Transcript

Jaison Oliver

Coming up this episode on the upEND podcast.

Nalo Zidan

In foster care, a lot of what I, atomically, represented was that I knew I could not survive being an individual. And what it meant to be together with others was complicated because I wanted to be with Black people. And not knowing what it means to practice community. So a lot of those lessons came from the jumping around in the different homes and like actually reconciling within myself that sustainable life is something you do. It’s not something you have. 

Jaison Oliver

Welcome! In this episode of the upEND podcast, we’ll be discussing the intersections and the solidarity between the struggle for LGBTQ+ liberation and family policing abolition. Before we begin what we know will be a powerful and informative conversation on the queer and trans liberation movement and how it intersects with the movement to abolish family policing. We’d like to offer everyone some quick stats around queer and trans youth that while they don’t capture the full picture at all, will hopefully help to inform our discussion on how gender and sexuality show up in the family policing system, including the foster system. So first, the foster system has more than double the representation of LGBTQ youth than the general population. One study found that 30.4% of youth in the foster system identify as LGBTQ plus and 5% is transgender compared to 11.2% and 1.2% of youth not in the foster system.

Then, transgender and non-binary youth have greater odds of being in the foster system compared to cisgender, lesbian, gay, and queer youth. Finally, LGBTQ youth of color have significantly greater odds of being in the foster system compared to white LGBTQ youth. So when these marginalized identities intersect across race, gender, and sexuality, we see the harms of the family policing system become compounded. But that’s not the whole story at all. And our guest has valuable insights that can help us to understand the lives beyond the statistics.

Josie Pickens

All right, so we want to welcome Nalo here with us today. Nalo’s pronouns are they/their/she/her/he/him. 

Nalo Zidan

I use any pronoun.

Josie Pickens

Any pronoun! Nalo is a philosopher, accountability strategist, and masculinity scholar who seeks to challenge the landscapes of how we engage gender, community, and justice. From intentional thought-provoking content to training community organizations, Nalo continues to invite us all to consider implementing community concepts above policing and disposal. Nalo’s next project, the Adult Preschool, seeks to imagine necessary lessons to connect adult experiences with how to practice community together. This virtual project will offer lessons we deserve to learn as young people, lessons that can change how we see the world and each other. So welcome, Nalo, to this conversation and thank you for joining us.

Nalo Zidan

Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thanks so much.

Josie Pickens

I guess we should begin at the beginning and speak to you, Nalo, about like experience or your thoughts around the family policing system. So can you share how the family policing system has influenced your life, especially as a person who is black and queer? Were there any particular moments or interactions that highlighted these intersecting identities for you?

Nalo Zidan

That’s a great question. For me, the influence that the family policing system has had on my life has obviously exposed more and more impact as I get older. But it’s left me with a set of conditions that I’m still undoing, still healing through and still understanding. Because as a child, I don’t think you really understand the full impact of the conditions you’re in until later. When that hindsight is a bit more 20/20 and you’re able to kind of conceptualize the conditions of the world and the experiences you had, it kind of clarifies and makes sense of some of the experiences themselves. Others confuse you. So I think a lot of the influence has been knowing what it’s like to produce some of the impacts of being in the family policing system and also learning that there is for me more life to live and that there are other ways to understand my being than just surviving.

So a lot of those things, undoing a lot of what I understood to be me understanding myself as powerless, me having to figure out what it meant inside me to be humanized against the shaping or the not having the nuclear family and up against patriarchal renderings of family, like it’s all mashed up in there.

And as far as my identity is concerned, it obviously the family policing system held a black queer person. So there’s a ton of me understanding myself within it and also understanding that the conditions of it still don’t support a child like me.

So I spent a lot of time kind of unraveling that, being part of very religious households, being a part of households that had other children and what that meant to be in a home where other children are being presented with a lot more access than you or that you’re just there for the money and you figure that out as a kid and you kind of just like realize that this is your only access to a home. So you’re trying to balance what you see and know and learn and what you, the conditions that you are just steeped in so you don’t go back to a group home. There’s just so many symptoms to undo like understanding myself as a, a black masculine, queer person definitely took a lot of shaping and foster care because as I noticed that they were noticing my masculinity by way of calling me tomboy or whatever, I saw them dispose of me because girl was what I was named or, girl being attached to feminine was how I was supposed to practice. 

So there was a lot of discipline there that was based on the shaping I should have been rather than getting to know who I was and planting love there. So there’s, there’s many scars and wounds to kind of continue nurturing. And I think coming from the family policing system, recognizing that those wounds just continue to reopen and what it means to care for myself is how I continue from here because of the family policing system’s inability to allow that nurturance to be accessed by us as children and by, and that family should be together and that there should be solutions and resources in place to ensure that families, especially Black ones that have queer children involved, is important to keep together. And then there was the other side, which was coming from a family of preachers. They wasn’t having it. So what was the family… 

Homophobia impacted me in a different way at first, because I was considering denouncing myself many times while I was with the family I was born with. And the mind, the kind of, and I want to be mindful of my language here, but the kind of sorting of the mind that happens in a child where you’re trying to figure out the question or the answers for why something’s happening. It’s like, it was an escape from homophobia, but also homophobia is inside of the place I’m only eligible to call home right now. The temporary nature of that. And the temporary nature with which it was imposed upon me that this was some phase I was going through, like there’s just so much to unpack there for sure.

