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“We Are On the Cusp of Something Great”: A Black Liberation Organizer on Next Steps for the Movement – An interview with Nikita Mitchell

Since the nation erupt­ed after the May 25 police killing of George Floyd, Black orga­niz­ers and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers have been work­ing around the clock to chan­nel mass protests into tan­gi­ble vic­to­ries. Niki­ta Mitchell, 26, is nation­al coor­di­na­tor of The Ris­ing Major­i­ty, formed in 2017 by the Move­ment for Black Lives, a coali­tion that includes Black Lives Mat­ter. Ris­ing Major­i­ty is led by Black peo­ple and peo­ple of col­or, and brings social move­ments togeth­er in an anti-racist, anti-cap­i­tal­ist Left for rad­i­cal democ­ra­cy. Niki­ta talked with In These Times in late June from Oak­land, Calif., after anoth­er of many all-nighters. She shared what this moment feels like after years of orga­niz­ing, The Ris­ing Majority’s plan for a ​hot sum­mer,” how to sus­tain pres­sure for rad­i­cal change and where Biden and Trump fit in.

“The demand to defund the police and fund the people has real traction. It’s not a new demand, but it has become a unified rallying cry.”

A lot of orga­niz­ers are telling me they are exhaust­ed try­ing to keep up — the move­ment, the pan­dem­ic. How do you keep going?

NM: As some­one who has been in move­ment com­mu­ni­ties for a long time, it’s deeply inspir­ing to me to see this lev­el of analy­sis, dream­ing, imag­i­na­tion. We are see­ing an accel­er­a­tion of pub­lic con­scious­ness not just in defense of Black lives — I think a lot of that foun­da­tion hap­pened in 2013, 2014, 2015 — but the need to trans­form sys­tems at the root. For me, that’s ener­giz­ing. So is the lev­el of mobi­liza­tion — across the coun­try, glob­al­ly, out of Oak­land. We are on the cusp of some­thing great, some­thing his­toric. It keeps me going when I’m tired.

How long have you been organizing?

NM: I can’t talk about the move­ment with­out talk­ing about my grand­moth­er, Dolores Bosley. She is from Bas­trop, Louisiana. She grew up in a home for folks who worked in a cot­ton mill and for share­crop­pers. She want­ed me to under­stand two things. One, the lega­cy of Black peo­ple. Two, that I am inher­ent­ly valu­able as a per­son. I attribute the seeds of my con­scious­ness to my grandmother.

My way into move­ments was through edu­ca­tion­al jus­tice work in high school, at 14, through a group called Youth Togeth­er. Ever since my fam­i­ly migrat­ed to Oak­land, Castle­mont High School was the high school we all went to, in a his­tor­i­cal­ly Black, Lati­no and Poly­ne­sian com­mu­ni­ty of deep poverty.

One day, they sus­pend­ed 80 stu­dents for a cell phone pol­i­cy — for cell phones drop­ping out of pock­ets, for walk­ing with a phone. That made folks real­ly angry. In addi­tion, out­side cops were brought in to deal with vio­lence, with racial ten­sions, when we knew the solu­tion was not polic­ing. So we land­ed on the mod­el of restora­tive jus­tice. That cam­paign result­ed in a city­wide res­o­lu­tion to have restora­tive jus­tice as the main mod­el of harm reduc­tion in schools.

I kept orga­niz­ing in col­lege. Union orga­niz­ing with UNITE HERE solid­i­fied my com­mit­ment to long-term orga­niz­ing. The thing that got me back into anti-police bru­tal­i­ty work was the start of Black Lives Mat­ter. I got a request, like a secret meet­ing, ​Black peo­ple come to this loca­tion.” I knew Ali­cia Garza and a few oth­er move­ment founders, and I showed up. That was the begin­ning of the BLM Bay Area chapter.

After years of orga­niz­ing for Black lives, are you sur­prised by the new mass protests? 

NM: A move­ment nev­er dies. There are cycles: Moments where it’s real­ly intense, moments of move­ment-build­ing. So I’m not sur­prised. Con­sid­er the time and con­di­tions: the con­ver­gence of Covid with the con­tin­ued ille­git­i­ma­cy of our gov­ern­ment. Trump and our gov­ern­ment did not pro­tect folks dur­ing Covid, but instead pro­tect­ed cor­po­rate inter­ests. You also have police mur­der­ing Black folks. That felt like the snap­ping of a straw.

But I am excit­ed by the lev­el of mobi­liza­tion. Dal­las has been out for two weeks straight, Min­neapo­lis for a month. I think about Black orga­niz­ing projects in Oak­land. They’ve been work­ing on get­ting police out of schools for a long time, and they are on the precipice of win­ning.

Let’s talk about win­ning. What is winnable now?

NM: The demand to defund the police and fund the peo­ple has real trac­tion. It’s not a new demand, but it has become a uni­fied ral­ly­ing cry. What it means is lit­er­al­ly pulling all the funds from polic­ing and mov­ing that to pro­grams that actu­al­ly ensure com­mu­ni­ty health.

