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tv   Charlene Carruthers Unapologetic  CSPAN  September 23, 2018 10:30am-11:47am EDT

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>> some of the authors have or will be appearing on booktv. you can watch them on our website, booktv.org. into the author's name and the word book into the search function at the top of the page. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening and welcome to the strand bookstore. my name is nancy bass wyden. i am the owner of the strand. we are located in greenwich village in the literary and activist capital of new york city. the strand was founded in 1927 in an area known as book row.
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it ran along fourth avenue from union square to astrid place and it has 40 bookstores. since the 91 years since all the stores have shuttered leading strand to be passed down from my grandfather to my dad and then to me always to be kept independent. [applause] tonight we are so excited to hear from charlene carruthers, strategies, author and leading organizer in today's like liberation movement. as -- as the founding national director at black youth project 100, she worked alongside hundreds of young black activists dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all black people.
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charlene is a black queer feminist with over a dozen years of experience in racial justice and feminist and youth leadership development. she was recognized as one of the top ten most influential african americans in the route 100, one of ebony magazines woke 100, and emerging power player in chicago magazine and is the 2017 recipient of the ymca doctor dorothy award. doctor cornel west found her new book "unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements" in the great lineage of harry tubman, ida b. wells barnett, and marcia b johnson. we couldn't be more excited to hear from her tonight.
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along with praise from dr. west, janet and patrice -- thank you -- also offer the raving reviews of this powerful mandate. joining sharding and conversation is organizer, educator and curator mariame kaba, founder and director project nia, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. she taught high school and college students in new york fo chicago and runs the influential blog, prison culture were thrilled to have these talented activists with us tonight and to be hosting their conversation with our friends at c-span who will be filming tonight event for booktv. please join me in welcoming
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charlene and mariame to the strand. [applause] >> hi, everybody. good evening. hey. so many familiar faces. so i want to just remember to let you all know that though we are being filmed against my will, i would prefer not to be in your photos. if you're going to take it taken of the charlene and i will be awesome so thank you so much for that. our plan is basically that charlene is going to read although that from the book and then i'm going to ask a whole bunch of question but things are
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completely irrelevant to the book. sorry it came to hear about the book. it's not going to happen. at all. we not doing that. we talk about other things liket yeah, going after a few questions and then we'll open it up to the audience. >> thank you, mariame. >> of course i will continue with my gratitude for mariame insane yes to this and say yes to these cameras. i know, it's a thing. but thank you. thank you for your brilliance and your commitment to our people. i appreciate you. [applause] and thank you to every person in this room for being here. it's been surrey. this is my like second official official stop, and it is wild and every time i look at and see people who i know. i can't say anything to out-of-pocket because somebody will call me out. and so i'm super grateful to be
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here, and to wrap with you all. so i will start by reading a little bit of the beginning of chapter five which is titled five questions. i once bristled at the public assertion that today's movement is not quote your grandparents civil rights movement. this i felt was disrespectful to the people who came before us but as i reflected more deeply i found truth in that statement. this isn't the civil rights movement, and that's okay. the institutions that led thought and action then are not the movement leaders now. the big four, the naacp, irvine lake, student nonviolent coordinating committee and the southern christian leadership conference either no longer exists or hold much less power
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and influence in black activism. today's movement doesn't look or talk or otherwise communicate the same way as those who came before us. today's movement isn't a black power movement either. the nostalgia for some of some for the black panther party for self-defense, the black liberation army and the philadelphia-based group move often overlooks the sacrifices people were forced to make in those organizations in the global context in which they worked. capitalism was cementing itself as a global practice while mass incarceration was beginning to take a firm grip on our communities. the crack epidemic had not hit yet and hiv/aids were is beginning to ravage our communities. the united states had fought wars against fascist regimes and was enmeshed in a cold war with the communists eastern bloc.
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j edgar hoover's intel was killing people, breaking that infrastructure and curtailing black power movement momentum. today's movement operates under unprecedented levels of surveillance but activists and organizers can share information at the speed not possible in the past. our leaders during times of heightened activities are on mainstream new shows the many black women, queer and translators such as colby and re-shod are highly visible and have access to resources to rebuild movement infrastructure. but our visibility is not enough. we still have economic, political and social interventions to make in organizing our community. and no one person or single group has ever won something truly meaningful for our people alone. even harriet moses tubman, a
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disabled abolitionist and the first woman to lead a military raid during the u.s. civil war had allies and co-conspirators. tubman helped liberate over 300 enslaved africans as an underground railroad conductor. by working as part of a network of relationships. first reading about her i learned that she carried a pencil and took notion. but i read little about the support system she had as a woman who had narcolepsy and was prone to fall asleep in any circumstance. these sleeping spells followed an event that happened when she was about 15. a two-pound weight aimed at another enslaved person hit her head. as a child i never wondered exactly how tubman accomplish what she did, and now understand that she is extraordinary organizing skills but also had assistance to do homework without being killed or losing a single person along the way.
