Feed Drop: Build Through Belonging, with Essie Justice Group

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Cayden Mak. On this show, we’re building a roadmap with a movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.

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Find us this week we’ve got a very special episode featuring a conversation hosted last month by our friends at SD Justice Group in Oakland. SC Justice Group is the nation’s leading organization, creating a constituency of women with incarcerated loved ones, taking on the rampant injustices created by mass incarceration.

They’re an amazing organization. You can find a link to their website in the show notes. This intimate conversation was led by attorney and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Michelle Alexander. She guides Maurice Mitchell, who’s the National Director of Working Families Party, and Gina Clayton Johnson, the founder and executive director of Essie Justice Project, through a deep discussion on criminalization, climate change and organizing black and brown working class communities in this political moment, they sat down on February 27th to talk about what they’re learning about care and loss in the polycrisis and how we can build deeper belonging.

And more powerful movements.

[00:01:54] Michelle Alexander: I am just thrilled to be here tonight and it’s exciting to see faces that I recognize. I used to live in Oakland and work in the Bay and it just fills my heart to come home in a way. And there’s just really nowhere else I would want to be at this moment in time, this political moment in time, then here at Essie a place that is deeply committed to the beauty, value and power of those who have been pushed to the margins.

I’m a proud board member of Essie really because I believe so strongly in its mission, and I’m convinced that deep. Organizing work that is designed to end isolation and build community. And that’s rooted in compassion and courage is really our best hope, not just for ending mass incarceration, but really the best hope for our democracy and our world.

It’s no secret that we’re living in a pivotal moment in history, a time when really the future of humanity really hangs in the balance. We take one look at our news free and, crises confront us daily. The insidious rise of white nationalism, threats to our democracy, accelerating climate change.

Staggering inequality, even the specter of world War and more. And I know that many of us in this room and beyond often awake, feeling confused anxious and desperate for answers and directions in this, chaotic landscape. But I think we also know that answers to these questions can’t be reached alone, that we need each other.

And that figuring out the meaning of justice and our direction means that we have to wrestle together with big questions facing us in these times. And that we need to think globally and nationally and politically, but we also need to think close to home about our neighbors, our communities, our families, and really what it means for us.

As individuals, as people to be alive in these times. Fortunately tonight we’ve got two amazing people who are gonna help us face some of these questions, at least wrestle with some of these questions. People who have profound wisdom and experience and who have committed their lives to reimagining what justice means, what community means, what democracy means.

Both of them are brilliant visionaries and organizers, people who have been proving through their own work and in their own lives again and again, that ordinary people have the power to change the world. Gina Clayton is one of my personal sheroes. I met her. Many years ago when SE Justice Group was in its infancy, and I was just blown away by her brilliance, passion, and determination to ensure that women with incarcerated loved ones receive the attention and support that they deserve.

As you all know, Gina is the founder and executive director of this amazing organization, and Essie is named after her great grandmother Essie Bailey. And it’s really because of Gina and her vision and determination and the amazing work of the Sie justice group staff that now women who were once invisible in conversations about mass incarceration are finally beginning to be heard and beginning to receive the support that they deserve.

One in four women. In the United States have an incarcerated loved one, including about one in two black women. And until recently, until Essie there’ve been little attention paid to their experiences in this era of mass incarceration. And Gina has managed to do what many thought was impossible and to build an organization and a movement rooted in the power and love of women who have loved ones behind bars.

And I think that is exactly the kind of vision and courage and determination we all need to learn from Now. Okay. And then Maurice Mitchell who is also joining us in conversation. He is someone I have wanted to meet for many years, and so I was so excited that this event gave me the opportunity to do that.

I’ve been admiring him and cheering him and his work for a distance for a long time. He’s a nationally recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the movement for Black lives. And he is been an organizer since his student days. He was born and raised in New York and began organizing as a teenager and college student, and he basically just never stopped.

He worked as an organizer for the Long Island Progressive Coalition organizing Director for Citizen Action of New York, director of the New York State Civic Engagement. Table. And then after the Ferguson uprisings began, he relocated to Ferguson to support organizations there on the ground. Ultimately co-founding Blackbird and serving as a key organizer and movement for Black Lives.

In 2018, he took the helm of the Working Families Party as national director where he is currently serving, applying his passion and experience to building a political home for multiracial and working class folks. So I wanna welcome both of them to the stage and to this dialogue.

So I wanna begin this conversation really by getting personal, it’s often said almost a cliche that the personal is political. But in these times, I think it’s important for us not just to skip over the ways in which these crises, especially the climate crisis and the threats toward our democracy are impacting us personally and our families and how our own personal experiences inform our politics and really how we are meeting this moment in our lives.

And Gina, I wonder if you would begin just by sharing a little bit about what’s been going on for you. You have been directly impacted by the LA wildfires, you and your family, and I wonder if you can just. Begin there by sharing what’s on your heart and mind in this moment, given what you personally are going through.

As our nation is certainly going through something too. 

[00:09:39] Gina Clayton-Johnson: Many people here know that on January 8th, my house burned down in the Eaton fire. Also on that same day my parents’ house burnt down. They were living there for 40 years. It was my childhood home. My kids’ school burnt down. We left that the next day for Atlanta where I have an aunt and uncle and a cousin.

They took us in and we’ve really been there almost ever since until recently. And came, we came back to LA and we’re back in LA now. And I think one of the things that I am. Holding is, there’s so much. But Altadena was a place that grew me up, right? It was my home my, my home right now, but also my childhood was all there.

All of my memories. Everything that I associate with family and community and coming back to a place where I’m like, this is where I belong, right? The concept of belonging, that was what El Sino was to me. To be able to walk to a park that’s called Charles White Park, that’s a stone throws away from where Octavia Butler’s resting place is to be able to send my kids to a school where the same black teacher is there who taught my brother when he was four, who is now 40, right?

There is a richness and a depth inside of that place that I have had as my little secret about what anchors me in my work and in my world. And it’s been burnt down. It’s just not there in anymore. And I think one of the things that I feel a desire to express is it’s not at all about not having stuff anymore.

