A.Naomi Paik: Sanctuary for all, sanctuary everywhere (ep355)
“If you’re actually targeting migrants as the source of the problem, if we’re thinking about climate migration as one of the amplified ‘threats’ from the Department of Defense’s point of view, then you’re never actually going to solve the problem because you’re only addressing the symptom and not the root cause.”
In this episode, we welcome A. Naomi Paik, an interdisciplinary scholar whose work examines the relationship between law and cultural politics, centering racism, state violence, and the limits of citizenship to secure rights and social equity. Paik is the author of three books, most recently, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary.
She is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on topics including im/migration, U.S. imperialism, comparative ethnic studies, women of color feminisms, carceral spaces, and racial violence.
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
A. Naomi Paik: I have always been interested in state violence. How is it that the state or the government at different scales ends up targeting different kinds of people for [who] they are, whether it's migrants or Black Americans, or women? I've been interested in how the state executes and justifies this targeting against its own people, as well as people who are not citizens. In order to understand state violence, you have to look at the law.
These questions deepened for me after September 11th. I was living in New York for a year before, and also years after. Being in the city during that time and seeing how this very devastating, tragic, overwhelming event became quickly harnessed and mobilized to execute even more violence against other kinds of people who didn't have anything to do with it was deeply painful, but also deeply motivating in terms of thinking about how these different mechanisms work together.
How do you mobilize millions of people to support a very violent agenda that is going to basically change the world? How do you mobilize all of that and how do you execute it through different legal mechanisms?
I [needed] to understand [the state] on its own terms, in terms of looking at the law. And I'm motivated by things that I hate—destructive foreign policies and warfare and all of these things. A lot of that motivation [came from] seeing these terrible things happening and not wanting them to happen again and wanting to uproot them.
To uproot them, we have to understand them deeply. That's where my interest in the intersection of law, state violence, and cultural politics came together.
Kamea Chayne: It sounds like as you start to let your curiosities lead the way to understand things as deeply as possible, you really see how all of these different facets of our society are very much enmeshed and related.
The concept of security is one that I'm really curious to deconstruct with you. Especially in discourses on sustainability, there are increasing acknowledgments that given the reality of the climate crisis, the sixth mass extinction and the systemic exploitation of our lands and waters, more and more people are facing concerns with, for example, a lack of access to clean water, or nutritious foods, or safe environments to live in. These concerns often get framed as issues of “national security” and therefore sometimes used to justify the increase in the national security budget.
How would you disentangle these threats to perhaps differentiate between what most people might yearn for in terms of security and safety, and then how nation-state institutions conceptualize these differently—and what they do end up doing under that guise?
A. Naomi Paik: Many sectors of government and the state are basically not acknowledging the problems that we're facing in terms of climate change, environmental destruction, etc.
But [there is] one agency that is fully cognizant of the problems that we're facing with the climate crisis and environmental devastation, and all the fallouts from our extractive economy, [and that] is the US military and the Department of Defense.
So this approach is what Christian Parenti calls the politics of the armed lifeboat. We acknowledge that the climate crisis and environmental devastation are uprooting many millions of people across the world through rising oceans, extractive economies that affect the poor with the land and water, from the loss of local economies, all of these different crises are converging, and they're being amplified.
The US military calls the climate crisis a “threat amplifier”. It takes already existing threats, i.e. things such as migrants (as if we had nothing to do with why people are forced to move in the first place), and then amplifies it. They have a clear sense that this is an actual problem and they are preparing for it.
But [the US military is] preparing for it by investing more and more into security infrastructures: thinking about how we keep the migrants from coming to where we are, how we keep them in their place, that they shouldn't be allowed to move for their own "survival purposes".
If you're actually targeting migrants as the source of the problem, if we're thinking about climate migration as one of those “amplified threats” from the Department of Defense's point of view, then you're never actually going to solve the problem itself because you're only addressing the symptom of the problem and not the root cause.
