The Lit Review Podcast

Fannie Lou Hamer is increasingly recognized for her leadership with the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, but did you know about the 600-acre Freedom Farm Cooperative she started? This is one of many examples of Black farmers organizing for power and self-determination highlighted in Monica White’s Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Monica and Page talk with Vivi Moreno, food justice organizer and urban farmer with Catatumbo Cooperative Farm and part of the Farmers for Chicago program hosted by Urban Growers Collective. ​Vivi helps us understand the long history of agricultural resistance and applies it to the ongoing struggles we still face today for healthy, sustainable, and self-determining communities.

​This was a hard book to talk about, but we’re so glad that we did. The late Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is beloved to many and considered a fundamental text in Chicana and Latinx studies. With gorgeous prose, she richly captures the unique experiences of those who inhabit the borderlands; of place, gender, class, and identity. Anzaldúa's book offers a poetic description of what it’s like to be caught between worlds. At the same time, this work is rightly called-out for those that it erases: Black, Indigenous, and trans people —all also existing and resisting in the borderlands. Monica and Page talk with Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute about the ongoing influence this book has had on her as a Black woman living on the borderlands of Chicago’s south side.

Originally published in 1950, Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire directly and dramatically influenced the liberation struggles happening in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A blazing collection of thoughts that affirms Black identity and culture, embraces surrealism as revolt, and demands decolonization movements that “decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.” ​Monica and Page talk with their long-time comrade Asha Ransby-Sporn ​of the Black Abolitionist Network (BAN) and Dissenters. to learn more about what Césaire challenges readers to think through and how we might apply its lessons to today’s ongoing struggles against empire.

Have you ever heard of the term “Alinsky-style organizing” and the rules that are involved? For example, “A tactic that drags on too long is a drag” and “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Here in Chicago, Saul Alinsky is often mentioned both for what his analysis is missing, as well as for the helpful basics his tradition offers. Monica and Page talk with Maira Khwaja of the Invisible Institute about Rules for Radicals: A Pragramtic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky. Tune in for highlights, lessons learned, and ways we might incorporate Alinsky’s approach as community organizers committed to abolition.

Ready to learn and get in your feelings? In this episode, Monica and Page connect with Stephanie Skora, Associate Executive Director of Brave Space Alliance and author of the Girl, I Guess Voter Guide. Stephanie shares her love and learnings from S. Bear Bergman’s Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter, a book of personal essays about their queer and trans experiences of family. This is a moving conversation about joy, resilience, memory, love, and softness, sprinkled with some timely conversation about the complexities of voting.

There’s importance in collaboration and experimentation when it comes to organizing. But what does that work look like in a community you’re not from? ​Monica and Page chat with Bettina Johnson, co-founder of Liberation Library and member of Chicago Afrosocialists & Socialists of Color of the DSA, about Hammer & Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D.G. Kelly.

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence hands us a sharp critique of the toxic role that the non-profit industrial complex can play in managing our movements in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, published in 2007. ​Monica and Page talk with Joy Messinger, a queer disabled femme organizer, former Program Officer at Third Wave Fund, and currently the Director of Training and Leadership at Funders for Justice.

​In the U.S., it’s becoming increasingly trendier to “go green” and become more environmentally-conscious in our daily lives under capitalism. However, there’s a whole other movement of eco-consciousness and activism that is being heavily criminalized and repressed. In his debut book, Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege, independent journalist Will Potter provides detailed accounts of the targeting of environmental and animal rights activists across the country. Our guest on today’s show is Brad Thomson, a local radical lawyer at the People’s Law Office, which has a history steeped in defending the rights of Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. Brad focuses on repping people whose civil rights are violated by the police and other state actors, and people criminalized based on their political identity and organizing affiliation. We explore Green is the New Red and how the people that have been involved in the most militant parts of these movements have been attacked and criminalized, how industry and government have characterized these militant actions in order to tarnish the entire movement, and use scare tactics to make it so that anybody who is part of these movements is fearful. Tune in now. Hosts: Monica Trinidad & Page May Guest: Brad Thomson Release Date: February 4, 2019 Length: 51:00 Key Questions: 1. What was the Red Scare? And the new Green Scare? 2. Who is the author and how does his background inform writing this book? 3. Who is the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)? 4. Who was Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC)? 5. Who is the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)? 6. How was the word “terrorism” weaponized in the Green scare? 7. How did corporations and lobbyists create this hysteria for governments and law enforcement to target eco/animal rights activists? 8. What does the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have to do with criminalizing protest? 9. Why should organizers read this book?

What does fascism look like today in the U.S.? Where does the alt-right fit into this? How can it be fought?! ​Monica and Page sat down with Chicago-based Native abolitionist organizer, co-founder of Lifted Voice, podcast host of Movement Memos, and Truthout writer Kelly Hayes to discuss Shane Burley's Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It.

Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 by Arnold Hirsch is considered a premier text on the subjects of housing and displacement. However, at about 382 dense & jargon-filled pages, it can be a bit intimidating. Here to offer a helpful summary is life-long Chicagoan, writer, co-founder of Transportation Equity Network, and neighborhood organizer Lynda Lopez.