It’s like the quality of the things and what they were designed for and to be in my life, in my family’s life. It’s about that, like that my great-grandmother’s mother, whose picture you’ll see right there her hands. She, my great grandmother was born on a sharecropping farm, and that was the farm that she lived on and spent her life.

Cassie White was her name, and she stitched her love and her passion into these little cloths. And they were like hand knit, hard to describe, little almost like dolls, clothing that she made where it was her art. And I had them on a wall with her picture they were given to me by my great-grandmother.

The work of her hands gone. And there’s so many of those things. And then when you zoom out and know that this was a black community, that there were so many more of those things. The things that we used to tell our children about who we are, who we came from, why we can do it every day, like they were the devices.

Through which we remember ourselves and our purpose purposes. And that was what was burned. I received a phone call that my grandmother was dying and Esys daughter. And you book a flight, you get the kids in the car, you pack up what you have and you go, and we went and on Thursday night, took a flight.

Friday morning, 9:00 AM at the St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. And I’m, I’m doing this, that thing, that you do you’re, I see her sitting in the bed and the curtain is drawn, it’s dark, it’s the morning. So I go and I open the curtain and I see that her hair is pushed up against the back of the bed and I, use my hands to.

Caress it down and I take her face and her cheeks and my palms and I give her a kiss and I hold her and I cut her French toast. And I ask myself, is this piece too big or is this too small? Is this how much she, like I do all of those things. And I think to myself later I know how to do this because of the way that I have been cared for, because of the examples and the reps that I have seen Matriarchs mostly, but all kinds of people in my life and in our base at se demonstrate.

And I understand something about care, that it is like that it is an expertise that. A younger version of myself would’ve walked in the hospital and say, I can’t touch her at this. She’s in the hospital. A doctor probably should. I don’t wanna mess up the wires, or oh, I would’ve felt small in that place.

But because I had been taught and brought up by women with incarcerated loved ones and formally incarcerated women, and the people in my family and caretakers who have been not a, not consenting to this, but made to do this in our world and in our families, and do it right out of love and all those things, I don’t wanna make it seem like, it’s not like we’re, but it’s that’s why I know how to do that.

It’s an expertise, but it’s also inherent in every one of us. I, it feels very clear to me that what is one of the things that does not work about the way that society is? Constructed is that we have, put gender categories on that expertise. We have decided that inside of capitalism, it does not, is not amount to a certain value.

And so the certain people are made small and discouraged from it, and other people are doing it and not compensated or seen inside of it. And,

and that’s gonna get us in a lot of trouble in the next season of whatever we are in right now, because we’re looking at the loss of what healthcare altogether. We’re looking at the loss of so many of the ways in which government has not cared for, these structures aren’t caring, doing the that caring work that I just described, but there were supports and there were things, if my grandmother didn’t have healthcare, she would be at my Uncle Jerome’s house and we would all be doing shifts, right?

What would it look like? What would we be doing? And how many people need to start expanding out into that expertise and into the ness of all of our abilities to do that work? I know this because in the last month I have been the recipient of such an incredible amount, and I’m like looking at the people in this room because it is so many of you who have taken care of me and my family in this moment, and I have stood and watched and learned in awe of what it is that your expertise is.

And I think that it is, your expertise in caretaking is as essential to our political future as it has been to my ability to get out of bed every day right now. And what’s real is that that is an expertise. There’s an awkwardness sometimes and oh gosh, what do I say? How do I text? How do I, can I just go and touch this person’s hair and fix it for them?

Can I, and what we have to get past that. We have to get past that. I’m too awkward for this. Or someone else has that gift. Oh, is her ministry? That’s just her ministry. No, that’s her ministry. ’cause you ain’t doing it right. And I, and so I just feel, so grateful for the examples that I have been witness to of people who know to be inside of their inherent purpose as caretakers.

Which is the thing that actually just links all of us no matter where you from, no matter who your people were. That is something we all were designed for as people are 

[00:18:12] Michelle Alexander: panicking in this moment because it seems like the world is ending, how important it is to remember that people’s worlds have been ending again and again.

And certainly it’s true on a larger scale if you think of what indigenous people have lived through in this country. But it also happens on a seemingly smaller scale as people lose their loved ones to prisons as people lose their own lives in prison and on the street. And that learning how to care for one another in the midst of our catastrophes is like the most essential work that any of us can be doing.

In these times and all the time as you put it. So thank you so much for sharing that. And Reese, I know that you and your family has also been impacted by the climate crisis and the profound ways. And I wonder if you might just share with us as well, 

[00:19:15] Maurice Mitchell: the storm destroyed everything that, everything.

My car, my clothes, my, my little toys. My, my little, the little like the, my little notes to my little friends from elementary school, my little report cards. I had this essay that I wrote, so I’ve been obsessive with. Social movements since I was a, since I could remember.

And I had this essay from fifth grade that I’m sure my, my teacher was like, this child is insane. Because it was like, it was really intense. It was like an intense political like thing, and all of that in an instant was gone. And I was homeless and I was li sleeping on my brother’s floor and I had, the clothes on my back and enough clothes for two days.

’cause that’s how long I thought I would be gone. And I witnessed my parents age so rapidly because of the stress and, because of my parents’. I probable journey. They are very resilient people. And there’s a way that epigenetically like that resilience is like, man it could come in handy, especially moments like that.

We romanticize the resilience in ways that aren’t, it’s like I don’t want black children to be resilient. I want black children to be free, I don’t want our people to rely on our resilience. Yeah. There’s just a way that we are able to, in a matter of fact way, metabolize oppression, metabolize tragedy, metabolize disaster, and just move on and do what you have to do because we have to do what we have to do.

That’s right. And and we don’t always assess. The cost and the downside of operating like that. And the thing that I’ve learned, I learned a lot from that. Like also, I’m a full on workaholic, and so I didn’t stop working, I didn’t my work was uninterrupted. I was just like, all right, let me find some free wifi and continue to work.

And it was during an election season and there’s many things I learned in that moment. One of the things is that I was forced into community in very deep ways. ’cause I just, I needed underwear, I needed food. I needed a place to stay. And so I, I was forced into surrender in ways that was has, it has continued to be really profound for me because these are ideas and concepts that abstractly, I think I would as.

