Conjuring Worlds with Maurice Mitchell

In this timely episode, Prentis is joined by the National Director of the Working Families Party, Maurice Mitchell. Maurice shares the roots of his organizing; reminds us of our power as a people and inspires us to continue to conjure and build a compelling vision toward the worlds we dream of.

Support the organizations that Maurice mentioned in the episode:

• Working Families Party
• Movement for Black Lives

You can check out Prentis' new book What It Takes to Heal is available now.
Follow @prentishemphill on Instagram to see show clips or become a Patreon Subscriber to support the podcast and gain access to the full unedited conversations and visual episodes!

The Becoming the People Podcast Team:
Producers: Prentis Hemphill & devon de Leña
Sound Engineer and Editing: Michael Maine
Research Assistant: Bhavana Nancherla
Original Music: Mayyadda

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hi everyone, welcome to Becoming the People. So I've been in a lot of reflection about vision. Who gets to have vision? Who doesn't get to have vision? Whose visions are we living inside of? These questions feel critical to me for understanding what's going on in the world and how we navigate our way through these rough terrains. And one of the things that's been sitting with me a lot is the vision that I think, particularly the right, has for our lives and our relationships and our societies. And that it's one that is unfortunately a derivative of visions I think we've lived inside of for a long time. The attempt to roll back time is to recover those same social relationships and ways of constructing the world that we've lived in for hundreds of years at this point. The harder work, it seems, is creating or conjuring a vision of something we haven't yet seen. And I say we haven't yet seen it in part because all of us come from visionary people and people that were able to conjure worlds that our ancestors lived in and flourished in. And yet we face a particular set of circumstances that few of our ancestors, if any, ever had to face. Not only are we facing compounding crises in this time, but we're doing it with people that are different than us, perhaps unfamiliar to us, and these questions of how we vision for ourselves and our people and what our visions for our liberation has to do with each other's liberations are complicated. I don't have any answers here, just a lot of questions. And when I thought about exploring visioning, organizing, how we do it, how we build connections and dream and move towards the worlds that we dream, I thought of Maurice Mitchell as a really exciting conversation partner. He's one of these people that I see in movement spaces that I've seen for years, that seems to be guided by something that is unseen, a vision of a world that doesn't right now materially exist. But it's clear to me that he's moving towards it and he's doing it strategically and through relationship. So I wanted to have Maurice on the podcast to talk some about what creates that, what inspires him, and what that thing is that I feel from him all the time. Maurice is a social movement strategist. He has been a visionary leader in the movement for black lives, and he's the current national director of the Working Families Party, which if you don't know about, you should definitely check out, and we'll have information on their work in the show notes for today's episode. This is a really sweet conversation. It's connective, it's illuminating, and I think it's probably honestly part one of many conversations to be had with Maurice. I hope you enjoy the show today and would love to hear your thoughts. Maurice, it's so nice to be with you. It's always a pleasure to see you and to be in conversation with you. So thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

Thank you. It's really good to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

I wonder if we could just start here. Can you tell me a bit about your upbringing and how it gets you to where you are in this moment?

