In The Time of the Right: A Conversation with Suzanne Pharr

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: What’s up everybody, and welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence Cayden Mak. On this show, we’re building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience at the broad front that we need to win.

[00:00:26] This week on the show, I’m joined by author organizer, movement Elder and political handy woman, Suzanne Pharr, to discuss the reissue of her 1996 book in the time of the W right Reflections and Liberation. It’s a timely book, and I think one our listeners are gonna find pretty sobering, not just because of Pharr’s astute analysis, but because nearly 30 years later so many of the same things are true.

[00:00:47] But first, of course, these headlines on top of the charges that were brought against Newark’s Mayor RAs Baraka that we talked about last week, Trump’s personal legal attack dog. Alina Haba has brought charges against three members of Congress, including the representative for New Jersey District 10 Lamonica MacGyver, for attempting to shield Mayor Baraka from the federal agents who provoked the confrontation.

[00:01:08] What’s wild and what Natasha Leonard writes about in the Intercept this week is that the mainstream coverage of this blatant attack against elected officials who disagree with the administration leaves out the part of the story conveniently, where these are targeted political attacks against black elected officials.

[00:01:23] If you just read their headlines, you’d be convinced that these officials were somehow causing the ruckus by themselves and that federal agents just moved in to respond. But if you watch the video footage from that day, you can clearly see that the agents are pursuing and provoking Baraka and other legal observers at the facility.

[00:01:40] By the way, it turns out that Haba is dropping the charges against Baraka, but claims that MacGyver and the other members of Congress were quote, making federal agents unsafe, and as a result, refuses to drop the charge against them. Let’s not mince our words here. This is part of a well-developed playbook for authoritarian escalation.

[00:01:58] Letting Ice and Haba and Trump off the hook in our public discourse is letting them consolidate authoritarian power. This won’t be the last time we see something like this, and we have to be frank about why. Have you noticed like me that the blast of obnoxious noise from Elon Musk has reduced almost zero over the past couple of weeks?

[00:02:18] And that it seems to correlate to around the same time that he spent $25 million to very loudly and publicly lose the State Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. He poked his head out of his cave this week to explain why in an interview, claiming he had quote done enough and that he claims to do a lot less political spending in the future.

[00:02:39] His posts pushed out to billions of users on his personal propaganda platform, formerly known as Twitter, have drastically shifted from constant bloviating nonsense about Trump and his destructive Doge project to focusing on his companies like Tesla and SpaceX. There are few things that I wanna note about this shift.

[00:02:58] One, we fucking called this. If we wanna impact the oligarchs, we have to go after their money. And while we don’t have any smoking gun evidence, nor are we likely to. This sudden disappearance from every news cycle doesn’t just happen by chance. It seems a lot more like someone’s beha public behavior being aggressively managed by a PR firm than the pompous and allegedly ketamine fueled outbursts that we’ve seen for the past year and some change.

[00:03:24] All signs suggest that his board and its majority shareholders said Enough is enough, and brought him to heal in response to the massive hits to Tesla stock prices and profits as a result of protests and boycotts of the past several months. Two, the nail in the coffin that finally deflated his oversized ego seems to be the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, which he was happy to slap his face all over.

[00:03:46] Wisconsinites were surely naturally appalled and sick of his behavior. The real work to drive voter turnout was of course, driven by organizers on the ground to win that special election. And three, and finally, and frankly most importantly, I think that it’s fine to enjoy a little catharsis now and again, God knows I do, but don’t believe for one second that we can wash our hands of musk and the mass of federal spending and bureaucracy cuts that he’s already enacted.

[00:04:12] The rich are never done with politics and Musk’s damage done is not limited to his three months in a special government position in a country where unlimited, anonymous expenditure is considered protected free speech. The lesson that he’s learned is not to stop spending despite his claims. It’s to do it more quietly like the rest of his oligarch friends.

[00:04:33] On Wednesday night, or maybe it was Thursday morning, the house GOP jammed through a budget reconciliation package that proposes massive and catastrophic cuts to Medicaid while giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to the richest Americans. We know this stuff isn’t popular, which is why they had to do it in the middle of the night, and the fact that many of the very voters that set these mago goons to Congress rely on Medicaid for their healthcare and their family’s healthcare.

[00:04:57] A big part of this bill is also eliminating coverage of gender affirming care for all age groups from Medicaid, and this is exactly the kind of narrative move that just St. Louis described on our show a few weeks ago. Using attacks on transgender people as a way of justifying, excusing, and covering up cuts to public infrastructure.

[00:05:15] Whether that’s healthcare as it is in this case, or public schools. It’s not just an ideological line of attack. They’re betting that cuts like this will make the neoliberal medicine go down with their base. But here’s the thing, voters are not stupid. Working class people are not stupid, and the tide is turning against this kind of divisive bullshit.

[00:05:34] Just yesterday, Tim Waltz admitted that abandoning trans people was probably not the most strategic move in last year’s election, and we now have this narrative opening to rub it in their face, kill the reconciliation bill in the Senate, and make the attack on poor and working class trans people central to the story that we tell about that.

