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.
Damon: What's up y'all? It's Damon.
Kiss: And Kiss. We are coming toward the end of season two, but we're doing it with a bang. We got a great couple of episodes as we round out this season. As always, we have our pal, our partner in decriminalization. Folks, wherever you are, I need you to get up out of your seat, make some noise for Eva Nagao.
[cheering]
Eva Nagao: Wow, y'all. The time difference between us has never been more apparent.
Kiss: That was an 8:00 AM intro for you and a 10:00 AM intro for us. That's so true.
Eva: Oh, I love it though.
Damon: I did give you a '90s Arsenio.
Kiss: I got you. I'll give you your time. Here's your like Terry Gross. Joining us on the show, Eva Nagao.
Damon: There it is. All right.
Kiss: Does that feel a little bit better?
Damon: That feels more coffee-appropriate.
Eva: That feels great. That's first cup of coffee news. Yes.
Kiss: Good morning, Eva. How are you doing and who are we talking to today?
Eva: I'm so excited for this episode, and I'm getting a little bit sad about the season coming to a close because it's just too much fun hanging out with you all and this audience that we've gotten such great feedback from this year. Last, today we have our friend, Andrea J. Ritchie, the co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization and a behind-the-scenes One Million Experiments contributor guiding us in this work and in most of the work that we do. For those of you who don't know our good friend, Andrea, she is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating. That's actually just all the verbs I could sit in there.
If you all don't know, Andrea, you need to. She has been agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans and gender non-conforming people for the past three decades and more. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the US. Andrea is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color and co-author with Mariame Kaba of No More Police: A Case for Abolition. If you haven't seen it in a bookshelf near you, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies has just dropped.
[cheering]
Right? Andrea is going to come today to talk about an exploration of how Emerging Strategies can help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer and more just futures. Futures that we hope One Million Experiments has helped you imagine and build.
Kiss: Beautiful. Dame, I just have to say, I love the increasingly expressive air horns but we are communicating.
Damon: Yes. This is big news.
Kiss: This is good stuff.
Eva: Actually, I was having lunch with a friend yesterday and I got no air horns, there were no sound effects. I was like, man, spoil.
Damon: Yes. Send the lunch back.
Kiss: You don't know what you got till it's gone. We got to savor these last couple of convos. With that, we obviously wanted to have Andrea on to talk about this new book and all the experimentation that she documented in it. Also, it's an opportunity to reflect on what we've learned over the years of doing this project and how it connects to the current moment. We're really excited to hop into the lab with Andrea. First, a couple of just housekeeping things. First off, just to place this interview in time, we recorded a couple of months ago in mid-October of 2023.
Which I don't think dates the conversation, but it does place some of the ways that we were making sense of the unthinkable structural violence happening in Palestine. Which is at the center of this conversation as a prism of understanding this moment in our world. Still relevant, but just want to place the ways that we were processing that as that was a much more whirlwind, first couple of weeks' moment to be experiencing.
Secondly, just to jump back to the business, as we mentioned on the last episode, we are so excited to be building out tour for the One Million Experiments film. We screened it in a couple of places virtually. We're going to be all over this land and beyond next year. You can check out the trailer at millionexperiments.com/documentary and then get in touch with us through that page or contact at respairmedia.com if you want to build a screening with us. We'd love to come your way and share the wonderful work of all these experiments and this beautiful film. All right, business out of the way, let's hop into the lab with Andrea Ritchie.
Damon: We are here, we are together on this unstable, wobbly, spinning planet, but we have this time together with one of the most phenomenal writers, thinkers, organizers, movement builders in our community, the one and only Andrea J. Ritchie.
[cheering]
Andrea J. Ritchie: It's like the best podcast ever to get on.
Damon: You got some extra sound effects-
Kiss: You're the best.
Damon: -we've never broken out before too. That was some new. It's a delight to be here with you as we kind of close the book on this One Million Experiments experiment. Before we get into all that, in this time, and however you define time, this hour, this day, this season, this lifetime, how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world, Andrea?
Andrea: I'm entering this conversation today with an incredibly heavy broken heart. We are recording this the day after Israel bombed a hospital killing 500 people in it and then tried to blame the people who were killed for their own murders. How it has me entering is definitely asking myself how I'm treating the world. How I'm showing up in this moment as someone who deeply cares about freedom and liberation and resistance to settler colonialism and imperialism and genocide and violence, and in ways that many of us are asking ourselves today, how are we showing up to this moment?
It feels like that's a question that's been coming with increasing intensity and frequency over the last five years, certainly since 2020. I remember asking myself that question many times in 2020. How am I showing up to this moment, this unprecedented pandemic, this biggest economic crisis in our lifetime, this next level of environmental and climate collapse?
How am I showing up to this new phase and rise of white supremacy and fascism in the United States and around the world? How am I showing up to this moment and this moment and this moment and this moment? It's the question that I'm asking myself again today. How am I showing up to this moment?
It's certainly not the first time we've been here in terms of the violence of the Israeli settler colonial state, but it certainly is the most intense I've seen in my lifetime and the most devastating I've seen in my lifetime. It's just at a level that has me asking myself, how am I showing up for the world today?
Damon: It can be too much to hold. I have a big question that I'm asking myself and I'm presenting to us, the group. 1ME has been really important in sharpening our focus in our work. As we have launched Respair, this notion of divest from despair, how we need to activate and respond and participate in shaping the world we want. I find this to be a moment that like despair is very easy to access and very difficult to combat and move through and move past. Just the hypothesis of all of this work is we will get closer to the safeties and the freedoms and the liberation that we want through practicing these really small units of community with each other consistently and with commitment.
In this time, how is that hypothesis, that approach, that praxis showing up? Are y'all able to find it or touch it in any ways? I'll be honest, it has been a struggle and sometimes it felt immobilized by the graphic genocidal violence that is happening right now.
Kiss: We're the go-get-mobilized people.
Damon: We are the go-get-mobilized people. Where for any of y'all are you all seeing this way that we need to experiment around this global crisis that is really traumatic for all of us to be alive while it's happening?
Andrea: It's hard because I have a book coming out next week called Practicing New Worlds that is focused on the idea that we can practice the world we want with ourselves in relationship with others. In communities of practice, in networks, in ways and with intention and skill and commitment and alignment around political values in ways that are decentralized, that are small, but network together into a force that can shift larger systems. As I was writing it, there were questions about how these small practices, experiments, on the one hand, bring the massive project of abolition into the realm of the actionable.
The charge that Ruth Wilson Gilmore gives us around what abolition requires is to change one thing, everything. I think people can be overwhelmed by that charge. There's so much that manifests as policing and violence and causality at every level up until this global imperial level, that it can feel overwhelming and something that we cannot take action against. What the hypothesis of a million experiments tells us is that in every action, every interaction and everything that we build, and everything that we practice every day, we can shift these larger systems if we act in ways that are mindful of how these kinds of shifts can happen.
