In this conversation, AJ Haynes and Eric Fleming discuss the experiences and perspectives of Jalessah Jackson (they/them), a black, queer feminist mother and founder of the Decolonial Feminist Collective. Jalessah Jackson shares their journey and a global and local perspective of reproductive justice in action. They emphasize the importance of integrating spirituality and organizing and the need for a decolonial feminist approach to reproductive justice that includes anti-imperialism and mutual aid. Jalisa also highlights the significance of community care, the role of ancestors, and the creative methods of resistance inspired by Audre Lorde's concept of the erotic. Follow @decolonialfeministcollective
https://www.jalessahj.com/home
Jalessah T. Jackson (they/them) is an interdisciplinary cultural worker, educator, writer, and organizer. With a background in Black Studies, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Cultural Studies she researches and teaches about critical theories of race, gender, class, sexualities, disability and resistance movements.
Across all of their experiences in the classroom and in community, their focus has been on the ways that systems of oppression structure opportunities in society, and her daily work has been with/in communities who are marginalized through those structures.
I'm Eric. Hey, hi, I've been emailing. Yes, I use, like, all the pronouns. I'm not precious about it. I think more often than not, he him, but like, whatever you want to call me is totally fine. Yeah, I'm just really. Excited to, like, get to know more about you. I've been studying your IG and things that you post, the things that your organization posts, and I'm like, Oh, this is dope. I cannot wait. So I'm just going to jump into the question. So for anybody who has not done a deep dive on your IG, like I did, so let's talk a little bit about you, your background, the world you inhabit, and how they've shaped your perspective. So, who is you? Who
am I? You know, what's funny is that that's the question that I'm always like, Oh, how do I talk about that? So, yeah, my name is Jalisa. Jalisa Jackson. I use the unpronounce I'm a black, queer feminist mother. I have two little ones, Samira and nadisa. And I am a cultural worker, a reproductive justice practitioner, and I like to say teacher, learner, educator, community based educator, that I'm currently, you know, living, loving and raising my children in so called Atlanta, Georgia on occupied Muskogee territory. I'm also the founder of decolonial Feminist Collective. This year, makes five years of what began as a just a book club, right? It started in 2020 after I had attended another excursion to Brazil. I attended the International decolonial black feminist summer school and had, you know, my backgrounds in African and African Diaspora Studies, gender women's sexuality studies, and so, you know, I had been studying Brazil knowing that it has the second largest black population in the world outside of only Nigeria. Incredibly excited to have the opportunity to be there and to learn from the black feminists there. But I was inspired to start this project because I noticed that in the United States, a lot of our conversations about black feminisms really centered on black feminists in the United States context. And what I know by engaging some of our black feminist foremothers, like Audre Lorde, like June Jordan, like Tony kmbara, was that they had deep they held close to their chest anti imperialist politics. And beyond holding those politics, they traveled internationally to ground with to connect to third world feminists, right and so and when I think about carrying on a strong black feminist tradition, it also looks like reinvigorating a deep connection, and not just lifting up the names of black feminists that are movement makers, resistors in the global south. But what actually, you know thinking about some successful revolutions that have taken place in the global south. What is it that we in the United States, those of us who live in the Imperial core, what is it that we can learn about their approaches to social movements, their approaches to political and popular education, their methodology, right? And so I'm thinking about solidarity as it relates to decolonial black Feminisms. It began as, you know, a place where people can come and join and to study, right? Thinking about what does it look like to create a third space for collective study that exists outside of academic institutions. Once upon a time, I thought I was going to get a PhD, but I was starred from my master's degree program, and I was like, I don't think the, you know, the ivory tower is for me, right? And as someone who tries to stay as close as possible to community, how can I bring the sort of university classroom to your community? And so decolonial Feminist Collective is primarily concerned with political, popular education, mutual aid and international solidarity building. I mean, we do that through regular PE. It's our reading group, reading and discussion groups, which people join from all over the world. And so it's an opportunity to, you know, stick to that solidarity and learning from different contexts. And also, yeah, so to bring those learnings to us. We also have hosted teach ins around predatory policing in the United