm seen and it's documented. I can name these affirming relationships in whatever space I'm in. My humanity is within my body, but it's also documented that I'm loved."
That is such a powerful tool that I don't want people to move past as it's just something to do to convince a prosecutor to go a certain way. In creating them, is that something that other folks have named or something you could imagine what looks like?
Makia: Completely. It's not just for the prosecutor or the judge, it's also for the public defender. Public defenders are often overworked. They don't have the full time to be able to really understand who each of our loved ones are, and so a social bio packet also helps there, to provide a fuller story for the public defenders in these types of cases.
Also, we had a young person who was at risk of being suspended. If you're in [unintelligible], you may already know about that school-to-prison pipeline and how Black children are suspended, pushed out of school and pushed into the criminal legal system. An incident happened at school. This young girl was being discriminated against and judged very harshly by the principal and the disciplinary board.
What we plotted together was, "Okay, let's make a social bio packet for her. There's thousands of kids at this school. To them, she may not seem like she deserves an intentional look at. We're going to build out a packet where she writes a letter, where you write a letter, where we all come together to show that this is a person, and the decisions they make are going to have a lasting impact on her, and let's set her up for success."
I agree, you can definitely use this way of thinking for other situations in schools, but at the core of it is getting to know people better, and moving slower. The system is funneling people through it, hundreds and thousands of people every day, and making these huge decisions that are breaking up families and destroying whole communities like it's a factory. A social bio packet at the core is get to know folks, move slower, be more intentional. Erika Totten, who was a mentor of mine in learning how to organize, she always would say, "We don't have time to rush."
Kiss: [laughs] That's great.
Makia: I think about that around the criminal legal system, restorative justice, and rehabilitation, and conflict mediation. We deserve taking the time out to get to know people deeply.
Damon: That's a borrow. Say the name. Who?
Makia: Erika Totten.
Kiss: Erika, you did something there.
Damon: I'm going to use that. I'm going to have to shout out Erika, but that's a [crosstalk] Yes, that's fire.
Kiss: That's true in terms of getting to know people, but also just in terms of how do you balance importance and urgency. The urgency can be so detrimental, but how do you still hold the importance of it at the same time? Yes, bravo, Erica
Damon: I want to go deeper into the infrastructure and the lessons of y'all's participation in the DC Safety Squad. One, just in looking through the websites and the research, just the document that lays out the structure of the DC Safety Squad in itself is impressive and a useful resource that is available. Can you talk a little bit more about that larger infrastructure, how Harriet's Responders plays into that space, and if you have any learnings, whether it be firsthand or from your community of folks that feel really important to you?
Makia: Harriet's Responders community defense pillar is led by Nee Nee Tay, who is another co-conductor. Harriet's Responders is our folks who's outside. They're doing a plethora of skills-based trainings, direct action trainings and so forth. They're leading police accountability campaigns. If a loved one is taken by police, who are the folks that are going to show up, support that family, help them through this process, and also help them advocate for what justice means for them? That is our Harriet's Responders pillar.
Then a coalition program from here, responders, is the DC Safety Squad, which is a coalition of individuals and organizations that are all about finding some alternatives to policing. It's all about saying that we deserve the time to experiment, whether that is building out copwatch teams, jail support teams, medical responders, that folks are like, "I'm going to stay, I'm committed to this."
2020, it brought up the name of abolition. We have thousands of people who are like, "All right, abolish them, but what next?" We find that our people, Black folks in every city all across the country, they get that they can't really trust the police, but they also don't have another viable option that they feel like they can trust and rely on to help them, and so DC Safety Squad is all about fitting ourselves into that gap.
Kiss: How has that been going?
Makia: The response has been immense and so rewarding. So many organizations are willing to jump in, so many people have joined. I would say DC Safety Squad has grown exponentially since the soft launch last year, and they are very busy. One of the things that is beautiful is they're working with the organization called Raheem. Raheem is building a PATCH Network app where folks can request emergency support. Right now folks are getting trained on how to use this app in working with Raheem and working with the other rapid responders in the city.
Kiss: Wow. It sounds like, and obviously, of course, things scale at different paces, but especially in the first season we talked about in the show was like the challenge, and in some ways, the like detrimental effect of feeling like you have to answer that question all the time, especially when it's posed in bad faith of the "alternative."