[00:05:55] Sound on Tape: Hi, this is Josh Stro podcast and multimedia producer for Convergence Magazine. I probably worked on the show you’re listening to right now, and if you’re enjoying it, I hope you’ll consider becoming a subscriber of convergence. What you might not realize is that for every hour or so of convergence content, you hear hours and hours of work by staff, freelancers and dedicated volunteers have gone into booking and prepping interviews and guests editing scripts, recording and polishing the audio, prepping promotional content, and so much more.

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[00:07:00] Cayden Mak: I am very excited to welcome Suzanne far to the show. Now Suzanne is a southern feminist, anti-racist organizer and one of the movement elders I’ve had such good fortune of learning from for many years. She’s one of the most astute observers of the political project, of the far right from a movement perspective, and someone whose work has spent issue, area, and geography.

[00:07:19] Welcome to Block and Build, Suzanne. 

[00:07:20] Suzanne Pharr: Thanks a lot. Glad to be here. I’m sorry that it’s on a day right after a couple of other horrible things happening. 

[00:07:29] Cayden Mak: Bill, yesterday was a rough, oh my goodness. Rough new day. I was actually at a strategy gathering. Of movement leaders from around the country yesterday.

[00:07:39] And the vibe, the vibes were in shambles yesterday morning. People were feeling it. It was rough. Yeah. To start us off, start off our conversation today. I’d love to hear a little bit about the origins of, in a time of the Wright Reflections on Liberation. Why did you write it originally in the nineties?

[00:07:54] And can you tell us a little bit give us a little overview of the insights that you were trying to share with your readers? 

[00:07:59] Suzanne Pharr: Yeah. It happened in 96 because I had just come off a campaign in which I had seen them make a big move. And the campaign was against queer folks. It was in Oregon and it was called the Nolan nine Campaign.

[00:08:14] And they had attempted to do a legislative, movement. They had a legislative agenda and they were trying to get this, they little, their a little idea embedded in the constitution. So seeing that it was like a big move on their part. I had been following them since election of Ronald Reagan, and I talk a lot about Ronald Reagan at times.

[00:08:38] Hard not to. And Ronald Reagan of the years that followed and I was in Arkansas following them. And so the book has a lot of. References to local things happening, because it’s the way I think that we learn in watching the Riot or watching anything Bill, you see what’s happening in your local area and you need 

[00:09:01] Check out to see if it’s connected to something larger. And then you begin to see this picture, and we were having far right folks, like the Posse and the KKK and those folks in Arkansas. But then we were seeing this underlying thing that was happening particularly about among church people, and particularly among certain politicians.

[00:09:23] We could just see thing after thing happening that we’re beginning to be connected. You know what, some, but we also didn’t take it seriously enough. This was the eighties, it’s oh, they’re just this, or they’re just that. And then I went to Oregon at request Scott Awa and participated in that campaign.

[00:09:47] And we, and he showed me this little video on gay, gay rights special rights. And the language in that’s important is special rights. 

[00:09:57] Sound on Tape: That 

[00:09:57] Suzanne Pharr: It hit me immediately. This came outta my history. That this is not about queers, this is about race. This is about the elimination of civil rights.

[00:10:08] And sure enough, that’s the position a group of us took of looking at this, of what was under the surface. The surface was you have to get rid of, these terrible people out outta society in terms of teaching, in terms of participation in all kinds of things. But it was really beginning to look at the dismantling of civil rights.

[00:10:31] And so it was helpful, I think, for all of us to come to understand that this queerness was connected to race in a very bad way. In terms of the use of it as one of their wedge points. And that was one of their big strategies was to constantly wedge people that apart divide, divide.

[00:10:52] And it’s been a successful strategy. So what I wanted to do was write a book that had concrete examples in it that people anywhere could recognize from their cities or towns or wherever they lived. And that to use language that was understandable. And to make it short, I think it’s only a couple hundred pages and readable now that I was thinking, let me make this readable for say, 11th grader.

[00:11:23] Little did I know that was probably a high mark, because now they’re talking about, I’m reading this in the paper these days that the reading level is like sixth grade. And the way I know this is, that was a constitutional amendment that’s they’re trying to pass here. And in order to do it they’ve froze in the ways that you can do a petition of voters, and said that whatever you write has to be written in the language of sixth graders.

[00:11:54] So you cannot use three syllable words. For example, constitution, 

[00:12:02] Sound on Tape: constitutional. 

[00:12:04] Suzanne Pharr: Constitutional, you gotta drop that. You gotta, you’ve got to drop that out. There’s a little humor. Humor for the day. And so what it attempted to do in the book is book, to look back and look at the history of the riot since when Harry, I, when bill War lost the election in 63, that’s when you began the building of it.

[00:12:28] So it’s a long history and it, and I wanna describe its methods and techniques. And I think the biggest thing I would say too, the bigger thing in terms of where it came from is this is a feminist book. This is a book that when you read it, that you’ll know it’s about the way things are in sectional.

