How Solidarity Falters Amid Repression and How We Can Do Better

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“This system was designed to do exactly what it is doing and has been doing: concentrating wealth and facilitating racial capitalism and colonialism and extraction,” says author and activist Dean Spade. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Spade and host Kelly Hayes discuss some common traps that activists fall into when discussing repression, and how we can strengthen our practice of solidarity.

Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about common mistakes that many of us make in the course of our solidarity work. We will be hearing from Dean Spade, who is an author, organizer and professor at the Seattle University School of Law. Dean is a longtime friend of the show, and I am constantly recommending his book Mutual Aid to young people these days, because it is an essential, practical guide for people who want to organize for collective survival. Today, we’re going to talk about a new resource that Dean co-created called “Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity When Responding to Political Repression.” This resource explores some common traps that people of conscience can fall into when expressing solidarity with victims of political repression, and talks about how we might avoid those traps. I am so grateful for this resource. Amid fascistic repression against Stop Cop City protesters and Palestine solidarity activists, it’s easy to exceptionalize repression in ways that actually redeem the carceral system, or to inadvertently reinforce divisions between supposedly “good” and “bad” protesters. Sometimes, in an effort to defend one group of people, we can accidentally harm another. Given what we’re up against, improving our practice of solidarity should be a high priority right now. As Dean recently wrote in Truthout:

The stakes are high, and will only get higher as the crises we face become more catastrophic while our opponents further criminalize our resistance strategies. Now is a time to bring greater rigor to our practices of solidarity.

So, today, we are going to talk about how we can show up for each other in ways that are bold and liberatory, rather than reinforcing the status quo and leaving people behind.

If you appreciate this episode, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Dean Spade, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Dean Spade: Thank you.

KH: How are you doing today?

DS: I feel like my brain is spread thin or my attention is too many places, even more than our world usually makes me feel. It’s just bananas these days. You know?

KH: I absolutely feel the same, and I really appreciate you being here with us amid all of the chaos. It means a lot.

DS: I’m very glad to be here.

KH: Can you introduce yourself and tell folks a bit about your work?

DS: I’m Dean Spade. I use he/him pronouns. I am Seattle-based. And for the last 25 years I’ve been involved in a variety of things related to queer, trans liberation, and prison abolition, and Palestine solidarity work. And my day job is that I teach at a law school. And most of my time is spent in community collaborative projects of various kinds.

KH: Can you tell us a bit about this new resource, “Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity When Responding to Political Repression?” How and why was this document made? And why did the moment we’re in necessitate its creation?

DS: This tool, this resource emerged from conversations that happened that kind of go back to last year when the indictment came down of 61 Forest Defenders involved in the Stop Cop City campaign defending the Atlanta forest from this new big police training facility, which has been a very visible site fight. I think compared to a lot of other ones we have in the U.S., it’s become like a real matter of concern for people all around the world actually. And there’s been just a really multifaceted, incredible campaign happening there to try to stop this facility. And the indictment was just like this wild document where it’s like this whole narrative about what anarchists are and what mutual aid is.

All these charges that frame these people as a criminal conspiracy, or doing things like buying a generator to use at an event, or posting things on the internet, or sleeping in the forest. There’s a huge range of activities people are engaged in related to this campaign, and making it into a criminal conspiracy using RICO Law. So it was a … “wow” moment of political repression. Obviously, nothing we haven’t seen before in the history of the United States, and yet definitely a terrible moment in which people had to really scramble to get all these people the right kinds of legal defense, and a lot of money had to be raised. And a lot of people are commenting on this as a very kind of terrifying instance of repression. And one of the things that I was seeing a lot then was kind of like some classic limiting talking points that tend to happen when political repression like this emerges.

And I saw some of them coming even from people who I really love, who are like other people part of the abolition movement, and who I really trust their analysis. And I was just like, “Ah, it’s so hard.” One of the things that happens, and it happened to me as somebody like, while I’m reading the indictment, I’m sitting there having two kinds of thoughts. On the one hand, I’m having all the thoughts of each thing that’s ridiculous that’s being said in the indictment where it’s like, “Well, that’s not a thing that can be said even inside the logic of the law.” And then, I’m having my other set of thoughts that are like this whole entire thing is completely illegitimate as is the entire criminal punishment system. So I’m of two minds, like a lawyer brain going, and I’ve also got Dean’s actual ethics brain going.

And what I saw happening a lot was people commenting, especially lawyers and law professors, but also sometimes it just any activist, or media person, or whatever saying these kind of inside talking points that legitimize the system itself in the way they’re talking about it, or pretend that the legal system is this fair neutral thing, and that this is this one instance where it’s not happening. And I was really concerned, seeing that. I feel like it really undermines solidarity with other people who are targeted by the criminal system. It also sometimes divides… It’ll be a focus on, “This person was just flyering. How could they possibly put in this criminal conspiracy? They didn’t throw a Molotov cocktail, but someone else did,” or whatever, you know? So there’s a kind of like dividing people up and making it seem as though some people deserve criminalization and others don’t. The people I was reading, a lot of them people I love. I’m like, “I don’t think they mean to be saying things that have those implications.

And so, I started talking to some people I knew about it, including some beloved friends at Community Justice Exchange. And I also confronted a couple of people I knew who had written things where I’m like, “I really adore you. And we really agree on things. And I was really surprised to see you using these talking points.” Some of us ended up in a conversation where we decided to collaborate together on a tool about it. And one thing that’s really cool about it was that some people who I addressed about things I was concerned about and what they wrote were really non-defensive. And you know what? [Their response was] “Wow, you’re right. I hadn’t thought about it that way.” It is really complicated to try to not talk with that lawyer hat on when you’re talking to a broader audience, and not in a courtroom, and there’s these implications to those talking points.

