Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it. To construct templates for possible futures.
- Audre Lorde
When it comes to public protest, we have an imagination problem. The people who most benefit from white supremacy[1]have controlled what it’s possible for us to imagine by controlling what we see, learn, and experience. When we imagine something, we essentially engage in a mental simulation or representation of various elements drawn from our memory and perception. If you can control those variables, you can control people’s imagination, and control doesn’t just mean limit. It also means you can manipulate the masses into believing they’re changing the world when they’re instead building the moat for you around your castle.
To crystalize the goals and results of this thousands years project, think about a quote from a proponent of this process: a school principal in Canada. In the late 19th century, the Canadian government forcibly interned hundreds of thousands of Native children over seven generations in Indian Residential Schools. In 1957, the principal of Gordon’s Reserve school in Saskatchewan described the purpose of his school as creating an environment where the Native children would have no choice but to think as white people wanted them to think. Another thought leader in this movement aimed to achieve the goal expressed by Gordon by surrounding the kidnapped children “almost twenty-four hours a day with non-Indian Canadian culture through radio, television, public address system, movies, books, newspapers, [and] group activities….” In such an environment backed by the well-documented violence of Indian Residential Schools, Native children could rebel in any way they could conceive, but they would be unable to conceive in any terms but white terms.
Growing up in prison honed a weapon the state didn’t intend for me to have; it brings to mind a Dostoevsky quote. "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." I would revise his statement to say that the systems of power operating in a society can be seen the clearest in its prisons. When you are a powerless population, like Native American children stolen from their parents, Power grows arrogant enough to stop effectively hiding its face. Imagine what that meant for me: a systems thinker trained in writing, performance, journalism, history, philosophy, religion, and political theory. I had the training to see oppression’s naked mechanisms, and I took a mental catalogue. With that catalogue, I witnessed something frightening watching TV in my cell or reading the news or talking to guards and volunteers coming in and out of the prison. The same dynamics enslaving me in prison daily played out in the world – in families, workplaces, schools, in churches, mosques, and synagogues.
I haven’t included the grisly details of Indian Residential Schools here, but in my criminal “justice” work, I have shared the details with people. When I do, blood drains from their faces. I’m never sure how to react because I know the same imagination-seizing processes have been operating on their psyche since they were an egg in their grandma’s womb. They don’t recognize it because in the free world the wolf wears their grandmother’s clothes. My deepest yearning in these moments is to help them see how prisons, police, courts, and legislative halls aren’t just components of a criminal legal system. They’re an integrated system of disposal and control honed and refined on disregarded people in something like a laboratory setting, and the dark wisdom that arises is deployed against the entire world. I’ve yet to feel convincing in these conversations; I’m up against their imaginations. Which means I’m 44 years of my unpopular wisdom against two millennia of accumulated cunning from the brightest minds white supremacy has had to offer.
When I say “convince,” I don’t mean it in an intellectual sense. They understand what I’m saying. If they don’t outright agree, they at least don’t deny it. What I mean is they don’t really let a new mental lens set. They turn away from it, defray the reality, by focusing on the next crisis that doesn’t require them to focus on the controlling problem: i.e., we’re children playing checkers while the nuclear-powered empires of the world are playing chess. I empathize. I also feel rage – at them, myself, and at the elegant design of white supremacy. I know that they wouldn’t turn away if I could offer them a solution. I can’t. I don’t have the imagination either; I know it, and so I feel doubly powerless. I keep having the conversations, keep facing my own grief because in prison I also learned strategies to work around the imagination challenge.
In Notes From an Abolitionist, I use my life as a metaphor — particularly how I decided at 19-years-old to write my way out of prison — to illustrate how and why Radical Orientation changes intractable conditions without the need for the practitioner to know how at the outset. It’s part of a four-part equation[2] of radical transformation that I’ve used to such powerful, inexplicable effects that I call it a magic spell. I offer the seven-minute, free essay version here: create a North Star from a sound framework – more on that in a moment – and move toward it. Sound frameworks aren’t necessarily complete frameworks, so the process is iterative, experimental. The imagination challenge disables us; so with incomplete frameworks, we should expect to veer off course; learn through self-reflection, community, and accountability; and correct course. Eventually the framework will be complete, as will our imaginations.