Jaison Oliver

You talked about some of the experiences that you had in the foster system. And I’m really wondering, because I’m hearing you discuss experiences with family, your own family, right? And some of the various parts of what that means. And then also these external families that you’re being pushed into. What did you learn about building family and community through that experience? You mentioned something about planting and nurturing and yeah, I’m just wondering about what were some of the takeaways you had in terms of looking at family, family and community from that.

Nalo Zidan

Yes, that’s an excellent question. I think that the greatest thing that I can point to just from my heart space alone is the idea that family is a practice, not a landing place, as much as community, as much as village and friendship. These are practices of nurturance and boundaries and love and care.

I’m not looking that there was a difference between like the reason why I felt like I’d lost something in the nuclear family was because I felt like I’d done something bad to be queer. I felt like I’d done something bad in order to. So if I were good, right, then I would be able to have access to these things. But that wasn’t the case. I remember being a child on the altar of my church being like, Lord, if the reason I’m going through all this is because I’m gay. If the reason my family left me, I’m being abandoned. If the reason, right, that I’m in foster care and nobody seeks to establish home with me is because of this, I am willing to practice against it. I am willing to surrender myself, to offer myself some nurturance because what I knew was that God was the only option other than the access I thought that I directly had by birthright from a mother, from a father, like that was not at all the case. 

My father was the first man to penetrate my body, sexual abuse. I went back into foster care because I told my school. So there is such a mashup. And then you got people saying that the sexual abuse is the root for my identity as a queer person. So going through foster care and the liminality of home and the liminality of all these narratives being told to me about who I am.

There was so much to sift through to understand feeling secure within myself. And that seeding and that nurturance I’m referring to in the practice of family was disrupted in my nuclear family because it wasn’t enough for me to be their DNA. It wasn’t enough for me to be a person who genuinely just wanted to be part of family without having a good day, a bad day, anything in between. I wanted to know that, hey, at minimum you willing to try loving me as I am. 

But what they understood was that it saved my soul to make me absent a family knowing that’s the thing I needed. Knowing that foster care from the first time when my mother was on drugs was what would have gotten my attention. you want to be with us? You must be saved. You must denounce this wearing these clothes and doing these things. And that’s when it changed for me to where I understood that it was the only choice that was here was the choice to love me. It was not my identity. It was not my relationship with God.

And that’s where a lot of my work is informed with regard to the conditions we’re responding to and not knowing how to respond in ways that make you feel whole without these things. It is a digging up of yourself and a repotting of yourself and every plant don’t make it. I’m just saying, like, there are ways that you have to keep those roots intact within yourself. And that care is not going to come from nowhere else. The thing I wish someone would have told me in foster care or in the family policing system was that like, you were dealt these conditions, yes. And there are ways that sometimes I have to learn what it means to care for myself because the world does not validate joy in a person like you. Tell me the truth. And so that’s where I understood that family is a practice and it is something different than you got my DNA. What’s up cousin? 

It was different than that. I didn’t fit into the narratives in the black movies of cookouts because they ain’t want me at the cookout. Like I had to remember that the cookout was the space of black community, was the space of black family. And also that’s why everybody ain’t allowed, but also it’s, it’s also the space of, I’m saying the people that are here are my family. So if you know, good, better and different, you gonna come, you gonna have to come to this cookout where all of us are here loving this person, nurturing, investing in this person. And we will decide, you know what I’m saying, what continues to happen to their lives. You cannot be concerned with me if you do not care for my life. And that’s where the family policing system falls short.

Josie Pickens

Yeah, and helping you to understand, I can create my own cookout. I can find my own family and community and create my own cookout. Yeah.

Nalo Zidan

That’s right. That’s right. And those cookouts being possible, still takes bringing something to the table. Maybe somebody got the grill, but they ain’t got the money for the meat. Maybe somebody got the seasonings. Maybe somebody got the oil. Maybe somebody got the electricity or the yard to have us all back there. That’s what village means. It is how are we creating functional, sustainable life among us, no matter how we change, no matter how we love. And like…

Josie Pickens

Yeah.

Nalo Zidan

That’s not to say we don’t have the boundaries of like to be in this community, this is what is required. You practice here, right? You can’t come to the cookout and you ain’t got nothing every time. But if we know the conditions of your life such that you can do this, we are saying, can you clean up the trash afterwards? Can you pick up the chair? It’s a place in the practice of family. And so in foster care, a lot of what I kind of atomically represented was that one, I knew I could not survive being an individual. And what it meant to be together with others was complicated because I wanted to be with Black people. And oppressed people produce certain things. And what does it mean to love you and to know that there are many factors that contribute to certain modalities for decision making, like telling a lie or not always being someone who’s grounded emotionally or not knowing what it means to practice community. So a lot of those lessons came from the jumping around in the different homes and like actually reconciling within myself that sustainable life is something you do. It’s not something you have. And that was a big change for me as a human coming up in that system.

Josie Pickens

A sustainable life is what you do and not what you have. That’s like, I had to repeat that. That’s a quote, okay. It is so true. That’s why I have to pause and repeat it. Like, let me make sure that we are that signaling in on that and focusing on that because that’s so important. I think when we’re talking about the Black queer experience or the Black experience overall it is it’s what we when they say life is what we make it. I feel like for Black folks, that’s something that is so, so true.