So anyway, we ended up making this tool where we just kind of were like, “What are five questions that we should all ask ourselves when we are commenting on moments of political repression to make sure that we’re not reifying a bunch of bad ideas that are just in the air and in the water in our society so thoroughly that they can come out of our mouths?” And they can especially come out of our mouths because we’ve been told those ideas are legitimizing, and that those saying those things will make our beloved people who are facing repression seem like what they did is okay or that it’s legitimate inside that system. But we end up actually throwing some people under the bus or pretending that the system is fair, or could be fair, or was fair except for this one thing it did. So the tool is just very, very basic. It offers these five questions, and offers examples about them, and it’s just really hoping to try to get people to think twice before saying some of these things.

KH: It’s so heartening to hear you talk about conversations where people are being challenged about their words and actions, from a place of love, and having those conversations lead to constructive collaborations. I feel like that, all by itself, is such an important lesson for folks. I could stay on that, honestly, but let’s go ahead and dig into the questions this document raises, because they’re so important. The first question reads, “Does this argument erase or ignore the ongoing violence of the U.S. colonial legal system or legitimize that system?” So, how do activists who are defending one another in the face of repression fall into this trap and how can we avoid it?

DS: Yeah, it’s so common and so difficult. So I think one of the main ways that people do this is what I was just saying, by talking about repression as exceptional. So saying things like, “This is not what our justice system looks like.” Or, “This is a threat to our democracy.” As if our justice system and democracy are these things that usually work really well except for in this outrageous instance. And this erases a whole history of political repression of social movements that is thorough and happening all the time now and has been happening for hundreds of years to anybody who’s resisting.

It has this patriotism in it, as if this system was designed to work… This system was actually designed to do exactly what it is doing and has been doing: concentrating wealth and facilitating racial capitalism and colonialism and extraction. These talking points often hang on free speech and freedom of assembly. And people will be like, “This is a terrible instance in which our rights to free speech and free assembly are being undermined.” And sometimes the way that people talk about that makes it sound as if they believe that those things are real. You know?

And I feel like one of the things we need to notice that our movements have really made clear is that those sort of fake universal rights have never been real. It’s a rationalization for a big scheme to colonize this land, and exploit people, and make people maximally exploitable for the long term, which is still going on, right? So the idea that we kind of invest in the narrative that those rights are universal, except for in this instance they weren’t applied. It feels really out of step with any real solidarity with all the people who have been the targets of these brutal systems and have never had those rights for all of time.

And it feels like it does this kind of legitimizing of a legal system that erases like what, at this point, I think we really know it actually is. And I think people do it because you want to say, “Hey, don’t do this to my people.” I get that. But I think it has a lot of costs to say it in that way. And there’s lots of other ways to say, like, it’s not okay to criminalize people for doing this really important campaign in their community to stop a jail from being built, or to Stop Cop City, or whatever it is our beloveds are doing.

It’s not the only way to get there. We don’t need to actually participate in the fictions of legitimacy of the U.S. legal system or … the fake story about how it’s like this wonderful unique democracy in the world that is the justification for U.S. and military imperialism. We just don’t actually need to say those things to say that the repression is unjust, and that we oppose it, and that we want to stand up against it, and that we want to support people experiencing it, and whatever else we want to say.

KH: Another question from the document that was incredibly relevant to my own work is, “Does this statement participate in dividing people engaged in resistance into ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ or ‘violent’ or ‘nonviolent,’ thereby legitimizing criminalization of people using bolder tactics?”

We talk about this all the time in direct action trainings: how the government and the media are constantly trying to divide us into categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent.’ And that these categories are actually about legitimizing harm and marking protesters for violence. Can you talk about that process and how well-meaning people can play into it?

DS: Yeah. I mean, this is so rough, so common. And really, there’s been critiques of this forever, right? This is so heavily and thoroughly critiqued by so many different people in our movements, and yet it’s still so common. I mean, one of the ways I see this happen the most is that people just throw the word “peaceful” in when describing any protest, with the idea that that will make it legitimate. And by doing that, participate in a story that, if this is peaceful or nonviolent, then therefore the cops shouldn’t come and hurt people. And that means that if the cops think it’s not peaceful or not nonviolent, then they can.

It legitimizes the idea that parts of our movement or certain actions or tactics are legitimately criminalizable, or that people should be subjected to the brutal violence of the police. And we never want to say that. And I think that is just implied by this wild overuse of the word “peaceful.” And we have to be real that it’s the cops and the prosecutors who decide what counts as peaceful or violent or nonviolent. They’re the ones who turn up people’s charges and target that at certain people. That’s what the state is, right? It’s a monopoly on violence. It decides. It tells us who’s violent and who’s not violent. And it says cops aren’t violent, and it says we are.

And so [the state] says, I pushed over a trash can and now I’m a violent, non-peaceful protester. Or the whole range, right? And it says which kinds of violence matter, and which kinds of death matter, and which kind don’t. And we reject that. And so, the problem with the kind of overuse of the term “peaceful” as a way to try to legitimize our protests or say that therefore, the cops shouldn’t have come that time, is that it suggests that there is any legitimacy to their violence and that they get to determine our violence. Actually, one of my collaborators on this from Community Justice Exchange sent me an article that I thought was really interesting about a recent case. The article had just come out in June.

A recent case about Ron DeSantis championing this law against rioting, in which the Florida Supreme Court had to rule whether or not this law was okay. And the whole ruling is about the question of whether or not it’s okay to have this anti-protest law as long as peaceful protesters are still going to get a chance to protest, right? So they’re literally in this law trying to determine what counts. And there’s this part where one of the Florida Supreme Court justices says, “For purposes of (the law), a narrow interpretation of ‘violent public disturbance’ is essential to ensure that prosecutions involving violations of the statute do not capture the peaceful, nonviolent exercise of First Amendment rights nor criminalize the mere presence at or lawful participation in an otherwise peaceful assembly or protest.” That’s the end of the quote from this judge, [Jorge] Labarga.

