Host and "Movement Meteorologist" Ejeris Dixon welcomes author and healing justice practitioner, Erica Woodland.
In this profound episode, Ejeris Dixon sits down with healing justice visionary Erica Woodland to explore how fascism is impacting our mental health and our capacity to organize. With a background in psychotherapy and decades of movement work, Erica discusses the emotional toll of surviving and resisting while fascism rises overwhelmingly. Ejeris and Erica grapple with what it really means to fight fascism without abandoning ourselves or each other.
You can find the tools you need to fight fascism at our Resource Hub.
Connect with Erica Woodland
Connect with Ejeris Dixon
Donate to the Fascism Barometer, and help us create more episodes and resources
And when you feel the pressure, share this pod, and visit fascismbarometer.org
Podcast production by Phil Surkis
The following is presented to you in around sound. It was recorded with whatever was lying around.
Erica
I know that we're in a moment where, if we do not understand fascism, its impacts, and we're not anticipating what's to come, our strategies for our collective survival are going to be deeply undermined and ineffective.
Ejeris
Hi, friends. Welcome to The Fascism Barometer. I'm Ejeris Dixon, your movement meteorologist.
And The Barometer is an educational project where we learn together what fascism is, how to stay safe, and how to create democracy and liberation for us all. As a Black queer feminist, I exist at the intersections of communities that fascists see as the enemy. And I have deeply desired a way for us to understand and measure the threat of fascism and how it impacts all of us.
In each episode, we work to learn what fascism is and what we can do about it from the perspectives of each of our guests. And as barometers measure pressure, we impact the pressure that fascism puts on all of us. So as I'm looking at the barometer today, its reading continues to be very high.
The regime continues its efforts to dominate universities, eliminate dissenting voices, and challenge resistance movements. But I want you to know that we're in this together. Experiencing and fighting the violence and cruelty of this regime is frightening.
It's anxiety provoking. And I'm in a lot of circles where people are nervous and tired. Resisting fascism takes courage.
It takes endurance. And while the fascism barometer is rising, I know we can navigate the storm, but we're gonna need all of us. So as we've said before, fascism is best fought with massive amounts of people power.
And that's what we're building together. Thank you for listening and joining the anti-fascist movement. Before we get to today's conversation on fascism, our mental health, healing and resistance, here are the latest updates on fascism in the news:
Welcome to the Fascism Roundup. In this segment, we talk about current trends in fascism in the United States. And there's so much happening that this is just a snapshot.
And we've placed some additional critical developments in the resource hub on the website. So Trump recently signed an executive order titled Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets. And it's dangerous, y'all.
It criminalizes being unhoused, which means it creates laws that make it easier to penalize and arrest unhoused people, like laws against people who sleep outdoors. This order also deeply impacts unhoused people with mental health disabilities or who use substances. And it does that by encouraging states to start or expand efforts to force unhoused people who are using substances or unhoused disabled people into facilities or treatment centers against their will.
Now, arresting and committing unhoused people won't end houselessness, especially since the US currently has a 7 million unit housing shortage. Additionally, this order would end support for housing first programs, which are shown to support unhoused people to access housing, and also end support for life-saving harm reduction programs. There's a history of the fascist targeting of unhoused people, disabled people, and people who use substances.
And it goes back as far as Nazi Germany. And it starts with removing people from public life, leads to imprisonment, violence, and even more.
Additionally, the Center for Public Broadcasting recently stated that they will be closing due to Congress canceling over $1 billion in funding last month based on claims of a liberal bias. Now the Center for Public Broadcasting has been crucial in distributing funds to over 1,500 public radio and television stations, many of which rely heavily on the support. Now, while NPR, National Public Radio, and PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, themselves only receive a small portion of their budgets directly from the federal funding, their local affiliates often depend on these grants for 25% or even more of their operating revenue. The loss of this funding threatens the future of many smaller stations, particularly those in rural areas which may struggle to survive.
Now, fascists rely heavily on eliminating all media sources that do not conform with their messaging. They do this to maintain control, and eliminating the federal funding for public media is right out of the fascist playbook.
Also, Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that the jobs numbers were rigged and designed to make him look bad.
The jobs numbers were just released for July, and the number of new jobs created in July was much lower than expected in the US. It was around 73,000 jobs as opposed to an expected 100,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also lowered estimates for May and June.
Now these kinds of revisions are a standard practice for the Bureau. And according to Time, this data comes after economists have expressed concerns that the Trump administration's constantly shifting tariff policies and the federal layoffs could negatively affect the economy. However, in a Truth Social Post, Trump stated that the economy is booming under Trump.
