Death Panel co-host, Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with longtime organizers and movement educators, Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, about their new book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, released May 16th from Haymarket Books.

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)

Mariame Kaba 0:01

We're being conditioned to accept mass death, as the price and the cost of doing business. We are in large part railing against this in our book. We're frogs in boiling water. And what has to happen is that some of us have to be saying, "Oh my god, we're frogs in boiling water. How the fuck do we get out of the boiling water?" And that is the work we're trying to talk about when we talk about reciprocal care, we are saying reciprocal care has to be at the center of getting us the fuck out of the boiling water.

[Intro music]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01

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So today, I'm really excited to have Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes join me to talk about their new book called, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, which is out this week from Haymarket Books.

Kelly Hayes is the host of Truthout's podcast, Movement Memos, and a contributing writer at Truthout. She is also a direct action trainer and a co-founder of the direct action collective Lifted Voices and the Chicago Light Brigade. Kelly has also co-organized and led hundreds of trainings, protests and campaigns including struggles for native sovereignty, health justice and the successful effort to win reparations for survivors of police torture in the city of Chicago. Kelly, welcome back to the Death Panel. It's so nice to have you back on.

Kelly Hayes 2:11

Thank you for having me again.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:12

And Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization, and has co-founded multiple other organizations and projects over the years, including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women, Love & Protect, the Just Practice Collaborative, and Survived and Punished. Mariame, welcome to the Death Panel. It's so great to finally have you on the show.

Mariame Kaba 2:48

Thanks for having me.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:50

So first of all, just congratulations to you both. This book is such a necessary and fantastic contribution. I strongly recommend it to everyone, absolutely read it. The title, Let This Radicalize You, comes from Mariame's often quoted words, which are "let us radicalize you, rather than lead you to despair," which for me, are often a crucial reminder that hope and grief can and do and must coexist, and one does not have to exclude the other. And this book teaches us that to change the world, we have to resist the suppression of grief and make space for hope that acknowledges ongoing loss. And these losses do not have to lead to despair, they can motivate us to organize. And there's a lot to unpack in this book. And we won't be able to cover everything in one discussion. So listeners, make sure to check it out for yourself. But I've chosen a few key points to focus on that I think are really relevant and useful to our current moment, especially for Death Panel listeners. Now this episode comes a week after May 11, which marked the end of the federal public health emergency in the United States for COVID-19. And as we've previously talked about, this period marks the start of the privatization of the COVID response, which brings new challenges and hurdles. And I'm really grateful that we can actually talk about the book in this context. So let's dive right in. To start us off, can both of you talk about how you hope the book can be used in the world? What is the book's sort of intervention? And why did you both write it?

Kelly Hayes 4:17

I think we wanted to create a book that we wish had existed when we were newer to organizing. I talk in the introduction about how I learned so much from Mariame during our rides home from protests and direct actions in my early years of organizing alongside Mariame, and how formative those conversations were. We lived in the same part of Chicago at that time and we worked on a lot of protests together. So we wound up having a lot of time to talk on our way home after those actions. And those conversations really helped shape my view of organizing, and ultimately of myself and who I wanted to be in relation to this work. So what I wanted most was to build a book full of rides home, a book that might offer people some accompaniment, that, you know, the kind of accompaniment that helped me find my way, whether it was with Mariame during a car ride, or with Lisa Fithian, or Sharon Lungo, or Ejeris Dixon, you know, people who I know have a lot to offer in terms of guidance and lessons learned, because they gave me accompaniment when I needed it. Because this work is not easy, and it involves a lot of growing pains and mistakes. And sometimes, we all need someone to sort of talk us through our thinking process and our creativity, and helping us open up our minds further. And so yeah, I was hoping to create a vehicle for some of that kind of thinking, to kind of think alongside folks,

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:51

That's really wonderful.

Mariame Kaba 5:52

Yeah, thanks Kelly for that, absolutely. I really resonate with the accompaniment comments that Kelly offered. I get a lot of requests for advice --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:03

I bet. [laughs]

Mariame Kaba 6:03

And also requests for mentorship from new and younger organizers. And I'm really not an advice giver at all. And there's really no way that I could respond to every question that a less experienced organizer asks of me, or the myriad requests for mentorship, because I'm actually only one person, contrary to what some people seem to think [laughter]. There's only one of me. Believe -- believe me, that's true.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:35

I mean, you'd fool people.

Mariame Kaba 6:37

I mean, it seems like it, right? I'm everywhere all the time. That's what -- time and space doesn't exist in social media land. But what ended up -- I'm also, and I think this is true for Kelly too, like, I'm also working all the time. Like, I'm currently organizing, all the time, in various different kinds of ways. So that means my time is extremely limited. And then finally, for me, the best mentorship is to be co-strugglers, and one can't do that with everyone across time and space. So for many years, I've thought about creating a work that I wish I had when I was starting out as an activist when I was a very young person. And initially, I pitched an idea to Kelly, that we collaborate to create a zine, a small zine that might offer some lessons that we've accumulated and learned over our years of activism and organizing. And I won't -- I won't ask Kelly to go into the debacle that that was [laughter]. That ill-fated project.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:47

Hey, first drafts are first drafts for a reason.

Mariame Kaba 7:51

That's right. That is absolutely right, Bea, absolutely. But anyway, what I want this book to be is a soft place to land basically for new and young organizers. And again, something that might accompany them as they move through kind of the general ups and downs of activism and organizing, something that you kind of can turn and return to as needed. And then also something that you can think with and to reflect on alone or with others. So those are my greatest wishes for what I hope the book might do.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:24

I really love that. And I think you both absolutely achieve that. This is a really generous book. I started reading it earlier on in the year, and it was one of those -- you know, I'm someone who reads like very closely, because I read with a screen reader, so I don't have the luxury of being able to skim, right, like I have to read, start to finish and sort of hear it all through, and sometimes even hear the footnotes thrown in in the middle of the text, which is not helpful, but always interesting. But it was one of those books where I just found myself sort of constantly stopping and actually sitting down and opening up the kind of master document that I have running about things we want to do to change and update the Discord and make it more responsive to the needs of the community. And it was like all of these moments where it just was really helpful in thinking with, exactly how you were saying and so, you know, I think that a lot of the things that you touch on in this book are particularly key for right now, we have so many people who are kind of new to organizing or maybe just starting wanting to become organizers in the context of COVID. And the many people who have been sort of newly activated, whether that's in the space of patient advocacy or Long COVID or in a sense of like being engaged in mask bloc or mutual aid projects. So, you know, it's kind of like an influx of new organizers, but this isn't necessarily something that is unique, right? It's often that I think a lot of the organizing that goes on doesn't necessarily occur in a very visible way. And there are constraints, like time and space that really do sometimes prevent the transfer of knowledge in the way that I think this book really very helpfully achieved. So let's start broadly with one theme that I think comes really early on in the book and it's very important for understanding a lot of the rest of the book, which is sort of how to deal with repeated disappointment that comes from others' lack of concern for or response to urgent crises. You know, one issue I think with the dominant way that we conceive of politics, especially regarding social change is that it relies on this kind of central narrative of there being winners and losers in every conflict. You know, the story goes that the winners win, and they won because that means that their idea is a good idea. And their rhetoric is good rhetoric. And the losers lose because their rhetoric was wrong or flawed, or their alleged failure is attributed to overly ambitious ideas. And after the dust settles, it's sort of assumed that those so called losers have to then recalibrate, change the message, accept defeat, reformulate the rhetoric, because a single loss sort of signifies some sort of signal of permanent failure for the political goal that they set out with. And this is -- this notion is categorically absurd and just incorrect, just saying. But it's often perpetuated as the norm in the discourse that surrounds like how social change happens. And I think one of the things that you both emphasize in the book is that organizing also requires that we think really deliberately about what stories we tell and what narratives we accept and reproduce. And there's that famous quote by Stuart Hall, which was referenced recently by friend of the Panel, Dan Berger, in a recent essay of his that goes, "Politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them." And Berger added further that, "Social change is not made by doing what is already popular." And I think this book serves as a tool to sort of help individuals recognize and practice that realization, that politics constructs majorities. And that change is made by going beyond doing what is already popular. And Let This Radicalize You really generously imparts all of these lessons to readers over and over, demonstrating that this mindset of winners and losers and the right and wrong rhetoric idea is not only a distraction, but it actually reinforces systems and forces of subjection that we're actually fighting against. So, you know, ultimately, what is more important than playing to be winners in a political game is to decide what we're going to stand for, and what the world we want to see looks like, and then to build and live that world now together. So to start us off, can you both unpack the mistaken assumption that sort of facts and fear motivate political action, that all you really need to do is recite the terribles? And if we could talk about sort of some of these myths about narratives and what works in organizing, versus what you both have found have actually worked?

