Holding Our Collective Grief, with Sarah Jaffe and Malkia Devich-Cyril

[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 impact of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.

Before we get started, I want to invite you to join our subscriber program. Convergence Magazine is an independent publication that relies on the generosity of our readers and listeners to create the rigorous, thoughtful takes that 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 two amazing guests. Organizer and strategist Malkia de co-founder of Media Justice and the founder of the Radical Loss Project, as well as journalist and author Sarah Jaffe, whose new book [00:01:00] from the Ashes, grief and Revolution, and World on Fire is out now.

I’ve been dreaming of this conversation for months, but decided it was time when Bill Fletcher Jr. Called on us in our post-election episode to grapple with the political and cultural implications of grief, both individual and social arising from everything that’s happened to all of us collectively since the start of pandemic time.

But first, some headlines from this past week. On Thursday, Amazon delivery workers organized by the Teamsters walked out of ten facilities across the country protesting low pay and dangerous working conditions. Amazon claims the drivers aren’t employees, which is, of course, bullshit. The shifts that the Amazon, that Amazon schedules the workers for often require them to work more than a full eight hour day.

Walking out less than a week before Christmas and Hanukkah, the biggest retail month of the year, when extra large volumes of Deliveries are taking place. It’s the kind of targeted labor action. We love to see also this week We may have gotten our first glimpse of what exactly the openly oligarchic rule of trump 2.

0 may look like Elon [00:02:00] musk the world’s richest man purchased his position in trump’s cabinet as head of a new kind of bullshit agency and self proclaimed quote unquote first buddy for 277 million. Elon Musk, whose personal net worth has also nearly doubled since Trump’s election last month, spent the day on Wednesday using his personal bully pulpit, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, to send out a plume of lies and threats about the end of year federal spending bill to his 200 million followers.

Cue complete government shutdown dramatics from the GOP with lawmakers clutching their pearls about the national debt. The real consequences, of course, are the disruption of hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and services that everyday Americans depend on. As of this recording, we are about ten hours from that still looming shutdown.

But I want to spend a little bit of time examining how this shutdown threat is maybe a little different than what we’re used to seeing from the fights that played out during the Tea Party era of the 2010s. Thanks for watching! There’s never really been this brazenness, this level [00:03:00] of brazenness about the billionaire influence in our government, and so very little fight back from the opposition party.

Musk is proud to brandish the cult of personality he’s built across the internet and his relationship to Trump way out in the open. Before organizers exposed them and made them household names, groups like ALEC and the Koch brothers more or less flew under the radar. You had to read beyond the headlines to really understand the influence of dark money and billionaires on our government.

But it’s Musk’s callous detachment from reality and humanity that’s perhaps the most sobering. While the Kochs are indeed selfishly focused on profits for themselves and their industries, which is Obviously contributing to massive wealth inequality and existentially deadly climate change, Musk and the super rich Silicon Valley billionaires now venturing into politics are driven by a much darker ideology.

They and their pseudo intellectual guides believe that democracy has failed as a project and the only way to fix society is to build an authoritarian monarchy, with them at the very top of a narrow pyramid of power. [00:04:00] Elon Musk isn’t. I think is a really special specimen of this class though. One who appears to think he’s playing with a computer simulation.

Starting in as early as 2016, he was talking about how he believes that there’s only a one in a billion chance that we’re living in the quote unquote base reality. Translation, Musk is almost certain we live in a computer simulation and nothing matters. He is definitely reading The Matrix against the text.

While we know Trump’s only political priority has always ever been to do what makes Trump richer, Musk’s motivation is even scarier. His seems to be to do whatever entertains him, and that brand of entertainment has proven to be cruel, juvenile, dangerous, and completely lacking in any empathy or conscience towards humanity and other living beings.

It’s a dangerous future that we face where people who think like this hold so much power, but we have to face this clear eyed. Blocking the nihilistic techno fascist is part of both the political and cultural fight that lies ahead of us. Now I want to welcome my guests for today [00:05:00] Sarah Jaffe is a journalist and author who’s recently published a new book called From the Ashes, Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.

Sarah, it’s nice to see you. Thank you for joining me today. 

[00:05:09] Sarah Jaffe: Hello, it’s so nice to see your face. 

[00:05:11] Cayden Mak: And we are also joined by Malkia Devich Zero, who is the co founder of Media Justice as well as the founder of the Radical Loss Project. It’s always good to see you, Mac. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me. It seems deeply appropriate that we have this discussion on, this is our final episode of Block and Build for 2024. It’s the day before the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and a time when a lot of people’s simmering grief is bubbling up for them. And I also think I should situate myself a little bit here too both of you were part of the wider network of people who had really valuable things to offer me after my parents passed in 2020. My memory of that time is obviously very strange. I think all of our memories of 2020 are very strange, but I do remember conversations with each of you.