[00:12:50] And the way we our lives are intersect, and our work has to be intersexual. That is interconnect, interconnected. So I wanted just, I wanted to put the harm out even though at that time it was a growing ember. Now is, now, it’s, now it’s a flame. And that’s in from 96 to 20, 20, 24 was when I did the republication of it.

[00:13:15] So it’s a long journey and, but I also wanted to son of the book around the forces of capitalism. Yes. Not just the forces of resentment, not just the forces of division, but the forces of capitalism. 

[00:13:30] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. ’cause we miss some, we miss a big part of the picture of that sort of unholy alliance, if we call it that.

[00:13:39] If we leave capitalism out of the picture. 

[00:13:41] Suzanne Pharr: Yep. I think we have to put it in the center of the picture. 

[00:13:45] Cayden Mak: What 

[00:13:46] Suzanne Pharr: motivates them and what works and motivating their following. 

[00:13:51] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I do think that one of the values of the, one of the things that’s really valuable about the book is that you lay this out in such a like clear and straightforward way that is you pull no punches, but also it’s like not it’s it’s, to me reading it now, I’m like, oh, this is a thing that. Not to date myself as I was nine in 1996. Okay. But but the thing about also that this is the soup that people my age and my generation grew up in, right? Yes. We came of age in a culture that was deeply immersed in this particular combination of capitalist, patriarchal, racist, homophobic, like that weaving together of movements.

[00:14:42] And that like under it’s one of those things that’s like really helps me understand in some ways, like why we are the way we are. People who are my age, who are 40, between 30 and 40 years old that so much of our reality was shaped as we were growing up by.

[00:14:59] This coming together of these different strands of the far right. Especially in the eighties and nineties. And so I, I find that to be incredibly useful. 

[00:15:08] Suzanne Pharr: Yeah. And I think this genera generation that you’re talking about too is very vulnerable and as a target. So after the time, of Reaganism, we really saw, how the economy changed, how we became international, how workers and workers’ rights changed, and how people began moving around the country.

[00:15:32] And I think people felt a deep sense of the breakdown of community. 

[00:15:37] Cayden Mak: Yeah. 

[00:15:37] Suzanne Pharr: Yeah. And so that was one vulnerability that there was not that sense of the community holding and also not the sense of the family holding because family members were moving around the country for jobs or moving outta the country jobs in some cases.

[00:15:53] And so that was a big shift. And then you add on and onto that tech, the beginning of the tech generation, where communications become entirely different, information becomes entirely different, and you begin to see that there’s a larger thing and to make it all. Absolutely horrible is the fact that we had COVID.

[00:16:19] So you have people feeling not as tight, not as close, not as connected, and not as responsible for as they once had. Not that they were perfect before, but this is, but this is a crashing of sort of societal norms and societal connections. So you find ourselves now which we didn’t have in 96, and I did not foresee this part.

[00:16:44] I I saw that we were headed to something very hard and very dark. 

[00:16:48] And way.

[00:16:55] Why did you e this or, it seems wild now, the kind kinds of things that you get when you write books like this. But I just felt that people had to know that. So you take this vulnerability that’s there with our rising the movements that had risen outta the sixties, so those are going side by side.

[00:17:16] And so it’s a difficult situation. The movements weren’t enough to hold what was happening because we weren’t focusing on that kind of change. But the greater the isolation is, the easier it is to divide people. You knows it’s so link in the chain, that it’s those links that give you strength.

[00:17:36] And so that, that was big. That was big. I forgot to mention another reason I think that. I came to understand authoritarianism pretty fast as I was watching it. It’s because I had one, because I’m a woman and I had worked in domestic violence, women’s anti-violence, and and if it’s anything that women know, we know authoritarianism, right?

[00:18:02] So every woman knows that we have lived in a CA in a situation for centuries in which we receive authority from above, or not granted authority ourselves, except in minor ways. And so people always talk about the origins of authoritarianism. That is one of the origins, which is. Not just two centuries old or three centuries old.

[00:18:26] This is from early, early times of that male structure of authority. And so that, that was an opening coming outta the women’s movement to be able to see things in certain ways. Just as now we know how to recognize a bully. We know a batterer, yes, a batterer when we see one, we know a person who, who will kill you for his wishes.

[00:18:51] So there, there are not very many. There must be some people who have blinders on ’cause some are in the administration because they managed to find a, a better route of wealth and privilege. But the rest of us out here in the country, we get this. So that’s always something that I keep in mind in terms of organizing.

[00:19:15] You have to speak people. You had to speak to them in their experiences. 

[00:19:21] And in their language and those experiences of women, they’re international, yeah. Everywhere you go, you can talk about authoritarianism. 

[00:19:32] Cayden Mak: Totally. And it definitely strikes me as not coincidental that a lot of the authoritarian playbook is the same as, whatever you wanna call it, if you wanna call it dvo, if you wanna call it gaslighting, that a lot of that playbook that authoritarian figures use on the public are very similar to what people who are engaging in domestic violence, domestic abuse use in the home, in the family.

[00:19:57] That that’s. It’s like at a wildly different scale. But a lot of the stuff, even talking about this stuff with with Mayor RAs Baraka and the members of Congress who went to this ice facility, that they are being described as the instigators, as the problem when what they’re doing is frankly carrying out their civic duty to look after their constituents.

