Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Joy James on Du Bois, Liberation Struggles, & Revolutionary Love

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jan 8, 2024 Dr. Joy James joins Breht and PM for the third installment of Rev Left's ongoing Du Bois series, but this conversation goes well beyond the life and work of Du Bois to cover James' newest book, her long history of organizing, the history of black liberation struggles in the US, and much more. Together, they discuss George Jackson, James' concept of the Captive Maternal, Erica Garner, "New Bones Abolition", Marxism, black history, Ida B. Wells, and much more. Overall its a wide-ranging conversation with an incredibly wise and experienced revolutionary intellectual.  Dr. James is Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College. Her book is New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)life of Erica Garner.  Proceeds from New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner go to Prison Radio. Follow PM on IG ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Brett O'Shea. And today we have kind of like halfway the third installment of our De Bois series and also just its own episode in his own right. We have on the one and only Dr. Joy James and of course my co-host for the De Bois series, P.M. Irvin, to talk about De Bois, but also talk about James's newest. book New Bones Abolition, Captive Maternal Agency in the Afterlife of Erica Garner. We talk about George Jackson. We talk about Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. We talk about Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by police and the activism that she engaged in after the death of her father up until her untimely passing at the young age of 27. We talk about the we-charge genocide petition to the United States signed by De Bois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, and others. Of course, we talk about Joy James' book and some of the core concepts within it and just have a really fascinating, wide-ranging discussion on all of these

topics. And of course, you can ask a question to Dr. James and she expertly just continues to discuss that question, takes it in fascinating directions, advance. is really profound analysis and I just found this this conversation really enjoyable and I think you will as well. And I wanted to say, as I say at the very end of this episode, her book, the one that we're sort of discussing today, New Bones Abolition, 100% of the proceeds go to prison radio. So if you buy the book, not only do you get a wonderful text, but you also get a support a good cause. So definitely do that. If you're interested and if anything, anything in this conversation piques your interest.

I also want to say we have an ongoing relationship with the wonderful folks over at leftwingbooks.net associated with Chris Plebledeb, and they're still offering RevLeft listeners 15% off anything in their library. I'll link to that in the show notes, and the link that I'll put in the show notes automatically applies that RevLeft code at checkout to get that 15% off. And because the holidays are coming up, You might have people in your family or friend's circle or younger comrades coming up that you would like to get a gift for.

This is a wonderful opportunity to get it at a nicer discount. Of course, you know, what we do here at Rev Left and what they do there at Left Wing Books obviously sort of is mutually inclusive and dovetails with one another really nice. So I think it's a cool collaboration and we really appreciate the good folks over at Left Wing Books for offering our listeners that discount. So take advantage of that during this holiday season if you can. And very lastly, before we get into the interview, we also have an Instagram. I spent the first six years of Rev. Left not having an Instagram.

I'm not a big social media guy in general. But I have started it in early October right before all the conflict in Palestine popped off. And I post a lot of stuff over there, much more active on IG than I am on any other platform. So if you're at all interested in that, you can go check us out at Rev Left official. on Instagram. All right, without further ado, here is me and PM's interview with Dr. Joy James on Du Bois, on her new book, New Bones Abolition, on George Jackson, Black Lives Matter movement, and so much more. Enjoy. I like to think of myself as an amateur librarian and archivist who tries to maintain certain analyses with other people doing the same labor so that what we understand ourselves to be as people who love and also as people in resistance, that those understandings don't become mutated or become performative in sectors that we don't control, meaning, you know, big state.

whether they're in academia or in performance, in governance, or in nonprofits. Well, it's an absolute pleasure and honor to have you with us today. My co-host, PM, is going to start this interview off. So PM, go ahead and ask the first question. All right. Thank you so much. So the first question is, who prompted you to do a deep dive into Du Bois's writings? And what did you learn from your deep engagement with his writings at the time?

Yeah. Thank you for that. It kind of grounds me as an academic who doesn't write because of academia. Well, you have to do it to get a job. But the person who started me to write in earnest or accelerated my interest in writing would be Charlene Mitchell. So brilliant, formidable black working class woman who is in the leadership of the Communist Party USA. And I never joined the party. But I knew her because when I was organizing in my 20s, I worked with everybody that I could learn from. And there were a lot of people in New York City. So black internationalists, communists, socialists, people confronting police violence. The anti-apartheid movement was largely present in New York at the time. So Mitchell was the person who recruited Angela Davis into the Communist Party, USA, through the Chalet Movement. Club. And that would have been probably around 1967 or 68, I believe. And I had known Mitchell because I was organizing in New York City, including in Harlem. And as I said, I was trained

by black radical intellectuals, but also by women who were aligned with the CP USA. And when we were visiting when I was out in California, Mitchell and I were in a conversation and she told me when I got back to New York to go to the Schaumburg Library in Harlem and to read everything that Du Bois ever wrote in terms of his memoirs. Now, I was trained by political philosophers very Eurocentric, the only quote, progressive, it wasn't even progressive anyway. The dissertation I could get away with was writing on Hannah-O-Rent. So I had not, I had read, Du Bois, but I'd never studied him as a formal student, meaning like through the academy, but through Mitchell, I studied him in the libraries in Harlem, and it's a wonderful setting,

you know, at the time. And Harlem was being gentrified, but, you know, then it was very clear about the culture. And as I started reading, I saw that Du Bois was shifting through his memoirs, right that at some point he believed in the talented tenth in fact he celebrated it in his 1903 text souls of black folk that you know is read widely i believe both inside the academy and outside but that was influenced by the home baptist missionary society american home baptist missionary society i believe that's their name they were a formation of white philanthropist in the 1800s who wanted to steer black leadership. So this is a long way from my saying that there's linkages between previous centuries

and the current one in terms of co-optation of black political will for resistance in order to stabilize land, freedom, and autonomy. So what I learned by reading the memoirs is that increasingly he moved from celebrating the talent intent. So Henry Morehouse, who was a white philanthropist, is the namesake of Moorehouse where Martin Luther King studied. And Laura Spelman, a Rockefeller, a white woman. Another philanthropist is the namesake of Spellman College. The esteemed women's college would be the partner or the mirror image, gender difference, uh, differentiated with warhouse. So the whole idea was for the black mass to be led by a fraction of the black

population. It would be the elite sector and the ones that had been assimilated or trained in institutions that were guided, if not prominently up front, at least behind the curtains by white philanthropists or well-doers, well-wishers, some form. of liberals, right, over the centuries. As Du Bois became more radicalized, you know, understanding more deeply economic exploitation of black people, his growing interest in Marx, he's growing interest in socialism. I think I believe near the end of his life, he did join the Communist Party briefly before he died. He understood that, especially in the McCarthy era in the 1950s, as it became more, as I said, radicalized towards the mass and away from the elite.

