Reimagining the Revolution, page 16
Oh man, I was so proud of myself. I thought I’d out-abolitioned a true abolitionist. It was short-lived.
“Prison is an irrational punishment because incapacitation makes redemption and reparations impossible,” Heshima said. “What I’m talking about is a period of time where this person is cast outside the bounds of the community—not caged, just relocated—until both internal developmental progress and external developmental restitution are made.
“So if you take somebody’s life, you should be responsible for filling that void,” he continued. “If that person provided for a family, you are now responsible for providing for that family.”
It made so much sense it almost made me mad. Not because I hadn’t tripped him up, but because in explaining a system that diverts from the present one, Heshima revealed some maddening truths about America’s criminal legal system I hadn’t even thought of.
The breadwinner of a family is killed. Are garnished wages from someone making pennies doing prison labor going to actually support the family left behind? Absurd. My own conditioning had reared its head: I hadn’t even thought about the element of redemption.
“I believe everyone can make a mistake, but no one should be barred from the capacity to change,” Heshima said. “It’s the only constant in nature: things either grow or they die.”
Autonomous Infrastructure Mission proposes abandoning the current system and creating a new society perhaps geographically within its bounds but wholly independent of it. AIM accomplishes this through closed-circuit economics, seen in communities like Black Wall Street, but moreover through redefining education, safety, and community.
Perhaps it’s easier for Heshima to abandon the current system because it has abandoned him. While California does not have explicit civil death laws—legal language that recognizes prisoners as having the same rights as a dead person—it might as well. Heshima’s mail is constantly confiscated and his possession of certain books has been met with disciplinary citations. First Amendment: freedom of speech. His cell is tossed on a regular basis, his communications are screened by the mail staff, and his telephone calls are monitored. Fourth Amendment: right to privacy. In 2022 the US Supreme Court made a series of rulings that denied prisoners due process, gutting their ability to present evidence they were not adequately represented (Shinn v. Ramirez, 596 US ___, decided May 23, 2022) and their right to provide proof of their innocence (Jones v. Hendrix, 599 US ___, decided June 22, 2022). Fifth Amendment: right to due process and fair procedures. Fourteenth Amendment: equal protection under the law. In total, Heshima spent eighteen years and eight months in solitary confinement. Eighth Amendment: cruel and unusual punishment.
“If they was to let me out today on parole, they could pull me over, search my car, come to my house in the middle of the night, pull me outta my bed, flip my mattress over, strip search me … and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it, because I’m not a person. I’m still J38283,” Heshima said, referring to his prisoner ID. “That makes sense in this society, where if I was a ruling class element, or I was one of their tools like law enforcement and I was tasked with ensuring the continuation of this way of life, the guys whom I would make sure to keep my boot on they neck or my hand on they shoulder would be the guys who have very little interest in the continuation of such a system.”
I imagined Heshima sitting in solitary, enclosed by concrete, with the dim glow of the hallway halogens seeping through the cracks of his food slot. Between his rights being stripped away and the darkness of Pelican Bay’s solitary unit, it must have felt like an actual tomb. How was it that, so detached from society, he was able to envision a way to build a new one?
“I don’t think it’s hard for him to imagine,” Duvon said. “The steps of AIM are very similar to how we grew up: Our mom planted a garden every year, had us eat cracked wheat with butter and salt for breakfast, fed our neighbors. Our dad taught us not to get trapped in the bad things that happen to you, to move on, to share your knowledge with the person who’s coming up behind you.”
For Heshima, the separation allowed him the time and space to perform a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions,” a phrase coined by Mao and embraced by the Black Panther Party. It is the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism, which views historical and political events as the result of a series of contradictions or social conflicts.18 With the world outside prison frozen in time, Heshima is able to examine these moments of conflict and contradiction, analyzing not the world he cannot access, but the history he can.
“The origin of our resistance lies in the very nature of the core contradictions of capitalist society in conflict with the advanced elements of its most oppressed strata: the bourgeois state’s attempt to stamp out revolutionary sentiment amongst the lumpen-proletariat in hopes of maintaining and expanding its reactionary character,” Heshima wrote in the Bay View. “[This is] in contrast with the struggle of political and politicized prisoners to raise the consciousness and revolutionary character of the entire underclass, all while resisting the fascist state’s attempts to silence our dissent, crush our will to struggle and foment defection.”19
(Told you he’s prolific.)
The World Right Now by Scotty Scott aka Scott W. Smith
7
Conclusion:
Beyond Freedom
Oftentimes freedom is so elusive that just having a taste of it becomes a goal unto itself. But without a sure path forward, history has taught us, new systems often imitate the ones they replaced.
