Trust Black Women: God Is Change

In this article, I reflect on social change and accountability in the wake of the Charleston massacre. Guided by the work of my colleagues and comrades from Women With A Vision, Inc. in New Orleans, I explore what it means to participate in the visionary fiction demanded and crafted by Black women, and why our future quite literally depends on doing so.

Trust Black Women: God is Change

By Laura McTighe
The Revealer | June 24, 2015

Author’s Note: In the last two weeks, our national conversation about race has moved from the absurd interrogation of Black womanhood because a white woman donned blackface, to the calculated massacre of Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depyane Middleton Doctor, Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson under the guise of protecting white women’s purity. The #NotInOurNames hashtag has emerged as an affirmation that white people will not be complicit in racist terrorism any longer. Black women started us chanting and tweeting #BlackLivesMatter. If we are going to realize their vision, we must learn to embrace the leadership they have been providing for centuries – and we must confront the ways in which when we have unwittingly and willfully erased their work.

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SayHerName — Photo: Andy Katz/ Corbis via For Harriet

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.” In the Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler breathed to life a new religion – Earthseed – based not in the sacred scriptures of elders and prophetic pasts, but in the presents and possible futures of the living. In accepting that God Is Change, believers were called to stand in their own power, to shape themselves, to shape the universe, to shape God. “Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe.”

My reintroduction to Octavia Butler came from Walidah Imarisha at a conference I co-organized with Josef Sorett last Fall, Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?: Religion and the Burdens of Black Sexual Politics. At the conference, Imarisha introduced us to the idea of “visionary fiction” that she and her co-editor, adrienne maree brown, had employed in their newly published anthology, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. As Imarisha explained, “Visionary fiction is not neutral. It does not purport to be neutral. The goal of visionary fiction is to create social change. All organizing is science fiction.”

It’s a jarring idea to bend your mind around. Every organizer, every change maker, every visionary is writing science fiction. Envisioning a world in which every person has the full freedom to be their full self is science fiction. Affirming that #BlackLivesMatter when nine Black people are gunned down in one of the oldest Black sacred spaces in the country is science fiction. As any organizer will tell you, vision is essential to social change. It’s the end that every protest held, every call made, every sign flown is pointing towards . It’s the hope for dreaming the impossible into existence.

As we struggle to realize the vision that Black lives matter, we have had to swallow yet another bitter truth. Amid the everyday terror of anti-Black violence in the United States, some Black lives matter more than others. We called out for Michael Brown, but could not remember Tanisha Anderson’s name. We set Baltimore ablaze for Freddie Gray, but forgot to light a candle for Rekia Boyd. Activists and scholars alike have pointed out the irony of this occlusion given that the #BlackLivesMatter movement was started by Black women, and that Black women’s leadership has defined what it means to defend the dead. Just as this violence has a history, so to does this occlusion. In the long and unbroken state of emergency in the United States, it is impossible to understand the contours of anti-Black violence and Black people’s resistance without reckoning with the history of how Black womanhood has been produced as a category of non-being – of how Black women’s very humanity has been made illegible.

All-Organizing-is-Science-Ficiton — Photo by Walidah Imarisha

That work of exclusion and erasure is also science fiction, albeit of a different sort than what Octavia’s Brood is writing. When Imarisha calls all organizing science fiction, she implores us to think about the gap between what is and what could be, and about how organizers strive to prefigure the future society they are working towards in their everyday political lives. I am calling Black women’s “paradox of non-being” science fiction because it is not reflective of Black women’s actual lives and work; it bespeaks a debased society that totally and completely erases Black women’s lives. The truth is, Black women face real and horrific state, structural, and interpersonal violence every single day. And it is also true that Black women are leading the movements to end this violence. They’ve been doing so for generations. To not speak this truth, to not #SayHerName, is science fiction. When we do not speak this truth, when we do not Trust Black Women, we become part of bringing to life this sick and twisted universe; we help write a future that looks far too much like our present and past.

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“THE REVOLUTION WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WON’T BE MY REVOLUTION.” These words united a crowd of New Orleanians on May 21, 2015, a national day of action to highlight state and structural violence that Black women face. Not only does local and mainstream media tend to treat this violence as invisible, but it also consistently ignores Black women’s protests against it. The small photo gallery uploaded to Nola.com after the May 2015 event did not name a single organizer or speaker. It was a sick sort of poetic justice. On a national day to #SayHerName, the local media would not. There was not even a mention of the significance of the location of the action: Miss Penny Proud, a transgender Black youth leader at BreakOUT, had been murdered on that site just three months prior. The press did such a poor job of covering the action that one of the co-organizers, Mwende Katwiwa (aka FreeQuency), had to pen her own story about it.

