Aengus Anderson: Welcome back to The Conversation. I’m Aengus Anderson.

Neil Prendergast: I’m Neil Prendergast.

Anderson: And this is our final episode.

Prendergast: And unfor­tu­nate­ly Micah could not be here for our final episode. He’s doing some yup­pie stuff in Portland, we think. 

Anderson: Something with board­ing a dog before a transna­tion­al flight. But we are here to helm this thing into the con­clu­sion. And the per­son we’re talk­ing to today is Lisa, she goes by ​“Tiny,” Gray-Garcia. She’s a self-proclaimed pover­ty schol­ar. She’s a poet. And she’s the cofounder of Poor Magazine, a pub­li­ca­tion by and for the house­less com­mu­ni­ty. She’s also one of the dri­ving forces behind the Homefulness Project, which is a grass­roots effort to cre­ate housing. 

We’ve talked to a lot of peo­ple in this series about a lot of real­ly abstract stuff, and Lisa is com­ing from a real­ly dif­fer­ent world. And that’s kind of why we want­ed to end the project here. In a way it’s sort of like a response to all of the inter­views we’ve done.

Lisa Gray-Garcia: I’d say as a per­son who’s been crim­i­nal­ized and arrest­ed for the sole act of being poor in the US, it’s prob­a­bly some­thing I’m always walk­ing with, speak­ing on, and try­ing to effec­tive­ly change just by…in some ways not so much rais­ing aware­ness, which seems very pas­sive to be, but more about spark­ing peo­ple’s under­stand­ing and change. That you don’t have to have nec­es­sar­i­ly these large, only large movements—although large move­ments are real­ly pow­er­ful and good—for change to hap­pen. You can also have indi­vid­ual change. You can have com­mu­ni­ty change. And if a com­mu­ni­ty starts to under­stand that there’s a hous­ing short­age, that gen­tri­fi­ca­tion is alive and well like it is in San Francisco and Oakland, that peo­ple are increas­ing­ly poor, then they might start to under­stand why they should­n’t be crim­i­nal­iz­ing poor fam­i­lies for the sole act of being with­out a roof. 

My mom was raised in orphan­ages and fos­ter homes. She was seri­ous­ly tor­tured in those because she was an unwant­ed child. And sad­ly many chil­dren, almost all chil­dren who are unpro­tect­ed end up some­how deal­ing with trau­ma. And in her case she made it by any means nec­es­sary, like a lot of us do, and came out the oth­er side if you will and raised me as this poor sin­gle mom­ma on wel­fare. Got off of that, got a job doing what I will call rev­o­lu­tion­ary social work. She got the paper by the uni­ver­si­ty by any means nec­es­sary. And all of this is slip­ping and skip­ping over so many dif­fer­ent hur­dles that for us, for poor folks to get through these insti­tu­tions are real­ly complicated.

But any­way, she did that and she got this job doing this pow­er­ful work, and then she got laid off and we became home­less. And so that sort of sto­ry of one pay­check away from home­less­ness was our real­i­ty. And at 11 years old we were thrown into com­plete­ly desta­bi­liza­tion, if you will. So we were either sleep­ing in our car on the street, in shel­ters, or places that we would squat. And it was nec­es­sary that at that age I had to drop out of for­mal insti­tu­tions of learn­ing and enroll full-time in the school of hard knocks, where I grad­u­at­ed with a PhD in pover­ty. And that’s the poet­ic ver­sion but the real­i­ty is I had to also work to sup­port my mom and my sister. 

So that last­ed for, almost up to when I was 20. And then the oth­er sort of nar­ra­tive about me and my mom was that we worked togeth­er. In this soci­ety they teach you to sep­a­rate. The sole…you know, rela­tion­ship you have with par­ents is to raise you and then push you out in the world. But actu­al­ly as an indige­nous (because I iden­ti­fy as indige­nous Taino, which is the indige­nous peo­ple of Puerto Rico, where my mom was from), we don’t prac­tice that. We prac­tice inter­de­pen­dence. And so that means if you’re a good daugh­ter, or son, in an indige­nous fam­i­ly you’re work­ing togeth­er with your fam­i­ly to come up and out of pover­ty or to stay alive. 

So that was our sit­u­a­tion. We used to do art­work we sold on the street with­out a license, which a lot of poor peo­ple do all over the world. And so we made art about our home­less­ness while we were deal­ing with it, which is real­ly insane­ly hard and crazy but was also amaz­ing and beau­ti­ful, a moment in time. And one of the things that hap­pened is that like I say, I was actu­al­ly arrest­ed, and put in jail, for the act of being home­less, and in a lot of ways that changed my life. 

Listeners should already know but sad­ly most peo­ple don’t know, it’s actu­al­ly ille­gal to be home­less in the US. It’s ille­gal depend­ing on what city you’re in but it’s almost ​‘cross the whole nation it’s ille­gal to—for basic things like sleep­ing in your car, is citable and arrestable. If you’re actu­al­ly sleep­ing on the street, you will be arrest­ed, cit­ed, and it sort of depends city to city. Poor fam­i­lies being home­less and work­ing to sur­vive is actu­al­ly not a nar­ra­tive you ever see with­in a so-called first world real­i­ty but it’s actu­al­ly very com­mon. It’s just that in the US we’re unable to be seen because if we come for­ward, if we’re seen as house­lesss fam­i­lies, as poor peo­ple on the street, we are crim­i­nal­ized, our stuff is tak­en by the police, and we’re put in jail or CPS calls. 