Mariame Kaba 12:55

Well, let me think about it this way. I have like three big thoughts. So let me just start off with asking you both the question. Do you know that up to a million species are threatened with extinction, like many within decades right now, do you all know that?

Kelly Hayes 13:14

Yes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:14

Yes, unfortunately, yeah.

Mariame Kaba 13:16

And that it's human activity that's accelerating kind of this biodiversity loss. I was reading a UN issued report that was authored a few years ago by 150 or so experts basically from 50 countries, and it estimated that kind of dozens of species are going extinct every day, as many as like 30% to 50% of all species are going extinct by 2050. And then we have all the biologists and the scientists, including people like EO Wilson at Harvard, who tell us that like 30,000 species per year are being driven to extinction, and that that's a rate of 82 species per day, when in fact, the Earth's "normal rate" of extinction prior to like human activity was about one species out of a million every year. So that basically means that the flora and the fauna may be disappearing at 1,000 times higher than they have throughout history, right. So this is a massive problem. Okay, now you both have this information. Now what? What do you do?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:28

Right.

Mariame Kaba 14:29

What's -- I'm asking you, like what's your first response? Don't think, just share what first comes to your mind and also how you feel, knowing all these facts.

Kelly Hayes 14:38

It's upsetting.

Mariame Kaba 14:39

Upsetting.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:40

I mean, my first response was to think about how the scale reminded me of how many species were wiped out when the dinosaurs were exterminated by a meteor that hit the Earth, you know? I guess, to layer more despair on top potentially.

Mariame Kaba 14:58

Yeah, yeah. So maybe despair, maybe overwhelm, upset, scared. Maybe you're confused. Now, did you all already know the specifics of the species extinction rates before I quoted those numbers to you?

Kelly Hayes 15:12

Not every detail that you cited, but yeah, I'd heard some of that before.

Mariame Kaba 15:16

You've heard some of it before. Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 15:17

I heard most of it. But I mean, yeah.

Mariame Kaba 15:20

Yeah. So you -- so both of you had some idea about this before. But you heard the information listed out, you still had -- it elicited various kinds of feelings in you, right. The UN report tells us pretty quickly that we need transformative change. That's the language it uses - "transformative change." What does that mean to both of you, in this context?

Kelly Hayes 15:44

To change everything.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 15:45

Yeah.

Mariame Kaba 15:47

Yeah. Now, I'm gonna say this, right. So okay, so for us then, it means like, specifically, how do we do it? And how is this going to impact me and my family specifically? And also 2050 is kind of a few years away for some of us. Like I don't -- it's likely I probably, myself here, I'm in my 50s, it's likely I won't be alive then, right? So the question then becomes, how are we supposed to convince billions of people to do things that will be good for others 1,000 years from now, or even 50 years from now, if they're not going to be here to actually see it. So I share this here, because I think that we need to get specific in order to understand how it might be that someone could hear truly alarming scientific and sound information and not be moved to action by it, right? Neither of you said, you are literally leaving your job or your life today, and devoting yourself 100% to stopping the extinction of these species. Neither of you -- extremely active, fair minded, kind people. This may be an issue that deeply, deeply concerns you, right? That you feel, like this is scary, this is alarming. This is pressing, right? But in the end, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to take action to address it. And it also doesn't necessarily mean that you agree with the science of what has been offered here. You could disagree with the science and still decide to care about the issue, because other people you love care about the issue. And you can accept the science and decide that you can't do anything about the situation and keep it moving. And the point is that we overvalue facts and science as motivators for action. That's what I wanted to get to here, okay, that if you can put yourself in the position of the person who gets that huge, huge sense of oh my god, this big thing is happening. And you as a person who's already an activist and an organizer, can't see yourself getting to a point where you can take action around it, this should make you very empathetic of this happening time and time again, across multiple issues for lots of people, because for many people, maybe nature is not their thing, even though they live with it, because frankly, most of us are disconnected from nature. We're living in cities, we don't notice incremental changes in the environment. Maybe that's not the thing that fucking moves us, okay? So does that then make you look at that person and say they're evil? Because they haven't been moved to action about a catastrophic, impending situation that's currently happening at higher and higher rates? No, of course it doesn't. You should feel much more empathetic about the fact that oh my god, yeah, that's true. That's not my thing, either. I hope it's other people's thing. I hope other people take up the action, right? So perhaps people don't just -- some people just don't value that particular wildlife that's being extinct, but they're plenty educated about it, they've thought about it. And that's just not what's important to them right now. And giving them more information is not going to change that behavior or that attitude. So I go back to that, instead of looking at a different kind of action, because I think you can do this activity and thought experiment, or experiment with your own people for every single issue on the planet. And what it should do is grow your empathy, not make you less empathetic and more angry at people, because you should then be very angry at yourself for not jumping in and taking action on every single thing that is going wrong on this planet. And you cannot do it because you are one person and you can only do so much. So that's why I wanted to start, because I don't understand, I've never understood how people are so mad at people constantly when they say I gave them all the this information about -- and I'm like, you gave them fucking information. That's it. That's it. You gave them information with no way of letting them know what they should do about that information [laughing]. Anyway, so.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:12

I think it's such a good thought experiment, I think it's a great way to try to sort of force those boundaries of like, what does empathy actually mean in the situation of like taking action, right? Because I think a lot of the things that are really catching people up right now are these kinds of conversations around the pandemic and this retrospective sense of like, could we have done something different to get through to people and make people believe, and I think that's part of actually the foreclosure and normalization, but it's I think much better illustrated in the way that you just laid it out than in me telling someone, no, you need to have more empathy and not be mad at this individual, right? I mean, there's only so much that you can achieve by even telling people, you need to have more empathy. It's way more effective actually to be able to demonstrate it and help them understand in this way than it is for me to tell people directly, like, you know, yeah, I understand you're really fucking pissed at individuals right now. And you see the pandemic as a problem of other people. However, it's a much -- actually, it's a much more difficult conceptual frame than simply saying the problem is other people, hell is other people, climate change is other people, you know?

Mariame Kaba 21:36

Exactly. And everything is other people. Guess what? Because not all of us can take on everything. So on pandemic stuff, I may be excellent. But I may suck on the extinction front, you know? Like, I mean, you know, so that's also situational quite a bit. So you may feel like somebody's like so virtuous because they agree with you on a particular issue, and they're taking action on that issue. But on 100 other actions, they're not doing anything, and maybe they're contributing negatively to those other issues. Now what, right? So I just think that we have to be much better at unpacking and understanding what's really happening. Now knowing this about people, though, gives us something important. And we can talk about that later. I want to let Kelly weigh in here as well, because I don't want to take up the whole time. But I think just having a different orientation to how you decide to approach people makes a huge difference in whether or not you'll be an effective organizer. And we try to get at that in this book, you know? Anyway, go ahead, Kelly. Sorry.

Kelly Hayes 22:41

No, thank you. I appreciated all of that. I mean, there are layers here, right. And like the first that's easiest for me to kind of jump off with is the pandemic, because in the very beginning, you know, before COVID really kind of consumed our reality here in the US, I saw some things that were happening overseas, and I was trying really hard to warn people. You know, my co-strugglers here in Chicago, folks on social media. Messaging folks who were dear to me asking them to change their plans. And, you know, I got a lot of pushback, in addition to being ignored by a lot of people, I got some, like, really ugly pushback. And folks were telling me that people I've known for years were making fun of me behind my back, you know, saying that I was off my medication, like really intense stuff. It was really an incredibly painful time, you know, psychologically, possibly one of the more difficult times of my life because I knew what was coming was so bad. And it just felt like a horror movie, but other people couldn't see it, wouldn't hear me. And I was really bitter. I had a lot of hurt and a lot of bitterness over how some people acted during that time. And when more of the people in my life, I'd say most of the people in my life accepted, okay, this is real, this is happening, and it was revamping all of our lives, you know, during that sort of shelter in place period, and everyone's now talking about what are we doing and how this is affecting me, my first reaction there was I had all the anger, I had all the rage, and I was very forcibly suppressing that in my interactions with people for the most part, because I was telling people as an organizer, here are the things I think we need to do right now. And one of those things was that we had to put old beefs aside in order to prioritize the work of keeping as many of us alive as possible. And you know, I could not say that while also saying and hey you over there, you remember that thing you said on Facebook a few weeks ago?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:49

Fuck you, yeah [laughing].

