Raphael Sperry is an architect, sustainable building consultant, and human rights advocate. President of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), he leads national campaigns to ban the design of spaces that violate human rights and to promote restorative alternatives to incarceration. His design and consulting work focuses on “net positive” design for buildings that regenerate energy, water and natural systems.
Raphael spoke at the 2017 Bioneers Conference as part of a panel discussion examining how engaged scientific, technological and design professionals can ensure the careful weighing of social justice, public health and environmental impacts becomes a cornerstone of all decisions made in their disciplines. An edited transcript of that talk is below.
ADPSR (Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility) is an independent 501(c)3 organization. Its origins go back to the early 80s when a bunch of varied groups united by their fear of the nuclear threat came together after the election of Ronald Reagan and the reigniting of a hostile phase of the Cold War. One outgrowth of that was that an exchange of American and Soviet architects was organized. The goal was to demonstrate that even though our governments were being hostile towards each other, within our shared professional world we could approach each other as citizens and colleagues and partners with mutual respect and learn from each other and have a peaceful citizen-to-citizen relationship.
We insisted on standing up and saying that it’s not acceptable for the government to prepare for a war that’s going to destroy all of life on earth, all of human culture, and everything that our professions have created, i.e. the built stuff of civilization.
Raphael Sperry
Another thing we did was organize a competition to design a bomb shelter as an educational tool: the point was to state clearly that architectural professionals were not willing to be complicit in trying to make it look as though we could fight and win a nuclear war. We insisted on standing up and saying that it’s not acceptable for the government to prepare for a war that’s going to destroy all of life on earth, all of human culture, and everything that our professions have created, i.e. the built stuff of civilization.
That was an example of how you can respond as a profession when you’re facing what seems like an overwhelming issue. ADPSR has over the years tried to identify the big issues that we’re confronting as a society and to single out the things that are specific to our professional identity, the pieces that we work on. For example, in the face of the growing environmental crisis, we were one of the early organizations to dive into what in the ’90s we called ecological building, a forerunner of what was later called “green building.” In fact a number of local green building organizations such as the West Coast Green Trade Show and the Build It Green Certification Program in Alameda County were spinoffs of ADPSR’s Northern California chapter. We published one of the first books on the topic in the mid 1990s, a compilation that described how to use building materials that had recycled content and/or were made from sustainably sourced materials, that were recyclable, that were nontoxic and so on.
A lot of that work has become mainstream in the profession, which is great. ADPSR has always been an organization that tries to be at the forefront of things and to speak about emerging issues before they become well known. We have tried to function as a conscience for our profession, but when you do that and you’re ahead of the curve, it’s not easy for the people in your profession to accept what you’re saying, especially the first time you bring it up. After a couple of years, though, they get used to your message, and gradually it becomes more acceptable.
In the 2000s we began publishing a lot of books through our New Village Press imprint, mostly about more equitable and rational community building and planning. We also developed an international affiliation called ARC-Peace starting in the ’80s. It’s a really interesting organization in that it has really good representation from both the developing and the developed world. It was long headquartered in Sweden, but its headquarters is now in Spain.
Architecture and Prisons
More recently the campaign that I’ve been most personally involved with is one that is trying to bring the voice of architects, designers and planners to challenge mass incarceration, which is one of the biggest social justice challenges facing the United States. Our level of incarceration sets us apart from the rest of the world. It’s part of a larger culture of violence in the U.S, which of course includes our wars, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. We have to recognize that those wars spring from a culture that’s willing to accept violence as an instrument of public policy, and that it’s exactly that same acceptance that is comfortable with police brutality, horrible prisons and a criminal justice system that destroys communities of color in the United States.
And our professional community is implicated in that culture. Prisons are buildings. Architects have produced those buildings. No civilization in the history of the world has ever developed a penal system nearly as large as what the United States has today, and many architects had to design those facilities. Historically, some of the prison builders were well intentioned. The first prisons were called penitentiaries, often run by Quakers who of course have a history of social justice activism. The idea was that people would go to the penitentiary and become penitent; they’d be given a Bible; they’d study and return to God and become members of the good community again. But a penitentiary built in the 1830s by the 1890s had become a total hellhole. It was originally supposed to have light and air and be a healthy place conducive to rest and rehabilitation. Instead, it had become violent, abusive, dangerous, filled with disease. 40, 50 years later they built “reformatories” that were hellholes. Later they called them “correctional facilities.” The names changed but each “reform” was as bad as the one before, and by the 1970s there were major riots in prisons all across the country. We had recreated the same problems over and over again.
Prisons are buildings. Architects have produced those buildings. No civilization in the history of the world has ever developed a penal system nearly as large as what the United States has today, and many architects had to design those facilities.
Raphael Sperry
We started a campaign called the Prison Design Boycott to encourage people to start thinking about alternatives to incarceration. We advocated that all of us in our profession turn down commissions to design prisons and say: “Designers are being asked to solve the wrong problem. Don’t come to us anymore and ask us to design better prisons when you’ve got 2.2 million people in thousands of new prisons already, and the country is getting worse as a result of it, with more injustice, not less. We want to design what’s really needed—affordable housing, mental health centers, etc., all of the things that are not provided to people in the very communities we’re over-policing and targeting with our prisons.”
That first campaign generated a lot of dialogue, and quite a bit of pushback too. We expected initial resistance, but it was pretty hard for our opponents to come up with credible defenses of, say, the “supermax” prisons in which some detainees are in permanent solitary confinement in tiny cells; or the forever infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which was actually designed by American architects and with British funding for the Iraqi government in the 1980s, when we were allied with Saddam Hussein in his incredibly bloody war against Iran. It was pretty hard for them to defend the facility at Guantanamo Bay, the first prison built specifically to deny people their constitutional rights in the United States, and that is actually a copy of a federal prison in Indiana.
And then there’s the California lethal injection chamber just over in San Quentin. There was a prolonged lawsuit in California that had very effectively stopped the implementation of the death penalty. That suit argued that using the state’s old execution chamber constituted cruel and unusual punishment because the facilities were so antiquated. Eventually the courts agreed, so the California Department of Corrections decided that in order to keep executing prisoners they had to build a new facility. They spent over a million dollars designing and building it, and they were really proud of it. “Look,” they said, “We’ve met the court standards and we’re ready to go.” They published photos and displayed the model of the chamber because they were so proud of its design. In order for that execution chamber to be built, someone had to use professional skill and professional tools, such as architectural software, to design it.
This offers a crystal clear example of the fact that professional expertise and tools are not value neutral. In this instance, they were used to build a killing machine, quite literally. This is something students aspiring to be professionals and those already established in a profession need to understand. Just because your expertise seems technical and removed from the social and political conflicts of the society and just because you receive a license to practice your craft, you are not absolved of moral responsibility about how your work is used. All these buildings I have mentioned have in common that the activities that take place inside them are gross human rights violations. And they were built specifically to house those activities. Those who designed those buildings are not insulated from what happens inside them. They participated in the intention behind them. They have to take responsibility for their involvement, in these cases, in torture, in inhumane confinement, in degrading treatment of human beings.
So we sought to mobilize people and to build a campaign around these issues. We dug through the AIA (American Institute of Architects—the main professional body of architects) code of ethics, and we found that it actually already contained some language that said that members should uphold human rights in all their professional endeavors. So we asked the AIA: “How come some of your members don’t seem to have a problem designing execution chambers?” But the AIA told us that the language in question just applied to non-discrimination within professional practice. They weren’t prepared to extend the concept of “human rights” to the actual end use of the buildings their members designed.
So we had a pretty simple proposal. We told them: “Why don’t you add a simple rule to your code of ethics that says members shall not design spaces intended for killing or torture or other human rights violations? We’ll even write it for you to save you a little bit of time and legal research because we’ve studied the question in great detail.” It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the national organization’s leadership didn’t go for it, so we did a bunch of organizing around it. We got three chapters, the San Francisco, Portland and Boston chapters of the AIA to support us. We worked with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other like-minded organizations as well. I think AIA is feeling the heat, but so far they have not approved it.
Some people argued with us that we should just focus on positive aspects of architecture. Architects love designing schools, universities, hospitals and clinics and cutting edge green buildings. Why not highlight those positive projects? But we felt that if you want to be in a profession that’s dedicated to providing people with housing, healthcare facilities and schools, you can’t be out there at the same time killing people and torturing people through designing prisons. There are some projects you should never do, like inhumane prisons and execution chambers. Not every design project can be totally great, but there has to be a minimal level of moral clarity in a profession. Architects can’t, on their own, transform the criminal justice system or implement the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, but they can try to be as strong a force for progress as possible and at least not to participate in crimes against humanity.
In that spirit, ADPSR has just recently spun off a project that we started a couple years ago called Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. It’s the first architecture firm in the nation specifically focused on designing centers for peacemaking, restorative justice, reentry housing for people coming out of prison, and other projects that contribute to transforming the criminal justice system. I urge you all to learn more about that, and I urge all of you, whatever profession you are in, to work to mobilize your peers to help transform your spheres of activity into vehicles of progress towards peace and justice.
By Ted Howard, Ronnie Galvin, Joe Guinan and Marjorie Kelly
This piece is re-posted with permission from the Democracy Collaborative & The Next System Project.
COVID-19 poses a dual challenge: a terrifying public health emergency, and the unprecedented economic shutdown. At the same time the pandemic is once again making obvious the racialized nature of our political economy. It is no coincidence that Indigenous, Black, and Latinx peoples are bearing the brunt of the disaster, in general suffering much higher morbidity rates and health and economic pain than white communities. This underscores a truth that long preceded COVID-19: the real virus is our undemocratic, inequitable and ultimately destructive economic system that attacks the vital organs our lives depend on: our communities, how we relate to each other, meaningful work, how wealth is produced and enjoyed, and even nature’s capacity to sustain life.
The destructive power of this exploitive capitalism, revealed again through this pandemic, has been relentless. Its appetite for extraction is insatiable, its capacity for destruction seemingly limitless. People of color in America have certainly suffered the worst effects of this system, but others— women (including women of color, of course), LGBTQI peoples, youth, our elders, and the white working class, have all endured violence at the hands of this system. People of color remain the primary targets, and race and racism continue to be weaponized to divide and conquer and to undermine the possibility of solidarity amongst these groups.
If past performance is a predictor of future outcomes, the COVID-19 pandemic points to a grim future. As the initial crisis passes, we will reemerge into a shattered economic landscape, with the old inequalities of wealth, power, and control we faced beforehand newly amplified many times over. The challenge will be to rebuild this broken economy into one that is not only financially resilient but also sustainable, just, and reparative.
For advocates of a new way—a new world, even—the occasion demands bold and strategic ambition, grounded in an honest reassessment of our prior convictions and assumptions. This paper proposes a cohesive response to the crisis in the form of a five-point plan for national economic reconstruction and community transformation that discusses how to:
1. Preserve local community economies by blocking financial extraction and consolidation;
2. Extend public ownership in the public interest;
3. Ground economic reconstruction in a new era of community wealth;
4. Institute a green industrial strategy on the basis of a green stimulus recovery package;
5. Establish a Next Generation Institute to support the movement for a democratic economy.
We see this plan as the basis for orienting our organization, The Democracy Collaborative, in partnership with the growing democratic economy movement, toward a limited number of points of intervention for maximum leverage in a time of crisis. We realize that many of our peer organizations in the United States, and indeed in other countries, are themselves pivoting to meet the challenges of this time. As we have since The Democracy Collaborative was established 20 years ago, we will continue to learn from and work with others as we evolve our own program and seek to make our contribution. We are all in this together, and this historic moment demands the shared experience and wisdom of all who are struggling for a more just, inclusive and democratic system.
Two Pathways Forward
Who will own America’s economy post-crisis? Two starkly differing paths lie before us. Down one path, we see the extractive economy restored—one established on land stolen from Indigenous people and built on the bloody backs of African slaves. It will continue to be an economy fed by low wages, especially for essential workers from Latinx and other communities of color. Too many white working-class people who have benefited from the currency of whiteness will continue to forfeit their opportunity to be in coalition with communities of color—and will themselves continue to suffer as a consequence.
Following this path, as the nation did after the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, will mean corporations will be bailed out and the wealthy will be protected, while the brunt of economic losses—bankruptcies, foreclosures, and a pileup of household debt—will be borne by ordinary people, particularly those on low incomes and people of color. Many more Main Street businesses will go under, with the best firms acquired by large companies and private equity at fire-sale prices. Elite, concentrated, absentee ownership will increase massively. The chasm of wealth inequality and the nation’s immense racial wealth gap will widen. At worst, this more virulent form of hyper-capitalism will survive through state authoritarianism, buttressing an already racialized police state that suspends basic liberties, backed by vicious populist politics. In such a scenario, the rough beast slouching toward us will wear the face of corporate neofascism.
Thankfully, there is another path—one that leads to a just, reparative, democratic, antiracist economy of broad prosperity and shared power. Here, government will belong to and serve the interests of We the People—with “we” really meaning all of us. In this scenario, when big companies receive aid, the public will receive an equity stake in return. These stakes could be placed into citizen wealth funds and used to rebuild shattered communities, both urban and rural, and could pay dividends as reparations to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities from which extractive capitalism has taken the most. Those who have contributed so much to the wealth of America but always been denied their share will finally receive a stake in owning their own future.
In this scenario, investors will become part of the solution. New investment vehicles will spring up to preserve local businesses, transitioning them— when feasible—to shared ownership. Instead of extractive private equity gobbling up distressed assets on Main Street, it will be fossil fuel companies that are bought out at fire-sale prices by government in order to wind them down. As COVID-19 recedes, a massive green stimulus will refloat the economy, creating millions of jobs and propelling us into the sustainable, post-consumer economy that the well-being of our planet requires.
As we move through and ultimately out of the COVID-19 crisis, one world or the other will be left behind—with consequences for generations to come. The business-as-usual path may seem far more likely, but the shape of the future remains radically undetermined. With crisis comes opportunity. Collectively, we face a once-in-a-generation opening to build a better world—our last best chance to construct a new social contract, grounded in the places we love, binding us together in a new, generative, democratic system in which all can thrive. We must strive to use the economic recovery as the starting point for a new birth of community in America.
We offer a five-point plan for shaping a powerful response to the crisis, a set of strategies to put the nation on the high road to a democratic economy rather than continuing down the low road of today’s elite-enriching, financially extractive economy. This is an ambitious program—and progressives do not yet have the power base to bring it all into effect, but it offers a direction around which to calibrate joint efforts, and a call to action with which to engage allies. This is a critical moment. How we handle the post-crisis recovery phase will help set the terms for the 2020s—the decade in which our collective future, the shape of things to come, will largely be decided.
A Five-Point Plan for US National Economic Reconstruction and Community Transformation
1. Preserve local community economies by blocking financial extraction and consolidation.
Amidst this crisis, local communities risk losing what remaining control they have over their economic future. We face the frightening prospect of a massive ownership transition, as large numbers of small and medium-size enterprises go under or are sold at pennies on the dollar. We can help make this a transition for good rather than for ill—preserving and supporting local businesses in the crisis, then keeping them rooted in community for the long run by transitioning them whenever possible, in the recovery, to models of shared ownership.
Small business is the lifeblood of our economy, providing nearly half of all jobs and circulating three times more money back into local economies than other companies. Yet according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, only one-third of small business owners could survive a shutdown of four months or longer. In majority African American communities most small businesses have less than two weeks’ worth of cash available. Many small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) could be lost forever. The pain of these closures will fall disproportionately on low-income workers of color. In rural areas, this could mean economic recovery never comes.
For the pick of the bunch, another fate may be in store. Waiting in the wings is private equity, with a reported $2.5 trillion on hand, ready to acquire companies at fire-sale prices. Further acquisitions will be made by corporations. Cities could lose their engines of prosperity. Millions could lose their jobs, which the corporate drive toward automation could mean will be gone forever. Down this road lies a massive shift in ownership upward to elites—“trickle-up” on steroids.
