Host and "Movement Meteorologist" Ejeris Dixon welcomes renowned activist and narrative strategist, Malkia Devich-Cyril.
In this episode of The Fascism Barometer, host Ejeris Dixon is joined by renowned activist, narrative strategist, and speaker Malkia Devich-Cyril for a wide-ranging conversation that connects the rise of fascism to collective grief, Black liberation, and the emotional landscape of organizing within repressive times.
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Ejeris: [00:00:00] I'm so excited to welcome Malkia Devich-Cyrol to the Fascism Barometer activist, writer and public speaker on issues of digital rights, narrative power, black liberation, and collective grief, Malkia de IL is the founding and former executive director of Media Justice. Malkia also knows grief from the inside out.
They grew up knowing that their mom would die of her illness. They grew up immersed in the grief that is endemic to being black in America, and they cared for their wife, comedian Alana Devich Il through her death in 2018. And I've had the privilege of getting to work with Mac and Mack is one of the sharpest strategists I know with an absolute heart of gold.
We've done some work together thinking and puzzling through how to raise the alarm on fascism, particularly within communities of color. Mac is dedicated to our liberation movements, but even more so dedicated to the messy process of how we heal, grow, and change [00:01:00] personally alongside our activism to live liberated lives.
Welcome to the Fascism Barometer Friend.
Mac: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Ejeris: So I kind of like to start with really what we're talking about and in my head we're at your family's Kwanza party, which I know to be epic. And somebody is like, you know, I heard you talking about this fascism stuff. what is that about and why should I care?
Mac: I mean, there's so many words that we use to describe it that don't mean anything to most people. You know, we talk, we talking about populist, right? Neoreactionaries, tech oligarchy. Nobody know what that mean, so. If I was talking to, you know, my homies or my barber or whatever, I think I would, talk about, you know, it's a movement, you know, just like all the movements we know about.[00:02:00]
Ejeris: Yeah.
Mac: but this movement, you know, uses, corporate estate power, government power, you know, to organize extremist hate. So that some people can rule and get rich on everybody else's back. You know what I mean?
And I would tell them they anti everybody but themselves, you know what I mean? In this case, you know, they, they use white power to organize themselves, but they multiracial.
There's a lot of different faces. You know, fascism got a lot of faces. and you know, that's why we have to understand it, you know, well, so that we can identify it when it creeps up on you. You know what I mean? As a movement, you know, it, it dismisses our grief. It distorts our grievances until we are left with nothing but resentment.
And then they use that resentment to recruit us and break the hard won bonds of solidarity that we've built over many, many centuries. That's what they do. And now that same [00:03:00] movement that I've been talking about is trying to capture the government, you know, they're trying to, confuse us and, they're trying to, uh, distort our belief that there is a version of democracy in which we can thrive, you
Ejeris: Mm-hmm.
Mac: but. They're not gonna win. You know? I believe that, I believe that, and I would like to make sure that as part of my definition of fascism, I, I make sure everybody understand that with hands on it, it is doomed to fail, you know?
Ejeris: Yes, yes. It's doomed to fail. Well, it's um, I think when we had Kelly Hayes on, she called it a death cult, you know, this idea, right? And so like there is so much violence built in and baked in to the ideology they're not even safe from themselves.
Mac: That's
Ejeris: That's, that's part of the, that piece around how they are doomed to fail, right?
Because they are supposed to be looking out for each other, but they will also come for each other. [00:04:00] And those are the kinds of opportunities that we have.
Mac: Yeah.
Ejeris: are some folks who feel like they can set this one out. That this is not, this is not for me, this is not my work.
This doesn't matter to me, you know? but those of us, black folks, queer folks, you know, all of us who the fascists see as the enemy. Why do we need to be in the fight?
Mac: Well, you know, during the time and period of, you know, chattel slavery in the United States, there was some working class white people that felt like they could sit that one out, you
Ejeris: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mac: And that's the same idea. Like black folk [00:05:00] have played a central role in, building this country. I played a central role in, ensuring rights for everybody, and so I get it right.
We, we feel like we've been abandoned. I. You know, we feel like we've been betrayed 'cause we have been, we have been abandoned and betrayed. And that the challenge is that when you face a loss of any kind, you can either, become radicalized by that loss, right? you can either let that loss point you toward a hopeful and inspired new.