On the one hand, that has been something that has given me hope about how each of us can be shifting the violence that we are seeing and experiencing towards liberation. On the other hand, the question I had the whole time I was writing it and that many folks I was in conversation with while I was writing it was, but what about when the state sees your experiment and sees what you're practicing and sees who you are or your existence as a threat, and reigns its violence down on you with the goal of erasing you, whether that's Freedom Square or that is Gaza.
Whether that is Acorn in the fictional world that we think of when we're thinking about Octavia Butler and the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents, where people have created a community of resistance under incredible repression, fascism, and violence. Then the state sees it and crushes it. Or it's the community response team that the state decides is too much of a threat and is going to shut down by one means or another.
I think this moment is just raising that question exponentially for me, which is like, how are our tiny experiments and efforts and ways that we're trying to build Black feminist communities and collectives of care, how can they meet the scale and the pure depravity of this violence? Then I realize that people are surviving right now through their relationships, through their interactions, through the networks they've built, through decentralized but networked action. I came up through the anti-apartheid movement and this is what happened. We saw genocide, we saw apartheid.
We were united around a boycott, divest, sanctions framework that had some key points that came from South Africa, came people there. Then all of us did everything we could. Artists were against apartheid, students were fighting for divestment from universities, shareholders were fighting for divestments from corporations, workers were fighting alongside trade unions in South Africa. Everyone was getting in where they were to fight back and to isolate this violent apartheid state, and insist that no one was going to be okay with any resources or any legitimacy being given to the settler, colonial apartheid state.
Everywhere we were, whatever we were in, we were thinking about how is this system right now invested in Apartheid South Africa and how do we insist that it divest immediately, whether it's our favorite artist or whatever institution we're involved in or whatever community we're part of. I think that's what we're doing now. I think we have seen how that decentralized networked committed action to speak in every conversation, to be together in communities of practice, to be in relationship and connection and network with people on the ground to recognize that many people in our community are connected to people on the ground, and moving resources through those networks and moving love and care and whatever we can, and mobilizing our rage has in the tiniest way shifted the system.
I still have questions. I'm still sitting here being like, that's a lot of nice words, Andrea. We are talking about 6,000 phosphorus bombs in two days and something the size of Philadelphia. What are you talking about? At the same time, I think that is the best we have, each other, and our intention and our care and our commitment to liberation in our lifetime by any means necessary. That there's not going to be one solution, that's not going to be a top-down thing. It's not going to be courts, it's not going to be litigation, it's not going to be policy, it's not going to be some one mass mobilization that's top down. It's going to be each of us taking action aligned around an intention and experimenting.
What are we doing that is shifting the conversation? How can we do more of that? What are we doing that's not working? Let's not waste our energy doing that. How can we be in relationship and moving resources and being in solidarity? People are saying, what are people on the ground saying? What's the feedback we're getting? What's the iteration we're getting? We're hearing from folks on the ground right now, don't send your money, nothing's coming in here. Speak your voice, move, act. Go do something. Say something. Go be at a place of power doing something.
Our response is iterative also with the call that we're hearing and that we're adapting to where we're seeing impact and where we're not seeing impact. We're recognizing that this is a long struggle and it's not going to work in linear ways, but we are going to get there. Those are all elements of emergent strategies that I talk about in practicing new worlds. They're all elements of how the hypothesis of One Million Experiments works. That's an experiment. I appreciate so much how you all have really leaned into the experiment part of it, the science part of it. The hypothesis, test, and evaluate aspect of experimentation because I think that's what's also important in this moment.
I think sometimes people read these things, it's like, oh, we're just going to try a thing and see how it works or we'll just show up and see what happens. That's not what we're doing here. We have a very serious intention with what we are trying to achieve here. That requires us to be rigorous as we are practicing different things and trying different things in assessing if are we having an impact on the material conditions that we're trying to shift?
Kiss: That rigor being needed and that evaluation. It's something we heard actually from a lot of the experiments was even if they didn't necessarily come into it knowing how important that was going to be, it became clear very quickly the necessity of that type of self-evaluation because you see in real time, once you're actually acting, what works and what doesn't. I'm thinking all the way back to like the friendly fridge shifting their understanding from a more charity mindset to mutual aid or Detroit Safety Team, or actually so many of them in pandemic, having to learn how to shift to adapt to the situation. Not just because they wanted to try something else, but because the situation necessitated it.
Yes. I think that's a really important part of it because it also then opens up the possibility of doing something else that's more effective. Rather than holding too tight, you have to let your frameworks, your affiliations, your taglines, wear them loose garments and when they are co-opted and constricted, you let them fall as gracefully...Yes, I think that's a really important part of it.
Andrea: I think groups like relationships evolving possibilities really have modeled that too in the sense that even though the need and the urgency is great, they have exercised real discipline in saying, we are going to go out for four months, try a thing, and then we're going to come back into the studio, and we're going to assess and evaluate and see what's possible. What happened and how we shifted material conditions, how we changed ourselves, how we changed our community, how we changed the conditions that people are navigating crisis under. Then we'll go back out again.
It's so easy to be like, but it's the scale of what's needed in the community is massive. The need that the collapse of racial capitalism and the climate are creating is overwhelming. We have to try and be there all the time and just keep going and going and going. That's kind of the organizing I came up in. We made so many mistakes, so many mistakes, dangerous, problematic mistakes because we didn't exercise that discipline of saying we need to stop and assess and evaluate and then go back out for the next iteration.
Kiss: It's so interesting. It seems like when you're in it and just speaking from personal experience, the discipline feels like it would be to keep going. It almost feels like antithetical to the lived experience to step back, but it is so necessary.
Damon: Throughout the show, like we've said, this is the lab. When you think of a lab, they are controlled environments. You reduce as many variables as possible. Everything is sanitized. There is few contaminations as possible, but this work is not happening in the lab. Most of the work is happening out in the field and that it does not exist in a clean environment. Even though it may seem like some of the things we're covering are cued or small, they are connected to a larger trajectory and a historical movement that is under threat that people have died for, that people are dying for.
That when we say we are trying to create this new safeties, it's not just because, oh, we think there is a better possible world and wouldn't that be nice to have it? It is because what we are resisting is and has been killing people. That is why people pop out those mutual aid tables. That is why people...That is why people are training up to intervene and build-up direct response, is an acknowledgment of, we are all very, very vulnerable in this militarized racial capitalism that is controlling most of our institutional realities. That's not the best recruiting tool.
It's easy to not say that where we're at the beginning or in every check-in, but a moment like now makes us have to appreciate the preciousness of life and that these experiments can be wiped away. If it's something that can be wiped away, how do you hold onto it when it is here? How do you memorialize it before it is gone? How do you document it? How do you share it? Because you referenced Freedom Square. Part of what shaped how we were there is literally every day when folks lost focus of what's going on or we start to get at each other, it's like, hey, this can stop tomorrow.