I was talking to a friend of mine from Egypt, who attended Cairo University during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Buoyed by the eruption of the Arab Spring less than a year before, citizens across Egypt flooded the streets with flags, banners, and posters, banding together to withstand an intense military retaliation. For the majority of President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year authoritarian rule, the people suffered economic hardship and brutal campaigns by the country’s armed forces. Their thirst for freedom kept them on the streets for eighteen days until Mubarak resigned from his position, giving power over to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
It was a massive undertaking, requiring the unprecedented mobilization of Egyptians from all socioeconomic backgrounds and costing the lives of 846 civilians.1 Their unlikely success had benefits and drawbacks: They had found freedom, but it had been theoretical for so long, and no one had planned beyond grasping it.
This vacuum left in the aftermath of the revolution allowed room for the military to step in under the guise of maintaining order while the country found its footing. Boosted by its newfound power and influence, forces eventually mounted a military coup against the first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. Subsequent clashes between the military and pro-Morsi protestors led to hundreds more civilian deaths. The military’s political and economic stronghold on the state ultimately led to a return to authoritarianism. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former minister of defense who led the military coup against Morsi, has defined his presidency by repressing public dissent—including forceful crackdowns on protests and freedom of the press—and economic policies that have led to extreme poverty; an estimated 20 million Egyptians are living at or below the poverty line.2
The Egyptian revolution can inform the current movement for liberation in the US in several ways. First and foremost, it proves revolution is possible. But it also provides a warning: Freedom is not an end in itself.
This volume has examined several evolutions of slavery—the prison-industrial complex, felony disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, economic disparities, redlining, and community destabilization. True freedom requires an account of all of these and a plan to ensure future evolutions do not occur.
“A new civil rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time,” Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow. “Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge the public consensus that underlies the prevailing system of control.”3
So hit the streets, organize mass protests, and make your voices heard. But attach yourself to a plan for the future, lest someone else plans it for you.
Brace Yourselves
The current landscape for activism is not for the faint of heart. This year police are on track to kill more people than any other year in the last decade. It doesn’t even matter which year you’re reading this. Fatal police shootings have increased annually since 2019.
There is also a well-organized counteroffensive already in full gear. The FBI is known to have used COINTELPRO tactics as recently as 2020, when the agency recruited an informant to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests in Denver.4 These active campaigns to undermine the integrity of racial justice movements are being deployed before the movement has a chance to fully heal from the damage of the last infiltration efforts, which led to the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. These wounds can be felt in the forms of constant infighting and divisive rhetoric meant to keep BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) groups from banding together in a unified stand against white supremacy. They’ve also infected racial justice movements with horizontal prejudice, a term that acknowledges how individuals in a targeted racial group actually reinforce oppressive and discriminatory systems.
To be in the struggle for racial justice often feels Sisyphean. Endurance to press on in the face of ignorance and slow-turning wheels of justice and democracy seems impossible to maintain, but it is not. At the Shabazz Center’s fifty-eighth commemoration of Malcolm X’s death, Angela Davis said, “How is it possible to remain committed over so many centuries, over so many generations, to this struggle for freedom? That is phenomenal, that each generation has passed on that impulse to fight for freedom to the next.”5
Fear not. As Davis stated, generations of experience are available to guide you through the labyrinth of obstacles that lay ahead. Through conversations with members of those generations, as well as my own experience, I’ve compiled four strategies to maintain your footing on this rugged path toward progress.
No. 1: Let the Movement Carry You
When I started working with All of Us or None, the first thing Dorsey said was, “This party started long before you walked in.” Many of us come in on fire for our own ideas, but we neglect to acknowledge the vacuum within which those ideas were created. Likely, they were designed without the context of what has and hasn’t worked in the past, nor an advanced understanding of how oppressive systems function and evolve—a knowledge gained only through dedicated trudging and ongoing political education. Like the students who met with Ivan Kilgore, carrying a cursory understanding and a backpack of buzzwords will not fare well in this fight.
As previously mentioned, the movements for equality and Black liberation have been trudging along for centuries. This can be seen as discouraging: People find it more comfortable to adapt to the status quo rather than fight long-standing, cunning systems of oppression that have, for the most part, prevailed over more just causes and movements. I urge you to see it otherwise.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion. As momentum carries the movement from generation to generation, so too are generations carried by the movement itself. Some of my dearest friends are those I formed connections with doing grassroots activism. We are like-minded, persistent, and always on the move. In each other, we find love, healing, and strength. It may sound cheesy, but amid an endless struggle, these acknowledgments of each other’s humanity are essential to survival.
As George Jackson once wrote, “We can only be repressed if we stop thinking and stop fighting. People who refuse to stop fighting can never be repressed—they either win or they die—which is more attractive than losing and dying.”6
Your final destination may not be clear, but if we’re all on the road together, we can never end up lost. The road will lead somewhere, and when you arrive you will not be alone.
