Transcript

Josie Pickens 

We’re excited to bring you a live recording of the upEND Podcast, where we’ll discuss how various liberation movements are intertwined. Activists and organizers working across different areas prisons, immigration detention, family policing, and international freedom movements will share insights on how we can strengthen our solidarity and collective impact. 

Our guest host Corey Best, THE Corey Best, over there will moderate the conversation. Corey is a black father, activist and community leader working for racial justice within child welfare and human service systems, in all his endeavors Corey brings a deepend historical, and contemporary analysis of the interventions of race, racism, systems of oppression, and how those systems interconnect to produce white advantage gaps.

Tanisha Long, whose pronouns are she and her, is the Allegany County Community organizer for ALC with a B.A. in English writing and a background in legal Studies. She currently organizes with the Abolition Law Center around issues of mass incarceration. Since 2008, Tanisha has led rallies on climate change, voting rights, and mass incarceration.

She is also the founder of REvisions, a nonprofit focused on equitable education for students of color. She aims to harness the power of art and activism to improve the lives of those affected by unjust systems.

Tariq Ismail is an associate professor at CUNY Law School, where he co-directs the Family Law Practice Clinic and Family Defense Practicum. He is also counsel to CUNY laws Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) Project.

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez joined the ILRC in 2002, and has been advocating for immigrant rights since the age of 11. A graduate of Occidental College and Southwestern Law School. She is a member of the state Bars of Texas and California, and has worked with several immigrant rights organizations, including the National Immigration Law Center, and Tahiri Justice Center. In 2020, she was recognized as one of Houston’s unsung heroes.

We got heroes in the House, all throughout the space, by the way! So I want to welcome this panel to the stage.

Corey B. Best

Good afternoon everybody.

I know it’s a recorded podcast, but we still can be people with each other. And I’m going to just go back to sis’ grounding earlier, just remember where we are. So what I’ll do is just set a little bit of the container and then I’ll sit down and join the conversation, if that’s okay with you. 

“Solidarity – The Through Line Toward Abolitionism and Freedom.” You know, when Maya was having a conversation earlier with Kelly, it dawned on me that relationships are the precursor to revolution. Right? And so we’ll talk a little bit about that as we strive to continually practice exploring how to be in right relationship with each other, the world around us, and the earth that sustains us.

This will also require us to to learn, unlearn and unmake colonialism, capitalism, ableism, cis-hetero patriarchy, and imperialism to actualize a society and a world where criminalization, policing, and punishment are no longer possible, where they are not required to manufacture and uphold existing systems of economic, political and social domination. A key function of abolition as a means that in solidarity we must act free.

Build models today that represent how we want to live in the future. This includes practical strategies for taking small steps that move us forward toward making our dreams real, that lead us to all believe that the things that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives through and through. 

Today’s conversation with our comrades will actually weave these threads together in a conversation. These connections underscore the intertwined and relational nature of our global struggles against oppression, and the importance of solidarity across movements toward liberation. We will also excavate pieces of true narratives and the through line, and the impact is family annihilation and separation. Family separation is the collective impact. 

True narratives are comprised of participatory collective messages told by people who share communal experiences. We made clear the distinctions in this conversation, the methods and the tactics used in immigration detention, family policing, and the occupation—ongoing genocide, ongoing occupation, ongoing genocide of Palestinian people —all while ensuring that the legacies of settler colonialism, imperialism and enslavement are visible in our collective analysis and interrogation.

We need to be reminded of the global context that fuels the machinery. State violence was not eradicated 60 years ago with the civil rights movement, and as a nation, we have consented to inhumane acts rooted in colonialism, Zionism, universal Christianity, enslavement, capitalism, and global superpower collusion. This structure is no puzzle, but rather a compilation of patterns that stems from kidnap, terror, torture, incarceration, plantation ethos.

Rape culture requires genocide. We can go back to the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Nakba, not a single event, but these are patterns of forced assimilation, economic exploitation, dominance, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous invisibility. Let us pause with that. And bring some of the texture and weight to what you say Sis? An unscripted conversation, right? 

Tanisha Long

That’s how I am. I have to have a comfortable, unscripted conversation, especially when I’m in my community. So I consider y’all my community. You know, I’ve only met you for our whole 24 hours.

This is community. And that’s how I have comfortable conversations. I talk to the people most affected by the issues and the people who are most likely to make the change. So let’s have a comfortable conversation.