SPEAKER_03 3:55

Absolutely. So to understand me, you I think need to understand a little bit about my grandmother. And my grandmother was born and raised in South Trinidad and Tobago. And she had a lot of kids. She had like 11 kids. And they grew up in rural Trinidad and in sort of like rural poverty. And they were all hustling. And so my my grandmother was a hustler. She raised hustlers. And so it was the family's project to get out of poverty. So one year it might be like recycling, right? So all of the older children are participating in that, like she's doing it, whatever. And then they move to another house. And then, you know, another year it might be my grandfather is out doing work, doing lumber, and my grandmother's selling things at the market, and the older children are taking care of the younger children. And one of the big hustles that my grandmother made was leaving Trinidad to come to the United States, which is a whole process because you have to learn how to do that and how to get the travel visa, and then how to overstay your travel visa, and then how to eventually find work in the United States. And so she left the family. She left my aunties and uncles and everybody else to come here to this new country and to find work as a domestic worker in other people's homes. So she's taking care of other people's kids so that she could send money to her kids. But she lost physical proximity to her family in doing that. She hustled on Long Island, working in other people's homes, Monday through Friday, living in their homes. And then the weekends, she didn't have a place to stay. And she found community because a woman who was a church elder noticed her in this place, Long Beach, where I ended up being born and raised, like just kind of hanging out in the square, the town square, because she'd have a place to stay. She noticed her, this black woman elder of a church, and they started a relationship that helped her get connected to the community in Long Beach. She eventually got an apartment. Eventually, she was able to bring my grandmother, my grandfather over, one of her older children over, and they all hustled in this one apartment. And eventually she was able to own property here. And she spent about a decade reconnecting the family and re-establishing the family here in the United States. So from the mid-60s to the 70s, was getting one child over, another child over, another child over. And that was a whole process. And so by the time I'm born in the late 70s, 1979, she's re-established the family in the United States. She's come here as a domestic worker who at one point was homeless. She's bought property. And I was sort of the recipient of all of that struggle. And surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins, galore, and I grew up in this context. At the sort of the birth of the neoliberal era, the Reagan era, the crack era, you know, my mom was a nurse that worked in Far Rockaway at the height of the crack era, specifically working in detox. So working with people with multiple chemical dependencies. My dad worked as an electrician. They both had unions. So I was in a union household. So my dad is from Grenada. And from 79 to 84, that was the new drool movement in Grenada when Grenada was this independent Black Socialist Republic and Maurice Bishop and the new drool movement led that. So we had a lot of pride in what was happening in Grenada and the transformation that was taking place there. And my parents were not political activists, but they very much, they very much elevated the stories of Black resistance from Malcolm to Martin to Garvey. And I really early on, when I noticed, I was able to notice how race, class, gender, immigration status, I intuited how they were could be real barriers to people being able to experience joy, being being able to experience connection. And that coupled with the stories about the UNIA, even recent stories, like when the move bombing happened, my dad would talk about it all the time. I developed this consciousness where I wanted to be part of the movement. I wasn't sure exactly what that looked like. But you know how like kids are like, I want to be a fireman. I wanted to be involved in movement. And it was really like I felt the thing that most deeply informed my movement journey and what keeps me connected is witnessing my grandmother make meatballs in the kitchen and share a little bit about her life and try to help me with math. And her kind of bemoaning the fact that every few years math changes and she's like, This is not what is what is this? You know, and you know, witnessing the hustle and the struggle and the dignity in that, but then also the downside of that, and just wanting my people, the people that I care deeply about, to have happiness. That really motivates me. I think also growing up in a multiracial suburb of New York and encountering racism myself, encountering the intense racism and the expectations of black boys in the educational sort of setting, and how many barriers were put in front of me to prevent me from actually excelling, from, you know, very early on tracking me to special ed because I was black and tracking, you know, my white counterparts to the sort of gifted programs and knowing deep in my soul that that was a violation to, you know, when I was an older student, you know, every single English teacher I ever had, whenever I wrote my first paper, they would bring me aside and be like, Did you write this? You know, in all those different ways that the institutions try to try to stare you into otherness. I I I developed a deep resistance to that. And that has propelled me into most of the life decisions that I've chosen.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

That's really powerful. And and thank you for invoking your grandmother. It's just wonderful to hear about her journey. And you and I come from a very similar era, we're a couple years apart, but some of the things you're referring to, though it looked different in Texas, I'm like, yeah, it resonates with me how we get shaped by especially the educational system. I want to start in the deep end here. Sure, we'll go. And then um find our way towards this joy that I feel that you're talking about that I also just feel from you so often. But I would say that we are witnessing and experiencing rise in authoritarianism in this moment. And I wonder how you make meaning of this, how you explain this phenomenon, what what's sort of happening? Because I think we're all watching the news and experiencing what's happening in our own societies and governments, and it feels like a really interconnected strategic rise. And and I wonder how how you explain what's happening. Like how how do you talk about what we're seeing?