Kelly Hayes 24:51

Like no [laughing], these things weren't compatible. So in order to make that point about what I thought needed to happen for us to survive in collectivity, I had to put aside my desire to express my angst about how I thought I'd been treated or how people had behaved. And so sometimes it's about that, right? Sometimes we're feeling our feelings, and we're gonna fucking feel them. But my feelings weren't the most important thing that was happening, even if they were important, right. And of course, they were important to me, but they weren't the most important thing that's happening. So sometimes we have to be able to say that. And I would say another piece of it for me is that when Mariame and I were working on this book, this process of considering that period of time, and considering why, why was it like that was really therapeutic for me, because we dug into sort of the psychological reasoning, you know, how some of us just react differently to threats. There are more effective ways to communicate with people with different cognitive styles. But I could see how a lot of the appeals that I was writing on social media, kind of pleading with people to take me seriously, appealed to my cognitive style. I was writing to people who thought like me, and people who thought like me were in some cases very responsive. I know a lot of folks who did preparedness, because they believed folks who were raising the alarm. But there are different ways that people communicate. And so there has to be sort of a diversity of tactics and communication, right, and reaching people in different ways. And it really helped kind of soothe my anger to understand that, all right, you're over here getting mad thinking good and bad people, right? You know, or friends and assholes. However you want to spin it. Dividing people into these categories of the ones that listened and the ones that didn't, when really the complexity is like, we're human beings. And so there has -- there's room for strategy here, you know, and as a strategic person that was really helpful to me to understand as well. It's like, okay, there are things we can do. We can vary our approaches, there are different strategies for communication that we can experiment with, to try to get through to different types of people. Like that was really helpful to me. And in terms of the facts piece, I mean, facts are an ingredient in good messaging. And I think that that's the most important thing to understand, that I could try to convey to someone who's newer in organizing, is that when facts move us, like when -- you know, if we hear a fact that resonates deeply with us, it terrifies us or it moves us to act, it can be so hard to understand how other people hearing that fact aren't having the same visceral or immediate response. It's like, what's wrong with this person? How can you live with knowing this? But the reality is that we all live with knowing all kinds of terrible things, right, as Mariame's thought experiment kind of makes clear. That as people, we learn to live alongside all kinds of terrible shit, it's functioning within the status quo is kind of the way that human beings function. It's how we live. And we also have the tendency to rationalize the status quo, or to tell ourselves that bad things are inevitable if they seem likely. Because it is easier for a whole lot of people to accept something bad is inevitable than it is to live with uncertainty. And understanding that helped me get my head around people's behavior a lot more as well. Because I have a low tolerance for uncertainty, right? But I kind of know enough about myself to know that's what I'm doing now, when that comes up, and I start thinking, oh no, this is -- you can't stop that, that's inevitable. I have the capacity to check myself and be like, actually, you don't know shit, Kelly, you don't know that's going to happen, you don't get to just tell yourself, that's gonna happen, and that we can't stop it. And so we're up against those tendencies in people. So I used to write these really elaborate threads about climate change on Twitter, because we had this great climate reporter at Truthout, award winning journalist Dahr Jamail. I would read his work and I would -- you know, I'd read the things he would recommend, and I'd get so torn up about it. And I would write these threads kind of trying to translate some of that into these like sort of bite sized pieces of information to make more people understand like, this is the terror and the severity of what's happening. And after a while, I started noticing in the quote tweets, people saying things like, well, there you have it, we are really and truly fucked. Like, it's all over, you know? And I'm just, no, that's not what I was saying. That's not what I meant at all. But that is what people will take away from it sometimes, if we just give them the scary fact, often they'll do the easier thing, which is to be like this tells me it's over and there's nothing I can do. Doom lets us off the hook. And so we have to be mindful of that tendency. But of course, like facts, you know, they're an ingredient and they're an essential ingredient. We talk about the importance of research in the book and the Lucy Parsons Lab and how crucial their work has been to movements here in Chicago. But it's just crucial to understand, you know, as Mariame was saying, that facts alone do not get us the results we want. Our jobs would be so much easier if they did, because the facts are usually on our side. But facts alone do not get people to reorient their lives, or their worldviews in the pursuit of justice. And I think a lot of the people listening can probably vouch for that from their own experience, because some people may be moved by facts alone, but that's not most people. But I feel like one of the examples we offer in the book, Reparations Now!, is probably the best example from my own life, which is that, you know, I knew about the Burge torture cases, I knew about how horrible all of that was. I had been hearing about for years the terrible things that these cops had done to these folks that they had tortured, these mostly Black men that they had tortured confessions out of. I was obviously very opposed to that. It was something I wanted justice for these people. I was aware of the reparations ordinance. I thought it was a great document, I thought it was a transformative sort of political statement. I didn't believe for a second that it could get passed. It felt like the definition of unpassable to me with some of the demands in it. Things like writing the fact that the tortures occurred into the Chicago Public School curriculum, you know, having a memorial to put folks who were tortured by CPD. These things just seemed politically impossible to me. And so while if in conversation, you know, I would have said, yes, this thing, this should pass, or in a speech at a rally or something I would have been happy to uplift it, I was not about to devote my life to trying to make this bill happen, because it didn't seem possible. And what actually got me to engage with this thing to the point that I was constantly working on this campaign and devoting all of my creativity and all of my energy outside of my day job to it, and willing to go to jail and training other people up for actions where we were planning to get arrested, but we fortunately never had to deploy, because every time we were about to escalate to the arrestable actions, we would get another concession. And so we would go back and regroup. And ultimately, you know, made our way to victory that way. But that, my part in that happened because of my relationship with Mariame, and the fact that, you know, we sat down for breakfast one day, and she was like, hey, we think that we could take some of this energy that's in the streets right now, and kind of channel it towards a local victory. And this could be that victory. And I didn't believe that was possible like in the least. But I could -- hearing it coming from my friend and my co-struggler, and knowing some of the folks involved, I thought, well, you know what, if these people are gonna want to throw down together around this, if this is where folks want to put the energy, it's going to mean something, it's going to be worthwhile. And you know, we'll put up a hell of a fight, you know, we'll put up a fight worthy of the history books, I'm down for that. And so on the basis of those relationships, on the basis of my belief in the power of Chicago organizers and our movements, and you know, the meaning that can be found in collective struggle, you know, win, lose or draw, that was enough to pull me into something. And over time, as we built together, that faith started to grow, that maybe we could really do this. And then when, you know, Rahm Emanuel wound up in an election runoff, and suddenly we had a lot more leverage to play with, I was like, holy shit, we could win, we could absolutely win this. This is a winnable fucking fight. And so, you know, that was a huge lesson to me. It was a huge lesson to me about foreclosing possibilities. But it's also a lesson to me on what it takes to move someone who's sort of, you know, ostensibly like on your side, they agree that the wrong is wrong. They agree the thing you want is right. And yet, maybe they don't believe it's possible. Or maybe they just don't see themselves as having a place in that struggle. Like how do you get from agreement to action? And you know, that is the work of organizing.

