Journal of Women, Politics & Policy

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wwap20

“Take a Moment to Ask Yourself, If This Is How

We Fall Apart?” Practices for Mutually Reinforced
Resilience in the Time of Reckoning More Lessons
from The Manual for Liberating Survival

Jasmine Syedullah & Rae Leiner

To cite this article: Jasmine Syedullah & Rae Leiner (2021): “Take a Moment to Ask Yourself, If
This Is How We Fall Apart?” Practices for Mutually Reinforced Resilience in the Time of Reckoning
More Lessons from The Manual for Liberating Survival, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, DOI:
10.1080/1554477X.2021.1872985

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2021.1872985

Published online: 17 Feb 2021.

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JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY
https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2021.1872985

“Take a Moment to Ask Yourself, If This Is How We Fall Apart?”

Practices for Mutually Reinforced Resilience in the Time of
Reckoning More Lessons from The Manual for Liberating Survival
Jasmine Syedullaha and Rae Leinerb
a
Africana Studies, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, USA; bNewburgh LGBTQ+ Center, New York, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Centering the carework of dismantling technologies of oppression which aim Fusion; Black Lives Matter;
to silence, exploit, and execute us – oftentimes to a point where repair is LGBTQ; grassroots
impossible – Syedullah and Leiner present lessons and activities from their organizing; embodiment;
liberation
co-created popular education curriculum, “The Manual for Liberating
Survival,” a movement leadership training for revolutionary organizing
designed to connect abolitionist activists and academics. This article draws
lessons from the Manual that focus on healing justice and abolitionist pro­
tocols for decarcerating care within movements for social justice. The paper
traces not only the transgenerational effects of anti-Black violence, commu­
nity separation, and racial trauma but also the protocols of repair and
resistance Black gender-non-conforming, queer, and trans women are seed­
ing within movement space.

Everything you touch, you change. Everything you change, changes you.

The only constant is change.

Octavia Butler1

The year 2020 began for us with an earthquake in Puerto Rico that startled us from sleep on
the second floor of a cement house propped up above a garage on stilts standing along the side of
a mountain, five minutes from the sea, ten minutes from the rainforest. We were staying with chosen
family, my partner’s third grade teacher, Angel, so he, my partner Rae, and I banded together, all piling
into Angel’s car in the middle of the night and set off in search of information, looking out for those in
crisis, bracing for aftershocks, and listening to the radio for instructions. The houses on that mountain
stayed standing while thirty minutes away many others did not. The lights were still out for most of the
island when our plane departed the next day as scheduled. More than a thousand days after the natural
disaster Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico many on the island are still navigating life without power,
running water, and necessary resources.
The anxious unsettled feeling that found us restless that last night in Luquillo extended beyond our
return home though as we followed news from Angel through phone calls and Facebook posts of the
grassroots relief responses to those hundreds of families left displaced and in crisis as the quakes
continued through January. Meanwhile, from the other side of the world, WhatsApp threads from
friends working in China and Vietnam were flooded with warnings of coronavirus, closed schools, lost
jobs, and quarantine. We squeezed one last family trip to the spa in the final days of February before
the alarm bells of what would become a global pandemic sounded. By spring break, two weeks later,
waves of Governor mandates shut down entire states with shelter in place orders. We soon learned that
pandemics do not travel alone.

CONTACT Jasmine Syedullah jsyedullah@vassar.edu; Rae Leiner rae.leiner@newburghlgbtqcenter.org.

© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 J. SYEDULLAH AND R. LEINER

The first protest against police brutality during the pandemic in our community took place just
across the river from us, in a post-industrial town called the City of Newburgh. Newburgh is eighty
miles north of New York City and was once called the murder capital of New York and ranked 37th out
of the 50 worst cities to live in in the country for its unrelenting struggles with violence and poverty.2
Rae’s been an organizer there for the last ten years and on our first date explained the complex
intersections of New York City gentrification to me, detailing how mass migrations to the mid-
Hudson Valley by folks in search of affordable housing were adversely impacting the community,
increasing the displacement of long time residents of color and exacerbating turf tensions among local
gangs and underground economies.
On March 26, 2020, Tyrell “Rex” Fincher was killed by Newburgh police. Rex was walking down the
street, rumored to be carrying a weapon that was visible to on-lookers, which prompted a call to the
police. Or at least that was the story given by the police to the media, a story which discounted the role
of the persistent neighborhood rivalries which were more than likely the reason for the call to the
police in the first place. According to all of the media stories publicizing the incident, Rex shot at police
officers who tried to tackle him and disarm him. It was the danger that he posed to police during this
“intervention” that prompted their shooting of him in broad daylight in front of everyone who
happened to be outside to witness the incident. Hours after Rex was shot, a local city councilper­
son–following a lead from social media–arrived on the scene to document the response of community
members and residents as rumors of a riot on Carson Street raged from the time of Rex’s murder well
into the night.
Rae, as a leading member of Black Lives Matter, Hudson Valley, heard about the murder and
protests forming that night. I stopped writing the paper I’d been hovering over in our makeshift office/
pantry stocked to the brim with canned goods, rice, and toilet paper. On instinct we both moved to
grab our jackets, then suddenly remembering COVID, stopped in our tracks. It was early in the weeks
of the shelter-in-place order and rates of contagion were high in our area. It was raining and the chill of
winter had not yet yielded its hold on the night air. We debated joining the crowds gathered in protest
in Newburgh and considered the risks. We are both immunocompromised. Our daughter is asthmatic.
At that point we were unsure how the virus traveled and were terrified by what we were hearing from
friends and family in the city. We were too scared to move that night and decided to sit tight, watching
the Facebook threads from across the river, panicked to our core, both knowing this would not likely
be the last incident that would call us into action, pandemic or no.
Rex’s case did not draw national attention. He was allegedly armed and resisting, two things that
garner no sympathy from the general public. Combined with his race, class, and gender his death at the
hands of police would not be cause for national unrest. For those in the community who still feel his
loss, for his brother whom we met later in the summer, for his sister, for his other family and friends,
the injustice of the loss of their brother was a call to action weeks before the murder of George Floyd at
the hands of Minneapolis police in the month of May. Rex’s brother was not the only immediate family
survivor of those harassed, gunned down, beaten, and killed by police we met this summer.
We met Melissa Johnson, whose two teenage daughters, Julissa and Jamelia, were beaten by
Poughkeepise police on their way home from school March 11, 2019. The two girls intervened in an
officer getting aggressive with a friend and both girls came to her aid. Julissa sustained a concussion
and for months afterward, officers targeted and harassed them as a result of the lawsuit Melissa filed
going public later that fall.
We met Tawanda Jones who lost her brother in a deadly beating by Baltimore police in 2013.
A mother, teacher, anti-police brutality community activist, and Christian woman, Tawanda has been
honoring his death and fighting police brutality for the past seven years including weekly virtual vigils
called #WestWednesdays, a podcast series on social media advocating for police accountability and
solidarity with other families who have suffered similar losses.
We honored the loss of Maurice Gordon who was a Poughkeepsie resident, right here in the mid-
Hudson Valley, who was shot down by New Jersey State Troopers on the highway just this summer.
We attended a rally organized by his family and friends in July and were moved by the testimony of his
 JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 3

