How to Unrig the Game

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: What’s up y’all? Welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Caden Mock. 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.

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Any amount helps either as a one-time donation or recurring monthly or annual subscription. And also if you don’t have the cash right now, I do wanna encourage you to support the show by rating and reviewing us on whatever pod catcher you’re using. If you’re watching us live on YouTube, smash that up vote button.

It really helps more folks who are looking for roadmaps in these treacherous times find us and our content. This week on the show, I’m joined first by the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, silky Shaw, to help us understand the danger and implications of ICE’s detention of Palestinian activists, Mahmud Khalil earlier this week.

And then I’m joined by author Vanessa Priya Daniel, to discuss her new book, unr The Game, what Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning. But first, these headlines. It turns out that not every member of Congress is asleep at the wheel. A good example of this is Bernie Sanders, who’s been barnstorming across the country, rallies last weekend, drew huge overflow crowds of thousands to small town gymnasiums in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the energy I.

Palpable Senator Bernie,

this guy isn’t even running for anything right now. This is proof that everyday Americans are really upset with what. They’re seeing from Trump and Musk. People are ready to get in formation. They’re ready to be organized by capable leaders and movements. If we show up for them, this is a huge opportunity.

Bernie Sanders cannot and should not be the only one stepping into that breach, and you know that I, if you listen to the show, you know that I like to follow the money, so I am excited. To share this at once. Interesting and depressing report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Their research shows that over $1 billion was invested in anti-democracy organizations and nonprofits over the past four years.

This count includes any organization who promoted false or overblown threats to election integrity are explicitly mentioned as allies in Project 2025 have been linked to state electoral preemption policies. Or which have been linked to working to criminalize protest. The result of all this money is that these organizations were able to hire 8,000 staffers and mobilize 400,000 volunteers to disrupt elections between 2020 and 2022.

Meanwhile, the number of people who work in local elections offices ensuring that our elections are free, fair, and accessible. That number is only 20,000 people across the country. There’s a clear imbalance here. We’ll put a link to this report in the show notes because I think it’s pretty important.

And finally, as part of the Trump and Musk administration’s continued onslaught against a stable and functioning society, they turned their attention this week towards education. There was of course the detention of student activists and permanent US resident, Mahmud Khalil, which we’ll be discussing with my first guest, and they’ve also made, started making their first promised cuts to the Department of Education.

They fired half the department staff now being led by professional wrestling, wife and actual child sex scandal, rug sweeper, Linda McMahon. In case we weren’t fully aware of the degree to which the cruelty is the point, their most eng aggressive firings in the department have fallen mostly under the categories of the folks who enforce civil rights for K through 12 school children under Title one.

While these are not yet direct funding cuts to education programs themselves, sources within the department suggested the administration has made sure to fire every attorney whose role it is to help states and school districts understand how they can and cannot use federal money for K through 12 programming.

So message received. They also made some steep cuts to the portion of the de Department of Education Staffing who oversees federal student aid. So do it that what you will. Another component of this week’s attack on education is also entangled with their efforts to dismantle rights to free speech on campuses.

They released a list of 60 universities placed under threat of losing federal funding if they don’t further crack down on antisemitism on campus, a mirror world weaponization of language against students who have been simply standing up for the human rights of Palestinians. Columbia University has again been specifically targeted.

Last week, Trump canceled $400 million in federal funding to the university, but apparently that wasn’t enough in spite of the university revoking degrees from and expelling pro-Palestine protestors firing and expelling graduate student leaders, by the way, right before they start a union contract negotiation and other efforts this week by the university to really pathetically submit to the Trump administration’s authority, Columbia’s interim president received.

A list from the DOE yesterday full of draconian demands to further dismantle students’ ability to protest. Or the threat is the Trump administration will do it for them.

As I mentioned in our headlines permanent US resident and Columbia graduate student Mahmud. Khalil was illegally put in detention and disappeared by ICE agents earlier this week. I’m joined now by the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, silky Shaw, to help put this ongoing fight to free Mahmud into Perspective Detention Watch Network has been working to abolish immigration detention in the US through organizing, advocacy and strategic communications for a really long time.

And so I’m. Really glad Silky that you could join me today to talk about this case and the larger implications and the sort of context in which it’s taking place. Thanks so much for joining us. 

[00:06:28] Silky Shah: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here with you. 

[00:06:31] Cayden Mak: I would love to talk a little about kind of the, what the precedent is for this.

I think a lot of people who don’t work in this space don’t realize how many people just get swept up in ice detention. What kinds of things that have you been working on over the years that portended this kind of targeted suppression? 

[00:06:48] Silky Shah: Yeah, I think that’s a great place to start. There’s a lot about this case that’s actually pretty common to everyday ice actions.

And then there’s things that are new that we have to be really alarmed about. And so in terms of the things that actually are quite common, I mean somebody being rated outside their home like, or near at their home or at their workplace or at outside their place of worship, like those things are actually quite common.

For the most part, people are funneled into the detention deportation system through the criminal legal system. But it happens in a lot of different ways. It happens at ports of entry. It happens at airports, so you can be picked up anywhere. It feels, a lot of people refer to this as feeling like a disappearance or kidnapping.