Capital will be the key agent needed to preserve and restore SMEs. Yet it must be of a new kind— both public and private, but operating in either case in the wider public interest. First, we must call for mobilizing public capital to prevent the leveraged buyout of local economies by private capital. One mechanism could be a federal, state, or even city-level holding company that would acquire struggling SMEs and hold them until they could be relaunched in the recovery. One historical model is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, used to great effect in the New Deal when it became the nation’s biggest bank and single largest investor. The International Monetary Fund’s research arm has already indicated such vehicles may become necessary in the COVID-19 crisis. If such a visionary move seems politically impossible now at the federal level, states or cities could pilot the model, creating Local Economy Preservation Funds. These might be financed through the Federal Reserve’s Municipal Liquidity Facility. When firms are exited from these funds in the recovery, preference should be given to locally-based enterprises owned by employees, communities, municipalities, and people of color.
Other public interventions may also be possible. The Treasury Department should be urged to quickly expand the capital base of the nation’s roughly 1,000 community development financial institutions, which use a combination of federal and investor assets to lend in disinvested, beaten down communities. The emphasis should be on CDFIs that specialize in employee ownership and support for local business.
We should also mobilize private wealth, with local investing and impact investing by high net worth individuals becoming widespread new norms, something the era of low interest rates may make possible. New “impact funds” are already planning to purchase and hold companies, with a view toward exiting the firms after transferring them to employee ownership. Support for startups by entrepreneurs of color and women will also be needed to fill the gaps in hollowed-out local economies. Such processes cannot be about restoring the status quo ante. Preserving locally owned companies is a vital first step, but to build a more just and democratic economy, we must root ownership in community for the long haul by transitioning firms when possible to local shared ownership models.
Much as the nation made a strong commitment to home ownership—albeit one with severe limitations along racial lines—after World War II, we now need a national commitment to broad ownership of enterprise. It might include the creation of a National Commission on Shared Ownership, which would launch conversations on how to lay the groundwork for a new movement for owning our future after coronavirus.
2. Extend public ownership in the public interest.
It’s time to usher in a new era of democratic public ownership for public purposes as part of our collective response to COVID-19. First, in order to protect communities, workers, and the environment, we must block crisis profiteering by absentee corporations and extractive capital. If the government bails out large corporations, it should receive ownership stakes in return and use its voting rights to restructure and repurpose companies in the interests of people and planet. The time has also come to establish long-term democratic public ownership as a new common sense, especially in essential sectors such as utilities, housing, transportation, education, and health care.
In responding to today’s economic crisis, we must not repeat the mistakes of the 2008 financial crisis by using public funds to bail out distressed industries in ways that deepen inequality. Instead of “bailouts” that reward elite shareholders, government should instead perform “buyouts” in which the public gets an equity stake in assisted firms. In such instances, the government should be an active owner, embedding democratic values and public purpose within these companies, to deliver on pressing social, economic, and ecological needs. For instance, car companies might be tasked with producing electric buses and other mass transportation vehicles. Large financial institutions could power a renewable energy transition and revitalize the real, productive economy. Airlines could refocus solely on long haul flights, with revenues helping fuel a massive expansion of high-speed rail and other less carbon-intensive forms of transportation. Fossil fuel companies could be decommissioned or converted to renewable energy production in an orderly fashion, providing for both the nation’s energy needs and a just transition for workers and communities.
Public equity stakes from government rescues could be placed in a social wealth fund. Versions of such funds, often called sovereign wealth funds, are already in existence across the United States (such as the Alaska Permanent Fund) and around the world (such as the Government Pension Fund of Norway). Such funds could finance community restoration, support universal basic services, or pay dividends to citizens. In the American context, these social wealth funds could be explicitly set up as reparations funds, undoing the pattern of material dispossession that has held since European colonists first set foot on the continent. These reparations funds could be the basis for finally achieving economic justice in response to the legacy and ongoing extraction experienced by Indigenous, Black, and Latinx peoples while also giving rise to new political alliances among them. White working-class people who are discovering that the wages of whiteness have undermined their own economic interests might also be incorporated into coalitions and solidarity with these groups.
To block crisis-enabled financial extraction, the public should be given the right of first refusal on large corporate acquisitions and mergers during the crisis and recovery. Approval of corporate acquisitions and mergers in essential industries— food, medical equipment, pharmaceuticals—could be conditioned on companies adopting new charters mandating public interest and democratic governance approaches. Such steps could prefigure an era in which maximizing returns to capital is viewed as outmoded, archaic, and dangerous in a world of interdependence and resilience.
The crisis has refocused attention on the failure of the corporate ownership model. One glaring example is vaccine production, neglected because it was insufficiently profit-producing. Going forward, we must defend public ownership—for instance, beating back Trump administration attempts to privatize the U.S. Postal Service—but also extend it in such areas as pharmaceutical production as a vital element of a thriving economy with plural forms of broad-based ownership.
3. Ground economic reconstruction in a new era of community wealth.
Communities face an imperative to take back the power to determine their own fate. This means abandoning the practice of luring absentee corporations through tax giveaways and instead begin building broad prosperity from the ground up in every community in America. Building community wealth should be the basis of a national reconstruction strategy. The explosion of mutual aid groups and community tables in the crisis could be incorporated into a major push to build power at the community level, centering recovery and reconstruction in a paradigm of community wealth.
Community wealth building—developing local assets and institutions in ways that ensure that wealth stays local and is broadly shared—first emerged in the 2000s to challenge the underlying logic and failures of neoliberalism. Over the last two decades, community wealth building has gained momentum as a local economic development alternative, one that seeks new levels of community control and power and a democratic economic infrastructure. It must now become the dominant paradigm. This means “going big” to integrate and scale the model: integrate, by intentionally weaving together a growing patchwork of institutions, activities, and constituencies to create a new self-conscious politics of community, and scale, by moving out of the narrow lanes of economic development and into across-the-board economic policies and strategies, mobilizing the full weight and resources of the local public and nonprofit sectors for community stabilization, development, and well-being.
A key power base of community wealth building lies in place-based institutions, such as nonprofit hospitals and universities. In adopting the “anchor mission,” these institutions can seek to deploy their substantial resources to benefit local communities through targeted hiring, purchasing, and investing. This must now become the norm, not the exception. Beyond “eds and meds,” the whole of the public sector should be mobilized, including local government, K-12 education, public policy, and not-for-profit activity, forming the basis for re-exerting wholesale local economic control.
As literally trillions of dollars come from the federal government to stimulate state and local economies, civil society organizations and political leaders should mobilize together to rapidly plan how to direct these resources toward building the ecosystems and structures of community wealth. Community wealth building practice must shift to meet the scale of the emergency—going beyond pilots and demonstration projects to help deliver a thoroughgoing recovery and reconstruction through economic transformation.
Post-COVID-19, we need to create an economy in which the needs of the community, as well as the imperative to live within planetary boundaries, come before the prerogatives of private capital. Clear principles for recovery flow from this approach. We must resist calls for cuts to public sector jobs and spending. The jobs that return should be full-time with benefits, not the precarious work that has come to predominate. Public and tax-favored private institutions—corporations, schools, city and county governments—should evaluate all their purchasing and procurement to see how much can be routed to local and democratically owned businesses. We should develop incentives for re-localizing procurement, since we have seen how global supply chains have broken down so spectacularly during the pandemic. When possible, we should bring manufacturing from overseas back to our communities, and keep it in the hands of businesses that are broadly owned, to create greater resilience.
In an ironic turn of events, the COVID-19 crisis may leave the entire nation looking like the Rust Belt, with its swath of lost small businesses and shuttered storefronts—the landscape for which community wealth strategies were first developed. As the national landscape takes on the devastated character of the Rust Belt, community wealth building principles are uniquely positioned to be at the heart of our economic response.
4. Institute a green industrial strategy on the basis of a green stimulus recovery package.
After the emergency phase of the crisis, the economy should be rebooted on the basis of a Green Stimulus. Looming beyond the massive but short-term economic damage of the pandemic is a far larger crisis in the shape of anthropogenically-induced climate change. A Green Stimulus would not only restart the economy after the present crisis but help stave off that next one. This is the call from climate and environmental justice organizations, whose work on the proposed Green New Deal is now being adapted to visions of how to best emerge from the pandemic. A post-COVID-19 Green Stimulus should be used to create living-wage jobs, transform the public health and housing sectors, and shift the economy away from fossil fuels.
Those suffering the most damage from COVID-19—low-income people and communities of color—are also those most vulnerable to the impending effects of climate change. Absent a focus on climate justice, any economic stimulus risks worsening these inequalities and further entrenching fossil fuel reliance. An ambitious Green Stimulus, by contrast, would be a down payment on a regenerative economy that builds wealth and resilience. We can invest in millions of green, union jobs to serve the nearly 40 million (and counting) who have filed for unemployment in the current crisis. We could build the public sector workforce and expand opportunities for shared and local ownership in green industries, while providing a just transition for workers in fossil fuel and carbon-intensive industries.
Green Stimulus investments must institute energy democracy through community- and municipally-owned renewable power. Also critical are major investments in greening our housing stock, particularly public and affordable housing. We must likewise build the resiliency of our water systems to deal with extreme weather events, and expand the capacity of public transit systems while making them fare-free. Such investments must be responsive to—and designed in collaboration with—frontline and fence-line communities that have suffered the most from disinvestment.
We will not make our way safely through the climate emergency if our economy remains dominated by corporations with a primary duty to profit maximization and investor return. This crisis has shown how the market fails when confronted with existential risk, and how basic services that should be universal—such as broadband or energy—cannot be treated as the byproducts of profit-seeking investments.
The fossil fuel industry provides perhaps the clearest example. Hundreds of oil and gas companies will likely seek bankruptcy protection, attempting to evade worker and environmental protections in the process. Left unprotected are millions of people unable to pay their utility bills because of this crisis, who are having utilities shut off by companies designed to commodify energy for profit rather than serve the public interest. Public ownership of the industry is the clearest pathway to managing a shift away from fossil fuels in a way that puts workers, affected communities, and the public interest first. This moment should be used to transform our utility system, perhaps through a new federal Community Ownership of Power Administration (COPA), working for a large-scale shift from investor- to community-owned energy.
A green industrial strategy—pairing a federal injection of capital with strict environmental regulation—could support the transition of workers into green jobs, while also mobilizing us to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius within 10 years. Such a strategy will also require regional coordination of the sort being seen during the pandemic, as governors retain collaborative control of when and how to restart the economy. These emergent approaches can be built into new forms of national, regional, and local government planning that must be reclaimed and re-energized as we enter the long climate emergency.
5. Establish a Next Generation Institute to support the movement for a democratic economy.
Prior to the current crisis, a tremendous wave of local organizing and activity was already taking place across the nation—around housing, racial equity, gender equality, minimum wage campaigns, climate justice, immigrants’ rights, and more. We at The Democracy Collaborative continue to be inspired by the hard-won experience and wisdom of these heroic community-based efforts, from which we have greatly benefited and learned valuable lessons for our own work. Yet even when these activists achieved important victories, they ran headlong—every time—into a system taking the nation on a downward trajectory toward greater inequality, rising environmental destruction, and the undermining of our democratic polity. In the face of this plutocratic system, the landscape of progressive organizing has thus far remained too fragmentary and disconnected, with inadequate larger-order systemic thinking and analysis, to challenge the dominance of neoliberalism and corporate capitalism.
Historically, the constraint on the system’s capital bias has been from government policy and organized labor. But the U.S. government has been largely captured, and labor’s strength has dramatically declined. We need a new institutional power base. This might be constructed by uniting the growing efforts of community-building institutions, grassroots organizers, and next generation enterprise developers who are already engaged in democratic economic experiments. We need a catalytic, sustained, and organized effort to take their work to a scale commensurate with that of the challenge—advancing the democratic economy by building power, policies, and institutions-hand in hand with powerful movements working in a converging direction. In this way, we can position the democratic economy as the new economic paradigm for America and beyond. This is, obviously, not simply the work of The Democracy Collaborative, but of thousands of organizations at all levels of our society, joining together in a spirit of trust, co-learning, reciprocity, alignment and respect.
Where it begins, in the shattered post-pandemic landscape, is in rebuilding wealth rooted in our communities. This requires the development of a new politics—beyond single issues and individual models—built around achieving deep systemic change. Throughout American history, broad social movements have succeeded in pushing forward progressive agendas, whether in the Progressive Era, the early labor movement, or the Civil Rights Movement. We need such a movement appropriate for our own times and challenges, linked to a system change agenda, capable of pushing radical “non-reformist reforms.” Our communities must start demanding a new approach that can hold local and national political leadership to account.
Achieving change at this level of ambition will require the development of new movement infrastructure and capacity, as well as an alliance among groups of unlikely bedfellows—investors, entrepreneurs of color, nonprofits, mayors, governors, activists, faith leaders, academics, economists, anchor institutions, civil society—as well as countless voters and community organizers. Also critical to this work are all the groups and individuals advancing progress in such areas as reparative justice, climate justice, green energy, employee and worker ownership, land trusts, and municipalization. Grounded support, training, truth-telling, and cross-racial, cross-sector relationship-building will be critical to meeting the challenges ahead and to knitting together a powerful movement for deep change.
Building the alignment, power, and energy that fuels a movement such as this will require deeper and more innovative approaches to political education. We envision a new research and training institute to support movement-building, the development of leaders, the sharing of cutting-edge practices and policies, and training in theories of organizing and enterprise development for long-term systemic change. Such an institute would also organize retreats, summer schools, visiting fellowships, and act as a place of contemplation and grounding for the work and the strategy. It would help create the relationships, trust, spaciousness, and time to facilitate deep thinking and reflective praxis. It would be the home of deep system-change ideas, the source of their propagation, and the archive and repository of institutional memory and knowledge for the wider movement.
We need such a training institute so we can learn from one another, challenge unexamined assumptions and beliefs and empower our activism toward systemic change (while not neglecting the cultivation of emotional intelligence, resilience, and well-being, without which too many activists burn out). The Democracy Collaborative’s specific contribution to this effort will be to build upon our two decades of intense work and deep practical knowledge on new economic models, public policy at all levels, and systemic design and theory.
To this end, we envision augmenting our existing institutional capacity with a new training institute that would ground our ideas and work in deep pedagogy and practice, aimed at cultivating the well-rounded and more deeply informed and trained movement leaders necessary to carry this work forward over the long haul. We currently lack the appropriate tools that would allow for the kind of cut-through and inspirational effect we will require if we are truly to sweep through the existing system and effect change—like poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s once-in-a-generation tidal wave of justice that rises up and makes hope and history rhyme.
Conclusion
For decades, many have pointed to the inherent failures of our political-economic system and its inability to deal with growing challenges, from climate change to wealth inequality. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the system’s contradictions have become intolerable. The precariousness of modern work, the eviscerated public sphere, the consequences of the limitless extraction of wealth from our communities and its redistribution upwards to the largest corporations and a tiny group of elites, the marginalization of a government apparatus demeaned by right-wing ideology and corporate capture, the fragility of a health system that is not a system at all—all stand revealed in the light of the present emergency. These crises were present long before COVID-19, but this pandemic is doing what even the great financial crisis of the last decade could not: it is revealing the necessity of fundamental changes in our social and economic organization.
A different kind of economy is further along in development than most realize, worked out in tangible detail in economic institutions and practices that are succeeding all around us, yet often remain invisible. This new kind of democratic, sustainable, reparative economy is both possible and now necessary, in ways previously unimaginable.
The COVID-19 crisis may well mark the beginning of a large historical rupture, a great divide between one era and another. We may be approaching a watershed moment in political affairs. There is no returning to the already-broken past before the crisis began. A new social and economic order must be built. We hope this five-point plan of action can be a starting point.
The work ahead will not be easy or automatic. But we must push forward on many fronts to advance the systemic transformation our time in history demands. Put quite simply, and to borrow a phrase beloved of our political opponents, There Is No Alternative.
This article contains the content from the 7/02/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Artivism = art + activism
Art is meant to elicit emotion. That’s what makes it a powerful tool for activists to advance movements of peace, love and justice. Art confronts social issues in ways that words alone cannot. From dance and theatre to painting and poetry, creative expression helps people share experiences and speak to the heart. Bioneers has always featured engaged arts and artists as core components of our annual conference.
This week, we explore how visionary artists around the world are critiquing the world’s most pressing challenges while inspiring hope and advancing solutions. The featured image is “Unite” by Barbara Jones-Hogu, 1971.
