Livestreamed on May 30th, 2021

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Full Transcript:

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Beverly Bain: 

Good evening, and welcome to a final session in the series Anti-Asian Racism Undone titled Creating Otherwise Worlds Relations, Abolition And Freedom. I'm coming to you from Toronto, the traditional territory of many nations including Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. Part of the title of this session, which is Creating Otherwise Worlds, was taken from the edited collection by Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith. In that collection, the authors challenged how native genocide, anti-Blackness and slavery while having distinct edges, while antagonism exists, these terms are often shaped and presumed as terms of incommensurability, meaning lacking commonality, and relationality. 

 

We heard from several speakers and panels over the weekend on the intimacies, proximities and relationality of Asians in the diaspora, but particularly in terms of relationships to Blacks and Indigenous people in the context of living, working and culture. This panel will move us through conversations on how we together, as Black, Indigenous, and Asians, imagine decolonial and Black and Indigenous futures, creating otherwise rules that would make new forms of life possible, to quote Rinaldo Walcott, in terms of the future that we move, that abolition does, and Dionne Brand, the spaces and practices we employ, not spaces of reform, but newness, making otherwise. 

 

So let me now introduce our panelists. Erica Violet Lee is a nêhiyaw scholar, writer, and urban Indigenous community organizer from Saskatoon. She holds a graduate degree in Social Justice Education from OISE at the University of Toronto. 

 

El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was born in Wales and grew up in Winnipeg. She was Halifax's Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015. Her book, Live From the Afrikan Resistance! published in 2014 by Roseway, an imprint of Fernwood Publishing, is a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. In 2015, she was a resident at the International Writing Program at University of Iowa. Her work focuses on social justice issues such as feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism, and decolonization.

 

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Border and Rule, Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism and Undoing Border Imperialism. She is also the co-author of Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration as well as Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Harsha has organized in grassroots migrant justice, anti capitalist, feminist, abolitionist, Indigenous solidarity and anti-imperialist movements for two decades and remains committed to imagining and building worlds anew.

 

Ian Tian is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto, researching race, gendered labor, and the question of the human in China's socialist communes and global factories. He has experience in organizing labor and queer activism in China, and abolitionist and migrant justice issues in settler Canada, particularly queer refugees, and migrations. 

 

Welcome, all, welcome! I want to start by asking you, each of you, and in the order of the introduction, to say something about the work you do, and why that work is critical in this moment. So, Erica.

 

Erica Violet Lee: 

Thank you for those introductions. Beverly. So it's such an honor to be here with everyone on this panel today, I think it's a critical moment to be talking about anti-Asian racism in all of our communities, whether Black, Indigenous, people of color, and especially for white folks who are tuned in to be cognizant of this moment and reckoning with the colonial legacies that we all share in common. So the work that I do is centered a lot in the inner city in Saskatoon, and in urban Indigenous communities. And so often, we don't have the luxury of theory, it feels like we don't have space for the luxury of theory, of sitting with our relatives in ways that aren't centered on settler colonialism. And I think about that a lot as a nêhiyaw person, how our relationality are completely centered on reconciliation with white settlers. And how we're not taught to imagine anything else. 

 

And so even just in the past few years, I think since my grad degree, have I really begun to do the research and the self education, and build the relationality as necessary to become a good relative to folks that aren't white. And obviously, I've always had people of color, Black folks and other Indigenous folks in my life. But to think about those relationalities in a meaningful way, that is based on freedom for us all, that is based on what we each need in our communities, and articulating what we each need in our communities, and not waiting around for white folks to be nice to us, to give us that space, to grant us the ability to build connections beyond them, is what I've been thinking about a lot lately in my work. So yeah, I guess that's all I'll leave it there.

 

El Jones: 

Thank you, Erica. You're always so humble when you speak. And you always want to locate yourself within so many different relations. And I really want to highlight that because you always speak that way. You always put yourself within a web of other people and other people's work and within community, and that's so important to hear. And I just wanted to say that, every time I'm on a panel with you. I want to speak about my work. 

