Re-Introducing The Political Foundation of 1919
Welcome to a special episode of 1919Radio. In this episode two of our organizers, Caleb and Shenhat, join our program to reintroduce the political foundation of 1919 and how and why we got started. This conversation details the different projects and programs we have worked on, how to get involved with 1919, and why we are motivated to continue pursuing long term revolutionary action alongside our community.
Title sequence credits:
Introduction clip: Angela Davis on Democracy Now!
Second clip: Sister Souljah response to Bill Clinton
Third clip: Kwame Ture on Organization and mobilization Song: The Pharcyde - Runnin'
Transcript
1919Radio Intro audio clip 0:00
I never experienced anything like the conditions we are currently experiencing.
I am mentally spiritually physically, emotionally, intellectually, and academically developed and acutely aware of the condition of African people throughout the entire world.
We don't want fortune, we don’t want popularity we want power, power. And power comes only from the organized masses.
CY 00:51
Wassup, everybody? Welcome to a very special episode of 1919 radio You might be hearing this for the first time on a couple of different platforms. But my name is Caleb. And I am an organizing member with 1919, and I am joined by...
Shenhat 01:14
Hi guys, my name is Shenhat. I'm also an organizer with 1919. And we're looking forward to this special episode on our radio platform today.
CY 01:27
Thank you, as always for tuning in. I know it's been a while since we've uploaded on here, but we're hoping to change that. Got some cool stuff coming. But this episode kind of takes things back for a formal introduction of 1919. And kind of telling our audience and our community about who we are, just to give you a better understanding of what we do, who we serve, and our political manifesto. 1919 magazine is a independent critical and editorial publication run by a small group of Black students and organizers and youths, providing spaces for our community to produce cultural work, to organize and to ground together and to see like themselves experience themselves and their experiences are reflected in print and other art forms. To get started, I'll tell you guys about I guess how 1919 was started. So we're going on, so 2022 is five years at the end of 2023 it'll be six years that 1919 has been founded. And it's really, it really was a response to three different sources of frustration I was feeling in my community, at my university and my school and then just within the arts and within the arts institution and industry in Canada. So I think first and foremost, 1919 is a response to racist and elitist media organizations and art institutions in Canada that don't really value the history or stories of Black, and other indigenous racialized people's. 1919 responds to inequalities of access, Black and racialized people's space in the neighborhoods in regards to not just learning opportunities, and obviously the material conditions the state limits us to have and what we're forced to live through, but also just like learning opportunities and access to arts based practices and programs that simply do not exist if you grew up in poverty in the Western world. And lastly, 1919 responds to just the overwhelming, overwhelmingly Eurocentric and anti Black educational institutions, whether primary and secondary, post secondary, that institutionalized and monopolize knowledge production through a European canon, through a Eurocentric canon. I think this is a big thing that informs all the work we do. Our center isn't the Imperial Belly, where we live, our center isn't Europe. But we really direct that center or orient that center on the places and the histories and the people that have taught us before. So we challenge this idea in our magazine by only focusing on the knowledge production and knowledge transfer of Black communities. And we hope to continue or we hope for that, we hope for that to continue to be our center. And we hope for that to continue like to inform our work. And then lastly, I'd say, yeah, we're focusing on addressing the needs in these communities because we understand that our communities continue to feel the violent effects of global colonialism. And as we've kind of mentioned before, in a lot of our other like radio programs or episodes that like we still remain like subjugated under a multicultural state, like here in Canada, wherever you live in the Imperial world, in the western world where whiteness is still the key to opportunity and power and this force, this factor is reinforced by traditional media everyday. We hope 1919 to be a little bit of a challenge to that.
