ow do we begin to encapsulate the political chaos of the past few months? Joe Biden’s soporific and incoherent June debate performance was followed by an attempt on Donald Trump’s life by a 20-year-old registered Republican and then the most unhinged Republican National Convention yet. Now that Biden has announced that he will no longer seek re-election, some of the fog is beginning to clear. Like a growing number of party elites, Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, a former top cop in California who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Who knows what will happen next.

In recent weeks, Biden’s flailing ineptitude brought together an unlikely group of bedfellows (“bedwetters,” according to the president’s diehard supporters) who successfully demanded that he step down — a motley crew that included many left and progressive organizations, some big money donors, former Obama insiders-turned-podcasters, veteran consultants such as James Carville, Never Trump Republicans, a smattering of Democratic representatives, George Clooney, and a majority of Democratic voters. This strange alliance united people who insist that Biden has been one of the greatest American presidents — the problem was his age and rambling delivery — and those who object to his principles and policies, particularly his unwavering support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

The left has long called attention to Biden’s weaknesses. But over the past 10 months, his administration has profoundly alienated core constituencies the Democrats need to win, young people foremost among them. Videos of unbearable suffering in Gaza — the leveled buildings, bloodied and traumatized children, and anguished parents — have sparked a moral revolt, prompting people to take the fight for Palestinian liberation to the streets, college campuses, the United Nations, and the ballot box. Organized student protesters and Democrats opposed to the unfolding genocide who voted uncommitted in the primaries were the first to show en masse that Biden was unelectable, well before the now infamous debate.

Much to the annoyance of liberal pundits — including the newly Biden-skeptical Carville, who fumed, “Don’t talk about fucking Gaza and student loans!” — the rising generation understands that the occupation of and assault on Palestine is inseparable from other crises, including systemic racism and police violence, unchecked corporate power and public austerity, fascism and climate disaster. In response, new bonds of solidarity are being forged across racial, ethnic, religious, and generational divides to fight for Palestinian liberation — developments we tracked in our previous issue.

But far more than the 2020 protests for racial justice, this movement has sparked ferocious resistance. Nearly everywhere, transformative solidarity is not only spreading — it is also being undermined and criminalized. For exercising their First Amendment rights, students have been slandered, beaten, arrested, suspended, expelled, doxxed, and blacklisted, including some of those interviewed and photographed for this issue. Educators have been reprimanded or fired or had their hiring frozen. New York Democrats responded to the protests against genocide in Gaza by proposing legislation that would turn blocking public streets or bridges into acts of domestic terrorism. At the federal level, Republican lawmakers from other states have 

London, February 2024. Photograph by Crispin Hughes/Panos Pictures, via Redux.

This is a continuation of a longstanding trend that intensified after the Standing Rock protests and then again after the 2020 uprisings, when multiple states passed laws imposing harsh penalties on protesters who obstruct traffic on roads or even sidewalks. The state is setting dangerous new precedents, something Priscilla Grim chillingly illustrates in an essay in this issue; she was indicted on racketeering and domestic terrorism charges simply for joining a protest against Atlanta’s Cop City. (Let’s not forget that the Atlanta metro police routinely train and swap tactics with the Israel Defense Forces, providing further proof our issues really are connected.) In every case, the goal is the same: to splinter fragile coalitions, isolate the left, scare off potential allies, and foster reactionary solidarity to quell dissent.

Whenever ordinary people begin to come together across their myriad differences to challenge oppression, wherever fragile shoots of trust begin to grow, the powerful seek to mow them down and plant a more mean-spirited and lethal crop in their place. Last fall, influential Democratic Party adviser Ruy Teixeira published a piece connecting the progressive response to Gaza to the George Floyd uprisings. In it, he encouraged his fellow Democrats to “throw the intersectional left under the bus.” Over the past 10 months, many elected officials have done just that, further emboldening a fascist right that has beaten nonviolent protesters while funneling mountains of cash into MAGA candidates’ coffers and pretending to denounce a make-believe scourge of antisemitism on the left. A disturbing number of Democrats have provided cover for their opportunistic Republican colleagues, including New York Representative Mondaire Jones, who sided with AIPAC to oust his cease-fire-supporting colleague Jamaal Bowman. For members of both parties, Palestine is not a real place full of real people but a wedge issue to exploit in order to marginalize the left — to sabotage inclusive, transformative solidarity while fostering its reactionary counterpart.

Across the world, far-right governments, which have been gaining ground by forging reactionary solidarity among their base, have faced encouraging electoral setbacks in the face of solidifying opposition in France, India, and the United Kingdom, while the threat of renewed austerity in Kenya has brought together coordinated mass protests of such intensity that President William Ruto dismissed almost his entire cabinet. It remains to be seen how a new Democratic ticket will respond to this fraught moment and whether organizers can continue to build on the momentum that forced Biden to step down to help ensure his successors stop funding the slaughter of Palestinians.

A majority of Americans believe a cease-fire is urgently needed. But we need more than positive survey results — we need to do the hard work of cultivating solidarity and building collective power. The question is what kind of solidarity we, the people, will choose to grow: A flourishing, inclusive, and transformative solidarity that fights to universalize access to affordable housing, transportation, dignified working conditions, and peace? Or a poisonous, exclusionary, and reactionary variant that aims to incarcerate, deport, and deprive people of rights, protections, and even life itself?

Milan, Italy, November 2023. Photograph by Giovanni Pulice/contrasto, via Redux.

he distinction between transformative and reactionary solidarity reminds us that solidarity is not always a good thing, as Hammer & Hope editorial board member Astra Taylor and the activist Leah Hunt-Hendrix argue in 

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea

. Picture the odious insularity of white supremacists, ethno-nationalists, and religious fundamentalists or of otherwise hypercompetitive billionaires who lock arms to defend their class interests, the provincialism of police unions, or the resentful bonds men’s-rights influencers forge with their followers. These people are united, but toward what end?

This form of reactionary politics exceeds U.S. borders. Narendra Modi’s Hindutva dogma promotes Hindu Brahminical domination through violence against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis, and Dalits throughout India; Viktor Orbán’s fascist traditionalism encourages religious and racial intolerance in Hungary; Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism colonizes and kills Palestinians while also smearing anti-Zionist Jews in Israel; Javier Milei’s anti-migrants and anti-Indigenous austerity plan led to the closing of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (Inadi) in Argentina; Jair Bolsonaro’s racist legacy includes the subordination of minority groups to the Christian majority and the rise of a militarized Christian state in Brazil. These leaders have one another’s backs, as documented ties between Netanyahu and Orbán reveal, as well as the growing popularity of the Israeli government among European far-right parties. Reactionary solidarity locks its adherents in a toxic embrace that essentializes its enemies — “human animals,” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians last fall.

This chauvinism serves a purpose. To paraphrase legal scholar Ian Haney López and author Heather McGhee, reactionary solidarity functions as a “plutocrat’s scythe”: a way economic and political elites weaponize a wide range of resentments and fears to harvest obscene wealth and power. And harvest they have. Fascist formations and parties around the world continue to make inroads, gaining converts and seats in legislative bodies. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires has climbed to a record high. Some of the most notorious members of this class are now proud promoters of a racist, conspiratorial right wing. Trump endorsers Elon Musk and Bill Ackman are bound by reactionary solidarity, having conscripted themselves and their vast fortunes into the “war on woke” — a battle absurdly out of proportion to any racial justice reforms or concessions. It’s a reminder of just how threatening some found 2020 and the specter of multiracial solidarity.

But the problem isn’t just the right. Embedded in every conservative backlash is the failure of the liberal establishment to improve people’s lives. Liberals’ unwillingness to blame the capitalist system for hurling us toward mass immiseration and planetary destruction leaves people grasping for explanations, and the far right is happy to fill the gap. Millions can barely make ends meet, yet corporate Democrats claimed for months that the issue was bad vibes and the public’s ignorance about how inflation works, opening space for fascist faux populists to position themselves as champions of the working class.

