We Must Burst Our Algorithmic Bubbles and Build Together Across Difference

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“We need each other, and interdependence is key to survival for human beings,” says Mariame organizer Kaba. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kaba talks with host Kelly Hayes about what their book Let This Radicalize You brings to this moment. Hayes and Kaba also discuss the fight for reproductive justice, the problem with schadenfreude, and the need to build collective courage.

Music by Son Monarcas and Pulsed

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. Back in 2023, my friend Mariame Kaba and I published a book about organizing called Let This Radicalize You. In writing the book, Mariame and I set out to create a resource that we wish had existed back when we began our own journeys with activism and organizing. Since then, we have been honored to hear that the book has been of great use, not only to new organizers, but also to people who have been doing this work for many years. Let This Radicalize You has received renewed attention since the reelection of Donald Trump in November of last year, as new waves of activists have struggled to find their footing in an era of rising autocracy. Today, I will be chatting with Mariame about what Let This Radicalize You brings to this moment. We will also discuss some of the issues we are deeply concerned about right now, from reproductive justice to criminalization and what it means to build collective courage. I hope you will find our conversation as heartening as I did.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Mariame, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Mariame Kaba: Hello. Thank you for having me, Kelly.

KH: It’s great to be in conversation with you. How are you doing today, friend?

MK: What a loaded question.

KH: I know.

MK: What a loaded question. I think today I’m doing okay and I’ll say that when I am answering that question, it really depends on the day. I think I am kind of at a low boil of rage right now, which is my default state. And I think though, in fairness to myself, there’s a lot to be furious about and has been a lot to be furious about for years. All the things that we’re dealing with right now, ongoing genocides and climate devastation, full-on autocracy, capitalism, all of the things. But yeah, I think I’ve been on a kind of low boil sense of feeling, just constantly furious. And I am also trying to stay grounded and to focus. There’s just so much happening all at once, and I think I’m trying to find a way to live my life in the midst of that. So I think that’s the long short answer how I am, how I’m showing up today. How are you doing?

KH: I’m pretty grounded all things considered. National politics are horrifying, and I’ve been dealing with a lot of chronic pain lately, but today feels more manageable than a lot of the days I’ve had to navigate lately, so I’m grateful for that.

MK: That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.

KH: A lot of people are living in a constant state of alarm right now. Can you talk about how your experience as an organizer informs your perspective in this moment?

MK: I mean, I think it’s completely understandable that people are feeling panicked and scared right now. We’ve talked about this a lot, but uncertainty really does breed a lot of fear, and we’re currently dealing with a daily assault of a fire hose of bullshit, which is intended to actually harm people who are already vulnerable and marginalized. I would understand anybody feeling that kind of sense of alarm and panic right now.

I don’t think that my organizing experience per se kind of gives me any special purchase on how to survive under full autocracy or fascism. I don’t think that I have that… I’ve been kind of surviving under mid-authoritarianism and neoliberalism, so this part I’m not quite sure. But I do think that my organizing experience is helpful in, I don’t know, reminding me that I need to figure out what’s actually within my control right now and what I can influence in a constructive way. I think it’s also helpful in orienting me to kind of seek out others and to talk with those folks and strategize, commiserate. I think thankfully I’m never prone to panicking and crises, and I think that has generally served me well in life and is really helpful right now.

I’ve been thinking a lot for right now and what’s been helpful is my first instinct as an organizer is always to think about who is most vulnerable and how to support those people first. And I think that that really applies right now. I’m also always concerned with the question of what kinds of concrete actions people might take, because I think that having agency in your life is really important and it’s really an antidote to the sense of learned helplessness, which I really see across so many areas in the country right now.

And I think the last thing I would say about what my experience organizing, how it shows up and gives me perspective or gives me not perspective maybe on this particular thing that’s happening at this particular moment, but over the years I’ve invested a lot in building community and in collaborating with others, and to me that’s always been kind of the most essential aspect of organizing. So I have spent the past few weeks, as I mentioned earlier, doing what I do all the time, which is to reach out, reach out to friends and comrades, to ask them questions, to try to make sense of the current moment collectively. It’s not lip service to me that we as human beings are interdependent and also that relationships are the foundation of life. They’re our currency. And I think when we talked, I think we talked a couple of days after the election, and I was saying that at the time that confirming our solidarity networks is always critical, but it was going to be especially critical in these coming weeks. And I think that of course has panned out as well.

So I think those are the kinds of things, not so much the skills I have learned in organizing so much as the perspective that I’ve been able to develop and the actual things I’ve done in terms of building community with other people. All of that kind of stuff I think has really helped to ground me in this moment. I don’t know, how would you answer the question for yourself?

KH: Well, I really relate to what you were saying about reaching out to strategize and commiserate with others, because I think that was the first thing that was helpful to me, after the election. Within a short span of time, I was in conversation with so many people whose wisdom and ideas I really value, including you, Andrea Ritchie and Dean Spade, and I think that made those early days a lot more constructive for me. And I think that helped set the tone. I am still in steady communication with people I want to solve problems with and think alongside, and that gives me a sense of direction.

I also think my experience planning and coordinating direct actions has been useful, even though that hasn’t been my role lately, because when you step into a tense situation in the streets, you learn to assess conditions. I am not as calm a person as you are, and I definitely have my spiraling moments, so having rehearsed practices around assessing conditions, deciding how to move and inviting people to move with me — I think that helps me keep my head together sometimes.