[00:20:20] That kind of reframing of them in fact, being targeted by federal agents is they’re somehow instigating, it’s somehow their fault. Yeah. That that, that feel like it’s not lost on me For sure. That those are classic abuser tactics. 

[00:20:36] Absolutely. Classic 

[00:20:38] Suzanne Pharr: domination. 

[00:20:40] You can’t, I don’t think you can find a black person in this country who cannot talk to you about authoritarianism. The language may be different, but they understand that oppression working class, what people understand that language, they understand that oppression, what it means not to have agency and to be used for your means of labor and that’s basically what it was in the beginning. Yeah. And throughout with women we are part of, we are part of the lay labor force, which is why we have the tism movement going on now. And this is, this is why you have no abortion. It’s not just that. Yeah. This is some sort of, oh, I wanna protect the babies, or I’m religious.

[00:21:25] It’s, no we need those little creatures to grow up and to serve us. This is why we’re turning our prisons into work labor places. 

[00:21:37] Sound on Tape: Yeah. 

[00:21:38] Suzanne Pharr: This, this is why people understand it at some granular level. If we can use the language to talk about it in terms of the real lives of people.

[00:21:47] Cayden Mak: For sure. Yeah. I also think that so many of the processes that we’re describing are also they are in some ways, like decades long processes. I’ve been thinking a lot lately personally about like how we are in a moment right now where people are like historicizing or periodizing the nineties.

[00:22:05] In a real way. So I feel like in a lot of ways, the like reissue of this book, the republication of this book feels very timely and a part of that. Effort to understand what the nineties really were. Beyond the sort of pop cultural nostalgia. Yeah. That I think the pop culture nostalgia moment precedes the like reckoning with what a period actually was.

[00:22:26] That there’s like a moment where we’re like, Ooh, we all miss TLC, like just but then we love that quote, but then we have to think about or we miss the music of the nineties, we miss the close of the nineties. But then there also comes a time where you have to reckon with the political culture of the time and the way that you are living in the echoes of it.

[00:22:42] And, there’s a number of writers and commentators who are like looking at, for instance the militia movement. And like the ways that, I, I grew up in Michigan and I remember. Being a young person, like pre teenager, like a preteen in the nineties, like we knew about the Michigan militia, we didn’t know what to do about it. Like I wasn’t in a community that was engaging with that, but it was like this, like low hum of something anti-government that was dark and scary and violent. And I think that some of that changed a little around nine 11. But like trying to understand the nineties politically and culturally and the way that it has impacted the culture of our politics feels very timely right now. Yeah. I’m curious if there are other factors that prompted the desire to republish the book last year and what the conversation kind of was around the reissue.

[00:23:35] Yeah. 

[00:23:36] Suzanne Pharr: I had talked about it, or people had talked to me about it prior to that, and I was like, no, I don’t wanna do that. Don’t wanna go through, it’s a bit, I don’t wanna go through it. And then as I watched things unfold, it wasn’t hard to see how this was going, how this was going to end.

[00:23:53] I’ve always used, relied on Reverend Nelson Johnson out of the Beloved Community Center for being a great thought partner with me at times. And it’s we were very clear the summer before January 6th happened that it was going to happen. We didn’t know exactly in that form, but we knew.

[00:24:16] Sure. And so this was a point of knowing this is what we were headed for, this was that it did not look as positive as, the kind of the jargon of politics was making it. And just thought this is a critical time for people just to have a basic understanding of how it developed, and to be able to read that and, in an easy form.

[00:24:39] And what I, I didn’t know is that this would be as fierce and as vicious and as terrible as it has been. And so all of the concerns that I can talk about later in the conversation about the way in which the movement was prepared or not prepared that was also a part of, maybe this, could, I see it as a movement book, not as Susan Afar.

[00:25:07] I’ve published something kind of book, but a movement book that could be used for people to get a, get an understanding of those methods and those goals so that you can see it as it’s happening, you can take it seriously and understand. That, that, like a 50 year period to get to this point only in the end, it needed just the great forces that had been organized and then a strong man 

[00:25:40] To lead it and to have that person be come out of the media was critically important. And so the, all of that coming together, but the project 2025 provided us early, what was that in the fall? An early 

[00:25:58] Vision of what it was going to be. And people were, all of us were appalled and astounded by that.

[00:26:05] But realize this is for real. But even with that, yeah. You couldn’t, you couldn not foresee a musk. If you were just out there in the general movement, trying to do your work. So yeah, but many of the pieces of it, of course we knew it was gonna be about immigrants.

[00:26:24] We knew they would still use trans folks as the splitting place. We know, if you don’t have a know the agenda of a person, how can you exert gender-based social control, it’s not just the scary trans people. You gotta know agenda, so you can have that social control. Trans folks, y’all messing that up.

[00:26:49] Cayden Mak: And I’m pleased. I’m pleased to do to be clear I’m here for this. 

[00:26:53] Sound on Tape: Good.