 

I want to talk about my family for a minute because I think it actually locates me. So I often speak quite a lot about my grandmother who was an African Trinidadian woman, and really gave me the nurturing pole of my work. So she was like a saintly woman. She was the classic Black woman that ran the house on nothing, raised the children, dealt with all the trauma, prayed it out, and then kept moving in life and obviously brought us to where we are today. I perhaps speak less about my grandfather sometimes, and in particularly in context of this event, I wanted to raise it because my grandfather's the political voice, and he was a Chinese Trinidadian. So African Chinese mix, the Chinese blood coming out of the Taiping Rebellion - because if there's one thing about the Jones family is that we got kicked out of like every single country in the world at some point for fomenting revolution, including like Martinique, Haiti China, like wherever we were we were doing something - and that's how my grandfather's family initially ends up in Trinidad. A bunch of that family actually go back into China and I was quite involved in Sun Yat-sen’s government. So, keep up the revolutionary spirit. And they actually have some African Chinese blood that then kind of moves around that government, which is kind of interesting. 

 

But why it's interesting in this context is because like I said, my grandmother was a African, dark skinned woman, and came from those traditions. My grandfather actually very much wanted to integrate this kind of idea of the Chinese culture and his African culture together. And one of the things he contributed was the Dragon Mas at carnival. So, really thinking of us in the context of this global migration. And of course, his work, he was a trade unionist, he was a political singer, I see that blood in my veins too. So as we sit here today to think about Stop Asian hate, the relationship to Indigenous solidarity, the relationship to the movement for Black Lives, something that I don't necessarily talk about a lot, but of course, I'm very located within the threads of that diaspora with an Asian diaspora within Black diaspora - even though of course, I identify as Black most prominently - part of that political thread comes through these different migrancies in different movements, and the ways of course that our cultures and had to come together and create. Especially in a country like Trinidad, which was until the mid-20th century, actually the most diverse country on Earth, in terms of those different hybrid identities. So that has actually really influenced my positioning. 

 

So in the work that I do, which I think is ever changing, which I think is part of the work of Black woman, so whenever you say what is your work, you're like, in this moment? or like over time? Sometimes it's fighting deportation, always working with people in prison, always working with people facing state violence, always trying to work within community. Obviously, that work changes over time, and as we are and as we mix our positions, but the main thrust of my work is always within abolition, which means that we have to be focused on the state and state violence. And one of the things that's of course, been very disturbing in this moment, is how effectively in Canada and elsewhere - so within the broader the Black Lives Matter global network, which has, of course, been dealing with this issue of, where's the money gone? 

 

And now, one of the things I want to relate to as well is, I've been talking about how so effectively in the last year, our movement in Canada has been switched from fighting state violence, to talking about entrepreneurship and business almost exclusively. So how do we move from the space of Black people are dying because they've been killed by the police, and we need to abolish the police. And we need to abolish the prison. I mean, we need to connect that to like the military and imperialism, we need to think about Indigenous sovereignty. How did all of that move to “Trudeau just needs to give us money to start some businesses?” Even my mother pointed this out to me, she's like, Oh, I was reading the Globe and Mail and it's all business like, what does that have to do with anything? Why - we already have childcare! 

 

So I actually want to locate us in this moment, and also talk about - in talking about my work, which is abolitionist work, what that means in this particular moment, as we somehow allowed a movement for Black lives to become so pro capitalist, so entirely tied up in the idea of like, wealthy Black business being the savior, and these corporate figures that have stepped in and completely derailed what we're doing. And of course, abolition work is committing to something much broader than “replace white capitalism with Black capitalism.” Oh the people that kill Black people in mines in Africa will somehow come save us now. Right, like, this idea, which is also of course, as we move into this corporate business space is of course, businesses making their money off Indigenous lives and Black lives. Oil companies are now trying to be diverse, mining companies are saying that they have diverse boards, right. And the people's lives that are at expense in this are Indigenous Black people racialized people around the globe. 