This reminds us that the term “backlash” has always been a misnomer. It misleadingly implies that conservative counter-reactions to social movements are natural and inevitable as opposed to ongoing and engineered. But division is not our default state; authoritarians spend money, time, energy, coordination, power, and opportunism to foment it. The right’s forging of reactionary solidarity is a long-running and expertly executed project — one that takes advantage of not only liberal failures but also the shortcomings of the left.

Berlin, Germany, July 4, 2020. Photograph by Stefan Boness/VISUM, via Redux.

olidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing,” writes the renowned and much missed labor strategist Jane McAlevey in 

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

. Whether reactionary or transformative, building solidarity requires resources, vision, and a willingness to dig in for the long haul. The kind of solidarity we need has to be consciously cultivated, meeting by meeting, day after day. Many of the pieces in this issue document efforts to do precisely that, whether in Sudan or Haiti or during past iterations of struggles that we continue to fight.

As leftists, we know we’d all be more secure if we funded social services instead of jails; more stable if our neighbors could stay safely housed and well fed; better paid if immigrants weren’t exploited for poverty wages; healthier if we protected the air and water in poor communities and distant countries. If being right were enough, the left would have won long ago. The same goes for having public opinion on our side. Survey after survey shows Americans want many progressive things, from environmental protections and universal health care to free college and union representation to a cease-fire in Gaza. But polling results aren’t power.

Power is created by building transformative solidarity and engaging as many people as possible — like the unlikely coalition that came together to push President Biden to pass the torch, based on little more than a shared desire to have marginally better odds of staving off Trumpism. To pose the kind of challenge that can restructure society on a more profound level, we will need to build movements that are both disciplined and diverse. In the United States, few if any social groups have the numbers to single-handedly overcome the forces invested in our oppression, which means we need one another to win. The multiracial working class toils day after day, but to exercise collective power over the economy, it has to be brought into consciousness, each individual transformed when they come to the realization that they are valued and needed and can be part of something bigger than themselves. That’s what organizing is all about.

We organize by meeting people where they are, even when they are somewhere that initially disappoints or even offends us. In a 2020 interview, 

, recounts a trip to Palestine he took as part of a delegation for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He recalls his dismay upon returning home when some people he met expressed reservations about being in solidarity with Palestinians on the grounds that some harbored anti-Black sentiments. He responded that the Black community was hardly free of Islamophobia — should Palestinians withhold solidarity from them? In Kelley’s words, “solidarity is not a market exchange.” It’s not transactional, a kind of down payment on future reciprocity or a campaign donation that can buy Mondaire Jones’s vote. It’s transformational.

Of course, making space for difference and disagreement is easier said than done, especially at high-tension moments like the present, when we’re encouraged to denounce people who fall short and to see all conflicts as zero-sum. This patient ethos can be tough on those of us who prioritize conceptual clarity and consistency. “We think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual — that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation,” observed the late great sociologist Stuart Hall. “When, in fact, the whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic  (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference.”

As philosopher and poet Audre Lorde recognized, we need to find ways to find common cause in our complexity and heterogeneity:

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identi­ties. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our dif­ferences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

Black Lives Matter protesters outside Trump International Hotel and Tower in Midtown Manhattan during another day of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd, New York, June 5, 2020. Photograph by Ashley Gilbertson/VII.

Gaza, the Democrats, and How to Fix Our Wretched Politics

, on Oct. 25, you told Hammer & Hope that 

’s (PYM) strategy included an immediate call for cease-fire, broad mobilization of supporters, direct action, and a demonstration “that there isn’t a consensus in support of genocide.” Eight months later, what’s PYM’s assessment of that strategy? What has been successful and what hasn’t?

 Generating crises was the primary strategy. There was a strategy of mobilization, agitation, and confrontation on every single front of our movement to create crisis for the American ruling class, and for the Western ruling class more broadly, to raise the political, social, and economic costs for their participation in this genocide. That occurred through mass mobilizations, direct actions, bridge and roadway shutdowns, airport and port shutdowns, things of that nature, but also through direct confrontations with the ruling class. Now we’re in a moment of reflection.

These past nine months have given us a sober and frank assessment. What are our resources? How much labor can we contribute to this struggle? What are the organizations that do exist? What are their capacities for a variety of things not just on a national level but on a local level? PYM is a national formation, but we exist across numerous locales, numerous chapters, and they differ in terms of skill sets, experience, leadership, infrastructure, base, everything you can imagine.

This assessment now helps us to understand: What should have existed nine months ago? How could we have built toward that? Now we can ask: What do we need to build in terms of infrastructure, resources, skills, organizers? We’ve always known we should build organizers, but organizers to do what? Give speeches? Yes. Organize events? Yes. Outreach? Yes.

When you ask where we have not been successful, that’s a question rooted in where we were deficient: infrastructure, organizers, networks, local scenes, connections to the left, connections to other movements and to other communities. We relied too heavily on mass mobilizing. I can say this in hindsight because I didn’t know how long this war would last.

What’s difficult, especially in a moment like this, is transforming everyday people who come to protest into organizers. That’s a project in and of itself. To do that while organizing a protest every week is hard. You can give people volunteer work all the time, you can ask them to bring water bottles, to set up, to become marshals. Transforming people into organizers means bringing them in politically. And the threshold to bring in someone politically is much higher than to give them a task. It requires developing a shared politics with this person. It’s not just what I think about the world. It’s also about how you do politics, how you relate to other organizers and to one another. This stuff is tough.

 The Palestine solidarity protests have hit the nerve of the U.S. establishment, university administrations, and the police, further exposing their imperialist inclinations and support for genocide. How does PYM see the expansion of the movement into a broader anti-authoritarian movement that integrates students, faculty, and workers? How does persecution, criminalization, and violent repression affect PYM’s strategy?

 Over the past nine months, the violent reaction of the state to the movement has facilitated a sharpening of contradictions for the broader public. The backlash has allowed for a lot more clarity regarding the role of the state. The state’s repression has exposed its long-term strategy around counterinsurgency. It demonstrated the state’s capacity to innovate, in real time, to expand its repression, and to use all the tools in its toolbox.

For the first few months, the repression wasn’t as heavy-handed. But with time, the Palestine movement generated a lot more crises, a lot more pressure, and there was greater demand to quell the movement coming from the right and from Zionists. As time went on, more arrests occurred for things we were doing before — and not just arrests but also surveillance and targeting of leadership and core organizers. Other movements have experienced this, particularly the Black struggle in the U.S. But up until now, there hasn’t been a confrontation with the state in a way that’s cross movement.

Led by Michigan Social Workers for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, and dozens of other local activist organizations, the Stand Up, Fight Back march and rally calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, Detroit, April 12, 2024. Photograph by Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu, via Getty Images.

To your question, how has PYM’s strategy shifted: We need to strengthen the politics of anti-repression work for our movement, and it has to go beyond our base. We have to reach across communities so they understand that the issues they are working on are going to be met with repression. We need to face that repression together through a shared strategy. This is especially true with the coming elections regardless of who wins, because the Democratic Party is willing to severely repress our movement. This will especially be the case should Donald Trump win — we’re all going to face even harsher oppression.

We see the state learning in real time what counterinsurgency strategies look like: facial recognition technologies, the expansion of Cop City in Atlanta to various locales. There’s going to be a study or some conference where they talk about what’s happened in the past nine months in relation to movements.

 We’d like to hear more about PYM’s position regarding electoral politics and the upcoming election.

 We believe that progressive movements can reflect the demands of the broader masses that are often articulated as non-starters by Democrats or Republicans. The Bernie campaign revealed this — those types of insurgent campaigns can present new political horizons and allow us to imagine outside what Democrats and Republicans think is possible.

I’d like to narrow the question to this upcoming election. You have, on the one hand, Biden, whose pitch is 

We are what stands in the way of fascism and the complete dissolution of democracy in this country

[This interview took place before the June

27 presidential debate and Biden withdrawing from the race on July 21.]