Now, he had a Ph.G. from Harvard, so he was well positioned to roll with elite. He began to understand that the people who would be dedicated to this struggle would not necessarily be the cadres or the sector known as well-educated, formerly educated, black elites. And he said in one of his last memoirs that when he was being pursued by McCarthyism, that it was the trade unionists and the black radicalists who supported him. It was not the black bourgeoisie. In fact, they fled from him. And this was not unique to Du Bois. I mean, you could trace the evolution of Martin Luther King that there was quite significant amounts of money that, you know, were flooded into the civil rights movement as long as he was

within the paradigm or the framework of considering our struggle only to be a domestic issue and all about integration and access to capital, or at least to capitalism in terms of working, be or doing the worker hustle to attain the house, the car, you know, the degree. And as King became more beloved or more as lined with the mass, as Du Bois became, the support from the black middle class fell away because it was not the ideology, it was not the politics, it was not the passion that liberals and integrationists, both in the state and also within, you know, the nonprofit, the donation sector, it was not what they wanted. So I appreciate, I appreciate Shirley Mitchell. She transitioned

in December 2022, I believe. She's in her 90s. I lost touch with her, you know, for years. But in the book, Transcending the Talented 10th, which I believe you can find online somewhere, there's a photo of her with Angela Davis and Nelson Mandela. And so I will always remember her as being one of the people who started me to write, but the writing had nothing to do with my dissertation.

I think that's the sort of usual route that academics do. Like, this is a dissertation you turn in the book. I was so disappointed with Arendt, Hannah Arendt's liberalism and also her racism and anti-feminism, among other things, that it was the activist who got me to do my first books. And I would say, you know, some 20, no, is it, almost 30 years later. the reason I still write is because of activism and because I'm trying to think of political theory in real time

not through not through the print but through the passion of the people as they organize obviously I read hopefully with some clarity and I write but it's the activists that energized me and that steered me into certain zones of writing

And then because of that, I was able to critique myself as a possible talented 10th member and then to try to always catch myself to make sure that I didn't reproduce the limitations that leadership has faced over decades, if not centuries. That's very grounding. And it's interesting to hear you use the formulation of political theory in real time. So many figures, not just Du Bois, but black radical intellectuals are doing precisely that. But Du Bois has his contradictions. So in the damnation of women, in Darkwater, he argues for progressive stances, especially progressive economic stances on women's liberation,

while espousing fairly socially conservative takes on sexual activity. And we know from your article on his proto-feminist politics that he's far from perfect with respect to questions of gender, particularly with respect to his sidelining of Ida B. Wells and Anna Julia Cooper. What is your critique of Du Bois's sidelining of these figures, and what is your larger assessment of his proto-feminist politics? Yeah, thanks. You know, in part I think that people like transcending the talented tense because it is a black feminist tax. And that's a lot of like we need to recover black women leadership. We need to not be sidelined. We need to understand the contributions that black women have made, you know, throughout centuries of struggle, liberation, formation of culture. And I do know in the, in the, you know, chapter, on proto-feminism, that Du Bois does say the right things in some sectors, right, about equality

and he does champion. He does have a very strong class bias. And that's something I was saying that he was, I thought he was working through. Now, understand I'm not a Du Bois scholar, and that would not be my thing. I'm not a historian, but I understand him as a political thinker, political theorist. he's sidelining of Ida B. Wells, he did not do that by himself. And so for me, you know, as my work evolves towards the captive maternal, I want to acknowledge gender differences, but I also want to see where they're blurred as people are seeking a kind of political project. And so they're disciplined by that political project, not so much by their gender, right? So it's Du Bois, but it's also Mary Church Terrell, who's a prominent, black intellectual thinkers. She went to Oberlin, I believe. And it's Ida B. Wells who gets

isolated, but the other person who isolates Wells, Ms. Wells, Ms. Ida B, she's my favorite ancestor. It's not just, it's not just to boys and Mary Church to rail at the founding conference for the NAACP. It's also Mary White Ovington, who's a white philanthropist who is paying for that conference. So there's a way, of course, Anna Julia Cooper also appears, but I don't see here as being as a radical political thinker in the way in which ID will be well says. So like the short version would be, yes, when black women lead, we need to remember their contributions. We need to push against this gender essentialism that is attempting to minimize their contributions, right, to the struggle or to veil them, you know, so the Du Boisian veil, right?

But the other thing I want to say is that in writing the Talented 10th, I wasn't trying to do the uplift narrative of this is how much Black women have contributed. It was just the fact of it. And I was like, yeah, it's important to put this down. But I wasn't trying to shape a trajectory in which the Talented 10th still had validity and it would be okay if it was just all black women or majority black women or majority black LGBTQ. So the issues that you point out are important, right?

But I'm also saying like if we radiated out in concentric circles, maybe that could be the nucleus, but as you expand out and you have a larger view of it, it's the elite formation of leadership that has to be challenged in its entirety. And it doesn't matter which gender, it is, right, which identity construct it is in terms of being differently positioned or marginalized inside society. One other thing we can mention is the Du Bois's work on the Philadelphia Negro. And again, I'm not a Du Boisian scholar so people can look up things. It's like,

oh, she mispronounce this. The classes aspect, if he grew up in, Great Barrington to some degree. He has a PhD from Harvard. He studies in Berlin. Yes, I mean, we don't even have to look at Du Boisek closely. We could look at our variations in this century. There is a way in which socialization, assimilation, can push you to think in ways that are very organized,

but only very organized because there's, so familiar and only so familiar because they're so aligned with the state and the dominant society. So his patriarchy to the extent that he has it, he's sexism, it radiates through black culture, but it also radiates through the larger, quote, white culture and other, you know, sectors within the U.S. And I think in some ways as he began to be marginalized himself as it became more radical. You know, he was pushed out from the NAACP. It was years later, right, after the NACP was being founded, but there's some irony there that he helped push IW Wells out, only to be pushed out later himself. And then he says in one of his memoirs, I wish I just had a

radical ally. And when I'm reading that in the showbook, it's like you had I'd be wealth. And you not only did you just blow her off, but you literally marginalized, her. And so you needed the radical on the ground. So I want to go back to Wells. And I appreciate, like, you know, Anna Julia Cooper, also got the doctorate. You know, they're all well-trained. This is serious, talented, talent here, right? But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the experiential knowledge that Ida B. Wells has from being on the ground. Like when she starts in her autobiography, when she's, when she's talking about her formation, She says originally she believed in the myth of the black rapist, which is like that cry of, you know, animalistic blackness that, quote, legitimizes lynching, which was followed by, you know, theft of land and also mass rape and mass persecution and torture for black people. So her knowing that her two-year-old goddaughter Marine, that her father, Thomas Moss, is lynched because he's engaged with other black men in a people. grocery store that has a white competitor that wants to see them out of business and is going to use the local sheriff, the local police to basically kill off his competition, not figuratively, but literally, right? That radicalizes Wells. That trauma and traumas, I'm sure,

that preceded that, but that makes her a crusader. And she's a crusader because she's on the ground. She's on the ground. She disguises yourself. She goes in the prisons or the jails to take testimony, you know, of caged black men and boys. She writes incendiary editorials that, you know, white antagonists think she's a man. And then they they write back, you know, in their papers that they're going to castrate him thinking that she's a he, right, and stake their body in the street. Like this is just going to be some gruesome torture ritual to instruct everybody. black person that you never rebel, but then she escapes. And she goes to England and she organizes with white women abolitionists, an economic boycott that cripples the economy of Memphis,

Tennessee. And I want to link it to the contemporary, at least a couple years ago when I'm listening WBAI and a black pastor says after, you know, George Floyd is murdered, if you kill us, we will kill your economy, I think, I mean, whether or not we can pull it off, I think it's the political aspiration and the clarity of the fight is what Wells brings to the table. And even though, right, W. Du Bois pushes her aside because he's doing this performative elite moment. At the end of the day or the end of the decades, right, he realizes that it's people like Wells that he needed in order to stay faithful, not just the political struggle, but to the clarity of political thought. Yeah, that is absolutely fascinating history and honestly rock-solid analysis. Ida B. Wells is one of

those figures that I've long wanted to do a deep dive on and wanted to help educate others on. So perhaps in the near future, an entire episode dedicated to her and her life and her work would be really interesting and good to do. Thank you so much for that. But now we're going to shift to a discussion of your new book with common notions, titled New Bones Abolition, Captive Maternal Agency, and the Afterlife of Erica Garner. Towards the end of the book, you mentioned the we-charge genocide petition to the U.N., which charged the United States with genocide against black people. The document was signed by W.E.B. De Bois, William Patterson, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, etc. What is the significance of this document in black radical history? Right. So again, thank you to Charlene Mitchell.

