Aslinn Pulley: We're Ready For Radical Change

Last month (which now feels like last year) I had the honor of sharing space with my dear friend, comrade, organizer, and founder of Black Lives Matter Chicago, Aislinn Pulley. Aislinn has worked on a variety of campaigns including the Reparations Now movement to pass the historic 2015 Reparations Ordinance for survivors of Chicago Police Department torture, and is currently the Co-Executive Director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center. 

Aislinn: We’re ready for radical change. There’s a confluence of things happening in the world that are making it more and more unfeasable and and impossible to continue with the same doctrine and hegemony that exists right now. It seems like the pandemic has forced a lot of things that have come to the fore in ways that they weren’t previously coming and make things a little bit clearer, like the fact that Trump just created an executive order to further deregulate regulations on business. In the first week of Lockdown, he did that press conference with CEOs of Walmart and Target and at that moment, for me, it was just like, holy shit, we’re in a hell pandemic. This is who you have on to ensure your business buddies that they will still be billionaires. But, then why feign surprise? Of course, that’s the system we live in… for so many people, it has become clear that it is time to make the leap forward for the sake of humanity, for our earth and have an entire restructuring of how we organize life and ourselves… that’s optimistic, but…. 

Irina: But that’s happening already though, right?

Aislinn: Yeah, even how we’re conceptualizing “work”... I saw something about how the “office” is now dead, which I think is probably hyperbolic, but it just underscores how we’ve designed our society. People can actually work from home, we can make allowances, we can think and construct in a radically new way -- and still accomplish work. I think for a lot of industries where working from home was an inconceivable thing, that just isn’t true anymore. We see that it’s possible. 

Irina: How has your own sense of what “the work” is shifted for you?

Aislinn:  For me, I see a real urgency in the need to expand public health and to demand universal healthcare in this country. The crisis of the pandemic further exposes how deadly the consequences have been in destroying our public health system. The organized abandonment that has happened across the board nationally, and specifically in Chicago, has meant that who we’ve always said are the hardest hit are so clearly the hardest hit, and whose lives are the most expendable to the system. To me, it seems so logical that the demand now is to massively fund and rebuild the public health system. That was really fucked up and resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, and we have to prevent it from ever happening again. 

I haven’t seen that be a rallying cry yet. Once we’re able to be outside in mass, that has to be one of the main things we’re demanding. It is counter to what I’ve seen local and national government folks talk about, which is austerity measures that need to be put in place because of COVID and the economy, which is the opposite of what needs to happen. In this moment we need to be demanding even more decarceration, demilitarization; the majority of the budget funds go toward those things and those need to be rerouted -- public health systems and all the systems that nurture life need to be massively expanded. 

Irina: Absolutely. I’m curious… what are some things, from your vantage point, that haven’t been part of the national dialogue or uplifted in the media?

Aislinn: That’s hard to answer because I’ve generally been trying to not pay attention to the news. I used to watch the morning news on WGN every day since high school… but I stopped. I want to start my day with meditation, with grounding, with breathing. With the pandemic, when I would catch myself reading article after article, I’d just get into this anxiety/depression spiral. I’ve limited what I consume from “news” outlets… I do not watch cable news, I hate it. The news I’ve been consuming is highly curated, so it’s not a fair representation of what’s out there, but instead, it’s what my friends are posting. 

Irina: Same, same. What’s cable? Another way to frame it is -- it doesn’t have to be in opposition to anyone else -- but what have you yourself started noticing that you haven’t noticed before? 

Aislinn: This may sound weird, but I’ve been noticing birds! It’s so interesting because I know other friends, like Tanya from SOUL (South Side Organizers for Unity and Liberation) installed a couple bird feeders in her backyard so she’s taking pictures of them. She has woodpeckers and ducks come! Another friend of mine had a bird come into her house. I try to observe the birds and listen to them, and try to identify them -- even though I have no idea. There’s this Canadian Goose that has been coming every day. It’s been interesting having that reconnection to wildlife in a way that I don’t know if I ever really had. As a child, I probably did, but I wasn’t taking the time to notice. I didn’t have the time, I wasn’t here enough to see patterns like that.

Irina: I love that shift from listening to the news to listening to the birds. Imagine what world we’d live in if everyone just listened to the birds, and was attuned with nature. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 3 years now and I’ve never noticed the blossoms in the spring time… never! I’d be hurrying to get to my car, to get to work, on my phone. Now I’m like, this is gorgeous.

Aislinn: There’s a tree right outside my bedroom window and I never noticed that you could watch the buds on the leaves slowly open and grow, like wow, this is really pretty. 

Irina: There’s this tree with beautiful white blossoms right now, and fuchsia ones, and I’ve never stopped to look or smell. I just never noticed them. 