The Thrive Choir: Harmonies of Liberation
Oakland’s Thrive Choir, a collective of passionate activist musicians, has created a groundbreaking model of what a fully engaged vocal ensemble rooted in community can do to inspire and galvanize its audiences. We spoke with three leading members of the choir, Austin Willacy, Kyle Lemle and Joyous Dawn, to explore their history, motivation and process.
“Creating music in groups and singing with other people have always been powerfully healing practices, and that’s as important now as ever, or more so, even if we have to do it online,” says Dawn. “And art can play different roles. One thing it can offer is a kind of chronicle of what’s happening right now, but it can share it in a way that’s not just intellectual (which is also important of course). It can convey the feeling of the current moment in a form that’s charged with creative spirit and that can reach people in a different, more direct way.”
Ancient Arctic Wisdom and Cutting-Edge Sounds: Zarina Kopyrina of OLOX
Indescribable performer Zarina Kopyrina (one half of the musical duet OLOX) discusses her roots in Siberia’s Yakutia region, steeped in an ancient and still vibrant shamanic culture, and her extraordinary life trajectory that has taken her from a tiny village in one of the remotest and coldest places on the planet to playing her mind-bendingly original and hauntingly beautiful music around the globe.
Your Invitation to Truth Mandala: A Community Ritual for Honoring Our Grief, Anger and Love for the World
This Sunday, July 5, join Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons for this two-hour ceremony, which will create a brave space to experience, witness and (if desired) express emotions you may be feeling about systemic racism, state violence, climate, the pandemic and all the roiling changes, challenges and movements uprising at this time.
Facing our Wounds: A New Narrative for a Time of Awakening
Jerry Tello is one of the most beloved wisdom teachers and brilliant storytellers we know. Of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan roots, Jerry was raised in the South Central/Compton areas of Los Angeles and has dedicated himself for four decades to transformational healing, to the mentoring of men and boys of color, to racial justice, and to community peace and mobilization.
In this interview, Jerry discusses how we can begin to address the imbalances and injustices in our society by taking a deep look at the false narratives that have dominated our culture for far too long, and how we can begin to reclaim our understanding of the sacredness and interconnectedness of all things.
Art As Social Change: Birthing the Dawn Of A New Day | John Densmore & Climbing PoeTree
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” (Bertolt Brecht). John Densmore, legendary drummer of the Doors, joins visionary spoken word duo Climbing PoeTree in an exploration of creativity and social change. This episode of Bioneers Radio features exclusive interviews with the artists and a special Bioneers performance of Jim Morrison’s poem, “American Prayer.”
New Bioneers Media Collection: “Artivism” for Social Change
All significant movements for positive change are accompanied by outpourings of artistic expression that help open our eyes to injustice and convey powerful new visions and possibilities.
This key role of the arts in social movements is as true today as it’s ever been, and we at Bioneers have sought to feature the work of groundbreaking socially and eco-engaged artists from across different disciplines.
From the LA Progressive: “‘Black Lives Matter’ Is About More Than the Police” | Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, pens this op-ed about how “black lives should matter in all stages of life — and to honor that truth, we must radically transform the system from its roots.”
From Lion’s Roar: “May Disrupting Anti-Black Racism Never Cease” | This article is by Kamilah Majied, who coined a framework that Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons often turns to — that a pro-social triad of behavior includes: Cultural Humility, Discomfort Resilience and Fierce Compassion.
Schumacher Conversations: Envisioning a New Economics
The annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures represent some of the foremost voices on a new economics, including a number of visionaries from the Bioneers community. Join Bill McKibben, Gar Alperovitz, David Orr and more in celebration of the 40th anniversary Schumacher Conversations series.
Registration for each virtual meeting is free, and the series begins on Thursday, July 9. Sign up today for the opportunity to hear these speakers reflect on their previous Schumacher Lectures given current economic, social, ecological and political realities.
Oakland’s Thrive Choir, a collective of passionate activist musicians, has created a groundbreaking model of what a fully engaged vocal ensemble rooted in community can do to inspire and galvanize its audiences. Bioneers’ Polina Smith interviewed three leading members of the choir, Austin Willacy, Kyle Lemle and Joyous Dawn, to explore their history, motivation and process.
Polina Smith: Hi Friends, would you start by telling us about the origins of the Thrive Choir?
Kyle: Almost 5 years ago now, a community dedicated to personal, systemic transformation called Thrive East Bay started to form in Oakland. The basic idea was that this community would provide a church-like, solid base that would help people come together across traditions, cultures and ages in a sacred space to form a “beloved community” that was not limited to any specific dogmas. Elders in our community, who have long been in the front lines of our movements, told us that central to any spiritual community there has to be uplifting music! And so I got to talking to Joshua Gorman in the beginning of this journey with Thrive, and I was invited to start a choir that would perform monthly in the community in Oakland.
For the first year or so we were a smaller choir and we performed once a month. We started writing songs and the choir began to form a real identity. We produced a whole bunch of original music, and we grew our membership. Then folks started asking us to perform all over the Bay Area and Northern California. There was apparently a real thirst for social justice-themed music, and people sensed the beauty of who we are as a group. All of our diverse members were just hitting it, really striking a chord with audiences, so we ended up being asked to perform at festivals and conferences, including Bioneers, the IONS Conference, etc. I think that at some venues that can get very cerebral and intellectual, we could provide a way for folks to also feel the messages at a soul level.
We’ve also performed a lot at direct actions and rallies in support of black lives and climate justice and immigration reform, and increasingly now as well we’re being invited to some venues because people just like our music, so we’re performing at music festivals such as Lightning in a Bottle. So, that’s our origin story. And this year we’re coming out without first EP of recorded music.
Polina: What about the Street Choir? How did that start?
Kyle: It was a pretty immediate response after Trump got elected. That changed the culture of resistance in America. People began to mobilize a lot faster and in larger numbers than what I’d seen during the Obama years, and we at Thrive felt that we wanted to make our music part of resistance movements here in the Bay Area, so we started training song leaders, folks from the choir and anyone from our broader community who was interested in offering music in the streets.
We bought a battery-powered speaker, attached it to a luggage roller and started wheeling it around to protests. We created a songbook compiled of some originals and some beautiful protest songs from the past two decades. It’s been really special. It has inspired a lot of people to share their voices. I think there are a lot of musicians and singers out there who might not always be comfortable showing up violently or in anger but are happy to channel their gifts in ways that are supportive to everyone else around them.
Polina: How have you adapted to the pandemic?
Joyous Bey: Pre pandemic we were still singing monthly at the base community of Thrive East Bay, and as Kyle mentioned we had been performing at some festivals and we were getting requests to share our music in more and more different spaces. Obviously we can’t do any of those live performances now. In a way, the pause has helped us solidify our business side, get our stuff together, launch our EP to the world and just get a bit more organized. We’ve been singing together almost for 5 years now, but we need to get our act together as an actual professional music group. In this moment we are still working on that, and we can focus a bit more on that aspect of things because we can’t sing together as a choir in person. We’re about to launch a crowd-fund campaign to support our EP getting out into the world. On the choir side, we’re continuing to have our check ins and having rehearsals on Zoom and having deep-dive opportunities to share because a big part of what makes this group so special is the amount of heart we put into what we share with each other.
Now our events are completely online, and we’ve also been hosting a weekly artist series. Actually, it’s not just artists. It’s a series called Medicine for These Times, and it features speakers from within our community who have a lot wisdom to share about how to tap into sources of resilience by offering such things as guided meditations or musical performances. Actually, all 3 of us have been featured on that series. It involves artists performing on video and offering their medicine into the world, into the virtual world in this case. We’ve also been doing virtual song circles. It’s been a real learning curve trying to figure out how to keep contributing under these conditions, and I’ve actually been surprised that strong connections can still be established, even when I’m not physically present with the artist or the community.
Kyle: Since we have some amazing songwriters in the group, one of the things we’ve been doing more of since we can’t sing together is songwriting together. Everyone in the group is now officially a songwriter, so now we almost entirely perform original music other than a couple songs here and there. So the lockdown has in that way stimulated our creativity and originality.
Polina: Who are some of the people and some of the traditions you have been influenced and inspired by?
Kyle: One person Thrive East Bay was definitely inspired by is the revered activist, philosopher, Buddhist teacher and whole systems thinker, Joanna Macy. On the musical side, artists who sing about and exemplify in their lives the themes of radical love and transformation, such as Sweet Honey in the Rock, Stevie Wonder and Melanie DeMore have influenced us. In general, those artists who feature harmony as a guiding force in their music and who gracefully sing of justice inspire us.
Joyous: Yeah, as far as the choir goes, Melanie DeMore, a really important vocal activist and songwriter in social justice movements, is someone we’ve had the privilege of working with, and she has guided us at different moments and different spaces. She has supported us in a number of ways and helped us improve our sound and has also taught us some really beautiful songs.
Polina: Do you think art and artists have a special role to play in this very challenging time?
Austin: As a result of the quarantine, it feels like everything is slower; people have had to slow down, and a lot of suffering, both economic and social, has resulted from those slowdowns, but one of the things that has also shifted is the way people are able to connect with art and music. I feel that maybe messages and inspiration from music and other forms of art can reach people on a deeper level because there’s not such a frantic pace of life. So the slowdown has been a big problem in many ways, but it may also have created more fertile soil for people to actually receive what artists are expressing.
Joyous: Creating music in groups and singing with other people have always been powerfully healing practices, and that’s as important now as ever, or more so, even if we have to do it online. And art can play different roles. One thing it can offer is a kind of chronicle of what’s happening right now, but it can share it in a way that’s not just intellectual (which is also important of course). It can convey the feeling of the current moment in a form that’s charged with creative spirit and that can reach people in a different, more direct way.
Kyle: I think the mission of our work with Thrive Choir is to help illuminate the joy and pain of what it means to be a human in a time of great transformation. And we’re at a time of great transformation right now with the uprisings across the U.S. (and around the world) in response to George Floyd’s murder. Artists and musicians have often been called to carry forward prophetic messages and speak to the possibilities of change and healing. They cannot just provide messages that are complacent and reinforce what’s already here, especially in times of great transformation and struggle. And right now I think artists can also help us look beyond the present to a world that’s more loving, that reveres the sacred in every human being and doesn’t try to go back to normal, but looks instead toward what positive futures might be possible on the other side of collapse. I think it’s up to artists to begin to paint those pictures and those songs that can give us a little guidepost towards a world of more harmony, a world that’s built to support everyone.
Polina: How might music help us to dismantle systems of oppression?
Austin: Music is a great example of something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. If you take a chord progression or a melody by itself, or even if you combine a melody and a chord progression, that’s one level of engagement. But if you combine those things with words, and in the case of the Thrive Choir we get a chance to also add harmony, there’s some third space that is being created. And it’s not like reading an article or reading some statistics to somebody. Music can find the chink in people’s armor and bypass the self-protective analytical mind to directly reach the heart and soul.
With live performance, particularly performance with a bunch of people singing, because human being have tons and tons of mirror neurons, people who are listening are also on some level experiencing the act of singing, and they’re getting to on some level embody the messages that are being sung, which in the case of the Choir are messages about creating just and sustainable ways to live for all beings, about getting in touch with spirit, about stepping up and standing up for things that really matter, about re-connecting with the earth, so I think that kind of music can really help change people.
Polina: What are your visions and hopes for the future of the Thrive Choir?
Kyle: Knowing that folks are really looking for music that speaks to the tragedies and beauty of this time and that really delivers a positive message of unity, of radical love, of harmony, we’d like to share our music beyond our northern California community. Our album that we’re releasing this year will help us to do that. We’re very committed to our work in our Oakland and East Bay communities, and that won’t change, but we also want to explore who else would benefit from hearing our music, so that’s a big vision for us this year, to share our music digitally so folks can hear it everywhere.
Polina: Do you have any messages for young artists?
Austin: NASA hired a professor named George Land to put together a creativity test in the 60’s. Some of their teams were getting stuck in their thinking about viable ways to get their ships and astronauts safely back to Earth and recognized they needed people who think outside of the box to help them get unstuck- the rest is history.
In his tests, he found that in an adult population, 25 and older, only 2% of us exhibit a genius level of creativity. He was curious about what would happen if he put together an age appropriate creativity test for 1600 5-year olds. He discovered that 98% of 5-year olds exhibited genius level creativity. At age ten, 30% of these same kids were at genius level creativity. By the time they were fifteen, 12%, and by the time they were 25, there were only 2%.
So, I would say: please, please, please do not let anyone socialize your creativity out of you. It is the most important thing you can offer in this life.
Kyle: I had a vision of a social justice gospel inspired choir, maybe when I was 13 years old, but I always thought it was too cheesy, that it wouldn’t work, that folks wouldn’t want to come together across different traditions. I thought that singing songs about trees and love would be just, cheesy, so I guess my message is that you need to believe in your dreams. Write the songs that are meant to be coming through you, and if it sounds cheesy to you, just keep working until it sounds epic. Trust that the messages that want to come forward need to, and don’t let perfectionism get the best of you. You will never know who will benefit from what you have to say.
Polina: Thank you so much to speaking with me today and for all the incredible work you do!
Bioneers’ Polina Smith interviews one of the most beloved wisdom teachers and brilliant storytellers we know, Jerry Tello. Jerry, of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan roots, was raised in the South Central/Compton areas of Los Angeles and has dedicated himself for four decades to transformational healing, to the mentoring of men and boys of color, to racial justice, and to community peace and mobilization. Co-founder of the National Compadres Network, Jerry has, among many other achievements, authored many articles, videos and curricula addressing fatherhood, youth “rites of passage” and culturally based family strengthening. He is the author of: Recovering Your Sacredness, A Father’s Love; a series of children’s books, and co-edited Family Violence and Men of Color.
Jerry discusses how we can begin to address the imbalances and injustices in our society by taking a deep look at the false narratives that have dominated our culture for far too long, and how we can begin to reclaim our understanding of the sacredness and interconnectedness of all things.
Polina Smith: Jerry, as a storyteller, a community leader and spiritual mentor to many young people, what are your thoughts about how to navigate our way through this incredibly challenging time of pandemic and social crisis?
Jerry Tello: It’s a time of reflection, a time for prayer, and a time of truth. Many people seem to believe that human beings are in control of everything that goes on, and that as long as you become successful according to Western ways, i.e. getting an education, making money, having material things and then getting power, then you can control your life, you can control your destiny, you can control your world, you can control your environment.
But our ancestors’ teachings tell us that we’re a very small part of this universe. We’re a sacred part of it as well (even though we don’t act that way most of the time), but we are beholden to Mother Earth, Grandfather Sun, the beautiful wind spirit, and Grandmother Moon. And if you look at our history, we have disrespected all those elements of the universe and nature. We’ve disrespected the trees that we cut down just to make money, and those trees and the plants are the ones that give us oxygen, so now we get a disease that makes us unable to breathe, right?
We have killed animals for our pleasure and for our comfort and destroyed their habitats without recognizing the interconnectedness of everything in the universe. Those animals have a part to play in the balance of all life. Once a species is not there anymore or its life is disrupted, the part of nature that those animals were a key piece of starts to fall apart, and viruses and bacteria that had been under control in their bodies escape and enter into us who weren’t designed to handle them.
So, we are seeing some of the results of our great disrespect, our tremendous ego and the false notion that we are, because of our borders and because of our governments, separate peoples and separate from nature. This virus is saying: “No you’re not! You’re all connected.”
Polina: What is your perspective on the incredibly dynamic global anti-racist movement that has arisen in the past few weeks since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis?
Jerry: The overall mentality that sees some people as worth less than others, that fails to see some groups of us in all our complexity, our beauty, our medicine and our blessings, is often based on the woundedness of the people in power. Many of our laws and systems, including our educational system, are steeped in that false story.
Many of us have, for many generations, have said: “Wait a minute! That’s not the true story.” But the folks in positions of power and a lot of those who have seen themselves as the dominant group have, for the longest time, been unwilling to face their own wounds. They’re addicted to their false story, and like any addiction, you’ll never get to heal it if you don’t acknowledge it first. We all know that if you have an alcohol problem, but you say no, I’m not an alcoholic, you’re not yet on a path to change.