best friend, his mother, his sister to march for justice for his death through downtown to the steps of
city hall.
The fabric of this movement is soaked in grief, in the determination of those who cannot sit still,
cannot sit silent as our family are taken without question, without apology, with no justice, over and
over, one every twenty-eight hours according to the ground-breaking study of the Malcolm
X Grassroots Movement.3
National uprisings against the pandemic of anti-Black violence and calls to defund and abolish the
police in the wake of the police killings of Ahmaud Aubrey, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd arrived
alongside climate collapse, alongside economic depression, in concert with the rise of fascism and the
everyday apocalypse of being stateless, undocumented, unhoused, unemployed, Black, queer, trans
and of color, incarcerated or otherwise too poor to matter. There was indeed fire this time, from fires
of protest in June and July, through a September so hot the western US coastline was consumed in wild
smoke plumes that blocked the sun, burned homes to the ground, and turned morning skies red.
Love alone is left as Baldwin reminds us. We are all watchers now. Patrolling for danger everywhere
from neighborhoods to news threads, in Zoom rooms and on grocery checkout lines, like heat seeking
missiles we are all learning to flatten the curve, track traces, avoid contagion, limit the spread. Not only
of COVID, but of the urgency, perfectionism, civility, and productivity that mask the violence of white
supremacy. Even while we’ve been conscripted by already existing institutions of surveillance to watch
each other, many of us are still unskilled in the work of watching out for each other, for those most
vulnerable to disease, to those most exposed to the elements. As protocols for containing corona
become more clear, the virus of white supremacy continues to rage, largely unchecked, overlooked and
undetected because we are not trained in a practice of surveillance rooted in love. Heightened levels of
watching are still underscored and organized by punitive logics of personal responsibility, individu­
alism, and self-interest, distancing us from one another precisely when our fates are most clearly
interconnected.
A summer of sensory overload, I found myself on my yoga mat the day after footage of Floyd’s
murder flooded the airways and asked myself what I needed. My body quaked. Tears flowed and
I found space to feel into the deep sea of sorrow lodged in my chest. The next day I noticed our
daughter was oddly silent, and figuring she was still upset over a break up, I asked if she was thinking
about “him.” When she responded saying everyone is, I realized in an instant that she was talking
about George. Over dinner that night, my partner and I processed with her and listened to her fears
and anger. By the end of the week we were planning Congregation, an alternative to rallies and
marches to bring people into much needed conversation about alternatives to calling the police that we
already have in practice in our communities.
We were organizing all summer. Congregation, rallies, vigils, marches, Zoom trainings, medita­
tions, and teach-ins. We attended sound healing sessions and moon ceremonies. Finding a balance
between staying vigilant and staying attuned to the needs of others meant sleeping more, avoiding
crowds, meditating religiously, touching each other intentionally, drawing on the relationships that
feed us most while still reaching out to those we know had few to reach out to. Becoming familiar with
the unfamiliar feeling of waking up each morning exhausted, bracing withheld breath for the shock of
news threads streaming headlines of science fiction horror and catastrophe, stressed our nervous
systems and made me literally sick to my stomach for weeks.
Since Puerto Rico, we have been, at a molecular level, living with a heightened sensitivity to our
surroundings, hyper-alert, and ever-vigilant, heeding the inheritance of survival strategies our ances­
tors gave us. Listening to the land and reviewing the movements that keep our eyes on the horizon,
engaged in the principles of sankofa. As the time of reckoning with generations of anti-Black violence
rises, as more are called in to the work of transforming the realities of the interlocking systems of
oppression that move through us, the more we know we need practices that ground us in the wisdom
of our bodies, in the technologies of awareness they hold, languages of feeling we learn to suppress,
feelings that contain the antidote to depression, anger, rage, grief, and uncontainable longings for
justice – the truth that feeling them fully is an act of resistance that seeds righteous action.
4 J. SYEDULLAH AND R. LEINER

As the world falls down, we who believe in freedom still reach for each other. We congregate on
calls, in virtual spaces, encrypting love in a look shared over masked faces. We reach for the things that
wake us up out of mental overwhelm and spiritual paralysis, things that remind us to feel ourselves, to
feel enough to feel each other. We turn to recipes that soothe and ceremonies that repair. We sing
familiar songs, watch films we’ve worn so well we know each word. We call old friends.
Healing is a collective process, not a solo sojourn, but a practice of mutual exchange, of community
care. We need each other to meet this moment and all the resources that keep us keepin’ our heads up
and eyes on the prize. The title of this piece is such a thing, a return to something that gives us space to
keep it real, to check in and pause long enough to honor the lessons to be found within our mistakes, to
be more mindful of the ways we fall apart under pressure. It’s a song that reminds us to keep paying
attention even when things fall apart, not just to external realities, but to internal ones as well; we know
that if we don’t take a moment to find ourselves, falling to pieces can pull us apart from the very people
and resources we need to stay grounded in times of turbulence, grief, and loss.
“Here Comes a Thought” appears in season four, episode four of Steven Universe, a Cartoon
Network creation of artist and songwriter Rebecca Sugar. The song and episode are trainings for the
title character and his best friend Connie on how to bring this mindful education into spaces of
collective self-defense and united persistence in pursuit of a more balanced and just world. Rather than
bonding over trauma, the friends find mindful unity in the midst of overwhelm, grief, and loss. What
they model is a practice, not a guaranteed or permanent state of being. It is a practice in watching out
for what pulls us apart, not as a corrective, not as perfectionists, but as a co-created protocol for
pairing. In the cartoon, this mindful practice of pairing is called fusion. In what follows we extend the
lessons of fusion we find in Steven Universe to grassroots contexts in need of strategies for finding
unity under pressure, for pushing for social change while being experiencing social injustice. This has
been the work of the summer for us – both as a couple and as a couple who want to curate beloved
communities in the places we call home. Our strategy for for mutually reinforced practices of resilience
outline five steps to fusion for the movement to defund the police and to hold all of us accountable for
our implication in the prison industrial complex, namely our cultural capitulation and reproduction of
its carceral logics and punitive isolationist disposability protocols for addressing harm and safety in
our relationships, movements, and communities. These are the lessons we have been learning and
relearning, creative practices for skillfully integrating the lessons of fusion into our local organizing for
Black lives in the mid-Hudson Valley over the long hot summer of 2020. We borrow inspiration from
these unlikely sources, the song “Here Comes a Thought,” and the show Steven Universe, because
honestly, we watch and re-watch them whenever the need for their lessons arise. It gives us hope.
Learning to look out for and care for ourselves and each other in the midst of converging global crises
is a practice, not a perfect, as my own meditation teacher, Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, Sensei always
says. Staying rooted in “flexibility, love, and trust,” as the song suggests, while staying alert can feel
nearly unimaginable. What we need most right now are tried and documented strategies to help us
keep coming back together when things stay falling apart.