Poverty has always been crim­i­nal­ized. In the begin­ning of the US, if any­body does their her­sto­ry, we just had pau­per’s laws, ugly laws that said if you were unsight­ly or dis­abled you could­n’t be on the street. If you owed peo­ple mon­ey you’d be thrown in jail. And those of course were all based on English or col­o­niz­er law that was you know, trans­ferred here because the same thing hap­pened in England in the ear­ly days. 

So arguably, that sys­tem of crim­i­nal­iz­ing pover­ty, leg­is­lat­ing pover­ty, and incar­cer­at­ing poor peo­ple has always been there. Giuliani start­ed to sort of bring it into the 21^st cen­tu­ry and from his work, if you will, launched a thou­sand ships of what I call the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of pover­ty, straight up. New York became one of the first ones that actu­al­ly made being on wel­fare and not hav­ing a home sort of like this fin­able offense and you actu­al­ly– When you stayed in shel­ters you actu­al­ly had to pay for your shel­ter bed out of your lit­tle tiny mea­ger gen­er­al assis­tance, or wel­fare check. 

Again, to bust peo­ple’s myths that are lis­ten­ers, there is no free mon­ey. People on wel­fare are not lazy, we actu­al­ly work for that lit­tle tiny bit of mea­ger mon­ey. To receive that ​“check” or those food stamps, you actu­al­ly have to do a cer­tain amount of work that used to be union labor just to get it. And of course it’s not in any kind of way liv­able amount, like some­thing between $169 for a sin­gle adult to $420 for a sin­gle par­ent or a par­ent with sev­er­al children. 

So peo­ple do this whole hat­er­a­tion on folks who receive gov­ern­ment aid, but it’s all based on lies, actu­al­ly. We do work. Single mom­mas do work. Single dads do work. And it’s real­ly peo­ple who are unem­ployed and have no oth­er way of sup­port­ing themselves.

Anyway so, I digress. Long sto­ry short, incar­cer­a­tion is a hor­ri­ble thing. But in that moment as well, because I was in so much trou­ble just to stay alive and keep my fam­i­ly alive and I was so tired of so much work and on and on, the act of being incar­cer­at­ed for a minute also start­ed to open my con­scious­ness up.

And so we start­ed to audit class­es at San Francisco State in Black Studies, La Rasa Studies, Native American Studies, and start­ed to learn about the rela­tion­ships between race and class and pover­ty and strug­gle, local­ly and globally. 

And right about the same time, we found a land­lord who did­n’t evict us the first time we could­n’t pay the rent. Again, talk­ing about what indi­vid­u­als can do. And in this case this land­lord, you know, was an indi­vid­ual small fam­i­ly land­lord. But she did­n’t kick us out when we could­n’t pay the rent. That act was so seri­ous­ly huge for us that it enabled me and my mom to think for the first time in our lives to not be caught in the hus­tle of strug­gle and fear of being on the street. 

That, and then the attor­ney who helped me out of jail, who for the first time I met a ser­vi­ceper­son, if you will, who did­n’t, again, take part in the pover­ty indus­try but actu­al­ly just asked me, ​“What can I do?” And I told him I could write. And he said, ​“That’s a valid thing to do,” and he had me do that for the 20,000 hours of com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice that he got my sen­tence com­mut­ed to. 

So I only did three months in jail and then I wrote this arti­cle. Being able to write and being published—it was even­tu­al­ly pub­lished in the East Bay Express. And it was actu­al­ly called ​“Criminal Poverty,” which even­tu­al­ly became the name of my book. That and learn­ing about our cul­ture changed our life and we were able to actu­al­ly start to think and con­ceive of the beau­ti­ful fab­u­lous­ness of Poor Magazine, which at first was just a mag­a­zine, an actu­al mag­a­zine; inten­tion­al­ly glossy, visu­al art and lit­er­ary art mag­a­zine about peo­ple who are nev­er giv­en space in beau­ti­ful mag­a­zines. People like my mom and me and all the oth­er found­ing mem­bers of Poor.

Aengus Anderson: When you’re work­ing on Poor, what do you want to do with the mag­a­zine? Even when you have things like Street Sheet, or mag­a­zines like that out there. Like, they cov­er it very dif­fer­ent­ly. Who are you talk­ing to with the mag­a­zine? Like what are you try­ing to [crosstalk] get across?

Gray-Garcia: Well that’s a great point, because we’re no longer mak­ing the paper one, because of actu­al­ly fund­ing. Poor is in fact po, by the way. So if any­one’s lis­ten­ing, we def­i­nite­ly need dona­tions. We don’t get foun­da­tion fund­ing. It’s total­ly based on indi­vid­u­als who just believe in what we’re doing or like to con­sume our poor people-led media.

But that said, from the begin­ning, because we did cre­ate four paper issues and they are very beau­ti­ful. And when we flipped off to online (www​.poor​magazine​.org) the goal has always been to reach every­body. I mean, it’s fun­ny because peo­ple say, ​“What’s your audi­ence?” Will, audi­ence first and fore­most of course is us. It’s not that we don’t have a voice. We have a very pow­er­ful voice. We just aren’t heard a lot of times. Or we’re talked for, you know. That’s a…whole dif­fer­ent banana than telling your own story.

