APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

Summary

In this conversation, Dr. Darius Green and Adrienne explore the concepts of liberation, political identities, and the implications of abolitionism. They discuss the differences between liberalism, leftism, and abolitionism, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of these terms. The conversation delves into the historical context of policing, the fear surrounding the abolition of police, and the importance of creating a world centered on collective safety. They also highlight the role of education in preventing harm and the necessity of incorporating abolitionist practices into daily life, while addressing the complexities of nationalism and the defense of oppressive systems.

Find Dr. Green on Instagram here

FREE Unschooling Resources:
➕ FREE Quiz: What’s Your Homeschooling Superpower? Take it here
➕ 10 Simple Ways to Connect With Your Child Find it here
➕ 10 Myths about Unschooling Find it here

Stay Connected With Me at These Reveries:
Instagram | Pinterest | Facebook | Youtube 

Work with Me:

➕ Join The Reverie Collective here
➕ 1:1 Coaching Sessions here

Read the Transcript:

Adrienne (00:00)
Hi everyone, welcome back. have Dr. Darius Green on with me today. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Green. Could you introduce yourself?

Darius Green (00:07)
Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I’m always excited to talk and share and bounce around ideas together and dialogue. But yeah, my name’s Darius Green. have a PhD in counselor education, master’s in clinical mental health and addiction counseling. And so I guess by, I usually share this publicly, at least on social media and other spaces I occupy, but pretty much work as a counselor educator, training counselors and mental health professionals formally, but also I think I’d just like to share that kind of information and liberatory knowledge as something that’s maybe more core and central to who I am beyond any specific role or identity, really with the goal of pushing people towards envisioning and dreaming of liberation, whether that’s a systemic level or in our personal lives too, and definitely as it relates to

questioning your making sense of politics.

Adrienne (00:55)
Yeah, I’ve really gotten into that term liberationist really speaks to me. I’ve been trying to find some words that really represent what I do. Um, cause I started in the unschooling realm, but as I’ve delved a little further and realized that it really goes into our parenting, it goes into our healing, into our trauma that I feel like liberationist parenting is really does a better job at encapsulating what I do. And what I try and put out there into the world. Why don’t we start with some terms here, speaking of liberationists, but can we just talk a little bit about the difference between liberal, leftist, and abolitionist? I know these terms get thrown around and often people don’t understand quite what the difference is between those three. So would you mind just expanding on that a little?

Darius Green (01:45)

Yeah, yeah, and I’ll preface by maybe trying to take a more liberation-focused approach by not giving like a textbook academic kind of definition, more so just colloquially what they mean to me and how they differ. When I hear those terms leftist, liberal, and abolitionist, mind immediately goes like distinguishing between, almost categorizing liberal over here, leftist and abolitionist maybe more similar, can be grouped together in some way, shape, or form.

And so one thing that immediately comes to mind is first with those terms, just as labels and identities themselves, in terms of making sense of what they mean, I always have to question like, where do those, the meaning from those come from, particularly from like a social and also internal lens. And so I imagine there’s, when people think about those terms, there’s the perspective of.

Someone who’s liberal will have a sense of identity within themselves that will tell them, this is what it means to be liberal. But there’s also sort of a social and an institutional context, particularly in the United States that’s driven by, let’s say, the Democratic Party. And maybe other institutions, maybe specific leaders that really shape and form what liberal means.

And so for me, as I say it, when I hear liberal, honestly, in today’s day and age, particularly since like 2015 leading up to the 2016 election, liberal has primarily seemed to mean not Trump or anti-Trump, anti that brand of conservative rhetoric that has seemingly, at least as I see them, not a history expert, but throughout my lifetime seem to have moved pretty swiftly from the fringe towards the dominant kind of view of conservativism. And so when I see people participating in enacting liberalism, what I usually see them doing is combating Trump or giving the appearances being different than Trump.

Even if, like in today’s day and age, that doesn’t always really pan out, sometimes liberals, leaders particularly, and also those who are heavily committed to identifying themselves as liberal can engage in the same behaviors, whether that is praising specific leaders despite harm that they caused. One in particular that I’ve seen some activists and scholars who are maybe much more leftist, giving critiques of President Obama.