Josie Pickens

It literally is what we make. You know?

Nalo Zidan

Yes. And powerless folks can’t, powerless folks do not know the power of what they can create if they are, if they are taught to see themselves as, as individuals, right? Like we do need each other, but the family policing system teaches us, you and y’all, what you gonna do. And that’s the part that breaks you down because you’re really trying to figure out how to do life, which is a part of what the village is for. But like survival raising and, and, and being raised by the experience of falling on your face, trial and error. Like you might make that one decision or change your life. You might, you might not actually know what it means to be in connection to community. 

So you develop like sustained anxieties in your body about trusting others. There is a very deep wound of trust among us as black and queer people and our children being most disposed of is its own thing. So I like to think of my journey specifically as not some specialty journey at all, because I think that, what it means to be survivors of the family policing system comes with superpowers inside those lessons that can teach us how power dynamics from adult to child, from support to the unsupported, from the oppressed to the oppressor, on how to mitigate what it means to have just outcomes come to those who are suffering from the conditions of the system rather than looking for someone to blame, figuring out that we are not at all protecting our children and what that feels like to us, right? If we just engaging in symptoms, they just need a house to stay in because they homeless kids. We just need…like it has to come from a red alert that like this is an issue that is pervasive and viral and conditional that capitalism and all these other oppressive systems continue.

Josie Pickens

Yes, and that brings me to the next question that I have for you, which I feel you’ve kind of already answered, but I want to see if you have more to add. How is the movement toward queer and trans liberation connected to the movement to abolish family policing? I feel like we have been answering that question since we started this conversation, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to add more if you like to.

Nalo Zidan

I think recognizing where abuse of power is happening and where there are massive amounts of powerless people, and in this case, a lot of times Black children, Black queer children, are taking on the consequences for it. I think that that deserves our attention, and that’s the reason why they connect. 

The issue of homophobia, transphobia, all of it is an abuse of power. You get to think something else because you can think something else. And the limitation of your imagination allows for that truth to be true within you and whoever else is enabling that conversation to be real in your household, in your office, in your presence. And what it means to be centered around other possibilities means for some of them people to be able to say they was wrong or the choices that they made were unhelpful or that we needed a different modality altogether or that some of the people who made those decisions take consequences. 

But I think in the world we live in today, we are more convinced that we can manipulate ourselves out of consequences, then we are trying to be accountable and what that means to show up in that way. So I think that they’re very closely related because of the overlapping in patterns of victims, queer people, Black people, trans people, poverty, poor people, and how those intersections continue to represent the children that are in the carceral system and the family policing system, which are ultimately connected at its roots. And I think that what’s most important is that we can even get to the place of admitting that, because everybody wants to be a good person, but no one wants to be an accountable person, which means mistakes can’t happen, which means poor decisions can’t just be reconciled. We’re looking to dispose, right? And no one comes forward when they feel like their life is at risk.

And I want us to be able to think about that when we talk about children. Children do not have the power to make decisions for themselves. And that’s because the law says there must be adults above them, over them to steer that path. But what happens when the adults have made decisions that produce consequences? What happens when they’re all connected? We want to be absolved of blame, not our part in carceral systems in the family policing system. And I want that to change for sure.

Jaison Oliver

I’m wondering about the learnings…at upEND, we try to figure out what are the takeaways, what are the things that we can really learn, especially from other movements. I think that is really a big focus for us this season of the podcast is where can we take ideas toward abolition, abolitionist thought that manifests in other movements? How can we bring that into our lens in doing this work. So how do you see abolitionist thought manifesting in the queer and trans liberation movement? And then how does that serve us collectively, regardless of whether we identify with those specific communities?

Nalo Zidan

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That’s good. There’s a way that I think there needs to be a grounding of principle that is immovable. Like I think that the goals become wavering toward satiating, like in movement work. And I’m saying from trainings that I’ve done from understanding the infrastructure of movement work and the difficulty of movement work when you’re around multiply traumatized bodies. And how to navigate that is very difficult. And shout out to movement for continuing because there’s been movement against movement. There are increasing number of threats to movement. Right, right.

Jaison Oliver

Movements against movement. Yeah.

Nalo Zidan

And it’s very true. And I think it’s important for us to ground on a set of principles that I think we defend regardless of how it comes up against our own rightness and righteousness and side movement, political correctness, all these things. We need to reach the human. We need to be able to, and this is what I hope to do with the Adult Preschool. I need to touch the person who not trying to hear your academic language, your connection to all this big systemic stuff. That is not something that I can see myself sitting within. You know what I’m saying? 

It’s like trying to get a room full of men to understand male privilege. It just, it don’t click away sometimes. And I think something that’s deeply important is to be able to understand and access. And I think that the family policing system teaches us about the carceral system. The family policing system teaches us how we navigate what it means to be accountable. The family policing system teaches us that adults are capable of manipulating and absolving themselves of consequences to children who are helpless. Okay? These are the things that I want our movements to stand upon. I want us to say that we are life-sustaining movements, which means if it comes against life, no longer. And obviously those come with boundaries, because you’re also not going to walk up in here and like, just completely take advantage of life here in our communities. 