So, first and fore­most us and our fel­low com­rades and sur­vivors and fam­i­lies and elders. But, equidis­tant with folks with race and class priv­i­lege. It’s always like that at Poor. So, most def­i­nite­ly inten­tion­al­ly cross-class. And of course one of the rea­sons, but not the entire rea­son, that we go for the aes­thet­ic, if you will, or what my mom would call ​“the Hollywood look” is because we’re from LA. In all of the stuff that we do, we bring art and we bring an aes­thet­ic, with an inten­tion to reach beyond those mar­gin­al­ized walls that peo­ple will put up when the word ​“poor” is mentioned.

Anderson: Right. It’s like you’d become invis­i­ble in print the same way you do in real­i­ty, right?

Gray-Garcia: Totally. 

Anderson: Yeah.

Gray-Garcia: Right. Totally.

Anderson: You know, with some­thing like Poor, say you reach a real­ly rich demographic—

Gray-Garcia: Right right right.

Anderson: —with the mag­a­zine… Raising aware­ness is one thing, but do you point them towards law, or chang­ing things struc­tural­ly? Like what’re the sys­tems that you’re try­ing to raise aware­ness of and prob­a­bly dis­man­tle, right?

Gray-Garcia: Exactly. I mean, I’m real­ly glad that you asked that and you’re fol­low­ing the dots. Because the goal has always been some­thing we call the extreme slid­ing scale. So in oth­er words, in the actu­al sale of the mag­a­zine when it was on the news­stand, if you will, was in places like Barnes & Noble and stuff like that, right. As well as, it was giv­en away for free in shel­ters. It’s com­plete­ly holis­tic in terms of the com­mu­ni­ties that’s it’s going to. And not to make any­body feel ashamed or guilty; those are use­less and pas­sive feelings. 

But the point is how can you lever­age your priv­i­lege and actu­al­ly walk with change? And you can, right. So, from the begin­ning every issue has always been and con­tin­ues to be solution-based. So the first issue was called ​“Homefulness.” We had actu­al­ly launched a dream for what we knew to be, as poor and indige­nous peo­ples, an actu­al solu­tion. So, all the arti­cles in the mag­a­zine dealt with dif­fer­ent forms of strug­gle and then solution. 

When I talked a cou­ple min­utes ago about the land­lord who did­n’t evict us, that’s a solu­tion. A lot of peo­ple with dif­fer­ent forms of access maybe have prop­er­ty. And I know out there for those of you lis­ten­ing who are you know, apart­ment own­ers and stuff, that’s very com­pli­cat­ed; I get all that. But if you want to help pover­ty, and you want to make change, that’s one of the things you can do, is you can change the way you think about rent.

The sec­ond thing is that we stood with artists and tech peo­ple all along who would pro­vide us for instance… At that time, I did­n’t even have access to a com­put­er. We were lit­er­al­ly house­less in the begin­ning issue. Artists like Every Quang, a rather famous artist sell­ing his work for 3 and 4 and 5,000 and more a piece in New York art gal­leries, donat­ed his work to us to use. And then also that’s how we were able to raise enough mon­ey to print the first issue.

So again stand­ing with and work­ing in a cross-class frame­work, we were able to not only put out the mag­a­zine but also to reach across, right. 

The oth­er whole piece of that is we also teach peo­ple with race and class priv­i­lege in our PeopleSkool. And what we do is we teach folks who are what I call ​“meshed in acad­e­mia,” who are only learn­ing from the for­mal insti­tu­tions of learn­ing, to learn from what I call pover­ty schol­ars. So it’s a con­cept that has to do with deem­pha­siz­ing that the only knowl­edge comes from for­mal insti­tu­tions of learning. 

Not to take away from the for­mal insti­tu­tions of learn­ing. You know, get the paper, what­ev­er, do what you need to do. That’s how our sys­tem is set up. But, that there’s oth­er forms of knowl­edge, and that you need to val­ue those, right. 

So it’s always been part of our dynam­ic to not only teach poor peo­ple or to pro­vide facil­i­ta­tion of skills to poor folks to be writ­ers and jour­nal­ists; this is what we do. But also to teach folks with race and class priv­i­lege to actu­al­ly decol­o­nize their own minds around what does this access to wealth even mean, right. Where is it based? As you beau­ti­ful­ly said, how do we dis­man­tle this sys­tem that is so fla­grant­ly set up so that some peo­ple are okay and a lot of peo­ple aren’t. 

Anderson: So you can reach these more priv­i­leged peo­ple. At the same time, is it part of the sys­tem itself that it has to have a poor class? That like, cap­i­tal­ism as we prac­tice it now could­n’t func­tion with­out that?

Gray-Garcia: Well, that’s real­ly of course a huge ques­tion. I’m not a social­ist, a com­mu­nist, any of those ‑ists, not because of no dis­re­spect for any of them. I think that they’re pow­er­ful move­ments. It’s just that we—me and my mom—just were about try­ing to cre­ate peo­ple solu­tions in a hum­ble way, walk­ing the world with humility. 

So I don’t have this grandiose-scale plan of what’s gonna work. I think that those are actu­al­ly kind of illog­i­cal in a 21^st cen­tu­ry real­i­ty when you have so many vari­ables of so many cul­tures and peo­ples and spir­its. What we prac­tice is real­ly going back to our indige­nous roots, and I say that to say that we have a mul­tira­cial, inter­trib­al com­mu­ni­ty of land­less indige­nous peo­ple and land­less poor peo­ple. I don’t believe that there ever should be a soci­ety that is root­ed on the backs of peo­ple suffering. 