Mariame Kaba 34:25

I wanted to just jump in here too, to say to Kelly, yes, thank you so much for recounting all of that. And I want people to also think about what what matters here is Kelly and I having a one to one conversation based in our relationship preexisting and the trust we had in each other, right? That these are also the ingredients of the organizing that happens. And so part of what we do in the book is we want you to understand that it's very helpful as an organizer for you to understand cognitive biases, because they really shape how we all interact with our worlds all the time. And that includes things like if you've heard of things like motivated reasoning, or confirmation bias, or fundamental attribution error, those are all cognitive biases. And a couple of years ago, I went back to school for Library and Information Sciences. And we were reading, we were assigned a book by a guy named Lee McIntyre, which was titled Post-Truth. And one of the things that he explained, which I thought was so helpful, is that humans, we tend to change our beliefs to match our feelings, instead of aligning our beliefs with the "best evidence," right? So as human beings, we actually selectively search for information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and our assumptions. And then we ignore conveniently all the information that does not. And we all do this, like nobody is exempt from this, right. And so we all interpret information in a way that's actually compatible with our existing points of view, surprise, surprise. And we do this most especially when it's in our self interest, or when the information we're actually confronted with is tied to deeply held or emotional beliefs that we have, and who wants to think badly of ourselves as human beings? We never want to feel badly about ourselves. We want to think that we're like smart and well informed and capable. If anything gets presented to us that contradicts that, then boy, we're right, we're right in our particular corners holding on tight to the raggedy information we have [inaudible] -- if we're confronted with information that suggests that something that we believe is untrue, we experience a tension, and we want to try to come together and harmonize our beliefs, our attitudes and our behaviors. And we're super uncomfortable when these things are out of line, when they're misaligned, right. And so when we're misaligned, we try to find ways that aren't going to threaten our sense of self, our sense of value, our sense of ego to reconcile that stuff, that's how you can have somebody who is brilliant, and you can tell them fact based evidential information, and they can look you in the eye and say, perhaps that's true, but I still believe what I believe. You've all -- you've heard this, right? Every single one of us have either heard that shit from somebody else or done it ourselves, right. And so that makes it really important for us to not -- like to understand that psychological play that's happening, so that when people are holding on to pre-existing beliefs for dear life, that we're like, okay, this is what's happening right now, I need to step back and find a way that is not ego threatening, to actually get this person to understand what I'm saying, to understand that I don't think that they're a bad person because they have these pre-existing beliefs, and that we have a shot to be able to grow together in this other direction. If they're trusting me enough to actually give me the truth of those pre-existing beliefs, then we have a place from which we can actually move. And so I just wanted to share that, because these things have real impact. And it changed frankly, for me, one of the things that I was always so angry about in the work that I do in the criminal punishment area, which was, I would hear people say things like, if they did something wrong, and they made a mistake, then there were 100 contextual factors for why that was true, right? They did something wrong, and all it meant was that they actually did something wrong. But when somebody else did something wrong, then it was because they were a bad person.

Kelly Hayes 38:48

Yes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:49

Mhm. Well, this is such an important, I think, framework to engage with, right? Because ultimately, what we're talking about, in some ways, is that politics involves conflict over meaning, right? There's -- even when there is agreement about observable events, observable facts, there are conflicting assumptions about the causes, the motives, the consequences, and the meaning. And, you know, the creation of meaning through the construction of beliefs is really, I think, also crucial for constructing what the narrative of political possibility is, which is why Kelly I so appreciated both in the book and also now in the conversation that you were saying, like, when you were first getting involved in the 2014 reparations campaign you were like, this is never gonna happen. This is asking too much. Because I think it really speaks to the fact that like, you know, political action and support are not actually shaped by what can be seen, but by what we actually have to construct, you know, what we must assume, what's imposed upon us, you know, these different kinds of dynamics, I think we often talk about to ourselves or narrativize as absolute truths, or common sense, right? But the fact of the matter is is that, you know, to borrow from the political scientist, Murray J. Edelman, who wrote this great essay from 1985 called Political Language and Political Reality that I love. And one of the lines in that is that -- it's a little pessimistic. He says, "There's no way to establish the validity of a particular political position to the satisfaction of people who have a material and moral reason to hold a different view or to think otherwise." I'm paraphrasing here. So. And I think a lot of times, we kind of take this as -- that kind of statement is a sign of like, well, there's just some people you're never going to change, right? There are some people who have a kind of structural reason to hold a different political view. But I actually think that this is rather than being a kind of statement of doom or a foreclosure of possibility, what Edelman is actually talking about is how we create the narrative of what political possibility is. And one of the things that you both talk about in the book is that, yes, facts are super important. This is part of how we construct arguments and assessments of what's going on in our lives and make meaning, but that what's also more important is like how those facts fit into a broader narrative, how we make meaning of what we are going through, and what our actions to organize actually mean, too.

Mariame Kaba 41:23

Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I also just think it's important to say, what if you get everybody to agree with your facts? Like, that's great. But a lot of people may agree with our facts and disagree about what to do about those facts. So like, it goes back to the point of like, there are layers to this. It's not all about just one thing. You do all this work and everybody says, yeah, we totally believe you. We understand that COVID is airborne, that we should -- that it's deadly as hell, that a lot of people are getting infected. And we just don't agree that we should all wear masks, right? Like, this is -- we're here now. We're in that mode.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:07

We've been here since February of 2021. Yeah.

Mariame Kaba 42:10

We have. We've been here. But a lot of people on our side agree with us about all the science. The facts are there. They all friggin can recite them to you. And yet they don't agree with what we should do about those facts. So we're not just constructing narratives around getting on the same page about what the problems are. We are also engaged in narrative building about what the solutions ought to be. And to me, that's harder. Why? Because it's asking people to do something that they are not being asked to do when they're constructing the problem. When you are saying to people, look at the scientists telling us all this -- what do they have to do, they don't have to do anything but choose to believe. That's -- you can get there. But then you have to say um okay, so y'all are gonna have to change your behavior in these following ways. That's how we are going to actually address the problem. Oh, now you're in for it. Now you're in for it. Now all those things about the cognitive biases, all those things about self interest, all those things -- like that comes into play. And that's the fight we're in right now. We're in a fight around what to do about these massive problems that exist. I am less concerned about the people who just refuse to believe the science. This is -- it bothers me to no end when I hear people on the left say "believe science." What the fuck is that, in the end? [laughter] Like, is that really -- is that it?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 43:36

Which science, yeah.

Mariame Kaba 43:36

We gotta believe in science -- yeah, not even which --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 43:39

Whose.

Mariame Kaba 43:40

Whose. And beyond that, fine, fine, let's believe science, that is not our problem. Our problem is what to do about what we have as information about the science. And that's where everybody -- the shit hits the fan, okay. So that's part of what we're trying to get people to understand, at least -- people meaning the audience for this book for us are organizers -- if you don't have this kind of way of thinking and a way of seeing and a lens for interpreting human behavior, it's going to be very hard for you in your campaigns to be effective. Very hard. You're gonna have even more disappointment than you regularly have in organizing.