Shenhat 05:17
Yeah, and it's really interesting to see like, where this organization kind of started in 2017. And like how we're able to continue in our work just by the fact that we're kind of grounded on these central principles that Caleb is talking about. These are also kind of the things that brought me into this organizing group a couple years ago, just the same kind of like frustrations, the same type of exclusion or like, just kind of like my experience in like institutionalized education, and how I wanted to seek out like, kind of just knowledge building, and learning and grounding with people, like from my own background, people that are coming from the same conditions as me, and that are kind of trying to, pin themselves in certain principles and ideological understandings of what our conditions are, and how we seek to like, kind of build community. So a lot of people always ask us about, like, what 1919 is, what we do, what's it about. So it's really important for us to have our political and ideological core goals very clear to our audience. Because these principles kind of ground everything that we do from our magazine issues, to our like community engagement projects. So first and foremost, we're grounded in anti capitalist, anti racist and abolitionist systems of thought. These are informed by critical historical class analysis of transnational struggle, and obviously, in the pursuit, the constant pursuit of decentralized and decolonial radical community building. So what does this mean? It means that at the heart of 1919, is the need to partake in and encourage liberatory ways of thinking. And we do that specifically through encouraging dreaming and reimagination, which we find are kind of central principles to abolitionist thought. There's like a realistic understanding that we're currently not free in our conditions and freedom requires a collective rejection of our present, and the constant effort to reimagine a better future for us all. And this means that our publication is grounded upon this history of freedom building and reimagination and thinks through what a print publication means for grassroots voices within African and African diasporic communities today. And fundamentally, going back to why 1919 started, there has always been this disconnection, a disconnection and an agenda of erasure sanctioned by the state and aiming to limit and restrict our African and African diasporic communities speaking and grounding with each other in public, and in private in the classroom and texts in our communities, and just in general. So our platform kind of tries to occupy the space, different spaces in media. And I guess we'll take a little bit of time now to explore how these different elements of our organizing kind of work together in tandem to help deliver our messaging and our programming in general.
CY 08:31
So I think, starting with our magazine makes the most sense. And that's what we're most known for. So we have a print and digital publication that brings together just the voices of all the different actors in our community. We have students, youth, elders, and adults just coming together to share the art, share their stories, share their critique, just in conversation with each other, in conversation with the reader and in conversation with their fellow community member. We've been publishing this magazine for the last five years. The first three were strictly digital, the last three were in print. And you could find these on our website. Some of the topics and issues that we explored includes reimagining community, transnational solidarity, communal care and healing, explorations of home, displacement, migration, abolitionists practices, incarceration, and many more topics and themes that I think you guys will enjoy. So head over to 1919mag.com after this. And yeah, we want to always focus on publishing work that allows artists and cultural workers, students, writers, again, all these people in our community to amplify their voice and to really open a space for dialogue, recognition and learning in our communities. I think one thing that like, like we really care about is generating collective spaces for learning in every outlet of our work. And that doesn't mean you're going to be arguing with someone who doesn't agree with you. But it does mean there's so much room for us to challenge each other and to really like work through difficult questions and difficult tasks. So we hope our platform could be a space for that. Especially too because there's so much yeah, there's sometimes so much that we don't agree on.
Shenhat 10:24
And the good thing is that, like our magazine is growing every year, which is really exciting to see. And that means like, kind of like what Caleb is saying, we hope to like expand alongside it and we're gonna try to like animate these magazines more and more, whether that's with like, screenings or film screenings, better launch events, hopefully, some like exhibits, kind of showcasing the work in our community. Because if you look at our magazines every year it's growing. And the quality of work has always been amazing. And it just showcases how much amazing cultural work people are engaging with in our communities, and that there's like a space for it to be shown and for it to be kind of celebrated. And we want to be the print magazine, the independent print magazine that gets to celebrate this work across, you know, Canada, across North America, across Turtle Island in general. And I guess when we're talking about print, and art and art being a very important place in which we can build community power and kind of learn together, it's coming from a place where we know that essentially art is the means by which we can kind of catalyze our community spirit, even stimulate political education, build community power and action. Art and cultural production, utilized as a method of knowledge sharing and communication dissemination, has really historical roots for Africans and African diasporic people as like a really effective way, as well as a rapid way of spreading information and mobilizing people. So 1919 is kind of grounded on this idea that the print publication is not only beautiful, it's a great art form, but it's critical. We understand that the evolution of the printing press has been like a very fundamental tool, both for society and significantly the state, and their attempts to manufacture consent in the production of news and media. So we've seen like, historically, pamphlets, flyers, newsletters, these have all been critical elements, aiding Black freedom struggles internationally because of their ability to mass communicate messages, ask questions and critique political conditions in the public space. So black freedom movements have utilized art as well as the printing press, as principle instruments in our struggle. And 1919 team wants to kind of follow in this tradition and in this lineage, and use, like black grassroots press as like a way to connect art and resistance. And we know the potential it can have in mobilizing people to take action on our conditions, and kind of bridge that gap between art and political action.