President Obama has this sort of image in our world amongst liberals as maybe being this ideal person, this first black man as a president. So he kind of represents a lot of maybe liberal values regarding, really surface level values regarding race in the United States. But there can be a lot of similarities between liberals and conservatives of like just unconditional support and praise, almost like the celebrity-like status towards not just him, but really any liberal politician who’s popular, despite grave harm that they’ve enacted just through occupying the position or maybe their specific way that they’ve personalized that position. And so when I think of liberal, I’m usually thinking a commitment towards a status quo, usually thinking, a, embodiment of white supremacy, patriarchy, hetero, cis hetero normativity, things like that. Those are all fine. However, they can’t look like, however Trump or however conservatives, present it. it’s really, as I see it, a maintenance of systems, but may be given the image of inclusion, may be given the image of equality or valuing that, but the actions and the institutional practices don’t necessarily follow through on that. They seem to maintain systems of oppression rather than deconstructing, abolishing, or seeking liberation from them.

Adrienne (05:08)
Right. So continuing to maintain all of the same structures, power dynamics, systemic issues. Maybe it’s just packaged a little bit differently. Maybe it looks differently on the outside. Maybe different words are thrown around, different imagery. Certainly the distinction that we are not right, we are not conservative, we are not with MAGA, but we are often still maintaining many of the same power structures and dynamics and policies and as you mentioned, continuing that harm in maintaining white supremacy, maintaining colonialism, maintaining Western values and ideals, maintaining similar binaries, all of those kind of things that kind of, yeah, thank you so much for clearing that up. So if we moved into leftist territory, then how do you see that as different?

Darius Green (05:58)
Yeah, and I don’t want to say that leftism is inherently different. i\I think it can be vulnerable to the same, I guess, hollowness of a liberal identity that doesn’t often feel like it stands on its own. It feels like it’s defined in opposition to something rather than the substance of something. So with leftism, I generally see a little bit more, a lot more substance, a lot more value in resistance to systems of oppression and a value for liberation, a value for actual equity and equality, a value for dreaming and looking beyond the status quo and acknowledging our current reality and how our current systems are functioning and questioning and challenging those. And at the same time, think the leftist identity can very much end up being hollow if it’s not rooted and grounded in sort of substance and core values. I don’t necessarily, and I think some leftism can look like that. That’s not necessarily dedicated to certain principles. It’s not dedicated to certain values. That it’s almost kind of parallel to how liberals view conservatives. Sometimes I see leftists folks essentially what drives their sense of identity is not being liberal.

They got the not being Trump part down, but it’s, I derive my sense of meaning and value and who I am as a leftist by being in opposition to liberals, which can lack some substance and value. But there’s also lot more variability, especially when we get into specific types of leftism that have maybe more of a definition. Abolitionism, would consider sort of a leftist ideology or can be conceptualized as a specific leftist ideology.

I think that leftism, yeah, can fall into some of the same pitfalls as liberalism, but also I see more people maybe committed to certain values or certain perspective or certain vision.

Adrienne (07:39)
Okay, okay. And then moving into really what how I see your work is being very abolitionist. How do you see that that differs? How what is being abolitionist mean to you? What do you feel like it’s not? Can you speak to that a little bit?

Darius Green (07:53)
Yeah, abolition is definitely a scary term every time I share about it, depending on the space that I’m in, especially if I’m in a space with liberals, if I’m in a space with conservatives. The immediate thought is this is destruction, this is anarchy, this is lawlessness, this is just pure chaos. And I can get why that can feel that way because abolition is very much rooted in the elimination of oppressive systems and structures, specifically as it relates to policing in prisons and other carceral systems. However, abolition is way more than that. think a central piece of abolition that gets missed out on, whether through intention or just because that fear pops up in people and prevents exploration, is that abolition is for creating safety, is for dreaming of a world that is different than what we currently experience, the conditions that we currently experience that promote things like poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, orchestrated oppressive violence. Abolition is dedicated towards eliminating those systems, but also creating systems of care, systems of community, systems of collective safety that values us as a collective as opposed to a system that values power.