Aislinn: I wonder what the birds are thinking because the environment is so different now. 

Irina: Well, they’re seeing more of us. They’re curious, all of a sudden, what does it mean?

Aislinn: It makes me think of pre-industrial life when people were just home. There weren’t many other places to go to. I’m so glad over the fall, I decided to buy some furniture… some nice things! I had stuff that I bought 10 years ago, or stuff I found, but I decided to make it nice for myself and I am so glad I did that. At the time, I was thinking to myself, I don’t know why I’m doing this, I’m barely here. Before COVID, I was just here to sleep. Majority of my time, I was out. 

Irina: How do you think that shift is impacting the organizing work that you’re doing?

Aislinn: It’s shifted how I think we meet, but it doesn’t feel like there has been a lag or a lull in the actual work. It feels like in some ways there has been an uptick, and what I realized today was: I need to schedule in time for myself to process and be with myself because I was getting into the habit of doing Zoom after Zoom after Zoom, or meeting after meeting because I’m here. But that break is needed, and I wasn’t aware of needing it before, but my body needs that time. 

It’s been two months or so and the organizing has increased to some extent. For Chicago, for the Mass Release campaign, it has allowed us to work more cohesively than pre-pandemic. Partly it’s because it’s clear that this is a main demand at the moment, and because people are available so we can get these 40 organizers on these Zoom calls that it would be tooth and nail to get in a room. 

Irina: I’m so curious, how has that shifted the dynamics of decision making if everyone is present? 

Aislinn: That’s a great question because we’ve actually been processing what that means if we’re all together. With the Chicago Torture Justice Center, we’re survivor-led. Survivors are there at the meeting, but we also have separate conversations with survivors to talk through things, discussing and processing together and then coming back. In the first space that we created, a lot of the survivors weren’t speaking and some of the other Black organizers were not really taking up space, and so we had to pause and rethink, how are we going to do this so it remains survivor-led and that we’re intentional with how we’re organizing and that it is truly radical and authentic to our values? So we decided to pull back from initially thinking one formation of everyone, and continue to nurture the survivor space so that there was intentionality for their voices to be heard, and that they were not in competition with more seasoned organizers, who might be at a different comfort level. So we took a step back and are still figuring that out. 

Irina: That makes a lot of sense. I also wonder about people's comfort in the Zoom space. Obviously there’s having WiFi, having a computer, etc. But also, people with traumatic brain injuries can’t really engage in that way and I think about folks who have experienced trauma -- I know how taxing it is for me, so I think about what are the barriers for people with different abilities and mental health situations to really take up space in those ways.

Aislinn: And the digital divide is so real! There are so many folks and the internet is choppy, or it just goes out, or they just don’t have it and they’re calling from their phone. And the literacy -- being comfortable with something like accessing a laptop. There are some moms who are part of Justice For Families, who pre-COVID, I was planning on sitting down to go over how to use their laptops. Now it’s like, how do we do this over the phone? All of that builds insecurity entering a space with folks who are comfortable with technology, who are comfortable with organizing terms -- they’re going to be more vocal. That’s actually been another realization: this extent of the digital divide and thinking about digital literacy and access to high speed internet -- and I want to say it should be a human right, and maybe that’s a reach, but it is a right. And in this society, we have the money, it’s not a question of that. It’s a question of intent and priority. 

Irina: It’s not exactly life or death, but it’s a means of connection and income… the ability to access employment… 

Aislinn: Yeah, and if we’re physical distancing and someone lives by themselves, this is a lifeline. That’s another thing I’ve been thinking about when we reopen, some of the political demands that we should be prepared to make include that. Certain parts of the South and West sides are just dead zones. Where the Center is in Englewood, and it’s not true for all of Englewood, but we can only have AT&T DSL and the highest speed is 3 Mbps, so it’s like dialup. It’s a nightmare, so we had to get a hotspot, which is what we use in the office. It’s because they haven’t laid the cables underground, so it’s too far away from the nearest hub, because there has been absolute neglect there. I remember Daly was talking about at one point providing free WiFi or providing Chicago free WiFi and I’m sure the tech companies approached him, and he was like, “no.” But that should be on the table. 

Irina: Are there demands that are becoming priorities that weren’t so much in the past?

Aislinn: I would say that the connection between incarceration and healthcare was a connection that I hadn’t yet made, in terms of understanding the many consequences of incarceration. Healthcare wasn’t one of them when I would think about it, but now with the pandemic, it has become clear how barbaric on many levels (on a global level) not just for the incarcerated people, which of course it is, but it also puts the entire population at risk. I hadn’t made that connection before, that the barbarity isn’t isolated, that it is globally applied. 

