Ep. 6 – The Poetics and Politics of Radical Black Mothering: A Conversation with Dr. Christen Smith

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race in Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice, and citizenship.

[0:00:21 Peniel] Today, on race and democracy, we speak with Dr Christen A. Smith, professor of anthropology and African and African diaspora, studies about transnational racial violence, black mothering, and resistance to state violence in the United States and Brazil. Kristin, thank you for joining us.

[0:00:43 Christen] Thank you so much for the invitation.

[0:00:45 Peniel] And I’m really excited about our conversation today because it’s really based upon the work that you do around transnational violence, racial violence, especially against black women, the gender. No nature of that violence. Um, and in the age of black lives matter. I think, uh, the work that you do is more profound than ever, And it’s really got global implications for how we think about gender, how we think about democracy, how we think about both the American nation state but also nation states in the Americas, including Brazil. So we think about South America’s Latin America’s, um, and today I want to talk to you about your work in general, but specifically, ah, you wrote a really brilliant article in Transforming Anthropology, which is a journal called facing the dragon Black mother, black mothering, um, sick quella and gender necro politics in the Americas. And I want us to break that down. And really, my, uh my, uh My first question is, you know, one of things you talk about is mothering and times of terror and ah, this this idea of sorrow as an artifact and in what ways does this idea of state violence against black bodies? In what ways is that both gendered and transnational?

[0:02:06 Christen] No, thank you. Thanks. And first, let me say thank you for reading, because I think that as, um as scholars, academics, we often do this work. But it stays in the archives, let’s say and so to bring it out, especially with the social justice bend, which I believe my work has. Um it’s important to talk about it and discuss it in a in a public audience. And so this is an important opportunity to do that now, in terms of the gender dynamic dimensions of anti-black state violence, and it’s transnational nature. I think that one of the things that I have learned working in Brazil for the past 15 years, almost 20 years, is that there are patterns to many of the experiences with state violence that we have here in the United States, in the black community, that we can also identify and other spaces. And I think that’s the first step of the answer to your question. And so one recognizing that the kinds of police aggression and police violence that we experience here in the United States the kinds of racialized bias that we experience in the judicial system, obviously recently, everything that’s on people’s mind is Santoyo Brown and the 51 years that she got for killing one of her, um, one of her aggressors. And I think that Mommy, when we think about the racialized system of state violence, we have to recognize that these systems are transnational in the sense that they’re in communication with one another and I’m gonna try to break that down quickly would also break it down so that people can really understand.

[0:03:53 Peniel] And can you tell us about the Brown case?

[0:03:55 Christen] Oh, absolutely. So Santoyo Brown was 16 when she was trafficked, um, it sexual traffic and she killed one of the people who had solicited her when she was being trafficked and, um although many of us see that as both a kind of self-defense and also a reaction to her, her victim status as somebody who was being trafficked at that time, she was convicted on first degree murder and just recently, a judge, a judge in Tennessee where she is incarcerated, um, decided that she needs to spend 51 years in jail before she is eligible for parole.

[0:04:41 Peniel] That reminds me of the Joanne Little case in North Carolina who who was raped by a prison guard and ended up killing her rapist. Um, and there was a big free Joanne Little case, Um, in the 1970s?

[0:04:55 Christen] Absolutely. And I think that that I’m glad that you bring that up because we can look back over time and see cases like this. And there’s another case, and I think her name was Celia, and I can’t remember her name right now, but the case will be familiar to people where there was ah, young black woman who was enslaved. This is during this during slavery times here in the United States, she was enslaved. She was purchased for the explicit purpose of being raped and eventually killed her rapist and but was pregnant by him when she killed her rapist. They waited for her to have her baby. And then the baby was born stillborn. And once the baby was born and born stillborn, they they hung her because she was convicted of murder. For that, no attention paid to the fact that she was serially raped over time. And so the reason why I think this is an important aspect or important story for us to think about the transnational dimensions is that one aspect of my work is really thinking about how we congenital er our understanding of state violence through time and space.

[0:06:08 Peniel] And what do you mean by state violence?

[0:06:10 Christen] And so by state violence, I mean violence that is either perpetuated by the state or violence that is sanctioned by the state.

