The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz

I’m interested in the revolutionary potential of joy, and to that effect I decided to check out The Black Joy Project by Kleaver Cruz. The Black Joy Project celebrates and promotes diverse narratives of Black experience and in this text Cruz offers an overview of the projects aim, some of the diasporic history that necessitates it. 

The book is informative and offers good insight into some historical factors for the Black diaspora. In particular, Cruz gives some background into the Dutch colonization of Suriname, which I feel is underrepresented in historical accounts. While that stands out, Cruz provides excellent context for a number of countries and strives to reflect the experience of a number of Black communities; another highlight is pointing to Haiti as a model for historic revolution and resolve.

The book offers a reasonable balance of principles and specific initiatives. There’s an emphasis on joyful and small-scale interactions, including things as simple as having a photo booth at a conference to capture the joy of Black attendees, sharing Black joy on social media to keep it front and center, and so on.

When it comes to principles, there were a few things that stood out within Cruz’s framework:

1) Cruz emphasizes that we need to think beyond the revolution. If our prime motivation is for the revolution, Cruz points out that it’s somewhat short sighted—we need to think of the day after the revolution and envision the joy it will hold. That keeps us motivated and focused on our goals, not mired in the process and living just for the fight.

2) Drawing from the spirit of improv, Cruz refers to the “yes and” principle as our modus operandi in doing this work. It’s clear that there’s a history of trauma in a number of Black communities and ongoing injustice and suffering. Cruz takes a “yes and” to traumatic stories: for example, to the statement “America has continually mistreated their Black communities” Cruz might respond “Yes, and they’ve continued to thrive.” The “yes and” method is a way of returning to joy and focusing on what needs to be done. It’s also a way of highlighting ongoing success and next steps. The narrative does not get to end at trauma: the work and the joy both go on.

3) Put another way, joy has to come first. Like Gholdy Muhammad suggests in Unearthing Joy, when engaging in conversations around Blackness we tend to default to injustice, but that centers the injustice rather than the most directly impacted. I would argue the same goes for talking about Indigeneity—when we talk about colonization, we too often center the impact of colonizers and erase the rich and vibrant culture and contributions of Indigenous people before, during, and after colonization. Joy emphasizes the strength and vibrancy of racialized communities and resistance to the oppressive structures that try to break them. Cruz phrases this in a much more accessible way than I just have.

4) Connecting with nature is critical. Drawing partially on the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Cruz examines the significance of nature as a model for resilience and versatility. For instance, Cruz draws on the image of moss and describes its many uses, linking it to the idea of community and fulfilling everyone’s needs. They also link nature to food and our practices surrounding its preparation, explaining the power of connection it brings. At the grander scale, they highlight the Afro-Indigenous Soul Fire Farm, who enacts food and land sovereignty as an avenue towards BIPOC independence.

5) Connecting with each other and reframing our experiences through the lens of joy is also critical. There’s a moment in the text where they narrate a gathering of predominantly Black attendees at which one mother is expressing her distress: her son was killed at the hands of police and was sobbing and, despite the fact that Cruz did not speak Portuguese, they could understand the pain. The event then became a collective mournful song that gradually transformed into a celebration song. It’s was a powerful account of reframing trauma through a joyful connection.

        Overall, The Black Joy Project is an account of optimism and hope. It’s informative without being overly theoretical and it’s specific enough in the accounts of initiatives while balancing the need for principles. It’s an accessible book that emulates its own call for connection. In some ways, the book isn’t anything revolutionary—but at the same, it absolutely is.

        Happy reading! Be sure to share your joy with others in the spirit of celebration and connection!

Starting Somewhere: Community Organizing for Socially Awkward People Who've Had Enough by Roderick Douglass

It’s easy to feel defeated. The same fights have been happening for years. The world seems to keep getting worse. I think it’s pretty draining to see how limited the long-term change has been, especially when we reflect on the level of public discourse in the last decade. What can we do? How do we carry forward? It’s the need to address these questions that compels me to practical guides like Roderick Douglass’ Starting Somewhere: Community Organizing for Socially Awkward People.

Before diving into the review, I have two notes. One is that the book leans way more heavily on the community organizing piece and there’s very little by way of actually coaching socially awkward people to get involved. The other caution is that, in researching the author for the text, I encountered some controversy. There are some claims from roughly two years ago that the author is not supportive to queer Black folk and he maybe went missing for a while? The details are hazy and I haven’t been able to parse it out yet.

The book is a contemporary look at creating change within communities. The book moves through a few different phases and modes. Partly, it’s a manifesto of beliefs; partly, it’s a history of some activist movements in the United States and contemporary instances of, for example, police brutality; partly, it’s a personal memoir and reflection. Of course, it also sometimes reads like a listicle of rules for organizing.