It's, of course, rewarding to hear the ways that challenge is being taken up and the infrastructure's being built, not just the like, "We're the eight people who are committed enough that we're going to try to meet all of the needs for everybody all the time," but understanding really what does it take to build this alternative infrastructure, whether that's on the tech end, the people end, the movement end. The scale of that is such an impressive undertaking.
Makia: Completely, because the police have had hundreds of years to build this.
Damon: Some bullshit.
Makia: Some bullshit. I wanted to ask like, "Can I curse on here?" [laughter] When the council members, they look at us and they're like, "Oh, if we take, what else/ What can we do if we get rid of the police?" Or they give you that hypothetical situation, or what happened to me on air a couple weeks ago, someone describe a really heinous incident of harm in my hood, actually, and was like, "What if that were to happen again, but you don't want the police?" I was like, "They didn't stop it. It happened."
That is actively happening. That is not a hypothetical situation in this post-police world that's happening. We don't have anyone to respond to it. This happened last week, and by DC Safety squad abolitionists Harriet's Wildest Dreams' saying, "Our people deserve better." We actually want to stop and prevent harm, not just show up afterwards.
Damon: The beauty of your work and our movement is it's not only telling established power that we want more, it's also recognizing with ourselves we want to and have to be more. Really, what I hear is, similar to if you set up the traditional mutual aid table and you provide groceries, the people who receive the groceries benefit materially and also learn that they are people out here who want to redistribute food and then the people who bring the groceries and distribute the groceries learn a new way to be in community with people.
Using that dynamic or that relationship, I'm curious where that internal growth has happened in the mutual reciprocity in terms of this harm response. Have people experienced a new response in a time of need and learned more about this movement, and have people responded to folks in times of need that taught them more about their capacity or honestly even limitations and what we need to build. Does that make sense what I'm asking?
Makia: It does make sense. I would say it's definitely our mutual aid pillar because it's like I'm showing up for folks and I'm changing my relationship to one another. I would say, for example, we had a fellowship this past summer and this was the first time that we included youth ages 15 and up in our summer organizing fellowship. One of our young people, they're doing court watch, they're out in community canvassing, asking people about what safety means for them. They're fully entrenched in on the freedom train.
This young boy went home to his parents and they reached out to me and said, "He came home today and said, 'I feel like I have a purpose now.'" For me, I cried. I'm not even going to lie. To be a young Black boy growing up in DC and to feel you have a purpose and that purpose is helping your people get free, that's enough for me to jump up for joy. I think that is a piece of representation of the ways that we can change ourselves by being involved in this work.
It's not just, "Hey, come help Harriet's Wildest Dreams." It's an offer to, as Mary Hook says, be transformed in the service of the work.
Damon: I want to check in with the space, with your home, and how y'all are doing because as you've named many times, a lot of this work is shaped by the uprising of 2020, which was national and global in its dimensions but DC also had a unique upturn in 2021. That, in many ways, as this uptick in fascism is a major part of it a counter-response or a counter-offense to our liberatory movements.
January 6th, as many folks know, there was a white supremacist-centered hoo-ha insurrectionist attempt in DC and a thing that I've been concerned about and have curiosity is there was a hyper-militarized response and investment as a result of that white supremacist's uprising. My assumption is that Black people were directly harmed by that. That's the frame I'm working with. That's my assumption. I feel pretty safe in that assumption but I want to check in with you on one how y'all are doing that.
One, it was more than just a news story for y'all, but two, how did the militarized response to white supremacy impact Black people in the space?
Makia: There are a couple of things. I was born in New York City. I've only lived in New York in DC.
Damon: You got a dangler as a New Yorker.
Kiss: Where in New York are you from?
Makia: I'm from Harlem.
Kiss: Okay. From The Bronx, uptown.
Makia: I say that to say that my personal experience with overt racism, fascism, and folks who identify themselves as white supremacists is a really unique experience being of the northeast or coastal elites. Nothing I say is to take away from the experience of my comrades in the south and my comrades in the Midwest. My family is from South Carolina and they experience racism in a completely different way than I do. That being said, the time around that summer, that election to January 6th was absolutely terrifying. It did not start on January 6th. These proud boys, white supremacists, fascists, trumpets as I call them.
Kiss: How has nobody done that? That's fantastic. Just blowing hot air.
Makia: I honestly, no shade and honestly, no offense to trumpet players. I played the trumpet.
Damon: True, true. Yes, I love to trumpet.
