Embodying Abolition in Our Lives, with Maya Schenwar

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors

[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 for the 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.

Before we get started, I of course want you to en to invite you to join our subscriber program. Convergence Magazine is an independent publication and we rely on the generosity of our readers and listeners to create the rigorous thoughtful takes you’ve come to expect from us week in and week out.

You can become a subscriber at convergencemag. com slash donate. Any amount helps, either as a one time donation or a recurring monthly or annual subscription. This week on the show I’m joined by one of the editors of the new anthology, We Grow the World Together, Parenting Toward Abolition, out now from Haymarket Books.

Maya Schenwar. The book brings together a collection of voices from activists, organizers, incarcerated folks, and their families revealing the complex ways we live out abolition in our daily lives through parenting and caregiving. But first, these headlines. It’s a new year. 2025 is off to a hell of a start, which I guess we knew it would be.

But not all of it is exactly what we expected. As we record this show, multiple wildfires are still raging in the Los Angeles area. At least five people have died as the fires continue to burn. Living in Northern California, it’s hard not to watch these fires with a sense of foreboding. Wildfires in January are simply not normal.

And the fact that Southern California has received pretty much zero rain this winter is a reminder that with climate change, the last few wet years that we’ve had up here in Northern California are likely an anomaly as opposed to the rule. Part of also why it’s been so hard to watch is the fact that with these fires still raging mostly uncontained, conspiracy theories are already boiling across the internet.

For those of us with actual friends and loved ones in Southern California, our feeds have been filled with harrowing stories of escape and loss and but there are plenty of other people around the country who’ve been inundated with content repeating some very spurious claims about where the fires came from, what has made them so bad, that kind of thing.

Of course, the president elect has also used this opportunity to antagonize governor Gavin Newsom and amplify and add to many of these spurious claims. This is a reminder of what we can expect over the next few years, and a reminder that we need to hold his prognostications very lightly. Don’t lose sight of the fact that millions of people are being affected by this disaster right now.

And they need our solidarity. We’ll put some links to some calls for mutual aid and other information that might be helpful to Southern California listeners in the show notes. And we’re sending our support and solidarity to all of those folks affected by the fires. Next there’s been a lot of news about Metta over the break.

And I’ve got to ask, is Metta, the mega tech conglomerate that brings us Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp app. Are they? This week, the tech giant announced that they’ve named Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, Trump simp, and misogynist Dana White to their board, a man who just a year ago was documented slapping his wife in public, and whose job duties literally include being a rape apologist.

When META staff spoke out about this on the company’s internal social network, those comments were deleted by HR, who claimed that the very reasonable and actually incredibly civil complaints were in violation of their internal community agreements. The fact that this is coming out at the same time that META announced that they’re getting rid of fact checking and altering their moderation policies specifically about immigrants and trans and queer people, not that these policies really did that much in the first place, in order to Keep up with the so called changing discourse reveals what insipid followers, the supposed leaders of the Silicon Valley giant, actually are.

The policies are, and were always, a fig leaf, covering the rotten core, and now they’re cozying up to the incoming Trump administration while parroting its lines. And the thing of it is, everything that’s been happening at META recently points to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is floundering to find a way out.

Any new idea that will keep people using his atrophying platforms. The company has always sold bullshit and continues to sell bullshit. And what’s clear is that many people have simply had enough. Finally, and I think that the observations about the difference in the way that people are treated by the The system of criminal justice and incarceration is relevant to our main topic today.

A 34 time felon and president elect Donald Trump was sentenced for his crimes earlier this morning after the Supreme Court decided late last night that he could no longer the use the excuse of, but I’m the president, to kick the can down the road. His punishment? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. More specifically, he was granted, quote, unconditional discharge, which means no jail time, no probation, not even a fine.

As an abolitionist, it’s a little confusing to feel this way, but it is upsetting to know that he can do what he did and just walk away with no consequences. The 78 year old, who retakes one of the most powerful offices in the world in just under 10 days, merely has to carry the label. For whatever that means to anyone at this point.