The root cause of the problem is extractive economies. It is climate change. It's our emissions. It's the way our economy is built globally, thinking that wealth accumulation can grow infinitely on a finite planet. This approach, the overinvestment in securitization, is not addressing it, but is in fact making the root causes worse.
Investing into the very agency that is the world's largest polluter is making the problem worse.
It's not only homicidal against people who are being displaced from their homes because of the climate crisis or because of extractive economies. It's not only homicidal against them but also ensuring mutually assured destruction because there is no securitizing our way out of this problem. Securitization of the climate crisis is going to make the problem worse.
If we take a security approach to everything, we're never going to address the root causes because the security infrastructure is part of the problem itself. I would say that this is also the case for the United States as a whole, with other types of institutions like the World Trade Organizations, etc. They can't address the root cause of the problem without advocating for the dismantling of their own institutional structures—it's actually not possible.
Kamea Chayne: It's also worth questioning what security even means and security for who? For most people, when we think about what is it that makes us feel safe and secure, we think about having supportive relationships, having safe housing, and having secure access to nutritious foods and water. How is that aligned or misaligned with how the nation-state envisions security and the plans that they carry out?
A. Naomi Paik: This question of security for whom and what does even security mean to begin with, is so important.
Security—and this is going to feel a little abstract because it is—and the concept of security itself, for it to make sense, relies on this persistent and intransigent threat of insecurity.
You can't securitize your way out of that problem. “Security” can never actually uproot these root causes of insecurity. It's not possible.
As long as we're going to be in an integrated world and an interdependent world—which we absolutely already are, from the moment that a person or any life form is born, it is interdependent with many other things. You cannot actually securitize everything. You can't get rid of insecurity.
But the fact that insecurity is always going to exist just amplifies the security state. It feeds into this idea that without national security or without these security apparatuses and infrastructures, then you will be unsafe. There are threats out there that will uproot you and that are a threat to your way of life.
If you think about the way the United States has rolled out its national security doctrine, it's almost always justified by self-defense, when in fact it is preemptive. So, we enact violence through many different means, not only through direct military confrontations but also through arms sales and economic arrangements, etc. All of these are preemptively trying to secure our national security. When we're constantly like this, this perception or this framing of security as the thing that we need to address the insecurity of the world is never going to work.
All of the things that you mentioned—when we think about what people actually need to feel grounded, to feel whole, things such as affirming social relationships, having the basics of what you need to live—food, housing, clean water, I would even say education, are the fundamentals for us to exist with each other. Those are the things that we need to be investing in. It seems to me that the framework of security is not the right framework for thinking about what things living people and living things need in order to coexist.
You can't ever get rid of the concept of insecurity completely. But there are certainly sources of insecurity in our daily lives that we can absolutely address, such as making sure that everyone has health care if they need it, making sure that everyone has a place to live if they need it, that people have sufficient and healthy food.
Kamea Chayne: We've talked before on the show about this idea that problem-creation and then problem-solving ends up almost always being more profitable than problem prevention in the first place. I see this pattern here: in that, there are various forces, whether political or economic or corporate monopolization and so forth, creating a sense of insecurity for so many people and then stepping in to say this industry of security is what you need to address that. That's problem-creation, and then problem-solving, [which] ends up being more profitable for all of those who are in charge of these institutions and systems, compared to just getting to the root cause of the crisis.
The United States, as one of the most powerful empires and nation-states in the world today, is often known as a nation of immigrants. I know you take issue with this dominant narrative, even though there are elements of truth there.
How do you think it obscures or prevents people's true understandings of what it might mean to love and care for this land? And to weave in our earlier conversation, how does this social construct of a nationalized identity that a lot of people have taken to heart—I believe sometimes to feel a sense of belonging, which is a deep human need as well—end up feeding into justifying what's being done in the name of national security?
A. Naomi Paik: I do have a critique of the narrative of the nation of immigrants, which many people share. It seems to be a very welcoming narrative, but it's in fact, fictional.
