A Conversation On Everything You Didn’t Think You Needed To Hear.
Photographed by Shane McCauley
Styling by Donna Lisa
American Studies sets up a conversation between two of the times’ most sought out social justice organizers––for the chance at a conversation free of any rules. Kendrick Sampson and Janaya The Future Kahn cover all the topics we should be thinking and speaking about.
Kendrick: I think protection is a big topic we should be taking about. I think a lot of the conversation is around voting and we've been trying to expand, especially with the marching orders of Dr. Melina Abdullah, to expand that conversation to organizing, to making sure that we're organizing for longterm liberation and that this is a moment in terms of the election, but it's a movement that's going to move far beyond that and has been for a long time.
But we haven't been talking a whole lot, as a society, about protection. We're putting it all on the line for a vote and being vocal about that vote, but that puts us at risk in a lot of ways. What are folks doing to protect us? What are institutions doing to protect us? Nothing, but how are we protecting each other? You speak so eloquently give folks all the juicy beautiful talks. How you feel on that?
Janaya: You’re right about protection, I think that's something that's definitely on my mind. I think too, big tech. This reality that we're in and the way that the world has changed, even in the last 10 years. The concentration of wealth, the confrontation of racial inequality, economic inequality, gender inequality. So here we are fighting for justice, we're focused on Congress, and meanwhile we have these tech tycoons, these billionaires, and soon to be trillionaires, who have so much power that is completely unregulated. So much ability to sway elections, public opinion, thought, fact, are able to do so all over the world. Our government structures are woefully unequipped to wrangle those realities and to grapple with them and deal with them. It is something significant that the DOJ is suing Google. I think that what comes out of that is going to be really interesting. Here's a better way to say it: I saw Jeff Bezos made this low income school for Black and Brown children. Some people were like, “That's amazing, that's great. That's what we're telling these billionaires to do.” All I could think of was how dangerous that was, how dangerous it was that the soon to be trillionaire was making this school for these low income students through monies that were based on a kind of philanthropic benevolence instead of actual taxes, which is what we should be fighting for, taxing the wealthy and the rich. So I'm concerned about a time where we're hoping for philanthropic benevolence from tech tycoons instead of actual accountability and pushing our government to do so.
Kendrick: Yeah, I see in my comments all the time, “Why don't all these celebrities just get together and make a school? Why haven't you made a school?” I'm like, “we're fighting for systemic change.” We shouldn't have to rely on people's goodwill, of the give back model, which is essentially shed your community, it's lonely at the top, all those tropes that basically boil down to shed your community and then once you get to this astronomical level where you have so much money that's been extracted from all the folks that are suffering in your community then you give back when it's time. Which I feel like is a false narrative. It doesn't build values. It relies on extraction and it relies on capitalism. It relies on oppression. It's misguided, it encourages folks to not fight, to focus on yourself and your own success and to define that success by how much money you can acquire and how exceptional you can be, to break through the ceiling and be the only one that they allow in your identity or one of few. Then one day maybe give back a little bit and do a little philanthropy to make yourself feel better and that just ain't how it worked. But the other thing, where I thought you were going with was with big tech, that I was looking at, all the folks—Naomi Campbell, Kelly Rowland and all these folks—that were like, why is Instagram and Facebook censoring my end SARS protest videos and such.
I was looking at that yesterday and just thinking about tech and it's invasive nature of taking over surveillance and you used to have to do so much to tap in people's phones and such. Now we have surveillance right here. Now they're trying to take over algorithms and pretrial detention and incarceration and how scary that is. That's something that’s not being regulated and not being paid attention to. Facial recognition and all this stuff that’s coming through tech is pretty scary. That's where I thought you were going.
Janaya: I mean, it's just part and parcel. Here's the reality: we're in the digital age. There's no changing that and I think that opt out option is gone at this particular conjecture. I think we’ve moved on from that. But here's the thing, we can get all the regulations and we can try to fight for them, all of them that we want, but before we do that, we have to wrestle them out of the hands of the people who currently have them. There is not going to be any recourse for accountability from Mark Zuckerberg, who is the board chair and has the majority of votes on the board. He decides what everyone sees and the way they see him. We can't get accountability so long as Mark Zuckerberg has the keys to the kingdom. What we're talking about is the kind of apparatus—yes, we can stop corporations from selling information to law enforcement. That's what we spent a large amount of time doing at Color of Change. I think there always has to be people who are doing that work. I think the ACLU is great at that work, but I think part of our job is always to zoom 40,000 feet out and to look at things in a way that is power mapping. We all say surveillance is a problem and we still walk around with our phones and everything else. So we understand that in the time that we're in that we need the information. But unless we're wrestling power from the hands that currently hold it, I don't know that we can get the kinds of recourses and the kinds of protections that we need.