[0:06:21 Peniel] So the criminal justice system,

[0:06:23 Christen] the criminal justice system writ large. So, think, for example, George Zimmerman. When we think about George Zimmerman, we think about a civilian killing another civilian, Travon Martin, in this case. But for many of us, we recognize that the state, in actuality, deputized George Zimmerman to be able to kill Trayvon Martin and it’s because of that deputization that he was able to walk off Scott free without getting any time or charges without getting any time or conviction for that murder. And we know that it was murder, right? And so when I talk about state violence, I think about the state in that frame. How is it that the state has a hand in the kinds of the ways that structural violence is perpetuated against black folk? And that does not only happen at the hands of state agents, it can also happen at the hands of a system. And so it could be the police. It could be judges deciding that you need to serve 51 years, like in the case of Santoyo Brown. Or it could be folk who are allowed to kill black people and particularly black youth without suffering any consequences, and the way that things like stand your ground laws allow that to happen. And so in that regard, I think about the state writ large and so if we think about the history of the state and we think about the history of the American nation, state and its ties to slavery, transnational slavery, its ties to anti blackness in particular. Okay, um and so particularly the ways that American nation states And when I say American, I’m always referring to. All of the Americas were started as colonies that then grew slave colonies and colonies that were built on a plantation slave system that then grew into nation states. Right there is that anti blackness that’s very much embedded in them. And that is something that you find repeated across the Americas. It’s not just something that we find here in the United States. And so what I do in my work is really try to identify those existing connections through time, right? So, from here, back through slavery, but also through space, United States to Brazil.

[0:08:39 Peniel] Now, can you explain in this article you talk about facing the dragon? What do you mean by dragon? That term dragon? Because it definitely reminded me of some of the black power, um, literature that I read on and study. Um, and people used to call America belly of the beast days that there were many different sort of metaphors for the United States. Um, and what it represented. So, what do you mean, by the dragon.

[0:09:04 Christen] Absolutely. So that’s actually a quote from Audrey Lord. And so part of the inspiration for this particular article was Audrey Lords s a man child. And so for those people who don’t know who are the Lord was she was a poet and called herself a lesbian mother warrior poet, Um, and one of the four mothers of black feminism in many ways. And she had two Children. And it’s thinking about how to raise a boy as a woman who had these multiple identities she wrote as they called Man Child. And in that essay, she talks about raising a child in the belly of the dragon, and the dragon for her is the American nation state. And she’s names that explicitly and what’s interesting is that if we go back through her essays, you’ll see that when she refers to America and she’s referring to the United States. But I’ve expanded it to also include all of the Americas. But when she it refers to America, she always refers to as a dragon, and she thinks of it as the belly of the beast. And so I’m very sure that it’s, uh it is a fruit of the Times. And so she’s writing in the 19 eighties and 19 seventies, Um and particularly these essays are early eighties free. And so that’s that’s part of her activism and in her organizing, um, background that’s coming through that language. But it’s definitely coming from Audrey Lorde and her understanding of the American state nation state as a patriarchal white supremacist, hetero, sexist capitalist’s space of oppression.

[0:10:44 Peniel] And I want you to before getting really diving deep into your research in Brazil, in Austin, I want you to unpack those terms, you know when we mean because I think sometimes people listen to those terms and they say, Well, what are people talking about me? They might understand that they’ve heard of the word capitalist, but they probably think of white supremacists, clan members, Um, and by the time you get to heteronormative ity or hetero patriarchy, you’ve lost them. So what? Let’s unpack. What are we saying?

[0:11:12 Christen] No, absolutely. What one. I want to make sure that I’m citing very exciting correctly everyone that I’m that I’m invoking here. And so, Audrey Lorde talks about those things, but so does Bell Hooks. And I think that if anybody is interested in really unpacking the ways that the connection between patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, hetero sexism and white supremacy I would really encourage people to read. Bell hooks his work on this because it’s definitely her concept in her understanding of it. But in the purpose of this conversation, patriarchy is literally the ways that we assume that men and masculinity and male figures should always be in the lead and everybody else should fall behind. And so when I think of patriarchy in particular and I talk about it so my students, one of the things I talk about are the ways that we see the nuclear family as a pyramid with the man at the top, the wife at the bottom and the Children at the bottom, and everybody at the bottom falls under the power reach of the man who was at the top. But interestingly enough, patriarchy as a structural understanding of power, also allows us to think about the nation as a family or transnational global power structures as family structures and the ways that men and masculinity are always seemed to be, that which should decide the fate of everything else beneath it, right?