 

So in this moment, as abolitionists, we need to constantly, constantly, constantly recommit to what it is that we are actually fighting for. And we are actually fighting against capitalist power, we are fighting against patriarchy, we are fighting against punishment. We are fighting against these hierarchies in capitalism that deem some people disposable, that deem all workers interchangeable, and create this idea of a global proletariat. If we lose sight of that we are not doing any abolition work. And we cannot I think in this moment, stand up and speak about Black lives with any kind of straight face and claim that the most powerful and privileged people are who should be heard from this time and not, of course, the people living in shelters, the people living in prisons, the people living in tent cities, and people facing all kinds of destruction, damage and life threatening conditions from capitalism. So I'll stop there as well. And I don't know who's next, I'm sorry. Harsha, I think.

 

Harsha Walia: 

Thank you. I was trying to my find my reactions. For El, as always. Thank you. Thank you all. Yes, I was trying to find fire, I could just find a party hat. Oh, Erica has got it to. Thank you, thank you all. It's It's such an honor. And thank you, Beverly and Min Sook, for convening this. And again, just all of your care and labor in this second series of Scholar Strike events, and all the brilliant work and everyone on this panel, I'm so honored. 

 

And in terms of my work, I don't really know, to be honest. What that work is because I think, perhaps similar to others here, and many of us who are in movement and in community, the work is always multiplying. And always of course, interwoven, struggle is in so many realms. But maybe what I can offer is a few things. And one is that a lot of the work that I've done over the past 20 years has been generally in the context of Migrant Justice and really an anti-border politics, that is anti-capitalist, anti-colonial. And when I came to these territories, and for several years had precarious status and was under a deportation order, the communities that sheltered me literally were Indigenous nations, including elder Wolverine Ignace of the Secwepemc nation who has since passed on, who was seeking out ways for me to gain status in his nation and his community - and received that welcome and I mean, welcome in a genuine way, not the Justin Trudeau “refugees welcome” way. 

 

But that relationship, that kinship, that reciprocity, for me has always guided me in the context of trying to understand and think about what it means to be Asian, if you will, on these territories in a way that understands what that means; what that means in kinship to Indigenous nations, what it means to reject immigration laws, as they have been developed by the Canadian settler state, the anti-Indigeneity, the anti-Black racism, that's inherent to immigration systems, the system of global apartheid, and what it means to then come to these territories and become part of trying to build something different, right? Of pledging allegiance, not to the settler state, pledging allegiance, not to Canadian ”multiculturalism” or the facade of reconciliation, or assimilation, but to really pledge resistance to struggle for liberation. And for me, that's really informed my sense of struggle, and by that I mean informed my sense of struggle in a constellation of people who have informed that work, certainly not alone. 

 

I've also spent a lot of time in feminist organizations, explicitly anti-violence organizations in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. And I think there is nothing that will, if you aren't already, that will convince you towards the necessity of abolition in the inheritance of Black feminist struggle, than being in a women's anti-violence organization, right? All of the kinds of responses about “what are we going to do without police?” “How are we going to respond to gender based violence?” “What are we going to do about the rapists?” When you're deeply in that work, day in, day out, you know that that is the work that the cops are the least concerned about. Day in and day out, that is the work that people in community are doing. And I've had the immense honor and privilege of being connected to Indigenous women and girls and Two Spirit people who've literally led the way in the Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to find their kin, day in day out, as an act of ceremony as an act of love, walk the streets every night. And that's not where the cops are, that's where community is. And so that every day abolitionist present, is an inheritance as well. And I've had the honor of being part of.

