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Today on The Laura Flanders Show, writer 
and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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discusses poetry, capitalism, and the difference 
between disability rights and disability justice.

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All that and a few words from me 
on Roads Less Traveled.

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Welcome to our program.

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Hi, I'm Laura Flanders.

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Safety.

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Every law enforcement officer and every politician 
will tell you that they're for it.

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And yet for many police aren't the answer, 
they're a problem in the community

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and today's policy makers 
are only making things worse.

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If what we're doing isn't making 
many of us safer, what might?

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Our next guest has gone on a search.

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Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 
describes herself

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as a queer, disabled, writer, 
performer, poet, healer and teacher,

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inspired by poets, June Jordan, Suheir Hammad,

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and what she calls the whole 
women of color pantheon.

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She is the author of several 
books of poetry including

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Consensual Genocide 
and the Lambda Award winning, Love Cake.

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She has a new book of poetry, Body Map, 
and a memoir, Dirty River, out this year.

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She also performs with the group Mangos With Chili. 
She's an editor, too, of the book

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The Revolution Starts as Home: Confronting 
Intimate Violence in Activist Communities,

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a book that grapples with the difficult ideas 
of addressing violence without police.

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We also discovered that we shared 
a meal together a few years ago in Toronto.

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Many years ago. I'm happy to see 
you again, Leah. Thanks for coming in.

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Thanks so much for having me.

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Let's talk a little bit about this notion of safety 
and we'll come back to other things.

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What does it mean to you?

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I think that there are a million 
survivors of violence out there.

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I think that most people have survived 
some form of abuse or violence.

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I think that as feminists, we've been talking 
about that at least since the '70s and beyond.

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And I think that in the criminal legal system

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-which I don't call the criminal justice system, 
because it doesn't bring it-

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no one ever asks survivors of violence 
what they need

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to have safety, justice, 
and healing in their lives.

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We're told as survivors of violence that,

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"Yay! Second wave white liberal feminism works,

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so we get to call the cops 
and send our abusers to prison."

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I don't know a single survivor who's ever 
called the police to get justice.

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And of the ones that I've read about, 
I don't know a single one who said,

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"Yeah my experience in the criminal legal 
system was great and I got what I needed."

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We're basically being used to create more prisons 
and to build mass incarceration.

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Explain what you mean by that.

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I think that like a lot of feminists of color,

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I understand why a lot of feminists in the 
'70s and '80s pushed for things

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like the criminalization of domestic violence 
and child and sexual abuse.

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But what black and brown feminists know

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is that bringing more police into 
our communities never keeps us safe.

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My good friend Ejeris Dixon, who worked 
for many years at Audre Lorde Project,

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talks about how what we're calling 
transformative justice is nothing new.

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She's like, "My father is a black man from Louisiana.

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Growing up, the police were the clan 
and still are"; and he's like,

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"That's not who we called when there was 
intimate partner abuse in our communities."

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That hasn't changed.

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Is that where the artist and poet and 
imagination comes in of what else might we do?

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What else have other communities done?

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Mm-hmm. [laughs] 
One thing that I'm really grateful for

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... so I'm about to be 40 which means I came up 
as an activist and an organizer in the '90s

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and I still... back then I would run into, you know, 
in whatever movement spaces we were a part of,

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a little bit of the "oh, cultural works, 
this very feminized unimportant thing."

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I still remember trying to organize 
a Free Mumia [Abu Jamal] rally in 1996,

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and there was some old white 
Bolshevik guy who was like...

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we wanted to have... we were young 
people of color, and we were like...

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"We want to have MC's 
and hip-hop artists and poets,"

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and he was like, "That's not how you do 
a proper rally. You sell the paper!"

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and we were like, "you're racist and irrelevant."

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I think that cultural work still is minimized

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but I think that it goes beyond just being 
the entertainment at the rally.

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I think it is just what you said about ...

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Diane di Prima once said that, "The only war 
that matters is the war of the imagination."

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And I think that it's very easy

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when we are surviving and not surviving 
multiple forms of violence all of the time

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to focus on the power that we don't have.

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One thing that the Allied Media Conference

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-which is a grassroots media conference 
I work with-

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stresses in how we organize is that we focus on 
where we're powerful not where we're powerless.

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I think the imagination is one place 
that we're powerful,

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and I think that we don't have the state, 
we don't have the prisons,

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we don't have the cops, thank God.

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What we do have is the wild, queer, 
feminists of color, decolonial imagination.

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And what difference does your disability make 
and the disability rights movement make?