I would, in an abstract way, say, yeah, of course community is powerful and important and vital and essential. I wouldn’t disagree. I would probably agree, maybe in a room somewhere with, you, I would to that, but I felt it, I embodied it. I surrendered to that.

Yeah. And I realized at the end of the day, because people were lost during Sandy, people lost their lives. They lost their stuff. I realized that have continued to realize like the value, the central value and power community because when you’re in a crisis, community is ultimately the bomb.

It’s ultimately the currency, it’s ultimately the bridge. And I don’t think it is, like simply a random artifact that neoliberalism relies on us to deny the fact that we are ultimately communal. I actually think that is like essential so that we’re uniquely prisoners of crisis when they happen so that crisis capitalism could do its thing.

And I witnessed that. I witnessed like the very best of us and the very worst of us in those moments. I witnessed how like none of no laws really matter because there are all these laws. I remember we were working on like improving the election laws in New York, which were horrendous at the time.

And then because of Superstorm Sandy, they were like, oh yeah, it turns out like, any of those things that you want could happen immediately. And I. You want to vote by mail? It’s fine with us. You want to I was like, oh, wow. These, laws, decorum rules, all the things that liberals hold so tightly to their illusions.

And in moments of crisis capitalism could take advantage of the illusory nature of these laws or our movements can. And that stuck with me and that later, I think in other moments was very useful. But the other thing is our movements. Our movements have to figure out what our posture is in crisis, because we don’t know when they’ll happen.

But under capitalism, we do know that there’ll always be crises. And so when we’re flatfooted during crises, it’s did we forget? And it’s our duty to be able to be in the posture day to day of building and building institutions like se day to day and in the moments of crisis, know how to pivot.

And we’re in a crisis moment right now, and I know many people are paralyzed. And I’ve seen this paralysis happen in, in different moments. I saw it in some ways in Ferguson where like the legacy civil rights organizations were like, all right, I guess we should meet in DC every day.

And we are right now, our very, albeit like bourgeois democracy is collapsing before our eyes, and we have like congressional leadership, saying all types of wild stuff like. It’s their government. What do you want us to do? Or so in that gap, those of us that understand the fact that yes, in crisis, it’s when it’s a time of monsters, it’s also actually an opportunity for those of us that that have vision to and also those of us that recognize the immutable and fundamental nature of community to fill the gap.

I was reminded, I was, I learned of that then, and I’ve been reminded of that ever since. And I think, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re experiencing all of these crises. The crisis of democracy. Democracy, these more and more intense weather events. These, this crisis of legitimacy of all of our institutions.

It’s not like these are crises that are happening in just disparate places. It’s a poly crisis, and the roots are actually the same roots which means that the solutions are the same solutions in some ways. And so I’m sitting with that in sitting with that memory and really grateful for you to, as you’re going through it to be here and to be in the, and, I don’t know if you suffer from the same workaholic affliction but I could identify with struggling to get up, but then also having a set of staff, people and members and a movement that you feel responsible for.

And I hope that you’re also allowing yourself to surrender. Even though you’re being called to lead and sometimes. One of the most powerful things our leaders can do is to show vulnerability in public. Yeah, public courage is powerful. And also being willing to be vulnerable in public is rare.

It’s courageous. Being able to not have all we need to disenroll ourselves from the hot take industrial complex, and just say, this shit is fucked up. I’m a human being. And November when Donald Trump won that election, and I’m speaking for myself as an electoral strategist, I allowed myself to be a person and I looked, to do my job, I often need to segregate.

Feelings of some of the darker feelings and put it in its place, put and put it in a box. I open that box up and I examine those feelings of self-doubt. Am I a good leader? Our strategy sound we lost, what did we do wrong? Did we lead the people into fascism? What could we have done differently?

So I, I paired into despair, I paired into loss. I paired it to self-doubt so that I could humbly and honestly arrive at a place of defiance and clarity today. But if you don’t allow yourself to examine those emotions truly and honestly, and in public. Claim, no easy victories tell no lies. 

[00:28:55] Gina Clayton-Johnson: But one of the things that I’ve seen and that I know is like the day after, because I, my neighbor was talking to me about this, the, or one or two days after our houses burned down, there was a tank on our street.

And

I think that there is no image that for me represents better that the fact that more and more climate disasters is, are gonna bring more, is gonna bring more and more carceral and punishment, and is gonna lean heavily on the prison industrial complex and all of its extensions to carry out. Disaster capitalism to carry out imperial.

Imperialist, fascism and more. And I, I know that Katrina taught us this. 

And there’s a, there’s an opportunity in to when these things happen, to advance a political agenda. And for some, that agenda includes like building up carceral infrastructure and punishing black and brown people, out of our economy and doing all kind, whatever, all of these things.

This is what I think we might end up seeing. And in fact, already are in Los Angeles. And we have fire seasons every year now. And, right before all of this. Happened last year. Essie sisters like took to the Altadena Pasadena streets and knocked on thousands of doors and had conversations about incarceration and a whole bunch of, political issues that were on our ballot.

And, little did we know that, that put us in a position to be able to make 500 calls to Aldeans within a matter of days to do wellness checks and to figure out what does this community need and how are, women with incarcerated loved ones and black and brown folks and working class folks.

Like, how are they doing? What is, what do their needs look like that are different than the Palestines folks, right? Not that all of us aren’t going through it, but like, how, how can we be there? I think that we have an opportunity to, your question about opportunities to actually stop more jails, more.

From being built more sheriffs and police funding, and that might sound a little wild right now in this climate. Like I know how that sounds, but the reason I’m saying that is that like we had the lar, we have the largest sheriff’s department in the country, and I have never felt more unsafe than the night that my house burned down in my community.

But every single day I have seen sheriffs ride up and down my street and they love to sit, three doors down, where they’re black folks live and are doing things, whatever. Every day I see him. But on that night, no one, not one patrol car vehicle. I did not hear a siren. I did not see a cop anywhere.