States. What are the links between projects like stop cop city, for example, and Atlanta, where there's all this funding going to policing, and the, you know, the training of our police officers abroad, right in Israel, what are the connections between how much we spend on militarization and our the budgets, the increasing budgets for war and the lack of social services for our communities at home. And so it's really to help connect those links. And so I really felt like I saw a gap in how we approach our work as black feminist United States. And this is not to discount the magnificent work that black feminists are doing, but I think, you know, part of being a good practitioner is practicing revolutionary criticism, revolutionary self criticism, and constantly reviewing our work and seeing how we might improve upon it to you know, and also improve the material conditions of our people on the ground outside of DFC. I also, you know, I am a consultant. I help train organizations. I facilitate the building of curriculum. I really love to learn. I love to teach. And so that's kind of really my bag, anyways, that I can support people and them developing themselves, support people in organizations, and developing their political identity, their ideologies as organizations. That's a little. That's my lane. So, yeah, that's that's a lot about me. A little in. A lot about me, but yeah,
that's fine. We wanted to know. We needed to know. This is not a question that I prepared, but my ear is on fire with the phrase that you just said. It was a revolutionary criticism. Talk to me about what's revolutionary about it. Let's, can we second? Yes,
definitely. So it's so interesting that you asked that today is the first day of August. At decolonial Feminist Collective, we are commemorating Black August as we do every year. And you know, Black August is a time where we really think about our political prisoners. We focus on fasting, studying, fighting and training our bodies, because we know that we are up against a lot, and we can learn from the Black Panther Party, who was engaged and struggle on multiple fronts. And revolutionary criticism is a term that I learned from asafia buchari, who was a black political prisoner. She was a member of the Black Panther Party. She co founded the Jericho movement for political prisoners to raise awareness about how we need to be supporting them. And she wrote about revolutionary criticism in a chapter where she was criticizing herself, right? She was talking about how liberalism is corrosive to our organizations, and it pushes us away from deeply reflecting on some of the ways in which we might be missing the mark, some of the ways in which we might be operating in a way that is not all the way in alignment with our values. And practicing revolutionary criticism is the primary tool for combating liberalism in our organization, which creates space for gossip, right? So instead of going directly to the person, perhaps you might talk to someone else about a grievance that you have, or a criticism about a strategy or a tactic. And you know, I think about revolutionary criticism. I used to my previous position, I was the Interim Executive Director at ARC southeast, which is a regional abortion fund, and we read this chapter to think about how we embody and practice revolutionary criticism. But I also think as a parent, that's a value that I bring into my household, right? And as someone who's deeply committed to reflecting on how adultism is deeply embedded into the parenting practices that so many of us just adopt because that's the social script of the society that we live in. We live in a society that devalues children and that does not create the space for, you know, constructive feedback to parents, right? And so I also think about it in the context of being a parent of two young people. I have a 12 year old and a two year old, and my 12 year old is, you know, really coming into herself, right? And, you know, sometimes she has a problem with certain things that I do or say, and I want to create a level of safety in my household for her to be able to also practice revolutionary criticism. I think it's important to name because sometimes criticism, like the hair, stands up for people, or, I've said, revolutionary criticism in rooms, and it's rubbed people the wrong way by so I think it's important to also name that it comes from a place of love, right? Love of yourself, the love of your people, the love of revolutionary struggle, that understands that in order to improve our material conditions, we have to constantly be reflecting practicing self reflexivity, as practitioners, as organizers, as movement leaders, right? And we can't do that without the criticism piece. And so I think a reframing of it as a practice that is developed because we love is helpful for thinking about revolutionary criticism. Yeah, I
want to just get finger snaps. Yes, thank you for breaking that down. Thank you for asking about it's a beautiful way of approaching like growth and systemic change, like, if we can't look honestly and accurately at how we're showing up, then we're not really almost harming any kind of movement we're trying to put together exactly, exactly. So I want to shift a little for our listeners. Can you define liberalism to those that aren't familiar with the term?
