Transcript: RICHIE RESEDA on Dismantling Patriarchy [ENCORE] /292
Ayana Young This podcast is brought to you through support from our partner, the Kalliopeia Foundation. The Kalliopeia Foundation envisions a future grounded in compassion, respect, dignity, reverence for nature and care for each other in the earth. To learn more, visit Kalliopeia.org.
Hello and welcome to For the Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young.
Richie Reseda Our vulnerability is not what makes us weak. It's what makes us strong. That living with, rather than living on top of, or seeking to dominate, is what makes us strong. It's just like how we relate to the earth. For the last few hundred years, people have related to the earth as this is something to dominate and exploit for my own game, and we are literally destroying the planet.
Ayana Young Today we are speaking with Richie Reseda. Freed from prison in July 2018, Richie Reseda is a feminist ally, community organizer, recording artist and founder of the social impact record label, Question Culture. Success Stories, the anti patriarchy organization he started while incarcerated was chronicled in the CNN documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y. He changes Californian prison policy with Initiate Justice, an organization he co-founded in prison.
So Richie, thank you so much for joining us on the For The Wild podcast today. I feel really honored and moved by speaking about the prison industrial complex with you. It's a topic we've wanted to have on the show for a long time. So this feels really important and fulfilling to be able to talk to you today.
Richie Reseda Thank you. Thank you so, so much for having me.
Ayana Young So you co-founded your program Success Stories alongside Charles Berry back in 2014. And I'm hoping that we can begin this interview with you sharing a little bit about Success Stories, and the ways in which you're trying to redefine manhood. How is Success Stories dismantling patriarchy by engaging in meaningful conversations with at risk communities, specifically men who are currently incarcerated?
Richie Reseda The story really starts in 2013, which is the year when we both transferred to Soledad, which is a medium security prison in California. We both came from different high security prisons. And what was different about the medium security prison is it had a lot of self help programs that were supposed to be rehabilitative. And what I had noticed as somebody whose mentors, my best friends, really my chosen family, my community, my wife, are all powerful intersectional feminist women of color was that the conversations that were being had about self transformation were not challenging patriarchy. In fact, they're enforcing it, they were just simply saying, “Don't break the law.” So I knew that we had to have a deeper conversation, but one that challenges patriarchy directly because patriarchy is ultimately what leads men to harm ourselves and others, this idea that domination is power. And my value is based on how I can dominate others physically, sexually, monetarily.
So we, I, first drew up a patriarchy workshop that was based on We Real Cool, a book by bell hooks, the feminist author and theorists, Bell Hooks, and I tried to deliver it in the existing self help groups that saw that and they laughed me out of the room. So I told Charles, we got to start our own group. And we started the research and the curriculum building in October of 2013. And we launched in February of 2014. And we really understood that in order for men or anyone for that matter to challenge patriarchy, you're really asking them to literally go against the entire world. So there has to be something in it for them on the other side, they're not going to do it because we asked them to do it or because it's the quote unquote, right thing to do. They're going to do it because there's some kind of benefit. So, Success Stories is really based on the idea that our personal success and our community success is only possible through challenging patriarchy.
Ayana Young There's a lot of dialogue around what will take the place of patriarchy, especially in the perpetuation of the misconception that dismantling patriarchy is dismantling masculinity. But the work of Bell Hooks, which Success Stories heavily draws upon, which you mentioned, counters this misunderstanding. Hooks writes, “Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity, and not to allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination. There is a creative life sustaining life enhancing place for the masculine in a non nominator culture, and those of us committed to ending patriarchy can touch the hearts of real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood or maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine, that does not make it synonymous with domination, or the will to do violence”. So I'm wondering, what do you envision taking the place of this masculinity held hostage to patriarchal domination?
Richie Reseda So something that we discovered in Success Stories is that it's not, we're not going to trade the catch all of patriarchy for a new catch all, for a new definition of manhood or masculinity that applies to everybody. By dismantling patriarchy, we allow people who identify as masculine to be themselves and for their masculinity to be the individualized expression of themselves in their masculine self.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's, it's interesting, because masculinity, and maleness and manhood, these are important initiations that our culture has kind of just completely buried, you know, young men or young women, they're not initiated into their, into this next chapter. And so I think it's interesting to hear you talk about how you really want the individuals to find how they want to represent their own masculinity. And I think that's what I'm hearing from you.
Richie Reseda What I'm saying is, be your true human self, what is most important to you, and who is most important to you, and live in a way that best serves those goals. And those people. If you identify as masculine, your masculinity will be based on that. But I'm actually personally not very interested in defining masculinity at all. I don't think it brings our society any value. I'm more interested in developing identities that are based in responsibility and love to the people who, and the goals that are most important to those individuals. Your masculinity, femininity, these that's like swag that's like style. It's just a way of what pronouns you want, how you want to dress, and that's like personal, individual swag. And it's important, but I don't I don't have a definition for it. That's, I think what we're doing by dismantling patriarchy is exactly what Bell Hooks said, once your your masculinity is no longer being held hostage by patriarchy, you get to define it for yourself.
