It’s been three years since the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the summer of uprisings that it sparked. What have we learned? What is our work? Where do we go from here? In this June 2023 Common Notions Blog post, author Geo Maher and writers and editors David Luis Glisch-Sánchez and Nic Rodriguez-Villafañe reflect on these and other questions.

Every Spiral Has a Downturn

Geo Maher

Three years can seem an eternity, but in the fitful temporality of our present—warmed to a fever by struggle and Covid alike—they seem to have passed in a flash. Lenin’s adage about those weeks when decades happen, when the collective pace quickens to the point where baby steps suddenly become his famous “leaps, leaps, leaps,” was never so true and never so widely cited. But if we often tend to see accelerated change as working our favor, not so of these years, which have been marked by downturn, disarray, and even despair.

To say that much has changed in the three years since mass rebellion shook the country and the world, in other words, is to speak of a profound loss. Lost is the heady confidence so many young people displayed in the streets of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Lost is the leverage, however fleeting, that movement demands to defund and even abolish the police once seemed to enjoy among political elites. Lost too, as our forces scatter, is the conceptual clarity with which many confronted mid- 2020, as the predictable talking-points of the right are taken up by even some self-described leftists, the defeatism of any downturn dovetailing with attacks on abolition disguised as pragmatism.

To be clear, even loss is too passive a framing, so here’s a better one: counterinsurgency. The entire weight of the political and media apparatus has been brought to bear on our movements in an attempt to convince us that we were wrong, too ambitious in our demands; that defunding is a pipe dream and abolition would be a veritable nightmare. The talking points of the Fraternal Order of Police—that the uptick in violence we are seeing in Philadelphia and elsewhere is the product of a defunding that never happened—are being parroted uncritically across the political spectrum.

Much has changed in the past three years, most of it for the worse. But lest we see this loss as a caution against Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s imperative to “change everything”—not all change is good, after all—we should be clear that even this kernel of truth is wrapped in a far greater falsehood. Specifically, we could make three dialectical propositions about where we find ourselves today, one for each year that has passed since the rebellion.

1. Things have gotten worse. The narrative of the right has found traction amid a deteriorating economic situation for most and a very real uptick in community violence in many parts of the country—all of which demands a coherent, counter-hegemonic abolitionist response. Concretely, this has made our work much harder and has contributed to a widespread sense of despair.

2. But they aren’t as bad as we’re being told. Counterinsurgency exists for a reason, and it’s to convince us that we’ve lost. The breath and ink expended to discredit defunding and abolition is only necessary because of the real alternative our movements represent. If Amílcar Cabral famously insisted that we claim no easy victories, we should accept no premature defeats, either.

3. Better and worse aren’t opposites. Much less are they mutually exclusive. As the dialectical tradition teaches, oppositions are dynamic clashes between social forces—and visions—vying for hegemony. On the one hand, to be worse means staying the same: the same white supremacy, the same police violence, the same—indeed, steadily worse—economic realities for the poorest and most vulnerable. And as the economic situation gets worse, the system doubles down and seeks comfort in the racist same. But getting worse can also be a doorway toward getting better, as the catastrophic human wreckage of the present accumulates in new struggles for justice.

Every spiral has a downturn, but descends with a sort of gravity that continues to gather force—in the form of consciousness, education, and the coherence of our analysis and the political formations that impress it upon the world. To recognize this entails neither the classic left accelerationism that insists “things must get worse to get better,” nor a heroic determinism of inevitable victories. It could scarcely be said that a moral universe even exists, much less that its arc bends toward something so ephemeral as justice. The only thing that is guaranteed is that the oppressed will continue to fight. Struggle is inevitable, victory is not.

***

Geo Maher (George Ciccariello-Maher) is the Coordinator of Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and the author of A World Without Police, Decolonizing Dialectics, Building the Commune, and We Created Chavez. His latest book, Spirals of Revolt: Study and Struggle to Abolish the Present is out next year through Common Notions.

Black Liberation and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice

David Luis Glisch-Sánchez and Nic Rodriguez-Villafañe

We had the idea for what is now Sana Sana: Latinx Pain & Radical Visions for Healing and Justice, years before the 2020 uprisings, but it was not until the collective energy that was mobilized nationally and globally around the simple yet radical premise that Black Lives Matter that we embarked in earnest to birth Sana Sana into this world.

We were clear from the very beginning that we did not wish to make the same mistakes that many Latinx projects do, and that is to explicitly or implicitly suggest that Blackness and Latinidad are mutually exclusive. For us, the Movement for Black Lives is a Latinx struggle because Afro-Latinx people exist, have always existed, and that Latinx freedom—whether Afro-descended or not—cannot be realized before, or separate from, Black Liberation.

Justice, freedom, and liberation, for us, is an all-or-nothing proposition. It is in this spirit and deeply felt commitment that Sana Sana was shaped and grown. The anthology, in the writing of both contributors and ourselves as editors, make plain that as Latinxs we must emphatically reject the aspirational whiteness that white supremacy entices us with and that has plagued our people for centuries. To show up for and actively practice the belief that Black Lives Matter requires an equal—if not greater—effort to confront, resist, and abolish whiteness as a political project. More specifically we acknowledged that a central premise of our liberation work is to usher and curate spaces that center healing.

White supremacy creates systems of oppression that are intentionally built to cause us pain. We see Sana Sana as a creative interruption of that harm, where speaking openly about pain, activating our healing, and imagining new worlds is a liberation, life giving project. It was our intention, and is our hope, that Sana Sana be received and understood as a project that is not just in conversation with the Movement for Black Lives, but in so many ways, an extension of it.

***

David Luis Glisch-Sánchez is a queer feminist antiracist healer, and is the founder of Soul Support Life Coaching, an individual and organizational coaching practice rooted in the queer Black and Latinx feminist tradition. They are also an interdisciplinary sociologist working in the areas of emotion, race, genders, and sexualities. They currently teach in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).

Nic Rodriguez-Villafañe is a non-binary transmasculine Boricua poet, writer, and DJ. They are currently an adjunct professor of American Studies and Writing Arts at Jefferson University in Philadelphia. They have been an organizer for over 15 years and are a researcher with the Philadelphia Participatory Research Collective (PPRC). Their poems have been described as an "eclectic blend of spanglish hip hop rhythms and Puerto Rican jabería, born out of the southern swamps of Florida." Their writing has been featured in The Gordian Review, Philly Inquirer and N.A.S.W Journal. They are a 2012 Leeway Foundation Arts & Change grant recipient and hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers Newark. Like most writers they have three jobs to pay bills and six side hustles to stay busy but their main love is always the poems.

David and Nic are the editors of the forthcoming anthology, Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice out in next month through Common Notions.