 Then you have Trump and everything he offers. With the border, the Biden administration has implemented the policies of the Trump administration. In fact, the Biden administration has co-opted the forces that were previously agitating against Trump’s border policies. The Democrats completely lower the political ceiling of what is possible and what is deserved. Biden is not in a confrontation with fascism. And when I say Biden, I mean Biden himself, his policies, the Democratic Party. They are not what stands in the way of fascism. They are the flip side of the Trump administration, they are the current in our society that sustains the conditions that give rise to fascism. So our fight is the same because our fight is about the conditions, not about who is steering the sinking ship.

 PYM recently organized a conference in Detroit. What was the importance of that conference? Is there a central outcome that will influence the way PYM organizes the struggle?

 was organized by a steering committee of 15 organizations; PYM led the planning. The conference helped us develop shared politics, a shared assessment and understanding of the points of unity around specific topics, including the right of our people to resist occupation, siege, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and the need to advance that right.

 campaign at the conference to target one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics companies, which facilitates the weapons trade. That was an important feature of what came out of the conference. We also addressed a central problem: weakness of coordination among organizations in the movement. One of the first things we did after the conference was to organize the red-line protest on June 8, when thousands of people demonstrated outside the White House dressed in red or keffiyehs. The same steering committee that helped organize the conference was now organizing an action. It’s now working to organize a mass mobilization on July 24, in response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to D.C. to address Congress at the invitation of both parties. So this coordination now will, over time, strengthen.

Stand Up, Fight Back participants march through downtown Detroit, April 12, 2024. Photograph by Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu, via Getty Images.

 I would like to hear more about PYM’s participation in the university encampments. How do you see them integrated into the organization’s tactics?

 They’re often described as spontaneous, and there’s some level of spontaneity. But at the same time, there’s been nearly two decades of building toward this moment. The student movement has been organizing on university campuses across the world, especially in the U.S., to advance the idea of divestment. There has been an accumulation of organizers both inside and outside the student movement. Many student organizers become community organizers, as I did. We contributed to the advancement of the student movement and its politics, its infrastructure, its skill set. And despite the four-year turnover, which creates a difficult environment — you’re replacing your organizers and having to start from scratch, and you lose institutional memory — the movement outside the university campus is still linked to the student movement. That allowed the encampments to be sustained. And that linkage allowed students’ politics to be articulated and advanced. Had there not been divestment campaigns years prior, there wouldn’t have been an encampment movement, and we wouldn’t have seen the ascension of the demand for divestment.

, which is accumulation. This refers to our movement’s capacity to accumulate victories, achievements, skills, experiences, lessons. In order to move forward, we’re in a constant state of accumulation, and it’s important to build a movement that is able to accumulate, not just rupture or separate from the past through the building of new politics, new organizations. That is what happened with the encampments. Maybe 80 percent of our organizers are former student organizers. Our PYM chapters have relationships with students and student organizations, and they support the movement in two principled ways. First is direct support, the provision of resources, political advice, strategic advice, logistical advice. Second is support bridging the student movement with the outside world. We were a bridge. We’ve linked chapters to lawyers and businesses we’ve leaned on to help sustain the encampments. We wouldn’t have been able to directly help had we not been working on this for years.

 How does class inform PYM’s political project?

 Class is something that PYM has attempted to engage strongly in terms of the makeup of our membership. The difficulty is it is a diaspora movement. The demographics of PYM used to be dominated by people who have graduated from universities and are engineers, medical professionals, lawyers, NGO workers, etc. Now the younger members are more likely to be students and service workers.

But we believe that our external programming, especially on the educational front, must engage every segment of our society and include the working class, obviously. Beyond our community, there’s the labor struggle, the question of unions. That’s where we’re starting to develop our footprint. The labor movement in this country is weak, especially in southern states. Canadian and British chapters have more experience and more engagement with unions. On the West Coast, for example California and the Bay Area specifically, the chapters are more experienced with unions than in Houston or Dallas or where it’s a little more elementary or embryonic. That’s a front we’re still working to develop.

PYM views the popular classes as the working classes of Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora more broadly. And because we are an exiled refugee population, which is not one and the same as a class, but reflects a class dynamic, class is the foundation of our struggle and the foundation of our society. We’ve developed a deeper articulation of what a future Palestinian state or society would look like. At the center of it is a politics that understands the role of the working class as central to the constitution of any state. Now, whether we’ve consolidated that politics — we haven’t reached that point as an organization or as a movement. That’s a deeper engagement we will likely have in the future.

 How are PYM’s relations with organizations in Palestine at this moment?

The Stand Up, Fight Back march and rally, Detroit, April 12, 2024. Photograph by Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu, via Getty Images.

 PYM as an organization, or as a movement field, sees ourselves as an extension of our people, as an extension of our homeland politics. It’s very difficult for us to directly engage Palestinian political organizations, because the dominant ones that are carrying the movement are deemed illegal and criminalized. You really can’t engage in a direct way or in a coordinated way. Instead, our politics develop independently through our shared struggles. That’s one aspect. Now, there are organizations and institutions that are not criminalized and that we do have relationships with — these are the nonprofits, the NGOs, the unions, etc. At the same time, the problems and the issues facing our respective institutions differ. Engagement can only exist on some high level and not in the nuances. PYM has relationships with organizations that do similar things, that think about things in similar ways. And creating space to gather engaged people and allow them to participate in political space is institution building.

 What’s PYM’s relation to anti-Zionist Jewish organizations both in the U.S. and in Israel?

 With Jewish anti-Zionist organizations, we have relationships, we work together, we organize on local levels together. But we also understand that Jewish anti-Zionist formations have a specific role to play in our struggle, and sometimes those roles can be complementary, but not necessarily overlapping. We’re still working to understand the parameters of that. So that means we’re not organizing together, but our efforts complement one another. For example, Palestinians are not going to enter Jewish community centers to agitate around Zionism among Jewish youth. But anti-Zionist Jews will play that role, and it’s complementary to our project.

It’s important to note that Jewish anti-Zionism isn’t a politics. Jewish anti-Zionism describes a segment of the struggle that carries that politics in order to achieve a specific goal. Jewish anti-Zionist groups have a specific role to play within their social context, as Jewish people who have come up in Jewish communities where Zionism is hegemonic. Zionism produces two things in my opinion: fear and isolation. Jewish anti-Zionism is supposed to contradict that — and contradict it not just on a discursive level in terms of proving its negative but also on a material level, on a confrontational level, to agitate against it and undermine its hegemony.

Jewish anti-Zionism, for me, cannot just be the negation of Zionism. It has to be an affirmative project of understanding the response to antisemitism as solidarity and internationalism, a confrontation with fascism, with state violence, a project that sees all of these other struggles, including the Palestinian struggle, as part of the fight. We want more Jewish people to reject Zionism as an ideological project.

The Palestinian Youth Movement holds a demonstration against Israel’s siege in the Gaza Strip, Toronto, May 15, 2021. Steve Russell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images.

A problematic formulation of Jewish anti-Zionism is about the redemption of the Jewish soul — this idea that there’s a state speaking in the name of Jewish people, so it’s important for them to speak out as Jews. Anti-Zionism is not an answer to the problems facing Jewish people. It’s not about a redemption of the Jewish soul or an answer to how Israel and Zionism have distorted Jewish identity, Jewish religion, etc. Anti-Zionism is a response to the problems facing Palestinians. Solidarity and internationalism are the answers to the problems facing Jewish people in terms of antisemitism. There’s a state that claims affiliation with Jewish identity. It could have been a British state, it could have been a French state, it could have been any cultural or ethnic or religious background that’s doing this to Palestinians. But anti-Zionism and the struggle for Palestinian liberation as an anticolonial project is a struggle for the liberation of Palestinian people, not the redemption of the Jewish soul.