When people try to make a plan of like, I'll bring this next week. It's like, Yes, I hope so, but just want to make sure you know this could all end tonight because of the conditions we are in and because of what we are opposing and facing. I don't want to trivialize at all the horrific loss of life or make it a learning opportunity, but as we look at this liberation struggle that has gone through centuries, many people have experienced life-ending violence that has made the necessity for it so much more real.
Andrea: It is these experiments that have ensured our survival through all of that too. I think that's the piece too. It's important to know that, yes, we are under threat, and also, yes, this is how we survive. In every world ending, we have seen that it is these small practices. There's so many ways each action can also just emphasize our dignity and make our survival possible. I think that's the part that's also precious about these experiments, right? Is that this is actually how we have survived. This is how we will survive. Whether it's feeding each other, whether it's being there for each other in crisis, whether it's making sure that everyone has access to abortion care.
I'm just running through my head all of the ways that the things that we're talking about on this podcast ensure our survival in the direst of circumstances. I think that's the flip side of it, and that is the recruitment tool actually. That is the antidote to despair. These experiments are the antidote. The reason that they can feel ephemeral is because they pose such a threat to what is. They are also the glimpses that we get into the world that we long for and to get to practice them, even that moment, to have an embodied experience of something that is not the carceral reality that we live in is what gets us to the next thing.
Damon: That survival is sacred, right? That preciousness of withstanding threat, but creating the space for survival is creating sacred space. Referencing the pandemic does make me think of the context that birthed One ME. The convergence of pandemic and uprising leading to this deepened and widened articulation of abolitionist demands and abolitionist vision. That then led to the question of, well, then what do we create? The answer being One Million Experiments. You talk about a rigor of analysis, of reflection. I don't want to put any pressure on you and I don't want to elevate you beyond the community, but there are a few people who I feel are as equipped as you to give a little bit of a bird's eye view.
I just want to like, three years later, this question has been asked. I think people have received that answer and maybe have new questions just looking at the moment. For me, it doesn't feel like we're in the same moment that birthed 1ME. I want to know, does that seem true to you or does it feel like we are in an extended moment or does it feel like we are in a different time? If so, how do you reflect on the three-year period, all of the organizing, all of the experimentation that you and IC and 1ME have been keeping such a close eye on and supporting?
Andrea: We're definitely in a different moment for many reasons, but what I want to lift up is that 1ME has made a different moment. We hear a lot. This notion that everything you touch you change, and everything you change changes you from, again, the Parable of the Sower, I think. One Million Experiments has changed the consciousness of the tens of thousands of people who have listened. We know because I see, we did an evaluation of our work over the last five years that Eva's been hard at work making sure is not only printed but gorgeous.
Tens of thousands of people have had their notion of what is possible shaped and shifted and expanded and deepened, and been given the courage to practice something different, to try something different. To just be like, well, if they started a fridge here, I could start a thing here. They're not experts, they seem like regular people. You don't have to be some special [unintelligible 00:25:37]. There's no abolitionist degree you go get. There's no PhD in building new worlds. There's no certification program. It's everyday people going out and doing everyday things with each other with a clear intention of shaping the world to be something different and living something different.
I think that's one of the things that shifted. I know we all have talked about how 2020 fast-forwarded conversations about abolition theory, practice, visions, futures to a much larger group of people into a more mainstream conversation. Whether it was folks resisting it or folks embracing it or folks being curious about it or having questions. Now I think we're in a place where, sure, the resources available for that, from philanthropy or government or other entities for these kinds of experiments are diminishing. The space that was opened up by the uprisings and the pandemic for this kind of organizing is closing in some ways. We have more people who have been profoundly shifted.
I think I saw that. Whether it's from a policy level, I saw that in the response to Tyre Nichols' brutal murder by Memphis Police Department. It was three years later and sure some folks showed up with the same tired, let's pass a law and try and change a thing. That wouldn't have stopped him from being killed and certainly won't stop the next person from being killed. Let's try and train the cops better, put more money and legitimacy into them. There was also a very, very powerful counter-narrative to that in Memphis. People were like, no, that's not it.
We can imagine different ways of creating safety for us on our roads and on our streets and in our communities. That's what we want and that's what we want to talk about, and we want to practice those. The default to there's some law, there's some policy, there's some tweaking of the existing system that we can do has shifted for a larger number of people. The default to what could we do with each other and what can we demand of the state in order to make that possible is more of a common sense. My admiration for Mariame Kaba and my respect and gratitude for her leadership and always knows no bounds.
It's just true. I think her invitation through conceiving of IME from the spreadsheet to the website, to the podcast, now to the movie documentary-- Exactly, has really been part of shaping that. I think it is a reminder that each of us can be part of shifting our collective consciousness. You don't have to be Mariame Kaba. You can be someone who's like, let me look around my community and see what people are doing because that's how this started. I want a different world and I'm looking for examples of people practicing it, and then I want to reflect those back out into the world so more people will be inspired to practice more things. Anyone could do that.
There was someone in the pandemic who put up a website. It was like dontcallthecops.com. She was a social worker and just did some research and vetted all the things. It was very helpful for folks in a moment to really think about what was possible. There was a bunch of marketing people in 2020 in DC who put up a website called defund2refund, and they just used all their marketing skills to just really help people understand we don't need to respond to someone who's having a hard day or is unhoused with the violence of policing. Let's use all of our marketing skills to show you how it could go down another way.
There's a lot of conversation about the backlash or, as Mariame would say, the front lash from every angle, from the government, from foundations, from community, about how violence has gone up and we can't do these experiments and we have to double down on the violence of policing, which has nothing to stop other forms of violence. People have been changed in terms of how they think about what's possible and what we can demand of the state and what we can insist the state not do. That's where we are three years later.
It's mind-boggling for someone like me who's very like, I want a linear plan and a set of steps and a plan of action. Then we do that step and then we get to the next step. We have the thing. It's hard for me to be okay with the uncertainty of we don't know what that's going to make possible, but I know it's going to make something possible. I think that's where we want to leave One Million Experiments, which is to see what it makes possible.
Kiss: One, as the practitioners making this on a monthly basis for a couple of years now, it is also always heartening to hear things like what you said of how many people you've come across or have responded saying that this was an entry point. I'm just wondering, Eva, from some of that feedback, response, communication work that was mentioned, if there's any "anecdotes", anything that jumps out of how people either individually or as a whole kind of talked about what 1ME has made possible for them.
Eva: This is one. Our amazing operations manager, Sheila, has been doing focus groups and surveys and really just interrogating how our work lives in community and with so many partners. I might have mentioned this to you all when we got this quote, but one of the listeners who was using 1ME as an exploring abolition discussion group piece said, I've been listening to One Million Experiments podcast. I feel like I'm finally starting to get what abolition means and the myriad ways it can look in practice. I have had feedback from so many close friends that echo that sentiment that this is an embodied way that people can start to really look at what these web of relationships make possible.