When you take our breath away, when you stop us from breathing without any contemplation or thought, the ancestors begin to cry. It reawakens the pain of centuries. When Mr. Floyd said: “I can’t breathe,” we’ve heard that before too many times. If we can’t breathe yet again, people say: “I’m going to use the breath I still have in me now to speak truths and to express the anger and the hurt we feel when we are not being seen. We will make all kinds of noise to make sure we’re not forgotten.” And sometimes when we feel uncontrollable hurt, we all do things that are not logical, that are not reasonable, but when the spirit shouts out “I can’t take this anymore,” it goes beyond the level of the logical mind.
So, right now we’re in a time of tremendous grief, tremendous pain, but tremendous opportunity. If we can honor each other’s breath, each other’s medicine, each other’s stories, maybe all of our stories will be able to be told, and a collective story that is not dominated by one people, one narrative or one point of view can be born. Unless all people’s stories are told, this world will never be healthy.
Polina: I’m moved when you say that to heal, we need to first acknowledge our wounds, but how do you think that false story, the thinking that one group is better than another begins? How do you think this disconnection from the sacred gets started?
Jerry: I think it starts with what we believe has value. We modern humans have created a hierarchy of value that tells us humans are more valuable than nature and the animals and then, after that, that certain humans are more valuable than the others. So that’s where it begins.
As a kid I remember that when we would go visit people, my dad would scold us and tell us: “Remember when you go visit your aunt, before you go and play, you have to hug everybody.” We had to acknowledge everybody, whether we liked them or not, wanted to or not. We were taught that you just did that. You had to acknowledge people, to see their spirit and acknowledge their worth. That is coming back to the belief that we will not be whole, balanced or healed unless all people’s medicine is valued in the same way, all people’s stories are valued in the same way. Then you’re acknowledging their sacredness and the sacredness of the whole world.
But if you’re not willing to face your wounds, you can’t get to sacredness. We have to start by wanting to change our narrative to a narrative based on interconnected sacredness, a deep understanding that we are sacredly interconnected to all things. That’s why my grandma talked to the plants, she’d say: “Good morning, how beautiful you look!” And she wasn’t crazy; she knew how those plants could heal us!” So she was acknowledging their medicine and asking for their permission to take a piece of them. This is what we need to do with each other as well.
Polina: One of your main messages in the talk you gave at Bioneers was to see the sacredness in everyone.. How we do that with people in power who are doing so much harm?
Jerry: We had a dog when we were younger. I loved that dog, but a car hit him one day, and he was in a lot of pain. We wanted to go help the dog, but we were told: “No, no, no, be very careful; he’s going to bite you.” He was in a lot of pain and was reacting to the pain, so he couldn’t accept our love in that moment. We have to be aware that people in deep pain and in denial and who are deep down ashamed, even if they’re not aware of it or are trying to cover it up, can be very dangerous.
And you can see, for example, that this man in the White House isn’t right; he’s damaged in many ways. You have to always pray for everyone to be able to heal, but it’s a more complicated problem because there are so many people around him who just want to stay in positions of power, who don’t speak truth and don’t acknowledge the wounds and won’t acknowledge what is wounding the world, let alone have any desire to change it for the better. That doesn’t mean that there is no potential for healing in those people, that there’s no sacredness there because there is always potential for sacredness everywhere, but when the woundedness is so deep among so many people in power, that creates a very dangerous situation for all the rest of us.
“Indigenous teachings tell us that you can’t have night without day, day without night.”
Polina: So, what do we citizens do?
Jerry: We have to change our narrative, but to be real we’ve also got to vote, and we have got to get active in a lot of different ways in the world in order to change the systematic ways of doing things that are broken. We have to get out there and change the systems, change the priorities, change the funding structure, and we also have to pray a lot and do our own healing.
Indigenous teachings tell us that you can’t have night without day, day without night. We all have our sacredness, but we also all have our own woundedness, and it’s not a shameful thing. It doesn’t mean you’re not functional; it just means you’re human, but there are many humans who don’t want to acknowledge their woundedness. And when powerful politicians don’t want to acknowledge their wounds and don’t want to acknowledge that our wounded politics and systems need big changes, that’s a big problem we have to face and try to deal with, with all the tools at our disposal.
So, we must all individually and together do what we have to do in our communities. We have to stand up and demand that this society and this system take accountability and shift the narrative so that the next generations might have fewer wounds.
Polina: Do you think artists and storytellers have a special role during this Time?
Jerry: Well, we are all artists. We all have our flower and song; we all create beauty. Even if it’s just combing our hair, or putting our makeup on, we create beauty. We are beauty; our voice is its song; our walk is a movement. The artist has the ability to take some things that seem simple and make them profound, things that seem valueless and make them valuable, things that don’t seem attractive and make them beautiful.
Storytelling is a feminine art form, and unfortunately in our culture it has not been given the validation and the worth that it deserves. But telling the right story can help transform ugliness into beauty, and pain, struggle and inequity into blessing and interconnectedness. We must call to all those skillful storytellers right now, and they are out there! They are speaking truth! They are marching in the streets right now! But we must tell the whole story, and we must challenge the news media to tell the whole story.
We also must have those wisdom keepers who can vision beyond the present—the storyteller dreamers, is what I call them, so they can tell what is going to happen in a beautiful way. We storytellers are responsible for transforming shame and the blame into understanding, so that the next generation doesn’t have to carry the same baggage, but has the ability to give more blessings and create more stories of possibility and of beauty.
Polina: Thank you so much, Jerry, for sharing your words and wisdom with us today. May your work forever be blessed.
Bioneers’ Polina Smith interviewed the indescribable performer, Zarina Kopyrina (one half of the musical duet OLOX) to explore her roots in Siberia’s Yakutia region, steeped in an ancient and still vibrant shamanic culture, and her extraordinary life trajectory that has taken her and from a tiny village in one of the remotest and coldest places on the planet to playing her mind-bendingly original and hauntingly beautiful music around the globe.
Zarina Kopyrina, born in the Siberian tundra of the Sakha Republic (aka Yakutia) in a large family, was introduced to traditional folkloric music and local Indigenous shamanic cultural practices at a young age by her grandmother and others. After graduating from the University of Yakutsk in Economics, Zorina became very politically and culturally active and eventually began a musical career, traveling globally and becoming a widely sought-after performer, one who has created a unique combination of authentic Yakut traditional shamanic sounds deeply rooted in nature and modern, cutting-edge, electronic musical forms. Zarina is also passionately engaged with activism on behalf of the rights and lands of far northern Indigenous peoples.
She performs as half of the duet, OLOX with her partner, Andreas Veranyan-Urumidis. Olox, which seeks to bridge ancient wisdom and modern ways, has performed around the world, from Burning Man to Bioneers to the Lucidity Festival to the Kremlin to Iceland to the Arctic.
Read Polina Smith’s interview with Zarina below.
Polina Smith: Where were you born? Where are your roots?
Zarina Kopyrina: My heritage is in Arctic Siberia, in what is officially the Republic of Sakha of the Russian Federation (also known as Yakutia). I was born in a small village with 900 people in the middle of nowhere, in one of the most remote inhabited areas anywhere, but it’s a big region. If Yakutia was its own country, it would be one of the six biggest in the world. It’s also one of the coldest inhabited places in the world, but that winter makes us strong. We live in one of the most severe climates on earth, but I think we have some of the most beautiful spirits. We deeply respect the power of nature and believe that everything is alive. There are many reindeers, and beautiful Yakutian horses who are central to our lives, and you can often see the Aurora Borealis. And Sakha culture takes its breath from shamanism. The word shamanism was first used to describe our culture. It is one of the most ancient spiritual traditions in the world. Our shamans are healers of people and Nature.
And I have to say today we really need to heal nature. Like in many parts of the world, my people are facing big challenges: the permafrost is melting at enormous speed; there are more and more huge wildfires in Siberia; and mining by big corporations creates a lot of destruction and leaves large wounds all over the face of Mother Earth.
Polina: Did you always know that you would one day leave your village?
Zarina: I had a very happy childhood exploring the forest, but I always knew that there were lands beyond our forests. We had a TV, and my grandfather and I used to watch National Geographic movies about wildlife, which I loved. I had a sense that my inner voice was guiding me and that one day I would link my small world with the bigger world.
Polina: How did your career as an artist begin?
Zarina: My grandmother contributed a lot of time and care to me, teaching me traditional Yakut songs and singing techniques, and I started participating in ceremonies. In every village in my homeland there is a big solstice celebration, and then there’s a really huge one in which all the villages from a big, big region come together. Around 200,000 people come to that celebration. I would sing at the ceremonies and lead the circle dance and play different instruments. These are collective ceremonies to help people cleanse body, mind and soul and connect to the sacred with dances.
There are also a lot of beauty and talent contests at these celebrations in which you present traditions from your particular culture. One year I won one of these musical contests, and for some reason the prize was to go to Vienna to see the opera, in German. I’d never seen a big city! I was just so overwhelmed, but in a positive way! This is what my inner voice had been telling me! I can love my home, but there is also a bigger world that I can embrace. My whole consciousness was completely changed by that trip.
Polina: What is your perspective on the difficult times we are living in?
Zarina: The pandemic happened so quickly that we didn’t have a time to prepare. I think that many of us thought this was the kind of thing that only happened in sci-fi and fantasy movies, and we can spend a lot of energy trying to understand which theories about the disease are true and which are false, but then we might miss the main message, which is that the whole world is changing—mentally, spiritually and physically. A big shift is happening.
I am trying to focus on what I can do with myself and how I can be useful. The first thing that pops up for me is how I can feel more compassion and help other people to feel more compassion. The second is how I can still make my music during this time and have it be a positive force, so Andre and I built a home studio in our garage, and we are currently working on live-streaming and preparing workshops we can offer. The whole world is shifting to the online lifestyle and we are part of that during this time too. We have always offered our music as a form of healing. When we play we feel healing energy flow through us and we try to transfer it to people we perform for, and we still feel that healing energy can reach people through music online.
Polina: Do you have a sense of what your life’s mission is?
Zarina: One thing I would love to do is to build a spiritual center in America where people could learn about my culture and where ancestral Indigenous wisdom from around the world could be shared. I would also love to invite young people from my homeland to such a place, so they could learn English and techniques such as permaculture and sustainable energy systems, all of these beautiful solutions that our elders were using versions of long ago, but that have been forgotten in modern life. I would like young people to come and learn these things and then go back to their homelands and build beautiful, healthy, sustainable communities.
Polina: If you had a message to young artists right now, what would it be?
Zarina: Just pay attention to what your heart would really like to sing about, or dance or draw. Put some deep wisdom into it: don’t just make it about entertainment or showing off. Pay attention to what your heart wants to express. I believe that young people have a big mission and that they can lead a lot of people. They will be the fresh wind that changes the world. Put the message of the world you dream of into your art!
OLOX performing at Bioneers 2019
Polina: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Zarina: We recently auditioned for America’s Got Talent (AGT) and have made it to the next round! You can see our performance here.
Some of our friends were surprised we went on that show because they consider it just pop music, but we enjoyed the experience. The AGT team love what they do, and they were very nice to us. I was surprised: they really wanted to get to know and understand us. So we feel very lucky to have that exposure. I think that this mass media, TV and the Internet, can be dangerous because it’s often used for brain washing, but if you have a clear vision, and you use it with a clean heart to share your gifts, it can be a great way to reach a lot of people.
Polina: I think in your case that’s definitely true, because I’ve seen you perform in several different settings, and I always felt that you showed up with total dignity and authenticity, no matter where or for whom you were playing, but how did you decide to audition for America’s Got Talent?
Zarina: I had wanted to be on there for 5 years. When I was in Moscow, I said to Andres, “we’re going to go to America and we’re going to be on a big, big show one day: it will happen!” It did take three attempts. It wasn’t easy to get on there. A few years ago we performed in front of the President of Russia, and we didn’t push it at all, but 3.5 million people watched the video of that performance. Then, this year another one of our videos got a million views, and I think that finally helped, so the third time we auditioned, we got called back. It’s not always easy or fast, but I feel the universe is helping us.
Polina: Thank you so much for speaking with us, Zarina. Good luck with AGT! And thank you for all your incredibly inspiring work!
Since the 1980’s, Karen Washington has been a pioneering leader in urban agriculture. She farms in New York City as well as on a rural farm north of the city. In 2012, Karen was named one of the most influential African Americans by Ebony Magazine. This is an edited excerpt from a presentation she made at a past Bioneers Conference.
I live in a marginalized community in the Bronx in New York City. Out of 62 counties in New York State, the Bronx is rated number 62 as the unhealthiest county in the state. People in marginalized communities have been labeled as people in need, as people who have deficits. We have to change the way we look at marginalized communities, and it starts with the food system.
Shifting Powerin the Food System
The food system is not broken; it’s working exactly the way it’s supposed to as a caste system based on demographics, economics, and race. If we’re going to transform this food system, we have to look at power and who has power. The current food system is controlled by a handful of people who are predominantly white men.
The dynamics has to change so that people of color have wealth and power. I’ve been involved in urban agriculture for a long time, and there have been some advances for people of color, but we don’t have power in decision making, and we don’t have the power in policy. In order for that to change, we have to change the way we look at ourselves and change the language of being called poor. In my community, I see people who have done so much with very little resources. I see the power in those communities rather than viewing them as weak. But, I have mixed feelings about the promise of the urban agriculture movement because I don’t see our faces, and I don’t see our voices, and I don’t see our power.
In my community and communities that look like mine, we are trying to form our own destiny. We don’t want to replicate the capitalistic system that extracts wealth, but rather we want to tap into the value of the social capital within our communities. Time and time again we’ve asked for help, but to no avail. So, now we look at our communities as a force and a power to come together to challenge the industrial, capitalistic system and to look at the impact of inequity when it comes to wealth and land.
Urban Agriculture: Local Control of Food and Economics
People have been growing food in cities for thousands of years. There seems to be a feeling that if people are able to grow food in their communities that things are going to change. For me, growing food isn’t enough. We need to address the structural, industrial and environmental determinants that reinforce racism in our society.
When we first started growing food in New York City, it was about taking back ownership of a community that had been devastated because of the exodus of white people – white flight. The people that stayed in those communities were usually people of color.
People began community gardens collectively coming together to change something that was devastated into something that is beautiful. Community gardens were a way to take ownership and to control the food and economics in our neighborhoods. Those things were unheard of in marginalized communities. 20 years ago, we started a community-based farmers market, which was unprecedented in a low-income neighborhood.
Marginalized communities are surrounded by a charity-based, subsidized, food system. In addition, on every block there’s a fast food restaurant. From Monday to Saturday you can go to a soup kitchen or food pantry. I’m not saying that those things are not important, but they don’t encourage local ownership. In order to change the structure of a charity-based, subsidized food system, people have to understand the language of financial literacy, economic development, and entrepreneurship so that the money that we make in our community stays in our community. That’s number one. Starting a farmers market in communities of color is an opportunity to make money and take ownership.
Overcoming Political Obstacles
But whenever communities of color try to move forward, politics comes into play. In New York City, there is a growing problem between open-space community gardens and development. How do we make structural change when the local food economy is up against city politics? If we’re going to move forward in the urban agriculture movement, we have to understand the politics that make it difficult to grow and sell food in the city.
The City said it was illegal to raise chickens and bees. Bees were designated as ferocious animals. We had to correct that misconception and educate the City that bees are critical to pollinate many crops. We had to explain the social impact of those restrictions.
I view community gardens and urban agriculture as a way to change the dynamic of the power structure because people within marginalized communities are not going to advance unless we take back power. For me and for a lot of people in my position – not only in New York, but in Detroit, Baltimore, and Oakland – we are trying to change the system so that the power of financial literacy and economic development is in the hands of people who have been oppressed. That means that we have to change the dynamics of the power structure so that people in those communities have control over their food system, but that’s a difficult task. I hear the promise of urban agriculture, but it’s not going to be fulfilled unless the people in those communities have ownership of land, have the right to grow, and have ownership of an economy that is a base for building from the ground up.
Building Social Capital and Community Wealth
A group of people in New York City have decided that we’re going to create something unheard of – a Black Farmer Fund. We have been waiting for support from the USDA for a long time. We have been waiting for the government to solve our economic dilemma, but the only way we’re going to move forward is by building social capital and wealth within communities of color in place of the capitalist system that extracts wealth and resources.