The struggle is about centering the Palestinian condition. By centering, I don’t mean that I as a Palestinian want to be seen and understood — I think that idea is very shallow and doesn’t benefit me. By centering the Palestinian 

 I mean: What are we facing as a people? What is required for us to overcome it? That is what I need centered, not some ontological relationship between me and another group of people. That’s not what has to be fixed here.

I do think Zionism is a negative project, the same way that fascism and its consequences for the soul are a negative project. But we’re not going to say, for example, that the end of fascism in Germany is the redemption of the German soul. That’s not a politics. Any ideological project that’s predicated on either the extermination or the expulsion of another people is not about the oppressor. A lot of the discourse among the Jewish anti-Zionist movement, or the Jewish pro-Palestine movement in the U.S., places emphasis on this redemption narrative, because it’s responding to its conditions. It is trying to intervene within its social base, within a social context of Jewish people saying, 

Look, Zionism is damaging to our souls. And this is why we should end it

. But Zionism is actually damaging to us Palestinians.

Protesters outside the Maersk office demanding the company cut ties with Israel during a demonstration organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Mississauga (near Toronto), June 11, 2024. Photograph by Mert Alper Dervis/Anadolu, via Getty Images.

What Comes Next for the Palestinian Youth Movement

It’s 1993, and dream hampton is in a studio called Hit Factory with a Cheshire-cat-grinning Notorious B.I.G., filming the Brooklyn MC recording a freestyle about toting guns and hopping yachts as a new-money rapper. Later, a 22-year-old hampton coordinates a phone call between Bad Boy Entertainment head Sean “Puffy” Combs and Snoop Dogg, who’s eager to broker a deal for himself and West Coast producer Warren G to appear on Mary J. Blige’s follow-up to 

 The footage, originally shot for hampton’s NYU film class, forms the backbone of her latest documentary, 

, a verité snapshot of hip-hop’s golden era, when the genre’s most culturally significant rappers — a generation hampton poignantly described as “kamikaze capitalists who just happened to be teenagers” — were coming of age. It also just so happened that hampton grew up alongside them, one of the many girls charged with protecting the bright, foolish boys they instinctively loved while interrogating their misogyny and trying to protect girls in the process.

Scenes of hampton challenging Biggie over lyrics about a guy who called himself “the rap rapist” (“For the record, I am o-fucking-fended,” hampton exclaims on camera) or bluntly asking Gang Starr’s Guru, “Why do niggas wanna kill bitches?” provide a real-time portrait of a hip-hop feminist working to dismantle the genre’s toxicity from within. And yet the film is notable for its absence of present-day commentary, a choice hampton made to avoid overly coloring the past. This approach is neither valorizing nor bleary-eyed but keeps the documentary eerily suspended in a time when hip-hop was transmogrifying into a capitalist beast and women found themselves in the crosshairs. The voiceover instead draws from articles hampton wrote between 1993 and 1999 for The Source, Vibe, The Village Voice, and other publications, with footage sourced from personal archives she uncovered in the summer of 2023 while clearing out a storage unit with her daughter. Ahead of the film’s June 2024 premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, hampton discussed the making of the documentary and its dual narrative about hip-hop’s assimilation into a fraught American dream and her own beginnings as a writer, filmmaker, and feminist activist whose name remains synonymous with a bygone era of giants.

 I want to start when you’re inside the renowned L.A. coffee house and jazz spot 5th Street Dick’s, in Leimert Park, interviewing its owner, Richard Fulton. You tell him, “Fifty years from now, I’ma still listen to hip-hop.”

] Oh, that was a lie! I wouldn’t even be listening to it 10 years after that.

 This film seems to capture the breakdown of your personal dream of hip-hop as a potential space for claiming “land and liberation,” as you’ve said in the past. When did you notice that dream start to dissolve?

 Honestly, back then, politically I probably would’ve thought of myself as a Black nationalist, and our greeting was “Free the land.” I didn’t think hip-hop would be part of some Black nationalist project. Or maybe I did! I don’t know. But it’s so laughable now. And by the way, the debates already happened a generation before, with Karenga versus Huey. I’m not saying the Panthers did anything better around gender than hip-hop. In some ways, we reify so much of the cultural nationalism. If you’re looking in real-time, you would say that Huey won those debates. But the truth is, Kwanzaa is more widely celebrated than the Black Panther program. One of the videos I remember so clearly from high school was Keith E. — Guru from Gang Starr — at a podium cosplaying as Malcolm X. When I first fell in love with hip-hop, it was the era of African medallions. I love the Jungle Brothers’ first album, 

 was as much of a part of my formative thinking as De La Soul’s 

. In so many ways, hip-hop is a failed project. It certainly failed in that it’s not even radical. I was once in a debate with the scholar Tricia Rose. Michael Eric Dyson had invited me to argue on the side “for hip-hop.” It was a silly little thing that happened in London. But Tricia won the whole debate. She was on the opposite side, and she won the debate with one line when she said hip-hop has turned into the cultural arm of capitalism. Any expectations I had of hip-hop being radical, let alone revolutionary, I abandoned pretty early on.

 Were there points in the past when you thought about releasing any of this footage?

 No. I had licensed some Biggie footage for VH1’s “Behind the Music”

episode on him, but I didn’t even look at it. It was literally in a box locked up in a storage space. I wasn’t thinking about it. I don’t know what made me say, “Let me get this small crew together and see what we have.” I thought we had a short. And then we started going through all the tapes and saw that we had a feature. It’s hard to look at your 22- and 23-year-old self, but there are times when I’m wildly impressed with her. Looking at that footage at 5th Street Dick’s was my first time seeing it since I shot it. A couple of members of Jurassic 5 were performing that night with Felicia Morris, also known as The Poetess. I saw myself at 5th Street Dick’s, and then I saw Richard come on camera. He’s since passed away. He was one of the architects of Leimert Park, which has had its own kind of renaissance and feels like 1990s Brooklyn right now. Richard was a formerly unhoused brother who had been given this space with the promise that he would renovate it. I’m just so happy I got him on tape. I made a temporal commitment to stay in that era. I would have loved to not have any voice-over — I didn’t want to be editorializing as a 50-something-year-old to that self or any of us.

 The film shows this tension of you being a Black feminist hip-hop writer raging against misogyny while having a personal relationship with these dudes who are sexist and lovingly holding their feet to the flames. At what point was balancing work and friendships the most difficult in that era?

 They didn’t see me as a writer back then. My very first feature was on Snoop, and when I met him, he understood me as a filmmaker, not as a writer. I had access to Biggie because he was my neighbor, and I was a filmmaker. I was never a reporter. Me and Q-Tip became friends after he was so mad about my 

 review. Me and Jay-Z became friends after I called him a hypercapitalist with cartoonish, misogynistic lyrics.

 That has to do with space. That has to do with me being in New York. I could’ve captured raging misogynists in my family. I could’ve done it on my block in Detroit. People call Puff “Diddy” now, and I’m getting way too many questions about what’s happening with him. But I know that my first response is that I don’t need celebrity to look at these questions. It just so happens that in my early 20s, instead of being home with my deeply misogynistic brother, I was in New York City. I have never, as a feminist, written off Black men, even though there are a zillion reasons to write off cishet Black men who are so resistant, decades into their lives, to unlearning patriarchy. The best that I can muster — and it’s a low-ass bar — is at least to be talking back, as bell hooks said. To not be passively taking this in. When I look at a 22-year-old dream, do I wish I wasn’t giggling sometimes? Yes, but I have some compassion and empathy for that girl. I don’t know that I’m as social as that girl was. Me now isn’t about to argue with Drake. I’m not going to get into a back-and-forth with Dave Chappelle. I’m not going to argue with any of these men, not just rappers. I’m going to let some trans girl read him after his third special. But back then …

 Back then, you were going back and forth with Method Man about the divide between Black men and Black women.

 That was some Five Percenter shit. Girl, I try never to get into a debate with damn Five Percenters. Would I do that now? 

 Can you imagine? What if you have a heart attack while you are having an argument about who’s the sun and who’s the fucking moon?