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i'll stop there. [applause] >> so i think i just want to start probably with what everybody wants to know, which is are you a yankees fan or a white sox fan? that's most important question to begin with. >> who are the yankees? >> oh, my god. can anybody leave the room now? it's over. it's any good as gone bad. if you want to talk about why you wrote this book and he had in mind as you're writing the book, that would be a good way to start. >> share. so i definitely had chicagoans in mind when about this book, just digging into little bit more people really in all honesty i had 18-year-old meet in mind whenever this book. i was 18 when when i first got involved in activism and then later community organizing as a student. some white folks are turning up
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on our campus basically organizing to strip away the representation of black and brown students in our syrian government. and also lgbtq citizens including the white ones. you're just like know, all of y'all have to go. that was on the first moment i organized around anything. the first action of which was the dream act, and somebody told me that there was some students because of their legal status that were not able to attend college. i was like what? that's whack and that's wild. while we were doing all these things nobody handed me rules for radicals, they could they didn't have it to me at that time. nobody handed me the midwest academy, like organizing manual or the wellstone way or anything like that. and if they had i think by trajectory would have been different. in many ways. i wish that we had a book from ella baker about how to organize, right? like that super dope. if we had a book like the
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prolific à la joe baker who were just talking about this walking as were coming over here, who helped found many organizations come was a part of many organizations and many organizations that we model our work after in pyp 100 like sncc, the student nonviolent committee. if, i guess that's to write the book i wrote but i think i'll organize what even sharper. we would've been talking about group centered leadership decades ago like at least in the work that i was doing. i wrote it because i had some stuff to say, a lot of my mind and i felt that this generation of activists and commute organizers have been on the frontline of a lot of things at a wanted to take the time to write down, put it in historical context because were not the first to do it and we won't be the last to do it. and in the mbit, not just a bit,
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be quite foldable with some of things i've experienced as an organizer and actually provides a very practical things come some concrete things people can do and in vision for where we can go moving forward. >> you mentioned just now something about kind of writing and documenting and wouldn't it have been great for us to have more from a lawmaker and any number of other organizers of the past -- ella baker -- and any other country thinks they were doing. i wonder if you could speak to your writing process and also to like why documentation matters to you as an organizer? >> yes. i have never been a disciplined student or, until recently a disciplined writer. like i was the person -- is it really bad. i would listen to the teacher or the professor in high school or college, election, write notes, i could take a test and still get like a high just some
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listening and maybe reading some stuff but i read a lot of things that were never assigned to me. i mean, i get a's for things i never read it's really wild. i have cried at chicago public schools and cleared i got a good enough education because i can write some things well. well and good, right? that hasn't been me. that's not, like i have been that person on my life. it was in august i was able to pick up, like when i was doing digital organizing with color change and the women's media system come i could buy a lot of stuff really, really quickly and had to make sense to a lot of people. building up like that muscle of being able to articulate complex things in a a way that could relate to a lot of people helped me. when he came to writing a book, it's a different beast. it's different from writing a
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paper, and op-ed, an article anything like that. i had to have a whole bunch of other people. i had a life coach, patricia, shout out to her for saving my life over and over. i would set a word count goal every week and i knew i would have my call from patricia about whether or not i hit that goal. it was accountability person for me. i also, i write best in the morning so i would get up seven or 8 a.m. i'm insomniacs i i didn't sleen that most of the that i would get a first in the morning, go to the coffee shop that was in my neighborhood, and i would write for about three hours that i would read and write for about three hours. and i would do this four to five days of the week for a long time. and i would go to work. and travel and i didn't do, i
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didn't meet my writing call every single week. i can do writing schedule every single day but i got into habit and another habit-forming person. unlike super habit at first. i don't is because i grew up in a neighborhood where drugs are real. i don't like doing that. i don't want no habit. i can't do nothing ever give it shower, brush my teeth and go to i'm supposed to go. i can't even do that the same way every day. it was just like i haven't. in writing the book i picked up -- i picked up the caffeine habit. i made it through college and graduate school without drinking coffee. that tells you what kind of student i was. and then in writing this book iced coffee, 30 iced chai every morning sometimes i would switch it up and take it like like a latte with almond milk. everybody if anybody ever wantsa gift certificate speedy these of the details. >> you can do these things.
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i really believe, like i do in dismissal i could write a book. i had to convince myself that people are believed to me like jill petit used to be a beacon press and is now at northwestern. she is like one of the earliest people who like believed i could write this book. i remember talking about what she thought this book could be. i'll set next week maybe can look on social media but i will say the thing that she was talking about in this book in the vein of books that come before it and what could possibly be for this generation of activism and command organizers. i had to believe in myself first that i could do this thing and that my words worthy for other people to read. >> can you speak a little bit to what is pyp 100? it's a big part of the book, a big part of your last five years until a bit about your political home is. >> so five years ago a group of
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young black folks in a room who had been gathered by doctor kathy colon and folk some was in the black youth project advisory council to think about organizing for black liberation beyond electoral policy. and my do this was a political scientist convening this. this thing who was a founding board member, has done a lot of writing, research and amazing work around how black folks have engaged in hiv/aids like righteous work and justice work, access to health care and dignity. and then we get in this room and its the weekend, that saturday night we learn that the person killing of trayvon martin is going to be announced. somewhere across the country they were dreaming of black lives matter, right, i connect with other people. this is all happening in the same time. and so there's something come in addition to being black august,
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there's something magical about august for black people. that month later, right, a month later, this was july when we started the organization, a month later is from the first met in d.c. during the 50th anniversary of the march on washington. we vote out our mission vision and core values statement. because between july and august we had had to put a medic mode. we decided we wanted to build an organization and wanted to build an organization that would be a political home for young black people. and you base building work. that was something that many of us looked around and we didn't feel that was a place for us to do that we could be, bring our entire sales. we are an organization of all kinds of young black folks. oftentimes, this happens in movement a lot, people assume because folks use words that they've all gone to college, not truth. some of people who do the best i can do much work workstation have never going to college. then when some people who do great intellectual work who have
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gone, they have phds and all kinds of stuff. we had people are formally incarcerated folks, who are unemployed, underemployed, people who work for labor unions. unions. all kinds, parties, people have been elected officials. what this organization is, what we do is we make interventions in the broader movement about how people understand the impact of policing in black communities. i like to think of it as an intervention to stop incomplete stories that are oftentimes told about the condition of black people so that we can create more complete solutions to the things that actually practice. we work across the country. we have a chapter in new york. i see some people from a new york chapter here in the room. we organized in the south, in the midwest, we have members on the west coast, everywhere in between. it's this, you have seen us. you see how we get down.
