“This system was designed to do exactly what it is doing and has been doing: concentrating wealth and facilitating racial capitalism and colonialism and extraction,” says author and activist Dean Spade. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Spade and host Kelly Hayes discuss some common traps that activists fall into when discussing repression, and how we can strengthen our practice of solidarity.
Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about common mistakes that many of us make in the course of our solidarity work. We will be hearing from Dean Spade, who is an author, organizer and professor at the Seattle University School of Law. Dean is a longtime friend of the show, and I am constantly recommending his book Mutual Aid to young people these days, because it is an essential, practical guide for people who want to organize for collective survival. Today, we’re going to talk about a new resource that Dean co-created called “Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity When Responding to Political Repression.” This resource explores some common traps that people of conscience can fall into when expressing solidarity with victims of political repression, and talks about how we might avoid those traps. I am so grateful for this resource. Amid fascistic repression against Stop Cop City protesters and Palestine solidarity activists, it’s easy to exceptionalize repression in ways that actually redeem the carceral system, or to inadvertently reinforce divisions between supposedly “good” and “bad” protesters. Sometimes, in an effort to defend one group of people, we can accidentally harm another. Given what we’re up against, improving our practice of solidarity should be a high priority right now. As Dean recently wrote in Truthout:
The stakes are high, and will only get higher as the crises we face become more catastrophic while our opponents further criminalize our resistance strategies. Now is a time to bring greater rigor to our practices of solidarity.
So, today, we are going to talk about how we can show up for each other in ways that are bold and liberatory, rather than reinforcing the status quo and leaving people behind.
If you appreciate this episode, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
[musical interlude]
KH: Dean Spade, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Dean Spade: Thank you.
KH: How are you doing today?
DS: I feel like my brain is spread thin or my attention is too many places, even more than our world usually makes me feel. It’s just bananas these days. You know?
KH: I absolutely feel the same, and I really appreciate you being here with us amid all of the chaos. It means a lot.
DS: I’m very glad to be here.
KH: Can you introduce yourself and tell folks a bit about your work?
DS: I’m Dean Spade. I use he/him pronouns. I am Seattle-based. And for the last 25 years I’ve been involved in a variety of things related to queer, trans liberation, and prison abolition, and Palestine solidarity work. And my day job is that I teach at a law school. And most of my time is spent in community collaborative projects of various kinds.
KH: Can you tell us a bit about this new resource, “Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity When Responding to Political Repression?” How and why was this document made? And why did the moment we’re in necessitate its creation?
DS: This tool, this resource emerged from conversations that happened that kind of go back to last year when the indictment came down of 61 Forest Defenders involved in the Stop Cop City campaign defending the Atlanta forest from this new big police training facility, which has been a very visible site fight. I think compared to a lot of other ones we have in the U.S., it’s become like a real matter of concern for people all around the world actually. And there’s been just a really multifaceted, incredible campaign happening there to try to stop this facility. And the indictment was just like this wild document where it’s like this whole narrative about what anarchists are and what mutual aid is.
All these charges that frame these people as a criminal conspiracy, or doing things like buying a generator to use at an event, or posting things on the internet, or sleeping in the forest. There’s a huge range of activities people are engaged in related to this campaign, and making it into a criminal conspiracy using RICO Law. So it was a … “wow” moment of political repression. Obviously, nothing we haven’t seen before in the history of the United States, and yet definitely a terrible moment in which people had to really scramble to get all these people the right kinds of legal defense, and a lot of money had to be raised. And a lot of people are commenting on this as a very kind of terrifying instance of repression. And one of the things that I was seeing a lot then was kind of like some classic limiting talking points that tend to happen when political repression like this emerges.
And I saw some of them coming even from people who I really love, who are like other people part of the abolition movement, and who I really trust their analysis. And I was just like, “Ah, it’s so hard.” One of the things that happens, and it happened to me as somebody like, while I’m reading the indictment, I’m sitting there having two kinds of thoughts. On the one hand, I’m having all the thoughts of each thing that’s ridiculous that’s being said in the indictment where it’s like, “Well, that’s not a thing that can be said even inside the logic of the law.” And then, I’m having my other set of thoughts that are like this whole entire thing is completely illegitimate as is the entire criminal punishment system. So I’m of two minds, like a lawyer brain going, and I’ve also got Dean’s actual ethics brain going.
And what I saw happening a lot was people commenting, especially lawyers and law professors, but also sometimes it just any activist, or media person, or whatever saying these kind of inside talking points that legitimize the system itself in the way they’re talking about it, or pretend that the legal system is this fair neutral thing, and that this is this one instance where it’s not happening. And I was really concerned, seeing that. I feel like it really undermines solidarity with other people who are targeted by the criminal system. It also sometimes divides… It’ll be a focus on, “This person was just flyering. How could they possibly put in this criminal conspiracy? They didn’t throw a Molotov cocktail, but someone else did,” or whatever, you know? So there’s a kind of like dividing people up and making it seem as though some people deserve criminalization and others don’t. The people I was reading, a lot of them people I love. I’m like, “I don’t think they mean to be saying things that have those implications.
And so, I started talking to some people I knew about it, including some beloved friends at Community Justice Exchange. And I also confronted a couple of people I knew who had written things where I’m like, “I really adore you. And we really agree on things. And I was really surprised to see you using these talking points.” Some of us ended up in a conversation where we decided to collaborate together on a tool about it. And one thing that’s really cool about it was that some people who I addressed about things I was concerned about and what they wrote were really non-defensive. And you know what? [Their response was] “Wow, you’re right. I hadn’t thought about it that way.” It is really complicated to try to not talk with that lawyer hat on when you’re talking to a broader audience, and not in a courtroom, and there’s these implications to those talking points.