Yeah, that's a good question too. So, and I think that's important too, because when we think about in the United States context, liberal is used very liberally, right? What does that mean? But when I think about liberalism, I think about a political and moral philosophy that is based on the right of the individual. So as a decolonial feminist, we often talk about the West, and when I say the West, I'm talking about the United States, and talking about Europe, I'm talking about UK, right? Like Australia, the hyper focus being on individual freedoms, but our communities have always been collective minded, right? And so when we think about liberalism, there's this hyper focus on the individual rights, the individual liberties and political equality right, right to private property before the law. But you know, so we want to come back hyper individualism. We want to come back Western individualism, because it doesn't speak to the collective conditions of our people, and it doesn't speak to the interdependence that is necessary for achieving our collective liberation, right? And so the chapter that I'm referencing from buchare is titled, I don't know the full title, but it's like enemies and friends, like part of liberalism is confusing us around who are our enemies, right? And who are our friends, and when we say friends, we're not talking about like. I hang out with on the weekend, like, who I invite over for tea, right? The sipping of tea, the spilling of tea, right? It's not that right. We're talking about being clear on who is in alignment with our oppressor to prevent the advancement of our revolutionary objectives, and who do we collaborate with on campaigns, on our organizing strategies to achieve our goals. Liberalism teaches us that we should only work with those that we like, right like people that we are actually friends with, and combating liberalism emphasizes the importance of putting smaller differences, and this doesn't mean not practicing criticism, but it's a recognition that we don't need to like each other, we don't need to be best friends, we don't even need to be friends to recognize that our destinies are bound up with each other and that we need each other and that some differences need to be put aside for the larger objectives of our movement. And so liberalism promotes sort of tendencies and behaviors that are corrosive to organizations because they hyper focus on the individual and subvert the sort of collective
demands of AJ, any more questions about that before we it feels good, yeah,
and I'm just gonna be throwing things in the chat and staying, yeah, staying quiet and snapping and probably making me lots of crazy faces and
no you, you remind me of me whenever. And I'm like, this is just what I do. That's very common response vibes like someone saying something, like my head will sometimes look it's about to fall off, because I need you to know how much,
yeah, I'm also, I'm muted when you're talking, but there's a lot of Yeah, yeah,
I do that too, yeah. So
I want to shift into the repro justice conversation a little bit. Yeah, I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about, like, what or who has influenced your relationship to reproductive justice concepts and equity.
Yeah, I really appreciate this question, because it allows me to really reflect back and whenever I think about, where did I learn? RJ, where did I first encounter it? There is the Where did I learn RJ as it relates to a way of being, knowing, practicing, thinking, doing, and then when I encounter the theoretical framework and movement, and those are not the same, those didn't happen at the same time for me. And so I appreciate an opening to sort of discuss that genealogy in a different way. But yeah, I you know, and I'm sure so many others would also say that they learned about RJ values and principles from their families, right? And more specifically, from my mother, who is and I've been in this, in these RJ streets for a while, I've been in these movement streets, right? She is the most principled person I've ever encountered. My mother had me when she was 17 years old and she was a single parent. I watched her right and you know that it reminds me, as a parent that I'm always being watched by my children. She embodied a lot of the values and principles of RJ taught me from an early age to ask questions, and I remember she would say things like, don't even believe what I tell you without doing your own research, right? Like, don't just take what I'm saying at face value. Like, go out there and find out on your own. So just the encouragement from her to be bold, to believe in myself, to trust myself, to do the necessary research and educating of myself, she instilled the values of agency and bodily autonomy from a very early age. I was a very inquisitive child, so taught me about anything that I would ask her. But yeah, I think having a child as a teenager, my mom had to go to school during the day, and she also had to go to evening school. I watched her struggle to balance motherhood and work and school, you know, she eventually went to community college to, you know, eventually go to nursing school to eventually become a nurse, right? And in my family, that's a very big deal, you know, I come from people who have really been impacted by mass incarceration. I come from people who have been impacted by, you know, gun violence. I come from people who are very hard workers and were not able to really pursue the educational route that my mom first and her family was able to and then myself. But yeah, I think watching my mother, that was my first encounter, and then, you know, I was always like, yeah, I want to live a very different life. You know, I don't want to become a parent at all or early, for sure, not early, but I also became a parent at an early age, and that really politicized me. It was through navigating being an undergraduate student, trying to work, navigating the social supports that I should have been entitled to, and facing discrimination, facing adultism, facing gender oppression, that that really made me angry. And you know, as Audre Lorde says, like there's uses to our anger, that's one of my favorite essays of