Select Commentaries from Black in Appalachia Interviews.

• Author: Amin, Enkeshi Thom El-

OVER THE YEARS, SOCIAL JUSTICE HAS PRODUCED AN IMPORTANT legacy of interviews with leading voices on abolition and the carceral state (including with Angela Davis, Michael Zinzun, Ericka Huggins, Frank (Big Black) Smith, Akil Al-Jundi, Michel Foucault, and more), while featuring related blog posts and dispatches. We wanted to bring in key organizers as part of our special issue on Black safety. In 2021, Dr. Shaneda Destine and Dr. Enkeshi El-Amin spoke with three community organizers, Ejeris Dixon, Krystal Leaphart, and Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, who have played key roles regionally and nationally in their work on Black safety. The interviews were always conceived of as a central component of this special issue. We could not imagine a special issue on Black safety that did not engage the work on the ground, the voices and words of those who have lived up close to interpersonal, structural, and state violence, and how those experiences led to their organizing struggles for Black safety. We now redirect you to them via the award-winning and nationally recognized podcast Black in Appalachia, created by El-Amin (the episode "Black Safety" will be released the last week of June). Black in Appalachia highlights how the dominant narratives of Appalachia have rendered Black Appalachians invisible and intervenes in this misconception by highlighting how Black families and communities have shaped and been shaped by the region. Like this special issue, the podcast interrogates what it means to be Black in Appalachia and beyond, creating stories and holding space where undertold stories can be heard and Black identity and safety can be reclaimed. We encourage scholars, organizers, and students to engage the sensory experience of hearing these voices after reading essays from this issue. What does Black safety sound like? What do you hear in these voices, these experiences, that catches you, moves you, holds you, pushes you?

We offer edited textual versions of these discussions here to provoke reflections on questions of Black safety--the labor of organizing and struggling to pursue it and the beautiful moments when Black people live and find it together. This version has been edited thematically for readability so that even though each organizer was interviewed separately, passages appear together when key themes and questions emerged. Together, we discussed how this group of organizers came to organizing, how communities and generational legacies have informed their work and their conceptualizations of safety, and how intersectionality, gentrification, and trauma in movements create challenges and tensions in abolition and shape their visions of Black joy and safety. In this written commentary, we focus on conceptualizations of Black safety and the tensions of reform and abolition. We see this contribution as an effort to explore emergent acts of activist scholarship that are aligned with organizing and movement work, bringing academic and activist worlds into greater proximity and linking academic journals to more accessible and popular spaces like podcasts, activism, and the work of transformation.

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer and political strategist with 20 years of experience working in racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, and economic justice movements. She is the Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting, centered in Brooklyn, where she partners with organizations to build their capacity and deepen the impact of their organizing strategies. She is the founding Program Coordinator of the Safe OUTside the System Collective at the Audre Lorde Project, where she worked on creating transformative justice strategies to address hate and police violence. Her essay, "Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation," is featured in the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. In January 2020, she co-edited with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, one of the first edited compilations from survivor and organizer perspectives on transformative justice. Ejeris describes herself as a Black queer feminist from the Bay, whose work "historically has been directly building safety structures and skills within people of color communities, [and] queer and trans people of color communities." "We work to survive," she told us, in her long-term work with people and families whose loved ones have been attacked or murdered by the police or have suffered interpersonal violence, in thinking with them about what strategies build and increase community safety.

Krystal Leaphart is an award-winning organizer and strategist from Detroit, Michigan, who brings more than a decade of experience in legislative advocacy and grassroots activism to build power toward a world that is equitable for all people, especially black women and girls. She currently serves as the operations and policy associate at the National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women (NOBEL Women). A passionate leader and emerging champion for intersectional racial justice, Leaphart serves communities at the margin of organizing, advocacy, and facilitation, and has extensive experience working and volunteering with civil rights organizations, civic engagement nonprofits, and community service bodies. She was a speaker at the inaugural Women's March convention, a facilitator for the White House Young Women Leading the Way conference, a panelist at the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation at the 2016 Democratic National Committee Convention, and a steering committee member for the March for Black Women in September 2017. Krystal grew up in the NAACP Youth Council and the YWCA, eventually incorporating Black GirlTribe, which focused on mentorship and advocacy for Black girls. Working through a Black feminist lens, Leaphart finds herself "just anywhere that I could help to push the needle in regard to what Black women, femmes, and girls need."

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is an Affrilachian (Black Appalachian) woman from the working class, born and raised in Southeast Tennessee. She is the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director of the Highlander Research &. Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, a social justice leadership training school and cultural center founded in 1932. Through popular education, language justice, participatory research, cultural work, and intergenerational organizing, they help create spaces--at Highlander and in communities--where people gain knowledge, hope, and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible. Ash-Lee is a nationally recognized leader in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and has thrown down on the Vision for Black Lives and the BREATHE Act. She also has served on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly, the advisory committee of the National Bailout Collective, and is an active leader of The Frontline. She is a long-time activist who has done work in movements fighting for workers, for reproductive justice, for LGBTQUIA+ folks, for environmental justice, and more. Ashley told us, "I've spent, in terms of full-time living, about six months of my 35 years outside of the state of Tennessee." A self-identified "southern supremacist," Woodard Henderson does "cross-movement building, partnership or building coalitions" and "it's what gives me faith and hope that we'll actually see the beloved community that we deserve."

Part 1: Conceptualizations of Black Safety: What Does Safety Look Like for You?

Enkeshi El-Amin: We are working on different conceptualizations of Black safety. Black safety is essentially an alternative construction to safety--safety, as its commonly understood through a carceral model. We're thinking about carceral safety as an extension of white supremacy, and we're thinking about how Black people create safety in their everyday lives through relationships, community, place, etc. And so we wanted to reach out to different people who might be thinking about safety, working to create safe places for Black people, and you're one of the persons that we thought about.

Shaneda Destine: So this work comes out of abolition work, but it also comes, specifically for this special issue, out of Enkeshi's dissertation work in dealing with urban renewal and gentrification in Knoxville and Black Appalachia, and not just thinking about it in a broad perspective or political perspective, as abolition or policy, but thinking about how Black people just innately sometimes within our neighborhoods--though segregated, though pushed into places without resources--feel a sense of safety around each other without whiteness, without policing, without the ways in which we think about safety from that white logic perspective. I came to this work doing work in DC and Maryland with Black women and queer folks and Black Lives Matter and doing narratives with them for my research ... seeing the spaces that they created within the organization to include respite, to include joy, to include a reprieve away from what's going on politically and with police violence and so on. So we're interested in the ways in which the activists and the scholars we talk to conceptualize politically, through abolition, but also through just innately being in community with Black people what safety actually looks like for us.

Ejeris Dixon: I think safety means ease and self-determination, the ability to choose the direction of your fife, have the resources that you need to build that life, and to identify however you want, love however you want, live where you want. It really is that sense of freedom of movement, freedom of resources. And the safety that I believe in is equitable, meaning that one person's safety does not take away safety from someone else ... that everyone has access to safety, and my safety increases your safety and so on...