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In the Spirit of Dr. King, Self-Care is Resistance

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Written by: Taiza Troutman

“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.”

The most revolutionary thing Black folks and other marginalized people can do to honor the work and spirit of Dr. King on his holiday is to rest and engage in self-care activities. Capitalism and its associated manifestations of state violence make living — for everybody who is not rich, cisgender, heterosexual, “well-educated” or white — nearly impossible. It is this common reality that unites us othered, deviant, non-normative folks across struggles and pushes us to engage in resistance work that forces us into the very face of trauma and collective oppression; work we engage with that builds on the legacy of the generations before us, and may in fact spark widespread social change.

This undying hope that so many people have creates space for social justice work across various forms of activism, advocacy and organizing to be romanticized absent of the reality of the pain, exhaustion, financial strain, character defamation and burn-out we actually experience in doing the work.

This same romanticism is applied time and time again, year after year to the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The legacy of Dr. King is one that is indeed unmatched in terms of his impact, organizing tactics, religious spirituality and preaching, non-violent teachings and as most recently acknowledged, his anti-capitalist, socialist thought.

“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.”

While he, like other activists and changemakers, is tied to a legacy that is steeped in revolutionary thought and practice, we miss the opportunity to use Dr. King’s teachings to unpack the importance of rest and self-care as vital parts of maintaining healthy, sustainable movements.

“There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.”

Self-Care: A Revolutionary Act of Non-Violent Direct Action Protest

Since 2014, an overwhelming chunk of my life has been devoted to community organizing and activism work in Atlanta, Georgia — the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself. My time in the work has been marked by a few good wins, a LOT of ugly losses, invaluable knowledge about the history of injustice and the inner-workings of this here city, and an undying desire to learn and develop more ways to end harmful urban regimes in favor of a beloved community for all humans.

Organizing, especially direct action protest and community education + advocacy, has also given me a truly magical Black, Queer movement family made up of some of the most extraordinary individuals who all live lives devoted to liberation work and Black joy anchored by a strong repertoire of daily active resistance.

As I reflect back on my time in the work and think about the ways in which we’ve grown together despite the storms we’ve weathered, the significance of our past MLK Day actions vividly stand out to me.

I have attended the Atlanta MLK Day parade faithfully since January 2015. Ironically, my first year participating in the parade was with my college roommates, who, at the time, were graduate students at Clark Atlanta University. They dragged me, an undergraduate student at Georgia State University, along with them because it was too important for me to miss. I protested, given that at the time, taking a nap sounded like a much better idea than what to me at the time felt like a performative “day of action” to celebrate an Atlanta native son that to me if he were still alive would frown upon the city’s current landscape of social justice and inequality; nonetheless, I went anyway and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Looking back on that day, it stands out in two ways: first, it was the first (and last) time I would attend the MLK Day Parade as another young Black Atlanta student. For us, it meant enjoying a day free of classes, celebrating with everybody Black — no agenda, no cause to stand for, and no organization represented. In the years that followed, my MLK Day Parades and following “days of action” involved making statements against racialized human rights issues in Atlanta such as the lack of affordable housing, rampant gentrification, the unjust actions of my own university and the lack of concern for the well-being of the city’s large homeless population. Second, this was indeed the first time I actively chose to skip out on a rejuvenating self-care day (even if all I had planned was a run and a nap) over participating in the work of an activist space.

The legacy of Dr. King is heavily represented by his unwavering commitment to the thought and practice of nonviolent direct action protest and the changemaking that resulted from the actions he lead. He once said, “Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another.” I, like many other activists, outpour my whole being into the (well)being of my community, organizing spaces and comrades, yet fail to keep this same energy when it is time to pour into myself.

Though many argue that the current state of King’s legacy of nonviolent action paints him as a pacifist and that over-focusing on this lane of his work alone limits the scope of his dream, I argue otherwise. Dr. King’s message of nonviolence peace work and use of direct action protest

offers current activists the space to expand on the meaning of direct action resistance as a means of fighting for peace to justify the place of practicing self-care in the work.

One of the most beautiful takeaways from growing up in the movement with a tight-knit circle of organizing fam and a more extensive circle of allies has been watching us learn the beauty and necessity of self-care practices as, among many things, a direct form of resistance to capitalist oppression rooted in stress, hyperproductivity, heteronormativity, state violence and the unyielding social construct of “time.”