This is like you get free tutoring, right? I learned more from her than I did from the people with PhDs in political science and philosophy courses. So the Civil Rights Congress was actually a black unit within the CP USA. say. And based in New York City, William Patterson would have been the lead editor, right? In 1951, they were trying to leverage the UN petition. Well, it was a petition or a document. And again, it was for the elimination and prevention of genocide. And I believe that would have been around 1948 or so. And again, I'm not a historian. Sorry, I didn't come with all the written material. numbers in front of me. That's okay.

But what they wanted to do is leverage attacks and a sentiment following World War, too, right? The devastation. I mean, millions debt around the globe. And also the colonial project is falling apart. They figured out how to put it back together, right? But at that point, it was very vulnerable to the, quote, so-called third world and their liberation movements. in 1948 actually would have been the knockba if I understand and if I pronounce that correctly in terms of Palestine and the loss of life and loss of land.

So what the civil rights Congress decided to do led by William Patterson was to take the experience of black suffering, black violation, the cleansing, of society of black people or marginalizing them, right? If you can't completely disappear them, then what you do, you know, you do mass lynchings, you target them, you steal their land, you force them into serfdom.

We recall that the 13th Amendment, which was supposed to be an emancipatory amendment, actually legalizes slavery if you've been duly convicted of a crime in the United States, so that after the Civil War, after that amendment,

passed, right? Black people died faster in freedom than we did in personal property plantations because we were owned collectively by the state and corporation. So the, you know, historians have written books like one dies get another. I mean, you're totally expendable and share a crop of you to death. You run, we'll shoot, we'll arrest, you know, you didn't get off the sidewalk for a white person to pass. And also there's some basic crimes that people are doing, but that's not while you're having mass arrest and people going to these death work farms, right? So under this construct, right, I call it the Trojan horse template in terms of U.S. democracy. The legislation that we get from within the U.S. in terms of civil rights,

inevitably there's some Trojan horse baked in. Like once you, you know, you pull it up and it's like you marvel out it, we got this amendment and this amendment. The structure of betrayal is embedded, right? And so I talked about the 13th Amendment, the organizations that are going state by state to repeal it as a state law, right? But writ large, the U.S. is a project that is imperial, that is racist, and that is deeply anti-Indigenous and anti-Black. So what they crafted was like a major.

major political campaign against the U.S. to be disseminated around the world. So this document which has the images of lynching, which talks about the violations and the rape of women and girls. And mind you, men and boys are also raped under these kind of war scenarios, but it's not as spoken about as often as the violation of women and girls, right? So they start to disseminate is across the globe. And the way I think of it, actually, just talking here with you, it's reminding me of the photographs that we're taking at Emmett Till's funeral in 1955, the 14-year-old who's accused of whistling at a white woman.

Other historians say he had a list, but either way, you don't torture or murder a child, you know, for a whistle. but his body is tortured by the Bryant's and they're later acquitted. His body is dumped in the waters, you know, anchored with a metal fan that comes apart. His body is brought by his mother back to Chicago. And of course, the figure the body is totally distorted and disfigured. The mother says to the black mortician,

I don't want you to touch anything, but he's a gas, so he's like going to try to, you know, close eyes or stitch something together so it looks more human. But the point is, it's an open casket funeral of a mutilated black child and thousands of people come to witness it and bring their children and the photographs radiate throughout the world. That's 1955, but four years earlier in 195, the texts with other images radiated throughout the world about how the U.S. has a predatory structure, a violent structure for the suppression of black people and political will to move beyond all forms of captivity. And so this is why I appreciate recharged genocide. And I wrote a piece about it, oh, decades ago as well. When just trying to study it and kind of understanding what the international community would think about it, how they would see the U.S. and so forth.

Back in that time, there were the structures of three worlds, right? the first world being, you know, the Western, so-called Western world, Europe, U.S., Canada, you know, European descent, the colonial powers, right? The second world would have been the Soviet Union, and the third world would have been those nations that were colonized in the so-called Global South. And the document speaks to all those three formations, right? But at the time, because of the civil rights Congress was linked to the CPUSA, which was linked to CPSU, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,

there was an anchor or space or support, more structured support, to take on the Western powers, the colonial powers. And then after 1991, of course, with Kovartov, with Reagan, you know, tear down that wall, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that those three-tier relationships, you know, dissipated. And so now what we have, you know, is still the premier imperial power, meaning the United States, but not the formation such as, as a civil rights Congress, you know, tied to the CPUSA. And again, I was trained by people in it. I never joined. I had my own reasons.

I just thought you could keep organizing. I'm more of an autonomous person than a organization person. That's the nicest way I can say it. But the imprint stays on. But again, I guess what I'm trying to say as clearly as, I can say there was a historical context that made it much more powerful. And there was an organization because the violence against black people in the Jim Crow era forced the solidarity across classes.

Now, when you get to like 2020, 2020, especially after you've had a two-term black president, Barack Obama, who also aligned with the mission of an imperial state. so is your first black imperial president, you see more fragmentation. And so the use of we-charged genocide, it's not as central as it was decades ago. And now I'm so curious about how we could have a unifying document that would push the state and the international order

to recognize genesis, site in all of its complexity. It's not about wiping out an entire mass. It's about starving people. It's about dirty water. It's about disappearing their children. It's about taking their land. There's so many components to it that it becomes in some ways comprehensive. And then maybe this could be the language that we share instead of these Tower of Babel, narratives that are fragmented, but I don't know how we would revive a document that in its heyday really made the U.S. feel threatened in terms of its standing in the world, whereas today the U.S. seems to be at least the government, not the people, seems to be almost indifferent to any form of

ethical demands about justice and about stopping mass murder. Yeah, that is essential analysis. And as always, I mean, I really appreciate your attention to violence as just a phenomenon to itself, but also as a structuring feature of U.S. society and the world system, shifting gears to the captive maternal. Also, I should add, I appreciate your attention to Palestine as well. But your book, Newbones Abolition, provides an important elaboration on your conception of the captive maternal. So what is the captive maternal and what are the five stages?

Okay. I feel like I should just create a little song ditty. I just press play, here are the five stages. I mean, there's probably more, right? I just figured out five and like with help from friends. But I want to talk about the origin, like just the concept. I think if you look in my work over decades, you're going to hear maternal or see it and you're going to see captive. But linking the two together came about in 2016 in the womb of Western theory, subtitled trauma time theft and the captive.

maternal. And that's because I was asked to write a piece, a chapter for an anthology on Foucault and the GIP and the organizing that Foucault did, like they believe with Jean-Gene and others in France around prison reform or prison abolition, right? So when I was turning in the draft, like it was 40 pages and one of the editors said, you've written 40 pages here and there's no gender. And that struck me. And I was like, wait, really? And so I looked back at it and there wasn't. And I'd spent years, you know, co-editing the black feminist reader, writing, you know, shadow boxing, black feminist politics, resisting state violence, which actually the first book, we had a lot about women's leadership. And I do talk about organizing, like in

Brooklyn, against cops with black women on, you know, bridges and black men, and black men, people and some of the international work we were doing, right, around child safety and food and Indian nuclear weapons. So when I looked at it, I realized there was an gender and I said, oh, right, this isn't an identity marker. The captive maternal is a function. And so then I had to figure out what is the function of the captive maternal, and that leads to the stages. And there's, again, And what I'm trying to do is look at the material struggle of our lives. And it's not always negative, right? We have music.