But honestly, I think the most important thing for my mental health and well-being right now is the awareness I have, due to my organizing relationships, of just how many people are out here trying to make things better. I am in community with so many people who are doing so much good work to reduce suffering and create as much safety and justice as they can, wherever they are, and that really helps me get out of bed every day. Because without that awareness, I think it would be so easy to get overwhelmed by the deluge of terrible news, and to feel like the administrative coup, and the mass layoffs, and the catastrophes were the only things happening. But people are always fighting the good fight, and they are definitely fighting right now, and that gets invisibilized a lot in the mainstream in ways that make people feel isolated and hopeless. So, that awareness, that sense of connection to so many people who are engaged in principled struggle, that’s something I really want for folks in this moment, because I believe that’s going to be a big part of what sustains us emotionally and spiritually in these times.

MK: I really agree so much with all of what you just said, in particular about feeling… I think there’s always some backlash to everything all the time in the world, especially if you’re on social media because listening to 10,000 people’s conversations happening all at the same time, and not even conversations, but 10,000 people’s monologues and journal entries happening at the same time, and we’re all guilty of that, just kind of doing our thing and posting through it.

And I think that sometimes that can make you feel like, wow, there’s nothing to do. The posting is the thing to do as we are experiencing all of these things. But I think when you’re plugged into a community of folks, it’s kind of easier to be able to have people check you on that and sometimes it’s like give you a kick in the ass, but sometimes it’s also just giving you kind of a loving redirection and being like, “I hear you. I hear what you’re going through. I’m listening. And have you considered that a lot of things are happening at the same time?” All the bad news is there and there’s other news. How can we kind of work through this together? And there’s an extension of a hand to help you in that moment. We can’t really extend hands so much on social media, particularly how it’s evolved to the point that it’s at now, and I think that’s probably to the detriment of everybody. But yeah, I really hear you on what you shared. Also, I vibe with it as well.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying about the kind of feedback and connection we aren’t getting from social media. Trying to spend a bit less time on social media has definitely been helpful to me. I am still on Bluesky, of course. You see me there. I will say that leaving X last year and spending very little time on Meta’s apps has been great for my mental health and good for my soul. But I do find Bluesky useful, and I do want to hear from the people I follow about what’s going on. And I want to share my thoughts and my work with people, of course, but I am also trying to be intentional about how I spend my time and my energy. I don’t want to spend my time getting angry with people who are shadowboxing their way through this moment. Because we have all seen that. People who are constantly creating a strawman, or reliving arguments they’ve been having in their heads for months, or just projecting whatever they’re angry about onto you, or how they interpret you, because they want to swing at someone. I don’t want to spend my time reacting to that stuff, or indulging it. Like, maybe they are out here dancing and dodging, trying to conjure up a fight, because they don’t know what else to do with themselves right now — but I do. I know how to be constructive, so I have to be accountable to that awareness. I don’t want to get pulled into unworthy conflicts. I don’t want to waste my anger, or its potential, and wind up spiraling when I could be learning or building something. And if I scroll too much, all of those things can potentially happen — as you’ve seen, in the past and on my bad days.

I think, when we find ourselves scrolling, we should ask ourselves, does it feel like I live here? Because we shouldn’t live there, psychologically. It can be a place we frequent, but if it’s becoming our psychological home, then we really need to create other spaces for our minds to wander, and other routines that can hold our attention.

But I try not to think about it in terms of staying off of social media. For me, it’s really about addition, rather than subtraction. It’s about focusing on the books I want to read, the conversations I want to have and the stuff I want to make. I also think it’s important, for those of us who have a tendency to reach for our phones, to have something else we can queue up, whether it’s a book we can scroll through, or a meditation app, or for me, it’s often my ScreenReader app. When I can no longer stare at the things I have to read, I need a sensory switch, so I listen for a while instead.

Whatever it is, directing ourselves toward things that are helpful or constructive is key right now.

One thing that’s been helpful to me lately has been joining a lot of discussion groups where book clubs and organizations are discussing our book Let This Radicalize You. The book has received some renewed attention since Trump was reelected. What do you think Let This Radicalize You brings to the moment we’re currently experiencing?

MK: I’m interested to hear more from you, hopefully right after this around whatever response I give about what you’ve been hearing from folks who’ve been engaging with the book. I think the trajectory of the book has been so interesting to me. And when you and I talked I don’t know how many years ago about writing what turned out to be this book, our goal was to create a zine.

KH: That was the plan.

MK: We even started on a draft of the zine. It was terrible, but we tried. And really our heart and our intention was we’re going to make this zine and we think it could be of use to younger and new organizers and activists. And we said very clearly at the time, we wanted to really share lessons learned from our years of activism and organizing. As it evolved over the years, I think we decided then that it needed to be a symphony instead of a duet. And so we talked to all these other amazing organizers and we talked about mutual aid and political education and burnout, community building, care and hope and Palestine and so many other things.

And I think about what we wrote about years ago are of course issues that persist, and then the book is published in May of 2023, but it’s of course as relevant in February when we’re talking right now at the end of February 2025, it’s maybe more so. All of the topics that we talk about are perennially important, but they feel even more important right now for people and maybe as a way to be able to think one’s way through and feel one’s way through what’s currently happening. So I’m so glad that more people have found the book.

I was talking to, I think Julie at Haymarket, and they made the book available for free during a couple of week period after the election, and I think it was downloaded over nearly 60,000 times. Right? That’s incredibly amazing.