The Black Farmer Fund in New York State has started to put the power back into the hands of people that look like me. We’re starting to form a language that is totally different. We’re trying to get people who have been out of wealth building, who have been out of the context of economic development and entrepreneurship and making them understand the power that they have within their own community to build wealth. Wealth building is never talked about in our community. Financial literacy and ownership are not talked about in our community.
I’m working to change that dichotomy, change the language, and help people understand the power that they have by coming together, sharing resources and putting money into a system that’s going to change the economic outlook so that farmers will be able to purchase seeds within their own community, purchase land, and purchase resources. It’s not going to come from outside. It’s not going to come from the government, it’s going to come from the social capital that’s built within those communities.
Although the enormous growth of interest in and research on psychedelic substances’ potential for psychological healing and consciousness expansion is exciting, there are shadow sides of the psychedelic community that require attention. Women’s contributions to the field have too often been downplayed, and the abuse of women in some psychedelic underground circles has been a serious problem. Also, people of color, LGBTQ and other minority communities have been under-represented in psychedelic conclaves. A stellar panel of figures at the cutting-edge of inclusivity advocacy in the psychedelic community shared their perspectives on how to remedy these problems.
BIA: My name is Beatriz (aka “Bia”) Labate. I am the Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines and a Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, also known as MAPS.
I have been drinking ayahuasca for 23 years. I’m Brazilian and I am grateful about that. It gave me the opportunity to encounter this brew and its traditions and to go to the Amazon and learn from Indigenous and mestizo people. I have a lot of gratitude for this path, which for me is a very sacred one, but I’m also a researcher and an anthropologist using scientific approaches to analyze this phenomenon.
Bia Labate
The first thing I want to make clear is that sacred plants and most psychedelics are not “drugs” in the way our culture uses that term. They are not associated with pathologies and crime, and it’s been great that we have been seeing a cultural shift around this topic and that psychedelics are no longer demonized. We are, in fact, currently experiencing what some people call a psychedelic renaissance: a revisiting of the nature of these substances and compounds that looks at their healing potential and their benefits, accompanied by a very vibrant resumption of the research that had mostly been abandoned after the 1960s. So we have had a renaissance of studies, and MDMA and psilocybin are closer and closer to becoming regulated medicines, largely thanks to MAPS’ pioneering work.
At the same time that our understanding of the healing potentials of these wonderful plant medicines and psychedelics more generally and of these sacred plant traditions has grown, we also must acknowledge that there are shadow sides of this whole movement that have not gotten sufficient visibility and that have to be addressed. These include: sexual abuse by ayahuasca shamans and psychedelic-assisted therapists; a lack of attention to equal access to these medicines for historically disenfranchised and marginalized groups, such as people of color and the LGBTQ community; and the lack of recognition for women pioneers whose work has been frequently at the forefront of this research but who have been written out of the historical narrative.
This panel’s goal is to focus on these issues. If the psychedelic renaissance is to grow and be able to bring healing and benefits for humanity, it has to include everybody. We have to start discussing how to include everyone in this movement’s expansion. Our institute has been trying to do some work in this regard, to highlight the contributions of black and Indigenous women and people from the global south, and also people working not just in biomedicine but in other fields and forms of knowledge. We don’t have anything against white male, straight, psychedelic biomedical stars. We love them as well, but they have a lot of space already, and we want to create space for other voices.
I now pass the microphone to my dear friend and colleague Dr. Monnica Williams, who is on the board of our institute and who paid her own way to come here all the way from Canada. She is a clinical psychologist, specializing in cognitive-behavioral therapies, an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa, Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Disparities, and Director of the Laboratory for Culture and Mental Health Disparities. She is also the Clinical Director of the Behavioral Wellness Clinic, LLC in Tolland, Connecticut. Dr. Williams has conducted clinical research on psychological and pharmacological treatments of OCD, PTSD, and anxiety disorders. Her research interests also include the role of culture and race on mental illness. She is an authority on obsessive-compulsive disorder, including sexual orientation-themed OCD (called SO-OCD or HOCD), racial trauma, and one of very few researchers focused on the inclusion of people of color in psychedelic medicine.
MONNICA: I’m thrilled to be here to talk about this. My little piece of this is going to be discussing racial equity and access as psychedelics go mainstream. Our mission at the Chacruna Institute is to provide public education and cultural understanding about psychedelic plant medicines and promote a bridge between the ceremonial use of sacred plants and psychedelic science. As a scientist myself, I often think in terms of anatomy, biology, and molecules, but I always have to remind myself that there’s a lot more to a human being beyond that—heart, and soul, and spirit. Our vision is a world in which plant medicines and other psychedelics are preserved, protected, and valued as part of our cultural identity, and integrated into our social, legal, and healthcare systems, and so I’m really excited to be a part of Chacruna.
Dr. Monnica Williams
I’m going to talk a little bit about racism today, and you may wonder how racism is connected to psychedelics. Obviously we all know that racism is real and alive and continues to impact people in a range of disenfranchised groups. Just about every economic, health and educational indicator shows that people of color are in far worse shape than their white counterparts in the U.S. There are of course individuals out there with racist attitudes, but the real problem is the pervasive, tenacious, deep structural racism in nearly all our society’s systems and institutions. And one of my areas of research is the impact racism has on mental health. There’s been a lot of solid research in the last 20 years that underscores how racism exacerbates just about every mental health problem that one can measure, and living in racist social structures causes its own form of PTSD. Racism is traumatizing.
And now psychedelic medicines are being advanced as potential solutions or at least treatment options to some of these mental health problems. And I personally do believe that the research is showing that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has the potential to heal or alleviate many types of psychological and emotional wounds, and not just MDMA, but psilocybin, iboga, and other substances as well. But people of color have not been included as research participants in these studies. In a recent review of research literature that we conducted in my lab, we tabulated 282 participants in a number of studies on psychedelics, and almost none were people of color.
Some of us in this psychedelic movement have been pointing out that black Americans are being left out of psychedelic research. My feeling that if white people are benefiting from it, people of color should too, and if we truly believe psychedelics can bring people together, we as a movement need to figure out ways we can do better. It seems pretty clear that psychedelic therapy is coming, but as it becomes legal and goes mainstream, it has to be available to all, and we will need, for example, therapists and healers of color who can take these therapies back to their communities to break stigmas and help people get well. We will need to explore whether psychedelics can help heal racial trauma. That is one of the things I’m dedicated to seeing happen, but psychedelic healing is only as effective as those who have access to it. Will these healing opportunities just be for white and elite people or for everyone? Will we simply replicate the oppression and exclusion in the larger society, or as psychedelics go mainstream, are we going to do this Right?
What would racial equity in this field look like? At Chacruna we put together a Racial Equity and Access Committee (there are also Women’s, Gender Diversity, and Sexual Minorities working groups) to promote inclusion and diversity by including the voices of those who’ve rarely been heard or included. So, to start, we want to give a prominent voice to, for example, women, queer people, Indigenous people, and people of color in the field of psychedelic science. Additionally, a social justice-oriented approach has to involve a more equitable distribution of funds and resources within the field and the transformation of systems and infrastructures to ensure fair access and equitable outcomes.
We need to start seeing diversity in our organizations at every level. We need to exemplify cultural humility and admit we don’t all have the answers. We can’t be experts in every culture. No one of us can which is why we need all of us. We need to develop and support culturally appropriate care because healing methods that are appropriate for one group may not be appropriate for another group. Community engagement is also critically important because for too long dominant structures have been imposing their idea of what communities need rather than participating and partnering with communities to hear their voices. We need to monitor disparities and, when necessary, call them out.
On our website, in the Chacruna Chronicles section, we have articles up on inclusion and diversity, and the pieces there include such topics as how white feminists can at times oppress black women, how unconscious white privilege affects psychedelic medicine, why psychedelic science should pay speakers and trainers of color, and how some groundbreaking people of color are making a difference in psychedelic healing (the catalyst for that was going to conference after conference and reading article after article and seeing no people of color reflected there, and asking where are all the people of color were and having conference organizers tell me, well, we just can’t find them. Well, now you can find them. We’ve put them on a webpage.) In fact, I see one of them here in the audience. Dawn Davis, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes from Idaho, a groundbreaking researcher on peyote conservation.
Another thing Bia and I have done to help amplify the voices of people of color and draw attention to this work is to be the guest editors of a special issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies on diversity, equity, and access in psychedelic medicine, and we will be including many people of color in the upcoming Psychedelic Liberty Summit we’re organizing for the spring of 2020. I encourage all of you who are interested in this to get involved. We can all make a difference in some way: you can volunteer, register for our newsletter, donate, follow us on our social networks, etc. We’re excited to welcome all of you to help to do this work because nobody can do it alone, and it’s an issue that affects everyone, and so everyone ideally will be part of the solution.
BIA: Our next speaker, Sara Reed, also came from far away, Connecticut, where’s she’s a therapist and the Director of Psychedelic Services at the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in the town of Tolland. She is the only black therapist in the United States who has treated patients in an MDMA clinical trial. Sara has expertise with a variety of anxiety ailments, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, depression, phobias. She also works extensively with patients who have endured discrimination-related stress and trauma, helping them detoxify from internalized racism. Sara has also been trained in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and is currently a therapist in a psilocybin study at Yale for patients with major depressive disorders.
SARA: Greetings to you all. It’s really an honor to be here. Special thanks to Bia for her commitment to this work and for bringing me here, and I also want to thank the coordinators, the organizers, volunteers, and founders of Bioneers for creating a space of visibility for visionary work. And last but certainly not least, I want to thank spirit for another opportunity to be a vessel and to share a small part of some knowledge I’ve learned within the field of psychedelic medicine.
Sara Reed
I’m here to talk about equitable and inclusive practices in psychedelic medicine, and I want to touch briefly on how we can move from theory to actual practice, or, said differently, how we move from a “head space” to a “heart space.” One key issue is the tension between making sure we are doing sound, rigorous science in our clinical research and not losing the essence of the work, which is connection, witnessing, and honoring the possibilities and the power of the present moment.
I often do dedications to my presentations as a way to remind myself to bring my full humanness into the room. My dedication for this presentation is to a spiritual teacher who is teaching me how to be more present and to bring all parts of myself forward. And even though I don’t know her personally, I highly recommend each and every one of you to read Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown. Her work has really impacted my life and has really helped guide this presentation.
To give some context and some background about me that’s relevant to this presentation, I was a study coordinator and a sub-investigator for the MAPS MDMA-Assisted Therapy Research study at UConn Health. Our site was focused on treating people of color and the specific traumas that face people of color, such as race-related stress and trauma. And unfortunately our site had to shut down before we could move on to the phase III clinical trials due to a variety of barriers, but even though we’re not an active phase-III site, we are still continuing the mission of advancing health equity for people of color in psychedelic research though advocacy work, though getting more in touch with the communities we serve, and by critically examining how race and power show up in psychedelic research. And these three topics—advocacy though storytelling, community, and understanding race in psychedelic—in the psychedelic context—will be the focus of my presentation.
At the MDMA-therapy study at UConn Health, we were under some pretty difficult constraints concerning the population that we wanted to serve. One constraint was that none of the therapists were native to Connecticut, and so we really needed to learn more about the community that we wanted to serve. We understood theoretically that we needed to build alliances with the movers and shakers in the community and to have buy-in, but that’s not easy to do as outsiders. We wanted to do community based work that wasn’t exploitative. We really needed to understand the heartbeat of the community. Another constraint is that in the clinical research realm, there are pretty strict deadlines and timelines that one has to adhere to, so we really had to be clear about the specific demographic-recruitment strategy we were going to use. We understood that “people of color” is a broad term, and that recruitment strategies for different racial groups might look different especially within the geography of Connecticut, so we were really thinking about all of these things as we were doing recruitment.
We reached out to a community organizer who helped us understand what was happening in Hartford, Farmington, Bridgeport, and the surrounding communities in Connecticut. From those conversations, we decided, given our time pressures, that it would be best for us to start with university students of color because there tends to be less stigma about seeking mental health services in that population and because they were likely to be more receptive to an alternative approach such as MDMA therapy. We gave talks on campus about MDMA therapy; we did a podcast called Can MDMA Treat Racial Trauma? Our approach was that people of color needed to hear about these experiences from people of color.
What the psychedelic medicine movement needs is inclusive community building. We need to build a multi-sector alliance that includes folks in drug policy reform and decriminalization, in harm reduction, in clinical research, and other organizations to sustain the working in related fields. Our work is connected. The milestones in our respective disciplines may look different, but we are all on the collective path towards healing and liberation.
We also need more diversity of people among those who hold positions of power. We need a greater number of black, brown, trans, queer, rural and neuro-divergent folks in those roles to help create spaces that actually represent and reflect multiple realities. In the psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy world, we need to recruit, retain, and support clinicians of color. There are not enough of us in the developmental phases of these drug-assisted treatments, let alone enough of us as researchers or clinicians. Without our voices in these spaces, we run the risk of creating treatments that don’t fit or exclude certain populations, or become elitist. And let me be honest: with the current systems and institutions in psychedelic medicine, it will be very difficult to advance health equity for many marginalized groups. Some parts of the current systems need dismantling and restructuring.
I participated in a psychedelic medicine and cultural trauma event in Kentucky, a day-and-a-half workshop that focused on the political and social factors that impact trauma and healing for people of color. I was able to expose people in my community to a very different way of being in their bodies and to talk about trauma and the effects of racism. Many people came up to me and were deeply appreciative and moved. We laughed, we cried, we danced, and we felt called to action to uphold our end of the sacred bargain as we fight for health equity for all people, especially those most marginalized in psychedelic medicine.
James Baldwin wrote: “Color is not a personal reality. It’s a political one.” Understanding that point is critical in the realm of psychedelic medicine. I’ll use a personal experience to illustrate. I took MDMA in a clinical context as part of the MAPS MDMA-therapy training. I was sitting on a couch, eyeshades on, music playing, two therapists in the room with me—the standard set-up for an MDMA clinical trial. As I started to feel the effects of the drug, my deceased grandmother appeared, and we shared a beautiful but brief moment. Tears of love flowed down my face and joy filled my heart. She carried me energetically to a place I knew existed but had never seen, a place that felt so familiar. I was a small part in this whole, but I finally felt like I had a place where I belonged. For the first time in my life, I felt free, me, a young, black woman, free.
Photo by Natalie Parham
In these sacred, precious moments, I was able to transcend the constraints of my political realities and connect to my humanness, the essence beyond masks and constructs. Soon enough, however, I started to notice the heaviness of my body, that my body was somehow slowing me down. I started to feel flooded with stories of my past and the ancestral past, my body reminding me of the fight it takes to stay alive in this black and female body. I had to learn how to sit with these stories in a way that I never had before. I had to be reminded that my political realities were just as present as my personal reality, and that my humanness is connected to both. So how do we move from theory to practice in understanding race? By moving past our theoretical understanding of race and courageously sitting in our racial wounds, by being present with our fears and intergenerational traumas no matter what our race is so we can all begin to heal and work towards healing from the wounds of racism and white supremacy.
As I close, I want to leave you all with one actionable item that can help you stay present and connected to your healing work, and specifically in healing from racism and white supremacy. Too often we get caught up in the liberation of others while forgetting to attend to ourselves, our own wounds and the parts of ourselves that have either benefitted from or been impacted by racism. So I ask, what’s something that you need to do to move towards healing that you’ve been putting off? What do you need to heal from in your own internalized racism? Take a second to think about it. Be honest about it, and sit with it. In the words of Adrienne Maree Brown, “The harder things are to say, the more necessary they are to say.” It’s time that you uphold your end of the sacred bargain and do the work. Show up in the way that is necessary and keep doing the work until you find your truth. We are all counting on you. The world needs your voice.
BIA: It’s my honor to pass the microphone now to Emily Sinclair, who is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology in the UK and is part of our Ayahuasca Community Committee. She has been the lead of our initiative on creating awareness about sexual abuse in ayahuasca underground circles and has been working hard going to different countries to raise awareness and share the set of guidelines we created on this subject. Thank you for coming all the way from the United Kingdom to California, Emily.
EMILY: I’ve been working for Chacruna for a couple of years. I’m an anthropologist and my main recent research has been on ayahuasca shamanism in Iquitos, Peru, which is the major hub of ayahuasca tourism, a Mecca for international ayahuasca use. That tourism and the spread of ayahuasca use globally have engendered a number of issues, so Bia and I came up with the concept of the Ayahuasca Community Committee, as a way to begin addressing key issues of concern across the global ayahuasca community, which of course includes a wide range of diverse communities working with ayahuasca in different contexts and settings.
