Gender Stories

Political healers at the intersection of race and gender - Part 1

May 02, 2018 Alex Iantaffi Season 1 Episode 3
Gender Stories
Political healers at the intersection of race and gender - Part 1
Show Notes Transcript
In this episode, Alex Iantaffi interviews the incomparable Arique Aguilar, lead organizer at TakeAction Minnesota, about what it means to be a political healer, how she came up with this concept and why this work is so relevant at the intersection of race and gender. They had so much fun in this conversation that they talked for longer than one episode so please check out episode 4 for the second part of the conversation! You can follow Arique on Twitter at @arique777Support the show

Instagram: GenderStories
Hosted by Alex Iantaffi
Music by Maxwell von Raven
Gender Stories logo by Lior Effinger-Weintraub


Lyrics from musical introduction: There’s a whole lot of things I want to tell you about. Adventures dangerous and queer. Some you could guess and some I’ve only hinted at. So please lend me your ear. 

Narrator:Everyone has a relationship with gender. What’s your story? Hello and welcome to Gender Stories with your host, Doctor Alex Iantaffi. 

Alex:Hi and welcome to the third episode of Gender Stories. I’m your host Alex Iantaffi and I am really excited to be interviewing Arique Aguliar today. She is a Caribbean pansexual mom and lead organizer at TakeAction Minnesota. I met Arique just a few months ago and I just kind of fell in love with her and her work. She manages the Women of Color and the Collaborators tables for TakeAction Minnesota. When I met Arique what I was really excited about, well one of the many things I was really excited about is that you talked about political healing and the work that you do around acknowledging people’s skills as political healers and building their skills. And I’d never heard that term before. So I wonder if we can get started with you telling me about political healers. 

Arique: Yeah! Political healers it took us a while to get to that word, right? I was hired at TakeAction 2016 right in the summer, so June. We worked really hard. We didn’t get the results we thought we would right and before Thanksgiving I found myself doing these coffee shop dates where we get women of color, different women of color to just meet up at a coffee shop and just check in. Like “How are you doing? What’s going on?” And the overwhelming theme through all of them was exhaustion and a request to lead an intersectional leadership training where we talked about the intersection of race, gender, and healing. So they really put me to task right? Cause an organizer doesn’t move anywhere their base doesn’t want them right? So I got my marching orders. 

And the first training was January of 2017 the end of January. My leaders we were all like “You know what would be really really just spectacular is if we got fifty women of color to like show up but like we were secretly ok with thirty. We were alright with that. Over eighty women of color showed up to that training. And these were women of color, these were young women of color, we had youth there, we had EDs (Executive Directors) we had people from all walks of life right? So it was an interesting room. And I trained on what we later figured out was like a coping mechanism right and the beauty about it was that we figured it out together. I’m in a room with over eighty women of color and I introduce a thought to them right, like: Here’s a line of conversation and then there’s a box where it expands and this is where you complicate the conversation and make it more inclusive about things and then I erase the square and make it a line again. This  process of the square going down? That’s negotiation moment, but are you the one collapsing it or are you waiting for other people to collapse it and are unsatisfied with what comes out of it, the next step? It all feels pretty cheesy. We’re like we’ll call it the accordion theory because it collapses.  

Alex: I love it! [both laughing] 

Arique: We’re were just really really trying to get a handle on organic intellectuality, like what are we gonna make with each other? We know about this we know our experiences can lead us in this. And the most important lesson there that we walked away from that training was: do you know the difference between a space that will validate you and a space that won’t? And that a lot of our exhaustion came from expecting a space to validate us that never will.   

Alex: Yes. 

Arique: So that was definitely, we figured that out together in conversation in plenary like we’re all just talking and figuring this out, so that was the major lesson. So then we were like I was like go experiment this summer, kind of like unleash them and then join us back in August right?  

So then as we’re preparing for August we’re trying, I’m trying, I’m desperately trying to figure out what it is we’re doing right all summer I’m just trying to figure out like like I know people find it powerful, I know people engage more, but anytime I was asked like what were we doing I didn’t really have words to describe it outside of people who already knew and were already convinced it was a powerful space right? Basically if you weren’t a women of color who had been attending these meetings like you had no idea what was popping off. So I started doing research. And we’re not in politics, we’re not in religion we’re not in spirituality right? I’m going through all these, all the humanities… Oh the humanity of it all! [both laugh]  

Alex: And what are you finding? You’re not in psychology, you’re not in sociology, what did you find? 