This is certainly not the first time the media has left us with an effaced portrait of Black women’s resistance. On August 14^th 2014, people nationally took to the streets to mourn and protest the murder of Michael Brown. Hundreds of people gathered in New Orleans’ Lafayette Park as part of this National Moment of Silence (NMOS). The local news station WGNO ran a simple image-free story covering only the short, scripted portion of the vigil in which Chanelle Batiste read aloud the names of Black people who had been killed by the police, and called all to raise their hands in the now iconic “Don’t Shoot” pose.

What the news omitted was that there were several Black feminist visionaries in front row of that protest crowd. Among them were Mwende Katwiwa and Desiree Evans, both members of Wildseeds: The New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective and staff of Women With A Vision (WWAV), a quarter-century old Black women’s health and social justice collective. They completely failed to mention that when the August 14^th 2014 vigil crowd began to disperse, Katwiwa asked those next to her, “Really? Is that it?” Then she pushed to the front and called: “EXCUSE ME! Is that all? I know too many busy people here who could be somewhere else but chose to be here. For Mike and others. There is too much collective energy here to waste. If we took to the streets, would you join us?” They did. And people joined. The vigil-turned-march grew to 400-strong before occupying the French Quarter police station – grievances were hurled by a community already well-organized against the everyday racism and terror of its local police force. It took The New Orleans Advocate more than a month to upload a small photo gallery of the action. As with the #SayHerName action, the real coverage of this vigil-turned-march had to be penned by Mwende Katwiwa herself.

BvC_KGgCAAEpEHX — National Moment of Silence march on Augus National Moment of Silence march on August 14, 2014 in New Orleans. Pictured left to right are Anita Dee, Samai Lalani, and Mwende Katwiwa. Photo by @Small_Affair

There are so many stories like this. For instance, we could go back a few years prior to March 29^th 2012. WWAV, under the leadership of Executive Director Deon Haywood had just secured a massive victory. With a carefully selected team of civil rights attorneys, WWAV brought a federal suit against the state of Louisiana for criminalizing Black cisgender and transgender women working in the city’s underground economies. WWAV leadership and strategy created a climate in which a federal judge could, and did, rule that a Louisiana statute for prosecuting sex work as a “crime against nature” was unconstitutional, thereby securing the removal of more than 800 Black women from the Louisiana sex offender registry.

However, the media coverage the next day featured a large picture of the judge, celebrating his courage to rule in the case. WWAV was not mentioned in the article; they had been written out of the story of their own win. Deon Haywood had to write the story of this monumental victory by and for Black women. Resisting media portraits that exceptionalized the “crime against nature” statute as an arcane relic of old South justice, Haywood connected the law and its enforcement to the broader climate of injustice Black women moved through daily in the post-Katrina neoliberal deluge. She claimed WWAV’s victory for everyone who had ever been criminalized and named it as the continuation of the long Black Freedom Struggle. When WWAV’s offices were firebombed and destroyed by unknown arsonists just two months later, Haywood again explained how the attack (and the government’s refusal to investigate) should be interpreted: Fire has long been used as a tool of terror in the South, but it can also be a powerful force for rebirth.

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The history written by New Orleans organizers like Haywood and Katwiwa refuses to script their work as reactionary, episodic, or somehow secondarily reactive to the oppressions they resist. Nonetheless, no matter how contextual, no matter how historically informed, no matter how deep its roots, Black women’s work is too often treated as though it is an eruption or a reaction, not the continuation of a centuries-long legacy.

Deon-Haywood — Deon Haywood speaking at a July 13, 2013 Solidarity Rally in New Orleans organized in the wake of George Zimmerman acquittal in the murder of Trayvon Martin.

The denial of coevalness is one of the oldest colonialist tricks for constructing the “Other” as spatially and temporally different from themself. We might recognize this denial in its more overt manifestations: the descriptions of peopled lands as “empty” or as “blank canvasses;” the minimization of indigenous social and cultural work as “primitive” or “backwards.” However, the scripting of Black women’s resistance as always already reactive is a no less powerful way of naturalizing the time and space of white heteropatriarchy.

To be clear: The strategies, forms, and histories of Black women’s resistance were not created by the oppressive forces with which their work has engaged. Black women created these strategies, forms of resistance, and histories. This work is Octavia Butler’s science fiction. It is Imarisha’s, and Katwiwa’s, and Haywood’s visionary organizing in which God is Change. It is the creation of a world in which Black women write their own stories and their own futures.