Step one
Jump ship, stay fugitive

Take a moment to think of just, flexibility, love and trust.

Steven Universe

If you have not been introduced to Steven Universe, this uncanny Cartoon Network series is full of
treats. In this world, the heroes are all female and/or gender non-conforming rebel freedom fighters
from another planet, a planet of magical sentient gems, you know, rubies and diamonds and sapphires
and such. Though the gems were sent to earth to colonize the land and kill everything on it, some of
those who landed here fell in love with the earth and its inhabitants and defected from their home
 JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 5

planet and fought to defend the earth from colonization. Their formation took the form of a ­
thousand year long war against former kin and clan. On their home planet, called home planet, the
gems followed a strict hierarchy, an all-female military-like chain of command ruled by diamonds and
organized according to gem type and color. Gems of like type and color would fuse together to become
stronger, bigger, faster, more weaponized, more deadly. Fusion between different gems was unheard of
and taboo until a ruby foot soldier and the sapphire soothsayer she was protecting fused onboard
a spaceship in the early days of the war between home planet and the earth-bound rebel crystal gems.
The rebels attack the ship and though the sapphire has foreseen her own death in the ensuing battle
and accepted it, a lone ruby foot soldier cannot abide sitting by while she is attacked. The ruby leaps to
the soothsayer’s defense, knocks her off her feet, and they tumble. The wayward foot soldier and
highborn seer suddenly merge into something new, a transgressive hybrid mess of a new formation,
a cross-color, cross-type gem fusion. Their fusion ends the battle, causing the rebels to retreat. Though
their union saved the ship, their transgression made them outlaws and the ruby was sentenced to
death. Rather than accept her fate, the sapphire chooses exile for them both, grabbing the ruby’s hand
and literally jumping ship, making the two fugitives. After falling to earth they conjoin again and join
the crystal gem rebel resistance as a fusion. We see many fusions in Steven Universe, but this is the only
pair who live as a fusion, role modeling for others the power of breaking with convention and showing
all whom they fight what power a union made of love can wield.
Fusion is a strategy and everyone uses it, the left, the right. As a strategy, fusion is not an endgame,
it needs a moral arch. Jumping ship to stay fugitive resonates with us as students of abolition and is the
compass component of fusion that makes it a tool, a winning strategy for the kinds of collectivity that
advance the cause of abolitionist. As decendents of those who survived the kidnapping and chained
detention at the door of no return, the middle passage, slavery, convict leasing, lynching, Jim Crow,
mass incarceration and all the rest, jumping ship in search of something other than the fate of our
forefathers, foremothers, and great-great-queerkin is a strategy we take seriously, not only as a means
of survival, but as a prophetic praxis of liberation.4 The ships we jump take many forms. Once they
were the vessels that brought stolen Africans to new lands as commodities, then they became the social
and political mechanisms that transformed our bodily autonomy into highly valued labor. Vessels of
profit fed policies that built institutions that produced and sustained white supremacist capitalist gains
that govern our lives to date. The ships we jump today are held together by white supremacist
heteronormative standards of living. They center those who can hord with impunity while concealing
all the violence of appropriation in manifest destiny. The rules of surviving passage on this ship are the
same as they ever were – suppression of emotions and feelings, prioritizing individual gain over
community care, the subjugation of the earth and our role within it, stripping interconnection to the
natural world from our lives.
Sitting with the wake up that was 2020 is a testament to just how meaningful interconnection and
interdependence are in times of collective crisis. But what we are also learning is that we are perhaps
too fast to fuse. We fuse with urgency, but we are not fusing with a clear and common goal, with
foresight, hindsight, and radical imagination. We are seeing just how far overwhelm, rage, and grief
alone can carry us – and it is not nearly far enough. Though popular support for movements for Black
lives was at an all time high in the summer, by September, according to a study conducted by Pew
Research, support for Black Lives Matter fell from 67% to 55% and has dropped since to 48% by
December 2020 according to a study conducted by Civiqs.5 Though more people than ever recorded
poured out of quarantine and isolation and into the streets to take a stand against police brutality in
the turbulence that followed the police killings of Aubrey, Taylor, and Floyd, their fusion failed to
produce more than a glimpse of the world we want.
As we are swept up in the romance of a cross-racial, cross-class, all-gender-inclusive collective
Black radical fusion, we must become curious about how we are showing up for ourselves, and what we
bring with us into moments of heightened pressure. Some of the consequences of fusing too quickly
can look like losing parts of ourselves to fit the other, or allowing aspects of ourselves to be sacrificed
for the so-called greater good. Self-sacrifice and erasure are often touted as noble traits of social justice
6 J. SYEDULLAH AND R. LEINER