For The Ris­ing Major­i­ty, our plat­form is rad­i­cal democ­ra­cy — so it’s not enough to just move mon­ey from police to pro­grams for the peo­ple. Com­mu­ni­ty con­trol is a key part of sus­tain­ing that shift. As the move­ment gets orga­nized, com­mu­ni­ty con­trol and par­tic­i­pa­to­ry bud­get­ing become addi­tion­al demands.

What kind of pro­grams need investment? 

NM: That’s a hard ques­tion — it requires the peo­ple. This is part of why par­tic­i­pa­to­ry bud­gets are such a cool thing.

Per­son­al­ly, when I think about com­mu­ni­ty safe­ty and well­ness, I think about qual­i­ty jobs that don’t sup­port cap­i­tal­ist inter­ests — green jobs, col­lec­tives. A reimag­in­ing of what our eco­nom­ic sys­tem could look like. Coun­selors in schools. Mak­ing sure every young per­son has food. What if food and hous­ing inse­cu­ri­ty were not some­thing which, every day, you have to wake up and nav­i­gate? Health­care — Democ­rats talk about uni­ver­sal health­care, but Covid-19 illu­mi­nat­ed the real fail­ures of our system.

Alter­na­tives to polic­ing — what excites you there? 

NM: I now believe in trans­for­ma­tive jus­tice. Restora­tive jus­tice is an impor­tant frame­work with use­ful tools, but it aims to get back to ​nor­mal.” For Black peo­ple, poor folks, queer folks, trans and non­bi­na­ry peo­ple, nor­mal is still a site of violence.

Trans­for­ma­tive jus­tice asks: What actu­al­ly needs to shift, so vio­lence and harm for a par­tic­u­lar per­son or com­mu­ni­ty doesn’t remain pos­si­ble in the same way?

A good friend of mine trained me on restora­tive jus­tice grow­ing up. His sis­ter was mur­dered in the height of him talk­ing about restora­tive jus­tice. It would have been real­ly easy for him to resort to vio­lence, includ­ing the vio­lence of lock­ing the guy up. What he decid­ed to do was cre­ate a restora­tive jus­tice process.

This person’s moth­er came to meet with my friend’s moth­er. They had con­ver­sa­tions about not just the crime, not just the vio­lence, but how their chil­dren got to the place they’re in. They talked about fam­i­ly and sto­ries and pover­ty, and hous­ing inse­cu­ri­ty, and how all of those things led up to the mur­der. My friend’s moth­er then went to meet the guy who mur­dered her daugh­ter. After some time, they had a real con­ver­sa­tion about the harm that was caused. Jus­tice can’t hap­pen out­side the peo­ple direct­ly affected.

None of that takes away the fact that her daugh­ter was mur­dered, the sad­ness, the rage. What it did do was cre­ate an open­ing for jus­tice in a way the cur­rent sys­tem would nev­er allow.

What hap­pened on the crim­i­nal jus­tice side? 

NM: You don’t real­ly have a choice about the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, unfor­tu­nate­ly. He end­ed up going to prison, which — accord­ing to my friend — felt emp­ty after the process they went through. My friend’s moth­er and this per­son had a rela­tion­ship — a ten­u­ous one, for sure, but a rela­tion­ship — and so pun­ish­ment felt emp­ty and not about jus­tice, for any­one. The sys­tem is still a site of ter­ror and con­trol. We need to reimag­ine how we deal with harm and say unapolo­get­i­cal­ly that pris­ons are not the way to do that.

And that’s hard to hold, you know, for peo­ple talk­ing about defund­ing the police — that, in a sit­u­a­tion with no police and no pris­ons, jus­tice will be more inti­mate. That feels dif­fi­cult for me, as a sur­vivor of sex­u­al vio­lence, to be like: How do I have a con­ver­sa­tion about jus­tice that looks some­one direct­ly in the eye? I go back to this all the time. What does it look like to take away these sys­tems that aren’t set up for jus­tice for any­one, and have a real com­mu­ni­ty process?

A lot of these solu­tions are local, where much of the police bud­get is con­trolled. What do you see on a broad­er, nation­al level?

NM: One key oppor­tu­ni­ty is the stim­u­lus pack­ages. In the mid­dle of a pan­dem­ic where 125,000 folks have died and 33 mil­lion peo­ple lost jobs, the stim­u­lus pack­age ear­marked $850 mil­lion to ​pub­lic safe­ty.” We know, for white suprema­cists and cap­i­tal­ists, that ​pub­lic safe­ty” means police bud­gets and ICE deten­tion cen­ters, when folks need Covid test­ing, rent can­cel­la­tions and freezes, employ­ment sup­port. So a fed­er­al tar­get for us is the stim­u­lus pack­ages com­ing up, as a place we can actu­al­ly redi­rect funds to the people.