Kelly Hayes 44:18

Yeah, you know, I'd like to add to that, that an example that we offer around COVID organizing in the book that I think is a really strong one that a lot of folks could take something away from is my friend Jenny, who is someone I met, I want to say it was 2013. I was teaching, leading workshops at an action camp and Jenny was 16. And she was, you know, the youngest person in attendance. And we formed a friendship there that she was probably the first person who referred to me as her mentor out loud and I was like, okay, I guess that's the thing I can be doing. Maybe I know enough to be someone's mentor [laughing]. But, you know, over the years, Jenny has engaged with a lot of activism and organizing and formed kind of an analysis around persuasion and how to make things happen. And when she was -- learned that there were vaccines coming on the market, she was really excited because she worked for a nonprofit that served the immigrant community in her city. And she thought, wow, we're really well positioned to help educate people about the vaccines and to have a vaccine clinic so these folks can get access, because she felt that, you know, the city wasn't doing a really good job reaching folks who were non-English speakers. And so she was like, we can fill a gap here and help make sure these people have access. And the folks who ran the nonprofit weren't really excited about the idea. They were like, eh, no, people aren't gonna like it, they're not gonna want to be pushed, and maybe some of those people were vaccine hesitant themselves. And so Jenny took a different approach, at a women's group that a lot of these folks attended, you know, she just started talking about her own experience, and what it was like for her to get vaccinated, what it was like for her parents to get vaccinated, and kind of put that out there as a jumping off point, and then started following up with people, particularly with mothers, who were part of the group, individually, just being like, hey, what did you think about that, that I shared in the group? And when people would voice anxiety or disagreement or share their fears, you know, she wouldn't lecture them, which was kind of what was happening back then. I don't know if folks remember. But in those early months of the vaccines are coming, or the vaccines are here, there was so much mockery, and so much shaming. And it was so frustrating to me as an organizer, like this is not how you get people to do a thing they're hesitant about doing, is by insulting their intelligence and telling them they don't care about people, like this is how you get folks to double down. And folks were sharing these videos that were like comically making fun of vaccine hesitant people. And I was like, I understand the emotions behind all of this. But if you think this is helping, it's not. And Jenny, you know, told me that she wanted to make herself into the place that people came with their questions and with their fears, because otherwise they were going to go to the internet. And they were either going to be told that their fears were valid, and that this stuff was poison, or that they were bad people, and that either of those things were likely to harden their position. So she just wanted folks to keep coming with their questions. And when they would bring a question, she would say, well, that sounds serious. Let's look into it together. And she would research with people and explore these things with folks and think alongside them. And so you know, we have this sort of Freirean approach as opposed to just trying to deposit the correct position in someone's head. And eventually, the demand from the clients at the nonprofit drove them having a clinic, because these folks changed their minds and decided, you know, I know enough now, I want it. Why won't you all help us get it? And the demand was so strong that when they had a clinic for the J&J vaccine scheduled and had to cancel it because of what temporarily happened with access to J&J, folks were furious. They were like, well, we've read enough about this, we feel safe taking it, why can't we have it? And so they had to hurriedly make a new plan and get them a Pfizer clinic, because the demand among the people to do the thing was so strong. And that this -- that there are approaches, there are ways of communicating with people -- not that it's always going to end that way or work that way -- but that there are ways of moving people and getting folks to reconsider their positions, and that they often don't involve what is the most -- might feel like the most satisfying thing in the moment, right? If someone says something that frustrates us, sometimes we want to snap at them, or we want to drop a bunch of facts on them and make them feel foolish, or we want to just make our point and tell them they're wrong. And you know, as I was saying before, you know, part of the issue is sometimes recognizing when our feelings aren't the most important thing that's happening. Maybe they're important, but they're not the most important thing. And Jenny, you know, I'm sure heard a lot of wild stuff, that she probably wanted to say like, that's ridiculous. But she wasn't gonna do that, because her concern was getting these people informed enough that they could make an informed decision about what was right for their families, because she didn't think they were getting that opportunity through the system such as it existed. And when she worked to give them that opportunity, a lot of them wound up making the choice that she thought was the right one. And I think it's important to know that we have that power in more situations than we realize.

Mariame Kaba 49:34

Mhm. Amen.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:34

Mhm. I really appreciate that. Kelly. I mean, I think, you know, in your book, you both talk about how refusing to abandon people is a really important act of rebellion and really necessary towards collective survival. And I think a lot of people throughout the pandemic have struggled with like, how do you kind of maintain boundaries with people, especially for people who are coming from the position that I'm in, where they're like maybe someone who's immunosuppressed or on immunosuppressive medications, and maybe they don't have the benefit that I have of not having a roommate or like living with a partner that respects your decisions or needs with regard to COVID. And then it has this kind of underlying fracture point in their relationship, and they feel abandoned, and they feel that it's very difficult to convince the other person who's abandoning them, that what's going on is even abandonment. And there's this dynamic that I think I'm seeing so many people in our community consistently running up against, and it's really kind of in a lot of instances very difficult, and putting people in this moment where they're sort of struggling with like, well, how is it even possible to pursue collective freedom if we have to rely on other people? And I think that that's like a really difficult and challenging kind of mindset to reckon with, but something that's really important, and you both address some of those feelings really well in the book. So I wonder if we could sort of talk about like, why you both still believe that it is essential to depend on each other and sort of how to work together maybe instead of thinking about just sort of reacting to individual instances, but maybe do either of you feel that there are lessons in the book towards kind of trying to think about ways to move forward from here and to move forward in terms of strategy? And what is worth building? Or what is worth framing our rhetoric around, versus some of these things that we've been discussing, which is sort of about what doesn't work?

Mariame Kaba 51:35

Yeah. I mean, a big part of the book is to say to people, don't believe that bad press about human beings, you know?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:43

[laughing] Yeah.

Mariame Kaba 51:44

I think often as human beings, we notice and pay the most attention to kind of cruelty and inhumanity. But I like to remind us that the reason stories of cruelty are so shocking to us still, is that they actually go against what most people's natural instincts are, you know? How else can we explain human survival to date, right? We work cooperatively, mostly. We are often concerned with helping others. This is reflected in countless small and big ways all the time. I get the individual feeling of like, all these people, they're so annoying, they're whatever, they're this, they're that, you know, I just think, I don't know, for me, I think it's so important to not just look towards the bad or the negative aspects of things. I remember constantly that most people aren't actually ghouls, that most people aren't actually evil, even though people do ghoulish things, and sometimes people do evil things. And we have to be in a position where we are looking at things on the individual level. And you all do this in your show constantly - I'm a subscriber. You know, you look at the individual, but you also -- you don't look at that divorced from the bigger structural forces, institutional forces that are working at play on a regular basis. Listen, at the current stage that we're in, we're being conditioned to accept mass death, as the price and the cost of doing business, okay? That is what is actually happening in this moment. We are in large part railing against this in our book. We want to say to people that as an attempt to uphold compulsory normalcy, a lot of people have to be sacrificed, and the public has to be primed to accept that sacrifice without rebelling. And that at the core of all of this is the need by capitalists for endless capital accumulation by any means necessary. And we can't elide this basic fact as we try to understand what's currently happening. We're frogs in boiling water. And what has to happen is that some of us have to be saying, oh my god, we're frogs in boiling water. How the fuck do we get out of the boiling water? And that is the work we're trying to talk about, when we talk about reciprocal care, we are saying reciprocal care has to be at the center of getting us the fuck out of the boiling water.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:22

Yes.