Adrienne (08:57)

Yes, right. I do think that often gets missed is that this idea that abolitionism is about destroying it all, bloody revolution, complete chaos and anarchy, and then not replacing it with anything. It’s not caring about what happens to anyone or the future. It’s just about eliminating what’s in place at all costs. And so we’ll have no systems, no government, no organization, no, that the world will just be on fire. I think that that gets perpetuated a lot, I assume, through many means of propaganda over the years to not dream of a different kind of world. Everything you just described really speaks to what I do in unschooling, which, you know, tends to get dicey because I talk about getting rid of the school system altogether compared to trying to reform it or trying to fix it or that so many teachers are doing their best and they really just need more support and more money. And what unschooling where we really differ there is one, we don’t take school and replicate it at home. So we don’t take those same power structures the power dynamic, the toxicity, the rewards and the punishment, the compulsory education, and then just replicate it in our own homes and repeat all those same systems. We don’t fight for, against police brutality out here and then come into our homes and police our children in the very same way. So it’s really about dismantling that altogether and re-imagining, which I feel like is one of the tools that white supremacy tends to use is eliminating creativity and imagination. It’s really getting all of us on this capitalist colonial wheel of exhaustion and exploitation that we don’t have the time, energy, money or resources to even think beyond what we currently have. Whereas unschooling tends to focus on that liberation and really so much of my work is about getting parents to let go of this idea that they have to replicate anything that currently exists and that they are perfectly capable and allowed to create their version of normal at home, which doesn’t include our little nucleus family in our home, in our bubble, not connecting with the world around us. That is a very typical view of homeschoolers that were sheltering and that were cut off from the rest of the world. And I think that tendency is to be like, you know what? not going to be in school, I’m going to take care of myself and my own and my kids and my little family, which doesn’t include that collective liberation, doesn’t include that connection with community and building all those relationships, which I feel like is just that other side of that same coin of abolitionism is, okay, we’ve gotten rid of this and these structures, but what are we creating? How are we going to connect with each other? How are we going to build that community? So that is such a big part of the work that I do as well. Thank you for that discussion about abolitionism and what it means to you. And I do wanna talk a little bit about why it is so hard for people to grasp that idea and what is so scary about it. I came upon your page when I saw a number of indigenous creators. Generally this pops up during the election and even more so now that comment about settlers really arguing over stolen land or settlers arguing about which party in this oppressive system is best to rule us and many indigenous creators that I see really want to abolish the system altogether. They don’t want to be a part of the very tools of oppression that are oppressing us, which they see in the two party system, which they see in these Western and colonial governments and ways of exploiting the land, all of it. And that’s really how I came into your work. But I find that when I talk about it, it really gets people on edge, really gets people feeling defensive. And so I kind of want to delve into a little bit about why you feel that is. Why is it that talking about you know, liberalism and even leftist is people can swallow that pill. They can, they can have those discussions, but as soon as we delve into that further radical category of abolitionist discussions, it just, I feel like the responses I get are either, well, it’s better than Trump. Like how dare you criticize anything that gets us away from Trump because that’s where we’re headed. Or it tends to have an anti-Black racism component, particularly if we’re talking about people like you said, like Obama, Kamala, any of those figures who are of different identities that aren’t cis, straight, white, able-bodied, but are seemingly above criticism.