I think that's something that brings me so much heart today. I think about my comrades in the street today. I think about my colleagues and the things that we're trying to get out in this moment and how all of those listeners, all of those relationships I think are what made these formations possible in 2020. How they erupted in so many places. Like the...across the United States and across the world, and how those formations, however fleeting they might have been, continue on in so many relationships that are the people that we're turning to today to say, what actions can we take together?
Andrea: It's so true. I just want to say also 54,000 listens to One Million Experiments is what we found.
Kiss: That's just on that feed, when you factor in the ergo folks, it goes up even higher.
Andrea: It's amazing. That's a lot of people. Yes, we live in a country that has an exponentially larger population. Yes, 54,000 plus, is a huge number of people. I just want to really double down on what Eva's saying about the iterative aspect of it. Which is that 1ME has become part as Eva's saying about how we build our network, how we strengthen our network, how we learn from each other. Then also it sounds like people are using it as the teaching tool in their community. I've definitely heard that also. People were saying, my mom and I were listening to One Million Experiments the other day and it sparked this conversation. I'm just like, wait, your 80-year-old Panamanian mother is listening to One Million Experiments and y'all are talking about how
Kiss: That's who we were aiming for.
Andrea: Absolutely.
Kiss: Shout out to my 80-year-old Panamanians out there. That's who we're making this for.
Andrea: Exactly. Remembering practices of community and collective care that help them survive US colonialism there, and making those connections and offering advice. Furthermore, the way we did it, was this, and you might be able to avoid this problem this way. It's really been a beautiful part of the fabric of the quilt of the work that we've been assembling at IC over the last five years.
Eva: I hear too, a lot of, I'm listening while I do the dishes, which I just really want to point out. That means people are doing the dishes, which is like a huge conflict transformation piece. Kudos to you all. You said you do them and you're doing it.
Damon: Not metaphorical dishes, the actual dishes. That's just like one amazing to hear. I'm beaming right now and I just want to say to all the folks who have done that listening and who have had conversations from this project, thank you and we love you and we appreciate you. Us having these conversations mean nothing if they are not engaging the folks who are in these communities or who are joining these communities or who are building new communities to create this world. Thank you, people, for being awesome.
You mentioned this like growing connectivity or the web expanding, and I want to hearken back to something you name that is in alignment with something we heard from Shira and Deana and have heard and said is that there is no certification for this. There is no institutional become an abolitionist degree or program. I have a question, is that because of a theoretical centering around emergent fluid, malleable spaces or is it something we should be striving for that we don't yet have the capacity for? Should we let go of that way of organizing, placing, and validating people? Or should we try to, in 20 years, build a thing?
Andrea: Oh no, because abolitionist organizing is acting, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, as if life is precious. We're humans, we shouldn't need a certification in acting as if life is precious. There are skills that we need, there are relationships and infrastructures that we need, but we're not delegating abolition to some trained group of professionals who are going to be able to make that happen for us any more than any other kind of liberation that we're trying to make happen. That's been how the state certainly in the US has disorganized liberatory movements. Whether it's anti-violence movements, whether it's movements for Black liberation.
Any movement has been disorganized by this notion that you just train up and pay some small group of people to solve massive problems of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism that have structured our world for 100 of years. That is ridiculous. Abolitionist organizing is just organizing. It's not some special magical thing. It's organizing and we all need to be organizing. Someone I love dearly is a firefighter who organizes at the fire station just in conversation because they're sitting around waiting for fires or emergencies all day. There's conversations and in that moment that's where they're shifting how people think with intention.
Other people I know sit around their various workplaces. I've done it. I've been an agricultural worker, I've been a factory worker. Those are places where there's just a lot of time to sit around and shoot the shit. What you do in those moments, people are like, oh yes, the cops, blah, blah. Did that help when the cops showed up? Did that help? Oh, you were scared? Oh, what can we do instead of that? People didn't have conversations like that with their kids. My friend Robin Maynard talks about how everywhere they see cops, she asks their five-year-old, who's actually now seven, what could we have there instead? What do we need instead? Nobody needs a degree in that.
I'm so angry and I'm partly angry because that is one of the ways that co-optation of our experiments has happened. We have something called the Building Coordinated Crisis Response Learning Space, where again, folks who are experimenting with how to respond, prevent, intervene, and heal from individual and collective crises in communities, come together every month and say, what do we try this month? What are some of the things we're struggling with? How do we let people know what we're doing? It's a place where there's a rigor of experimentation and learning together from our practice happens.
We were talking yesterday, we're kind of doing a roundup of the last couple of years that we've been holding this space, and one of the things we talked about was the co-optation. That as soon as community-based crisis response became something people were talking about and that some money was flowing to it, suddenly Harvard had a program on community crisis response and other people were trying to set up certified community crisis response. Like what?
No, that is a way of taking what we are trying to envision and organize towards and create that is about transforming ourselves, each other, our conditions, the way we think about and respond to and engage with the world and shove it back into the carceral machine and pull out any of its politics, pull out any of its liberatory vision and potential, and turn it into something that's going to replicate what is. Beth Richie writes very powerfully, Mimi Kim writes very powerfully about how that happened with the anti-violence movement and we're seeing it happening with this community crisis response mutual aid movement. I just have so much energy behind it because I think this idea that we delegate everything to someone else who's a professional is precisely how we got here.
Damon: That's how they get us.
Andrea: It's literally how they get us. That doesn't mean that I run into someone who's just had a gunshot and go, I don't know. I'll just try something and see how that works. I do need some skill and some training. Maybe that means I need a CPR certification or something. I don't want to say that we just run into situations without skill. I do want to learn how to be better at emotional first aid. I want to learn how to be better at mediation. We did TJ Skill-Up that Eva led where I went-- I go through IC programs. I have to sometimes fight to get in them because they're so popular. I have to submit an application and see if I get approved and when I do get approved, let me tell you, I get really excited. I'm like, oh, whew, because I know there were like 800 people who wanted to get in this thing. The fact that I got in makes me feel good.
Kiss: Well, you know a guy.
Andrea: No, it doesn't work. You'd think it works. I literally reach out to Eva, I'm like, hey, help a sister out. Eva's like, I don't know, girl, it's 800 people. I'll look at your application. Thankfully I got into that program and went and practiced my conflict mediation skills and my de-escalation skills. I've been doing those things for years without training, with some training.
Kiss: The difference between training and professionalization or certification, that's the fault line. It's not don't learn how to do it. It's don't have the only people who are allowed to do it, be the people who have been validated to do it in the eyes of the state.
Andrea: Exactly.
Eva: Well, you know what the application was? It was like, basically we are looking for homies who are already practicing, who are seeing something blow up on the block and who are using all the tools in their toolbox to deal with this situation. Calling on all the connections they can, calling on all the relationships they developed. We're trying to find those particular people to give them some community of practice so that they could practice some skills that we know have worked for us. That they could also grow relationships together so as they do skill up, they could call on each other.
Kudos to you, Andrea, for being one of the 800 people who are on that list now, who can call each other to figure out how hard it is to skill up in conflict transformation. There's no certification that's going to make you feel more confident. You're not going to get a sticker if you listen to all the episodes. This is hard shit.