Mariame Kaba 54:22

Okay. And that you got to do this work because you're not going to get out of the boiling water alone, sorry, people. It ain't happening. You may find a little lifeboat and one raft, and you may be trying to oar and you're trying to like pedal your way to out of the whirling water, you're not going to do it alone. You need some other people in that raft with you to get to the other side. And so, you know, to me, I guess I'm -- you know, this is -- like I really struggle myself with the way that we are taught the history -- the way that we're taught stories about how human beings are. It's like -- copaganda is one form of the story we get told about, which is to be afraid of each other, to think that other people are out to get us at every turn, you know, etc, etc. But in fact, if you look all across history, you see and see this in disasters. You know, Rebecca Solnit book about, what is it, A Paradise Built in Hell, it's a great example of the ways that we talk about and cite in the book, people coming together to try to actually collectively make safer spaces and safer communities for ourselves. There are countless examples. One, I also point to all the time because I think this is something, people may not know this story, but I think I just want to share it to just bring to -- it's not in our book, but it is a story we actually reference in No More Police, which is a story of a guy named Peter Warner, who was very well known in Australia, he died a couple of years ago, like at the age of 90. And in 1966, this guy and his crew rescue a group of teenage boys who had been stranded on an island for more than a year, right. These young people were like, in June or something of the year before, they were ages -- students, ages 13 to 16 years old, I think. And they were at a boarding school and they stole a 20 foot boat and decided to go on like a joyride on the sea. And a few hours into their trip, wind breaks out, they break their sail and their rudder, and they start being adrift on the ocean for like eight days or a week or something. And they end up, they spot an island called ʻAta, which is about 100 miles south of Tongatapu, which is the main island of Tonga. And that island had been the home at a certain point in time to like over 300 people. And a British slave trader kidnapped about 150 of those people and the king decides to shut down the island, relocate the rest of the people to another island. But the boys get to this island, and first they like live off of like fish and coconuts and bird eggs. Then three months later, they find a ruin of a village and they're like, okay, this is great. Now we have stuff that we can actually make, you know, make a little hut for ourselves so that we can be covered. They find a machete there. They find taro plants that are domesticated, they find a flock of chickens that were descendants from the previous inhabitants. They start a fire which is super huge, right? And they decide to build this makeshift settlement. And they create a garden for themselves. They create a badminton court for themselves for recreation. They have like a little gymnasium with like the actual bench press they create, okay? They like -- a guy gets like some wood and he makes a guitar. This is like a real story. The young men decide that every morning and night they're going to start the day with song and prayer. They come up with like a roster for themselves of like times where people are taking, you know, turns resting and that other times people are taking turns gathering foods. Other times, some people are looking for the ships, you know? When fights break out, they figure out a way to go to the opposite ends of the island and they could return when they cooled off. And they have a whole like little tribunal where they all decide how to handle stuff. One young man breaks his leg and his friends fashion a split and his leg heals perfectly right? Then later on, they go and they interview these boys many, many years later, in like 2020 or something. And one of -- he's an old man now and he's reflecting on what happened. He's like, I learned a lot on that friggen island, more than I learned in any other place in my life, including school, right? Because I learned how to trust myself and to trust other people. And to me, what I take away from that story of those shipwrecked boys on ʻAta is that it's the antithesis of the other story we get told, right? Every single person has read that damn book, The Lord of the Flies, some form in school, and they know -- The Lord of the Flies is actually a fictional story, y'all. It's a fictional story published in the 1950s. We have this actual story of these young people who live for months on an island on their own, in real life. No one knows that story. But every single person knows The Lord of the Flies. Why? Everybody knows The Lord of the Flies because it's a dystopian story of people doing shady, horrible things to each other when they're isolated on an island. And to me, stories are so powerful, and they can really be healing and they can be transformative. And the stories that we tell ourselves as a society can also be super limiting and super damaging. And to me, in our current culture of late stage capitalism, the stories we are telling and retelling are stories about the fact that everybody needs to be locked up. The police are needed everywhere. No one cares about anybody else. Everybody's just like, every person for themselves. Everybody's selfish. No one cares about each other. And that is a lie. That is an absolute lie. And how do I know it's a lie? Because every single day I see people not abandoning other people. I see many of your listeners I know are people who are caring for each other, themselves, and others in community. I saw the explosion of mutual aid efforts that came early in the pandemic, right? I saw all of these things as possible, right, all of these things as possible. And so I share that story, I go into it with everybody who's listening, because I want you to tell a different story about yourself and the world that you're living in. I want you to notice not just the bad things, which are fine to notice, but I want you to also notice all of the millions and billions of people across the planet, not just the United States border, but across the planet, who are every single day refusing to abandon other people. And that is who we are calling out in the book. That is what we want the attention to be placed on too. Not because we don't think you should pay attention to bad things. No, of course, there are lots of bad things. But it's not the fucking only news, okay? There are other things going on, too. And should you pay attention to those other things, maybe you amplify those other things. Maybe you tell that story over and over again to each other, maybe that then gets other people excited. And it becomes a contagious thing that other people want to do things and we're in a virtuous cycle, rather than the constant cycle of lament, doom, people are horrible, we should be protected from each other, because we're going to kill each other on the subway every minute of the day, when millions of people ride the New York subway every single day, and none of them are dead, okay? And again, not to take away from harms that happen, but not to also privilege those harms, to the detriment of the vast number of things that are mostly good happening every single day that we do with each other, that we are as human beings cooperative, let's play that up. Let's give people more ways to get together and offer collective care. Let's make our resources go in that direction. Let's demand from the government that they resource that stuff. And they take away from supporting the death making institutions. That's what defund was all about. So I just -- I want to say that and I want to say that clearly. And I want to say, yes, Kelly and I fall on that side of the ledger, okay, on the side of the ledger that says yes, there's a lot of bad things, but - but, that is not the main only story.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:02:47

So beautifully said.

Kelly Hayes 1:02:48

Yeah, I really agree with all of that very strongly. And I also want to say, you know, I understand the feelings that come up from folks who feel like -- you know, I've heard from a number of people, and I think I've heard probably from my own lips, when talking about struggles that are disregarded, communities that are disregarded, like nobody cares about us. That feeling, it comes from a very real place of what it's like to feel left behind, what it's like to feel like even people who consider themselves socially conscious, don't seem to be paying attention to what's happening to you or your community or seem to have left you behind. And I really appreciated something Aly Wane says in the book about how if he weren't an undocumented immigrant himself, he would not understand what he understands about that experience, about the system, because this is all built to prevent folks from understanding one another's struggle. Like everything about this society is structured towards people not understanding what it's like to be an undocumented person, or what those folks are really up against. And so, you know, in his work, Aly is trying to tear down those barriers of understanding and trying to get as many people to the table as possible to build understanding around what is really happening, and what the common ground is, and how we can do something about it. And as Mariame said, it's like we don't have to deny the ugliness and how terrible a lot of the things that are happening are, but we do need to remember that those aren't the only things that are happening, and that they never have been. I'm constantly inspired by the ways people are adapting to crisis and working to protect each other in this world.

Kelly Hayes 1:04:31

And one example that's really important to me, personally, is the Woodland Women's group on my reservation. And it means a lot to me to know that these women initially came together as a trauma survivors group. You know, a friend of mine just was kind of shocked that a group like that didn't exist when there was so much trauma in the community, and so just kind of created a little makeshift beginning for them, and that emotional survival work and co-struggling blossomed into culture work and mutual aid and elder led education. And these women built something truly meaningful, something that helped people cope with the darkest days of the pandemic in the beginning. And when -- and it enabled them to continue crafting together over Zoom when they couldn't be together in person, and tapping into some of the best parts of Menominee culture, in order to sort of pursue those collective aims. And I think it's important to understand that the Menominee Nation survived into the reservation era, in part because reciprocal care was a core cultural practice. The idea of letting someone starve if you had food was un-Menominee. It was the practice of striving not to leave anyone behind that got us through an apocalypse. So as a Menominee person, you know, facing a new set of apocalyptic challenges, like I'm drawing inspiration on that, and I believe in that capacity, I know that it's there, I know that we have that as people. And it's not like all of our people were super agreeable, and no one was ever an asshole.

Mariame Kaba 1:06:13

Hello [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06:13

Right [laughing].

Mariame Kaba 1:06:14

I'm sure there were a lot of people out there keeping each other alive, who were like, man, you fucking suck, but here, here's some fucking food [laughing]. And that's what it is sometimes, you know, that's what striving for collective survival really is. It's not about sort of self selecting ourselves into a group of people who are like, yeah, we all get it, you know? The army of those who get it is not going to get us through, that's just not how anything works. Collectivity means something much bigger than that. And that's how we're going to survive.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06:47

Mhm. That was so wonderful. Thank you both for that. I get asked these questions so often, and I feel like -- I feel bad, because any one person's answer to sort of like, you know, how can I create relationships and structures based on actual interdependence? How do I sort of learn to trust people? How do I build things in the face of the ongoing normalization of death? Like, I feel ill-equipped to answer the question, mostly because I don't think there's one answer to it. And I feel like people are often coming to me looking for like, what is the one way out? And I feel bad being like, well, there are millions of -- you know, like we have to try everything, right. Because I know, in some sense, it's kind of an unsatisfying thing to hear, because what you really want is just to not feel so fucking alone.

Mariame Kaba 1:07:42

Yeah, yeah. Can I also say that the -- I hear you on that, and I also hear about the unsatisfying answer part. Most answers are unsatisfying to somebody. But I do want to say the answers are also, you just do it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:08:00

Yeah. Yeah.

Mariame Kaba 1:08:01

And again, deeply unsatisfying. But that's the response, is you just do it. Because every single one of us in the world knows that most of what we have created in the world, we just did it, we did it with other people, one other person be found. Like, I think there's also this sense that everybody has a -- we have a warped sense of what scale looks like, I think, which is that everybody thinks things -- many people think we have to do a lot of very large, big things in order to make a difference, in order for it to matter. And my response is the complete opposite of that. And I know a lot of people disagree with me on this and have -- you know, friends of mine and comrades of mine disagree on this, but I will go to the mattresses, to my death saying this - I think doing a lot of small things is a good thing. I think doing a lot of things that you pull -- making things with your friends, one other person, builds something for the two of you, which is something that you put out into the world, which other people will benefit from too. So you don't have to think on the largest possible scale of everything in order to take a step towards doing something different and doing something that allows you to feel like you are in the process of taking care of yourself. I mean, I'm sure many of your listeners have listened to or have read adrienne maree brown's book, Emergent Strategy. And in that book, you know, adrienne points out things that have been echoed for so many years by so many other practitioners and organizers, which is that how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. And to me, this is a major truth because if you internalize that as truth, then what you end up doing is trying to make sure that you are at the small scale, the way that you hope you will be at the large one. So you can do a lot of work on yourself, and you can find just a couple of other people to work with too, so that you can build something that is outside of just yourself, that is with other people, that you're practicing creating these new social relations within the oppressive systems and structures that we have. That practice of creating new social relations is key to what we all talk about when we talk about prefigurative politics, right? So I think that -- I think that you should really be -- when you feel unsatisfied by an answer, that's not the end, that's the beginning. Because that should tell you that there's something that's gnawing at you, that's something that's there --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:48

Something you need to do, yeah.