Arique: Political science? Nowhere. Yeah so I kept digging and I found this like sub-study called Cultural Trauma. And it took a couple articles before I could really figure out like what was the original like document that I could go to and really understand this theory. And so Hirsch and Smith developed this paper that really spelled out cultural trauma. And it really spells out Public Memory as well. So I was just like what are we doing? We’re healing. What are we healing from? Well trauma. And that’s where I found this article about cultural trauma. And so you know suddenly like we have these words that we’re playing with. So now we have these words, cultural trauma and the other word is public memory right. 

So cultural trauma is where a specific event permanently changes the identity of a whole group of people. And some of the main examples that they came up with were the Holocaust and Hurricane Katrina and how they were treated after, or not treated after the hurricane. So I was just like ok, so cultural trauma permanently changes the identity of a group of people. I don’t think, at least I didn’t believe it only, that was term that you could only use for these like two events. I really just critiqued and said I think these were people with PhDs who have a lot of literature at their disposal. And these two events were momentous and there’s a lot of folks that you know did history, did art projects, got their diplomas by collecting or being part of these like documentation of these events. So then I thought well, St. Paul Philando Castile was a cultural trauma.  

Alex: Absolutely. 

Arique: It like changed the way everyone felt, the way everyone walked through this world right? And there were Black folks and people of color were just like really believed they could be next. And that kind of change doesn’t heal overnight right. 

And then the other term was public memory.  So public memory is this whole study about our systems of remembering, right what do we remember? But what I really liked about that was it said like what people choose to remember. And that was really agitational for me because I was just like that’s right, people are making choices on how to remember certain things.  

Alex: And I would say also who remembers what, right? Who remembers what history right? And whose history? 

Arique: Whose history, exactly. So it goes all the way from journalism to museums right? Like there’s those who devote their whole lives creating a museum so that this moment can be remembered. I grew up in Chicago and the DuSable Museum in Chicago was like a big deal because here was a Black-centered that we will not forget both the successes and the atrocities of like what happened for our people, their people, my people. Yeah. 

Alex: A complicated post-settler colonialism conversation in the Carribeans. 

Arique: I’m not on the white side is what I’m trying to say! [both laugh] That’s what I meant by it, the big “R” people!  

Alex: Exactly! 

Arique: But yeah those were still like verbs or actions. There was no person performing these things. And public memory it was really easy to connect that to policy. Like there are people even in DC who aim to pass legislation that they know is not gonna win, but it is a strategy to invoke a conversation that is not being had. I wish I could think of an example right now but there’s, I’m sure someone will know one. But it’s to invoke. Oh! There was one in DC about reparations that was it. I don’t know who did it, but I know about the story about like they introduced a piece of legislation to begin the process of reparations and it got shut down sadly, but people were having a conversation about it and is a way to like inject yourself into the public memory. It’s about power. It’s about how are we using the structures that we have at our disposal to really bring our stories to light. 

Alex: So how does political, the idea of political healers emerge from this context of cultural trauma and public memory and policy? 

Arique: So it really came down, like to go back to that moment of like exhaustion to go back to those moments where we realized like how do we navigate spaces that won’t validate us and how do we create spaces that will validate us? Right? Those words are what a political healer navigates through. The whole phrase or formula or however people really want to engage with it, political healers use rituals to bring cultural trauma into public memory. Right like that’s the formula, if you will. There’s just a lot of room there to like play. The whole point is that things like racism, sexism that feel so big and abstract and yet there’s all these concrete examples but we can’t ever like fucking change the things. All of a sudden the word “ritual” kind of pulls that on it’s head. Cause what happens if instead of walking into a room saying “We have all been conditioned to be... to act like a heteronormative masculine white dude”. It’s kind of like ok, now what? Right? What do we do? What if you went into that same room and said instead “We have accepted a ritual of reenacting masculinity in very toxic ways. And it’s racialized and it’s gendered. What is the ritual that we’re going to invoke and now practice to counteract that? It became this thing to create, it became something that you could practice with each other right. Like ritual didn’t have to be this like everyone let’s do yoga. Although I think there’s some offices that might just like yeah, just do some fucking yoga yall need to stretch.  [both laugh] But no like what if we thought about these -isms as practices and that we actually needed to find an alternative practice instead of just naming “This exists and we’re not that”. Ok? 