Corey B. Best

Let’s do it. All right. No particular order here. But we’ve talked about patterns and settler colonialism and things manifesting. So what we want to make clear are like the distinctions and how, I read somewhere Tarek that you said that genocide, enslavement, these things, and I’m paraphrasing, family separation is the that the impact. That that’s what’s happening. How are they manifesting in ways when it comes to Palestinian occupation, immigration, and prison? 

Tarek Ismail 

Thank you for that question. It’s a big one. And I guess I’ll start, with a bit of my own family’s history.

Because we’re here in community and it’s relevant. And I’m not talking about the time when, a caseworker asked, my little sister if anybody has a parent in the room that hits or pinches their kid. And my sister raised her hand, and we had a caseworker come to our house, although that’s true. And, you know, we were impacted in that way by CPS, but that’s not the same, that’s not the family policing I’m talking about or the family separation that I want to spend a second here talking about. 

What I want to talk about instead is, my dad, who was born in a tent in Beirut, Lebanon, might have heard of it, within miles of the tent, that he was born in, which is now a cinder block, home bombs are being dropped, 2,000-pound bombs are being dropped.

The other day, eighty-five 2,000-pound bombs were dropped that we paid for. Right. So I think about this fact and I think about the fact that my dad was the first of his generation, the first of his family line, in fact, to be born outside of Palestine. His brothers and sisters before him were born in the same house.

His parents, my grandparents, were born in the same house, my great grandparents and so on and so on. Right. When Israel was founded in 1948 as a settler colonial project. And what I mean by that is a project that wanted maximal land with the minimal amount of indigenous people. Right. And here I’m talking about maximal land for European colonizers with the minimal amount of indigenous people, a story that we know very well here in this country, right.

My dad’s family was expelled and my dad was born in that camp. And what that has meant for us is that while My dad ended up here, I have an aunt who was in Syria, an uncle who was in Lebanon with another uncle and another aunt, and uncle who somehow ended up in Canada.

And the basic fact of it means that if we wanted to have a cookout together, I don’t know where the hell we would do it. That’s family separation, right? And that is the impact that a settler colony can have on a family. When you don’t care about the indigenous population or the population that you’re seeking to demean, the very structure of that society depends on the most integral unit, which is the family.

And destroying that family unit then makes it that much easier to control that population. So I know it through my own family’s experience. And my family’s experience is not unique. It’s the story of at least 750,000, Palestinians who were expelled during the Nakba. And I don’t know if that answers your question, Corey, but that’s sort of how I hear it.

Tanisha Long 

I want to say something to your point. You said something about like, breaking families up is used as a means of control, like the work I do involves like, honestly, abolishing the prison system. And what we see all the time is that they want they don’t want your family showing up to court. They don’t inform them of where you’re at.

They try to separate you from your families so they can break you down. They want you to take plea deals. They want you to disappear. They want you to stop fighting for your freedom. And they want you to become this shell of a person because you don’t have that family on the outside of you anymore.

And we see it every single day. And that’s why we’re like, we’re showing up. We’ll be your found family. We’re not going to let your mom go into debt trying to finance your commissary. We’re going to do these things to try to keep you up. And that’s where that comes from. It’s because we recognize these states, and these systems are built to not just break us down as individuals, but to take our collective identity by taking away our families.

Josie Pickens

We hope you’re enjoying The upEND Podcast.  A quick note: upEND is funded through the generosity of people like you who believe that ending the harm of the family policing system will help us to create a safer future. If you’re enjoying this podcast, we hope that you’ll consider donating to our work. Visit upendmovement.org/donate for more information.

Corey B. Best

Angela Davis is noted as saying that we’re in an ideological struggle. And so you touched on this enlargement. So, by 1948, right, there was about a third enlargement of whiteness. But by that time and so now we’re like a fifth because 2030 is going to put more white people in white categories.

Right. And so this, this expansion of whiteness, this devastating of family, this churning, into this category, Eurocentric or what have you, however you want to talk to it? But today we just say white, right. But there’s some immigration strongholds. So, I referenced in the context the 14th amendment, like naturalization and born into.

So how does settler colonialism impact or manifest itself in the work that you do for immigration, whether it be reform or to just abolish these walls and all that shit? 

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez

Yeah. I mean, for me, it shows up with white nationalism and with replacement theory. Right? Right now we’re in election season where we’re hearing all sorts of, frankly, fuck shit about people that aren’t white.