Mariame Kaba 1:10:50

Something you actually -- an action you must take as a result of the unsatisfying nature of the response you got, you know? Seek that satisfaction, seek a way that you can figure out what you need to be able to do to be able to make it so that that tension that you're experiencing, because there might be information that doesn't quite sit well with you, is an opportunity to actually delve deeper, and not to stop the conversation from moving forward or stop your sense of exploration and discovery from going forward. So yeah, y'all, if I did not believe what we could win, I would not have spent the last, I don't even want to say the amount of years, that I've spent active in the world.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:11:32

What do you mean, you don't like wasting your time? [laughter]

Mariame Kaba 1:11:35

I mean, ask Kelly. I told Kelly that we were gonna win on reparations. Even my friend Joey mogul, who was the writer of the reparations ordinance, did not think we were gonna win.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:11:50

[laughing] Hell yeah.

Mariame Kaba 1:11:50

Okay? Joey will tell you that. I believed it. I was like, we are going to win, we are going to do this, right? And it's -- people -- it's not because I'm some sort of -- maybe I am delusional on some things, but it is not because I'm delusional about -- it's because I believe that if we come together and bring and create a force, and if we are able to demand things that people really want, and if we're able to fight together for it, and if we're able to put some things aside in order to do that, that we can win, we can transform our conditions, it is possible. So I just want people to like sit in the reality of that. And to figure out just small beginning steps of getting on -- getting in right relationship with each other, getting in right relationship with yourself, and figuring out what the right relationship is to the struggle, and then move. Take action. That's it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:43

Hell yeah. I mean, so well put. Kelly, is there anything you want to add and jump on? Otherwise, I have one final question I wanted to ask you both. And I don't want to take up too much time. I'm so grateful. This has been awesome. And I know people are gonna love it.

Kelly Hayes 1:12:58

Yeah, I would just add to that, to sort of add to what Mariame was saying about sometimes we start small, or sometimes our actions seem small, that a lot of big things that have happened would not have happened if somebody had not started small, right? If we look at the Chicago Teachers Union, and a lot of people are aware of the historic work that has happened with that union in the last decade or so. But how did that begin? It happened with a bunch of folks getting together and starting a reading group. That was the beginning of CORE. That was folks coming together and being like, look, we're up against some austerity, this stuff that's happened with the banks is wild, we need to get our heads around this. And so they read together. And from that reading, came planning and visioning. And from that came a group of folks with more radical politics taking over the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union. And that has changed the trajectory of a lot of things. And in my own experience with my collective, you know, we're talking about a handful of Black and Native folk coming together in 2015 and feeling like there needs to be more, there needs to be more direct action, sort of tactical education at the local level. We need something here that helps equip people the way that folks get -- at that time, it seemed like folks were only learning certain things if they were able to go to these elite action camps, you know, that Greenpeace will maybe bring two people from your city a year to get to go to this camp and get exposed to all this knowledge. We're like, how do we create a little more of that here locally? It was a small group, kind of a small goal. And in the years after that, we've trained 1000s of people. And in the first year of the Trump administration, we trained like over 400 people that year alone, because when folks were eager to learn, we were ramping up our efforts. And I have no idea what the sort of rippling or cascading impacts of all of that is, but I trust that it's significant. I trust that. And I believe that because I think when you arm people up with new information, new tactical sort of visions, and the tools they need to try to express their creativity and struggle, that you're going to have an ongoing impact, those people are going to have an ongoing impact in the ways that they de-consolidate knowledge and build upon what they've taken away. So I think that there has to be some trust, you know, that we all have to start somewhere. And that if we keep building in a good way, that the good grows, you know? The good grows, that we build together.

Mariame Kaba 1:15:36

Absolutely. I love that, I love those examples. And you read off a listing earlier of some of the organizations that I've been involved in co-founding, Bea, at the beginning. And that is not even --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15:48

That's not even half, yeah.

Mariame Kaba 1:15:50

You know, and there are more that aren't on my bio, okay. So over the many years that I've been doing work and helping to co-found and build organization and build containers for collective action, and right now, I have just launched with some comrades, a small little formation called libraries -- we're calling it For the People: A Leftist Library Project. And people can get some information about that project and what our goal is -- we just launched a couple of months ago, what our goal is, is to get leftists excited to be involved in defending public libraries. And to do that, we want folks to run for their local library boards. We want folks to join their local Friend of the Library's project. Talk to me in five years. Let's hope that within five years, we will see 1000s of leftists on all these kinds of boards, on all these kinds of -- defending public libraries, publicly, vocally, loudly from a left pol, right. Now, do I know that we're going to make that kind of a difference? No, I don't. But do I believe? Do I believe that it makes a difference to have a container for collective action that would help us get closer to that goal? Yes, I absolutely do. So in the midst of everything else I have to do, yes, I have started with other people, a new container for collective action that is decentralized, that has no money behind it, that -- you know, but you take the chance, you move forward. I'm not going to sit around scrolling and yelling about the right wing taking over library boards and changing books and banning books and sit around and constantly just complain about it, like there's nothing we can be doing about it. Come on now. Come on. There's so much you can be doing about it, you just have to decide to do it, you know? You have to decide to do it. And for some people, they don't have a container, they feel like they don't know where to start, I'm going to tell you, come on board to librariesforthepeople.org. And we give you a list of ways to start, right where you are, you don't have to leave your friggin house. And if you want to volunteer with us, we have a huge data project that we're doing, and if you're somebody who can't leave your home to be out in the streets fighting, you can join us with the data project and do some online research and contribute that way. There are multiple ways and points of entry for people to do stuff in this community. You just have to choose action, you have to choose to do something. So this is what we are saying in this book, we are saying that the only thing you are responsible for doing is to take an action, an action of any sort in the direction towards more justice. Find a way to be able to use what you already got. And we see it constantly. People are like, oh, I'm an artist. Well, you're an artist? You're a perfect person to be doing some shit, you know? We need some art, we need some -- you know, Just Seeds, this is exactly what they do, and making revolution irresistible to all of us, you know? Well, I don't really know what I'm doing. You have so much you can be doing. So much. Stop moaning, okay? [laughter] Stop fucking moaning. We are not at that time. We are -- fascism is live worldwide. And if you ever wondered what people were doing in the 1920s, it's what you're doing right now. If you're doing nothing, then you are doing nothing under fascism's rise, reappearance, you know? So yeah, stop it. That's my response. Stop it. [laughing]

Kelly Hayes 1:19:36

It's not an interview until Mariame starts yelling [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:38

I love it.

Mariame Kaba 1:19:38

I mean, it really isn't. It really isn't.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:41

You're in good company.

Mariame Kaba 1:19:43

I have to -- I have to go on my rants, mini rants because I constantly am asked by people the same question -- well, what do we do? And then you offer them a list of things to do and they'll go, I don't really know what to do. When somebody says that, it's that they're not ready to move, you know? They know they should feel ready to move, but they're just not ready to move. And to me, that's okay. You got to acknowledge that you're not ready to take action. Don't -- but stop bothering everybody with saying what should I do, when people do tell you what to do and you choose not to do it, that is not an issue about not knowing what to do. That is an issue about not being ready, for whatever reason, to take that action and move forward.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20:22

Well, and I think there's something else that happens too, which is like the other half of that coin, which is the kind of gatekeeping that happens where people are told, the actions you're taking are not legitimate, you know?

