Deana: [00:00:00]
Welcome to Stories for Power. I’m Deana Lewis and I’m a member of Just Practice Collaborative. Stories for Power is an oral history project produced by Just Practice Collaborative and Creative Interventions. It explores the political lineage and historical experiments that gave way to this wave of transformative justice, community accountability, and prison abolition.
In each episode of Stories for Power we speak with activists and organizers from different cities who were and continue to be at the forefront of feminist abolitionist praxis. We talked about the bold experiments and interventions they were a part of in the early 2000’s through 2010, and how their work informed abolitionist transformative justice and community accountability organizing today.
Don’t worry, if any terms or words have you [00:01:00] confused, we’ll do our best to link to resources in the show notes, and you can always go back to listen to the special introduction episode for more context.
In this episode, you’ll hear from three amazing abolitionist feminists, Shira Hassan, Mariame Kaba, and Erica Meiners.
They talked about the bold experiments and interventions they were a part of in Chicago between the late 1990’s and 2010’s, and how their work informed abolitionist movement organizing today.
Have you facilitated a process using community accountability tools or strategies? We want to hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative want to share new stories from people who are taking action to end interpersonal violence without the use of prisons, police, and other carceral systems. Find the link in our show notes to learn more.
A note for our listeners, we will be discussing violence, including police violence, intimate partner violence, and community [00:02:00] violence. We encourage you to take care of yourself, and we understand that taking care of yourself can also look like not listening to this podcast until you’re ready.
Let me introduce our guests. They have amazing and extensive experiences and knowledge. I’ll do my best to summarize. We have linked their full bios in the show notes. You can also learn more on our website StoriesforPower.org.
Shira Hassan is a former sex worker, drug user, and a lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist. Shira began working as an activist as a young person in the early 1990’s. She is focused on the experiences of girls, boys, transgender and queer youth involved in the sex trade and street economy using organizing and popular education as tools.
Shira has worked in Chicago and New York City helping young people start their own nonprofits and lead social justice work. She’s the author of Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction. [00:03:00] Also, Shira is one of the co-producers of this podcast.
Shira: I got to Chicago in like 2001, 2002, and it was right as Claudine O’Leary, Laura Janine Mintz, Alissa Hall, and a bunch of other really incredible people were forming a project called Young Women’s Empowerment Project, which was led by and for young people who were trading sex for money, for survival, or in the street economy. And what was unique about it was that it was a social justice organizing project and not a social service. And so it was a harm reduction based organization where so much was possible because of the leadership of young people, not in an adult centered organization, but actually in an organization that was being run by young people with the support of adults.
And so I had been coming from a project that was a little different and a little similar at the same time in New York City called NYPAEC New York Peer AIDS [00:04:00] Education Coalition, which was a project that was co-founded by Edith Springer, who many credit as like the godmother of US based harm reduction.
And also Kelly McGowan, who co-founded a number of syringe exchanges throughout New York City. And that project was also for young people of color who were street-based, trading sex for money injecting drugs. And I started as a peer in that project, I actually, one of the youth outreach workers outreached to me when I was a young person and then brought me into the project, and then I became like a program coordinator there.
Deana: Mariame Kaba is an educator, organizer, and librarian who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She’s the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame co-leads the initiative, Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in [00:05:00] 2018.
She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years, including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Task Force on Violence Against Girls and Young Women, Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, now called Love and Protect. Just Practice Collaborative, Survived and Punished, and for the People Leftist Library Project.
Mariame is the author of the New York Times bestseller, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice. She’s also a co-author of several books, including Fumbling Towards Repair, A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators with Shira Hassan, No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Andrea Ritchie, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes, and Lifting As They Climbed, Mapping a History of Trailblazing Black Women in Chicago with Essence McDowell. She’s also written two children’s books, Missing Daddy and See You Soon.[00:06:00]
Mariame: Well, I moved to Chicago in 1995 from New York City where I had been immediately prior to my move, working for a domestic violence organization in New York called Sanctuary for Families, which is the largest private domestic violence organization in the city. Before I even moved to Chicago, I reached out to a few people who I knew here and asked them about references or suggestions of places that were domestic violence organizations that I might volunteer with when I got to town.
So my first week in Chicago in ’95, I came in, I think mid-August, Friends of Battered Women and their Children, again, which is now called Between Friends, was running their 40 hour training that week, like the, like the day after I moved to Chicago. And I signed up and went to that, that training immediately, even though I had already been [00:07:00] 40 hour trained in both sexual assault and domestic violence before then. You couldn’t volunteer at the time with them if you didn’t get their 40 hour training or some other one here in Chicago.