We have Saravan, My Funny Valentine's. We have Fela, Kuta, Saur tears, and blood. We have art. We have culture. We have passion. But we're always under siege. You know, even in people who have money, like dealing with denigration, anti-blackness, in ways, you know, that are captured.

say, and Frank Wolderson and Jared Sexton's, Texas and their analysis. So when I'm looking at this, the first stage is going to be care. And I know caretaking is really big and it's always been big, but now there's more writing about it. So I talk about the care that I saw when I was in Harlem, like you're hustling to get your kids in a good school, but then like if it's going to be a private school, then they're going to have to deal with the racism. But if you keep them in the local school, it's under resource and there's mold in the classroom and there's metal detectors and there's NYPD walking up and down the hall. So you're that you're captive to the choices. There's not, you know, unless you've got serious, serious money. And even when you do,

you find out it doesn't work for you the way you think. Like Serena Williams, she almost dies giving birth because people don't believe like, you know, medical systems that black people feel the pain that we are actually feeling and trying to tell you, right? And so, you know, apartheid medicine, like apartheid real estate, like apartheid schooling, I mean, it radiates throughout the culture. So in the zone of care, you understand that you're going to be conflicted and that you're compromising. Like you discipline your kid to obey the principle, even though you think they're racist or corrupt, right? But you want them to stay in the system because you're told by the state and society that the only way to succeed is that you like keep your head down,

and do the hustle and you perform the way the system asks you to perform. If not, then we'll demote you or you'll be kept back a grade or we'll just call, you know, NYPD and Child Protective Services to come get your kid. So it's that conflict within care. And in the womb of Western theory, I talk about the theft, how the state steals our generative powers to comfort each other, to love each other, to stabilize each other. And they use that soothing that we provide, that supplemental food, the supplemental care, that the state refuses in its medical system and its educational systems.

You know, I could just go on. No clean water, you know, a lot of things are going on. Half of the schools, I believe, in New York City, there's lead in the fountains waters in the schools. It's a report that I just read the other day. So the state is dysfunctional. So you have to be functional in your love and care. stabilized your family community yourself so that you can function within a dysfunctional state which you see the irony in that the second level you get to okay we're in the protest zone

I'm tired of this I need to speak to the principal or the manager who's in charge like who's running this right this is corrupt we're being denigrated somebody's siphany there's so many levels especially in New York City like Eric Adams the mayor I guess is is being looked at by the FBI for a number of things, but even without the FBI, you could see the discrepancies. That's the nicest way I can put it. But you realize the protest can't be individual. And, you know, maybe you could do an individual like, I demand or I'm going to lawyer up, but then you need money for that, right? So that moves to the third stage, which is movement. And that's where the collective is clearly visible, even though you can think of the

family as collective or your renegade PTA parents like, let's you. just try to take over the school or try to bring in something that's useful in terms of culture that is not state culture. But the movement, you know, go to 2020. That's when it was global. People came out, right? All over the globe. Eight minutes plus Derek Chauvin's knee, you know, on George Floyd's neck. But the movement, the movement is not sufficient. As you've seen, I mean, the movements died down and there's been more police killings despite the movements or maybe because of the movements. Like the police are flexing. There have been some adequate or useful reforms in different sectors, but overall, the structure is stable in terms of predatory policing.

And from the movement, once you study the insufficient contributions that it can make, it makes real contributions, but it cannot sway the state. and it cannot sway capital or corporations. And the police have, you know, quite a bit of immunity baked in through their unions, which oddly, like why they have unions. So one of things then becomes maranage. And this is where smaller sectors will just spin off into autonomous zones, the people who keep organizing, who are like, we need to do like an after school, school or we need to do a full day's freedom school whatever the moms of liberty are doing with their hypocrisy like you know they're having threesomes and then trying to ban every gay and trans kid you know within you know 30 mile radius whatever the proto-fascist moms are doing or dads are

doing or whatever however they label themselves they get autonomous zones because of space where you don't have to perform as a liberal. I find, as I said, an airbrushing revolution for the sake of abolition, the claim for non-reformist reforms to be very problematic language. So I called it an oxymum. So when you get to the stage of maranage,

you're not playing around with language. You're dealing with material reality that we were talking about earlier. You're being more like the Civil Rights Congress or more like Ida B. Wells or more like Malcolm, trying to build, you know, a coalition that is international, right? And when you get to that stage of Maranage, I believe that's when the police apparatus

really pays attention to you. I think the Black Panther Party had reached that stage. And it doesn't mean they didn't have white allies or Chicano allies or, you know, Hampton, Fred Hampton was all about the Rainbow Coalition, not like the way Jesse Jackson did it, which was, you know, co-optation. And then Obama co-opted in 2008 when he was running, right? But seriously, in the neighborhoods, providing food, providing housing, defending people against predatory policing or civilian predatory behavior, that is prohibited by the state, in my reading of it. I mean, as long as you're doing cultural dance or performance or

entertainment, they don't have a problem with it. But when you start to present that you can care for people and communities and they will do a 360 rap. Remember, there was no free breakfast program in the United States until the Panthers did theirs. But what did the police do? They shot up their offices, like poured out the milk on the floor,

trashed all the cereal, and then the state co-ops the concept, right? It's like we will provide. But again, it's under the, the state demands about how you have to conform to a corrupt society and a capitalist predatory and imperialist order. So the last stage is war resistance. And I can sum it up quickly because when I think of Attica, I see all these stages. And this is why gender for me is not the primary signifier. In a prison like Attica, in September 1971,

One month after, the month after George Jackson is assassinated and in prison in California, that becomes a catalyst, right? First stage, everybody in the prison probably doesn't identify, self-identify as male, but it's a male prison, so they're going to call you that. And they call you other things too, right, out of name. So the first stage you have the trustees, what are they doing, work that is feminized in a larger society. They're making the food. They're cleaning. They're mopping. They're tending to each other. They're doing infirmary. They're, you know, dispensing meds and library books.

All the, this, quote, stuff in society, that's the glue that, quote, women onto, like during COVID, it was said that some 800,000 women lost or left their jobs because they were the one staying home, you know, to keep the kids and the elders stable, that is the zone in prison where everybody who is identified as male is doing that first level stage. The second stage protest, like you tell the warden, don't call me boy anymore, don't tell me the N-word, I'm tired of working for 27 cents. You do it individually as small groups. That's not moving the edifice of the prison. So you go to the third stage, which is a mass. gathering, a rebellion. And this is what I believe was triggered through the assassination, the shooting of

George Jackson, I believe in the back as he was running towards prison walls. And he was in an enclosure where he's going to go. He wasn't going to scale the prison walls, right? So in that third sector, that movement pushes people towards Maranage. And Maranage is about having your autonomy space. So what do they do they take over the prison they create a maroon camp within the prison fortress and what is the response by the state after you know tom wicker and prominent attorneys come to visit you know and journalists etc etc governor Rockefeller governor of new york calls president nixon and they deploy the National Guard, and they come with Vietnam level, once they got it out of Vietnam, you could call it surplus military gear, and they shoot through the white guards who are hostages

in order to kill the rebels. And so the war resistance, right, is not just the killing by the National Guard. It's according to Orasami Burton's recent book, Tip of the Spear, which is probably the definitive book on Attica now it's like after they take over the prison they torture survivors especially the leaders and they allegedly read his book and determine yourself kill additional leaders so those are the five stages you start by say you know just treat us like humans we want human rights civil rights they're denied you protest in small cadres or individually You say collectively we need to make a move. If it's something traumatic, then the collective is responding as a traumatized entity. And yes, they took over prison. And there were some deaths during the takeover. I think a couple of trustees died in probably one guard.