We’re hearing old and tired tropes of communities and what they consume and not consume what they do or don’t do. And it’s to dehumanize it is to put people back in their place right. And we’re seeing it a lot to where both parties are adopting the same rhetoric that is dangerous. You know, it’s gotten to the point here in Texas where Operation Lone Star.

And for those who don’t know about Operation Lone Star, Operation Lone Star is a state-funded immigration enforcement program backed by billions. It’s with a “B” billions of Texan taxpayer dollars. And what it has done, it has increasingly militarized our border communities where folks who have lived there for years are now getting citations. And I think the statistic is that citations have gone up by 1,000% for people that are just living and going to school and helping their communities.

So when we see this dehumanization we are allowing in the name of public safety for systems to be built that further oppress and actually marry two systems. So Operation Lone Star is the disgusting marriage of the criminal legal system and the immigration system to where now migrants and people of color are being funneled through separate jails, have their own judges who are retired off the bench, racist judges, their own prosecutors.

They are turning state prisons into migrant jails, right? People are now being punished for simply trying to do the right thing. We’ve we’ve had lots of reports of where migrants encounter officials. And these are our state troopers. The state troopers tell them, you know what, you want to ask for asylum. Okay, walk five miles up the riverbank and there is when you will find, CBP, Customs and Border Protection and you can turn yourself in there. Well, five miles up the road is not CBP. Five miles up the road they are now on private property, which facilitate the state troopers to then arrest them for criminal trespass. From Operation Lonestar we have seen laws that are making mandatory minimums for quote unquote, smuggling, but smuggling is now interpreted as just simply being undocumented in a car.

Right? I could go to jail in Texas today for ten years if I take my cousin, who is undocumented, to CVS. At the same time, is not lost on me, that while we are increasing mandatory minimums in the state, we are also decreasing the access to public education. We are making our schools into detention system and further solidifying the school-to-prison pipeline.

So this is all interconnected. You know, while billions are being funneled to the border, we just had a hurricane in July where people in my community still have trees on their houses. Their fences are still broken, but we’re funneling $11 billion to do what? To terrorize our people. So that’s how I see it today. And that causes a lot of this family separation.

It causes a lot of the need to consistently grind. And it’s all by design. Because if we’re too worried about where our next meal is going to come, we’re not going to be worried about, well, why am I even struggling to have a meal in the first place? 

Corey B. Best

I appreciate that. We definitely are identifying the parts, containment, fear. It’s coming from the same source, but I want to go a little bit messy if we can and quite honest. So it’s pretty obvious that the four of us, we got a different background. Right? We didn’t come in with a whole lot of planning for this.

And we have our own sort of niche, and to some degree, I didn’t go to CUNY, but I went to the same schools you went to. Like, I was taught whiteness the same way that all of us were. And so where I’m going is this notion of, pulling from the book “Solidarity”, this notion of “us” and “them”.

A couple of months ago, I’m sitting in a class, it was about genocide in Palestine. Fucked my head up. I’m like, and? What about my people? You following me? I said, we’re going to get real and we’re going to get messy right? 

And then I started to experience something different in my body. When a woman said that she was lynched in Jerusalem for trying to help children read. And so many other things through those nine weeks helped me to see in a different way what I was preaching but wasn’t practicing. 

And that is, yeah, my liberation tied to yours. Right? But when it came to yours, I wanted mine to be first, damn it! We said honest and messy, right? 

Now, that is a form of fear. I’m fearful that I won’t be seen because I come from a people who were never seen but for this. And then there’s this notion again, back to the book “Solidarity”, this notion of polarization. So I fell into this same trap. So me not seeing other bodies’ humanity is what white institutions and Zionists want me to do.

Now, I’m glad I hustled out of that fast. But where I’m going is this. I’ve also been taught that “us” and “them” is wrong. I’ve also been taught that polarization is wrong. So where do we go when it’s time to build a bigger “us”? And what must we begin to really think about, know, and deal within ourselves to get rid of some of the shit that we got individually to deal with, based on how our own traumas sort of override the way that we need to be in an organized way to move forward. And I hope that that made sense. None of that shit was on this paper, y’all. 

Tanisha Long 

You took the long way around it. I’m not going to lie, but it worked out. I liked it. Me personally, I hold the belief that, kind of what you were hinting, I was like that transactional solidarity, that belief that you got to do for me before I do for you. One, that’s rooted in capitalism. It’s the belief that everything we have to do is transactional.