The idea that we are going to trust these systems that have relentlessly targeted people who are engaged in any kind of effective resistance, that we’re going to trust them to determine who’s peaceful and who is not. There’s a really great new book coming out from Peter Gelderloos that is about a lot of these themes. And the book is called They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us. And he says something like, “If we do any effective tactic, they will make it a crime.” And I just thought that was very powerful to really get clarity that these labels about who is peaceful or not peaceful, violent or nonviolent are usually used to just ensure that effective tactics aren’t used.

And we see that. They constantly are expanding the criminalization of protest. They’re like, “Oh, now you can’t wear masks.” They’re constantly increasing what they can prohibit and say is a crime, and that is a part of the same narrative. So anyway, the bottom line of this being that I think that the danger of us relying on those same categories that are used in such a nefarious way against us is very significant. Unfortunately, it’s just still incredibly common even amongst people who share a lot of other analysis…. They still fall into using these kinds of terms in their press releases or their statements about the protest.

KH: This is something I will never stop talking about. We have a section on this in Let This Radicalize You, and I have a section on it in every direct action training I facilitate. We have to talk about it, always, because the messaging we are up against is ubiquitous. The truth is, we don’t have any kind of larger social agreement about what constitutes violence, and we certainly don’t have that kind of agreement within our movements. There is a spectrum of opinion about whether property destruction is violence, or about whether particular tactics are violent or nonviolent. I’ve even heard people say that “self-defense is not violence,” and as someone who has had to use my hands to defend myself, I will say that I fully disagree with that idea. It is violent to hit someone in the face, but is it necessary? Sometimes, it is. And I don’t feel the need to redeem having hit someone, in my own defense, by characterizing it as nonviolent. It was necessary, and to me, that’s the descriptor that matters.

We’re never going to have an agreement, among all of the people we might want to take action with, about what constitutes violence, when it comes to protest and liberation. But if we could get our heads around the fact that the systems we are challenging are fundamentally violent, we might stop obsessing over these critiques so much. Because in this society, the concept of “peace” is used to measure whether or not we are disrupting a system that is killing us, that is displacing us, that criminalizes homelessness and perpetuates genocide, while annihilating the natural world. We are surrounded with unfreedom and manufactured premature death, and yet all of these critiques about violence are leveled at protesters. The status quo has a license to kill, so those harms are just baked into people’s expectations. The question is always about whether protesters crossed a line by breaking a window or a machine, or by pushing back. I’m asking: What is necessary or unnecessary in the face of the violence we are witnessing and experiencing? And so long as we are fixed on critiquing people who are responding to unfathomable violence and destruction, while the other side gets to act with impunity, imprison us, kill us, and burn the world down, we are going to be out here destroying each other, rather than fighting what’s killing us.

DS: And also that realistically, if you believe that activists and people involved in movements should only be peaceful and should follow the rules set by their opponents, then you’re counting on the idea that we’re going to somehow convince people, we’re going to convince our opponents to stop these systems of war, and capitalism, and impoverishment of almost everybody for the benefit of very few, and destruction of everything on the planet. Like that we’re just going to convince them by showing up and having demonstrations that follow all their rules. And that’s not true.

These systems that we are trying to destroy and dismantle and change, they don’t have a moral conscience. They’re not like, “Oh, no. We didn’t realize people were dying because of our war. Yikes. Oops, we’ll stop.” That’s not a thing. And I think that more and more people are coming to understand that. I think we’re in a period of increasing militancy, and that’s visible. And because of that, we’re also in a period of increasing political repression. There is going to be a sharp rise in both, and we’re already seeing it.

And mobilization. People use a diversity of tactics to fight back. And there’s also a sharp rise in the criminalization of all of that and the violence against people protesting, as we can see with the recent student encampments. Everything is pretty turned up. And so, I feel like it’s even more important than ever for us to get some understanding about how to have solidarity with each other instead of being like, “Oh, you used a tactic that I don’t like. It makes me uncomfortable.” Or, “The state tells me I’m peaceful enough, so now I’m not going to have your back.”

And that’s really real. People really have been abandoned by movements or not given sufficient support who take larger risks. There are people still in prison for things they did in 2020, and there’s not the kind of robust support for those people that there should be, in part because people have these discomforts with actually standing up with folks who take a bigger risk than them. And that is something I’m quite worried about.

KH: I’m worried about it, too, and we really need to evolve beyond this kind of abandonment of protesters who take bold action. What we are up against, right now, is annihilatory violence and the rise of authoritarian rule. To expect people to stay within the lines and follow the rules is a perspective that is divorced from reality, which many of us are. If we are going to survive apocalyptic times, if we are going to build worlds worth defending, we have to be more invested in each other and in collective survival than we are in property, the norms of this system, or any allegiance to its rules. We cannot afford to demand or expect submission in the face of state-sanctioned destruction. We just can’t. And this is now, and will always be a narrative struggle, in addition to being a material struggle. You cannot concede the framing of a narrative struggle to those who would control and dominate you. People tasked with sustaining the status quo will always characterize anything that fucks up the status quo as violent, and we can’t accept those terms or that framing. We can’t tell our stories within that frame.

Relatedly, another question the document asks is, “Does this statement reinforce boogeyman terms and tropes that our opposition is using to delegitimize our movements and justify repression?” Can you talk about some of these boogeyman terms and tropes? And why deploying them in defense of activists can be harmful?