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and there's like, it is my first political home, not my first organization but the first place for i am consistent date in a political stronger and as an organize i do the work that organizers do it into the day. if you do nothing else as an organizer, i help to develop leaders. that's your stock as an organizer. if you look up and you been doing this work for 20 years and you have nobody who yet helped to develop as a leader, then you haven't done your job. you have done your job and that's what i been able to do and if so excited for the people who are taking my job. the incoming national codirectors of the yp whenever. i'm so excited for them. i trained one of them personally and the other is one of the most disciplined and committed organizers i've ever met in my life so i'm excited for the. >> that's the main thing. i also want to talk a little bit about the evolution of the yp into an organization that takes an abolitionist stand.
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the organization didn't start that way. people kind of came to the work. i met with early on with some of your members who are trying to figure out when you're trying to write up your, you know, the values and with lots the struggles. talk to folks a little bit about that evolution and how, where the organization has ended up around the. >> so the first time ever heard about abolition, abolition of the presidential conflicts, the police, was from asha. you thought about tearing down capitalism, having done everything that i wanted all gone. and she's the first person who i've ever come whoever even expose me to that idea. i know you are one of the people
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who influenced her, right? and ruthie gilmore and of the folks who are major influences on the people who helped start this organization. and so i'd like to many of us like to say like those of us who were like left of progressive, we want out. because when we started, we were arguing about, it was one person, i remember the first convening we had. he was like what we need to do is focus on like me and voice. we were like okay. okay, okay. [laughing] we won. and think we can do both and all and then some. we can do, we can focus on black men and boys, black women and girls, non-binary folks, trans folks, all all of it in between and whatever else folks evolving to come right, in the years to. and i remember, i took effect in the book the debate we had over
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body cameras and the organization. this was before walter scott was gunned down in south carolina and it was caught on tape. it was before laquan mcdonald, 16, him being shot and killed. pitilessly before all of that. there was actual debate about whether body cameras were an effective measure to hold the least accountable. we compromised. i wish we had not compromised. i really wish pickets and evolution because we were not come use all four members, abolitionists, all that stuff and to keep it 100 with you we're still contending in the organization. right now we're contending with the demands of a the officer who killed laquan mcdonald. when i say continue, like the contradiction that come up realistic and is not from a place of judgment at all. like i get it. i get it and is just like okay, so how are going to live within these real contradictions. i think it was fresco who first
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made the declaration of independence you know she likes to make declarations about things, right? about as being -- [inaudible] >> yes. fresco is the person who popularized unapologetically black. she doesn't like to talk but because she's a i do want people to know me for brandy. unlike that was, that is a political framework that is like an actual set of values. you didn't just slap it on a a shirt because they looked cute. she put on a shirt and schmidt a part of our dna as an organization intentionally say that we can be black in all of this and then some and that we have nothing to apologize about because of who we are. like at all. i think all of that is important, and i'm excited to see what we go in five years and like as we begin or continue to do the work of creating alternatives that are the imperative of us, ourselves abolitionists. >> do you want to talk about
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what organizing under black queer feminist lens is for folks? that's a huge part of the work and the kind of values of byp 100, connected to the in the book you lead with the story to illustrate what a black queer feminist lens using that within your organizing looks like and needs. you want to share that with people as well? >> yes. this book isn't my memoir, and it's not a history of byp 100. there are are a number of stories in the book that like illuminate some of the really tough moments that i've been through personally and we've been through as an organization. and one of them to me is where my politics as a radical black feminist, my practice in organizing the black prism lens eking real. it has to become real in that moment or we would just like
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actually talking like not real stuff. i think it's been always hard to talk about it, and i put it in the first part of the book because i wanted to get out of the way cited have to talk about it for the rest of the book. sexual assault and sexual violence for folks is that in 2015, we received reports one of our leaders had sexually assaulted a young black woman years prior to our organizations founding by do is any moment where he been kidnapped by the police and we were organizing, his name was a terrific his image was everywhere, and we've been organizing to get the bail money because he had been charged with a felony. and we were just like afraid because we were receiving multiple threats by both government or state actors and people who are acting in the interest of the state, whether
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or not they were paid it doesn't matter because that's how they were acting even though they called themselves being a part of our movement. i remember like laying in the bed the night when, after he was arrested and literally like scooped up and thrown into a car and i was like physically like anxious and distressed. of the folks organizing. we'll figure out what to do about the situation. and then we get -- i didn't see the open letter until probably months later. i just knew we received a report and people were tweeting and saying this person did this thing and you are all talk about free him? of the same time i also found out later that folks within the artist committee were saying he's a good guy, he doesn't deserve to be in chill. i think it was triggering for the young woman. so my dissent is that's why she sent the open letter she posted the open letter to our organization because we said we
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had to set politics. we said we believed in this thing. when you receive a report like this and you claim is have set up politics, what are you going to do? what you going to do about it? and in that particular moment our organization had never been more biblical, as an indivisible leader i don't think i'd never been more visible. this was after, , the video of e coming of laquan mcdonald had been released. we were in the streets, fighting the cops. we had to fight the cops. i would tell the store, i threw my body over -- i did know who he was at the time, yaks can but i knew he was a black person. i was like yoakam your not getting arrested tonight. i found much, i always find a thinsulate. we had to make a choice in the moment and i remember seeing you, i remember seeing kathy cohen and just like being in tears outside of the cook county courthouse. because i did deliver this news
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to malcolm, and i remember seeing chris thompson, out of the courtroom, she is like crying and she's like they dropped the charges, he's going to be released. and him walking out in a moment was probably one of, like elation and as like i have to deliver this news. .. we sit in the back of my car i share with them what we've learned and what we've been told and he tells us his account of what happened and then we let him know thatwe are reaching out to the young women .