Kiss: We'll give you a sticker.
Eva: Maybe we'll give a stick a sticker.
Andrea: You get a sticker. You do get a sticker.
Eva: You pass the quiz and you get a sticker.
Damon: But not a certificate.
Kiss: Yes, no.
Eva: We're thinking so much about this gap in practice when we designed and we continue to work with TJ Skill-Up. We're trying to figure out and ask people, like after they did the training, while they were doing the training, what is it about this? Is it the community? Is it somebody you think is an expert at this laying it down? Is it that you've done eight two-hour sessions? What is it about this that's going to give you the confidence to act on these skills? Part of this drive for certification. We just want somebody to say you can do it. I think what One Million Experiments is saying is you can do it. Here are some really smart ways to go about doing it. Here are some smart people who have done it.
Andrea: It's also like, practice makes you better and makes you more confident. We sharpen each other's skills, and I think we all need to be continuing to learn and practice. Last year Mariame took a whole mediation training again because she wanted to sharpen her skills even though everyone is like, Mariame's the mediator that we all want, and that's true. We want to keep sharpening our skills and be in practice together.
Damon: I got to stay in the gym. You got to keep...
Andrea: Right? Exactly. I think that's the thing that people are not grasping around this experimentation thing, which is that it takes a huge amount of practice to manifest and embody something different than what we've been taught and learned, and that we can do that together by practicing with each other.
Eva: Yes. It's like you get no certifications, maybe a sticker, but all you get is continuing education requirements. That's abolition.
Kiss: I also think that part of what can hold people back, in addition to the cops living in people's hearts and minds and the other things that are mentioned, is the desire to not mess up and hurt somebody. Knowing that the stakes are so high in some of these moments whether that's providing emergency first response or helping to mediate in a moment of harm and facilitate what happens next or even providing food, there's a risk attached to that. There's the way that the state can respond, but then there's also the ways that if you "mess up", you can re-injure someone. You can cause more harm.
Damon: You can be criticized.
Kiss: Yes. I think that's real and is a thing that holds people back. I don't think that the act of training means that you won't ever make a mistake again, this act of rigor and practice. What it does mean is that you'll know more, you'll be able to do more and you might be more open to other people helping you do what you do better. I think it doesn't eliminate that possibility of making a mistake, but the fear that you might make a mistake is something that fades away the more active you are. Does that make sense?
Andrea: Absolutely. I think it's just also remembering as Signe Harriday said on the podcast, like, what we do know is the state is-- it's not even making mistakes, it's just doing harm intentionally because that's what it does. Someone who has all the certifications and training and practice in the world will walk up to a trans person and be like, I'm not providing treatment. That's way more harmful than someone who has been practicing skills and trying and getting better at things at least doing less harm than that.
Damon: Yes. This feels like a moment for gas. I really need to affirm the space. I got to gas y'all up because we're reflecting on this project of One Million Experiments as existed in many iterations. That is just one medium of the work that I see, or Interrupting Criminalization is doing at large to offer resources towards this skill-building and towards this confidence and taking folks' commitment to the next level. I just want to shout out a little moment that happened last year. I think it really crystallized to me what I see as offering and the space that it holds.
Andrea, you came to Chicago, I believe...and Devon from Milwaukee were part of the coordinating team of this Black abolitionist retreat that happened on the Breathing Room campus. It was like two, three days, and we're going through these intensive six, eight-hour here's a workshop, here's a report back, here's a story session, here's community building. Every 15 to 20 minutes, folks who have been really deep in the work, folks in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Kentucky, St. Louis, Chicago obviously, were coming at these points of really difficult questions or reflections or this is a need we have or I don't have an answer to how to facilitate in this way.
About every 15 to 37 minutes, you just slightly and almost like with a little blush would go into your little tote bag or your little book bag area and pull out a very well-organized document and be like, oh, well, actually we have been spending the last nine months compiling people's thoughts and experience on that exact question and have curated in this way that's very digestible. We could take 20 minutes to look at it. It happened to the point of you were almost embarrassed by how many answers and resources y'all already had prepared for folks who, from my perspective, are the deepest in the work.
One, I just want you to receive the gas, Eva, Andrea, Mariame, the entire IC community, because that is invaluable. One Million Experiments would not exist as a podcast if not for that work. Respair, as we know it, would not exist without our work of doing One Million Experiments. It's changed our life. I watched in the room, it gave people the understanding that, oh, folks are doing this thinking and I'm not alone. One, thank you, thank you, thank you very much, but two, now can you reflect on that moment? Why was that embarrassing to have so many resources available with the exact thinking or frameworks that people were questioning?
Eva: I'm going to interrupt because one reason because that's how much shit is in Andrea's trunk. Andrea's just riding around the country in a little sedan with a trunk just full. It's like a Mary Poppins bag.
Damon: Full of toolkits.
Kiss: We've got to get you a hatchback, my friend. Come on now.
Eva: Like, I got it in here. I got you, I got you, don't worry. It's literal physical things.
Damon: It wasn't links. It wasn't like here's the PDF to, here's the QR code. It was stapled, very well printed. Somebody even had some color on it of like, here's the thing. It was amazing.
Andrea: Thank you. I'm a little embarrassed now. One, it's because I'm an old school organizer and I came up in the time before the interwebs and we had our mimeograph things that we handed out everywhere. I still believe that putting something in someone's hand that they can take home, that will lie on the kitchen table, that someone will pick up in the welfare office, that someone will look at on the wall of
the bulletin board in the common room of the campus or whatever, reading the bathroom is how we continue to be in conversations with people.
Kiss: If we can monopolize bathroom reading, that means we've done our job. That is an important point of intervention.
Andrea: Let me just say the anti-trafficking movement is the carceral feminists who have approaches to trafficking have monopolized the bathroom reading. Insight actually made a poster around police violence against women and trans people of color in 2008 that had a lot of words on it that people clown me for. Then I was like, but that's some bathroom reading. I've seen that poster in bathrooms and people have read it. There you go.
I think it speaks to the intention of IC. When Mariame and I first came together in 2017 to create IC as a space to do some downloading, and it goes back to the question that you asked at the beginning, which is, how are we showing up to the world? We are both in our 50s, we are both some of the few 50-year-olds who you will still see in organizing spaces like that. Not only that but doing the-- I organized that gathering that you were talking about, Damon. I brought the signup sheet, I brought the-- you know what I mean? We're doing still the day-to-day organizing work and we love doing it even though that's...
Eva: Mariame is literally snack shopping right now for our retreat.
Andrea: Right, and is like, can you send me the thing because I'm printing the agendas? I was like, yo, Mariame, I think the millennials don't need us to print things anymore. I think they're going to look on their tablets or something. We really wanted to download everything that we could into this generation of organizers. Mariame talks about making things all the time as a way of sharing lessons learned, information, knowledge, questions, engaging people in conversations, giving people tools to fight back, to think, to come to what she calls the next best question, to just keep moving us towards the horizon of abolition.