No one knocked on my door and said. Did you know that there is a fire right on that hillside? Do you need help taking your stuff to your car? Are your children okay? Is there a person who is disabled that lives here? Is there a vulnerable, somebody who could use some help? Nobody, right? And so there’s an opportunity to expose the absurdity of what we right now have as our safety infrastructure in this that there were, FBI, agents, tanks, national Guard, all kinds of people swarming the day after.

None of them could tell you how to go get some underwear, or a place to live or you know where to connect to make sure that, you can make a phone call or find fresh water. Like no one had that skill. And so I do think that there’s an opportunity here and our movements and our organizations that have been working on criminal justice and the criminal justice system know how these systems operate and know where the weak points are.

And I think there’s definitely things that we’re not, that we need to do differently and all of that. But I think that there is some intersections here that we can move into between, what’s happening on the climate space and arena of our work and world and what we’ve been doing inside of our criminal justice work.

[00:33:45] Michelle Alexander: Maurice, do you wanna add to that at all? 

[00:33:50] Maurice Mitchell: When I think about what you laid out, and you talked about the criminal legal system and prisons, jails, the military, you talked about. Black and brown folks in this country. I think also about the climate crisis and the migrant crisis, and they’re related.

Because so many people in the global south are finding it harder and harder to live in their communities to live dignified lives and to make a life in their communities. And so they have to migrate to other communities, sometimes migrate to other countries. And so many people are migrating to the United States or are migrating to countries in Europe.

And as a result of that right-wing nationalists movements are responding to these folks who are coming from the global south into these white majority countries. And I always laugh because I remember back in the day, these, like these Northern European social democracies, they used to be so smug, they were like, we have a socialism here for you.

And now they’re like, the hard right parties in all of these places, it’s like they would like thumb their nose at the US and like we’re racist and imperialist. And it’s yeah. Okay. And then it’s 0.1% folks from Syria are in Sweden now and all of a sudden, like the most hard right fascist are like growing in your parliaments.

And in Germany it’s the a FD here it’s maga. And so these crises are connected and the further right wing authoritarian a regime is the more. Prisons, jails, police and military are a requirement. Yeah. And so I was talking to somebody and I was like, I think the United States regime is the most right.

Ringing regime on this planet right now. And we were debating, I was like Victor Hoban and Hungary, and I don’t know Israel. And, I was like, there, I don’t know, maybe it’s a close top three or whatever, but like you could quibble with and what is required for their project is a rapid investment in prisons, jails, military, and all those systems of control because they plan on ensuring that Medicaid, Medicare, snap basic needs.

Basic resource in education. Head Start is completely defunded. That our social base, whatever we had of it, whatever was left of it after 40 plus years of neoliberal neoliberalism is completely defunded what fills that gap, but these systems of control. And so if you’re fixated on defeating MAGA over here and not committed to ending the carceral state over here, then your analysis is disconnected. Yes. If you’re truly committed to democracy, then you have to be truly holistically committed to democracy, which means an analysis that recognizes that we have to have a response to an investment in these systems of control That.

Has a different relationship to, and a definition of public safety that’s rooted in investment in our people. A lot of people talk about democracy, like it’s this abstract, ethereal thing. It’s this thing that we learned about and we cherish and we learned about in our textbooks. And that’s the thing that we’re protecting instead of our people.

And one of the problems, the asymmetry that we have is we have the right wing and they’re destroying institutions. We have, and this is true not just in this country, but in a lot of countries, that the folks that people, the people who are leading the pro-democracy movement are center right or center left parties that see their job as protecting institutions.

And but this is a time where people have given up on institutions and so who is the force that is protecting our people? And in a time when the right wing forces are destroying things, it’s like a smashing grab robbery of the greatest proportions you could imagine. And the wreckage is falling on our folks.

There is a opportunity because in that wreckage, we could be the force that’s building something new. And so that’s actually really exciting. But that means we have to be independent of the people that have led us here. The people that have led us here are not simply the right wing.

The right wing is taking advantage of the consensus, the neoliberal consensus. And that was brought to you by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. And so if we in this next era, look to the people who brought us here to get us out of here. We’re gonna go, we’re gonna go full. Like we have the embers of the possibilities of releasing ourselves from this.

We’ll go fully into this. We’ll go 40 years into the desert. And so I think this is like a moment if our analysis is sharp, that we could be a true movement that recognizes that the work of ESI is democracy work. If we choose it. And I for one want to choose it, but that means we’re gonna, we’re we don’t look to Capitol Hill for leadership.

Okay. And that also means we don’t, we don’t quibble with when they say the crazy things that they say and we look to one another for leadership. 

[00:40:00] Michelle Alexander: Yes. Wow. There’s a couple of things that you said that I just wanna highlight as they. I think relate to se in particular.

And one of them is this kind of question of what is democracy really? Is it an abstract idea? Is it a set of institutions or is it really on its deepest level this idea, right? That every person, every voice actually matters. And every life. And I think in so many ways that’s at the heart, Ofie, that every woman’s voice every person, not only who has been lost behind bars, but those who are caring for them and loving them matters, and what does it actually mean and look like for we to, for us to take those voices and those lives seriously and treat them as though they mattered.

And, it also brings to mind a book that Lonnie Guinier wrote, the Miners Canary. 

In which she was arguing that, black folks have served as the miners canary for American democracy. Yeah. 

And I think in so many ways, mass incarceration was the minor’s canary for fascism knocking on our door.

Wow. Are we willing to allow the poorest and the darkest among us to be rounded up and carted off and locked in cages? Are we gonna allow our local police departments to turn into militaries? Because if we hadn’t allowed that as a nation, we wouldn’t have militarized police forces, we wouldn’t have tanks in downtown Los Angeles in the midst of a climate crisis.

But it’s because people allowed generations of poor people of color to be rounded up and locked up, that we have created conditions in which democracy is at risk for everyone. And one of the ironies of this moment, I think, is that we hear in the media a lot and in political discussions about how really it’s the right wing right now that is succeeding in creating communities of belonging.

And that people who are feeling isolated and alienated are more likely to find a sense of belonging and a political home on the right than they are. Among those who. Imagine themselves as to be fighting for democracy. And I don’t know if you might wanna speak to that. Gina, in terms of both what you’ve seen and experienced and heard about, what it means not only to create communities of belonging and its importance, but the extent to which those spaces are being created on the left as much as they are on the right.