To say, think, or write otherwise is no less sci-fi. Ignoring Black women’s work, writing their stories for or without them, can only bring to life a sick and twisted universe in which Black womanhood continues to be produced as a category of non-being – in which we still do not #SayHerName.

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“The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.”

When we speak the truth of Black women’s lives and work, we become part of changing the universe into ones in which ALL Black lives matter. We also learn a very different way of analyzing our current social order. Human life is deeply and radically connective – in the clutch of an arresting officer’s hand, in the cut of a judge’s tongue, in the grimace of a store clerk; and also in the scarce resources nonetheless shared within each community, in the cascades of laughter that fill the darkest of institutions. This relationality gives everyday Black feminist resistance a vital elasticity. It’s possible to “hunker down” in times of crisis and gather loved ones close; just as it is possible to stretch out and re-form the severed threads of community and thus unravel those of the American empire. In each case, the strategy is the same: Counter social death with a defiance of living. Organize into a world in which it is possible to realize these collective visions together.

We all live history every day. But is that history writing us? Or are we writing it? Octavia Butler asks us to recognize Black women’s writing and organizing as powerful, sacred work – as a collective force that spins the present and future into existence. When we #SayHerName, we are participating in the visionary fiction demanded and crafted by Black women. When we affirm #NotInOurNames, we are participating in the visionary fiction demanded and crafted by Black women. This participation touches us. It changes us. And through the leadership of Black Women, it changes the universe.

“Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe.”

unnamed — Zina Mitchell photographed at the offices of WWAV on May 29, 2012, days after the arson attack. Photo by Laura McTighe

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Previous articles in my race and religion series for The Revealer include:

Making Time: Religion & Black Prison Organizing, with Hakim ‘Ali

Haunted Passages: On Carrying the Past and Envisioning Justice

To Take Place and Have a Place: On Religion, White Supremacy & the People’s Movement in Ferguson

A Public Conversation about Making, not Doing, Time

MAKING TIME: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons

FRIDAY / APRIL 10 / 3:30–6:30PM

JUROW LECTURE HALL, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East

A public conversation about making, rather than doing, time and the critical and often misunderstood role religion plays in geographies of confinement and discipline, as well as in the everyday practices of incarcerated people. Presenters: Hakim ‘Ali (Reconstruction, Inc.),Tanya Erzen (University of Puget Sound), Robin McGinty (CUNY), and Angela Zito (NYU). Moderator:Laura McTighe (Columbia University).

The event website is here.

You can read the participants’ bios here.

The event Facebook page is here.

ORGANIZED BY: THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA AT NYU

CO-SPONSORS: DEAN’S OFFICE, NYU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE; THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROGRAM

Making Time: Religion & Black Prison Organizing, an Interview with Hakim ‘Ali

Who makes time in prison? And how do they make it?

In this article, I speak with Hakim ‘Ali about Islam and black prison organizing in 1970s Baltimore in anticipation of the NYU event, “Making Time: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons” on April 10, 2015. More information about this roundtable conversation can be found here.

Making Time: Religion & Black Prison Organizing, an Interview with Hakim ‘Ali

by Laura McTighe
The Revealer | March 27, 2015

It is shortly after the Fajr morning prayers and snow is falling as big as fists. Hakim’s deep laughter punctuates the steady chug of the steam radiator in the corner, as he launches into another tale of a Philadelphia long since passed. I smile in knowing recognition. Hakim has an unparalleled gift for storytelling. We have been talking for almost an hour.

Colloquially, folks often speak about incarceration as “doing time.” What Hakim and I have been discussing is the idea of “making time.” Can we better understand the everyday work of building geographies of confinement, as well as the complex strategies for transforming our darkest of institutions, if we think about time as “made” rather than “done”? Who makes time in prison? And how do they make it? Hakim knows the world of prisons far better than most: he spent forty years of his life behind bars. “And it is only, ONLY by the grace of Allah that I am sitting here having this conversation with you,” Hakim reminds me, with a sudden somberness. “I am a Black Muslim man, 71 almost 72 years of age, and I understand fully what that means in this day and time, in this country, and in the world.”

Hakim and I met in Philadelphia more than a decade ago. Our connection was one of intention as much as coincidence: in 1978 – the year I was born – he had been transferred to the federal prison in Lewisburg, PA – the town I lived in as a teenager. Over the years, we have built a relationship of closeness and reciprocity, as beloved friends and comrades. Through our work together, I have come to know Hakim as a poet, an educator, a revolutionary, a father, and a confidant. He rarely talks about how he survived the hell of the local, state and federal prisons that held him captive, and I know better than to ask. Those silences in his life story have been built up because of too many small abuses to count, because of great and incomprehensible ones.