] Did those types of conversations ever feel futile? Like you were hoping for a shift in thinking that would never happen?

 I did hope for a shift in thinking. I believed it back then. I believed we were all in this project of thinking together. I thought we were in a project of exchanging ideas that would grow us. I thought we were all in a project of reading books. This is when, on Sixth Avenue and West 4th Street in front of the basketball courts, you could pick up C.L.R. James or Maryse Condé and talk to the brothers waiting to get tapped into the game about the book you were holding. Even ridiculous books like 

The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman

, we would have rigorous debates about them. We were reading bell hooks. We were reading Octavia Butler and Walter Rodney. We were engaging. I’m not talking about all the MCs I knew — many of them weren’t. But me and my peers were. bell hooks in particular was about trying to apply some of these principles to your everyday life, and I remember trying to do that. Again, God bless little dreamy. Now I understand it’s not like some of these men haven’t had a chance to unlearn. No, they are doubling or tripling down on this patriarchy. It serves them. Being an oppressor or being at the top of the food chain in an oppressive hierarchy is not a problem for them. I’m not saying they need to be thrown away by society or that they need to go to jail, but I’m down to not spend the time I have left on the planet engaging people who have created moats of basicness around them.

 Hip-hop is now at a point where violence against women is gradually getting out in the open, most recently with the shooting of Megan Thee Stallion and the Diddy allegations. Even in the Drake versus Kendrick beef, women are collateral damage. What, if any, conversation is this film having with the current moment?

 My analysis of the current moment is cursory at best. I dip in and out, in that I’m on Twitter to see what’s happening, and that’s when I catch a bunch of Drake and Kendrick strays. What I can see is that, yes, women are collateral. With Kendrick and Drake, I tweeted out, “Patriarchy makes targets out of women who ‘belong’ to men.” That’s just a patriarchal construct. That’s ancient. I would also like to say that in that epic beef from my era between N.W.A, Dr. Dre credibly alleges that Eazy-E robbed him of millions of dollars as that group fell apart. So does Ice Cube. None of these three men have fights. But who ends up being brutally attacked during that beef? Dee Barnes. A five-foot-three, 110-pound person. Then I see Kendrick’s wife, Whitney, invoked by Drake.

You brought up the allegations against Puff. To see 50 Cent acting as if, somehow, he’s some defender of women [

]… It’s not a real opportunity for him to have a conversation about the way these men not only are harming women in their own lives but how, through their contributions to the so-called culture, they perpetuate all kinds of violence against women. What he’s saying about Puff is not what he’s saying about Russell Simmons. It’s just that one of those men is his enemy. So that’s not interesting to me. Maybe the conversation is louder because we have social media; more voices are jumping in, and men are weighing in who aren’t rappers, aren’t music executives, aren’t engaged in this high-stakes, hypercapitalist play that is so-called culture and capitalism at this level. The fact that my film feels so right now is actually sad to me.

 You talk about the importance of men in hip-hop holding each other accountable at one point in the film. That issue came up around your Lifetime docuseries 

, and you suggested that what would have impacted the culture is if R. Kelly apologized and took accountability.

People hold up T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Justice and Fairness for Mike Tyson” outside the courthouse during Tyson’s rape trial, Indianapolis, 1992. Photograph by Steve Kagan/Getty Images.

 And those two things are married. During the time depicted in this film, Joan Morgan wrote an epic piece reporting on the Mike Tyson trial in Indiana for The Village Voice. What happens after Mike Tyson was convicted? Spike Lee goes to visit him. Not to hold him accountable but to let him know that there’s still love out in the streets for him. So it’s the opposite. Mike Tyson comes out of having done that bid with no better understanding. I believe no one had a conversation with Mike Tyson about consent as a child, and that in many ways, he was suspended in a particular mind-set as an athlete and exploited and used in all these ways. That does not mean he is innocent of being responsible for the harm he caused Desiree Washington. I don’t think Spike Lee had a conversation with Mike Tyson about consent when he went to visit him. I’m going to put $100 on that. And when Farrakhan was giving some speech about how culpable Desiree Washington was in her victimization, I don’t think he had some private conversation with Mike Tyson about his responsibility in raping her. That was 30 years ago. Dee Barnes was in a club that had almost everyone in the industry, including Tupac, in the room when she’s dragged into a bathroom and beat up by Dr. Dre. And that doesn’t even start to address all the things we witness when folks in our family cause harm.

 Diddy appears in the documentary in a studio scene with Biggie and then later on when you call him to connect him with Snoop. What do you think Diddy’s so-called reckoning and his failed apology mean for the MeToo movement in hip-hop, if anything?

 I didn’t watch the video or his apology. I don’t know what it would’ve been like if someone had video of Dre beating up Dee Barnes. People I follow on Twitter are like, “This is what restorative justice is not.” We’ve introduced these terms that are perverted to the point where they don’t mean anything. It happens on the left, too. Those conversations just don’t seem earnest. Puff is loathed. 

. So people are going to have a different conversation about him than Russell Simmons.

 Did having the camera as a 20-something give you back some of the visibility you lost at the time? A sense of control? What did the camera give you?

 Looking back at this footage that’s 30 years old, I had to remember how new it was. Now we all pull out a camera. People are so used to being filmed. A whole generation has had a camera in its face its entire life. We didn’t have camera phones back then. At one point, Snoop tells Warren G, “She’s doing a documentary about us.” He’s excited. I’m shooting Meth in the car, and that footage feels so different than when I give my camera to my cameraperson, Emir Lewis. Immediately, Meth goes into shouting out all the members of Wu-Tang and talking about all their names. He gets a little bit more performative. People are still trying to figure out, in that era, how to act in front of the camera. They’re all so new to celebrity, but we’re also new to this kind of technology. Cameras aren’t new. But having the camera in their faces is new, especially in a verité way that’s not about 

Let me sit you down in a studio with Fab 5 Freddy on Yo! MTV Raps, and you tell us about your latest project

Yo, I want to follow you around and just be yourself, and when you can forget about the camera, do so

. There are times when Biggie is absolutely acting like I’m not there. I’m taping him on phone calls. There are times when I disappear, and there are times when I do something else. If I’m following Frederick Wiseman’s strictly verité style of filmmaking, I would never come from behind the camera and be like, “What the fuck? What’s up with you?” But I’m also in relationship with some of these men outside of the moment when I’m filming them. Not all of them — I didn’t have a relationship with Method Man or Onyx. But some of the access they’re giving me is because they weren’t getting that attention in that moment.

Graffiti artist Andre “Baby Man” Charles in front of his tribute mural to Tupac Shakur on East Houston Street on the Lower East Side, New York, 1996. Photograph by Janette Beckman/Getty Images.

 Watching it, I felt like these men need therapy [

]. They’re working out their internal struggles through you and the camera. What were you hoping to capture as a filmmaker at the time? Do you think you achieved that?

 I wonder what I hoped back then. When I was watching Wiseman’s 

 in film school, we talked about how it was impossible to be a true fly on the wall. I’ve known this from pulling out a microcassette recorder. It just changes. The entire time I interviewed Tupac, for instance, I never pulled out my tape recorder because he was so onstage all the time that to pull out a tape recorder was to put him in a particular mode. I would have to run to the bathroom or run to my hotel room after our interview and write everything down because I knew that the recording device itself would bring out another side of him. And so there’s the attempt to make fly-on-the-wall Frederick Wiseman verité filmmaking. I was interested in how it might look to do that with my friends. My friends happened to be New Yorkers in the ’90s who were making hip-hop; some became famous like Biggie, and some never blew up. I had friends on the West Coast I was shooting, too. I didn’t even want to be a documentary filmmaker at first. The first thing I made after film school was 

, a scripted drama with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. I wasn’t like 

. Those films were so radical and dope to me that I was like, 

Was I failing? Yes. Because Frederick Wiseman doesn’t get in front of the camera. I was toggling back and forth. I don’t know that I had real goals for what I hoped to achieve, but I knew it was important to keep the camera rolling even in that moment with Biggie in the club with Kim, where it’s clear they’re having a private moment. I’m at a little bit of a distance, shooting them. It’s not TMZ-style. They were aware the camera was on. But they’re having an argument, and Biggie makes this gesture where he picks up a chair and slams it on the ground, which indicates that there’s violence in their relationship. And I was thinking, 

. I kept shooting. In a less charged moment a few minutes after that, I’m onstage with Biggie. I’m trying to make my way through a sea of men onto the stage to shoot his performance. I fucking stayed with this shit, got up on that stage through 30 dudes, and got the shot. One of those is obviously a very loaded moment, and another is just: Look at me keeping the camera in my fucking hand and getting the shot. The goal back then was to keep rolling. And then it takes time for that footage to breathe to know what I have.