leadership but in the end undermine the sustainability of liberation movements. We are thinking here
about how the all Black Lives Matter rallying call has been a point of division in the communities with
whom we organize. Homophobia and transphobia are not the only obstacles to unity. Power and
trauma are challenging bedfellows in spaces of social justice movement building. As we learn to bring
our whole selves to the work of making movements rise to meet the struggles of the moment, we often
encounter more friction than fusion with others, folks come from different walks and each are
survivors of alternatively traumatizing timelines and landscapes of violence. Class, gender, religious
affiliation, and region can make organizing even within racial affinity a maddening affair. Movement
burn out and break down can pose challenges to our ability to collectively show up and move together
when the situation asks it of us. How do we heal enough in real time to hold on through conflict? How
do we turn to each other when we are under attack and not replicate the “I got mines” mentality of self-
preservation we have all been taught by the very ships we are fighting to jump? How do we hold on to
each other through processes of accountability? Co-create reparative consequences for harm that can
carry us through even when we are all triggered, even when we are all carrying more grief and pain
than we know how to hold in a good way? Can we, collectively, fuse while jumping the ship?
Fusing while jumping ship is more than fashionable – it has an impact. The greater the fusion, the
greater the impact of that formation when it hits the water. Mass exodus without knowing our defaults
and how we plan for them can leave us wandering in the wilderness without resources or direction for
years. True liberation requires we practice moving out of bondage together, by moving through the
individual feelings that compel us to stay in our comfort zones rather than find our working edge, and
step up to it. When we jump we contract and struggle to extend ourselves toward each other. Jumping
ship alone is not enough. Fusion without jumping ship is just a flash mob. To make a ripple of change
a tidal wave, we have to take the time to find ourselves, as the Steven Universe song instructs, and
center ourselves enough to be skillful in how we are showing up for and from our own trauma. The
consequences of what happens when we are not paying attention to how we are showing up are
apparent in the ways our movements get stuck fighting each other even when we are winning, get stuck
on things like framing and messaging, breaking down over who is most neglected in our movements
and who whose lives must matter most, or first, or at all.
Witnessing how that trauma may surface, may catch us off guard, and quickly shift us out of
alignment with our accountability to our common mission or beyond our capacity to hold compassion
and care for ourselves and each other can be so unsettling that our ability to stay united against the
press of the opposition can be deeply compromised. Some of these fractures need time and space to
heal. Some can be prevented by being in practice with and learning from our trauma responses. Many
of these responses are our personal patterns and some are inherited responses or patterns passed down
to us as survival mechanisms from early childhood and/or ancestral strategies of survival. Liberating
cultures of care from outmoded habits of survival is more than a matter of the mind or the will alone.
As colonized subjects – Black folks, people-of-color, and poor folks – we are conditioned through our
bodies to suppress our natural ability to access ancient information inherent to our sense of self-worth
and self-love. We struggle to fit into the molding assigned to us by domesticating cultures of carceral
racial capital. While so many of us seek escape from class, racial and gendered subjection through
education and social climbing, often respectability itself becomes a trap, leaving us defenseless against
those who remain unimpressed by our efforts, and then, sadly, isolated from those who likely hold the
medicine for our healing, defense, and liberation.
We have seen the effects of fusion in the anti-slavery movement, the anti-lynching movement, the
Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. We have also seen what happens when a movement
wins and changes policy, but leaves baseline cultural and economic patterns of patriarchy, capitalism,
and settler colonialism within that win largely untouched. The revolution we need today is more than
a political revolution, it is more than a spiritual revolution. Before we can consider fusion, we first have
to take a moment to ask ourselves what we are holding, understand how it is weaponized by ourselves
or others – and as Rev. angel often reminds us – ask ourselves if and how it is helping and/or hindering
how we are actually showing up for ourselves and each other in the work of social change.
 JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 7

Step two
Rae’s hot tips for fusion for beginners

“In the face challenge we do not rise to our aspirations, we fall to the level of our practice.”

- Practicing Justice co-founders rusia mohiuddin,

Universal Partnership, Warriors for Embodied Liberation and

Rev angel Kyodo williams, Sensei,

founder of Center for Transformative Change, the new Dharma community

quoting Bruce Lee

I was in my mid-thirties when I learned about the concept of fusion. Honestly, I am not sure if the
show is for children or not. It centers queer and trans experiences and expressions, centers people of
color, highlights white supremacist behaviors, and challenges them, talks heavily about feelings and
accountability, incorporates problem solving through mediation and loving responses to difference.
The idea of fusion had not ever struck me as a metaphor for social change or liberation, but as I was
folded into the work of rusia mohuiddin, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, adrienne maree brown, Lama
Rod Owens, it all became clear how interdependence is a necessary and ancient tool for liberation.
How holding the work in ways that honor me is about being transformed by the work in ways that
contribute to my liberation and the liberation of others. I am not an expert at these things, but I do
have some thoughts about breaking down fusion, for beginners, to help support the development of
those lenses and practices that I wish I’d had.
I thought I understood so much about social justice movement spaces and the power of community
organizing to win campaigns and change systems. The tactics and culture were a killer. I majorly burnt out
after working for close to five years as an organizer and found myself, reluctantly, stepping away from work
that was doing dual things in my body. I found the joy and rigor of organizing really fed me, fed my soul,
sustained my need to embody justice. At the same time, it ate all my free time. I didn’t take care of myself in
the ways that I needed to and I ended up in the emergency room twice in one year due to stress related
anxiety attacks. I wasn’t taught and inherently forgot that I engage in liberation work to honor myself, my
family and my community. Instead, I was honoring and replicating systems that dehumanized me in service
to the movement. They didn’t allow me to access space to rest and restore, even when I had vacation days
saved up. We’d actually brag about never taking days off. I knew that the framework for white supremacist
neoliberal-capitalist organizing models and tactics weren’t going to be enough to secure liberation for Black
people. This isn’t about blaming the teachers that had that instilled in me hard work and rigor. It’s more
about having a moment of loving reflection on the moments that made this one possible.
I was experiencing transformation through my work, but it wasn’t what I needed to be okay. As a single,
multi-racial Black identified, queer parent, it was hard to balance my ability to integrate the work that I lived
and breathed with being there for my child and taking care of myself. The ripple effect wasn’t just solely on
myself and my family, but also in the ways I was able to show up in my community. Trained in the school of
Saul Alinsky organizing, I spent my days doing outreach, building up a list of contacts, moving contacts to
meetings or events connected to the ongoing campaign work that we were engaged with in an effort to
leverage enough power to make systemic change. I was responsible for the leadership development of
community members, preparing them for meetings with elected officials, union heads, and engagements
with other community members. I worked on elections, get out the vote efforts, candidate forums, direct
actions, developing demands, creating scripts, phone banking, and managing volunteers. None of my
experience is uniquely outside of the realm of community organizing, which is full of rigor and a nine hour
work day minimum. I was there, but had limited capacity to create the relationships that I needed in order to
survive. I learned that this was normal for the people that I worked with and that we were all contending with
this type of fatigue consistently, and in that I wasn’t alone. However, I was alone when it came to needing to
8 J. SYEDULLAH AND R. LEINER