That's what's been happening. Then as each moment that I was talking about earlier accelerated, the stakes and the pace of organizing and change, we were producing more things. I have heard people say throughout the last three, five years, but particularly since 2020, are you all listening in on our meetings? Because we will literally be talking about something one week and the next week you release the thing we need. That mostly makes me feel incredibly good.
Kiss: Very proud of the surveillance apparatus you've built...communities is very...
Eva: Oh, Lord.
Andrea: Right. No, it makes me proud because it means that I have successfully adopted and practiced the first principle of the Allied Media Conference and Allied Media project's values, which is we begin by listening. That happens because we're listening because Mariame and I are in the meetings and because we're listening to what people need. Sounds like what people need is a space to come here and talk about those things. It's listening to people being like, oh, we're fighting police contracts here and we have these campaigns that have worked really well and we're curious about these other things.
I'm like, oh, well someone over here is trying this thing. Maybe you should talk to them. Actually, you know what? Let's just start a cohort and you all can come together once a month and talk to each other. We'll just reflect what you all learned from and with each other back out to other people who might be in the same situation. Then again, I feel like I am showing up to the world in the way that I want to when we put out what I'm describing as the fight, the FOP power, the power of police fraternal associations toolkit that we just put out this week, thanks to Eva.
Then Asha, who was at that gathering tweets, "Thank you. We needed this." Now I know that the purpose that Mariame and I had in coming together to join forces to collect, gather, and continue to download resources and information and knowledge. I just want to be clear, it's not just our own. It's what we're hearing and listening and synthesizing and reflecting back from all the organizers on the ground that we're in community with. I feel like we're achieving our mission. Why it's embarrassing is, there's just something awkward about people naming a need and being like, well, I actually have a thing...
It's like I'm hungry...want to be like, I'm hungry. I'm like, look, I made you your favorite meal. I still made you your favorite meal. I have to figure out, I have to reflect more on what feels embarrassing about it. Maybe it's feeling like taking up too much space. Maybe it's feeling like an embarrassment of riches. People have said to us that I see you all are just pouring stuff out of there like a fire hose. In some ways, the people are struggling to absorb it all. We want to create some tools for folks in the next year to embark on their independent study of the library of things that we've created.
When we say library, we include...episodes. We include all the video, all the toolkits, reports, podcasts, images, art, et cetera and to really digest them another level. Maybe you tasted it, maybe you swallowed it, maybe you had it, but now is there a way that we can really help folk digest it and use it in their practice because it has been a lot coming out? I think maybe that's the embarrassment, it's an embarrassment of riches, and also that I'm pulling it out of my tote bag and handing it to you like somebody's auntie.
Kiss: No, but if you're going to carry the tote bag, you got to just own being a tote bag person. I feel like you're way past that point about it. To the--
Eva: Yes, we're at cart level, please.
Kiss: I hear you on the rigor of production, which we've also experienced in our own ways then trying to make sure that there's pathways for the rigor of people engaging with what you make. That's something that at One Hope the podcast has been an entry point for folks to find their ways to those other resources. Looking at the next year as we share this film all over the country, one of the goals of those screenings and those spaces is to provide an opportunity and an entry point in physical space for people to start engaging with all of the many things that you all have made. Thank you all for all of the work that you poured into building responses to those questions that people had. That's an invaluable thing to offer.
Andrea: Some of the things we created, just to be clear, are just ways to have conversations about questions. The abolition and the state discussion tool that if you were at Socialism 2023, you saw me hawking out of my backpack repeatedly.
Kiss: You're like the Too Short of the abolition movement who sold tapes out of his trunk for years, well into being incredibly successful and he still had tapes in his trunk. That may be the end of where the analogy lasts.
Andrea: That's hilarious. It's true and I will still be doing it hopefully till the day I die. I think the discussion tool is just a series of questions and answers that people have offered for people to be like, does this resonate more with me or does this resonate more with me? How have I thought about this? What do I think about states? Where did I learn what I think about states? What did other people learn when they grew up in other places about states? What have other people practiced and have other people thought about these things and reflecting back other conversations and each of them bringing a new iteration?
We recently hosted a convening around these questions and someone who's been coming to all of them and who's an organizer I deeply respect...said, "I feel like the conversation is getting sharper every single time." I just want to name that so much of what we offer has ideas and things people have tried elsewhere. Thoughts Mariame and I have, reflections that we have based on having been part of these movements over decades but some of them are just questions. I think that's something I've learned from this practice of experimentation is that you have to come with your hypothesis, your questions, and then come with your questions about what the impact has been and just keep asking generative questions.
Even in this moment, what brings us to the next question, what's the next generative question about what we can be doing beyond wringing our hands in despair and raging outwardly? What's the next best question that's going to get us to the next iteration of the conversation? There's a lot of different kinds of resources, but some of them have no answers, just questions.
Eva: Something I'm really proud of about One Million Experiments about I see the experiment is how a lot of those resources reflect the space that I've been following Andrea and Mariame into of the idea of organizing on the 500-year clock. A month ago held the conversation of abolition in the state, not knowing that this month was coming, but always having those conversations on the back burner so that we're able to meet these moments that much sharper and that much clearer, but always having them.
Andrea: I think Mariame often talks about how before the film, everything is happening everywhere all at once. It's like we're winning and losing at the same time. We are moving forward and falling back at the same time. Abolition is happening now and is a horizon we'll never get to. I think recognizing that, and again, this is what I was trying to teach myself with writing practicing new worlds, is that you just keep practicing and you just keep operating on different timelines and trying to create something that if it's not useful today will be useful at some point and will be useful today in preparing us for some point. As we talked at the beginning of this episode about how do we speak into the future? Or as one of all of our now favorite quotes at interrupting criminalization from Lorraine Hansberry, how do we impose beauty on our future?
Kiss: In that imposition, what do you hope this show what people will have access to, might make possible for the work they're doing?
Andrea: I hope it makes possible what Kelly and Mariame have called the jailbreak of the imagination, the way in which policing not just as a practice, but as a way of structuring and understanding the world has infiltrated and embedded every cell of our body and every nerve pathway, and in a way that needs to be extricated in every moment and every practice. I think this podcast is a tool for that to just step outside of what is into what could be, and learn from it in so many different angles.
I think that sometimes people think abolitionist organizing looks one way and maybe didn't when the thought of an abortion fund is abolitionist organizing, or wouldn't thought of a fridge is abolitionist organizing, or wouldn't have thought of any of the other things that folks talk about. You might think about...in a violence intervention program like that you might think of...medics like that, you might think of...llike that. There's so many other things that you all dove into that really help people understand that it is literally everything, it is literally anything that you're doing with an intention to move away from policing, punishment, surveillance, and exile and towards a practice of collective care, mutual accountability, and passionate reciprocity as the CR insight statement says.