It clearly doesn’t mean anything to him, though it does to regular people who get convicted all the time. The average sentence you or I would face in the state of New York for a single felony is one and a half to four years in prison. It looks like Nixon was right after all. When the president does That means it is not illegal.

Now I’m pleased to welcome my guest this week to the show. Maya Shenwar is the co editor of the new anthology, We Grow the World Together, Parenting Toward Abolition. Her co editor Kim Wilson was going to be with us today, but she’s being affected by those wildfires in LA. Our best wishes and solidarity are with her and her family.

But Maya’s joining us today to talk about the book, which is available now from Haymarket. Maya Shenwar is a friend of the pod and director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism, board president at Truthout, and another member of the Movement Media Alliance. Welcome back to Block and Build, Maya.

[00:06:14] Maya Schenwar: So much, Caden. 

[00:06:16] Cayden Mak: There’s a reason that I was excited about starting the year, talking to you about the book. And I think that in a lot of ways, this conversation is a continuation of the way that we ended 2024 thinking about grief in our politics, because wrestling with grief is also inextricable from the way that we think about and do caregiving.

It’s also really clear in the book, so much of both parenting and abolition is about grappling with this sort of dual force of grief and love. And in particular I found it really moving the way that you wrote about your beloved late sister, Keely and her dreams of being a mom and an aunt and how deeply intertwined your experience of parenting your kid is with the loss of your sister.

Yeah, I just really wanted to, I don’t know. for like really articulating What you did in your contributions, you’re writing in the book. And I dunno I just think these things are coming up for a reason. And so I’d love to hear from you what this anthology means to you and why you think it’s so essential right now.

[00:07:21] Maya Schenwar: Absolutely. Thank you. So Kim and I created this anthology. Because we wanted to show how care work is central to organizing. And I think in this moment, it’s particularly important to remember because we’re gearing up to organize against rising fascism, which is the opposite of care. The anthology emerged out of a kind of restless and chaotic period in my life.

So my kid was a toddler during the 2020 uprisings, and that’s when the kernels of the book began to form, and I was feeling guilty about not being able to go to as many of the protests as I otherwise would, and I was also freshly grieving the death of my sister, as you mentioned. She died in early 2020 of an overdose.

And I spoke to a friend who was a mother of an older child about all of this, and I pretty much said I feel like I’m not doing the work, the social justice work. Sure. Because I’m doing all this caregiving of my child and caregiving of myself in my grief. And she basically said that is the work to care is also the work.

And this sparked something for me. And it made me think about how, when my sister was incarcerated, which happened on and off for 13 years. Before her death. I was busy writing about prison, organizing against prison, but the deepest work that I felt I was actually doing against prisons was visiting my sister inside, writing her letters, talking to her on the phone, just all that care work, which is maintaining the connection that the prison and the prison industrial complex are doing their best to tear down.

And so all of this got me wondering how other people were thinking about it, how other people were wrestling with the question of this relationship between caregiving and organizing, particularly organizing toward abolition, but we know that intersects with so many other issues. And I approached my friend, Kim Wilson, who is an incredible abolitionist organizer and also co hosts of podcasts beyond prisons.

And I wrote her like a, 25 paragraph email asking her to co edit the book and she just wrote back, yes. I wish she were on the show with us because that’s her vibe. Kim is this long time organizer against prisons and also is the parent of three adult children, two of whom are incarcerated. And when Kim is fighting to free her sons, she’s also fighting to free everybody.

And so this struggle is a current throughout the book. And it was how we set out to edit it and to gather contributions, how the work of parenting and care work more broadly can fuel broader liberation movements. And We did not know that this book was going to be coming out right before a second presidency.

Sure. Yeah. But, I feel like this onslaught that we’re facing, does emphasize the book’s importance and make it relevant in a different way. And part of that is simply that mutual care for each other as human beings is an antidote to fascism, which erases human beings. Another thing I want to raise, though, is that some of our book’s contributors who are incarcerated are, in a sense, living under overt fascism already.

And I think, and I don’t use the word fascism lightly, but all the folks who are incarcerated are under a type of authoritarian rule, and they hold key lessons for us in figuring out how to face these times. And I am going back to their work again and again. So I just will say briefly what are these conditions?