[00:26:57] Cayden Mak: You’re welcome. America.

[00:27:02] Oh my goodness. 

[00:27:03] Suzanne Pharr: But I don’t feel though I don’t feel despair and I don’t feel depression or, total horror all the time, though. That one’s a hard one. Just because Yeah. It is horrifying for sure. We watch the wars and we witnessed shock and all, but it wasn’t ours.

[00:27:23] On us, it was ours doing it, but not on us. It was there, and now suddenly we understand what shock is. This doesn’t have the blood and guts of a war, but it has, when someone says they’re taking away your access to health, we’re taking away your access to food, we’re taking your access.

[00:27:45] It’s not bloodless. We’re talking about dying people. 

[00:27:48] So that, that effect, I think for virtually everyone I talked to, the turning point for them was U-S-A-I-D. 

[00:27:58] Which is really interesting 

[00:28:00] Cayden Mak: in that. It’s really interesting. Yeah. 

[00:28:01] Suzanne Pharr: Yeah. But it was just the idea that after these years of trying to, BA followed basic tenets of living internationally with people and having concern and interconnection with them the life giving forces of U-S-A-I-D being taken away was just overwhelming.

[00:28:26] Cayden Mak: I find that very fascinating too, because I think, it’s U-S-A-I-D has never been a politics less endeavor. And at the same time, there is so much vital about what U-S-A-I-D has done in the world to, support the people who are supposedly our allies that also maybe we want to control a little bit.

[00:28:47] Keep ’em, keep them easy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s attract them to our sort of like global poll. But it does strike me that is a direct strike at the heart of the idea of what the United States is as a global power. There’s there’s a piece of the liberal con like post-war consensus about what the role of the United States is in the world.

[00:29:10] That, that is di that is aimed at dismantling. And I think that something that maybe I would be interested in your take and tease this out a little bit is like the relationship between the sort of like isolationism of MAGA and the sense and there’s a, again, it’s like there’s, it feels like there’s an echo to me of the the thing that you’re talking about, individual isolation and then this global isolation.

[00:29:35] That there’s like an isolation from the international community. Yeah. I’m curious what you think, what your thoughts are about that and like how you see that sort of, ’cause it’s both a material question about trade, about industry, about these like big, like economic questions, but it is also a sort of like cultural and discursive question, right?

[00:29:57] About what it means to be like in a broader community of like people on the planet, right? And yeah I think that like we as the left look, we as social movements are currently struggling with how we think and talk about the United States’ role in the world. And how that can shape our politics.

[00:30:20] Suzanne Pharr: Yeah. I think isolationism is at the heart of what we’re talking about, whereas collectivity is at the heart of the kind of freedom and humanitarian ways that we want to live. So I think the isolationism is necessary for you to be a dictator. 

[00:30:39] You can’t be linked up to other countries because then you’re having to have, some kind of common interest, some sort of common issues and resolution of those issues.

[00:30:49] You isolationism is moving always toward, I can hit you with a hammer,

[00:30:56] and I have the force behind me. I have the force of money, I have the force of guns, I have the force of, the bombs that can be dropped on you. But I think it’s just this very much a central part.

[00:31:08] Authoritarianism. So I, and we move closer to it all the time. I’m gonna go back to with that, to U-S-A-I-D in that I think the other reason that people were so struck by it hit at the same time, we have so many damage and dying people in Palestine. 

[00:31:30] When you the one place where people seem to, even those who seem to unable to seem to find some emotion, is that idea of so many children and babies killed.

[00:31:46] And so I think U-S-A-I-D sort of stood for. Into a country like that. This is the way you get medical support into a country like that. This is the way you get medicine for HHI into a country, that allowing us in the midst of our domination to feel like we were still good people. 

[00:32:10] Sound on Tape: And 

[00:32:10] Suzanne Pharr: that took away, taking it away dropped that possibility of us representing ourselves as, so when you have that middle class, upper middle class person going to Europe or going to the Middle East, they can say I know America does these bad things but we also take care of people. We do have good in our hearts.

[00:32:33] We’re, and that, that to me is a really important kind of idea to think of. Why do us a ID mean so much to people. And I think it’s multilayered. I think. Yeah, I think I would not Damn all US citizens, I think we have plenty of people who have great hearts and great compassion and are struggling in a very hard environment to have it, you know, that they’re pushed hard in that area because the possibilities of need grow greater every day.

[00:33:09] And our capacity to meet those needs is harder. And that has to do with everything, it has to do with the economy, it has to do with wars, it has to, name everything. 

[00:33:19] Sound on Tape: Yeah. 

[00:33:20] Suzanne Pharr: But climate change, you name it, it’s our, it’s in our, it’s in our daily lives. So I wanna go back, this leads me to, I wanted to talk about, if I can Yeah. Jump on a subject here, but back to this idea of isolation and separation. And the damage it has done to us, it’s been a tremendous damage to our movement, especially the movement that’s housed in nonprofits. Yes. ’cause, the right could only rise by finding cracks to move through.