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I heard you begin to talk about it, 
but I think it's important.

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Right. We actually use the term disability justice 
because the disability rights movement,

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while it's incredibly important and I'm grateful 
for the work those organizers did,

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has been predominately a white dominated 
single-issue movement.

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Disability justice as a term was coined by people 
of color with disabilities who were revolutionaries,

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especially Patricia Berne and Leroy Moore 
of Sins Invalid

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who got really sick of being marginalized 
as disabled revolutionary people of color

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within both white disability rights and 
non-disabled people of color movements,

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and I would just say everything. [laughs]

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Cara Page, who is a beloved, beloved person, 
who is the ED of Audre Lorde Project right now,

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she was part of a group called Kindred, 
which still exists,

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which is black and brown queer southern healers, 
and they came together because she was like,

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"Organizers are literally dying in the South 
because of chronic illness and ableism

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and the relentless pace of our movements 
that is ableist."

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So I would say that the first thing 
that's true for our movements

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is that sustainability is a huge issue for us.

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There's so much that non-disabled activists 
can learn from disabled people

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and that's kind of one of the beginning places.

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I think a lot of non-disabled activists, 
or people who don't identify as disabled yet,

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are used to thinking of disability only in terms of, 
"Oh we need to get a ramp."

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And that's really important but it's a really 
huge cognitive leap for non-disabled folks

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to become aware that disabled folks 
have our histories and cultures of resistance.

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We have crip science.

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We have incredible organizing skills that 
non-disabled people need to learn from.

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I can organize from bed. I can organize 
on the internet. I can organize on crip time.

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I can do a lot of miraculous things that are 
not on a 16 meeting a week relentless schedule.

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I can do that on no money and I am not alone.

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I am one of millions of disabled folks 
who are resisting,

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and I would say a whole lot of other things 
about eugenics and the value of our bodies

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and how the struggle around those issues
are immensely connected with anti-prison organizing.

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Just to begin with.

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And I would just add one other thing. 
It has to do with fun.

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Oh, yeah, right?

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I had a disability justice activist 
talk the other day about aging

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and said to her not-disabled, 
they didn't think, colleagues,

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"You want to learn how to work your body as it ages,

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as if you're lucky it will acquire disabilities, 
learn from us."

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Oh I need to say this. 
My friend Naima Lowe said recently,

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she's like you know,

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"The thing that non-disabled folks 
have to learn from us

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is that we've already survived some of 
the worst things that can happen;

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and I don't just mean what ableism sees 
as the individual tragedy of our bodies,

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I mean surviving ableism and capitalism, 
and we know how to do it.

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And we are thriving and we are surviving 
and we're not always surviving but we are."

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So yeah, exactly.

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When that, y'know, break-neck speed 
burn-out able-bodied activist

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gets cancer or diabetes or, you know, gets an 
amputation and is like, "Oh my God, my life's over!"

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we're there to be like it actually really isn't,

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but you need to change the way your life is 
and the way movements are

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so we can actually be part 
of that radical imagination.

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[Laura] And we can have fun.
[Leah] And we can have fun.

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[Laura] Talk about fun.
[Leah] What do you want to know?

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[Laura] What you're into.
[Leah laughs]

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[Laura] I'm watching you and I'm thinking

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you're talking about some of the most intense, 
hardcore stuff and yet you're clearly relishing it.

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[Leah] I'm not dead.
[Laura laughs]

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I was like many survivors who make it to 40.

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I was not supposed to ... I'm going to 
quote somebody who's going to make you cry.

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I mean June Jordan, right? 
The revolutionary queer black poet.

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Cancer survivor and, y'know, cancer not-survivor 
said right after 9/11,

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"Some of us did not die. I guess it was our fate 
to live, so what are we going to do about it?"

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I was talking with one of my chosen family members 
who is also a hardcore survivor who's 42

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who painted this cane and they were like, 
"We made it. Now what do we do with it?"

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We survived and we have all that knowledge.

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I'm thankful every day and not in some 
weird bourgie Christian way.

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I'm just like, I get to be alive.

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[laughs] I get to have made it through 
some of the roughest stuff,

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and that's not to say that there's not going 
to be disasters that keep coming.

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I have a poem in the book called 
The Worst Thing in the World,

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which is the truth is, it will keep happening.

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You know, we're about to run out of water in 
California in a year. Octavia Butler was right.

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What one thing that we also have power over

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is our capacity for joy and pleasure

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and that's something that queer and trans folks 
have always held onto,

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is, y'know, we don't have to be homonormative. 
We actually don't have to.