The book starts off with an account of the author’s criminal past, running a CoinStar scam because the machines, at the time, all used the same keys. Douglass makes the case that this is a rebellion against capitalism. The anecdote is an engaging one to start the text.

From there, the book goes through some principles and practicalities for organizing community movements. Then, the text goes into some specific tactics for agitating. The book finally builds towards some discussion of common principles and values for guiding the work. I would say that the text gives more practical and applicable tips than some of the more philosophical social justice books I’ve read, which is a welcome change, even if I don’t entirely agree with the efficacy or viability of some strategies for myself.

One of the things I really appreciated about the book is the way Douglass frames how organizations should form and operate. Essentially, everyone needs to start small and go to community events. There’s an optimistic bent about going to community events that aren’t necessarily political in nature but that aim to address community needs—maybe it’s a fundraiser for building a new park, or maybe it’s a tree planting event, or maybe it’s a film screening followed by a discussion. These all become framed as places where people can find political affinities. Douglass discourages people from starting new groups—at least without starting by looking to see if any similar groups exist. The groups should all target particular community needs and address those first. Maybe the ultimate goal is to dismantle racism, but maybe the first step is just to replace racist graffiti on a particular wall downtown. Douglass also frames community organizations as fluid and dissolvable. That’s a really refreshing approach; I often feel like I need to be part of something eternal and everlasting, but Douglass suggests that the whole point of community groups is to do a job and then either update themselves or disband. It makes the whole idea of social justice seem much more manageable.

In terms of tactics, Douglass suggests everyone “lie, cheat, and steal.” He encourages that people lie to police, for example—whether it be about their name, or giving them the wrong directions when they see a teenager running away from them, and even going so far as to perjure yourself in court to let friends off the hook. The part about stealing is quite literal: Douglass goes through 22 tips for shoplifting effectively. I don’t really see myself taking this particular form of action, but I appreciated the cheekiness of making a whole chapter about how to be a better criminal. I’d have to do some more research to see how reliable the advice is. 

In another chapter, Douglass goes into the details for effective community organizing with clear, practical suggestions. The text is nothing if not accessible. There’s a number of ideas regarding everything from how to structure your meeting agendas, how to select meeting spaces, who to hire for supporting crowd control, where to get money from, and so on and so forth. The chapter reads largely like a checklist and I can imagine it being used as such.

The latter part of the book gets more philosophical in nature. There’s a relatively lengthy discussion of voting as a tactic. I have to admit I take some issue with his line of argumentation, but I can appreciate it nonetheless. His argument is that voting provides legitimacy to a system that is fundamentally unjust; all politicians, in Douglass’ view, are fascist. I understand not wanting to provide legitimacy to the system, particularly in a two-party system. Douglass disagrees with the idea of voting as harm reduction, but I just have such a hard time believing that there’s no difference between, say, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Certainly, there are issues with Harris’ lack of care for the genocide of Palestinians—not that Trump cares, either. I just don’t believe that, had Harris been elected, Elon Musk and Doge would have been a thing or that our public discourse would be so openly racist, or that ICE would have been sent into major cities like a private militia. Voting isn’t going to change the system, and I hate the idea of providing legitimacy to it, but at the same time I can’t let go of the idea of harm reduction voting.

The ending of the book also goes into some more broad principles for organizing. For instance, about who to accept money from (or not), and how to manage the safety of members in groups. Douglass discusses the idea of crowdfunding and how to allocate funds directly to those most impacted. He also offers alternatives to raising money and focusing on tangible goods. He presents skepticism around NGOs and suggests that any group that has extra funds saved up is suspect: all money should be spent immediately on the projects the group has at hand (except, perhaps, legal fees). There’s then a whole section about the role of men within the movement and how becoming better partners and taking care of children can also free up space for their partners to lead revolutionary movements. Douglass discusses the necessity of holding men accountable for their actions when former abusers cannot be pulled from the movement entirely. I think reality gets messier, but Douglass’ optimism is fundamental to sustaining ourselves.

Overall, the book is an accessible outline for community organizing with its fair share of tips and anecdotes for how to effectively engage in community action. I appreciate its overall project: we are firmly rooted in the idea of praxis here, not too philosophical to be actionable. It seems like a worthwhile primer for people looking to get started in their communities. I’m sure there are some tips that you’d be able to apply in your own efforts.

Happy reading and happy engaging!

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac

As you can likely infer from the title, we’re entering some difficult territory with Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mac. This is a nonfiction book that confronts the challenging discourse surrounding sex work wherein the authors recognize that it would likely be better for women if sex work did not exist at all, but, since it does, we are obligated to establish better practices for protecting those in the industry.