We don’t got to be dumb about it, but we need to allow those to be responses, not things that we stand on just because our emotions are an uproar from yet another condition produced by these systems. I need us to start with children because children are at the greatest risk. And so when I think about these things, I would like us to have core principles that we sustain and defend that say that we have a healthy respect for difference, that we are focused on the issue and not the person, and that we are focused on the goal and not our emotions sometimes. And I think that’s helpful to the idea of protecting children because a lot of times we hear something happening with children and we get momentary outrage. And I want us to be outraged because this thing is still living because this thing still exists here and we can see it, we can touch it. We have stats to say another child has died every hour of the day. 

And so I think recognize school shooting, whatever it is, I would like our movements to stand upon a certain set of principles that even if this virus comes within our movements, we are able to identify it and eradicate it prior to it informing our values. We have a response for if someone comes up into our space and tries to eradicate life among us in a certain way. I think we should definitely have those moments where we’re like, you’re not responding. We are going downtown right quick. You feel me? All those responses are necessary so they know we’re not playing. There’s so much of that that helps to defend children and to defend Black and queer life. What I don’t want to happen is that our movements are seen as fickle and irresponsible because we don’t actually have boundaries for how we’re willing to reach into what whiteness produces. White supremacy is going to produce what white supremacy was made to produce. That’s just the way it is. And…

Josie Pickens

Every time. Yes.

Nalo Zidan

What does it mean when white supremacy knows the way that it can touch and access us through our children, through our this? They’ve been saying stuff out loud and having no consequence. They know very much the power they yield. And we are saying that like in the midst of that, we’re not saying, “white people did this. So that means I’m about to,” you feel me? It’s a response to a condition. We need to have foundations on life, community, eradicating conflict, not using harm against one another and recognizing that the most harm, like life on earth is actually the earth. You know what I’m saying? 

I think when we get to those places that we can get to the roots of what harm looks like, I think we can start to talk about how we can spread that as a curriculum for how we continue to protect one another and protect children and protects vulnerable life, people with disabilities. And as of right now, I think that’s something we fall short on is making sense of how we practice in those ways, even against the ways that we know some of us will die. Or that we know that some of us will be harmed in the midst of white supremacy. And unfortunately, just like the kids who suffer from sexual, emotional, physical abuse right now in this moment that we’re recording this podcast that some of them are going to die till we figure it out. I want us to figure out how we create strong, sustainable movements without being uprooted by things that are being produced from systems instead of collapsing them onto each other.

Josie Pickens

I tell you, you’re doing our job for us, Nalo, and answering all of our questions before we have an opportunity to ask them. But this question, I know earlier you mentioned your mother, your birth mother, and issues around substance use, sexual abuse, your birth father.

So as we’re talking about building family and community in the face of what we experience with white supremacy, I want to talk a bit about that journey of like forgiving your parents or healing from those experiences. So this journey of forgiving your parents is parents are healing from the experiences that you’ve had, especially when they’ve caused significant harm, is incredibly complex. Can you discuss the process you’ve gone through to forgive and heal from the actions of your birth parents? How have you worked to address and heal those harms outside of punitive carceral systems?

Nalo Zidan

Yes, I want to first say that forgiveness is no longer language I use. And that’s not to be…people just like muddying waters over things. That is not what I’m trying to do here, but I’m speaking from my own very intentional journey. But forgiving seems to have been weaponized in our socialization today to mean absolving of something. It is responding in our bodies. Like when you tell somebody who caused you harm to forget, like it’s almost like the weaponization of an apology. Tangibly in the human body, it has now changed. Like somatically, probably it has changed in us how we receive, of course. 

Josie Pickens

Right. Yeah, there’s a somatic response.

Nalo Zidan

And so, I think that there is, for me, the language I would use is, I have learned to adapt. And the reason why I use adaptivity instead of forgiveness is because I will never be without its symptoms. I will never be.

And I want to make a radical choice toward pleasure. I want to make a radical choice toward living a life instead of surviving, because there are the symptoms that I will always have to deal with and suffer through. And so what that meant to me was that people say in the cliche way, I don’t want to be, what’s the language? I don’t want to be a victim of whatever, or I don’t want to only be a survivor. And like, for me, it’s almost like the side of an addict that just cannot change. You can’t just invite an addict, an alcoholic to a bar and be like, you know what, you don’t need drink no more. You good. You feel me? Like, I think it matters that we recognize that those conditions will continue to pervasively produce certain things. 

And so for me, I’m like, what are the conditions? Right. Or what are the outcomes that the conditions I was shaped by can produce, what are those outcomes, right? And it’s hard for us to do this for ourselves because I feel like you don’t wanna ever think that you can be the worst of anything or that you can make a harmful choice. And I also know that harm is a thing that teaches us lessons, right? So for me, my father is someone who was my favorite person in the world before the sexual abuse started. Father’s day was yesterday. I can’t even imagine how I strategically get through these days. His death anniversary is also in a couple of weeks. And you think about these things and it fills us with compassion. I can see it on your faces. It just does. There is something that rests on us that says, I wish that didn’t happen to you. 

And as I’m going through this and experiencing this, I want to understand that the conditions my life has left me and the cards I was dealt is not the end of my life. And so I allowed my parents to exist there and I allowed grief to show up when it shows up. If there is a moment where I am enraged, I put myself in conditions where rage is acceptable. And that means maybe I gotta go to the park or the gym or I gotta take sprints or I gotta hit a heavy bag. I’m gonna figure out, or I need to scream at a friend’s house like, there are just medicines at that point. There is no fix for the harm. There is no fix for the hurt. 