Emily Sinclair
One of the challenges of our work is trying to make it applicable for all of these often very different communities and to include people collaboratively in the work that we do. Our aim is to provide support and advice to participants and practitioners that address these issues, and one major concern in ayahuasca circles is sexual abuse of participants by healers and facilitators of ceremonies. Our first initiative was to produce the Ayahuasca Community Guide for the Awareness of Sexual Abuse. I was motivated to produce these guidelines due to my own experiences in Iquitos. I’ve lived there and worked there for the past six years, and I actually ran a small ayahuasca center for a time. I started to realize how many people were coming through that center and the wider region to work with ayahuasca in order to heal trauma caused by sexual abuse that they’d suffered in their lives. And then I was very shocked to discover that sexual abuse was also quite prevalent in the very setting in which they were seeking healing.
Sexual abuse in ayahuasca communities happens mostly to women, so we produced these guidelines addressing them mainly to female participants, but we also hope that they can be of benefit to everyone to help to raise awareness generally across the community that this is indeed happening. One key issue is that because there are so many new participants unfamiliar with ayahuasca rituals, there is a lot of potential for facilitators to take advantage of their ignorance to take advantage of them. In the guidelines we try to explain typical scenarios of abuse specific to ayahuasca settings and provide advice for ceremonial participants so they can avoid unsafe situations, and we seek to encourage awareness and positive action across the community to combat this problem.
The process of writing them involved collaboration with victims and survivors of abuse, long-term practitioners and participants across diverse ayahuasca contexts and communities, consultation with colleagues across the psychedelic community, and also with experts on sexual abuse. And of course we also drew on our own fieldwork experiences, anthropologists, and long-term participants in the ayahuasca community. As well as providing general safety guidelines such as checking out the healer and the context in which you’re going to drink through community contacts beforehand, speaking to people in the know, drinking with trusted companions, etc., we also created more specific guidelines aimed at empowering women by informing them about what is usual practice and what is not so that they can recognize red flags and feel more confident about speaking up if something doesn’t feel right. So, for instance guideline number four is: “It is not necessary for healers to touch intimate parts of your body or any area to which you do not consent.” Or number five is: “Ayahuasqueros do not require you to remove your clothes.” One of the main aims of these guidelines is to demystify the figure of the shaman. Another key issue we wanted to draw attention to is consensual sex between healer and participant. We found that many occurrences of abuse take place in this context whether the abuser has manipulated a participant or assistant’s trust and taken advantage of the uneven power dynamics between them. Another aim of these guidelines was to promote a sense of collective responsibility for this problem in our midst and to encourage collaborative action to combat it.
We also created a legal resources companion to the guidelines, which provides information about laws related to sexual abuse in popular destinations for ayahuasca in South America, and a list of helpful organizations where victims and survivors can seek support. These are available currently for Peru and Brazil online though our website via this link. I think this is a really important part of the work. I personally know of a couple of examples of women who have gone to the police in Peru to complain about sexual abuse and actually been laughed at by the policemen there which of course causes much more trauma, so it’s really important to know safe places where you can go should this happen.
Most people in the ayahuasca community were very supportive of the initiative, but I did experience some resistance. Notably, there was a prominent figure who tried to tell me that sexual abuse was no longer a problem in Iquitos, or in general, and that an insider organization called the Ayahuasca Safety Association was already set up to deal with the problem, should it occur. This is something I knew not to be true because I was closely connected to that group. So was demonstrative of the fact that the truth about sexual abuse in the community is being suppressed by some people either perhaps because they are complicit in it, do not want supposed outsider intervention, and/or do not want to draw attention to negative aspects of the ayahuasca community in the interest of protecting its reputation and their own livelihoods. This is a very dangerous attitude, and fortunately we seem to be moving away from that kind of behavior in addressing these problems in our midst.
I distributed the guidelines in ayahuasca tourist information hubs that included cafes and hostels as well as the Peruvian Tourism Agency. And I spoke to a lot of newcomers in the region who were new to ayahuasca and were very surprised to learn that sexual abuse occurs in this context, and this is very common. It’s the main reason this information needs to be available to these new participants.
I also had formal and informal conversations about the guidelines with local practitioners and Westerners in the community including ceremony leaders, participants, local artisans and local healers. And sexual abuse is recognized as a big problem in the wider society as well as in ayahuasca contexts. Local people especially emphasized the importance of education to address this issue. I also met with the Ministry of Tourism and the British Consul in Iquitos. One of the great successes of this project is that the British Embassy in Peru has taken an interest in the guidelines and has actually disseminated them throughout all the western embassies aiming for them to be used as safety advisory information for travelers to Peru. And I’ll be attending a meeting at the British Embassy in Peru next month to discuss these issues with representatives from all the relevant organizations. The British Consul pointed out to me that governments are becoming less interested in trying to dissuade people from drinking, probably because it didn’t work, and more interested in trying to ensure their safety while doing it. That’s a really positive development, and it shows that ayahuasca-related practices are becoming more widely accepted.
I have given presentations in local schools and had great discussions with Peruvian students which addressed sexual abuse in general, gender inequality issues, as well the growth of ayahuasca tourism in their community. It was really interesting to hear their points of view. Many of them consider the tourists who come to drink ayahuasca as “crazy gringos.” I think that more education of this kind with local and young people in the community would be welcomed and beneficial for all.
This process has highlighted for me a few key points. Firstly, I think it’s essential that we acknowledge the abuse in our midst. Abuse is happening within healing communities as much as beyond them in the larger society. We cannot overcome this problem if we choose to ignore or suppress it. Community self-regulation involving communication and collaboration across cultural and gender boundaries is also essential for combating this and other safety issues in medicine and healing spaces.
I think the inclusion of men in this conversation and in this effort is also particularly important. Otherwise we run the risk of creating further segregation, which of course is one of the underlying causes of abuse. So on that note, in ayahuasca contexts specifically and perhaps beyond them, the division in many cases between Western and Indigenous and mestizo Amazonian people, and the lack of understanding that exists between them is a huge issue and a causal factor of abuse of many kinds which goes both ways. In Iquitos and more widely there is a great need for improved cross-cultural communication and educational initiatives that would serve both Amazonian and Western groups and encourage reciprocal relations between them. We’re currently formulating projects to be based in Iquitos that will try to address these issues for which we’re currently seeking funding. So if you’d like to come and speak to me afterwards to find out more about those projects or visit us at the Chacruna booth, that would be very welcome. We’re also selling plant products and textiles from the Iquitos region there, and those sales benefit the local people in that community as well as helping to sustain Chacruna’s work.
BIA: Following this thread about the importance of addressing the shadow sides of psychedelics, we are now going to hear our last speaker, Sarah Scheld, a Training and Supervision Associate for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Public Benefit Corporation. Sara helps coordinate and develop curriculum for MAPS’ MDMA Therapy Training Program and recently collaborated on a Code of Ethics for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy providers (that was published in the MAPS bulletin issue that I had the pleasure to be the guest editor of, Women in Psychedelics). Her work focuses on trauma awareness, somatics, and the ethical use of psychedelic medicines to help heal people, communities, culture and the environment. Before I hand it off to Sarah I want to mention that MAPS faced a challenging situation involving an incident of therapeutic abuse and responded by stepping up and insisting on clear accountability and transparency, and I think that’s worthy of praise.
SARAH: Thank you, Bia. Thank you, Bioneers. It’s amazing to be back here. Thank you to my co-panelists. I’ve been really grateful to collaborate with most of these women doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work with the MDMA Therapy Training Program that teaches therapists to facilitate MDMA-assisted psychotherapy mostly as a treatment for people with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sarah Scheld
I want to share the caveat that I’m not here specifically as a representative from MAPS, and will not be talking a lot about the MDMA Training Program in detail. I’ll mostly be speaking about my own experience and how my interest in psychedelics developed into a passion for trauma awareness and trauma resolution, as well as the role of the body in personal and cultural healing.
When I started working with psychedelics in 2010, I was in the underground psychedelic scene of New York City in both ceremonial and recreational settings, and there I had quite a variety of experiences, some healing and illuminating and some challenging. On the challenging side were experiences that were facilitated by, for example, untrained and unskillful basement shamans, and some experiences with actual predators, men in positions of power in the psychedelic community who attempted to, or in some cases did, cross sexual boundaries with me. At the time I had graduated with a degree in film, and I was working as a production designer, and I was very devoted to my own creativity, but I’d also struggled with a severe eating disorder for several years as well as chronic migraines and no menstrual cycle, but at that time no medical professional had ever attributed my symptoms to trauma. I was even making experimental films about sexual violence while on another level abusing my own body.
When I started experimenting with psychedelics, I was reminded of this spiritual connection to nature that I’d known deeply in childhood, but I wasn’t yet aware that I was being drawn into this work to address trauma. I wasn’t aware that the issues I was navigating were related to a history of sexual trauma. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that in college I had been drugged and date raped by a stranger, or that I had experienced this trauma in an altered state of consciousness. By opening up to psychedelic experienced, I was unconsciously trying to re-constellate and heal that trauma, but I was ending up in situations that were actually replaying it and were actually re-traumatizing. This was a period of spiritual opening for me but also of confusion and I would say of spiritual emergency. I had really murky boundaries and experienced a lot of symptoms—trauma symptoms reemerging—becoming withdrawn, and ungrounded, and I started developing addictions to other substances.
Not long after my home in New York was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, I chose to move to California in 2013 to pursue a master’s in East-West psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies—I see a couple of my alums are here—out of a strong interest in psychedelic healing work and out of a need for my own personal healing. And there were a couple of things that I encountered during that time that really changed my approach to how I was healing with these medicines. One was I began to work with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in a one-on-one context with a really skillful underground therapist, and through that work I began for the first time to realize that I have trauma and that MDMA can be a powerful ally in trauma healing. Through this work I gradually began to work not only with the trauma of this rape in college but to uncover completely repressed memories of early childhood sexual abuse. I understood that a lot of my behaviors and addictions were really a trauma response, and I also realized that my childhood interest in art and in nature had emerged as a way to distance myself from those traumatic experiences.
The experience of safety with my guide during this journey also taught me about the importance of the container for this work—the set, setting, and quality of the human relationship. All of this is context for why I’m so interested in the ethics of psychedelic spaces. In recent months I had the great opportunity to collaborate with many others who are more deeply versed in this realm of work on a code of ethics for MDMA-assisted- psychotherapy providers working on MAPS protocols. And it’s through my own experience as a trauma survivor that I can see how people with trauma could have difficulty holding their boundaries with unethical practitioners.
As you can imagine, psychedelic work carries heightened ethical challenges for practitioners including very strong transference and projections that can affect both practitioners and participants. Repressed sexual feelings can arise in these spaces, and in American culture many of us use substances to let our guards down sexually. It’s such a common phenomenon, and so it’s just really natural that repressed sexual feelings would come up in altered states.
I’m not going to go deep into the ethics of MDMA work but want to highlight one aspect of it. In deep experiential or psychedelic therapy, and especially in trauma work, it’s not just about the psychedelic substance that’s doing the healing work. It’s really the relationship that’s a key agent of healing. A participant in a psychedelic session can experiment with new ways of being in a relationship, feeling a new sense of safety or self-expression, or a capacity to set boundaries, and then they can internalize this experience as embodied knowledge and rewrite new neural pathways such as: “Oh, safety is possible,” or “I can be received by this person who looks different from me and whose difference I might have mistrusted before.” And for myself, the more I work with medicines, it’s more about which people I’m sitting with to have these experiences and what their values are rather than about which substances I’m using.
I’m interested in this topic of ethics not just for the MDMA work but because, as all of us here are, I want to raise awareness in this wider community and protect people having experiences in any setting above ground or underground. And while I’m working professionally within a medical model, I do believe that people should have the right to have these experiences and to be held by community in a safe way and in a container that’s appropriate to their own personal and cultural needs. And I’m really grateful to see this expansion of dialogue around ethics—sexual ethics and ethics around cultural differences in this community in the past couple of years.
Another key piece of my own healing has been the study and practice of somatics and somatic therapy. Around the time that I moved here, I started studying these somatic- psychotherapy methods—Hakomi and Somatic Experiencing—which more so than other therapies are interested in tracking and working directly with the felt sense of the body alongside emotional processes. These approaches, particularly Somatic Experiencing and also MDMA-assisted psychedelic therapy, all work on the principle of allowing the body to complete interrupted trauma responses, to move towards comfort, to do what our bodies are actually as animals designed to do but might have been prevented from doing in the moment of a traumatic event. These methods help people move beyond the narrow story of trauma to a sense of their organic self, and really through trusting the intelligence of the body to release, and self-regulate, and regulate in relationship.
Photo by Neungstockr
As I studied trauma therapy, I also learned about the concept of titration, going slowly and managing emotional processes in bite-size pieces small enough that they can be contained by our nervous systems. With titration, you build safety, touch into trauma but pull back if it’s too much for the nervous system to handle. And with that, I started to realize that in my earlier psychedelic work I had been doing the exact opposite of titration. I’d been blasting myself open and actually staying caught in a trauma cycle. Being—for example, in ceremonies with people screaming all around me was actually just overwhelming for my nervous system and was preventing me from being able to do the deeper work that I needed to do.
I’m so grateful for somatic practice because my psychedelic experiences were really ungrounded without it. I was chasing altered states as a means of chaos seeking, or alternatively as a means of spiritual bypass. And I now realize at the time I was also taking in a dominant narrative about how to use these substances. A lot of psychedelic research tends to overwhelmingly focus on ego-dissolving experiences, these kinds of cosmic- oneness experiences when we’re not connected to the body, and I think in part this tendency is because a lot of the writing in our field still comes from older, white men that tend to privilege mystical experience and bypass the body.
Also our understanding of trauma in neurobiology has vastly advanced since the ‘60s and ‘70s when therapy in psychedelic work both tended to explore catharsis and this idea that we have to break through repression. And while catharsis and ego-dissolving experiences have their place, what I’ve learned from my own experience and from witnessing other trauma survivors is that some of us actually need to rebuild our egos rather than shattering them.
Through somatic work I realized that my unconscious and my shadow really live in my body, and once I started studying through these somatic practices how I was dissociating, I realized how shockingly disconnected I’d been from bodies, especially my body, since I was quite young. I’d learned to dissociate at a very early age as a way of coping with extreme physical discomfort I had experienced, and I had turned, as others do, this abuse against myself into addiction.
Thankfully we’re learning more about how addiction is rooted in trauma, and there’s been a real failure until now in Western medicine to recognize this, and I have felt personally failed by that. Eating disorders specifically are rooted in trauma, very often, sexual trauma. And I’ve been learning about this from my colleagues who are developing a research study sponsored by MAPS to explore the potential of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of eating disorders. I’m really excited about what I think can be really groundbreaking work. So with somatics, all of my personal work gradually became about my own embodiment, and this has been a really slow process. I’ve been humbled again and again to be reminded that psychedelics are not a panacea and that healing developmental trauma takes a long time. It’s difficult work to become re-sensitized to the world and to learn to self-regulate.
Embodiment work begins with learning safety through relationship, and for me community, in particular healing friendships and healing partnerships, have been more influential than any therapeutic relationship. Throughout this process I began to think that if I had a trauma history without knowing it and was dissociated without knowing it, what might that say about the general public?
I’ve become really interested in looking at how trauma symptoms show up in our culture and how trauma awareness and trauma resolution play a part in collective healing. Psychedelics are repressed precisely because they teach us about trauma, and our culture has done a lot in our history to deny trauma, and we tend to look away from it and dissociate from it unless we absolutely have to look at it. It’s notable that it was only after the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement that PTSD became an official diagnosis. And so now as a student of trauma work, I see trauma symptoms everywhere, in climate denial for example, which Benjamin White more aptly calls “climate dissociation.” Dissociation is a trauma response in which one leaves the body when experience is overwhelming. I’ve also been unpacking the relationship between dissociation and whiteness and privilege, and seeing privilege as this dissociative mechanism that protects people from dealing with their trauma or others’ trauma. And how do you work with someone who’s dissociated? Not by ideologies, or rationalizing, or yelling, but by beginning with safety, and relationship, and resource, and asking what they care about.