make assessments of how the impact of this work weighed on my body and my spirit, I found myself
departing from my job, assessing if my passion for social justice should be relegated to something I did
outside of a paycheck and to seek out spaces to heal, to rest, to restore not just my body but what I thought
I should be holding onto to do this social justice work. This was the beginning for me and I was a newcomer
to this particular road of healing, being a wounded healer, carrying big ideas for social change, and crashing
up against the limitations of my body.
For a long time, I centered myself but not in the ways that would help me to decenter my ego or
allow me to unpack my learnings to see possibility and contributions from my experiences. That part
came just months after I had to leave my organizing post in search of healing on multiple fronts.
I didn’t center myself in healthy ways because honestly everything that I thought I knew about healing
was selfish and white supremacist rooted; it wasn’t actually about facing my trauma or cycles of harm
experienced in my past, it was surface level and superficial at best. This centering just continued to
keep me unaware of how to see, identify, locate, and hone in on my pain or my ability to find methods
of transformation. What I learned during this period of time was that the trauma that I had been
carrying and, – at least I thought so carefully balancing – was still showing up in my day-to-day life and
impacting me in ways that I couldn’t see. I was being transformed no matter what the outcome of the
work was, the power that I struggled to realize was about my choices to hold onto old cycles, thoughts,
and patterns of behavior. All of these observations were not easy to come by and it took me three years
of training with my embodiment teacher, rusia, to get as far as I did in understanding how colonialism
and white supremacy are deeply, insidiously rooted in my acts of self-care. It was a struggle to find the
destructive cycles of how I policed and harmed myself, making it difficult to move forward in building
the relationships that I needed to sustain myself to be seen, heard, and held. Yet I could so clearly and
easily see how our society used mechanisms of oppression to so effectively repress/suppress my
community, I didn’t realize the full impact of how these external forces had a shelf life inside of my
body and ways of being. When I think back on the follies of my youth and the lack of awareness that
I had about how I harmed myself and others, I shudder and am still reconciling these feelings of guilt,
shame, and anxiety. If I didn’t have the opportunity to sit with myself and observe and own these
patterns and cycles, I would not be able to see them now. Again, I am not perfect, far from it. But that
was a moment of clarity about how fusion works and shows up in my life.
The concept of fusion is about being transformed through and in service to the work for liberation
as Mary Hooks declares in the Mandate from Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and BLM Atlanta
back in 2016. Liberation practices aren’t liberatory unless they are beyond the zones that we have been
socialized toward, past the reaches of white supremacist thinking and praxis and into something
ancient. What is more ancient than being in community with one another, sharing in the interde­
pendence that has kept us alive for thousands of years? What is more ancient than leaning into yourself
to learn the deeper truths of your own inner voice and insights? Nope, it isn’t new thinking, it’s
reclaimed thinking. Humans have relied upon each other for thousands of years and survive through
interconnected bonds predicated off of survival. We figured out how to deal with harm, how to heal,
how to love each other, when things didn’t work out, how we departed from one another.
Fusion for beginners honors where we all are when we come to this work, pushes us to think about
how we have internalized white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist frameworks (overt and covert) into
our practices of liberation. You might have been practicing fusion and just didn’t know it.

Step three
Radical carework: surviving liberation by healing backwards

“We’re not just growing healthy plants, we are growing healthy soil.”

Angel Gonzales

organic farmer, community organizer, and retired NYC school teacher

 JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 9

In some instances, fusion is a choice made of love. But in other contexts, it can also be a result of
strategic necessity, capitulation to a coercive or carceral relationship to power, domination, or control.
Fusion can also, quite simply, be co-created by a shared experience of hate, fear, or rage. The kind of
pressure fusion requires is not, in and of itself, good or bad. Their effects encompass the full range of
possibilities people have found to create and recreate the world and their place within it.
The kinds of fusion created under the conditions faced by folks fighting to survive slavery were
complicated by a structural matrix of violence that followed them no matter where they found to go, the
reach of captivity followed, and with it the intimacy of subjection, and the denigration of public
punishment. There was space for choice in the work of survival, but it was tight, narrow, and dangerous.
Outside of fugitive community and maroonage, caring for Black bodies under slavery was largely folded
into the care economy of a coercive system of forced labor extraction and exploitation. As a result, to
nourish desire, pleasure, choice, and thrive under those conditions enough to pass them on to future
generations was, and perhaps still is, a kind of freedom many “free” people do not currently enjoy or
know how to protect. Fugitive fusions made of love and born of such radical carework survived slavery,
and under the racial capital contexts of today, those traditions of carework surfaces in movement spaces
as spiritual healing, ancestral grieving, grounding work, and earth medicine that bring us back to our
bodies and reminds us what all we have to regularly shed when it no longer serves us. In this contect, we
use the word radical to get to the root causes of the obstacles that block our liberation, interconnection,
and longing for justice. Reaching for new ways of connecting with ancient sources of strength and
wisdom can counteract the ongoing and everyday ways caretaking has itself been cannibalized by its
own casualized undercompensated commodification and consumption. For many of us living “free”
today means running up against the brick walls of a culture that can’t care for the very people it profits
off of; the policing and criminalization of poverty, citizenship, gender, and race; the lack of access to
affordable housing, health care, child care, elder care, welfare; the lack of investment in community
programs, youth development, vocational training, adult education, intimate relationship counseling,
substance abuse counseling, domestic violence counseling; the gatekeeping of respectability politics, the
academy, the nonprofit industrial complex, and local politics all limit public access to resources for
building community accountability, self-determination, and mutual interdependence.
In addition to navigating structural constraints over our bodies, love, labor, lives, and longings,
generation after generation we who are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of
unwanted affections, domination, dispossession, and other forms of coerced sexual encounters have
had to figure out how to make a way out of no way to care for ourselves, on our own terms, toward our
own ends. We have been meeting along the well-worn path of caring for our own heartbreak, learning
how to hold onto ourselves and, when we can, hold onto each other, as we become expansive enough
in our trust and in our love enough to breathe space into it for more of it. This is the way we begin
healing backwards. Surviving slavery left little choice for reimagining liberation. Surviving liberation is
the work the afterlives of slavery wants us to forget we still have to do. This is the radical carework that
birthed new tendrils of desire out of the murk and mud of grief. Tending to and cultivating the desire
for fusion made of love, sprouted out the funk of stolen moments and hidden embraces, the kinds of
touch made of choice and surreptitiously showered on each other is another relationship to freedom
than that which can be granted through legal rights and recognition. The carework folk took on to just
keep on keepin’ on are those we carry on today, knowing if they helped folk survive slavery, they just
might help us here now survive liberation. As Cara Page reminds us,