 What I have isn’t a single perspective. It’s more than a diary entry. This is a collective, shared moment. This is Snoop before he’s aware of whatever persona he’s going to create. Biggie not aware of a near future that’s fatal. Kim not aware of who she’s about to become. I’m sure Guru, who was older, didn’t think death was around the corner for him. Prodigy was well aware that he had sickle cell disease that could cause his death. I think about how clear and focused he is in the moment as he’s recording 

 Do you remember what you thought the moment you saw Biggie with the chair?

 I was wondering what I was thinking when I kept the camera rolling. I was witnessing, and I didn’t turn away. And I’m glad that I didn’t. Because looking back on it, I think that’s evidence of what Kim has described. I didn’t include it to be an indictment of Biggie. I don’t know who Biggie would’ve become.

 Are you worried about inadvertently valorizing the artists who played such a big role in making this genre misogynist?

 I hope that my portrait isn’t a valorization. Certainly not for me — I’ve never valorized other human beings. But in terms of presenting it in the now, yes, of course, there are things I worry about, but that part of me had to let my editors do their job because I was so dedicated to the film remaining in that era, not me with this wisdom of 30 years who knows what’s coming.

One of the B stories is watching Biggie and Snoop make these albums. I say in the film that these albums set up what ends up being a fatal standoff between the coasts. But in the moment, we didn’t know that. In the moment, I’m putting Snoop on the phone with Puff for the first time. And I did have a sense that they needed to talk. I am moving between these spaces. As a Midwesterner, I’m not married to any coasts. As a woman, I’m not in their beefs.

 What I see is these boys in hip-hop finally getting a chance to be men and not knowing what to do with that. How much awareness and compassion did you have with them at the time?

 Oh, my gosh. I love what you just said about them becoming men and not knowing what to do with it. I think of so many memoirs. I think about Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver. I grew up on Donald Goines’s books. I think about Darnell Moore’s memoir 

, about growing up in Camden, New Jersey, as a young queer Black boy. All these testimonies of a perilous, precarious journey into manhood and this failed project that is America, let alone the failed project that is hip-hop, and how impossible it often seems. Does that invoke some kind of compassion in me? Certainly. Not just compassion but empathy, because I know how impossible it is to come into womanhood in the same failed project that is America and that is hip-hop. But we’re also hard-wired, growing up as Black women, to — the only word that comes to my mind is coddle. To privilege and prioritize these brothers’ pain and struggles. I wrote about Dee Barnes, but all my activism was against police terror. I was living in New York then, so a lot of that looked like organizing around and against the NYPD. It’s not like women don’t receive direct violence from these same players and actors — meaning the police and the state in general — and not just secondhand. Women are abused by the police, but most of that is happening to Black boys and men, so my organizing at the time and today still centers Black men in a particular way because the state continues to center and target them. It’s that work that we have been talking about since we got here as Black women where we are exceedingly open to remaining in relationships, no matter how much it hurts. We’re open to being a place of healing, a soft landing for these men, whether they’re our brothers or friends, our lovers.

 “We love them to death” is what you say in the film.

 We love them to death. And we were trying to love them into healing. But the way that I’m wired, that love doesn’t come without some talkback. Yeah, I could focus on the men who are absolutely stuck in saying the same misogynist, homophobic, basic-ass shit that they were saying back then. But there are so many people I know who’ve grown. Some are famous rappers, and some are just the men in my life who’ve grown from being engaged with women like me. But there are so many women like me. I’m not the only one. I just happened to have a camera back then.

dream hampton at Soho House New York, June 10, 2024. Photograph by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for Hammer & Hope.

dream hampton Has Worked to Dismantle Hip-Hop’s Toxicity

Haiti has been held hostage by a bloody regime and its backers in the West for the past decade. The right-wing PHTK party, founded by former pop singer turned president Michel Martelly, has held power since 2011, and over that time, there has been a dissolution of Haitian institutions, repeated failures to hold elections, and reported affiliations with armed groups that people widely refer to as gangs.

Over the past five years, armed groups have become significantly more powerful in Haiti. Under President Jovenel Moïse’s administration, a commission for disarmament advised several gangs to form a federation in order to facilitate communication with the government. In the years that followed, the groups in that federation became more powerful and more heavily armed in a country that does not produce weapons and is subject to an official arms embargo — despite which, many illicit firearms are trafficked into the country 

. Some political analysts have concluded that these groups, who have turned their weapons on the people, seized control of entire territories and paralyzed the capital by 

, operate more like paramilitary groups than gangs.

The insecurity bringing the country to its knees is part of a long-term effort to quell resistance, particularly in working-class neighborhoods. In 2018, popular uprisings erupted after a senatorial commission reported that most of the Petrocaribe funds had been stolen or squandered by government officials in the PHTK party. [

Petrocaribe is a program by which Venezuela sells petroleum to a number of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America at a preferential rate to allow these governments to use the money saved to pay for developmental projects instead.

 across the country, with thousands asking where these funds went, demanding the ouster of the PHTK party and denouncing the United States’ imperialist hand in Haiti’s plight. In response, the state has perpetrated a campaign of violence and repression against activists in the form of massacres and kidnappings. At the same time, it has abandoned some working-class neighborhoods completely, with even the police in retreat. Gender-based violence in the form of gang rapes and forced labor for gangs is a particularly ubiquitous practice.

 headed by a recently formed presidential council. On June 25, at the request of the PHTK party’s former prime minister and the so-called international community, foreign boots are scheduled to arrive in Haiti for a confusing mission led by Kenya and funded by the U.S. in response to the insecurity that has swallowed the capital and many of its surrounding cities. This latest episode continues a long history of foreign intervention into Haitian politics, from the 

 to France after its independence, a U.S. 

 with the explicit support of the State Department. Such foreign intervention has 

. In May, I met with a group of Haitian women activists to talk about how the current climate has changed their everyday lives and how Haitian women are responding to it.

 The current climate of insecurity has presented so many threats for the Haitian people, and the masses are the main victims. With whole regions of the country cut off from the rest because of armed groups, it is understandably impossible to organize at a certain level. How has the current conjuncture affected your work as an artist, activist, or academic? What are the limitations you are facing?

I live in Pòtoprens in Nazon. I am a factory worker in the textile industry. I am an activist who works to help women understand their rights, especially their labor rights. I entered this work because when I looked around, I saw workers being mistreated, and they accepted it. The reason why they accepted it was because they did not know their rights. I am the coordinator of a trade union organization called ROHAM (Respect for Haitian Factory Workers), which is there to ensure that workers’ rights are respected and to support workers who are legally pursuing their employers and other concerned bodies. When the workers have demands, we help them through the means provided by Haitian law, either through strikes or popular mobilization.

I will first speak as a factory worker on the issue of insecurity. Because of the inability to transport materials, 200 people were laid off at the factory. After more time, the plant had to close down altogether. To me, the current climate of insecurity poses the biggest danger to women, especially women laborers who get up early in the morning in the dark to come to work. We are coming from everywhere. There is one woman at the factory who was raped, and two months later, her husband was shot in the same area.