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We have so much that's about sex and joy and pleasure 
and the powers of decadence on no money.

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You have great examples of how people do confront 
violence without recourse to the police in your book.

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[Leah] Thank you.

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The group UBUNTU stands out in my mind. 
The word meaning born to belonging.

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[Leah] I am because we are.

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I am because we are.

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Talk about how they work and why you thought 
it was important to put them in the book.

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UBUNTU is one of the most amazing groups 
that I've ever run into ...

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who is a queer black 
feminist troublemaker genius ...

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[Laura] Who's been on this program.

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Good! I feel blessed every time 
I'm in Alexis's presence.

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I ran into UBUNTU's work when I was stealing time 
from my day job at the eviction hotline.

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They came together after the Duke University rape 
-I hesitate to call it a trial-

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but where several white male 
Duke University Lacrosse players

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sexually assaulted black female sex workers 
who they'd hired to dance for them at a party.

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I always talk about that story when I'm asked 
to talk about transformative justice

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because that is an example where, you know,

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I mean, just the forces 
of anti-black racism, whorephobia,

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you know it's a perfect storm of everything awful.

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It would be really easy to feel like 
there's nothing we can do,

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and UBUNTU came together and they said,

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"We can't control the courts but we can 
do a national day of truth-telling march

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past the house where the assault happened 
holding signs saying,

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"Someone I love is a sex worker," and, 
"I believe survivors,"

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and do a dance routine to Audre Lorde's 
A Litany for Survival

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in front of the house where the assault happened.

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They just grew to do incredible anti-violence work 
in Durham, North Carolina and beyond.

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Just speaking to that,

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this example that is in the interview that 
we did with Alexis that pops out at me is that,

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you know they had multiple examples of just, 
they were like,

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"Yeah, we were just walking down the street one day 
and we ran into this young woman

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who'd just been assaulted by her partner and we
just said, hey, what do you need? Come with us.

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We took her into our home. We made her tea. 
We talked about our experiences.

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We called her family and her faith leader."

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And when I asked Alexis, "So that's something 
a lot of feminists wish they could do,

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but when something like that happens, we freeze, 
so what made that possible?"

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Cycling back to what you said about relationships,

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she was like, "90% of our work doesn't 
look like traditional activist work.

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It's doing childcare. It's hanging out.

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It's building with each other so we're not a clique, 
we're an actual community,

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and we know that we can call on each other during 
the times of deepest crisis and we can respond."

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That's why I think we need to do relationship work

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and that's work that's looked down on 
because it's feminized

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and it's not seen as like big, beating the chest, 
I'm leading the rally, work.

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It's just what women and feminized people 
have always done.

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I always say we have a big fight around 
the shredding of the social safety net

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but what we don't talk often enough about 
is not the net but the fabric.

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We need to re-stitch the social fabric.

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Which I think is what you're talking about 
when somebody opens their doors.

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So much to talk about.

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Mentors. I'd love to hear about 
more of your mentors.

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What you've learned from different people.

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Then this word transformative justice.

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This idea that you're in a transformative 
justice moment. What do you mean?

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[laughs] You want me to start with that?

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[Laura] Yeah.

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Yeah. We're in a transformative ...

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00:12:42,952 --> 00:12:45,025
I mean we've been in a transformative 
justice moment all of our lives.

213
00:12:45,025 --> 00:12:50,995
I think that right now it was really intense being 
at the Color of Violence 4 Conference,

214
00:12:50,995 --> 00:12:52,530
which happened this past weekend,

215
00:12:52,530 --> 00:12:58,576
and feeling, really feeling, how I feel like I've been 
in movement with the folks who were there,

216
00:12:58,576 --> 00:13:02,207
the black and brown women who were there, 
for 15 years,

217
00:13:02,207 --> 00:13:05,785
and for so many of us we started, y'know, 
going back to that ...

218
00:13:05,785 --> 00:13:08,042
the early Incite documents of like,

219
00:13:08,042 --> 00:13:10,321
so the police don't work for us 
as black and brown folks.

220
00:13:10,321 --> 00:13:13,619
When they're called, they arrest us, 
they beat us, the deport us.

221
00:13:13,619 --> 00:13:17,355
It's never safe to be a black sex worker who calls 
the cops when your partner is beating you up.

222
00:13:17,355 --> 00:13:19,763
It's never safe. It's never going to add to that.

223
00:13:19,763 --> 00:13:21,157
What do we do instead?