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i'm going to be clear i'm talking about my experience. i can't tell you what it was like for other people who were much closer. there is a public accounting of this entire situation on the internet you can get and you should read because i can only tell you what it was like for me and it was hard for myself and to others, the two other bracket women who were all survivorsof forms of sexual violence .to deal with this and to be like, okay. how do we figure out what holding our comrade like and the young woman we received this report from? in the midst of all of thiswe were being dragged on the internet . people were dragging us claiming that we were doing this, this and not doing this this and the third . and one person called them and i was like we know each
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other, you could have called me. i could have told you what's happening because a couple days later rosen were talking with the young women about what are you interested in doing? and i questioned my own politics, i questioned as a black feminist, just as a black woman about what i thought after we left that conversation and the young woman said that she was open to doing a trip through the justice process and malcolm said that he would show up for us to and had he not, we'd be having a different conversation. he wouldn't bein the organization anymore and he's an active member of the organization now though he said yes . she said yes, and even more importantly, shira hassan and x said yes. to holding a process that ultimately was over a year
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long. >> 18 months. >> 18 months, and people talk about this a lot as anexample of what to do and i want to be clear, we made a lot of mistakes along the way . >> that's what the transformative justice process does, you make mistakes. >> what i don't appreciate and what i will not ever forget, maybe i've forgiven some people but the lack of empathy that people have for us in that moment, in our organization and outside the organization. there were people who made assumptions about what wewere doing and what we were doing and it hurts. because we were being attacked from all different sides. people were attacking me and kathy for being lesbians. okay, whatever. then at theuniversity of chicago, men were funding us, i still haven't seen a check . we haven't even gotten a
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thorough check. i like , i am not a paid protester. i've not gotten my checks to protest so there were all these accusations about us on the internet. people were making physical threats. we foughton the streets on back black friday. i was fighting grown men, it was wild . but i included that story the beginning because i wanted people to know what it's like to have to practice what you preach. and it doesn't mean it's going to be perfect and even in our organization now, what we created out of that was the healing and safety council. we pretty much almost had to start that all over again i think and we are assessing and reevaluating what it means to run a self-governing, self determining body to deal with violence in our organization and i think that's a part of healthy life cycles, right?
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when you have to recognize something is not working, how we think it could work and do the work and course correct, make an assessment and make those assessments so we can move forward. >> conflict is neutral. it's how you decide you are going to respond to that conflict. it can be a regenerative thing. we are the biggest warmaking country in the history of anything so it's interesting. so yes, a couple last questions and then to the crowd, i was hoping you could talk about your three commitments that you talk about in the book that you think our movement should hold and then you know, a final question around where do you see the movement currently, the movement for black lives. where do you see it as being right now and where would you like to see it move in five years? >> so in chapter four, i tried to make the numbers line up and it didn't work. three commitments, chapter 3. but, yeah.