 

I'd say perhaps the last thing for me that I feel is really important for me in this moment, and always, is internationalist struggle. And I think oftentimes we kind of go between the local and the global in ways that don't always see how they're mutually constituted through each other. My family is - this month marks the anniversary of the Sikh genocide in India, and also six months of predominantly sick and Punjabi farmers, who have surrounded the capital of Delhi. And all these struggles are distinct, but they're made through similar legacies of violence, of imperialism, of colonialism, of extraction of racial capitalism. And so for me, internationalist struggle is part of our lives. It's part of, of course, who we are as people who move and who migrate and who are displaced. And we carry that in our lives all the time. And I think it's also a necessity of how we - in order to build a world anew, we have to see how the world is connected, right? What are the ways in which global violence binds us? And also, global kinship binds us. I don't want to live in a world where the only connection I have to someone halfway across the world is through violence, where they've literally built my clothes in a sweatshop, and that's all I know about them. And so how can we think about a world differently where instead of these networks that are soaked in deep violence, that we can build international solidarity as a legacy of resistance here, and knowing of course, that's not new. That's part of our inheritance already. But for me, I'm in this moment, very thoughtful about rekindling those and relearning those as well. Thank you.

 

Ian Tian: 

And thank you, everybody. It's such an honor to be with so many impressive and great minds and thoughts together. But I do want to first acknowledge the land that I'm sitting right now has been for thousands of years, the traditional land of the Huron Wendat, the Seneca and the Mississaugas of the Credit. And I'm saying this, because I came to what we know as Toronto four years ago. And I'm still learning about histories of Indigenous peoples across the Turtle Island, and feeling very humbled to be able to be on this land. And what that means for me specifically, is also that my hometown is actually part of what we know as French Indochina. So that is an intimate relationship between the French Empire in Asia and the French Empire, in what we know as Quebec or French speaking part of Canada. 

 

I think, like everybody, my work is also kind of all over the place. So I have a large bulk of my work has been labor and queer organizing in China. So I was raised and grew up in China. And my University years, I was organizing labor strikes and protests, specifically, in the south part of China, where a lot of electronic gadgets are produced. A lot of these workers are women. And they produce things like iPhones that we use, especially the outsourced labour in this industry are quite, quite harsh and exploitative. And this points to why I think this work is important, because I think anti-Asian racism has been global since its inception. In a way, those women who are producing these iPhones are connected with the kind of process of anti-Asian racism here in Canada. And I will tell you why. I think there is a certain kind of Asian roboticism that tends to treat Asians labor as robots in this capitalist popular culture. And in the in the case of China, especially with China's million plus populations under the communist rule that appears as the most extreme antidote of the American way of life, US and Canadian youth often portray the developing nation like China as being populated by extraordinarily mind controlled and hardworking populations, oftentimes as these mechanics and as these clocks in a system of capitalist production. And this is so intimately connected to how, I guess Chinese labor were perceived by the Canadian states in the reopening the railway constructions, which are documented by scholars like Ikyo Day. 

 

And the second, my interest in my work has been thinking about the question of the human, because I think white liberal humanism is not the way to save us. And in particular, and thinking about how China's 30 years of social experiences tell us about revolution, embodied freedom and other kinds of relationality and prefigurative politics. So in this sense, I'm thinking about how a situated knowledge rooted in ordinary people's experiences with state socialism between 1949 and 1979, contribute to a more transnational reworking of the question of the human, the reworking of white supremacy Eurocentrism, and a reworking of our current anti-capitalist politics. And that's, I can talk more about that, but that's what I'm more interested in. Great.

 

Beverly Bain: 

Thank you. Wonderful, thank you so much. As I'm listening to all of you speak, and one of the things that have become clear, and I think, Lisa Lowe, who's an Asian American scholar, and people might have heard of her, actually spoke to the fact that the colonial rulers, particularly saw those of us as dangerous, particularly in terms of meaning Blacks, enslaved Blacks, Indigenous, indentured workers who are non-white, saw us all as dangerous, particularly the sexual laboring and intellectual contacts that we've had. Which is actually where we've seen in the West, where we have been pretty much demarked off with ethnicity, and the way in which ethnic relations, multiculturalism and all of the state’s liberal policies have shaped all of us into these particular isolated groups, have changed the narrative or rewritten the narrative, to assume that there have not been contact relationships, that we have not been, that we have not shared, particular kinds of relationships with each other, sexual, intellectual, labor, culture, etc. And those things are evident. 