SPEAKER_03 11:56

Yeah, the way that I talk about it. So as somebody that was born almost to the day when sort of the neoliberal era really took off, I think about it in the context of the past 40 years, right? And so, yeah, we've lived under capitalism for some time now, but the phase of capitalism that we're living under, neoliberalism has a certain logic to it and prescribes certain solutions. And we've been living under the this neoliberal consensus for a while, where in the United States, for example, Republicans and Democrats basically agreed on some of these ideas. You know, it ranges from this idea of free trade, which has which has led to millions of good-paying union jobs in manufacturing to leave the United States and go elsewhere, and those communities to be completely devastated. And a lot of those jobs, those working class jobs, allowed people to have dignified work, where they were able to own homes, where they were able to take care of their families and to be able to establish this idea that there's an American dream we're fighting for. So that's just one aspect of this neoliberal philosophy. NAFTA, which was signed by a Democratic president, Clinton, led to all of those jobs being offshore. But then there's other ideas, this idea of shareholder supremacy, this idea that the only thing that a company should care about is profit. And the only stakeholder that matters is the shareholder. And the job of any company is simply to grow in order to satisfy the demands of shareholders. That idea, as like just gospel, is part of neoliberalism. There used to be this idea that there's multiple stakeholders, right? That shareholders might be a stakeholder, but then also workers are a stakeholder and the community is a stakeholder. That's out the window. There's two pieces. The idea that the market, that there's something magical about the market, and that all solutions could come from the market. And the market is always efficient and more effective than anything else. And it's our job to basically be shrinking the commons, shrinking the things that we all depend on collectively, and finding a market-based solution. And so here we are, more than 40 years into this experiment that accepts all these things as gospel all around the world. So this is a global economic system. And what's happened is like we see it like even with the class of people that America had told that it was reserving the American dream. If you look around the world, working people of all stripes are feeling this deep sense of alienation. Because another thing that neoliberalism talks about, like it's a whole, it's an economic philosophy, but it's also a set of ideas and logic. This idea that there's no society, that we're all individuals. It's just in the air. There's no society, we're all individuals. Growth, growth, growth. It's just all about unlimited growth. And so people are feeling in their souls, in their psyche, the impact of four decades of that, of living in this like pro-growth. Greed is good. There is no society, there's only individuals. It's the shareholder, whatever the shareholder wants. And people feel left behind. People feel a sense of economic insecurity and physical insecurity. People feel deeply betrayed. People feel a sense of stolen dignity. And in comes right wing populists who offer, I think, a very, very compelling story about how we got here and how we could get out of here. And so what the right wing populists tell us is yes, believe your eyes and ears. If you're feeling alienation, if you're feeling hurt, if you're feeling a sense of stolen dignity, you're right. Your dignity has been stolen from you. They, the elites, stole it from you. And they gave it to the other, the immigrants, right? They gave it to migrants, they gave it to black folks, they gave it to the undeserved. It's us, the deserved, versus them, the undeserved. Work with me, give our movement power so I could help you protect your family, so I could help you reclaim your dignity from them. If you are able to understand the material and economic base for what's happening, which is 40 years of unchecked sort of capitalism on steroids through neoliberalism, to me, that helps me understand why so many everyday people around the world, across race, across gender, feel this sense of deep alienation, feel the sense of like, I'm doing everything that they said I should do. Yes, there's abject poverty. And and we've always had abject poverty. And that's deep. And that's that causes deep alienation and deep pain and suffering. But even people who are relatively middle class are asking the question of, is that it? Is this just it? Am I just a cog in this machine? And so it's causing this crisis of legitimacy where people are beginning to look at all of these institutions anew and questioning everything. And the right wing populists are providing a story that is very compelling. Whereas a lot of the pro-democracy forces are status quo forces. So while the right wing populists are saying, I see you, I feel you, that feeling, that pit in your stomach, I am choosing to bear witness to your suffering. The status quo forces tend to say, help me not protect your family or help me work with you to regain your dignity. Help me protect democracy. Again, help me protect the institutions, help me protect the ideas and emblems of the status quo that actually have you in this position. It's the biggest recruitment recipe for the right wing, where the right wing is ironically demonstrating more compassion for the emotional condition of working people than the pro-democracy forces that are basically saying things are gonna get better. Things aren't as bad as you think they are. Don't believe your eyes and ears. Don't believe your heart. Just vote for us again, and we'll make things marginally better. Where the right wing is saying, no, no, no, no, no. Things are not good. That pit in your stomach, believe it. I see you. Join me, and we will vanquish our enemies.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Okay, so I I really appreciate what you're saying and how you're breaking it down because it's so visceral, and I think there's so many people that relate to that feeling that are experiencing that. And a question I have for you, I have a lot of questions out of this, but there's where I want to start. You talked about the sort of pro-democracy folks. This is not not telling a compelling story, not telling a story of people's lives and how they actually feel. This is something I am often feeling, which is that we are not actually, and I would say on the left, telling a compelling story about who we are together and what it could be like if we actually work together. I'm wondering if you share that assessment, if if you have thoughts either on why we struggle to tell that story or what that story could be. Um, one thing I just want to add is that I, you know, when you talked about the right telling a compelling story, I'm like, even Make America Great Again, it's like it's an it's a perverse kind of nostalgia in this way. Because there's so many, I mean, it just I don't even want to get into it. But it offers a kind of vision. It is not a vision that compels me, but it does offer a kind of vision. And I think even for some of our folks in our family, there's still inside of us that desire to have been included in the American dream, to have had access to that. That's still really alive in so many of us. So I guess my question is what's your sense of what a compelling vision is for who we could be together?