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close enough. when i first started writing this book about 4 and a half years ago, i had a lot written down about what generates movement and what causes atrophy in movement. i had to pull it out of my body and sells but i wrote a lot about that, about how the body naturally, atrophy is a natural thing of cells and generation of new cells is a natural thing. like, we regenerate and things die. so what i was thinking about is what are the things that generate movement and what are the things that break it down? that's how the chapter was. and i said actually, we need to be a lotmore specific and assertive so people have something concrete to take
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away with them after they read this book. so the three commitments that i talk about , excuse me. the commitments i talk about first is a commitment to leadership development and that's not just some hissy thing that you have a fellowship program. which is cool, i was in a lot of fellowships or you have training here or there or like a rigorous commitment to seeing people as people who are trainers to bring support, that poor things out and can turn back and receive things and that leadership development, it's a cycle. it's this, it goes all around and that we often times misinterpret what they said and barbara talks about this in her book that when ella baker talks about strong people not needing strong leaders, she was talking about a specific context in which single, charismatic, more often than not pretty much always men were seen as the leadership of the movement. and no, i am charismatic, i
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am. and i'm okay with that, and our organization is not made or broken by me. right? our movement is not made or broken by me . and that like, one of the reasons i'm able to get any sleep at night is because i know we have a lot of strong leaders, not just in our organization but strong leaders across our movement and so that's the first one. the second is a commitment to healing justice. literally as a part ofyour dna as an organization .so it was actually carol page was one of the people who along with the healing justice collective that provided one of the earliest definitions of healing justice in which she talks about or they talk about that healing justice identifies how we can politically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and
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violence. and that we can bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, our hearts and our minds . what would it look like if we had movement where we as an organization created containers for people to do self work? and what i mean by self work is what we can honestly look to the recovery and addiction community in work that people do around that meeting, be it aa, sa or anything as every week? it's going to be there, you've got to show up. they're not going to do the work for you. and what if we have movements but we didn't expect our organizations to do our healing work for us. but we could expect our organizations to create containers in which we could do that work and a movement to create containers for that. one of the things that we
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often times , with and i see people struggle with the cross movement is that folks are like, this organization set out this expectation and you're not meeting it. we can't do everything. >> we are not your family in real life. it's not like that. we arefamily in a metaphorical sense . that is unrealistic. people have to do the work of the movement that is also yes, connected to you but it's not about you. it's not about you and what you're going through's iq. >> we've got to separate that out. we've really got to separate that stuff out . >> so it's wild to me. what the movement can do is help to coordinate a network of actual healing practitioners and i don't mean people who just put on a certain dress and clothing,
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coif and call themselves healers. i mean people who have committed tocraft . >> i have to leave the stage. i didn't say it, you said that. >> people who are committed to craft, your craft is massaged, your craft is generally somatic, your craft is clinical psychology, clinical therapy. your craft is cooking for people because you want to nourish people in that way. work on that craft. our organizations have to invest in that crisis intervention. rape crisis counselors, mediators. we should be spending money on those things as much as we spend money on campaign development because when folks come into these organizations expecting the kit and the caboodle, we can't hold back. we're a bunch of 18 to 35-year-old and we have some people who are clinicians, rights, and people are figuring this out and it takes a certain level of humility to admit what you don't know and to say before
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i do any of this, i need to be trained on conflict mediation. i know need to go apprentice under somebody who's been doing this work for some time. so i want people to take it seriously and i see that often times, a lot of the stuff that happens is when people make in our organization, people involving irresponsible sexual relationships. irresponsible ones is whati'm talking about. we are a sex positive organization, do what you are going to do with enthusiastic consent . yes, yes! we'll see, i don't know. but --
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>> we're embarrassed that we were going to be as good as we can be enthusiastic, yes. right. often times it's not an enthusiastic yes, what happens continuously after that and it causes conflict and people bring their personal relationships into the organization for us to deal with. and then you get the peanut gallery that chimes in and was never even involved in that relationship. >> and they're not going to be there a minute after they chime in. it's the drive-by group, you know what i mean? the people who have something to say and then where are you at? you're gone. >> this is connected to the third one. we're starting to have some fun. combating liberalism through principle struggle. this is where i've never come out of the marxists or the socialists, maybe at some point i will and maybe this is my coming out in the book , but in miles little redbook he talks about combating liberalism and in trying time
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you leave who's one of my favorite black feminist socialists , they talk about engaging in principle struggle and so i took those two things and thought through one, so many rumors fly in our movement unchecked. people fly off the handle on social media. i've literally seen people lie and get the peanut gallery to back them up and it has destroyed things and people and organizations in multiple ways. and in many ways, i've been liberal, meaning that just letting stuff go. letting it happen without checking it. and in the little red book, no talked about often times addressing this because these people are our friends or we have a relationship, even though we know they're not doing right. they're doing dirty. or we're afraid of what further backlash that could happen which is also real, i've found good people, i don't necessarily judge people in these situations.
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and then what time you talked about a lot is we shouldn't be struggling just to struggle and i see that in our organization that i'm just bringing this up and i want to be educational, not because i want to move things forward. we should be struggling for the sake of advancing our movement, not struggling for the sake of our own ego or because we want to hear our own voices or we think we are right or our assessment is be true and the only truth. so people get killed and i talk about john huggins who were killed in, as a result of a conflict between two organizations in 1969 and these rumors were created by the counterintelligence program of the fbi. the feds. and i see it all the time, people swapping text messages, emails, creating rumors, soaking up here, anxiety and they may not be
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paid by the state buttheir agents of the state and i want those people to know that we see you and your time is going to be up real soon . and what you're doing, it's not okay. and it has to end because it's destroying, it actually erodes movement in a way that's not conducive so to your question about the movement of black lives and what i want to see happen in the next five years, tuesday night andrew gillum won the democratic primary in florida. i know andrew from like 2011, 2012. and i am excited about many of the organizations that are involved in this because i trust them. i trust their politics. i trust that they're not putting all their coins in this person.