So I went ahead and did that, and I was on the crisis line for the organization. And then I started doing anti-oppression workshops and trainings as part of the 40 hour training. In 2000, they invited me and asked me if I’d be willing to come and work full time at the organization. They created kind of a new position called the Prevention and Education Manager, and so I would in that role basically be responsible for revamping curriculum around domestic violence education in the schools, in particular, and in community-based settings and in the hospitals. And that they wanted a, a kind of a more robust presence across the board on those areas.
So I came in. I became the prevention and education manager there in [00:08:00] 2000. I hired several staff people to kind of fill out our department, and for then four years I was the Prevention and Education Manager at Friends. So that encompasses 2003 and 2004.
And the reason I situate myself starting there is because it was really… that work that I was doing already with people in the schools and in these other places that led me to be able to, to co-found a project called the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team, YWAT.
YWAT, we basically started in 2003 as a summer project under the auspices of Friends of Battered Women and their Children.
Basically, I asked my boss at the time, Kathy, if I could write a grant, which I did to the Girls’ Best Friend Foundation and hire some girls over the summer. Then these young people would basically do a [00:09:00] participatory action research project on street harassment in the community, an issue they had raised at a forum that I had co-organized the year before around addressing violence in the community.
I think it’s important to note that because these were very young girls – anywhere from, I think 12 until 18 at the time. And I was already an abolitionist at that point in time. I was very clear not to kind of proselytize or evangelize abolition to the group. Like they knew what I believed. But I was…it was really important for me that they came to their own consensus and ideas around violence, how to address it, what they wanted to do around it. A systemic analysis as well as an interpersonal analysis.
So during that time, I also got involved with being on the board of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, which that will lead into more about Shira’s work. I also got involved with, in 2007, starting [00:10:00] the Chicago Freedom School, and then in 2009, I launched Project NIA.
There were many other formations and involvements between them, but I think those are the key things to share. I think the other point I wanna really make sure people understand is that Incite!, at the time, Women of Color Against Violence – now, Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence – launched in 2000 and had a major conference in Chicago in 2002. And I was involved in helping organize that 2002 conference.
Again as a predecessor to that 2003 date is important because we had all these people and ideas and thoughts fomenting in the city because the conference had come to the city in 2002. So all of that, you know, kind of mixed together is something about the context of the time in the city.
I’m sorry, that was a long way to explain, but in order to [00:11:00] situate myself, I wanted to, even though it wasn’t a straight line trajectory, there were many trajectories and many lineages already in play during that period of time.
Deana: Writer, educator, and organizer, Erica Meiners has authored multiple books, including Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies and For the Children: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State. They co-edited the anthology, The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom.
Erica is also the co-author of a number of books, including Flaunt It: Queers, Organizing for Public Education and Justice with Therese Quinn; The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence with Judith Levine; and Abolition. Feminism. Now. with Angela Davis, Gina Dent and Beth Richie.
Erica builds mobilizations for liberation, including movements that involve access to free public education for all and other queer [00:12:00] abolitionist struggles. She’s a member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project, the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, and the Education for Liberation Network.
Erica came to Chicago from Canada approximately 25 years ago. Since landing in Chicago, she has been involved in abolitionist, anti-violence, feminist and education justice organizing.
In 1998, they, along with other people, including Claudine O’Leary, began a free library in the women’s section of the Cook County Jail. Later, Erica and some collaborators, including Jitu Brown and Toussaint Losier began a free school, St. Leonard’s Adult High School for people coming out of prisons and jails. Erica then went on in 2005 to co establish a Critical Resistance chapter in Chicago.
So Erica, after hearing from Shira and Mariame, what else would you add about that time period in Chicago?
Erica: Then I think that there were like so many political education events that, you know, started to emerge [00:13:00] in so many organizations producing materials at “Summer University,” which I feel like fell within this time period. Uh, “Summer University” around anti-PIC work, you know, shepherded mainly by Project NIA, but I think also had like so many other amazing people. We met, I think, every Saturday at that sweaty Hull House with no air-conditioning during this time period.
So, when I moved to Chicago, it was so interesting ’cause I had a much longer history of doing feminist work in Canada. When I moved here, I felt like it was anti-PIC work, and then the beginnings of abolitionist work.
And for me, I tried always to sort of stay connected to the amazing transformative justice work that YWEP was doing, that Ann Russo was cultivating, you know, through many gatherings; through the work of Incite! For me, it took me, it still sort of has taken me a while to sort of like, merge those two realms, or to try to get those two realms to always be in conversation.
Deana: Well, thanks for sharing some of [00:14:00] your extensive backgrounds. Shira, can you talk about some of the non-police non carceral interventions that you use to address violence?