SPEAKER_03 20:54

Yeah. Well, I do I do actually believe that way too many people who are part of the broad pro-democracy united front or people on the left have not, I think, considered this as much as I would want us to consider it. And I think there's a number of reasons for it, actually. One of the areas that I believe the right has been able to make investments in over time has been in ideology, right? And one way of thinking about ideology is it's like it's a big story that helps you understand where you are and where you're going. There's a lot of reasons why, in the context of the United States, there's asymmetry there, right? There were active measures made in order to interrupt the ideological traditions of the US left. A lot of people over a number of generations, there were two Red Scares, there was COINTELPRO, there were a lot of resources put into Sometimes jailing, sometimes killing, sometimes co-opting leaders and folks who are leading a very particular ideological vision on the left. And so as a result, folks on the left tend to be more tactical and not necessarily nest these tactics. So, for example, when I say tactical, I mean like, all right, we're gonna respond by doing a rally. Rally is a tactic. The to what end is the strategy. And I would, I would argue that the right has invested more in the to what end. And this is not to blame anybody on the left. Again, I want to put in the context of all of the work that's been done to interrupt. But as a result, we're at a place where our storytelling is not as rich because in order to tell the story, we need to understand the context, which is the ideological work. And so one of the things that I believe very strongly in is to make that investment. Otherwise, you're going to tell a story based on somebody else's terrain. If you're not clear about which ideological tradition and which strategy, then you're probably inside of somebody else's strategy and you're probably advancing somebody else's ideological vision. And so even our best attempts at resistance, right? Like I use the analogy of like, you know, you could buy a Che Gravera t-shirt in the mall. You have to make sure that your tactics aren't the Che Gravera t-shirt in the mall. The only way you could do that is by nesting it inside of a strategy. And the only way you could be clear about your strategy is by actually taking the time to understand the vision. So I tend to believe that a lot of the us them storytelling that is told is basically people in our movement playing the role of reliable progressive activists in a story told by the right wing. Right. So Fox News, News Corp. Their business case is based on the idea that there's a binary tribal reality, that there's us and them, that there's red America and blue America, that there's progressives and conservatives. When we play into that narrative, I don't, I think it's it's a story that we could always we'll always lose because our project is different than the right wing project. Our project is not the mirror image of the right wing project. And so if you find yourself just being the mirror image, where a lot of what they do in the right wing is to dehumanize the other, and then we're simply othering quote unquote them, then we're actually in the othering business, which is the business of the right wing. We're in the alienation business, which is the business of the right wing. Even in our efforts to call out what they're doing, or even in our efforts to tactically whack-a-mole one issue or another, or respond to one controversy, right wing controversy or another, if we respond in a way that is just part of the othering machine, then we're part of News Corps and Fox News' whole business strategy. So we have to interrupt that. And I would argue that our job is to build the bigger we. Our job is to actually challenge the othering that's taking place. I want to make sure I'm clear. Like, I do believe in fights. I do, I do believe that there are battle lines that should be drawn. I'm just I'm just curious about ensuring that we're not engaging in fights on battle lines that have been drawn by the right wing and that we're choosing which theater of battle we want to engage in. And I think there's a lot of opportunity around engaging working people of all stripes, including working people that might disagree with you on a lot of things, in understanding that there actually are some battles that we could be involved in that allow us to see one another as potential partners. And I'll just give an example. I was at a strike line in Toledo. I saw young black women who was working in the Jeep plant in Toledo for maybe like five, six years, on the same strike line as an older white man who'd been there for decades, who had like a right-wing t-shirt on, right next to an older, older black guy who had worked similarly for decades. They all recognized that they were part of the same same struggle. And it was obvious that there was a lot of difference there. And it was through that fight, that shared fight against the corporation, that they were learning over time how to be one with one another and how to see one another. And I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish about it, right? Because those differences remained, but the solidarity and the reasoning that solidarity is a choice that came to the surface because of that fight. And so I think that's our job. Our job as organizers is to help people see cause for solidarity and to recognize that the othering of other working people only serves the interest of the white Christian nationalists and the corporations, right? Like there's a reason why, in the logic of neoliberalism, there's this idea that there is no society. One of the reasons is if there is no society and it's just me, why organize? Why join a union? Why it's like all of those things are useless if there's if there is no society. My job is to grind. My job is to put my head down and to figure out how I could hustle. You know, it's like, you know, one of my like one of my conspiracy theories is that one of the reasons why American Ninja Warrior is so popular is that it's a metaphor for capitalism. And it's like there's this elaborate course that's almost impossible to achieve. But technically, it's achievable. And simply because technically it's achievable, everybody that's watching American Ninja Warrior from their homes or from wherever, there's some something inside of you that believes, like, you know what, if I trained enough, I could do this. I could actually do this. And when we're looking at the success of an Oprah Winfrey, for example, and we hear these stories, and we hear these exception to the rule stories about our current system, that in is one way that neoliberalism is teaching us, like, yeah, see, there's no society, there's just individuals. If you can be Oprah, then you could achieve this thing. I'm more curious about the rule, though, not the exception. And it's the job for people who are the exception to remind everybody of the rule. And I think that that is the work that our movements can do, that organizing can do. It can help people take a beat and to look at their condition and the condition of society in a different way so that they could begin to perceive the rule and not just become obsessed with being the exception and then say, like, wait, why are we running through this course? Why is there a moat? You know, like why who put this moat here? You know, why is there a moat? Why are we scaling this wall? You know, you begin to ask yourself those questions instead of just being curious about how you scale the wall. Like we talk about crabs in the barrel. Crabs habitat naturally is not a barrel. So who took the who took the crabs, who put them in the barrel, who built the barrel? These are the questions that we begin to ask ourselves when we're able to organize ourselves as working people. And then then we could make other decisions instead of me versus you, despite our differences. What would it look like if we joined forces to ensure crabs are never in a barrel to begin with? The crabs in the barrel analogy is incomplete because it becomes why are you hating on me for leaving the barrel? instead of why is there a barrel to begin with? Who took us out of our natural habitat and placed us in this barrel? Those are the questions that our movement could begin to ask instead of the questions that are the curiosity of cable news, which is like in the binary sorting, are you right or wrong? Are you left or right? Are you blue or are you red?