Healing generational trauma is not separate from political liberation. We are interested in investigating the role of
wellness inside of a liberatory framework. Many of our cultural communities have had healers be at the center of
our organizing to help sustain organizers. We are looking at theoretical understanding of what the practices have
been in creating communal infrastructure around wellness and well being, inside of Christian supremacy and
white supremacy. We’re talking about communities of color, working class communities. How do we remain well
inside systems that do not want us to be well or already associate us to disease?6
10 J. SYEDULLAH AND R. LEINER

A movement history reflection and activity

The movements for Black liberation in the 1970’s came off the heels of the Civil Rights Movement and
was born out of the lynching and state sanctioned deaths of Black people by the hands of white
vigilantes and the police. The ability to carry a firearm to defend your Black self and community was
seen as directly challenging the rights of white Americans to engage in an age old practice of inciting
terror through violence that was met with little to no consequence. It was Huey P. Newton that
founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland California in 1966 as a result of Black
men being racially profiled and murdered by police.
The Black Panther Party became a polarizing symbol for Black liberation for Black people in an America
that was still reconciling with flight from the South during the great migration, navigating poor housing
conditions, and the rapidly industrializing economy. The Black Panthers inspired other racial minority
groups facing race-based prejudice that locked them out of institutions of higher education, economic
opportunity, housing and neighborhood options, to organize for self-defense, self-determination, and
autonomy. The Brown Berets, Young Lords, and Yellow Power were all formations that fought for some
time alongside each other against the dominant culture of white supremacy that threatened their lives and
communities. It’s clear the impact that these movements for equality had within our systems of education,
access to food, and healthcare, but what wasn’t clear was how they managed to fall much shorter than their
aspirations for overthrowing the white supremacy deeply embedded in our government and social question.
It begs the question of why? All of the studies on these movements surface the truth of government
informants and disrupters within these groups that helped to derail their collective work and dilute the
power of these formations from the inside. However, it begs a deeper dig into understanding how the
roles of sexism, rape culture, anti-LGBTQ attitudes, and trans misgonination played a role in what
made these groups vulnerable in the first place, surfacing opportunities to implode the movements and
people involved with them to fall short of their goals to beat back a tyrannical system of death and
oppression. It is these very lessons that we are missing at this moment of national uprising and
navigating harm which could help us to lean into and grow from these attempts at dealing with both
the external and internal nature of human conflict folks faced during a time of war.

Activity one: skin in the game?

(30 minutes)
So often, the challenges to movement-building show up within affinity groups. In places where
individual proximities to power are obscured or elided in favor of lifting up a shared set of experiences
over others – Blackness or race over gender or class, national identity over race or religion.
Prompt: How are YOU impacted by the intersecting systems of oppression within affinity groups?
How are differing proximities to power within communities you identify with weaponized or
leveraged against members of that same community?

● Journaling 10 mins to surface an instance where you found you had skin in the game re: resisting
intersecting systems of oppression, what did support in the face of this challenge look like?
● Storytelling and Resonance Practice: Take ten minutes each in small groups to share your
experience. After each person shares, allow space for the other participants to reflect back
moments in the story they resonated with, e.g. I really felt it when you talked about feeling
isolated. Or I really resonated with the moment you called your mom.7

Step four
Community study: organizing Black lives in the Hudson Valley
Can we fuse and jump ship together?
“The overwhelming majority of us are taught from birth that regardless of any transgression we experience from
a family member, we must protect our family at all costs”
 JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 11

Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Love With Accountability8

Black Lives Matter was founded in July 2013, with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on
social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin in February
of 2012. Hudson Valley’s chapter started organizing in 2015 first as a coalition and then as a formal
chapter with organizers located in Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Dutchess, and Ulster counties.
I joined the chapter in 2016 and started organizing meetings to recruit more Black people in the area,
joined the core organizing team, attended events and actions whenever I could. What drew organizers
and activists to the space was a need to build relationships and community that centered the principles
of the BLM movement outside of New York City where police brutality and vigilante interactions were
commonplace occurrences that received little to no attention from the media. Foundational to the
movement, Black femmes and queer-identified community found their way to a movement space that
centered them, incorporated Black feminist theory, and challenged the impact of patriarchy in the
movement for Black lives.
What we, the collective of Black activists and organizers, brought to the table was an understanding
of how anti-Black racism pushed Black, brown and Indigenous peoples into small upstate cities,
keeping us trapped in cycles of poverty, pimping us for low wage jobs and discrimination, our
warehoused bodies fueled job creation in local jails, holding cells for those with untreated mental
health issues and criminalized practices of survival. The mid-Hudson Valley is overwhelmingly
Republican and so narratives rooted in racist rhetoric about communities of color are prevalent and
lead to calls for increasing police budgets and decreasing dollars that could go to breaking cycles of
intergenerational poverty through the not-for-profit industrial complex, all that in addition to the
continued exploitation of Black womxn’s labor, the alienation of Black queer and trans people, and
overall suppression of Black communities to thrive.
This consistent onslaught and psychological impact of socialized acts of violence targeting our
community safety leave Black communities engaged not solely in a fight for their own lives, but
conflict within our community about how to solve these problems. Black people are not a monolith.
We don’t all agree on what accountability or liberation looks like within the context of white
supremacist American cultural norms. We, as a chapter collectively, have had to confront attitudes
about the call to defund the police vs. police reform. We, at BLM HV, have a deep-rooted under­
standing of how the history of policing impacts the current day outcomes of policing in our commu­
nities and that we can’t reform it in order for it to work. We need to abolish a system that has
demonstrated time and again that it cannot hold its own to account; there is far too much infiltration
of misogyny, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism within the system of policing to have the 1950’s
version of the idea of police. These systems rely on forms of oppression that we have been all too
familiar with when we layer them with patriarchy and the impact of the Willie Lynch letter’s legacy
within the Black community, even just symbolically. Domination means violence. Gender binaries
become battlegrounds for power grabs. Anyone who isn’t replicating heteronormativity is subject to
ridicule and critiques of their sexuality and gender expression. “Queerness is the disease that the white
man gave to the Black community,” are sentiments I heard frequency in 2020 over the last three
months while organizing with Black people in Dutchess and Orange counties. It’s the heartbreaking
aspect of doing the work, navigating the ways in which internalized white supremacy and patriarchy
are embodied by Black family and show up as anti-LGBTQ+ solidarity.
In the summer after the death of George Floyd we experienced an uptick in activist activity to
challenge systems of police and policing at a rate that we had been trying to galvanize since the
inception of chapter. The calls to the street, support for training organizers, political education became
overwhelming and exhaustive. As a small but yet nimble group of Black people, we shifted to respond
to the moment and found ourselves pushed to capacity, praised for the work, critiqued for not leading
all the charges, framed as divisive, opportunist, and sexist against Black men, and told that we favored
queer people far too much to really stand for the Black community as a whole.
12 J. SYEDULLAH AND R. LEINER

