Benji Hart: Worlds End All The Time

In mid May I had the honor and privilege of sharing space with Benji Hart; author, artist, educator, abolitionist, and friend. We discussed life during the pandemic, the power of care work, organizing, and demanding the world we imagine. 

Irina: So how have you been in these times? 

Benji: I’ve been okay. I am kind of an introvert in general. I’m definitely a homebody, so the being inside and question of ‘what do I fill my hours with?’ tends not to be my problem. I’ve enjoyed, in some ways, the slow down and change of pace. In some ways, I’ve felt really good about it. Not touching people and not seeing my friends and the existential dread is horrible.

It’s been a really hard practice, and not uniquely for me, but to slow down and not turn off or tune out or disinvest in what’s happening in the world… to do both and not feel guilty about the slowing down and the resting. To be like, this is scary and this is draining and overwhelming and it makes sense you’re sleeping a lot, and it makes sense that all you want to do is watch comfort TV and cook. You’re not being a bad citizen or activist by taking care of yourself. As much as we talk about those things… to actually practice them and to think I’m not going to worry about that thing today or I’m not going to check the news and not feel guilty about that has been a practice.

I’m genuinely learning and reconnecting. I had a great conversation with Juliana Pino -- they work with LVEJO and are one of my favorite people -- but she said to me, “The strategy of the right and Fascism is to overwhelm you, to throw so much at you that you retreat and throw so much at you that you are robbed of the things that they don’t think you’re deserving of, like rest and peace of mind and comfort and joy.” Not in a froofy way, but it is actually so important that you rest and pause and take care of yourself because the barrage is meant to make it so that you don’t and so that you spin out and falter, so that you do something out of desperation and not from a centered and grounded place. Reclaiming your mental health and care is actually a way of recentering and refocusing yourself so that you can fight, and so that you don’t spin out and fall in a place of desperation. 

Irina: That’s so real… Taking back our time and allowing ourselves to prioritize our well-being and mental health and not having that guilt… I feel like the pull of capitalism is so strong, undoing that need to constantly be productive and only valuing your contribution to the world as something that can be measured as some kind of output... What’s been helping you resist those pressures?

Benji: I think a big one is: being forgiving of myself and of others. I think that is important because we are in a crisis in so many different ways and everyone is responding differently. It’s been hard and I have not always been successful, but it has been important to try to be forgiving and understanding of the ways I’m responding and also forgiving and understanding of the ways other people are responding even when they look different, or are the exact opposite of how I’m responding. We’ve seen all of that, where some people are saying, “You’re not doing enough or you’re not mobilizing… now is the time to act, we need to get our shit together” and then the other accusatory side, which I think I have been more guilty of… “We need to slow down and pause, take this time to regroup and recalibrate because the go go go and the act act act isn’t serving us right now.” We actually need a balance of both of those things and we’re not helping each other by judging each other by how we’re responding to emergency and how we’re responding to crisis. I don’t want to be judged if I need to take a whole week and stay in my house, write in my journal and do “nothing.” 

But also, needing to do the check for myself… And if someone has the energy to organize a caravan right now, or if someone feels called or useful or ready, to get on a Zoom call and organize a conversation across different organizations to most effectively respond, then I’m grateful that someone has the capacity and ability to do that. There is no wrong way to respond to an unprecedented global pandemic. Again, forgiving myself, forgiving others, listening to myself and listening to others has been really important instead of not just knee-jerk reverting to, “The way I’m responding is the right and healthy way and the rest of you need to get it together.” That’s not right or true and it’s not helpful to anyone. 

Irina: Right. Yeah, I’ve had to check myself a lot and be like, “Am I judging someone’s trauma response right now because they’re not in the same place I’m at?” And also, “I’ve been in this place for a short amount of time, and that’s going to change and that’s okay.” 

I’m curious what you’ve noticed in terms of organizing, besides obvious changes like folks are on Zoom and we’re doing caravans, but in terms of relational organizing, what are some shifts in how people are coming together and supporting each other? How has it felt?