Way of living, or you can allow that loss to deepen your resentment, and to turn you away from inspiration and hope, and that's what's happening right now.
Um, and that's why we need organizers. You know what I'm saying? Like what would I say to the people who are dismayed right now, who feel betrayed right now, who don't have a, a way to look [00:06:00] forward?
You know, I wouldn't say anything to them. I say something to me, you know, I'd say something to the organizers whose job it is to organize them. You understand what I'm saying? It's not for me to preach at people who are hopeless. You know, it is, it is for me to arm and enable those whose job it is to bring the hopeless into formation.
Ejeris: yeah, yeah. And I think that's what we see our mission here and what so many of our listeners. So many of the Fascism Barometer community want to kind of be these people who can hold hope right now, right? And hold inspiration and bring our people in. And, um, like, your work is epic and spans many years, many decades, but I've been really interested in and loving this attention to grief.
I was, I think I was listening to something else you had done and my summation was like, oh, it sounds like Mac is saying grief is almost the cause and the cure, [00:07:00] meaning there is this way, this despair, That grief impacts our communities and movements and our abilities to organize, but it also feels like a certain amount of grief is also what is fueling fascism.
So I'm just curious about, you know, grief is a word that means so many different things, but where you are so unique and so sharp is around how it affects our strategy.
Mac: Ooh.
Ejeris: And I would love for you to just to unpack how grief is, impacting our organizing and our movements right now.
Mac: Now. I appreciate that question. I mean, first off, I think that, you know, we have to reorient how we understand grief. Let's start with understanding loss, right? Loss is natural. I. It's a natural part of the change process. Everything we love, we will lose, right? Everything ends.
Ejeris: Mm-hmm. [00:08:00]
Mac: so incorporating loss and as part of our understanding of change, both the changes we seek and the changes we wanna, move away from, right?
that we have to be able to manage loss as part of our leadership. Sorrow is an emotion. Yeah, is not the only emotion that happens after a loss. There are other emotions too. We have a responsibility to engage the full range of our emotions. But let's talk about sorrow. Let's talk about despair.
Despair can lead to demobilization, it can lead to demoralization, you know, um, it can lead to depression.
Ejeris: Mm-hmm.
Mac: It can also lead to empathy.
Let's get clarity, despair can bring us closer together. It can help you understand the hurt that another human being is feeling. Despair is not [00:09:00] only a limit to movements, it's also an opening, a softening, uh, a place where we can rearrange our politics.
Sorrow has it to uses in social movements. Now, grief. Grief is not an emotion. Grief is not a loss event. It is a reaction. It is a process to loss. Yeah. It is a process that happens after we face a loss. If we understand grief as a process, if we understand grief as a natural evolutionary response to change, right?
Then we can understand that grief is something that we have some agency over.
It's not something that happens to us. Grief actually is not the harm. It's always the healing right. Now, loss can be the harm. Loss is natural, but it's not always natural. Loss can be imposed. Let's get clear. [00:10:00] Loss can be imposed by exploitation.
It can be imposed by exclusion. It can be imposed by extinction. Okay? Those kinds of losses that are imposed. You know what I'm talking about? The losses where all our people is kidnapped out the community by the criminal justice system. You know, the losses of gun violence, our children are murdered in the streets, you know, the losses of land, you know, that happen as we are displaced and pushed about the nation, about the world, all around.
Those kinds of imposed losses produce. Alienation. They make us scared. They fracture our movements, they weaken our solidarity. You feel me? that kind of loss is systemic. That kind of loss is a system of deprivation and privilege. It privileges some and protects some and it from others.
Okay? That's the harm.
I just wanna be clear now. Grief [00:11:00] comes in like a medicine. Grief comes in like a healing. Grief and organizing are the same thing. Organizing is a process, a collective process by which we move from a loss to meaning and action and change. That's exactly what grief is.
Ejeris: Okay.
Mac: That's what grief is. Now, we think about grief on an individual level, but when you collectivize grief, when you systematize grief, you give it a methodology.
Hey, that's called community organizer. Feel me? So that's, that's the idea, is that, you know, we think about grief as something personal, as something private, something we are experiencing. We connect it in with the emotions of sorrow. We connect it in with our personal losses. But when you take it up a notch out of that and you understand that we experience grief.