Alex: So what are we?  

Arique: What are we? What are we doing? And this is… the term ritual became a moment of creativity and inspiration especially for a lot of women of color. 

Alex: I love this. And when we were talking earlier preparing for this, you were talking a little bit about the skills women of color bring to this work of political healing and the skillfulness and the skills and the knowledge and the expertise that women of color bring. So can you tell me a little bit more about those skills that are involved in political healing? 

Arique: Yes! So again, rooted in January right, a lot of what sparked that conversation and that engagement was highlighting emotional labor as real. As so gendered and racialized that people honestly believe it’s a personality thing. Like “She’s just so warm” or “They’re just so welcoming” or “I really just feel seen by them” right like personality traits 

Alex: Rather than a skill? 

Arique: Rather than a skill. Exactly. And so then when we conflate it with personalities instead of looking at them as like skills, teachable skills, two things happen. One women of color who often have to engage in what we call “emotional tending” if you will, right, to maintain their projects, their economy, their home, their family, there’s just this level of emotional tending that is part of this racist sexist structure and where a lot of the exhaustion comes from. Like how, how do I you know like “How do I show up for this so that they’ll give me that” just a lot of choices that we have to make as women of color. I would argue all of us do this, but women of color being at intersecting identities like really enhances this skill.  

Alex: Absolutely. 

Arique: So then we don’t, if we refuse to see it as a skill then we refuse to compensate women of color for this skill and worst of all we relinquish accountability for other folks to learn this skill right. And we’re not these limitless vessels of emotional tending, right? Like we’ve got other shit going on too. Like I don’t... But it has been amazing to me how often I’ve had to remind the men in my life that like you are requesting a lot of emotional labor from me that I don’t have, and how foreign that feels to them. They’re like “I was just talking to you.”  It’s like no, you are requesting that I validate your experience, help you navigate a solution so that you can come out looking like less racist in this context. 

Alex: And that’s a lot of work! 

Arique: That’s a lot of work! 

Alex: That’s so much work. And when emotional labor is invisible and devalued and not recognized then it’s this thing that in my experience often talked about in femme circles or women’s circles it’s still not fully understood in dominant culture. Right it’s still expected especially from women of color, like you said. And there’s still this expectation that women of color will rescue us. Like look at what happened in the last election. 

Arique: Fucking  Alabama.  

Alex: People got excited, like Oprah for president. So how are we all gonna do this work and not just put it all on women of color?  

Arique: I also just want to put in a plug that I really really really have a big pet peeve of folks using the term “women of color” because they’re scared to say “Black women”. Like the erasure of Black women in Alabama was not ok to me. Like it was all Black women. And they didn’t do it for anyone else except themselves. Like they weren’t trying to save anyone else except themselves. So I just wanna like yes obviously, we’re all women of color but I think like Black women tend to.. Like the way they organize the way they show up and show out cannot be understated.  

Alex: So let’s talk about that for a minute. How much does anti-Blackness also play into the erasure and the devaluing of kind of the skill and expertise that Black women in particular have around political healing really? You know emotional labor is one skill but like you described so much more around racial and around, yes creating those moments of public memory which they’ve been so amazing at doing here in the US over the past few years with like Black Lives Matter for example. How much have we seen Black women in leadership being political healers bringing those skills.I’ll stick my foot in that. So I think like what has been so exhilarating for me is being able to use Black Lives Matter as the prime example of what political healing looks like. People can have their opinions about tactics or outcomes or all this like bullshit capitalistic what is the product, what is the final stand, but at the end of the day when Philando Castile was murdered… he… there needed to be a moment for public mourning. People were really lost, people were really confused. People were terrified. And so as much as people, folks want to comment about what shutting the highways does, what tactic, how it was used in the Civil Rights Era every side of the argument at the end of the day, this was a ritual that brought cultural trauma, the murdering of a Black father in front of his daughter, in front of his partner. They were bringing it into public memory in that moment. You could not help but talk about what happened to Philando every time those highways got shutdown. I’m not gonna lie, sometimes the traffic jams would be so bad I would like get really excited and be like “Is this my moment? Can I just leave my car here and go to where they’re shutting down the highways?”  