The Atlanta Black Movement community engages in work across the lanes of food and environmental justice, housing rights, anti-gentrification, prison abolition, fair wages and economic opportunity, anti-recidivism, youth empowerment, LGBTQ rights, safe biking and transit access and the elimination of those equity barriers that keep the city’s most vulnerable Black folks at an extreme disadvantage when compared to the lives of their more affluent and white counterparts. And this work is exhausting. As time has gone on, however, the work of healing, of practicing veganism, feeling free on a bike and finding slices of nature in the concrete jungle, planting gardens, having parties, communal napping and time banking has allowed us to engage in a revolutionary form of direct action protest via self-care that affords us the opportunity to engage in meaningful work without burning out.

Dr. King spoke on the power of direct action work in numerous speeches, lectures and sermons. However, his exploration of the method in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” piece is one particular iteration of the practice that can be applied to reframing engaging in self-care activities and healing work as forms direct action protest in direct resistance to the demands and strain of capitalism.

In “Letter,” Dr. King pens an open letter after being arrested at a 1963 action in Birmingham, Alabama for disobeying what he vehemently deems in the letter as an “unjust” anti-protest law passed to impede the growing desegregation movement in the city. He breaks down the importance of nonviolent direct action protest early in his letter by saying:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

The idea of self-care in any form, as it is tied to notions of joy and pleasure, has been denied to Black people since slavery; a denial that has been continuously reinforced by capitalism and thus minimized in our forced culture of struggle and survival. It is most often articulated as something that is simply out of reach or not meant for us. Because of the nature of its denial, Black people choosing to find ways to care for ourselves, our families, communities and environments is indeed an act of powerful direct action resistance to the violence of capitalism and racial oppression. King continues writing in his letter the fundamental tenets of direct action protest and why it is the chosen course of action for desegregation work in the South:

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action….. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was “well timed” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.

Given the fundamentals of engaging in nonviolent resistance campaigns articulated by King, self-care as resistance can be justified based on Black people’s deep understanding of the nature of our oppression, as we have collected the facts of our disenfranchisement since the earliest slave narratives and abolitionist thought papers were published. It is because of this overwhelming evidence that Black organizers have fought for generations for seats at the negotiating table of our oppressors to demand our liberation and have subsequently engaged in acts of performative respectability and decorum to prove our worthiness of such treatment. We have attached ourselves to this seemingly never-ending hamster wheel of changemaking work only to have yet to see actual change happen at a large enough scale to consider ourselves “free” and thus we are exhausted. We have the right to be exhausted. We must therefore be mindful that, unfortunately, change does not come from a persistent exhaustion and subsequent collective burnout.

So what are we left to do? Step four: we engage in direct action protest through taking a step back and taking care of ourselves. MLK Day is one of contradiction as it gives many of us the day off to celebrate the life of Dr. King, yet because his legacy is so heavily steeped in a narrow view of “action” many people, organizers and non-organizers alike, choose to spend the day volunteering for and learning about various causes, marching in the streets and “giving back” in some way, while not acknowledging that taking the day off for what it is — a day removed from the work and engaging in rest and leisure — is actually an acceptable form of action.

I do not mean to drag anybody for their tradition of service on King Day; do you. But I would, however, like to offer those folks who understand exhaustion and burnout from this work an alternative way of thinking through service and action that restores, not depletes us. We as Black activists must understand that we cannot afford the ambulances we chase if we burnout and actually are in need of the ride. We therefore must take any opportunity we can to figuratively sit our asses down, re-center, give our brains and bodies a break and rest. I have a very real, attainable dream that self-care, healing and sustainable well-being can and will be a reality for us. After all, according to Dr. King, we engage in nonviolent protest to resist war and to struggle for peace.

As he notes in “Letter,” collective rest and self-care indeed creates a crisis of disruption unimaginable to the dominant power structure. Rest and self-care regiments in a world that seeks to work us weary enough to not protest is active protest. So for those of us who choose to nap, read, share the company of other carefree Black folks, to binge watch trash tv, indulge in good food or take a yoga class on MLK Day and not volunteer, march or fill our calendars with movement meetings, we should be affirmed in knowing that we too are revolutionary and resisting.