Shira: When I moved to Chicago, I, I got really lucky and met Laura Mintz right away around 2000. And then, so when I moved in 2002 and YWEP was forming, I wasn’t a founder. Claudine O’Leary was the first director, and a lot of the architecture of YWEP came from that, those early days where, and I was not a part of that. But I did begin to take leadership in around ’02 / ’03 and then became the interim director in, ’06. And then, we sunsetted in 2013 as a result of the anti-trafficking laws. And a lot of what was happening in the city at that time was this real upsurgence in reactionary politics where, I would say mainstream, mostly white, but not all, feminists were really [00:15:00] starting to form what we later termed carceral feminism. And that… my first introduction to the concept of carceral feminism, which basically means using law enforcement as a solution to gender-based violence, the carceral logic of the way people were approaching the sex trade and street economy led YWEP to really start thinking about formalizing the strategies that we had always been using. Because none of us could ever call the police or access help, really even through social services, because of not only the stigma attached to being a young person who was either using drugs or in the sex trade. But also the legality in Chicago. It was illegal actually to be homeless and under 18, and if you went and sought help from a social service and you were under 18 and not housed, you had to be immediately turned into [00:16:00] the foster care system.
And what was ironic about that was that a lot of the many people who were homeless and street-based and under 18 were on run from foster care. And foster care sort of really abdicated all understanding and responsibility of their role in homelessness and saw themselves only as a system that could manage homelessness for young people rather than in acknowledging the critical role they played in causing homelessness.
So young people, particularly young people under 18, but even young people over 18, who may have had more options in terms of actual shelter beds, had so few options. Practically speaking, because adult shelter systems are notoriously unsafe. There were no beds for trans young people. Queer young people were so unsafe. And anybody who was thought to be involved in the sex trade was immediately either thought of as a trafficked victim or as a young person who was breaking the law. So we [00:17:00] had so many strategies to deal with healthcare, to deal with violence internally and externally to our project, to deal with pimps, to deal with Johns, to deal with so many different issues that we all managed internally.
And it wasn’t until conversations I started having with Mariame, probably in ’03 or ’04, we started talking for real about some of the things that we were trying that were outside of codified systems, outside of like regular degular help, help systems, and started talking more about the things that we were doing. Which I guess you could call more underground or off the books or away from the eyes of the state that, you know, we really just thought of as organizing. And we really just thought of showing up for our community. But at a certain point it started to become clear that this was an organized approach. And that there were other people who also thought about that organized [00:18:00] approach like Incite!
And so when we encountered Incite! I believe it was ’06 we, uh, YWEP had received a series of death threats, from a combination of law enforcement as well as one pimp and one John and one boyfriend. It was, we got like six in a space of a week, maybe coincidentally, or maybe coordinatedly. We could never really tell. And we had been to the Incite! Conference and we knew who the Incite! members were in Chicago.
And when we reached out in crisis, that’s when we really, hooked into this broader network of women of color and trans people of color who had an organizing practice around how to respond to violence without state systems.
Deana: Mariame, let me kick it over to you. Can you talk about safety and some of the interventions you were a part of?
Mariame: I think that for me, I was really called into being moved out of [00:19:00] like the traditional things in the, the, the tools that I had, right? In 1990, I was on the crisis line of the women’s center at my college responding to sexual assault survivors’ needs. So I was a teenager at that point, a survivor myself. And I mean, I don’t think my analysis of sexual violence was very deep in terms of sexual violence as a political tool, as a structural issue.
I was really entrenched in like, these are the tools that we have. We have orders of protection, we have counseling, we have shelter beds, if we can find them. We have kind of consciousness raising groups, but they were mostly therapeutic. They weren’t like organizing groups in any sort of way.
It wasn’t until a friend of mine was in a very [00:20:00] complicated situation where she was sexually assaulted by somebody that we all knew, that I officially had to make a move away from all the traditional tools that I had been using and relying on for so long because she did not wanna use any of those tools. She did not trust those tools. She did not think those tools were gonna come through for her ’cause they hadn’t really come through for her. She did not want this person arrested by the, you know, did not want them further entrenched. They already had problems and issues including substance abuse. Like, you know, there was like all the things that I think I, or automatically thought about, were not, were kind of a little bit moot at that point.
Before then, when I was working with young people, I didn’t know this at the time. I later figured out that I was also using creative ways of addressing harms within our groups. But I didn’t call it anything and I didn’t think it was organized. [00:21:00] I think that, you know what I mean? I just think we were just like, let’s do what we can to keep people safe to the best, uh, extent that we can, using any and every tool.
But most everybody did not want the tools we were, that were on offer. They did not want orders of protection. So they were rejecting that. They did not want, like formal counseling. They…there were so many. They did not wanna go to shelter. Like shelters were terrible for people, right? And so I think that for me, that’s really what pushed me was like, what was on offer wasn’t what people were asking for.
And so if that’s the case, then what else is there? And that, what else is there? is what prompted me to be like, what else could we do as a community of folks? Not just me, by myself, one person, you know. How do I bring other people in with me to help answer some of these questions? Something else had to be on offer. And that’s kind of what pushed me in that [00:22:00] direction.