Soon people realize where. Khalil was taken. Mom, Khalil was taken. But the reality is this is what it feels like for family members. Somebody’s taken from them. They have no idea where they’re going. They don’t know when they’re gonna see them again. They don’t know. If they’ll ever see them again.

I think that is really common. There’s also, he was taken in New York, quickly transferred to a detention center in New Jersey, and then quickly transferred to another detention center a thousand miles away. In Louisiana, and this is also really common for years, people transferred from detention center to detention center as a way to like disrupt.

Their case and also to take them away from family and community and make them be in this like place of despair around, and a lot of people, sign off voluntary departure and other things to, to leave because the conditions are so bad. And then the last thing I’ll say, I think there.

There was a lot of attention on the fact that Khalil had a green card and people were shocked that people who had a green card could be detained. But that since 1996, large categories of immigrants who have green cards have been put in detention and deportation proceedings because of their interactions with the criminal legal system.

And so it’s not, we’re in a situation where if you’re, and even. There have been instances where people have been de naturalized, so there’s a lot here that actually we have seen before. Yeah. I think what’s so alarming about this is that actually we’re seeing an extension of the sort of framework of criminality to include political dissent and, attacks on free speech and that’s what’s really concerning about what we’re seeing here.

[00:09:04] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. I think it, it really is helpful to talk about this not as this god, this came outta nowhere thing, but that this is part of an apparatus that is being weaponized in a particular way. And one of the things that like stands out to me too is that part of targeting Khalil in particular is that the administration knows that Palestine is this wedge issue on the left, right?

That there are still not people who listen to this show, but there are still people on the left who are progressive except Palestine. It’s his courage and leadership, khalil’s, courage and leadership, that it really made him a target. I’m curious what you think about this sort of like way that this is being weaponized to make him and perhaps make more Muslim Arab, Palestinian immigrants into these quote unquote bad immigrants as opposed to the good ones, right?

That there’s this, thing happening here. Discursively, I think too, in addition to the enforcement itself. 

[00:10:01] Silky Shah: Yeah, no, I think that’s such a good question. I like I, I think, like I wrote a whole book on the aspects of the good versus bad immigrant frame and how much it has really reinforced the idea that no immigrants are deserving, right?

It’s yeah. The reality is that immigrants. And Palestinians have been so grossly dehumanized and demonized and like in this way that actually going after somebody like Khalil going after immigrants appeals to the base and does the job of removing. Immigrants and Palestinians from public life in the public sphere even more.

And so we have this situation where they’re of course they’re gonna go after Palestinians because like you said, it’s a wedge issue. And this is like a sort of like the weakest possible target and to extend state control in this way. And I think from my perspective, so much of this points to like even Marco Rubio said, this is.

Not about free speech. This is about who has the right to be in the US or not. But the reality is that it’s like they’re going after free speech under the guise of immigration enforcement. And they can do that because detention and deportation has been so normalized in this country for so many, for many decades now and by both Republicans and Democrats.

And so that’s what we see happening here. And I think. What it tells us is that actually there are so many connections between the war on immigrants and war on terror and the reasons why we need to actually bridge across movements. 

[00:11:25] Cayden Mak: Yeah. No, that, that seems right to me. I think it’s like the, the way in which Marco Rubio has been able to do this weird linguistic juujitsu. We should not let him get away with it. 

[00:11:37] Silky Shah: No, we have to fight this. I think that’s the thing. I think there’s this like sort of tension with, hey, this happens to immigrants every day and this is not okay and we need to, acknowledge that this has been allowed because, or it’s possible because of the way these systems have been built, but also.

This is new and insidious and really concerning, and we have to fight it with everything we have because it, it is the slippery slope. Like when we accept detention and deportation for some, that like more and more people be, become eligible for that. And we don’t, we can’t this is the reason we actually have to fight for everybody.

[00:12:11] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost like building a huge apparatus of state control is always bad. Yes, absolutely. 

I’m also curious to talk a little bit more about this sort of like shuffling of. Detainees around the country. Yeah. What can you, what else can you tell our listeners about this move to this particular ice processing facility in central Louisiana?

What do we know about that facility and what can we infer about that shuffling? 

[00:12:38] Silky Shah: That, that facility has a long history of abuse. It was actually opened up as a youth jail. Many, two, three decades ago and actually was shut down because of the federal government saying the abuses in here are not okay.

And so they shut it down The Geo group which is like the big immigration enforcement conglomerate that has all these different contracts with ICE and DHS and for border militarization operates the facility. It’s a really terrible, like the condition, there’re. Even just recently, or there was 300, I think in 20 23, 300 people went on hunger strike because they weren’t having, the conditions were terrible also.

Like they weren’t afforded any due process rights, which is pretty much the norm in detention. And it’s a terrible facility and also like part of the reason to go down there as you have even worse jurisdictions and worse courts, and the possibility of relief is even harder. And so we see this time and again where.

Immigrants are constantly transferred. They’re also often transferred for retaliation. And they’re transferred in really dehumanizing ways, usually shackled in the process. I think there’s been stories about like mahmud not being, Khalil, not being able to like, speak with lawyers or do other things.

This is just the norm. And I think. Everything about what’s happening, at least in regards to the detention, is actually not unique in any way. I think him being targeted is the unique thing and the thing we have to call out. But this is how the system works and it works for, the hundreds of thousands of people that go through it every year.