A foundational aspect of the text is defining sex work as work, in some ways like any other. People often make moral arguments against sex work and decry (especially, but not exclusively) women selling or “renting” their bodies for a fee. The argument starts to break down, though, when you try to explain the difference between a sex worker selling her body and the destruction any number of people subject their bodies to for work. Consider, more directly, a miner whose body is perpetually sore or, to take it further, an Uber driver who never sleeps and so subjects themself to any number of illnesses. Gig economy work notwithstanding, we have a number of protections for workers—so what is the difference? The line of reasoning is reflective of the authors’ approach. Not that their work isn’t data-driven, but Smith and Mac tend to wax more philosophical and offer reasoned arguments for the ethical treatment of sex workers. They remain consistently informative, if a little general, and probe into the paradoxes of the industry.

Particularly compelling to me is the way they break down sex work prevention laws and expose them for their injustice. For example, in an effort to eradicate sex work, several countries have decreed that there shalt be no brothels and have put in anti-trafficking measures. The problem, though, lies in the definitions of these practices. For instance, a brothel is defined as any place in which sex work takes place by more than one worker. What does not get factored in is whether the workers are there at the same time, whether they know each other, and so on. Smith and Mac give the example that two women engaged in sex work might rent an apartment together to save on rent and be around as backup in the case of unsafe situations. Even if they are not working at the same time, and even if they also live where they work, their apartment gets counted as a brothel. Similarly, if you ‘harbour’ anyone involved in sex work, depending on where you are, you might get classed as a sex trafficker—including if you have a friend or family member in your life that engages in sex work and happens to sleep over at your house. These laws effectively serve only to cut off sex workers from their communities and make sex work less safe.

Another measure that people have attempted is to criminalize not sex workers but their clients. While we’re all prepared to shame people for being in the industry, the reality is that there are people willing to buy sex. Smith and Mac are quick to point out, though, that sex workers need the money, while their clients do not need to buy sex—there is an unevenly distributed need. And, like abortion—making it illegal means it will still happen, just less safely. So, when clients are criminalized, it has a few effects; it decreases the amount of vetted, trusted clients. In turn, workers are more willing to accept riskier clients—clients more prone to violence or not paying or having STIs. 

Smith and Mac expose a number of hypocrisies that arise from not listening to the lived experiences of sex workers. Early on, they note that anti-prostitution organizations hire unpaid interns for months with no arrangements made for housing. These jobs, which could be paid, are nonetheless advertised as unpaid internships. The women most able to take on these roles are those who can afford to do unpaid work—that is, women in a position of privilege from where sex work is something to be abolished, not a pathway open to women who have suffered at the hands of national and global policies. Smith and Mac continually return to the notion that sex work is a product of circumstances imposed on desperate people—people who have been rendered illegal as they flee from circumstances beyond their control, and so forth. Particularly when it comes to trafficking, we could make a pretty circular venn diagram of people who oppose migration and those who oppose sex work. Well, in the case of trafficking, making everyone “illegal” paves the way for exploitative sex work of the people they claim in another breath that they want to protect.

Revolting Prostitutes is thus a difficult book to grapple with. It exists in a space of grey areas: prostitution is not ideal, yet needs to be protected. We want to reduce the necessity of sex work, but can’t criminalize it. We want to help people get out of the industry while recognizing that it is a viable income for some subset of the population. There are also, I imagine, far more sex workers in the world than you expect, especially if you broaden the definition beyond prostitution alone. This is not a book of easy answers, but is certainly a book of compassionate ones.

Happy reading!

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander is essential reading. It’s the only mandatory minimum sentence I’ll provide here.

If you’re looking to understand the history of incarceration in the United States, this book gives a thorough account of how we got here. Alexander gives an excellent overview of how slavery took shape in the United States, how policing emerged from that context, how poor Whites were turned against poor Blacks and leveraged a modicum of advantage that created the context for ongoing racism, how Jim Crow laws morphed slavery into a new form, and how the carceral prison system is a direct extension of the racist policies and climate that exist in the United States. It’s profoundly informative.

I think we can (almost) all agree that the prison system is highly problematic and needs reform / abolition. The New Jim Crow challenges many assumptions society holds about the prison system in the United States, even reforms that we (White people) believe to be progressive. Alexander offers counter-readings that expose the impact of prison reform practices on Black lives. For instance, even in the preface, Alexander discusses the idea of house arrest. Many people hail it is as being a more humane approach to punishment—surely superior to a prison cell. Yet, when we rely on technology to police, even the slightest problem can have severe consequences for Black prisoners. The “well-intentioned advocates” of technological solutions that advocate for monitors and algorithmic judgements neglect that the algorithms are already biased and that constant surveillance does not mean freedom. Consider also that ankle monitors have a series of problems: 1) the zone in which you’re able to travel may preclude you from having a job, seeing your family, raising your children, and so on. 2) The private GPS tracking company that provides the ankle monitor may charge you up to three hundred dollars a month for the “service” and 3) they are prone to malfunction, which may alert police to come to you immediately and bring you back to jail or deport you for breaking your conditions. We also know how much encounters between Black citizens and the police can escalate, which creates a new risk every time the GPS signal cuts out. Considering these challenges really illuminated for me the extent to which our alternatives to prison are often ill-advised or ill-considered from a specifically White lens.

We also cannot talk about modern prisons without discussing the War on Drugs. The anti-drug legislation that exists has a racial bias that targeted users of crack cocaine (as opposed to powder cocaine), which had different historical and racial contexts where Black citizens were more likely to use crack, while powder cocaine was for White people. [As an aside, she notes how it’s only when White people start using particular drugs that the conversation changes towards decriminalization or legalization—or even towards discussing the drug as a public health concern, rather than a concern with crime]. Alexander notes how only one senator commented on how the focus on crack was a scapegoat for other kinds of societal ills, arguing, “if we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the maligned welfare programs, the desolate neighbourhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a federal grant to develop it.” It’s a poignant criticism and points to the trend we see consistently in discussing social ills. People talk about the fentanyl epidemic now and the increase in drug use—but how often do we talk about the root causes of those issues?

I’d like to focus a bit more on the notion of policy, since it becomes increasingly clear that there is a disconnect between policy and the context of peoples’ lived realities. That understanding is thoroughly explored in Alexander’s book and one case in particular struck me as significant. In 1988, the year I was born, there was a new Anti-Drug Abuse Act that was passed and created more punitive consequences for drug crime. For instance, it
“authorized public housing authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal activity on or near public housing premises.” When we think about where drug crime comes from, we can imagine the economic context of aspiring dealers and frequent users. To think that people who are already struggling could be evicted is a harsh sentence, but think also of some of the language used here: what does it mean for a tenant to “allow” any form of “drug-related” criminal activity “on or near” public housing premises? The vagueness of the language permits evictions that may not be justified. Consider, for instance, a tenant whose fifteen year old son, unbeknownst to her, agrees to lend car keys to a drug dealer so that he can drive ten blocks to sell. Did she allow this to happen? Is loaning car keys drug-related? Is ten blocks near the premises? These ambiguities permit selective evictions—and who will bear the brunt of them, I wonder?

Worse, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act “eliminated many federal benefits, including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug offense.” Drug crimes are the result of desperation. Taking away opportunities further perpetuates the problems and renders it more likely that Black men will end up in prison. The act expanded the use of the death penalty for drug crimes and increased the mandatory minimum for drug offences, even for people with no previous criminal convictions (5 years for possession of cocaine with no evidence of intent to sell). Previously, the mandatory minimum for possessing any type of drug was one year.

The “tough on crime” discourse that emerged at the time failed to target the societal conditions that created crime and instead punished people unnecessarily. It’s kind of like how if we took all the money that went into policing homelessness, we could literally just give people homes. Alexander offers a number of anecdotes about “tough on crime” mentalities that are as horrific as they are depressing. For instance, if you’re okay with the death penalty, consider whether it was just for Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man convicted of murder who was put to death but was so “mentally impaired” that he “had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning.” I find that absolutely devastating and Alexander follows it up with a quote from Bill Clinton gloating that he could not be considered “soft on crime.” Why is that something we aspire to? Alexander’s juxtaposition of the two moments is laced with tragedy and a grim poetics.

Any time you hear people discussing crime, it would behove you to act like a three year old and keep asking why and not stop.

“I’m tough on crime.”

“Why?”

“Because these criminals are putting people in danger.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re selling drugs to little kids.”

“Why?”

“Because they can make a profit and don’t care.”

“Why?”

“Because…”

I’d keep that conversation going, but I don’t know how act tough on crime enough. Essentially, what it will come down to is that policies, laws, and their enforcement preclude people from living full lives. Surely it’s clear that crime is a response to inadequate housing, inadequate social services, inadequate mental health services, inadequate employment opportunities, and so forth. There’s a history for crime, and Alexander persuasive argues that that history is bound up with racism.

Some objectors will suggest that crime is “race-neutral”, but The New Jim Crow exposes these race-neutral necessities as false. For instance, people might argue that Black people are more prone to use and sell drugs when, in fact, that is not true, but rather reflects a cycle of racist policies and perceptions. Alexander notes that people have “differential access to private space” and that “influences the likelihood that criminal behaviour will be detected.” She gives the example of how wealthy people selling drugs are likely doing so in a private location, like inside a home, while poor people tend to have to share space and will go outside in order to conduct their exchanges. So, police catch crime in concentrated areas of the poor where drug enforcement is more easily achieved. Then, the statistics show more crime in that area so they continue going there, meaning they catch more people, and the cycle repeats.

Similarly, potential jurists cannot be excluded based on race, but supposedly race-neutral language can be used to exclude Black jurors. For instance, fashion choices stereotypical to Black males might be excluded as untrustworthy or undesirable. Someone may not like the look of someone’s hair. They don’t say Black, but that’s the underlying message. So even when cases go to trial, there is such little chance that one’s peers will truly be there to assess the case.

One thing we often forget is that incarcerated people do not exist in a vacuum. They have families, children. They have friends and communities that suffer when they are isolated from one another. When people are forcibly removed from their families, everyone suffers. Try that “why?” question out the next time some racist says that Black dads are never there for their kids. Why aren’t they there? Where are they? Why are they in prison? Why did they allegedly commit the crime? The New Jim Crow also blew my mind in its discussion of parole. One very common condition of parole is that you cannot associate with anybody that has a felony conviction. This means that when you go back to your high-poverty neighbourhood, if there are other people who have been convicted, you cannot even go out for groceries without getting a parole violation. One drug offence can mean that you are prohibited from all kinds of interaction—and that happenstance may have you violating the rules of parole and being sent back to jail. White people do not have the same challenges when finding a community after parole. Mass incarceration reproduces segregation. Alexander notes that people who might have escaped or transformed their communities instead find themselves “in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality, circulating between ghetto and prison.”

Politically, it’s worth noting that convicted people cannot vote. The convicted cannot voice their convictions, as it were. This note that felons are unable to vote disproportionately affects Black citizens, and indeed was initially designed to ensure an all-White electorate. Supposedly race-neutral barriers to voting have sprung up in all kinds of forms: a poll tax, a literacy test, a requirement not to have ever been convicted—all measures that are contextually targeted towards Black folk. This mass incarceration also seems to contribute to the trend of re-electing people who are “tough on crime”—-if the people who are mass-incarcerated could vote, we might actually see some reform or abolition of the prison system in lieu of more proactive social policies.

Alexander breaks down at every level how the prison system is designed with an anti-Black bias. From the focus of the legislation, to the enactment of it and the policing which follows, to the selection of jury members, to the extent of punishments, to our public discourse around crime: all of these are contributing factors to a profoundly racist system. In part of the book, she even discusses how “criminal” is a re-coding of “Black.” As people recognized that they could not be overtly racist, they had to change the language to a dog whistle other White people would understand.

The book is incisive, persuasive, informative, and all good things nonfiction should be. It opened my eyes to angles I previously hadn’t considered and provides the historical context essential for weighing in on any issues related to crime and punishment.

Read it. Spread the word. Make change.

Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin

        Nonfiction sometimes serves to inform, sometimes to persuade—but rarely does it serve to excite. In the opening pages of Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, you can feel the energy and the push to take action. The doom and gloom despair of statistical realities have their place, but Benjamin’s focus is on creating a vision for what might be otherwise, which seems to be confirmed in the excellent supplementary interview between her and Ibrahim X. Kendi that is added as an appendix to the book.

        Viral Justice is the kind of book we need: a book that looks backward to explain, but looks forward to empower. The book is about social justice advocacy, particularly as it pertains to race, in the wake of the Covid pandemic. In the introduction to the text, Benjamin offers an excellent outline of the project. She begins with the following reflection: “Racism, inequality, and indifference are a juvenile rebellion against the reality of this interconnection, microscopically, and sociopolitically.” Citing from James Baldwin’s address at the National Press Club on December 10th, 1986, she writes, “I want to grow up and so should you.” She then sees the Covid-19 pandemic as “perhaps [...] forcing us all to grow up, exposing that vulnerability and interdependence are our lot, whether we like it or not.” As an aside, there’s an excellent Propagandhi song that expresses a similar sentiment: “There is no me / there is no you / there is all. / There is no you. / There is no me. / And that is all. / A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. / A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of / the Universe is love” (“Duplicate Keys Icaro (An Interim Report)”).

Anyway, Benjamin suggests that “Covid-19 is a social disease” and draws from the work of sociologist Eric Klinenberg, to note that “solidarity is an essential tool for combatting infectious disease and other collective threats. Solidarity motivates us to promote public health, not just our own personal security.” She then notes that he cautious: “It’s an open question whether Americans have enough social solidarity to stave off the worst possibilities of the coronavirus pandemic.” If I retain one essential element of Viral Justice, it is that the myth of independence is seriously overblown and politically precarious. At every turn, collective action and solidarity are required. Even “vaccines” (both literally and metaphorically) “are no magical fix for the kind of pathological self-interest that masquerades as independence.” Benjamin explains, “When we look worldwide, access to a Covid-19 vaccine has widened the gap between those whose lives matter and those deemed disposable” and then notes that “we don’t have to resign ourselves to this infantile individualism-cum-vaccine-nationalism.”

The questions that guide the text are as follows: “What if instead we reimagined virality as something we might learn from? What if the virus is not something simply to be feared and eliminated, but a microscopic model of what it could look like to spread justice and joy in small but perceptible ways? Little by little, day-by-day, starting in our own backyards? Let’s identify our plots, get to the root cause of what’s ailing us, accept our interconnectedness, and finally grow the fuck up.” This passage gives an example of Benjamin’s inviting and direct tone. I appreciate the humour and emotion in her strategic use of expletives as we embark on her vision of a “microvision of social change.”

Essentially, Benjamin brands the text as a selection of lessons we can learn by modelling action after the virality of Covid and crafts the text with a blend of autobiography, statistics, anecdotes, and academic studies. That said, she very specifically notes in the closing interview that looking at problems academically is a privilege of those who do not need to live the realities; academia diagnoses but does not reimagine. The framework for social change presented as an alternative is drawn from the work of Dean Spade; Benjamin notes that there are three types of movement work:

1. Dismantling harmful systems
2. Providing for people’s immediate needs
3. Creating alternative structures that can meet those needs based on values of care, democratic participation, and solidarity.

One of the highlights of Benjamin’s work, for me, is the way she makes discussions more nuanced and truly progressive rather than replicating models that do not serve us. The point is made clear when discussing the carceral systems in an early chapter of the book. A few quick reminders: the prison system is harmful for inmates, but also for the families of inmates—of which there are many in the United States. The impact of that system is far-reaching, including the innocent families of incarcerated people. Benjamin notes that when we see people doing wrong, our knee-jerk reaction is often to want to see them punished or imprisoned. Benjamin notes, though, that this model is fallacious, since it replicates ideas of carceral justice rather than reforming it to better serve us.

As a point of contrast, take the example of Ecuador. Benjamin explains how in 2007, they “began a bold experiment that didn’t cost a lot of money.” She notes that “rather than continuing to criminalize street gangs, the country legalized them, and as sociologist David Brotherton documents, gangs were able to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming, just like everybody else. Some members went to school, started businesses like catering and graphic design companies, or took advantage of grants for job training or setting up community centres. As a result, homicide rates dropped dramatically and gangs began operating more like social movements, even collaborating with their rivals on cultural events.” The approach is simply a reworking of policy in the same way that legalizing drugs is simply a shift in policy that changes policing practices and allows people to seek help and addiction resources. The notion is that over years, “trust and long term relationships had a chance to build up. It wasn’t the policy alone, but how people used the legalization of gangs as an opportunity to transform how they related to one another.”         From the opening chapters, Benjamin then transitions into a discussion of inequities in education. I value those conversations, of course, given my profession. There’s some excellent discussion of hiring practices, the impact of suspensions, the idea of segregated schools (either directly or indirectly), and some of the grassroots initiatives that were supportive of true social change (cf. Cultivating Genius by Gholdy E. Muhammad). In a tangentially connected passage, Benjamin discusses how job descriptions can be rewritten in order to be more inclusive and facilitate more diverse applicants. This, I think, is especially needed for a school system that is significantly, homogeneously White.         I can hear the objections of people who will say “but jobs should go to the most qualified applicants!” I’ll counter that with a fantastic passage from Viral Justice. Benjamin recounts being at a conference and presenting in a majestic place and when they are being praised for their distinction, her fellow panellist interrupts: “Yes, you are worthy—but you are also very lucky.” The conversation Benjamin offers about luck is incredibly poignant. I believe this is a blend of her fellow panellist’s commentary and her own: “Lucky. Not a word one hears often enough in elite spaces. Being lucky doesn’t mean you are not qualified, it just means many others could have been in your shoes, but they were not chosen, and there are many more besides who might have qualified if given the same opportunities.” Summed up in one glorious sentence, Benjamin offers this line: “Luckiness does not negate worthiness, it negates entitlement” and continues that “Luck is the kryptonite of elitist delusions of specialness. And even then, the language of luck doesn’t do justice to the sheer organisation of selectivity, a key dimension of elite spaces, as a process [...] These processes are more often than not obscured.” These kinds of insights allow us to reconceptualize our relationship to power and privilege. Being aware in this way is necessary to take action for change.         Alas, I feel like I’m always waiting for a book that offers a list of ten ways to make the world perfect. That never happens here or anywhere—I guess you could count something like 12 Rules for Life if you want something by an opportunistic hack and political lunatic, but I don’t and I don’t. Viral Justice gives a guideline for making small changes to create opportunities for others, provide for peoples’ needs, and develop new systems. It makes the idea of change manageable and thus offers an optimistic outlook for the world. In short, it embodies that phrase: “Think globally, act locally.” It’s the small actions that matter.         I admit that between finishing Viral Justice and writing this review, I’ve started reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and some of the core concepts are getting jumbled in my head. That in itself is illustrative of Benjamin’s point: we are all connected. These texts are connected. No one is in isolation, for better and for worse.         In this case, I’d really like to think that it’s for the better.               Happy reading!

The Stubborn Particulars of Grace by Bronwen Wallace

        I had the good fortune of studying creative writing with Carolyn Smart when I was an undergraduate student at Queen’s and it was she that introduced the name Bronwen Wallace, with whom she was friends, into my frame of reference. That, however, was over a decade ago. Reading goes slowly, you see, and so I never made it to any of Wallace’s work until now.

The Stubborn Particulars of Grace is a collection of poems that veers towards confession, eulogy, and activism. The whole collection reads as incantatory and dedicatory in nature, with poems for specific people. It recalled to me some of the advice in Anne Lamott’s book Bird By Bird, where she discussed how her best writing begins as a gift to someone. Wallace embodies that: these poems feel like gifts, sometimes to a fault—the gifts needs to be broad enough to be stolen by others. In any case, the collection is deeply personal, but also has an outward focus towards social causes and community-building. To that end, the conflicted tenderness in the treatment of inmates at Kingston Penitentiary really shone.

In terms of style, Wallace’s individual lines aren’t as flowery, ornate, or challenging as you might expect from modern poets. Her style is direct and straightforward, almost as if her poems are more like short stories than densely packed constellations. The style has its pros and cons; the poems don’t really grip me with their language, but the length of the poems offer some great opportunities for circling back to a core motif or playing with juxtaposition in interesting ways. The unlikely connections and associated meanderings were the most engaging pieces.

There are five poems in particular that stood out to me that I’d like to offer some commentary on here: “One of the Things I Did Back Then”, “Gifts”, “Joseph MacLeod Daffodils”, ”Testimonies”, and “Neighbours”.

In “One of the Things I Did Back Then,” the opening stanza is focused on deeply personal involuntary memories. In describing summer, Wallace writes that the smell of summer “isn’t roses or freshly mown grass” but is instead the “hot-baked dusty steam / that rises from the pavement / just after the street cleaner’s gone, gritty / and warm as any memory worth the work.” She then proceeds to jump between connected memories, smelling decaying newspapers in the library and reading through birth and death announcements. It’s a morbid scene where the speaker writes down a list of the names of children who died in infancy for someone else. The narrative builds a mysterious premise as the narrator speculates on where this man might be and then the second stanza takes a surprising turn: “When he deserts, / his real name becomes a skin / he has to shuck, so he can wear / the one I’ll give him, a dead child’s, / that allows him a birth certificate, / a social insurance number, a chance.” In a short vignette, Wallace builds a life, presumably for a draft dodger or a Vietnam veteran, because the next stage recounts watching movies of young men getting pushed from helicopters and children bursting into flames and “a war coming at me, not from the TV / but through my own front door, born from hands / that dried dishes or made soup.” To her credit, Wallace builds the milieu and fills it with real, flesh-out characters with a great deal of economy. The speaker of the poem confesses to feeling conflicted and the ethical dilemma of the piece comes across with such confessional beauty it’s hard not to be engrossed by it. She notes, “Mostly I see what I did back then / as a way I had to help them, / but sometimes I think about the parents / of the babies whose names I stole, how they’d feel / if they knew and whether it was a kind of violation.” She describes the excitement of finding a new identity “like winning a lottery, / and how the names, the two dates / made the cards I used look a little like tombstones.” I find the juxtaposition of light and dark in the poem plays beautifully—tragic, but beautifully. The end reflections demonstrate introspection as personal as universal in its implications:

Here, we know only too well
the chances a name offers
or denies. The difference it can make,
like the bit of luck or the casual decisions
that add up to a lifetime.

Here, I know, too, that the war
I thought I had a tiny part in stopping
merely shifted location and goes on
as planned.

She finds the universal core of the experience to share before ending the poem with a personal reflection on her own birth announcement and passing into history to do her part. I feel like the poem “One of the Things I Did Back Then” serves as an excellent reference point for Wallace’s ability to navigate the personal, political, and universal effectively.

Her poem “Gifts,” appropriately so named, given the nature of the book, begins again with a deeply personal moment: “Right now, my son is crying / because the T-shirt be bought me for my birthday / is a bit too small.” Even beginning the poem with those two words, “right now” gives the poem an immediacy and grounds it in “reality” (or as close to it as text can come). Her son’s sobs are described as “stubborn intervals / that try to force a song apart,” which is such a wonderfully poignant phrase. From there, the poem becomes somewhat list-like in the reasons that Wallace would still wear the shirt: “it’s not that small” and “because of the Mickey Mouse decal” and how it is personalized with her name, and he saved up, and she’s his mom, and so on. The sentiment her son feels I find relatable: you know the gift isn’t perfect and it’s devastating: “He can see for himself how it wrinkles / under the armpits and clings / to my shoulder-blades.” The feeling is compared to that of an argument where “words we let fly [...] [are] dry birds, in some empty room of the brain” — another great image to ground the experience. The poem then delves into memory of watching him grow and become a man and find his place in a masculine world and that disconnect that forms noticeably, suddenly.

As I mentioned before, the length of the poem allows Wallace to explore a motif and forge unlikely connections, which may be best represented by her poem “Joseph MacLeod Daffodils.” The poem starts with dialogue where someone tells the speaker that she’s planting perennials because she’s scared and says, “because I’m scared and it’s the only way I know / to tell myself I’m going to be here, / years from now,  watching them come up.” There’s some meditation on what kind of milestones can be marked by the growth of plants—“when Jeremy / is old enough to drive, I’ll have to divide these, / put some under the cedars there; by the time / he leaves home, they’ll be thick as grass.” There’s then an extended discussion that offers a view to the intimacy between the characters, hovering around the idea of death and staring down the inevitability of it. As the two share ideas back and forth, the speaker shares knowledge that there are yellow daffodils called Joseph MacLeods, and that the way “they got their name / was that the man who developed them / always kept a radio on in the greenhouse / and the day the first one bloomed, in 1942, / was the day he got the news / of the Allied victory, against Rommel, / at el Alamein, and the announcer who read the news / was Joseph MacLeod.” She says it’s a “sense of history” that she can appreciate: “no El Alamein Glorias or / Allied Victory Blooms for this guy, you can be sure. / It’s like the story my mother always tells / about joining the crowds on V-E day, swollen with me, / but dancing all night, thinking now / she can be born any time.” The conversation shifts over to another long stanza that discusses Diane Arbus and cancer and divorce and the existential dread being spread out between them. There’s a direct address to the interlocutor in the final stanza: “It’s what I love in you, Isabel. / How you can stand here saying / ‘Brave and kind. I want to get through this / being brave and kind.’” By the time the last stanza arrives, several of the key motifs return and the way the flowers and Joseph MacLeod and their shared love of quotations serve as touchstones that enhance the themes of the poem with a final observation that the more a secret tells you, “the less you know,” offering this enigmatic note to end on, with questions about mortality and immortalization hovering just above.

The poem “Testimonies” is a compelling, fraught work that meditates on language. It praises an old woman’s voice that serves as a guide for “her people.” The poem is seemingly focused on an Indigenous experience from the outside as people strive to document languages: “the long hours / taping these languages which only a few / of the elders speak now.” It’s a poem about sharing stories, but also about having to “create the alphabet / that takes them there.” The poem then becomes an extended metaphor of map-making and language-making as co-extensive. There’s a beautiful anecdote about a parrot in the Northwest Territories that lived for sixty years after being brought over and how it sung songs in a cockney accent, “the voice of a dead miner / kept on in a brain the size of an acorn.” There’s a compelling moment where “all countries of his lifetime, contracted / to its bright, improbably presence / amid men who figure they’ve seen / just about everything now.” There’s a compelling contraction of space and language that nonetheless retains a connection to the outside, a thread to follow to something bigger. Again, the juxtaposition in the poem plays well. There’s this small link to the past through the parrot, and then it’s expressed again from another angle with shards of pottery popping up in layers of earth, then shifts to a meditation on how we slow down to look at car crashes and scan the wreckage, “blessed by our terrible need to know everything.” Further, there’s a man who ploughs a skull up in his cornfield that long goes unclaimed. Then, there’s a comment on the fields being enriched by deposits of a glacier. The whole poem is snapshots of the past that linger: “the trunk of old clothes / or the chair that didn’t make it / to the load on back of the truck” and “those smaller choices / we all have to make / about the future / and what can be wisely carried into it.” If there is one poem in the collection that is a masterpiece, it is this one. Everything is finely wrought and cohesive.

Finally, I’ll make a brief comment on “Neighbours,” which has lush imagery and comments on the idea of perspective. It notes that “insects see / as ultraviolet, a luminescent landscape / we can’t use, though the city / rises from it, scared and hopeful, / like a friend I haven’t seen in years.” The fact that this passage about perspective and invisibility emerges within a poem about inmates is a brilliant turn. Again, the juxtaposition really works. Insects see invisible worlds that we don’t, and prisoners are literally removed from our sight. It’s an exercise of imagination, of perception-based empathy, even for people who have done reprehensible things—a challenge Wallace doesn’t shy away from.

This idea of perception is critical to The Stubborn Particulars of Grace, and it’s a book that gets better when you look at it more closely. When you start to see the connections between the different components of the poems, you see a finely woven tapestry emerge. While the poems sometimes seem more personal than accessible, there’s nonetheless a kind of universality that shines through and provides some wonderful intimacy. The language on its own isn’t ornate enough to warrant quoting isolated lines, but the storylines of the poems, their meditative empathy, their calls to action, and their weaving are well worth sustained attention.

Happy reading, everybody!