Either voice or text after, especially that fall after my mom passed away suddenly, that [00:06:00] really helped me a lot. And so it’s, I don’t know, it’s especially, it feels especially tender and good to have this conversation with the two of you. Yeah, thank you. To get us grounded here, I want to ask a basic philosophical question of both of you, and I think that you’ll, you both have slightly different ways of coming at this, but what is it that we’re talking about when we talk about grief?

Um, I think there’s a lot of ways to, I think one of the things that strikes me is there’s a way that on the surface, We talk about grief as a sadness that we feel, but there’s obviously so much more there. Sarah, from your reaction, I want to kick it to you first.

Oh, God. Oh, that’s so intense, though. 

[00:06:37] Sarah Jaffe: Yeah I, it’s before my father died in 2018, which is why I ended up writing this book. book. And before that I would have been like, Oh, grief is like sadness, right? Yeah. And afterward, I’m like, Oh, no, it’s like everything. It is every possible emotion.

It is more than an emotion. It’s a sort of state of being like a friend of mine referred to being in the [00:07:00] land of the dead. And I, That was I was like, Oh yeah that’s it. I feel like my entire relationship to time and the world and my body has changed. And it’s yeah, it’s a really profound reaction to profound loss.

So we’re not just talking like small things, right? We’re talking the loss of somebody who you love deeply. We’re talking about the loss of something that’s been foundational to your idea of yourself. And within that, like there are so many shapes and ends. Actions and non actions and transformations that happen within it that it feels really impossible to boil it down to like grief is this because every time I think I’ve put my finger on what it is, it will come kick my ass in an entirely new way.

[00:07:59] Malkia Devich-Cyril: I [00:08:00] feel that. For me, grief. Is multifaceted, but primarily, I lost my wife, I lost my mother, I’ve lost upwards of 20 friends and family members that were close to me through that process. I’ve come to understand that the dominant society. Frames grief as this individual, private, personal, time bound set of reactions and emotions.

And I think a lot of us buy that too some version of that. For me as somebody who studies social movements, who’s a community organizer and as a black person, particularly focused on, on black grief and its power and purpose, for me, grief is. other things. One, it’s a meaning making, adaptive process.

[00:09:00] So it’s a narrative process. It’s a cultural process. It’s also a process. It is a a natural set of responses and decisions following a loss of any size. We grieve in so many ways, And about so many things, the loss of our languages, our land.

But even in other ways. And one of the things that’s been so important to me is to recognize how natural it is that everything you invest in, you will lose. 

And it’s, There’s only one form of investment. Capitalism is also an investment. White supremacy is an investment. And even for those of us who oppose those things, we are compelled by their force to invest in them.

And therefore when they change, when we lose them, there is a kind of grieving. This is something that we have to deal with as a community and as a movement. So I don’t think of grief [00:10:00] as a set of emotions. I don’t think of it coming in stages. I think of process by which we move from lost to meaning.

[00:10:13] Cayden Mak: That’s great. That’s I feel like that’s like such a, like rich like short and rich like snapshot of what it means to grieve something. And also that it’s process based, which I think is interesting. Super crucial. Mac, I am curious to hear a little bit more. With that as the sort of teaser about the radical loss project.

What is the vision for what you’re working on? And where did this idea come from? 

[00:10:40] Malkia Devich-Cyril: Because I’ve experienced so many direct losses. I’ve been thinking about this question of the role of loss in my life as a strategist for a long time, role that loss and grief play inside of social movements.

A lot of times we think about we, [00:11:00] there, there has been actually a lot of research on this question of collective grief, there is growing research on how mass loss affects communities. Putting those two things together with the community. Power building and the way that those things impact social movements at a broad scale, our strategies our leadership our basis and the, our capacity for mobilization, our capacity for absorption institutionally, that the fact that grieving has something to do with our power building infrastructure, our power building leadership, and our power building strategy.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but it wasn’t until my wife died from cancer, that I really decided that I didn’t want to do whatever I was doing before I had to stop for a minute, and and I began to think about what it means to be radicalized at the point of loss.

We were in this [00:12:00] pandemic where at the same time as I was experiencing, I experienced about 17. personal losses between 2016 and 2022. And that just created an incredible incentive for me to think about what it means for loss to radicalize me. And then to take that, that, that question, into a research process.

to begin to identify the components of what transformative grief might be as a leadership development process, as a, as an idea, but also then as an initiative. And then the radical loss initiative was born. From that, I began to do programming started a grief group, started a inspiration community, started something called a Freedom Cleanse, started working with the Butte educational system the school district on grief with [00:13:00] public education staff with educators, basically, and students.