No. 2: Find Your Lane (And Stay in It)
In his critically acclaimed bestseller Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes the argument that humans have conquered the world, reining in famine, plague, and war. His proof is in the number of people who die from obesity outpacing those who die from starvation; the number of people who die from old age eclipsing those who die from infectious diseases; and suicides beating out war casualties. I’m not sure I’d classify that last one as a win, but according to Harari, we did it. It’s all rainbows and unicorns from here on out!
Back in reality, this world’s got lots of problems. I remember reading Sapiens and finding it very difficult to get past the premise that we’re ready to dismiss our failings and move on to the next phase of development. There are fights yet to be made for trans rights, reproductive rights, prison abolition, immigrant rights, labor unions, climate change, economic justice, racial justice, and countless others. It is possible to link several of these together via underlying oppressive structures, but too often the ecosystem of progressive organizations tries to take on everything at once in the hopes of arriving at Harari’s utopia. Dismantling any single pain point requires laser focus, and the desire to do good in every vertical where evil exists can lead to muddy messaging and burnout.
If you have the energy for it, great. But this work will require endurance, and where you spend your energy and where you conserve it are important considerations. I maintain my endurance by dedicating my time to verticals linked by white supremacy—namely fights against antisemitism, racism, and criminal justice—by researching, interviewing, and exposing undeniable injustices and amplifying alternative structures. For vetted organizations in the fields of immigration reform, women’s rights, and environmental justice, my support is more financial. I still participate, but not in a way that detracts from the causes I am more knowledgeable about and that require my full attention if I am serious about seeing them succeed.
So decide what you’re most passionate about, how your skills are best suited to contribute, and remain focused.
No. 3: Avoid the Oppression Olympics
I bonded with Ken, my All of Us or None comrade who introduced me to revolutionary thinking, over our ancestors’ shared traumas, but we could have just as easily been divided by it. We could have argued about whether or not the Holocaust was as horrific as slavery, or even about the validity of comparing the two. Instead we united in our pain, rather than presuming to understand the other’s.
The term Oppression Olympics was coined by Chicana feminist Elizabeth Martínez in a conversation with Angela Davis at the University of California, San Diego in 1993.7 In reflecting on this conversation years later, Davis would write in the foreword for Martínez’s book that Martínez “urges us not to engage in ‘Oppression Olympics’ [or create] a futile hierarchy of suffering, but, rather, to harness our rage at persisting injustices to strengthen our opposition to an increasingly complex system of domination, which weaves together racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and global capitalist exploitation.”8
Like any Olympic sport, the Oppression Olympics can be draining and exhausting. It requires energy that’s better used to fight a common oppressor than each other. It is also a common tool of purveyors of oppressive systems, ensuring the fight is always among those vying for power, not against those who are in power.
When we first started organizing the Stop Killing Us rally at All of Us or None, a rash of infighting quickly spread between the Black and Latino members of the staff. Especially in a place like California, where Latinos are the largest racial and ethnic group at 39 percent of the population,9 the number of Latino victims of police homicide also exceeded other races. The local and national trend, the Black contingency argued, was that per capita more Black individuals were killed by police, not to mention the fact that the murders igniting protests around the country were reactions to the deaths of two Black individuals (George Floyd and Breonna Taylor). Meeting after meeting, we debated over how many dead people from each race should be displayed on the posters I was charged with creating. In fact, the organization spent so much time fighting over the numbers that other elements of the protest—such as public outreach, media outreach, transportation, and more—were overlooked or rushed at the last minute. In the end, the posters displayed the per capita rate, but few victims of either race were given the attention they deserved: The protest was poorly attended, poorly covered by the media, and had little impact as a result.
In an effort to ease tensions, elders in the organization offered a way to approach intersectional situations without engaging in hierarchical suffering. Dorsey, for example, had participated in the 2006 protests against HR 4437, a federal legislation that would increase penalties for undocumented immigrants and classify them and anyone who helped them enter the country as felons. Many of the immigrants at risk were Haitian, but the vast majority were South American. According to Dorsey, the protestors presented a unified front—the most likely to succeed—by putting South American immigrants front and center. These individuals would then be responsible for acknowledging the far-reaching implications of the legislation, including the criminalization of their Haitian counterparts. Some states did end up passing similar legislation, but HR 4437 was defeated.
Focusing on suffering, or attempting to “out-suffer” another person, detracts from the focus required to end such suffering. Remind yourself that infighting is often the result of clandestine efforts by the ruling class to retain power by convincing those without power to participate in their own oppression, whether it be the FBI’s counterintelligence program or the prison department’s censorship of a ceasefire letter. Be clear of what you’re fighting for and who you’re fighting against.
No. 4: Laugh Out Loud
I was moderating a panel at Stony Brook University called Writing for Liberation when a graduate student raised her hand and asked about self-care.
“I can see how intense this is,” she said after I had patched Ivan into the conference and the “this phone call and your telephone number may be recorded” memo had interrupted at least 100 times. Even in a conversation about liberation, the carceral system was managing to get a word in. “How and when do you find the space to breathe, to pause?”