[00:43:13] Gina Clayton-Johnson: I rethought about this today. The question of is the right doing a better job at creating communities of belonging? And I think, and I can be organized outta this, but I think that they are, and they have done, and that’s not to disparage any, the reason I struggle with that is ’cause I know.

Brilliant organizers who’ve been doing this and who do this and who I’ve learned from and, who have been building communities of belonging. It’s just that we need more base builders. We need more. And I think about really early in sess development. We notice that one of the impacts of this, the carceral infrastructure and what mass incarceration does on a family level, on a personal level, is to isolate people from one another emotionally geographically, et cetera.

And climate disasters do the same, right? They remove people from one another, from their homes, from their places from crisis. Does this and and. Though the mandate therefore became, we need to create a space of belonging. Particularly because the type of isolation was wrapped up in lots of moralistic judgments and shame and stigma that prevented the coming together inside of crisis.

’cause you see that too, right? Everyone’s hurting and you’re like, stand together and be together and all these things. But when there’s also judgment and shame and yes this is all happening to you, but really no, it’s just you and it’s your fault that you’re such and such who you love is incarcerated and, deal with it because your hurt isn’t really hurt, or whatever.

That’s, I, that’s a different level of isolation. So we’ve been looking at this and studying this and figuring this out for a number of years and. We have SE essentials in our organizing. We have five SE essentials and every single member that goes through our Healing to Advocacy nine week program, memorizes these, and one of them is, I belong here, so does she slash they.

And it’s something that we all embody and bring into the core before you can even go and do campaign work. Our members are reciting this and sharing this and studying that concept. And we think it’s important because at the end of the day, belonging is way sticky, way more magnetic to us than politics will ever be and a political belief system will ever be.

And it’s. And I mean us not sie, I mean us as human beings, like we are, we, it’s pri it’s primal. The idea that we need each other, not just an idea, but the knowledge, the guttural knowledge that if not for you, I wouldn’t be right. And I think that’s something that we have to tap into. And in order to tap into it, you have to be authentic and you have to meet people where they are.

And I think one of the, one of the realities is that to all of the, there’s been a lot of pontificating about we’ve just not as the, we as the broader left have not done a good job showing up for working class people and then we really miss the ball, all these things, which I think makes a lot of sense.

And I think, but what I sometimes don’t hear is yeah it’s the. Emotion. It’s the depth of disappointment, despair, frustration. Not just meet like a material demand, or place where people are, but meet at the place of like, how are you really doing? The fact that no one has ever asked you what you think about how things should be.

And tho I think those are the things that we, that organizers know how to do. It’s just, it’s 1 0 1. And I think that’s, that feels really important right now. Yeah. 

[00:47:29] Michelle Alexander: Yeah. It’s interesting, ha rent, famously Yeah. Wrote that the root cause of fascism is loneliness and isolation.

White, white men in part particular. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And it’s dangerous building organizations that are, fundamentally comm, committed to breaking down isolation and addressing loneliness and yeah, building mutual connection and community are necessary not just for the thriving of those communities, but for ensuring that punitive, repressive fascist orientations don’t take root and take hold.

[00:48:07] Gina Clayton-Johnson: And the political so in 2018 we produced a, we wrote a report and we coined the term political isolation. Really intentionally to describe what we were seeing among women with incarcerated loved ones because we understood that like this is having a political effect. That when you, when systems that are very intentional, separate people from one another, and not just any people, but a people who are historically and currently oppressed, then that reinforces, perpetuates and invents more inequity and more suffering and ways that we have to understand and then take on directly, right?

And through creating the vehicles and the access points and the vectors of connection. And that the way to do that has to be through belonging and really being smart about how to architect belonging into our programs and our strategies and our movements. That’s where, that’s really for us, like where that came from.

[00:49:14] Michelle Alexander: Maurice, I’m wondering we’re in a moment right now where partly because of people’s shock and fear, there’s both paralysis and there’s also a sense of urgency and people wanting to take action and to get engaged in a meaningful way. And yet there’s also some underlying, let’s say, divisions and tensions that haven’t fully been resolved within our movements.

And I’m wondering whether, if you could speak a little bit to the tensions between the big tent organizing approach. With the real needs of communities to honor the distinctiveness of the harms that they experience and suffer. And some of the identity based organizing strategies that are often involved in constituency building and what as both what we can learn from the past.

And what as the way forward for our movements now. 

[00:50:15] Maurice Mitchell: Yeah. Great question. I believe that it’s our historical duty to be forming a popular front against fascism, which means that requires everybody. And I actually think that the past month is. The perfect argument for a popular front.

’cause it’s like I was saying the other day there’s enough billionaires on this planet to, to fill a medium to large size high school so that leaves everybody else. And so if you’re not them, then you with us. So what we gonna do? And to me that is the premise of the popular front.

What we going do, what we all going to do. Yes. And in that popular front, there’s a lot of diversity, which is why United Fronts require strong factions. It’s a both. And I think sometimes we think it’s either or, but your factional work, if that work isn’t strong. What happens is you bring something weak to the coalition table, right?

This is often times why black people get lost in the sauce when we go to coalition tables that are multiracial because we hadn’t done the proper base building and organizing of a black agenda that we could bring to the multiracial agenda setting table. So maybe we bring our votes hastily to the table and people who are hungry for votes are glad to take our votes.

And then at the other end of the transaction, they’re not so interested in the agenda, right? Which is why the faction building is so critical on our terms and in our time so that not, so we could simply build a faction so that we could, in a. Dignified and clear-eyed and strategic way be in right relationship with others in a united front against fascism.

It’s the both end. There’s this really tired discourse about quote unquote identity politics. And it’s so boring. I almost don’t want to talk about it, but the actual value of identity politics is like we all carry all these identities, right? And, we’re witnessing identity politics in full blast in front of us because white identity is white identity is also an identity.

And the right wing uses it every single day and has historically used it in order to organize politically. So they want us to they wanna organize around identity. And then they want us to organize with one hand behind our back. And so the value of identity politics is like you’re meeting people where they actually are.