 

However, we want to talk about some of the antagonisms, though, in terms of our relations. How do we then talk about the antagonism that belie the kinds of relations that we experience today? And I think El, you actually gestured to some of that as capitalism, which is the underlying and white supremacy, which has underlying factors that have actually shaped the way in which our relationships have played out. The way that that anti-Black racism work, the way the anti-Asian racism work, the way that anti-Indigenous, violence, colonialism - the way that colonialism and slavery has shaped the Americas. And all of these foundational aspects have shaped our relationships, shaped our relationships in relation to capital and to white supremacy. Thus we understand that Black people in particular, in the diaspora and globally, are shaped, as those who are commodified and are owned and possessed through a form of capitalist relationship. Rinaldo Walcott talks about that in his book On Property. 

 

So I want to ask each of you to talk about what it means when we talk about being in relations with each other, and to seriously unpack that, and for us to really talk about the commensurability, which is the fact that we do have commonalities, but there are some antagonism that forces us apart. And part of what we're trying to do here is to untangle, disentangle some of that, and to try to start thinking about how we build otherwise worlds that actually will also be based on care, and ethical worlds. So let's talk about what it means in terms of building relations in relation to abolition, to Indigenous sovereignty, to liberation, to freedom. Let's talk about that. 

 

El Jones: 

Both you and Ian pointed out something that's fundamental and I think kind of obvious, but important to reiterate, which is this idea of how white supremacy is always designated as interracial roles. So when I talk to my students, I would say it's like Star Trek. Like, I know, quite literally, that is what Star Trek is founded on. Right? Vulcans are supposed to be Asians and Klingons are supposed to be Muslims. And then never shall there be anybody out in those racial groups that's different, because everybody's the same. And then in the Star Trek world, humans are the white people who may not be the best at everything, but they have imagination. It just glues everything together. And that's, of course, the racial narrative of settler colonialism, right? So you can read about the British going into India and being like, yeah, the Indians will beat us on exams, if we have free and fair exams, but just because they're nerds like not because hey, like understand the world, right? But this continues to shuffle us around in particular ways. 

 

And so this is what Erica was also talking about, right? That we so inevitably surrender our discourse into the discourse of whiteness, that we are all only placed and defined in relationship to white people, and never in relationship to each other. So when we talk about Indigenous solidarity, we're almost fundamentally think of it through this white lens and not what does it mean to be Black and be in solidarity with Indigenous people with our specific histories? What does it mean for Black and Asian people, Black and Indian people, Black and Chinese to go Black and Vietnamese people, like all separately? What does that mean, as we come together, and we don't have that conversation, because we've been so pushed off into these different modes. And of course one of those is the idea of the model minority. And this is where a lot of the tension comes from, of course, because Black people are almost never allowed to be That model minority, we are at the bottom, Indigenous people are at the bottom. 

 

And then the idea is, of course, in the settler colonial imagination, which imagines these empty worlds into which pioneers come in and all the rest of us are latecomers. So Indigenous people have been erased - I'm getting told to slow down, I'll try and talk slower. So in the settler colonial imagination, Indigenous people are erased from the land. And then all brown people are, Black people are imagined as late comers who owe generous thankfulness to Canada's generosity and benevolence, right. And so under this mode, this means people get written into the idea of being the grateful immigrant, the hard working immigrant. And of course, as Ian has highlighted, this completely occludes all the exploitation of capitalism under - as if people want to come and work in a convenience store for 20 hours a day, or serve food for 21 hours a day, as if that's some ideal. And then, of course, that keeps pushing this ideal of a particular kind of labor on us that we're never supposed to imagine ourselves beyond. We're never allowed to imagine ourselves in leisure, or having pleasant times or relaxing. We're all supposed to imagine the work and then my immigrants sort of brought in as the thing to be held up, like, what are you complaining about? Because this Chinese person has a PhD, but he's driving a cab or whatever, right? And like, this is supposed to be like something we're supposed to look at that instead of looking at the system that makes that happen, and who's excluded and who gets to come in, and why do we have a point system, and what is the racist history of that, and that all gets excluded into this idea of holding up labor. 