We've never really been a nation of immigrants. What we are is a settler-colonial nation.
I'm riffing off of a bunch of people here. But someone who I'd like to really draw your attention to is Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, who just wrote a book called Not a Nation of Immigrants.
I understand why many people who have immigrated from somewhere else and settled in the United States really embrace this nation of immigrants narrative. Because it does give them a way to feel included in something else, in the place where they have moved to and tried to become a part of and built their lives. I totally get that—my own family has that story.
But what the nation of immigrants as a dominant narrative does is it papers over and excludes the violent history of settler-colonialism in the United States. What I mean by that is that some of the earliest settlers, in order to create the United States were not here just to immigrate and integrate with what was already going on. They came here to destroy the people and the civilizations that were already existing on this land and replace it with their own new and permanent society.
It's not just about exterminating all the Indigenous civilizations that were already here—or trying to, it has not been successful—but it's also very much about racially containing basically everyone else. That is the history of the United States. The national identity has been built around European white nationalism, that's also very patriarchal and rooted in property ownership. So the nation of immigrants narrative papers over that.
The other thing that it does is it also papers over the U.S. history of immigration. So, in the U.S. history of immigration, if you look at some of our earliest immigrant restriction laws, they've always been deeply rooted in racism, patriarchal subordination, and capitalist labor exploitation. What the nation of immigrants narrative does is twist all of the actual living histories of racialized exclusion and turn the U.S. into a narrative of the land of opportunity, where different people from around the world can come and build their lives and be successful. That has just not ever really been the case.
Historically, in terms of how we have recruited racialized labor from Latin America, Africa, and Asia… it's always been through a logic of labor exploitation and not through welcoming difference and others into a "nation of immigrants".
Kamea Chayne: All of that is really important to bring to light so that we don't forget a lot of the complex and dark history that has been a part of the founding of the so-called United States.
We recognize today that there are increasing economic disparities in the world. That same trend, of course, has been true for those who live within the United States as well. I worry about people's real pains and struggles being weaponized and misled and leading to a lot of the surface-level working-class divisions that we see that then prevent people from recognizing a lot of those underlying and shared hardships.
I wonder if you could take us beneath the surface here to address some of the prevailing talking points against immigration that really might be a weaponization of the real economic struggles that a lot of working-class families and individuals are facing today.
A. Naomi Paik: We can think about some of the prevailing myths that end up pitting working-class people in the United States who are citizens of the United States, against working class (often people of color) coming from elsewhere.
One is the [myth] that “migrants take our jobs.” Another, from the flip side, is, “well, at least immigrants commit fewer crimes.” Both of these are myths. And they are both pitting two different types of people, who might be differently situated but actually have way more in common than they're being allowed to see, [against each other].
Part of this has to do with the fact that things such as racism and nationalism and patriarchy, all of these hierarchical power systems don't need to explain themselves. We're born into a world that's so thoroughly structured by these hierarchies that they don't have to.
What does take some level of explaining is how people who are on the surface seem very different are [actually] competing against each other...
They're competing against each other for basic survival resources [when they] share common goals, common struggles, and—this is the most important part—common sources of their subjugation.
Let's think about the [myth that] “migrants take our jobs”. We see, as you mentioned, we have increasing inequality not only in the US but around the world. This does not just happen. This is architected through things such as an integrated world market—basically, economic globalization, where wealthy corporations can move their production to wherever labor costs are cheaper.
Lots of corporations move their production sites to places such as China, Mexico, Jamaica, etc., to lower labor costs. [So] you see jobs leaving places like Detroit or other urban centers in the United States that have strong unions, [which then] drive labor costs [there] up. [We’re thus] seeing [how] economic globalization was enacted in part to break up the working class and to break up working-class power, [through moving] the sites of production from places where working-class power is quite strong, to places where it's unregulated and quite weak.