Darius Green (13:49)
Yeah, for me as an educator and my background in counseling, something that I really like to do ties into some liberation psychology and liberation theories, like decoding like the latent messages behind what people are saying when they’re defending systems of oppression or when they start becoming defensive. And as you were kind of describing like some of those messages and reactions that people have in alignment with that fear and defensiveness is like, hey, I want to protect my way of life. I want to protect the way that things are for me and how I’ve been raised and how I’ve experienced them. I don’t want to experience change. This is good enough for me. While also having that kind of caveat of not really caring about others, not really caring about how one’s way of life and living came to be, not really contending with sitting with the corporal realities and atrocities of settler colonialism that have made white people the dominant population and culture in the United States at the expense particularly of Native and Indigenous folks through the exploitation and trafficking and enslavement of Black folks, the exclusion of pretty much every racial and ethnic minority or minoritized population in the United States.

the changes based off of the interests of white supremacy at any given time. And so when I hear those kind of comments from people and I see them in my own spaces, what immediately comes to mind is like that fear of like even acknowledging and reconciling with the fact that this country is a settler colonial nation, that it was created as such as a settler colony, that it was created with the backdrop of genocide and many other forms of colonial violence and that those actually have not stopped at all. They’ve been reformed and changed to appear differently and feel more palatable towards changing times and global sort of standards, I guess, of what’s moral and what’s ethical. But at their core, still a system of white supremacy, it’s still a system of capitalism, still a system of patriarchy that enacts horrible forms of violence that it’s easier to turn our heads away from rather than sit with the reality of what that has been, what that is, and what that will continue to be without actual liberation and change from that core structure.

Adrienne (15:52)
Well, let’s look at if you don’t mind if we look at policing through this lens, because I think that same idea of yes, we need police reform and people accept police brutality, but we certainly cannot abolish the police or abolish ICE or about right like it’s that abolitionism that really gets to people same with schooling. Well, we can’t get rid of schools, we have to reform, reform, reform. So I know a lot of the research that you do is with police brutality, particularly with black men and black mental health. So could you explain it maybe through that lens? I feel like it’s a good concrete system that we can take a look at.

Darius Green (16:33)
Yeah, I’ll try to not get into lecture mode too much. I just gave a, tried to give a presentation on this, this past weekend where I just walked through the history very broadly of policing. And many abolitionists aptly point out that policing as we know and experience it today in the United States has direct roots and ties to a system of chattel slavery. We can trace back the lineage even further if we take a global perspective and see like that model of slave patrols maybe being the earliest form of policing as being adopted from some other forms of policing in England. But that was adopted specifically in reform specifically for the purposes of maintaining a system of racial caste that was needed for, I don’t want to say needed, that was used to sort of establish sort of a racial and economic system in the United States into sort of justify or address sort of this growing fear of white existential fear of retaliation from enslaved people for being put through some gross oppressive and deadly violence of again being trafficked, being enslaved, being confined, being cannibalized, so many are being subjected to sexual violence particularly for black and enslaved women in the past, but also sexual violence towards black enslaved men historically and contemporarily as well. And so, no one just sort of settles and takes colonial violence. We see that in Palestine, particularly through resistance. We’ve also seen that from many enslaved populations, such as in Haiti, there’s going to be resistance. No one just kind of settles into sort of learned helplessness. And that resistance promoted some white existential fear and for the system of white supremacy and racial caste of chattel slavery to be maintained, there needed to be a police force that was created to end slave codes that were created to control essentially what black and enslaved people did that then legitimized and necessitated the creation of slave patrols in addition to already existing forms of policing. And yeah, just during times of chattel slavery, sort of during the Civil War era, up to the Civil War era, I think that role of policing was certainly done by current forms of policing at that time, slave patrols and slavers and actually anyone who was white was ordained. And so that has some relevance for today’s day and age of policing where we see like white vigilantes or quote unquote lone wolves who find themselves in their mind and subjective experience doing the justice of a white supremacist system by policing black bodies, by using carceral violence and punishment. But with child slavery as like a route, it’s important to always note that it was not abolished. The 13th Amendment simply made a reform to slavery that said, well, we can’t do this anymore because of maybe the Civil War and through resistance efforts towards the current system of chattel slavery. And so we’ll adapt a little bit. We’ll keep the core structure of it. And that adaptation is that of punishment for crime or through criminalization. The dynamics of slavery get to exist paraphrasing the 13th Amendment, which is really easy to read and I encourage listeners to simply go Google it. It has very little legalese. It’s very simple and short and pretty explicitly says that.