That's why I hope that people use it that way, that when we're wondering how to confront a problem that feels intractable, that we go back to see, well, how do we navigate that? I think even in the moment that we are living in right now, there's some inspiration in understanding how violence interruption, works, and the role surfacing and detoxifying grief plays in that.
Channeling it and releasing it and transforming it in a way that doesn't manifest as genocidal violence, and how are we going to detoxify and transform the grief that we are visiting on people as we're talking right now such that it doesn't replicate itself into more internalized violence of trauma and family violence and community violence and more externalized violence? That's what I hope it does, is that it also creates opportunities for folks to think about having these kinds of conversations. It's cute that you all are two cis men with big mics and a podcast, which is a little stereotypical in terms of the podcast demographic.
Damon: Oh, yes we know.
Kiss: We're well aware.
Andrea: It's so interesting because folks who don't know, but Daniel and Damon have big mics, and even I have Apple headphones. Anyway, I hope the encouragement is that people sit around in their living rooms and have conversations about the experiments that are happening in their lives in their communities. That they maybe adopt even the format and say, "Okay, a family member was doing XYZ, we tried something different to navigate that, let's see, what was the hypothesis that if we just loved on this person, instead of cutting them off, that they might shift their behavior? How did we do that? What was the outcome? How do we want to try and do something different next time?"
How can people pick up this model and do it with their own mics or do it without mics, and then maybe write a zine about it or share it in some other way? I hope people can replicate this notion that we're going to learn from each other, take what lessons we can from it and apply it to our community, and continue to inspire each other to act towards the futures that we want.
Eva: One of my hopes that I've had for these two seasons is that we've modeled vulnerability in some way. I think this is such a big part of taking the leap into experimenting and reaping the benefits of the fruit of those experiments is sharing all of the mistakes and bubbles and joy and grief along the way. What becomes possible in that togetherness of vulnerability. I want to read you guys one more quote that I found from our evaluation. This person is definitely getting a sticker by the way, so whoever you are, let us know.
Kiss: Maybe even two, and maybe we'll send a little pack.
Eva: They said, I knew it would be fascinating, but I think I'm surprised by how much a joy and fun there is in it, I have a new theory that abolitionists naturally tend toward having a good sense of humor, fed partly by the podcast. I think what has been so special, what you bring here today and into the lab, Andrea, is just letting people feel all the feels that this work is now that it very much helps to feel together. Joy is definitely a part of it, grief is a huge part of it, but in both of those feelings, vulnerability is needed.
We've had so many people come on here, and really share what a gift it is. I don't know that we knew we were going to get so much of what we have, but I hope that people can appreciate how hard it is to come on here and share what we've done wrong. That's not super acceptable. That's definitely not getting new certification, but it's a big part of what we're trying to get into those living room conversations.
Andrea: That's been my greatest lesson. I'm a Capricorn, not that I haven't mentioned that 17 times I like doing things well, I like being good at what I do. I like being sharp and rigorous. What I've learned is that that actually does not get us where we're going, that we have to be willing to learn our lessons from our mistakes and share them and be open to them and that connection requires vulnerability. Someone asked me recently, what courage requires in this moment. My answer was that courage is collective.
The vulnerability, the community, the willingness to talk about and learn from our mistakes, and failures are the only things that are going to get us through this time, and the only things are going to get us through the survival. Yes, being surprised that I can find myself laughing today with you all, in spite of the moment is also what's going to get us there because then I write about this in Practicing New Worlds, I heard someone say at a conference in 2019 that abolition has to be abolitious, that we have to be irresistible. Eva says, no. I was taken by Eva, but maybe it...
Eva: That's not the sticker.
Andrea: That's not the sticker? Okay. That sticker will not be coming to a town near you because Eva is going to refuse to make it, but I do feel like there is something about how joy and connection and love and care under the worst of times is what draws people to us. I keep referencing Parable of the Sower today, I'm sure there's a reason for it. At some point, people are traveling on a road and someone approaches them who has a resource they need, land. What the protagonist reflects on is whatever it is that we created together attracted this person to us who had something we needed.
How are we creating something together that attracts people to the vision of the world that we have, and helps us project it forward? I think that's what One Million Experiments podcast has been. Has been creating something, a community, a space of joy, of laughter, dare I say, an abolitionist space that is attracting people to the vision of the future that we're trying to shove through this portal. I'm grateful beyond measure to you all for creating that, and you have my unending gratitude and respect for the work that you've done over the last two seasons in creating this podcast. I'm in awe and just deep gratitude for it. I know 54,000 people, at least, are as well. Thank you.
Damon: Thank you. I received that. Also, I want to reflect back exactly what you just named is how you have shown up and the impact you've had on the world at large, but on me as well. I am honored to be in community with you, to be in your legacy and you talk about this notion of collective courage and your presence is always encouraging and not just in the sense of giving compliments or sentimentality, but when I see the intentionality with which you approach each space, each question, each conversation with a fervor and a deep passion, it deepens my courage to stay present.
It again attracts to the work because you remain human, the courage you had, that you demonstrated in this conversation, to show up with the full pain and agony that you brought, I have struggled to be present with that even though it exists for me. Even modeling in this conversation and then being so thoughtful, I think is a microcosm of how you've shown up in the world. It's really been an honor to be a part of work that you are a part of and to deepen connection. Thank you to the entity, to the organization, to the movement at large. Andrea, thank you to you for giving these decades to making this possible that we could have these conversations because it took a lot of time to get to being able to say experiment in these ways. I really want you to know that it is a deep honor to be in relationship with you.
Eva: Andrea can't cook, but she'll make sure you're fed.
[laughter]
Andrea: Oh, thank you so much, Damon. I can't tell you how much that means to me, how that lands in my heart. I started the podcast in tears, I'm ending it in tears, but these are tears of joy and love and connection, and that means the world to me. Thank you.
Kiss: Thank you for trusting us to be in your lineage doing this work in a way that other people could hear. That's a lot of trust. Yes, it's been such a joy to be connected and participating and active together. I'll speak on my behalf, but I think for Damon too, has been a big part of what enabled us to sustain through these last couple of years. Thank you for trusting us to help build this space with you.
Andrea: Eminently trustworthy, and even a gal. I just want folks to just know the miracle that is even a gal, even a gal makes so much possible, and quietly nobody just--
Eva: The sound effects are pretty loud here. I don't know if you. [laughs]
Andrea: The rest, it's like stealth, right? All of a sudden, something magical has been created, and Eva has many secret skills and I've seen them blossom and grow beyond show through this podcast in terms of the production of it, the recruitment of people, the curation of groups to be on it. Just everything Eva makes is beautiful in addition to being complex, nuanced and funny and real and accessible, and this podcast has been an example of that as well.
Damon: I dare say cool.
Andrea: Cool. That is so true, right? Eva's the person who's going to be like, "Yes, Andrea, we're not going with abolitious, sorry. That was a nice idea, but we're not going with it." Eva definitely is also a stopper of bad ideas, and I'm so grateful because that's a really important skill.
