Critical conversation 1

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Date: September 15, 7pm EST

Speakers: Mariame Kaba and Moni Cosby in conversation with April Harris, Amber Kim, and Tank Sherrill

Session 1: Relationships

Session 2: Community Care

This unit is about intersectionality, a concept coined by the Black feminist intellectual Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. Laid out in an essay titled, “Demarginalizing the Intersection,” Crenshaw argued that for many people of color, it is the intersection of multiple forms of power and inequality that determine their experiences, opportunities, and life chances. Crenshaw sought to use the term to challenge frameworks of oppression that focus on a single determinative cause, like racism, as the source of subordination and inequality. Against this “single-issue” perspective on how systems of power like white supremacy and racism operate, Crenshaw argued that for many people framing the violence and injustices they experience requires that we examine the intersection of multiple systems of domination and power.  For example, many Black women experience both racism and misogyny in the workplace as they confront white supremacy, just as the working lives of many undocumented Latinx immigrant workers in the United States is shaped by the intersection of racism and citizenship discrimination. Further still, the violences and social divisions that Black and immigrant trans women confront often occur at the “intersection” of racism, misogyny, transphobia. 

As Crenshaw argued for these members of the community, a single-issue framework like racism at the workplace to describe their social experiences or to mount a defense of their lives only denies their intersectional reality. Finally, addressing the antiracist and Black freedom movements in particular, Crenshaw argued that when we advance single-issue frameworks in our movements for liberation-- such as when we restrict our understanding of racism to the experiences of men of color-- we implicitly or inadvertently create strategies that better the social conditions of some in our communities, while maintaining or worsening the marginalization of those in a community who daily face intersectional social oppressions. For Crenshaw, a major aspect of intersectionality is taking the time in our thinking and activism to analyze the frameworks we are using to understand power. Intersectionality teaches us that before we can address and remediate intersectional oppression, we must learn how our own frameworks and analyses of power have limited our understanding of intersectional oppressions. Without learning how our own thinking created intersectional blindspots, we remain in danger of creating ideas and institutions that continue to marginalize.

As we conceptualized our 2021 curriculum, we intentionally started with this section on intersectionality to foster a sense of group intimacy and vulnerability. In order for us to build institutions that truly address the harm we’ve experienced, and prevent harm from happening in the future, we have to trust each other. The Intersectionality section has two subsections: Relationships and Community Care. The first subsection, Relationships, focuses on the frameworks we often use in everyday life to identify ourselves and those around us. The second subsection, Community Care, focuses on the ways that institutions built under racial capitalism fail to meet our needs, and the ways that we can build ideas and institutions that are truly life-giving, connective, and sustaining.

Critical Conversation 2

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Date: October 21, 7pm EST

Speakers: J.T. Roane and BP (Fight Toxic Prisons) in conversation with incarcerated comrades

Session 3: Land

Session 4: Climate Justice

​​If, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition is “life in rehearsal,” then “the stage itself must tell a story.” The stage for our Study and Struggle is the land. Who decides whether land is occupied by fruit trees or nuclear waste? Shade trees or enslaved labor? Free housing or prisons? In the United States, this depends on who owns the land. European colonization brought concepts of capitalism and private property. In Mississippi, settlers dispossessed and displaced Indigenous peoples, most of whom did not have privatized relationships to the land. Settlers surveyed and divided fields, forests, and lakes for sale. Until the abolition of chattel slavery, property owners built cotton plantations that depended on the unfree labor of peoples of African descent. After the Civil War, most Black Mississippians worked as tenant farmers and sharecroppers for white landowners. Tenants could grow small gardens to eat and sell fresh food. But racial capitalism meant the strict surveillance of how renters used the land. A tenant who planted vegetables—instead of cotton—might be evicted by their landlord. A family who tried to raise their own livestock—as Fannie Lou Hamer’s did—might find their cows poisoned. Those who resisted this system were subjected to state and extralegal violence. Police frequently used vagrancy laws to arrest those they considered underemployed, turning them over to white landowners or putting them to work in the profitable and deadly replacement to chattel slavery: the convict labor system. This “slavery by another name” was eventually replaced by the penal farm, shifting profits from private landowners to the state. One of the enduring legacies of these transformations is Mississippi State Prison, known as Parchman Farm.