I really see that trauma work brings people out of old survival strategies and back to the body into the present, and in this way, healing trauma is a crucial task in the broader work of responding effectively to the needs of our time. And I really appreciated Eve Ensler this weekend telling us to trust our bodies. It’s that simple. I’ve become really interested in the work of people focused on the intersection of somatics and social justice, organizations such as Generative Somatics and people such as Resmaa Menakem who work specifically with racialized trauma in the body and explore how our bodies and bodily interactions are shaped by systems of oppression and how we tend to perpetuate those systems in our relationships. They also show us we have the power to reshape ourselves and to reshape our interactions. This is an important piece for me when it comes to thinking about ethics—understanding our bodies within the greater ecology of our relationships and understanding our cultural shaping. Working with trauma is complex and confronting because it asks us to face all the intricate connections of trauma stories, intergenerational trauma, the whole ecology of trauma, and how we participate in it.
Coming out of dissociation from being a victim of sexual trauma has also made me feel the abuses I’ve perpetuated against the Earth’s resources and the ways that I’ve been complicit with suffering, or blocked from empathy. So for practitioners of psychedelic work, how might the oppressive structures we unconsciously carry affect our ability to support the empowerment of someone in our care? Kylea Taylor, author of The Ethics of Caring, which is a really amazing book on the ethics of non-ordinary-state therapy, writes, “We professionals are a combination of our programming by cultural paradigms and the deep self-reflective work we’ve done to discard whatever of the mainstream culture is not consonant with our authentic selves.” We have to work hard to see through and transform the oppressive structures underlying the systems that we’re working with.
I’ve been appreciating the way the author Ta-Nehisi Coates frames cultural semantics, that as a collection of living bodies, we actually have a collective cultural body, and the cultural body is also processing trauma, so we have to also work with this collective nervous system. He says that in effect we have to approach our activism, our cultural-body healing work with a somatic understanding of the world. It has become really important for me to think about that in movement work.
I’ll end by re-emphasizing the idea of titration I mentioned earlier, the importance of staying in relationship, staying kind and honoring the principle that growth happens when it can be held within the capacity of the nervous system. I want to express a lot of respect and gratitude to the people who have held these traditions alive for many generations in spite of colonization and to the lineage of underground practitioners who have also kept the flame alive, and to so many people who have dedicated decades to patiently working with the complex legal barriers to push these treatments and to make these treatments accessible to make it so much easier for young people like myself to join this work now. Thank you.
BIA: Thank you so much, Sarah. Before we open it up for questions and answers, I want to mention another minority we haven’t discussed, which, ironically, is something very dear to my heart, the LGBTQ community, which I’m part of. The Chacruna Institute organized a conference last June called Queering Psychedelics which aimed to explore the intersections and overlaps between the queer movement and the psychedelic movement, both historically but also looking into native traditions and the idea of two spirits, and thinking on how psychedelic therapy or shamanism could help these special populations that often suffer high levels of depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, addiction, and stress. We addressed such issues as the special needs of these populations and how psychedelics might help them, and what special contributions this community could make to the larger movement. It was a wonderful meeting, and we just published a document called “10 Calls to Action Toward an LGBTQ-Affirmative Psychedelic Therapy” on our website, which I recommend highly.
I just also want to thank my wife: she has had a lot of patience because I took eight years to be able to say those words. It was a coming out for me as well, and I want to thank California because it’s much easier to be queer in California than in Brazil. I have a few cousins and aunts who voted for Bolsonaro who is incredibly homophobic among other problems; he makes make Trump look like a really nice guy. I think it’s very important that we embrace this topic of gender minorities and bring it to the heart of the psychedelic movement because it’s so overlooked. Very little attention is paid to this topic. So I want to invite you all to go to our website and read these materials.
I also want to share a story that illustrates what hard work we all have to do. We held an event called Women in Psychedelics, and one of the participants said the N word. I did issue an apology, but it definitely was not strong enough a reaction, and Sarah Reed, who has been so generous in joining us here today, was very upset and left the event. We didn’t know each other at that point, but she was a guest at our event, and she wrote me a very nice email explaining why that incident was so upsetting, and I felt really bad. I reached out to Sara and to Monnica to ask for their help and guidance in figuring out how to address what had happened. After millions of zooms, emails, and phone calls, we ended up issuing two apologies, including a collective one on behalf of all of the women there because silence is compliance with white supremacy, and everybody was silent. Nobody said anything. And it has been a very tough process, and I got very upset a number of times, but my wonderful team and friends told me to hang in there. And a few months later we’re all here sitting on this panel talking about these critical issues. I’m sharing this personal experience to show how we can grow together, and that hard conversations can bring healing and advancement, and I’m so proud to have Sara and Monnica as new friends, and I’m so thankful that they so graciously accepted my invitation to participate in this panel.
AUDIENCE MEMBER (AM): What can be done to get more participants of color in psychedelic therapy treatment?
SARA: I hesitate because I think the way that the psychedelic-medicine field is now, it may actually be more harmful for people of color to participate. Unless there’s a critical examination and understanding of race and power and how they play out in psychedelic-assisted therapy specifically, the set and setting might just not be right for many people of color. And there are other impediments as well. There are so many barriers we have to break down. In many communities it’s not okay to ask for help. There’s not enough mental health literacy for black folks particularly. They often don’t understand their symptoms as trauma, for example, so education will have to be a huge part of the movement.
AM: How might specific communities be able to have more autonomy over their medicines and healing processes and have more of their own people become licensed or trained in how to do this well to overcome the strict, clinical barriers that are in place now.
MONNICA: Right now those who are being trained to be psychedelic therapists are a very exclusive group in a lot of ways. There isn’t a lot of representation of people of color, and so one of the things we’ve been passionate about is bringing in more people of color to get this training, so I can go into my community and have clinicians who are a part of my cultural group administer this therapy to me in a safe, familiar container, and right now that can’t happen. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to ask for.
BIA: I want to say that in the ayahuasca world one of the main problems is that traditional networks of power and of authority are being dissolved. So traditionally shamana operated within a community with authority structures they had to answer to. With globalization and the explosion of ayahuasca use and tourism, this tends to be dissolved, and you have, for example, a lot of itinerant shamans who aren’t accountable to anyone. So I very much encourage people that want to get engaged in this phenomenon to create supportive communities. The commodification of ayahuasca is posing many challenges. We just put out a document called Commodification of Ayahuasca: How Can We Do Better? One of our main recommendations is that people who want to use this medicine constructively should try to form communities around the medicine, communities that feature accountability and self-regulation.
SARAH: I just fully believe that certain kinds of community-based traumas, because they happen on a community level, are better held in community, and there are already examples of that in this work, and one that’s happening in a legal way is there’s a study at UCSF conducted by Brian Anderson called Researching the Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy in Long-Term AIDS and HIV Survivors, and they’re actually doing group preparation and integration work so that these survivors can be in community with other survivors. And for certain conditions such as PTSD, it’s helpful to have someone who’s deeply trained to work with that kind of material.
AM (addressed to Monnica): What specific therapy would you recommend for sexual abusers?
MONNICA: That’s a really important question and a hard one because abusers are so stigmatized that often they can’t come for help, and often abusers were abused themselves. Abusers need help like everyone else, and I think it takes a special kind of person to work with an abuser, and at the same time I think we do need a shift in our social consciousness to allow us to also approach abusers with compassion so that they can get the healing that they need which will then help everyone.
BIA: We have to wrap it up, but thank you all so much for coming. This was a really great session. If you can, I urge you to support the work of the Chacruna Institute and of MAPS, which is on the frontlines of so much of this work.
Tieron Johnson is a young staff member at Rez Refuge on the Navajo Reservation. He and others at Rez Refuge have been working tirelessly as first responders during COVID-19, distributing food, water and other essential resources to his community. To learn more about how to support their efforts, click here! Maya Carlson of Bioneers spoke with Tieron about his leadership providing mutual aid to people on the Navajo reservation and what it feels like to be a role model for young people in his community during these times.
TIERON JOHNSON, REZ REFUGE: Hello! My name’s Tieron Johnson, I’m 19 and I’m pretty awesome. I’m calling from Fort Defiance, Arizona. It’s a little community just by Wind Rock, Arizona.
I am a Program Coordinator with Rez Refuge, a youth center for teens and Academic Success Program (ASP) students. We have programming for youth ages 6-18 where we hang out with the kids and do outdoor programs as well as arts and craft. We’re helping kids keep their minds off the bad in the neighborhood, as well as get kids inspired and motivated. I started off in the program when I was in middle school. Rez Refuge kept me off the streets and kept me focused on wanting to be better. I used to be really shy and I couldn’t communicate as well as I do now. My confidence level has risen as I’ve grown up with Rez Refuge. We have an amazing team here and I’m happy to be a part of this organization. It’s opened up a lot of opportunities. As I’ve gained more responsibility and experience with Rez Refuge, my confidence has risen.
MAYA CARLSON, BIONEERS: I like the connection you make between responsibility and confidence. It’s a meaningful thing to be able to support other people.
TIERON: Out here on the reservation, we don’t have many role models, so it feels good to have some of the kids here say how much they look up to us. They tell us that they miss us when we’re dropping off food and supplies to families in quarantine. I miss running around and hanging out with the kids.
MAYA: How has COVID changed your work with Rez Refuge?
Mutual Aid at Rez Refuge on the Navajo Reservation in Spring, 2020
TIERON: We weren’t paying much attention to COVID in the beginning, but then it started to hit home, and we started to get serious. Rez Refuge took a week off and then we went to the local high school and St. Mary’s Food Bank, where people were handing out food supplies. They gave us 110 boxes of food with cereal, basically canned goods and non-perishables. We drove around the neighborhood and handed out some to our participants, as well as other people we knew walking around the neighborhood. We got experience distributing food, and learned how we could do it better. After that, we got in contact with Navajo & Hopi Families Covid-19 Relief. They brought a bunch of food from Shamrock Farms and we distributed all our food. It was hectic because we had about 11 or 12 people a day coming through our doors, and we still had to do our desktop jobs. We’re trying to figure out how to recover and rebuild after all of this.
It’s been challenging for us at Rez Refuge to balance personal life with the distribution we’re doing. We have family who obviously want to travel and go out, even during this COVID-19, and we have to isolate ourselves away from them because we don’t want to get anyone else sick because of the work we’re doing. We’re exposing ourselves every day, and we have to take extra steps to be safe.
MAYA: How do you get in touch with families who are in need?
TIERON: We get some recommendations from our participants, some people reach out on Facebook or through our email communityrelief@rezrefuge.org, where people can ask for a care package. A care package contains food for youth, elders, and toddlers. We’ve got diapers, wipes, and hygiene supplies. We have a lot of bottled water here too. We’re trying to figure out how to distribute those because we received donations of 275-gallon tanks and 330-gallon tanks. People are reaching out to connect us with people they know who live in areas where they don’t have connection to the Internet or the outside world.
MAYA: Is this remoteness why it is important to distribute water and water tanks on the Navajo Reservation?
TIERON: The water tanks are important to distribute because most natives live in isolated areas where they don’t have running water. Many don’t have utilities and it’s hard to get water. Many people on the reservation are elders stuck in places where there’s no food or supplies, and they have cattle on top of that. They’re hauling water in 55-gallon barrels, which is not enough for daily usage of washing, drinking, feeding animals and caring for crops. It’s just not enough so we’re really glad we got those tanks.
MAYA: Is that part of why you reached out to LifeStraw?
TIERON: Yes. I reached out to LifeStraw on my own because people really need water filters here, and I figured I might as well try. It doesn’t hurt to try, you know? They responded, and it was pretty exciting! We got three community tanks that purify water along with three medium sized and three small purifers. So in total we got nine donated water purifiers from LifeStraw.
MAYA: Why do you think it’s important that young people are making the effort to take on leadership roles to support their community right now?
TIERON: I felt how meaningful it was to be supported by my community. When I was little, I was in my own head. But as I got older, I got to travel and see the world. When I came back here, I saw how beautiful it is here. Many of our youth don’t get the opportunity to leave the rez and come back and feel that feeling of seeing your home again. It reopens your eyes and you’re going to want to make it look beautiful. That’s why after all this is in recovery. We’re hoping to start up our neighborhood watch, as well as a community beautification project and trash clean ups. Alvin Deahozy, another long time Program Manager at Rez Refuge, is starting projects in our garden as well. We’re pushing forward even as the numbers of COVID cases are still rising. Testing is taking a while so we’ve had to get used to coming in in the morning, checking our temperature, logging it every couple of hours, washing our hands, and wearing masks if other people are in the building.
During COVID, Alvin has been spending a lot of time out in the garden and teenagers will come up to the basketball court behind our building to watch him. Everyone stays 6 feet apart as Alvin explains parts of the plants. The teens are really interested. Everyone is bored and on their phones all day so they really want to get out of the house. We’re trying to find a way to get teens and volunteers to garden with us and flip some compost.
It’s exciting to see how the kids who come here really like gardening and being outdoors. The kids can be kind of naughty when they’re inside, but once you take them outside and start showing them plants, they start seeing how peaceful it is. It’s cool to see how they relax when they’re gardening and watering plants. It’s like meditation.
MAYA: Do you find that gardening together is another way to share stories with the kids you work with? That’s one of my favorite things about working with land alongside other people.
TIERON: Yes! It’s nice to share stories. I remember we used to do storytelling when we were harvesting corn. When we were like taking off the seeds of the corn and packaging them, we used to tell funny stories and old stories that our parents used to tell us that have been passed-down.
MAYA: I first met you down on the Dine College campus for the Bioneers Intercultural Conversations gathering where you and 40 other youth from across the country came together for an educational exchange to learn more about critical issues facing Indigenous and all peoples. That’s how you initially got connected to Bioneers, yes?
TIERON: Yes. I’ve been twice, and last year I was a facilitator. Intercultural Conversations is amazing. I’ve met a lot of interesting people. The first year, I hung out with a bunch of other natives from different places and we shared stories about how our cultures are different, but yet in a way the same. The experience made me really appreciate being Navajo. I learned a lot too. We heard stories of the North Dakota pipeline and how natives have an old story of the Black Snake running through North Dakota. It turned out to be the DAPL pipeline. It’s crazy! These stories make me believe that there are time travelers. We learned about petroglyphs and meanings behind them. Natives from Fort Defiance, from New Zealand, from California, all had petroglyphs.
Youth participating the Intercultural Conversations project on the Navajo Reservation in 2019
MAYA: You just said that going to the Bioneers Conference and being with other native youth has made you proud to be Navajo. What do you feel proud of?
TIERON: I feel proud of being Navajo because of how resilient we are. We keep going forward. No matter what is thrown at us, we’re still going to be here. It’s that warrior mentality. You always want to be great, and that’s what we at Rez Refuge are trying to inspire and bring that out in youth.
We want them to step forward into confidence to be better, because we know they can be better. I didn’t know I could be here right now doing this type of work. It’s really eye opening to see how the staff at Rez Refuge helped me and how I’m now helping other youth. I wonder if I’m going to mentor a youth and if that youth will go on to do something great.
MAYA: Before we end, I am wondering if you have any advice you want to share with youth out there. What are you hopeful about in all this?
TIERON: I’m hopeful for a lot of things. More than anything, I’m hoping that everyone is staying safe, washing their hands, making sure they’re taking the right precautions, and that you’re taking care of yourself. If you feel like you’re getting a cold, make sure to get yourself checked. But it’s going to get better.
MAYA: Thanks for that. Is there anything else you want to share?
TIERON: I got lifesavers and I wish Jim’s would open up. Just kidding… I’m all finished.
Vanessa Raditz (they/them) is one of the guiding voices of Queer Ecojustice Project and the producer of the film Fire and Flood. In this conversation with Maya Carlson of Bioneers, they offer insights into the many forms of queer resilience as well as the importance of visibilizing the vulnerabilities queer and trans folks face while also uplifting the resistance, regeneration and power of LGBTQ+ people in movements for justice, care and liberation.
MAYA CARLSON: Can you tell me who you are, where your feet are grounded, and how you describe yourself?