However, the firing of a statistician who says things that Trump doesn't like is as fascist as it gets. And this highlights that it's going to become increasingly more difficult to get accurate numbers on the economy.
Finally, the genocide in Gaza continues.
Israel's military assault has caused a 60,000 person death toll. Meanwhile, famine and starvation increase. The United Nations World Food Program released a statement naming that 39% of people in Gaza are going days at a time without eating.
All of this is happening while there are 6,000 aid trucks ready to enter Gaza, yet Israel is denying access. Here in the United States, the repression of pro-Palestinian movements continues, particularly on universities. You may remember that the Trump administration froze federal research funding to multiple universities on claims that colleges have permitted pro-Palestinian campus protests to create an environment of anti-Semitism that allowed Jewish students to be threatened and harassed.
Recently, Columbia and Brown universities both agreed to settlements to restore access to millions of funding, and in Columbia's case, over $1 billion in federal funding. Columbia has agreed to pay the administration $200 million. Additionally, they've agreed to end the consideration of race and admissions and hiring, to not allow protests or demonstrations inside of buildings where academic activities take place, to increase the size of their security staff, and to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism into its policies that, according to Truthout, expands the university's ability to punish students and faculty who criticize Israel and Zionism, among other agreements in the settlement.
Now, Brown University has also agreed to pay the regime $50 million. It's agreed to end the consideration of race and its admissions policies and to enforce a ban on transgender athletes in women's sports. Fascists have a long history of controlling and manipulating academic institutions to suppress dissent, to eradicate spaces for independent and critical thinking, and to increase their power.
Yet, despite this, in a recent Gallup poll, it found that just 32% of US adults support Israel's military actions in Gaza, which is a record low. And while 71% of Republicans support Israel's actions, only 8% of Democrats and 25% of independents do. Organizing and activism matter.
And all the organizing that people are doing to end war, genocide and fascism can and will make change all.
Ejeris
I am very excited to welcome Erica Woodland to the Fascism Barometer. Erica Woodland is a facilitator, consultant, psychotherapist, and healing justice practitioner with more than 20 years of experience working at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, trans and Queer Justice.
He's the founding Director of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN), a healing justice organization that actively works to transform mental health for queer and trans, black, indigenous, and people of color. Erica is also the co-editor of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation Collective Care and Safety with Kara Page. I must admit, Erica's my chosen family and his wit, clarity and honesty have deeply supported my knowledge around healing justice, trauma, and mental health, especially as it intersects with social justice movements.
Welcome to The Barometer Friend.
Erica
Thanks so much for having me.
Ejeris
So we like to start with kind of how people are talking about and thinking about fascism. And I know that you spend a lot of time with your family and I am curious around how you describe fascism to them and why it matters to the communities that you're a part of.
Erica
I love and hate this question, Ejeris, honestly, because, I got put onto even knowing I needed to understand more about fascism, I don't know, around 2016 when you started ringing the alarm. Um, and I get the honor and privilege to spend a lot of time with my niblings, um, who are 12 and 14. And so I actually just went to the National Museum of African American History in DC um, with my nephew and I mean, hundreds of years of history of fascism, is alive in that place. Right? And so I did not get a chance to practice this definition with, my nibling, but uh, next time I see them I will because Uncle E is always about the political education, right? Um, and this is one of the isms we have not covered.
So my analogy is, what if you imagine the worst bullies in your school somehow got control and power over the whole school.
Ejeris
Mm
Erica
The bully controls everything. The bully's able to organize followers of the bully who enact violence on behalf of the bully. Some students are confined to the school and not allowed to leave. Others are denied access to the school.
Instead of kind of the sporadic harassment that you might experience in a school from a bully, they are harassing everyone and they're not just targeting the most vulnerable. I'm thinking about what it means to have the bully also run over the teachers and the principals and school is already a deeply dangerous and problematic place, but I would explain to them, imagine if all of the structure and so-called order that you were anticipating was completely disrupted and, in the midst of that chaos, the group of bullies are blaming trans kids and the kids in special education for the drama and the shenanigans.
And I think what I came to when I was thinking about this is how central the consolidation of power is to fascism. And that, you know, it doesn't happen overnight and it's not an on off switch. And so while this school analogy I think would really resonate with my nibling, I know that we're in a moment where if we do not understand fascism, its impacts and we're not anticipating what's to come our strategies for our collective survival are gonna be deeply undermined and ineffective.
Ejeris
I can't tell you how much I love the bully analogy. Also, because I've just been reading more about histories of different fascist and authoritarian leaders and how many of them were bullies coming up and how different scholars also use an analysis of like how bullies treat people to, honestly think about, predicting how different fascists and autocrats are gonna act.