Benji: I think that, and I’m having a lot of different thoughts I’m sifting through, but on one hand, I think COVID-19 has been this incredibly watershed moment where some of the most radical demands that many communities have been making for the longest time are being broken open as not just “moral” or “the right thing to do” but actually as “this is the only way to protect ourselves from the changing conditions of late Capitalism and the fall of empire and the imminent destruction of our planet if we do not make radical changes to the ways we live our lives and interact with each other.”

I read in Truthout this morning on how the deportation machine hasn’t stopped and that is spreading COVID, and people are being held in detention, which is a breeding ground for the virus and then they’re being deported back to countries that have done a much better job than we have in responding to the crisis, and not spreading it. So, now through the deportation machine, which really means the exportation of our carceral system and carceral values, the US Prison industrial complex, which includes immigration detention, is now literally exporting the virus. It’s like, “Oh, not only is the deportation machine immoral, it is a health risk and is keeping us from fighting this pandemic on a global scale because we can’t actually pretend what’s happening with this pandemic in Guatemala has nothing to do with the US.”

It’s a horrifying, terrifying, heartbreaking time and we probably won’t, speaking for myself, actually understand the loss from this moment until we have some distance from it. The mourning that’s on the other side of this, I’m probably not even prepared for it. In the moment, it’s like, look at that. Immigrant and undocumented communities called it. Poor and working-class communities, workers, unions called it. Prison abolitionists called it. The radical feminist movement called it. It’s like, not only are those moral ideas, but they’re logical and perfectly feasible, and can be executed quickly and efficiently when there’s desire to do so. This pandemic is proving that they’re actually necessary. It’s no longer about “Wouldn’t it be nice?” but “We cannot survive.” 

The idea that money will protect you or boarders will protect you, or the safety valves of consumer Capitalism will protect you, it’s like nope, you can pull all the strings you want, but COVID-19 is making it incredibly clear, almost to a poetic extent, what kind of world we need to survive. And it’s actually not a new vision for the world, and in some ways that’s been encouraging me. Abolishing the prison system? Arrest stoppages? A thriving minimum wage? A universal healthcare system? None of those are new ideas and no one has been just talking about those ideas since March 2020. They’re very old ideas and the folks that we should have been listening to have been offering them to us for a long time. In some ways, that is a shift. I’m sensing it, but I’m not always seeing it -- which is some of the problem of social distancing/isolation, it’s hard to actually gauge what is and isn’t happening but I believe and am feeling like more people are on our side than before. 

Even people who were saying, “Oh universal healthcare? Where is the money going to come for that? How are you facilitating that? How is that even possible?” It’s possible, because we clearly have trillions of dollars to bail out private entities, so the resources are there and it’s possible, meaning we can actually create, distribute, access on a large scale when we need to. It’s not that we can’t figure out how to do it, there’s just been an opposition to it from folks with political power and economic clout. And that’s it. I think there’s been a lot of folks from a while ago who think that’s a radical or simplistic statement, but it can be done. And if we’re going to survive, it has to be done. It’s no longer an idealistic pipe dream. 

The other thing that popped into my mind when you asked that question: in the same way, on a broad scale, things that were called “unskilled labor” a couple weeks/months ago are now referred to as “essential.” Unskilled workers are suddenly essential workers -- again, poetic -- if we’re not treating essential workers like they’re essential, at least we are naming them as essential. A meager start, but it is a start. I’ve noticed that in activist circles as well… now that we’re in quarantine / on lockdown, a lot of the work that I think previously might’ve been thought of as not the “real work” or the most “radical work” or generously it might be called the “behind the scenes work” but more bluntly, people might say “the less important work” or the “work that makes the other work happen.” Now it’s like, oh shit, that’s actually the most important work. Now, people who are like, “wow I’m so grateful you had this together” to the folks who are doing community farming, and folks distributing meals and doing mutual aid and raising money and crowdsourcing funds and protective gear for neighborhoods and communities -- now people realize that that’s the essential work. It’s like, what we were calling the “behind the scenes” work that makes the direct action or “radical” work happen -- that’s the radical work. Seeing that shift of whose work is getting focus and support in a new way, which is a good shift, even within our activist, queer, organizer communities, has always been a humbling and recalibrating and a “make you check yourself” result of COVID-19. 

