abolition is both the horizon and the anchor…

 

 GROUNDING Principles

  • We want Freedom.

    We believe that Freedom is an actional praxis that must be performed, rather than a political right or condition that can be administered within the colonial national-state framework of euro-modernity. Black and other oppressed communities will not be free until we organize toward seizing the power to develop Black consciousness and politically determine our own national destinies for ourselves, together.

  • We want Land.

    We believe that Land is the basis for any revolutionary action. For any need Land can provide. us with all of the sustenance that our people need. We derive our power from the geographies in which we live and love. In the face of ecological catastrophe, We advocate that all Black and/or Indigenous ancestral lands in Africa and the Western Hemisphere be returned to its rightful, ancestral stewards.

  • We want Education.

    We believe that education is at the core of any meaningful practice of community. The systematic closure of Black “Jim Crow” high schools throughout the Southern US was a deliberate act of epistemicide. We oppose integration into white supremacist institutionalized learning spaces and seek to produce anti-colonial research

  • We Want Abolition.

    We believe that racial capitalism is the corrosive root of euro-modern colonial relations and must be abolished, by any means necessary. As a militantly anti-colonial organization, We seek the destruction of coloniality & carcerality, the military-industrial complex and punishment enterprise, and the logics of domination necessary for the capitalist economic system to function.

  • We want Justice.

    We believe that justice is a collective praxis aimed at reckoning with and transforming the harm & violence visited upon and wielded within our communities. Justice is liberatory. We seek not to engage with illegitimate white supremacist legal structures solely concerned with punishment, but instead strive to build a just world in which Black people may thrive.

  • We want Power.

    We believe that power is the ability to define social phenomenon and collectively organize community resources to shape those phenomenon to the will of the people. We seek solidarity & accompliceship with the so-called Wretched of the Earth.

envisioning change,

inspiring hope

 

political education.

We value the power of ideas. Education is the core of struggle, and as abolitionists, theorists, and practitioners of traditions of radical Blackness, we seek to develop a shared historical analysis and collective political consciousness. We come from a tradition of engaged pedagogy that views learning as a perpetual process of existential struggle that is best done carefully, together. We look to foster an intellectual culture and abolitionist praxis anchored to the best of the traditions and values that we have inherited from around the world across time, oriented toward abolition of racial capitalism on the horizon of a future of limitless possibility.


advocacy through narrative.

We view advocacy is the connective tissue between analysis and change. We help communities communicate their needs through narrative. People know what our communities need, but often lack access to the networks of power necessary to fulfill those needs. We work with communities to tell their compelling stories and help provide guidance and resources to bring those narrative to life through written and spoken word, photography, and documentary film and employ various tactics to use community narratives to persuade policy makers to listen to the needs and imaginations of our communities and compel them to adapt to our demands.

leadership development.

We’ve always been the leaders that we’ve always needed. We seek to highlight the talents that all of or community members already possess, cultivate the skills we may lack, and position our community members to succeed and gain control over our political destiny. As we learn and struggle together, we will develop the skills that we need in order to flourish. We seek to foster an environment encouraging members to see themselves as the leaders they need and to instill an intellectual culture enriched in traditions of radical Blackness that enables our communities, through their members, to fiercely and effectively advocate for the needs of the People’s by any means necessary.

Philosophies

 

Ethos of Care

Learning to take care of eachother, together,

Growth is a really difficult process, and if we do it right, it is at its core, traumatic. We tend to think about personal knowledge as a stack of books. As we come to know things, imagine those things as individual books. Most of us all learn the same thing first: how to breathe. When we come out of the womb, exposed to oxygen for the first time, our newborn bodies send signals to the rib cage to activate our newborn lungs to automatically jumpstart the breathing process, and as we do, we let out our first cry. As we wail, our cries ensure our literal grasping of breath. From that moment on, we experience and come to know things in a specific temporal order, and some of those things aren’t always entirely true. So, if breathing is the first thing we learn, imagine that as the first book we place on the floor as the foundation for the stack of books that represents our personal knowledge. As we are socialized to learn all sorts of things ­— how to eat, to communicate our needs, object permanence, how to love, etc. we move through life and sometimes we encounter new truths that challenge or outright contradict the things that our former selves knew. When it happens, we have to go back toward the bottom of the stack of our collective knowledge and pull out old books that are harmful or otherwise no longer serves our current purposes. But as we can imagine, the taller the stack of books get, the more devastating this process can be; the whole stack could come tumbling down jeopardizing the integrity of our ego, identity, and otherwise relationship to existence. Even if the entire stack of books doesn’t come piling down like a game of Jenga, it takes a tremendous amount of work to apply the things that we learn towards moving through the future differently. Like most sort of work, learning is painful, and oftentimes feels extremely lonely. Luckily, as is the case with the crying newborn, we aren’t in this thing alone. Just as the newborn is typically attended to by their mother, doulas, midwives, medical staff, and so forth, in this collective struggle to build community and a different world together, we are a collaborative who has a responsibility to each other to gently swaddle us as we cry out in our struggle to breathe. At the foundation to our pedagogy is the establishment of a mutual praxis of care.