DS: First, I just want to go back one step that’s related to this question as well. Another piece of this is that if we distinguish ourselves because we think it’ll make us safe. If we’re like, “Oh, no. We were the peaceful ones.” These kind of boogeyman tropes. You see it in the Atlanta indictment that I was talking about before. They use the term “anarchist” as a scare tactic. But sometimes it’s the word “terrorist.” Sometimes it’s “Black radical.” There’s various words they used, kind of trotted out by the right and by law enforcement as super illegitimate, similar to “violent protester” or words like that.

Whenever people in our struggles are hoping that we’ll be safe by distinguishing ourselves from whoever our opponents are saying is bad, it really doesn’t work, right? Because what we’ve seen with the Green Scare, or the COINTELPRO, or the criminalization of people who were involved in the George Floyd rebellion in 2020, or any of these moments is that they do a big net. They use the trope or the boogeyman idea as the justification for the big net. But if you just look at the Atlanta indictment, it’s like they are indicting people who posted something to the internet or flyered right alongside somebody who damaged construction equipment or through a Molotov cocktail. It doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work to be like, “No, I’m not the anarchist one.” Or, “No, I’m not the one who throws a Molotov cocktail.” Because the nature of the way political repression works is that they want to get rid of your whole movement, your whole campaign. They’ll find ways to rope you all in. And of course, they want to put the fear tactic at the center of whoever they can describe as the most risk-taking or not legitimate under their system. But it doesn’t work, right? What we know works in all areas of our movements is solidarity, that if we stand together, we’re more likely to be safer overall than if we let them divide and conquer us.

And this thing with these kind of boogeymen, what I found with the Atlanta indictment was that it really heavily relied on the idea of anarchism. If it weren’t so sad and enraging, it’d be kind of funny as a read, the way that this law enforcement apparatus is describing anarchism. But you know, they’re like, “Oh, my God. And they have solidarity with each other. And they create these things called mutual aid funds to help each other when they get in trouble.” They’re like learning about us in an anthropological way. And they see it all as incredibly terrifying and dangerous because of these politics.

But one thing that I noticed is I think a lot of people in our broader movements who are against the police, and care about the environment, and all the things that are overlapping struggles that we’re all part of don’t actually have any idea what anarchism is because we’ve lived with hundreds of years of extreme repression of any anti-state forces in the United States, and so don’t know what that politics is. And there’s a couple caricatures that get used even inside our movements, like anarchists are like white, smelly people who don’t want anyone to get any help. Very, very, very inaccurate ideas that are also racist and erase all of the intense central work of anti-state theorists and leaders who are, of course, not white, who really led this in the U.S. context.

In any case, those characters and that lack of understanding makes it really easy for people to be like, “They’re not anarchists.” Try to actually distance once the boogeyman word comes up. Instead of being like, “Yeah, this is a multi-tenancy movement that’s got all kinds of legitimate political positions including there are anarchists here.” You know what I mean? Which is the truth, of course, that there’s people who are anarchists and not anarchists in all parts of our movements. But that kind of willingness to join up with that. And it was interesting. I’ve talked to people who’ve had other moments and contexts in Canada and elsewhere where this has come up, where the government has done a big repression campaign against some set of people after some set of actions, or protests, or whatever, and focused on them as anarchists.

And then, sometimes other people in their movements struggle with whether or not to stand with them. Even though they’re called anarchists or whether or not to distance themselves and say, “Oh, no. We weren’t anarchists. Some of us weren’t anarchists.” And it’s just like, “Come on, y’all.” This is a basic solidarity item. We need to stop having really deep misunderstandings of each other’s political tendencies that aren’t useful, and that actually make us vulnerable to these kinds of division, and where we pair it with repressive ideas from our opponents about each other, that is not useful.

But also, our gut instinct move cannot be, “No, we’re not that.” You know? “Oh, no, no. We’re not violent. Oh, no, no. We’re not anarchists.” Or, “No, we’re not Black radicals.” Or whatever the story is. “That’s a minority of us. That’s not really who we are.” These are not ways to be in solidarity when the government is picking a term like that as a central point of targeting. Really, it’s just a really, really bad idea. And I think that that’s another place that we are very behind in the same way that we’re very behind with cleaning up our engagement around terms like “peaceful” and “nonviolent.”

KH: Can you say a bit more about how fear or a sincere desire to rescue people drives us into some of the traps described in this resource?

DS: Yeah. I mean, one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is how… I’ve just observed over many, many years that when people are feeling that we’re under attack, like people we love have been arrested or people are facing charges, we’re rightfully scared. These systems are horrible. They do disappear people from our communities. There’s been a long, long history of that. Many of us are supporting political prisoners over a long period of time. When we’re afraid, sometimes we grab on to legitimizing discourses or ways of speaking. People suddenly start talking kind of weirdly formal. You’re like, “Wait, I’ve never heard you use that word before.”

There just gets to be a kind of retreat to discourses of legitimacy hoping. I think it’s not always conscious. Sometimes it is, right? Certainly, yeah, if you’re advocating for somebody in a courtroom, you may have to speak the language of that space. If I’m advocating for somebody to get asylum, I have to act like their conditions are so, so, so exceptional, and they’re a special person who deserves asylum as if nobody else does. But that’s just the nature of how you’re forced to argue that by the immigration system. But if I’m out in the world talking about people experiencing the violence of the immigration system, I’m not like there are these few that are really good, but the rest of them should definitely be deported. No way, right? That’s not right. Right?

So figuring out how to not speak the language of the systems when we’re afraid. And then also to distinguish, okay, right now, am I talking to the media about this repression or am I speaking to a court? And I don’t think that doesn’t just happen to lawyers. I think a lot of non-lawyers in our movements feel like they need to speak the language of legitimacy when they’re scared, or when we’re under attack, or being delegitimize as we often are. And I see this from all kinds of people, just like kind of jumping into that way of thinking, and it’s understandable. And also, I think it does have these unintended consequences of furthering those logics that basically put us out of solidarity with each other and say, “Oh, yeah. Sure. Some people should be criminalized for their participation in resistance.”