Ayana Young Thank you for clarifying that. That's really, that's beautiful. So in preparation for this conversation, my mind has been so attentive to patriarchy, and the prison industrial complex and punishment as justice. And I'm led to think about how violence is viewed as male birthright in this society. The statistics show that something like 98% of mass murders are committed by men. 90% of murders are committed by men. 80% of those arrested for violent acts are men. And then additionally, up to 80% of women convicted of murder were acting in defense of their abusers. So on the topic of America's mass violence problem, I'd like to ask you how you're forging meaningful and transformative conversations about violence beyond limited narratives of, for example, gun violence, how have you been able to be in conversation with men around the normalization of carnage in this country?
Richie Reseda The first thing that's really important is we need to understand that harm is more important than crime. So the culture of this country is always talking about crime and punishment, we have almost this eerie, creepy religion that's obsessed with the law, and these notions of like honor that are tied up within the law. And as we know, laws are just made by people. Something can be legal today and illegal tomorrow. There are things that happen that are legal, that are extremely harmful. And there are things that happen that are illegal, that are not harmful at all. So I feel like step one, and how we have conversations with men around violence that aren't limited, is we need to get rid of the carceral, prison industrial complex way of thinking about violence, and talk about all violence, not just that which is illegal, or that which has been criminalized.
So an example of that is this: You know, we have these conversations in prison, recognizing that people who are in prison are living under a constant condition of violence. That the simple act of being in prison where you are being held at gunpoint, hundreds of miles away from your loved ones, and forced to be there is a violent act. That is an arrest, a kidnapping, with metal restraints, called handcuffs. That is a violent act. And, we point that out not so that people can be justified in their victimhood but so that there's an understanding that we're not here to further criminalize you or to further put you down or to shame you. We need to understand that we, as incarcerated people, or back when I was an incarcerated person, are living under a constant system of violence. And we perpetuate a constant system of violence when we believe in this idea that violence is power. And that domination is power.
And the same way that we feel being held at gunpoint, hundreds of miles away from our families, the same way that we feel when we are facing violence, and we are facing harm. That's how others feel when we were in enacting the types of violence we enact in our communities, which may look like something really obvious, like gun violence, or something really obvious, like the robberies that I committed, but it also can look like street harassment, it can also look like leering at somebody. Neither of those acts are illegal, right? It can also look like requiring that your female partner cooks for you. These are all acts of violence that are not necessarily illegal, but cause people to feel just as violated as we do when we receive violence from the state. And I think that creates a bridge of empathy to people and it's easier to work through that bridge of empathy than it is to work through a bridge of shame.
Ayana Young That's powerful. Empathy is powerful. The fact that we're in this culture that teaches us violence is powerful is so backwards. And I really, really appreciate your analysis. I would be remiss to not discuss California's vast and destructive prison system, specifically focusing on the school to prison pipeline, and the tremendous privatization of all facets of prison life. So perhaps beginning with the ladder, as a preface, could you speak to the ways in which for profit prisons are trying to monopolize life inside, as well as after prison? I'm specifically thinking of Prison Healthcare, privatization of halfway houses, and then the drug treatment centers.
Richie Reseda So as you mentioned, California is one of the biggest incarcerators in the world. We have the highest per capita incarceration rate, in a country that is the biggest incarcerator of the world. And if I could add one more layer to that, Los Angeles, where I'm from, Los Angeles County, is the biggest incarcerating county in the biggest incarcerating state, in the biggest incarcerating country in the world. With that being said, there are multitudes of organizations that have sought to capitalize on this. That's what mass incarceration is really all about. It's about using fear and incarceration and criminalization to get votes and money, whether it be from politicians looking for votes, or money, or from private organizations, and even public organizations like public workers unions, looking to capitalize off of incarceration.
So to the second point, around the school to prison pipeline, I think that that is largely a product of what we were just talking about, a product of patriarchy and the idea that domination is power and that if you can dominate somebody you somehow quote unquote, win. So when you have children who are maybe acting in ways that adults don't want them to, a way to get them to act right is to dominate them, is to isolate them, is to quote unquote, punish them which we know to be just a euphemism for enacting revenge against them. And it really shows, the school to prison pipeline, really shows how overboard our sick addiction to domination as power has become. Because we live in a country where it's okay to hit children, it is acceptable and even expected to physically hit defenseless children.
And if that's our culture, then of course, it's okay to us to also lock up children, to also forcibly strip search children, to put children in solitary confinement, to put children in, until very recently, life without the possibility of parole sentences, Death Row sentences, because our culture teaches us because of this notion of patriarchy and domination is power, that is how you win. That is what quote unquote, teaches people a lesson, is by violently striking down on them.
Ayana Young Wow, Richie, thank you. So I know that there's these three main theories behind the school to prison pipeline, which I just want to briefly cover so that our listeners can dive into this conversation with some background information. The first theory is backed up by studies that show how it costs less to house people of color than white people in prisons because the average white person in prison is significantly older and often has higher health costs. Therefore, for profit prisons make a higher profit off of the exploitation of people of color, thus incentivizing them to lobby for policies which encourage the detention of youth.