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Gosh, you touched on so many things that I wanted to talk to you about. And so I might want to go deeper in a few of those places. You know that I am particularly interested in emotions and the body and how it relates to everything that you're saying. So, you know, as you're talking about becoming a we, becoming a we, I'm thinking a lot about what stops people, like what actually gets in the way. And some of it you're saying, what's the story? How are people situating themselves in story and in relationship to one another? I'm thinking also about safety or how we understand safety in our movements or in the world. And one of the things I've been tracking inside of organizations and movements is that it feels like for a lot of us, safety is increasingly maybe, and I think this relates to what you're saying about dehumanization, but increasingly is sort of the absence of difference. That that's how we understand what produces safety. As opposed to what I think I hear you saying, that safety, and this is also what I believe, that safety is sort of generated through relationship and connection. That that's actually where safety comes. But I I feel us so often in this other space of I'm going to be safe when we align. And what I understand about that, and what really resonates for me too, is that it can feel really threatening to be close to someone who may be espousing beliefs that feel contradictory to you being able to live fully in your life. How do you hold that? And and more the question I have, and this is one I'm often holding, is like, how do we do that? What does it take inside of us to be able to do that? To be able to go, there's difference here, and there's enough of a connection, and there's enough of a kind of intactness inside of me that makes it possible to maintain this connection. Does that make sense what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_03 32:44

Absolutely. Yeah. I have a lot of skepticism when I approach binaries. I've rarely found a binary that actually reflects my experience of reality or a binary where the people that I care deeply about don't happen to be on the bottom of that. Right?

SPEAKER_01 33:04

Same. Same, Mo.