KH: I think people also make the mistake, from a place of fear, of thinking that we have to adopt a more conservative framing, rather than pulling people toward the values and the understanding that we are trying to organize people around. If we’re foreclosing the possibility of the very political transformations we’re aspiring to by contorting ourselves and our arguments to fit the perspective of a person who doesn’t believe change is possible or necessary, where is that supposed to take us?

DS: It’s not how change happens. I think for me, studying social movements and studying social change all these years, I’ve just been surprised again and again. That logic. I need to move in the middle or I need to think about somebody more conservative than me when I talk about this, and try to imagine who they think is deserving. That actually reinstates and reinforces the exclusive norms that are in that person’s mind. You see this with trans politics. If I just talk about a trans youth in school, but never actually talk about a trans prisoner. If I just talk about trans people only as those who are the most digestible, palatable version of trans. For years, we’ve fought this.

And it’s like a bunch of us being like, “No, do not shape advocacy around those kinds of assimilation frameworks because then you will actually just reinforce the harm being faced by the most vulnerable people.” The person who people can tell is trans, the person who is unhoused, the person who does always have to use public bathrooms because they don’t live in a place with a private bathroom. All these things, right? But that move, we’re going to go towards the palatable or the deserving framework, and then just actually reinforce that framework is so common. I think you’re right that it is fear-based. And I think that the reality is that it actually works the reverse.

The reason people’s views change is because of pressure. It’s because they feel the pressure. I think it’s really interesting to see this in the movement in solidarity with Palestine in the United States right now, where we’ve lived under such strong, strong Zionist storms for so, so long, and it’s been almost impossible to get anything else uttered. And most people really don’t know the truth about the Israeli military and the Israeli colonial project. And what is pushing and changing that is people really standing up in a fierce way.

That’s when you see a lot of drastic and sudden opinion change, is when people really make trouble, not when people slowly only say things that will make no one uncomfortable, which I think is inside a lot of spaces. People are still trying to convince each other like, “No, let’s just do it in a way that’s really, really quiet and really mild. Don’t use the word ‘genocide.’ That’s too strong.” I’m in constant conversations where institutions are debating that exact thing. And I’m like, that is a misunderstanding about what actually changes people’s minds.

KH: Absolutely. Solidarity has to be bold, and there are times when it has to be fierce, if we actually want to move the line on the issues we care about. And as we’re talking about solidarity, I’m also thinking about your friend Amber Kim, an imprisoned trans woman who was recently moved to a men’s facility. Can you tell us about that situation?

DS: Yeah. I mean, this is something that has been at the front of my work this past week. Amber is somebody I met years ago when she was in a men’s prison in Washington near Seattle. And then, through some policy changes and some really hard work by a lot of people, she was transferred to a women’s prison, which was a much better place for her. Obviously, no prison is an acceptable place for any human. And then, there was this horrible situation in which guards in the women’s prison leaked to the right-wing media that she was having consensual sex with another person in the prison, which of course, as we all know, is incredibly common in U.S. prisons. And in women’s prisons there’s a lot of non-consensual sexual assault from guards and CCOs [Community Corrections Officers]. But of course, also there’s consensual touch and sexual contact between people in women’s prisons as between people everywhere.

And she and the other person were both punished. But also, Amber was suddenly transferred back to men’s prison, which is eventually, of course, dangerous for her. As we know, there’s so much research about the experiences of trans women in men’s prisons. And this is just a wild story on so many levels. One that as punishment, she would be reclassified, right? The prison system still knows that she’s a trans woman and transferred her previously to a women’s prison for a set of reasons related to their policies. Two, Washington State is one of these places that loves to tout itself as having this very progressive set of prison policies. Of course, that is not a thing that can exist. And its prisons are completely brutal, just like every other prison system I’ve ever known people in. Also, Washington has its first openly lesbian Department of Corrections secretary right now, so it’s being headed by a lesbian.

I think it’s just like a narrative we see a lot, just like, “Oh, well, if there’s a Black police chief, it couldn’t possibly be a racist police force.” Or if there’s judges of color, it couldn’t possibly be a racist legal system. Or if there’s queer cops, then it couldn’t possibly be a homophobic police system. Or if women head the military and the arms industry, everything will be great with war. So I think it’s just another opportunity to see that kind of very problematic neoliberal shifting where there’s representation in leadership in these spaces that are still doing their exact brutal violence against people like Amber. So yeah, it’s just been a very difficult week. She was beaten, and hogtied, and transported in a van without a seatbelt while hogtied. It’s ironic, just recently Washington State passed a law that the police can’t hogtie people because it’s so dangerous and deadly.

And yet of course, these things are all still common in these brutal systems. So there’s been a lot of effort to try to push the DOC [Department of Corrections] to transfer her back to women’s prison rather than keeping her in the men’s prison. Using Instagram, you can plug into the campaign and find out when the call-ins are. If you’re willing to participate, I’d really appreciate it. You can find it all through my Instagram. But yeah, it’s just so incredibly devastating, and also just such a testament to the fact that like, the false promise of trying to ever create any kind of prison system that’s any safer for women or trans women or queers or anybody, they have control over her life and they can just change course at any time. And she’s in a system that is based in torture, including the torture that you are punished if you have consensual sexual contact in the place where you live.

KH: Well, please keep us in the loop about how we can show support for Amber.

DS: Thank you.

KH: Given your legal background, I also want to ask about the recent wave of scary Supreme Court decisions. I know there’s a lot more going on there than we have time for today. But I just wanted to ask, are there any thoughts you would like to share about the impacts or implications of any of these recent Supreme Court decisions or how our movements should respond to them?