You create an autonomous zone. You speak to the New York Times. You speak to what you're talking to the world in a way in which the 1951 document, but in a much more civil life, we just. gave you the book, you know, at the UN headquarters, whatever, but you're still talking about the same denigration, disposability, and torture of living beings that you're treating as dead. And then you literally bring in the National Guard to render them physically dead, right? And so once you get to that zone of war resistance, then things quiet down, and you scale back down.

And these are maybe cycles, but in the last page of the book talks about the Urabahs, the serpent, right, that's swallowing its own tail, we have destruction and we have resurrection. We die and then we're born again, like maybe not this person talking, right, but some aspect of our thought, our will, and our love. And I don't know if we can break out of this cycle and I don't really care. I'm just interested in us not being stuck at the first levels in which non-reformist reforms is presented as a real option, as opposed to what the pastor said. You kill us, we'll kill your economy. Yeah, that's very interesting and very helpful. I'll have to sit with that. So among other things, the book is a beautiful tribute to Erica Garner, although it's not a biography, as you make clear.

Why did you decide to center and honor Erica Garner as you have, including, for example, by situating her as a captive maternal in your sense and a guerrilla intellectual in Rodney's sense? Yeah, thanks for that. I never matter. And as I say in the book, I don't know like, Why would she even meet with me? You know, there's no, at least I was going to be in a protest. And I did go to a couple, right? But, you know, there was a serious cadre of organizers. I think people should more closely differentiate the different sectors of Black Lives Matter. Like there are some people who became one entity.

And then there are other people who are just in the material world, changing the balances of power or challenging them. She was one of those people. And I always struck by like, you know, she transitioned in 2017 when she gave, she had given birth four months earlier to her second child named after her father. So that would be Eric Garner, right?

And I was struck by how come more people weren't talking about her after she transitioned. And when I found that she had transitioned, I was still, you know, in New York. And I was mortified because, well, I mean, people get busy with their lives and, like, you got elder care. And then there's younger people. You know, this is the fulcrum of the seesaw, the Canton, like you're balancing life with insufficient support from the state. And the state's predatory anyway, so you have to keep an eye on it. And then you have to keep an eye on, you know, civilians who aren't always ethical or nice.

But I was, I was struck by, I didn't know that she needed that much support or care, right? I know she talked about depression and other things like on democracy now and other platforms because, you know, I kind of followed her like other people and I was listening. And I know that, you know, 2014, that was the year, right? people were killed constantly and every year, but 2014 was Eric Gardner, Michael Brown, and Ferguson, so Eric Gardner in Staten Island, New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and who's 18, Michael Brown, and then 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Ohio. So she weathered that year, and I could hear her, like when I'm listening to her, talk to Don Lemon or some other journalists in liberal media, whatever, who are trying to get her to stay aligned with the liberal narrative, like reform, we can do this, we just have to, like, being good people is sufficient. I think being good people is imperative, but like, how do you define that?

And the state has not agreed to be, to restrain its violence. That's the nicest way I can say it about the state. So while I'm watching her and I'm learning from her and then I write, like I'm doing something with Georgiancy for the New York Times. And it's like a meditation on her. So that was in the first time in 2014, there's a piece in New York Times. And George Yancy is a prominent. philosopher at Emory, right? And so his connections, there was a lot of interest in philosophy, and I was

talking about her in Ida B. Wells. And I consider Ida B. Wells to be a captive maternal as well. And so as I begin to look more closely at her life after she transitioned, there's a high maternal rate for black women in terms of, morbidity. I mentioned Serena Williams earlier. She survived, but not everybody does. I decided, after I heard that she had transitioned that whatever I did for a year, whenever I was asked to talk, I would only talk about Erica Garner. And so I talk about that in the book. Like when I'm in Sao Paulo for a conference with these international jurists, I'm only going to talk about

Erica Gardner and played a clip, the ad that she did for Bernie Sanders, which is absolutely stunning. And he did not ask her to do that ad. She reached up to him, I believe, with a tweet or something, and offered to do it. And she filmed it in her apartment with her seven-year-old daughter, right? And it was so powerful that Harvey Weinstein, who I believe is incarcerated now, had reached out to the Clinton campaign and offered to do a counter ad to negate it. And they said, no, thank you. Just stay away from it. But it was really strongly in its presentation, right, articulating the need to control predatory policing. So if I was in Columbia, I was in California, I was just moving around Chicago in different places, but it would be a meditation on her.

And again, I never met her in no intention of doing a biography of her. I'm not a historian or a biographer, no attention of trying to meet the family or get their take on it. I was trying to find these stages. Maybe I'm so glad you asked that question. I was trying to see, are these stages real or did I just make them up? But I could see the stages in her from the early kind of liberals saying the right things. These are what the journalists want to hear. And moving like to the protest, to the movement and then to this kind of maranage with their collective.

It's like we do not follow the script that the state and the nonprofit writes for us. We're not doing their dance routines, right? We're not entertaining the mass by our suffering, you know, driving like the sales or clicks on media because you want to see another dead black body monetizing black death. She refused that. And the people who organized with her refused it. and the way in which they shut down New York City streets and subways

and the die-ins on Staten Island she was a template to read I mean just you know in our book we have a QR code and that goes to an amecasite and some of the young people working on this book who's a collective effort they're thanked in the acknowledgments

they collected 11,000 of her tweets you can see where she moves from this kind of listening to what the media wants her to say to rebellion against it and then she takes on the executive leaders that's what I call them so it's mayor de Blasio it's governor Cuomo and eventually it's president Obama because she feels like this is a setup they're all saying the right words but nobody's pushing for accountability right and I studied I studied her because she was a younger mother.

I studied her because she was brilliant. And I learned from her. Like I can study an ancestor like Ida B. Wells and learn from her. So why couldn't I study Erica Garner and learn that way also? And so that's what I did for a year. And then, you know, it happens you move on to other things. But then I just started waiting for somebody to say, more about her and to remember like more publicly and I'm sure her collective and crew talked about

her all the time but I'm an older generation like with multiple generations I have to support so I wasn't in the streets that much I wasn't organizing that much I was doing my academic job so I could keep it but she became an instructor was she flawed of course everybody was flawed but she was brilliant and brave. And that combination of those two, like she wasn't cultivating an identity or a public persona. She was just being very clear about the truth. And that's what I wanted to know better in terms of how I think about politics and how I see the world. So the book is organized into three parts. The first one, you know, talks about the theory

that Captain Maternal, the role of black feminists within it, talks about black women who are compradors, right? So, I mean, the first one that always comes to my mind is Condoleezza Rice because of, you know, weapons and mass destruction lies like led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, you know,

in Iraq and destabilization of the Middle East. But I could throw a lot of other names out there, right? besides Condoleezza Rice. And so I wanted to see what our contradictions were as black women. I wanted to see how we were aligned, how we splintered. I want to understand better the relationship of the liberal to the radical to the revolutionary. So there's a discussion about Bell Hooks in her contribution and a discussion about Asada Shakur and her contributions.