So I think it's, I think it's really accurate and I love, clear image, so thank you. I've wanted to have this conversation for a while around how the acceleration of fascism is affecting us emotionally, because there's such a connection between how we're doing emotionally, our mental health, and our ability to make clear and grounded decisions.
And so, as people are being bombarded by everything that's happening – violence and grief and danger – what is fascism doing to our mental health?
Erica
I wanna start off by saying that, before the second merry-go-round of the Trump administration, we were all not doing well. Right, you know, I noticed a market shift, in 2020 when COVID hit the scene, but we already know that our peoples have been struggling. And I think we can't really talk about emotions without talking about how we survive extreme stress and how we survive trauma and violence while also living with generational trauma.
So. This moment I think is, I call, I call it an instapot. Basically, we are under extreme pressure - when I am supporting folks around their collective care and safety or thinking about myself, I'm like, what are the release valves? Because we can't actually do as much as we need to stop the pressure, but we can give ourselves moments to like actually tend to the impacts.
So. Just to be super clear, to break down trauma, because that's a word that is deeply overused. Um, and it means, it means everything. It's the bad thing that happened to you, it's your response. It's the strategy to heal from said event. But trauma just in, you know, simple terms is really thinking about how our systems, our physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual system is overwhelmed by an event and the feature of trauma is the overwhelm. It's not the event itself, right? So you can experience something very life-threatening, but if you are actually tended to after, and you're connected to healing resources and you're witnessed, you won't have long-term traumatic impact. So. How we keep our systems from being overwhelmed in this moment, to me, is the key question, and it's a paradox, right?
These times are meant to overwhelm us. These times are meant to evoke deep fatigue, apathy, brain fog. I don't know. So many people I know are having health crises. I'm like, if your mental health is cool then all of a sudden your body's down bad. And so really understanding the connection between mind, body, spirit. I also think that there, you know, rightly so, people are holding and experiencing a lot of rage. And I'm here for it. But it's often misplaced within our communities. It's often misplaced within our movements. And when we have misplaced rage that doesn't have a place to go, because we are criminalized when we express our rage, um, it just adds to this insta pot. I think the other things that I'm seeing a lot more and experiencing a lot more honestly are depression and apathy. And I, I think, what trauma has to teach us in this moment and what our nervous systems have to teach us in this moment is that we need to understand how to accurately respond to the conditions.
And we don't wanna over respond, but we definitely don't wanna under respond. And both of those can be super dangerous.
Ejeris
That makes a lot of sense. I was recently talking with some folks about how fascism impacts us and I got this question that I wanna puzzle through with you, which is, I understand it's important to be grounded and to find grounding practices, but the amount of time it takes me to get grounded is much longer than the amount of time it takes fascism to activate me. Right. So it feels like the second I am finally grounded then something else in the news or on social media or my friends.
So how do we deal with the fact that, it's this constant barrage of alarm and then, and that push pull, like that paradox that you're actually talking about around pacing.
Erica
This is so real. I mean, I actually just had a pretty big intervention with myself about a week and a half ago because I was, like, oh, you are not okay. And it's not just about being grounded, it's about as soon as you start to fall off of your basic care, it's kind of a wrap. So I think some of what I've been practicing – and this is gonna be deeply unpopular—there are parts of the barrage that we don't have control over, and then there are things that we do have control over. Some of what I've been really playing around with is really getting real with myself about what is the amount of current events and news I need to consume and just understand to do my job and to keep myself and my community safe.
What are the formats that are least activating, right? Because it's all activating. Uh, sidebar. I'm getting a lot of my events through black comedians. Actually, that's, been one of my hacks. Honestly, I don't know what else we have access to right now.
I think there's also a piece around if I am listening to something that's particularly activating that I make a commitment to myself if I'm going to keep listening, that I have to like keep tracking what's happening physiologically and emotionally, right? Sure. Sometimes I pause, sometimes I say, not today.
Sometimes it's like, I actually need to hear this story. So it's about the ways that we remember not to abandon ourselves, and that can be very simple, right?
You don't need a whole bunch of practitioners. Everybody all day long are doing things to take care of themselves. So I think the things we have control are really doubling down on those things and being very strategic.
I think the other piece is that we are at a new baseline, so I don't even know that I'm trying to be grounded like it's a, a destination. I'm just trying to be as grounded as I can, as anchored as I can, and putting myself around people, places, and situations that remind me that I deserve safety, remind me that I can create safety for myself even inside these conditions.