We're asking for the kinds of protections from a government that directly benefits from access to the information. The FBI came up with black identity extremism, not Facebook. I think we have to be really clear about what it is that we're talking about and not conflate. This is the problem. This is what's so great about our movement, we have so many people who have very clear lanes about what it is that they're doing. I think of Malkia Devich-Cyril who founded the Center for Media Justice, who's been doing tech work before it was cool to do. I think of Color of Change having structure around big tech and Silicon Valley and then also having it's criminal justice work. I don't think that we need to, this is the great thing about this time that we’re in, is that we don't all need to be experts in it.
I think what we do need to fight back against though is this idea that we shouldn't be experts, that expertise is not a thing. There's one thing that does scare me—Kendrick, it really does scare me—is there's a very deep anti-intellectualism here that is celebrated. I'm very, very concerned with it. It looks different across the political left, it does, it's not the same kind of anti-intellectualism that is a rejection of facts that we see across the right. We see an absolute, complete rejection of fact across the right. Across the left I think it shows up differently. it shows up from a place that is more related to values, but it's still there. It's the idea that I can watch a 30 second video and suddenly I know as much as Melina and my voice matters and my opinion matters as much as Dr. Melina Abdullah. I do think that there's something concerning about that, our job should not be to eliminate expertise. Our job should be to remove the obstacles that impede expertise. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want us to lose expertise for the sake of accessibility. Our job is to remove the obstacles there, I don't think expertise needs to come from institutions necessarily, but there are two things that you absolutely cannot, we cannot lose when it comes to expertise, and that's years and peers. You need both: you need years of work and study behind you, and you need peers, people who are in the same field as you, who are doing that work. Iron sharpens iron in that way, and if I'm ever stepping out of line that's where it is. Those are things that I think are very important when it comes to conversations, when it comes to what I'm seeing now that the success of this particular person or a kind of political nihilism that says, “Biden and Trump are the same.” That stuff really concerns me. I see that as a lack of political education, and what are we supposed to do with that, how do we work with that? Because it's also a kind of nihilism too. “None of this matters. This is going to accelerate the downfall of this empire.” I'm like, “Is it?” What we know for sure is that people are going to be hurt in the meantime. Can you say verifiably that we know it's going to speed up the collapse of the empire? On the idea and the concept, historically speaking, that empires eventually fall, do you think it's going to fall 10 years sooner? Five? A hundred? But what we can measure as a life. We can measure a life. So those are some things that I think are missing..
Kendrick: I do like where you're going with that. I'm thinking because there's a bit of microwave activism. Kind of doing this whole, “I watch a video and I'm an expert.”A lot of people think that, like, if I post—and we've seen this a lot. Where people are thinking, “I post a flyer, I make a flyer, I post a flyer, that's my protest.” Now people will get out in the streets and that's all that happens. Or I go to other protests and pass out flyers at theirs. Those types of things I think people show a lack of understanding of what organizing really is and the years, like you said, the peers and the years that are involved. It also highlights how these systems of oppression are working and discouraging us from seeking out the knowledge and the practice of change, of liberation, and the community building, Which is the biggest, they do not build community, no coalitions, that's their goal, keep us divided in many different ways and it's very effective. One of those is anti-intellectualism, and especially with males, which. whew, we could get into. But that makes a whole lot of sense. What do you think, as you said, wrestling the power from those that hold it, what does that look like in a practice?