So anyway, we ended up making this tool where we just kind of were like, “What are five questions that we should all ask ourselves when we are commenting on moments of political repression to make sure that we’re not reifying a bunch of bad ideas that are just in the air and in the water in our society so thoroughly that they can come out of our mouths?” And they can especially come out of our mouths because we’ve been told those ideas are legitimizing, and that those saying those things will make our beloved people who are facing repression seem like what they did is okay or that it’s legitimate inside that system. But we end up actually throwing some people under the bus or pretending that the system is fair, or could be fair, or was fair except for this one thing it did. So the tool is just very, very basic. It offers these five questions, and offers examples about them, and it’s just really hoping to try to get people to think twice before saying some of these things.
KH: It’s so heartening to hear you talk about conversations where people are being challenged about their words and actions, from a place of love, and having those conversations lead to constructive collaborations. I feel like that, all by itself, is such an important lesson for folks. I could stay on that, honestly, but let’s go ahead and dig into the questions this document raises, because they’re so important. The first question reads, “Does this argument erase or ignore the ongoing violence of the U.S. colonial legal system or legitimize that system?” So, how do activists who are defending one another in the face of repression fall into this trap and how can we avoid it?
DS: Yeah, it’s so common and so difficult. So I think one of the main ways that people do this is what I was just saying, by talking about repression as exceptional. So saying things like, “This is not what our justice system looks like.” Or, “This is a threat to our democracy.” As if our justice system and democracy are these things that usually work really well except for in this outrageous instance. And this erases a whole history of political repression of social movements that is thorough and happening all the time now and has been happening for hundreds of years to anybody who’s resisting.
It has this patriotism in it, as if this system was designed to work… This system was actually designed to do exactly what it is doing and has been doing: concentrating wealth and facilitating racial capitalism and colonialism and extraction. These talking points often hang on free speech and freedom of assembly. And people will be like, “This is a terrible instance in which our rights to free speech and free assembly are being undermined.” And sometimes the way that people talk about that makes it sound as if they believe that those things are real. You know?
And I feel like one of the things we need to notice that our movements have really made clear is that those sort of fake universal rights have never been real. It’s a rationalization for a big scheme to colonize this land, and exploit people, and make people maximally exploitable for the long term, which is still going on, right? So the idea that we kind of invest in the narrative that those rights are universal, except for in this instance they weren’t applied. It feels really out of step with any real solidarity with all the people who have been the targets of these brutal systems and have never had those rights for all of time.
And it feels like it does this kind of legitimizing of a legal system that erases like what, at this point, I think we really know it actually is. And I think people do it because you want to say, “Hey, don’t do this to my people.” I get that. But I think it has a lot of costs to say it in that way. And there’s lots of other ways to say, like, it’s not okay to criminalize people for doing this really important campaign in their community to stop a jail from being built, or to Stop Cop City, or whatever it is our beloveds are doing.
It’s not the only way to get there. We don’t need to actually participate in the fictions of legitimacy of the U.S. legal system or … the fake story about how it’s like this wonderful unique democracy in the world that is the justification for U.S. and military imperialism. We just don’t actually need to say those things to say that the repression is unjust, and that we oppose it, and that we want to stand up against it, and that we want to support people experiencing it, and whatever else we want to say.
KH: Another question from the document that was incredibly relevant to my own work is, “Does this statement participate in dividing people engaged in resistance into ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ or ‘violent’ or ‘nonviolent,’ thereby legitimizing criminalization of people using bolder tactics?”
We talk about this all the time in direct action trainings: how the government and the media are constantly trying to divide us into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent.’ And that these categories are actually about legitimizing harm and marking protesters for violence. Can you talk about that process and how well-meaning people can play into it?
DS: Yeah. I mean, this is so rough, so common. And really, there’s been critiques of this forever, right? This is so heavily and thoroughly critiqued by so many different people in our movements, and yet it’s still so common. I mean, one of the ways I see this happen the most is that people just throw the word “peaceful” in when describing any protest, with the idea that that will make it legitimate. And by doing that, participate in a story that, if this is peaceful or nonviolent, then therefore the cops shouldn’t come and hurt people. And that means that if the cops think it’s not peaceful or not nonviolent, then they can.
It legitimizes the idea that parts of our movement or certain actions or tactics are legitimately criminalizable, or that people should be subjected to the brutal violence of the police. And we never want to say that. And I think that is just implied by this wild overuse of the word “peaceful.” And we have to be real that it’s the cops and the prosecutors who decide what counts as peaceful or violent or nonviolent. They’re the ones who turn up people’s charges and target that at certain people. That’s what the state is, right? It’s a monopoly on violence. It decides. It tells us who’s violent and who’s not violent. And it says cops aren’t violent, and it says we are.
And so [the state] says, I pushed over a trash can and now I’m a violent, non-peaceful protester. Or the whole range, right? And it says which kinds of violence matter, and which kinds of death matter, and which kind don’t. And we reject that. And so, the problem with the kind of overuse of the term “peaceful” as a way to try to legitimize our protests or say that therefore, the cops shouldn’t have come that time, is that it suggests that there is any legitimacy to their violence and that they get to determine our violence. Actually, one of my collaborators on this from Community Justice Exchange sent me an article that I thought was really interesting about a recent case. The article had just come out in June.
A recent case about Ron DeSantis championing this law against........