As a natural evolutionary response [00:12:00] to change, and we can give it a methodology and we can bring it into a collective process, and that collective process by which we heal the collective process by which we grow consciousness and find meaning, the collective process that takes us into collective action, that leads us to institutional and structural change.
That's called grief.
Ejeris: Yeah.
Mac: so the kind of grief. I'm talking about is a radical grief. I wanna be clear. I'm talking about a radical version of grief. The kind of grief that we often experience and understand is a reactionary grief. That's the grief that's distorted,
that's the grief that's been disenfranchised to been dismissed,
and that kind of messes with our personality.
Right. That makes us contracted and smaller. that's the kind of grief, [00:13:00] that's where grief has been ignored. You understand what I'm saying? That's not grief itself. That's grief being ignored, dismissed, and distorted. when that happens, that's when our movements suffer. That's when our leaders suffer.
That's what leads to the kinds of breakdowns, and uh, burnout that we see inside of our movements today. But grief itself, the healing evolutionary beautiful process of moving from loss to meaning to action, that's a healing.
Ejeris: I would love to, to think about this, even deeper. 'cause I would like to just puzzle out for people who are in groups for people who are organizing with people right now. and thinking that. People are experiencing collective grief. I'd love to hear your thoughts on kind of what that looks like and what, like a [00:14:00] more helpful, like this radical grief response that you're talking about is, and then this dismissive grief response so that we actually can give people some examples and ways to play with this.
Mac: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, I like to think about. I will organize as our leaders, our community workers, our artists, our journalists, our activists, our academics. They are vulnerable witnesses, right? They are on the front lines of, trying to produce change up against one of the most formidable opponents the world has ever seen.
Right? We, we understand that and, what they, we. Experiencing right now what we call collective grief. I like to focus it in on collective sorrow. Yeah, that is a communal sorrow. We are sad, we are lonely. If we understood it [00:15:00] in the way I'd like us to, we'd understand that that harm, that fear, that despair, that dismay is characteristic.
Of alienation
Ejeris: Mm-hmm.
Mac: that what we are experiencing is alienation.
Yeah. And, um,
Ejeris: Can you describe alienation a little
Mac: Well, I'm just, well, I mean that's what I, I'm talking about the ways that we are separated from each other, from the things we care about, our work, our labor from the land. You know, from all the things that make us human and who we are, we are turned away from those things.
You know, alienation can feel like isolation. It can feel like depression. It can feel like addiction. Right. It can feel like, a drive toward consumption. We, we know that we, we know that feeling, you know, and so, and I'm [00:16:00] just trying to, I wanna really clarify that, that feeling that is called alienation.
That's not grief. And I wanna bring that language into our lexicon, into our, how we talk about what we are experiencing so that we can, uh, give it the medicine that it needs and the medicine that it needs. Is, lemme tell you what, alienation hates alienation, hates relationship.
Ejeris: Mm-hmm.
Mac: You know, grief loves relationship.
Grief thrives on relationship. What we need now is the infrastructure to rebuild relationship memberships, our infrastructure for relationship, bringing people into connection with one another and all the ways we can, but through membership is one of those ways. You know, bringing people into relationship with an organization through membership is a healing process, or it can be.
You know, where are the [00:17:00] support groups for our leaders? Come on, right? where are the circles that are gonna hold us through this time? We need infrastructure of care. So we need infrastructure for relationships, okay? We need infrastructure for care. Care as part of a movement strategy, relationship, as part of a movement strategy.
We need to be building beloved communities. Inside a beloved community where we understand emotion as a valuable vehicle for transformation. Come on now. We understand that we're connected and emotions. should be part of our narrative strategies. They should be part of our organization building strategies.
how do we move through this process? How do we build mature leadership? Part of what we need is we need grief leadership, right? We need social emotional skills and capacities. [00:18:00] We need to rebuild our training pipelines, right? And we need to bring into those training pipelines, these social and emotional skills that teach us how to be in relationship, how to build beloved community.
How to build infrastructures of care. This is part of our job as organizers. I don't know if we always know that. You know, I don't know if we always know that we, I think we think our job is to be right, you know? I think that's what we sometimes think it is to have ideological. Superiority over everybody else.