Capitalism seems to make us think that though there’s a transaction that can happen to heal me period with an ED and now it’s over. No baby. Every single trigger that this harm has left you with, you will be with for the rest of your life. What does that mean for me? How do I take the care knowing the wounds I have prior. We charge other people up…you shouldn’t say that because this is possible to have been perceived or whatever and I’m like on the other side of that. I don’t know what the medicine is to make healed an -ed word that I can accept. So I didn’t forgive them I very much remember them and I’ve reconciled I think or am reconciling daily what it means to know myself or want to know myself and see myself even the parts I don’t like well enough that I’m not within the binary of good or bad person, innocent, guilty person, but that I am human. And how do I walk myself through the process of my decisions such that it becomes more intentional to do? 

And that might not always be available in the moment, because when you black and queer and somebody, you know what I’m saying? Just doing something to be up in your face or to disrupt ease or whatever. Like we have many moments where that’s not possible. And I have many moments where it is. What can I do to offer myself new possibilities for living a life? That every move I make does not allow me to think of my father. That every move I make doesn’t like rip me to shreds because my mama abandoned us and did not return. You know what I’m saying? Like she made the choice she made. She needed to make that choice because a drug addict is not of right mind. I have compassion for the conditions that shaped them. Right? And whatever those things are, I don’t have control over, but I know it is my job within myself to utilize strength in a community such that I am not alone. That’s something I need. I need family. I need it. Right? 

I don’t always get it right. I recognize the scars and the shaping, but I know I need that. And I am easy to reconcile when I am the problem. And when it comes to my parents, at first I was just all about, it’s a, and it’s a both and, and then some relationship. Sometimes I’m like, no, he, he wasn’t worth nothing to me because forget him, F him. You know what I’m saying? It roots in you that there are, it lets you know that the human experience is non-binary.

We don’t just have a forgive him or you’re still rotting in the soil of this thing. There is a plethora of different energetic experiences happening about the grief. If you don’t give the grief room, the grief will make room because it’s like air, it’s like a pressurized can. It will explode. You do not have control over when it explodes, but you can release some air. Give yourself a little bit of relief. 

You can allow yourself to reconcile within you what do I need to feel cared for? How do I fight for that instead of a promotion on my job? How do I fight for that above that next check I need? There are so many ways that I’m not sure if we’re fighting for, and for me, I had to reconcile this, my happiness or a certain level of public success. I want to be mindful of what it means to nurture the conditions for me to be an accountable person, for me to be a person who can be mindful that I can make poor decisions, I can cause harm to people, I’m not somebody who’s always innocent, always good. And then how does the world inform me from there? So my parents produce a lot of different feelings inside me. 

My mother is still living and still making the choices she’s making. My father was murdered more than 20 years ago, right before the verdict for the rape and sexual assault. And the way that that grief shows up doesn’t give you a schedule, it doesn’t give you a time and place, none of that. And I think what’s important for me is just focusing on the care necessary to continue. Because if I want to continue, I’m going to continue. And that’s not always easily accessed. And that’s what I want to teach my people how to do. How to need each other, how to practice community, how to care for ourselves.

Josie Pickens

I’m sitting with so much from that.

Nalo Zidan

It’s a lot to sit with for sure.

Josie Pickens

Okay, I know we have to move on to another question, but I am sitting with so much of that because I love the idea of that -ed on healed, especially like we are always constantly in this space of healing our trauma. So many of us are maneuvering through traumas that we’ve experienced within community, within our families. Yeah, I’ll be sitting with that for a while and replaying it for a while. So thank you so much for that, Nalo. I think I have another question.

Nalo Zidan

Yeah, yeah, just real quick, I kind of want to like make sure that I that I offer this point just as a cherry on top, because in no way is my my journey like easy. It’s more or less the road less traveled. And it’s because of the muck and the entanglement of conditions and what they produce. It takes a lot of action and practice and intentionality and all the things that aren’t so much accessible all the time to certain people. And I want to leave room for that level of humanity to be there also because access is the reason why we have the tools or possibilities. And I call it self self-raising, but when you are self-raised it means a lot of what you learned was not because of the guidance of someone else. It was because of the choices you had to suffer from. And not everybody got somebody to fall back on. I couldn’t call my mom if I got in trouble at school. You know what I’m saying? I couldn’t call somebody to be like, yeah, it was my legal guardian, but they was just going to be like, she got suspended again. 

There’s a difference in knowing that you have something to lean on and when you don’t, because when you don’t have things you need, care is not something that is, that is pronounced or produced in a person. Care does not show up where care is not present in their lives. And I want to leave that there because I don’t want care to be the work of care and the work of healing and transformation to be something that’s left to just fickle decision-making.

Josie Pickens

Yeah, that conversation around access and resources really changes everything. It is the difference between the way that you are able to maneuver through your experiences and the way others are able to maneuver through their experiences. So that kind of leads to the next question that I have around. So we’ve talked a lot about the family policing system’s response to your experience in family and the harm that you experienced in family. We know that that involves removal. We know that that involved placing you into the foster system.