Just a bunch of experiments, started jumping off. And finally, I came to the realization that power building movements need models, they need tools, they need infrastructure to help us grapple with grief and loss. It’s not enough for us to name that it exists. We got to figure out how we use it to achieve our goals.

[00:13:25] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that’s, that seems very important. And, like I mentioned at the top of the episode, like a lot of my motivation for getting the two of you together on this is, was that on our post election sort of digestion episode, Bill Fletcher Jr. was like, part of what happened here in this election cycle was a direct response to our social inability to deal with.

The collective grief of what happened to us in the pandemic, that we have not grappled with it as a society. And then compound that with the genocide in Palestine. And so many [00:14:00] of the violence, the sort of quote, unquote, everyday violences visited upon us and our people, right? Through capitalism, through racism, policing, sexism, homophobia.

And I think that this insight that our movements need to have a real answer for this is also so much at the heart of your book, Sarah, that you’re talking to organizers across the country who are grappling with different kinds of griefs, not just the grief of the loss of mortal life, but also the loss of lifestyle, the loss of a livable environment.

Thank you. I’m interested, Sarah, to hear what you’ve learned through those conversations, and I’m also interested to know a little bit about how your book tour has been going, because I’m sure that has been, you’ve been out on the road talking to people about this. 

[00:14:46] Sarah Jaffe: Yeah it’s been so interesting because you write a thing about a subject that like part of your premise for writing this book is we don’t like to talk about this.

And also like capitalism doesn’t like us to talk about this, right? Yes. And then you’re [00:15:00] shocked when the New York Times doesn’t review your book. Okay. I’m never shocked with New York Times. Yeah. It’s been so interesting because like the difference between the things that people say to me when they come to an event or they’ve read the book or they’ve heard about the book, I’m getting just emails with people telling me about their losses, people coming up to me in bookstores and just being like, Oh my God, let me tell you about, this thing, this person, this family, this whatever change that they’ve had in their life.

And then the public discourse is just yeah, no, we’re not going to talk about that. We’re going to completely pretend that everything is fine. And then I was, I try not to be in the prediction business because I’m a journalist, right? I’m in the business of talking to people.

But about a year ago, I was actually a little bit more than a year ago. I was like, Trump’s going to win again. And we need to be prepared for that. And it’s just been like millions of conversations with people being, refusing to deal with that even being a possibility, let alone being likely.

And [00:16:00] yeah, and I, Had this conversation recently for a column charmingly called Daddy Issues and Huck Magazine, which is based in Britain and beautifully, it’s a obviously tongue in cheek name, but it’s about masculinity and patriarchy and grief. And. We were talking about men, in this moment, and particularly, and I’m like, like, has not Cuba’s just saying right when capitalism changes, even if we don’t like it, we’re grieving the things that have changed.

And one of those things is a certain kind of masculinity. That’s just not accessible to most people anymore. And it’s mostly white, and it was associated with industrial jobs. And it’s, It’s the, again, part of Make America Great Again that Trump is promising, right?

It’s what are, what is he promising? Actually, he’s promising I don’t know, a certain kind of white man that he can have a certain kind of job and a certain kind of wife again, which spoiler alert, is not going to happen, right? Nothing he’s promising is going to do that, even if it were possible to shove capitalism back into the bottle the bottle of 1945.

It’s not [00:17:00] happening. And, in not dealing with that, in not understanding it as a form of grief, even. You’ve just got a bunch of people who have a lot of rage and anger and hurt and whatever, and they are being offered the chance to turn that on other people who have even less power than they do.

And that’s like the promise of Trumpism, right? Is it like we’re not going to really make your life better, but we’re going to make somebody else’s life worse and you can enjoy that. And that is, whatever arguments we want to have about. fascism and what we should call what’s happening right now.

That is something that I think of as central to fascism in any format, right? It’s like the sort of spectacular punishment of people declared the other. And, I think part of the reason that, that I’m interested that I don’t want to speak for Malakia, but that we’re interested in talking about grief as part of movements is if we don’t deal with it, then like it can get really nasty.

And yeah, and so [00:18:00] I’ve been thinking about that a lot since, the eminently predictable election results that just declaring the politics of joy was not enough to make most people in this country feel joyful did not shock me and probably didn’t shock any of you. 

[00:18:12] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:18:12] Sarah Jaffe: But, it’s been a frustrating.

Several months, and I think again, I’m just really struck by the way that that you put that talking about, like the things that were imbricated into whether we like it or not, that then we leave when we lose them, even if we knew they sucked. 

[00:18:36] Cayden Mak: Yeah, which again, going back to the thing that Mac was pointing out, just feels like a very organic and it feels like the curse of living in linear time, right?