I will open­ly say that I believe that there is some­thing very wrong with cap­i­tal­ism. I just find, from a per­son­al lev­el, not some like you know, major frame­work lev­el, that it’s very dam­ag­ing, and it’s not a human sys­tem. As peo­ple become more and more dehu­manized, they do things like, a guy was on the street yes­ter­day or a cou­ple days ago in San Francisco, and he was dying. Was bleed­ing from the nose and the mouth. I was­n’t there, because if I’d been there it would­na hap­pened but… People just watched him. And they got out the cam­er­a­phone and they filmed him. But they did­n’t call 911. They did­n’t go over to him and give him some water. They did noth­ing. Sadly that’s becom­ing more the norm. So, this dehu­man­iza­tion is very dangerous. 

Anderson: Yeah, where does it lead?

Gray-Garcia: Well, arguably it leads to what we’re already in, ​‘kay. How do we get to a place that has the high­est incar­cer­a­tion rate of any place in the world? Okay, we’re already there. Just to go back again to solu­tions, the main thing is in 1996 when we put out the homefullness issue, me and my mom, deal­ing with iso­la­tion which is one of the most hor­ri­ble things that hap­pens in cap­i­tal­ism, one of the things that we knew is that that way of liv­ing could­n’t con­tin­ue and it was not a good way to be. And we cre­at­ed the begin­nings, along with oth­er pover­ty schol­ars, of what is now called The Homefulness Project.

It’s a sweat equi­ty cohous­ing mod­el in a school where we teach our chil­dren back our indige­nous lan­guages, a sliding-scale cafe, and a com­mu­ni­ty gar­den. Me and my mom, deal­ing with the very things that we’re talk­ing about now, sort of dreamed this. You know, fast for­ward, what­ev­er, six­teen years or so. We’ve actu­al­ly been able to get land for Homefulness. Which is huge. And the way that we did was we taught peo­ple with dif­fer­ent forms of wealth and access, and dif­fer­ent forms of race and class priv­i­lege, to lever­age their wealth to sup­port and stand in sol­i­dar­i­ty with a poor people-led, indige­nous people-led vision. One of the rea­sons that so rad­i­cal is it’s com­plete­ly out­side of said pover­ty industry.

Anderson: And how do you make the case? Like, say you bump into that per­son. You know, you meet a young per­son and you’re hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with them. And they’ve nev­er thought about any of this stuff before—this is all new to them. How do you tell them like, ​“Hey, this mat­ters to you. This is why you should care…” You know, because it seems like a lot of what we’re talk­ing about here is like, you’re up against an entire ide­ol­o­gy that makes you invis­i­ble, right—

Gray-Garcia: Right.

Anderson: And so, when you’re talk­ing to the per­son who holds that ide­ol­o­gy what’s the first point of contact?

Gray-Garcia: Mmm. Wow. That’s deep. And it’s real­ly inter­est­ing, too, that you ask it that way because I want to name our sol­i­dar­i­ty fam­i­ly. We have what would be more gen­er­al­ly known as a sol­i­dar­i­ty board. And what those folks are is peo­ple with race and class priv­i­lege. And again, these aren’t folks with a lot of mon­ey. They might have a lit­tle trust fund, or they might have some inher­i­tance, right. But they start­ed to under­stand that the sys­tem is not a human sys­tem, and how do they help to effec­tive­ly make that change? 

But the key piece to answer your ques­tion very sim­ply is, I can’t do that. It’s that sim­ple. They can do it, right. Because they can talk to each oth­er. For me what it’s gonna look like, is some poor per­son try­ing to hus­tle some change out your pocket. 

Sadly, that kind of marginalization/separation that verges on dis­re­spect but I don’t even blame peo­ple for it, it’s how we’re trained, is com­mon. It’s why the oth­er crazy indus­try hap­pens, which is what I affec­tion­ate­ly phil­an­thropimp­ing. It’s why there’s a gigan­tic indus­try set up of ​“phil­an­thropy” or ​“char­i­ty” which I’m com­plete­ly against. I’m not say­ing that they don’t do great things for grass­roots non­prof­its, and obvi­ous­ly that’s the only way it’s set up right now so you know, keep on keep­ing on. But to allow it to just go unfet­tered is not okay. Because the real­i­ty is what those are is those are safe­ty nets so that peo­ple with race and class priv­i­lege nev­er have to deal with us crazy poor peo­ple try­ing to ask them for mon­ey. And again, that’s all root­ed in these sys­tems of separation. 

So, the first step that we have peo­ple do is come to PeopleSkool. Because I per­son­al­ly can­not answer that ques­tion, can’t dis­man­tle that gigan­tic nar­ra­tive of BS—which is real­ly what it is, right. But when they come to PeopleSkool they do a semes­ter. And you know, you might think well that’s a lot just to get a dona­tion for some–, but that’s real­ly what they have to do. Because all of us pover­ty, migrante, indige­nous, elder, youth schol­ars teach on our own expe­ri­ences. And peo­ple learn them­selves. We don’t pound any­body over the head. We’re not try­ing to hus­tle no change. We’re real­ly just try­ing to teach peo­ple. An extreme­ly pow­er­ful train­ing that all peo­ple in the US should take part in. Just because it starts to take apart these myths.