And I think a lot of times people just don’t uncover that final thread where it’s like, oh shit, what they’re doing to them that’s a practice or they’re learning from the playbook, but this is what they’re going to do to me, or this is what they’ve done to me. And I’m so far like used to what they continue to do to me that I’m not recognizing it’s happening.

And then when I see it in somebody else, I’m like, oh, that is what they did. But they never fixed it for me, so why are we going to start with them? And what we don’t realize is that it’s that reach down theory, like in order to like liberate ourselves, we might have to first liberate the people who have it worse than us.

And we have to reach down to pull everybody up. Everybody always ask me like, why do you care about Palestine so much? And I’m like, why don’t you? That’s a little weird, first off. I used to have that default like it comes down to education, which in your case it did. But there are a lot of people who know about Palestine and they know what’s going on, and they’re so far past desensitized they really don’t give a shit no matter what I tell them.

And you have to put it in the context of themselves for them to even care. And that’s okay to an extent. If you’re if you’re changing and you’re moving out of that. But at some point, we just got to be the good people we are on the inside and do the work and realize that community doesn’t just mean the people who look like us, talk like us, or financially position like us.

It means is everybody. And until we get that everybody mentality, we’re gonna exist in a transactional solidarity type of environment.

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez

I mean, what she said. I’m sorry, what was the question again?

Tarek Ismail 

I can jump in. It’s a hard question. And I I start thinking about this question when I start thinking about talking to my family and my people about representing the families that I represented in family court.

“How do you represent someone who’s accused of neglect? How do you represent someone who’s accused of neglecting their kids or abusing the kids or whatever?” And it’s because as a society, we are obsessed with innocence. We are obsessed with insisting that we are more innocent than the next person. Right? And ultimately, my family wanted to say we would never do that to our kids.

And they have their own racist ideas that go into that too. But the fact is, we have to get rid of this notion that we are more worthy than the next group. It’s vital to our existence as people. There’s no way we’re going to be able to move forward unless we can get rid of that.

I wrote down a quote here from Golda Meir who how many people heard of Golda Meir? She was the prime minister of Israel for, some time. There’s a number of streets named after her in New York. And she’s lauded because she is one of the first female heads of state. She said at some point, this quote might sound familiar to us.

She said, “We can forgive them.” She if she’s talking about Palestinians, “We can forgive them for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for making us kill their children.”

She said “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” Now think about what that says about her notion of innocence. What she is entitled to and what the Arabs that she’s talking about, or the Palestinians that she’s talking about, are not. How she thinks about herself as a mother to her children and what she thinks about Palestinian children and who they are as mothers to their children.

17,000 Palestinian children have died in the last year. 17,000 mothers rendered without their children, and many more children rendered without their parents. Why is their claim to their kids any less than our claim to ours? 

And so what this is about, Corey, to my mind, is if you read a sentence and it says “this thing is true, except for this group of people”, unless we focus on that “except” and start shrinking what’s to the right of that “except”, the “except” is going to be the whole sentence. 

And so, to my mind, it’s about shrinking the space to the right of the “except”. And we can’t do that alone. And all the ways that we heard about from Kelly earlier today, relationship is the core and the and the foundation of all of this. But we can’t do it alone. 

Corey B. Best

Jennefer, did you want to to come in? 

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez

Sure. Yeah. It just brings me back to some thinking I’ve been doing about specifically the immigrant rights movement and the different concessions that we have given ourselves or allowed ourselves to make in terms of progress. And the biggest one has been determining who is set up for immigration relief and who deserves immigration relief, who doesn’t in the context of detention. Who deserves to be free and who deserves to be detained. And for years, with even in the DACA movement we heard things like no fault of their own. “They came here under no fault of their own.”

But while you do that and you’re trying to spin it as a positive narrative, you’re automatically saying that there’s also a group of people that didn’t deserve to be here, that it’s their fault that they came here, without thinking about what American imperialism has done to the world. And how what’s happening now is just our chickens coming home to roost, honey, because we have done this to everyone in the world.

And now when people are coming to our sidelines all of a sudden some people deserve it, they don’t. Which has honestly put us in the moment where we are today, where we have people that are supposedly champions for immigration calling for border security. But what does that mean? Calling for mass funding to DHS, but some of that funding is going to go to these systems. 

Yes. We’re shutting down immigration, private sector ones. But the US marshals still have their contracts in state prisons. So I think we have to, tying in abolition to this, when we’re in our movements, basically, we also have to think about reformist reforms versus abolitionist reforms.