Makia: I called that because it's just the sound that just ugh. Anyway, an offkey trumpet is how I feel about this, but I lived downtown a couple of blocks away from the White House. They were patrolling, marching, they were having multiple trips to DC leading up to January 6th. There was violence, they stabbed people, they were attacking the Black Lives Matter mural that existed as we call the Black Lives Matter fence. People who came across from all around the world during 2020 to show their love for Black people in the movement created this beautiful mural.
It was just the white supremacist's job of just coming down to just try and tear it down. It was community folks that defended our protestors, that defended the fence, defended the unhoused. People who lived downtown, not the police. The police often protected them and worked with them and we named. These people are talking about coming back here. They are getting more violent. The city ignored us. The police obviously ignored us. There was a lot of warnings about what January 6th was going to look like just because of the violence that they had been showing in DC itself.
It was really terrifying to live downtown at that time. There were times I couldn't go to sleep because people are literally chanting outside of my apartment building. "We hate gay people," and a lot of other really obscene things about Black people, trans folks, about women. When January 6th happened, it was a shock. There was a lot of fear but it was also this moment of-- it seemed like everyone else started to realize, these people are real. If they can come here on this day, imagine what they're doing as teachers. Imagine what they're doing as police officers or elected officials or the havoc that they are reaping.
Damon: Bankers.
Makia: Right. They're people that are making decisions. They're your babysitters. They are within your community and they feel this strongly.
Damon: To say the least.
[laughters]
Makia: One of these things, something has to connect. Honestly, that was like a prayer of this mass violence was just shocking. I wasn't there. We put out a thing to tell people, "Do not go outside." Harriet's Wildest Dreams had not been officially started yet, but as movement leaders in DC, we pushed all left folks and asked them to not engage because we knew how violent it was going to get. Even just the people who went out to record. Many people were either brutalized and traumatized by what happened.
I guess my main points are we told them that this was about to happen, and most times for this, you can look at the violence that Black and Brown people are experiencing because we are always the canaries and the mine.
Kiss: How did that build up and then that day, if at all, inform how y'all define defense once the organization was built?
Makia: I think the right or the trumpets, they seem to try and co-op everything. They co-op the words of freedom, liberation. They co-op abolition. They considered themselves some form of the defenders. To me, I think they're defending white supremacy and white dominance. For us, we very much recognize that these people are actively trying to tear down. However, I care about the Capitol building but it is more about the idea of progress, the idea of diversity, the idea of ending fascism, and our own bodily autonomy as marginalized people and they're actively trying to tear that down, everything that we build.
It necessitated us to build a community defense hub from January 6th and even just the defense that we had to do that year of literally defending our art, literally defending our people with our bodies physically. I wanted to pull back to what you talked about around the investment. It changed the landscape for us when it came to advocating for defunding the police. It became this thing of the police were now this coveted agency. All of the harms that had happened. 2021 was the highest rate of murders by police in our city.
All of that seemed to be erased because of the recentering of police as defenders of our community because of January 6th. Also, the amount of funding that went to the police in overtime hours. I think from 2020 to 2021, they had over a million overtime hours that went to police budgets.
Damon: Not dollars, hours.
Makia: Hours, right. Many, many more millions of that. I think it was in 2020. I think I had 25 officers that had $3 million in addition to their salaries and one of them was a dog handler. When you counted it all up, all of their bonuses ended up to be about $3 million that year. Anyway, the point is there was a big investment in policing, whether culturally in an idea, in trust, and also in dollars.
Damon: You named a necessity to have to defend your creations and your space with your bodies. I'm thinking about bodies in the personal specific, but then body as in a body politic or an organization as an organism. What healing regenerative, repairing somatic work did y'all have to learn or have to deploy that you already knew? As I heard you say, that my heart just went to, how do we heal those bodies or what attention was given to them?
Makia: Yes. Can I do two things?
Damon: Please do.
Makia: Okay, so one I mentioned the Black Lives Matter memorial fence and it is actually an artifact collection. It was protected by Nadine Seiler and Karen Irwin, people who literally for months were outside every single day, seated in front of this memorial fence to protect it from white supremacists all year round. It actually is a collection that is in our library. Just wanted to shout them out and thank you for that defense to protect our history. I think when it comes to the body, I'm a body positive, fat positive activist as well.