KH: It’s mind-blowing.

MK: Right? It’s amazing that many people turned to the book and thought, okay, well maybe this is something that can support me in some way. You know how I feel about writing. I hate it. And you also know that the main reason to write, in my opinion as somebody who is doing work all the time, is that it’s a documentation of sorts. I do journal all the time, every day, so that’s a practice for me of just, I often don’t know what I think until I see it written down. And so just kind of having that, but it has a lot also because for years I’ve told other younger organizers to document their work. It’s kind of like, again, that “do as I do, not as I say” kind of thing. You got to show up when you give people advice to do something, you better be doing it yourself.

But it’s been amazing how resonant people have found it who are not new organizers, who are not younger organizers, who are people who’ve been doing this work for a long time and they’re like, I find things in here that are of use to me. That I don’t think I expected at all. That wasn’t part of the, not just our motivation and reason, but it’s been so lovely to see how that’s been useful for people and they found it a resource. And I think all the other stuff we made around the book, the workbook and the discussion guide questions and everything else is being put to use, helping people to make community with other people through reading groups, helping people to be able to see themselves reflected or see other people’s words reflected that give them things to think about in this moment. It’s been really amazing.

You’ve been doing a lot of conversations as you mentioned before, with small groups of people about the book for a couple years now, including after the election. What have you been hearing about how people are engaging with the book at the moment?

KH: One of the themes that is coming up a lot, unsurprisingly, is burnout, and I think that was one of the most important chapters in the book, for me personally, to even get the chance to work on. I learned so much from the people we interviewed for that chapter, and I think Morning Star’s perspective — about how we don’t just need rest, but also rejuvenation — that was a revelation for me, and I think a lot of people have had breakthroughs around that idea. Because we cannot endure all of the blows of oppression, and pour everything out of ourselves, in the ways that we do, and just rest our way out of that. We need renewal. We need rejuvenation. We need routines that are healing for us, however small they may be. This is why I started asking people I work and build with, what nourishes you, and are you getting enough of it? I think this is a moment when it’s so important to think about what sustains us, and what makes it possible for us to stay curious, stay engaged in what’s happening, and stay in the fight. And it’s really encouraging to see people talk about evolving their own practices, and really grappling with the fact that they had been sort of spiritually starving themselves without even realizing it. We can’t heal a wound we don’t realize is there, and we can’t meet a need we don’t know how to name.

I also see a lot of conversations about active hope, about not giving up on people, and about navigating conflict. I think people appreciate the way the book makes room for respecting our feelings and our dignity while also figuring out how to navigate conflicts that arise in this work. Because this society and the political spaces people inhabit online do not condition us to work across difference. Those skills don’t magically appear out of nowhere. We really have to build those muscles. Like, it’s completely normal that my impulse is to tell someone to fuck off, just like it’s a normal impulse to drop something that’s heavy, but sometimes, I need to carry that heavy thing. So, how do I condition myself to move through discomfort, and also to know when, actually, I just need to drop this weight, because it’s not worth trying to carry this, or it’s not mine to carry?

We obviously need to be able to work with people we think differently than we do, and whose opinions are going to frustrate or disappoint us. And of course, you and I are no stranger to this. We are prison abolitionists. A lot of decent people, who I want to work and build, think we are bananas for wanting to get rid of police and prisons, but maybe really agree with us about abortion access, or disability justice, or the importance of mutual aid. We know how to move with the people who think we are bananas, but are willing to put their trust in us as co-strugglers. And you know, over time, some of those people who thought we were bananas have become prison abolitionists, and that happened through the work of shared struggle, and sharing ideas from a place of mutual respect, as we built things together.

MK: That’s absolutely true. That is so true. I think it really helps to be a minority of a minority on so many fronts. I’m wondering what your thoughts are about the current online conversations about fuck-around-and-find-out politics. Where are you kind of situated on the spectrum of that as it relates to working across difference?

KH: You know, I am in deep agreement with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, who’s said that “at some point you should decide whether you will accept the discipline imposed by your material objectives and commitments or the ‘discipline’ imposed by your resentments.” As Fẹ́mi says, “The ruling classes would like nothing more than to choose for you [and] you’ll never believe which they’d prefer!”

I want to win. That means I want us to have more power than our enemies, and I want to take away the power they have. The people who have supported them, and put them in office, are obviously a big part of that power, so yes, I want them to lose those people. That means there have to be other places for those people to go, places where they are welcome. As an organizer, this isn’t my biggest concern right now, because I am primarily concerned with creating as much safety as possible for the people in my communities who are being harmed, most of whom did not vote for that man. But that objective is also more important to me than any resentments that I have.

And I want to stress that I understand why people are angry, and why they want to express that anger. I have a lot of resentments, too, that I think are really well-founded. Someone called me “evil” last year for saying things would be worse under Trump, and yes, I have feelings about that. But those feelings matter less to me than my material objectives. And they really mean nothing in comparison to what we’re up against and what the moment demands of us.

I also really agree with what you’ve said publicly about how we need to decenter the Trump voters in our conversations, and not obsess so much about whether or how to welcome people whose electoral choices have harmed us.

Obviously, if it’s a space I am organizing, there are going to be standards about how people treat each other that anyone present is going to have to respect. But I don’t screen people walking through the door to find out if they’ve ever been an asshole in their beliefs or political opinions. Most of us have, in some way or another, whether we admit it or not.