And that’s something that is hard because you want those small wins. But I think that’s also been why we’ve been digging ourselves in these holes.

Corey B. Best

Thank you all for that. You said nationalism earlier. This is also an off-the-cuff question and it wasn’t planned. But white nationalism organizes very well. And I understand having my security, you know, the same institution that I want to dismantle my security’s tied to it. All of that, that jazz.

But from a personal perspective and just what you’ve seen in your own, ecosystems of organizing, why do you believe that those of us and many of us in this room who stand for justice, who will speak truth to those that are deemed powerless before they speak to power, all of these things that we do to to be trendy and our organizing and and our abolitionist work, why are we so damn afraid to take a stance on what we believe?

Why do we pretend to be neutral when there’s no such thing as neutrality? This gets back to the “us” and “them” and that kind of polarizing. Like, how do we build the bigger us if we’re afraid to say what the fuck we standing on?

Tanisha Long 

Not you asking why we don’t stand on business. Okay? Messy.
Put the paper down. Like, okay. One of the things I will say, because you had mentioned, like, white nationalists organize so well, white nationalists also aren’t fighting over resources. And that’s that’s a huge thing. I saw the craziest shit in Pittsburgh.

It was a video. These white nationalists, we do a lot work, with the unhoused. Shout out to organizations like Crip, in Pittsburgh that are really holding it down on HUD. I saw this video and these white nationalists, they were they were doing the work we do. They’re walking around the encampments, the the homeless encampments, in Pittsburgh, and they’re handing out resources.

But they were handing out resources only to the white unhoused people. Like, they were literally like, no. Handed it out. They put this one lady out there, she was pregnant. And they’re like, “Look at this poor pregnant white woman.” They didn’t know the baby was biracial, but we ain’t gonna tell them because they were giving out snacks.

But like, what they were doing was they were enforcing that that system among people who had absolutely nothing and we’re in this very shared reality of having zero resources, they’re like “Other white people hold you up. It’s safe to separate yourself from these groups. You’re not like them.” And when we do our own organizing, what I’ve seen a lot is a crabs in the barrel mentality where if I be too radical and I stand up too much, I might lose that little bit of funding that the three funders we have give us. I’m going to abandon my morals for $75 thousand because they know we need them that much. 

And it’s unfortunate. But if we all aren’t willing to take principled stances and stand up to the people who are going to take our resources, if we don’t fall in line, then we’re not radical at that point. We’re puppets.

And a lot of people in our own communities are very comfortable with being puppets, as long as there’s a spotlight on them and the money is flowing in, and it’s just what it is for me. 

Corey B. Best

Who wants to lean, deeper into that? And I know I’m understanding that we’re talking about why there is a barrel in the first place.

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez

I think to add to that, well, the nonprofit complex is one thing. But even just cancel culture and just how we police each other, and I think that has been maybe one of the most devastating, because people are scared to stand in their truth because they’re going to be called out and not called in.

And while there is a moment to correct, there is also a moment to teach and to build. I’ll tell you one example. I went to this NLG conference in Oakland years ago, and they separated us between people who identified as white and people who identified as nonwhite. Within that space there’s multiple generations of activists right in that room, some newer age, some old school.

And we know that the level of education into things such as gender identity and sexuality may not have touched some of those older generations yet. There was an opportunity in that room to teach someone about this, but instead, everyone, including the facilitator, jumped on this person, saying that he called this person an “it” when that was not what came out of his mouth.

And it was a moment where me and my friend who were sitting next to the person were like, “but that wasn’t said.” But all of our protection of this person, because they were getting all this smoke for no reason, was overpowered by the ability to need to be right. To stand on the right side.

But were you really standing on the right side when you’re jumping on someone that didn’t say these things? And what if they were saying these things? We’re all in this room. We’re all at the NLG conference, right? We have some notion of radicalization in our minds. This would have been the perfect opportunity to lean into our older generation and be like, you know what? Let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about this and have a learning experience. And in that moment, that’s when I realized there has to be a better way to do this. Because what makes my position better than yours and what makes me the corrector? Why am I policing you if we’re trying to abolish the policing system?

Tarek Ismail 

So, I think your question is sort of what is what is keeping us from standing for the things that we believe in? Absolutely. First and foremost, I’ll say that repression is real, right? We’ve seen over the past year with students on campus, we’ve seen police come in and beat the shit out of them. 