Adrienne (19:34)
Well, in Ava Duvernay’s 13th movie is also really simple to, no, not simple, very poignant in a way that the lay generation can just watch. And I know it blew my mind and really led me to looking at our history of the RCMP here in Canada, because it’s very much.

Darius Green (19:39)
Mm-hmm.

breaks it down.

Mm-hmm.

Adrienne (19:55)
similar but with native and indigenous populations really started to keep them under control and keep them from revolutionizing.

Darius Green (20:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, that’s just kind of some of the early colonial history, but like slavery has essentially been maintained, child slavery, the dynamics of racial cast in the United States have been maintained. We see it through the Jim Crow era of policing and legalized segregation, that same dynamic of racial caste and oppression through policing is maintained using very similar behaviors and dynamics, the enactment of and needing police to be a force that in access Jim Crow laws. We see that through the civil rights movement in the United States that system and iteration of racial caste policing was challenged and that promoted. Again, if reform is the norm, the reform was to essentially adopt a colorblind ideology instead of exclusively and specifically targeting Black Americans, there needed to be an expansion to make it appear not racist or not specifically anti-black by essentially letting other, making other people collateral, maybe particularly through anti-drug policing and the war on drugs. But the system of racial caste maintained itself. There’s differential treatment and responses to substance use historically, particularly related to marijuana use and also that distinction between policing crack and cocaine even though they’re similar substances, that’s based off of racialized lines. so through that, it still maintains that system. And even today, in an era of mass incarceration, I don’t know how to particularly describe our current era of policing. I know some things that come to mind are globalization, militarization, surveillance technology as maybe some dominant and emerging reforms of policing, particularly in response to the quote unquote war on terror or essentially making some more overt expansions of policing the target, brown folks, Arab folks, South West Asian folks.

Adrienne (21:40)
Yeah, well, and I wanted to go into a little bit. What is it that scares people about moving from police reform to abolishing that system altogether? is it that we as white people, cops protect us generally. And so we are concerned that if that system goes away, who are we then going to call? And so we understand that police brutality exists, but what could possibly replace cops that are still gonna ensure our safety. I feel like that’s generally the argument that I hear and the defensiveness that comes up for people.

Darius Green (22:18)
Yeah, so specifically for white people, think you worded it beautifully. There’s the fear of who’s going to protect us. There’s, even as you put it, there’s just the latent acknowledgement that policing, at least along the lines of race, is meant for the protection of white people from black people, which again goes back to that core origin of slave patrols, to protect white people from this existential fear that there’s going to be retaliation from a population that’s being enslaved and subjected to it settler colonial violence, despite the fact that that’s never actually, that’s never been sort of a dominant form of resistance in the United States of violent resistance that is rooted in retribution and revenge. But yeah, that sense of fear that if police are gone, that means the criminals can run loose, the quote unquote criminals are essentially the black and brown people who have been subjected to violence and oppression of the system, they will be free to enact revenge. And so I think that’s a core underlying fear that if we get rid of police, we get rid of our sense of safety, our way of being. And these other people that we’ve been dehumanizing, that this system has been dehumanizing, can then enact revenge. They can put the same system in place and flip it, do a 180 and put it on white people, or that they will have their own kind of vigilantes are lone wolves enacting revenge. I think that’s a major underlying fear, even though it doesn’t make sense.

Adrienne (23:33)
which is really saying the quiet part out loud for me.

So what are we then imagining in place of that? In place of abolishing the police, abolishing ICE, abolishing those systems?

Darius Green (23:46)
Yeah, mean first just I think one thing about abolition that many people get wrong is that many people call it like naive or utopic and I don’t think in abolitionist perspective as I’ve heard it described or as I’ve learned it from other abolitionists who’ve been at it and organized much longer than I have this assumption that people are not going to be safe that they’re going to be vulnerable to harm I think abolition acknowledges that harm is inevitable. We’re humans. We have differing and diverging interests, either through intention or even by accident. We’re going to cause relational harm in some way, shape, form. So abolition recognizes that and focuses on how can we create collective safety? How can we also create true transformative accountability for when harm occurs to transform ourselves, transform our interactions with others, our communities, and our society from accepting harm as a norm, accepting systems that facilitate harm as the norm. So abolition really seeks, has this kind of preventative lens and has this iterative perspective around safety instead of our current system of policing and prisons, it focuses on the needs for security and status quo of whoever holds dominance and power, which would typically be straight white men who are wealthy and not disabled, so on and so forth. Abolition is really pushing for how do we actually center those who are most vulnerable historically, contemporarily to these forms of oppressive violence from these oppressive systems? How do we create a world where we get to be safe, that we get to experience true safety and that our needs for safety are at the center and fabric for how our communities that we’re dreaming of will function?