You’re meeting people spiritually where they are with our many identities so that we could build strong bases. That’s why you do that. So that we could win as strategic. I think when identity takes on a neoliberal form, that could be really problematic, right? When it’s, about black faces in high places when it’s about neoliberal diversity.

Isn’t it nice that Walmart has this board that has all of these interesting, multicolored people on it? And that is the slight of hand, right? And when we’re talking about DEI, if we’re not having a conversation about power, then we’re having a conversation about vapi corporate strategies that really didn’t matter anyhow.

And it’s like you talked about the left. I also want us to be clear, and I don’t want us to gaslight ourselves. Billions of dollars were raised and spent in this election. The left did not raise and spend most of that money that was not the left. I just wanna be clear. Yeah. The left was part of a united front strategy.

The Working Families Party was part of the United Front strategy that was not led by the left. That felt, that strategy, if I could tell a story, ’cause it gets to the belonging thing. That strategy wasn’t crazy. It nearly won. Like it was a close election. Yes. We should tell the truth.

It was a close election by the way. Strategy nearly won. So it wasn’t a crazy strategy. It’s one of the reasons why we were like, this wouldn’t be our strategy, but we’re junior partners. We’ll sign ’em for it. We have some notes. No, don’t wanna see ’em. Okay. All but we understood the assignment because this was a united front against fascism.

And so how many times you play it? I would sign up to be part of that united front. And I’m unsurprised about every single thing they’re doing because they said it. They said it. They said it. Yeah, they said it. Every single policy they said it. So we got the receipts about that. I’m in north, I’m in North Philly.

I’m knocking on doors. I knock on this door of a black woman. She’s 24. It’s a working class, the poor black community. And she’s, she spends a, she’s very generous with her time. And so we talk and she says to me if I vote. And I don’t know if I’m gonna vote, but if I do, I’ll vote for that lady.

But I, for me, and for us, it’s, it is gun violence because there’s multiple people on my block who aren’t here because of gun violence. She said, and this will echo in my head forever. We don’t cry anymore. We don’t cry anymore when people die around us. And I don’t know how me voting or not is gonna change that, and I don’t know how it would’ve changed that.

And I talked with her about the different issues that we are working families party are working on. I also talked about the contrast between Trump and Kamala Harris and the issues that Kamala Harris was carrying. She agreed with me. She didn’t disagree with me on the issues. She was like, yeah, that makes sense.

And. That makes sense. And oh, child tax credit. All right. That’s cool. That makes sense. All right, cool. But she didn’t believe in me. And the thing that twice as much money on digital ads and TV ads and flights of male will not answer is why that woman has lost a belief in her power and why When people like me knock on her door, I’m not sure I, she feels like I am an extension of the community or an agent of the system, right?

That is a trust and belonging and connection gap that the people who raised and spent billions of dollars were not interested in healing at all. That wasn’t. That wasn’t on their vision board. Now that we’re in this moment and being part of a united front is critical, it’s critical, it’s still critical, which means I said it before Cheney de Chomsky, I know it’s hard and messy.

And if you’re in a coalition space and you’re not uncomfortable by the people in the room, then the room isn’t big enough. You need to feel uncomfortable. I can’t believe this person is in this room with me. That’s what time it is. ’cause this is a time of monsters, right? If you are not physically uncomfortable, then you’re not in a powerful and broad enough coalition in this moment.

But in order to sustain that means you have to do your base building work. You have to do your agenda setting work. So when you, and you’re in that coalition space. You’re coming with your own base and your own strategy. And what I think is so necessary for this moment is we can’t let ourselves ever be assumed by the fail strategies of others, by the people who just recently failed and are trying to gaslight us.

So they’re like, oh man, if only trans people didn’t exist right then, maybe the Republicans wouldn’t have created those, they them ads and then maybe Kamala Harris would’ve won. You can’t create your own bespoke reality. It turns out that trans people do exist, that immigrants do exist, that black people do exist.

And it also turns out that the right wing will always scapegoat. The right wing will always play their reliable games stoking white resentment. And if you haven’t developed a strategy against it, it’s actually your responsibility. And you don’t place the bag on the communities that have historically been the scapegoats.

So those folks, I feel have discredited them, discredited themselves in this moment, and we should probably not look to them for any more answers. But the good news is that we could look to one another. 

[00:59:36] Michelle Alexander: One of the things I was thinking as you were speaking and describing the importance of being uncomfortable, being willing to be uncomfortable, and to show up in spaces where people that you don’t feel comfortable may even feel a little bit threatened by our present.

It made me think, yeah, we may need those spaces. We may need to be willing to be in those spaces, but we’re gonna also need spaces where we feel safe. 

[01:00:03] Maurice Mitchell: Yes. 

[01:00:04] Michelle Alexander: We’re also gonna need communities of belonging in which I don’t have to worry Yes. And worry about whether I have trust with. The person who’s sitting on the other side of the room.

And it strikes me that as you’re building the big tent, Essie is building the safe spaces. Yes. And so I don’t know if if that’s something you wanna speak to Gina if that resonates. 

[01:00:32] Gina Clayton-Johnson: I’m always, the two of you have made such a big imprint on my understanding of how to do this work in different ways, but, so I just always learn so much. And I think what you’re saying about the necessity of both is a hundred percent true.

I think about that. I, it was interesting because I don’t know if this is something you experienced in Ferguson or the other places that you’ve been on the ground, but. In that first moment right after the fires took place, it was like, the thing not to say actually was, black homes matter. 

It didn’t resonate the day after. 

Didn’t, it was like we all in it together. 

What you talking about? Like I feel just as neighborly, all of a sudden we all opened up we’re all going through this together, but let me tell you how quick. It took whole, it started to make sense again. And it’s because inside a big tents we see the inequities and the things that we are accustomed to take place in exactly the same ways. It’s very 

[01:01:47] Michelle Alexander: predictable. That’s right. 

[01:01:49] Gina Clayton-Johnson: And those harms and those hurts and those. Reticulations of just what we came from end up in our strategies and even on our agendas.