During my first ten years in prison, I spent a lot of time in my cell writing my way out of prison, 12 to 16 hours at a time. People from my affinity group – Black men from California’s Bay Area – would stop by my cell and ask what I was doing. “Working on my fantasy novel,” I would say. They would stare at me, reading beneath my words. My community is very sensitive to what’s beneath the surface. We have to be. What they saw: a boy in prison for murder who believed he would get out of prison by publishing a novel about dragons and elves. “Nobody gives a fuck about you writing a book,” they often said.[3] Because white America has created a myth about how Black people keep each other down, I have to pause here for some cultural clarification. These men were not putting me down; they tried to teach me in their imperfect way that wishful thinking threatened my survival. I could no more convince them of what I knew than I could convince the horrified faces that the forces arrayed against Native children’s minds were qualitatively the same as those arrayed against every person in the country. I know these men weren’t putting me down, that in fact, they respected this thing about me that they didn’t understand. I know because these same men, afterwards, would stop by my cell to ask, “You need anything, youngster?” These same men stopped by to confirm my safety when the guards moved a man into my cell known to rape his young room mates. Many years later, the same men turned a blind eye when I sat down during a racial riot – a violation of prison decorum punishable by death.
What makes a sound framework to arrive at a North Star? Clarity. In my systems change work, whether it’s shifting the way jails operate or changing the way journalists report, clarity is always the first stage. I devour information to map the social and political landscape; understand the history of how the landscapes developed; and through a lens that encompasses past, present, and probable future; I identify the elements that entrench the status quo. Clarity about high-stakes, intractable problems can be terrifying because they often feel impossible to solve. They feel impossible because we have been conditioned to over rely on our captured imaginations. The next stage, then, of the equation is courage, the capacity to not turn away because once we’ve turned away, we’ve lost clarity. When we turn away, even for a moment, the opposition rearranges the pieces on the board. We must make a priority of building our capacity to sit in terror and uncertainty. If we do, we’ll find our capacity to perform miracles.
The third part of the equation is integrity, first to build that capacity to perform miracles and then to act from it with Radical Orientation. From these three components – Clarity, Courage, and Integrity – comes radical transformation. I suspect we’ve discovered a universal law. I, of course, can’t prove that, but let’s examine one of the many examples of how it has functioned in my life.
My North Star in prison: write my way out of prison.
Clarity. I had a lawful life sentence, and only a politician, judge, or warden had the power to release me. No politician would release me. Politicians of that time either derived power from the country’s tough-on-crime agenda or they feared being a target of that agenda. No judge would help me because I was guilty, and no warden would release me because I represented the human capital upon which prison systems depend to exist. All the people who could release me from prison were my opposition. I would need to win someone powerful over, but I had no meaningful way of interacting with powerful people. I needed emissaries to interact for me, but because I’d grown up in prison, I didn’t have a social network outside of prison. Even if I’d had people to speak for me, they’d be the emissaries of a boy indistinguishable in most minds from the stereotype of Angry Black Thug. The most formidable problem in this constellation of helplessness was the racist, tough-on-crime culture that dominated American discourse.
I often describe culture as the soil in which we plant our seeds for liberation, and if the soil is poison, what grows from the seeds will be poisonous. It felt impossible to develop any strategy for my freedom that wouldn’t die in the soil. I felt doomed.
I’m never quite able to explain to people how I felt doomed every day in prison, and yet I moved through the world with a hope and purpose indistinguishable from my understanding of delusion. Whatever quality exists at the root of this ability and the power it gave me to change my world and the world around me, it developed in the second stage of radical transformation.
Courage. Helplessness can be paralyzing. That’s why so many people turn away when I describe the terrifying realities of white supremacy. What happens if we build[4] the courage to sit in the terror. Breathe and let it have us. Breathe and watch terror’s mechanisms. Catalogue them. What I learned getting to know my own helplessness, learned on an internal level deeper than I’d accessed through reading or education or listening to Ted Talks, was that helplessness is a feeling, not a state of affairs.
This realization led to the first tenet of Radical Orientation: the practitioner assumes possibility. When I assumed possibility at 19-years-old, I experienced it as a leap of faith. Now, in my 40s, I understand the tenet as more pragmatism than faith. My situation in prison felt impossible because I hadn’t yet discovered that in the realm of human creation, collective imagination determines possibility. Arguably technology, social dynamics, and resources define what we can create. My rebuttal is two-fold. First, these other determinants can all be viewed as stemming from the history of our collective imagination. That is, they or their uses are products of our imaginations. Which brings us back to the problem of our captive imaginations. I couldn’t over rely on my imagination and succeed because the status quo had shaped it to preserve the status quo. If we take our experiences of impossibility for granted, then we have no chance of discovering a solution. If we assume possibility, then we can win. Second, usually when someone says “that’s impossible,” they’re referring to conditions at a static point in time, but life isn’t static. It exists on a timeline, and time changes all conditions. Something in 19-year-old me understood that.