Remind me that I belong and remind me that like we have to fight honestly, like at the end of the day, in this particular moment, the one of the ways that we heal and one of the ways that we effectively use our emotions and our nervous system is through resistance. And those of us who've been going hard in the paint are doing too much, right? And so that is not necessarily the model that we're offering here. Um, but I do think we need to figure out pacing, right role. And honestly, if you are not okay, there are things you probably should not be doing because it's dangerous and you're making potentially yourself and other people less safe.
So, I wanna live in a world where we can call each other in when we are noticing people are super activated, triggered, dysregulated and I think the more we actually understand trauma on a basic level for ourselves and our communities, I think the state is gonna be less effective.
Ejeris
Yeah, everything you just said really resonated with me. And then I'm also gonna let folks know all of the words you just named and all the definitions, I'm gonna collaborate with you if you wouldn't mind, so that we can get them into the resource hub so that we can give folks some tools.
Um, I think right role makes a lot of sense. And I am, I'm now tracking 'cause for some people, this podcast may be an entry point into my work on fascism, but there's like many years before it. And really what catapulted me into caring was my anxiety. Like it was just like people keep saying that fascism is coming.
They say that Trump is a fascist, or they say maybe he is, maybe he isn't. I was like, I don't like a phenomenon that can affect me, that I cannot break down. Like I need to know what it is. When is it coming? How is it showing up? What do we do? I knew that one of my gifts is to be able to disseminate information well and to also hold a lot of information without getting overwhelmed or being pretty good at being like this is what I need to pull back. So in some ways it's like for people where constantly being on the news doesn't work for them, I'm like, I'll give you top five of the last two weeks, but even when I think about my own journey, there was a time where I remember, I think I called every leader of a movement group I knew. Probably in like 20 17, 20 18. And I was like, what is your plan on fascism? This thing is happening, what is your plan? And there were lots of folks were confused or like, I don't know if we need one. And I got so sad and so angry that I took a break from thinking about it.
So I think there's this piece around, there are short term moments that we are in where we need to go hard, but it's also this interplay between like the short term and the fast and the slow and all of these pieces 'cause I'm definitely seeing folks right who are like, it's fascism.
There's no time to heal. It's go time. And and then I see folks who are like we need to attend to ourselves to even begin to actually, be strategic in this moment. And I feel like there, there are polls and I know that you're, you're talking about something more complex than that, but recognizing that probably when I said both of those things, we both thought of like two different people, you know, who for some reasons you know, in some situations will have to collaborate.
How do we navigate those pulls within ourselves, within others, within groups?
Erica
This is an amazing question because. Not only do I spend a lot of time thinking about it, but I actually spend a lot of time practicing talking about it inside of work, for myself, not for other people. So I think the first thing I wanna say is that our nervous system is our alarm system, right?
So imagine if you had a car alarm and it went off forever and you couldn't turn it off. Right. So that's one, that's a one pull.
Ejeris
Yep. Yep. I know that person.
Erica
Yah. Yeah. Hey, I've been that person. Imagine if you had a car alarm and somebody was trying to take your car and it didn't work and it just never worked, right?
And so those are the pulls that you're describing. Um, the alarm going off all the time, that would be hyper vigilance, fight flight response. The car alarm not going off at all might be freeze, dissociation, fawn response. And so being able to actually be in spaces where you're in community, naming that for yourself where you are, and also naming your habitual responses to stress really, really helpful and useful.
But the reality is you need your alarm system to accurately assess danger. That's what you need it to do. So we need to deeply understand the physiology of trauma, and you don't have to read anything to do that. You can just actually build your awareness about what happens in your body when you feel anxiety, what happens in your body when you feel fear.
I've been in spaces where people are so disconnected and afraid of engaging with their fear that you can't even have a conversation about what's happening in this moment. I mean, I, I had a conversation with someone recently where I was being vulnerable about how I was being impacted by these times, and the person was just like, oh, okay, well moving on.
And I was like, oh, no, not moving on. We all need to be tracking and paying attention. So someone like you who has been ringing the alarm for a long time, and there were people who were like, it's no big deal. Like your alarm system was dialed into not just what was happening in the present moment, but also what's to come.
And so we actually need more and more people who are able to do that kind of work and, and bridge making. Because the reality is your nervous system is gonna do what it does.
Now to the people who say you can't heal under these conditions. Let me tell you a little something about healing. We actually have a lot less control over that process than we think.