[00:14:09] Cayden Mak: This really some very valuable perspective and thank you again Silky for making the time to talk to us about this. Where can folks find out more about detention, watch networks work, and keep up with what you’re doing? 

[00:14:21] Silky Shah: Yeah, we’re at Detention watch network.org and we’re on Instagram and Blue Sky.

At. Detention watch. And yeah we work with groups all around the country, so if people are interested in getting involved, a lot of our work right now is trying to prevent the expansion of detention. And one thing I’ll just say about that is like, detention really facilitates deportation.

It’s the way that they can deport more people. And so we really believe preventing expansion is gonna be a big part of stopping Trump’s agenda. You can learn more about organizations in your community through our website. 

[00:14:51] Cayden Mak: Amazing. Thanks 

[00:14:52] Silky Shah: so much. Yeah. Thank you for having me. 

[00:14:54] Cayden Mak: On the sort of campus repression side of this case too, I thought it’d be great for us to share this clip from a teach-in that we hosted on March 10th with our friends at Historians for Peace and Democracy, which you can find the whole teach-in on our YouTube channel.

One of our panelists, UCLA history, professor Robin DG Kelly linked the detention of Mahmud, Khalil very clearly to the overall climate of repression on campuses today. Take a listen. 

[00:15:19] Robin DG Kelly: I just wanna zero in on one thing, and this has to do with the arrest of BU Khalil by ice. The fact that ice agents could come on campus and arrest a student at will without a warrant prepares a way for extending its mass deportation plans.

I. Aimed at anyone who’s undocumented, and that’s one huge thing. The administration’s decision to withhold $400 million from Columbia because of its alleged antisemitism from an administration as the most antisemitic, which is true administration probably at least in the last 70, 80 years. These actions, all of them.

Portend a general attack right on all protests, on all academic freedom, on all funding streams, and on all migrants. So like they’re not gonna give that money back to Columbia, no matter what they do. They could bend over backwards, they’ll never get it because it’s not about that. So we have to address the elephant in the room.

And that is that the Biden administration and the university administrators who are already moving this direction, it’s, that’s part of the problem. Don’t forget Maba do. Tall, the doctoral student at Cornell threatened with deportation because. The administration suspended him for protesting genocide and Gaza, or just the general repression of nonviolent anti-war protests in the name of stamping out antisemitism, but really aimed at suppressing any criticism of Israel.

This set up I. It’s the repression we’re dealing with right now, and we saw this coming. The financialization of higher education and reduced state responsibility, not only generated unprecedented student debt, but it means that faculty and administrators are accountable to who? To trustees and donors, not to the pursuit of knowledge.

They’re not accountable to social change. They’re not accountable to the students because it explains why our universities have become police states. My university spent $12 million over the course of a week to beat up students and destroy their encampment. So we can’t always look at this as somehow a crisis that came outta nowhere because Trump won an election.

It goes back to my point about appeasement. We’re battling our own administrations. That claim to be liberal. So that’s, I think this is the danger we’re facing.

[00:17:46] Cayden Mak: My next guest’s new book is un rigged the Game, what Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning, drawing on candid interviews with 45 prominent. Women of color movement leaders and her own experiences as an organizer at the helm of an organization to lay out the unique perspectives that women of color bring to our movements and also obstacles.

Women of color leaders face, how they can navigate them and how we all can flank them in their leadership. It’s available now from Penguin Random House. I’m happy to be joined today by Vanessa Priya, Daniel. Hi, Vanessa. Hi, 

[00:18:16] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Caden. 

[00:18:16] Cayden Mak: Thanks for 

[00:18:16] Vanessa Priya Daniel: having me. Good to be here. 

[00:18:19] Cayden Mak: Yeah, it’s it’s really great to see you and it was also great to catch you in conversation with a friend of the Pod Vinny last week for your book.

[00:18:28] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah, Oakland was a lot of fun. Yeah, it 

[00:18:30] Cayden Mak: really felt like a big family reunion. I saw a bunch of people that I was like, oh shit. Like 

[00:18:34] Vanessa Priya Daniel: it’s really great to see you out here. Yeah, it did. I think, that’s been the vibe in the tour. I think people are just really wanting to be in community and be together.

Right now. It feels important in these. Difficult times. 

[00:18:45] Cayden Mak: Totally. Let’s start by laying out your thesis in the book a little bit. I think a lot of our listeners probably can think of a woman of color leader they know, maybe it’s even themselves who faced some really brutal headwinds to their leadership and even supposedly supportive movement spaces.

What is the, sort of the thesis of the book? What is the offering you’re trying to make here? 

[00:19:03] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah. The thesis of the book is that, this is a call to radically shift how we see and treat women of color leaders in our movements. And I wrote it because I want us, and I want our movements to win.

There is no team that is serious about winning that benches. Its MVPs for no good reason. Particularly in the clutch moment of a big game. And we are, fighting fascism right now. We absolutely need our full strength. I. And the fact of the matter is women of color and black women in particular, have always led in our movements have been the backbone of movements.