And Shira’s right, you know, we started talking more formally I think in 2004. We were, you know, I was just like, I’m struggling here. Like I need this for a young person that I’m working with. And Shira’d be like, “Hey, have, you know, maybe think about that. You know, maybe this might be a good way.”
Deana: Erica, what about you? Can you talk about some of the abolitionist projects you were a part of? Like for instance, why did you co-found a high school for formerly incarcerated people?
Erica: I mean, I think it’s what people asked for, needed, wanted. And it also seemed tangible and doable. Right? And I had a job at a public university at the time and had access to the kind of pipelines that would make that possible. And it was something concrete that people had asked for and needed. And I think CR kind of had surfaced about that time. Are Prisons Obsolete? Dr. Angela Davis’s book came out, and I felt like it was really…I don’t think I understood it fully when I read it and when I [00:23:00] started to engage with the organization.
But I felt like doing local work by being connected to bigger frameworks, political education networks, was very helpful for me to have. I feel like I work well in community or in conversation, in dialogue, in kind of connection. You know, those conversations really pushed me to kind of think about local work differently and the imperative of sort of doing the both/and – like making sure we’re staying alive. But also that can’t be it. We have to be changing the systems and doing that work so that we’re not just doing the, you know. Shira was talking about like service work or whatever. I mean, we can’t just do that. We’ve gotta be doing the, the bigger frameworks. Right? So it was super important to be learning from, you know, what, YWAT was doing at that time, and YWEP.
Deana: Lemme just take a quick pause because these acronyms sound so similar. YWAT stands for Young Women’s Action Team. YWEP stands for Young Women’s Empowerment Project. Okay. Thanks Erica. Please continue.
Erica: You know, they were the different pieces of the puzzle. [00:24:00] But it was like really helpful to learn from that and be able to take that back to the different kinds of, you know, projects I was working on and thinking about like, how do we, what does this mean to, you know, take this work here, how do we, how do we move some of this, these ideas?
And often it was just showing up in a meeting and sharing it, but not, not being able to figure out in the, in the moment how to bring that in. So I don’t know if that’s the, you know, the intervention, but I, I feel like that’s a bit of the landscape.
Deana: So all of these projects have had a lasting impact locally in Chicago as well as globally.
And we know, especially for abolitionists, success is a complicated concept ’cause there’s no easy answers. There are some places where we can point to and say, “yes, this works.” Now let’s talk about those things. What are the things that stick out to you as successes in your work?
Erica: To go into spaces – like there’s so many formerly incarcerated people who are like at different tables, not enough. But I feel like 20 years ago, there was [00:25:00] like, they weren’t even allowed in the room. Change the table, change the room, all that kind of stuff. But I feel like it just brings me a ton of joy. All the political education materials that Chicago, I think about the reports from YWEP, all the amazing toolkits from, you know, Project NIA over the years, and the work that’s the, the many chapters of Critical Resistance did.
So I feel like those are not just Chicago specific, but that time period successes that I lean into. People were wanting to do the work locally and were, were like hungry for materials and connection and were often isolated in the kinds of places, you know, that we were like in our day jobs or in our kind of organizing.
And so being able to connect around producing materials, around study, you know, using materials from other organizations was really motivating.
Mariame: You know, the PIC Teaching Collective is something that we started at Project NIA. It was around the same time as Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim [00:26:00] Crow, came out. We used chapters of The New Jim Crow in our conversations with people. We always had packed rooms of people for every session at the Chicago Freedom School. We did then invite people to apply to be part of a smaller group of folks who would pull together this curriculum. It’s always been part of my belief that the best way for us to begin to work together is to begin to figure out what we think together, and to try to make one thing together – to have a goal and try to see if we can actually do it. And it’s a good way to, it’s a good way to think about how we work together.
For me, I think about the various ways that I was able to support the young people who were in my life by actually providing them with the things they needed to stay as safe as possible. And that those things included putting people up at my house when needed. It included going with people to get their abortions. It included literally picking up the phone and calling partners and being like, “I’m [00:27:00] aware of what is going on here, and you better be on your guard because, you know, you’re being watched, basically. We know what’s happening, this is not happening in the, in the, the quiet darkness.”
It involved more intense things where I would bring in other people to support on other needs that were happening. Most of it focused on harm reduction before I had a real name for what harm reduction was. There’s some more kind of involved community accountability processes that I was part of that involved intervening and support people who are directly being victimized to actually get safety when they needed it.
They were messy, but I would say that every person that I’ve talked to will look back and would tell you that they are not in the same place they were when they began those processes. And that was the success for them. They put them on a road towards the thing that they’re now on now. I feel really good about that.
And I think that [00:28:00] safety wasn’t just one thing and that, that there were many ways to try to be safer and that if we brought a, enough people together and put our heads together, we would all come up with better things than if people were just left isolated and one other person was there taking on the full weight of all of that meeting every single need.