DS: Yeah. I mean, obviously there is way too much for us to discuss, but I will say a couple of things that are really on the surface for me yesterday and today. One of the cases that people are talking about a good bit (but I think is a little abstract and hard to understand for many people because it’s a little bit of an obscurity of law) is this Loper Bright case, which is the case people are describing as getting rid of the Chevron deference standard in terms of the administrative state. And one of the things I teach is administrative law. And so, this is like a world of things that I think about. And administrative law is really important to people who practice poverty law, which was kind of where I was before immigration law, etc.

Administrative law is the area of law that’s all about administrative agencies that really run our lives, ranging from ICE and DHS to the FDA, to the Transportation Administration, and administrative agencies exist at the federal and state levels and at the municipal level. And they actually make the rules of our lives like the legislative body like Congress or your state legislature will pass a law, but it’s the administrative agency that writes the regulations. So the actual rules of how that’ll happen to you. And that also does things like administrative hearings, like it’s actually going to determine: are you disabled for purposes of this benefit?

Or you know, if there’s a law about clean air, they’re going to determine how much of this pollutant can actually be in the air. One of my concerns about the ways this case is being discussed is about a very fundamental misunderstanding that I think liberals really promote about administrative regulation. I think a common thing most people have heard of is like, there’s an idea that Democrats are for regulation and Republicans are against regulation. This idea that Democrats are for a big government, Republicans are for a small government. That means, should we have a lot of things like the EPA and FDA robustly regulating or should we not? Right?

This is the kind of story that these parties tell about themselves, not liberals tell us. And it’s a really bad way to think about resistance and oppression from the perspective of people who are in our movements. And I just want to clear it up because I still hear it being repeated when people are talking about this case. Because the case is about this question of whether… What the Chevron standard fundamentally looked at was if Congress passes a law, and then an administrative agency is writing and enforcing regulations, and there’s something unclear in the congressional law, it’s something that could be interpreted two ways. But of course there’s always a million things like that with every term you can imagine, right?

Like should courts have to defer to the agency’s expertise because the agency is a place where doctors and epidemiologists and people who are toxicologists, whatever, work? How much deference should the court have to give to the expertise of that agency? And liberals who are responding to this case are saying things like, “This is ridiculous that they’re not going to show this deference anymore because the administrative state is full of all these experts, and they have these neutral, wonderful expertise about science. They’re the ones who would know whether a drug is safe or how much pollutant should be in the water.”

But the reality of course is that both Democrats and Republicans, both liberals and conservatives, they all want to heavily regulate all of us just in different ways, right? The conservatives love to intensely regulate immigrants and people with disabilities. Nobody wants a small state amongst all of them. They all want a giant military. They all want a giant police state. That is a lie. They do have differences about some things. No doubt they have some differences, but it’s definitely not along the lines of whether some want to regulate and some don’t. I think they’re all pro this kind of regulatory state. They just have different agenda items in it.

And what happens is when they get their administrations in place, they appoint people who run the administration the way they want, right? So when Reagan is in power, we’re going to have an EPA that is not interested in regulating polluters very much. And when Democrats are in power, we’ll have an EPA that is slightly more, but way less than we need or way less than any of us would want, willing to regulate a small number of those people in a very limited way that none of us should see as the solution. It’s not ever going to come through this racist, capitalist government.

In any case, the worst way to think about this case, Loper Bright, is to think like, oh no. Now, the conservative Supreme Court is making it so that our wonderful administrative state can’t work the way it needs to, and that’s just not real. And one of the ways you can know that is that the prior standard, the Chevron standard, was beloved and delighted by the Reagan administration when it happened. They were really into it because they thought they would always hold the executive branch. They were having a great time holding the executive branch, and they wanted the administrative agencies to be more powerful than the courts.

And so, all that happens actually is just that it gets batted around. So now, we’re in a period where there’s going to be decades… Although I think you and I both know that the system is not going to be stable enough to have decades of this, but potentially decades of this very conservative Supreme Court. And so, they’re really excited to get rid of the deference in administrative agencies and put more of the power in the hands of the court. But that just is a football that gets batted back and forth between the Democrats and Republicans as they, at different times, control the judiciary and the administrative agencies.

So, it’s very important to, again, this is very similar to our conversation before, not to speak of the administrative state as if it is neutral, as if it is based in expertise. Absolutely not. It is completely political. No matter whose control it’s ever been under in the U.S., it’s always been pretty much aligned against workers, against the environment, just like at different levels, just different amounts, or different instances. There are different controversies, but it’s not as if we’ve ever had an FDA that cared more about our health than the food and drug industry. Or that we’ve ever had an EPA that actually helped slow in any meaningful way the outrageous destruction that we’ve experienced in our ecological context our whole lives. You know?

So I just think a sharper way that we as radicals could talk about this would not be to pretend that there is a neutral set of scientists running the administrative state whose beautiful expertise is now being undermined by this case. So yeah, certainly this is part of the right-wing agenda of us making it easier to knock down any potential labor or environmental regulations that some future Democratic administration might want or that others have passed in the past that are still in place. But it’s not because those weren’t enough or are sufficient, or are neutral, or are based on the best evidence. I mean, if based on the best evidence, we’d be having total regulation of all greenhouse gases because they’re killing us all.

So I just have been quite concerned about the way that is discussed. And I think partly it’s just because the whole framework of the administrative state is very invisibilized in our culture. People are like, “Oh, there’s three branches of government.” And no one talks about how most of the governing we all experience is actually through these agencies that actually determine a lot about our day-to-day lives, and our well-being, and ability to live. And instead, we mostly think about courts and presidents and Congress. And so, I think it’s just hard to have a sophisticated conversation about this that doesn’t just fall back into this liberal kind of pro-government way of talking.