Many of the points that progressives count on our side of the scoreboard would not exist if women of color hadn’t put them there, including, by the way, the four years of breath that we had in between Trump administrations, which is, it. Imagine how much worse it would’ve been if we hadn’t had that breath, which was really brought to us by black women organizing voters in states like Georgia and other women of color, in tough places like Michigan and Arizona and all over the country.

This is, I. A critical part of our strength as movements, and yet we have never had this conversation in the public square about what it is costing us or how much more we could be winning. Wanna flip it that way? I. If we truly valued the strategic brilliance they’re bringing and if we stop making leadership positions so treacherous for them.

So this book is cracking open that conversation. I got to talk with over 45 different leaders to really, I. Surface. What are some of the unique superpowers I named three in particular that women of color are bringing to movement that are particularly important in the fight against authoritarianism and fascism?

And then I talk about what benches us, particularly the top five things that I heard the most in the interview. And the call is for people to intervene, to change it, to un rig the game. 

[00:20:53] Cayden Mak: Great. The other thing, I’ve been reading the book. I have not made it all the way through yet, your own story is really deeply woven into the texture of the book.

And it makes perfect sense to me from a strategic perspective and also from clearly part of the reason that you were called to write this book is you’re like, I see this around me. Yeah. And one of the things I’ve been reflecting on and reading is just that like, how many of us come to movement work because of the pain that we feel from the world outside of ourselves.

And then we find this belonging and purpose once we get involved in movement. And I think what stands out to me about this offering is it’s also about this sort of like. Where the rubber meets the road was we’re trying to translate our personal experiences into collective power. Yeah.

And the ways in which the world outside of ourselves really hold us. Still enthrall, right? That yeah, we can’t, sometimes we don’t even know, but how deeply it’s claws are in us. Yeah. And I’m curious, you could talk a little bit about, like that tension that, that. Comes up again and again about the world outside of our movement spaces and then the world inside of our movement spaces and how those two things are like constantly in conversation, sometimes for the worst.

[00:22:00] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah. I think that it’s so many of us, and we talk about how many of us in movement bring trauma with us. I think it is a beautiful thing to, to survive. Certain kinds of oppression and hardship, and then make the decision to compost that in a way to try to create something beautiful, to try to remove those forces of oppression from other people.

To try to actually shift and make structural change. My experience is I grew up a queer mixed race kid. Half Sri Lankan, half White in Seattle, Washington in the eighties and nineties. This was like the, the, it was the birth time of grunge. It was the birth time of hip hop.

I was, my family was the only Sri Lankan people I’ve ever met in Seattle. And then I was disconnected from them somewhat at a young age, but after my formative years when I was about five. But I, my experience navigating I. Race as somebody who didn’t fit anywhere, but who was really guided by black women in particular, who helped me navigate this country as a girl of color.

My experience as a survivor of sexual violence and gender-based violence my experience, coming out as queer, before it was. Easier in many places. It’s still hard in many places. But, easier in places like Seattle to do that I think have definitely shaped my politic to be one that values things like the wisdom of people who are the most marginalized in society about how to strategize our way out of oppression into, a valuing of grassroots organizing and, and I shared my story in the book, which was actually one of the hardest things to do because as an organizer, you’re really taught you, you don’t do that. You put yourself in the back, you, you support others. And so my editors had to really wrestle me around that. But I felt like it was important because I.

Other people were being very vulnerable in what they shared in the book. And also because even though my story is unique in its own way, all of our stories are unique. There is something about the lived experience of many women of color at these intersections of race, class, and gender and colonialism that actually shapes our politic in a way that. Causes us to drive in a certain direction strategically, that’s really important in movements. And we see that in like the three superpowers that I talk about in the book. 

[00:24:18] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Let’s talk about the three superpowers. First tell us what they are and then could you talk a little bit about examples of them that came up in your interviews, that kind of thing.

[00:24:28] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. The first one is 3, 360 vision. So this is really the ability to not just. Tackle forces like capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy and patriarchy individually, but to tackle ’em simultaneously. And this is not new. Kim, Kimberly Crenshaw talked about the experiences of these forces as intersectionality.

The Kabai River Collective talked about them. Shari Moraga wrote about them. But when we see the organizing practice of women of color, this drive to fight for, not just fair wages, but for racial and gender equity and pay, not just for healthcare, but for reproductive and gender affirming healthcare.

And it really is tackling the interlocking forces of oppression that hurt all of us. The second superpower. I call generosity, which is really this conviction to fight in a way that doesn’t leave certain people thrown under the bus. And it is that determination to say, we’re not, we’re not gonna fight for timid, timid wins and we’re not gonna put timid demands out there. We’re actually gonna demand the fullness of what our communities need to thrive. And be well. And we are gonna demand what the planet needs to be livable. And that kind of boldness is just such an antidote to this affliction of timidity that we’re seeing right now, which fascists really rely on.

To get all of us to obey in advance. And, we see it in the squad as a left flank of Congress. We see it in folks like Fatima Goss Graves, head of the National Women’s Law Center, coming out and saying, her organization will never abandon trans women. We see it in the sisters who are behind the Green New Deal.

