Reimagining the Revolution, page 14
These seeming contradictions are not unfamiliar to Andrew, who’s seen his fair share of life’s tendency to present us with both all that is good and all that is evil. His life has been filled with bright stars and dark days, liberation and death, prosperity and famine. None of it makes much sense, he conceded. Why would the Olympics come to Atlanta? Why would a rapper and an activist go in on a bank? Why would a city in the Deep South be the hub for HBCUs? Why would millions of Africans be made cargo, then trade, then slaves?
The answers fall into Andrew’s long list of “unknowns.” But in a sitdown with Mike on his WABE Atlanta show “Love & Respect with Killer Mike,” Andrew offered an interesting hypothesis for that last question.
“We may have been sent here by God to make this nation be what it ought to be.”
Doing Time by Gerald Morgan
6
Reimagining Infrastructure:
The Autonomous Infrastructure Mission (AIM)
“Sista Paula.”
His voice was deep and mellow. It reminded me of Frantz Fanon’s introduction to Black Skin, White Masks where he wrote, “Things I’m going to say, not shout. I’ve long given up on shouting.”1 The voice on the other end of the call echoed through a long hallway he just finished mopping. It came through scratchy, a common side effect of old-school pay phones still mounted to the walls of Kern Valley State Prison.
I was getting quite fond of Heshima Denham calling me “sista.” His expression of intimacy reminded me that we are bonded by a connective tissue deeper than race.
“‘Shima, how you holding up?” I replied.
A correctional officer positioned some distance from the payphone barked an order. It bounced off the walls and reverberated through the phone. Prison is intentionally disorientating, as I am constantly aware, whether it be the prerecorded messages that interrupt my conversations with Heshima and Ivan every few minutes or the irregular schedules we work around to communicate. No matter how many years you’ve been inside—Heshima has been incarcerated since 1994—you never get used to it.
“Disorienting tactics allow prison officials to alter inmates’ views, beliefs, and realities,” writes political scientist Patrick Doolittle in his senior thesis for Yale University, the basis for the Marshall Project’s Emmy-nominated series The Zo.2 “They do away with structures, traditions, worldviews, and logic that may empower them, or keep them tethered to reality itself.”
I first reached out to Heshima after learning about Amend the 13th, an organization he developed in prison to oppose the slavery exception in the US Constitution. In researching an article, I discovered a recording of a speech Heshima had made for the August 2017 Millions for Prisoners March, where activists from around the country descended on Washington DC to protest inhumane prison conditions and the 13th Amendment’s slavery provision. One of the country’s last remaining Black-owned radical periodicals, the San Francisco Bay View, helped galvanize support for the demonstration in the Bay Area and posted Heshima’s speech on its website.
“From the slave codes to the Black codes, to the legal slavery provision of the 13th Amendment and the thousands of civil death statutes that derive their legal authority therefrom, America has made a mockery of the concept of ‘freedom and justice for all’ by ensuring it is always denied to some,” his speech went.3
I wrote to him at Kern Valley State Prison to ask if he’d be interested in contributing an article about the 13th Amendment for an upcoming issue of the All of Us or None newspaper. After several replies were confiscated by guards, he called me.
“I’m doing OK, you know? Can’t complain,” he said.
He most certainly could complain, but that’s not really his style. With each new evolution of punishment and deprivation he’s endured, Heshima has held firm to his humanity and identity. He does this by using his New Afrikan name, Joka Heshima Denham—rather than his government name, Shannon Denham—Heshima stemming from the Swahili word sima, meaning respect and honor, and Joka referring to Hồ Chí Minh’s “dragon,” a being that would fly out of the prison gates upon the dismantlement of imperialism.4
He also makes stylistic choices in his writing to maintain a sense of autonomy. In his articles for publications from the Bay View to Mother Jones, he critiques “Amerika” or “Amerikkka”—the single K standing for “killer,” he says, and the KKK being fairly obvious—calling attention to the 50 million Indigenous people killed during western expansion and the 250 million Africans who died en route to the New World.
“It’s a way for my reader to see a term and not associate it with what the current zeitgeist associates the term with, but instead its function and purpose,” Heshima told me. “The underlying basis of law in this nation is violence and death.
“There’s also a more rebellious motive associated with how men like me express ourselves. Words are instruments of power.”
To exert that power, Heshima writes prolifically and provocatively. He’s written about America’s devolution into “the most advanced fascist state in human history,” rising above Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, made possible through both advanced technology and a more cunning ability to disguise itself as noble in its actions.5 This can be seen in the many Big Brother spy tactics it deploys in the name of national security. Cloaked in this camouflaged persona as a gatekeeper of peace and security, the United States can claim to be the world’s safeguard of liberty while having its population heavily surveilled and more prisoners per capita than any other nation. Domestically, its deception is even more profound, evolving and advancing oppressive systems that impact a compliant population that yearns for the status quo and is conditioned against revolution.