224
00:13:21,157 --> 00:13:23,457
And to go on these, what Alyssa Vera calls,

225
00:13:23,457 --> 00:13:27,866
"marvelous journeys and stories 
that are still being written."

226
00:13:27,866 --> 00:13:31,168
I think that we're in an incredible moment right now

227
00:13:31,168 --> 00:13:34,816
with Black Lives Matter as a black feminist-led 
movement and created movement.

228
00:13:34,816 --> 00:13:39,782
It is incredible for me to look at Rolling Stone Magazine, 
to look at that article that says that,

229
00:13:39,782 --> 00:13:43,492
"Policing's a dirty job and it turns out no one 
has to do it. Here's 10 alternatives."

230
00:13:43,492 --> 00:13:46,556
To feel that all over North America, 
people are saying,

231
00:13:46,556 --> 00:13:49,840
"Actually calling the cops always ends up 
with someone getting killed,

232
00:13:49,840 --> 00:13:54,592
so what are we actually do instead? Because 
our lives are on the line all the time."

233
00:13:54,592 --> 00:13:59,327
I've felt complicated about transformative justice 
and I'm someone who's helped organize it.

234
00:13:59,327 --> 00:14:03,609
Revolution Starts at Home came out in 2011 
and I was very optimistic and I thought,

235
00:14:03,609 --> 00:14:06,235
"Oh and you know we just had the US social forum 
and in 3 years we'll just abolish the police.

236
00:14:06,235 --> 00:14:07,753
It'll be great."

237
00:14:07,753 --> 00:14:11,111
And it turns out that this project of replacing 
the state with community based alternatives

238
00:14:11,111 --> 00:14:16,875
is thrilling, maddening, exhausting, you don't know 
what's going to happen around the corner.

239
00:14:16,875 --> 00:14:21,311
It's very hard to work ... 
it's the most triggering work you can do.

240
00:14:21,311 --> 00:14:29,481
To speak to especially people in our communities 
who we love who cause harm,

241
00:14:29,481 --> 00:14:31,539
and to be able to be in the place where we say,

242
00:14:31,539 --> 00:14:34,368
"I love you. I do not want you to be 
locked up for the next 40 years.

243
00:14:34,368 --> 00:14:37,523
What you did is absolutely not alright 
and we're not going to let you keep doing it."

244
00:14:37,523 --> 00:14:41,486
We have not been trained to do this and it takes 
developing a lot of emotional muscles to do it.

245
00:14:41,486 --> 00:14:44,197
I believe that we are doing it 
and it's also not a straight shot.

246
00:14:44,197 --> 00:14:46,070
Your life is so not the straight shot.

247
00:14:46,070 --> 00:14:47,366
[Leah laughs]

248
00:14:47,366 --> 00:14:51,702
You are performing. You are organizing. 
You have 2 books coming out this year.

249
00:14:51,702 --> 00:14:53,503
You've written a memoir already.

250
00:14:53,503 --> 00:14:58,021
A. How do you find the time? 
And B. Is it a little early for a memoir?

251
00:14:58,021 --> 00:15:04,872
No. [laughs] I know. I mean, my niece Luna 
Merbruja, formerly known as Askari González,

252
00:15:04,872 --> 00:15:08,583
who's an incredible 22 year-old 
transgender Latina organizer

253
00:15:08,583 --> 00:15:12,323
who co-organized the first trans-women of color
national gathering ever last year.

254
00:15:12,323 --> 00:15:16,564
Her memoir Trauma Queen came out 
2 years ago, she's 23.

255
00:15:16,564 --> 00:15:17,447
[Laura] She beat you to it.

256
00:15:17,447 --> 00:15:18,996
I think she did. She did.

257
00:15:18,996 --> 00:15:21,494
Dirty River took 13 years to write

258
00:15:21,494 --> 00:15:24,955
and it makes me think a lot about 
the stakes for feminist of color writing.

259
00:15:24,955 --> 00:15:29,745
Alexis, as you probably know, she was one of 
the first people to get access to June's archives.

260
00:15:29,745 --> 00:15:34,793
June wrote, what 27 books over her life time? 30?

261
00:15:34,793 --> 00:15:38,729
Alexis has spoken a lot about, "Yeah, I read 
the correspondence where June was like,

262
00:15:38,729 --> 00:15:40,451
'I couldn't pay my phone bill that month.'

263
00:15:40,451 --> 00:15:43,737
Or where she was fighting so hard with 
the publishers of poetry."