So I think about the successes along a continuum, frankly. I don’t know if other people who were looking at the story from the outside would say, “this is a success.” And in fact, I think a lot of people looking in from the outside have very, really different views of this stuff, which I think is partly what makes transformative justice, restorative justice, and community accountability so hard.
Because everybody wants to look at it from their perspective individually. And it’s like, “I don’t feel safe.” Well, you know what? This wasn’t about you. If it had been about you, maybe there would’ve been a different outcome and a different way, and you would’ve asked for different things. But [00:29:00] this is not actually about you. Like that was, that’s something I’ve learned to say often to people, which is like your conception of safety is not other people’s conception of safety, and you need to actually check yourself.
A huge part of doing this kind of work is not to impose your vision of what should happen on other people, and not all of us are equipped to do that. Always the focus is on – did the person who caused the harm transform into a perfect person later? And we don’t know that. We can never know that. And it’s up to them. It’s not up to us because we know that in order for you to change, you have to choose to change. And then you have to choose to stay on the path to make sure that you don’t continue to do the exact same thing over and over again. And I personally cannot control that and don’t want to. Like I have no interest to.
But what I want to do is to provide enough support so that you have an interest in wanting to potentially step into transformation. [00:30:00] I wanna provide support to allow you to take accountability.
Shira: I think like the overarching goal is that we completely changed the game, both in Chicago, but also nationally – on the sex trade and street economy for young people.
We were the first group of young people of color, with life experience in the sex trade and street economy, who were vocal and out abolitionists. And we weren’t the first radical sex workers to be anti-police violence or anti-state. Right? I’m thinking of Sylvia Rivera. I’m thinking of Marsha P. Johnson. I’m thinking of Miss Major.
There were so many anti-police terror activists. But we had the frame of abolition, and we had the frame of liberation around all things that included the right to participate in the sex trade. The right to use drugs. As well as the right to [00:31:00] live a life free from violence and policing. And I think the shift is palpable.
I think there’s like so many Instagram accounts that mirror our language without even knowing it. And part of the reason why that’s happened is because the research that we did, which I think is another huge intervention, where we led a participatory action research project where we collected hundreds of reports that allowed us to track how young people in the sex trade were fighting back and healing from institutional violence.
It’s called Girls Do What They Have to Do to Survive: illuminating Methods Used by Young People in the Sex Trade to Fight Back and Heal. And that reframe and that data really really really shifted language because it was in the New York Times. We did a national tour of it where we did dozens and dozens of workshops at major [00:32:00] conferences and events sharing the research. We, we went on national public radio.
And this is young people, ages 12 to 24, many of whom hadn’t ever been taken seriously as a person, let alone as a researcher. And that that tool that we used, some of that data went to the United Nations for the 9th Periodic Review that the United Nations does of all countries’ best practices. Policy Project wrote this incredible document and quoted some of our research.
And then, you know, the United Nations found that the US was not accountable to people in the sex trade, in part because of the work that we did, along with so many other groups at the time. And then the data and the tool that we created was again used by folks from We Charge Genocide, which was years later, a little out of our timeframe. But that tool was adapted to track [00:33:00] police violence, and that was again, years later. But you can really see the arc.
We for years ran the country’s only syringe exchange that was operated by young people of color in the sex trade. That was a drug neutral, body positive syringe exchange. So we had hormones, syringes. We had safer injection supplies and produced so many tools and resources on everything from self-injury to how to pierce, to how to give yourself stitches, to how to stash drugs without getting a yeast infection, and how to manage sexual assault by police officers when they were doing body cavity searches.
We really shifted, I think, a lot of conversation for people individually and nationally. And I think one of my favorites was part of our campaign called Healing in Action. And the campaign was called Street Youth Rise Up, which is still run by Dominique McKinney and a handful of [00:34:00] other folks who were a part of YWEP space, and they’re still running that campaign to change the way Chicago sees and treats homeless, homefree and street-based youth who do what they have to do to survive.
And part of that campaign was we had a doctor of Chinese medicine, Tanuja Jagernauth, teach us how to make our own herbal pills. And we made them for anxiety. We made them for pelvic pain, for depression, for cold and flu. And then distributed them throughout Chicago to other young people involved in the sex trade and street economy, along with tips and tricks for surviving a doctor’s visit. Because doctors were such a huge site of harm for everybody in the sex trade and everybody who uses drugs, but specifically for young people and young people of color.
Oh, the other thing that we did that was really kind of top secret but amazing to offer, and I think more people should consider doing, is we started a Safe House [00:35:00] network. And so that was something that we did to help people who couldn’t use shelters, couldn’t access shelters, still have a safe place to go for the night.
And coordinating that Safe House network meant that we were meeting young people all over the city at all different times of night to help get them to a safe spot for the evening. And then sitting with them the next day and figuring out what was gonna be the next night, what was gonna be the next night.