SPEAKER_03 33:06

So this question I think is actually a both and. And there's a tension, but I think you know, it's our job to hold the tension. And so I'll give an experience in my history. I remember when I was in high school, right? And I was pretty academic. I was a nerd, and I grew up in a multiracial suburb of New York. It's one of the few places in Long Island that are that is like legitimately multiracial. It's a town called Long Beach. Most of the towns in Long Island are very segregated. So Hempstead will be mainly black and Latino, and it'll be right next to Garden City, which is mainly white. And so I grew up in this multiracial setting. A lot of the administrators and the teachers were white. And I remember when I said I was going to a HBCU, some of them were upset because they they argued that HBCUs were like substandard, which was just their, you know, them passing on their pathologies on to me about black institutions. But then also that being in that setting won't set me up for the quote unquote real world because it was like an artificially black setting, something like that. And both of those, I'm not going to get into it, but both of those ideas are deeply problematic. But what I what I would say is that one of the blessings that I got from going to college for four years in that environment of an HBCU was that it was a form of a safe space. It was a space where just about everybody was black. So race and racial difference meant something very different in that context. And I wasn't, my blackness wasn't foregrounded in a in a way to show contrast. We were all black. We celebrated our blackness together, but it was a it was a form of a space that allowed all of us to be safer from the direct psychic violence of white supremacy. Like I told you, like there were, I remember there were white teachers that I that told me that there was no way I could possibly write the things I was writing. That was like a form of like, you know, child abuse. I mean, you want to support the the academic urges of students, not somehow try to convince them that they can't do what they could do. So there's so at Howard, I was protected from that. And when I left Howard, it wasn't like I was able to live in the artificial environment of going to school all the time at Howard University. But when I left Howard, I felt more confident in myself to be able to engage the reality and be able to like deal with really intense racism when it came up because I felt a sense of confidence. And so I believe that safe, quote unquote, safe spaces are very useful. High bar of entry, high standard of conduct spaces, where you're self-selecting a group of people specifically because you recognize that you are generally marginalized in broader society. And you could set high bars for who's allowed in that space and very, very high high standards of conduct of what is allowed in that space. And that is insufficient because we need to build a bigger we. So we also need low bar of entry spaces. Those are the mass organizing spaces. Those spaces are designed to ensure that our movement is irresistible, is curious, is compassionate. Come one, come all. Those spaces should be prepared for and be willing to engage a lot of difference. A lot of difference. And uh you should if you're going to be in that space and if you're going to organize that space, it might be helpful for you to also have a safe space so you could be fully nourished and seen in all of your complexity, and you could you could anticipate likely a lot of affirmation of your values and your identity, and so that you could engage in that low barb entry work where people are going to come. Like that means, like, you know, for for us at Working Families Party, we're knocking on doors. So you're knocking on somebody's door. What's behind that door? I don't know. You know, but what I could anticipate is somebody who is awash in the dominant society's views of maybe the hustle culture that I talked about, or some of the race, class, and gender pathologies that are part of the dominant society's story. Or that that story that we talked about, the MAGA story or the right-wing populist story. When I knock on the door, open, open that door, that person might share some of those things. Most people are incoherent ideologically, right? Most people do not have a coherent ideology. Like I nerded out a lot on all types of ideologies because that's my jam. That's not where most people are at. So I should expect that some people might, when I knock on their door, they might have like, you know, right-wing conservative economic views and you know, some relatively open views about LGBTQ people, but some archaic views about race. And that's the same person, right? Like, you know, I should anticipate it. And if I'm doing the low bar of entry work, I should fortify myself so that when I'm exposed to these ideas, I don't feel like it's my job to quote unquote correct somebody. It's my job to be curious about where they're coming from, to listen, to understand them, and to be in the right relationship with them. Then in the context of that relationship, we could struggle with one another. But I have to be willing to be in relationship and also understand that my development is a journey, and I'm still on that journey. Their development is a journey and they're on that journey. And it's it's not my job to correct somebody. It's my job to be in a journey with them, which is a different relationship when you're doing that low bar of entry work. So I think it's a both and there's a role for the safe spaces. I would argue that we desperately, urgently need to do a lot more of low bar of entry, bigger we work. And we need to acculturate people to that work and to begin to be curious when we hear a difference, not feel like it's our job to correct when we hear a difference.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