But this morning, under the guise of “making time,” with the snow showing no sign of relenting, Hakim began to speak about his conversion to Sunni Islam, his work with the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Baltimore bank robbery that catapulted him into the caverns of justice in America. The year was 1972. The date was February 23^rd.

* * *

When we got popped, the Baltimore cops told us the folks in Philly were calling a citywide holiday. The “Philly 5” they called us in Baltimore. Of the five, three of us were Sunni Muslim and one of us was Nation of Islam. And the other one, because of his association with us, was sympathetic to Islam, even though he wasn’t Muslim. So Islam was our point of unity as we were doing what we were doing, existing before the trial, and even during the course of the trial in the way that we were referred to, you know.

A National Guardsman watches detainees in the Baltimore city jail on April 10, 1968, six days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. (Weyman Swagger/Baltimore Sun)

So one day while we were in the city jail, we were in the yard – something had just happened, a dude had tried to escape earlier – and they had everybody out of the buildings and we were in the yard, with the police around us. I saw this brother walking down the yard, and he had this paper rolled up in his back pocket. And I saw different parts of words – something about Islam, and the some parts of the Arabic… So I approached him, and asked him, “You mind if I look at that?” and he said, “Man, you can have it.” And he gave me the paper. So I opened up the paper, I was reading it, and it was in fact a newsletter coming from this masjid in West Baltimore. It had an address and contact information, so I got together with the other brothers and showed them the paper and we decided to see if we could get some materials sent in for us to read.

Just to be clear: Sunni Islam was not in Maryland. Anything related to Islam was the Nation of Islam, or this little small group of dudes who were Five Percenters. At the start, we didn’t have intentions of establishing anything in the jail. We were just seeing if we could get some materials, something to read, or a contact. But eventually this effort on our part led to us establishing traditional, orthodox Sunni Islam in the Maryland system.

First, we started with the city jail, where we were awaiting trial. Eventually we got somebody to come out. The first visit was a personal visit – the Imam, Ali Akbar, came out and met with one of the people in our group. Then Ali came back again, and we created an opportunity for him to meet not only with ourselves but also with a couple of other brothers that we found out were there and were Sunni Muslim. They had been existing under the radar, you know what I mean? Because the Baltimore jail is transitional, and folks were focusing on their case.

So we got to the point – and I’m really, really, really summarizing this – that we were able to get this brother Ali from the masjid to come in and meet with the Superintendent of Baltimore city jail and we literally got jummah started there. It was the first time that the dude had heard about jummah, it was the first time that Muslims from the community had even entertained the thought of coming into the city jail. And from that, later on down the line, a position was created where Ali got appointed as the community Imam – the representative of Islam for the Baltimore jail.

That was sort of our first political/religious statement, with all the other stuff we were doing prior to coming to Baltimore and getting locked up. We believed that we were in the course of revolutionary action, taking from the government, supporting the people… It was the same sort of concept as what the Black Panther Party was doing, but we had not been building institutions. We mostly just focused on meeting the community’s immediate needs – helping folks with rent, paying their bills, getting food… So this was the first real thing that we literally did in an institution, and to this day what we started still exists.

So that was a real spiritual change for me….

Continue reading at The Revealer….

Haunted Passages: On Carrying the Past and Envisioning Justice

What do we do with our collective histories of violence?

In this photo-essay, I descend into the bowels of Johannesburg’s notorious Number Four prison, and reflect on on how we remember, what we work to forget, and whether we are willing to be haunted by those histories that are not really past.

Haunted Passages:
On Carrying the Past and Envisioning Justice

The Revealer | February 24, 2015

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones – and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.” -Nelson Mandela (Photo by Laura McTighe) — “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones – and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.” -Nelson Mandela *(Photo by Laura McTighe)*

“That’s because you live in the United States of Amnesia!” my friend chided as we descended into the bowels of Johannesburg’s notorious Number Four prison. “Indeed,” I laughed in agreement. Back home, I was far more accustomed to the “it wasn’t that bad” approach to our nation’s past, as if whitewashing our collective histories of violence would make them go away. For more than a century, the “Moonlight and Magnolias” myth of life in the antebellum South has dominated our national consciousness. Only one plantation in the United States – Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation – tells the story of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved, and it only just opened on December 8, 2014 after a long, embittered struggle led by local Black residents. Entering Number Four, I was unable to contain my shock at how meticulously the curators of this prison-turned-museum had documented the perversions of apartheid justice perpetrated within the carceral complex.