 

So yeah, in a place like Nova Scotia, where there's a historical Black population that has been here for like 400 years, obviously on top of the Mi'kmaq population on whose territory this is, which is unceded, unsurrendered - hat becomes a particularly tense dialogue, because this is one of the issues even with newer coming Black people as well, right, and that becomes this read of, “Why can’t African Nova Scotians pull themselves up? How come these people are still living in poverty? I come from a country that doesn't even have social welfare, and we work hard, and I can't believe that these people in Nova Scotia so living with this.” Instead of like, looking at the 400 plus history of white supremacy, which as the first site of Black contact in North Americas, were also the most intensely white supremacist site of contact, including, of course, Cornwallis committing genocide upon the Mi'kmaq population, through scalping proclamations, literally wiping people out to 1,200 Myanmar people at one point. 

 

So I think this is where we need to be attentive - because of respectability politics you want to say, okay, well these people are hardworking, these people are good, they're respectable, they do this - and then the rest of us are the embarrassments. And if we could only be harder workers and stop complaining, then we could be like those immigrants, and that's where so much of this tension comes from. 

 

And this is the last thing I'll say on this, because I know other people have things to put in - but this is what Noel Ignatiev and others have talked about - that whiteness is conferred on you in return for consent to state violence, right? So when we look at the history of the Irish, who are anti-colonial, anti-English, in solidarity with Africans, and then when they come to the Americas, they exchange that for whiteness, and they start committing violence upon Black workers. And we've seen this over and over again, the question of white Jewish people, and are they white or not? And like, what does that mean, and where the solidarity goes? And we're seeing this now with Asian people as well, I'm using that as a broad term, I know that's not - There's often this sense of like, how close are like Chinese to white, and can you achieve a white status if you just get enough education and work hard? And of course, who does that leave behind? Right? 

 

So this is where we always have to, not just from an abolitionist lens, but from a solidarity lens, we have to put state violence front and center because we understand that in the state violence, they want Black people to concede to narratives around Indigenous people, right? Like, oh Indigenous people get all this? We are Black, why don't you get that? And that's divide and rule. Right. So these are some of the sources that we really have to think about how white supremacy has, from time, operated this way. And we have to try and shift that lens for ourselves. I'll stop talking, and I'm sorry, captioner. I know I'm fast. I'm trying to slow down.

 

Beverly Bain: 

Harsha or Erica or Ian, who wants to go next? Erica, do you mind?

 

Erica Violet Lee: 

Of course. Yeah, thank you for that. That's so much to think about. So what I'm thinking about right now is what Bev gave us, the provocation that Bev started, which was thinking about relations, and the messiness of relations and the necessary, and talking about the antagonisms that occur, just by virtue of us living in the same area by like existing in the same space. And that actually being such a beautiful thing, and a thing to be embraced, I remember talking about - and I should be clear that I don't mean hate between us, I mean the difficulties we will necessarily encounter on our way to learning how to care for one another properly. 

 

I remember talking to an Indigenous feminist scholar, who told me, I was being critical of some other Indigenous feminist scholar’s work and thinking, well, she could have done this different than she could have done this different, I was quite young at the time. And this more senior scholar said to me, isn't it amazing that we have the luxury now of there being enough of us to critique each other's work and each other's like, each other's production and each other's viewpoints? Like isn't that magical? And that just has changed the way I thought of things forever. 