Incarcerated people are surveilled in one way or another. 24 seven, their communications are all monitored. They’re arbitrarily searched, stripped of their clothes. They’re barred from organizing. And when they do organize their investigated, interrogated, often severely retaliated against all of these things that we’re talking about, like potentially being worried about under the next administration.

We see how this happens behind bars, and yet they’re still organizing, doing hunger strikes, labor strikes, zines, filing class action lawsuits, doing noise protests, all of these things. And they’re also organizing through care, through simply showing up for each other, showing care and dignity and love.

When the whole mechanism of the prison is intended to be. to isolate and, strip people of their dignity at the hands of the state. 

[00:13:39] Cayden Mak: Yeah, I was really struck by that actually in reading Kim’s interview with her son about the ways in which a lot of his work on the inside is giving care to these younger guys who are, like, learning this system for the first time, encountering this repression for the first time, and that in the conversation that they’re having as like a parent and an adult child, which I think is like particularly poignant, is just that here’s how we live out this framework, not just here are the like like theoretical or conceptual commitments we have to it.

But this is what it looks like in practice. And I thought I found that interview to be incredibly powerful. 

[00:14:17] Maya Schenwar: Absolutely. Yeah. I think about how Kim’s son, Paul LaCombe shared this insight that we have to sleep with our boots on, and it was like he was giving us instructions for something we didn’t know was coming.

That there’s always work to be done. We have to be on alert. We have to be prepared. And this is this. Scary but essential lesson, I think, in fascist times, that preparation is this ongoing thing, and education is this ongoing thing, like you said, including education between people that happens informally to prepare each other for the worst.

[00:15:06] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. And in some ways, the other thing I think that is really interesting that you all do is in the book is also talk about parenting and family as Not just like strict nuclear families and thinking about how family is it’s the love is a verb thing, right?

That this is an activity that we do together. Family is an activity that we do together, not a thing that is imposed upon us. And I think that When we’re thinking about those like informal ways in which we learn from each other and prepare together that’s like a huge piece of that that I don’t know, I’ve been thinking a lot about that also with regards to the LA wildfires and like how crucial mutual aid work.

Is about those smaller units of human connection and that those units, those smaller units are like a necessary constitutive part of this larger fabric. 

[00:16:01] Maya Schenwar: Yes. Yes. And I think. Our incarcerated comrades and co strugglers teach us how we can take care of each other and build family, even when authorities are telling us not to.

And when I say family, I’m talking about building lasting, sustained bonds of interdependence. And Shira Hassan talks about this more in the book, it’s like, what is chosen family? What are we building exactly? But yeah, I think incarcerated people are teaching us how to build family in ways that support each other’s survival.

And they’re saving each other food, they’re saving each other’s sanitary supplies, sharing books, gifting each other art. Finding ways to send people messages when they’re in solitary confinement. And, Basically creating community in a place bent on isolation and invisibilization, which I think, out here, obviously it’s not as stark and extreme, but that is also true.

[00:17:17] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And it may not be extreme now, but there’s also, I think, ways in which If we think about how much of the MAGA agenda right now is about driving trans people, for instance, out of public life, that 

Those things are coming, right? And more for certain people than the general population, but that that has real impacts on our cis.

[00:17:42] Maya Schenwar: Absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s really important to highlight because these elements of isolation that we talk about all the time as abolitionists are part of fascism writ large. So yes, taking trans people out of public life is a form of that and it’s a form of utter social control that we see manifested in the prison.

And there are places in the book that, that we talk about this, but in prisons, there are tools for further isolation and trans people entering prison are often put in solitary confinement for their quote unquote safety, 

[00:18:33] Cayden Mak: right? 

[00:18:33] Maya Schenwar: And that’s another thing that we see coming up out here is, This use of the idea of safety to justify absolutely everything.

And one thing we’re trying to do with the book is counter that with its opposite. Safety actually comes in connection, in community, in intentionally building family. 