It’s easy to say, well, these people did not care about my struggle or my suffering when they made their choice, and that’s true, but that’s also how most of the world sees nearly everyone in the U.S. Nearly all of us, especially people who were born in this country, are moving in ignorance or with a functional indifference toward a whole lot of people’s oppression. Some of that oppression, we materially benefit from. Some of it was specifically outsourced to other countries so that it wouldn’t exist here, in the form of labor practices or environmental violence. People are typing about how irredeemable folks are for not being attuned to their suffering while using mobile phones that were made by who? With components that were mined where, and under what conditions? Now, we could pass judgment on that in absolute terms, or we could acknowledge that we’re all extremely flawed human beings, that we are all more attuned to the oppressions we experience and witness firsthand, and that many of us are susceptible to cults and demagoguery. That’s not an easy thing to own about ourselves or humanity, but it’s real.

We’re all moving through algorithmic bubbles, passing judgments, as though our story is the whole story, and as though everyone is getting the same story about what’s happening and what it all means, and none of that is real.

MK: Yes.

KH: Our frustrations are real. Our anger is real, and we need places to put all of that. Which is why I go to therapy, and why I have group chats with my friends, and why I hop on Zoom with you. We need to vent, but are we people who want to change things? That is always the most fundamental question. I saw something recently on Bluesky where someone said, “So everyone’s supposed to talk like they’re an activist or an organizer concerned with coalition building. That’s just not realistic.” And I’m thinking, “Well, I’m not focused on what’s realistic for every random asshole on the internet. I assume that I’m addressing people who actually want to make things better, and I am talking about what it takes to do that.” If people don’t actually care about winning or making things better, and they just want to emote and feel righteous, then I’m the wrong person to be listening to anyway.

If you actually want to change the course of things, I think that it’s fair to say you should be strategic, and that you should put your objectives ahead of your resentments. And you know, when I can’t do that, I go do something else. I watch Star Trek, I listen to music, I rant and rave in a trusted environment. We all need space to do what we have to do for ourselves emotionally, and we don’t have to post through every emotion that we’re having.

MK: I think people do, though, have to post through every emotion they’re having. I think this is part of a much larger thing. I hear back and forth people going, “There’s a loneliness epidemic,” and then a bunch of people are like, “That’s actually not true!” It’s the same thing that happens about every issue. But you know what? There’s a loneliness epidemic for a large group of people and there’s not a loneliness epidemic for another group of people. This is always the case and the way… what I think is indisputable is that people are much more isolated from each other. We’re just more isolated from each other, and that has to do with a lot that has nothing to do with your personal ability to make friends. It’s about capitalism, extracting time and labor from everybody and you just not having it by the time you’re wrenched out at the end of working a million hours to also then have to think about how you’re going to extend your community beyond your immediate circle of people, if you can even have energy for your immediate circle of people.

It’s about the ways that COVID has made it very unsafe for some people to be able to be in direct one-on-one relation with people who don’t take the same precautions that they do. It’s about a slow erosion over time of no public spaces to meet where you don’t have to spend money. It’s all of these things combined, in my opinion, has accentuated people’s anger, their fury at other people, and also a sense of just despondency that they’re alone. And that feeling of “I’m alone” is bad for a lot of reasons. It’s bad because we need each other, and interdependence is key to survival for human beings. You’re just not going to get away from that. We are interdependent. We will always be interdependent. That’s what it means to be a human being.

So that is very frustrating for a lot of people because they feel like they don’t have anybody to actually rely on, and perhaps they don’t in some way, doesn’t still mean that they’re not interdependent to other people. And that’s the frustration and the rub over there can lead you to feel just so resentful and angry. But there’s also that part of we’re out of practice of having to deal with people’s bullshit in intimate ways. We have to post through it. We have to find a way to say, “I’m here. Nobody’s paying attention to me. I’m here. You have to pay attention to me because I’m doing this very dysregulated thing in this moment online.” I think that all that stuff, it’s really making me think about the relationship of that to this fuck around and find out, this kind of pleasure we get out of seeing other people suffering when we feel that we’ve been made to suffer, like that punishment, “I’m getting back at you.”

All the things that, I, as somebody who’s an abolitionist, particularly an abolitionist that’s rooted in transformative justice, I always need to point that out because not all abolitionists are and don’t have to be, but that is something that is of deep, social, emotional, personal concern. I see this happening across so many different pieces of my life where folks who are just deeply isolated, extremely lonely, struggling on their own, have to find a way to take that out on other people. And when they see other people who they see as responsible in some way for that, displacing the systems and the structure onto the individuals, it is really impacting what we can do together. That was a long thing, but it’s something I’m thinking about consistently and all the time right now because I think it’s going to have a long-lasting impact on what we can do together.

KH: I think what you’re saying is so true, and it’s something that really worries me, as we move through these really difficult times. Are we fighting to build a society that abhors cruelty and needless suffering, or are we simply going to be angling to redistribute the suffering to even the score? Because the ruling class will be happy to ensure that poor people whose opinions and politics offend us suffer. We can chase that satisfaction all day, the way we’ve learned to chase it through the criminal injustice system, which of course, has never given us a just world or delivered us from evil.