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“I Still Know What You Did Last Summer: Pandemic, Pride, and HIV Afterlives”

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by Jatella Jordan

Atlanta Black Pride began as a picnic. 

Once upon a time in 1996, “a small group of African American lesbian and gay friends held a picnic over Labor Day weekend to celebrate their unique experience in Atlanta’s LGBT community. Each year, the group grew with others from the community and neighboring cities.” This swelling group would become the non-profit, volunteer-led 501(c)3 organization, In The Life Atlanta (ITLA). As a founding party to the International Federation of Black Prides, ITLA annually hosts upwards of 100,000 Black queer people in Atlanta, Georgia–comandeering almost every major club, the entire metro area, and, the city’s heartbeat, Piedmont park. 

Atlanta Black Pride is the largest pride event dedicated to Blackqueer people in the World. 

Of course, everyone who attends is not affiliated with ITLA, nor is every event held in the name of Atlanta Black Pride on Labor Day weekend engineered with the consultation or even knowledge of ITLA. However, I find it imperative to properly situate what can be considered a kind of Blackqueer Hajj into the larger, historical context of the “Black (gay) Mecca”. 

As I write this, cases of COVID-19 and resultant deaths are on a relative decline in Georgia. Yesterday, September 4, 63 people died; ten less than the number who died the day before on September 3. There were 2,066 cases discovered yesterday as well, which in comparison to the 2,675 found the day before seems like progress–seems. 

Either unwittingly or out of sheer moral dereliction, Blackqueer people have, nonetheless, crowded the concrete corridors of downtown Atlanta in the name of “Pride”. Fulton County, in which Atlanta resides, has the most cases of any county in Georgia with 25,540 confirmed cases to date. Footage from inside clubs packed passed capacity proliferated Black twitter. Bodies move as if welded together; the building heaves as it holds them–constricted and ecstatic. Sweat and swisher-soaked shirts find their way up over heads, tucked into jeans or draped across clavicles, couches. Tongues untied touch, mouths unmasked meet. Exhales no longer waited; they breathe each other in, eliding every edict to distance. Under these conditions, death is imminent, intimate.

In 2018, WSB-TV reported that, according to Emory University’s Center of AIDS research, HIV infections had reached “epidemic” proportions for Blacks in Atlanta, with every 1 in 51 Black people at risk of diagnosis. 42% of new HIV diagnoses in the country in the same year were among adult and adolescent Black people. Black queer men–the demographic majority of Atlanta Black Pride, I must add–make up for 37% of new diagnoses among all queer men in the United States. 

One of the very few things known about COVID-19 is that it disproportionately impacts the already immunocompromised–the Elderly, the infantile, the asthmatic, the seropositive. Hence, it would seem to behoove the Blackqueer attendants of Atlanta Black Pride–who by no means nor stretch of the imagination are solely responsible for the intracommunal increase of HIV diagnoses nor by majority, themselves, seropositive–to be vigilant, not simply about their own health but about the health of their larger community. Put differently, Atlanta Black Pride 2020 seems blissfully ignorant of, not merely this current historical moment but, moreso, itself; its attendees–against the backdrop of 5,000+ deaths, 263,000 cases and counting, impending eviction crises, mass unemployment, abolitionist unrest–begin to appear almost morally bereft. 

I’d be remiss if I did not mention that most of the event fliers appeal to cisheteronormative cultural appetites with well-oiled and scantily clad, light skin men/mascs who titillate the impoverished desirability politics of its viewers. Consequently, thin, conventionally desirable, cisgendered, homonormative Black men get to feel most hailed and at home. This may possibly clarify why it looks to be the case that, for Atlanta Black Pride and her benefactors, the pandemic is not to be taken seriously; to whom/what do cisgay men ever feel accountable? 

On the other hand: it is, however, simply empirically untenable, outright false to assert or even suggest that Black cisgay men are the only Blackqueer folks present for Pride. Anything else would be or border erasure. This, then, raises an even more harrowing question: for whom/what is the Blackqueer responsible? If cases rise in Atlanta post-Pride, even if only within Blackqueer commons, are Blackqueer people, even partially, responsible? Who is the onus on to defend Blackqueer life or stave off Blackqueer death and dying? 