[00:18:55] Cayden Mak: That’s great. One thing I also wanted to ask you about is what the process of putting this book together was, because you mentioned in the introduction that you all didn’t approach these writers with, specific parameters.

And I think it’s also interesting that it’s a mix of folks who, it includes a child, right? With an incarcerated parent like a small child with an incarcerated parent. But, there are also contributors that I think a lot of our listeners will recognize by name, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorn, Adrian Marie and Autumn Brown, like folks and Shira also, just folks that have been part of inform, like forming and informing.

Contemporary abolitionism as as a, like practice as a conceptual framework, but I’d love to hear a little bit about the process of putting this together how you did work with writers and how this narrative through line came together as you were putting the book together. 

[00:19:47] Maya Schenwar: Yeah, definitely.

So we knew that it had to be an anthology. And part of that was a lofty conceptual reason, which is that abolition is a collective project, and we really want caregiving to be a collective project in our ideal universe. But then, also I’m not an expert on parenting. 

[00:20:13] Cayden Mak: Who is? And 

[00:20:14] Maya Schenwar: nobody is! And that’s part of the point, right?

He’s nobody is. There are people telling us that they’re experts on parenting and they just do what they say. But Every kid is different, every context is different communities have different systems stacked against them, which often are not taken into account in any of this parenting advice.

What we decided to do is reach out to a whole bunch of abolitionists, Some of whom you mentioned, we also reached out to Miriam Kaba said yes, Dorothy Roberts said yes, Victoria Law, like we reached out to all these people within our abolitionist organizing circles, and then we reached out to folks inside the amazing Erica Ray wrote a piece.

Some formerly incarcerated organizers like DeMaria Monday wrote an amazing piece and EJ, who’s six years old wrote a great piece about having a father in prison and we, What we did was we thought, who do we want to hear from about care and in connection with abolition and prisons? And we did not assign people topics.

We got very nervous that they would all write the same thing. I was definitely stressing out about this. And I know like I had this idea people have a common conception of abolition that we’ve all developed together and what if everyone just reiterates that? That’s really great, thank you very much.

But when the essays started coming in, they were all really good. Remarkably different and I think part of this is because everyone is coming from their own vantage and people had to really dig in and think about their experience as opposed to just their analysis and some people told us this was the hardest thing they ever wrote.

Harsha Walia was like, thanks a lot, this was so difficult, but her essay is amazing, and, yeah, I think sometimes thinking about how we are making decisions in our day to day lives with things like care work and relating to children and building chosen family, that kind of thing in relation to our values is sometimes a challenge to write about let alone think about.

Do, but yes we brought all these essays together and even though people wrote about very different things, there were a few clear narrative through lines, I would say that emerged and one strand. That runs through the book is articulated, I think, by Heba Goyad, who writes about parenting toward abolition in the context of Palestine, and she talks about how for Palestinian parents, just the act of loving one’s child is done under these conditions of apartheid, occupation, genocide, and taking into account those conditions.

Love fuels resistance. And I think that idea of love fueling resistance is a through line that, that runs through the book and touches on things like Dorothy Roberts essay, where she’s talking about how mothers are turning so young. State violence against their kids into a driving force to mobilize against the family policing system and foster care system that’s stealing their children.

And so their deep love for their kids is fueling their organizing for everybody’s kids. And similarly, Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes about a group in Los Angeles called Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. That was a response among mothers in California to the system locking up their sons, and it turned into this organized group that became broadly political.

in terms of education, in terms of advocacy, in terms of resistance, but started out from these moms just saying, give us back our sons. And so many parents and caregivers in the book are talking about how the fierceness of their love for their kids made them more viscerally driven to protect all kids, all caregivers.

All people, which moves them to fight for their incarcerated co strugglers and so on. So this idea of love fuels resistance, I think, is one definite theme. I think another one you brought up earlier is this theme of collectivity beyond this thing of simply a parent child relationship. Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of what we’re doing is calling for a different kind of society.

[00:25:53] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Fundamentally, yeah. 