264
00:15:43,737 --> 00:15:47,954
The people who wanted her to delete the subtitle 
"a revolutionary blueprint."

265
00:15:47,954 --> 00:15:53,090
I feel immensely lucky to be a queer, 
disabled feminist of color writing,

266
00:15:53,090 --> 00:15:57,580
and it's not, you know, it's not ... 
no one dinged me on the head with a star.

267
00:15:57,580 --> 00:15:59,868
It's not automatic. It's taken a lot of collective labor.

268
00:15:59,868 --> 00:16:03,694
It doesn't happen if our presses 
and media movements don't keep going.

269
00:16:03,694 --> 00:16:09,088
And like a lot of queer working-class, 
feminists of color, disabled folks, fill in the blank,

270
00:16:09,088 --> 00:16:12,032
we've really led real lives.

271
00:16:12,032 --> 00:16:17,572
My memoir is about me running away from America 
when I was 21 to set a national boundary

272
00:16:17,572 --> 00:16:21,283
between me and my parents and their love 
and their abuse and their internalized racism,

273
00:16:21,283 --> 00:16:26,146
and walking straight into a movement moment 
in Toronto in the late 90's that was filled

274
00:16:26,146 --> 00:16:29,089
with queer feminists of color and Desh Pardesh

275
00:16:29,089 --> 00:16:33,375
which was a revolutionary cross class 
south Asian queer organizing center

276
00:16:33,375 --> 00:16:37,289
and the biggest global diasporic 
Sri Lankan community in the world.

277
00:16:37,289 --> 00:16:40,337
And, y'know, nothing like being in love

278
00:16:40,337 --> 00:16:43,891
with a queer brown crazy boy 
who you're reading Franz Fanon with

279
00:16:43,891 --> 00:16:46,173
who also hits you when he's triggered too;

280
00:16:46,173 --> 00:16:49,092
and that's where my feminism 
and my organizing comes from.

281
00:16:49,092 --> 00:16:50,698
And we need those road maps.

282
00:16:50,698 --> 00:16:52,707
I partly wrote that book because ...

283
00:16:52,707 --> 00:16:56,440
I mean I'm a book nerd and I have an
incredible collection of small press literature

284
00:16:56,440 --> 00:16:59,107
that's currently in a storage unit in Berkley.

285
00:16:59,107 --> 00:17:02,750
The incest survivor and survivor narratives 
that are out there

286
00:17:02,750 --> 00:17:07,326
are often very white, very from 
second-wave feminism, very single-issue,

287
00:17:07,326 --> 00:17:11,881
and I wanted to document all of our true life 
adventure stories of actually how we survive,

288
00:17:11,881 --> 00:17:13,960
in a very complicated way.

289
00:17:13,960 --> 00:17:16,788
Now there's never a moment on this program 
where I don't use the word queer

290
00:17:16,788 --> 00:17:18,229
and someone doesn't email me and say,

291
00:17:18,229 --> 00:17:21,375
"How can you be insulting people. 
What, are you going to use the 'N' word next?"

292
00:17:21,375 --> 00:17:22,635
What does queer mean to you?

293
00:17:22,635 --> 00:17:28,204
Queer means everything that's not straight that's 
in the practice of moving always towards freedom.

294
00:17:28,204 --> 00:17:31,507
So, Leah, you agreed generously to read something 
to us. What are you going to read?

295
00:17:31,507 --> 00:17:34,155
I'm going to read a poem called 
Wrong is Not Yours,

296
00:17:34,155 --> 00:17:36,735
after June Jordan, 
and it's from my new book Body Map.

297
00:17:37,405 --> 00:17:42,022
"One day you are a 22 year-old with 
dread-locked half Desi hair

298
00:17:42,022 --> 00:17:44,962
you decided to lock when you did 
double dip mescaline on New Year's Eve

299
00:17:44,962 --> 00:17:48,605
after staring at pictures of sadhus from south India.

300
00:17:48,605 --> 00:17:53,347
Years before Carol's Daughter in Target or 
Palmer Coconut Hair Milk or Kinky Curly,

301
00:17:53,347 --> 00:17:58,369
and you have no idea what to do 
with all that curly, curly hair.

302
00:17:58,369 --> 00:18:00,602
And you decide you want to change your name

303
00:18:00,602 --> 00:18:02,562
from Albrecht to no more Albrecht.

304
00:18:02,562 --> 00:18:04,617
You want your great grandmothers'.