But I, I would say that if we really wanna do the healing work, the transformative work that our jobs are, are have to do with building relationship, building infrastructures of care, building and building all of that into beloved community that can transform and build our leadership, the social and emotional skills that we need to lead into this next century.
Ejeris: you are speaking from a place of wisdom [00:19:00] and it sounds earned. and, and in my own journey, I feel like not being attentive to sorrow, to the impact of loss to grief at some point, there's just a day where I couldn't organize from that place anymore. I couldn't live that life like that.
the disconnect got to be too much so. I would love for you to talk to us about how you got here, like how this wisdom around the need for care infrastructure and relationship infrastructure and, radical loss, became your mission.
Mac: Yeah. You know, it's funny because when I look back, it's always been my mission. That's what's so funny. I didn't know that, you know, back, back in the day, but. I grew up with a parent that had sickle cell anemia. Um, my mother, uh, who was a single black [00:20:00] parent, uh, sickle cell anemia is a genetic blood disorder that, historically has been fatal and generally kills people relatively young.
and, um, you know, my sister and I have the trait. my mother had the disease and it meant that she was frequently ill. it also meant that any crisis could be fatal. So, um, we grew up with that knowledge, you know, and at a time when there was very little information, you know, about sickle cell anemia because it primarily affects black people.
So of course there was very little research on it. I also grew up as a panther cub. And there's an intersection there. Right? the Panthers were particularly committed to research on sickle cell anemia. they, Built a, a whole framework, you know, around serve the people programs that, became essential to my understanding of community organizing.
So Care as part of a movement strategy was endemic, inherent to my [00:21:00] understanding of transformation from the gate I. Um, my mother ran the breakfast program in New York, um, in the Harlem chapter. So this was very central to our understanding of one of the ways that you build community and one of the ways that you build membership, you serve the people care is essential.
Um, throughout my life, growing up in the eighties, you know, as a black, child, I lost many friends, uh, to murder. To, um, the kind of accidents that only happen in, in poor communities. Uh, children getting run over by buses, children falling down, elevator shafts, children dying in fires. year after year, children being, uh, shot in the head.
we lost many, many, many friends, many family members this way. you grow up, you know, with that as the context. Yeah. and so part of the. Work of [00:22:00] organizing for me has always been about saving lives too, right? So here we have this context where, on the one hand there's a context of challenge mortality, you know, death all around.
on the other hand, we have, framework you know, of, political transformation with care at the center. And then I became a narrative strategist, right? And my mother was a storyteller and the Panther party had a newspaper and I understood that. one of the ways that we were going to make change together was through our collective grief and part of the expression of our collective grief.
This public mourning. This is a narrative strategy. Grief is a narrative strategy, and so every step of my career. grief has been at the center of that as I grew older and I got married, I fell in love with, with someone, and she was an incredible human being, just an amazing person. And we got [00:23:00] married and just a year after we got married, she was diagnosed with, uh, stage four.
Cancer term, a terminal cancer. And two years after that, she died. Um, she died in my arms. My mother died in my arms. And just last year my uncle died in my arms. And so this process of loss, of losing the, what is most dear to me. Also shaped me as a leader. You know, throughout all of this, I was organizing, I ran an organization for 20 years at the beginning of that organization, my mother died.
At the end of my career at that organization, my wife died. So loss book ended my career at Center for Media Justice.
So I understand what it means to lead in the face of crisis. I understand what it means to try to lead when you've lost everything. the defensiveness, the [00:24:00] contraction that comes when you're trying to hold up a future while living also in the past.
You know, I, I understand what that feels like, what that looks like. I also understand that all the people we work with, everybody we work for, they come to us because they've lost something. Every single member, every single person joins a movement in part because they have lost something. They are looking for something.
They want that something back. We have a responsibility to forge a strategy out of grief that takes people through the process by which they can come back to themselves. That takes people through a process by which they can be connected to another. That takes people through a process by which they can be connected to power.
That takes people through a process by which they have so much [00:25:00] agency that then they can confront the power that took from them in the first place, that created that loss in the first place. And then from there, build the meaning. I. That can transform how we live. We are trying to become new people. This isn't just about building power to change conditions.
This is about trying to become somebody new, to let the grief forge a new personality, a new relationship to the land, a new relationship to ourselves and to each other. That's who I am. Right now, I'm a new person. I'm trying to be a new person in the context of an oppressive regime, and I think that's true for most of us.