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what they're doing is putting their coins into this agenda and moving this agenda forward and that they have a certain level of trust for andrew gillum and i think it's okay to have a certain level oftrust but he's one person. he's not going to be the entire florida state legislature . so organizers actually, when we should always focus on issues, not candidates. what are the issues that a candidate or that are actually moving on that they're committed to? somebody's going to have to be there to hold them accountable. somebody's going to have to be there afterwards and to flank them when they want to move something . when andrew enters the governor's house or the governor's seat inflorida, talking about medicare for all , legalized marijuana, goes up against the nra, all those things, they are going to come for him. they're going to come for him and who's going to be there
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to say you come there for him, you've got to come there for all of us. that's the kind of politics i'm interested in engaging in because for me, electoral politics are not the final destination. my good friend jessica bird talks about the safe houses along the way on the underground railroad . and she talks about electoral stuff and she works on a lot of black women's campaigns, she's working on a black women's campaign in georgia and we're ready to go in georgia. and she talked about how elections can be safe houses for where we're trying to go. barbara ramsey talks about how we need a defense of strategy in what we're doing and to me, how i understand all of this is that we need 40, 50, 75 year strategies in our movement. we need that and we need to be able to turn up because it's a tuesday as the comrades and blackout say. we need to be able to bang up against the system because we need to bang up against the
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system and all of those strategies and tactics, i've been saying this. strategies, plans, thetactics on how you carry out the plan. we need all of these things in order to get to where we want to go . and i don't mean that everything, i don't think all opinions are right. i don't think all ideologies are right but i think there are multiple strategies that we can deploy over a week, over 40 years, over 75 years that get us to a place that i'm interested in where heat we as human beings are able to be in right relationships with each other and right relationships with the land that we live on so the movement for black lives is a broader constellation of a lot of organizations and
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includes southerners on the ground, father's daughters. the black lives a matter global network, all kind of organizations across the country and we are connected globally, too. we convened in south africa the beginning of this year with black organizers and activists and i really look to my comrades who are thinking about that work and i'm excited about the work for the next five years, where we get some electoral victories and pivot that into real political power that's collective and goes beyond candidates. thank you so much. so we're going to have people ask charlene whatever questions you like to ask and there's going to be a mic and people want you to speak in the mike . >> i wanted to comment on the fact that your pumps match your lipstick. >> i knew you would care. >> so charlene, i've noticed in your book a black, queer and feminist. so is there a reason why
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there are, as there and i say this because i am a gay black man and recently a political candidate interviewed me and i responded that your anti-gay and antiabortion so i can't support you. his response was that he has since changed his positions on these issues but for me, that would be like a white person calling me a nigger 10 years ago and changing his position on that. how do you as a black queer honest reconcile all those things? >> that's a great question about how i reconcile being black, queer and feminist . nobody's asked me that question before in the way that you asked it. for me, it's not something that i think i was black today, i'm going to be queer
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tomorrow, feminist the next day because all these things to me are political identities. like, inasmuch as they are about gender, about my own experiences, about my relationships with people, they are political. i don't actually think you can't be politically black, and particularly in the us context, especially in the us context but i do believe that as a black person it is a part of my identity in a way that i believe in black liberation as a necessary thing even for this planet that will outlast us but for humanity to continue. in anywhere where we have some semblance of dignity. and then as a queer person, being a queer person and there's believing in queer politics and i talk about
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that in the book quite a bit. trying to decipher between those two things that just because you're black, because you're queer and you're a woman doesn't mean you're radical. doesn't mean you're revolutionary. just because your gender nonconforming doesn't mean you don't play into gender binaries in your actions. i've seen people do it. it's wild. just because you are documented, disabled, transgender, any of those things doesn't mean you're automatically radical . it just doesn't. it takes consciously taking up those commitments and doing things to live out your values in the world cause shout out, i personally love beyoncc and cardi b and they talk about feminism is the belief in equality of women to everybody else but that's a .5 step. everybody doesn't even believe that so you can get to that point, i want to take you farther than that. i want to take you past
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equality as the goal to justice and transformation. i want to take folks to that place and reconciling all of that every day means when i walk into all-black spaces i'm like, okay. where are the trans folks? where are the women? where are the people who have any sort of disability. i'm thinking it who's at the table and we're talking about incarceration, anybody in this room been incarcerated? so if people are impacted by mass incarceration in various ways, various ways . so i'm always thinking about that. if i i'm in a room full of white folks, you can probably guess such and such and not just in skin color but like, politically. i don't want just any old black person in the room because he's black, what do you believe in? so it's a constant thing i'm always thinking about. and i'm an anxious person in general.
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i think two and i'm a thinker so my mind is always moving but it's an ongoing thing and making sure that i get as close to walking the walk or walking the talk that i claim and i want to make sure that i get as close to these politics and what i do in my actions. >> anybody else have questions that you want to ask of charlene? don't be shy. they can cuss you out later on, too. i understand that that can happen. >> they told me to stand up. do you believe that story that justice can make up for every crime is committed? that's something i struggle with. i missed a lot of meetings but i'm trying to get back into it and that's a question i struggle with as brp is an abolitionist group. >> what's your name?
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>> lashonda. >> oh yeah, you texted me.i heard a couple things in that question. one, that who defines what a crime is and how are we thinking about things that people do and how they impact other people. so crime is often times defined by the state, it's defined by the government which is not always the same as violence or abuse that someone has experienced and restorative justice is not about understanding, like a practice that people engage in to make up for time that people do to other people. as i understand it, it's about recognizing the things that people have done to folks and people committing to taking action to be held responsible and accountable for the thing they've done which aims to restore some of the harm that they've done, either individually or on a
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community level or systemic level. so i don't think those two things, and i'm still learning like how to talk about these things and understand these things but no, going through a restorative justice process doesn't erase what someone has gone through. that's not the point. what we have right now, what happens? if i put somebody in this room right now and the courtesy, professionalism and respect for the nypd. this is so wack that we have this on their cards and they roll up. i never have to admit that i punched this person. i never have to apologize for punching this person. i never have to sit down and talk to them about what i did and not just them but my community about what i did. i never have to admit to that and that's the possibility of restorative justice and that is not within the system that we have right now.