Number Four is a relic of apartheid governance: even in their confinement, people classified as native, coloured and Asian had to be kept separate from whites. In its heyday, Number Four held some of the most notable leaders of the liberation struggle. But the vast majority of those confined were the hordes of Black people arrested every day under the Pass Laws that controlled their movement in and out of the townships to which they had been forcibly relocated. Today, the hallowed walls and recesses of Number Four are filled with the oral and written testimonies of former political prisoners, creating a painful, if imperfect, archive of life inside.

Ekhulukhuthu (the deep hole) isolation cells extended along the furthest-most wall of Number Four. Each concrete box is fixed in time, stripped of bedding with only a small beam of natural light filtering through the peep hole guards used to spy on those confined. Now, only one cell door remains bolted shut. When I turned to my friend for explanation, his finger was already outstretched: “That cell is haunted.” I nodded slowly, as my gaze refocused on the closed isolation cell door: “I think this whole place is haunted.”

* * *

What do we do with our collective histories of violence?

It is a question that the entire complex now known as Constitution Hill is actively engaged in making sense of. Not only has Number Four been meticulously preserved and filled with testimonies of the abuses perpetrated therein; the trio of prisons it is a part of (the whites-only Old Fort, the non-white Number Four and the panoptic Women’s Gaol) serve as a sort of courtyard for the new South African Constitutional Court. The relationship between the past and the present here, however, is not merely one of proximity. The walls of the Constitutional Court are constructed entirely out of bricks from the demolished awaiting-trial cells that used to stand on the site.

constitution-court — *Photo by Laura McTighe*

There are many questions we could ask about why the designers of the Constitutional Court chose to “upcycle” the materials that enclosed thousands of South Africans arrested for no more than what we in the United States would call “walking while Black.” It seems more important, now, though, to reflect on the effects of that choice.

In religious studies we think a lot about the creation and protection of boundaries. How is the sacred delineated from the profane? How are they kept apart? What would happen if they were to mix? A tremendous amount of everyday ritual activity is dedicated to preserving boundaries, to ensuring that matter never falls out of place. As such, these boundaries not only teach us about what matters to communities; they also help us to understand what they are afraid of.

Back in the United States of Amnesia, we work hard to hermetically seal our histories of violence, thereby creating an impenetrable boundary between the past and the present. Constitution Hill’s flagrant disregard for this boundary was striking, if a bit disquieting. Bringing the bricks that had once muffled the cries of the detained into the new nation’s court was a powerful act. The space groaned.

And it also rejoiced. Outside the court, two awaiting-trial cells had been left standing. Their painted interior walls lay exposed. Large speakers adorned their unseemly facades, humming the melodies of struggle songs. It was as if the voices of those awaiting trial had demolished the cells themselves – brick by brick, wall by wall.

* * *

Inside Number Four, the groans that filled the Constitutional Court became recognizable as the voices of Molefe Makiti, political prisoner, 1963; Molefe Pheto, political prisoner 1975; Alex La Guma, political prisoner, 1956; Indres Naidoo, political prisoner, 1963; Henry Nxumalo, pass offender, 1954; Samuel Nthute, political prisoner, 1963; Prema Naidoo, political prisoner, 1982; and Godfrey Moloi, prisoner, 1956. Their oral histories recorded the horrors of life inside Number Four, starting with the meal area.

Apartheid law regulated prison meal rations by race, with gram per day allowances for rice, meat, fish, beans, vegetables, fat, sugar and salt. In practice, meals generally consisted of rotten boiled fish, which was served on trays as dirty as the pads and blankets that passed for prison bedding. The perimeter of the meal area was lined with stretches of “toilets” where guards would taunt political prisoners as they feebly tried to aim at holes in the ground and defecate the slime that passed for food.

The most ceremonious debasement came when the incarcerated returned from court appearances: the guards forced them to strip naked and undergo the infamous tauza“dance” in the prison courtyard as part of a rectal cavity search.

The perimeter of the courtyard was lined with group cells, each holding a different trace of the everyday violence of apartheid justice: soiled bedding, torture devices, broken games…

When I walked into the final group cell, I jumped back in shock at the sight of a perfectly positioned tank, constructed entirely out of prison-issued blankets. It was a piece of visionary fiction, to use Octavia’s Brood’s phrase: what was imagined had been brought to life. Those held captive at Number Four dared to envision a world that did not exist. They took on the might of the apartheid state armed only with woolen cloth and twine. And they won.