Adrienne (25:18)
And we’ve seen really that when we do center those marginalized identities, it actually runs a lot smoother. the right, cause we’d look at things like collective healing. Look at things like community equity when we’re centering the most marginalized demographics, which is how I think of children most often, those power dynamics and power structures tend to dissipate. right, compared to when we’re centering those in dominance, in power. It just, it is naturally violent. It’s inherently oppressive. It’s inherently causes more collective harm than when we’re centering the identities that you spoke of earlier. I want to point out too that we’ve seen very directly that the more money we pour into policing systems, the more violence and harm is actually caused, it really just funding more violence and harm. And that the more we defund from that and actually put that energy and those resources into mental health, into counselors, into, you know, those professionals or people in the community who know how to center those marginalized identities in those demographics, that that’s actually where we see the greater protection and less harm and less violence.
And so that’s kind of how I imagine, imagine this future world, right, is funding those, those methods of collective healing, collective liberation, the preventative measures, especially with, you know, therapy with anything that’s really tracking the root and those symptoms instead of waiting until later on when we see the harm, when we see having to help people after the trauma, having to help people after the violence has been caused after the oppression, but instead really going into it at the very beginning, which is the work that I do with children, that if we can raise them from the beginning to know that their consent is going to be honored, that their autonomy is going to be respected, that just because I’m older and bigger and more powerful doesn’t mean I get to take advantage of you and get to exploit you and get to enforce this top down hierarchy. And imagine if we have an entire generation of children who know that their voices matter and understand power dynamics and understand exploitation understand that they are in charge of their own bodies and that they can set boundaries and they can say no and they can stand up for themselves even if it’s against their own parents, their teachers, that that’s all encouraged. We then have an entire generation that grows up knowing how to treat people because they’ve been treated correctly. And what I always see as the problem is we even see this with Trump and his childhood. Like we see people who get mistreated in childhood.

But we see this with children who are treated so poorly their entire lives. We see this happen when their voice isn’t heard or listened to when we’re not seen or validated and that trauma occurs. And we grow up repeating those same patterns. We grow up enforcing that in our workplaces and in our homes with our future children and in our policies.

Whereas I feel like if we can just back it up a little and focus on preventing the trauma to begin with, instead of assuming we can always fix trauma later on, and we can always just put all of our energy and resources into fixing adults instead of looking at.

what we’re doing from the very beginning to harm those adults in the first place. I just feel like it creates so much more opportunity for health and healing and fairness and equity to begin with.

Darius Green (29:20)
Yeah, what I hear you sharing that’s important from an abolitionist perspective around like, what is safety? Safety isn’t achieved by responding after the fact. That is, in terms of policing, that is usually punishment, that’s retribution. Safety is actually preventative, going to the roots, preventing that from happening in the first place. And so I really appreciate you kind of mentioning like, that starts with like how we raise children. Just as much as it’s central to look at what is the actual core root of things rather than, hey, this harm happened, let’s respond to it, let’s punish people who created the harm. And I think something else that you’re pointing out, and I saw you kind of back away from it little bit, like when mentioning Trump, that happens a lot with abolition. That’s a point of tension sometimes when we look at people who are offenders, serial offenders of these oppressive forms of violence, the people who orchestrate it.