305
00:18:04,617 --> 00:18:09,456
You are a 22 year-old on a straight diet of nothing 
but Franz Fanon, Marlon Riggs, and Chrystos.

306
00:18:09,456 --> 00:18:13,082
You are a Sri Lankan daughter 
of the Dutch East India company.

307
00:18:13,082 --> 00:18:15,562
You want no more Albrecht.

308
00:18:15,562 --> 00:18:17,164
No more rape in your pelvis.

309
00:18:17,164 --> 00:18:18,763
No more, "Where'd you get that name?"

310
00:18:18,763 --> 00:18:20,726
No more, "Are you adopted?" No more.

311
00:18:20,726 --> 00:18:24,315
Even though your grandmothers whisper, 
"Keep a white name for the passport."

312
00:18:24,315 --> 00:18:28,558
In fact, keep as many passports as possible.

313
00:18:28,558 --> 00:18:30,832
You never know what boat 
you're going to have to get on.

314
00:18:30,832 --> 00:18:33,244
Who you'll have to bullshit in an immigration office.

315
00:18:33,244 --> 00:18:35,892
You'll never know where we'll have to run to.

316
00:18:35,892 --> 00:18:37,854
Make home on. Sip your tea.

317
00:18:37,854 --> 00:18:39,653
Cook your rice. Wait for death.

318
00:18:39,653 --> 00:18:42,809
Looking at an ocean almost like your own.

319
00:18:42,809 --> 00:18:46,457
But you, you want your great grandmothers' name
who eats hot pepper.

320
00:18:46,457 --> 00:18:49,314
Who walked out of Galicia with 13 children.

321
00:18:49,314 --> 00:18:50,976
Your other great grandmother

322
00:18:50,976 --> 00:18:54,690
whose name is a foot-note in a Lankan 
history books' cross-reference index,

323
00:18:54,690 --> 00:18:58,503
you find researching your senior thesis 
on mixed race women in Sri Lanka.

324
00:18:58,503 --> 00:19:01,964
Teachers, union organizers, and sluts, 
every one of us.

325
00:19:01,964 --> 00:19:06,880
And you get something infinitely Google-able. 
And infinitely unpronounceable

326
00:19:06,880 --> 00:19:09,336
except for Ukrainians and Lankans and Dravidians.

327
00:19:09,336 --> 00:19:12,387
And even when Dennis Kucinich runs for president

328
00:19:12,387 --> 00:19:15,499
and puts and Mp3 file on his website 
saying how to say his name

329
00:19:15,499 --> 00:19:19,288
and you think it might be a good idea, too.

330
00:19:19,288 --> 00:19:21,229
Your name is not wrong.

331
00:19:21,229 --> 00:19:23,414
Wrong is not your name.

332
00:19:23,414 --> 00:19:27,041
It is your own. Your own. 
Your own. Your own.

333
00:19:27,041 --> 00:19:27,748
Your.

334
00:19:27,748 --> 00:19:29,429
Own."

335
00:19:29,829 --> 00:19:36,139
Listening to you read Leah, I hear references to home. 
You have the word tattooed on your chest.

336
00:19:36,139 --> 00:19:37,270
[Leah] I do.

337
00:19:37,270 --> 00:19:39,962
June Jordan also wrote a collection 
Moving Towards Home.

338
00:19:39,962 --> 00:19:41,272
What does home mean to you?

339
00:19:41,272 --> 00:19:43,212
Oh, you sucker punched me.

340
00:19:43,212 --> 00:19:47,549
I think that, for those of us who are diasporic, 
home is always a question.

341
00:19:47,549 --> 00:19:50,101
I think that part of the reason why 
I got "home" tattooed there

342
00:19:50,101 --> 00:19:54,056
is that this body is the only thing that 
I'll ever own, and it's on loan.

343
00:19:54,056 --> 00:19:57,355
And I think that for those of us who 
have been forced from our homeland

344
00:19:57,355 --> 00:20:02,128
through, y'know, the top 5 of colonialism: 
rape, genocide, war, imperialism, et cetera,

345
00:20:02,128 --> 00:20:07,503
we carry home in our body's memories. 
In our cells. In our bones.

346
00:20:07,503 --> 00:20:10,503
We make home wherever we are.

347
00:20:10,503 --> 00:20:12,221
Whether it's a prison cell. 
Whether it's Brooklyn.

348
00:20:12,221 --> 00:20:15,165
Whether it's wherever we go 
when we're gentrified out of Brooklyn.

349
00:20:15,165 --> 00:20:17,266
And we make it in the imagination.