What do we do with our collective histories of violence?

Constitution Hill forces us to reckon with the fact that our histories of violence are not really past. Put differently, the point is not whether we are haunted (as if not being haunted is some sort of proof that we have officially overcome); the point is whether we are willing to be haunted.

In 1940, shortly after his release from a French prison camp, Walter Benjamin famously penned, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” In late November of 2014, Rinaldo Walcott breathed new life into this imperative, asking about the physical, emotional and spiritual labor of defending the dead, of convincing the world that #BlackLivesMatter.

Constitution Hill inflects this sense of obligation somewhat differently: How do we live with the dead?

Being haunted might sound creepy, even scary. What ghosts might we encounter if we open ourselves to their presence? But perhaps in our haunting – in our willingness to be haunted – we might begin to understand why our collective histories of violence have such power to press upon our presents. And in so doing we might also begin to imagine new ways of moving forward… As Saidiya Hartman reminds us in her memoir of a journey along the Atlantic slave route, Lose Your Mother: “If the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it is because we are still looking for an exit from the prison.

lalutacontinua — La Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues). *(Photo by Laura McTighe)*

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Laura McTighe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Through her dissertation project, “Born In Flames,” she is working with leading Black feminist organizations in Louisiana to explore how reckoning with the richness of southern Black women’s intellectual and organizing traditions will help us to understand (and do) American religious history differently. Laura comes to her doctoral studies through more than seventeen years of direct work to challenge the punitive climate of criminalization in the United States and support communities’ everyday practices of transformation. Currently, she serves on the boards of Women With A Vision, Inc. in New Orleans, Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction Inc. in Philadelphia. Laura’s writings have been published in Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), and a variety of community publications.

To Take Place and Have a Place: On Religion, White Supremacy & the People’s Movement

On August 9th, I took in the news of Michael Brown’s murder with my Women with a Vision, Inc. family in New Orleans. Not once did we question whether the uprising in Ferguson would be “a moment or a movement.” It’s a question that doesn’t make sense when you are enmeshed in a long struggle for liberation that is still alive and kicking.

In this article, I reflect on the movement in Ferguson, the forces that obscure it from view and the long history of black women’s organizing we can’t afford to forget…

To Take Place and Have a Place: On Religion, White Supremacy & the People’s Movement in Ferguson

The Revealer | September 18, 2014

“I CANNOT BELIEVE I STILL HAVE TO PROTEST THIS SHIT!!” the block pink letters of France Francois’ sign fired with exasperation. The date was August 14, 2014. Michael Brown had been shot and killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer, Darren Wilson, just five days prior. Francois was one of thousands who took to the streets in cities across the country as part of the National Moment of Silence/Day of Rage. People in Ferguson had not left the streets since Michael Brown’s murder. “I think, throughout the nation, we’re all asking ourselves this question: ‘How did we come here again? How did we find ourselves in this very same space?’” Francois told AlterNet in an interview shortly after the protest. Indeed, how did we?

Undeniably, the death of Michael Brown has erupted onto the national scene in a way that few murders of black and brown people by police have. That itself is remarkable. In the wake of Ferguson, there are many questions that have been bubbling through the country… Why Ferguson? (Where is Ferguson?) Why not New York? Who will be next? The question I have found most troubling is the repeated inquiry by activists, pundits and scholars alike: Will Ferguson be a moment or will it become a movement?

At face value, this might not seem like an inappropriate question to ask. The uprising in Ferguson has shone a vital and painful spotlight on the everyday terror of anti-black violence in our country. Many worry that this attention will be fleeting; they wonder if the organizing in Ferguson will be able spur a more radical transformation of the people, policies and institutions that perpetuate the devaluing of black life.

What I want to call our attention to is a pair of claims that are embedded in the moment vs. movement juxtaposition: first is a claim about how change happens; second is a claim about what counts in American history.

Of the many articles that have been penned in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder, two in particular put a point on the vision of social change swirling around the moment/movement question: educator Josie Pickens’ August 18th article in Ebony magazine, “Ferguson: What’s Respectability Got to Do with It” and historian Jeanne Theoharis’ August 26th piece for MSNBC, “The arc of justice runs through Ferguson.” Both criticize reporting that has portrayed the protesters in Ferguson as disorganized, reckless, even dangerous. Moreover, both call us to examine how a sanitized version of the civil rights movement – stripped of its poor, young and female leadership – undergirds such critiques. In Theoharis’ words, “Such framings memorialize a civil rights movement without young people in the vanguard, without anger, without its longstanding and ongoing critique of the criminal justice system.” Through these fables, we are made to believe that Ferguson must be a moment, because “real movements” do not look like this.