It’s just you can’t go back to the thing. It’s complicated enough with 

[00:18:48] Sarah Jaffe: no linear fucking time. Yeah. 

[00:18:49] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And I think that what I’m seeing from both of you is this question about, like, how do we build a new narrative around grief? And that the imperative for that is [00:19:00] deeply political one.

And, uh, our sort of larger social inability to even acknowledge it, aside from just nodding at it, is limiting us from envisioning what, Like the world could be like. Yeah. And I’m I guess I’m also I’m curious to hear from you Mac about what like what you found, especially through working with movement folk, folks with educators.

What sort of doors have opened up to folks as you started talking to them in a real way about grief and how we metabolize grief together. 

[00:19:37] Malkia Devich-Cyril: It’s a good question. First of all, let me just say I read Sarah’s book and Sarah’s amazing. So thank you for writing it. It’s a gift to the movement. It’s a gift to the world.

I think for me, the things that have been unlocked in my conversations and in my experiments and projects is one. Each person who has suffered a [00:20:00] personal loss as they come to discover and really relate to the reality that there is a politics to mourning that there is a relationship between death and democracy, that their losses aren’t simply the result of some personal problem, which is what, which is the entirety of the, this is where community organizing begins.

So yeah, the big unlock is that there is really no difference between healthful collective grieving and community organizing. That’s the first, that’s the first thing power building begins with an acknowledgement of loss and turns on the pivot that there is something that can be done, that there is a reason that these losses are taking place, that they’re mechanized, that they’re unequal, that they are out of balance.

And then the realization that who lives and who dies is a direct direct, has a direct correlation with distributions of racial economic power [00:21:00] that, some of that consciousness raising through the lens of grieving even to the understanding, as we’ve run grief groups, many grief groups they don’t allow for you to talk about your For example, during the period we were initially witnessing so many murders of black people by the police and by vigilantes on social media.

And even now, as we witness, this genocide in Palestine the, this the civil wars and the genocides and other parts of the world. When you go to grief group, because you lost your partner, you lost your child, you Or you lost your parent, you ain’t supposed to talk about all the rest of it.

The grief group is for everybody, right? MAGA, you MAGA, the grief group is for you. And so for me to come to the grief group, I can’t acknowledge that My personal losses and my cultural and collective losses are all they’re all part and parcel of the same thing. I [00:22:00] can’t talk. So it became clear to me that we had to have other spaces.

We needed spaces for activists and organizers and leftists to grieve that was supportive. We also needed spaces that could acknowledge and we need thought leadership that’s going to acknowledge that MAGA. Is straight up a maladaptation to loss. Yeah. Yeah. You feel like we need to be able to say that direct.

Yeah. That the alienation that is being produced in late stage capitalism and the kind of a national culture that’s being produced right now as, in response to that’s all related to a refusal to grieve. Knowledge and admit loss, a refusal to deal with loss and change, all loss is a, is an element of change.

That’s what it is. So we think about grieving. It is about helping us process change and white nationalism refuses to process. It doesn’t want it. It [00:23:00] wants to control change could violently resist change. Exactly. Either resist it or wants to control it, right? Because sometimes it wants change in a particular direction, but it very much only wants it.

Exactly what it wants to maintain. Power wants to maintain itself. It wants to reify. And so grief is the antidote to that level of reification. It won’t allow it. So this is some of what, we don’t have enough research. We have to be able to articulate new ways of thinking about grief and talking about it, both scientifically, neurologically, medically.

We need new ways of talking about it politically, personally, and that requires more research. That requires more conversation. And we need a whole new approach. There’s an innovation needed right now in community organizing. We innovated when we went from politically neutral to ideological, right?

That was a leap forward in our methodology. Now we need to leap forward in terms of [00:24:00] care, in terms of the role that grief and trauma are playing in how we make change. 

[00:24:05] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Related to that, one of the things, Sarah, as I was reading your book is just thinking about how our ability, also just on an individual level, being able to appreciate another person’s grief, or their capacity for grief, is also really tied to our ability to see one another as different.

people, right? As actual human beings. And I think one of the things that I’m really interested in is the role that grief can play in actually bringing us closer together in a time when everything feels like a rupture, everything is falling apart. Whether that is like our economic system, our environment And that so many of the sort of political impulses are about separation, but that so many of the stories in your book are about people coming together and seeing one another’s whole humanity through the acknowledgement of grief.

And I was, I guess this is a prompt for both of you to think about a little bit [00:25:00] how that works. 

[00:25:02] Sarah Jaffe: Yeah, and I have to say to that Mac invited me to their pandemic joy group while I was in the middle of working on this project. And we talked, we were put in touch with by the lovely Maria Poblete friend to all, and yeah, and then Kristen or who’s in my book with somebody that I met at that group.