350
00:20:17,266 --> 00:20:21,526
And we also get to envision where home's 
going to be that hasn't happened yet.

351
00:20:21,526 --> 00:20:23,687
It doesn't just have to be loss.

352
00:20:23,687 --> 00:20:26,219
It doesn't have to be the thing that 
we're imagining that we want to get back to.

353
00:20:26,219 --> 00:20:30,089
When Palestine is free, it's going to be 
a different place than it was in '48.

354
00:20:30,089 --> 00:20:31,828
Yeah. And we make it with each other.

355
00:20:31,828 --> 00:20:33,349
Right. Exactly.

356
00:20:33,349 --> 00:20:35,431
You can find out more about our guest Leah,

357
00:20:35,431 --> 00:20:40,865
and June Jordan, the Poetry For The People founder 
and professor at UC Berkley at our website.

358
00:20:42,571 --> 00:20:45,449
This is Airport Ode #1
from Body Map.

359
00:20:45,449 --> 00:20:47,511
"the truth is, I ask for the opt out.


360
00:20:47,511 --> 00:20:51,446
I ask for it every single time.

361
00:20:51,446 --> 00:20:56,260
I would rather be patted down by a 60-ish white 
working class woman who looks just like my mom

362
00:20:56,260 --> 00:20:59,216
who I will studiously ma'am and ask about her day,

363
00:20:59,216 --> 00:21:02,781
than to sit sweating waiting for it to happen.

364
00:21:02,781 --> 00:21:05,225
than to have beam of atoms shot through my body

365
00:21:05,225 --> 00:21:10,633
and still get barked aside, patted down, tarot card, 
cock and coconut oil wanded.

366
00:21:10,633 --> 00:21:13,367
Once on my way to a red-eye 
from a performance in a cocktail dress,

367
00:21:13,367 --> 00:21:15,214
you were young and brown and queer

368
00:21:15,214 --> 00:21:19,204
and you said damn, it'll be easy to search you, 
you're hardly wearing anything at all

369
00:21:19,204 --> 00:21:20,597
you complemented my mukkuthi

370
00:21:20,597 --> 00:21:23,352
and because I am a frequent 
queerartbrownlady flier,

371
00:21:23,352 --> 00:21:26,342
you remember me from a week or two ago

372
00:21:26,342 --> 00:21:28,284
this is where we are in 2012:

373
00:21:28,284 --> 00:21:31,861
I chat friendly and deliberate 
with the sister who searches me

374
00:21:31,861 --> 00:21:32,933
legs spread out in front of the other,

375
00:21:32,933 --> 00:21:36,492
the back of the hand on sensitive areas
your zipper line, your bra

376
00:21:36,492 --> 00:21:41,197
casual spread eagle in public as everyone 
hops on shoes, puts laptops back

377
00:21:41,197 --> 00:21:48,579
Not too long ago, every airport line a panic attack, 
every airport four hours sweating armpit rank,

378
00:21:48,579 --> 00:21:53,164
every bus crossing the small room and barking 
guards who don't even pretend to be polite

379
00:21:53,164 --> 00:21:56,656
who go through all your things 
and take you to the glass toilet

380
00:21:56,656 --> 00:22:03,331
Every time they chirp or bark, "I'm going to pat your 
hair now" I go deep inside and all the way out

381
00:22:03,331 --> 00:22:06,752
once, my girlfriend picked me up at the airport 
with a little tupperware of dinner

382
00:22:06,752 --> 00:22:09,633
and fucked me in long term parking 
bent over the hood of her car

383
00:22:09,633 --> 00:22:14,752
I was too nervous to come but 
I loved how she wanted to feed me,

384
00:22:14,752 --> 00:22:16,663
how she wanted to fuck me back

385
00:22:16,663 --> 00:22:24,294
in the middle of all these concrete cameras wands 
scanners fingerprints nexus red blinking eye

386
00:22:24,294 --> 00:22:26,708
this place that hates us."

387
00:22:30,680 --> 00:22:32,879
That was a poem from Leah's new book Body Map,

388
00:22:32,879 --> 00:22:35,680
about which you can get more information 
and find out how to get a copy for yourself

389
00:22:35,680 --> 00:22:37,742
at our website: GRITtv.org

390
00:22:37,742 --> 00:22:39,853
It's hard to imagine an American poet

391
00:22:39,853 --> 00:22:43,779
more celebrated than 4 time 
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost.

392
00:22:43,779 --> 00:22:46,157
Whose most famous poem concludes

393
00:22:46,157 --> 00:22:50,990
"Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I, I took the one less traveled by.