 

And I see that as sort of an underlying concept of treaties moving forward. And so treaty scholarship is so huge on the prairies in the land currently referred to as Canada. And so that's what I grew up in is learning about treaties, the number treaties, specifically, I should say, between Indigenous people and the Crown, between First Nations people and the Crown. And those treaties for us were the formation and the foundation of starting to consider ourselves as Indigenous people only within the context and in comparison to white folks. Like, these number treaties exist, therefore, the main relationship that matters in our lives has to be that one between us and the Crown subjects, aka white folks, white Canadian folks, specifically, because no one else really fits the bill. 

 

And so I think of treaty gatherings and how they're starting to come back, and treaty gatherings - well, they never disappeared, but they were definitely not allowed to happen during the eras of Indian agents, not allowing Indigenous people to gather because it was considered, like, a declaration of war, basically, if more than a few of us gathered together at a time. And so I think of those treaty gatherings and how cool it would be to have gatherings where we weren't always on display, or performing for white folks, performing reconciliation. I see this even happening now, now that Black and Indigenous solidarity is becoming sort of a trendy thing to talk about. And necessarily, it's becoming a thing to talk about. But I worry that so often the people that have the money to pay us to talk about these things are white people. And so often they're in the room, they're in control of the conversation, and therefore dictating that conversation. So yeah, that's just one one thing I'm thinking about. And then another thing, especially during COVID, those gatherings have been basically stopped altogether. And so what are we doing moving forward? And I think it gives us a great opportunity to disrupt treaty gatherings and sort of continue that framework moving forward. I'll stop there for now so someone else can talk.

 

Ian Tian: 

I can build on Erica's point. Yeah, I think I wanted to build that Erica's point of comparison, I think being in relation with one another means for me, is to think relationally instead of comparatively. I think it is crucial to not compare trauma or analogize different histories, experiences or oppressions. Rather, I think for me, being in relation means an acknowledgment that we come to specifically abolitionist work from different places, both literally and figuratively. But it does not suggest that it is impossible to build bridges. I think Black feminist bridge work is so crucial here. It is possible to see for example, through an analysis, that we are working against the dominant system of our times and in abolitionists’ work that hegemony is perhaps the global prison, police and security industrial complex. This complex is so intricately linked to global racial capitalism, white supremacy and modern nation state systems. 

 

Just to give you an example. If you all know the Blackwater, the security firm, the head of Blackwater, Eric Prince, was actually a board member of Frontier Service until 2021. Frontier Service is actually a private Chinese firm, that provides security services for South Sudan and Kenya, and all your industries. But they also provide security services to Chinese investments in Southeast Asia. So what I wanted to say is this kind of money, capital and these security industrial complex, they flow transnationally. And that means our analysis also needs to be transnationally linked. And this is, when we talk about anti-Asian racism, it's always important to situate this racism within all the other relationships that is shaping and being shaped by capitalism and all these -isms that we are trying to subvert.

 

Harsha Walia: 

Thank you all. This is, it's just also brilliant. And thank you, Beverly, for the question and the just the provocation there, it's just so necessary. I'll echo a lot of what's been said, and just the necessity of thinking about relationship, not as sameness, but as solidarity, which are of course two different things. We don't have to presume that we have shared experiences or similar experiences to be in solidarity with struggle. And that, in fact, finding solidarity through difference - and here difference, of course, being both socially constructed in a material reality - is so important. Because then it allows us to not flatten experiences, but to also find intimacies of connection and find those transnational relationships. And again, not in essentialist ways, but in material ways, right? Like, what are the ways in which our lives are materially written differently because of differences, and how state violence and racial capitalism treat us differently as a function of that divide and rule that El was talking about. 

 

And I think part of it even starts with like anti-Asian racism, right, like even the category or idea of “Asian” has to be problematized, not only because “Asian” is a deeply homogenous category, but also because the relationships of Asians between each other is so underwritten by differences across caste in the context of Asian people, and the Asian diaspora, of different Imperial relationships of different imperial powers. India as an occupying force, for example, and of course, here we can include China and Japan in various ways. And so that becomes part of that part of that interrogation and antagonism, Beverly that you put so well, right of like, how do we think about intimacies and antagonisms as being held together even as there may be a shared experience of imperialism or indentureship, for example, even the Asian experience is so widely, widely different. 