And I just remember that the talk that Matt gave at the beginning of that group was about productivity and our relationship to work. And that was so like, hand in hand with the way I was thinking about. grief and as a sort of a rupture, particularly with work and with our ideas of productivity, that it requires you to stop.

Yeah. And I’ve been trying over and over again to think about how to talk about we need spaces that we can just be We so often in the movement as Mac was saying that day, right? We’re focused on we’ve got to move. We’ve got to do this thing. We’ve got to accomplish this thing.

We’ve got to hit these boxes and this whatever. And because we’re up against [00:26:00] so much, we can forget that we. That’s a capitalist mindset itself. And that actually, sometimes what we need is precisely to stop and to reflect and to rest and to just be in the company of people who care about each other.

And this sort of, Fascinating and horrible tension between like grief is coming for all of us just like death is coming for all of us and also like it is unevenly distributed and people’s access to care and the economic means of life and everything else means that people right people who are in Gaza right now are dealing with just an unending wave of grief that I cannot imagine because I live in the US but also live in New Orleans, which is a place where life is Cheap in a lot of ways.

Because of a variety of issues of historic, white supremacy and violence and disinvestment and, having a little Trump as our governor and so many other things. And so I am [00:27:00] used to living in the murder capital of the U S and knowing that these are, even within this city, deeply unequally distributed by race and class, and by gender And so as people who are working on people who are, trying to build a better future, a more just future, a more equitable, I hate all these words. They feel like all the things I have to say in like articles for nice magazines and like people who are revolutionaries, we have to have space for the grief that is coming for all of us that is an inevitable part of life and that is not a bad part of life as Mac was saying is a natural part of life and also to fight with everything that we have the horrors that are being perpetrated all around us and on us. And in our name with our tax dollars, right?

And I, I’m Jewish. So I spent a lot of the last year being like, absolutely not in my name, but also, please, just not at all. When it comes to Palestine. And so, thinking about [00:28:00] what are the spaces look like where we can, Just have our grief and be with each other and care for that.

And where are the spaces that we move that grief into action and a lot of the actions that have been done by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace in the last year have really moved like grief rituals into the public space and said, in our attempt to shut things down and to actually stop the production of death.

We are going to be grieving while we’re doing that. That has been really beautiful to see in a completely horrific, year and some odd of genocide. And then there are times when we, we do have to move with the kind of speed and. Yeah, that it’s really hard to do when you were in acute grief and holding all of those complicated things together is the challenge we have to meet.

And I, I don’t have a set of rules for how to do it in part because nobody grieves exactly the same way. But I think the thing that we all have in common is that we will all [00:29:00] grieve and we all do need to be held in our grief.

[00:29:06] Malkia Devich-Cyril: Absolutely. I think that is a true gift in being able to locate grief inside of an understanding of capitalism, racial capitalism, because it begins to give us an understanding of the depth of the emotional content of what we’ve lost and gives us a way to understand what we’re facing and the road we need to take.

Being able to recognize that the authoritarianism that we’re engaged, that we’re witnessing, that we’re threatened by right now, that it has emotional roots. You know what I’m saying? That there’s a cultural fascism that is on the rise as much as a material reality. You know what I’m saying?

And And that the fact that fascism as we understand it is often facilitated by mass [00:30:00] loss events. Genocide, but not only direct genocide, but also climate emergency forced, structural, structurally derived climate emergency, pandemics, these are all roads to authoritarianism.

They’re roads to chaos. And it’s inside of chaos that I remember watching game of thrones and, the priest or whatever, when he said, chaos is a ladder. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a odd job to climb it. That’s what he was talking about. I was like, Oh, you drive this up serious strategy now, but but it’s true, that they will use the chaos, build a ladder of control, fascism gets its opening, but it’s also how Other kinds of radical change gets an opening.

And that’s the piece we can’t forget, that we have as much opportunity. We don’t have all the resource. We don’t have all that, but we have as much opportunity to forge a new [00:31:00] direction as they do. 

[00:31:01] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that’s right. 

[00:31:03] Malkia Devich-Cyril: So that’s something that understanding grief helps me to remember that in my grieving can go any direction I pointed it.

You feel me? 

[00:31:12] Sarah Jaffe: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:31:15] Cayden Mak: Yeah, I think that there’s just been this sort of like constellation of themes that at Convergence, we’ve been thinking about publishing about talking about since, before the election, but they’ve become a lot louder since the election around things like mutual aid, and like how mutual aid can be part of a power building strategy.

And trying to grapple with I think what is about this sort of deep cultural question about who cares for whom and what does care look like? That just seems one, it feels like something that we can wrap, we can wrap our arms around a little bit in this moment that it feels immediate and correct to do because people are going to be desperately [00:32:00] needing more mutual aid in the years to come.

But that I think that Mac, when you talk about us doing innovation in this area, it occurs to me that like, in this moment of rupture, in like our political moment, that we are being given the opportunity to like, rapidly iterate on some things that require, um, require and allow us to grow beyond the sort of like vision of racial capitalism.

Yeah. And There’s something exciting and it’s frightening, but it’s also exciting in that and in that insight. 

[00:32:35] Malkia Devich-Cyril: Absolutely. Reparation and reconstruction require a grieving process. 

[00:32:39] Cayden Mak: Correct. 

[00:32:40] Malkia Devich-Cyril: They have to have it, and right now we in a dangerous moment, we shouldn’t under, underestimate the danger that we’re in. Absolutely. The kind of the kind of melancholia, right? That basis and constituencies and voters are experiencing the movement is experiencing it too. It’s demobilizing, 

[00:32:59] Cayden Mak: It’s 

[00:32:59] Malkia Devich-Cyril: [00:33:00] oppressive. You feel me? It makes it hard to act.

And that’s dangerous. It’s rooted in cynicism. It decontextualizes your understanding from the material conditions and reality. That’s a danger. You feel me? But, yeah. But there is a sorrow that actually can build our empathy, can actually build beloved community. There’s a kind of sorrow, as long as it’s rooted in a true, in true relationship with the material conditions, as long as it actually functions to bring us closer together, and it doesn’t feed our alienation.

There’s nothing wrong with being sorrowful. Being sad. It’s the kind of sorrow. Again, it’s the direction of the sorrow. Is it, does it pull us apart or does it bring us together? That’s for me to question. And those are strategy questions. That’s why I’m tired of grief being solely in the purview of psychologists, therapists, you know what I’m saying?

I wanted to get in the purview of organizers and [00:34:00] leftists and strategists and narrative, folk and all of that because These, the whole thing about the politics of emotions, we’ve been talking about that for a minute, for about 20 years, there’s been science and da, narrative, but we don’t really understand that we have a responsibility to combat alienation, and one of the ways we do that is through grieving active process of grieving together with one another.

That’s a way forward and I think that’s a way to respond to fascism and it’s a way to carve a future and a vision that is a whole new kind of democracy, a whole new way of thinking about economy, whole new ways of thinking about gender. You feel me? Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:34:47] Cayden Mak: I think Sarah, I also want to loop back around to.

some of the stories from your book and some of, I don’t know if there’s like a specific, any specific reporting you want to draw out from your book is a like [00:35:00] teaser, especially on this particular theme of like how people are turning like metabolizing grief as part of a strategy for organizing.

If there’s stories that you want to pull out there. 

[00:35:12] Sarah Jaffe: Yeah. There’s a lot obviously in here, but I think You know I want to shout out Kristen or Kizza who, again, I met through Mac, who started an organization called marked by COVID after, her father died of COVID and she started organizing the people who had lost loved ones to the pandemic.

And particularly, her father lived in a state where the governor had told them, everything’s fine, reopen, go do whatever. And he believed them. And I really. I really related to her story. I feel she was talking about her dad who was, whose family was from Mexico who, supporting Trump was like his form of assimilation.

And I was like, Oh, this sounds like my Jewish dad, right? This is your way into whiteness is by supporting white supremacy, and that, that feeling [00:36:00] again, of being like I disagreed politically with this person who also raised me and made me who I am. And that led her to forming this organization that had this really, again, beautifully expansive set of demands around care, right?

Health care, but broader care, including grief care, right? That if we actually put into effect would help not only people who’ve lost people to COVID, which is most of us really, right? Yeah. Do not talk enough about how we’re at a million and some odd Americans died of cove it. Most of us know a few people and but these are also demands that would, if they were actually all put into effect, they just radically transform the way that we.

exist and function as a society, right? We would have to take grief seriously. We would have to take care seriously. We would have to take rest seriously, right? Not just paid sick time, but like recovery, things like that. And it’s, it’s amazing how these demands they echo [00:37:00] over and over again, right?

That healthcare just keeps coming back to the center of our debate. And yes, I am going to bring up the United Healthcare shooting because I’ve been fascinated by this right now, which is not a book, obviously it just happened, but as a story about grief, it’s really fascinating, right? Because actually the battle that’s happening in public between sort of pundits who are like, but he had a family.

And people on TikTok who are making dance videos about Luigi Mangione are saying is who do we grieve for actually, right? Do we grieve for the rich guy? Or do we grieve for the hundreds of thousands of people who have died because they’ve been denied functional health care in this country, right?

Do we grieve for the people who are suffering every day because they have, they Illnesses that could be treated but they’re not able to because we their health insurance won’t pay for it because we have decided as a country that we are not going to do this thing even though Most people want it.