Anderson: Where do those myths come from?

Gray-Garcia: Well that’s a crazy thing. I mean you know…so going back to the begin­ning again of our con­ver­sa­tion. If you think about the way that this sys­tem was launched… And again, I’m not speak­ing for oth­er places. One of things I just want to name is that peo­ple think, ​“Oh, there’s not real pover­ty in the US. Go to Haiti, and go to Jamaica and you’ll see real pover­ty.” Well, actu­al­ly that’s again anoth­er mythology. 

What is dif­fer­ent in in the US, just to rename this, reclaim this, is that you can­not be seen as a poor per­son in the US. The actu­al street that we walk on can’t have shan­ty towns built on them. And when they do, they’re there for a lit­tle bit of time and then [snaps fin­gers] cops come, or the city depart­ment of cleanup comes to take all their stuff away, and some­times even pow­er wash­es down. There’s also street sales that are allowed in oth­er parts of the world that are not allowed here. So what you have is you have a sys­tem or a soci­ety that’s set up to pre­tend like there’s no pover­ty at all.

Anderson: Right, and the same mech­a­nisms that do that make it real­ly damn hard to get a job, right.

Gray-Garcia: Exactly.

Anderson: I mean, they make it… It’s like you’re trapped in the point where you can’t get out.

Gray-Garcia: Right!

Anderson: But it seems like part of what we’re deal­ing with here is also this myth which allows the peo­ple who walked past you to go…, ​“The posi­tion you’re in is your fault.”

Gray-Garcia: Right.

Anderson: Right. Because the sys­tems are invis­i­ble to them.

Gray-Garcia: Exactly, and just to reartic­u­late because your ques­tion was real­ly clear, ​“where do the myths come from,” and I think that’s very impor­tant to artic­u­late. When we talk about the way that the US cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem was set up— So first of all you know, the found­ing fathers and all these things, and then chat­tel slav­ery, and then the steal­ing of indige­nous peo­ple’s land. What hap­pened is that the peo­ple came here and they brought their laws, their anti-poor-people laws, from oth­er places. 

For instance, the whole notion of access to prop­er­ty was already put on the books as one of the most impor­tant val­ues in the US sys­tem. So you think about if that’s one of the most esteemed things, to be a so-called prop­er­ty owner…then what if you’re not? Right? So that’s the first split, right.

The sec­ond thing is we’re taught, again, under what we call the cult of inde­pen­dence, this Horatio Alger notion of ​“all I need to do is pull up my boot­straps” and, ​“get your S togeth­er and work hard,” right? And so any­one that is per­ceived as not doing that is con­sid­ered, quote, a whole litany of slurs, right, from lazy, to crazy, to stu­pid, to a bum, to—on and on, hobo. And some­how this is taught to chil­dren very young—because I teach kids all the time. Like six-year-olds know the word hobo. It’s like the most insane—where did you learn that? They don’t even know, it’s crazy. 

Anderson: It’s like it’s not the 30s.

Gray-Garcia: Yeah, exact­ly. It’s just off the chain. Because the hate of poor peo­ple, and the dis­re­spect, is built-in. Why? Because you can’t build mon­ey hoard­ing up if you don’t believe in the mighty dol­lah, you see. And one of the things that’s most impor­tant in the US sys­tem is hoard­ing of wealth. 

Think about it, right. How much can I get? How much can I build? How many hous­es can I have? How many—I mean, it’s insane. The Malawi peo­ple think we’re insane. They think we’re actu­al­ly tor­tur­ers, because they have a sys­tem that com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, where they believe that if you have a job you’re going to sup­port the whooole fam­i­ly. If you’re the only per­son in the house that has a job, that’s fine. Then at least the house eats. 

So again, the cult of inde­pen­dence, where we are taught that I’m out for num­ber one, and as long as I get num­ber one clear and I got all my stuff and I got mines, I’m good. So then you per­ceive the peo­ple who so-called maybe aren’t doing the same thing as you, which is work­ing hard, as lazy and crazy and stu­pid and bums, then you have effec­tive­ly set up the idea that you are dif­fer­ent than your fel­low human being. That you are oth­er than. That he is oth­er than you. And then once you do that, you don’t care what hap­pens to him, or her. It’s kind of hard to take in because you start to real­ize oh my God, how did this hap­pen? You know, when peo­ple start to unpack this stuff it’s crazy.

Anderson: So we’ve got this mythol­o­gy and we’ve also got law—

Gray-Garcia: Exactly.

Anderson: —that’s built on method­ol­o­gy. What does a bet­ter future look like?

Gray-Garcia: [sighs loud­ly] Well…I’ll tell you this. I’m work­ing on my sec­ond book. It’s called Poverty Scholarship #101, a peo­ple’s text. Subtitle, ​“pop­u­la­tion brings the pop­u­lar edu­ca­tion.” Heads up to Paolo Freire. And the rea­son I bring that up is that in the book I’m try­ing to— I’m basi­cal­ly not try­ing, but I’m along with my fel­low pover­ty schol­ars local­ly and glob­al­ly dis­man­tling these mytholo­gies and look­ing toward what we call a move­ment of solidarity. 