We know that. Rihanna Gun Wright, a black woman wrote it A OCA. Latina was its first champion in Congress. Varsi Prakash with the sunrise movement galvanized youth at the grassroots. And then when it stalled out, it was Representative Prim Jayapal as head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who really locked arms with sisters at the grassroots and in Congress to make sure that key parts of that made it into the Inflation reduction Act.

So that is why we have the largest outlay of resources. To address climate change, including serious dollars for the most vulnerable communities. So boldness is very possible and it is so critical in this moment. And then this last piece of this last piece of not of not leaving communities behind.

Again, I just want to say as an example, the Reproductive Health Equity Act up in Oregon, the women of color who negotiated that and just would not agree to. A package that didn’t include trans and undocumented folks. And I think this kind of solidarity really jams the gears of divide and conquer.

Yeah. Which is what fascism relies on in order to advance. And so these three superpowers are. Really present. I would say it’s important to qualify by saying that they’re not inherent, right? So not every woman of color leader has them, we have plenty of dysfunctional leaders in our movements and, Candace Owens and Nikki Haley and all that.

And not every leader who’s not a woman of color lacks them, but they are disproportionately present. Among women of color because of what we’ve had to navigate, to survive. And the other thing I just like to point out about these superpowers is that they’re not about saving people, right? We can take the most pop culture example like the palace was always gonna be worse for Meghan Markle. If she hadn’t gotten out to save her own life, prince Harry would still be back there drinking tea in the sunken place. So it is, his freedom was a happy byproduct of her saving her own neck.

So that’s what we see. But there, they’re really important to for all of us to really think about how to embrace and adopt in this moment. And. When we see Gavin Newsom doing what he’s doing, what? When we see Schumer doing what he’s doing? Okay. This is when we need a tuning fork about how to remember that we have backbone and courage in this moment.

This is, these are a lot of the sisters that we need to look to. It’s the Linda Sarsour gen posts. The Ashley Woodard Hendersons of the world. 

[00:28:39] Cayden Mak: Totally. Yeah. It really feels like a call into what could our collective practice look like if we were to take this seriously?

That it is. I think to your point of this not being about women of color coming to save us, is this no, we can actually all invest in this as part of our practice, that this is not Yeah. Something that is exclusive or special or magical it’s when we start treating it as magic that we actually get into trouble, right?

Yes. Which gets into some of the like obstacles and headwinds and challenges that women of color leader face is being, treat, treated as like these unicorns who can come in and fix everything. 

[00:29:13] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I have something in the book called The Job Description, which is the long list of everything that women of color leaders are expected to both do and put up with in leadership positions.

And I. The top five which were the most universal because I also have a section of the book called We Are Not a Monolith, which really addresses the fact that people come for the next of black women in different ways than they come for the next evasion and Latinas. And the top five really are the invitation onto a glass cliff, which is to lead an organization in crisis.

The assumption of incompetence. Number two. Number three is the expectation to mother and mammy. Number four is being given zero margin for error. And number five is that you’re abandoned when you’re attacked. 

And some of the ways that this, these show up, the glass cliff, for example is Kamala Harris being invited to mount a campaign with less time than any other candidate.

It is a leader I talked to in California who was given, was invited into lead an organization as a CEO and then few weeks onto the job gets told by the controller that there’s not enough money in the bank to make payroll at the end of the month. Jesus and no one had told her about the situation before she took the job.

Yeah. And then, so she works around the clock to rectify the situation, weathering her own health in the process. But really, it’s that knowledge that you are more than any other leader. You’re going to either work your black or brown girl magic to fix the problem, or you’re gonna take the fall for someone else’s mess.

The assumption of incompetence is really the demand that we work four times as hard to be. Seen as half as credible. And one of the, one of the most heartwrenching stories that I heard was from a friend, an excellent organizer and leader, Amisha Patel out of Chicago, who, talked about working through chemo and radiation during her cancer treatment.

But these kind of stories were really commonplace of just not feeling like you can. Slow down because you will be discarded by movement. You, your credibility will suffer. And the health impacts that this is having on people are are just really weathering folks. The expectation of Mother and Mammy, that was like the biggest single biggest.

Lightning rod issue. I, yeah, 

[00:31:30] Cayden Mak: I feel like at your book launch, that was one of the ones that really struck a nerve with folks too, that people were like, I know about this. Yeah. 

[00:31:37] Vanessa Priya Daniel: You can feel it. It’s like palpable in the crowd, you hear people like that exclamation ’cause it’s just so I.

You’ll be acquits and this is really the being cast as mean or aggressive or normal levels of assertiveness that would be accepted from any other leader. It’s being told you’re cold or unfeeling. Anytime you say no, it’s this expectation that you’re not just gonna deliver. Fair and sustainable workplace where people have a voice on the job but some, like a utopia where no one ever feels a trigger or discomfort.

And then the kind of punishment that is meted out in the public square when you don’t deliver on this impossible standard. It also looks like this demand that you perform vulnerability, which is, some people really want leaders to perform this because they are fundamentally uncomfortable with seeing a woman of color just fully standing in her power.

I talked to one leader who, she left leadership because her staff was clamoring for her to be more vulnerable. And, her annual reviews were. Filled with things that said, she’s visionary, she is great strategist. She’s a good fundraiser, but you know what, she never cries.