But they don't always align, right? And so for me, Erica Garner became the youngest of my teachers. And so that first part, we're dealing with concepts of theory, of feminism, of captive maternal. And the second part of the book, it focuses on her father, Eric Garner, and how he was killed in Staten Island. And Ramsey Orta is preserving the video clip. And later, you know, the police really hounded him for that is it's the visuals, right?

It's the, we call it snuff porn of a lynching that catches the imagination, and also traumatizes. To the third part, which is how we could take our need and our struggles around, I can't call it police reform. But our struggles around predatory policing and how we connected to the international, you know, arena or the international struggles using the language of recharged genocide so she doesn't appear prominently in all three sectors it's really the second sector which is her zone but she she is central to this three part you know division in the book and there is a thread you know between all three parts and i guess you know to wrap on this one i would say the way we're taught, at least the way I was taught in academia,

is like you read the people who write the books or the people who have prominence in society. But I found her to be so informative and so brilliant. And she leaves her interviews behind. And we studied all of them or most of them that I can find. And as I said, we have 11,000 tweets. But she is clear, not. deceptive and she is not performative and that became that became a possibility to have more clarity

about what political resistance might be and what it looks like and then how to keep that visible even as most people don't talk about her yeah listening to you discuss erika garner uh really it brings sort of tears to my eyes thinking about her, her life. She died in 2017 at the age of only 27 years old. You know, all the tragedy and heartbreak that she experienced in her short life is absolutely devastating. But, you know, it is one of those names. And unfortunately, there's so many names of people who are killed by police in the U.S., black people who are terrorized, who are taken from us too early. And we remember these names, you know, Brianna Taylor, Philando Castile, you know, Tamir Rice, we can go on and on. But some names do sort of slip out and you sort of forget them. And Erica Garner, obviously, she wasn't the person that was on that famous video. It was her dad. But she picked that up, that pain and that hurt.

And she organized around it. And she became this really principal, as you say, non-performative, authentic voice. So I just really appreciate how you sort of center her humanity and her heroism in such like a loving and compassionate way without trying to impose anything. on her or, you know, you know, trying to shape her into an image that fits some narrative. It's just like you're taking her humanity as it is and you're centering it. And I find that beautiful and deeply moving. Thank you. Can I add to that?

I mean, because you made the distinction really clear. She was not a casual, well, she was later, right? I mean, in December 2017, as you say, when she transitioned four months after giving birth. But Hearst was not the spectacle of being lynched in the public square, right? But it was the agency. And one of the things I began thinking about is like decades ago, the people who we focused on were the ones who had the agency or who presented the agency or shared it.

It wasn't because of their victimization. But now the narrative has shifted. Does that make sense what I'm trying to say? like the black vulnerable the black the names of black people that we remember are victims whereas in the 60s or the early 70s they were activists and they're you know so you know Fred Hampton and he was murdered with Mark Clark but what were they they were in Chicago doing like you know the breakfast programs the security programs forming the rainbow coalition with white appellation. who'd come to, you know, Chicago with Chicano's Puerto Ricanos, right? That, like, our agency has diminished. So when you see black people, it's real, it seems to be mostly about the victimization, not about the resistance.

And what captivated me about her is she was a resistor. Like, whatever pain she was in and probably deep levels of it, She constantly resisted. Like, we can, the movement mothers, right? The mothers of the movement is what they were named. I was at the D&C in Philly in 2016 and the Mile House. What was that? The Mile High?

What was that? No, it's the Wells Fargo. The Wells Fargo Stadium, right? And, like, the first person to come on stage is Bill Clinton, and he was booed. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense. And then, you know, later the mothers of the movement to come on. And, you know, I'm not going to name them, but you know who they are. And so they're campaigning for Hillary. And they have corsages and the colors are coordinated. I think it was

champagne and maroon. And I'm watching in the chief seats and the, you know, in the bleachers. And because I know liberals, that's how I could get a ticket to get in. Everybody starts Cheney Black Lives Matter. And it's like, whoa, what is going on? This is so weird because this is Hillary's moment. Like how, and she's not, she's police friendly. Like, you know. and military-friendly, if you think of Libya and other places, right? So I'm like a later find out that John Podesta, who's like a key person in DNC, his emails had been hacked. And I think this is why they went out of Julian Assange.

I think he ended up posting them. And what it, like out of all the troves of content that was in there, one thing that was totally stuck in my mind is a statement that if anybody ask you about these police killings or black victims, you just say black lives matter and you chant. If they ask you about policy to deal with predatory policing, you say nothing. And that's what I meant about the performance. Like, this is incredibly orchestrated. And she went outside of the script.

And that's why I found her to be absolutely brilliant and brave. Yeah. Yeah, well said. And that little factoid you dropped about Harvarez. Weinstein reaching out to the Clinton campaign to counter signal. I mean, just blows your mind, real scumbag stuff there. But the last thing I want to just mention before we move into the next question very quickly is we've sort of drawn on a few parallels between the black liberation struggles historically in the U.S. and what's going on in Palestine. And there's

this very much this, and I think it echoes the sentiment you just made, this sort of liberal approach to these things that is fine with, in the case of America, black people, in the case of Palestine, Palestinians being victims. And there's a certain sense of sympathy and compassion even to some extent, not material policy, but at least in rhetoric, at least in emotion extended to those victims. But the moment those victims turn into resistors, those same liberals will turn their back on them incredibly quickly, dehumanize them, call them terrorists, et cetera. But we understand that there's a deep dialectical relationship between the victimizing of these people and these people resisting in whatever ways that they can. And, you know, us on the, on the, on the, on the revolutionary

left, we don't, we don't draw the line and just, we're comfortable with them being victims. We're also supportive of them in their resistance in the case of Palestine in particular. But I think it parallels stuff that you've been saying in that last answer quite well. And I think that's certainly interesting and something to note. Go ahead. Before you go on, Brad, um, just a quick, uh, quote that comes to mind with respect to that is Muhammad al-Kurd and his, his book, beautiful and powerful poetry book, Rivka. I forget if it's in the introduction or the afterward, but he criticizes the tendency to, quote,

women and children, Palestinians to death. And let's avoid that tendency. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move into this next question. So in the episode, we remember the attempts to be free. a wonderful interview you did with our friends. Millennials are killing capitalism, which we highly recommend, and I'll try to remember to put that in the show notes so people can find that interview with you. We love what they do over there. You also identify George Jackson as a captive maternal, and you were speaking a few questions back really fascinatingly on George Jackson. Can you kind of, and can you kind of just reflect a little bit more on George Jackson's life and his legacy as a militant and a radical intellectual for us? I would love to hear your thoughts on him more broadly.