That’s right. And you’re like, dang, why is only white people talking here? And why has a woman never ever said anything and why? All of a sudden you see that in those spaces and you feel it, and you and so what you’re onto in terms of just that’s why we need to collect, like it’s sometimes people say safe spaces and it’s almo.

It’s oh, because we don’t have thick skin or something, we need to like you and like we, we need the spaces to be able to. Listen, strategize, build, because those spaces don’t let us do those things. 

[01:02:38] Maurice Mitchell: That’s right. 

[01:02:38] Gina Clayton-Johnson: And so I do think it’s very important and that is what power building is. And that is how, you create those belonging, that belonging.

I also think that like organizers set some really important parameters around who gets to belong and who doesn’t in way, and I say that and it sounds mean, you out, you in, but this, our organizing strategy is like drawing the line what you did earlier. I was like, come on, you organize like you with this or you with them, you with the billionaires in the high school or you with the right, like that was you drawing a line and saying this.

That’s very strategic. And organizers do that all the time. We cut turf around experience and identity. And we do that with a lot of strategy and that’s the strategy of building constituencies. What is a constituency? It’s a group of people. Like we at, we’ve written this down, we thought about this and we had the little theory in our thing.

But it’s about creating a, a group that has tangible identity inside of a public and political sphere that is able to manifest an agenda. 

How do you do that? What’s real is it’s already been done and it doesn’t, it’s not just come out of nowhere, but labor created a constituency right out of workers.

That was an intentional movement. And how do you know that it’s a constituency? It’s because you can recognize that group of people and you say those people will probably believe in these things, and they all seem like they’re together. And I have a name for them, right? That’s a constituency.

And that constituency can be leveraged in the direction of all kinds of things. Not just one issue in one moment, but over and over and over and over again. Which is why we need to be building constituencies. Yeah. And that’s what Essie is working on doing. That’s what your work does, and what I think will pay huge dividends over a longer arc of time than like flash in the pan campaign moments.

We think of it as, when you build a constituency, you take a group of people who have a shared experience, you make them identifiable. You fuse them with their logical politic and you. Build a power, you, in you, you do those things in the direction of, and you make them cohesive.

Very important. That’s where the belonging is. Yeah. It’s actually what comes first. Cohesion, identifiability and politic. Those are the three things. And then they push an agenda. 

And they continue to push agendas. And so I think about the important work of working families party, of building a constituency and depositing a constituency into our futures that can be leveraged into the direction of liberatory change of that vision that you were talking about, of the alternative to the fascist, very clear plan that is taking hold.

I think that is what we need. And that requires strong strong fluency in. Belonging making in terms of our strategies and our programs. 

Yeah. 

[01:05:49] Maurice Mitchell: Can I say something? 

[01:05:49] Gina Clayton-Johnson: Yes, please 

[01:05:50] Maurice Mitchell: do. Yeah. ’cause I feel called to say something here because I couldn’t agree with you more.

And we’re living in that there was no such thing as a MAGA identity just a few years ago. That’s right. Identities and politics are constructed. And we live in a world where, like DC based consultants, they take polls and they look at polls as static evidence of some sort of immutable truth.

Polls go up and down they look at polls and they’re like this isn’t popular, so we’re gonna stop talking about this and we’re gonna talk about these things that are popular. The right wing constructs, identities, and constructs a culture that. Can be hospitable to their plans, right?

They’ll look at a poll and they’ll say, we’re not popular. Let’s seek to make our politics popular. That’s actually our job, right? Our job is to construct the identities of a future multiracial democracy, right? They’re not just gonna happen. They’re not self-evident, they’re organized, right? There, there are no guarantees in any direction, right?

People are like, oh, this is a post neoliberal era. Yeah, there’s a lot more bad shit that could happen. We could be, it could become a techno feudalist moment, right? If we, but we could intervene with our organizing. That’s the actually exciting part of it, right? The fact that an old world is dying and so this new world, if we’re bold enough.

If we’re like, okay, let’s, instead of fixating on, because people are like, oh, what is, I’ll wrap up. What is the I get this question all the time. It’s like the Democratic Party lost the trust of working people. How did they regain it? I’m like, first of all, I’m building the working families party, so I’m not on their payroll.

But that’s the wrong question. That’s the wrong question. The question is like, how does the working class regain their trust in themselves? And to me, the asymmetry that I see is like you have a Democratic party who actually does a decent job in raising and spending money in order to win elections, and they win some elections and they lose some elections.

And right now they’re focusing on the next election. And they’re like, all right, how do we win these like midterm elections? And they’re relatively good at doing that. They’re not. They’re not always successful, but they’re not horrible. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. The problem is that’s, that is the MO of the Democratic Party.

The MO of the Republican Party is how do we remake the world in our image? So one party is how do we re make the world in our image? The other party is like, how do we win these marginal congressional seats in 2026? We might, they might win, they might lose. It won’t matter. And so our job potentially is to step into the gap and to make a world, and that provides all of us across all types of identities, a vocation that meets our moment and meets the honor of our people.

That’s something worth struggling for. Yes. That’s unfortunately what a lot of these MAGA men have. They have a history making vocation. What is ours? It’s up to us to figure that out. Alright, 

[01:09:20] Michelle Alexander: I was gonna ask you I think the temptation is always to wanna end like on a very cheery and hopeful note.

And I don’t want us to end on some kind of saccharine hope. But I do wanna hear from you if you have hope, what does hope mean to you and what are you hoping for? And I’ll share myself that, I gave up on, the, we can win kind of hope. Because I felt like.

I, we need to think of really carefully about what winning even means. What we’re willing to do how we go about seeking our goals. But on a deeper level, I think I also just had to wrestle with a certain kind of pessimism that was sinking into my bones. And and so now I think of myself as really holding onto a certain pessimistic hope, right?

Not that we’re gonna save democracy but that

even though the odds are against us in countless ways, that somehow people have found a way to defeat the odds over and over again. That’s right. Our ancestors have, and that what may be dying needs to die. And that we may not even be capable of imagining now what’s possible and what can be born in these times.

And so my pessimistic hope is not in imagining that we are gonna win in some kind of idealized way. Acknowledging that no victory is permanent and that the odds in many ways are against us. And that people make miracles every day. 