I’m also thinking about conversations I’ve had with Ejeris Dixon, Shane Burley and Dean Spade recently about how so many of us lack the skills to just be human together, with all the mess that being human entails. We have been socially deskilled under capitalism, and the pandemic has amplified the problem for a lot of us. Measures we had to take, for collective safety, came at a cost, in terms of our social skills and practices. Now, some of us are less adept socially than we used to be, or more avoidant of other people in general. And of course, some people are losing the connectedness they need because they can’t find spaces where they can safely be with others, due to COVID concerns, and a lack of COVID safety. There are so many isolating factors at work, and so many ways we have lost touch with each other. And I absolutely agree, this feeds into the kind of pleasure-seeking in other people’s pain that you’re talking about. It’s like, If I can’t have justice, I’ll settle for satisfaction, and it can feel satisfying to see people who’ve pissed us off have a bad time.

There’s also a kind of celebration of pettiness on social media — often by people who have zero tolerance of anyone being petty toward them — that I think feeds into this, but if I go down that road, we’re going to be here all day.

You know, I’ve already said it, but we weren’t meant to live on social media. Social media is performance based. It’s about approval and disapproval. It’s expressive, but not necessarily relational, at all. Social media is performance-based, while actual organizing is about collaboration. It’s about listening. It’s about so many skills and practices that can’t be honed in the algorithmic bubble.

MK: It’s about conflict resolution. One of the things that I’ve been saying a lot for the last few years has been this concept that I use called “concierge-ification” of everything but concierge-ification of activism and organizing, which is like DoorDash-ing activism and organizing, the constant sense that folks can delegate out to other people things that they want delivered to them with very little investment on their part beyond… In the case of DoorDash, you’re paying for it. But when you’re paying for it, then all of a sudden you act like a consumer, not a community member. And we’re in this place where folks think they can DoorDash everything.

A lot of what the work is in organizing is completely… there’s a mutual exchange. It is a sense where putting stuff in and you don’t know that you’re going to get anything from it, out of it. Certainly not in the immediate nature of things. It’s you stay and fight instead of just like, “Oh, I’m done. It’s over. I didn’t get what I wanted. I’m calling your manager.” That kind of, I don’t know, posture really, I think, is detrimental right now for the work that needs to get done if it has to do with organizing and activism work. And I don’t know how we change that. I’m not sure, but it has to be addressed more forthrightly. Yeah, it’s something.

KH: I really appreciate that concept, of the concierge-ification of activism, because I think there’s a very real line between asking to be held in our humanity and have our needs considered, and acting like frustrated consumers when people and events aren’t exactly as we would like them to be.

MK: Yes, consumers, but also be furious if that can’t actually happen because we don’t have the resources to actually do the things. We live in capitalism and all of the contradictions of it, but we are not going to be, I don’t know… Was it Robin [D.G. Kelley] who said solidarity is not a market exchange? I think that there’s a sense here where it’s like everything is actually a market exchange, and we’re not going to get free that way. We’re not going to get liberated that way. And I don’t know how to explain to people that is just… it’s a recipe for continued and maybe worsened conditions for all of us over time should we stay in this mode. But I would love more conversations that are honest about that. But since we can’t even talk about money in the movement, I don’t have a lot of immediate sense that we’re going to get there anytime soon. But yeah, it’s really interesting.

KH: This also brings to mind, for me, the whole Auntie Network situation, after the fall of Roe. You had one person who probably, kind of haplessly, and from a place of meaning well, wrote a post about being willing to host people who need to travel to get an abortion. And then suddenly, you have a bunch of people who are like, this is my movement and identity now. I am part of a network of people who say they will host people — without any thought for what it means to safely create that kind of infrastructure, or about the infrastructure that already exists, that desperately needs support. It’s more of a declaration of identity without any consideration of what it means to actually create safety and just conditions for people in a tough situation, or to meaningfully build power and infrastructure with other people. It’s like This is the revolution, in my apartment, on my terms. It’s just me saying a thing that I will probably never do, and would not be prepared for, if I were called upon to do it. And if that sounds familiar to folks listening, that’s because I am not just describing the Auntie Network people. I am describing a lot people of who envision and demand all politics be done and dealt on their terms — and let me tell you, that’s one way you can tell that someone doesn’t fucking organize anything.

And while we are on the subject of reproductive justice, I really want to address this topic, because this is something you and I have discussed a lot, in terms of what it’s going to mean to show up on this front of struggle during Trump’s second term. How are you approaching that fight right now, and what advice are you offering people who want to take action around this issue?

MK: Woo, friend, what you just talked about before about the Auntie Network or the Underground Railroad conversation that happened after Dobbs, I want to say more about that in a minute because I have so many feelings and also thoughts on that whole sorry situation that occurred on many levels. And yeah, you and I have been talking about reproductive justice for a long time. I’m supremely worried about the further criminalization of abortion. We know already that they’re planning potentially to invoke Comstock, which they don’t need the Congress war, which would make mailing “obscene” items or obscene materials through the mail illegal. Obscene is in the eye of the person saying it’s obscene, potentially making [mifepristone] a controlled substance at the national level.

There are lots of things to consider there and lots of different caveats, but that would be not good. All the stuff they’re doing about trying to push forward at the state level around fetal personhood, what might they do nationally around that? That’s really, really scary to me. We were on this panel together a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking with people who are currently organizing around reproductive justice. And folks on the ground are already doing a lot, but with so few resources, so I’m really worried about organizing capacity. And frankly, there’s a total lack of leadership within big repro, the large nonprofit abortion focused or reproductive health focused groups, that’s not new.