394
00:22:50,990 --> 00:22:53,123
And that has made all the difference."

395
00:22:53,123 --> 00:22:56,562
When the most celebrated poets' 
most well known lines praise difference,

396
00:22:56,562 --> 00:22:58,594
why is it that we're so scared of it?

397
00:22:58,594 --> 00:23:00,119
"Maybe we need more poets."

398
00:23:00,119 --> 00:23:02,955
That's what John F. Kennedy said 
just weeks before his death,

399
00:23:02,955 --> 00:23:06,632
at the groundbreaking of the 
Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.

400
00:23:06,632 --> 00:23:09,873
It was soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis,
the Cold War was raging on,

401
00:23:09,873 --> 00:23:14,107
10 million Americans needed jobs, 
"America needed strength", said Kennedy.

402
00:23:14,107 --> 00:23:16,442
"But strength takes many forms,

403
00:23:16,442 --> 00:23:20,095
and the most obvious forms are 
not always the most significant."

404
00:23:20,095 --> 00:23:21,348
His words.

405
00:23:21,348 --> 00:23:25,517
"The men who create power make an indispensable 
contribution to the nations' greatness,"

406
00:23:25,517 --> 00:23:27,095
the president continued,

407
00:23:27,095 --> 00:23:30,768
"but the men who question power make 
a contribution just as indispensable.

408
00:23:30,768 --> 00:23:34,379
For they determine whether we use power,
or power uses us."

409
00:23:34,379 --> 00:23:38,042
Music and poetry and the arts 
push us, said Kennedy.

410
00:23:38,042 --> 00:23:44,874
"When power leads man toward arrogance, 
poetry reminds him of his limitations.

411
00:23:44,874 --> 00:23:48,369
When power narrows the area of man's concern,

412
00:23:48,369 --> 00:23:53,487
poetry reminds him of the richness 
and diversity of existence."

413
00:23:53,487 --> 00:23:55,850
That was half a century ago.

414
00:23:55,850 --> 00:24:00,393
Today we have entire months 
dedicated to something we call diversity,

415
00:24:00,393 --> 00:24:03,219
including this one, June, LGBTQI Pride.

416
00:24:03,219 --> 00:24:06,895
Except mostly, we don't celebrate diversity.
We celebrate sameness.

417
00:24:06,895 --> 00:24:11,860
We honor all the progress that we lesbian 
gay bisexual and trans Americans have made,

418
00:24:11,860 --> 00:24:15,338
becoming accepted as normal by straight America.

419
00:24:15,338 --> 00:24:18,677
Now I'm for everyone enjoying 
the same rights in these United States,

420
00:24:18,677 --> 00:24:22,467
I support that ongoing project, for everybody.

421
00:24:22,467 --> 00:24:25,016
But I would like to celebrate 
something else this June:

422
00:24:25,016 --> 00:24:27,424
Roads Less Traveled.

423
00:24:27,424 --> 00:24:34,024
Especially the roads less traveled that 
LGBT people have taken, and take daily.

424
00:24:34,024 --> 00:24:37,324
The same old roads will take us 
to the same old places.

425
00:24:37,324 --> 00:24:40,889
It's divergence, 
as the straight white poet once wrote,

426
00:24:40,889 --> 00:24:43,268
that makes all the difference.

427
00:24:43,268 --> 00:24:44,336
Tell me what you think.

428
00:24:44,336 --> 00:24:46,551
Laura@GRITtv.org

429
00:24:46,551 --> 00:24:48,165
And thanks for listening.

430
00:24:57,488 --> 00:24:59,660
Today on the Laura Flanders show,
from the archives,

431
00:24:59,660 --> 00:25:02,975
an interview with author and law professor
Dean Spade.

432
00:25:02,975 --> 00:25:06,874
[Spade] One of the really interesting, 
um, contests, inside trans communities,

433
00:25:06,874 --> 00:25:08,891
and more broadly in queer and trans politics,

434
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is whether or not hate crimes laws actually work.

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[Flanders] And an exclusive preview of

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Spade's new film about pinkwashing.

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[speaker] Israel is gay friendly 
when it serves its purposes...

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[speaker]... every year, chemical pesticides
kill no fewer than 3 million farmers.

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Every day, workplace accidents 
kill no fewer than 10,000 workers.

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Every minute, poverty kills 
no fewer than 15 children.

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These crimes do not show up on the news,

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they are, like wars, normal acts of cannibalism.