hers that I return to all the time, whenever I feel angry, and we live in a world that tries to diminish our anger and that tries to pathologize. Is it? But the anger at that moment was useful for me. It really lit a fire. I'm an Aries. It lit a larger fire under me to really focus and, you know, I wanted to understand the ideals of us, democracy, like life, liberty, freedom, hard work, and how that was not aligning for me. I was always a hard worker. I always went to school and got good grades, and at the end of the day, there were intentional barriers put up that prevented me from accessing the necessary supports to support myself as a student and also to support my daughter at that time. And so I encountered RJ that way. I, you know, oftentimes reflect on the lengths that the women in my family had to go to take care of their families and the activities that they needed to engage and to provide for them. Sometimes, you know, activities that would be frowned upon if we're talking about respectability politics, right? And so I remember in grad school, I wanted to write about some of these activities, right? Like I wanted to write, I started writing and thinking about sex workers, and specifically sex workers who were parents, and thinking about their survival tactics as subversive, right? And I got a lot of pushback in grad school from my program director, who was saying, who's a white feminist, who was saying, sex work cannot be subversive, like it's not subversive. And I think that in a predatory democracy in which we live that almost necessitates the premature death of black people, but especially black birthing people, strategies and tactics that are meant to sustain our survival are inherently subversive, right? And so, you know, she encouraged me to write about something else for my master's thesis, and I could not be convinced to be to write about anything else. And so I did. I wrote about sex workers, black femme sex workers, who were parents who were against, you know, many odds doing what they felt necessary to take care of their families. I learned about a long history of black sex workers. You know, I studied black sex workers in the 19th century in Chicago, right? And so it connected me to this long history of women who did what they had to do, who did whatever necessary to support their families, right? And so we think about their RJ tenants, the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, the right to sustain and support your children in healthy and safe environments without the fear of violence from the state. We're always under the threat of violence from the state, right? And so I'm thinking about these principles and how they've shown up in our history with communities, and how we don't know about some of these histories because the activities were frowned upon, right? And so that was my sort of, you know, an abbreviated, informal way of engaging with the reproductive justice framework. And then, you know, my first sort of entree into the RJ movement, more officially, was through working at an RJ organization. I worked at sistersong Back in the day, and I was really excited about connecting what I had learned in my master's program, connecting what I had learned in my black studies program to the work that was happening on the ground, to the communities that I was living within, right? Like, I don't think about myself as outside of the communities that are centered in reproductive justice. I am very much of my community. I'm a member of my community. My community members know who I am. They see me in community with them, right? And so, yeah, you know, I bounced around a few times, you know, doing more comprehensive RJ work, training, educating at sistersong. Then I moved to the abortion space with feminist Women's Health Center, and then, as I mentioned, leading arc southeast and abortion fund and all of those helped me see a different angle into RJ work allowed me to engage with different segments of our community that needed different things at different times, and so it has been really impactful for me to think about RJ in my life. I don't call myself an RJ leader. I call myself an RJ practitioner. I think that our values are something that have to be lived, and they I think that they're not just lived as someone who works at an RJ organization. They have to be embodied in your life, in your daily life and your daily practices, who you you know, who you be, both inside and outside of any institution.
Yeah, we're kind of talking around this next question, but there's, there's clearly a lot of overlap in your experiences, you know, with all of your studies and all your activism, all your your work, like with communities, but I'm thinking about more specifically, with the decolonial Feminist Collective and RJ space, right? Yeah. How do they inform each other? Like, how is your work with decolonial Feminist Collective breaking down or shifting or building upon RJ
principles? Yeah. Thank you for that question, because I've been thinking about that a lot. And, you know, I bring RJ into every space that I'm in. I think one of the things that sort of very clearly identifies a decolonial feminist politic is an approach to anti imperialism. And while reproductive justice is a framework that is rooted in the human rights framework, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be specific. Critic a decolonial feminist approach to reproductive justice recognizes the limitations of a framework that is founded within an institution, ie the UN that has white supremacist origins and that often operates to the benefits of the West, specifically the United States. And I'll give an example. You know, we've been seeing the conversation of a ceasefire come up at the UN a few times, and we've seen nations across the world vote for a ceasefire, and we've seen those votes be thrown out, or we've seen it not come to fruition. Of a ceasefire come to fruition because the United States voted against it. Now, how is it that one nation can vote against something that the rest of the representatives are voting for, and it does not come to fruition. It speaks to a disproportionate influence that the United States has over the