Mariame: This is part of the transformative justice work. It’s like the ongoing education, the ongoing research, the ongoing learnings that they learned about themselves and their political consciousness shifts and changes that has benefited more than themselves over time.
Deana: These successes sound life changing, and I also know that with successes comes many challenges.
Can you talk a little bit about the challenges and how you’ve worked through them?
Mariame: It’s always a challenge [00:36:00] when you are working with young people as organizers to find the right supports for them to continue to do that work. We were very lucky at YWAT because I’m not afraid of fundraising, and I was able to fundraise money for these young people to be able to get stipended to do the work they were doing.
These are not…the girls in YWAT were all the young people who the city tries to throw away. But when I tell you that being with those young people, in many cases for 10 years almost, and seeing the ways that they had to navigate so much just to be able to, like, get on with their day on a regular basis, made me see, just like it is challenging to live in the world as Black and Brown kids, young people. It’s just hard. So that’s one angle [00:37:00] of it.
But I think we had the resources because we raised the resources to be able to have, you know, give them other kinds of ways to be able to participate. But if we hadn’t had those stipends, they couldn’t have done this work because they, they had to work in order to bring money back to the house, to their families, to themselves. You know, like this allowed people to basically have like a part-time job, amount of money to be able to organize. And that’s not a given for every kind of young person.
I think the challenges of what we ended up with, which were people throwing them under the bus. And saying like they were responsible for the things that the politicians wanted, which was more surveillance. They used their experience of saying,” we’re feeling unsafe in this neighborhood, in this community,” and weaponized it. And you know, I can speak to also the challenges of our, of individual interventions around safety, but I’m not gonna do that. I’ll just let other folks jump in at this point.
But I think, I don’t think [00:38:00] we think enough about the whole entire context of people’s lives, like the things that it takes to be able to be part of transformative change. We don’t think enough about the backlash.
Erica: Maybe I’ll just talk a little bit about challenges as opportunities. I just remember, you know, when CR, when this first couple of chapters of CR formed, you know, we had to be able to answer like the “what about the bad people?” question, which came up, you know, at every, every event, every political education event.
And I think that that, you know, moved people to engage with the work of Incite!, you know, the work of transformative justice, the work of community accountability. But I think that it really sharpened people who came to abolition largely from anti-prison work to be, to have to sort of engage some of that work.
But I think that that was very important and important to me, and really moved me to do a lot of work with people with convictions for sex offenses and to try to deepen that work. Another sort of early challenge for CR, you know, [00:39:00] being willing to sort of be uncomfortable. I remember in the early, I think it was the second iteration of CR in Chicago and going to discussions about Burge and John Burge and which, you know, was about prosecution and, and trying to open up different spaces for different, like conversations about accountability.
Those were, those were hard. And I think that those of us who went to raise those weren’t super good at it, right. And we didn’t have good tools and, and, and I think they were uncomfortable discussions. But we trusted and loved some of the people who were doing that work. So it was like, we can stay in, you know, stay in the same sphere and not necessarily agree about everything but trust, you know, have some trust in a process, which sounds a bit touchy feely, but I think that was important.
And I think other challenges are just people, people are flawed. Like people have a lot of trauma. So what does that mean to organize… I’ve been thinking most of us don’t have, you know, good communication skills, good ways of dealing collectively. How do we organize ourselves without a boss, without an authority figure?
[00:40:00] Thinking about all the varied study groups or kind of networks that I’ve been a part of has also taught me a lot about communication. That’s a challenge for new people coming in, a challenge for all of us. How do we do, do work, but also stay outward facing and connected? How do we network ourselves better together? So it’s not just like I’m doing my thing here and it’s super important, or my campaign, my project, and I think we, we still struggle with that, right?
Shira: On the individual and micro level, there were just challenges every second of the day.
On a macro level and with perspective, I think the two main challenges were misunderstanding of our work and erasure.
The misunderstanding came really from everyone. The anti-violence world misunderstood why we weren’t advocating for more shelter beds or more laws. The world that was largely supportive of us inside women of color and trans people of color, anti-violence and abolition [00:41:00] space that was newly forming loved us.
And also we were who we were and that we were, people who were using drugs and trading sex for money. And so that meant that we showed up in the space as us all the time. So engaging with people who really took us seriously was such a gift in those spaces. And at the same time, you know, not everyone did.
Or we would say something in a meeting and then, you know, it would get incorporated into the analysis, which was so inspiring and so helpful and helped us change the game. But then we stood out, right? Like we, we stood out in all the spaces we were in, and it was always really a question of how to, be heard, even when people were listening, genuinely.