I think even to that point, or at least as I’m observing in something I see in other spaces that create tension is realizing that Donald Trump is a human being. And with that, he wasn’t born the oppressive bigot that he is. He was socialized to be that. He was incentivized. He was rewarded through various overlapping systems, through his family, through many things to become that. And I think part of abolition in addition to safety, but also accountability and justice needs to be transformative. And what that means is looking at the social context that creates harm and facilitates harm. Looking at, how did someone like Donald Trump come to be who he was as a person? How does a system operate to elevate him or other people like him to positions of power to further expand these systems of oppression and create grave harm?

I think abolition really tells us to focus in on that rather than being like, Donald Trump is a bad person. He’s the bad apple. Instead, we need to look at the entire system that structures our communities, that structures our environments. That’s an essential part to creating that transformative change and that prevention too.

Adrienne (31:09)
Yeah, yeah, recognizing that this is all learned behavior and these are learned biases and these are learned perspectives. And yeah, you very quickly realize what you can get away with, what makes you popular, how I’m treated with the police versus how someone else might be treated with the police. It’s conscious, unconscious, all of it, but it’s learned. As you said, it’s socialized. And so we have to start with particularly children. That’s just my realm of expertise, but not ignoring the fact that this is going on, you know, not trying to get away with what kids are too young to hear about this or kids are too innocent or like it’s, it’s a hundred percent our responsibility to talk about that and the realities of our world. Because in my experience and talking to my kids for 10 years, I’m not teaching them white guilt. Like their reactions have always been, that’s awful. Their reactions have always been very empathetic. Their reactions have always been I don’t know, I just feel like we don’t give kids enough credit with how much they’re actually capable of understanding. And the goal is not teaching them shame and guilt, which are again, tools of white supremacy, but that awareness, that consciousness and that resolve to do better and not internalize things that they certainly haven’t done as of yet. But yeah, to me, nothing has ever been more harmful than curating that education, whitewashing history, pretending that it doesn’t exist at best, then teaching, purposely teaching harmful practices at worst, but at least starting with being really open and honest and vulnerable, which I just think we’re not taught to do.

Darius Green (32:56)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, we live in a world where we don’t do that, where we believe that children can’t handle that. They’re too young to handle that, despite the fact that they experience that. Or other things, especially in the United States, children can be young enough to experience murder of themselves with a fear murder through gun violence, but too young to learn about racism, too young to learn about consent and rape culture, though.

And I think to me, what that highlights and what you’re sharing underneath that is, like we do humanize children as they’re not real humans. They’re objects for us to control, shape, and manipulate to be whatever we want as opposed to being capable of being human, being able to learn, being able to sit with complex ideas. Yeah.

Adrienne (33:34)
Which is, mean, honestly, that is such a tool, right? As we’ve seen with Palestine is once you can dehumanize people, a group of people, you dehumanize trans folks, you dehumanize children, Palestinians, it’s much easier to get people on board with violence and oppression and harm. ⁓ And so how do we bring that humanity back into play, into the narrative?

Darius Green (33:54)
Mm-hmm.

Adrienne (33:59)
Lastly, I’ll let you go here, but I wanted to address how do we then best incorporate abolitionist practices into our own lives, into our own perspectives, into our own thinking, and really get comfortable with this idea without getting our backs up and without, I don’t know, this fear of radical lawlessness, anarchy. How do you see that happening?

Darius Green (34:24)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, think the first thing that comes to mind is we need to be humble. We need to see ourselves as not being exceptions to the rule or exceptions to the way that systems oppress others. For example, I’m a black man. I can’t accept make myself an exception of a system of patriarchy, even if I’m not, let’s say, engaging in some of the if I’m thinking about a pyramid of rape culture, even though I’m not engaging in like the most protest forms of violence, I’m still socializing. At any point in my life, I could engage in those forms of violence and be rewarded for them. And so I think part of it is being humble enough to like look at the ways that we are all shaped by systems of oppression, including if we’re marginalized by systems of oppression. For me as a Black American, I’m still shaped by systems of white supremacy and internalized aspects of those systems and rewarded for them. Let’s say I work in higher ed in academia, plenty of opportunities where I’m rewarded to uphold white supremacy, maybe through doing quantitative research and things like that. And so I think being humble is a very first step. And I think a central second piece is not doing it alone. Doing it in community is, think, an absolutely essential thing to do.