And this type of stuff this type of not being able to do the normal things that you need to do to set good boundaries and to lead is just a huge issue. And, I won’t go through all of ’em, the abandonment well attacked is really 

[00:33:03] Cayden Mak: that’s another of the ones that I think really struck a nerve last week.

Yes. Yeah, 

[00:33:08] Vanessa Priya Daniel: that one. It looks like what we saw happen to the. Leaders of the Women’s March. The original leaders of the Women’s March, there were four of them, but only the three who were women of color were singled out for these attack ads from the NRA that caused people to threaten their lives.

And then they were dragged across the internet behind all these false accusations and rumors, and they kept reaching out to folks in movement. To say, can you help and support us? And people wouldn’t return their calls. People treated ’em like they were radioactive and, and then a year later, of course the New York Times broke the story that it had been Russian bots and trolls that were behind all of that online, as attempted to cleave the women’s movement. I just, the story after story of, people being attacked and then like left out on the hill to die. It would just really intense the, depending on the level and severity of attack people, some people had their lives threatened and just the abandonment, for some people.

I had talked to one sister who checked in herself into inpatient treatment center for PTSD. I talk to people who struggle with suicidal ideation. This is not. Small stuff. And I, when I was hearing these stories, I kept thinking of this the words of this feminist writer, Carolyn, Jess Cook, who says, why were we taught to fear the witches instead of the people who burned them alive?

Ooh. So this is, these are some of the things that are benching us that we really need to start to build awareness of in our collective movement consciousness to be able to intervene on. 

[00:34:37] Cayden Mak: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I think one of the things that I was thinking about at your book launch was this question about political home.

Yeah. So much of the way that and another friend of the pod Linda Burnham. Brought this up. Yeah. That so much of the way that our movements operate is professional and professionalized. Yeah. And it really feels one of the things that, to me it feels like a through line of a lot of the ways in which we bench women of color is about how we’re asking people to be both like these like human beings who are like available to us in their full humanity, but also leaders of professionalized organizations where there’s somebody’s boss and that yeah, that ambiguity also creates some space for this where it’s they also have to be raising money, building structures, making sure that people’s needs are met. I’m curious if you had any conversations or thoughts about what the role of political home needs to be under the game?

I think that. God, I forget who I, it may have been Samuel o Blazo Wills, who used to be the ed of Lavender Phoenix here in the Bay about how the places we work can’t be our political home because we are also employees. I agree with that. But yeah I’m agree with that. I’m curious about any conversations you had about holding this tension between the need to have people who are thinking about.

Our movements and our strategies and our work full time. And then the need also to be whole people who are learning and growing with our peers and comrades. 

[00:36:05] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. I do agree with that, that our political home should not be the place where we’re getting a paycheck. And Linda Burnham had some great insights on this and also just on how much we are loading on top of these movement C3 workplaces.

Yeah. That is really untenable. And one of the reflections she had that I really appreciated was that, in the sixties. There was an acknowledgement that human beings have a lot of different needs. Right? Emotional, spiritual needs. And so there were places in the movement that met those. You had very robust kind of spiritual component to the movement.

You had robust cultural spaces with music and art and where people could go to get that kind of inspiration and get that kind of healing. And you weren’t trying to load the expectation that all was going to be delivered in the same place where you are having difficult dialectics about strategy and tactics.

It’s just not a, it’s not real. It’s not, which is I think what we’re wi witnessing. Yeah. You cannot load that much weight in these places. And and then I also think of Bernice John, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagan, who just passed. This year and this beautiful gift that she gave us in the form of the Peace Coalition politics, which I urge everybody to go out right now and find and read.

I’ve read it, reread it multiple times this year, but she talks about the need for comfort and that we are no longer, this time. In, in the history of this country where you could go and make social change from a very small group of people where people were raised in the same town.

You were in the same race and the same class, the same language, and all like that is just. Over, like it’s done. Like in order to get to freedom, we have to get in these, what she calls coalition spaces. But, I think our very diverse movement spaces, and those are by in, by their nature, going to be painful.

Because we are coming with different lived experiences. We are learning and skinning our knees and trying to level up our understanding of how to show up well together, understand people’s history understand their pain, the way they’ve been oppressed, how not to understand our own programming and these waters we’re all swimming in.

So what shall the way she puts it is you don’t look for your milk there. You gotta go get your milk. Somewhere else. Yeah. When you come in these spaces, it’s because we know that there are forces that are trying to kill us. And we are here because we can only survive when we come together.

And in these spaces we have to have discipline and rigor. About leveling up our language and all of these things. And understanding, and we have to have some grace with each other. We have to understand the difference of someone who is just being careless and being bigoted and the some and the diff and someone who, may have good intentions and is just in a certain place on their learning curve and genuinely trying.

Because we have all been on different places in our learning curve. So I think that that is important to. To really consider and that we have to remember in our workplaces what we’re accountable to. There’s been a lot of it forgetting about that. Yeah. We have to remember that bedrock accountability to the liberation of the most vulnerable communities.

When we start to lose the plot and think that the moral of the story is our comfort within our paid movement organizations, and that should be the real campaign. We end up exactly where we are now in a lot of places, which is bleeding a lot of energy into that and not being effective.