So the move­ment that’s out­side of pover­ty indus­try, non­prof­it indus­tri­al com­plex, these big, huge you know, bul­bous kind of sys­tems that are not sus­tain­able, to look at things that we can do which I believe are good for the plan­et whether you’re poor or you’re not. Which is to move in a hum­ble way. In some ways it all relates back to food. So it’s based on the hunter-gatherer notion. Like you know, veg­e­tar­i­an­ism, veg­an­ism, or meat-eating—all that does­n’t real­ly mat­ter. The issue is we’re con­sum­ing too much. And so how do we live in a hum­ble way, or in as our indige­nous ances­tors say, in a good way, that takes care of every­body? That does­n’t prac­tice the con­tin­ued hoard­ing of wealth. 

It means that we flip these ideas—all of us togeth­er, in sol­i­dar­i­ty whether you be a per­son with race/class priv­i­lege or you be a per­son in poverty—of sep­a­ra­tion. And you prac­tice what we call inter­de­pen­dence. Because it’s actu­al­ly again good for every­body, because what we’re talk­ing about is we’re hav­ing land­mass decrease. And so we’re hav­ing more peo­ple in the world and less space to stand on. So glob­al cli­mate change is real, for what­ev­er rea­son you want to say. And peo­ple are los­ing their space and these hor­ri­ble tragedies are hap­pen­ing more and more for what­ev­er rea­son. And the real­i­ty is that there’s also pop­u­la­tion growth, right. 

So if you put all that togeth­er, one plus one plus one, plus cap­i­tal­ism, you basi­cal­ly have a recipe for incar­cer­a­tion, for extra­ju­di­cial killings, for intense crim­i­nal­iza­tion, for more leg­is­la­tions, and for more hoard­ing of resources. And what does that mean? That means that any­body who falls in the mid­dle any­where, even whether they’re middle-class folks, end up with less and less. And the scary thing is peo­ple real­ly have to under­stand that there is not this notion of scarci­ty. There is enough for every­body. It’s just a lot more peo­ple have to start hoard­ing the stuff that there is.

So if you’re a per­son with some form of race and class priv­i­lege what is it you can do? It’s a hum­ble thing. Maybe all you can do is buy a Street Sheet that day and not ques­tion the Street Sheet sell­er about where he’s spend­ing his mon­ey. Let me tell you, a CEO at [Chevron?] makes two mil­lion a year and nobody ques­tions how much he’s blow­ing up his nose of that mon­ey. So why are you going to ques­tion some­one if you give ​’em a dol­lar that they’re gonna spend it on alco­hol? That’s their deci­sion. You either want the paper or you don’t. You either want to give the dol­lar or you don’t. Walk away if you don’t. End of top­ic, you know; guilt not nec­es­sary. But the issue is stop the crim­i­nal­iza­tion, stop the mythol­o­giza­tion, and let’s cre­ate the togeth­er­ness, right. 

Similarily you know, again if you’re a land­lord, if you’re a busi­ness own­er, you’re gonna believe in this bullsh—in this idea (excuse my French) is Ban the Box, right. So Ban the Box is a move­ment that a lot of peo­ple at All of Us or None shout out, which is a prisoner-led move­ment to stop, before you hire some­body, try­ing to do a back­ground check on their life. I mean, a lot of the times peo­ple were incar­cer­at­ed because of pover­ty; many times, if non-violent crime that’s what it was. I can tell you, any­one does­n’t believe there’s apartheid in this coun­try go into any plan­ta­tion prison. Frightening. 90 to 98% of peo­ple of col­or. Mostly African-descended people.

So, how do you change these sys­tems? You change them one at a time. You change them a com­mu­ni­ty at a time. Stop buy­ing into the idea of the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of peo­ple for the sole act of being poor. Work effec­tive­ly against these sit-lie laws. And sup­port poor peo­ple and move­ments. One of the things I’m going to be doing is once our book, the book is done, which is very soon, we’re going to be teach­ing oth­er com­mu­ni­ties in pover­ty across the globe how to start home­ful­ness. Because we under­stand how huge this is. 

And we’re doing it. We’re going to start build­ing this sum­mer. We raised enough to build our first straw-bale house. If peo­ple want to donate, they can definitely…it would be appre­ci­at­ed. Because we’re try­ing to raise 400 thou­sand, which isn’t real­ly that much mon­ey. We’re gonna build eight straw-bale hous­es for land­less fam­i­lies. And a school, and a sliding-scale cafe which basi­cal­ly gives peo­ple food if they don’t have any mon­ey for noth­ing, and if they do they kick down. So you’re always sup­port­ing each oth­er, it’s always a circle.

Anderson: And it seems like you know, I always try to talk to peo­ple about what’s good. And it seems like the thing that’s emerg­ing for me in this con­ver­sa­tion is com­mu­ni­ty, right [crosstalk], or the sense of an ​“us?”

Gray-Garcia: Right. Right.

Anderson: And, that’s one of the biggest ten­sions in this project, as I talk to all sorts of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. If we look out this win­dow at the world, do you see…us? Do you see a lot of dif­fer­ent us’es? Or do you just see…all oth­ers? And it feels like that’s kind of one of the big ten­sions of the time that we live in. Why is think­ing ​“us”—because it seems like your pic­ture of us is big—

Gray-Garcia: Very big.

Anderson: —It’s like, the plan­et, almost.

Gray-Garcia: Yeah.

Anderson: Where does that come from and why is that good?

Gray-Garcia: Well again, going back to…I wan­na call in my indige­nous ances­tors, almost every… We all come from some­where, right. Whether you be Northern European or not, you come from indige­nous peo­ples. The ways of our ances­tors was not to think about me, me, me. And I do want to say again, bring­ing the con­cept home, that is a very US notion. I do feel in a lot of ways most sor­ry for peo­ple in the US than I do any­where else. Because there is so many lay­ers of bull­shit you have to cut through… Yourself, even if you’re doing your own decol­o­niza­tion or real­iza­tion work. To not think the very thing that you just said. To not look at almost every­body as dif­fer­ent than you. 

Let’s talk real­i­ty. It’s deeply root­ed in racism in the US. Deeply. Beyond even clas­sism or pover­ty. That’s why we at Poor talk about the con­flat­ing of race and class as one; because one of the things that we are taught in this soci­ety because it was nec­es­sary to teach peo­ple to hate their broth­er and sis­ter who did­n’t look like them so that they can oppress them. So that they could not care about them when they were poor. So they could— Let’s go even fur­ther back. So they could not care about them when they were in shack­les, right. How many peo­ple are still liv­ing with the ances­tral mem­o­ry of try­ing to strug­gle with the notion of chat­tel slavery? 

And so many peo­ple of Anglo descent either are not nec­es­sar­i­ly descen­dants of that but come out of a knowl­edge base that’s root­ed in that. And so when you talk about the us’ing ver­sus them’ing or the me’ing it real­ly is very much relat­ed to white suprema­cist val­ues of sep­a­ra­tion, because that’s also root­ed in that.

Anderson: Say we’re talk­ing about out hous­ing issues or equi­ty issues, you know. Is that some­thing that we can talk about it and we can like, have a mind­set change social­ly? Or do we need to have some­thing go real­ly wrong, and then react to it and change?

Gray-Garcia: Well sad­ly I think that that’s just the way human beings are. They get comfortable…

Anderson: We’re reactive?

Gray-Garcia: Yeah. They get com­fort­able. They get…sort of sta­t­ic? And then just kind of keep going along even if they’re not hap­py. I mean the ​“aha” that we usu­al­ly get to peo­ple actu­al­ly, inter­est­ing­ly enough, is first of all how do you take care of your elders? How do you take care of your chil­dren? And how do you take care of yourself? 

The iso­la­tion I spoke of ear­li­er is an epi­dem­ic not just with poor peo­ple but it’s actu­al­ly most with middle-class peo­ple. And iso­la­tion kills. To me it’s a tragedy that so many elders are alone in the US, of what­ev­er class they are. That we prac­tice these ways of sep­a­rat­ing our­selves from the peo­ple who gave us life. That they’re not teach­ing our chil­dren. That they’re not seen as folks with wis­dom, and have very much to do with thri­val and continuation. 

But more impor­tant­ly to answer your ques­tion, I know the peo­ple lis­ten­ing to this might wake them up, because we sparked some inter­est. I think con­ver­sa­tion’s real­ly pow­er­ful. I think what you do is impor­tant. I’m glad you do it. I know that that’s really—in a lot of ways we make art and we make media about this stuff all the time for the sole pur­pose of chang­ing peo­ple’s minds. And well, we also do it to save peo­ple’s lives. But both of those things mix togeth­er, and in the end you also do need to put your feet on the pave­ment. You need to protest. You need to sign peti­tions. You need to acti­vate change through legislation. 

I don’t pow­er one move­ment over anoth­er. So big ups to all the peo­ple who work in move­ment change. We do that as well. We sup­port move­ment of all kinds. We need to do all of those things, and we also need to conversate.

Anderson: So we’ve got all of this his­to­ry where it’s always been inequitable. And we’ve always had peo­ple who’ve been grab­bing pow­er. As a species do we always like, push peo­ple down? Are we always going to be keep­ing peo­ple in poverty?

Gray-Garcia: I’m opti­mistic because I’m acti­vat­ing change myself. I’m opti­mistic because my broth­ers and sis­ters and fam­i­ly at Poor Magazine, the Idriss Stelley Foundation, United Playaz, artists and activists all over the world, are oper­at­ing change as we speak. 

I’m not opti­mistic about our mom­ma Earth. I’m worried…truthfully. I think that we don’t have a lot of time to change the way we are. And so I keep want­i­ng to do more real­ly quick­ly. I’m like, ter­ri­fied that we’re not gonna get home­ful­ness done in time, or we’re not going to raise the mon­ey, all these things, part­ly because I know how impor­tant it is to show a mod­el of change to people. 

But I know that also, a lot of us folks are doing as much as we can do. And real­ly in the end, the con­cept of opti­mism is in and of itself kind of root­ed in Horatio Alger cap­i­tal­ism. Like, I don’t— I think it’s overblown. I think we need to take from our sis­ters and broth­ers in oth­er con­ti­nents who say that they fight their whole life for change. They may not see it before they pass. They may not see it before they tran­si­tion. And their chil­dren might take on the lega­cy that they’ve start­ed. I think we want things too quick­ly in the US. That’s part of our lega­cy. If we’re real­ly mov­ing with humil­i­ty, you do what­ev­er you can do. And it’ll take the time that it’s gonna take. And we’re all just gonna be you know, mov­ing along this path. But if we’re mov­ing in a good way, that we know with our hearts that we’re sort of unpack­ing these lies; that we’re mov­ing in interdepen­dence rather than inde­pen­dence; that all we’re doing then is actu­al­ly prac­tic­ing optimism. 

Aengus Anderson: I think the way she ends talk­ing about opti­mism embod­ies why I think this is such an impor­tant episode to end on. 

Neil Prendergast: Explain that to me.

Anderson: Everybody have asked about opti­mism in this project has said, ​“I’m an opti­mist.” I don’t think any­body said, ​“I’m a pes­simist.” People have qual­i­fied it in dif­fer­ent ways, but they just sort of like, rolled with the ques­tion and then explained a lit­tle bit about gen­er­al­ly why they feel bet­ter about the future. And I think usu­al­ly that’s because feel­ing worse about the future is just, unpleas­ant and scary so don’t. 

Now, what Lisa does is she says well, optimism…pessimism…it’s even part of her equa­tion. She’s just doing what she can, and she’s try­ing to make sure it’s going in a bet­ter direc­tion rather than a worse direc­tion. You know, it’s kind of like even think­ing about opti­mism is almost being too impatient.

Prendergast: Right, and it seems like that comes nat­u­ral­ly from the sense of humil­i­ty that she clear­ly has and also dis­cuss­es. For me I think this is a real­ly great one for us to fin­ish on, for a slight­ly dif­fer­ent rea­son. So often in The Conversation, in this project, we’ve been talk­ing about ​“the cri­sis.” You ask all these won­der­ful­ly inter­est­ing peo­ple, ​“What’s the cri­sis of the present?” For some peo­ple they can iden­ti­fy it. For oth­ers they say, ​“Well, it’s some­thing I’m wor­ried about for the future.” 

What’s the cri­sis of the future? For some peo­ple they say, ​“Ah, you know, if we have rea­son or right-minded cul­ture we can avert the cri­sis.” Other say things like, ​“It’s just gonna take the cri­sis to actu­al­ly change things right then.” We can’t do any­thing about it. And that’s a dis­cus­sion that I think runs across the interviews. 

But in this last one have some­thing I put a dif­fer­ent cat­e­go­ry, which is, we actu­al­ly do have the cri­sis here. 

Anderson: She’s liv­ing the crisis.

Prendergast: Exactly.

Anderson: Yeah. The cri­sis is, what hap­pens when you’re sleep­ing in your car and you’re tak­en to prison.

Prendergast: Right.

Anderson: Yeah. The cri­sis is being crim­i­nal­ized as a class of people. 

Prendergast: To me this gives cre­dence to what peo­ple have been say­ing in many of the episodes that we’ve put up, where they’ve said things like, ​“We can’t think of our­selves just as mar­ket beings. We’re big­ger than that.” And I think that’s very much what she’s point­ing to here. Look, I mean there are some basic fun­da­men­tal human rights that we have. And the mar­ket can’t touch those things. 

Anderson: And that were essentially…communal, right?

Prendergast: Right. 

Anderson: Not in the sense that we must live com­mu­nal­ly, though that is a big theme, but that we’re deeply inter­con­nect­ed as a peo­ple and there are a lot of val­ues under­neath all of these things. And when you don’t have the lux­u­ry of wealth?, the neces­si­ty of those val­ues shines in a real­ly dif­fer­ent way. 

And you men­tioned humil­i­ty ear­li­er, which is a big part of this con­ver­sa­tion. And I think this con­ver­sa­tion also forces us to be a lit­tle bit more hum­ble our­selves and to acknowl­edge that in a way the sort of huge, spec­u­la­tive con­ver­sa­tions we’ve been hav­ing about the future…are sort of an indul­gence. They’re some­thing you get to have when you’re afflu­ent enough to be hand­wring­ing about things that many steps away. Which I don’t think is to dis­cred­it any of them? But I think it’s a real­ly good reminder that there are a lot of rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences on this plan­et. And while we have tried to get a lot of dif­fer­ent view­points in here, when you’re real­ly, real­ly poor, you have a view­point that is dif­fer­ent than every­body else in this project. 

Prendergast: Absolutely. And you know, to be fair to the project, too, and to see how it con­nects I think to this inter­view, is to point out that she’s a pover­ty schol­ar. And so it’s not just that she’s inter­est­ed in some sort of mate­r­i­al dis­tri­b­u­tion. She’s absolute­ly inter­est­ed in chang­ing what peo­ple think. It’s not just about redis­trib­ut­ing mate­r­i­al stuff. This is about chang­ing the type of peo­ple that we are, and the way we think about our­selves, which is so much a part of this project, is also what she’s doing here, too. So there’s a con­sis­ten­cy with this inter­view, and I think all of the ones that came before, in that way.

Anderson: In some ways so sep­a­rate, in some ways so of a part. But in all ways, it real­ly forces us to reflect back on the ear­li­er episodes and maybe see them in a slight­ly dif­fer­ent light. And it cer­tain­ly demands us maybe to set opti­mism and pes­simism aside and just to try to go out right now in small ways and make the world a slight­ly bet­ter place. 

This is The Conversation, and that was Lisa (also known as ​“Tiny”) Gray-Garcia, record­ed in San Francisco, California June 21^st, 2013. This will be the final inter­view of The Conversation, but we’ll be back to dis­cuss whether or not any of us are opti­mists or pes­simists after going through this epic radio journey.