The mid-Hudson Valley is predominately white and yet the majority of protests toting “BLM” as
the header for their rallying cry has reached a level of exploitation. For years, the chapter worked to
move people to People’s Institute’s Undoing Racism workshops, to engage in interpersonal and
systemic work to address anti-Black racism in policing, in LGBTQ+ services, in the medical industry,
in police accountability work, in reentry programs, in homelessness, in youth development, and much
more. These cries had gone nearly without response by our white neighbors and lawmakers, only
elevated when they were trying to tokenize us to get elected or galvanize people to their side of the
debate. As a chapter, we spent more time clarifying what tactics are appropriate and in alignment with
BLM’s platforms than broadening our reach and deepening our relationships within the Black
community to tackle some of the issues that create fractures within our movements for liberation. It
wasn’t just white people that we had to put out this information to benefit, it was Black people whose
values and strategies for liberation differ and whose movements have been met with violent responses.
We, collectively, are still growing as a chapter and a movement. We will continue to engage in the
work of Black liberation changing our tactics from solely being reliant on direct action but also on
political education which is sorely needed during this time of possibility.
Keep it Real! This is one story, from one point on the constellation of movement making that compose
an international movement to make Black Lives Matter. How is the work unfolding in the places you call
home? The following are exercises and activities to surface your own case study, to identify strengths and
challenges in the work of community fusion and where your collective needs work in walking up to the
edge of its comfort zones and jumping ship as one.

Abolition 101: reflection and activity on decolonizing reform

The impact of colonization in the Americas lives and breathes in our collective Black, brown,
indigenous, undocumented, woman, queer, and trans bodies. What are the branches of colonization
in our society? The police who profile us in our own neighborhoods and treat us like criminals, the
“criminal justice system” that always manages to allow the real criminals who extract wealth in the
form of our bodies, from our communities, into prisons and jails that house populations that get
counted by the census, nestled in suburban communities that profit off lives that are not recognized,
respected, or matter beyond their use to those who hold them captive. Reform, as Ori Burton reminds
us in his Abolition 101 training in the long hot summer of 2020, is a neutral term. It cannot alone
change anything.9 Decolonization and decarceration are the practices of change that hold reforms
accountable to larger political projects than the liberal political process, as they currently exist, can
contain.

Activity two
Screen and Scan (30 mins)
Visions Of Abolition: From Critical Resistance To A New Way Of Life (Part 2)
https://vimeo.com/groups/313838/videos/78762375 (first 20 mins of 50 mins)
(10 mins) Embodied Journaling Prompts

(a) Find your feet. Scan your body after you watch the film. How do you feel? Where do you feel it?
Notice your breath. What do you notice? What’s coming up for you as you encounter and
absorb new information?
(b) Notice any discomfort or dis-ease that arose. Is that a pattern for you?
(c) Is there any information you received from this clip that might support how you have
conversations about prison, abolition, and accountability in your circles?
(d) Are there things that support you to stay with the film’s conversation? When do you feel your
attention drift? When are you hanging on for more?

Improvising on the Reality of a Snap Decision (20mins)–

 JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 13

Rethinking our emotional responses to harm requires imagining alternative forms of justice, ones
not rooted in retribution and revenge as Davis says in the film. Can we practice carework in spaces
of conflict? Remember a moment in your own life when you made a snap decision that you wish you
could do over. So much of our investments in punitive, carceral consequences are embedded in our
harsh critiques of ourselves. Stepping toward healing is a process of retraining ourselves to self-
interrupt when we are on autopilot. Pausing just enough to see the choice in the moment is power.
There is such power in choice. In a journal or drawing, improvise on the reality of a past snap
decision you made and rather than a do-over, reflect on how might you have been supported in the
aftermath of your snap decision to own your actions in a way that cannot take back what you did,
but might be a more choice-full compassionate and intentional response for you and those involved
in the incident?
Share out: No need to share your story, simply state out loud one choice you found that you can
take with you into the future, e.g. I can tell the truth. Or I can forgive myself.

Step five
Emergency response: congregate to liberate or, is this how we fall apart?

It is urgent that we as harmed peoples begin healing.

We don’t need the colonizers’ religion, languages, and institutions to do this.

We need to bring back our own. To take care of our children,

to love each other and Mama Earth as we always did.

This is the ultimate healing, not just for us but for future generations of us.

Lisa (Tiny) Gray-Garcia10

Poverty Scholarship - Poor People Led Theory, Art, Words, and Tears Across Mama Earth

In response to this moment of protests and rallies we recognized we need alternatives to calling the
police in the place we call home. Emergencies in our communities are not one-stop shop problems for
which a single solution is ever sufficient to stop patterns of harm from lessening the life chances of our
families and friends. Problems of safety, shelter, health and well-being are deeply political and complex
and finding alternatives to calling the police when these are threatened requires we take inventory of
our existing resources of radical care and improvise on ways to address the gaps that build deeper
relationships and strategies for community accountability. That said, we decided to leverage the energy
of our social media presence to promote a community strategizing and relationship building conven­
ing that we called Congregation. The first Congregation that we convened at the end of May drew over
three hundred people into a local park in Poughkeepsie.
Honestly, we were not prepared for this turn out. Our outreach was solely digital and we were not
sure who was going to show up and were concerned about the engagement of the Black community
who make up a small percentage of the population in the area. We used circle technology to break the
community up into groups to talk about what it would look like if Black Lives mattered. The
conversations lasted for almost 2 hours and took on different iterations during the designed experi­
ence. Groups generated lists of what systems change would look like if Black lives truly mattered, we
turned those notes into an eighteen point list of demands to fight for defunding the police through
a systems change approach to reallocate funding back into the community.
Congregation as a model for community-gathering has influenced other activists in the area and
has been adapted by several other rallies and marches to convene community members to have deep
conversations before engaging in direct action. This was an unintended consequence of putting out the
model to galvanize people to action.
14 J. SYEDULLAH AND R. LEINER

We learned something about the formula and used Congregation for a second time to push for
decarceration in the Dutchess County jail system after 200 million USD was allocated by the state to expand
the jail facilities in Poughkeepsie. We convened and listened to community members about how they would
rather see this funding spent during this moment of reexamining the prison industrial complex and the
failures of the “criminal justice system” especially for Black folks and communities-of-color.
After Congregation, our BLM social media was inundated with requests for support in the
community to push legislation to hold police accountable. Not enough pushes for defunding,
unfortunately, but moving the dial in a very conservative region of New York whose voting base
is Republican is a win in itself. As pandemic conditions persist into 2021 we struggle to find ways to
congregate and look forward to times that permit in-person spaces of conversation and
collaboration.
***
Since the protests in Minneapolis this summer, 104 people protesting against police brutality have
been hit by cars.11 Vigilante violence goes on unimpeded in Kenosha, Wisconsin and in our own
Pleasant Valley where Black mothers and children were attacked and punched in the face by white
supremacists in the street during a peaceful protest in July of 2020 as the police looked on and did
nothing. The ways we are being called in to watch out for each other are countless. In the political
shifts on the horizon, we are reading the writing on the walls and know fusion as a practice of collective
survival is immediately necessary for our communities to jump ship from our reliance on the police
and prisons for our community safety.