Eva: Oh, but it is so good, friend, to be able to have all the bad ideas together with you. You guys just don't know, right?
Damon: There's an example to emulate.
[laughter]
Eva: It's an honor to-- yes, all of the rejections, feel really good.
[laughter]
Andrea: It's amazing. Yes, so if you need a creative director, well, you can't have her, but even a gal is the one--
Kiss: You may not be able to replicate it completely, but it's a model for what you might be able to build on and build in your own space.
Andrea: Exactly.
Eva: Don't worry, Andrea and I will make a zine about it eventually. Don't worry. [laughs] No, so much love to you all. It's been such a journey. I hope that so many other people have shared on this journey too. I'm thinking about, again, all my comrades in the streets today, and sometimes that euphoria of feeling you get when you're in community physically in a real way. Even though we're not in a room together today, you get that buzz when you leave a good organizing meeting. I know that I'm leaving this podcast with that buzz and I hope y'all are too.
[music]
Damon: Whew, so much gratitude and love and appreciation for Andrea, but we are not done. It's time for our peer review, so we got to welcome Eva back in the lab. Eva, what's up?
Kiss: That's all you're getting.
[laughter]
Eva: Oh, yes, it was a little awkward pause waiting for my horns, but hey y'all, it's good to be back.
Kiss: Eva, what's jumping out to you from that conversation?
Speaker 5: Hoping I don't offend all my peers.
Eva: Here we are months later after this October conversation, and we are where we are in the world. Hospitals and schools are still being bombed. The conditions have worsened, but it's not so entirely different from where we were sitting with Andrea in October. I think being with Andrea and with you all my new friends in this time and talking about the rigor of relationships, talking about relationships as survival just means so much to share these spaces in this time with you.
I so encourage anyone else who is listening to this podcast, to share it with others and to have conversations about it, and to be together. She is such a light for me of a person who believes in liberation and fighting for liberation in our lifetimes. Her examples of her work and study and relationships that she has in South Africa, talking about everyone getting in where they can, where they were, everyone I see around me getting in where they can, where they are.
I hope that this conversation is a call to you to get in, is a bomb for those who are in, and that it offers some guidance and how these strategies, these lineages, these shifts, and systems become visible and provide a guiding light forward. Maybe not an antidote to despair, but is something that gets us through the day.
Kiss: A pathway to it.
Eva: That's right.
Damon: I think what she modeled for me and what I was struggling with at the time is this feeling of like, "Oh, solidarity or accounting for privileges means staying upright and so is it appropriate for me to feel undone or to feel saddened by something that folks are experiencing so much more acutely, or that I am not physically experiencing even though I feel connected to it?"
Her modeling of starting the conversation of like, "This is all that I'm feeling and it is hard to get to any other place without working through and expressing and releasing just how heartbreaking, just how horrible this is," was a helpful reminder for me at the time. Because I think I was trying to power through or sometimes wanting to offer what the analytical, how do we make sense of this? This is the way we'll write about it 40 years from now. Taking time and allowing the real human feelings to emerge and not feeling a guilt that was connected to feeling sad, which is bizarre. Even just that modeling of the true, honest, real way was really a lesson for me in addition to talking theoretically about how we abolish carceral systems.
Kiss: Yes. This is why it's useful to be in relationship with people who have been doing this work for decades because they've been in the mix in flashpoints like this where you are confronted with the visible realities of structural harm, and you have to figure out, like you said, how do you move with that centered wherever you are? That can mean tactically and strategically, but also how do you move through the world? How do you make sense of your day when you know that that's going on?
That's a big challenge that I think a lot of people, myself included, have struggled with in these last couple of months. To be able to talk about that feeling even with someone who has been trying to figure out how to move through that in relation to South Africa, and in relation to Israel Palestine, and in other moments, it's very useful to be [chuckles] connected to people who they might not have all the answers, but they've shown through their actions what's made possible when you stay consistent, you stay committed and you stay connected to the people that you're working with and that you are in movement with.
It doesn't mean that Andrea's expected to lift us out of the pit, but it is just if we're going to be in the pit, I'd rather be in it with people who have been in the pit before. Any other jump-out lines, ideas before we hop on out of here?
Damon: Yes. I have one and I asked her the leading question around institutionalization of these ideas knowing her grounding and knowing that I'm sure she would complicate her question, but just saying how outright she pushed back or rejected that idea. I think that's what so many folks, even if it's unnamed or striving for, it's like, "Oh, in 20 years from now we'll have a fully funded thing that's a part of the thing," [laughs] right?
We'll have a space to go through because creating things is hard and being emergent requires a type of holistic listening to your environmental stimuli and variables that takes a lot of energy and takes a lot of attention to be paid out. Building up the capacity to continuously do that for generations as opposed to building up a institute at Northwestern or Columbia or something that is then fighting with the colonial state side of the university, or building up a nonprofit that has a national board and an annual gala that goes on for 75 years.
We know that we can make payroll and folks will show up to their job as gratifying or comforting, as that institutional framework that the rest of our been dominated seems like that is not the path we are looking for. There is some excitement of that, taking off your dress shoes and wearing sandals, let your toes spread out. Also, I think I want folks to-- as I'm trying to face the fear of what that means of like, it will always be soil that needs tended and it'll never be still. The earth is moving and living and breathing and growing and changing. If we are talking about creating earth-like systems, it's exciting of whew, we're not doing that, but it's also like, oh wow, we'll never be doing that. Don't be waiting for some institutional fairy to come and flatten the emergent practices we have to continue to build.
Eva: Life is precious as we quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore in this episode. Our time is precious. I think there's an image that just sticks with me throughout these days of a protester holding a sign that says, and you probably have seen this, but it says, "What you do during a genocide is what you will have done." Extrapolate that to these precious wild lives that we live. What you do is what you will have done.
Kiss: I think what we're going to do is get the hell on out of here.
Damon: Get out of here. One big flex though, and you named the listening numbers and she said the number around 50,000. That ain't enough. That ain't enough.
Kiss: That's not where we're at.
Damon: One Million Experiments is broadcast across two channels, and when we add that up, we're pushing a 100k baby. Thank you to all you experimenters and pseudo-scientists out there. [laughter] That word has more connotation than I was aiming for, but [laughter] you struggling scientists out there for tuning in. The intention is not only for you to listen and be fed with the knowledge, but to see yourself as a part of this network so that 100,000 represents that we are not alone and that there are a lot of people who are plugging into this project. If you've listened to this, try to find someone else that has listened to this and go deeper in conversation because that's what this is all for.
Kiss: As a reminder, bring us to you to help build that conversation together around the One Million Experiments film.
Damon: You can have conversations with the actual us. It's possible, it could happen.
Kiss: Damn. Hit us up at contact at respairmedia.com or go to millionexperiments.com/documentary. All right y'all, we're going to be back in the lab one more time, until then.
Damon: Much love to the people.
Kiss: Peace.