Yeah. So that's Jared and Josh at Millennials of Killing Capitalism, and that was the longest interview I'd ever done in my life. And it ended up in pursuit of revolutionary love. We transcribed it, or they transcribed it. They were kind of to do that. And it ended up taking two chapters. But in other sectors, both there and elsewhere, I've been fascinated. Fascinated, that sounds weird, right? I've been. studying, you know, George Jackson and trying to, you know, understand. And it took me, you know, there's a difference between Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, right? But his understanding of the kid, he's understanding of captivity, he's understanding of captivity. He's understanding of privilege and power. power, right? And also how difficult it is to be disciplined in struggle. W.L. Nolan, I believe, is one of the people who was incarcerated who mentored him. And my position is the way I read, you know, how he talks about Nolan or other people's readings

and stuff like that, that they loved each other, you know, as brothers inside. But W.L. Nolan had started a petition, you know, following all the, all the legal remedies, like, we, we need to file a petition. And, like, this is a protest level, you know, Captain Materiel, and give it to the warden and, like, about how the guards, all white guards, are putting broken glass and human feces in our food. And, like, there's a whole list of grievances. It's, like, it's horrific, you know, about the, the behavior and the abuse.

But when he's in the yard, he's shot with another man who also black, men who were putting together the legal petition. And I, you know, when I think about these atrocities, it isn't as if we don't do what we're, quote, told to do. I mean, that was the same, you know, Attica, they took over, but they were trying to follow the rules of engagement. I'm just going to use that phrase. If it's not appropriate, then just forgive me or forget it.

But the rules of engagement, you're being terrorized, your community is being terrorized. And you're asked to negotiate, you know, state your needs and your petitions, follow like a system of, quote, decorum and decency that brings you to this other zone, which is supposed to be liberatory or fair. But that's not how it went. Like, not for Jonathan Jackson, the 17-year-old who was trying to, you know, liberate his brother and other black prisoners, not for Ruchel McGee, who got out in July. you know, at the age of 83 and then transitioned, I believe, in October. And he had been acquitted of all the major charges from the Marin County courthouse, which was about taking hostages to leverage. Okay, that's illegal. Got it. But my understanding the people who shot up the van were the prison guards. It wasn't the people, it wasn't the three

black men who were incarcerated. It wasn't a 17-year-old teen, the younger brother of George Jackson, right? And so Rochelle McGee was actually acquitted of all major charges in 1973. Angela Davis, his former co-defendant, was acquitted in 1972. So one year later, it should be like, okay, Rochelle got an aggravated

kidnapping charge that was dismissed and then simple kidnapping, which could be one to five years. But the judge refused to enter the jury verdict into the court records. And Richelah had written me, you know, years ago, and I, you know, like, I was like, there's a moment of me, like, I don't think I'm naive, you know, like, I don't think I, like, have these imaginary, you know, thoughts about the democracy, like, that it's not predatory. But I do sometimes think there's just a baseline that they wouldn't possibly cross,

not because it's illegal because obviously CIA and FBI do all kinds of things that are murderous and illegal but just like a certain decency that the citizenry would call it out that's not what happened so

writing for Harvard inquest co-authoring with Colongia Janga FTP Free the People and it also means other things the acronym it's trying to sort out

that you can't see George as an isolate, right? Even though his writings and he's become like some iconic symbol in different ways. But he's a prototype or a pattern that is replicated over and over again. And that there's like linkages between George and Rochelle McGee, whether or not they ever met face to face. And so when I'm talking about George Jackson, millennials are killing capitalism or I'm talking about another podcast with grad students or something like that, I'm talking about a persona who is deeply embedded in love and intimately familiar with violence. And there are many people like that. And you can, you know, make whatever moral critiques you want.

want to make, okay? But the point is, at least for me, is how could we articulate? Again, I'm saying we have to rewrite, we charge genocide over and over again. And everybody has to be included in that tax in terms of shaping the narrative. So you can't kick George out of the text, and you can't kick Jonathan Jackson out of the text. You can't kick Cabral out of the text. You can't kick Che I Guevara. I mean, there's this whole list of revolutionaries, even if you reject or repudiate what they stand for, but you have to understand that they were the catalysts

to allow us to have a language that could articulate the material world, the real world that we live in, not the aspirational world that we wish we lived in, right? And so he's indispensable, but then I start to wonder if he's also going to be, in some ways, co-opted and romanticized in academic or other, you know, performative or scholarly, you could call it that too, literature or text, the way in which, say, Asada Shakur has been, right? So again, for me, I'm sorry if this sounds too complicated, but I'm trying to figure it out in real time. You can't excise anybody from the narrative who shape the narrative. And you can't co-op their political will and make them a liberal when they were not. And you can't make them a pacifist when they were not. You have to deal with the material reality of who they were.

And because that is a legacy that they left for us. Now, do we replicate what they do? Like, no. I mean, 50 years ago is. This is 2024 almost, but we would have to agree to comprehending how violent these zones are. And then when rebels resist within those zones, they're most likely to be killed or disappeared. But they're not all going to be pacifists. And since we don't have any public discussion about this, it's like we're, I feel,

like sometimes we're in a tower of babble. And again, to be clear, I'm not saying you replicate anybody's actions. I'm just saying that you study honestly so you understand the depth of violence and terror that is meted out against the radicals. So this is one thing I say in the book that I hope is helpful. I distinguish the epicenter, which is why I see the surface of politics, from the hypo center. Like the hypocenter is like ground zero. That's. where they explode the bombs, right? But in the analogy that I'm trying to construct with this, the epicenter is a surface of politics

where we perform as ethical people and progressives, which is fine. That's decent. But there are some people who actually became guerrilla intellectuals and guerrilla fighters. So they went deeper into the politics, pursued and hunted by FBI, CIA, and those pursuits and hunts were not,

legit anymore than staging like coups in Brazil or whatever as the U.S. was doing in 1950s, 1960s, or sending contras after training people at the School of America, as I was about to say, School of Assassins in Fort Benning, Georgia to run death squads in Latin America. So you have to understand the radical violence of the state in the prison, but also in these, you know, proxy wars that they're waging and the radical violence of resistance or you don't understand material reality so i can't i don't really talk about george a lot but i do talk about george because it's necessary like without george you don't even understand george and jonathan right you you don't even understand why angela davis went underground those were her guns but she did not

give permission. That's how she got acquitted. So, but somebody, you know, a teenager presumably took the guns and used them on a raid that was not supposed to harm anybody. Huchel McGee actually was just supposed to go to a radio station and talk about the torture inside of prison and how he had been railroaded into prison. But, you know, the guards shot up the van like they would, you know, National Guard would shoot up Attica. And I don't think we, have created the emotional intelligence to be able to adequately now we i'm going to just talk about me and you know some people who are more sheltered like me in the academy to really comprehend what george is saying even though george is really clear and i think that's what sometimes he gets

rewritten i mean i want to you know leave this thought with you i mean in early 2000, you know, I don't care. I just say everything, no. I went to Brown and I was given $10,000, like research money. Instead of using it for that, I just invited political prisoners to campus, whether underground, Panther, what am I missing? Puerto Rican independentista, you know, representatives for aim. Like, you know, did, hey, come, use the money, just fly in, use a hotel. And that became imprisoned intellectuals, that anthology. But 20 years of ago, it was the, you know, the heat that came down from me from the head administration to, like, my colleagues encouraged me to leave. I'll put it that way. And then a couple of months ago,

there's this conference at Brown, mass incarceration, Kenaramumia, Beaumont, but they say, like, everybody's a political prisoner, which means nobody is. So you can't differentiate between political revolutionary struggle, right, or autonomous zones, Maranage, because everybody who's like captive and victimized is given the same agency of as a political prisoner, which even if George said that, I'm not going to buy it because that's not the material reality I see. But this time, it's just well funded and it's celebratory. So I'm like, how is it in a span of 20 years? First, you couldn't have political prisoners, you know, come. These are people who got out, obviously. And even to do the anthologies around them, like,