You know,
Ejeris: I mean, everything you're saying feels like a complete needed transformation. And also hard.
Mac: Matt Hart.
Ejeris: It sounds mad hard, and [00:26:00] you know when people are faced with hard things, sometimes they move towards them, but sometimes it's like. Mac, you better than me. That sounds like a lot. You know what I, I, I salute you.
Mac: Man,
Ejeris: here.
Mac: I feel it.
Ejeris: and I think sometimes that response is around how much confidence a person can have and what they can hold and what they can do.
Sometimes there's like an underestimation, right?
But I'm curious, I'm curious around for everyone who thinks they're not ready for this journey.
Mac: Yeah,
Ejeris: What, what you got to say?
Mac: man, ain't nobody ready. You know, ain't nobody ready. I mean, you know anybody that's giving birth, I'm sure can tell you that a massive change. Nobody ready for it. Anybody that's faced death can tell you [00:27:00] nobody's ready for any of it. And what we're trying to do is allow parts of ourselves to die in other parts to be reborn.
We are not ready. We don't have to be ready. All we have to do is practice. I want to open, extend the invitation to practice with me. You know, for me, I've made plenty mistakes. I helped give birth to an entire sector called the media justice sector, and in the process of me participating in that leadership, I hurt people.
I made mistakes. I didn't always do the right thing, I. Was a human being, suffering from the plight of being a human being
Ejeris: Hmm. Hmm.
Mac: in a society that doesn't care for human beings. So, I, I think what would it take for us to, expand our grace first in the [00:28:00] mirror and then to everyone else? what would it look like for us to extend our compassion?
First in the mirror and then to everyone else, what would it look like to, to build our commitment a clear stated political and personal set of commitments that we could measure our lives and work against, and let those commitments change as we change, you know, what would that look like? What would it look like if we.
could engage in a set of collective principles. See this, none of this is about being perfect. None of it is about being ready. It's about trying.
Ejeris: Yeah.
Mac: It's about trying at every step, trying and then being willing to try again. It's about falling down in public. Letting yourself fall down in public because you know what?
We're not out here trying to be CEOs. [00:29:00] We're not out here trying to be like them. We out here trying to be like us and the way who we are, the people we are, we're trying to build a revolution, and that's messy and it's imperfect. And it's beautiful and we have to let it be that, and we have to be willing to struggle principally in principle, struggle with one another.
All that is required to do that is care and effort. So if you not ready, but you have some care. Genuine care for human beings. And you can, move that around at all times. And you have some willingness to be in, in practice, have some effort that you have everything that you need. And let me just say, honestly, care and effort, and let's add the third element.
Practice. If you are willing to practice, you have to practice. These are skills. We wasn't born with 'em. We gotta learn [00:30:00] them. we was born with care that gets taken from us. We build effort that's agency, but we have to learn skills. And so we have to lean on people that maybe don't know a little bit more, done it a little bit longer.
You know what I'm saying? It, it is time for us to do that. Be willing to learn something new. You don't know everything. I don't.
Ejeris: We don't have to be right. And we don't have to
get it right the
Mac: And we just not. Right. We just ain't right.
Ejeris: we not, right. No, I mean, these times ain't right. so we're in the midst of various forms of collapse. some of them are the results of a long history or like environmental exploitation. Some are being sped up. Right. and so this rising fascism is going to create more loss, losing people to repression and violence and abduction disappearing people.
Some people are gonna just [00:31:00] flee It's also like loss. There's a little loss of like, but my personal plan was to do X, Y, Z and that feels like, you know, where people who lost their jobs and had plans, right? People who are losing their benefits, people are losing their homes. people will be in this grief process as we're moving towards freedom and liberation.
and this collapse, which feels. like this continual feeling of destabilization, Where the, the ground underneath you is just changing and moving and falling. How do we navigate that and move towards freedom?
Mac: Man, you know, I, I started this project called Radical Loss. To answer that question in part, because I don't think there's a simple, straightforward answer, but here's the framework that I have developed for myself. [00:32:00] I believe that the first step is acknowledging losses, personal and political, individual and collective within the self and within the structure.