CY 13:16
Yes, thank you, Shen for that. I think understanding the history of Black freedom struugles is very important for 1919 because I think one thing is that, although, like we said we're most known for our print magazines, and we are a print magazine, and we are a digital publication, that's not all that we are. We don't see ourselves as just an outlet for platform in culture production, we also see ourselves as aiming to be a voice to contributing to this movement, contributing to the grassroots work that's going on. And one of the ways we do that is through 1919 radio. 1919 radio was actually initially started probably back in 2018 or 2019, I don't remember. But it was started to challenge anti Black cultural spaces in Toronto, which is one of our, like home cities by hosting a community based platform for independent DJs. It's just kind of an initiative aiming to get back creative control to artists and DJs, who are looking for opportunities where their independence was respected, and their work was fairly compensated. And we kind of took this original like, idea of 1919 radio and kind of incorporate it into the rest of the interdisciplinary framework we hold that has to do with education and cultural production. So we introduced conversations on our radio during 2020, and conversations with speakers, we had a couple scholars, shoutout to Jared Ball, Jemima Pierre, Simone Brown, all those guys. We brought them on at different points in our radio, and just to kind of ground and connect all of our projects is fundamentally rooted in anti colonial resistance, radical political education and actions like collaborative community power. Although, we didn't lose that element of music. The element of that art form, which is really important to our community was really important to us as well. And it's just important to Black people as well, because I think we, we know there's, like in every city not just Toronto, there's a growing, or I guess there's a shrinking list of safe spaces for Black people to gather, communal spaces where our art and presence is valued, where instead, most times we find our art mind as material, mind as an aesthetic, while we remain tokenized in institutions and in spaces by the establishment, by the industry, by staff, by owners and stuff like that. And yeah, this channel and our radio is really just the home for 1919 political education. Like I said, we have interviews, we have talks, and this year, we hope to really become more consistent and bring about different kinds of material and work to the radio that hopefully with your help and with your feedback, we could disseminate information that is critical to our community, to our collective that is interesting as well.
Shenhat 16:00
Yeah, and we also hope that like the evolving vision for 1919 radio will kind of grow, continue to grow alongside some of our other projects that we're working on. In this like effort to build, like we've said, kind of decentralized learning spaces, which is also just critical, just in terms of how 1919 is organized. Like Caleb said, we have kind of like two chapter cities, one in Calgary, and one in Toronto, and hopefully growing in Edmonton as well. So it's really important that we create and cultivate decentralized learning spaces. And 1919 radio along with like other projects that we're working on are kind of hopefully going to be the home for that. For example, in late 2020 up until this past year we launched what was the first iteration of a community learning initiative that we've been working on and trying to launch for quite some time called the Community Syllabus. And this was a space where we invited members in our community to read the text "Assata Taught Me" by Donna march in a five week reading circle program. We got to read and discuss the text and explore like major themes in the book, including policing, mass incarceration, war on drugs, youth mobilization, surveillance. And we just like really kind of sat together weekly or bi weekly and interrogated like a lot larger themes, connections to abolition, revolution, internationalism, anti colonial struggle, all these things over the course of this reading circle, which is a really really amazing experience for all of us in a really like, interesting and exciting way to learn alongside our peers and alongside people in our community. And we understand that like the learning never really ends and it's our responsibility to be in constant pursuit of building these learning spaces. So yeah, we were able to kind of bridge connections to different materials we've encountered in our political education and exchange resources with people. And this year, we really hope to further this Community Syllabus program, bring more text and community activation experiences to our community members to bridging this gap between what we're reading and how we're taking action in our communities in an effort to create more spaces for Black youth, African diasporic youth that are excluded, shut-out and essentially miseducated by our colonial education systems and the people that are in charge of our learning. And kind of like, find a space where people can alternatively learn, learn with each other, teach one another, about our political conditions and seek radical pathways to alternative futures for ourselves. We really hope that these different ways that we activate 1919's political principles can kind of show themselves in these different projects, and continue to grow and be sustainable. And speaking of sustainability, I guess we can talk a little bit more about 1919, and how we sustain our work, and how you can support 1919 work. So Caleb, if you want to talk a little bit about that?