So I learned about healing and I came into healing justice work before I had the language for it. Um, sitting with survivors of state violence who were incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, unhoused in the drug economy, street economy, sex trade, I was a street outreach worker. Literally, I'm just showing up to give you supplies so you can keep yourself safe. I'm just out here making sure you have underwear and hot chocolate. You are actually processing your grief. You are actually processing your generational trauma. So I have watched people like Marshall Eddie Conway, may he rest in power, my mentor, former Black Panther, former political prisoner. I watch people like that heal under confinement and so what I have learned from my teachers, what I've learned from my own healing processes and crises is that oftentimes we're interfering with our healing process. Oftentimes it is being interrupted because we're uncomfortable or it makes other people uncomfortable.
But healing has its own intelligence, and your nervous system knows how to get back into a state of balance. So you have to figure out for yourself what are those things that help you get there. And again, you don't have to go far out into the world. Like what are the things that help you feel loved, comfortable, safe?
What are the practices that help you get to a place where you are more able to navigate what's coming at you. So, I think that also bumps up against this idea that healing is this thing that happens off to the side. It's like I, I'm healing all the time, like. I'm like surviving this hellscape and then amazed at the amount of healing that I'm doing against my will.
I don't wanna heal this. I'm like, why am I thinking about something from 20 years ago right now?
But I'm like, oh, the acceleration, the possibility inside of that is that we can actually accelerate our healing, we can accelerate our analysis, we can accelerate our strategy. Like there is an energetic potential in the chaos that we can leverage, for ourselves, but also politically.
Ejeris
Yeah. I see that, I see that in my own circles and ways, like people are growing at a pace or learning at a pace, right? Like, so there is this, this dynamism that is not just negative, right?
Like, so like the healing potential can be accelerated, the resistance potential, how they intertwine that gives me hope. Um, I wanna keep digging into this piece around, I think you had made an analogy of the nervous system as an alarm system. And so one of the things that I've been really curious about and sometimes afraid of for a while is what people call like normalization. And uh, a lot of fascist scholars would talk about it and it was mostly just, and you probably can say it, um, in, in so many better ways, but that the same thing that would've alarmed us, I don't know, in uh, December 2024, we may just like shrug at now because we are so used to the constant terrible and that there is a way that this concept of normalization and ot seems like there's, I wanna, I would love you for you to talk about like, physiologically what it's doing 'cause it sounds like there's some way that your body is trying to do some balancing, but in that process, that also can mean that, when we need to be making big moves, when we need to be saying like, this stops here, or let's change the scope of our work, or, this is when we need to kind of escalate politically, inside of us, it may not seem like a big deal anymore. So recognizing that, fascism is a rapid acceleration of both like prisons and policing and removal of the rules and consolidation of power – all these things are happening very fast – how do we allow ourselves to still think systematically and strategically under those conditions?
Erica
Great question. These are the questions that keep me up at night. I don't have fully formed answers, but some of what I've been thinking about, especially as I've been on my own healing doozy inside of this moment, I'm like, I don't have time for personal healing with the world as such, but I think what I'm being asked to come back to is staying connected to my capacity to feel and to not become desensitized.
I am a very sensitive person friend. You know, I feel, I feel things. I'm like, why do I have to feel this? Um, there is a sweet spot for all of us around staying connected to feeling in a way where we are still as present as we can be and being completely disconnected. And again, not only do we need to be able to do that self-correction, we have to have movements and we have to have relationships where we can be like, yo, I'm concerned about you.
Like what's going on over there? And really understanding that whatever we normalize now, that just we're, it's basically we're normalizing future terror, right? And so those of us who sometimes see the danger before other people and get told it's no big deal.
Ejeris
I know a little bit about that.
Erica
Yeah. been doing a lot of labor, and we actually need more folks to do labor. The other thing that I will say is the main strategy that we have access to right now is awareness. Some of what I'm talking about, we can't always do. So if you can't, how do you need to shift your role or the interventions that you're a part of if you can't actually make bold moves right now because you are being impacted in a way that you can't be strategic.
And some of that's about having honest conversations like, yo, this ain't for you right now. Right? But ultimately, we have to find the balance between totally collapsing and being in overdrive and nobody can figure that out for you. And so, and it doesn't have to be these big sweeping practices. I wanna just come back into like small incremental, like in terms of like not overwhelming yourself with healing.
Ejeris
Yeah.
Erica
Because people are doing that too.