[00:25:56] Maya Schenwar: It’s a little thing. It’s a little thing. But I love, so I, one of the interviews in this book is an interview I did with Miriam Kava about children’s books and using children’s books as abolitionist tools. And Merriam often talks about this idea that everything worthwhile is done with other people.

But there’s this normative expectation in many of our settings that one or two parents is basically going to, bear the entire responsibility for raising a kid or multiple kids. 

[00:26:38] Cayden Mak: Very common assumption, yeah. 

[00:26:40] Maya Schenwar: And so a number of authors in the book talk about what it would mean to shift toward viewing All children as our children.

This is something Miriam talks about. Yeah. And what would that mean? In looking toward Palestine, what would that mean in looking at these draconian policies around trans kids? What is that going to mean in looking toward children of incarcerated parents? Or, incarcerated children because plenty of children are still incarcerated.

So we sit with these kinds of questions and then there’s just the practice. Like a lot of the authors in the book are trying to parent collectively or at least do more collectivism in their parenting. So Nadine Nepper talks about forming this parent university with other radical parents and trying to bring their kids together every weekend and do projects and build something that, that you can fall back on, like an actual community.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. Talk about this collective childcare that they were part of, which sounds like a utopia that I want to basically exist in. Oh my god. I’m not a child, but yeah, would love to attend this collective childcare facilitated program. 

[00:28:11] Cayden Mak: That, that stuff is so it’s, I think what’s so rich about the book is the way that like, those things are so clearly interleaved with these deep reflections on the nature of society.

And it did that chapter in particular also made me think about how, like, when I was a toddler, in, like the late eighties, my parents had me in a co op preschool that like similarly I actually, after my mom passed away in 2020, I found like some papers from the co op preschool that were like, here are the roles that all the parents are taking.

And here’s whose turn it is to bring lunch for everybody. And some of the names of the kids, I was like, oh, and I continued to be friends with that kid, like basically through high school, like it’s. I, it was one of those things where I was like, oh, like the, these sort of remaking society utopian dreams don’t have to come from, super radical people, right?

My mom was like an SDS person in the sixties, but she was also pretty as a, as like an adult, as a professional adult was like I’m going to do, the nuclear family thing. But they don’t, they can run alongside each other in these ways that don’t necessarily, that and they in fact need to run alongside each other, which is one of the things that sort of struck me about a lot of the writing.

[00:29:23] Maya Schenwar: Yes, they absolutely do. And then I think, and that’s so beautiful. I’m thinking about little Caden in the corrupt daycare. How amazing that is. And right. It’s not this all or nothing thing. It’s we’re all existing in this society that’s trying to put us in these little nuclear silos. So what can we create that pushes back on that?

What can we imagine as part of a broader society that would push back on that? And what experiments can we try? So Victoria Law writes about creating this informal collective in New York that was a gentle pushback against the fact that all of the organizing communities were just not places that kids could be.

So you had a kid and then people are like, all right, see ya. And so she helped create this collective that did things like childcare swaps, but also pushed the local activist groups to provide childcare and to welcome. Kids at meetings and events so that you actually could do that thing instead of saying Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to just exist in my nuclear family, but society is not that way So yeah, just thinking about like those kinds of experiments on the left and I love In Shira’s interview, how she’s talking about building queer chosen family apart from thinking about kids.

And this is one of the pieces I reread the most these days. And she quotes this long time chosen family member of hers, Bill Weaver. And Bill Weaver says, Abolition is not only about dismantling the prison industrial context. It’s also about building the world we want to see, and Chosen Family is one concrete way of how we’re doing that.

It’s one of the ways that we are doing that part of abolition, the building part. Which I think also ties in with the name of your podcast. 

[00:31:49] Cayden Mak: Yeah, I really appreciated Shira’s piece. In particular, also as an adult who, I don’t have a kid of my own, but that I am part of a larger family constellation where we take care of kids.

My partner is a parent and I’m a non parent caregiving adult in his life. And just thinking about, I don’t know we, we actually, in our relationship, often talk about this, that it’s actually really good for him to know that I am not his parent, but that I’m here for him, that’s actually, really healthy, just for kids to know that there’s other adults that care about them, that are not their blood family, is actually, like 

[00:32:29] Maya Schenwar: Absolutely.