Thank you for breaking that down. It feels just a really important point around how we resource ourselves. I mean, I think a lot of us do it intuitively in a way. Like who you're in community with, who you bring over to your house is probably going to be different than who you might find behind a door that you randomly knock on. And getting prepared to do that is, I think, often a kind of missing place. Like, how do you emotionally or outside of that space get prepared to encounter difference in a whole lot of different ways? And knowing, having that discernment of okay, I'm experiencing this difference, but that doesn't mean that I have to have a certain kind of intimacy with this person. Like there can be barriers and boundaries and a shape to our relationship that is different than other relationships in my life. It feels really important. I want to ask you a question that is, you know, every time I see you, when I run into you, and I've run into you over the years, you are a person that I can anticipate will be smiling when I see them. We'll be laughing when I see them. And I know I've heard you say in this conversation, other places, how important joy is for you. It sounds like it's almost like we say in somatics, a kind of organizing principle, something that you organize your aliveness around is joy. And you wrote a piece that has joy in the title that has gotten a lot of buzz, building resilient organization. I think it's toward joy and durable power in a time of crisis. The joy word is kind of, you know, it's almost unexpected in there. I wonder just what that means for you and what that means for you as an organizer.

SPEAKER_03 42:07

Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think about it in in a lot of ways. So I think one of the reasons why some people choose to keep their head down and stay out of other people's business, quote unquote, or uh choose to disengage from uh big problems that are going on in the world, or big social problems, or choose to pretend that things are too complicated for them to be able to uh place their energy there, is I think people are trying to protect themselves from experiencing the vicarious suffering of other people, right? And there's it's true that if you choose to tap in, like if you choose to use your eyes and ears and uh not shy away from take what's what's taking place in Gaza, what's taking place in Haiti or in Congo, what's taking place around you, you know, what's taking place in uh downtown San Diego or downtown San Francisco or downtown wherever you're from, uh you will perceive the human suffering that's taking place. But there's vicarious joy too. That if you choose to separate yourself from being connected to others, yeah, you'll protect yourself from the vicarious suffering. But the flip side is the joy that's taking place all the time, right? And you actually rob yourself from being plugged tapped into that as well. When I think about joy, I think about my experience as somebody who's a person of African descent. And one of the things that I think is so magical about black people in this hemisphere, every single one of us, like every single one of us, which I find just like It's amazing. Like, how how do we how do we not remind ourselves about this? This this fact is that I may not know the exact story, but I do know that for me, I have an ancestor that was born somewhere probably in West Africa, many, many, many generations ago. And that ancestor somehow interacted with somebody that led to them being captured. And they likely had to travel miles and miles and miles and miles from wherever they were at to the coast, the west coast of Africa. And in that journey, in the capture, there were people who likely fell, who likely died. And in that journey, there were there were those that they traveled with who didn't make the journey. And then they likely stayed in a dungeon for some time. And in that context, in that dungeon, there were likely people who perished. But that ancestor survived and made it to the belly of a slave ship and traveled the very long, treacherous journey from someplace in West Africa to someplace in the Americas. Maybe it was Brazil, maybe it was Puerto Rico, maybe it was the Carolinas. And many people did not make it in that trip. And then they survived the seasoning, the work to attempt to transform a human being into chattel. And they lived out their days likely on a plantation. And before they died, they met someone. And in some context, they met that someone and they had a child. And it's possible that in that context they had a form of deep human connection and joy with that person. Under the most intolerable conditions. And that happened again and again and again and again and again. And then slavery was abolished. And then you know, through Jim Crow. And here's Prentice. Here's Mo. That's every single black human. That's every one of us. No matter who you see, who's black, next time you see them, remind them of that improbable journey. And that's all of us, from any person of African descent, from the southern tip of Chile all the way to Canada. That is our story. That is our birthright. So to me, that's a story of intense suffering and joy. We created the blues and jazz and hip hop. And you know, we created through the suffering this culture, we created dance, we created, and so to me, the reason why I highlight joy is that what I've noticed is that there's a way that we could allow ourselves to sit in a story of trauma and trauma only. And that is a partial story, right? That is a partial story. And I think there's a there is work to be done to excavate joy. And it's not to exclude the trauma, it's not to exclude the suffering, but it's to create a complete story. Because I mean, like, yo, like I will go to a funeral of a loved one, and then a few hours later I'm jamming and joking and kicking it with my like is my tears and suffering on that day. Am I betraying them by laughing and fellowship fellowship fellowship fellowshipping with my people? Right? Am I like, am I somehow uh lying to myself by experiencing joy in one of in a dark moment, or are they are they connected? And I think there's a there's a there's a connection there. And so part of me servicing joy in the context of social change is to highlight that connection. And I know that the only way we could build that bigger we is by ensuring that our movements are irresistible. And an irresistible movement is a joyful movement, an irresistible movement is a compassionate movement, an irresistible movement is a curious movement. And as an organizer, as somebody who's constantly trying to figure out how our ideas become the common sense, how you know, as somebody at Working Families Party, I believe that the people should govern. So I'm I don't just want to be a protest movement. I want to be a governing movement. I'm constantly trying to figure out what is the posture that our movement needs to be in in order to achieve that. And I believe it's a joyous posture. It's not joy at the expense of our suffering, at the expense of our stories of trauma, but it's it's joy in order to fully understand the suffering and the trauma. Like, you know, I I j you know how like people say white people can't dance? I I I disagree. I think that that is reductive, I think that that is essentialist, I philosophically disagree with that. But what I believe is at the core of that is that if you are only a consumer of a culture, then you're that allows you in the marketplace to be able to perceive simply the things that are joyous, and to be able to disaggregate the joy from the suffering, right? So when black people engage in black culture, hip hop, jazz, our imp basically American culture is black culture, right? We are simultaneously perceiving and experiencing the joy and the suffering. And so when we dance to black culture, that's what you see. And when people simply engage black culture or any culture as a consumer, then you're gonna dance to it like a consumer. Right. And I think that that's what people are seeing. And so the the piece around joy to me is like joy is our birthright. Joy doesn't, I'm not being liberal, like everybody should be smiling and laughy all the time. That's not what joy means to me. Joy means to me perceiving our capacity to find pleasure, to find laughs, to find happiness, to find desire in the midst of the suffering. That is like the human condition. And that is worth fighting for.