[00:33:50] Because we had extraordinary movements coming outta the sixties, coming outta the seventies, coming outta the eighties. I think I’m not just the civil rights movement of, I think of the people with disabilities that, that whole movement of looking for, a victory and had a great victory.

[00:34:08] Civil rights, had great victories. I think act up. All queer movement had great victories and I think we should be really proud of those. But I think also during this time, we did not listen to what was formative for my adult life, which was the Kabai River Collective statement of this idea that we are more than just one thing.

[00:34:34] That it’s that, yeah. That it’s there are many aspects to who that, who we are, and we have to see people, we have to see people in that way, and we have to work in that way. But we went more and more to, singular politics of one group of people who’s suffering this thing, which makes it hard.

[00:34:54] It had to be proved that it’s much more terrible than what somebody else did. The identity politics kind of thing. So the, you have to do that in part. In order that we thought to get our people, but also to get the money. You had to. 

[00:35:10] Sound on Tape: Yeah. 

[00:35:10] Suzanne Pharr: So the competition among both identity and just among nonprofits in general over money has been pretty disastrous for us.

[00:35:18] And it’s corporatized us. We look more like those within the nonprofit sector looking act more like little businesses, or in some of them, big business, especially than 

[00:35:30] Cayden Mak: some of them very big businesses when a lot of money 

[00:35:32] Suzanne Pharr: dropped in the last, five years, that shifted.

[00:35:36] And so you combine that, with not being in interconnected and doing, singular identity, politics, being highly competitive, being structured like a business, and you add not being able to be in each other’s physical con presence. How do you have a movement community? And that is a terrifically important thing to have that some sense of connected, we need to at least be looking in a, in the same directive, or we need to maybe go many different ways, but to the same goal.

[00:36:15] Not the same little victory, but the same overall goal. And I think we, we have to work that out. I think we have to totally rethink nonprofit organizations and everything. Everything from what is the power of the funder. What is the power of a, of an organization that’s built like an A-frame where the power is at the top and what does it mean to be paying people far more money than the people that they’re working to build into agency of their own?

[00:36:49] It’s, there’s just so many issues in that, that, we’re, I think it’s time to call for another. The revolution will not be funded and to hold that conversation in a big pub public way because if we did some things to toward this all, but we did not pay attention to it enough and directly, like they said, it was only after September 11th that people began to wake up and say, oh.

[00:37:17] There’s something out there and it’s got some control in the government and it’s moving in this way, and we gotta move. So we’re like 40 years behind. No. Yeah. Not 40, but a lot behind. So I worry about that. I don’t see the places where we’re having that conversation, and it seems to me that it’s just,

[00:37:43] it’s not a problem that’s too big to solve, I think is of Solv. Yeah. A solvable problem. 

[00:37:50] Cayden Mak: Let me try to weave some threads together here, because I it’s interesting that there are a number of movement elders that I’ve spoken with very recently. Like in the last couple months, Linda Burnham said something very much, this effect me as well.

[00:38:03] There’s another family. There’s some threads out there. You know what I mean? Uhhuh. And I think also that one thing that occurred to me very early in my career as somebody who has made my living, is able to put food on the table and a roof over my head by working for organizations that are 5 0 1 c threes is like, why on some level, I’m like, yes, I really like having employer paid health insurance.

[00:38:32] ’cause oh yeah, geez, it’s and on another level and you should, yeah. And there, there are a lot of structural shifts that we could make in this country that would also change the material conditions of folks who are doing the work within these organizations that would change the dynamics within them too, right?

[00:38:49] Whether that’s universal basic income, single-payer healthcare, whatever. And also there’s also a piece of this to me that is about the thing that happens when you are in a funded organization that like your goal then becomes to continue to like, reproduce the organization year over year, as opposed to being like, what is our long-term agenda?

[00:39:10] That’s d directive zero. Directive one might be the mission that’s on the website, but Directive zero is we need to continue to employ our people. Which like, I would like to, right? Like I think it’s important that we have folks who are thinking about these questions full-time and putting that time in.

[00:39:27] And I think that a lot of the competition stems from not just the dynamic with funders, but also the sense that if these are our full-time jobs, we wanna have jobs next year too, right? Like we wanna have jobs the year after that. That there’s a there’s a really complex interplay of the way the economy has shifted with the sort of just like complete dominance of neoliberalism. Yep. And also I think, yeah it’s, it feels so like messy and complicated to me to think about, like, how do we pull these things apart? And also I think that one of the things that strikes me about the Reflections and Liberation chapter is how focused you are on the way that we need to be building together.

[00:40:13] Because like, when I think about when I wear the hat, that’s I run Convergence, which is a publication, which is also, it is also a business. We do have a product, that people are increasingly willing to pay us for as well. That, there’s that hat, and then there’s the hat of Caden, the guy who like lives in Oakland, who like, has relationships with people, who has friendships, who have, who has Conrad ships.

[00:40:33] And that I don’t know it’s very hard to untangle these threads to me. And it’s something that like I struggle with also, that and that a lot of my friendships are also relationships that I built in this professionalized nonprofit like work environment, which is also complicated.

