Now playing / tracks featured in this episode:
“W.D.E.” by Night Cleaner
“911 is a joke” by Public Enemy
Hey y’all,
Early drop of an extended version of the episode airing on Mainline News Hour via WRFG Atlanta tomorrow. My talk with Jasmine and Kwame of Community Movement Builders about current events unfolding in District 12, particularly the Pittsburgh neighborhood. CMB shared with me their letter to the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Association outlining the “misconduct, abuse of power, and failure to meet fiduciary needs” within the local neighborhood planning unit (NPU), specifically two individual gentrifiers in the area.
This is a prime example of how the broadly discussed issues of gentrification, capitalism, racism, and (neoliberal) fascism play out directly in local communities on a micro level. Examples include local gentrifiers calling 911 on organizers, reporting housing as a “party house” to the cops, shutting down a free fridge during a global pandemic, surveilling Black residents who are trying to build life-affirming systems, harassing Black residents, creating a closed/undemocratic environment within the NPU … all examples that Jasmine and Kwame discuss at greater length to illustrate the realities that Black working class/low-income residents are in while building sustainable, self-determined, liberated communities that seek to exist outside the exploitative and extractive system at-large.
The talk also lends to more reflection on how individuals (we) are deputized by the police state to do the work of the state for them. The local gentrifiers mentioned in this episode are not police themselves, and yet, they are—because they’ve embodied the tactics, behaviorisms, and thought patterns of a police state in their individual actions against Black working class residents in Pittsburgh. This is a reminder that this system is parasitic and insidious and can infect any one of us.
Are you holding on to any sense of moral superiority, thinking you’ve somehow evaded this infection? How are we carrying on the legacy of colonization in our everyday actions, thoughts, and life responses? How are we playing the role of a fascist in our interpersonal relationships? How can we heal ourselves and break the cycles of abuse, trauma, and power dynamics to become better comrades, lovers, partners, friends?
All questions I pose myself while I continue my journey as an abolitionist, journalist, human. Grateful for the lifelong work to grapple with these things and the continuation of growth; it feels never-ending and that feels okay with me. It’s expansive.
This version of the episode comes with an exclusive ramble-y intro by me that won’t be airing on the radio or our regular podcast. I’m doing a lot of inner work this month, so I’m swimming a bit but it feels appropriate given the current energies of the collective. Happy Pisces szn + Pisces new moon—hope everyone is allowing themselves or learning how to go with the flow with ease. (Do we have a choice other than going with the flow, really? Pisces, which rules the ocean and its tides, reminds us that we don’t.)
solidarity,
aja
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INDIGENOUS LACK ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This episode and post were written and recorded on the ancestral lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Tribe, who were forcibly removed by colonizers from this area now known as “Atlanta, Ga.,” in the early 1800s.