United Nations, right? And so I think we have to really look at the origins of institutions. And you know, I really respect a broadening of our understanding of rights, from civil rights to human rights, and I recognize that those were the intentions of our founding mothers, that civil rights are very context specific. They can ebb and flow and shift based on your geographic location, and that human rights are supposed to be inalienable rights people all over the world entitled to. But we know that in practice, that that's not the case, and so a decolonial feminist approach to reproductive justice. Would re articulate RJ in a decolonial feminist framework, right? It would lend an analysis of imperialism, which allows us to then think about the limitations of the United Nations, the limitations of a human rights framework, and think about a decolonial right, a decolonized framework, as we think about ways of being, of knowledge production, of the coloniality of gender, right? We were really weaving the threads, and we're also understanding the impact that the United States has on quote, unquote, human rights around the world. You know, the United States has over 800 military bases around the world. You know, it has its hand in sort of meddling and democratic elections around the world, right? And this is to maintain us hegemony, the power of the United States as the quote, unquote, most powerful nation in the world. And so, yeah, I think one of the primary ways that we make that connection is through a clear analytic of prisons and predatory policing and militarized policing United States and its connection to the US military and what it does, right? Decolonial feminists speak specifically to that. It's looking at the domains of power, right? You know, I think I find it interesting. Decolonial feminisms has very interesting criticisms about the limitations of frameworks like intersectionality, for example, right? And, you know, they talk about it being based on a US, sort of liberal, black feminist approach that is much more concerned with multiculturalism, as opposed to really thinking about the roots, the creation of racial categories, the creation of the human slash non human dichotomy, the creation of gender, which we understand as a colonial imposition, right? And so I appreciate decolonial feminism because it helps us zoom out and think more globally. I think, as it relates to reproductive justice, sometimes what we conceive as wins the United States are not wins for Women and Gender oppressed people of the Global South. And so I'm thinking about how we align our strategies and objectives to not stand on the necks of our siblings, right? Like, you know, I'm thinking about, yeah, I'm thinking about how we ensure that we're not de prioritizing feminist solidarity for our own comfort, because we exist in the Imperial core, right? And so how do we identify our enemies and friends? As Bukhari would say, and Pat Parker, right, a black feminist us, black feminist who was an anti imperialist, she says we must identify our enemies and friends based on their position on anti imperialism. Last summer, we at De colony Feminist Collective. We hosted a reproductive justice teach in which sort of really did some more weaving around the weapons exchange programs, the reproductive technologies that are sort of forced on global south populations by foundations in the United States, right? So I'm talking about foundations that fund some of the US repro movement, participating in eugenicist population control approaches on the continent, in Brazil, in India, right? And so even as it relates to who we rely on to move our work, which is very important, some of these same actors are participating on the global scale in really harmful ways. And so how do we be honest about what's needed, both, you know, politically like, how do we understand what's happening and ensure that we're not being used in any sinister way that prevents us a building of solidarity? But yeah, I think that's how I see the connection between RJ. It's really moving our analysis beyond it's drawing the connections we. Between the local and the global, and thinking about how they inform each other. And I think especially as a southern RJ practitioner, right, when we think about, you know, in the United States South, this is where black people are concentrated the you know, at least 60% of black people are concentrated in the United States South. And I think thinking about ourselves as part of the global majority, right, when we think about black and brown people being concentrated, in the Global South. And so even as I think about the South, I use South plural the South is who I'm committed to. And the United States South could be seen as an internal colony of the United States when we think about the material conditions of Southerners here. So there's a lot of parallel between what we're dealing with in United States South with the Global South. And so how do we be in deeper solidarity? Do colonial feminisms allows us to think about that and to practice in a way, practice our reproductive justice in a way that prioritizes a freedom that transcends the colonial borders that is the United States? Need you
to get off my neck for a second with your brilliance, yes, yes, yes, yes. I look you brought up some keywords that are again, making my ears set a fire. I want to talk about the local and the global for a second. Maybe let's go to the local first. This podcast is called the South has the answers, right, right, primarily as a way to push back on anti southern sentiment, which we're defining as a combination of anti blackness with classism, right? And so we are thinking about all the black women and FEM and queer folks that are moving through these oppressive conditions and really being creative and restructuring and attacking and tearing down. So I'm wondering if you can talk about either what you're noticing in your neck of the woods with other organizers in the US South, in terms of the creativity, in terms of what people are doing right, or even just specifically what you're doing. But what are you noticing? Like, what answers are you seeing out there from other folks in the South?
Yeah, that's important. Can I really see the South as, like, we're in the lab, right? Like, despite the disparaging stereotypes and dominant ideologies which are absolutely anti black, because, as I said, at least 60% of us are here. And so what is the root of these ideas about the backwardness and the lack of intellect, right? I think what I'm seeing that I want to lift up is a deep commitment to uplifting social reproduction work. And when I say social reproduction work, I'm thinking about the way that we take care of each other and the caring labor, the caring work. We don't always talk about it as work, but it is work that goes into maintaining and sustaining our social movements, right? One of the things that I noticed as a parent in RJ and then eventually leading an organization, is that you don't see a lot of parents as executive directors of reproductive justice organizations. The United States is a very anti parent, anti mothering, specifically space, as evidenced by our policy, the lack of childcare. We're constantly in a childcare crisis, and women are leaving the workforce because it's just not making sense to spend your mortgage same amount on your mortgage as it costs for childcare. And I think especially since the onset of the covid 19 pandemic, which really what we saw some really intense state failures of the state to really fill that gap for people. We see people forging and creating mutual aid networks, right? And not just the exchange of money, but the exchange of skills and services and care that helped keep people alive, and that continues to help keep people alive. So I've seen really creative ways, whether it's helping people pay their electricity bills and creating programs for that. I've seen a guaranteed income programs prop up by organizations that give black mothers in Atlanta, for example, a certain amount of money every month. That helps buoy people. When we see these state failures, it's important to also name that in my context, Georgia, Atlanta has the highest rates of income inequality in the nation. Atlanta leads the country in income inequality. The minimum wage in Georgia has not changed over the last sort of, like 20 years, or something like that. And the housing inequality is a huge issue here as well. And so we've seen a return to a prioritizing of caring labor, and I do think that there's more to be done. It typically falls on the people who are already charged with the responsibility of caring work, and so I would like to see it more evenly distributed, with the recognition that there is no freedom, there is no liberation without caregivers and parents at the table. Right? I really, truly believe that, and our ability to be deeply invested in organizing depends on how well our communities are caring for us and our ability to take care of each other. I've seen, you know, food distribution programs, right? Grocery distribution programs. I'm seeing Child Care collectives pop up to share some of that labor. I'm seeing homeschool. Collectives pop up to you know, really think about the limitations of the public school systems, and we see the book bans happening all the time, the bare bones curriculum that our children are presented with in school, and a real intention and prioritization of providing children with a more comprehensive understanding of their world and their responsibilities and it so those are some of the things that, you know, we see land projects cropping up and skill sharing, right? People teaching folks herbalism. You know, I'm thinking as someone who has ailments post covid, like I have really been able to develop an understanding of herbs. And this is also like returning to the source some of the skills and technologies that our people have had, especially in the south, who have not always had access to healthcare, like had to really learn from the land and learn with the land and be in relation to right relationship to the land to heal themselves. And so I see a returning to some of those technologies from my ancestors.
I'm noticing also in you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong here. But I feel like a lot of the things that we've learned from our ancestors that have been perhaps lost, maybe folks in the global south have not stopped doing or like maybe they're having a renaissance. Can you now connect us going from the local to the global what are some things that you're noticing as you travel throughout the global south that people are doing as acts of resistance for community care? What specific other areas?
Yeah, we know that our ancestors carried with them these technologies and held them and passed them on, you know, through generations, right? When our people were transported to the United States, just like our we did with spirituality, right? And I think as we talk about healing, spirituality is one of the pathways to healing ourselves and our communities. And so I see the connections, especially as it relates to being in right relationship with the land. We know that folks in the global south will be disproportionately and are disproportionately affected by the climate change that we're experiencing, right and so what does it look like to protect ourselves, protect our people from the impending climate catastrophes that we continue to experience. I think one of the things that really struck me while I have been traveling, and something that I really noticed was the prioritization of children and the emphasis that young people are not the sole responsibilities of their parents, but that there is a community, a collective responsibility for caring for them, for prioritizing them. For example, when I was in Cuba, there is a collective called Afro diverso. This is a queer and trans collective, and they educate the community. They go block for blog. We'll talk about block for block organizing. They were able to pass, they were able to help pass the families code in Cuba, which is the most expansive legislation for LGBTQ people. It is legislation that protects children. It's legislation that protects elders. It recognizes all types of family, familial groupings. And they're really methodical in how they were able to go, you know, communities and community to talk with people, to see what they were thinking about, things to educate families, to educate children, being present for children. And they were able to change hearts and minds and where people had, like, sort of antiquated beliefs about LGBTQ issues. They saw LGBTQ people showing up in the community and hosting after school programs for their children, and those had tangible impacts on people. I think, you know, especially as we talk about herbal medicine, we can learn a lot from global self practitioners, especially in places like Cuba again, who is not able to import medications easily because of the US embargo on the islands. So we see people making do with what they have and being incredibly resourceful with what they have. And I think you know, in the context of the inaccessibility of medications. I'm even thinking about how hard it is for someone in the United States to get past covid If they have a covid infection, how it's over $1,000 for people who are uninsured and most people don't have just a lingering $1,000 in their bank account, not in the not in the United States, people are living paycheck to paycheck. And so what are ways that we can return to or learn from global south practitioners about how to care for ourselves.