[00:40:54] Suzanne Pharr: I think the pro professionalization is an issue all, 

[00:41:00] Sound on Tape: yeah. 

[00:41:00] Suzanne Pharr: Most people I know in the movement talk really big about issues of economic injustice. 

[00:41:07] But don’t work with people who experience economic injustice and do not hide them. They mostly hire graduates of universities and go universities.

[00:41:20] So you have a movement that’s talking about the working class, but not living among and working directly with the working class. And that is a huge critical issue. ’cause these conversations about the professionalization come down mostly to talking about whether people should be paid a lot or not.

[00:41:43] It’s, the question is, how can we do this work and get people to be able to change their lives, be able to work with people to enable this changing of their lives that they’re fully engaged with. So we’re not doing training to that level and we’re not doing, we’re not, so we have a lot of people who are being hired just for very specific responsibilities.

[00:42:10] Have not done experienced, the political education that you need to understand why it’s important to be with the people that you’re supposedly standing with and for and also people do not have in particular organizing training. Almost everybody calls themselves organizers.

[00:42:34] What ain’t true.

[00:42:39] Just because you could, you put a party together, it might be a little bit of organizing. Yes. 

[00:42:46] Cayden Mak: That does. Not an organizer make No, 

[00:42:48] Suzanne Pharr: But organ organizing in the deepest sense is not that. And so I think all of that is something that can be taken care of. It’s just it’s just one of the things that we need to do.

[00:42:59] We need to find this way that we can move forward, not doing the same thing by any means, not carrying the same politics, but toward an end goal that has collective acceptance. When I look out there, I think what will save us. Okay, because this point that’s my language using the word save what I say.

[00:43:21] Because many days it looks like, oh my God, so many people are standing in front of a certain kind of, maybe they’re all different, but a certain kind of firing squad. Whether it’s the loss of their money, their homes, whether it’s the loss of food whether whatever it is that makes you able to survive in this world, 

[00:43:41] Sound on Tape: that 

[00:43:41] Suzanne Pharr: People are facing that.

[00:43:42] But I think it will be collectivity on every level, so that, that may, that means we had to figure out how to be part of community. How to make community, how to build community. There was a lot of push and important conversation after COVID about mutual aid. Yeah.

[00:44:03] Out of that. I think people maybe learned a lot about community and maybe a lot about that. It’s not, you don’t make, you don’t bring about strength by doing for people you find bring about strength by doing with people. That’s where we needed a lot of organizing training and how, how to have that movement.

[00:44:21] I think the other thing that people have, and people have deep desire for community because they feel this split. We all do. Yeah. Everywhere. And it’s 

[00:44:31] Cayden Mak: evolutionary on some level. Yeah. Like we’re, we are not designed to be isolated. That’s right. As like a species. 

[00:44:38] Suzanne Pharr: But that was broken. It was broken.

[00:44:40] Broken both by the internet and by COVID. And so it’s a matter of, how to move that. And then I believe strongly we had to redefine family, but saying this for a decade or two. Yeah. And I think there would be, people begin to understand. What there is that we hold that we can call family, and how we can rely on that, depend on that.

[00:45:03] So it’s community and then those smaller pieces, which are family. And we can, I think we can figure out how to do that. We can do that. People do it now, but we haven’t. We haven’t talked about it enough as movement work, yeah. As an example of what we can do. And then finally, clearly you could tell I could talk all day long.

[00:45:27] I’ve been thinking a lot, what could be a common goal? What is that possible? And I’m taken with this idea that maybe what we could believe in common was is the international bill of human rights. And I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, but it basically covers everything that we talk about.

[00:45:48] It holds within it high principles. So you, when you think about that Bill, it was it came at the end of the second World War. So here they sit down after 60,000 to 80,000 people have died, and most of those were civilians. And they write this bill and it’s put into effect in the 48. But I think what we could get it to be is that we could fortify our humanity with it.

[00:46:18] It holds those very humane things. And so we would, it would be a matter of getting it where it’s followed. So there’s a move that we would have to make, but just something in terms of theory and practice and belief. That would be one thing I think would be absolutely common ground is that Bill, if we spent some time thinking about it, how it could be used and how it could be brought to the point where nations actually have to follow it, but it’s lacking. Yeah. And people are lacking that one piece. 

[00:46:54] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And I think that there’s, implicit in that, to me is also this question of accountability. Yeah. Like, how are we accountable to one another? 

[00:47:04] And I think that, like the other thing that the culture of Neoliberalism has done to us is thinking that the way that we are accountable to one another is by basically paying each other money. That’s right. That’s pretty sad. And that’s the only way I feel we know how culturally, that like the mainstream culture has taught us that we dis like. Apologize that we take responsibility thi for things, and we do that by paying money to the public, to somebody we’ve wronged, whatever that is.

[00:47:39] And I think that there’s this feels connected to the, like nonprofitization Yeah. Thing, right? There’s there’s a, there’s a lie about that that circulates in society and that, like philanthropy is frankly part of that lie, right? Yeah. Like philanthropy. The part of the point of philanthropy is it’s oh, we’ve amassed this enormous amount of wealth and our sort of like noble o obliger is to give it out.