I love books like The Body Is Not an Apology, and very much in the same sense of the way you described it. Somatic practices, I don't have a long drawn out like, "Oh, we do like Tai Chi, we do this." Our people are just at breathing. Our people are at learning how to breathe. I could spend all year on breathing for the folks within my organization, our members, and our loved ones to get into a practice of it and a practice of getting ourselves grounded, centered. A world without police means we have to know how to deescalate ourselves.
In that, in itself takes many, many experiments and practices. I think for me, the most grounding thing that I can do for myself and that I can encourage new folks to do is to get a practice on breathing.
Kiss: You mentioned that book. What are there any other resources that have been helpful for you or folks in your circle?
Makia: Ooh.
Kiss: That was a good deep breath and in respect.
[laughter]
Makia: Sonya Renee Taylor writes The Body Is Not an Apology and it's a book about the power of radical self-love to see ourselves outside of this white supremacist capitalist view on bodies but let's see, I'm trying to remember because the people who taught me how to breathe are a part of an amazing Black leadership with BOLD.
Damon: Got to be BOLD.
Makia: Yes, I was like BOLD taught me how to read.
Kiss: We could have done like, "Survey says, 'And we both would've did.'"
Makia: I'm trying to think like, "Okay, where do they get that from?" One of the things and the reason why our Harriet's Wildest Dreams encourages spirituality and encourages transformative justice and not just having restorative justice. Not just having transformative restorative justice, but also relationship with the world and relationship with spirit comes from the fact that most of us learned how to be activists in this world. Like I said, Erika taught in through the Emotional Emancipation Circles, so Emotional Emancipation Circles are community self-help groups.
Damon: Great name.
Makia: Have you do know about them?
Damon: I don't. That's a great name. I'm just a fan of the words you just said.
Makia: It comes from this Community Healing Network and the Association of Black Psychologists, and then Erika taught and really revolutionized it for me by giving it a more movement minded, queer-friendly, trans-friendly focus but just myself sitting in a community group healing space on a weekly basis to talk about what are the ways that the world is trying to take me out and what are the lies that I've been told about myself, my Blackness, my movement, my body, my gender, and how can I dispel those lies as just like that is the question that we are asking ourselves every single week.
I think it made me a stronger person and someone that is much more interested in fighting for freedom in a way that does not tear me down.
Kiss: That's beautiful.
Damon: I was just going to say, I just to name resources that look deeper into what's been named, but also as we shouted out BOLD, one of the founders of BOLD is Alta Starr who's amazing, who works with a space called Generative Somatics, so you go to generativesomatics.org and they have a daily practice tab. They also have a practitioner's network that you can either learn from or sign up to be a part of, so for folks looking to go deeper at that work, that's a resource.
Makia: Thank you.
Kiss: As we move towards winding down, I think what you just said about having the space, not just alone, but also in a group, ask those very specific and important questions. One, I think is just useful for listeners is something that's a tool that they could add to their toolbox and an important set of questions to stay ruminating on. As we think about the many experiments that Harriet's has done, are there other particular tools, frameworks, if someone were to try to build something similar in their space, what would you want to make sure they know have understand?
Makia: My biggest thing with anyone who's trying to start organizing their community is to be in their community. Nothing is possible without having deep community input. The first thing that I did as a political organizer for Harriet's is a Black belief survey, where we are just going outside and asking people how they care about safety, what does it look like for them, and to just learn about what are you willing to do. One of the questions we asked was, if you were trained and skilled, what would you be willing to do in your community without police?
Just that question alone can provide a lot of information for what you want to build and what makes the most sense because, I think, Damon, you talked about it of like, "We're not fixing the entire system in one day. We're doing small little experiments." Maybe it's a Brick Light Clinic, maybe it's a Know Your Rights class, maybe it's something that is small that we can replicate and make sustainable. I would say be in community, survey your community, ask them those key questions, and then experiment.
Damon: At the risk of being redundant--
Kiss: Which is a risk we take from time.
Damon: Yes, we're risk-takers here. I want to invite you to stay in that space of like as we're winding down these reflections. I want to frame it in two ways. One, invitation. One, are there any direct invitations for Harriet's Wildest Dreams, things you want people to show up to, or for people who aren't in the DC space, invitations into this work, and then we'll come back out of that of the conclusions you have to wind down from our hypothesis?
Makia: We are always looking for folks, we're looking for Black folks to become members, we're looking for allies to be agitators, and folks can go to www.harrietsdreams.org. If folks are like, "I just want to read about your work." We have 20-page impact report where folks can read about our work, can read letters from our fellows, and just get into the nitty-gritty of the work we do. Maybe you're not in the DC area or the DMV area. My thing is, I believe in organization, I believe in formations, and so I do encourage people to find a political home.