Can you tie in the spirituality element, like we talked about this briefly at, like, the very beginning, and I would love to circle back to that. So I'm curious about spiritual technologies that you're using in your RJ practice. Yeah,
yeah. So yeah, and you know, this is actually something that I noticed in RJ spaces, like I was just joking with a comrade. I'm like, I rarely go to a RJ meeting or something, and there's not an ultra build happening before we get into the nitty gritty, right? Like we're gonna do a little something, right? So what's there? Sometimes it's, it's more in the background than front and center. But, you know, I have learned from global south practitioners around the importance of a goongu, right, like your ancestors. And you know, there is this sort of Christian stronghold in the south, right? And so part of the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of power has been maintained through Christianity, right? I think it is a. Matter of fact that Christianity was used as justification for colonizing the global south. It was used to pathologize African traditional religions and spirituality. And some of those sort of ways of thinking have permeated or continued in our communities today. And so I think in the blending of it in the Global South, with more intention, right? With having ritual be a part of an organizing meeting, right? I remember being in Cuba, and we're talking about police violence, and then we're also like, there's drums present, there's dance. That's a part of it. And so, yeah, I think about even the sustainability of our movements, and how, you know, I don't like the term joy as resistance. Like, I think resistance is a very particular thing, but I think joy is a component to our sustenance, of the nourishment of our spirits, which allows us then to resist, right? I think I see this real blending of the two through spirituality in the Global South. And then, you know, like, as we were discussing earlier, we talk about the Orishas, who were warriors, who were also lovers, but who were warriors, and who we can call on to support us as we resist and are today. And one of my favorite quotes from Tony K bombar, she starts off by saying, I start with the recognition that we are at war, right? And she's not discussing war metaphorically, right? I think sometimes the United States, we think about war as something that's happening over there, as opposed to something that's happening in our communities, right? And, you know, I also think about the Haitian Revolution, where there was a ritual that took place before this multi year struggle to kick the colonizer, to kick the enslaver off of the island. And so there's a real link between our African indigenous spiritual practices and our ability to sustain ourselves, because we recognize that the struggles are long struggles like they're not going to be one. Our liberation is not going to be won overnight. I think we've seen real regression in some of the gains that our ancestors have made. And so what can we learn through spirituality, through political education, through studying, also decolonization movements, right? And so I said, I don't like the term joy is resistance. I think resistance is resistance, and this isn't to the Spirit's joy. I love joy. I love being happy. I love laughing. I love connecting with my people. And I just feels important to say because decolonization is used so frequently today, and there's this saying that decolonization is not a metaphor. There were actual decolonization movements that took place when we think about the PAIGC in Guinea, Bissau, when we think about the Mozambique and revolution, right, when we think about Latin American, the Zapatistas, right, there were actual armed resistance movements that really prioritize relying on each other for educational needs, for healthcare needs, for spiritual needs, right? And so I think that we can really study, we can and we should really study these decolonization movements and think about what is applicable to our context. And so I like the local to global thinking, because it's a recognition that there's a local context. And you can't copy and paste strategies and tactics from location to location, but you can draw parallels between the material conditions of the people that are fighting for their liberation and shared strategies. We know that during Ferguson, Palestinians were sharing with black Americans how to take care of each other on the streets, how to support each other when they're tear gassed, right? So there are technologies that can be shared across these borders that can help us towards this collective liberation for the global majority. I don't know if that answered your question, but that's Yeah, absolutely.