When we started doing campaign work, and we said, this is gonna be a transformative justice campaign – that baffled all the organizers because a campaign has a clear target. That target is generally a policy. [00:42:00] Whether it’s a public policy or a private policy, you want to move something, right? Like you wanna ask for something and you wanna get it. And we really had to define what a transformative justice campaign was. The way we defined it was building community capacity to respond to and transform violence without engaging the state.
But to define what a transformative justice campaign was in and of itself was a challenge. Like we had to figure out our own language and make our own rules, and then make people understand it. Again, even when they were truly listening, it could be a challenge to really like do the amount of, of translation necessary to explain who we were. And then I think, in retrospect, the erasure is pretty fabulous.
I think like I am lucky to be pulled into spaces where I can talk about our work, and I think part of what [00:43:00] I learned is how to patiently, repeatedly, consistently explain the same concepts to people who are your allies, friends, and who care about you. And how to divest from people who prove themselves not to be without wasting time. Sort of like moving them to your world.
And like really what we chose to do was focus on people who already were invested in listening. And so that… that was everything from the media that we worked with. We only worked with independent media, and we developed specific relationships with specific reporters. So we like shifted our energy and invested in who were our people, and spent all of our time on the people who were listening. In retrospect, again, the erasure in mainstream harm reduction in the anti-violence world, and you know, in the white sex worker movement of [00:44:00] our work is profound. I do think we live in an, ahistorical society as a country anyway. So I don’t think it’s unique to us. But I, I have been really impressed at how quickly people forgot.
Somehow we have name recognition. But what they don’t know is how what we did informs what they’re currently doing. And that’s, that’s interesting ’cause in one way you want that, you wanna become part of that ethos. You wanna change the game so much that ev… we all disappear in it because we’ve just collectively won, right?
And at the…and on the other hand, you want young people in the sex industry economy, particularly young people of color, who are historically and notoriously stolen from and ripped off everywhere, to be understood as co-designers of a vibrant, beautiful movement that we’re in now.
Deana: I really hear what you’re saying, that at the heart of abolition and transformative justice [00:45:00] organizing is relationship. Can you talk more about your relationship to each other and how those relationships impacted your work?
Erica: Nothing that I have done individually or collectively would have been possible without the labor of, you know, all of you.
I was remembering the FAQ that YWEP did about people who wanted to do research in, in sex work. I still circulate that. I have like some mimeographed, I’m sure, copy of it somewhere. But I feel like all of the, the work that I, you know, have been able to do with other people, with community, with you – has been because of this, this kind of, the analysis, the way of working, the politics. I feel like I attended, I paid attention because I felt like they were doing work that was engaging and transformative. And was language I, you know, was helping me figure out shit in other [00:46:00] realms, right? So I, I am, you know, you know, I have multitudes of gratitude.
Mariame: Same as what Erica says, I learned so much, for example, during my time as a board member at YWEP, when I disagreed with certain things, and then needed to be basically explained to as to why those things needed to be the way that they were. You know, like changing my mind about things. Educating me to make me understand why it made sense to do things a certain kind of way when I had not been used to doing them in that kind of way, right? Like moving with actually the flow of the people who are directly in the line of fire, so to speak.
But I also think they learned some stuff from me and the way that I moved, too. It was not just a one way…it was a, a reciprocal thing, you know? I got to become [00:47:00] friends with Shira through that.
Erica is one of the most clearheaded thinkers that I know. She’s somebody who can look at an issue, break it down, and explain it in a way that allows people to understand it in a new way and does it like non-condescendingly and non-academic speaking wisely.
She can talk all the words in that way and the big words, but like can bring things to people’s levels of understanding so, so well. And it’s one of the best models I’ve seen of using the academy as a way to liberate resources.
Those are all things I’ve taken from both of them. I’ve relied on their counsel at various points when I’m stuck or I have things that I need to help figure out. They’ve always been there to help me figure those things out, or at least give me a direction to go in for myself to figure it out. So I think about that all the time.
And I wanna say one last thing, [00:48:00] which is I do think we don’t give ourselves enough credit for…Like there’s a lot of conversation a lot of times about how we’re all so isolated in different places. But you know what? In Chicago, that’s actually less true than in other places I’ve lived and been. There’s no way that we could have won reparations if we hadn’t had these preexisting relationships that had been built over generations, and a long period of time and had gone to each other’s dumb ass events for a while. You know what I mean? Like, that were not well organized, not well attended, not… you know what I mean? Like none of that stuff would’ve happened.
Shira: I think that one of my biggest takeaways from that time was truly, and I don’t mean to sound like rose colored glasses, but we were patient and kind with each other.
Erica: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Shira: I, I really… the practice [00:49:00] of someone breaking it down for me because I did not understand that word. I did not know. I remember Mariame had to explain many words to me, many words. But one of them, you know, was “carceral.” I did not understand the word carceral. It took me years to to grasp what the difference was between regular degular feminism and carceral feminism ’cause it all looked the same to me. I couldn’t figure it out. And I say this as a feminist, right? Like, I was like, I don’t get it. I thought that’s what everyone said was feminist is the same. And so, you know, I, I think like the ways that people were teachers and learners at the same time, and consistently willing to be both.