KH: Can you say a bit about the criminalization of homelessness as it relates to the recent Supreme Court decision?

DS: So of course, the other case I’m thinking about so much right now is the Grants Pass case. It’s so funny. When I read deeply into it, it’s like you go into the kind of legal brain where it’s like you’re thinking about all these details about how they rationalize, either the argument that was made that lost, that governments shouldn’t be able to criminalize people for sleeping outside when there’s nowhere else to go because they have this… You’re criminalizing them for having a status as a homeless person rather than for any criminal behavior. They cannot not sleep, right? This is the argument.

The whole set of legal rationales inside that, when you read it, or the ones that prevailed to the Supreme Court that say that it is actually fine to continue to criminalize people from being poor, they’re just all these like legal logics that the case and the different advocates bring you through. And it’s just like, fundamentally, it’s just like this is wrong and outrageous. And it’s horrifying that we have a giant criminal system that is designed primarily to control poor people, with particularly targeted groups of people inside that. And that this is going to make it easier for what I think we all see going on, which is we have higher rents than ever.

We have this wild financialized housing system that has been designed to be, for its whole history, a method of controlling people, of expanding colonization, and land theft of different kinds, and of forcing workers to work in dangerous exploitative jobs so they can make these rents, and having this illegitimate rent system. All of that, we have to live with all of that. And there’s kind of this, it’s even better for those people who control all of that if they can literally lock you in a cage if you don’t comply. That’s been happening all along. It is a crime to be poor in the United States.

It’s been a crime to be poor in the United States since the beginning, but there’s just always further refinement, enhancement of that brutal violence. And that feels particularly meaningful right now when food and rent are both so prohibitively expensive. From what I see, more people are living outside in the U.S. than I have ever seen before in my life. Or living in cars, or RVs or other inadequate shelter that is criminalizable, and are constantly being swept and moved by police. And so, this case is another really significant moment in that. It’s not as if people weren’t criminalized for being homeless before this case. This has been happening, and is happening everywhere that I go.

But this case further legitimizes this kind of criminalization of poverty that is just throughout our system in every location. And it’s just a real sign of kind of where we’re at with the far right agenda advancing so fully and stepping into such great legitimization in ways that feel very deeply entrenched. And I think it reminds us that none of what we want is going to come through fighting in the legal system. Our fight in our movements cannot be won through the colonial legal system. It never could have been. But I hope people even more than ever notice that [the] system cannot deliver what we need, and our fight needs to be about very bold direct tactics attacking our opponents and supporting each other through the fundamental mutual aid work to survive given these conditions.

KH: I really appreciate your perspective on this. I think that wave of Supreme Court decisions was really demoralizing for people, and I have had a lot of people reach out to me, kind of in a panic, saying, “What the hell are we supposed to do about these Supreme Court decisions?”

And I totally get it. The churn of human disposability under late capitalism is horrifying, and these right-wing judges are escalating our experience of collapse and disposability in a number of ways. For me, the wave of panic was pretty fleeting, because while all of these decisions are heinous and upsetting, they’re also within the scope of what I’ve expected from U.S. politics for some time now. So my beliefs about what the moment demands of us at a grassroots level are unchanged. And for me, that sense of knowing what I need to do is actually really calming.

I think one of the most fundamental things we need to understand about this moment is that the fascistic disposability culture that’s escalating right now has to be fiercely opposed with a counterculture of care that is rebellious, that is about refusing to abandon people, that is about refusing social disposal, that is about collective survival.

And getting deeply organized in that way, and defending the idea that none of us deserves to be left behind, that everyone should be cared for, that everyone should be defended, that’s going to be fundamental to any meaningful fight that we put up against any of these onslaughts that are happening. And I think your book, Mutual Aid, is a crucial tool in that work that’s ahead of us.

DS: Yeah. When we look around, it’s like, okay, these Supreme Court cases happened, and there’s similar bad rules and laws and ordinances happening in all of our cities against unhoused people, and the cops are sweeping more and more people in cities like mine, in Seattle, supposedly progressive. They’ve increased the police force, specifically targeting people in parks. So what should we do? Right? We can’t win at the Supreme Court level. I know there’s nothing I can do about the Supreme Court, but I can join the work in my town, and that I see this all over. People actually creating Stop The Sweeps groups. People going and trying to physically stop sweeps. I mean, how many people would it take for us to make it impossible for the cops to complete a sweep?

I think a lot about Vicky Osterweil’s amazing book, In Defense of Looting. She has this account in the 1930s of people who would do these, what they’re called black bug squadrons. When anyone was being evicted, they would have thousands of people show up to the eviction, and stop it. And they stopped tens of thousands of evictions in the early ’30s in New York City. We need that level of direct action now. We need people to stop just being onlookers at this horror that’s happening at the Supreme Court level or at the presidential election. And instead be like, “Wow, I can be part of stopping this right now.” That can mean people sabotaging the police vehicles that are used for sweeps.

That can mean people putting their bodies with their neighbors between vulnerable unhoused people and the cops. And also, just supporting people while they’re camping, opening their homes to people, opening their yards to people. All of this to stop people on their blocks from harassing folks who are trying to live in an RV or a car. There’s a feeling of powerlessness that I think these kinds of cases can inspire, which makes sense because [it’s] really scary how big these systems are, and how aligned they are against us, and how well armed they are. We need to move away from that and towards like, “Oh, no. Actually, I can take direct action right now with other people in my community, and that’s actually all I can do.”