“When I speak of fascism, I’m talking about the assimilation of billions of people to a particular psychology,” Heshima once told me. “It’s a psychology that rationalizes stuff like having more than enough housing to house every single person inside this country, yet callously allowing millions of people to sleep on the street; that claims to be the beacon of freedom and justice yet has the largest prison population on the planet.”
Perhaps the greatest validation of the power of Heshima’s words comes in the form of the consequences they’ve earned him in prison. The most severe of these consequences were inflicted during his time at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California, in the early 2000s. Heshima began receiving 1819 forms, the corrections department’s “Notification of Disapproval,” and his mail would go missing. Next came a slew of Form 115s, the department’s disciplinary report. These seemed to correlate less with actual violations and more with how outspoken he was becoming about his New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalists beliefs, an ideology stemming from Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and Black revolutionary tradition. Eventually, the department used a tattoo he had, his possession of Blood in My Eye, and a drawing he had made as “evidence” of an affiliation with a prison gang and sent him to what was termed a “validated security housing unit (SHU),” an area where prisoners who were accused of being gang members were held in solitary confinement indefinitely unless they were paroled or “debriefed” by defecting from the gang and providing incriminating information about its members. As prisoners in Pelican Bay put it: “Parole, snitch, or die.”6
The prison department justified its use of indeterminate solitary by claiming prison gangs were responsible for rampant violence and drug sales within the system. In response to criticism, the prison warden at the time, Clark Ducart, was quoted as saying, “You gotta keep the predators away from the prey.”7
The “predator” reference, an age-old racist trope, lends itself to the argument that prisoners are not seen as people. But more significantly, this wide-cast dragnet of gang suspicion allowed correctional officers and prison administrators to control the proliferation of ideas under the pretense of controlling contraband. To the prison department, ideas carry just as much danger, if not more, than alleged gang beefs or drug use. This position was no more apparent than an instance in 2012 when four men, allegedly from the four biggest rival gangs inside California’s prison system, penned a joint letter calling for a ceasefire in the name of cooperation. They gave it to administrators and asked them to proliferate it. After all, they were being kept in the SHU for instigating violence, and this was a call to end it. Prison officials confiscated the statement and destroyed it: Apparently, the idea of prisoners working together was far more foreboding than the population killing itself off.8
On Our Own
At the time of the joint letter, Heshima was already deep in the underbelly of Pelican Bay. He had been “validated” as a member of the Black Guerrilla Family, a Black collective that Heshima says has been strategically misconstrued as a gang to prevent its true values from being legitimized.
“I was back there in the SHU with them for twenty years and they wasn’t stabbing nobody, or selling drugs, or any of that crap they tried to put out into the public,” Heshima said, his voice still calm and measured. “They were there reading books and articles and teaching the younger brothers.”
Affiliations aside, no one, gang member or otherwise, deserves what the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture called “the severe and often irreparable psychological and physical consequences of solitary confinement.”9 Prisoners in these units were kept in their cells for twenty-three hours a day, only leaving to exercise in isolation in small rooms, divided by concrete walls.
“In the most inhumane conditions that can be produced in an industrialized nation, an indeterminate SHU, a torture unit, these men who had no hope of ever getting out understood something,” Heshima told me. “If we are going to end legal slavery in America, we’d have to liberate ourselves.”
This idea of self-liberation would ultimately lead to Heshima’s blueprint for the Autonomous Infrastructure Mission (AIM), a design for self-supported communities independent of the state. According to its mission statement: “If the institutions which have preserved legal slavery in Amerika continue to be the primary basis of the infrastructure in our communities, the social ills they inevitably produce will continue to perpetuate de facto ‘legal’ dehumanization and exploitation.”
Heshima needed empirical evidence that self-liberation was possible, and he wouldn’t have to wait long, as the same men who had penned the ceasefire letter had already begun developing a plan for freedom.
The four men at the far end, also called the Short Corridor due to its remoteness, were Todd Ashker, Sitawa Jamaa, Arturo Castellanos, and Antonio Guillen. They had been isolated together because the department believed they were high-ranking gang members, with sway over the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Mexican Mafia, and Nuestra Familia, respectively. With little more than a food slot to shout through and cracks in the concrete wall between exercise spaces to relay messages, an unlikely collaboration between the men from rival groups began to form. They redefined their caste, putting themselves in a prisoner “class” rather than in racial enclaves. In 2011 they staged two modest hunger strikes, mostly to test their grit, calculating how much water they needed to keep their hearts working and how much weight they would lose. They spent the next year putting on weight and coordinating with advocacy groups, friends, and family through coded letters and notations in law books to spread the word about the strike. On July 8, 2013, the first day of the strike, 30,000 California prisoners stopped eating.10 The fast lasted fifty-nine days and eventually led to a federal class-action suit that ended indeterminate sentencing in California.11
Back on the phone, a loud noise interrupted the conversation. The guard’s voice, closer this time, muttered something to Heshima, who seemed to be covering the bottom of the handset.