I think it’s psychologically 

[00:32:31] Cayden Mak: very important. 

[00:32:33] Maya Schenwar: Totally. How terrifying is it that the only people you could count on would be your parents? Yeah. If you think about just like the limitations of that, and then I think about how all the fairy tales the scary thing. That it all starts out with is that these kids are orphans, 

The worst and but what I will say about that, that Miriam brings up is that in those contexts, those children will find the forest creatures and find, these different elements and, Build community.

And yeah I think that challenging ourselves to Think about parenting and care outside of those structures is just one of those necessary tools, particularly right now. 

[00:33:27] Cayden Mak: Yeah. A good segue. Your own essay in this book is called an imagination party. How my toddler feels my abolitionist vision, which is first of all, the like anecdote that Sort of like you frame this up with is so cute.

Um, but also like we’re moving into this political moment where all of our most ambitious dreams feel so on the back burner, right? Like the idea that like we have to play defense, we’re going to be on the back foot. in the shadow of rising fascism is really, I think part of why people are struggling right now, right?

What do you think the places for imagination is for like right now in our moment in particular? 

Yeah. First of all, could you tell us that story about your kid? Because it’s so cute. 

[00:34:12] Maya Schenwar: Rules. Sure. . I think, I’ll start by saying we live in an imagination squashing capitalist society.

And I think one thing that made a big impression on me was a few years ago I interviewed Rachel Herzing and spoke about a lack of creativity being a primary stumbling block to moving beyond prisons. . And just. Obviously there are many stumbling blocks, but that a lack, like this culture wide lack of creativity actually, like that directly interferes with our ability to organize.

And to me, young kids just blow the lid off that entirely. If you actually listen to them, like it’s very easy to, not listen to them. But, if you actually listen to young kids, the things that they are saying are so wild, wacky, and out of bounds. It’s just never, I, so now, right now, my kid is six.

And just this past couple days I found out that the blue fairy that follows them around all day, apparently, has turned 100. And they have created like a machine that will give us all cheetah speed, but there’s some there, there’s something bad about that you have to give in exchange.

Also the lost and found is haunted with ghost witches and there’s and there’s all these creative responses. to build in response to all of these situations. My kid is also drawing like hippopotamuses that will throw Donald Trump and has this really good idea of replacing prisons with brownie bakeries.

[00:36:13] Cayden Mak: Beautiful, 

[00:36:15] Maya Schenwar: but I think that’s like where I was coming from and going into my essay I didn’t want to I feel like I had this fear of making things too cutesy. It was like, but, kids are cute that’s another benefit to them. It, 

[00:36:33] Cayden Mak: Can confirm, it helps sometimes.

[00:36:35] Maya Schenwar: Yeah, and so I think that so I went and then I think going along with yeah, like this sense of trying to combine all that with the fact that what we’re trying to do with imagination is imagine the radical world that we want. So the little cute story is I went into 7 Eleven, When my kid was three with my three year old kid, and they were wearing this shirt that said, A is for abolition.

Mariam Kava actually gave them. And we’re sitting there waiting. In their stroller and the cashier at the 7 Eleven was like making conversation and asked my child, what is abolition? And I was like, Oh no, I’m one of those leftist parents who has put a shirt on my child and they have no idea what it means.

I’m like using them as a poster child, but of course they’ve been,

So they said that abolition was a party and it was like what is it like? But when they explained it, they were saying it’s an imagination party, which is the title of the essay. And that it’s a party where you’re imagining things. And I love that because the idea of abolition, when we talk about it in what we want, as opposed to a particular campaign, it’s imagining what we really would want in a very expansive way for the world and for our communities.

And. Like tearing down the walls, literal and figurative and building that world. And so the imagination party metaphor I’m not going to claim my kid knew what they were talking about, like in relation to prisons or whatever at the time. But I think that they got to a truth there.

Yeah. And that in order to fuel the kind of transformation that we talk about wanting, we’re going to need a really wild, raucous party of imagination in our collective minds.