These fables also resign us to a jack-in-the-box approach to social movement history. “Real movements” are past and temporally bounded. A “real movement” pops UP when people make a large (but not too large) demand; it goes DOWN (or is put down) when that demand is met (or is too threatening). It is a thing for the history books. By this account, “real movements” are not only sanitized; they are exceptionalized. And so, too, are the social conditions they seek to address. In this way, we can only ask if Ferguson will become a movement, because we are telling a story of the United States in which there is no continuity of black struggle, much less a need for it.

What power dynamics are at work when the protests in Ferguson are treated like the colorful explosion of the jack-in-the-box? What is at stake in viewing black resistance in such an episodic way? What cannot be seen when it is viewed this way? These questions are at the heart of the #BlackLivesMatter systematic call to action – a call issued in response to the ways in which black lives have been devalued and black suffering has been rendered illegible. In this tradition, I want to call us to a deeper appreciation for the movement being carried forward at Ferguson. To do so, we must commit ourselves to resurrecting events that have systematically been made to vanish from our consciousness. We need to appreciate the often-untold history of black poor people’s movements, as well as the long tradition of black critiques of the everyday rituals of white supremacy. We also need to account for the ways in which our notions of justice and liberation are inflected by religious language and sensibility. This takes us back not simply to the Civil Rights era, nor even to Jim Crow, but rather to the founding of the American republic. It is an uncomfortable history, but it is vital for us to tell it if we are to appreciate what it means to be living into the possibility of justice with the movement still-alive in Ferguson.

Click here to continue reading at The Revealer…

Religion on the Move: People, Passages and Possibilities in America

In the Fall of 2014, I will be teaching Religion on the Move: People, Passages and Possibilities in America. This interactive seminar uses – and teaches – historical, social scientific, and narrative methods to analyze religion on the move in America. Such theoretical complexity is foundational to the study of religion at Columbia University. While our department offers courses in many different geographic regions and religious traditions, we share a cross-cutting commitment to pushing beyond the things of religion (beliefs, relics and institutions) that have traditionally animated scholarly inquiries, and to examining instead the lived processes of religion through attention to time, transmission, place, body and media. Religion on the Move contributes a fresh perspective to current department course offerings, both for North American concentrators and for students University-wide.

Course Overview:

Our work together is divided into three core areas of inquiry: Narratives of Passage; People in Contact; and Possibilities of Movement. A theoretical and methodological introduction frames our semester’s work. We begin by asking how we should study the making of mass migrations (beyond push-pull framings) and the complexities of religion on the move (beyond framings of religion as a salve for coping with the shock of the new). We then turn to two narratives of traveling with Americans and practicing religion to consider how following the people changes our perspective on religion and mobility, as well as the types of questions we can ask.

In Narratives of Passage, we explore the classic types of free/forced migration through the peopling North America by European empires in the colonial period; the Middle Passage of enslaved Africans from 1619 to 1808; and the forced expulsion of Native peoples through the Trail of Tears mandated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. With each example, we consider how people’s religious formations and spiritual yearnings are re/made through different experiences of mobility.

In People in Contact, we bring these single community narratives into conversation through an exploration of the making of the American Empire at home and abroad in 19^th and 20^th centuries. We begin with the mass influx of people from Irish, Jewish and Chinese diasporas in the antebellum and post-bellum periods, considering the complex reasons migrants left their home countries, the lives they built in contact, and the rise of anti-immigrant nativism. Next, we turn to “The West” as an imagined space of religious pluralism and possibility, and as a rapidly industrializing site of missionary control and social engineering. Finally, the two World Wars frame our discussion of the simultaneous protection of freedom abroad and curtailment of freedom at home, first through the 1924 immigration reforms and then through Japanese internment. These landmark policies are juxtaposed against coterminous flights from terror and trauma, first through the Black exodus from the Jim Crow South, and second through the post-Holocaust resettlement of Jewish communities.

In Possibilities of Movement, we temper the celebratory mood of Civil Rights era immigration reform with a careful consideration of three major examples of forced, restricted and controlled movement: first, the fight for citizenship rights among undocumented workers; second, the struggles of belonging and recognition among the nation’s poor and mass-incarcerated; and third, the global exportation of American ideals of freedom and democracy through which the War on Terror became a War to Save Women. In each, we examine how religion is moved by, with and for people.