“Hey, I gotta wheel a guy to medical,” he said when he finished with the guard. “Lemme call you right back.”
I was reminded that the liberation Heshima and his fellow hunger strikers earned is limited. When Heshima was released from the SHU back into the general population, he found himself at Kern Valley State Prison, an eleven-hour drive from where he started at Pelican Bay. There he works as a porter, mopping hallways, transporting men to the infirmary, and doing routine maintenance. While it may seem counterintuitive to engage in the system of prison labor rather than resist it, Heshima has been told that refusal to work would land him back in the SHU. Although he acknowledges that the plan he developed in solitary for AIM may not be contingent on his freedom, it is contingent on his ability to communicate with those he’s entrusted with carrying out his mission.
A Labor of Love
Bri Hawkins grew up bouncing around youth homes in the Midwest. Amid a chaotic upbringing, the children who were raised together came to depend primarily on each other. Bri often speaks of those she lived with as her brothers and sisters.
As is common with those placed in group homes—youth in this environment are two and a half times more likely to become involved in the justice system12—Bri and her contemporaries began engaging with what Heshima calls the “underground economy,” a criminalized series of ventures that the unemployed, the uneducated, and the consistently denied participate in for survival.
“If you don’t have a job, or there’s no capital to fund an entrepreneurial enterprise, there’s only one place you can actually make money, and that’s the underground economy,” Heshima explained. “It’s the doorway to a very unique aspect of American culture where the system denies access, pushes people into the underground, then criminalizes that means of survival.”
It was here in the underground that Bri’s radicalization formed. When she was thirteen, she was living in another group home, this one in Chicago. One afternoon a group of kids from the home engaged in a robbery. They dispersed as the police arrived, Bri and her assumed brother Dante dodging into an alley. Dante, a young Black teen who was unarmed, was attempting to scale a fence when a police officer shot him in the back. Bri watched as his lifeless body fell to the ground.
“That’s kind of what sparked my radicalization,” Bri said. “It was definitely a transformative incident in my life.”
After Dante’s death, Bri started engaging in community protests surrounding police homicide and police brutality. She stood with the families of Mike Brown and George Floyd and connected with groups like Families United, a nonprofit that travels the country providing support to families and survivors of police violence. She also connected with various prison abolition groups. (The parallels between police brutality and the dehumanization of Black Americans via incarceration provide much crossover for orgs in this space.) Bri began following social media accounts such as the one operated by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a prisoner-led organization that fights for humane conditions and the preservation of human rights in carceral settings. In addition to organizing inside—providing law books and courses to prisoners across the US— Jailhouse Lawyers Speak has a prolific outreach program, and back in 2019, its Facebook page featured information about Heshima’s blueprint for self-liberation that linked out to a website. As she read the details of Amend the 13th and the Autonomous Infrastructure Mission, Bri’s eyes began to widen.
“I was sitting at these protests watching the same attempts of things trying to be done in the community to effect change and knowing that a piece was missing,” Bri said. “This was the missing piece.”
Bri used the website’s contact form to request more information and connected with Adam Brashere, the national coordinator for AIM.
“Some activists are lip service: they print flyers, but they do little work,” Adam said. “The more time I spent with Bri, I saw she was sincere and that she had a way of sharing our mission with the people in a way they could understand.”
For Bri to start an AIM chapter in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she had established residency, she needed to be walked through the platform: an aggregation of eight distinct community programs designed to eliminate dependency on mainstream power structures.
The Sustainable Agricultural Commune provides access to healthy foods and restores urban ecologies.
The Closed-Circuit Economic Initiative creates collective ownership of businesses and promotes economic circulation within the bounds of the autonomous community.
The Youth Community Action Program and the New Afrikan Math and Science Centers Initiative focus on developing the next generation, educating them on their cultural history and how to further the AIM when their time comes to lead.
The Emergency Response Network provides training and guidelines for responding to community crises, whether a natural disaster or a domestic disturbance.
The Community Safe-Zones Initiative preserves a sense of security for youth, women, and elders, providing shelter and necessities.
The integrity of these zones is protected by the Secure Communities Mandate, which trains community members to serve as a defense force.
The Strategic Release Initiative calls for decarceration, specifically the release of influential elders within the Black liberation ecosystem.
All of these work in conjunction with the Amend the 13th: Abolish “Legal” Slavery in Amerika Movement, a coalition-based national campaign to remove the slavery provision from the 13th Amendment and repeal all civil death laws. The AIM is where oppressed people, enslaved under the 13th Amendment, would find refuge upon release from bondage.
“Amend the 13th is saying you cannot begin to end the institutions upon which legal slavery rests in this country without first abolishing its existence in law,” Adam explained to me. “AIM is saying there is another way of life—that we can police and defend ourselves, that we can educate and feed ourselves—and in so that new way of life you no longer risk falling prey to the trap of the underground.”