One of the things that we work so hard at, here at upEND, is the imagining and dreaming component of this abolitionist work that we’re doing. And so I’d like to ask you, what would have you preferred to happen as opposed to being removed from your family, entire family, removed from your community, placed in the foster system and with different families within that? If we’re dreaming, if we’re imagining, what would that have looked like for you?

Nalo Zidan

I’m going to be honest, I thought about this question since you sent it. And so much is produced, right? And in order to get to my actual answer, I have to sift through the capitalist dream of wishing I was born to a family where we had enough resources that I never would have been in foster care in the first place to actually speaking to how I would have wanted this particular situation handled. One, I wish that…

Josie Pickens

But I think that’s also an answer, to pause you. I think that’s also an answer. What if there were resources and recovery for your mother? How would that have changed your experience among other things within your family? So that also is a possibility, not necessarily being born into a different family, but access and resources like we were talking about just before this question. But go ahead.

Nalo Zidan

Yeah, definitely. And that’s an excellent point. Thank you for offering that because I think sometimes we don’t recognize the mental impact that capitalism and the family policing system and all that have on us and how we dream of what else there could have been. Like as a kid, a poor kid, you obviously dream that you was with a rich family who could buy you whatever you want. 

I’m talking about real things that I have thought as a child. Or you think about always having food on your plate or living in a big house where you had whatever it was, you always think of that. And I think having resources and having enough to care for ourselves doesn’t mean dreaming that I’m a part of an exorbitant culture of rich people who just hoard resources. And there’s that part that I meant. 

I don’t dream to be Elon Musk’s child. I want to be mindful that I have a very clear sense of what enough would mean. But I’m saying that for me and my family, I would have, there’s a combination of choices I wish would have been different on the parties that were my parents and loved ones. And then there was because my mother did have, like they were gonna fully pay for her to go to a rehab and they were gonna fully fund her having housing and they had already guaranteed us a full four bedroom house and all, like my mother made a choice. I had to swallow that part too because as much as I wanna talk about like all these other impacts too, like there was a part on my mother that was her choice to get us back and to follow through with the process. And the things that led up to her making that choice connect with harm that she’d endured. Her mother was a drug abuser and like for her to be a child and get access to those things, it is hard to break out. 

So there are so many things that I can say I wish, but I think in the bigger picture of it, if we had what we needed, if we had a safe place to stay, if our family wasn’t so plagued by indoctrination, Christian indoctrination, to be able to see that a mobilization of our family was necessary to help my mother in a certain way. That my father wasn’t some blemish-less person, like he was capable of penetrating a child as a grown man. And no one believed me in my entire family. They still don’t. And reconciling that within myself, I think my dream is more that there is an opportunity for accountability and justice that moves beyond how a person appears. 

I would have wanted that to matter more. I would have wanted my parents to care more about the impact it had on us as children, their decisions, then it would have to just like say, if we had a house and money and all that, I think that there are some trauma, like, familial trauma that needed to have been addressed. And when you don’t, that trauma is pent up until it is exposed by someone. And like, I believe I’m the first generation in my family to have done something different as far as my choices, but it also led me to not make certain choices. 

I think for me, I would have wanted nurturance and care to be the center of how my family practiced. I would have wanted the policing system to not exist, so I didn’t endure the sexual harm so long trying to keep my dad out of prison. I knew what happened to a Black man who…I was reading bell hooks at 10 years old. I know what would happen to a Black man who was sexually assaulting a child, and I wanted to protect him from that. So for years, I endured this treatment because of what I knew in the early age that I knew it. So I would have wanted access to, to being able to not have the respectability culture of a child, not being able to say, no talking back. No, no, actually this man did this to me. Grandma, like, yes, he did. And what is you talking about? You was not there. I wanted to be able to say that I want Black culture to admit its part in the tenure of my harm. I want my family to admit to the wounds that they endured and how they produce wounds for me.

I want them to be able to access that because they had those wounds, it did not absolve them of the accountability of at minimum apologizing to me for the conditions that they offered to me. I have realistic dreams about what was possible in the conditions of their influence and in how systems influence how they made those choices. And I don’t want them to be absolved because I want them to feel the discomfort to say that I will do…I want to do something different with how I treat those who I call family, right? 

Not that family means some circle of people that’s going to protect one another at any point through anything. My father deserved for my family to dispose of him, but he was a heterosexual black man. But for me, it was easy because I’m queer. The visibility of sin is what I wrote about when I wrote that article. I called it the visibility of sin. And that’s because they could not see beyond. They couldn’t see my father as someone who was a child rapist because he was still suiting Todd, blessed, playing the organ, sing. My father could sing through the, man, well, I’m talking about Kim Burrell sing. He could sing. And because he fit the aesthetic part, compassion was produced. That’s the consequence of the good bad binary. I want people to be able to have seen and noticed the signs, right?

My stepmom who lived in the house with us at the time, before I went back into the system, she come home from class 11pm/midnight after her night classes at school, she come see me as a child running out his room with no clothes on. That don’t, that’s no, it’s no red light? It’s no flag? But the love she had for him, whatever he said was going to suffice. And that’s what I mean. I want adults to admit their participation in how these impacts from these systems influence their choices because we have to expose all these parts. It can never be just systems. It can never be just like I want us to talk about the wounds we have and how they’re informing us going forward. That’s what I wish would have happened.