But they do consistently suck up like a bulk of the resources, and that’s to the detriment of local organizations that actually help people access care. That’s the reality we’re in now. It’s going to be even more acute should these other things be enacted, and those big repro groups are just not in a position to lead millions of people. And that’s what is needed because a lot of people care about abortion, and a lot of people care about reproductive justice more broadly. And I think because I’ve been adjacent to this work since I was a very young person, and I think that bodily autonomy, which, of course, includes unimpeded gender-affirming care, is central to any notion of freedom or liberation. What we want is freedom for everybody to be in the world, to be themselves in the world, to move freely within the world without being subjected to forces of oppression. That’s what we want. And your body is such an integral part and vehicle and vessel for your enactment of that freedom, and to have that controlled by the state and these just fascists is so… You feel it in your body. It’s just so horrible.

Also that I’ve been directing resources to support people getting trained to be abortion doulas for the last few years. In October, I organized a doula training here in New York City, which you were able to join part of. I think that the way forward has to be to spread information and knowledge about self-managing abortion in every single community context that we can. It should just be common knowledge. And there are some groups already trying to do this work, but they need 10,000 times more resources, human, financial, et cetera to do this work in a way that would disseminate that information and make it easily available to people, especially in a time when we’re probably going to be in a position where they’ll start censoring websites and other things like that. We know that the tech folks are not our friends. They’re not benevolent people out there to be, quote, “free speech” people. No, you’ve seen what they’re doing, these techno-fascists.

I’ve been trying to figure out and working on a project currently that’s an offline project, but it needs resources so that it can be made available to the hundreds of thousands of people across the country who could use it. I just had a conversation with some organizers yesterday about another idea that I think would also ensure that people have access to care whether that care is criminalized or not, and again, it needs so many resources.

And this brings me to the thing around the wanting to start the Auntie Networks or talking about the Underground Railroad or constantly referencing the Janes. I think the Janes are a good thing to know about. You should read about their work. What they did was so, so important. The people who are still alive from the Janes will tell you they would prefer that we actually just have the right to have abortions and to have bodily autonomy. Their work was for a certain period of time and a moment. And everything that they did already is being done now in networks that have emerged in the 40 years since their work. Every single part of what they were doing is inhabited within a network that’s national and international now in this moment. You don’t have to wish for certain things because those things currently exist.

This is the thing that will now send me on a rant. All these things need resources. And frankly, what has been among the most disheartening things that I have experienced in the last five years has been watching that the lefts in the US seemingly be unable to resource abortion funds and practical support organizations. That we haven’t been able to do it makes me so worried that we’ll be able to fund and support and resource any kinds of infrastructures that are desperately needed that attend to people’s material conditions and needs. I don’t understand why funds have to struggle every month to be able to provide the care and the access to resources that people need in order to be able to get what they need. What’s the thing that is making that not happen? I just see it’s just an ultimate unmitigated own goal for us on the lefts. I don’t understand. We are going to need so much more infrastructure to provide for people’s emergency material needs from here on in, and how is that going to happen?

When you think about the fact that these funds are overwhelmingly run by volunteers who are not getting paid who are raising money not from large foundations, but from your auntie down the street who’s sending $10 a month to them, right? This is such an embodiment of everything we talk about when we talk about mutual aid. What’s not clicking? What’s not clicking? And it just worries me. It just worries me so profoundly. These fascists do not worry me, honestly, to the extent that my side of the political spectrum is currently worrying me. What are we doing?

Anyway, I’ll stop there. I don’t know what you have, your thoughts on it, but it’s just I don’t understand. I don’t understand why we’re not getting our act together. I don’t understand.

KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying. We are swimming in a sea of reaction, right now, and there’s not enough coherent analysis. As you know, and many of our listeners know, I became an abortion doula after the fall of Roe, and I am very passionate about the idea of making the basics of self-managed abortion common knowledge. I have done some work toward that end, and I have definitely observed this thing you’re talking about, where people tend to have a hyper-focus on, or even sort of fetishize the Janes. What I like to remind people of, as much as I admire the Janes — I mean that work happened here in my city, as part of an important lineage of care work outside the law — I also know that this was just one small piece of how people accessed abortions prior to Roe.

If folks would read Angela Hume’s book, Deep Care, they would learn about the decentralized groups in the Bay Area that were providing abortion care through an affinity group model, and also keeping directories of doctors who would provide care, and also helping people leave the country to get care. And some of those people, who did that radical, criminalized, underground work were people who went on to found the first independent abortion clinics, or to become licensed care providers, or to organize clinic defense during the “war years” of the 80’s and 90’s. These were people who did whatever it took to make sure people could access care, in and outside the law — and whatever it takes includes building and sustaining the infrastructure of abortion funds. This is all part of the same radical lineage. People who helped folks access care outside the law helped create the infrastructure that has allowed people to get abortions legally. And now that abortions are, once again, illegal in many places in the U.S., we obviously have to fortify that infrastructure and defend it at all costs.

We all have critiques of the systems we have to operate within, including nonprofit systems, but we are living and dying within these systems, and people are being forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will within these systems. That means, sometimes, the infrastructure we need and have to utilize and strengthen isn’t going to be utopian. Public health services are hardly ideal, but I fight for them. Hell, the workings of the federal government are far from ideal, but I am against them being gutted by DOGE.