[00:39:30] Cayden Mak: Yeah, I know that’s, I know there are also a lot of people in that room who are like, yes. When you mention this in particular, that I think that, we see that, we see this a lot in a lot of the it, it seems very related to the like mothering and maming block, that it’s like you have to be everything to me.

[00:39:49] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah, I think it is. And it’s also this, Ash, Ashley, Woodard Henderson talks about the O that we’re in an overcorrection. And I think, I’m 47, so I came into movement kind of late nineties and two, early two thousands. My first paid jobs, we were at one extreme there, and now we’re at another extreme and neither were good.

Yeah. We went from like this. Over focus on the external, where the internal workplace was like a really shitty place to be. And then we overcorrected now there’s like this navel gazing and pursuit of total comfort in the workplace while the external work is atrophying. We went from, sweeping a lot of discrimination under the carpet to. Now false accusations of discrimination being used as these cheap tools to carry out vendettas against people. A lot of us, when we came into movement, we didn’t even have health benefits and wild, now there’s this expectation Yeah. That that people, that their workplace is supposed to deliver total healing from their trauma.

So what I found interesting about. Just from the interviews is I think women of color are not trying to go back to the good old days because those days were never good for us. But we’re also like getting killed by what’s happening now. Because if you are already under the expectation to mother and mammy and now you have, you’re expected to deliver this utopian work environment on top of that is a crushing weight.

Oh yeah. And so what I see is people driving towards, I guess the way I would describe it is like. Really a clarity about what love looks like in our movement organizations. And my, my friend Malkia de Cy talks about, we can’t just blame. People for the traumatized state they’re in.

And I totally agree with that. I think there are structures and systems that are shaping people’s behavior and we have to offer structural solutions like healing justice, like tools for emotional regulation, which by the way, women of color leaders have been at the forefront of bringing into our movement organizations.

Yep. And part of that is more grassroots organizing, training, more political ed. Long arc strategy. All of these things are very structural important components. And we have to understand that love also looks like a limit, love looks like saying no to some behavior. It looks like, for example this.

This conflation that we’ve seen of all rigor with exploitation Yep. Of all positional power with abuse. Yep. Of all discomfort with being harmed. It, this is making us sloppy and unstrategic and we need to be done with it. The seeding into the domain of white supremacy culture, things like excellence and timeliness and why are we doing this? This is, it is such a, it’s so a historical to these long traditions and histories of black and brown excellence that have never been about the white gaze. They’ve always been about delivering excellence and beauty to our own communities. And so I think that there is.

There is a shift that we have to make to also acknowledge, like movement isn’t for everybody. Some of the and or certain positions in movement aren’t for everybody. 

[00:42:53] Cayden Mak: Also true. 

[00:42:53] Vanessa Priya Daniel: And we have to be able to draw some boundaries with that. I, I, one of the things, the analogies I use is surgeons don’t let people in the operating room who faint at the sight of blood. Firefighter firefighters are not hiring, fire departments are not hiring people that say now that I’m here, I really am down with being in the calendar. And I love to ring that little bell on the truck, but, hot things trigger me.

So like we, we do have to have, a balance between the fragility culture that has. We’ve overcorrected into and the martyrdom culture that we don’t wanna go back to. 

[00:43:27] Cayden Mak: Yeah. There’s some like dialectical move that we need to make now in order to get to the place we need to be. I think I, that, that feels like intuitively true to me also is been in leadership in movements for, I don’t know, at this point, about a decade also.

So it’s yeah, it’s something I’ve seen crop up again and again. I think, the the other thing that occurs to me is just that obviously you couldn’t have known what our political environment would be like when this book came out. And we were just mentioning how like the book launch felt like such a balm and clearly like really relishing the ability to connect with people.

Out on the book tour, but I’m curious how you see these lessons from the book resonating with people now and like hitting, especially because of the political context in which we find ourselves. 

[00:44:16] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah. I think that fascism, like when we look around the world, the path to fascism has always been paved.

Usually been paved. I. With the eroded rights of three groups, L-G-B-T-Q folks, women and Oppressed, racial and Ethnic groups. And every single woman of color in this country is a member of at least two. And those of us who are queer are, which is a lot of us in movement, are a member of all three.

And so I think we are just under very. Few illusions that the way through this moment is to keep our heads down and to follow orders. We are highly motivated to fight and I think because fascism is essentially the very worst of America on steroids. It is that three-headed monster of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.

That women of color who have been fighting that same monster for hundreds of years in this country, in order to just survive, actually have something to teach this country about how to fight. So when we see, Jasmine Crockett, how she’s showing up, when we see how a OC is showing up when we see how leaders like Fatima and just.

Like closing ranks and standing with the most vulnerable communities. There’s just a clear message that is inoculating us against the kind of spinelessness of a newsome, to say the way through this is not being, I. Timid and aang in advance and, throwing communities, vulnerable communities under the bus the way through.

This is being bold and undeterred and is standing first and foremost with the most vulnerable communities. And I think that is critically important. The other piece is that our power as movements really comes from. People. And sometimes I think we forget that when we end up in these c threes where it’s four liberal arts majors and we’re trying to foundation funding Yeah.

And are like self-righteous with everyone else. I mean our power actually comes from people and like the ability to organize ordinary people at scale and for long enough to actually win systems change and the power to govern and. We don’t have a problem in this country with people agreeing with us.