Other theories include schools, willfully reporting, so called underachieving students to law enforcement in order to remove them from the schools, which would lead to stronger scores on generalized testing, and incur greater state and federal funding, as well as over policing. And then, you know, implicit racial bias. But what I'd really like to focus on is the devaluing of life, and the assigned value and worth of young men of color in context of patriarchy, as well as whatever you're willing to share around your own experience and that of other young men who end up in prisons for things that happen to them as children, really.
Richie Reseda Yeah, thank you for offering that background. What comes up for me when I listen to those types of things is that there are two things happening that come from the same source. On one hand, we have systems, the school system, the prison system, police agencies, that are systemically exploiting people or abusing people for the sake of the benefit of the system. On the other hand, you have people, individual people making harmful choices, sometimes, because you can also go to jail without doing anything or for doing something that's very minor. And I think it's important to point out that the sources of both of these buckets of harm, if you will, the systemic harm, and the individual harm, both come from patriarchy, because they're ultimately both fueled from this idea that domination is power. And that cis hetero men are inherently dominant and inherently powerful, and are valued by how violent we are willing to be.
So a real life example, I'll use my own. I really robbed two stores, I did not go to jail for something I didn't do. I made that choice within the context of being raised to feel like having money and being financially independent is what gave me value. I was kicked out of my house when I was 16 years old. A little bit before that when I was a young teenager, my dad told me, I can see you in your future, asking your brothers for money, because my younger brothers, he experienced them as more responsible than I was. And I told him with so much pride, I can still remember the rage I had in my heart, I will starve in the gutter before I asked any of you for money. And I was committed to that. And when I got kicked out of my house, I valued myself based on how my ability to make money with no skills, 16 years old, in the streets, because patriarchy didn't tell us that you have to be responsible, necessarily. It just says you have to make money. And I was committed to doing that. So when I lost my job, I robbed two stores. All of those decisions were made in patriarchy, that doesn't mean that I'm not responsible for them. I'm absolutely responsible for every choice I made as an individual. But those choices were made in patriarchy.
And then on the other hand, what you have happening within the same story, not only was I kicked out of my house at 16, but I was kicked out of school, and I was 16. Not because I had bad grades, but because I had good grades. I had the ability to graduate as an 11th grader, because I had good grades and then completed all of my requirements to graduate high school. And there's a policy in LAUSD, the Los Angeles School Department where you can do that. And my principal, who didn't like me because of my politics, told me, No, I will not let you graduate with the seniors. And if you don't want to go to school anymore here, you should drop out. And once you're out of school for six months, you'll be able to be considered a drop out and you can get your GED. So that's exactly what I did. And I also grew up in the LAUSD Los Angeles unified school district that had the zero tolerance policy, where I had been choke slammed by the school police department for talking out of turn. LAUSD has its own police department, the Los Angeles School Police Department and the entire police department with armed guards on campuses, including elementary schools.
The city of Los Angeles invests over half of its general budget into police. Up until very recently in the city of LA if you were late to school for a ditching school. You didn't get in trouble. You went to court. You had a case, you had to go to court, you were arrested. My first time being arrested. I was 13 years old, for leaving school early to get a haircut. The first time I was put in handcuffs was for roughhousing when I was 12. Me and another Black boy were put in handcuffs, we didn't go talk to a school counselor about being too aggressive and what we might do if we bump someone else at school. We didn't talk about consent. We didn't talk about any of that. We were put in handcuffs by the police. So both of these things are happening at the same time.
On one hand, I'm making harmful choices based on patriarchy. On the other hand, we have an entire system, we have an entire quote unquote public safety apparatus that's based in patriarchy that seeks to dominate for the sake of power and control. And that's their vision of safety. And it all culminates when I decide to rob this store, and in response to me robbing the store, here's what didn't happen, what didn't happen is, the victims were never consulted, that never happened. The victims are never given any therapy, because there's plenty of people in the store, it must have been extremely traumatizing for them to even see that let alone the people who are actually at the cash registers. They never were given any therapy, the stories were not even paid back. There was never any reconciliation between me and them. There was never any healing, encouraged on their behalf.
To this day, they could be sitting in this room, I wouldn't know who they are, they would know who I was, we're not allowed to communicate with each other. I tried to write to them and apologize to them. A couple years later, I got a letter from the district attorney's office of Los Angeles telling me, I cannot do that, it's illegal, I can get in trouble if I try to apologize to them. The DAs are supposed to be the go between the victims and the people who committed the acts of harm, but they will only allow communication that is negative towards the offender. So even if victims write a letter to the prison for a parole hearing, saying let them out, we forgive them. They oftentimes refuse to facilitate that communication. They only facilitate it if they're saying keep them there, we hate him. So they have a vested interest in keeping people in hateful places that are not good for their own healing. So that's the system. That's the system that we have. I robbed these two stores. And what I got is I got pistol whipped with a shotgun, beat up by two grown men, I was 19 year old kid, 150 pounds, locked in handcuffed, kidnapped, sent away from my family, they tried to give me 150 years to live, thank God, I have a community around me that donated money through GoFundMe, so I could get a private lawyer and get 10 years instead of 150 years. And then I was held at gunpoint away from my family for seven years. Now what part of that solved any harm or restored anybody?