But it’s not, but it’s not, but it’s not, but it’s not, but it’s not . . .

It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok.

I’m here.

I’m here.

I’m here.

“Here Comes A Thought,” Steven Universe

We ain’t goin’ out like that! Historically, we never have and given the circumstances, we can’t afford
not to jump ship, fuse, and transform ourselves in the process. We can’t not try it out, try it out, and
fail and try harder. Try out fusion, fail, learn something, come back and try it again. Jumping ship
requires a lens by which to to see the ship, to see the interlocking systems of oppressions within us and
how they operate both in us and externally, within our society. It requires that we be in choice to align
our beliefs with our behavior, to act on what we see with foresight, common goals, and grace rather
than stay in our comfort zones, shut down, tune out, and stay so socially distanced from each other we
forget how to connect at all. It requires that we honor those that we are seeking to form right
relationships with and understand that forming right relationships is a practice; an embodied
practice, a spiritual practice, a collective practice. Practices we have to keep coming back to, to get
anywhere. We are curating spaces of transformation – for a ceremony of forgiveness. We need to be
brave enough to confront the trauma of our collective pasts and face the horror that lurks there. We
need ceremonies and sacred spaces to hold these practices to confront this historic trauma and feel
how it is still operating through us. We need ritual and sacred texts to move though and integrate our
mosaic of struggles. Whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we have to reconcile with the
fact that all we hold, holds us and must be confronted, or we will drown in our ignorance and pride.
We hope that you have found something of value in this piece, that some of these concepts aren’t
too new to you but have been reframed in a way that opens up new avenues of practice. That the tools
and context can help you on your way to fusion and that your exercise in fusion is emergent, evolving,
growing and expanding.
 JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 15

Notes
1. See Octavia Butler’s prophetic post-apocalyptic fugitive narratives Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the
Talents (1998).
2. See https://tcf.org/content/commentary/welcome-to-newburgh-murder-capital-of-new-york/?agreed=1
3. See http://www.operationghettostorm.org/uploads/1/9/1/1/19110795/new_all_14_11_04.pdf
4. Likewise, the following piece does not follow scholarly conventions, but jumps scholarships to stay fugitive,
because the kinds of freedom we’ve been emancipated into always seem to fall far short of expectation. That said,
our primary sources are animated, our lived experiences are recent and ongoing, our theory is both ancestral and
emergent. This piece is a collaboration between intimate life partners, between activist and academic affiliations,
and we center the fugitive, the fusion, the prophetic work of testimony, storytelling, and teach-ins – a mode of
analysis that breaks rules when needed and reaches for whatever elements and ideas are actually keeping us
grounded, keeping us moving toward alternative orientations to home than those we had to leave behind,
otherwise premises for and protocols of risk, accountability, and safety.
5. Char Adams, “A movement, a slogan, a rallying cry: How Black Lives Matter changed America’s view on race, ”
CBS News, December 29, 2020 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/movement-slogan-rallying-cry-how-
black-lives-matter-changed-america-n1252434.
6. Cara Page, “Healing Collective Trauma,” http://www.healingcollectivetrauma.com/cara-page.html.
7. Activity inspired by workshop with Relationship Uprising, Watershed Center, Millerton, NY: December 2019,
see https://relationaluprising.org/.
8. See Love With Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse, edited by Aishah Shahidah Simmons.
AK Press, 2019.
9. See Ori Burton’s “Abolition 101 training” https://abolitionjournal.org/studyguide/.
10. Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, Dee Garcia, and the Poor Magazine Family. Poverty Scholarship – Poor People Led
Theory, Art, Words, and Tears Across Mama Earth (Poor Press Network, 2019).https://www.poorpress.net/
11. See https://powdersvillepost.com/cars-have-hit-demonstrators-104-times-since-the-black-lives-matter-
movement-began/

Acknowledgments
This is the second installation of a larger project. The Manual for Liberating Survival is a popular education curriculum
Rae and I are co-creating, a culmination of our personal and collective journeys in political organizing. From student
activism and prison abolition through burning out and breaking down, through artist collectives and food justice
campaigns, to turning inward and deepening into embodied practices of meditation, yoga, earth medicine, sound
healing, ceremony, and martial arts. It combines the popular education of activist knowledge with historical and political
theory amassed from years of Black feminist study within and beyond contexts of formal education and credentials. It
emerges from both our own direct experiences as organizers and our studied understandings that it is not enough to
survive movements for liberation—we must simultaneously liberate our methods of survival from habits of colonialism,
domination, and genocide. It draws inspiration from the popular education realm of zines, curricular pamphlets, and
downloadable toolkits for deconstructing the ways our communities have been working for the liberated survival of
queer and trans of-color communities through the work of abolitionist activism for generations. This manual’s aim is to
reflect the limits of our overreliance on disposability and respectability in our movements, to recognize that not all we
have inherited by way of strategies of survival, care, adaption, adoption, shape-shifting, and transformation that came
from those who have come before us are things we want to keep with us as we move toward the change we want to see in
our communities, chosen families, and movements. In our first installation, we focused on how our movements for
abolition can reproduce the very carceral logics of policing, punishment, and detention we seek to abolish in our
relationships and in our organizations. In this article, we turn more specifically to how we come together to care for
ourselves and each other through crisis, through calamity. How have the lineages, practices, and protocols of care-taking
past and present imprinted themselves on–in what Kesho Y. Scott called in her 1991 book–our habits of surviving in
ways that keep our “strategies for life” on point in some moments while still keeping us from thriving in the next? (See
also Kesho Yvonne Scott, The Habit of Surviving: Black Women’s Strategies for Life, 1991)

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.