Um, that like we’re having yet again, a public discussion about health care, [00:38:00] about whose lives matter. And about who gets to be the victim and the perpetrator of violence in this country. 

[00:38:08] Cayden Mak: And 

[00:38:08] Sarah Jaffe: it’s all a whole bunch of just, the same things that we’ve been talking about here and the same things that we’ve been thinking about here.

Is. is like the question of what is violence even 

[00:38:20] Cayden Mak: right? 

[00:38:21] Sarah Jaffe: Is violence only someone getting shot or is violence denying people’s healthcare claims and then having a party about how high your profits are? I, in the book, I lean on Uncle Freddy Engels’s discussion of social murder, which is a term that he took from the workers, right?

He didn’t come up with it. He got this from the people who he was reporting on when he wrote, the conditions of the working class in England. And so this idea that like the capitalist class is perpetrating murder all the time, that particularly healthcare CEOs are perpetrating murder all the time.

And what we’ve seen in the public response to this event. is that most people get that. [00:39:00] Most people might not know the term social murder, but most people sure get that it’s what’s happening. 

[00:39:06] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. It’s felt it’s immediate. It is the experience I think all of us have had at some point with somebody, even if not us, somebody we love getting denied.

I think it’s 

[00:39:17] Malkia Devich-Cyril: funny that the two people in that process are two white men, 

[00:39:22] Cayden Mak: and 

[00:39:23] Malkia Devich-Cyril: that’s the only reason. A conversation like that can be taking place at the scale that it’s happening, you know what I’m saying? Because black folk been shouting at, from the hills about this question of violence.

Franz Fernanda wrote about it however many decades ago. We have been in a conversation about who gets to grieve and who gets to be grieved and what is violence. And they and it’s 100% dismissed. And then we have this moment. Which I think is an important cultural moment. It is an important moment, and it is completely saturated inside of white [00:40:00] supremacy.

I can’t let that, that be, that escape recognition and acknowledgement. 

[00:40:06] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. Because it strikes me that in a lot of ways, it’s the same question that Black Lives Matter is asking about policing and the structure of the structure of violence that is policing and Who, who is a victim?

Who is protecting themselves? That’s like the same set of questions fundamentally. And how we value lives as a society. 

[00:40:25] Sarah Jaffe: Yeah. Which way does the gun point, right? Which way does the gun get to be pointed? Always in one direction. And yeah, we’re just, so we live in a world where institutionalized white supremacy has said, you just get to watch a genocide in Gaza, and that’s just going to be fun.

We’re just going to do that. You get to have, we don’t even keep track of how many people the police kill. We have to do that ourselves because they don’t actually even count. We don’t count who is even able to access health insurance, even with the crappy [00:41:00] affordable care act situation that we’ve got.

I 256 a month and So how many people still can’t afford this, right? How many people are even locked out of that death making system? And then even if you have health insurance, is there a hospital in your community? Can you get there? 

[00:41:15] Cayden Mak: Is 

[00:41:15] Sarah Jaffe: there a doctor who’s 

[00:41:16] Cayden Mak: going to take you seriously?

[00:41:17] Sarah Jaffe: Exactly. Is there a doctor who’s going to listen to your pain and actually count that it matters? That’s so many ways that in every single one of these systems it’s death making for everyone, but it’s death making for some people a lot harder, faster, earlier. And yeah, it’s just, we have to make use of the leveling moments in the narrative while also like never losing sight of the fact that, among other things, right with COVID, like when people realized that it was disproportionately black and brown people who are dying of COVID, that’s when we started to see the protests saying, open everything back up.

That’s when it started to get politically polarized, right? When it became clear that if [00:42:00] you could work from home and had a nice job where you could work from home, you’re probably going to be okay. And if you were a line cook, you were probably going to get COVID and die. If you were working in a meatpacking plant, you’re probably going to get COVID and die.

If you were in a prison, you’re probably going to get COVID and die, right? Like this, the, we’re all in it together. Evaporates so quickly. 

[00:42:19] Cayden Mak: Yeah, it happened and it was like a light switch I felt like. Yeah. And I think that the flip side of this, as we were saying earlier, is that this is where the sort of like seed of solidarity can be made real for people, right?

That there is, I think in here the, like if we actually level with this and if we level with what this means for us as human beings. And for the death making systems that we were born into and that we perpetuate. That it, it does feel to me that there’s a very clear pathway through that touches on the fact that this is an unequally distributed but shared experience [00:43:00] of being human.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, as we wrap up, are there things that you hope our listeners will consider as we move through the end of this year? What are you, what would you like these considerations, these conversations to do to shape the way that we do politics together in this next period?

Fraught as it is. 