My bottom line is that I can’t take people seriously when they romanticize underground work if they can’t be bothered with efforts that are risk-free. Right now, most of us can help guarantee that people who don’t want to be pregnant can get abortions. We can do that by supporting abortion funds. If someone is not willing to be bothered with that, because it’s not radical enough, or they don’t like nonprofits, or whatever, I don’t believe they are going to build an underground system that actually provides for people’s needs. If folks will not do this work now, when we can do it out in the open, then I don’t believe they will do it secretly, without resources, and at great personal risk. I just don’t believe it.

I know there are people out there who are willing to do what it takes under any circumstances to make sure people can exercise their autonomy, and I believe those are also dead serious about keeping every legal pathway open to people — and making sure people are resourced when pursuing those options. Autonomy by any means should obviously include the safest avenues available to a person, always.

So, if you’re passionate about abortion rights, consider supporting an abortion fund, or even using the Chicago Abortion Fund’s toolkit to host a house party to raise money for an abortion fund. Maybe that will lead to forming a study group, or a discussion group. Maybe you can host discussions to educate people about the basics of self-managed abortion. Maybe you can read Deep Care or Saving Our Own Lives together, and talk about what else the moment might demand of us. But let’s start by sustaining the infrastructure we have.

[musical interlude]

KH: I want to take a moment to talk about criminalization, and how organizing against criminalization and the injustice system has helped prepare abolitionist organizers for the moment we’re presently experiencing.

MK: Yeah, I think that anti-criminalization organizers have so much experience fighting authoritarian forces. And I mean this between folks on the outside, but especially folks on the inside. Incarcerated people are already fighting authoritarian forces on a daily, daily basis. We should be listening so much more and engaging so much more with them because they have information, tips, lessons to share with us.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about, years ago I created a primer around the Attica Rebellion for young people, and youth came because a friend of mine who was teaching in Chicago was like, “I’m trying to teach something about the Attica Rebellion, but I can’t find anything. Their books are not written for high school students,” all this other kind of stuff, so I made that primer. But it was just one in a line of resources I’ve made that have focused on incarcerated people, their rebellion, the work they’ve done, the cultural production and intellectual production that they’ve done. I did a whole exhibition a few years ago called Black Inside in Chicago that really relied on that and on political prisoners.

And I say this because Rachel Herzing, a friend of mine and comrade, wrote a helpful essay not long ago where she suggested that the criminal punishment system is the enforcing arm of fascist forces. And I always say that criminalization is the indispensable fuel of fascism. And I think people are seeing it now perhaps in a way that they weren’t seeing it before. It’s just central to the fascist project. It’s like a core, it’s not a peripheral issue. And so those people who’ve already been part of the struggle against the PIC have valuable information and lessons that can be shared about successful campaigns, about how to keep going, just having strength to keep pushing through despite the oppressive forces that come down on you.

And so I think we should be really looking at how folks on the inside have been fighting. I think that when you think about the question of cowardice, most of us aren’t brave as human beings. Most of us are not brave. Any strategy that relies primarily on people’s bravery is going to fail. And that is the point of the organizing on the ground, which is strength in numbers. Because when there are many more of us, it doesn’t just rely on single people taking brave stances. That’s one angle of it.

The other angle of it is noncompliance and just saying if you’re not going to do it loudly, just refusing to participate in what you’re being told to do. Maybe it’s slowing down a thing. Maybe it’s losing a thing. Maybe it’s not agreeing to comply in advance before there’s actually anything beyond a slip of paper telling you you have to do a… I don’t think that we can rely on most human beings to just be courageous and that that’s the strategy for how we’re going to get through this moment. And this will probably be unpopular with some people, but I just look at human history and recognize and see how quickly people tend towards normalcy bias. People will cling to the familiar even when the familiar does not serve them anymore, even when they’re drowning from it, even when they’re being deeply harmed from it. Because the other side of it is to go into something uncertain, and that is just often too much for people. Too much, right? And fear is the survival mechanism that we have that tells us how to stay alive. And so mammals, people like… How are we going to stay alive in the world? And so, the fear is triggered in you. You’re not going to take any chances. You’re going to rush and hide or you’re going to seek out some form of safety. And that’s not going to be the kind of safety that tells you to stand up by yourself and do things.

We can’t count on that as the main strategy. Some people are going to do that, but that’s why they’re extraordinary. And most of us are just ordinary people trying to live and do what we can to live well within our capacity. And so, we have to figure out how we’re going to make it easier for a lot of people to not comply. What actions are going to be possible for us to be taking so that that happens? How do we support people when they do take a risky move? How are we going to show up for those people in a massive way for real? And you know what I’ve seen over the last few years, Kelly, is I’ve seen us not show up for people who take big risks, not show up well for them.

KH: That is the absolute fucking truth.

MK: It’s not new. That’s not new. Okay? As long as I’ve been doing work in community over 35 going on 40 years now, I have seen us let people down over and over and over again. And when I say we, I mean movement. I mean, other human beings. I don’t want to speak… I’m going to keep my mouth shut because there’s just a lot that I’ve had to be party to in the last few years behind the scenes and the difficulty, for example, in just raising money for people’s legal support. I don’t want to say just how… Anyway, it’s hard because there’s a lot we need to talk about, but obviously we can’t talk about it publicly, but yeah.

KH: So much of this resonates, particularly the way that folks want everyone to be bold and brave and then abandon people who take courageous and bold action. I also feel really strongly about this… As you’re saying, we have to start from a place of recognizing that most of us are just ordinary people who aren’t going to be courageous unless we cultivate conditions that foster collective courage. As an individual, I am not going to withhold my rent because my landlord is on some bullshit, but I might join a rent strike. As an individual, I don’t tangle with cops, but I have stared down police many times as part of a determined crowd, gathered together for a just cause.