Alex: But then no it’s just traffic.  

Arique: It’s just traffic, there it goes like goddamn. But there, those, that is a prime example of political healing.  

Alex: And grief should shut things down right. FOr me there is so much vulnerability in having that grief so public and saying this is not ok, this is not business as usual and it has been business as usual for too long to kill Black folks and to kill Black women often those are not talked about, all the Black women because of systemic violence 

Arique: And Black trans women. 

Alex: And Black trans women and how people are systematically targeted and killed right? And so yes, that was a moment of “You need to grieve with us. Or you need to at least acknowledge that this is happening.” 

Arique: You will not be spared.  

Alex: You will not be spared. 

Arique: That’s what I felt from those highway shutdowns. You will not be spared from being reminded that this happened and that we’re here to end it. 

Alex: And this needs to be part of public memory. This cannot be erased, this cannot be overlooked. This is real. And you should not be spared. Absolutely. And those moments are really moments of incredible public vulnerability in many ways, right? Just grief has been so privatized in dominant culture, in dominant Anglo culture grief has become this brief individualized and if you grieve for too long right, it’s almost like a disease. Whereas actually, I don’t know I was brought up in Italy and there is a process, and there is a visibility like in Sicily people wear Black clothes or Black buttons when somebody dies and there’s a long period of mourning. At least a year of intense mourning and not functioning that we expect from close people and that’s not how grief plays out here in the US. 

Arique: No cause Lord have mercy on our capitalism if we actually make time for grieving. That was sarcasm. 

Alex: Yes that was. [both laugh] 

Arique: I think just the way that we have been taught that it needs to happen in closed doors. Or that other people’s emotions will make us too uncomfortable. It’s a distraction, it’s a tangent, it’s something that you do over there. Honestly I would call it gender oppression because like the first time I understood gender oppression was when someone said the work of mothering in private is gender oppression. And that just like, in my mind there were so many moments where people were like honestly mad that my son was acting like a two year old. There was even a moment we were in a city council meeting and he was loud. I mean, not any louder than typical but I looked at them and I said “I think we’re the adults in the room, so just speak louder.” LIke I was not going to apologize for my son being a son and I was not going to require my brown boy be like policed or managed in a way that would make other folks more comfortable. Like he’s not a distraction, he’s here because of the fucking structural sexual exclusion of women and mothers. Like that’s why he’s here, so deal. 

Alex: And the lack of structures, support and financial support to have kind of safe and affordable and free care so that you can go do your job. 

Arique: Right! So when I learned about that, that there was such a thing as like privatized mothering, or however the phrase was said, it’s not difficult to take note of the privatizing of healing. That it is inappropriate to be in public and with others when you are grieving. When you are mourning. And it doesn’t even have to be a death - just any trauma, that that’s just something that you do with you and yours and like no one else should be a part of that cause that’s just embarrassing or I.. I don’t know the words to characterize public displays of emotion are racialized. They’re just like. You’re out of control, like how much of that is angry Latina, angry Black women right? Keep your emotions on check, this like over exaltation of cool, calm and collected. And it’s just like you’re cool, calm and collected in just the wrong things because you’re not seeing this. 

Alex: Well and cool, calm and collected is not an appropriate response to everything. Some moments we should not be cool, calm and collected in the face of murder, in the face of violence, in the face of oppression. Absolutely, all of that tone policing and body policing, adjust your face is part of both misogyny and anti-Blackness at the heart. 

Arique: Racism yeah. 

Alex: And so here you are doing this work of bringing political healers in kind of these beautiful community organizing spaces, and really nurturing strategic public vulnerability  

Arique: That’s right. 

Alex: Which is really fucking up right misogyny and white supremacy with strategic public vulnerability which is really what Black women are really good at. 