We’ve seen professors stand in front of their students and they get the shit beat out of them. We’ve seen people get fired. We’ve seen presidents of universities hauled before Congress and made to sing for their supper. And when they don’t sing the right tune, they too are sacked. And this game is designed in part to force people to fight internally as opposed to fighting the seat of power.

So repression is real. And we’ve seen it sort of turned on folks all the time. So there’s fear of that repression, and it’s well founded. And so then the question is, what do we do about it? Like what what options do we have? And we often look to models to help us decide what we do about it.

And so if you look to the model, for example, of the the Democratic National Convention. Probably one of the Blackest Democratic—and I’m going to be messy too, maybe​​—probably one of the Blackest Democratic National Conventions that I’ve seen in my lifetime, talking about Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm. And Jesse Jackson is honored, and the Central Park Five are honored. Whatever. And Kamala Harris is the candidate, and somehow they can’t manage to have one Palestinian-American on stage. Somehow they expect that by electing someone, it makes all of this right? And it’s not right, ultimately. Because she is still going to be cutting the checks for the F-16s that dropped those 2,000 pound bombs. So then the question is like, okay, well, if that’s one model, what other models do we have?

And this is where I think the idea of sort of knowledge and power are related. Like if the model of power is this and we don’t have a good model for how organizing will actually bring us power to push back against that, then, you know, we’re right to be afraid of the repression because we haven’t figured out a way to push back against that oppression in a way that successful.

And it reminds me in part of what Amanda was saying yesterday about, crumbs. Right. One visit being a victory. You know, a sandwich visit being like, “Oh, I got some unsupervised time.” And that judge who holds the power is the one that’s deciding how much I’ve got. That judge is deciding my degree of innocence and how close I’m allowed to be to my children.

And so much of this has to do, I think, with organizing in such a way that builds the power and demonstrates that we have the power to push back against repression, whatever form that repression takes, whether it’s CPS, or the judges or, the DNC. So to my mind, that’s that’s a big part of the reason is because we haven’t yet successfully figured out how to organize against the sort of repression that people are rightfully afraid of, or the boogeyman of that repression.

Corey B. Best

And when we are afraid, sometimes we become the same boogeyman we want to slay is what I heard you say, right? You know, at the same time, I think that what Amanda said yesterday about crumbs is important here when it comes to solidarity and movement, moving forward. Not that that we’ll have a solution in an hour’s conversation, but that we got to stay fucking hungry like Stokely said a long time ago, one thing that has gotten us off the rails is that we get full with the crumbs. 

Services, programs, goods. Boom. You got that? Like we got full. But I want to get back to this abolitionism freedom solidarity like as the through line for for a moment. And I’m not sure how much time we have, but I think we can get it in here really good. The, the the other part about my personal struggle that, that I told you about was my myopia. 

Like just a single issue. I’ve lost friends. You know, I was taught that you don’t speak against Jewish folk. You know, and my grandmother didn’t sit me down on her lap and tell me this shit. But that’s the messages I got, like, you don’t speak against that, right? They got this little bit of land and they want it all. And all these things, like, you just don’t speak against it. So I, I was raised to think about a single issue, like petty living, like I live just one single issue in my life. And I realize now, at almost 26, that I don’t live a single issue life.

Tanisha Long 

You said,  oh my God, there’s a whole world out there.

Corey B. Best

There’s a whole world out there, right? 

Tanisha Long 

I’m in it. 

Corey B. Best

There’s a whole world out there. Right? So this this is one that I want us to to really hear from you all. What is it that we as people, as organizations, moviemakers, doers, activists, organizers, what is it that we must begin to learn, to hear, to feel, to notice so that we break that myopia and realize that there is no such thing as a single issue struggle. And that might get us toward this solidarity, cross struggle. 

Tanisha Long 

So it’s basically why we’re here, right? We’re talking about relationship building. Everybody knows my my vibe is the jail. I always test the boundaries at work on how much of an outside, it appears outside, issue I can bring in to what we’re doing and connect it to the jail.

And the reason I’m doing that is because I’m trying to bring new people into caring about this issue. In order to do that, I have to educate myself on the issues that affect them. Which, like you found out, I realize that shit affects me too. Damn. Family policing. I didn’t even realize there was family police until I really dug into it.