Ejeris
I mean one thing I noticed about myself that I think is connected to a bunch of things, but also connected to my experience as a survivor is that I don't feel consistently, I feel in waves. I feel in waves. Um, so I can like navigate a lot of things and think it's not impacting me, but I actually have to like, give myself a, I have to put myself in a safer place or like, take a break, go on vacation, and not like long break, but sometimes it's like a weekend off, right? And then I'm like, oh, I have 5,000 feelings about what happened last week. And I think I stumbled across that after not doing that and having like all kinds of health issues from not taking those breaks. I know it's not. Sorry, I'm remembering. There was one summer where I bought every self-help book that I thought was connected to a problem I had inside of me and tried to like learn how to fix myself, which is, I know not the way to do it, but, for people who are trying to be like, well, how do I understand myself better as I'm doing all of this work?
What are either practices or processes or tools to help people with that kind of self knowledge that you're speaking about?
Erica
That's a great question. Journaling has been an off and on practice that I've used as well as therapy to actually keep track of myself and to be able to look at patterns over time. So I'm a therapist, shout out to therapy, but also it's actually not always the most effective strategy for my healing or anybody's healing.
And so when I go to therapy or my journal, it's because I am not actually connected to myself in the ways that I need to be. and I'm able to reference back or have somebody reference me back to like these larger patterns. So again, the more awareness we have, the more choice we have. Um, I think the, the other layer to this is being real about capacity.
So, so many of the crises that I get tapped to intervene on, I'm like, this didn't even need to be a crisis because you were already moving in a way that was really dangerous to your own self, and you could have intervened earlier or we could have prevented this altogether.
So, I recently came back from sabbatical, which was amazing, I am shocked that I was able to pull it off. But one of the residual benefits is that when I get off track, I'm a, I'm able to notice it sooner and do something about it. So a week and a half ago, that could have turned into a minor crisis, but I was like, no, no, no. You actually know the things that help you and you've fallen off.
And I, I know it's gonna sound real basic sleep, water, food. I hadn't been sleeping well. Some of it is the time of year. It's like light until midnight. I'm like, what? Who's going to bed? Um, some of it is consuming, doom-scrolling at night, and some of it is I'm just processing a lot from the day, but I was like, no, let's just start with intervening on sleep.
And that one intervention allowed me to make other interventions. So again, you could go to a healing retreat. You could do these very dramatic things, and I'm, I'm not saying you shouldn't, that can be helpful, but really this is about the day-to-day practices. But once your basic care falls off, everything's out the window. Of course, you are irritable. You have not eaten. Of course, we're fighting in the meeting. It's three hours long. We didn't have a break. I was like, why are we not having breaks in meetings anymore, y'all.
Ejeris
yeah.
Erica
So I just wanna bring us back to those really basic things. You have to be in a deep, intimate relationship with yourself and to take your needs seriously.
And that's very hard to do in the world that we're in, and it's hard to do in our movements because ableism is still very much popular. I know people don't wanna say that, but.
Ejeris
No ableism is popular. And also we don't have the amount of leaders that we need. We don't always have the amount of people that we need. Like this has been the year of saying no to a lot of things for me, and all the things I said no to were very important and needed. And there were times where like, well, someone was like, can you recommend someone else who could do it just like you?
I was like, I cannot. I cannot. And that's, that was always the, the way to get me to do things. You know, if I, if I, but I've been trying to have a, a year of doing fewer things, but doing them well and doing them better. And it's been so that there's time for sleep and food and water and friends and, you know, all the things that, um, Yeah, that help us be full humans underneath this. So it sounds like there's this piece around our basic care if we zoom out into like our groups and our movements. You've written this amazing book on healing justice. You've been advocating for the role of healing justice in our movements. I've been talking to people about how critical healing justice has always been, but how, especially critical it is to integrate into our movements under fascism.
I would love for you to kind of talk to us a bit about like what healing justice means and what do we really mean about integrating it into our movement spaces? Um, although there are some spaces that I know already have a lot of healing justice happening within the movement work.
Erica
You know, I've been a student of the particular kind of trauma that survivors of state violence live with since I was in my twenties and came into abolition and that, and I remember asking Eddie Conway like, the Panthers, I'm like, y'all had a lot of trauma. Like, how were y'all dealing with that?
Right. And I start there because we actually need to figure out how to address the ways trauma is moving through our political movements, our relationships, our bodies. We need to address the ways that it is making us vulnerable to the state through things like criminalization. Because our coping strategies are criminalized.
We need to address the ways that it is undermining our strategy and ability to make grounded assessments and the ways that it is fueling conflict harm and cycles of abuse, right? So these are things that we already know. What Healing Justice offers us is the opportunity to intervene on that trauma for the purpose of building power. For the purpose of resistance, right?
And so there are a lot of things that, get called healing justice that I would argue are not, and that could actually take us away from the task at hand, which is getting free.