Arique: Yeah. I am really grateful for you remembering the words I said earlier cause I… I’m in another world right now. But the… So when I started organizing with women of color, I got really frustrated, honestly offended, and disappointed at all the sad women of color stories that I was now witnessing. It was almost like I had seen these but now that I was in this role where it could be my leader up there or someone that I’m investing in, that was really hard for me. So like the idea of strategic vulnerability is understanding that you are not walking into a space that will validate you. And that is critical. That is a level of emotional transparency I don’t think our movement gives to folks that we ask that they share their stories. And so then if we’re asking folks to share their stories, it’s because they’ve been invested in in a way where their story connects to a next step. So their story is not void of strategy. Their story is not void of a collective. Their story is not their own story, it is an example of what many people are going through. That that’s actually the value of the story and lifting things up is and you know I’ve seen, I’ve seen just a lot of moments where people are sharing things they weren’t actually comfortable sharing. And like what was that about? And where, you know, I honor peoples’ agency, you share what you want to share but what is the culture that you are bringing into your spaces where people feel too exposed at the end of it instead of powerful, instead of clear. Instead of sure and rooted in what they’ve just accomplished. That they shifted people in the room. That no one in there can unhear the words that they said, right? That’s what I think storytelling should be, I don’t think it’s always that for folks. Especially women of color, there’s just this need to display us as like beggars, pain porn just like, “Oh I’m so buried like in debt” I mean and it’s true, but like that we have to have the saddest of the saddest stories instead of like just really being connected to a community that the leader has identified they connect with right and and that they’re not alone in this experience. 

Alex: Well and when you were talking about that it reminded me of what I’ve heard some of the trans women of color in my own trans community say about, you know it’s fine to mourn trans women of color who keep being killed, when they’re dead, but what about uplifting and celebrating and supporting trans women of color while they’re alive? That the only legitimate way of existing for certain identities is through pain, through death, through violence, through obituary and that is unacceptable. 

Arique: It’s unacceptable and it’s offensive, deeply offensive.  

Arique: It is, it plays… the saddest part is that those stories when they get uplifted, the stories of death, that is a double-edged sword to those stories. Cause as much as it is bringing these lives taken too soon up to public memory, it’s also showing a norm. Like there is a whole other group of people that’s like yeah this happens all the time. It can breed complacency. So I think there’s just as much power in mourning publically as there is in celebrating publicly and I think like that’s just there is room and space to create these emotional phases in our movement and I think we need to take it more seriously. Cause it’s actually not about just pitching what the next campaign is gonna be or like pitching how we’re gonna fundraise all these monies. It’s actually like how are you gonna guide your group through a set of experiences that breeds resilience, breeds trust, breeds collectivity. And has this cohort working as a team at understanding their strengths and their weaknesses as they move as a unit right? 

So I think the...I think anytime a life is lost we should know about it. And there’s a way that feds into some kind of norms of like who’s worthy of being taken versus who’s worthy of maintaining their life and their comforts. There’s race and gender all over that. 

Alex: Oh absolutely. And ultimately who's worthy of being in power. We’ve seen huge changes both at a city level in MInneapolis/St Paul, at the state level around kind of more Black women and women of color in leadership, those kind of public positions. And what a different ritual that is to see those women uplifted as powerful. There have been some really iconic moments I would say in the last elections about seeing like Black women and Black trans women being uplifted up as political leaders. 

Arique: I think that’s right. I think there’s definitely more women of color running for office. Just kind of... There’s also plenty of women of color who are running campaigns that are winning that often get erased because the candidate. I remember sitting around, we were having drinks at a happy hour and there were two women, they like toasted to each other ‘No more campaigns with dudes” right? Cause there’s… talk about emotional labor, there’s a lot of abuse that happens in campaigns, especially when there’s a race and gender dynamic between the campaign manager and the candidate. 

Alex: We were talking about strategic public vulnerability a little while ago. 

Arique: Oh yeah! 

Alex: And how grief can be a moment of public vulnerability, but strategic public vulnerability can be much broader right? Like you said, those moments of celebration, those moments of choice of like… and those moments of making public what’s usually invisible. You know for somebody to win a campaign, how much emotional labor and support is there that often falls on the shoulder of Black women and women of color where there’s a disproportionate amount of support that is offered. 

Alex:Thank you for listening to this episode of Gender Stories. Arique and I were having so much fun that there is actually a whole other episode, episode 4 that is the continuation of this incredible conversation about what does it mean to be a political healer at the intersection of gender and race. So I hope you will listen to episode 4 and as ever, thank you so much for listening. 

 

[instrumental musical outro plays]