Janaya: I think that first, it's really small, but unfortunately the only mechanisms that we have to use at this particular moment in time is our government, not the law enforcement bodies of our government including the CIA, the FBI, et cetera. Police, departments, Homeland security, those are things that operate under our government. That's who we have to make sure that information doesn't get into the hands of and corporations will sell that information. There's two things that I think can change. One is antitrust work. The breaking up of the big monopolies, these corporate monopolies, these big tech monopolies, I think that's the first thing that we can do. The second thing that we can do is get some rights for citizens on data mining. Right now, the trade-off is that you and I, everybody, we all go online and we get access to each other, we get different kinds of opportunities, whether that's to speak or to share information. We can connect over campaigns, like End SARS. We can do all these things and the trade off is that we are providing data. One thing that I know for sure is that all of us—I really worked for years trying to get surveillance to be a sexy topic. It's not because the majority of people, if I would ask anyone in my neighborhood, whether the trade-off was a concern, it isn't because in their mind, they're like, “I'm not doing anything wrong. So what do I have to worry about?” There isn't an understanding of how much worth our information is to corporations and the profiles that they can build on how manipulative those technologies can be, how so many of these things are informed by zip code. We don't have a lot of access to that information to know how expensive, how much money these corporations are making off of data mining. The ads that we see that are targeted towards us, what if—look, this is a buy-in concept, there's lots of ways to look at this, but one of the things that I'm grappling with, I'm not even presenting this as an absolute, but if this is the age that we’re in, the digital age, and everybody is benefiting off of our information, except for us, then it stands to reason that citizens, whoever, whatever, and I think we can be more expansive around that, anyone who uses the technology deserves to be in charge of their own data and deserves to be able to sell that data where and when they choose. They deserve to be able to edit that data where and when they choose. There is a data profile on every single one of us that we have zero control over. That's partly why Cambridge Analytica was so startling, not only because of course Russian intervention and politics, but I was targeted by those ads myself. I remember logging into Facebook, on the rare occasion that I did cause it's not cool anymore, if I want like three-year-old information and my 12 year old information for an article that's been just recently circulated, it's great. When I would log in around 2016 or whatever… I know that it's all owned, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever—cognitive dissonance. This is the age that we're in, Kendrick, but so I log in and I would see an ad and the ad would say something like, “Another Black man lynched in Mississippi by police officer.” I know enough to look it up and I know enough to say, “This is not right. This is the third, fourth time I’ve seen something like it.” The point was, my left leaning profile made in the minds of these algorithms and this tech that was meant to sow discord, that I was susceptible and vulnerable to manipulation because of my data profile that said that I was left leaning and that I was more radical and could grow to hate white people. All these things that, that is what the information that they had on me told them. So I was targeted and on the other side across the right somebody else would have been targeted as well saying, “Black Lives Matter kills police officer.” It didn't matter whether it was true or not because enough people will see that and believe it to be true. It just creates the worst kinds of chaos and the worst kinds of conditions. I think there are two courses of action. One is on the personal level, on the level of the individual and one is on the level of government breaking up big, big tech, those antitrust laws, and to get people to have some sort of say in where and how their data goes and their ability to make their own money off of it. People deserve that, people deserve to be able to make a profit if all these corporations and individuals are making massive profit. The other thing, now you’ve got me on a rant, but the last thing I'll say is to anyone who believes in like this, it just crushes, it kills any kind of an economically speaking big tech is one of the worst things that happened to this country. What was the thing, Kendrick, back in the day—Kodak had what, 45,000 employees, at one point it was a company that was like worth a billion. You know what replaced Kodak? Instagram—12 employees, right? So people aren't able to work because of this change. They aren't able to work in this changing industry that concentrates wealth to a very small few people. They should be making money because they are enabling that technology to exist in the first place. We have become the product so we need to change that, and we need to change that immediately. Right now that is something that should be fought for as we work in these sort of antitrust laws. Anyway, it's just researching and reading up on myself for myself the moment.
Kendrick: Me too. I kind of want to go into the definition, I want to break down all these things. What is antitrust, what is it, all these things, but one thing that's really shouting out to me is what you said about assessing your value and having participation in the economy that is your life and your knowledge and your habits and your interests, and your safety, really. Which gives you some control over it. I think if people started to think about those things, I've been thinking about a lot, and this is going to sound like a tangent, but it's going to the right place. I've been thinking about a lot how these companies are bringing in people like yourself, like Patrissee Cullors and all of these different folks are coming into these companies, or being hired for diversity and inclusion task forces and all of this stuff. A lot of buddies of mine are and then they discussed their contract negotiations with me and stuff like that, or bringing us in to speak or whatever and make them feel like they're doing something. “Checkmark! We are part of the liberation movement.” Without ever saying the word liberation or ever being really interested in it. In looking at that and looking at contracts of how much people should be paid to speak. A lot of organizers, a lot of people that have been fighting for liberation, activist organizers, for a long time don't even realize that they should be paid for these things. They're going in and doing it for free.
Janaya: We're still anti-capitalist too. Here you and I are talking in capitalist terms while we're anti-capitalists.