We need to both do our own work to acknowledge what we have lost, say it aloud, and also we have to do work in the culture to ensure that the culture acknowledges the losses. Why do we pull down the monuments? Why do we, you know, demand the holidays? Why do we, you know, all, all the things right? We, we want and need the losses, both generational and present day to be acknowledged.
It's one of the jobs, of media. It's one of the jobs of the storytellers and the grios. It's, uh, one of the jobs of organizers acknowledge the loss. The second step for me is embodying the loss. Yeah. The full range of feelings. When you [00:33:00] embody, you begin to take a stance towards the loss that begins to build agency.
When you allow yourself to feel, you can't face it unless you can feel it. You can't feel it unless you can acknowledge it. So these are steps, right? So we, we gotta do the work, the practice work of learning how to embody the full range of emotions and feelings, and we need space to do that. Right. We need space to do that.
And so that leads me to the third step accompanying. We need accompaniment for bereaved communities and leaders. They need support. They need solidarity. Okay? That means we need the kind of organizational policies that accompany bereaved people. We need the kind of, practices within our institutions.
I. That give [00:34:00] bereaved people space, and I'm saying bereaved, that doesn't just mean people who've lost a loved one. That means people who are losing, making ha going through significant losses, just like the ones you just described. Accompany them. Accompany them with support groups, accompany them with, grief education, accompany them with, appropriate policies, accompany them with dollars with enough, resources, money so that they can find support outside.
Like how do we accompany those who are walking with laws? That leads us to the fourth step, all of this support and solidarity, embodiment, and acknowledgement. Should help us find meaning. Yeah, we are searching for meaning and this process should help us do that. And as [00:35:00] part of that, we have to foster leadership and transformation.
This is where we begin. To systematize and organize the grief process, to build our own leadership to then go out and support other grieving people. Yeah, because lemme tell you something, I, I'm gonna tell you a little story if I can.
Ejeris: Yes, you can.
Mac: I was a, I was, I was, maybe I was 14 and it was one of the first times. I had re uh, gotten published.
I was published by Kitchen Table Press, um, a press that had been run by Audrey Lloyd and Barbara Smith at the time. And I got a little chat book, little, my first little chat book published. I. My mom was excited. She bought like a hundred copies and then she sent me out to Restoration Plaza in Brooklyn with a shopping cart.
She was like, go in and sell your book. I sold them at a a dollar pop. Came back with a hundred dollars actually, and I think I came back with more, 'cause people [00:36:00] gave more than that, you know? And I was really excited. You know, I was 14, I never had
Ejeris: A hundred
dollars. Yeah. Yeah. You ready? You ready?
Mac: I was like, I'm about to buy me some sneakers. I wasn't allowed to wear nothing, name brand. So I was like, Ooh, I can do my own. This is my
money, you know, I
Ejeris: money. Here we go.
Mac: My mother was like, I'm so proud of you. All right. So, um, which, which charity did you wanna give it to?
Ejeris: Ooh,
Mac: I was like, no, I ain't that what you talking
Ejeris: The me, me, the me charity.
Mac: the me charity?
What is she talking about? I'm not trying to get my money. This is my money. You know, I earned it. And my mother said, oh, you confused when you have a gift, that means you're supposed to give it, it's not for you. or I should say, it's not only for you
Ejeris: Mm-hmm.
Mac: And so this piece around, uh, understanding that the same gift that gave me the [00:37:00] capacity and the drive and the need to write.
The same losses that inspired my need to speak about them. They also are the same. That that creates the vehicle for my leadership.
Ejeris: Yeah. what has been taken from me, when I get it back, I have to give it out. I have to give it out. that's the way leadership gives something back to us.
Mac: It actually fuels us. And so leadership is a process of transformation, not just a process of giving away what you don't have. And that's part, we gotta change that mentality. You know what I'm saying? Leadership is a process of transformation, of meaning making and as part of that, as we assist and be in solidarity with others who are grieving, that helps us grow, that gives us meaning, and that helps us heal.
And finally the final step is we take all that healing and we [00:38:00] take all that growth and we take all that leadership and that transformation and we move into collective action. For structural institutional change, we change the conditions that caused the loss in the first place. We close the gaps and under those new conditions and through the process.