And luckily, it’s also the most effective thing, like learning how to help people get out of an arrest situation, like unarresting each other…. How do we support each other when we’re being tear-gassed? What are the things we need to do to really, really prepare to be in the reality of how antagonistic this relationship is with the governments that we live under — state, federal, local, et cetera — and to take action at that level. And I think that that’s something that our prior conversation about how people have been told to be peaceful protesters that really prevents people from thinking through and planning for, and it’s just what’s needed if we want to save our own and each other’s lives at this point.

KH: I really appreciate those insights. On a lighter note, it was recently announced that you have a new book on the way, and it’s one that I’m really excited about. It’s called Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together. Can you tell us a bit about this project and when we can read it?

DS: Yes. This book is coming out January 14. It is basically a self-help book about friendship, sex, love, et cetera, breaking up, all that, for people in our movements that I’ve been writing for about nine years and comes from my experiences of just seeing how kind of lack of emotional awareness in this area of our lives and inability to apply our feminist and pro-sex, and anti-racist, and disability justice, and other politics in this area creates a lot of conflict, really difficult conflict in our movement groups, and ruins a lot of collaborations and projects and organizations. And the things we really need really badly right now, doing creative stuff together to survive and resist.

We really mess it up because we’re kind of actually just doing the normal cultural scripts in this area. We’re not different enough. We’re not really that radical when it comes to this. So even though many of us want to be, of course. And then, I think a lot of us are also unhappy, and stressed, and in bad relationships, and bad situations because of how deep the cultural norms that guide us are, and how harmful, and how they guide, not just us as individuals when we’re creating relationships or being in relationships, but also they guide how our friends respond to breakups or how we all respond when controversies about relationships are happening around us in groups we’re in.

And so, this book is about kind of the things I’ve learned over my 25 years in this movement, about how we need to rethink this, and deal with a lot of the ways we react to each other, and the ways we comprehend or think about ourselves and relate with ourselves that make this area of life, one in which many of us act our worst and are also incredibly unsafe and unwell compared to how we have our ideas together a little better in some other areas or are more able to sort of join our political analysis of the world with our actions in some other areas. So that’s what this book is.

I try to do things that make it like a self-help book, like it’s very skimmable, and there’s a lot of bullets, and pop up boxes. I hope it’s very readable for people, including people who are newer to our movements. I’ve just, for years, been engaged with a lot of young people who are doing their first mutual aid project or their first encampment, or things like that. And this stuff is really coming up, and people who are my age and older who’ve been seeing this and going through this for years and years in our movements and feeling those frustrations or dead ends. So I’m hoping it will be a resource for us to stick together more in these very, very worsening scary times because we really, really need to.

KH: I love it. I can’t wait to read it. It also comes out a day before my birthday, which feels like a gift. I hope you’ll come back and talk to us about the book when it’s released.

DS: Thank you. I’d love to. I’m very curious about how people will receive it. I’m excited to have conversations about it.

KH: Well, we have covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to share with the audience today?

DS: No, I’m just so grateful for this project. Movement Memos is such a resource for me, and I’m constantly sending people episodes to listen to. So thank you so much for doing it.

KH: Well, thank you for that. And thank you so much for joining me today, Dean. This has been a great conversation.

DS: Thank you.

[musical interlude]

KH: I am so grateful for Dean and for the insights he shares in his work. I hope our conversation about solidarity has been generative for you all, and I hope that you are thinking deeply about how we can show up for each other and strengthen our networks of care and resistance in these times. The politics of our current moment are scary as hell, and to get through this mess, we need the kind of solidarity that we’ve been talking about during this episode. We need to be principled and committed in our support of one another. We need to care for one another, and we need to be more invested in each other than we are in this system or its laws.

That’s what our situation demanded before the recent wave of nightmarish Supreme Court decisions, and it’s what our situation will demand regardless of who is elected president. Because life on Earth is incompatible with this system. Regardless of how regulatory struggles play out, we are going to have to boldly defend the natural world. Environmental safety regulations matter, but they were never enough to save us. No matter what happens in November, we are going to need strong solidarity networks to defend unhoused communities, because the criminalization of homelessness is a bipartisan project. To act against the violence of ableism, borders, reproductive unfreedom, policing and racism, we are going to have to overcome our alienation and unshackle ourselves from the norms that govern our lives.

What we need to be doing, at the grassroots level, hasn’t really changed in recent weeks, though our sense of urgency may be heightened. It’s reasonable that we’re more alarmed, and it’s also necessary, because to be honest, a lot of people’s actions have not been fully aligned with the severity of our situation. The threat of Trumpism and the actions of the Supreme Court are driving home to people that the institutions and norms they’ve relied on are actually completely collapsible, but these were already apocalyptic times. Just as the injustice system was already a repressive nightmare, even though that feels new to some people. The good news is that what shocks us can enliven us. If you are feeling rattled, use that energy. Direct it. Break out of any complacency or illusions you may have harbored or enacted about this system being inevitable or permanent. Engage with the reality that so many people are already experiencing globally — that we must organize for collective survival, and work toward transformation like all life on Earth depends on it, because it does. If you’re already doing that work, I want to thank you, and also to remind you that you’re not alone. None of us are. So let’s keep finding each other.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• Don’t forget to check out the resource Five Questions for Cultivating Solidarity When Responding to Political Repression.
• You can also learn more from Dean by checking out his book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).
• You can learn more from Kelly by checking out their book with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, or by subscribing to their newsletter, Organizing My Thoughts.

Referenced:

• We Must Fight Repression With Solidarity — Not by Replicating Carceral Logic by Dean Spade.
• They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements by Peter Gelderloos.
• Even When Trans Women Win Transfers to Women’s Prisons, They Still Aren’t Safe by Victoria Law.
• In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action by Vicky Osterweil

Further reading:

• Take a Deep Breath and Think About What You Need to Do by Kelly Hayes.