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it is not required to happen and i think about this when someone is killed in our community. be it by the state or by one of our neighbors. we can't ever get that person's life back. we can't ever get that person's life back but what are the possibilities? where someone actually even just admits to what they did, to your family member because they never have to do that in prison. they don't have to explain anything, tell you what happened to your loved one when they took their last breath and that person then is entering the system with other people who have been involved in the system in the cycles of hurt and pain are then re-perpetuated in the present, in the jail over and over again so itdoesn't end and many of those people will leave.
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they will leave prison at some point . a person who likely has never even done any restoration work forthemselves . so we're putting folks who may or may not have harm to someone into prison or even in jail, they're not actually found, how many people are in rikers who never been found guilty? there there and then you leave and it's just this back-and-forth process. so restorative and transformative justice are interventions to that process and alternatives to that process that we don't just rely on punishment and these concrete buildings where sexual violence happens, where physical violence happens. solitary confinement happens and then people come back as a community so what do we expect to happen? but the same thing all over again. i don't know ifyou had anything to add . >> you did a great job.
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i think something about that question i always find it interesting which is it's that you already have in your mind certain things that are yourissue . like there are some things that happen in the world that are so harmful that you believe can never be transformed and i'm always like , you are allowed to have those feelings. you are allowed to hold that. that's you. you've decided that there are certain things that cannot be transformed into something else area at not a judgment. i get worried when people do things like so, some are abolitionists, what's your alternative? that's not my problem. and the reason it's not is because it's not a solitary person's job to transform harm. we live in a culture in a society where we are all implicated, we all have to come up with something
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different or better if we think the current thing that we have doesn't do what it's supposed to do so it's not up to me to give you the alternative. what i try to do is to try to figure out a way to allow people who want it to have a space for a beginning towards healing for them. >> i want to say that tj and rj prophecies arjun themselves healing. often they feel terrible because your working out your pain. and you're adjusting. but on the other side of that, you have potentially an
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opportunity to get on a path towards healing so that's what i think matters about transformative justice and restorative justice but you don't have to buy into that to be part of an abolitionist organization. you can still go ahead and somebody does harm to you, call the cops. if it works for you, that's cool. do your thing. i never judge people who have experienced harm along their decisions about who and what they want to access. i'm just going to tell you though that most people are going to be helped by those systems so my interest is in working with those folks, the folks who know that the system isn't for them. they can't access it for whatever the reasons are but they still want a way to transform the harm that happened in their lives so i don't think we need to be evangelists for a framework. i think we have to figure out a way to address harm and i know this system causes more harm than it transforms so for me, that's why i choose abolition as a horizon, because the thing that's going on right now, it's not helping people who are harmed and it never helped me. so that's worth it in terms of what i think about that but i think a lot of times people take a defensive post about it, what are you defending? you're defending this stuff? which sucks terribly? why are you fighting for this one. figure out something else
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with other people. that's actually there to address the problem and i'm not over here to defend anything, i'm here to do what i can to live in the world to the best of my ability, that's it. so i hope that's helpful. >> i'm going to add one more thing it's that people add what are we going to do with the rapists and the murderers . what are we doing with them now? and so the work of abolitionists is to dig into figuring that out. what are we going to do about it, because i can tell you, the state has not figured it out. it's not in the interests of the state or the corporations to figure it out. so that's our work. >> thank you for this book and this conversation, i appreciate you so much. my question is a writerly question, i thought i saw something you said on social
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media about this book changed so much in the beginning to what it became and i wonder if you could talk about that process and how it changed . >> i started a blog in, i don't know, 2010 or something called the freedom pages and it was based off of coral latest book, i wish i had a red dress in which she writes this list and it's a fiction book, but the main character talks about what every free moment, what every free woman looks like and it's a group with teenage girls and i said , i know what a free woman looks like and i called my blog the freedom pages and the book was called the freedom pages to begin with and after i finish writing it, my editor and folks onthe press are like , maybeyou should change the name of the book . and at that point when you are in the whole book, i'm like okay.
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he had to read line edit it so many times. for real, i wasn't planning a suggestion that we should title the book something different, i wasn't that pressed about it. maybe he did pop off. but i wasn't as pressed as i could have been, i'll say that. so we talked about it and we landed on a different title which i think is a much better title. and it goes beyond just the title but it also tonya, my literary agent told me at probably half the comments i made about other people. i need to see more of you in this book. i know you know what other people have done and what other people saidbut even in changing the title or thinking about it differently, it required me to be more assertive where i used more could or should it was we must , this is what we should do. all these things.
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a lot more assertive, that was a big part. the otherway the book changed, i think it was more memoir when i started . and i said i don't write a memoir, i want to write a serious history practice book , i want to do that. and yeah, it was very different and also at one point it was more like a manual, to for organizing and i said i don't need to do that. what are the interventions i can make intellectually and when it comes to our practice in something that's not too long that anybody can read my 300, 400 page manifesto on all these things. but i wanted to write something that was, and it wasn't even my idea for it to be hardcover, it was going to be a paperback and my editor again was like, this is a serious book and people need to take it seriously so it needs to be hardcover.
