Rest is the opposite of capitalism's "grind culture," which only values people for their production output. This system exhausts people to the point of collapse. Without rest, there is no capacity for resistance nor dreaming of a better world.
According to the mission of The Nap Ministry, the folks at the forefront of nap activism, this work seeks to "honor, reimagine, and recapture the dream space that was stolen for centuries."
The "nap gap" is real: Black folks & other people of color are more likely to have sleep issues than white people due to the stress of racial oppression. This intersection with other forms of inequality leads to both physical and mental health disparities as well as decreased productivity at work (which factors into income inequality!) Self-care is a necessity for all oppressed folks who are healing from intergenerational Trauma--Black women especially.
Did You Know?
The concept of "zombies" as we know it can be traced back to the lore of enslaved folks in 17th-century Haiti (then saint-domingue). The majority of the Slaves brought into the french colony from Africa were worked to death within a few years. A very scary idea for an enslaved person was zombiehood--no agency over their own bodies, even in the afterlife.
When building anything, your first step is to see what you're working with:
what do we have?
what are we missing?
what is broken/needs fixing?
The first step to building a better world is harm reduction. Only then can we truly move forward!
Principles of Harm Reduction
from the national harm reduction coalition @ harmreduction.org
Accepts, for better or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them
Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe use to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others"
"Establishes quality of individual and community life and well-being — not necessarily cessation of all drug use — as the criteria for successful interventions and policies
Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm
Ensures that people who use drugs and those with a history of drug use routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them
"Affirms people who use drugs (PWUD) themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use and seeks to empower PWUD to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use"
Recognizes that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination, and other social inequalities affect both people’s vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related harm
Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be associated with illicit drug use
Trump's Presidency Linked to LGBT Mental Distress, study finds
The study: The rise in extreme mental distress among LGBT people during Trump’s rise and presidency
The linked study in the journal Economics and Human Biology found that extreme mental distress increased among LGBTQ people (or GSM–gender and sexual minorities) during Trump's ascension and consequent presidency. Extreme mental distress as defined in this study means reporting poor mental health every day for the past 30 days.
"This study found that the 'extreme mental distress gap' between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people “increased from 1.8 percentage points during 2014–2015 to 3.8 percentage points after Trump’s presidency became a real possibility in early 2016.” Even seemingly small increases in extreme distress are important, the study notes, because such distress is not common."
Read more here: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/trumps-presidency-linked-lgbtq-mental-distress-studies-find-rcna2871
1. Pay Attention. Give your undivided attention to the speaker, & acknowledge the message. Pay attention to body language. Look at the speaker directly and avoid distraction. Don't mentally prepare a defense or disagreement!
2. Show that you're listening. Use body language and gestures to show that you're interested. Try occasional nodding and smiling combined with spoken encouragement like "yeah, uh-huh"
3. Give feedback–as a listener, it is our job to understand what is being said. Ask questions to clarify points. Reflect out loud with what you're hearing by saying things like "What it sounds like you're saying is..." or "What I'm hearing is..."
4. Defer judgment. Don't interrupt to disagree. Don't interrupt at all!
5. Respond appropriately using the information you understood from the speaker. Be candid, open, and honest in a respectful way. Respond how you would want someone to talk to you.
An Afro-Futurist Future is a Harm-Reductionist Future
by Mallory Culbert
The end of the prison-industrial complex and the release of all prisoners are in humanity's best interest. Disabled people are more likely to be arrested & abused by authority figures/cops. Black people are arrested & jailed for drug-related charges at 2x the rate of whites, despite using drugs at the same rate. People who use drugs are punished for needing healthcare and/or minding our own damn business. We can do better.
The afro future cannot exist with harm reduction. We must address harm to the "afro" (Black) community in the form of reparations. For Black Americans reparations are due for slavery and for the racist drug war that incarcerates Black people disproportionately. After the civil war, 40 acres of land and a mule were promised to us. Without reparations, Black americans today have 1/10th of the wealth of white americans.
We are looking towards the future. We must be able to envision the future in order to build the future! In the Afrofuture, where we fully own our own bodies, drug use is a fact of life. Why? Because we can determine what best works for us!
We imagine an inclusive future that intentionally makes space for the perspectives & needs of historically excluded groups of people.
“The first Afrofuturists envisioned a society free from the bondages of oppression—both physical and social. Afrofuturism imagines a future [without] white supremacist thought and the structures that violently oppressed Black communities. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, often presented through art, music, and literature” [1].
Afrofuturism is a direct contrast to Black Pessimism, a belief that considers Black people not as Humans, but as things to be watched and used by white and non-Black people. Black Pessimism examines the unique horrors of anti-Black violence, the endurance of anti-Blackness in the US after emancipation of enslaved folks and racial desegregation, and those aspects of Black suffering that cannot be fully explained by political economy or class conflict.
Black (capitalized, like every ethnic group) doesn't just include people descended from enslaved peoples in the americas, but is a term that describes the systematic devaluation of Black labor and bodies in a racial capitalist hierarchy. Whew, that was a mouthful!
This can look like Black laborers making a portion of what non-Black laborers make for the same work (devalued). It can look like Black neighborhoods being used as waste dumping sites by the local government (devalued bodies). It looks like racial segregation and whites moving away en mass to keep away from Black people. It is based in slavery with the idea that Black people are replaceable animals and not human. “Black” encompasses many culturally distinct groups of Indigenous peoples across the world, like the people of the Mer Islands of what is now called Australia or the Siddi people of Southeast Asia. Black folks span the spectrum and the globe; yet there is one universal experience between us--experiencing anti-Blackness, racial prejudice against Black people. This experience varies across cultures and depends on how race is socially understood and constructed in each one.
Afrofuturism escapes us to a different world, a world of our own creation. Black joy is not found in the absence of pain and suffering. It exists through it, even if injustice is inescapable. "So yes, I want the world to recognize our suffering. But I do not want pity from a single soul" [2].
Sources
Perry, Imani. “Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/racism-terrible-blackness-not/613039/
Capers, I. Bennett, Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044 (February 8, 2019). New York University Law Review, Vol. 94, p. 101, 2019, Brooklyn Law School, Legal Studies Paper No. 586, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3331295
In the united states, racial capitalism (the legacy of an economy built on the free and cheap labor of Black enslaved people) shapes and surrounds our relationships. It maintains an unfair legal and social culture that underscores how we interact with one another, shaped by long-enduring means of control in the form of racial and gender hierarchies. Sex and drug education in the settler-colonial united states of america must be political because sex and drugs are political. They are political because the way we interact with sex and with drugs is inextricably tied to our access to power and self-governance. Both race and gender inform your “worth” (and your humanity) in a deregulated capitalist economy: Within racial capitalism, power comes from being hegemonically white and male.
Check out my zine below!
Queerness is political: to be “queer” is to deviate from the norm. But who gets to decide what’s truly “normal?” In the u.s., what’s normal is dictated by White Supremacy Culture: “The two genders” we’ve been confined within as the price to (unwillingly) participate in american society were borne from the creation of a racial hierarchy with cis-het white men situated on top. Our sexual relationships are regulated by bureaucracy; the few meager illusions of power and self-determination that exist are regulated by The State. From the politics of desire to sexual liberation, we must decolonize our existence and detach our worth from our so-called “cash value.”