And I definitely, had a lot of conversations with Erica like that, too. I remember many brunches where I was like, “help me understand. I do not [00:50:00] get what this says. Like I do not understand this concept. I don’t understand this book. I don’t understand how to write this down or apply it to this thing.” And I think that being, being teachers and learners at the same time, and just always being willing to have the grace with each other to be in those spaces was one of the most important learnings that I had.
Also, patience and grace, even in our worst moments, even when we’re angry and being able to respectfully be in principled struggle in a way that was like very vibrant. I mean, I remember struggling through Critical Resistance meetings, not because of the politics, but because of how different the politics were expressed by different people, and not understanding where different people were coming from in their approach. And I remember a specific [00:51:00] meeting that I met with Erica afterwards, and Erica just broke down, “this person’s coming from this perspective. This is the historical importance of this perspective. This person’s coming from this perspective.” And then being able to reenter the meeting and being like, “oh, this is a gorgeous symphony of disagreement.”
This is so important for us all to understand and be in because the solution comes from us all living in our truth and living into our… our real experiences in the world, and not actually trying to make the internal conflict go away, but trying to bring some sort of understanding and overarching principles and politics to what we wanna move together and how we wanna move together and what is the baseline for how we wanna be in space and move together.
And so, yeah, it’s endless. It’s endless what I’ve gotten from, from Mariame and [00:52:00] Erica and endless what I’ve gotten from the work that, that, Rachel, you’ve done. You teach me every day about how, how I wanna be in, like, how we wanna age together. Like how we wanna be in radical, ex punk, current punk, queer people of color community together.
Like how do we wanna keep working this out, you know? Because what happens in the meeting and what happens outta the meeting are just as important.
Deana: What you shared was so beautiful. And shout out to Rachel Caidor, a Just Practice Collaborative co-founder, producer of this podcast and person who is with us for this recording.
I wanna move on now to talk about new organizers and practitioners coming up in this work. So what are some lessons and or knowledge that you wanna pass on to them?[00:53:00]
Erica: Study, learn from the work that’s gone before. You know, yes you can create a new organization, but also, you know, look around you. There’s so many, you know, networks also that are just doing work in the now.
Shira: I guess to the question of what do you want new activists to know? I think I want you to know to look towards the past to the future, and like there are so many things that people have tried.
More groups should consider safe housing networks. Take a 40 hour training at your rape crisis center. Take a 40 hour training at your domestic violence center. Do something, you know. Educate yourself, build with people. Don’t start a safe…you can’t start a safe house network alone, but you can find your people and you can get the skills that you need.
And it isn’t to say that a 40 hour rape crisis training gives you the skills. It’s that you should know what they don’t do, right? And you should know what the system allows. And you should… allows for and what it doesn’t allow for. And you should build with the people who are equally [00:54:00] upset that those systems are failing. I think there’s a lot of answer there and a lot of potential there.
I think it’s really important for people to practice and remember that mistakes are a part of practice. And obviously, I’m biased because I’m with Just Practice. But I mean truly like it is okay to make mistakes. None of us would be doing the work we were doing. If we didn’t have spaces where we could make mistakes and be accountable for them. We will only win this by staying in it. And we will only stay in it if we are kind to each other and can really see who we all are in the work all the time.
Mariame: I do wanna say this ’cause I think this is something that people don’t take seriously enough.
I do think for new and younger organizers the importance of documenting your work is really important. Not just for yourself, or for the people who are directly impacted, [00:55:00] but because you will forget. And I think if we are really serious about this and growing this stuff and going back and really looking back at history, we can’t do that without documentation.
And I don’t think it needs to be that other people will document. I think it’s important that you who are in this space, who are in these moments, do that work.
Deana: Thanks to the great city of Chicago and all the amazing organizers that live and work here who are making this world a better place for all of us every single day. I encourage you to take the lessons that you learned today and keep practicing.
Have you facilitated a process using community accountability tools or strategies? We wanna hear your stories. Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative want to share new stories from people who are taking action to end interpersonal violence without the use of police or carceral systems. Find the link in our show notes to learn more.
Stories for Power is presented by Creative Interventions and Just Practice Collaborative. [00:56:00] Executive produced by Mimi Kim, Shira Hassan, and Rachel Caidor. Produced by Emergence Media. Audio editing and mixing by Luis Luna, Joe Namy, and iLL Weaver. Music composed by Scale Hands and L05 of Complex Movements in collaboration with Ahya Simone.
Stay tuned for more episodes of the Stories For Power Podcast. Check out our show notes and go to StoriesforPower.org to learn more.