Kendrick: Exactly, right. But at the same time, I'm like, how do you valuate that? It is a challenge, in what you just outlined and just thinking about, like, I shouldn't be charging for this, but also if you're going to be making money off of this... How do you valuate that? What I came to the conclusion of, and I was about to start putting videos out about it is, is a series called “You can't afford me.” There's no way in hell you could valuate my trauma that I've experienced, the years of studying and trial and error and all of that, the trauma of my ancestors and my parents and all of that. There's no way you could valuate that and actually pay me what I'm worth. So aim high because usually it's an aim low situation, “This is our budget, this is what we have for diversity and inclusion.” You know what I'm saying? So in thinking about that, in that same vein, tying it back into what you were talking about, that's something that I think marginalized folks, targeted folks, the most targeted people with all of their different identities and intersectional oppression and trauma, have to factor that into their value to these companies that are making huge profits off of their labor, off of their bodies, off of their health, off of their information, their safety, their security, their surveillance. I think if we realized—I don't want this to turn into, like, “If we realized our value, we would…” but I do think that there is something important in assessing the fact that they can't afford us. You know what I'm saying?
Janaya: Yeah. I think there's something there.
Kendrick: It’s almost like a reparations kind of a conversation.
Janaya: Yeah, I do worry about that in the context of reparations, but I totally agree with the ethos. I do want to say, you just really poked at something that has been made very apparent to me, I've been feeling this recently, Kendrick, the scholarship of activism and organizing is not respected. I've been trying to think about how to articulate that in a way that made it make sense to me and I couldn't just decide. People can self identify wherever they want. Like, I can just decide that I'm a healer. I could except that expertise requires years and peers. I could say that I'm an actor, great, but expertise requires years and peers. I could say that I'm a therapist, but expertise requires years and peers and in this case, some kind of formal education. The point is that there's an education process and I don't think that people come into activism with that level of respect. I see even people that we look up to, and I'm using the we as a collective here, and at this time when so many folks are just sort of being like, “Oh, I'm an activist, I'm this and that” or having conversations on activism. My first question is who knows you? I'm not even talking about celebrities, that's one thing, that's its own thing. I think a beast that is challenging because somebody asked me the other day, “Well, don't you think that so-and-so got this wrong?” I was like, “Maybe. But I'm going to be honest with you, I'm less concerned with that than I am with the fascist in the white house.” That's a person who might not have gotten it right. but they're trying to get it right. But then there's the other side of it, Kendrick, which is like, we end up with a Kanye when it doesn't go the way that we hoped. What happens when people who don't have credentials in a specific area, we just give them so much power. There's also how much power we give up and how much power is taken when there's just not a respect for the scholarship that comes in organizing and activism. There has to be some kind of recognition for years and peers, but there is this belief that anybody can do it. That it's just a thing that you just tag on to all the other things that one can do.
Again I want everyone to be activated. I want everyone to be involved. I'm not concerned with people saying that they're not getting it 100%, when again, we have a very clear threat. I would rather build that person up than tear them down when we don't have enough people. Still there's something that I believe culturally needs to shift around how we approach organizing and activism as a scholarship, instead of just a thing, a hat that somebody can wear or not wear. We wouldn't have the wins that we've had, if not for dedicated organizers and activists, and you know, what you alluded to as well is that most of the time, it's not paid work. It's work that requires after hours work. It's work that requires passion and conviction. So that's something that has been very concerning for me, was the complete disregard for the kind of knowledge that so many of our folks come into this with after working on it for years, decades.
Kendrick: Yeah. I think about, I actually talk about this a lot, what's deemed necessary and most important in school. Our education is problematic. But also we have to learn the oppressor’s version of our perspective, of our history but why isn't community organizing an essential part of our education? Why isn't art looked at as an essential part of our education. You talk about a lot and I always reference this, people imagine shackles on wrists and enough people believed it to make it true. People imagined children in cages enough and people believed it to make it true. We need to imagine liberation. We need to imagine better. Thinking about that, the tools that we have in school actually diminish our imagination, especially our imagination for liberation. We are not provided any tools to organize for liberation in school and that shows where our value is. The first things to go are the most important things in school. If you have to defund the budget a bit, you have the health goes away, nurses and counselors, if there were ever those things at the school, and art. Right. I think of folks like Patrisse that learned in school how to organize because they went to a special school. I'm like of course you have 30 organizations by the time you're 20.
Janaya: Yeah, I was like, “Wait, what” exactly when I learned. “You can do that?”
Kendrick: Right but like I didn't get into really learning what organizing is, what actual organizing is, until 2015 with the Black Lives Matter movement. Some people won't ever know. Like mama, she's 99 now and she doesn't know what organizing is. She does not know what it looks like because she saw it as flashpoints in the media. , 100% agree with you that it's not valued and we're bred not to be interested, to value other things and prioritize our own problematic view of success, or version of the grind in service of something that won't ever serve us. I think that that is something that we need to push for hardcore. A reprioritization of what we were learning in schools and what we value most in society.