We conclude the semester with a discussion of migration, diaspora and religion that flips many of our major course themes on their heads: the story of hundreds of African American men, women, and children from all walks of life who sold everything they owned, bought Sears and Roebuck tents, and left the United States for Liberia in 1967. They called themselves “Hebrew Israelites,” claiming that they were genealogical descendants of the ancient Israelites. With careful attention to their out-migration, settlement in the modern state of Israel and growth to a 5-continent diasporic community, we revisit our opening questions and theories about the making of subjects in motion, the possibilities of finding place, and the religious aesthetics of imagining new futures.

Required Texts:

Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1986.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Galvez, Alyshia. Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Migrants. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Jackson, John. Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Vargas, João H. Costa. Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and the Meaning of Blackness in Central Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Wallace, Anthony. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

Reassembling the Archive: The “Born In Flames” Oral History Project at Women With A Vision

In the summer of 2013, with the generous support of a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life, I was able to travel to New Orleans to begin work on an oral history project with Women With A Vision, Inc (WWAV). For those not familiar with the organization, WWAV is a twenty-two year running black women’s health collective, which gained international notoriety in March of 2012 for overturning a 207-year-old crime against nature statute being used to criminalize sex work in Louisiana. Two months later, their offices were destroyed in an aggravated arson attack. That night, all tangible memorabilia of their groundbreaking work went up in flames.

With the working title, “Born in Flames,” we envisioned the WWAV oral history project to be a living embodiment of Executive Director, Deon Haywood’s words after the arson attack, “Fire has long been used as a tool of terror in the South, but we also know that it can be a force for rebirth.” The title is also a nod to Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film with the same name.

As the lead interviewer for the project, I am the member of the WWAV team responsible for gathering, transcribing and editing hundreds of hours of life history interviews with the visionaries who have guided WWAV over the last two decades. We decided on a life history format because it decenters events (like the arson), thereby providing staff, participants and allies the space to reflect on the paths that brought them to WWAV and the lives they lead going forward. In the first phase of the project this summer, some began with stories of their first social work practicums; others with childhood memories of being on segregated trolleys. Some found WWAV to be their only lifeline in a time when communities were being torn to shreds by the war on drugs and AIDS; others had to battle their own families simply for working at WWAV. Some could trace their family lineages back through generations of New Orleanians; others were transplants who would never be able to return after Hurricane Katrina. This texture only begins to illuminate the contours of the small grassroots organization that catapulted onto the international stage in 2012, and has quite literally kept tens of thousands of people alive since the early 1990s.

Ultimately, these interviews will be foundational for my dissertation. I will all be working the WWAV team to build a readily accessible online archive of the “Born in Flames” project with an anticipated release date of May 24, 2019, the seven-year anniversary of the arson attack.

Below you will find an excerpt from Women With A Vision’s official announcement about the project. Please click here to read the full post.

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from Women With A Vision, November 22, 2013

Rebuilding Our Archive: The “Born In Flames” Oral History Project with WWAV Board Member, Laura McTighe

After the 2012 aggravated arson attack on our offices, we lost more than our home and sense of safety in the city we love; we also lost all the tangible memorabilia of our more than twenty years of work.

In the wake of this attack, WWAV sustained our rebuilding process by making new memories – uniting our members to craft policy campaigns for combatting the policies impacting their lives; microfinance projects for expanding their employment possibilities; and trauma healing circles for sustaining their community with one another. On the one-year anniversary of the arson attack, WWAV was able to take our healing work retrospective, with the help of board member, Laura McTighe… [continue reading at WWAV]

Why Are You Here?: Challenging the Prison System, Challenging Ourselves

I have always grounded myself through writing. It is one of the first things that my beloved mentor, John Horace Bell, figured out about me when we were launching Philadelphia FIGHT’s prison programs more than a decade ago. His journey to this work through ACT UP Philly is so beautifully captured in this oral history interview. As soon as we began our journey together, John started pushing me to document the truths we were discovering in our work. I was slower to put words to the transformation that was happening to me.

John, and all of the people we had the privilege of working with, changed my life. They are my friends, my teachers, and my family. They taught me what it means to fight for the world I want to live in. Everyday working with them, I saw this world take shape.

On this one year anniversary of John’s home going, I am remembering that honoring John means honoring the people he fought for us to become. It is with both humility and respect that I share this series of reflections that John loved so much, which I was prompted to write in 2007 while working with a group of seminary students and congregations who were providing mentoring support to incarcerated men and women in Massachusetts’ College Behind Bars program.

Please click here to download a PDF of “Why Are You Here?: Challenging the Prison System, Challenging Ourselves.”