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and that was a great decision because i want something that people can throw in their backpacks and read on the bus or the train or whatever . i was excited about all that stuff when i was writing the book and i'm happy about where it landed, i'm happy it's more assertive. there was a whole chapter that was going to be here but not in here and i think that's for future books. whenever i write another one. >> you were a community activist and organizer in chicago, just like president obama. if you find any inspiration from him? >> how do i respond to this, there's a camera in here. so we're not the same kind of organizers. i'll just say that. not the same kind of organizer, we were trained by some of the same people.
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arne grass was one of the same people who trained obama, he was one of the people who i first had my 101s with so we have this connection there in who trained us. i'm trained by organizers even though i don't organize in the risky fashion anymore and i did not write the a people for organizing. and i'm from chicago, born and raised there and i never organized there until i moved back home so even that, he came to chicago, he organized there. in a very particular context. he's very briefly, i'm a commitment to organizing in chicago. that is a part of, and i'm always, i spent six years struggling between doing
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national work, be it when i was at national action and doing local work in chicago. and it's something i struggle with consistently. and really wanted to have authentic relationships in chicago and i just pop off of the gums across the country about what happens at chicago because ihappen to have an address in the city . i do real work in the city, for real. so it's very important to me. i also think our politics are very different. they're very different. i think maybe seven years ago our politics would have been a lot more similar for sure. we would have been neck and neck around what we believe in. but i talk it about it in the book that we are the first iteration of movement ever organized under a presidency of a black person. nobody has ever continued with thatin the united states of america ever area so it's inherently different .
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already. how do you challenge someone who is so revered in chicago by manypeople and around the world , right? he's like our king, ozzie davis talked about malcolm x., people talk about barack obama in that way. he will have photographs of him. exactly. so if you say anything about barack obama but it's all of that so we can sit with and appreciate his administration , passing health care reform and we can sit with the administration having so many black women, queer folks. having that lgbt q reception with gutierrez around
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immigrant detentions and specifically trans-immigrant detention. if we can do all of that, if we can be excited about all those things, we also should beable to contend with the fact that his administration deported more people than any other administration in this country's history. we should be able to hold those contradictions that he was a war president . he didn't take the bounty off, i don't think he had the power to take the bounty off of all of our political prisoners but he could have granted clemency to other people. he had the power to do those things and he didn't do it. but he could have. so we have to be able to contend with the contradictions of an obama presidency as much as we were excited about him. and then lastly, the community benefits agreement we are fighting for in chicago. right now, there's a coalition that includes the camera would oakland community organization,
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brownsville regional collective and a host of organizations calling on the city of chicago and the university of chicago and the obama presidential center to sign a community benefits agreement that says if we're going to invest tens of millions, even more than that and a presidential center on the south side of chicago, we're going to make some agreement that mitigates the harm and destruction that can cause to the surrounding communities. so folks should check that out. obama cda and that'swhat we're fighting for . trust me, excuse me? no organizer of their strike ever listens to anyone who says trust me. >> especially not if they're a politician. >> no chicago organizer worth their stripes trusts a politician. so i'm probably going to get in trouble and not be invited to any obama foundation
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events after this talk but i don't know, we will see. >> i think we are at the end of our time. charlene is going to be around to sign people's books so stay and do that. i want to save two quick things before you go. one is that we are in new york right now about to try to elect a new governor. sorry, elect a governor. so you know there's a primary coming up on september 13 and we currently have this guy in office and people will choose whether he's going to stay there or not but in the meantime he has enormous power to be able to rent clemency to free people from prison. and he is not using that authority.
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he has commuted 12 sentences in eight years, given 160 pardons, that's ridiculous. there are 51,000 people currently incarcerated in the state that could be freed by him tomorrow if you wanted to do that. that's how much of the clemency power he has that can be used the good end. so we survive and punish new york are working for him to release all survivors. we are also pushing him to do much more in terms of releasing aging prisoners that are currently locked up in prisons that are in their 25, 35 years and are still locked up and could be released tomorrow he refuses to push the parole board to do anything around that. please pay attention to what this person has promised and what they are not delivering on. i'll ask you to sign postcards that julie has encouraging him to do his job. so please join us and it's important that we be engaged
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on the local level and not talk about mass incarceration from here but actually talk about it from the local spaces where we have power and we don't have to worry about jeff actions currently occupying the white house. thank you very much. >> thank you charlene. [applause] >> c-span launched td 20 years ago on cspan2 and since then we've covered thousands of authors and book festivals spanning more than 1000 weekends. in 2010, former secretary of state condoleezza rice talks about growing up during the civil rights area in july 1964, they reported that civil rights had been signed by president johnson and then the local anchor came on after and said the so-called
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civil rights had just passed. so my parents and i have a couple days later decided we were going to go out and test this new civil rights so we went to restaurant in a hotel nearby and the people looked up as we walked in and it was like something out of a movie. they look back and stop eating. >> watch this and other programs for from the past 20 years at booktv.org. type the author's name and the bookinto the search bar at the top of the page . >> gary smith, how often do economics professors talk about the role of luck and chance? >> used to be never. economists assumed that the world was a known certainty and they had rational decisions with no regrets and obviously that's malarkey. >> host: economics is rational, isn't it? >> guest: we had these guys with a prize in economics that our psychologists and th

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