The sec­ond thing we’ve been talk­ing is divest­ment from white suprema­cy, racial cap­i­tal­ism and anti-Black­ness. Some of the analy­sis we’re work­ing toward is how state­sanc­tioned vio­lence and ter­ror are pro­tect­ed and enabled by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. So let’s talk about defund­ing mil­i­ta­rized forces domes­ti­cal­ly and abroad — because the func­tion of those sys­tems is ulti­mate­ly to pro­tect cap­i­tal and white suprema­cy. And we under­stand Trump as a fig­ure­head of this in this moment. For exam­ple, when Trump threat­ened to call in the mil­i­tary on pro­test­ers to defend prop­er­ty. As if that Tar­get build­ing is more impor­tant than a liv­ing, breath­ing soul.

Trump is not the first, but he is dan­ger­ous. So we’re also think­ing about how to call out the ille­git­i­ma­cy of gov­ern­ment in this moment. When we ask, ​What does it mean to fund the peo­ple?” You under­stand that con­cept; I under­stand that con­cept; Trump will nev­er under­stand. His vest­ed inter­ests put him against the people.

So are we talk­ing about cam­paign­ing against Trump here? 

NM: That’s a direct ques­tion! (laughs) The Ris­ing Major­i­ty and the Move­ment for Black Lives are talk­ing about mobi­liza­tion that calls out Trump as the fig­ure­head. We are unapolo­getic that he and his folks down the bal­lot need to go. And we’re clear we need to do that work with­in our ecosys­tem. What’s required to get Trump out is sus­tained mobi­liza­tion, but sus­tained mobi­liza­tion should not be just about get­ting him out. It’s clear we need a nation­wide cam­paign to defund the police and to fund the people.

And then there’s Biden. (laughs) Oh, Biden. It’s not like Biden is that much bet­ter. Biden has sim­i­lar inter­ests to Trump, right? But he has a dif­fer­ent game plan for which way to enact vio­lence on our peo­ple. He’s a neolib­er­al can­di­date, and we have expe­ri­enced the impact of neoliberalism.

What do you say to Biden’s police reform pro­pos­als: choke­holds, racial bias train­ing, com­mu­ni­ty policing? 

NM: They are a dis­re­spect to the peo­ple who lost peo­ple to police bru­tal­i­ty. A dis­re­spect to the peo­ple being bru­tal­ly, bru­tal­ly repressed by police. It’s a dis­re­spect to say to peo­ple mak­ing a clear demand to defund, ​We’re going to give you a reform!” If that is not neolib­er­al­ism… (laughs)

Biden’s going to try to give con­ces­sions to the peo­ple— some of which may seem like harm reduc­tion because ​now you won’t get choked out” — but a con­ces­sion that does not actu­al­ly trans­form the sys­tems that enable vio­lence is a con­ces­sion our move­ment should question.

It’s a chal­lenge. We’ve been sold a dream that the Civ­il Rights Act was a pin­na­cle; it’s not. How do we invest in a long-term, proac­tive strug­gle? Come Trump or Biden, that’s the work of movement.

How are move­ments engag­ing and edu­cat­ing all these new protesters? 

NM: When the mobi­liza­tions real­ly began heat­ing up, The Ris­ing Major­i­ty did a polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion pro­gram. We had a vir­tu­al ses­sion with Angela Davis, Jami­la Woods, N’Tanya Lee from Left­Roots, Kay­la Reed from Action St. Louis, Karis­sa Lewis from Move­ment for Black Lives, Tim­my Rose from Dis­senters and Greisa Martínez Rosas from Unit­ed We Dream. That teach-in had about 360,000 views, so I think folks are hun­gry to be out on the streets, to make mean­ing in this moment. Edu­ca­tion is some of what this move­ment will be up to in the next few weeks.

How do we sus­tain pres­sure for change? Can street protests persist? 

NM: We need a com­bi­na­tion of tac­tics. We at The Ris­ing Major­i­ty are call­ing for a ​hot sum­mer” of intense orga­niz­ing. We also know folks will get tired: We need orga­ni­za­tions to hold sus­tained ener­gy for a long-term, proac­tive struggle.

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Nikita Mitchell | Radio Free (2020-07-27T12:22:00+00:00) “We Are On the Cusp of Something Great”: A Black Liberation Organizer on Next Steps for the Movement – An interview with Nikita Mitchell. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/27/we-are-on-the-cusp-of-something-great-a-black-liberation-organizer-on-next-steps-for-the-movement-an-interview-with-nikita-mitchell/

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" » “We Are On the Cusp of Something Great”: A Black Liberation Organizer on Next Steps for the Movement – An interview with Nikita Mitchell." Nikita Mitchell | Radio Free - Monday July 27, 2020, https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/27/we-are-on-the-cusp-of-something-great-a-black-liberation-organizer-on-next-steps-for-the-movement-an-interview-with-nikita-mitchell/
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» “We Are On the Cusp of Something Great”: A Black Liberation Organizer on Next Steps for the Movement – An interview with Nikita Mitchell | Nikita Mitchell | Radio Free | https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/27/we-are-on-the-cusp-of-something-great-a-black-liberation-organizer-on-next-steps-for-the-movement-an-interview-with-nikita-mitchell/ |

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