Cultural historian Saidiya Hartman, in her trailblazing monograph Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America, looks at the Black codes and Freedmans’ Bureau handbooks to illuminate how postbellum America incorporated recently emancipated slaves through liberal ideologies of consent, responsibility, and culpability. The “ex-”Slave demonstrated their appreciation for emancipation through self-mastery, discipline, and hard work. After 400+ years of free labor, idleness and lethargy in the Black was shamed and eschewed as “the body no longer harnessed by chains or governed by the whip was instead tethered by the weight of conscience, duty, and obligation,” writes Hartman. In a constant performance of ethical sophistication and proper conduct, Black bodies were ushered into a more modern regime of servitude in which they would perpetually genuflect to the behavioral dictates of the State and its White majority in always already foreclosed attempts at making good on the promises of manumission: national incorporation, sociopsychic recognition, juridical protection, and legal equality. To be irresponsible–meaning both without anything to be responsible for (property for instance) or to be accessed as negligent vis-a-vis what one is supposed to be responsible with (personhood and other persons)–was to be unfit for freedom. 

Under these on-going conditions, the Blackqueer remains precluded from recognizably responsible behavior at least insofar as Blackqueerness yet marks the racially abject and sexually deviant imposition on and threat to the very notion of the public and every concept of the proper, good, and socially acceptable on which it relies. Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis, Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics, and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments come into chorus beautifully on this point. Blackqueer responsibility is a misnomer because Blackqueer propriety is impossible. As Hartman further advised in 1997, the Blackqueer is the constitutive outside of citizen-subjectivity, or the Blackqueer is only a political subject to the extent to which it is criminally culpable. The Blackqueer capacity for responsibility, within a legico-juridical order to which it has no place or legitimate claim, is always a precondition for Blackqueer criminality. 

The Blackqueer is ontologically ir/responsible: at once, made to be responsible for their own bio-political damnation and irresponsible with their ever-pending redemption. “Sin is Negro as virtue is white,” writes Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. “All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good.” 

What might it mean to understand Blackqueerness as the refusal of the politics of the proper? What if the politic of Blackqueerness is to dispossess itself of the proper, which is to say the appropriate and the “responsible”, which is to say place and/in state? Can we look at the refusal to be withheld from each other as that dispossessory politic? Maybe getting together is the only or originary politic of the dispossessed; those dispossessed, first, of the very possibility to get together. If what poet-philosopher Fred Moten reminds us is true, if “we get together to fight,” can we see within all the fighting, the “fighting to maintain our capacity to get together”? Must we be responsible for the conditions that coproduce our constriction and our ecstasy? Whither might Blackqueer rage and release be permitted? What would it look like to shift the penologic of responsibility back on the “authors of devastation,” whose “innocence,” Baldwin tells us “constitutes the crime.” 

Before the U.S. government decided to rescue Wall Street from COVID-induced collapse, it refused to democratize access to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis while defunding the Global Fund to Fight AIDS. Blackqueer people, particularly in Atlanta, have long occupied a state of [non-]emergency, with nothing to show for it besides a well-lit stadium and a Mayor with Bottoms for a last name. Therefore, when we ask Blackqueer people to be “responsible” for their contribution to the pandemic, be held accountable for COVID’s role in community, we must first ask how “responsibility” itself is a request for a comportment that consents to the current medico-juridical paradigm that engineers Blackqueer death–both, premature and belated. Blackqueer riskiness, ethical irresponsibility, was not why HIV/AIDS became an epidemic and, in the same way, it will not be why COVID-19 never loosens its grip. A government that capitalizes off of catastrophe; that chooses profits over people; who–right before entering a $1.95 Billion deal with Pharmaceutical company Pfizer and biotechnology company BioNTech, a $2.1 billion deal with French pharmaceutical company Sanofi and British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline–allowed the ban on evictions to expire, permitted schools to reopen, began disseminating “back to work” plans, and “phasing-out” travel restrictions: the U.S. government will always, in every instance, be responsible for the rise of coronavirus and its asymmetrical presence in Blackqueer and poor communities. 