[00:48:03] And that is actually innovation of accountability as opposed to, it’s like a, it’s like a performative evasion of accountability as opposed to actual accountability. 

[00:48:13] Suzanne Pharr: So what if as a movement we could get the, that bill of rices to be le legally biding, which it’s not now, it’s not legally binding.

[00:48:22] And what if it were, what if it were around the world legally binding? You could do things as part of the work on that or looking toward the one, you could just use it a frame for all that you do. Because all, virtually everything we believe in is list listed in that. But you could have human rights boards where within a community you could look at what seems to be violations of human rights in that community.

[00:48:46] And you could raise that up. That would be just one of the small things that you could move towards, like they have those community boards in San Francisco that you probably know about with the due mediation. It’s like taking this stuff that’s resting over here in somebody else’s hands is not doing going well and putting it in the movement’s hands of working it in a different way.

[00:49:07] But I think human rights boards, you could actually port out over and over. And so you say what does it mean to just point it out? I think it means an incredible amount to have awareness brought up all the time, because I think we have to nurture our humanity. It’s, it can slip.

[00:49:27] We can slip to the point where we are not the caring human beings that we should be. It needs to be nurtured by. This is why I’ve put a lot about in the end of the book, about culture, cultural work, because I think that’s one of the ways the message is carried. That does, through the feeling that you have when you hear those songs, whatever those songs are, that links you to other people, moves us toward that.

[00:49:54] Being able to, strengthen that sense of being, being more humane. More connected and more having more ability to stand up and stop what is horror and, you’re blocking bill and build those parallel organizations. Build particularly build those parallel and an opposition ways to live that represent that, that humane self.

[00:50:22] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that resonates for me also that there’s a way in which we’ve been separated from our humanity. It’s not just that we’ve lost That’s right. Actually that we’ve That’s right. It’s been, it’s sometimes been rested from our hands as we kick and scream against it.

[00:50:39] And that figuring out ways to figure out ways to claw it back and to be like, this is who I am and who I would like to be in the world is. I think it’s one, it’s, I think a lot of the reason that people come to social movements in the first place. Because they’re feeling that lack and that the challenge is about how do we hold that process?

[00:50:58] And I, I think that a lot of the stories and the reflections on Liberation chapter where you talk about people that you have known and that people, and that your own process of finding belonging and movement is in deeply instructive in that sense. 

[00:51:14] Suzanne Pharr: I find great hope in our, having a generation now that really cries out.

[00:51:20] We will not watch people die on the ground, we’ll not watch babies be killed. We will not honor this country for doing that. People have lots of talk about generational differences. But virtually every young generation that comes along has some sense of want to make change. And this one I think is seriously connected to we will not, we will not honor a country that does this, 

[00:51:53] Cayden Mak: that we’re standing on the ground off. Yeah. And people are putting stuff on the line Yes. For it too. It’s not just talk. Yeah. And taking chances. Yeah. Suzanne, it’s almost a delight to talk to you.

[00:52:08] Suzanne Pharr: Great. It was big fun. 

[00:52:10] Cayden Mak: Thank you. Yeah, and I also, I’m also like, I have 50 more questions and we could talk for the rest of the day probably. 

[00:52:19] Suzanne Pharr: Yeah. I appreciate you talking about in the time of the right, and I do want to make sure that people know that this is not a marketed book, that you can download it from my website, which is suzanne Pharr.com.

[00:52:35] It can be bought through Amazon, but that’s because the university that did it for free is to have a contract with them, but the book itself is totally available, is in the, it’s in the commons.

[00:52:49] Cayden Mak: And there’s a discussion guide that’s like new discussion guide. Yeah.

[00:52:52] Suzanne Pharr: Yeah. Yeah. New introduction. Yeah. You’ve gotta, if we’re gonna do something about this capitalism that we’re living in, we’ve got to do things like get our information in the commons 

[00:53:07] Cayden Mak: common. Yeah. Yeah. And meet people where they are with that information. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on the pod and I hope I hope this is a vehicle by which more people are like, oh, I should read this book.

[00:53:18] Because we need it. We need it, 

[00:53:20] Suzanne Pharr: We need every we, we need everything we get and people are putting out great information. The world of it, and you’re one of ’em. So thank you for that. 

[00:53:29] Sound on Tape: Thanks, Suzanne.

[00:53:34] Cayden Mak: My thanks again to Suzanne Pharr for joining us today. The second edition of In The Time of The Right Reflections on Liberation is available for free, as she mentioned for download on her website, suzanne Pharr.com. We’ll put the link to that in the show notes. You can also buy a paperback copy there as well if you want to hold a physical book in your hands, which sometimes I do.

[00:53:53] This show is published by Convergence. A magazine for Radical Insights. I’m Cayden Mak, and our producer is Josh Stro. Kimmy David designed our cover art. If you have something to say, please drop me a line. You can send me an email that we’ll consider running on an upcoming episode at [email protected].

[00:54:10] And finally, if you would like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bring our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment. You can become a [email protected] slash donate. Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements.

[00:54:28] I hope this helps.