That's the apparatus we have, one that's based in patriarchy, domination. And all the while they made money, I worked as a firefighter for 14 cents an hour, putting out fires in California, the private companies that you mentioned earlier, like global telling, which are they do the phone calls for prisoners, they made 1000s of dollars off my family. Prisons, if you ever drive into a California prison, which are purposely put in the middle of nowhere. It's like Desert, desert, nothing. And then a whole town, often beautiful towns, because there's an entire economy that's sprung up around this prison, because California prison system has one of the biggest budgets of any of our state agencies. $12 billion. $12.8 billion this year, and all the private companies that then benefit off that, the gas stations for the visitors who are going to go see their loved ones, the package companies that you know, you can buy your medicine and clothes and food through while you're in prison. There's telecommunications companies, contractors that build prisons that maintain prisons, there's just a huge, exploitative, patriarchal entity, that is our quote unquote public safety system or quote unquote criminal justice system, that is also operating from a place of patriarchy as well. So my story perfectly paints how patriarchy, plus patriarchy, equals patriarchy. Harm, plus harm, equals harm, and then they wonder why most people who get out of prison are worse than they started?
Ayana Young I am totally floored by thinking about you as a young child 12, 13 years old, experiencing so much violence. And then of course, it would make sense that that is what you've been conditioned to then do, is to reenact the violence because that's what would happen to you, and then to think that you couldn't even have apologized. There's just no restorative justice, there's no connection to be healed afterwards. It's insane. I mean, everything that you're just saying is like, it gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse as you continue to tell the story. It's unbelievable. But of course, it is very believable because this is what's happening and we need to see it for what it is: $12.8 billion. I mean, that's insane. It's absolutely crazy. Thank you for those details.
You have an article that you penned, titled, “I Always Knew One Day I’d Go to Jail.” And you write, “Sending people who act out harmfully in the community miles away from anyone invested in their growth to a place full of other harmful people, under the guise that it will make them more responsible is ridiculous. The fact is, we are spending billions of dollars a year on vengeance instead of safety. What most people call justice is really just revenge. And it's expensive, not to mention often carried out more harshly against people of color.” It's absolutely true that geography and space are negligently left out of the national discourse around prison reform, the incarcerated are moved hours away from their families, like you mentioned, sometimes even to different states. And it really is so antithetical to community healing and individual healing, to remove them from their community is not just a punishment to them, but it's an act of violence to all of those in their life. So I'd really like it if you could speak more to the current system and culture where our initial idea of a solution is that of banishment.
Richie Reseda Yeah, I think that the banishment is only a product of a society which wishes to seem civil on the level of the world stage. So what we really do in this culture is we want to cause as much violence and harm in your life as we can get away with without looking barbaric. So if they took me out of my robbery and cut my hand off, they wouldn't be able to claim this, you know, land of the free home of the Brave narrative. But by all of the wounds, being economic, and emotional, and the scars being to my mental health and to my spiritual well being, then they get to look like they're still good people, like this is a humane way to deal with it. And I think that's where the banishment comes from. And the reason why we're sent so far away has everything to do with economics as well.
You know, cities bid, counties bid to have prisons in them because they know what it does for the economy of the area. There's a book by Ruthie Gilmore, called Golden Gulag, which is specifically the economic story of the California prison boom. A lot of these places where these prisons were built were places where their industries dried up, their old mining towns during the 40s and during the war, these were towns that were building weapons for the war effort. And then once the wars were over, once Korea was over once Vietnam was over, they didn't have anything to do there. So they built prisons instead, places where agriculture dried up, and it doesn't make sense there anymore because it's desert, it's barren, so they build prisons instead.
It has everything to do with economics, where these prisons are, and it has everything to do with racism of where the people start. Most people in prison are coming from urban areas, they're people of color who are coming from cities, and then they're being sent to these rural areas where the economies have died for one reason or another. And that results in, like you said, an act of violence towards the family as well. People who haven't seen their loved one snatched out of their lives and haven't seen them for years, sometimes for decades, because they're sent hundreds of miles away. And oftentimes, these are poor and working class families that can't afford to drive 400, 500 miles to go see their loved ones. The farthest I ever was from home, I was in a terrible place called Susanville, California. It's very close to the north eastern tip of California and it was a 10 hour drive from my family back in Los Angeles. Who's going to go drive 10 hours through the Sierra Mountains, where you need snow chains to go see somebody? We don't have snow chains. We're from LA. My wife had to learn how to put snow chains on her own car by trial and error driving through the snow at high altitudes where people regularly drive off the road and die. Icy road storms. It has everything to do with economics and racism, that's truly the source of that banishment.
Ayana Young I'm really interested in how you're speaking to why prisons are erected where they are. And I think about, you know, we were speaking earlier, before the conversation, the podcast started about the environmental intersections with prisons, and I just thought, oh, my gosh, okay, here it is. There's land that has been colonized. So the Indigenous people have been kicked out, the resources have been completely stripped of, topsoil of whatever abundance there once was on that land, because of mining because of some type of resource extraction project. And then when they're like, Oh, well, now the land is basically worthless, you know, economically speaking, because they've destroyed this land. And it's like, oh, well, great. We'll just basically enslave people in these prisons as the new resource, as a new way to extract from the land is to put people into places that no longer can serve capitalism. And that is, oh, my gosh, I have chills. I've definitely driven by, I've been on long road trips, and I've seen where prisons are. And I do find that it's usually in these places that are barren, because of some type of resource extraction issue that happened whether it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago. So that's, that's really coming full circle to see how, yeah, just to see how that all works out. And it's really, it's horrifying.
Richie Reseda I think one of the saddest examples of that was the valley fever outbreak that took place over like the last five years, 10 years. For those who haven't heard of it, Valley fever is a deadly disease that is made up of fungus that lives underground in much of the Central Valley of California. And that's where it states, that's where it thrives. But if it gets into the human body, it colonizes the human body and kills the host, often, specifically, to Black people. And to Asian folks, API folks, and to white folks, as well. Because oftentimes, Latinx folks have Indigenous heritage to this land, and genetically have built in immunity. So here comes CDCR, building all these prisons in the middle of the Central Valley and filling them up mostly with Black people. And people were dying, and they couldn't figure out why. I've seen people get valley fever, people are getting valley fever in prisons where I was. You will see somebody go from being 250 pounds to being 120 pounds in the course of three to six months. And then they're gone. Because CDCR was building and continuing to build and expand upon these prisons.
So one of them, Pleasant Valley State Prison, is in the middle of the Central Valley. They have thousands of people locked up in this prison and they wanted to expand a part of the prison like build a prison hospital on the land. And when they broke ground and started building it, they let out a bunch of this valley fever and it was a statewide problem to where they had to start transferring people from all over the state. And you can't be at this prison. You can't be at this prison, there was a whole crisis within the prison system that largely went unnoticed outside of the prison system because nobody else lives in these places besides people in prison, but the cops know, the cops know to wear masks. They know not to put cops to work at those prisons who were Black cops because of the valley fever problem. And we, you know, lost a lot of our friends and longtime loved ones who are incarcerated with us due to valley fever, because of the development of unsafe land, dry, unsafe land. It got worse during the drought that we had a few years ago because there was no water to keep the ground down, so when they would break ground it’d be these huge clouds of deadly dust traveling across the valley killing people.
Ayana Young Now that you've told the story, I remember watching this short 12 minute documentary, it may have just been called Dust. And it was all about the valley fever outbreaks in the Central Valley. And it was horrifying. It showed this one man who had gotten it and they didn't know what was wrong with him. He ended up getting this huge tumor on his head. He couldn't see, it was like the worst pain of his life. The migraines, the cluster headaches, he was in so much pain and to see the degeneration, and this was a man who actually had access to, I'm sure it's much better healthcare than what they have in prisons, and to see his journey through valley fever was horrifying. And it was all from the dust and like what you're saying, the fungus that lives under this dust. So that's just another completely untold issue that, you know, who's talking about that? So thank you for bringing that up.
Now I'd like to transition into a conversation around the necessity of community friendships and long term relationships when it comes to dismantling patriarchy. Bell Hooks writes, “The work of male relational recovery, of reconnection of forming intimacy and making community can never be done alone. In a world where boys and men are daily losing their way, we must create guides, signposts and new paths. A culture of healing that empowers males to change is in the making.” So in your own experience, inside and outside of prison, what did this community and system accountability look like for you.
Richie Reseda Simply put, it was the greatest joy of my life to build real relationships that began for me inside of prison. Relationships were real friends, who, you know, Bell Hooks uses the definition of love, which is actually originally penned by M. Scott Peck, which is that love is the spiritual investment of oneself into the spiritual growth of another. When we were able to start building these anti patriarchal relationships, these love based relationships in prison, I had never felt freer before in my life. Because now I had somebody who I could give a real hug to. Now I have somebody who, when they asked me how I was doing, I could be honest about that. Somebody who I could be open about my insecurities with, somebody who I can be open about my trauma with, somebody who I can ask for their support in a way that's not just like, give me solutions to a problem, but is like, just be with me in this pain that I'm in, and invest that same energy into others and stand firm for somebody trying to be the best that they can be. It really is. Something that we learned in Success Stories is, when you give people the opportunity to be real human beings, they will take it. We want it. We've wanted it our whole lives. We just need to create the context in which it's okay to be that way. And once we did, we were free. I had never felt freer, and I was still in prison.
Ayana Young Thinking of a follow up question I have is around making sure that said male community is attentive to the likelihood of reinforcing patriarchal structures and behaviors in their own systems of accountability. So I guess I'm wondering, how can men stay committed to educating one another about patriarchy without furthering, you know, furthering an unbalanced power dynamic, or what kind of community infrastructure is required for these networks to thrive?
Richie Reseda I think the understanding that we're gonna do something patriarchal, we're going to have patriarchal thoughts, and the humility to, one, admit that to myself, that I'm going to show up in that way and the humility to take that feedback from someone else and to give that feedback to somebody else is absolutely required in order to build that type of community. We're not seeking to build a quote unquote healed community because once you're healed, you cannot be healed. There's no more room to grow, we're seeking to build a community in which healing has a context and a safe space and it is okay, and that requires the understanding that I'm not perfect, that I'mma mess up and that we have the trust in each other that I'll listen to you and you're saying, bro, that's not it. Bro, you're on some BS right now. We need to establish that humility and that trust.
Ayana Young I'd really also love to talk about the timing of liberation and how it can be drawn out, especially when tackling historical ways of knowing and being in this world. I'm thinking back to the documentary you're featured in The Feminist on Cellblock Y. We can see how men of all generations are showing up and engaging with this work. I'd love it if you could speak to your own experience in dismantling patriarchy, and the sort of generational nuances you found in the conversation you held alongside other men in prison.
Richie Reseda So my understanding, my experience is that liberation is not a time, it is not a goal, it is not a finite place to arrive, that liberation is our way of being as we fight for freedom. So there will always be some sort of oppression, some sort of mismanagement of resources, mis allocation, unfair allocation of power or resources. How are we relating to each other and ourselves as we build the world that doesn't have that, as we squash those problems as they arise? I feel like that's where liberation exists.
Ayana Young Well, that is amazing to start with. Yeah, I'm just really interested in the generational nuances, when you're having these conversations around dismantling patriarchy, you know, how was it speaking with other men in prison, especially those older than you are or younger, just the generational nuances of that all?
Richie Reseda Yeah, patriarchal culture changes and shifts, and it looks very different from generation to generation, it looks very different in different circles of people, different races of people. Something that I find fascinating about every generation is that there always seems to be something that looks anti patriarchal, on its face, but is in fact patriarchal, of under it. So I'll give you an example. The kind of swag of the 70s of wearing curlers in your hair, and bright colors, and high heels and platform shoes, all of those things. If we just see that on its face, it looks like oh, that's almost like drag, these are really some liberated comfortable dudes. But that was pimp culture. That dress like that, you know, that was gangster culture that dress like that. That was, you know, the rock stars that were or even the singer songwriters that would sing these beautiful songs about love, but in actuality were objectifying women and using them as sexual and economic objects. Patriarchy will always find a way to protect itself in culture. We have the same thing today where we have rappers who sing on the track and wear tight pants and may even get their nails done and have colorful hair. But when we're listening to what they're saying, they're reinforcing the objectification and oppression of women.
So, understanding those nuance those cultural nuances is important. Understanding what patriarchy looks like, from culture, to culture, gender, to gender, generation to generation really helps in dismantling it because I have to know what I'm talking to. When I'm talking to somebody in my dad's generation, they're going to feel perfectly comfortable. My dad's in his 50s, he's going to feel perfectly comfortable putting down gang banging, and all that stuff that happened kind of after his time that really popularized after his time, but he's going to hold that old school, especially being Black, because it happens at the intersections, right, but that like old school, Black, Christian, you know, defend the household, the man manages the books, the wife makes the food kind of that kind of patriarchy I experienced him is very wedded to. So dismantling patriarchy for him looks different than dismantling patriarchy with the homies who were my age, and looks different than dismantling patriarchy with a white dude who, on his face might look like the acceptable, you know, quote, unquote, acceptable American man. But patriarchy might not look like street harassment in the white community. I don't go to a lot of white communities and see people yelling out their windows, at women and queer folks the way that you do in communities of color. But what you do see is the subtle talking over women, putting women into very specific roles in the workplace, and white men treating women in like a very, like, let me let me teach you kind of way, assuming that women are incompetent professionally, it's something that I see more in the white community than I do in communities of color where women are often the leaders of households and organizations.
So it's just like, you have to know not only the generational differences, but the cultural differences of each kind of subset of people you're talking to in order to really dismantle patriarchy, because it'll trick you into thinking if we buy into these racist notions that patriarchy is only misogynist rap music, or patriarchy is only gangster culture. Then we'll miss religious patriarchy, we’ll miss white professional patriarchy, it requires a me and to all of those of us who consider ourselves to be feminist allies and freedom fighters in this space to really study patriarchy and know what it looks like, in all of its different forms, in order to dismantle it across the generations, cultures, races, genders.
Ayana Young Oh, my gosh, I really appreciated your examples. And so true. I mean, I, I do see that I. And it's interesting how some men can look politically correct or acceptable, you know, in, especially in the white culture, but then all these other ways of demeaning women and people of color and trans and, you know, oppressed people, but they can look like they're playing the role of being a politically correct person. But all the ways that it comes out. And, yeah, I mean, there's so many, there's so many forms of it. And I really liked hearing your analysis of it. I really also want to highlight your work, of you and your wife, that you do with initiate justice, which both of you founded in 2016, as a way to mobilize the currently and previously incarcerated, and their loved ones into a movement that is directly leading criminal justice reform efforts. So I'd really like it if you could speak to the inside outside strategy you have devised and a little bit more about the organization itself.
Richie Reseda Thank you. So while we were doing Success Stories, actually, we were doing the anti patriarchy work in prisons, Charles and I had realized like, there's really no incentive for people to go to this program, outside of just wanting to change, but people should be able to get time off their sentences for going to this program. We should be able to decarcerate California while also ending patriarchy in California through this program. So we told Taina and Taina’s background is in state policy and political science. And Taina said, well, let's write a bill. Let's make it the law. And she instructed Charles and I to do the research on the bill, because we had access to the prison Law Library and a lot of prison regulations and stuff that's just hard to find outside of prison. So we did the research, sent it to her. She formatted it as a bill idea. She got it introduced in the state legislature. And we realized that being in prison, we actually, in trying to get this bill passed, we had a lot of opportunity, because you look out onto a California prison yard, and you have people from every county, every legislative district in the state. So we started organizing people in prison to have their families write letters of support for the bill, that kind of was the birth of the inside outside strategy.
That bill ultimately didn't make it, the governor hit up the author and told Assembly member Stone who authored the bill, hey, you know, go ahead and kill the bill, I can do this more powerful with the ballot initiative. And you know, we didn't trust anybody, especially anybody in the government at that time. So we thought they're just trying to kill the bill. But the author listened. And lo and behold, the governor came with what ultimately became prop 57, which is a much stronger version of what we were doing. And we then mobilized behind prop 57. And we realized that look, you can stand in front of a target and collect signatures for a proposition. But most people walking out of target do not care about this, you don't care about people in prison being able to earn time off their sentences, but the families of people in prison do.
So we need to organize through the prison. So we were sending prop 57 information sheets with voter signup packets, through people in prison telling them to send this to your loved one, have them registered to vote and vote yes on this and we sent out 2000 of those. And building that membership inside and building that membership outside of the loved ones receiving those packets is how we started building these two bases of incarcerated people inside and then formerly incarcerated people and the loved ones of incarcerated people on the outside. And ultimately due to obviously a statewide coalition's work but including our work prop 57 passed, we got it implemented with talking points that derived from a survey of 3000 people in prison of how it should be implemented. And it was because of that legislation that I'm home right now. I wasn't supposed to go home until March 30 2020. But that law allowed me to earn my way out and come home July 16 2018. And now we have 14,500 members in prison 120 organizers in prison, a training program for organizers on the outside as well. We're doing four bills this year, one to get people on parole, the right to vote back, one to apply prop 57 credits to people who came to prison as children. Another to get rid of medical co-pays and in jails and prisons. I mean, now, you know, 14,500 people in prison and their loved ones, we have a political base like we can really move things.
Ayana Young That is so amazing and exciting and so. So strategically smart, I mean to think of what you said, the people who really care about this issue are the families at home with the people that are in prison, and to really understand who your base is, and who, you know, would actually take up energy and time and resources to vote and to organize around it. It's so beautiful. And I don't like the word hope. But I imagine the feeling of hope or something like that, running through the prism through yourself through others. And especially that the bill got passed, or the proposition that you were talking about. We need to hear success stories like this, we need to hear that it is possible, it's possible for these things to get done. And I really, I really love that. And I want to talk more about the bills that you started mentioning with Initiate Justice, and what they're pushing through. But before that, I'd actually like to delve deeper into the history of voter disenfranchisement, a cause Initiate Justice, particularly is attuned to, so perhaps you'd be willing to talk about the origins of felony disenfranchisement, which was written into California's constitution back in 1849, after they initially rejected the 14th amendment.
Richie Reseda Correct. So we know that the way that the 13th Amendment was written was saying that slavery was illegal unless in punishment of a crime, and that there is a very active campaign on the behalf of governments which are controlled by white Americans, to now criminalize Black people to put them back into a position of slavery. Part of that was to make sure that Black folks couldn't vote. So for years, Black people technically could vote, but legally, there is no legal national legal protection to allow them to vote. So a lot of municipalities and states removed Black folks' right to vote.
And then you had the 14th Amendment, which was supposed to guarantee nationally that Black people had the right to vote. California actually didn't ratify the 14th. Amendment allowing Black men to vote I should be specific. Until 1968. Wow. So yeah, like my dad was already alive before California ratified the 14th amendment. What California did do, though, is they managed to write it into their state constitution to disallow a large group of people from voting. California has a strong history of racism towards people of Chinese descent, Chinese people were not allowed to vote. The Irish were not allowed to vote. There's an entire political party dedicated to oppressing the Irish in California. And the language in the original Constitution. If you go and read it is crazy. It says something to the effect of any retard, idiot, moron or criminal will never have the right to vote. And it wasn't until the 70s when they took out all of that terribly oppressive language around morons and idiots. But they left the part around, quote unquote, criminal, and then further specified it to say, meaning people in prison are on parole.
Ayana Young Oh my gosh, unbelievable. But not, not unbelievable. But it's just to hear it again, like to really be able to hear the dates of when people were and were not allowed to vote is, is important, because it really wasn't that long ago, we're still very much in the culture of the past, quote, unquote, it's not in the past. Even though people are allowed to vote now, not everybody's allowed to vote. And there's all these issues that are coming up. And I think it's very important to be reminded of these issues. Now. I know we've had a really great conversation for a while and I have one last question for you. And I'm really thinking about the slaughter of emotional vitality under patriarchy, under a system in which women are patronized for their emotions, and men are told to basically silence theirs. So I'd really like to talk about accessing and accepting vulnerability as an emotional state, and how we can strengthen our emotions in the face of patriarchy’s collapse. What are the steps we can take in refusing to collude with patriarchal culture and restoring reverence to emotional beings.
Richie Reseda I think the key is reminding ourselves that our emotions are not what makes us weak. They are what makes us strong, that our vulnerability is not what makes us weak. It's what makes us strong that living with rather than living on top of or seeking to dominate is what makes us strong. It's just like how we relate to the earth for the last few 100 years, people have related to the earth as this is something to dominate and exploit for my own game. And we are literally destroying the planet, like, there literally will not be, we will be gone within 100 years. So it looks like we're winning, but we're actually losing and the people who lived amongst the earth and worked with it and were vulnerable. When there were storms, they had to work with it. Right? Like we're talking about earlier, when there's heat, we had to work with it, they were vulnerable, but they won. There's people on this land that's now called the US for 10,000 years, no global warming, no black stuff all in the ocean. 10,000 years. In the course of 200, it's almost gone, because we're trying to dominate it. And we do the same things within ourselves, trying to dominate those emotions, smash them down, trying to dominate others, smash them down, trying to act as if emotions are a weakness. We're actually the ones who lose, we end up with the mental health problems, we end up with the depression, we end up killing ourselves, we end up killing each other, we end up drinking ourselves or smoking ourselves into oblivion. Our survival is based on our willingness to hold that discomfort, that vulnerability, hold those emotions.
Ayana Young Richie, you are such an incredible human being, I feel completely honored to have shared this time with you, with all the work that you've done all of your personal experiences and the trauma that you've worked through in order to even speak the way you speak about these topics, and then help others in your own journey. I wish I could give you a hug and just like a high five or something I don't know. But just like, please, like, I, I want to, I want to support you in whatever ways we can at For The Wild and get people to rally around the bills that you're working on and, and support the organizations that you have founded, co-founded and work with. Because the work you're doing is really deep, and it's very multifaceted. Yes, of course, like, there's so much about prisons, but it's so much more than that. It's about the culture. It's about how prisons even are sustaining themselves, the slavery of imprisonment, the ways in which people connect with one another connecting with their families. I mean, this is very, very deep work that you're doing. And I really am so grateful for you. So thank you for this time that you've shared with us. But also just thank you for your life. And, and I just want to support you to keep going because this is huge stuff that you're doing.
Richie Reseda Thank you. Thank you so much. Ayana, thank you for having me on. Thank you for creating the space for these conversations. And for all the kind things you said. Everything that we try to do, whether it be in the workshops of Success Stories, the policy work of Initiate Justice, the music we do with Question Culture, what we're ultimately trying to get folks to do is to tap into that love that we have inside of us instead of trying to dominate others. And every moment we can do that we're getting closer to the solution and farther away from, literally, from death. So the more of us who do it the Freer we’ll be.
Hannah Wilton Hi, everyone, this is Hannah, one of the writers and researchers here at For The Wild. I'd like to mention a few action points for this week. First, Initiate Justice, which Richie co-founded with Taina Vargas Edmund is currently working on three pieces of key legislation, ACA 6, AB 965, and AB 45. For updates on ways in which you can get involved and support visit initiate justice.org. Second, if you're a resident of California, go to find your rep.legislature.ca.gov, locate who your senators and assembly members are and call them saying you support ACA 6, AB 965 and AB 45. For links and more information, you can visit our website or click on the details tab of this episode.
Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast. The music you heard today was from Paul Cannon and Lake Mary. And our theme music is from the late and great Kate Wolf. I'd like to give a shout out to our team, Podcast Production and Editing, Andrew Storrs, Writing and Lead Research, Francesca Glaspell, Outreach and Research, Hannah Wilton and Aiden McCray, Podcast Music, Carter Lou McElroy, Digital Community Organizing, Eryn Wise, and Suzanne Daliwal, Graphic and Web Design, Erica Ekrem, and Melanie Younger with Partnerships and Media.