Parchman encompasses 20,000 acres of the Mississippi Delta on land once occupied by the Choctaw people. It is a site of enduring and unspeakable violence. The land has borne witness to centuries of gendered racial terror and unfree labor. This human suffering wrought by Parchman’s continued existence is inextricable from the harm and environmental degradation to the human and nonhuman world that surrounds it. The once-fertile farmland in the Delta floodplain, that made desirable the plantation which preceded the prison, is permeated with toxins leached from the prison’s water system. These toxins flow into the nearby tributary of rivers surrounding Mound Bayou, one of the first autonomous, all-Black settlements of the post-Reconstruction period. These environmental conditions, which poison people inside the prison and the habitat and people surrounding it, are not atypical. The communities disproportionately impacted by prison conditions often are those whose conditions are also made worse by prisons.

In almost every state, prisons are built on or near toxic sites, producing and accelerating life-destroying conditions for both humans and nonhumans. SCI-Fayette in Pennsylvania sits 500 feet from a 500 acre coal ash dump site and former coal processing waste site. People incarcerated there have reported chronic sore throats, thyroid disorders, cancer, shortness of breath headaches, sores, cysts, tumors, and vision problems. Residents in the nearby town of LaBelle, PA, which is predominantly Black, have reported similar symptoms. Prisons destroy life, human and non-human. For humans to thrive, and earth to survive, they must be abolished. This is why abolition must be green.

Critical Conversation 3

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Date: November 9, 7pm EST

Speakers: Stevie Wilson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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Session 5: Class

Session 6: Revolution

This “Red” unit highlights histories of radicalism, primarily those of communist and anarchist perspectives. Although many have heard these words, it is more likely that we have heard them defined by their opponents than advocates. Assata Shakur described the first time she was forced to reckon with this. To impress her peers, she threw around terms like “democracy,” “communism,” and “freedom,” only to find that she could only regurgitate what she heard on television or in passing. The only language she had to describe communism was provided to her from people invested in its failure. That embarrassing event taught her that “only a fool lets their enemies tell them who their enemies are.” This unit is an effort to demystify some of what these concepts mean and give examples as to why they have been so important to revolutionaries and organizers. We encourage readers to try to challenge some of these dominant conceptions of communism and anarchism, and leverage the lessons learned by radicals towards our present struggles.

Critical conversation 4

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Date: December 1, 7pm EST

Speakers: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Harsha Walia, and Jalil Muntaqim

Session 7: Nation

Session 8: State

Internationalism—the politics and practice of shared affinities beyond national boundaries—has long been a hallmark of radical movements. From enslaved people fighting their way out of bondage to indentured servants and immigrant workers fending off exploitation to Indigenous peoples fighting to retain land and resources, internationalists have long had to contend with capitalism as a global system. Yet the problems of colonialism and conquest, debt and extraction bond the world in unequal ways. Leftwing movements have recognized the nation-state as an artificial boundary designed to promote antagonism. Internationalism is the practice of solidarity on a shared planet. It is a recognition of the global nature of oppression and the possibility of transformation in an unequal world. Internationalism recognizes that even in a global system the intensity of domination and resistance varies over time and space. 

This unit addresses two concepts central to internationalism: Nation and State. As concepts, they are related. Both concepts name ways of creating unity, enforcing division, and expressing power. They might even be used together: “nation-state.” Yet, we seek to explore the productive tension between these two terms in defining what is at stake in an INTERNATIONAL orientation.

Nation can refer to a country, as well as the people who reside there. It can reference ethnic groups and other forms of social difference as well as nationalist projects concerned with determining who allegedly does and does not belong. Nationalism takes root through the distinct visions political constituencies create for themselves. These readings highlight Black and Indigenous nationalisms that have rejected the racism of US nationalism in favor of international solidarity.

State, meanwhile, represents institutions of governance: members of security forces as well as elected officials, and representatives from federal agencies all embody “the state.” Through terms like “state violence,” we seek to identify how forms of governance are used to detain, injure, and exploit people. These readings explore the state’s ability to make war and incarcerate, and the transnational coalitions that people form in the effort to defend themselves against state violence.

This study guide asks how we can use “nation” and “state” to clarify the stakes of governance, to identify forms of affinity and antagonism, and to help foster critical awareness about internationalism as an intellectual and political project.