Furthermore, if to be Blackqueer is to lose the right to one’s own body or the right to own one’s body; if Blackqueer bodies are always “public texts”, as Karla Holloway might suggest, then we must take into our analysis how Blackqueerness has been written into the general political body, the hegemonic commonsense, the collective unconscious as, in itself, a biological threat, as negrophobogenic as Fanon later puts it, as sheer pathogen. This discursive-material conceptualization–Blackqueer systematic vulnerability to disease/death conterminous with disease/death as the universal sign of Blackqueerness—rebuffs performative concealment or “proper posture”. There is nothing the Blackqueer person can do to not be a figure of epidemiological scandal. The Blackqueer is the ghost of every pandemic. The Blackqueer occupies the political role of bioterrorist, in advance. Borrowing a Hartmanian locution: this is what it means to live as the afterlife of HIV. 

Still there is the very real risk of acquiring (and dying by) COVID. The lives of Blackqueer folks, disproportionately immunocompromised and/as disabled, hang in the balance. Their vulnerability to death seems eclipsed–as it is already more generally–by an intracommunal propensity to play with precarity. There is no question that a dearth in political attention to the Blackqueer disabled structures Blackqueer responses (or lack thereof) to the pandemic. Yet, I want to suggest that play can also be a Blackqueer disabled response. I want to suggest that Blackqueer disabled folks attended Atlanta Black Pride, against their best self-interest and though it might not be an ethics to universalize, it is not a politic to minimize. Amidst the ongoing War on AIDS, Blackqueer lifeworlds–crowded nightclubs, dilapidated bathhouses, un/protected penetrations—become articulations of summers refusing to be stolen, bodies refusing to behave, backs going unbent. Blackqueer folks–disabled and otherwise–engage in risk irreducible to the apolitical or asinine. There is a politics present in Blackqueer folks’ refusal of the ways precarity precludes play. If we think about the war on AIDS as war on the Blackqueer disabled/immunocompromised, how might Blackqueer disability always entail the negotiations of play and precarity; how might those negotiations proliferate to unforeseen, counterintuitive and counterproductive ends? A politics of Blackqueer commons might also look like where touch persisted, when pleasure insisted under the pressure of pandemic and antiBlack public, especially as the difference loses all distinction, especially since “we have nothing to lose but our chains.”

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Twitter Reacts to BlackLoveDoc’s Shortage of Dark Skinned Women in Promotional Video

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#BlackLoveDoc returns to OWN on September 5th, and they’re being dragged through the Twitterverse because of their promotional video, which dark-skinned women are largely unaccounted for. 

If you’re unfamiliar with what #BlackLoveDoc is, it’s a docuseries where a collection of black couples—queer and hetero—have discussions about love on camera. 

The promotional video sparked a debate about colorism. One Twitter user replied, “When I say that ‘Black love’ is nothing more than a lie this is what I mean. The women had to pass a paper bag test to even get the so-called ‘Black love.’ This is why I’m [a] firm believer in Black women opening their options and dating the right person for them regardless of race.”

Whoever runs #BlackLoveDoc’s Twitter account, probably Gayle King, replied: “Hey Ella! We agree. This is why we show Black men and women of all shades in loving relationships – we even show them in relationships with someone who isn’t Black Flushed face And some folks are mad. It sucks. But we [still] show US being loved. Because that’s what matters.”

Bad response to being called out for colorism. Surely a billionaire like Oprah can afford better social media editors and public relations training for her staff. 

Enjoy these tweets of #BlackLoveDoc’s promo getting dragged:

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Cori Bush Snatches The Missouri Primary From 19-year Incumbent William Lacy Clay

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A little positive political news is coming our way. Cori Bush, who’s running for Congress in Missouri has snatched the primary vote from Lacy Clay, who has held the seat for 19 years. For the past 50 years, the Clay family has held the seat. Today, Cori ends that streak.

Of importance is that Cori is not only a Black woman, but one of the better-known organizers for Black Lives Matter. The Congressional Black Caucus was very vocal about their disapproval of her “radical” stances, but it seems their clucking has meant absolutely nothing to the final result. She punctuated her victory with a simple tweet:

Boom! Haha. Ya girl has sass. I’ll remind you all that she was one of those protesting for our lives at Ferguson and has lead her public life with a raised fist ever since.

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