[00:43:24] Sarah Jaffe: How long 

[00:43:29] Cayden Mak: do we have? Long as you want, to be honest. Mack, you want to start us off? 

[00:43:39] Malkia Devich-Cyril: I want, number one, for each time we experience a loss, profound or otherwise. that we are able to re center inside of that loss and engage with the natural part of it, while at the same [00:44:00] time learning from the part that is mechanized.

So that’s number one, I want us to build our own capacity to engage with loss. As part of, as leaders, I think it is a mandate for us. As power builders, I think it is a responsibility, in terms of how we deal with our constituents and our infrastructure. And I want us to be, begin to incorporate a relationship with laws into our leadership development, into our strategy into our institutions and infrastructure.

That’s one thing that I want that I want to lean on right now, especially in not only this holiday season, when many of us are just sad, yeah. I want to. Invite people into that sorrow and let that sorrow be transformative. Let it not simply make us stuck I think that we have a Responsibility to resist [00:45:00] cynicism and that we can do that through sorrow not by rejecting This is our work is to be emotionally competent have clarity in terms of our Social and emotional development being part of our political development 

Huh. Huh. And I offer that, as something that I’m working on myself, part of my practice of solidarity is to work on me in public, and so I offer that this is something I’m working on, and I want to work on it with other people who are Like mind.

[00:45:35] Sarah Jaffe: I love that. That part of the solidarity is working on me in public. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about myself in public this year, and I’m really over it. I really don’t like doing it. It makes me really uncomfortable. And and I’m a journalist and I, my job is to talk to people, and to tell stories and hopefully not screw them up.[00:46:00] 

we’re told we are supposed to be objective, right? And what is objectivity? But another word for institutionalized white supremacy, right? So who gets to be objective? Spoiler alert, right? And so in, in thinking about writing this book, I was like, okay, I’ve got to have to talk about myself. I don’t like it.

I don’t like it. It makes me really uncomfortable. It makes me want to hide. But the only way that I can go in and have any of these conversations with anybody about grief, the only way I can roll up to somebody and be like, tell me about the worst thing that ever happened to you is if I’m willing to do it first.

If I’m willing to show up and be like, hey, this is why I’m writing about this. This is why I’m thinking about this. This is why like me losing someone made me see the world entirely differently. And not. be able to put that aside and just go on with my day. It was like, this is fundamental to how I’m seeing and understanding the work that I do and the [00:47:00] organizing that I report on and the people that I’m in community with.

And

yeah it’s, as Max said, it’s a work in progress that I feel very much like I am not that good at, but

grief made me. less willing to put up with bullshit and also more understanding of the people in my life. And I think that combination of things is actually a pretty good set of skills to go into, Trumplandia 2. 0 with. I think we need to be more and more willing to show up for and care for each other.

And to, be less willing to swallow the garbage that is just going to be heaped our way. The narratives that we’re going to be told about who is important and who matters. Yeah. So that’s what I’m trying to hold onto [00:48:00] going forward into another year, another round of fights, um, and live in the belly of the beast in the deep South.

Yeah, I think people down the South have a lot to teach the rest of the country also, since I was also just in Texas were just yeah. 

[00:48:19] Cayden Mak: Sarah, Mac, it was absolutely a pleasure to talk to both of you. I feel like, I don’t know getting you both in conversation. I’m like, this is it.

This is it. This is how I want to end my year. These are the kinds of conversations that like, I’m like, this is why I embraced to do it. Cause like you, Sarah, I hate being perceived the kinds of conversations I realized that like we could have on this program. And that I think that they are so important to the way that we think about strategy going forward.

And the work that both of you do has been such a gift to me personally and to our movements. Sending both a lot of love. 

[00:48:53] Sarah Jaffe: Thank you. Good to be here with you both. 

[00:48:55] Malkia Devich-Cyril: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure. 

[00:48:58] Cayden Mak: All right. My thanks [00:49:00] again to Mac and Sarah for joining us today. You can find Sarah’s new book, From the Ashes, Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, wherever you get good books, and at fromtheashesbook.

org. You can also catch up with Mac via the Movement Innovation Collaborative, and radicalloss. org is coming as a website you can find in January. Thank you also to all of you for listening this year, whether you’ve been with us since the first episode that we aired back in the spring, or you’re just finding us now.

I’m really glad that you’ve been able to join us on the wild ride that has been 2024. Our team is taking two weeks off for the end of the year, and I hope you get some downtime this season too. Rest assured we’re going to be back on January 10th with more deep dives with Movement Voices. This show is published by Convergence.

A magazine for radical insights. I’m Caden Mock and our producer is Josh Elstro. If you’ve got something to say or a question to ask, you can drop me a line by sending me an email at mailbag at convergencemag. com. And finally, if you would like to support the [00:50:00] 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.