But yeah I think that what I would add to, to that kind of that kind of framework is that if we listen to kids, I think there are powerful lessons. They’re in those wild imaginings for defying cynicism. And that’s something that we really need to be taking on in this moment. We’re going to get into those organizing ruts.

We’re going to get into those kind of moments of despair. And. Imagination, not just in what do we think could be done with this prison instead of it being in prison, but imagination, all the different facets of our lives, including what could my routine be when I wake up in the morning so that I don’t feel like crap all day, like the things that we need to do to carry on in this society also require imagination together and apart.

So I think that. That it’s worth taking inspiration there against cynicism and also taking a cue from Miriam in the interview about children’s books. One of the things that she mentions is that children’s books are tools for. Abolitionist organizing because they encourage wonder and this culture that we live in deems wonder more acceptable in the realm of childhood, like an imagination more acceptable in the realm of childhood.

It’s 

[00:40:57] Cayden Mak: romanticized almost as like a kid thing, 

[00:41:01] Maya Schenwar: right? And so taking our cue from kids books, from kind of those child centric spaces, those cooperative daycares, and voices of children, I think can help us. Guide us toward unleashing our wacky dreams that just might save us. 

[00:41:23] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think we’re, I think you’re right. They were in desperate need of some wacky dreams. I will say also that the other thing. As a sort of pitch to non parents from me as a non parent to other non parents about this book are also about the like, ways in which several writers think about reparenting ourselves as adults.

[00:41:43] Maya Schenwar: Yeah. 

[00:41:44] Cayden Mak: And that piece of the puzzle that like, it actually first of all, having relationships with children as an adult help helps us do that consensually or otherwise. As you described and like having a toddler while you’re grieving your sister’s death and like that experience, which I, any parent who’s been through a hard time emotionally that like their kid was like not fully present for probably like that makes sense.

And then also the last chapter of the book where folks are thinking about intergenerational trauma and like, How raising a child or being somebody in a child’s life opens up. those like new vistas on the ways that we have been hurt by systems is also, I think, to me feels very essential in this moment so that we don’t get stuck in this ah, God, this is impacting me in this horrible way.

And that we start seeing, it’s not just seeing all children as our children, but really seeing like all people as our kid. 

[00:42:42] Maya Schenwar: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that Reparenting element was really powerful for me, too, because there’s this sense in, I think, parenting literature, but also the idea of being a parent where it’s you have to get it right.

And your parents probably got it wrong. 

[00:43:07] Cayden Mak: No pressure. You don’t know how to do this, but no pressure. 

[00:43:11] Maya Schenwar: Honestly, I think we can broaden that to just relating to other human beings. We don’t know how to do this. Every generation screws it up and then we’re like, all right, now I’m in the world what am I going to do?

And I think that one thing that. The several authors who talked about reparenting and talked about their relationships with their parents brought to it was thinking about the systems their parents were up against. So whether that be the family policing system or just coming into the U. S. as a working class immigrant, like up against all of these systems, trying to both provide for a family and then also meet a bunch of expectations that could never be met. And so thinking about reparenting, not just in the sense of my parents screwed up, but also understanding the conditions that they were parenting under. And I think Kim, this really powerfully in her essay, survival parenting, where she’s saying, Hey there’s some tips in the book for sure about parenting and caregiving.

But Kim is saying, More broadly, we have to think about the conditions under which most people are parenting and how they are not ideal and how moving forward is also grappling with these systems are keeping us down. These systems are making it so that we can’t make our kids all their little organic, handmade, produce based snacks and give them enriching activities instead of making them watch TV all day, which is what my kid is currently doing while being home from school.

And yeah. So I think there’s that as well in like looking back and looking forward, what are these systems doing? How are we relating to them? And I think that also ties in. With another theme that I hope we can all bring to our organizing, which is making space for mistakes and the lessons that they bring, and also the fact that they are always happening, and we cannot change that.

And that’s something that is important. ever so evident in parenting. But it’s also a reality of organizing. And Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn talk about this as trying, failing, trying again, failing better is the work of caregiving. And I think approaching or organizing with that kind of framework that So called failures will happen, mistakes will happen.