Radical transformation. My conditions made it impossible for me to write my way out of prison. I committed to Radical Orientation, and when time changed the soil wherein my seeds grew, I was ready. The same holds true for liberation work. Today, we’re up against the most powerful forces of oppression in recorded history, but opportunities to deal a decisive blow will come. But we have to be ready. The reason I try not to use ableist language, why I use human-centered language like “incarcerated person” rather than “prisoner,” isn’t because I think changing language alone will end white supremacy. I do it for two reasons: one, I recognize that since colonizers weaponized language’s power to define our realities, creating new language can help free our minds. Two, I know that we can’t wait to build that language until we’re close to defeating the enemy because that represents a state of unpreparedness. And if we’re not prepared when our opportunities come, we’ll likely lose them.
I spent most of my incarceration preparing to discover a way out of prison. I quite selling and doing drugs because that lifestyle decision had led me in and out of prison all through my childhood. I stopped gambling because a dice game argument triggered the murder I’d committed. I refused to carry a knife in prison because I practiced quiet pacifism. I took a vow of truth telling. I saved the little money I made from writing and endured day-to-day sub-poverty, and I meditated like a monk in Japan. People often asked me why I lived the way that I did. I would tell them that I didn’t know how I’d get out of prison, but when the time came, I had to be ready.
I didn’t necessarily need all these practices to get out of prison, but I ran them like experiments. I measured all outcomes by whether they made me more qualified for freedom or made more tools for opponents to keep me inside. Experimentation created new experiences; new experiences expanded my imagination. I deployed that growing imagination against my problem’s defining conditions: i.e., I had no way to convince power brokers to release me; I didn’t know anyone who could do it for me. Prison, by function, isolated me which stole my social power, and even if I solved for isolation, America’s tough-on-crime culture didn’t support the release of Angry Black Thug.
I started by building a writing career, so I could you use it to shatter stereotypes about me. The stereotype was the only issue I could engage, but every solution represented distance traveled toward my freedom. I understood that the further I traveled, the more I would experience, and the more I experienced, the more I would be able to create new pathways forward. New opportunities opened that I hadn’t imagine before; editors loved working with me because they liked me. Through both them and my growing readership I developed robust social networks. I had emissaries. Being a good writer translated into being a good educator and public speaker. I began co-designing curricula with professors and teaching their college undergrads, piping my voice into their classrooms over the phone. My networks grew. I became more political because writing also made me good with comms and narrative strategy, so I got involved with legislative policy.
Around this time, I realized the solutions to tough-on-crime culture had – forgive the cliché – been with me all along! Tough-on-crime had been built on narrative strategy, so it could be dismantled with counter narrative strategies. Imagine me smiling. I went to work thinking through the elements that perpetuated the culture and settled on two: public fear and politicians who used that fear as currency. I put my comms at the disposal of the grassroots organizers and organizations who had been fighting mass incarceration for decades and focused my writing projects to support two goals. Shift public fear of incarcerated people to public empathy and reveal the relationship between politicians’ tough-on-crime tactics and systemic racism. Success with these goals would transform tough-on-crime rhetoric from political currency into a political liability.
Then, it happened. Tough-on-crime proponents overplayed their hand. Mass incarceration began to cost the U.S. more dollars than voters wanted to pay, and the U.S.’s War on Drugs incarcerated one too many sons of prominent white families. Progressive decarceration movements surged in California. The door cracked open temporarily, and I was ready.
I began this essay by naming the imagination problem with public protest. Embedded in this statement lives my belief that modern protest is ineffective and often undermines our ability to effect lasting change. It’s ineffective because we haven’t been clear about what it is, what it can achieve, and what it could accomplish if we apply the framework of radical transformation. Next month, in Part Two of this essay, I’ll explore the question. I made the decision to publish the first essay for free subscribers, but only paid subscribers will have access to Part Two. I wish I could publish all my work for free, but if you read the first essay and find my analysis useful, I ask that you become a paid subscriber because that’s how I’m able to continue this work.
[1] I define white supremacy as something beyond Anglo domination; I understand it as a metaphor for power. For more on this viewpoint see my February’s essay on this Substack, Invisible Threads.
[2] Clarity + Courage + Integrity = Radical Transformation.
[3] Often but not always. Some men would just nod with a “keep your head up” look on their face.
[4] I say “build” because it’s an iterative process of running away, as is natural, but then coming back. Every return is another brick of building. Every brick of building increases our capacity to never run away again.
Thank you for sharing this -- your story and your framework for radical transformation -- so boldly and bravely! Can't wait to keep learning with you!