[0:12:54 Peniel] So that means that this notion of patriarchy even impacts anti-racist and social justice movements. Because in that case, these movements, even if they’re resisting white supremacy or even if at times they’re resisting capitalism and talking about socialism, the world they’re reimagining doesn’t question patriarchy.

[0:13:14 Christen] Absolutely, absolutely. And I think there’s been a lot of great work on some of our beloved black movements from the 19 sixties and 19 seventies that did just that, wanting to disrupt the racial order and the way that race and racism function, but not really paying attention to gender. And if you don’t pay it into two gender, are you really disrupting the power structure?And I think that in terms of the relationship between patriarchy and white supremacy, we have to remember that for generations we as black people have been in fantasized. And so if the nation state is a patriarchy such that he who has the he who he excuse me, he who is the father figure is the white male landowner that our founding fathers here in the United States imagined as the citizens right, the true citizens of the nation’s one who could vote and actually decide the political future then as black folk. Historically, we have actually been in the place of Children and property. And so that’s the connection between white supremacy and patriarchy in many ways white supremacy. And when I talk about white supremacy, I want to be sure we’re not talking about just the clan. We are talking about the clan, but we’re not just talking about The Klan were talking about all of the ways that we as a society assume that certain people are racially inferior and therefore that there is a there. There is a privilege to whiteness. There’s a superiority toe whiteness, and that whiteness is somehow more advanced, more developed than everything else. And so, if we if we think about white supremacy in that way as a logic, then when we look around the world, we see lots of examples of the ways that white supremacy gets reproduced by people who don’t have hoods on their heads.

[0:15:13 Peniel] Absolutely and read by states, absolutely institutions within the nation state. Um, you know, I was fascinated by the case studies of the police killings in Austin and Brazil that you talked about very, very moving. Um, and you talk about so much state sanctioned violence against these black bodies, but in very specific ways. You also talk about morning and radical mothering. And how, when mothers lose their Children, there’s a riel reverberation. I mean, they’re left in this in between space between being living and being dead. So I want you to talk about that. Um, you know, how does this anti black violence really how it works trans nationally. You give a couple of specific, um, instances and case studies. Um, and how does that impact black folks in black communities? Beyond the criminal justice system, You talk about the politics of seeking help in terms of therapy. You talk about mothers who are unable to keep their jobs in the aftermath. Thes thes thes murders of their Children. Um, so and, yes, there’s more, but yes,

[0:16:25 Christen] no, I think, um, let me say that. Let me let me start by saying this. I started this project because as a mother, I recognized that there was something very insidious that was happening with the family members of the young folk that I was seeing getting killed in Brazil and the United States. that people weren’t paying attention to. And that is the fact that in the aftermath of of killings, particularly police killings, um, and I talk a little bit about that and the article as to why, Specifically, police killings, we could talk about all murders and all violence writ large. But there’s something about the way the relationship between police killings and grief and repetition over time that I want us to pay attention to. And that is the fact that the state is as citizens, right. Technically we are citizens, and so if legally we are citizens, then structurally, the state should take care of us. And there’s something deeply insidious about the state doing the very opposite. And instead of ensuring life, actually seeking out death all right, which is also where the term necker politics comes from. But I’ll go into that later. And so I started to see the ways that mothers of young people who were killed by the police were literally dying slowly in the aftermath of those killings. And I started to see that in the beginning in Brazil I was doing work in Brazil and I was working with a in an organization called Hodges, said Amato, Hodges, Santa Marta, React or Die, which is an organization that works with the families and communities of people who have either been killed by the police, disappeared by the police or incarcerated, And I started to at different events. I started to meet the parents of these of these of these kids that had been killed, and I started to notice the ways that the mothers get sick and slip into a depression that is deeper and more life altering than the depression that we see. I think normally, and I also started to see that the way that their lives were completely unraveled by these killings because of the the state nature of it. And so it’s not just that people were getting killed, it was that people were getting killed and mothers and families had to go into witness protection programs and had to go into hiding and couldn’t work anymore. And because they couldn’t work anymore, they also could not. They also could not be in their friend groups and had to leave their neighborhoods, and they had to ah, leave their jobs. Many of them stopped eating, many of them started to actually go lose their their their mental faculties and not be able to relate to society. And literally I saw the ways that this was killing them slowly. And so even the ones who were strong and who were fighting were often getting heart disease, um, pneumonia, other kinds of very adverse health effects. And some were even eventually dying. And I would that would actually see that that pattern happened. And when I started to look at that in conversation with Collaborator whose ah, one of the co coordinators react to Die when I was doing interview with her in 2012 and she was talking to me about the violence and this is somebody from Brazil in Salvador Bahia where I’ve been doing my work and she was talking me about the impact on the family and as a medical doctor, one of the things that she said waas. You know, we never think about the ways that adverse health effects that these killings have on the family members. And when she said that I started to and and she said she used a specific word, which is a word that is used relatively frequently in Spanish and Portuguese, but not but less so in the United States and English. Um, and that word was sick. Well, which literally means the lingering, the after effects of disease, the deadly aftereffects of disease. And so when she was talking about that, I started to really kind of think about the transnational patterns. And I started to say, you know, this is something that is happening not just in Brazil, but it also happens at home where I’m from in the United States.

[0:21:24 Peniel] And when you think about all these police killings in Brazil and you talk about death squads one I want you to talk about what’s the racial implications here? Because Brazil is so racially diverse and to what is the precipitating? Ah, cause for this because we think we know in the United States mass incarceration. In the last 40 years, it was rooted in the drug war. A prison boom prizes, private prisons, sort of anything about neo liberalism and sort of the privatisation and sort of the abuse of public funds. Um, for for for the rich, for the 1%. Why is it happening in Brazil on this scale? I think that that question is a very important one because it actually it also goes back to this question of the transnational. And so, it’s very much tied with the drug war of the quote unquote drug war. It’s very much tied to the militarization of policing trans nationally, the transnational discourses of policing and zero tolerance community policing in quotes and the ways that we are increasingly becoming policing states not only here in the United States but also abroad in places like Brazil. And so one of the things you asked about was the desk wants. And so Brazil’s death squads can be traced back to the early. Some people would, I would say, early 20th century in in terms of exact tracing. But we could even make the connections back to the 19th century with the secret with secret police in Brazil, secret police and particularly what? What our desk wads death squads are clandestine groups of, And this is the technical definition claim clandestine groups of vigilantes that exact killings outside of the law. That would be the dictionary definition. But in Brazil, the actual lived definition is that police officers form groups where they go in the dead of night and actually execute people. And that is something that is

[0:23:44 Christen] much more common there than it is here in the United States and disproportionately the people that they are targeting our young black men. That should sound familiar to any audience that’s familiar with anti black police violence here in the United States. The methods are a little different because we don’t necessarily have the kinds of culture of of death squads that we have here in the United States. But that connection to police thing is very familiar. And so when you’re talking about Death Squad, you’re also talking about something that’s extremely complicated, this connection between on duty policing and off duty policing. And so, at what point does somebody become become a police officer? And what point do they stop being a police officer

[0:24:34 Peniel] In our country? You never stop, really.

[0:24:36 Christen] And I would argue, and the people who I work with in Brazil with argue that you never stop in Brazil, either.

[0:24:41 Peniel] You’re always on duty here because there’s so many times when off duty police officers get into some kind of conflict with, with ordinary citizens, usually black, that dovetails into this question about necro politics. You know, you talked about sick Walla. Um, and can you explain to turn necro politics and have the work that you’re doing? How it how it it both theorizes death and its aftermath on black families, but especially black women wires. Is it so important? And what do we What do we glean? Both? Theoretically, but in terms of practically and even for policy, trans nationally when we focus on on women

[0:25:21 Christen] Absolutely so necro politics is a term that was coined by, and she’ll in Bombay, um, in 2005. At least that’s the article that was translated into English is in 2005. Um, and in that article he’s engaging with food, coz notion of bio politics. And so Fuko has this notion of bio politics, where he talks about the ways that the state engineers life and controls life in the every day, and and what Mbemba is attempting to do is really think about the ways that the state is also engaged in manipulating death. And how is it that in addition to wanting to control the minutia of everyday life, the state is also interested, or the sovereign in which is in the terms that he’s using was very theoretical. In technical terms, the sovereign is also interested in trying to determine who who lives and who dies and on what terms right? Which also goes into a goddamn been and some other theories in philosophy for those who are interested so necro politics, in essence, is the subject ation of life to the powers of death. Right? Um and particularly when the way I’m using it is with regards to the state in memory doesn’t gender that what I try to do in my work is toe also gender it. And so in what ways is policing and police violence Actually, not just about controlling the lives of black folk by harnessing the powers of death, right, killing police Killing is literally harnessing the powers of death, but also black women. And why black women? Because, as I mentioned before, there are mothers who are literally dying slowly because of the loss of their Children to police violence. And for those of us that that may seem kind of general and nebulous, But I would only bring up two cases here in the United States and I think a really key one is the case of Veneto Browder, who was the mother of Kalief Browder. Kalief Browder was a young man who was incarcerated on Rikers Island, subject to abuse and solitary confinement. For years, he was incarcerated as a juvenile, and he was jailed because he couldn’t make bail when he was arrested for when he was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack and related later found out that he didn’t steal it back by, um, in

[0:27:51 Peniel] Kalief. Browder is the subject, one of the subjects of Ava Duvernay’s The 13th documentary.

[0:27:56 Christen] Absolutely, Absolutely, And so What people may not know is that, um, Kalief Browder committed suicide shortly after a little over a year after he was released from Rikers Island. That’s something that that mental illness that is the result of incarceration to me is also part of this sick Walla, right? One of the sick Walla of state violence is that it is a disease that is developed as a result of the state violence of incarceration, right mental illness and suicidal tendencies. And so he committed suicide in his mother’s apartment. A little almost a year later, his mother died of a heart attack. And when we think about Veneto, Browder’s story, this is Vinita broader, literally single handedly championed her sons case From the beginning to the end, she fought tirelessly. She and I don’t like to use the word tirelessly, but that the only word that’s coming to mind right now because we all get tired from this work. But it’s a matter of speaking. She fought relentlessly. She she did everything in her power to bring attention to her son’s case. And when you, when you see her family members talk about her heart disease in her eventual her eventual death after he was killed, many people said she died of heart it heartache, and I believe she died of heart ache. But I also believe that when we think about her dying of heartache, we have to resist the temptation to say this was natural causes. Because is it natural to lose a child to that kind of violence? And is it is it natural for us to have every aspect of our life upturned financially, emotionally, structurally, and not be given the resource is to be able to deal with that because, you know, where is the state restoration in the case with Kalief Browder and his mental illness because he was incarcerated.

[0:30:01 Peniel] And one of the things you do in your work is you provocatively you argue that this is happening purposefully. So this is different from saying, um, some kind of conspiracy theory. But this is saying that this the state is anti black. These nation states both in Brazil, in the United States and especially you look at working class people and working poor people and just poor and unemployed communities. Really? Ah, global peasantry here in the Americas. And how the state is purposefully targeting black mothers and potential mothers was one of the things you do is look at Patricia Hill Collins and the notion of blood Mother versus other mothers and black communities are filled with people who are mothering, including the case. Larry Jackson, Austin, His his his his sister little Visa Liquisa, who’s also another another mother. So I want you to talk about that in terms of why are they targeting black women? But then also, um, talk about how these women in Texas, in Brazil, how they’re organizing against this patriarchy, how they’re organizing against this violence?

[0:31:08 Christen] Absolutely. And so why do I say that? They’re they’re being targeted? Because my argument is built on a notion of structural violence and structural violence, That theory of structural violence. Johann Galle Tongue would say that structural violence occurs anywhere, anytime. There is a gap between the potential of life and the actuality of life, and that gap leads to eventual death. And so if we look at the fact that these mothers are being left to die, that their Children are being targeted disproportionately and structurally,and that in many ways the state actively turns its back on these mothers when these things happen and I would even take it a step further actually vilifies the mothers. Because if you look at these cases over and over again, think about the ways that mothers are portrayed in the media. Think about the ways that we talk about. Mothers think about about mothers, black mothers, absolutely black mothers. There’s E. I can’t help but think about Lesley McSpadden. Lesley McSpadden having to stand there in the street and look at her dead son for four hours. Michael Brown Yes, Michael Brown, her son, Michael Brown and not being able to get close to him, not being able. Teoh even do anything and being subject into constant kind of subtle disrespect in that particular situation and an explicit disrespect in that particular situation. And that is a way when I think about that story, and I think about all of the stories that I know of in Brazil in the United States, and I think about the ways the state deliberately distances black mothers from their ability to mother, making it an impossibility, then to me, that’s what I mean by targeting. So how it is that black mothers are not allowed. And when I say and I’m glad you brought up the other mothering from Patricia Hill Collins because I want to be very, very clear, I think that this is a gender inclusive way of thinking of mothering. And so, for example, I can give you examples of black trans mothers who mother people in their community that to me would fit into this rubric as well. And I think Miss Major is a good example of that out in California, and so this this the ways that the state intervenes in our ability to mother as black mothers is to me what is targeting tow us. And beyond that, there is an insidious nous to that distancing that also caught that also leads us to die. And that is something that I want us to really think about. And I can’t help but think about the the case of Erica Garner as well. And I think about her as an other mother. Obviously, she’s Eric Garner’s daughter, and so she wasn’t his mother. But in this rubric of other mothering and blood mothers, etcetera from pictures shell Collins, then we can think about her as an other mother,

[0:34:23 Peniel] Eric Garner’s black man who was choked to death in Staten Island, New York, for selling cigarettes illegally and famously, I can’t breathe were his last words, and that became that video became viral, and so many young activists connected to the black lives, matter movement and anti-incarceration, anti-mass incarceration used that slogan and you discussed that very well. Can’t Yeah,

[0:34:46 Christen] I mean, it’s interesting cause I wrote this article before she passed away. And so in January 2018 this year, um, she she died of a heart attack and she was in her early twenties. And this is Erica Garner. This is Erica Garner, his daughter, and Erica Garner was the forefront of the movement. And so part of this theory is about this theory of Sick Walla is about really trying to understand what is the toll that are fighting for our lives is taking on us physically. What is the toll? And and you have a young woman who had some health challenges but also just recently had a baby. We know from all of the work that’s been done around the relationship between black women, racism and premature and and premature death following pregnancy or prenatal health issues. That one of the reasons why black women have so many prenatal health issues is the stress of racism. And if the stress of racism can be directly tied to prenatal health issues and black women dying prematurely, then what does the stress of losing somebody to police violence due to your body to your life? And that’s the kind of connection that I’m trying to make and those of connections on making across the Americas.

[0:36:09 Peniel] Well, I wanna have a final big question for you that tries to really pivot and and build on this work. But look towards a sense of optimism in the sense of I think, reading this article, I was very, very optimistic as well. And I want to ask you about your sense of optimism about the ability of black, working class and grassroots communities to resist this dragon, um, and reimagine new ways of of, of living and in new ways of being in building new new communities and how how they could impact the state. Whether that’s through policy, whether that’s through politics, whether it’s through nonprofits, whether it’s through just grassroots community networks are you Are you seeing that and and are you optimistic about, um, this kind of political organizing and resistance, that transnational as well?

[0:37:05 Christen] When you ask that question, I immediately think about the mothers of the 12 young men who were massacred by the police and in Salvador by AEA in 2012 in the Kabul. A massacre what we call the Kabul a massacre. And they have been organizing to put pressure on the state of IAEA. Teoh actually Ah, find the police officers responsible for that massacre guilty and and very quickly, what happened with that was that the police invaded a neighborhood called tabbouleh. Um, in this in the part of the neighborhood called Villa Moyes’s. They pulled out the young men, young men who were hanging out in kind of a vacant field where people kind of gathered and just hanging out Generally, um, they surrounded them, took them into the woods and executed them one by one. And so, um and we know that because some of them escaped.

[0:37:59 Peniel] And why did the police do this?

[0:38:01 Christen] Why did the police do this? This is a very excellent question. Um, the police’s version, the first version, which has since then been completely dismissed, um was that they were in a gun battle with people with a gang that was organizing to try to rob a bank. That was absolutely not the case. The courts have found that that was absolutely not the case the young members shot in the back. Um, there their clothes were taken off to hide the fact that there they were shot in the back. They were It was staged as if they were part of a gang. Um, the motivations, the the official motivations that have been said by the state, um, have not been satisfactory. And like I said, they said that this was some sort of gun battle. They retracted. They’ve stepped back from that, um, those in the community will say that this was a terror technique. This was about the constant, the ways that the police seeks to terrorize these communities and keep these communities under control. And I am I agree with the community members, and so the But the mothers in that case have been experiencing unprecedented ah, persecution, Um, getting terrorized by the police, getting intimidated by the police ever since then. But despite that and this is the answer to your question, But despite that they are organizing and they have come together and they they they are putting pressure on the international on international human rights organisations including Amnesty International um, Human Rights Watch. Also putting pressure on the Organization of American States and the inner and the Inter American Human Rights Commission to pay attention to this case They have been fighting in the courts. They just lost one of the aspects of that fight. Unfortunately, where they were trying to get the case federalized and get it out of state court and put it in federal courts in Brazil. They lost that a couple of weeks ago, but that has not taken away their desire to fight. And so I believed, quite frankly, and the reason why I say that this is a targeted kind of violence in my article because I believe, quite frankly, that it is because of black women’s ability to resist. It is because of our ability to fight back. It is because of the way that are very organizing, and our love as black mothers is a threat to the state. That is, why were targeted. And so it’s not as if it’s not as is. Our existence is off is the opposite of what is going on or is a reaction to what is going on. It is our resistance that is the cause to what is going on, and so I would encourage us to think about it in a different direction. It’s not what it what are black women doing to respond to this violence. But why is it that we must understand and think of this violence as a reaction to the ways that black women are changing the world and are pushing back and are trying to protect life and black life because the at the end of the day, that’s what this is about at the end of day. This is about what are the stakes of protecting black life and ensuring black survival. And no one ensures black survival and protects black life more than black mothers in whatever form that they come. And so that’s why we are the biggest threat to the state and and that’s why we are organizing is the biggest threat. And so you have mothers organizing Lucy McBath, Um, the mother of Jordan Davis, just one in Georgia in this past election cycle, which was wonderful at one of congressional. She won a congressional see? Absolutely. Um, I think that. And I know that Lesley McSpadden and the mother of Mike Brown is also running for an office, um, in Ferguson as well. And so there are mothers who are choosing to do this through the political lens. Um, and the and the more traditional route there are mothers who are organizing within themselves, um, in ways that ah, trying to bring it back to the community. And so what does it mean to think about new forms of policing, for example, policing, abolition, for example? Um, I think black women have been at the forefront of that, and I would say that that would be a black mothering type of of of a political manifestation. The abolition movement and also black women are also organizing against police violence quite directly and and trying to figure out ways to push back and to speak back. And I think they were always constantly resisting. It’s just that we need to We need to think about what that looks like in the every day and the different the different levels of it. So I would I would characterize black mothers resistance from everything from just fighting for the everyday survival of black Children in your community. And so I know, for example, black women who were organized. Hey, Ahsha, for example, the organization that I work with has a community school, um, that primarily services young, young black Children in a space that is heavily policed and heavily targeted by violence. That, to me, is a form of resistance all the way up to directly confronting the state, thinking about ways to rethink the structure of the state i e. Abolition. Thinking about ways to Reese restructure the way that we do our judicial system, prison abolition as well and elected office, which is a more traditional route. And I think that we there there are many different examples of the ways that people are resisting and pushing back. And so I don’t want this. I don’t want this conversation. I want this conversation about see quella to draw attention to a public health crisis that, to me, requires our attention. Because if if we take into account the black women who are slowly dying from police violence than the problem with anti black police, violence is much bigger than we think about. I always talk about the nuclear bomb, and so you would never just count. The people who killed were killed in a nuclear bomb. In the moment, you also count the people who die of cancer and the after effects over time. And so police violence is a nuclear bomb. We have to count the ones that die in the moment and also the ones that die eventually and so that, to me, is really the big issue that we have to think about. But in addition to that, we also have to recognize that that is not the only that’s not the only thing that’s happening. Black women are constantly resisting, even if this violent scenes mammoth and and and unwieldy.

[0:44:48 Peniel] Okay, well, thank you. Um, has been a great conversation about the poetics and politics of radical mothering in an anti black world in the state of ah, anti black violence and suffering. But I think we ended on an optimistic note in the sense that all these mothers ah, whether they’re blood mothers or other mothers are organizing, um, and really resisting and trying to construct a new way of being

[0:45:16 Christen] absolutely and thank you for for having this conversation. Because again, I think that this is something that, in order for us to really seek justice, this is something we’re gonna have to pay attention to and start to address. As as as a world community,

[0:45:31 Peniel] no, absolutely black lives. Matter is global is global in scope. Thank you.

[0:45:38 Christen] Thank you.

[0:45:39 Peniel] Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.