The insecurity has completely killed me as a union woman. In the factory where we work, we have a union. We try to recruit as many women as we can. Inside the union, we also have a women's organization. Whether or not a woman chooses to join the union, she has the right to join the women’s organization if she wishes. We would often go to other places for various trainings, and then we would return to share what we had learned with the other women inside the factory. After the closure of the factory, we kept fighting to work with the women, but in the end, we couldn’t.

Insecurity has affected me deeply and in so many facets of my life. But this specific facet, making it so that I can’t do my work as a union woman, this work that I love so very much, helping women, talking to women, making them understand their rights as workers — this has completely demoralized me, in every sense. I cannot find the words to explain how this insecurity has played out in the lives of women workers.

I live in Pòtoprens. I am a young feminist, militant woman. I am a member of 

 (Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti), a national peasant organization, and I am a coordinating member of

We have been facing significant challenges over the past three years, stemming from when armed groups cut off the Great Southern region from the rest of the country. Now, the Great North is also blocked. In our organization, we accompany and activate solidarity with the peasants. But lately, we have been unable to go to the field. Food production and transportation activities are paralyzed. When we try to move forward in the face of all the risks, when people in rural communities try to move ahead with their work activities, they cannot manage to reach the capital or the major cities. In large cities like Okap, Gonayiv, and Sen Mak, food does not arrive from the countryside because people are blocked en route, especially the Madan Sara [women who purchase produce from rural farms and sell it in larger regional marketplaces]. We know how the Madan Sara works. These women largely rely on credit from banks and microfinance organizations. Many of these women are unable to pay their debt because they are not able to sell in the big cities.

Vanessa Jeudi, Port-au-Prince, July 5, 2024. 
Photograph by David Lorens Mentor for Hammer & Hope.

I am a singer, composer, creative director, and feminist activist. I work with the feminist organization Dantò Feminis, which specifically works with women workers, street vendors, and women living in working-class neighborhoods in Pòtoprens. I am a founding member of Bosal Mizik, a record label that works on art and resistance in working-class neighborhoods through workshops with young people.

I will not only name the general state of insecurity because this has been a situation long in the making. I will say instead that after 12 Janvye [the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that killed 300,000 people], when Michel Martelly came to power, there was a shift when it came to being an artist in the country. Certain questions became more urgent. Who are you creating for? Whose side are you on as a musician? What categories of people is your art speaking to?

With Martelly coming to power, many other artists in music went on to government positions. This created a division among musicians working in the country. Many musicians decided to align themselves with the PHTK regime; then there were other artists who automatically became marginalized because they had chosen the other side. This means there are gigs they would not accept and certain establishments they would not play for anymore based on principle. This completely transformed the cultural scene in Haiti.

This has really highlighted the Haitian artist’s duty to resist, a duty of solidarity toward the Haitian people and toward ourselves as well. Because we are also affected by the political climate, our families are affected. I have moved from Pacot to Turgeau, to Laboule, to Dèlma over a short amount of time because of all of the violence and armed groups gaining territory. There is an implicit responsibility that artists have to resist through the work we produce. But the context I’ve described means that there are also challenges to this resistance.

I am a sociologist and a feminist activist. I want to talk about my work in political thought and academia, which is an extension of my activism. It is another way to be an activist. There are many ways to be a militant.

I have witnessed many things as a professor at the State University of Haiti in Pòtoprens. Students who came from areas where insecurity was more pronounced, such as La Plaine, Kafou Fèy, and the southern part of the capital, had to flee their homes. I realized that many of them were living on campus. I would arrive in the morning to teach and find students who had not yet woken up.

This puts the students in such a vulnerable situation. How do they live their lives? How do they eat? How do they wash their clothes? What if, for example, they have a health problem — how are they keeping up with their medication? This meant that I had to lower my academic expectations of my students, give less work, and stop pushing the students the same way I used to. I had to adjust my rigidity. The relationship of professor to student in an ideal world looks like one generation accompanying the next in their pursuit of knowledge. But in a context like this, the role of a professor becomes impossible. Since the space where you do your work is no longer an academic space, there are different dynamics at play; it demands different things from you. How do I show solidarity with my students? What is allowed and what is defended in this space?

Then I realized that there were professors who were in the same situation, who found themselves having to sleep on campus along with the students. How do we maintain the intergenerational dynamic in such a space? How are we redefining the relationships so that the transmission to be made between professor and student can still happen? This is what the political context has made of our work.

 We know that the widespread terror is a tactic to break resistance efforts and to quell any uprising, especially in working-class neighborhoods. I’m thinking about what Nahomie just said about the insecurity hurting women the most. If this insecurity is made to break resistance, targeting women means that women pose a very specific threat to power. What are the many ways we see women blocked from doing organizing work and resistance work in our society as a whole, especially in a time of political instability?

Nahomie St. Louis, Port-au-Prince, July 5, 2024. Photograph by David Lorens Mentor for Hammer & Hope.

This climate of insecurity has someone powerful controlling it, someone who is leading it and telling it where to go. This person has designed this insecurity specifically for us women. And it plays on our lives in every sense — it plays on our precariousness, how we are, and how women fight. I don't know if everyone sees it the same way I do, but the places that are most attacked are marketplaces. When you go to the marketplace, it is mostly women you find. They attack the churches. When you go to church, it is mostly women you find. We are targeted because the person controlling this understands that we are the backbone of our communities.

It is the same in how people put down women who want to be politically involved. People tell you things like, “Aren’t you a woman? What are you doing at protests?” I remember when there were demonstrations demanding the Petrocaribe money. Where I was working, 20 women and I went down to protest. When we came back, there were many people — when I say “people,” I mean men, leaders inside the factory who saw us and wanted to shame us — saying, “Leaving to protest during your work day? Will the person who made you go also pay for your missed wages?”

Everywhere we go, women are doing the same work regardless of the space. We take care of people. We take care of the collective. The Madan Sara take care of the child with no family, just like the woman inside the church does for the children around her. The food vendor on the street knows to leave a plate of food for the mentally ill person who is always on the block. She also knows that in the pot of food she’s cooked for the day, there is a plate of food for her neighbor and her children, who have been without food since morning.

Author Rita Segato talks about what is happening in Latin America, how when we talk about women's bodies, they are part of the community, so attacking women’s bodies means attacking the space, it means attacking the territory. This means that for the hand that used to reach through the fence of her neighbor’s house to feed the children inside, if the child she used to feed now holds a weapon, that hand can no longer cross through that fence to continue care work. Violence destroys everything that creates the bond of solidarity between us inside our communities. I don’t think it’s possible to remove from Haitians what they are, but I also think that the urgency of our problems does not leave our minds free enough for us to have the same political engagement we used to as a society. And it leaves our communities tense and hostile.

One of the biggest blows is that they attack the soul of the community. When you attack the marketplace, you attack the soul of the community. We are realizing, as Nahomie said, that it is all the spaces where women are thriving: where women are making deals and organizing 

], where women exchange and forge new connections with each other, where women are gathering donations for people in need. Whether it’s money being exchanged, energy being exchanged, people exchanging words, or goods being exchanged, these are the spaces that the armed groups are directly targeting.

Sabine Lamour at Brown University, Providence, R.I., 
July 8, 2024. Photograph by Elias Williams for Hammer & Hope.

In the process, they’ve destroyed the relationships that women of different social strata have built with each other. I used to have so many women I was friendly with. I had a network of relationships, not necessarily with people I met in professional spaces or went to school with. This was the network of relationships that I had built by living and moving through the city because I have my footprints in the city, and I have people that I knew and talked to. Today, I don’t know what has become of these people. These casual relationships are the ones that allow us to connect, where we can gossip about when something isn’t right, and then we can create a political dynamic linked to the fact that we have an understanding of when something isn’t right. This is what’s broken. It’s not just our capacity to resist — they have taken away our ability to occupy the streets. In Haiti, the streets are the first spaces of citizenship. One of the biggest problems that this crisis brings is that we cannot truly be citizens.