I love healing. Healing's great. Actually no. Healing is not great. Lies. Healing sucks. It's super painful.
You get undone over and over again. There is not always rainbows and kittens on the other side. Howsoever healing's great because I want to do this to ensure my niblings aren't carrying forward generational trauma. But ultimately I want to change the conditions of violence that are leading to me having the trauma in the first place.
So any kind of practice that brings you into your individual experience only, um, that does not account for what's happening in the world, any kind of practice that leads you towards self-indulgence and feeling like as long as you're cool, everything's cool. That is not healing justice. Um, we need our movements to understand and be able to articulate how am I affected by trauma and how is that showing up in this work relationship?
And how is this showing up in our strategy? Right. I've worked with countless groups where I'm like, y'all are in a fight response and it’s not that you shouldn't be fighting, but like what's happening is automatic and unconscious. And so we actually need to be back in intentionality and we can't do that if we don't start to reckon with trauma.
And some of that is through our practices, but some of that is actually through having practitioners who are grounded in organizing, who are grounded in movement building, and who are also grounded in their particular practice as a healing justice practitioner.
So, a healing justice practitioner are folks who tend to the emotional, spiritual, and physical well-bring of our movements, and is someone who is both a practitioner and trained up in organizing, who can support Healing Justice interventions around collective care and safety. They can be nurses, therapists, peer counselors, organizers, doolas, energy workers, coaches, facilitators, artists, and more.
So, some of the ways that I do that with movement organizations, often I get asked to come in and support staff. Like, our staff, they’re having feelings, or we don’t know what to do, you’re a therapist come in and fix it. And so usually I start with, okay, that seems like a symptom of a larger problem.
What we don't need is depoliticized healers, tending to our, our movement organizers and activists who are on the front line.
So the more we are traumatized, the easier it is for the state to control us, um, and to infiltrate our movements. So Healing Justice offers us a framework to get real about the ways that our ancestors survived, what we can learn from that, and what we need to bring forward, and also what we actually need to redesign completely because these conditions are completely different.
I also wanna just say, Shout out to Kindreds Southern Healing Justice Collective and Care Page who brought this framework into the world and also have really named and acknowledged that healing justice is not new. It just really refers to the ways that our movements for liberation and freedom have always included strategies for care, protection and safety.
Ejeris
Yeah. I almost feel like you, you started to capture this debate that I've seen and debate that I think about sometimes. When I started this podcast, I wanted it to be a space for the communities that were going to be the most impacted by fascism to kind of speak on our wisdom, our strategies, and our knowledge.
But I've also been in movement spaces where people have concepts of, um, too traumatized to lead. Whether it's people who have experienced a lot of abuse or people who are, you know, but it's always this thing that I feel like is, is put upon either a community or a person or a condition.
How do you think about that interplay between wisdom and trauma and, and how do we use kind of this knowledge that we have of generations of surviving, all the, the difference between the American promises and the American nightmare, right? This, this piece around like US based fascism and, um, what we have to show about resisting it, but also all the scars that we, our communities hold as well.
Erica
This might seem like a bizarre answer. In my psychotherapy practice, I often am sharing with folks like we are not supposed to be okay under these conditions. I think that we also need to manage our expectations. Like folks are like, I'm struggling with depression. Of course you are. Right? And so I, I do think that when we have the ability to take a beat actually perceive what's happening with ourselves. There's a lot of information there. And our ancestors did not have the ability to take those moments of pause. And I'm literally saying a moment, a breath, a song in your car, whatever your moment is to get back into connection with yourself. Um, and so I think that the intersection between wisdom and trauma, and I'm gonna throw healing in there, is that the same way that we inherited generational trauma, we also inherited generational resistance strategies for resilience. Those things are not separate. And in this moment we actually need to be in deep, deep study around these things, not because everything can be applied, but even the ways that our elders and ancestors were thinking about times of escalation like this are really, really useful.
I actually spend, I'm spending a lot more time listening to elders and ancestors through interviews and, and their written words to understand that actually we are part of a generational legacy of struggle and the torch has been passed to those of us who have assumed it and, and are down to pick it up.
That comes with a lot of responsibility and a lot of sacrifice. It is not supposed to be easy. Not supposed to be easy. We need to be kind to ourselves. We need to be kind to each other, but we also need to struggle together. So, I think if anything about this moment that we could use as an opportunity, it's like all of the shenanigans that were never important, we can actually throw that stuff out the window.