CY 19:26
Yes, I will. I think the only thing I mentioned before we get into that is, and I know we kind of talked a lot about our publication and like how we're grounded upon this history of what a print publication means for grassroots voices within African communities today, diasporic and on the continent. But going back to why 1919 started, there's always been a disconnection, right. There's always been an agenda of erasure sanctioned by the state aiming to limit and restrict African communities speaking and guarding each other in public, in private and like Shen said in the classroom and in text. And I think one thing that's important to us, we look back and we see these people that have laid the way for us, our ancestors have led us and so when we speak of groundings, we called back on the work of Walter Rodney, who coined that term, in his book, "The Groundings with My Brothers". To Rodney, like Groundlings, meant breaking out of academic isolation and engaging in mutual exchange of knowledge with those struggling on the ground. That's critical for us. I think, like Shen briefly talked about the Community Syllabus, we talked about the radio, we talked about the publication. Everything we do is for the people in our community, everything we do is for the people, where we come from, I think, we've all had our experiences in university and formal education, I think limitations are very clear. There's really not a space where we'll be getting free no matter how hard we try. And so I think it's critical for us to take the information outside the institution and into the street. And we've been able to do that, to an extent so far. Like I mentioned earlier, with all these scholars who are some of the leading scholars in Black geographies or in their field, like Jemima Pierre's studies and works on Haitian affairs, really want to bring that knowledge to our community. So yeah, just a last note on that Shen, as well as anything you wanted to say.
Shenhat 21:34
I think it's really like what you're talking about in terms of our own personal experiences, whether in higher education or in workspaces. And the fact of the matter, is that a lot of information about our conditions, our political realities are really not accessible, but maybe the language is not accessible, or it's coded. But at the end of the day, Black people, African diasporic people, immigrant people in this country, are very aware of our conditions. We have the language to express the systems that we're living under, we're frustrated. And it's just a matter of seeking the community and the people that exist around you that also feel the same way and building knowledge and building power through that and our conditions, whether that's our whole lives and we're encouraged to seek or to exist in a space of alienation and isolation. And it's really important for us to push the fact that this community exists, there are people like you, there are people that want to seek alternative futures that want to learn and ground and put what they know and understand about how we live, and what's wrong with the ways that we live. And you know, all those things, they want to put that into action, they want to put that into communal learning, and want to build community. So this is kind of hopefully going to resonate with some people and hopefully encourage you to seek out any type of revolutionary long term action. Whatever that looks like to you on whatever seems fit, whether that's like joining a book club, or reading radical literature, or seeking out community spaces like that, at 1919. You don't have to be a cultural worker, specifically, or an artist or an amazing writer, to seek out communities like this or to be part of our, community. spaces like this are really important, and to know that they exist. I know, for me, it was very important. It was really nice to know that a space like this existed, I'm sure for you Caleb, it's been like really critical to just your political education, to my political education. And it's really important for us to seek out community. So yeah, that's all we wanted to add. And yeah, and I guess, in terms of supporting us, supporting radical action and supporting long term kind of revolutionary action for leftist publications like 1919, there's many ways that we can kind of like cultivate sustainability for ourselves. And we want to do that in a way that kind of aligned with our principles and our best fit for what we're trying to do and our political goals and intentions. So yeah, we have a couple of different ways that we go about doing that.