They have completely crushed all resistance movements. Insecurity is not something that comes on its own. We recall, from the first moment when there was the petro-mobilization, where the people were demanding, “Where is the Petrocaribe money?” there were key neighborhoods where protesters would get stones thrown at them or shot. However, from July 6 or 7, 2018, they began to target a specific social class of people who were more likely to be politically involved and actively participate in the protests: people from working-class neighborhoods. This led to the Lasalin Massacre [killing 71 people in the Lasaline slums of Pòtoprens], which officially took place on Nov. 13, 2018, but which began on Nov. 1, according to the survivors. Armed groups started entering people’s houses to rape women, to repress them. There has been a whole process where, at first, people were attacked on the street for resisting. Now they come inside your house to put pressure on you, kill the people in your home, rape children in your home, prevent schools from functioning, burning key spaces such as schools and marketplaces — all spaces where the reproduction of life takes place.

Those who resist are also attacked through the denigration or assassination of their characters. I’ll go back to the example of the mobilization around Petrocaribe. These people have undergone a series of social attacks. But if you look closely, they mainly attack the women who led that movement. They receive the same vitriol feminist movements received: accusations of being homosexuals, hating men, being promiscuous, etc.

I want to talk about migration, which is another thing that breaks the momentum of mobilization. Dating back to 1915, we start to see people in the rural areas leave their hometowns to come to the city to work in factories in the industrial parks. There are those who left to work in the 

 [sugar mill], either in Cuba or in the Dominican Republic, during the first wave of occupation until today. This continues to break the spirit of mobilization.

It is not without reason that different countries in Latin America offered work programs to attract Haitians. Countries like Chile and Brazil opened their borders. In the case of Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff met with Martelly in 2012 while Brazil was preparing to host the World Cup and needed to build stadiums. They needed cheap labor to do it, so they called in Haitian workers. Since then, Haitians have similarly ended up in Chile, Nicaragua, and Mexico. It is these same powers who are deporting Haitians once we arrive in the United States, the same ones who created the conditions to make us leave the country in the first place. This is all a well-coordinated and clear process to make Haitians leave and seize the agricultural land we have. Look at how they use the land: they put concrete on it to make free economic zones and tourist zones. This is what they do.

We see clearly that the whole project of imperialism — I'm talking about the U.S. in particular — is to make us dependent. Meanwhile, we leave everything that would make us regain our self-determination as a people. Today, young Haitians have only one goal and project: to leave the country. There is an erosion of values ​​that makes you see the question of struggle, the question of resistance. That is not what is on anyone’s mind; those are not the conversations being held. When we look at social media, the only message we see is, “Let’s get out of here, Haiti is unviable.” They create the chaos, they create the climate of terror, and then they are the ones coming up with a plan they have manufactured, a disguise to tell you that they are the ones who have the solution when the reins have been in their hands the whole time.

Islanda Micherline Aduel, Port-au-Prince, July 5, 2024. 
Photograph by David Lorens Mentor for Hammer & Hope.

 We have entered a new phase of this conjuncture where we are bracing ourselves for a foreign intervention, coming under the guise of bringing law and order and security. But we know all too well that it means more violence toward the working class and gender-based violence toward Haitian women. How are we going to protect ourselves as women, protect our communities, protect our families? What hope, if any, are you seeing in terms of grassroots movements and the spirit of resistance in the people?

We know that occupation has never brought anything good for us. I’m wondering what we can do to raise the consciousness of young people specifically — talk to them, teach them about what’s happened in the past. And for the women, talk to them about how they can protect themselves in the context of occupation because, in many ways, they are set up to be the most victimized. I see a lot of people minimizing what is about to come. Because the insecurity has become so overwhelming, many people think it’s normal for the situation to end in occupation. That’s the analysis many people have because that’s how this project has been designed. They have made bandits come destroy so that we can see foreign forces as our deliverance. The only thing we can do is educate the people, speak to them, bring them in, and make them see that occupation has never been good for us.

As an artist who makes protest music and who produces cultural work that sheds light on the daily life of Haitians, I think the role of the artist is to continue to stand in solidarity with the people, whether that is denouncing or raising awareness of things that have been made invisible. I bring up invisibility because I have been thinking about gang rapes and other forms of violence women have been experiencing more lately because of the current political climate, and the state has said nothing. The media has said nothing. So, it is the artist’s role to bring this awareness.

Despite all our resistance, we find ourselves at the point of occupation again. Occupation is not what we were asking for. There are other ways to solve our problems. But this is the choice of everyone who proclaims that Haiti is an ungovernable, chaotic entity that cannot take charge of itself. They are the ones who have decided that these people must be infantilized.

I think we need to continue the work we are accustomed to doing on the ground: meeting with the communities, holding them, and mobilizing. The West is always going to come up with the easiest formula for them. The biggest question now is how we end this endless wave of death in the country — the endless wave of death, rape, dehumanization. I say let power do what it’s going to do. And in the meantime, let us do what we need to do. We won’t see the result now, but in the long run, we can build so that we can make a different kind of society, another way to live, another generation, another form of attachment for our children to this country.

This occupation is already at our door. Women will be subjected to violence. Whenever there is occupation, women’s bodies become the territory of war. We need women’s organizations to conduct self-defense training because when women are subjected to collective rape, there must be groups that can give them the tools to respond to these types of violence. Even though this is the government’s responsibility, until we find a government that is for the people, that will respond to these needs, we must find a way for women to have a self-defense capacity.

I will finish by pointing out something crucial. Despite everything, there is still an extraordinary capacity for resistance. When you look at Haitian women, despite the situation of women workers and the shut-down industries, the women find a way to make ends meet. Despite being chased out of major market spaces, these women head uptown to Petyonvil; they go up to Dèlma. There are parts of the city where cars cannot pass right now because the vendors who were chased out of the Salomon marketplace have taken up business there. Because these women want to live, you will see them in the street with baskets on their heads. They tell you there is hope and they can build an alternative.

This piece was published in collaboration with 

. Mélodie Cerin provided editing support.

“Armed Groups in Haiti Target All the Spaces Where Women Are Thriving”

n a cool evening in May, LaToya Ruby Frazier gathered with friends and strangers in a basement theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The communion was a 

, surveying more than two decades of photographic work. After a brief introduction by the curator Roxana Marcoci, Frazier walked over to a podium at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk suit, and her hair, a dark brown mass with sandy highlights, was styled into an afro. The artist looked like a figure pulled straight from Barkley L. Hendricks’s ethereal portraits.

“I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the 21st century,” Frazier said, reading from a recent essay. “For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist — one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time — historical erasure and historical amnesia.”

This essay, which is printed in full at the beginning of the exhibition catalog, defined the center of the evening’s program, “A Credo on Solidarity,” which included a suite of creative responses to Frazier’s philosophy from other artists and scholars. The poets Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan performed spoken word, reading a long poem from a large brown scroll they unfurled onstage. Sandra Gould Ford, an artist, educator, and former steelworker, presented a slideshow illustrating Frazier’s thesis with photos, quotes and videos. There was sound art, featuring June Jordan’s 1982 poem “Moving Towards Home,” by Shala Miller; a biographical essay by the scholar Imani Perry; and an affecting dance by the video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser and her mother, the choreographer and dancer Wendy Osserman.

These pieces not only embodied the ideas in Frazier’s credo — subjectivity, power, art as a means of healing — they also testified to a critical component of the artist’s work. At the heart of 

 is the artist’s devotion to collaboration. Frazier was raised Baptist, and her faith is a clarifying tool for understanding her practice. She believes in empathetic listening and frequently cites agape love — a Christian idea that promotes selfless and unconditional care for others — as a principal tenet. Like James Baldwin, whom the artist counts among her influences, Frazier positions herself as an interlocutor, someone “called to stand in the gap between the working class and creative class communities.”

Hammer&Hope

No. 4

Summer 2024

Poetry’s project is to remind you of your mother

Kaleem Hawa

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