It's okay, data political home if you need to, but be intentional about the way that you spend your time in the communities that you're trying to join and be a part of. I would definitely push joining a formation near you. I'm a part of the movement for Black Lives, so I'm really big on trying to connect people across the country to all kinds of formations.
Damon: We started with a hypothesis of the work and you offered so many lessons and so many methods, so many resources, so many approaches but for you, just for this moment, conclusions you've had from learning and experimenting with Harriet's Wildest Dreams?
Makia: One that feels really clear on a political sense that the need to prioritize a Black feminist lens in all the organizing that we do to get at the root cause of issues. As Charlene Carruthers talks about needing to place the voices in the political lives of Black feminist queers and LGBTQIA folks. I've seen that be even a higher priority in the two years that I've been organizing in Harriet's. Then also, I don't have to show up for every fight I'm invited to. That's a big lesson for me in the two years in this organizing.
Damon: That's a tough one.
Makia: I'm in Aries also, so that's really hard.
Kiss: At the risk of opening a big can of worms as much or as little as you want to share, what has that meant for you? What has that made possible?
Makia: In a simplistic sense, every time a council member says, "Oh, I don't really know if you got people powered because you didn't bring no one to my special meeting. If we can't bring people to that meeting for whatever reason, y'all got the meeting at a time where people are at work or people don't even trust you because you keep pulling us to come to tell you what we need and you don't do nothing about it." I'm not going to be pushed into a sense of urgency by folks who have no history. It changing living conditions for my people.
That's a form of me not showing up for every fight. It also means we can't respond to everything. I am deeply trying to build power. I'm trying to build networks. We're going to show up for our folks, but I'm also not an ambulance chaser. I really appreciate the people that are my point in this movement is to show up every single time there's a loss of life in our community and we need those people. I also understand that the formation I'm building at Harriet's, we cannot sustain that kind of work.
We try to deepen our political lens with each loss and create opportunities for folks to organize.
Kiss: Beautiful. Is there anything before we end that we didn't touch on that you want to make sure gets included in this conversation?
Makia: I guess just ways that people can find us. Like I said, www.harrietsdreams.org. If folks would like to follow me on Instagram, @fatfairygodmuva. I really encourage people to get active in the abolition and then also to look into some of that fat liberation work as well.
Damon: I started with naming it and just want to thank you again for being so gracious in this time with us, but for your commitment to this work and just I heard the name, but in learning more specifically about what you do, I'm so encouraged and grounded to see such a robust example of who we want to be. It's hard to get the affirmation we deserve in this space. I just want you to know that you are seen, and as people are hearing this, you and y'all, the big you are really impacting our world towards what it needs to be.
Thank you so much and I look forward to now being further connected now that we've had this conversation.
Makia: Yes. Thank you so much. This has been so heartwarming.
[music]
Kiss: It was Makia Green from Harriet's Wildest Dreams. What a great conversation. Now that we've learned so much from them, it's time for the peer review.
Damon: Eva, welcome back.
Eva: It's great to be back, Damon.
Damon: Let's dive in. For you, what were some of the things that initially stuck out from that conversation?
Eva: I have a lot of background knowledge about this organization, having watched them progress over the past couple of years. Also, DC is a special place for me because I grew up in Maryland, so I've got some ties to this community in particular. It is an immense amount of work that Harriet's Wildest Dreams is doing, undertaking, imagining. It was so great to be in the lab with them because I think they're so upfront about how much experimentation is going on. I think especially when you're diving into abolitionist organizing right now, we talk about the urgency that people can often prod abolitionists and others with.
I think what a great example of people navigating at a pace that they're setting in the community with intentionality, with love, and also just an important organization to watch about how we handle moving abolitionist agendas and community demands in the future. I think we're going to see an abolitionist organization's this tension between community building, community defense, and abolitionist principles come to the forefront of conversations more now and to really struggle about what it's to respond to community violence and what it means to be an abolitionist voice.
Not calling for the prosecution or imprisonment of anyone, including police officers, including people in the state who are harming our community. I just think it's an important conversation to have. It's an important context for all these conversations and Makia really shows us how we can come to the table to mobilize together to not work in silos and to really focus on direct material aid while still doing the work, the reading, the conversations that need to be had to push those wild dreams even further.