This is the process. 

[00:46:16] Cayden Mak: The 

[00:46:16] Maya Schenwar: process of 

[00:46:17] Cayden Mak: being alive, really. 

[00:46:19] Maya Schenwar: Being alive, exactly. And I love in the last chapter, Susana Paras and Alex Villalpando talk about this anecdote about their child. Getting angry at them. And they actually include the note that they received from their child. Yeah. And their kid is expressing anger and isolation and they look at this and share it openly and view it as a parenting win.

They’re like clearly we did something where we made our child feel hurt and we, and also they expressed it and this is going to keep us moving forward and framing it as like this will happen. And I think in organizing, one of the things that sometimes prompts a falling apart is something that is a loss or everyone views as a loss or, really is quite a failure or fragmentation.

Fragmentation. And then it’s organizing doesn’t work. I 

[00:47:26] Cayden Mak: get it, or like this, yeah. We throw out the entire thing as opposed to examine where maybe also we made a mistake or didn’t do things in the way that we now think we should have. 

[00:47:38] Maya Schenwar: Yes. Yeah. So Dylan Rodriguez writes in the book, I love his essay and he writes about how sometimes he finds himself exhibiting the tendencies of a cop or a prison guard in relation to his kids.

And he’s, an ardent abolitionist. And he says, he’s saying this not as a confession a confession or some sort of like big reveal, but actually an attempt to push back on. Righteousness, like you can be some kind of like perfect abolitionist, perfectly applying your values all day long. And instead I think thinking about things with an approach of humility and an idea that mistake making will always be a part of caregiving and a part of existing and therefore also a part of all organizing.

Then we can embrace that this constant trying and learning process is something that we’re going to have to get really good at. In these fundamentally chaotic times. 

[00:49:00] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is like really it’s very I find that to be incredibly grounding and also remember a reminder that we’re operating on.

A longer arc than any one single victory or loss. And that I don’t know. I like in, in times like these, I come back to this book called finite and infinite games by James Kars. And in the book, one of the things that he posits is that there’s two kinds of games. There’s a game that the goal is either is to win and that’s a finite game.

There’s like an end condition. And then there’s an infinite game where the goal is to keep playing. And I think a lot about how. Actually the goal of doing small P politics is actually to keep playing, right? That like we want to 

[00:49:42] Maya Schenwar: keep playing 

[00:49:42] Cayden Mak: and we want as many players who are engaging in these struggles in good faith to, to keep playing and how important that is.

[00:49:52] Maya Schenwar: Yes. Oh yeah. I think about, so Autumn Brown talks about this a little bit in the book and I think it also ties in with imagination. And Autumn talks about driving her kids to school and just spontaneously starting to talk about Harriet Tubman. And what she said was, I think it’s really crucial that we recognize that Harriet Tubman did what she did from inside enslavement.

And for her to do what she did from inside enslavement, she had to really believe that there was a different reality. That there was like this different thing and keep moving forward. Obviously, a million failures, right? A million losses but keep moving forward. I think with that framework that you just mentioned that we need to keep playing and that the goal is larger than any of us and hopefully on a longer arc than we could imagine or see.

[00:51:12] Cayden Mak: Totally. Maya is always a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:51:18] Maya Schenwar: Always a delight to talk with you. And I could do it all day. 

[00:51:23] Cayden Mak: The book is We Grow the World Together. You can get it wherever you get good books. I also noticed that on heymarketbooks. org, the ebook is like 40 percent off.

It’s six bucks. So pick it up for yourself, pick it up for a parent in your life, and read it together. Yeah, it’s a good, it’s a good read. I, full disclosure, I did get it for my partner as part of her holiday gift. So she’s very excited. This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights.

I’m Cayden Mak. Our producer is Josh Elstro. If you’ve got something to say or a question, please drop me a line. You can send an email that we’ll consider running on an upcoming mailbag episode at mailbag at convergencemag. com. And, of course, 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 member at convergencemag.

com slash donate. Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure our independent, small team can continue to build 

a map for our movements. I hope this helps.