 

And as we know, race gets written in different ways through migration, right? People become racialized differently. And that is one of the one of the tricks really, of even state selection of migration, where say, South Asian identity gets written, as as an oppressed identity, if you will, where an upper caste Hindu person is somehow in the same multicultural category as a South Asian who's Dalit, caste oppressed, and non-Indian. Even that, just within the context of the South Asian diaspora and state selection processes, really force an ethnicize in ways that completely and deeply erase power and histories of violence. And so I think that's all part of the antagonisms. And then, of course, more and more and more in terms of, how do we think about that in relationship to anti-Blackness, in relationship to settler colonial violence, in relationship to enslavement? And all the ways in which as Lisa Lowe's works pointed out, and as you noted, Beverly, those intimacies, right, those intimacies across continents.

 

And I think, of course, the good immigrant, bad immigrant and the state selection process in there is such a huge, and thank you all for mentioning that - it's like literally a pillar. Because the state is selecting people and conversely expelling people in ways that entrenches those differences of Islamophobia, of anti-Blackness, of heteronormativity, of castes. Literally you get to stay or you are expelled based on the price of welcome into neoliberal citizenship, and where Indigenous nations are completely erased in that process. The Canadian settler state and whiteness determines the worth and value and ability for people to stay and not to stay. And whiteness becomes the host, right? Whiteness literally becomes the host of welcome and the price of welcome. And so I think that that underwritten kind of violence and racial capitalism in terms of who labors, and under what conditions, is so key to that. 

 

Of course, during COVID we'd be remiss to not mention the deaths of migrant workers, in this past year. At least 10 farm workers just in Ontario, who have died, right? Not because not because of COVID, because of COVID, but because of the conditions that manufacture vulnerability to COVID. And that keeps people as indentured laborers in this settler state and economy. 

 

And I think one of the antagonisms - and this will come back to me around our internationalism - is that one of the ways in which austerity in particular works in the past two decades, is the “help ourselves before we help others” ways in which politics gets articulated. And I think it's an antagonism we have to kind of contend with and as both El and Eric and Ian have noted, how one of the ways that that becomes hard to talk about is because it gets mediated by whiteness. Like, we can't speak to each other across communities and across different experiences, because it gets mediated by whiteness.

 

And I think one of those antagonisms is something that I've observed and tried to work through in relationship to community and struggle. Like, this idea of for example, why refugees getting housing before other people? Which really, again, belies, that internationalist spirit of like, well, first of all, refugees are not are not charitable, like, victims, right? This is a global legacy of violence. And the Canadian state is complicit. And really, how do we draw lines between who is us, who is them, who is ours, who is theirs, who's that kind of thinking? 

 

So internationalism, which binds us together, which both solidifies the model minority in some ways, but also challenges it by calling onto us to think about global violence, which really is part of the antagonism that we have to struggle against, the us versus them that's inherent to a lot of this. And when it comes to the piece of the pie, if you will, the questions around who gets it first, which I think is the austerity, scarcity politic that often exacerbates antagonisms, because we don't see ourselves as bound up in collective struggle or collective liberation. But we see ourselves as needing scraps from the state or needing the scraps from racial capitalism first. And I think that is one of the antagonisms, particularly in migrant justice struggles. 

 

And of course, a lot of this gets festered and fostered by white supremists who say, Oh, we need to help homeless people before we help refugees. And it's like, you don't give a fuck about homeless people in the first place! Or conversely, like, we need to help refugees before we help homeless people, because refugees contribute to the economy, it's like, you don't give a fuck about refugees either. And so the ways in which communities get pitted against each other, and again, completely underwritten by white supremacy, and the divide and rule that the state and racial capitalism is trying to do - I think those antagonisms that really are at the surface of what is a reality for a lot of our communities, I think it's something that we can work through, and I think has to be named in order for us to work through that together, because the state really takes advantage of those antagonisms and exacerbates them and often creates them.