Irina: Absolutely. I would add to that list… care work, right? It’s interesting because the National Domestic Workers Alliance literally uses the framing of the work that makes all the work possible. It’s like you were saying: we see it as the “support” work but not the “real” work, but it is absolutely the real work. It’s making me think about, and this is someone else’s analysis -- I don’t remember who it is -- but shifting the mindset from innovation to “cultivating” and “maintaining.” How do we move away from creating the shiny new thing to thinking how do we maintain? How do we support? How do we care? I’ve never thought about it as “the most radical” -- that is interesting.

Benji: Where I really want us to go is getting rid of the idea that anything is more radical than anything else, but the reshift, refreframe, refocus is nice, too. 

Irina: The question I’ve been asking folks is Grace Lee Boggs’ question, “What time is it on the clock of the world?”

Benji: It sure feels like the time on the clock of the world is very close to Midnight. It sure feels like we’re getting close, or getting ever closer, to an end. I’m really inspired here, not at all unrelated Grace Lee Boggs, but I’m really inspired by adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown’s work and words in moments like this. Something they talk about, which has been helpful to me to hang onto, is that worlds end all the time and new worlds begin all the time, and that many of our ancestors have survived apocalypse already. The Transatlantic Slave Trade was an apocolypse, the Indigenous genocide was an apocolypse, the Holocaust was an apocolypse, and all kinds of wars and genocides throughout the history of our people are all their own ends of worlds. Obviously that’s not a small thing -- obviously those are momentous, traumatizing things that reverberate throughout our histories and diasporas, so it’s not to treat them lightly. It’s not to say that just because they happen frequently that they’re not as scary and painful and traumatizing as we perceive them to be, but it’s also to remember that things end and sometimes things need to end. 

The US Empire needs to end -- it is unsustainable. The war machine, the global war machine, it needs to end. Capitalism needs to end. I don’t think anything happens in a linear way, or in a uniform way. I think we’re facing a lot of real death and loss that we can’t get back and mourning that is important… and also, death is a part of the life cycle and a part of the bounds of the universe that we inhabit. It’s time for some things to die, and some things to release themselves and time for us to release them. 

On my best days, on my most hopeful, I see this as an apocalypse for those things -- as an end of the world as we’ve known it, which comes with loss. As Shira Hassan would say, “All change is loss.” And even those that have suffered from these systems will lose things -- understandings, orientations, comforts -- in ways of surviving that we’ve grown accustomed to under these systems, and that’s not to be taken lightly either. At the same time, the Mother and the universe is sending us some very clear messages. She’s like, “Yep, this chapter is done. We did this and we learned what we needed to learn, and it’s time to let go and figure out what comes next.” On my hopeful days, I want us to take on that collective challenge. Now is the time… let’s figure it out. We’ve been demanding alternatives to these systems and structures… we’ve been demanding alternatives to policing and incarceration… we’ve been demanding alternatives to patriarchy and rape culture… let’s do it. Now is the time to collectively figure it out. Even in little ways, even seeing new people showing up is so exciting. 

I’m thinking about a few nights ago when the Lightfoot continued demolition on the Crawford Coal Plant in La Villita -- and this was the second demolition that month -- after the first horrifically botched one happened; it was such an insult to that community. Even far away, here in Roger’s Park, I watched both of those...just livid, and feeling very powerless, thinking “do we go to Little Village right now?” I don’t know what the ask is… and someone who is not from that community, I don’t know what the right way to show up is. Seeing folks from Little Village coming to Lori Lightfoot’s house… some of them being folks we know well and have been in the scene for a long time, but a lot of people are just residents who are fed up, like “I’m not usually a protestor or an organizer, but this is incredible bullshit and we’re tired of talking about it and expressing frustration. We’re going to do something about it.” Seeing so many faces I did not know marching to Lori Lightfoot’s house saying, “This is bullshit and we will not let you have peace if you keep treating us this way”... that was so encouraging for me… because a) It was such a powerful and brave action and b) to see new people mobilizing… we are not alone. There are more folks willing to listen, and more folks willing to jump on the bandwagon than even a couple months ago. What do we do with that? I think is the next question. 

Irina: I agree -- seeing those photos, I was like, “Damn, I can’t believe this has happened before. We need to be at Lori Lightfoot’s house every night.” 

Benji: Every night. One community sets the stage for another. They did something so important that night for many reasons, like… folks know where your house is now! 

Irina: Right!

Benji: And they know they can go there… that’s important intel.

Irina: You’re so brilliant.

Benji: You’re so kind!

Irina: I’m curious what your thoughts are on this transitional time as we’re entering “Phase 3” -- the resocialization... I don’t know… insights, feelings, thoughts… That’s something I’m sitting with a lot. Doing work in the public sphere, working with children and families, working for a government institution. Thinking about, how the hell do we do this safely? How are we not replacing the people who love and care about our young people with police because we are? What does this summer look like? 

Benji: I don’t have a good answer, only that… so much of my life right now is teaching me to let things unfold and not control processes, but be present for them. I’m so bad at that, it’s so hard. I want to make things happen. A lot of us as organizers and activists kind of have that bone in us, where we’re like, “No, we can make this happen right now! Mobilize the right people! Have the right framing and choose the right tactics! We can make this happen right freaking now.” And that is not a bad attitude to have by any means and there is important truth in that, but we can also have a hard time accepting the long game, and our our own limits… 

One group of people can do a lot, but they can’t do everything. I think that’s important if you’re going to mobilize effectively and sustainably… for the long haul, since that’s so necessary. All this is to say is… there are a lot of ideas competing with each other right now and Fascism is one of them. Responding to this crisis and responding to the inevitable ones that will result from it and come after it… do we do that with tightening boarders and locking down immigration or do we do the exact opposite? Restricting access to water or do the opposite? Invest more heavily in policing and surveillance or do we invest in childcare and universal healthcare and education and teachers and nurses and librarians? I do think those things are diametrically opposed to each other, and I do think folks in power have that same understanding. It’s like, “We actually share that understanding, we’re just on opposite sides of what we want to see as the results of that.” For me, there is some liberation in understanding that. It’s like, “You see the same things that I see, you actually understand exactly what I understand… You just want the Fascist vision to win because it’s more beneficial to you as an individual. Whereas, I want this other vision to win out because it’s more beneficial to me, but it’s also more beneficial to the people I belong to and the lineage that I come from and the justice that I want and the other people on this planet that I care about because there is also the battle of the individual good and the collective good. That is at the heart of Capitalism -- the heart of Puritan colonialism and the US Empire. 

I say this to say that  COVID-19 has blown open so many things and folks are rushing really fast to seal them back up. It’s going to take extra force and violence to seal them again because they were blown open so wide. So much has been exposed in the last weeks. Part of me thinks that’s great and encouraging, and as folks on the left, we should take advantage of that and point to that because people will try to make us forget. But I also think there are other forces pushing justice hard, and I don’t believe that anything is inevitable. I don’t believe that eventually things will just happen or justice will win out because it’s right and moral and logic -- I don’t think those things alone are enough to bring about the vision that we want and deserve for the world. 

This moment has proven unequivocally that we need universal healthcare, and that doesn’t mean we’re going to get it as a result of this moment. It has proven that we need workers’ protections, that we need a thriving wage, that everyone needs housing, that policing/prisons do nothing to combat a crisis. It has proven all of these things better than our theorizing and “smarty pants articles” ever could have -- and it’s also not enough. Just because they were proven, doesn’t mean we will get the world we deserve; we still have to organize for it. We still have to keep the model in the moment in our memory because people will forget and they are invested in us forgetting. It’s important to be like, “No, remember that time in early April 2020… we were able to provide everyone with minimum income or we were able to provide free testing. Remember? That happened!” It can be done, we watched it happen. We want to live in the world where that is the norm, not a shoddily cobbled-together response to a global pandemic, but actually the norm.

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