The majority of of the population is with us on everything from L-G-B-T-Q, rights to abortion, access to, you name it. And we also don’t have a problem with people being attracted to movements because we have seen the biggest. Uprisings and protest movements in the last 10 years in the history of this country.

Yeah. What we really have is a retention problem. What we have is a conversion problem. We have not been able to convert these flashpoint moments like the women’s march, like the uprisings into sustained change, and we need to figure that out because we have another flashpoint moment that’s coming at us soon because Trump didn’t win by a huge margin.

And at some point the people who. More people stayed home. More people stayed home. Exactly. And at some point the people who voted for him as the shake him up candidate that was gonna lower the price of eggs are going to see that the emperor has no clothes. They’re gonna be looking for relief somewhere else.

At some point, the folks who stayed home on the couch are gonna be feeling the pinch of what’s gonna happen to our economy and they’re gonna be looking for relief somewhere else. And where our movement’s going to be. Yeah. And we have got to have grassroots organizing infrastructure in place with the skills and abilities to talk to ordinary people and love them and not judge them and meet.

Them where they’re at and help them to gain that experience of using their collective power and having a win and having that light bulb go off when they recognize that they have power, which is was always my favorite part of being an organizer. ’cause it’s really hard to turn that light bulb off. We need that and we also need to tend to movement spaces so that they are not devolving into this like weird mix of mean girls and Lord, the flies that a lot of spaces have become, where it’s like, who wants to do this? Who wants to volunteer their free time to go into a space with some self-righteous people who are trying to ride on them and humiliate them on social media. When you’re working two or three jobs, you’re hurting in all kinds of ways.

So we really have to, we really have to lean into getting that together in this moment. And there’s absolutely no workaround to rebuilding grassroots organizing infrastructure and bringing that back into the, back, into the center. Yeah, 

[00:48:44] Cayden Mak: totally. And I think that one of the things that really stands out to me too about the book is that a lot of those lessons we actually already have learned, right? That there are people who are ready to take on that mantle and like it is, I think, incumbent upon all of us in movement to be asking like, who’s doing it, who’s doing the work? And like how can we elevate them? And yeah, the insights that they have, which seems to me it seems like core to.

Being able to, women of color leaders in meaningful ways is see them for what they are and who they are. 

[00:49:20] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And I think we have an embarrassment of riches. When we look at. Folks like Ashley Woodard Henderson, when we look at Linda Sarsour when we look at Bambi Salcedo and just like the joyful fierceness with which she is leading we have every single thing that we need here.

So how do we get out of our own way? How do we really honor what these sisters are bringing and embrace it and learn from it. And adopt it. 

[00:49:45] Cayden Mak: Yeah. As we wrap up here, could you all say a few, are there any other things that you wanna share with our listeners about like how we better flank women of color leaders?

Anything we haven’t gotten to? 

[00:49:56] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Yeah. I would say that there’s a lot of concrete things in the book, but they really boil down to two things. One is to value and recognize the superpowers that they’re bringing, and the second is to intervene in what gets in their way. It’s impossible to separate out the silence and the inaction that surrounds the mistreatment of these leaders from rape culture.

[00:50:15] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:50:15] Vanessa Priya Daniel: And rape culture thrives on silence. It thrives on bystander, so people need to intervene. It doesn’t take a lot of people to intervene. I have seen an entire room that is coming for a leader over some simple mistake, which is again, zero margin error. Error shift completely. When just one person says, wait a minute, let’s put this in the context of everything this leader has done right and everything this leader is up against.

Even when people are getting dragged online. To say, you don’t have to rebut what’s happening, but to raise your voice and say, you know what this is I’ve known this leader for X number of years and this has never been my experience of them. Give people another data point. Don’t just let bad actors be the only source of information.

And this, by the way, is building exactly the kind of muscle we need. To address fascism. That’s right, because this practice of sitting on our hands while we watch people being dragged is training our own people to be sheep. And it is tilling the soil for that kind of bystander that allows fascism to advance.

If we can’t build that muscle in our little organizations how are we going to build it when we are up against Trump? So we need to start now in doing not the easy and popular and safe thing, but doing the right and high integrity and a difficult thing. In the moment when it needs to be done.

That’s 

[00:51:30] Cayden Mak: right. Thank you so much for making the time to come and block and build, Vanessa. It was great to talk to you about the book. 

[00:51:35] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Thanks, Caden. Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Thank you so much. 

[00:51:37] Cayden Mak: I assume people can where can people find the book? We’re, we’ll put a link in the show notes. 

[00:51:41] Vanessa Priya Daniel: Vanessa priya daniel.com has all the information about the book and the tour.

I’m halfway through. I have five stops left, so come out to the tour, come be in community. I’d love to see you. Fantastic. 

[00:51:51] Cayden Mak: My thanks again to Silky Shaw and Vanessa Daniel for joining me today on the pod links to the Detention Watch Network and also Vanessa’s website. And for the book on Rig, the game will be available in the show notes.

If you have something to say, please do drop me a line. You can send me an email that will consider running on an upcoming mailbag episode at [email protected]. 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 the.

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 small independent team can continue to build a map for our movements. I hope this 

helps.