was for you know that was a negative you're embarrassing the department or something in the school to 20 years later it's like oh let's let's talk about political prisoners because we're you know everybody is and I mean this is what this is what I start to my my speech starts to falter this is when I understand Erica Garner much better than I understand what's going on in elite sectors, right? And so George, you're always going to talk about George. Foucault talked about George. He signed that pamphlet or help co-author it with Jean-Geney and other people, the mask assassination. And we put it in the Duke book. So this is the first time it's translated into English. I'm not saying it was the best translation, but it's the only one we had at the time. And that

was 2008, and the book was titled Warfare in the American Homeland. And Duke editors, like, they had And other times, like, are you declaring war in the U.S.? I said, of course not. Just like, just, you know, read the book and see what's in it. But George Jackson is in there. And so we're like, you know, Frank Wilderson, Manny Mirable, it was a whole diverse

range of folks, right? But I guess I want to leave with what I'm started, you know, I started by saying, we need to see the material ground and the people who are doing the work on the ground to even comprehend the reality. And so Erica Gardner makes her contribution in her work on the ground. And Georgian Jackson makes his contribution in his work

on the ground. Of course, his, you know, his work cost him his life. Brilliant. So just to be respectful of your time, we're running out of time here. And I just want to ask one more question before I passed off to Brett. So I want to give you space to reflect on the relation or relations between captive maternal's abolition and revolutionary love? Captive maternal's abolition and revolutionary love. I would say, let me go towards the middle, abolition. I would say, like I said in the book, what was this, shadow boxing? It came out like in 99.

There's different forms of abolition, just like there's different forms of black feminism. It's just been collapsed, like, as a container. concept. And so you don't see the ideological differences. There's, you know, there's the abolition that is liberal, more liberal, and then there's the radical liberal, and then there's the radical, right? And then, you know, the revolutionary abolitionist would be George, because he was forming an army from what little I know. The captive maternal as concept. So you said abolition, Captain Maternal, what was the third? and revolutionary love

yeah Captain maternal is a way in which I am probably putting together my what is myself now like after you know in the 20s

like you know being on the ground and in the marches and some of the you know fights you know are the battles for me, it's the capacity. I think for all those three terms, it's all about capacity. Because before I say the Captain Materals is about function.

And if we do the act, if we do the deed, if we make the commitment, we have no idea where will we be, but at least we're on a path. I am concerned about us being like in resin, like just reified in these positions. that seem to be so solid that they become brittle. But everybody, you know, nobody acknowledges that they don't have the fluidity. They can't bend, they can't expand and contract as needed, right? And so the captain maternal, because of the stages, like we could move forward towards revolutionary struggle and we can retreat from it.

We have all those options and a lot in between, right? the abolition that comes from the academy you know as I said in the writing I was there from like some of the origin story and then I just like I'm out because it's just it's not going to be what I do it doesn't mean that they're not making a contribution

or they haven't made contributions it's just not the politics that I can support but I can't align with them because I can't find what I need to see the clarity and to see the ground. And in part maybe because, as I've said, repeatedly in different podcasts or whatever these interviews are, I grew up with a military officer and I grew up in the ROTC. So for me, like, yeah, war is normative. You thought it was an exception? It's the norm. And so sometimes I'm looking at what academics are saying. And I'm like, I can't see the reality, you know,

I'm growing up on these military bases that I've experienced. So I don't know. what kind of world your guys are in, but this is not, you know, as I said, like military people make fun of what they call civilians. Like, you can't stomach violence and you can't really look at it. And so, like, there's this, like, a veil over it or something like that. It could be wrong. I'm not speaking for everybody in the military, but it's just like there's like this rupture of what I know to be real, having been with some Uber conservative people who, some of them kill for a living and like the discourse that comes out of the academy of like we've got this we just need more reforms and i'm like no this this stuff is really deep and we you know and my people

weren't even like the fascists in the military we're stealing all that weaponry right and siphying it out and getting that training for free right so mine were kind of like well we're just the conservative black liberals sector but we're like not here to like do ethnic cleansing or that's what they said, but they still did it anyway when they got deployed. So I think through the Captain Maternal, through abolition, through that last container, it's going to, I'm coming back to Agape. I guess it's just going to be my last word, and I know people make fun of me about that, like, oh, I'm so Christian, whatever.

But I talk about love is political will. I talk about an I pearl and I talk about a new bones. And when I'm reading some of George or when I hear about how the people in Attica responded to his death, and they had been reading George inside but never met George because they're on the other side of the continent. They're in New York, Georgia's in California. But they could see that if you read George, you could see that he loves and that he cares for us. At his funeral, there is some 8,000 people, white lesbians, like Beau Brown, they went underground, they started doing expropriations. I think you guys know what that means.

They eventually, like, did eight years in prison. But we're not stupid. We know when people care and when they risk. And so if these categories don't mean or they're not useful, I don't care. I wasn't, again, trying to create a brand or some, like, lexicon. I was just trying to explain how I see us move. And I think we can be captured in the academy in ways that are very sophisticated. And so that's why I think we have to constantly be fluid and moving.

But moving towards resistance and not reifying victimization, we will be victimized. That's, I mean, come on, like, who has all the predatory power? but we can offer intellectual, emotional, and bodily defenses. But the most important thing is to be clear that we are on a journey and maybe to discern what stage of the journey we're on and how we need to move forward, like the Uruvus. I mean, like the serpents, we will disappear and we will reappear. And that is our inheritance.

And every time we reappear, that is when we express our love and our political will and our power. And if that's all we have, that's good enough. Absolutely, beautifully said, far from disparaging your use of the word agape and the concept of love, I absolutely deeply appreciate it. And I think it ties your analysis and makes it incredibly human. And I could genuinely sit here and listen to you, talk all day, you're a, you're a, you're a, a fountain of wisdom and knowledge, and I really appreciate you sharing, being so generous with your time and sharing your time with us today. Now, we definitely had more questions on the outline, and I would love to have you back on maybe sometime next year to talk about

those questions, talk about Ida B. Wells, to just talk about anything else because there's so much that we still have to discuss and would love to hear you talk about. But that's going to have to do it for today. I wanted to let everybody know that the book that we've been discussing is again new bones abolition, captive maternal agency in the afterlife of Erica Garner, and importantly, all proceeds from the book go to prison radio. So you're buying the book, you're getting something wonderful, and you're contributing to a good cause. Before we let you go, Dr. Joy James, can you just let listeners know where they can find you, your book, and your work online? Yeah, I don't, yeah, I'm really good with the digital thing. I mean, if you just Google

Joy James, you can find the books. But different. definitely common notions. And you could go to their platform. You'll find some things. And divided as a publisher. They're based in the UK. They're the ones who put out in pursuit of revolutionary love where millennials are killing capitalism and blackness, you know, a number of different formations because we're all in dialogue with each other. That's a collective voice. And they're also there. All right. Got it. PM. Any last words? No, just thank you. So, so much and we appreciate your

intellectual interventions and we wish you well. Thank you. And you'll stay well also, okay? Yeah, we'll do. All right. Take care. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Rev Left Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio or make a one-time donation at BuyMea Coffee.com forward slash RevLeft

Radio. Links will be in the show notes. I'm going to be able to be.