Vanessa Raditz
VANESSA RADITZ: My name is Vanessa Raditz, and I currently live in Athens, Georgia, which is in Muskogee Creek territory, and within the range of Cherokee territory as well. I am originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, the suburbs outside in D.C. in Piscataway territory. And I lived out in Ohlone territory in the East Bay for about six years.
I am a graduate student in a PhD program at the University of Georgia in the geography department. For my PhD research I look at queer resilience, particularly using visual methods to visibilize the vulnerability and resilience practices of queer and trans people, particularly marginalized queer and trans people, including those with disabilities, people of color, and folks who’ve been incarcerated or otherwise marginalized in the present systems. That work comes out of reflection, study, and community over the past four years with the Queer Ecojustice Project, which started in the Bay Area. We wanted to weave a narrative that understands how the extractive economy is also a gendered economy, and how ecological liberation requires liberation and sovereignty of the gendered body.
MAYA: What does Queer Ecojustice mean to you and how does the the Queer Ecojustice Project put that into practice?
VANESSA: Ecojustice is a framework that brings together environmental justice, food justice, and climate justice. They are all related and inextricably bound by processes of racial subjugation, capitalism, nations and borders. Part of what Queer Ecojustice does is articulate how heteronormativity and cis patriarchy are also entangled with these other structures.
On a practical level, many of the queer and trans people who are in environmental justice organizations are leading incredible campaigns right now but don’t necessarily have a narrative for why their identities as queer and trans people are relevant in the struggle. Grounding our movements in that understanding is especially important for younger generations who are coming in bold and unapologetic about their identities. There’s an immense power in reclaiming that we are part of the natural system.
Queer Ecojustice names the indivisible levels of vulnerability to climate change. I think about the facts that 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+ and one in two black trans people will be incarcerated over their lives. Incarcerated populations aren’t evacuated in natural disasters. They’re used as the unpaid and underpaid labor to deal with the catastrophes and are generally subjugated to incredibly harsh measures in carceral institutions that are only exacerbated in these moments when the public can’t be there for visitation and surveillance. The Queer Ecojustice Project also threads together the healing justice world, which is very queer and trans-led, and the food justice world, which has so many amazing queer farmers within it. All of these groups are in a concerted movement together. We’re not dying, we are fighting and building. We have a vast network of people who are doing the work in very different ways.
MAYA: What’s the relationship between Queer Ecojustice and Bioneers?
VANESSA: I initially came to Bioneers through the youth program. I was a sophomore in college, and the chair of our student environmental club. Bioneers is where I was introduced to biomimicry and the magical world of fungi. It was the first environmental space in my life that had such an insistence on prioritizing indigenous voices and women’s leadership. I started doing environmental work in Kenya with Wangari Mathai so I think I was primed to receive some of the messages of Bioneers. Being in a conference space and seeing the way that indigenous leadership was prioritized had an enormous impact on my life.
Bioneers has always been very queer to me. There is power in naming it with spaces like the Queer Mixer or programming in the Youth Unity Tent. Queer Ecojustice Project isn’t bringing the queers to Bioneers, we’re creating space to name and uplift all the folks that are already in our movements doing this work.
This is especially important considering that we have youth who, because of this historical moment in which they are growing up, are able to articulate at very young ages that, “This is my identity; this is how I want you to call me; this is the restroom I should be able to use; these are the spaces that need to be provided for me.” Part of what Queer Ecojustice Project is doing at Bioneers is saying, “That’s right! We are affirming you and we’re going to provide those things for you. This is the space you deserve. You’re absolutely right, you deserve this space, let’s make it happen!”
MAYA: Going back to Queer Ecojustice, would you say this framework both addresses the vulnerabilities and structures of oppression that queer and trans folks face while also reclaiming that narrative by centralizing queer resilience and resistance?
VANESSA: Part of queer resilience right now is that resilience as a term is very fishy. It can be a trickster word. It’s used by nations and corporations in ways that go against some of the goals of ecojustice movements. Part of “queering” is questioning that co-optation. Indigenous Peoples have been on the frontlines of this global extractive economy and have continued to create driving cultures of not just survival but also regenerative reclaiming of beauty and sacredness.
It’s important to ground Queer Ecojustice in that history and the history of LGBTQ+ movements, recognizing that the separation from our bodies is part of that colonial encounter. The history of the LGBTQ+ movement has resisted apathy from a government and a world that is not in support of queer and trans liberation.
When I think of resilience, I first look through a lens of ecological resilience, and then through physical and psychological resilience. If I’m in a queer and trans space where people are talking about resilience, it’s almost always psychological resilience. You’ve been traumatized and thrown out of your home, you’re a homeless kid in the city trying to navigate these systems, what do you need to be resilient. That’s the conversation I so often hear in queer and trans spaces.
If I’m in ecological spaces where people are talking about resilience, they’re talking about how we design rainwater catchment systems and how we create diversified polycultural food ecosystems that invite multi species, relationality. A lot of my thinking has been trying to bring those conversations together.
Ultimately, the psychological resilience and the ecological resilience are melded through the body. That’s why I like working in food systems. Food is one of the first places where we can reweave those connections between body, Earth, mind, and spirit.
In a conversation about resilience with an herbalist and healing justice advocate in the Bay Area for my film Fire and Flood, I was asked the question, “What do we want to be resilient towards?” Even if we just consider a 500-year colonization period in the Americas, what does resilience look like if we’re thinking about a 500-year future, and we think of resilience to that potential wound and not the wound of today? If a hurricane comes and we are trying to be resilient from that hurricane, how are we trying to repair not just the world that we lost yesterday, but the world that was lost 500 years ago?
MAYA: Taking into consideration ecological, psychological and physical resilience, what are different sites you profile in your film, Fire and Flood?
VANESSA: I specifically profile Santa Rosa, following the Tubbs Fire of 2017, and Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. In both places, food systems, people, farmers, and other folks are involved, including healers, disability advocates as well as queer and trans nonprofit organizations. There are a lot of different people playing their role in that resilience ecosystem, recognizing the multiple aspects of resilience that are necessary to do that 500-year healing.
MAYA: What are the teachings and lessons we can all learn from queer resilience?
VANESSA: Looking at LGBTQ+ history, one really important truth to hold is that we have always existed. Existence is resistance. It’s important in this moment that people understand that they can be who they are, even as crises continue. We’ve seen disaster after disaster, COVID-19 is nothing new, but the religious right and the political institutions that are connected to the religious right can declare that these disasters are the result of queer and trans people, and it’s God’s retribution against their immorality. This is a very old narrative. That is one level of oppression that we’re fighting against. The history of LGBTQ+ movements says no, we’re natural and we belong.
The particular history of the AIDS crisis has a lot of lessons, especially for COVID-19. The government didn’t recognize the crisis and actively worked to suppress knowledge to inhibit scientists and to dismiss the deaths of people who were marginal to society – queer and trans people, people with disabilities, hemophiliacs, people that required blood transfusions were also part of the frontlines, and Haitians were actually part of the very first wave. There were always multiple parts of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) movement that were very invested in resisting the State and doing direct actions in public. At the same time, others in the movement were providing care for the sick, and creating spaces and acts to mourn the dead. ACT UP also leveraged the privilege that was predominately white and middle-class, to create real, structural wins for all people with HIV and AIDS. One oral history from a white gay ACT UP organizer expressed that if anyone else had taken the actions that white folks with privilege were carrying out, they would have been arrested. But he wasn’t. White folks with privilege were allowed to keep going for longer before police encounters. They had our own TV station. They had our own radio station. I could talk about ACT UP for a long time.
MAYA: You mentioned earlier that young folks who identify as LGBTQ+ are arriving into a very different world. To me, this includes the openness with which they can express their identities, the legacies from queer elders who have laid this groundwork for care webs, for holding each other and grieving, for vulnerability, and for new family networks. A question I have is how queer and trans young folks growing up today are going to continue evolving and building even more inclusive movements for upcoming generations?
VANESSA: Another important lesson is from Mab Segrest who wrote Memoirs of a Race Traitor and is one of the founders of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). She gave this really impassioned speech in the early 90s at the first Creating Change conference to ever come to the South. The title was “A Bridge, Not a Wedge”. How can queer identities be a bridge not a wedge? How is understanding our history of marginalization within society a way to connect and build coalitions with people of color, with indigenous communities, with folks who don’t share whatever our pansexual, demiromantic, X Y Z identity is, but are also oppressed under the extractive economy of gender racial capitalism? How do we continue to use our deep understandings of our bodies and attractions and desires to build stronger coalitions?
MAYA: When you think about upcoming generations in that 500-year vision, what are the hopes for what we can learn from these times and move forward?
VANESSA: When you first ask that question, I go to a very dark place. I hope they have a chance. My hope for the young folks is that the older folks – myself included – and the people on whose shoulders I’m standing, have been able to do enough in the time that we have to get the young people coming into the world right now a chance to continue this journey. My biggest hope is that we’ve done enough, not necessarily to fix the situation completely, but at least to give the ones still working on this a fighting chance.
And again, in the spirit of Southerners on New Ground and their commitment to liberation in our lifetimes, I hope for them, no matter what the world is that they are growing up into, that they’re able to manifest microworlds of tastes of liberation within their lifetimes. I really believe strongly in the power of that refiguration and the way that the radical imaginary can deepen, and that we can deepen our trust in our imaginations when we are given the opportunity to taste little moments of the prefiguration of those dreams. That’s what I hope for them, the opportunity to smell and hear and lick a tiny bit of that queer ecological future.
The following blog post was written by Bioneers board member and the Othering and Belonging Institute’s Director, john a. powell, on June 16, 2020. It was originally posted on the Othering and Belonging Institute’s website.
john a. powell
I’ve lived in and traveled to all corners of the country talking to people about race for many years. One question that many people new to understanding racism are asking is, “What’s wrong with saying all lives matter?” Sometimes the question is asked earnestly, and sometimes it’s a defiant retort to “Black Lives Matter.”
The idea that all lives matter is certainly true. All lives should matter. We all have a stake in supporting our shared and collective humanity. As the pandemic has shown, every person’s health and well-being is intimately bound together, whether you’re in a city of 10 million in China, in a small town in Italy, or at Carnival in New Orleans. Our care needs to extend to all of us, as well as to other species.
Yet the problem with “all lives matter” is that it’s based on the myth that all racial groups are situated similarly, that we all have equal opportunity and access to things like a good elementary school, a bank loan, a doctor who believes us, healthy food, and that we can all rely on and trust government institutions, like schools and law enforcement, to care for us. For example, most white people more or less have faith that they can call the police, and the police will help them out. Black communities are much more hesitant because they understand that the outcomes can be deadly.
All lives matter also ignores history and resists efforts to improve the lives of Black people specifically, who have been struggling for 400 years under the weight of anti-Black racism to belong in this country and to have our humanity seen. A recent study found that the impact of trauma from oppression and violence can be detected in families for five generations. Could your great, great grandparents vote? Could they own property? Were they lying in bed at night afraid? Were they allowed to go to school? Could they read? Were they migrating across the country to escape violence? Were they barely surviving or dreaming of an exciting future?
Putting Our Different Experiences in Context
Consider a statement that women managers in the workplace should be treated with respect. One could say all managers in the workplace should be treated with respect. While the second statement may be true, it ignores the reality that women are much less likely to be accorded respect in the formal workplace, and women managers should be treated with respect too.
One more example may be helpful. If someone is physically attacked, it is an assault. If someone is physically attacked because they are gay, it constitutes two crimes: An assault and a hate crime. A hate crime is an attack on the person and all people in the category. It is a form of terrorism and treated differently than a simple assault.
Black Lives Matter is saying people are being attacked by the police because they are Black. While whites might be concerned about being mistreated by the police, I have not heard of a white person saying they were mistreated or attacked because of their whiteness.
So when you say “all lives matter,” you are making a statement based on the false perception of a post-racial society, which means we’re free from racism. We know that’s not true. And by denying the reality of where racial groups are situated, that statement in effect maintains structures built on a foundation of white supremacy.
Breaking vs Bridging
Because it can be easily misunderstood, I’ve even been critical of the term “Black Lives Matter.” What that term is really saying is that “black lives matter too.” But that nuance gets lost to many whites when you don’t explain that, and you instead risk engaging in what I call “breaking.”
Breaking language frames efforts for equality and justice as being “us vs. them,” a zero-sum game where one group’s benefit comes to another group’s detriment, and inevitably gives rise to a backlash. The “all lives matter” retort is an example of that backlash.
As an alternative, what I advocate for is “bridging,” meaning we want to engage with other groups, and we are willing to hear their story and their suffering. Their humanity is not called into question. We can be part of a shared fabric. To recognize someone’s full humanity does not entail either agreeing with them or measuring against our own. We understand that racial justice and equality are not zero-sum games.
To assert that Black lives, that gay lives, that women are of equal value does not entail a put-down of cis straight white males. But it suggests that much of our practices and norms at one time were explicitly designed to say some people matter, and others don’t.
This article contains the content from the 6/18/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
American history is inseparable from the anti-Black racism and exploitation weaved into its very foundation. As we seek to topple systems of violence and oppression against Black communities, we must acknowledge these uncomfortable truths, but also the people power that has driven the most powerful civil rights movements throughout history. That includes the one we’re living through now. We’re beginning to see glimmers of action towards pathways forward and practical solutions that, on their own, will not “fix” systemic racism but represent real steps in the right direction.
This week, we explore anti-racism with Ibram Kendi, restorative justice with Fania Davis and public health at the nexus of racism and state violence with Dr. Rupa Marya. Read on and share widely, help us move forward towards a united, antiracist society.
Celebrating Juneteenth
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, declaring that all enslaved people were to be set free. But it wasn’t until two years later, on June 19, 1865, that Major General Gordon Granger had delivered that message to the last group of Black Americans subjected to slavery in Galveston, Texas.
As a celebration of Black freedom and liberation, Juneteenth is a powerful kind of Independence Day. Find a list of Juneteenth resources below, including essential readings and events near you.
From Six Nineteen: This nonprofit organization is organizing Juneteenth uprisings nationwide, to send the message that Black Lives Matter.
From the New Yorker: “Growing Up with Juneteenth” | Professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed reflects on how a Texan holiday transformed into a national tradition.
From Demos: This digital letter includes ways to support Black leadership and to take action against racial injustice.
Restorative Justice: From Harm to Healing | Fania Davis & Cameron Simmons
The restorative justice movement has boldly shown that arresting the cycle of youth violence and incarceration early can lead to significant changes. Restorative justice leaders Fania Davis and Cameron Simmons describe the incredibly effective work being done to transform schools and juvenile justice policies in Oakland, CA and around the country.
How to Be an Antiracist: A Conversation With Ibram X. Kendi
In his book How to Be an Antiracist, professor Ibram X. Kendi challenges traditional definitions of racism, and who can be racist. In this interview, Kendi discusses what’s missing from the discourse around racism, the difference between antiracism and non-racism, and more.
Rupa Marya – Health and Justice: The Path of Liberation through Medicine
Dr. Marya has been working to make visible the health issues at the nexus of racism and state violence through: her medical work; The Justice Study (national research investigating the health effects of police violence on Black, Brown and other disenfranchised communities); helping set up a free community clinic for the practice of decolonized medicine under Lakota leadership at Standing Rock (the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic); and international outreach with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes.
From the Washington Post: “I’m a black climate expert. Racism derails our efforts to save the planet.” | Marine biologist and policy expert Ayana Johnson pens this op-ed around a burning question: “How can we expect black Americans to focus on climate when we are so at risk on our streets, in our communities, and even within our own homes?”
From Kanopy: “WHOSE STREETS?” | This short film provides an unflinching look at the Ferguson uprising, told by the activists and leaders who live and breathe this movement for justice.
From NPR: “How Much Do We Need The Police?” | In this interview, Alex S. Vitale — author of the book, The End of Policing — discusses what roles police should and shouldn’t play, what he makes of the current protests and what actual change in the way police in this country do their jobs might look like.
From Yes! Magazine: “Why Police Reform Is Not Enough” | This essay asserts that the focus on police reforms, such as improved training, doesn’t solve racially biased policing. That’s because of the nature of policing itself.
Take Action with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Today, years of hard-fought civil liberty protections are under threat — and to influence lawmakers, the ACLU needs everyone to get involved. Click the button below for actions that you can take, both big and small, to help make a difference.