CY 24:11
Yeah, definitely. So I think, one, obviously, as an independent cultural production platform, we're struggling like everybody else. I think, the struggle is not something we run away from because I think if we're struggling, that means you have a pretty good idea of the contradictions we exist in. As a radical organization, as a Black radical organization in a capitalist neoliberal society, which is filled with contradictions and opportunities to sell yourselves, and to be bought and to be crushed by the institution. But all of these opportunities, I think, are also opportunities to reinforce yourselves and your values and your beliefs. And so like how we really sustain ourselves at 1919 is, in the past through some grants we received by the Canadian Association of Black Journalists, as well as New College at U of T. But even then, grants will never be a way to support the work we do. That's not something we're ignorant to. So one thing that has really supported us, has just been the donations from our community. Those donations went to paying the contributors in our magazines, they went to paying digitial contributors, photographers, artists, and other cultural workers, a fair and competitive rate. We also pay our freelance writers more than CBC, and they are a billion dollar organization, so they need to get it together, but they won't. They got, you know, billions from Justin Trudeau and all those guys. We pay our DJs, everyone on 1919 radio, covering printing costs of our magazine, which is really, really expensive, but really important for us. I think, having that print is just is a great way to explore these ideas and to feel these ideas as well in your hands and as you flip through the pages, it's a really great feeling. And also small grants that we've used in our community organizing and community initiatives we hope to hopefully establish some kind of micro-grant or some kind of like revolving grant where we could send that out to cultural workers in need of assistance this year. And it's also helped in our community programs we've done, like we've partnered with the Prisoner Correspondence Project, we've done the book drive for federal prison libraries across Canada. We've done some smaller things like clothing drives for refugee claimants and asylum seekers in Toronto. And we need money to do all of this, so it's to circulate the funds, or whether it's to buy resources. I think that's the main thing, yeah, the main way, monetarily to support 1919.
Shenhat 27:13
All in the name of like redistributing this funding that we’ve received, all of the money that we've gotten in the past has been through these donations and for the sake of transparency we definitely have to make it clear that we've never received any money from any big corporations, and no organizations that don't align with 1919 in our goals, in our political ideologies. That has sustained us just in terms of what we were able to do for the last few years and in the past year actually we've decided to try to develop something that can sustain our organizing in a more long-term way and also in a way that kind of keeps us accountable to the people in our community that support us. So we launched in 2020, alongside our recent issue Homecoming, a membership subscription program. And this is a program that again supports our projects including our print and digital publication, all of this money goes towards the things that Caleb has said in terms of paying our digital and print writers. Everything, all the costs and expenses that go towards running this independent organization, this independent publication and we hope to honor the labour of cultural workers and like recognize that this money needs to be redistributed from within our community.
Shenhat 28:46
So our radio platform, 1919 radio is a space obviously for music, conversation, political education. We've done in the past our Abolition Arts and Writing Program and our youth arts writing workshops that we've done in the past. We have our community education platform, the Community Syllabus which we spoke about and all these things in our ongoing commitment to build community power through various grassroots community initiatives that we organized with. Like the partnerships that Caleb mentioned like the pen pal program, the book drive, these are all things that can be funded in support through our membership subscription. So we encourage people, people in our 1919 community, members and non members to contribute to this work how they see fit.
CY 29:37
One other thing I want to say, Shen, is that yes the 1919 membership is a way to support us through a small financial means. But it’s also a way for some people who don't have the means to support. We also really encourage our community just take part in revolutionary action in whatever way that is available to them. So engaging with radicalizing literature, community booklist online, reading lists, getting involved with local initiatives that practice solidarity with incarcerated people, spreading the word about Black publications like 1919. There’s just so many ways we can cultivate and develop an abolitionist community, and just a community in general because community’s really what’s going to save us and protect us from the violence of the state. The only way we can start to move away from the state is when we can show them that, you know, we have enough power, we have enough structure we have enough organization to make the state absolute. And it's important that everyone in our community and black Africans know that there’s platforms like ours that exist, as a space for collective learning, for art and for cultural work that's committed to making our struggle and our voices heard.
Shenhat 30:44
It's definitely important for us to note that most people will probably think that the primary way to engage or to get their art or work seen and kind of submitted is through our print publication. But like we said there's so many different kind of platforms that we operate from, so if you want to get in touch with us, if you want to have your work seen, if you want to develop a project, community members or non-community members, people in our membership or not in our membership we definitely want to see your work. We’re definitely always open to receive pitches for our digital publication, our next issue magazine call out for new submissions will be open. There are many ways that you can support or to be part of 1919. We want you to see this as a space where your ideas can kind of come into fruition, whatever that looks like. If you want to participate and organized alongside our team and our projects, and support the coordination of all events those opportunities also exist. It's just a matter of reaching out to us, there's many different ways people who are interested can engage with 1919 and the work that we do. All of our magazines, programs and projects will always continue to remain open access online. You can find all the work that we've done, all the publications that we put out in PDF on our website 1919mag.com. Those things are always there and will always be free and open to access.