Mariame Kaba 1:20:34

Yes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20:34

You know, your politics is not legitimate resistance, because you're throwing a brick from bed and not throwing a brick in the street, right. And I know there are a lot of folks in our server, who I adore dearly, who work so hard to help keep each other alive, who have tirelessly supported each other throughout the pandemic.

Mariame Kaba 1:20:54

Yes!

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20:54

And they're like, I just feel like I'm not doing enough. I'm like, you all are keeping each other alive, there are fucking 3,000 people in here, keeping each other alive. That's the most wild thing --

Mariame Kaba 1:21:06

Huge.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:21:06

I've ever experienced in my life, and I've been organizing since I was in high school, doing work with farmworkers in Florida. Like, you know, there's -- I've never been a part of anything as large as our Discord before, that's fucking overwhelming. And the amount of like direct reciprocal mutual care that goes on, whether that's helping each other get prescriptions, coaching each other for dealing with the doctor, I mean, these are things that are also care coordination at a kind of level that I've never seen before, either. And people are discounting the work that they're doing.

Mariame Kaba 1:21:38

That is ridiculous.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:21:39

As not valid.

Mariame Kaba 1:21:39

Do not discard that work. Do not discard that work. Survival -- oh my god, survival work is critical. If you're not here, then what's going on? There's nothing else that matters, you know? We're trying to live, we're trying to live, we're trying to live. And so you are helping other people, and more importantly, you are helping yourself to live, and you are putting into the world, you're pouring into the world in this way. I mean, to me, that is so important and so critical. And you know what, also, I think to myself on a regular basis, that care is not just how we treat each other. It's solidarity made flesh. And you are -- that is what you're doing. That's embodiment of that, that's hugely important. So I do hope that the people who listen and are part of your active community, see that work as activist work. It absolutely is activist work. And if you take that work seriously, then you're making -- you're enabling other people who are surviving and being alive to do other things. And then that also is a virtuous cycle that keeps growing and growing and growing our possibilities for power to be built over time. So I just think, you know, again, show up consistently, take action, do what you can, from where you are, stop doom scrolling. These are all the things that can make our lives better, in my opinion.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:23:05

Absolutely. I mean, I think at the end of the day, the only thing that we can do is do what we can with the time that we have, and do it together. And for the people that are coming after us. If there's anything that having a rare disease with, you know, no hope of cure in my lifetime, or whatever, imposed on me at 19, was to one, get very comfortable with uncertainty, and learn to sit with that. But it was also like the most important lesson in teaching me that none of the experiences that I was going through in terms of medical neglect and abuse and the experimental treatment that we were trying and the fear that I had about venturing into experimentation with really powerful drugs and not a lot of evidence or science to say that I was going to be all right, you know, or that it was going to work or that I was going to see again, and I still can't see, you know, all of that medical trauma, on one hand, on the other hand, is making the path for the people who are walking behind me a little less bad. And that's at the end of the day, like as a patient, right, that's my job, as a --

Mariame Kaba 1:24:08

I love that. I love that, because it really is true about -- you know what, I'll just speak for myself here. I'm a chronically ill person. I have been since I was very, very young. And I have managed that in multiple kinds of different ways over time. I would never say that I'm glad I'm chronically ill. No, of course not. But I will always say that what that has taught me has been to live in the moment, in a way that I'm acutely aware of my -- of the importance of noticing things, of noticing things that will be about my health, of noticing how other people live in the world, and of noticing the bigger world trends and things that are happening. It made me discerning from a very young age around figuring out what was important for me, and what was not important for me. What are the things that I will take on? And what are the things I gotta friggin leave behind in order to survive and thrive in my life within the context that I live in? And, you know, I think the -- I never use disability language for myself, though I am a disabled person, if you look at it within a broader context. I understand that that -- there's been value, for me, in being able to navigate my world in a different kind of way that gives me perspective that other people may not have. And yes, yes. So in that way, I think about that on a regular basis, too. So yeah. You can cut that part out. But yeah, I just was responding to what you had to say, because it vibed -- I vibed with it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:25:53

Would you prefer us to cut it out? We're happy to, if you'd prefer to keep that private, too.

Mariame Kaba 1:25:58

I mean, I think people -- people mostly know some versions of it. So it's fine. We can keep it in, if it's useful.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:26:05

I think, I think some people are going to appreciate hearing that, to be honest, you know? I know there's a lot of folks who have been beating themselves up because they feel that what they're doing and the organizing they're doing, that it's not enough, because it's not at some sort of scale of DSA, or they haven't become ACT UP yet. And I keep telling them, you know, what you're doing is fabulous and wonderful. And you need to sort of trust yourselves and not be so hard on the work that you're doing. It's really important. But they know I know them, and they know I care for them, and I'm biased, right? So I think it would help to hear it from you, too.

Mariame Kaba 1:26:40

[laughing] Sure, sure. That's fine.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:26:44

From the bottom of my heart, thank you both for such a wonderful discussion, and also for such a wonderful book. As I said, this book is so full of really, really important stories that are just -- it's like, it's so clear it's just decades of knowledge and all of the relationships that you both have built through organizing and through doing so much wonderful work with the wonderful people that you draw inspiration from, who are your comrades, who you've moved through the world in solidarity with, and so I highly recommend, readers, go ahead -- readers -- listeners, go ahead, please check out the book. Very little has been spoiled for you, I promise. We also have a conversation coming up about Mariame's other book with Andrea Ritchie that she mentioned, No More Police, which is where that that story of the boys came from. So Andrea and I are gonna be getting together to talk about that book later this month. So stay tuned for that. But Kelly and Mariame, thank you both. This has been so wonderful. And I really appreciated getting to read the book, and even more getting to discuss it with you two.

Kelly Hayes 1:27:46

Thank you so much for having us.

Mariame Kaba 1:27:49

Thank you for having us. And Kelly, did I cut you off? Did you have something you wanted to say, that you want to put in here, based on what we were just talking about?

Kelly Hayes 1:27:56

Oh, I just wanted to name, in addition, you know, our -- survival work obviously is essential, because our lives are essential, like we're all essential. But it also makes the future possible, right? Survival work makes everything that comes of our lives possible. And, you know, in my 20s, when I was living in active addiction, and I was homeless at one time, there's so many things that I wouldn't have made it through, if not for collective survival work that people were doing, and that I've benefited from. And everything that's happening in my life now, all the work that's happened since, I mean, including this book, like it's made possible by the fact that people have cared for each other at times in my life when that was essential. And that is -- that is embedded in my belief system. It's embedded how I've learned to care for other people, and in how I internalize our responsibilities to one another. And so yeah, I just want folks to know, to never undervalue that work, both in the immediate sense of, you matter, we have to survive, we have to keep each other alive. And also in terms of, we make everything possible by keeping each other alive. We make everything else that will happen possible by doing that work, so it should never be discounted.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:29:15

That was beautiful, Kelly. I think that's actually the perfect place to leave us for today. I was gonna tell Artie, you can move that around before my outro, but I think that should really be our final thought.

Mariame Kaba 1:29:28

I agree.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:29:28

Mariame and Kelly, Thank you both so much for everything. Really appreciate it.

Mariame Kaba 1:29:31

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:29:32

Oh, it's been my pleasure. And again, listeners, if you'd like to pick up a copy of the book, it's called Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. It's out this week, May 16th, from Haymarket. There'll be a link in the episode description, as well as a bunch of other links for you to look out for things both Mariame and Kelly have mentioned in this conversation. I've read it three times already. It's great. We may do it -- we actually might do it in the Death Panel Discord Reading Group, with or right after our re-read of Liat Ben-Moshe's Decarcerating Disability, so it'll be really wonderful.

Mariame Kaba 1:30:06

Oh yay, I'm so excited. You're gonna be excited to know that Liat and I have worked together on a zine.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:30:13

[gasps]

Mariame Kaba 1:30:13

Imagine, that is coming out at the end of May.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:30:18

Oh my goodness, so exciting. I was just about to email her this week, so.

Mariame Kaba 1:30:22

Oh, good. Yes, yes, yes. So maybe some of your listeners will be interested. It'll be a free download, so I'll send you the link.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:30:30

Awesome. Please do. And listeners, as always, thank you so much for supporting our work. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism or request it from your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. Patrons, we'll catch you Monday in the patron feed. For everyone else, we will see you next Thursday in the main feed. And as always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)