And we have a ton of groups who organize with us around jail work, and you wouldn’t expect them to be the groups that are doing this. We got one group, it’s like a bunch of little white ladies, and they’ll go to these jail oversight board meetings ready to burn it down. And they didn’t start that way. They’re like, you know, we feel called to do this work because we have X, Y and Z connection.

And I’m like, but did you know that not only are you’re paying to incarcerate all these people, but this person used to serve in your congregation. And they’re like “They’re arresting congregants?” Girl. And they arrested everybody out here. Me, my mom, my dad, my other dad, my ex, my sister, everybody.

And you realize that, like, okay, so jail affects me because I’m paying for the jail. Jail affects me because we can’t afford these other services, because we’re paying for this. We don’t have legal representation for people the way we need to because we give a ton of money to the district attorney and just a little bit to the public defenders, so people can’t afford to defend themselves, so they stay in jail, so we can have someone elect themselves and say they’re tough on crime. Oh no, it’s affecting my elections. 

We have a representative in Pittsburgh, Summer Lee. We talked about how they give you crumbs or they they threaten to take everything from you. And why wasn’t anybody standing up and giving us a Palestinian representative on the stage, which is wild.

And she was out there saying, hey, we need this. She don’t care if she serves another term or not. She’s there to to do work. And we need people who are willing to stand on business like that and not care what money AIPAC throws at them and not care about whether or not they’re going to get canceled. I know I’m not the only person in this room who’s been doxed. These are scare tactics, and we have to expand our understanding of the world around us and be willing to self educate.

And like you said, make moments teachable instead of just trying to attack each other and our friends and our family and be right. I’ll never be right. I’m probably wrong about everything, to be honest, but I don’t care. I just want to be a learner.

Tarek Ismail 

It’s been a hard year. And it’s it’s been a hard year because, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of stuff and learned a lot of stuff that, I shouldn’t have had to see or see or learn. I really should not have had to see what the inside of a baby’s skull looks like, but I did.

Many of you did. I shouldn’t have had to see what it looks like for a dad to pick up plastic bags and inside those plastic bags were his kids. But I did. So did y’all, right? I think that as much as we can make arguments and as much as I can tell you about where your tax dollars are going and who you’re voting for or not voting for, whatever, relationships end up being the way that you might hear stories that are real, that are people’s lived experience.

If you don’t have an opportunity to hear those stories and connect them with someone that you know, then it may as well be a video game that you’re seeing on on your phone or on the TV. So it’s each of our responsibilities to build those relationships and to ask difficult questions in those relationships. It’s why when we, when when we do a class on family policing at Cuny, we insist that one of the first things the students do is go to court and see what’s going on because you can you can read Dorothy Roberts Til you’re blue in the face. I have, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same as seeing it with your own eyes and meeting people who are going through it. So I really encourage folks to meet people who are going through it, learn from them. And I think that’s really to me, where it’s at, I can’t, I can’t think of another way. Tying it into your own self-interests, it’s cynical. And I haven’t seen it work in the way that knowing that fighting for someone until their last breath. As as as Kelly said.

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez

I think we just have to remind ourselves that it is very easy for the oppressed to become oppressors. People don’t get a pass just because they were oppressed. If you are now oppressing others.

Corey B. Best

Woah. That was a lot. A lot to digest and and to kind of nibble on. I want to just to sort of wrap us up, not to close the circle, just to leave the loop open so we can all come back to nibble on bits and pieces of this conversation. I encourage everyone here to tap in, and build a relationship. 

Tarek, to start with your point. It’s been a hard year.

It’s been a hard 408 years collectively, if we only talk about 1619. That’s not a what-about-ism here. It’s also been a hard 100 years of the war and the genocide in Palestine. Like war just doesn’t happen overnight. Genocide doesn’t just happen with one dream, right? I mean, it it takes years to get to where we are. And it’s just been this ongoing journey for such a hard year. Family policing, cages, walls and big ass balls with spikes on them in rivers and border states. Watching people decimated. Whiteness and its ideology is out to annihilate melanated bodies, period. Period. 

With that notion, we walk around on blood soaked soil, shuddering all day. Not knowing why I move this way, why I move that way, why am I reacting in this way? Why the fuck am I angry now? It’s supposed to be sometimes. Because I feel it up here. I don’t know if y’all feel it, but I feel like these bodies right here are embodied. They’re not talking out the side of their necks. They’re regulated. Where does embodiment fit in to your ability to return?