Kiss: Yes, I think it goes to how they responded, Damon, to your question about as they-- so succinctly paraphrase what type of ancestor they want to be. There is this long view that's so present in what they're trying to build while still not losing sight of what does it mean day-to-day to do this work. I think one of the values of that long view is also understanding the importance of-- maybe this is my own bias, but the archive of it also, that in all of that work, in all of that defense, one of the things that they really made a point of prioritizing was the defense of that memorial fence.
The idea that one of the things that they were proud to share was that that wall now lives in a space that it'll be a teaching tool, a learning tool, and a record of the work that they've done in that time. Seeing the work that it took to get that to that space. That was a space that was under threat, not just for the present, but also for how we understand this moment in the future. I think obviously that's part of what we're trying to do here, but it was interesting to hear someone who's so in the mix still seeing the value and importance and the prioritization of that type of work, too.
Damon: Yes, I have three things real quick that are sticking with me. I'm going to be tight on this one. One, just how direct their work is. Abolitionists' work is more than just engaging the carceral space. It is more than just intervening when harm is happening, but that is also a very important and central thing that we need to do. The directness of defending in the court and also having rapid response teams that are providing defense in the community from harm that occurs while also defending against counter movement and white supremacy literally in the streets.
In addition to all of the humanizing community building work, directly addressing harm and violence in the state and in the community, and just want folks to see that that is happening in that way. Secondly, to your point you just made Daniel that their connection to time and the way that they ground this work, not just linguistically, but in format, in this lineage of fem freedom fighters and do the work of Ella, Ida, and Harriet, not just in name which led to that notion of ancestors of tomorrow, which is really important to me.
Then thirdly, I've grown into being this word nerd as some of the listeners may know. Just how intentional they are with language and how some of those language emergences touch spaces that I've been a part of in Chicago. The intentional use of conductor as an agent of defense, change, transformation, and protection. The intentional use of loved ones. Knowing that these symbols of the idea, which is what language is really important in how we shape our relationships to each other, into the spaces we're engaging.
Seeing that as a point of defense or intervention or front lining, how we speak about the work and our connections to each other is something that I just really take with me in affirm.
Eva: Makia mentioned this as a takeaway in their interview, but I love it so much. They said that they were not going to be pushed into a sense of urgency by people who have no history of changing living conditions for my people. That gets to the point of million experiments when we started this project. It was because people were clamoring for so-called alternatives. There was a sense of urgency and movement to provide examples, to provide organizations, to show this work and the long legacy of this work that is being done all the time.
One of the things that spurred us on making this collection was knowing that we are going to be asked those questions again in the future. Not to cave into that sense of urgency, but to really show people what they've been missing out on. I appreciated Makia's stance and it really made me think about the first days that we were conceptualizing one million experiments and what led us here and what will drive the work going forward, which is these flashpoints in time, but also documenting the work and showcasing it.
Kiss: Yes, look at all that they've been able to build because they're reacting with commitment but not the urgency, you know?
Eva: Absolutely.
Kiss: Yes. What a great start to the second season, as we mentioned up top. If you want to find out more about the work of Harriet's Wildest Dreams, go to www.harrietsdreams.org. Eva, how can folks find all the million things that One Million Experiments is working on?
Eva: Well, you can go to www.millionexperiments.com and can I get a sound effect here?
Kiss: It depends.
Eva: Wow. Great. You can now go to our new Instagram page, which is @MillionExperiments.
Damon: Ba, ba, ba. We on the Gram baby.
Kiss: Look at that. If you went to the website like a year ago, it's made some substantial upgrades. It's also a really accessible way to learn about the experiments that we haven't yet gotten to and all the work happening. Make sure you go check that out. You can find the work of Interrupting Criminalization where Eva?
Eva: www.interruptingcriminalization.com. You can spell all that out. You're there.
Damon: Google will help you.
Kiss: I just want to make you say Interrupt Crim one more time when you say it what the Twitter is?
Eva: Either Twitter and Instagram and all of those good socials are @InterruptCrim.
Kiss: It's just so funny when you say it because you are like, "I know it's not the best." You can come up with, but it's hard to come up with names. We're at AirGo Radio again, it's hard to come up with names, and also just make sure that you subscribe, comment, rate, and review One Million Experiments wherever you get your podcasts. Just type in One Million Experiments on your favorite podcasting platform.
Damon: Much love to the people.
Kiss: Peace.