Despite the arguments of having to lock people away, the logic behind carcerality or this is what keeps people safe... Not only is that not true, but it is further harmful for the rest of society in ways that are erased in that narrative, in that telling, which is really interesting in thinking about what kind of society do we actually need in order to enable the most free, the most safe, the most nurturing… what does that look like? Universal healthcare for one seems like such a no-brainer, but universal housing and access to education are doubly reinforcing each other in ways that are really foreclosed by the dominant arguments of “merit” and “deserving” which are all completely arbitrary and flawed. The inequality of our society means that everyone is further made harmed in ways I haven’t seen or understood. 

Irina: Does this moment have you thinking about reparations in another way?

Aislinn: That’s so interesting because the 5 year anniversary happened on the 8th, and I’ve been thinking: what do reparations mean when the harm is ongoing? The reparations we have in Chicago are reparative, but reparative doesn’t mean that the harm is over, and it doesn’t mean that it’s enough. It’s not part of the larger conversation we have around reparations for descendants of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade as this is what we’re fighting for, but then that’s it. It has to be this expansive conversation… it’s reparation and, because the payouts, the free access to education for all survivors, to the city colleges and their grandchildren is beautiful and necessary, the inclusion of teaching about the torture is so necessary in our schools. The Center is so necessary and needs to be multiplied all over the country, and those things open up so much more. It’s almost like reparations are the first step in this longer conversion of society because it allows us to then see more possibilities.

Irina: What do you think would be some of the next steps?

Aislinn: The Center’s work has allowed me to think so much more deeply about the consequences of state violence as individuals, as community members, as family members and how that trauma is lived so often in our bodies in many ways and in our social relations, how we relate to ourselves and others. It has made me look at our history, and particularly Black folks in this country, with that lens… all the trauma, all the trauma, all the trauma that is denied language… Denied, denied, denied… and the consequences of that, and how the pain comes out because the pain never disappears, it just transforms into other things. With the work of the Center, I’m seeing things differently, like the ways in which people can engage in care and can access care are political acts and are politically determined in ways that I wasn’t able to identify before. 

Who is worthy of care? Who is deemed worthy? Whose care is named? Are politically determined in ways I hadn’t realized. Even looking at the systems of care, they are not separate from these systems of harm. What we do at the Center, we operate from a community council model, so our clinicians will go into folks’ homes (of course, this is pre-COVID), meet people at a park or another safe place because as torture survivors of the state/police… the concept of safety, being outside and in an institution, and most of whom the torture survivors were formerly incarcerated, concepts of being within a four-wall and safety are complicated. Even folks who were never incarcerated, but live in Chicago and feel the plethora of police, what does it mean to feel safe or unsafe when your physicality is also at the mercy of whether a particular officer(s) will be violent towards you? Thinking through those things and creating our treatment around that have been really eye-opening in terms of how I understand systems of care and who’s left out. 

Irina: Thank you for sharing that. I’ve been reading the generative somatics book on The Politics of Trauma so a lot of what you’re saying is really resonating, and just thinking about reimagining care. It sounds like from what you’ve shared… it’s a co-creative process with it being survivor-led. Without divulging anyone’s personal information, what are models that you all are using? It sounds like it would have to be unique to the folks you’re working with. You mentioned the possibility of meeting in a park or a home, what are other modalities that you all are finding effective?

Aislinn: We also use non-traditional forms of therapy as well as traditional. We offer craniosacral therapy, which is very light touch therapy. It is particularly useful for trauma survivors because sometimes massage can be more triggering, but it’s light touch and can be no touch. It’ll put more attention over certain areas -- a hand, a forehead, a foot -- but in a masseuse-type setting. You lay on a table, the lights are dim; it’s very calming. We also have an acupuncturist who will sometimes come to our Rise meetings and do seed pods in the ear. 

Pre-COVID, we met with someone who was thinking of doing meditation and since COVID, we have been offering virtual meditation. And, of course, organizing! Part of the work is dismantling these systems, which is actually very healing. Being actively involved in the campaigns to free the remaining incarcerated survivors and figuring out the plethora of other things to organize around incarceration is also very healing. Some people are only going to do the organizing work, and that’s totally fine. We all heal differently and we’re all at different stages of our healing. 

Irina: I’ve been re-reading Robin D. G. Kelley’s The Radical Black Imagination and I’m curious, what are some things that your radical imagination is envisioning right now? 

Aislinn: This is so corny, but I’ll share with you! When I was a little kid, I really loved Strawberry Shortcake so my fantasy was to have a Strawberry Shortcake village, which is where all my people lived. I want a commune where we all have our little huts and houses and they connect, or don’t, but they’re all in proximity in nature. That’s my dream.

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This conversation was lovingly transcribed by my dear friend, writer, and cultural organizer Rivka Yeker. You can check out their work at @hooliganmagazine.