The amount of people who January 20th, I was like, Hmm, I ain't really dealing with that person. Where I'm like now. We actually need to squad up, get together what beefs are actually beef, which beefs are imagined in our, in our minds, in the stories that we make about each other. Um, that we actually have the opportunity to practice the things that we need to be free now, and I know a lot of people say that, but I'm like, you could just show up with integrity and ethics even more so now because everything depends on it. So I don't know, Ejeris. I don't know. I am not hopeless. I will say that and I'm not hopeless because like you, if you study cycles of history, then you can be horrified, but there's many, many examples of our people struggling against fascism and a lot of other forces of violence.
I remember when I was full circle, when I was with my nephew in the museum, there was so much content and you know, they don't have no seats in there, so everybody's legs were hurting and I was like, we can't take it all in. But anytime there was a reference of, of rebellion or resistance, I was like, you need to read that.
Ejeris
Yep.
Erica
You need to see that, that's where we come from. That is in your veins. You don't have to do anything to manifest that. That's you. You know, and I remember we spent a lot of time, um, at a display around the Haitian Revolution, and I was just like, you need to read everything on these signs. Like, and I mean, he loved it.
He was taking pictures and everything, but I was just like, we need to know what time it is. And we need to know who we are and where we come from and where our role is.
It is okay if you can't hold onto that every day, none of us can. It's okay if you're struggling to get there. If we actually move a more aligned with the capacity we actually have, we'll be more effective.
I'm an efficiency hacker. I'm like, oh, we have limited resources. What is the best use of our limited resources? Um, and we spent a lot of time, like you said, like saying no to things so you can do the things on your plate. Well, game changer.
Ejeris
Yeah.
Erica
Game-changer.
Ejeris
So, you know, we're a learning and an action space. In terms of the actions you think people can take both so that they are present in the work that they're doing, but also supporting healing justice efforts.
Like what, what are the suggestions that you have for folks after this conversation?
Erica
A lot of what I'm doing right now is collective study and political education, honestly. Um, so both holding spaces for political education, but also putting myself in spaces of political education. It's really important if you, if we don't have the analysis to understand what's happening right now, we're not gonna be able to act effectively.
We need more of us sharpening our analysis because I'm really tired of arguing with people about facts. Really like our people. It's very hard to be arguing with our people about facts. I'm like, no, I live in Baltimore. ICE is in Canton. They are snatching people up. This is happening just because you're in a different neighborhood.
This is, this is going down. So, I think that's really, really, really important. I also think that. I don't know about you. Maybe you're, maybe you're seeing something different than I am. But the amount of organizers that I know who don't have a rigorous safety plan, I'm like, we need, we need to have a plan.
And I think some of that is, for me, that helps my nervous system to have a plan, but for other people it doesn't. So being able to get together with folks and like having the serious conversations, and linking up with people who know what they're talking about and who have receipts for their work.
This is a time where a lot of us are going to are vulnerable to being scammed because things are very, very, very dire. And whether that's getting scammed by a healer, a spiritual practitioner, a movement organization. Link up with people who know what they're talking about and have receipts and do your own vetting.
Those things feel really, really important right now. And it might not seem directly connected to our emotions, but it, it really is. It really, really is.
Ejeris
Well, yeah. And how safety is always connected to our emotions. Erica, this conversation is needed and overdue and, um, I'm really excited for folks to dig into it and for all of us this season to keep, really thinking about healing and healing justice and trauma and how we are present in these times.
So thank you so much for joining us.
Erica
Thanks for having me.
Ejeris
We've reached the end of today's episode. And while the pressure continues, I also feel more equipped and resourced to keep fighting fascism. And I hope you do too.
In this episode, we talked about how fascism increases trauma, how it impacts our emotional state and mental health, and how we can take care of ourselves in ways to be more strategic collectively. We discussed the role of healing justice in our movement work. And as this is a learning space, you may have heard terms or concepts that are newer to you, like healing justice or the medical industrial complex.
And we've dropped some resources in the hub. Support your learning and activism. Now in our last two episodes, both Rachel and Erica stressed the role of learning and education as a critical part of our organizing and activism work.
Here at The Fascism Barometer, we hope to be one of your many learning spaces. We've also listed so many educational opportunities in the resource hub on the website fascismbarometer.org. We appreciate you joining us, and we're working hard monitoring The Fascism Barometer for you.
Together, we can keep fascism at bay. So watch the skies and subscribe to this feed, as we only have a few more episodes left in this season, and we can't wait to share them with you. And when you share the show with a friend, you've got it - You help fight fascism.
Our producer is Phil Surkis. Our theme is by Magliet Hedira.
This podcast is a project of Ejerie Labs. And I'm your movement meteorologist, Ejeris Dixon. See you next time on The Fascism Barometer.