I have seen a lot of people act courageously, in the face of danger, and as you have said, that usually comes from a place of strength in numbers. And I think it’s bigger than the sense that we’re less likely to be hurt, because there are so many of us. Yes, we are more of a force to be reckoned with, and that’s obviously a factor. But I also think we become invested in each other through collective action in ways that start to break down the illusion of our separateness. When we take action together, our self-centered realities under capitalism can be upended. My sense of safety can become bound up in yours. My understanding of what it means to defend myself can become bound up in defending you. We are braver together, in part, because when our connectedness is enlivened, we realize that our well-being is collective. We have the potential to feel that, but that doesn’t happen by accident under capitalism, or because we tell people it should. It comes from that messy shared struggle we have been talking about, and it comes from actually showing up for people. When we abandon people who take bold action, we reinforce that this system was right about everything and that we’re all ultimately on our own. If we don’t want people to move that way, we need to create spaces where things don’t work that way. We have to actually live our values.

Well, as always, friend, this has been a great conversation. As we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience?

MK: I think, I know we talked a while, but I do want to say that something I want to talk about is the honest to God feeling of just people being overwhelmed right now. And also so many people actually want to take action and don’t know where to start and where to begin. You just aren’t going to be able to follow all the news. You can’t do everything. You really do have to focus on one or two things and that’s it. Back in November after the election, I opened my big mouth on social media, and that’s always a problem on so many levels, but I then had to kind of follow through and I organized a virtual series of workshops for new activists and organizers in December and January, and I invited comrades and friends to facilitate these. The workshop series was called “How Do I Take Action Where I Am?”

And thousands of people participated in these five sessions. And then I organized a sixth session, and it was a final session at the end of January because [what] I had heard from some people who participated in those workshops was that the workshops were super helpful to them, but they were still feeling stuck about how to begin, just how to start, right? And so you were part, I think of some of the people that put some suggestions into a document that I posted on Fedbook where I asked organizer-comrades to look at a document that I had been starting to work on that was just like a workbook for people, a very short one that you could just print out from the computer like sheets of paper. And if you wanted to make an activism organizing plan, here are some things that you might ask yourself and think about.

And it’s been amazing to see. It’s available on Interrupting Criminalization’s website. You can link it in the show notes, but it’s free to download. And I just suggest to people like work on it yourself and then get a bunch of friends together who are also struggling with how to begin and work on it together and talk it through and maybe be accountability partners with each other to do one or two of the things on the list that you come up with. I just think this is a good moment for all of us to do what we can to the best of our capacity from where we are standing.

And to me, that’s critically important. This is a long road. We did not get here yesterday. We have been getting here and we’ve been in some form of authoritarianism in this country for years. And I just think the confluence of the full takeover of the three branches of government make this different for us in many ways. But also I think there are a lot of people we can learn from right here in this country who grew up in authoritarian, fascist-like communities and countries who we should be talking to more and people around the world who we should be in deep connection with.

One of the things I’m appreciating about the #TeslaTakedown pickets that are happening beyond the decentralization, giving people a way to be with each other, the ability to actually see your results at some point of what may happen. All the good things about that, has been also seeing the global pickets that are starting and have been going on. How do we connect with each other across borders? How do we enact the things we believe in? If you’re somebody who like me, who believes in no borders, this is the time. We could be doing stuff where we’re in solidarity with each other even more than we ever have been, because this is a far right takeover worldwide. So, I just think there’s possibility here, and I want people to maybe lean into that possibility more and also feel your fear. But one way to overcome that fear is to make sure that you’re with other people, that you’re fighting alongside other people and that you’re not alone. I think that’s critical. So that’s what I would say.

KH: Well, friend, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I really love the zine, and I have recommended it to so many people. I hope everyone listening will check it out, and if you don’t need it for yourself, maybe share it with someone who does, because a lot of people need help finding their path right now.

It makes sense that a lot of people are frozen right now, and aren’t sure how to begin. We need to figure out ways to extend our hands and help people along. I think the Making a Plan zine is a great resource toward that end, like so many resources Mariame has made over the years, and you can find that zine along with some other great resources in the show notes of this episode.

Mariame, as always, I am so grateful for you and for the conversations we have, and the work we are able to do together. Thanks so much for joining me today.

MK: Of course, friend. Thank you for asking me to be part of the conversation. And our conversations obviously will always be continuing.

KH: Absolutely.

MK: To be continued, so yeah.

KH: To be continued.

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 Mariame and Kelly’s book Let This Radicalize You.
• Mariame’s Making A Plan zine is a template for those seeking to make an activism or organizing plan.
• You can check out the Chicago Abortion Fund’s House Party fundraising guide here.
• To learn more about the history of abortion care outside the law, you can check out Angela Hume’s book Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open.
• To learn more about the history of harm reduction organizing in and outside the law, check out Shira Hassan’s Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction.
• If you are interested in learning the basics about self-managed abortion, and sharing that information with others, you can check out Kelly’s 2022 piece on that subject.
• You can find Mariame’s zine Attica Prison Uprising 101: A Short Primer here.
• If you need support in your efforts to access abortion care, you can find that here.
• You can find more resources related to Let This Radicalize You, including a study guide, here.