I just described. We become a new person. We become a person that is in different relationship to loss. We become a person who is, at ease navigating grief. We become a person who, who is, able to say, at the moment of my death, I'm happy with the life I lived and that is my goal.
to me, I am in movement because I believe fundamentally that the process of transformation, that movement takes me through will not only heal the world, but it will heal me. I'm not out here to be the [00:39:00] by movement. I go to therapy. You know what I'm saying? Let me talk to an expert, you feel me? But I understand that it is a transformative process that is a healing process. That gives me the skills and the tools and the energy and the worldview and the consciousness to be who I was always meant to be.
And that's what I'm talking about. To me, that's what grief is supposed to do. Get you to who you was always meant to be, get you to, to a level of ease with change, with loss, and bring you into some level of repair. And that's what I think we need as we
try to navigate everything that's going on.
I can't sit up here and tell you that there's some way you're not gonna feel bad. Okay? Because I think that's what people wanna hear and that that's not available. I. That is not available. We are experiencing all types of genocide and [00:40:00] authoritarian regimes, and we are experiencing state violence on a level that in this generation, we haven't seen.
There's no way I, we not gonna wake up and just feel good. That's not, that's not available. What is available is feeling extraordinary purpose. What is available is finding moments of joy and allowing those moments of joy to flood through you. What's available is being in relationship. What's available is giving to the society, to the people, to the land.
This is what is available. And so I'm just saying when you ask me how do we navigate, we navigate this way by being in relationship to what it is.
Ejeris: I mean, this conversation is profound. You are profound. And, um, the fascist of barter community, it's an action space. So I'm curious, what would you like to say to our [00:41:00] folks who wanna take action with radical loss with this framework? Or even just apply what you're saying into the work that they're doing.
what are your marching orders for us?
Mac: Well, I, I say number one. if you wanna learn more, go to radical loss.org. and there's a lot of information there. Um, I've built a resource bank, um, a virtual resource bank about loss and social movements that you can read a bunch of stuff there and, and just learn what you wanna learn.
There's a lot of information about alienation, a lot of information about, bereavement collective action, and there's a lot to learn, so feel free to do that. I would say the second thing is build infrastructure. I. Right. Build support infrastructure, build infrastructures of care. Do it now.
Do it now. Because the fact is things are only, hate to say it, but they're only going to get worse, at least in the, in the, in, in the immediate, future. And we need those [00:42:00] infrastructures of care right now. Right now, we need, uh, we need dollars pointed toward those infrastructures of care. And we need to save what we can, of our healthcare, institutions, you know.
Yeah. The third thing that I would say that we can do right now, right in this moment is make a decision about where you will stand in solidarity. Make a decision because, uh, your, your bonds are set to be broken, and the only way for you to do the healing and the grieving that you need to do. Is in solidarity.
So make a decision. Make a decision about who and what you are in solidarity with, and take a stance that cannot be broken by any, oppressor rationale. There are many. Steps you can take like many action steps. Getting the, I'm in a support group. I also run a support group. You know, I run something [00:43:00] monthly called the Freedom Cleanse, where by 50 to 60, um, people each month gather virtually and we commit.
To something that we're going to remove from our lives that is in the way of our freedom and something we're gonna bring into our lives that is gonna bring us closer to our freedom. We do it for 10 days out of the month, covering the day that my wife, Alana died. You know, I, I have a group, or I don't know what you call it, a community called Pandemic Joy.
And we gather, every few Sundays and we sing and we meditate. Build what you need. This is what I'm saying. I needed that. When my wife died, I was alone. I was lonely, I was scared. And it was just before the pandemic hit, I was deeply isolated. So I built what I needed and somebody else needed it to.
'cause that's how that goes. You feel me? So now hundreds of people engage in that process because I know whatever's true for me is true for you. [00:44:00] You know what I mean? Whatever I need, you needed to, so build what you need and then invite somebody in.
Ejeris: I don't think it could be said better. Mac, we've been in this theme of solidarity and you took us to kind of the emotional and spiritual and organizational requirements to do so, and then you just showed us. How you are using your gifts to do what you just said, build what you need, and the invitation to the Fascism Barometer community for people to use their gifts to build what they need.
So we are so grateful for every minute that you just spent giving us a masterclass on loss, sorrow, grief, transformation, right? Collective freedom, and we're so grateful that you're here alongside us in this work. Thank you for joining [00:45:00] us on the Fascism Barometer.
Mac: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor.