commitment to care
what will it take for you to commit to your community and your collective future?
It takes less than 30 hours in Dallas County Jail to (re)commit to abolition. For 30 hours I waited for the carceral bureaucracy I was prepared for to run its course all the while knowing I had a crowd of community members waiting for me just downstairs. I knew that my warm bed, my full-time organizing gig, and my relative freedom was secured and that all I had to do was wait. I knew that the act of protest that landed me there carried a light sentence compared to the millions incarcerated worldwide for various crimes of poverty, mental illness, or other social trespasses - with no end in sight for their detention. I walked out of county jail with a renewed dedication to material solidarity for folks entangled in the carceral system for lots of reasons, not just political prisoners. The rhetoric of “real criminals” vs us “protestors” was weaponized for/against us to which we vehemently denied any such separation. Abolition is about changing the conditions of social relations, culture, and “normalcy” so that patriarchy, homo- and transphobia, racism, and all the other violent psycho-social doctrines lead to crime and criminalization.
I’m saying nothing new here that other abolitionist and socialist thinkers before me haven’t already lamented - that the distinction between violent/undeserving and nonviolent/deserving offenders is not practically useful; that the conditions of repression stretching to reach large swaths of the population have long been practiced and perfected on incarcerated folks; that the reduction and expulsion of policing and prisons should be everyone’s priority. Look - I’m aware how quickly this newsletter can come off as aloof and grandstanding if I’m not being material about how we can exercise the solidarity and power-building I’m always going on about. But I’m a firm believer that just because we don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean we can’t ask the questions and figure it out along the way. So far we’ve done a ton of work to name the problems, and there’s so much information out there about the consciousness-raising, working-power building that really shifts societies. Yet many of us seem stuck in the “what now?” of it all. So what does it look like to examine our relationship to commitment and discipline at a time when building a new world requires us all? How can we identify what we’re willing to lose, to give up, to sacrifice, and to do in order to make the world anew?
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I moved to Dallas nearly three years ago, eager to return to the South after a couple years in New Hampshire for college. I came to the same conclusion many had warned me of - that Northerners are much more cold and unfriendly than the Southern warmth and hospitality I was used to. I didn’t strongly identify with the South until leaving as there’s something about missing a place, about looking for your familiar trees and starts and ‘squitoes and not recognizing them in unfamiliar skies that makes you more able to define home. I knew nothing about Dallas before arriving; in fact, my first time stepping foot into the state was the day I moved into my first apartment here. I shared my worries with my friends who either moved home after graduation or moved in with each other. I was worried I’d struggle to find community and would suffer mentally and emotionally in the meantime. I was worried about living like a tourist or a gentrifier, but was unsure how to go about creating deep ties in a strange new place whose only commonality thus far was that we share a common history of Southerness - the good and the bad that defines it. I didn’t know how to be young, Black, gay, anxious, and leftist in a state known as much for its big culture as for its deep repression.
I made slow strides for two years. I went on a couple of Bumble BFF dates that quickly fizzled out, all except for one sweet teacher friend who I’m honored to still know. I followed every local social justice org I could find and sporadically popped into events that I could get to in 20 minutes or less as I still found Dallas highways and traffic incredibly daunting. I told myself I’d commit to a mutual aid group, and then a community garden, and yet with each endeavor I wasn’t finding the sustained connection with anyone necessary to bring me back, to help me commit. I considered myself deeply principled then - aware that we each have to commit to showing up, to being in community and building the world we want to see together. I knew that no one would hand us the change we wanted to see and that I could either be an angry, aware bystander or an active agent of change on some scale. Yet making this commitment real - showing up regularly, within my capacity but as consistently as I can - remained an elusive goal hanging over my head that kept me from consecrating my post-grad life as complete and fulfilling.
The last 6 months of organizing for Palestine have brought me closer to witnessing, feeling, and building real community than I have since I arrived in Texas in July of 2021. Amid the backdrop of an intensifying genocidal campaign against Palestinians who have been living under occupation for 75 years, solidarity and discipline have crystallized into a sharp, tangible reality for many of us. The stakes have never been higher. In Palestine, Sudan, the DR Congo, and countless other locales struggling under the boot of imperialist capitalism, constant death and forced migration constitute a reality in stark contrast to the distracted, consumerist lifestyle their oppression enables for those living in the metropoles. Not much about this relationship is new - inhumane acts of warfare and militarism have been critical to the upkeep of empire for centuries. What’s new is the ability to broadcast these atrocities in real-time and to respond in real-time to the dissolution of our fabricated comfort and distance. The U.S. is trying to ban TikTok as part of its wider campaign to manufacture public consent for a war with China; more specifically because the youth are no longer being fooled by Israeli and other imperialist propaganda, and are sharing too honestly too quickly. Time and distance are collapsing on us and bringing us back to a sense of global interconnectedness and responsibility - and with that responsibility is the choice to continue on in blissful ignorance, or to do everything in your power to help bring about liberation. I’ve been lucky enough to find folks who make this choice easy - we’re marching towards a new world together, battered and bleeding but breathing in each other’s possibility.
There’s lots and lots of meetings. Hours of discussing, debating, experimenting, building elaborate plans and then scrapping them and starting from the top. Overwhelming ourselves with all that there is to tackle and fix, and having to reign ourselves back in towards focus and realism. There’s crying and exclamations, breakdowns and revelations, exasperation and frustration and anyone would have whiplash from a few weeks deep in organizing in community. And yet I challenge you to find someone who didn’t feel fundamentally more whole, more human, more sane and secure in their place in the world after spending intentional time reflecting and acting on the world around you with the people around you. With the (next) world’s end nipping at our heels, we’re trying and failing and trying and winning and trying again. Once you get a feel for all the possibility and power the people hold despite what the dominant narrative would have us to believe, it’s an almost addicting experience to experiment together and see how good things can get.
My community has taught me more about responsibility and discipline than years of prison-like schooling ever did. As Mariame Kaba reminds us, hope is a discipline that must be cultivated amidst insurmountable odds. This is not an invitation to unfettered optimism, but instead is deeply rooted in material reality. What’s more material than the fact that human history is that of human participation in changing the world? The discipline necessary to remain committed to your community and your collective goals despite mounting repression, setbacks, failures, and ruthless elite capture is only made possible through forging deep bonds with said community and reuniting your humanity with theirs. Capitalism isolates and stratifies us; community is the bond we forge in opposition to a system that seeks to sever our humanity from others. Only through building these intentional community bonds - rooted not just in proximity but in shared values + principles, commitment to each other, and vision for the future - can we combat the psychological warfare capitalism wages against us. My community saves my life every day by reminding me that I am human first and foremost and that I deserve goodness because of it.