Adrienne (35:32)
Yeah, sorry, one last thing that I thought of. So I’m a dual citizen, but I’ve grown up most of my life in Canada. I spent some time in the States, Utah as a Mormon, which is a very specific experience. But what I noticed is that when I talk about abolitionist practices or when I criticize, the Democratic Party or some of its leaders. What I tend to get also that I was wondering if you could address is there’s still this strong American need to be nationalist. Like there’s still, which I just, I have started to see in Canada happening a little bit more with Trump’s threat of us becoming the 51st state. It’s kind of the only time I’ve really seen strong Canadian nationalism. Usually we’re, pretty quiet about that. But where does this idea come from that? Okay, we can criticize these systems, but we still really need to be proud to be American. And we still really need to make sure that people know that we’re proud Americans, even though we want these systems reformed, and we see the brutality and we see the harm and will even accept settler colonialism. But at the core, still, we all need to still be for America, America existing, America being great. I see it even with marginalized identities and it’s just such a disconnect for me. And I was wondering if you could speak to it at all and what’s going on there and is this about abolishing being American altogether and because I’m all for that but I’m just wondering how what comes up for you with those kind of responses.

Darius Green (37:15)
Yeah, mean, two words that come to mind that facilitate them in the broadest sense, think propaganda, particularly from our military industrial complex, that values and prioritizes like the sense of nationalism that maintaining our structure of this nation as it is, is something that’s vital and important in this sense of loyalty to it. And another, particularly for not exclusively towards people of the global majority, but definitely in terms of instances where people of the global majority who are oppressed by the system historically and currently, when we defend it, there can be this sense of assimilation that has its own sort of colonial roots like for Black Americans, something I experienced like a lot of pushback from fellow Black Americans when I stated that I wasn’t going to vote for Harris because she supported genocide and was going to continue genocide. I’m not going to support anyone who is wanting to enact genocide in general because it’s immoral, but also specifically for Black Americans supporting genocide in Palestine of Palestinian people is quite literally the exact same colonial tools that are embedded in black American history of our oppression and enslavement and experience of genocide, even though some people deny that that is genocide. And so I think something that’s important to keep in mind for, I’ll speak for black Americans is that like our experience of oppression in this country forced assimilation through enslavement. Other racial and ethnic minoritized folks forced assimilation to being part of this system of what it means to be quote, quote American through various means. Maybe it’s pushed through the model minority myth. Maybe it’s pushed through like a politics of respectability that you can’t be like this type of person with a global majority. You have to be this kind that’s respectable, that follows the rule of law, that fits in with society, goes with the flow. I mean, that’s been normalized.

And it hasn’t always, even though it can get a lot of criticism in today’s day and age, I think it’s also important to keep a mindset, a trauma-informed mindset of like some people actually had to assimilate to survive in the past. The consequence in previous times are not necessarily felt currently at least, not that they’re non-existent, but I’m thinking during times of chattel slavery, resisting white supremacy could result in death, could result in harm to one’s family. And so there is this survival need that, hey, we need to assimilate and that can get transmitted across generations as like, is the survival tactic. To survive, we have to assimilate, we have to pick and choose our fights. And that can end up taking the shape of defending our country, even though our country is an active and expanding settler colonial nation.

Adrienne (39:43)
Mm hmm. Yeah, it is an entire topic we could talk about for many, many hours. But I’ll let you go. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate the discussion and being able to have some dialogue here about really difficult, nuanced, complex topics that just cannot be addressed in a five second reel or a 20 word post. It’s just too hard.

Darius Green (40:08)
Mm-hmm.

Adrienne (40:11)
Thank you. really appreciate your voice and your perspective and the space you take up online. I’ve learned so, so much from you. So thank you for that.

Darius Green (40:19)
Yeah, well thank you for inviting me and just dialoguing and having some conversation that needed an important conversation.

Adrienne (40:25)
Yeah, definitely. OK, we’ll chat soon.