Jaison Oliver

So I feel like this means I gotta ask about Adult Preschool. You’re telling us what we need from adults. In terms of care, in terms of accountability, in terms of the potential for transformation. Yeah, tell us about the Adult Preschool.

Nalo Zidan

Hahaha! So the Adult Preschool, and I’m gonna be honest, this is a project I am fearfully confident in. And I mean that I am as much terrified as I am tenacious in its success. But the Adult Preschool seeks to lay a platform that says there are skills and practices and knowings that we do not have in the broken system that is what community means. And to reify and to continue to make attempts at sustaining what the skills are that fill those holes. And that means everything from conflict resolution strategy to fighting against the carceral system and to navigating the conditions we’re in so that as Black community, we always have access to our joy. We know how to mobilize for one another. And that justice isn’t something that’s centered on how it makes us feel. I want the Adult Preschool to sustain and to ideate for futures that that violence is available to, but that also like we have principles of life sustaining practice for one another. 

What does it mean to be part of a community? Convenience culture is to dismantle that. That’s number one, because convenience culture has taught us that there is a pill we can take to stop our pain. Not giving attention to stretching daily for our mobility and like whatever else are the amounts of care that we need to practice and continue on together. What it means to have healthy respect for difference, homophobia in the Black community, all of it. I want to figure out how we make an awareness of our socialization such that we can continue moving forward in a way that puts power back in our hand to decide the trajectory of our future, that we can have respect for difference and know that it doesn’t take away from the fact that you also get to exist too. And that’s hard to do in a capitalist society. 

It’s hard to teach skills around conflict resolution when the carceral system is teaching us to punish. It’s hard to talk about the foster care system, family policing system, when we think, she’s just a bad mama because she did this. No, I’m saying let’s see each other as…we talk about Black women as being most harmed. We talk about queer and trans people about being most harmed. Yet when something happens that produces a consequence that pulls our compassion or whatever else, we just seek to just eradicate the person like a cancer instead of reconciling the fact that there are multiple needs that go into harm resolution strategy and conflict resolution strategy, there needs to be as many people mobilizing for the victim as there is mobilizing for the person who caused the harm. Or it will just locate itself in a different place. There’s just too much to think through. And because our feelings are our feelings, a lot of times that explosion kind of overtakes it. 

Let me give you an example. I cannot step up to practice on a case where a grown ass man harmed a child. Okay? I know that that’s my trauma. I cannot offer myself because I cannot have care for your life. I don’t. I’m probably voting for the longest sentence, the whatever. I’m probably doing that, right? And when it comes to community organized harm resolution strategy, there needs to be people who can think without that emotion there too.

Right. There needs to be representation for that person, but also them. So I think for me, I want to, I want to talk abolition as it pertains to recognizing the work that care requires, recognizing there is no, no pill. There is no one all practice because prison is the ibuprofen. Okay. It’s if you did this, throw your behind over there disposed of. Okay. And we don’t think about when they get out, we don’t think about all the votes we lose because they felons and this and that, because that’s why you won’t vote for it. And then that includes us children in the family policing system. And it just trickles down to us. And we have, we are defenseless against its impact. 

And so I just, I want to see, I want to see abolition come alive in the way that we are able to see consequences outside of how they fit in with what we think was just because the death penalty made him, made something feel good in me. Maybe I’m not healed, but I have some was satiated and that’s why I’m going for this response. So I think that’s what I mean when I, when I say that I want abolition to mean that we are sustaining life because, all punitive points right back to the carceral system, right back to disposal, and that does not support our movement. 

So when I think of Adult Preschool, I’m hoping it’s a medium for training, for offering resource, for connecting communities, for connecting movements, to say that we are here to provide tools that you still have the choice to use. I can give you a hammer and a nail, and if you ain’t never touched that wall, I don’t know what to do, but that’s the point. We have to know that there is labor. Capitalism teaches us that labor is something that we should stray away from because it’s abused labor in bodies. That doesn’t change that care requires labor, justice requires labor. Community requires labor and that’s what Adult Preschool seeks to do. 

Sorry, I kind of got passionate there, but it just drives me so, so deeply to offer this information in a way that’s accessible to people, accessible to the hood niggas, accessible to the PhDers, accessible to the kids who barely reading. I’m trying to reach them. Because guess what? Them the people. That y ‘all so easily willing to check the box of them being in prison, easily wishing to dispose. We tried all we could, have you? Or is it easier to dispose? Giving people boundaries. If you do this, this is the consequence. You will be removed from community. What does that mean for your life? To your life, to be without us. I want to offer a thing that allows people the ability to see their humanity centered while also navigating all the other things that we’re still figuring out how to do. And the hard part is life is short and there’s just not enough time, but I’m hopeful that Adult Preschool can bridge the gaps on.

Jaison Oliver

You had brought this idea up before of this question of, what are the outcomes of the situation I was harmed by can produce? And trying to expand those possibilities. And I’m really struck by what I keep hearing from you, this recurring theme of new possibilities. So transitioning into something a little bit different, but really building on what you’ve talked about so far, what are the healthy, joyful futures that you envision for queer children, families, and communities? Beyond, as in a world where we have the Adult Preschool that we all collectively need. Where we all participate in the work of producing and sustaining care in every aspect of how we live our lives. What’s the healthy, joyful future that you’re envisioning?