So I want to start to bring it to a close when you're talking about the ancestors earlier, and Audre Lorde came up a few times, so shout out to Mother Audrey. So I'm curious, have you connected with Audre lorde's uses of the erotic, and how do you bring that into your RJ practice? Yes,
it's so funny you bring up Audre Lorde, my little my two year old, is named after her. Their name is Adisa, and she changed her name to gamba. Adisa later in her life, she holds a very special place in my heart, and I have a giant sized picture of her in the adjacent room over here. Yes, I have connected to the uses of a neurotic that's so interesting that you asked me that, because I have been thinking a lot about the erotic in my life, right, and how it functions, and the creativity that is necessary to mount struggles against a predatory state, right? And I think the erotic opens the door for creative methods for all of us. And they might not look the same for each of us, right? They might, you know, for me, you know we were talking about like, what you're getting ready music before I hop on a call or I facilitate a training. I need to move my body. I need to dance. I need to connect with my heart, my brain. My heart, in my brain, that is in my gut, like the intuitive knowing, right? And I think that's connected to the ancestors, right? It's one of my ancestral gifts, is my intuition, right? My deep knowing in ways sometimes that other people do not know yet, or not know at the moment, or maybe just won't know. I'm also a child of Oshun, and so when we think about she is the Orisha of sensuality, femininity. She is the Orisha of dance. She is the Orisha of, like, a deep, motherly love, right? She's also, you know, connected to, like, the deep occult and magic, right? And so we're thinking about, like, where do these things connect? She's also a warrior, right? Like, you don't want to be on, oh, sad side. It's not good for you, right? Like, and so I think of the erotic showing up in my spiritual practice, right? And it's also a place, a deeply imaginative place, right? It's a place that I'm able to access through meditation, for example, and it's through the quieting of my mind when things are happening all around me all the time. You know, our society is designed to keep us in a loop. And so, yeah, I learned a lot from Audre Lorde around the erotic and I think, you know, yeah, she teaches us so much about it being a source, right, of being a source of sustenance, a source of creativity, a source of power, a source of connection. And then she also, you know, little known fact about Audre Lorde was that she had a rigorous anti imperialist consciousness, right? You know, I encourage folks to read her poem equal opportunity, where she is talking about in that poem, the betrayals of having black faces in high places, right? The betrayals of having black people over institutions that cause harm to black people and people of color. And this poem, she's talking about the invasion, the US, invasion of Grenada, which is where her family was from, right, I encourage people to read her essay apartheid USA, where she's thinking and talking about the United States support for South African apartheid, right? She talks about the United States being on the wrong side of history since the United States has existed. So what can we learn? What can we glean from this ancestral mother, right, this warrior, lesbian feminist mother, and I think that's connected to be erotic, right? So, like, how can we be creative to confront what is to be resisted so that we can live our lives with possibility, right? There's a poem by her that is titled power, I believe. And she starts off, it's really powerful. She says, the difference between poetry and rhetoric is the willingness to kill myself versus my children. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but I'm thinking about how we delay our struggles. Sometimes, I think often about what my children will be inherited, and what risks I might be willing to take so that they can inherit a more tenable world, right? A world that is not violent, a world that has possibility, that allows for them to live full lives, right? And, you know, she was real saucy with her pen. Like, I was like, when I first read that, I was like, dang. Like, but I was like, yeah, like, Am I willing? The difference between poetry, right? Like, really speaking the truth and rhetoric, which is just something that we hear all the time, right? Rhetoric becomes meaningless. It doesn't mobilize us. And so how do we move from rhetoric to truth telling?
How do we move from rhetoric to truth telling? Yes, you gifted us so many gems today. So I just want to thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing your brilliance.
I appreciate this chat with y'all. Yeah, thank
you. I also just want to shout you out and acknowledge you really quickly, because I think you I'll highlight two things you really made me think about honoring our bodies and the wisdom present in our bodies, and the magic of what's possible when we tap in, even if that is from throwing that ass in a circle. There's magic in release and connecting to oneself on a deep level and connecting with your ancestors through your movement. And two, you really lifted up care and sharing and community resources in such a lovely and beautiful and clear way. So I just want to thank you for lifting up two like tangible things that people could take away today and go check that ass and go share some dinner with somebody. And it could change a lot.
It really can. It has altered my life in very meaningful ways. So encourage it.
Jalisa, how can people find you?
I am on the social things follow decolonial Feminist Collective on Instagram. Jalisa, J on Instagram. Decolonial Feminist Collective is also on Facebook, if that's your thing, and decolonial FC
on Twitter, any trainings or anything coming up that you want to promote. Yes.
So we are in Black August. We will be hosting our collective study group with the conflicted womenists. This month, we are reading the war before by Safiya Bukhari and global lockdown Ray. Gender in the prison industrial complex, which moves us to the global understanding of prisons. And look out for some upcoming trainings on decolonial reproductive justice. There's there's more to be announced on that too. Yeah.
Thank you so much for your time. Darling. Appreciate you.
Thanks. Y'all take care.
Hello. You can't get one on, one off,
like, if this is like, how can we get you?