[01:11:14] Maurice Mitchell: Yes. Yes. And 

[01:11:16] Michelle Alexander: So that’s where I am with it. And I’m curious where you are.

[01:11:24] Gina Clayton-Johnson: Yeah. I don’t relate to the word hope anymore. It’s not, I like, I really, I was talking earlier to you I really just want everybody’s list on what it is that’s. S getting you out of bed in the morning? Is it the promise of a cup of coffee in the afternoon? Is it like a item of clothing that makes you feel confident?

Is it a crush? Is it like, what is it? I just really wanna know ’cause I need the list and need to apply the list and that is where I am. But I relate and resonate deeply with the evidence, right? The evidence of our. Our transcendence. Oh, and perseverance and ability to somehow make miracles.

Out of really bleak moments. I know that to be true during human history. I don’t know what that means for my own life and the life of my kids and their ability to be happy and alive and healthy and free and I don’t know. And those are the things that I actually care about. That long arc of, are we gonna win one day?

Freedom’s gonna feel and sound and be like, okay, is that my kids? Or is there their kids and their kids? And is, I don’t know. Is AI gonna take over? I don’t, those things I, yeah. 

[01:12:37] Maurice Mitchell: But 

[01:12:37] Gina Clayton-Johnson: I’ll say like the night that the fire happened, we were in our house and the kids, we put the kids to bed and we could finally Mark Anthony and I could finally talk to each other.

And we were like, so are we leaving? Are we staying? We didn’t get any evacuation order, not even a warning. We had no evacuation and nobody told us to go anywhere Okay. Until three 30 in the morning. Our house burned down like two hours later. So we decided to leave because we didn’t have power.

And we were like, oh, we need to make food for the kids in the morning and it’s gonna be really awful to deal with the hangry of our toddlers. And we had a debate about it back and forth. Wait, we can make this and we can make them that. No, yeah, we do need to just go to some friends and make sure that there’s food.

And so we left so that we could have oatmeal and that’s how we packed, worse than you would pack. Much better for a weekend trip than you packed, than the way we packed to leave the house. 

[01:13:34] Maurice Mitchell: Yeah. 

[01:13:34] Gina Clayton-Johnson: And weirdly, when we were on our way out, I looked over at Mark Anthony and I saw him.

Holding this haw pot. He, which is part of his spiritual tradition. And I was like, why do you have that? And I got angry, I was like, now I’m tear a little bit of too much maybe of our business. But I was like, what are you doing? Because I just got some passports and I, like I grabbed the documents and I was like, why do you, are you packing?

Like we’re not coming back? And he was like, oh no, I don’t. He couldn’t explain. Wow. And what’s also true is that right before I went and got the passports, I’m not even sure why I got those, to be honest. But right before I did that, I went and got these rings that are my belonged to my great-grandmother and were given to me by my grandmother and I wasn’t wearing them.

And I was like, and I wear them every day, but I wasn’t wearing them. I was nighttime, I was about to go to sleep, whatever. And I put them on. I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m gonna wear these. And on the drive out of our community and our, our really last moments at that home and while it was still intact, I, Mark Anthony explained to me that haw pot for what it means and what it represents is his destiny.

I don’t know what that is. It doesn’t feel like hope, but it feels like evidence of something. And there’s so much of those little pieces of evidence that I have had in this. Do you wanna get a final word in? 

[01:15:14] Maurice Mitchell: Sure. I feel called by, I don’t know what I was going to say in response to that, but I know what I’m gonna say now.

Evidence. So the reason why I love black people, and if you know me. There’s one thing that I love is black people, but the reason why I love black people and like I’m not I’m not like an essentialist. It’s not like I think black people are like essentially amazing, but I think as a matter of fact, we are amazing.

And I’ll explain why, because we’re evidence

every single black person from the southern tip of South America all the way up to the northern tip of Canada is evidence. That’s why our presence, our mere presence, and the fact of our history. It’s such a fundamental threat to the project of fascism. Every single person. When I when I got here I got out of the cab and I went to the hotel and I went to this hotel and before I could get in, this woman, she was on some shit, but she ran up and I was like, excuse me, I need to get into my, and but I stopped and I remembered she’s evidence.

She’s evidence because there’s a story that I share with her, I share with you, and I share it with you, and I share it with you. That starts with some person that I don’t know in West Africa. Who was captured and everybody around them didn’t make it. But that person made it. Yeah. Which is like the odds of that.

And then they took some treacherous journey from wherever they were to the coast of West Africa and other people took that journey and not everybody on that journey made it, but they made it. And then they languished in a dungeon with so many other people, and some of them couldn’t make it out of that dungeon, but they made it.

And then they sat in the belly of a ship for months in squalor around death. But that person made it. And then they made it to maybe Brazil. Or Jamaica or South Carolina or Cuba. And they survived the unimaginable process of attempting to convert a person to chattel. And a lot of people resisted it, couldn’t make it, but they made it.

And then in the midst of slavery, they found another person and birthed a person. And that is your ancestor. And they were able to live a life and find love and birth another person. And that is your ancestor, and that is her ancestor. And that is your ancestor. And we survived through slavery and through Jim Crow and through mass incarceration.

And not only will we survive maga, we’re evidence that we will thrive and we will be the victors through maga. We’re evidence of that. That’s why they have to disappear our history. That’s why ultimately they will try to disappear us, but we’re evidence of the victory that already is ours. Yes.

Because that ancestor. Already paid the price for the victory that already is ours,

[01:19:48] Michelle Alexander: and I will not say another word. We will end right there. Thank you so much to both of you. Thank you. This has been outstanding. Thank you. Thank you.

[01:20:01] Cayden Mak: This show is published by Convergence Magazine for Radical Insights. I’m Kaden Mock, and our producer is Josh Stro. Kim David is our production assistant and designed our cover art. Special thanks this week to Kelly Phipps and Emmett Iers and the rest of the team at SD Justice Group for your partnership.

And if you’ve got something to say, please drop me a line. You can send me an email that will consider running on an upcoming mailbag episode at [email protected]. And finally, if you would like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bringing our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment, you can become a [email protected] slash donate.

Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure that our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements. I hope this helps.