Nalo Zidan

I want to go ahead and say, and I don’t know how controversial this will be, but I am not fighting for a future that is only good because I believe that that’s unrealistic. There are, until capitalism and these major influences to our lives are eradicated, which we do not know, I’m speaking to the world we live in right now.

I’m speaking to designing tools and having an imagination that includes people who are not seen as good. And I’m talking about everyone from the masculinization of the black woman to the death of the trans woman to the, I’m saying that there are people who genuinely are not going to be able to be convinced that these people are worthy of this level of access to joy. And I think community orients us to being able to be together, but there is still and always a threat to our lives. Because how do you get a white supremacist to not want to kill us when he sees us? How do you get someone who’s practicing homophobia to think that God is what they know about God is wrong, right? 

The protection of religion, the protection of certain ideology is going to produce certain outcomes. And this is how I know the outcomes produce the same oppressive symptoms that we are trying to mitigate. But the symptoms are not the things that require our attention. We’re talking about eradicating the system itself. We want to dispose of everything but the actual system. So what I am seeking to create with other minds is an organization that remains adaptive to supporting and teaching new visions for how to adjust and adapt while also working toward the world of care, the world of trust, the world of access, the distribution of resources that we want to see is possible to do among people. 

And what’s so difficult about this kind of vision is that the trust we don’t have speaks for the bulk of why people don’t work toward this level of access. If you’re not going to pay me, I’m not volunteering. You feel me? If you’re not going, if it doesn’t feel like a safe space, I ain’t showing up. I’m saying the world is what we don’t have control over. I’m saying what do we have access to such that we can come together and make an actual thing that is not possible to us right now.

Because before anything was possible, somebody dreamt it up. Every word we speaking, a white man looked at something and made the word up or whoever else. From language to what we call a cat and a dog. Like somebody made it up. And I want to know with a bunch of other humans who are as crazy as me that we can dream up something else and that is not contingent upon how it makes us feel, but what saves our lives, what sustains our communities and what continues to fortify an allegiance and alliance. We talk about allyship, what’s the allyship we have to this earth? Can we stop littering? Can we, there are so many ties and to our, from our choices to oppression to, and I don’t want it to be binary any longer.

If good or bad person is the barometer, then you can socialize someone to think that because they don’t have a degree that they’re on the bad side, a bad person. That if they ever done a drug that they’re on the side of bad person. If they ever had to steal something to feed their family that they’re on a bad person. And what does that do for how they inform their worthiness to make choices outside of what you have constructed is a bad person? That’s why it’s easier to dispose. 

And I think that I don’t want to see a world that’s good. I want to see a world that’s human. So the evidence of what’s produced is not as simple as saying we measure systems availability of harm. I want to know how much is our choices, how much is lack of resource, how much is because too many women are being targeted or too many trans people. We need to know that honest data. And so I’m hopeful that we can do that through the push toward seeing one another as human first.

And I think restoring our trust in one another allows us to trust one another’s humanity. And if we can’t trust one another’s humanity, justice is rarely possible because I don’t see you as somebody. I mean, I think about it. I’m like, if somebody says something about my mama, you know what I’m saying? I’m more likely to say something than if I heard back in the day, one of my friends talk about some old lady up the street. That lady ain’t got nothing to do with me.

But what happens when we become familiar to one another such that I do care? So I seek to have kind of a radicalized, really aggressively radicalized community to teach us how to be together and really an experiment to see what’s produced. I have no clue what will actually be produced, but I know to touch one person means to touch a thousand. So that’s kind of where I’m at.

Josie Pickens

I feel like this conversation could go on and on. We’re enjoying it so much and getting so many great jewels. 

Jaison Oliver

We’re just gonna have to continue it in Houston. You’re gonna come visit us and we’re gonna keep it going.

Nalo Zidan

That’s right.

Josie Pickens

I know we’re going to keep it going. Absolutely. We just wanna let the good folks know where they can stay connected to you and where they can find you in your work, out in the world, virtually, online, let us know.

Nalo Zidan

I’m new to TikTok, but I guess I’m guessing also it’ll be in the details of the podcast, but on Instagram, I’m @NaloDarling. And on TikTok, I’m @KingNaloDarling. And I have a website that NaloZidan.com that is under construction currently and will be launching later in the fall, along with the Adult Preschool Podcast which right now is Bad People Podcast. I might leave it that way, but Bad People Podcast is the start of it. Episode one is up already if y’all want to go listen to it. 

But yeah, that’s the way you can get in touch with me. And let’s ideate together, let’s dream together. I’m so looking forward to shaping a world that isn’t conditional on whose life is good or bad, who gets to be disposed of and we’d be okay with it and who’s not. I don’t think we earn our lives. When you take your first breath, you know what I’m saying? You earned it then and we just gotta figure out how to be able to still sustain that life being worthy on earth. So I’m hopeful that I can contribute to the dream of that.

Josie Pickens

Yeah. I’m telling you that good and bad conversation. OK, we are going to end it, but it all is according to perspective. You know what I mean? Anybody could be good or bad according to perspective. So like you said, we need something, when we’re building this beloved community that we are all hoping to build. And we do have to eradicate that idea of good and bad because it isn’t rooted in anything real most times but okay that’s it we’re done thank you so much Nalo. We’ll have this conversation in person!

Nalo Zidan

Yes we will. Definitely!

Jaison Oliver

Thank you for joining us, Nalo!