SPEAKER_01 51:05

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's so many things about that that I want to geek out with you on one day when I see you. This improbable joy, this um having us be being able to experience our lives, the joy and the sorrow, the the beauty and the pain. That's a part of what it means for me to experience liberation, is to be liberated into my full experience as a human being. And I want that for our all of us. And I'm just really grateful that I got to talk with you today. Maurice, you are a light in our movements and so grateful for everything that you offer and do and inspire in all of us. So thank you.

SPEAKER_03 51:45

Thank you for the invitation. I'll come back anytime.

SPEAKER_01 51:48

Love that. It's gonna get dicey out here, so we might bring you back. Mo, before we leave, are there any organizations that you want to lift up and let people know about?

SPEAKER_03 51:58

Well, sure. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't invite everybody to become a member of the Working Families Party. And we seek to build a politics that is reflective of all of us, our identities, our joys, our suffering, all of those things. And we seek to be a rebuke of the tribal politics that I talked about, so that we could build a bigger we and so that the people could govern. Like in a democracy, everyday people should govern. Like we believe that crazy idea. And so I invite everybody to come and join the working families party. If you're black, I invite you to join the Movement for Black Lives, which is a very broad ecosystem of Black-led and focused organizations all around the country struggling together to try to figure out how we as Black folks could get free. If you are a worker, I invite you to join a union or organize a union in your workplace. You know, we're in the midst of a moment when workers are really feeling their power from, and we've we've witnessed some very high-stakes victories for workers. Just recently, Starbucks workers finally had a very significant victory where that company, after stonewalling and spending millions of dollars to be able to challenge their organizing, has agreed to come to the bargaining table with their workers, which is huge. UAW and the AutoStrike, that was a victory. The Hollywood writers and actors, that's a victory. The Teamsters, that's a victory. Workers coming together is to me one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And, you know, the answer. So, you know, we talked about the right-wing story, but to me, our story has always been about everyday people coming together and being reminded that we have the power, right? Like if workers decided to stop today and we had a general strike, the the entire world economy will halt. But if hedge fund managers decided to leave their jobs tomorrow, we would be fine. Right. And we should always remember that we have the power. We have the power. And we're told this lie that the power and the value of the economy comes from someplace else, other than us and our ingenuity and our passion. And coming together as workers through unions is a reminder of that.

SPEAKER_01 54:32

Becoming the People is produced by Devin Delania. Sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Bobnan and Chirla is our research assistant. Our theme song was created by Meada. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find more clips of the podcast on my Instagram at Printed Temple. And if you'd like to watch the full visual conversations and help us sustain the podcast, please join us on Patreon at Printit Temple. Thank you so much for listening to the community.