Tarek Ismail 

This might be a bit corny. But, you know, I think we are afraid to talk about what a parent gets out of being a parent to their child. We are afraid to talk about that. We are afraid that it’s selfish to say having my daughter brings me peace.

Raising this Palestinian child in this world brings me peace, grounds me, reminds me of the capacity to return. This child who for more than half of her life has witnessed genocide of her people. But it’s true. It’s true. I’m not saying it because I’m in this room, but I know that folks here who are impacted by systems that affect that relationship will understand that feeling more than anybody else, that there is something unique, at least to me, and I’m not out there saying, you know, go have a kid because it’ll bring you peace. I’m not I’m not saying that, but I am saying that for me, it’s a real source of grounding in this world. And it only helps me understand the people that I organize with more, affected families more, to know even the distant thought of having that taken from you is so scary. And so peaceful when it’s not so grounding.

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez

I think for me, it comes from the trauma that I experienced at a very young age. Earlier you heard that I’ve been advocating for immigrant rights since I was 11, not because I wanted to. I would have loved to just been a child, but it came out of necessity.

My father was incarcerated in federal prison. And the day that we went to go pick him up, he was supposed to be released, was the day that we realized that he had an ICE hold and that he was never going to come home.

That anger, that loss, the destruction of my family fueled the need to find an answer. Right? The need to find someone who could give me a yes. It took me all the way to the White House. I was able to advocate for my father before the president at the time, George W Bush. And unfortunately, I was seeking a federal pardon that I didn’t know how rare those were.

But from that experience of seeing that and achieving what I thought at that moment was the highest position and feeling that loss, it’s what fueled my desire to want to become a lawyer. But at the same time becoming an immigration lawyer in the era of the Trump administration, witnessing family separation and actually writing the name of a parent on a child’s arm in preparation for family separation was the most disheartening thing because at that moment I learned that the system that I was chasing, that I was trying to find my answer, was actually the same system that I was, was oppressing people that were like me. And that loss and that distortion of what side am I on really brings me back to that fire that fueled inside me when I was that age. 

Because the need to be with my family, the need to have these very primal relationships with the people that gave me life, is what has led me to bring back, even as as much adversity as we’re facing within these movements, has kept me going, because I know that somewhere out there, there’s also a child that has that same primal instinct. And I know that in my case, I that relationship has sailed, but if we could bring peace or at least some sort of leverage or levity to someone else’s life, that’s what keeps it burning.

Tanisha Long 

I tell people all the time, I’m not my trauma. I’m just traumatized. And for me, it was learning that if I continue to let what happened to me or what these systems have done to me become my identity, then I don’t really have anything to work towards there. I want to find out who I am outside of these things that keep happening to me, but at the same time forge an identity that’s able to survive them.

And when I got to that place where I realized you are a whole person, no matter what they try to take from you, do from you. I realized that other people need to understand that too, and they need to understand that this society has told you you’re worthless. This society has told you that your crimes exclude you from from care, and that you don’t deserve as much as the next person.

Like when you were talking about like, who deserves to be innocent and whether or not your innocence or guilt should decide whether you deserve basic human rights or civility. And I believe, like my role is to teach people, that people just deserve human rights and they they deserve to be heard from from the incarcerated person to the person who is literally just struggling to feed their kids, struggling to have the land that they were born on. These are things that, for me are just intrinsic, like there’s there’s no middle ground anymore. 

And I tell people all the time, I’m not mean, it’s just my face, but like it really is. And I just feel like, I’m not mean, it’s just my face. But also you have to you have to wonder how much of what’s happened to me has affected how I present outwardly to the world. And am I this embodiment of trauma? And I want to move in ways that show the world that there is more, and you are more. I find joy in everything. I joke about everything, whether it’s appropriate or not. But that’s what I do. I just try to help people find, if you can’t find your joy right away, find your path to it.

And sometimes that’s through organizing and sometimes that’s through your community. I’d be nothing if my grandma didn’t drag me through life like, “I believe in you.” And I try to be that for other people. And the friends I have right now, they’re solid. I don’t think I could crash out if I wanted to. And that’s what you have to be. You have to be that community that don’t let each other crash out. And you don’t have to be your trauma.

Corey B. Best

Before I give you my big thank you and my humility for being in in your presence, I just want to bring Angela Davis back into this container. And she writes in “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” quote, “As our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom.”

And good people, I believe that I have found some solid folk to be in right, messy-ass relationship with. And just thank you for gifting us with your your heart, your courage and your bravery.