This is an attack on working-class people across different spaces. But it also means that those working-class people across seemingly divided vast distances and language and cultures actually have a common source of their problems.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about it this way: she says that at the same moment that certain economies like Detroit or South Central L.A. were being decimated by the movement of capital away from these local economies elsewhere, at the same moment that people are being displaced in the United States, there are millions of other working people elsewhere in the world who are being displaced from their homes and actually end up having to follow the capital.
If we can see how these different groups of people are actually being affected by these much bigger systems that are bigger than any one of us, but that affect millions of people globally, we could actually form a huge power base among all these people who are being screwed over by finance, capital, by economic globalization, and so on.
But it's not necessarily obvious how these different groups of people are connected to each other, so it doesn't make as much sense (right away) to a person in the same way that a nationalist discourse would. [For example], “we have to be protectionist for the local economy,” and that means being anti-immigrant.
It takes more explaining to unpack all of these complex connections.
Kamea Chayne: Relatedly, something you've shared before that really stuck with me is that "Immigration policy works as labor discipline." In other words, as you say, "The legal system of migration acts as a disciplinary function around work and labor extraction."
Perhaps this speaks to the fallacy of the idea that banning migration can preserve job opportunities inside of one's borders. Because it may seem counterintuitive, but if I'm getting this right, it's actually delegitimizing migration that preserves the devalued status of “undocumented workers”—that then makes their cheapened labor even possible to exploit for the corporations that are going to try to cheapen the cost of their inputs, no matter what. What else would you add here?
A. Naomi Paik: I would [add that] immigration policy is labor policy, first of all. Even from the very beginning, there's always going to be a tension between the desire of capitalists, basically, corporations, very wealthy individuals, business owners, etc., to have the cheapest source of labor possible. Then [there is] the other tension of still wanting to preserve basically a white national identity.
The thing about capitalism is that it's always racial capitalism by nature.
There is no version of capitalism that does not exploit already-existing social differences like those of race, nation, gender, etc.
This is why “Third-World” workers earn less. It's one of the reasons why capital moves to formerly decolonized nations in order to exploit the cheaper labor there. It's why people of color on average earn much less than white workers here, why women earn less than men... Capitalism exploits differences.
What's really “great” about the exploitation of migrant labor, from a capitalist point of view, is that as soon as that labor force starts organizing, asking for raises, or asking for or demanding safer working conditions, what can you do? You can call the state and deport all of those people.
Deportation and deportability operate as a check on the formation of organized labor and the demands of workers.
You cannot actually deport all of the undocumented workers in the United States. Even if you tried, even if you could, it would not be a good thing for capitalists in the economy.
The point about deportability is not to actually deport everybody. [Because deporting is] a really big mess that we have to grapple with as well.
Kamea Chayne: It's more of a threat.
A. Naomi Paik: Yes, it's more of that labor discipline.
It's the fact that you [could] be deported, so you better keep your head down and not make too many waves. Just keep your head down. Keep working. Accept what you've got. Don't organize with your colleagues.
Kamea Chayne: We've learned on the show before about how the vast majority of the agriculture system relies on the work of “undocumented” migrant workers. If we had none of those people here, the entire food system would collapse, and people would not be able to eat. I'm sure this is true for other production systems as well.
A. Naomi Paik: Getting back to one of your earlier points, what do we need to feel grounded and safe in our communities? We need healthy, sustainable food. The fact that our entire food production system is based on labor exploitation is something that we need to talk a lot more about. What this also gets to is the unsustainability of capitalism itself. Food production under capitalism cannot be profitable.
That's why you're seeing so many agricultural workers and farmers across the world driven into debt or being driven off their lands in places as diverse as India and the rural Midwest. So, if food production cannot be made profitable under capitalism and requires massive exploitation of regular working people, then what are we actually doing in terms of this basic necessity for people to live?
It's a way of getting into a deeper critique of our economic system rooted in capitalism altogether.
If we can't even produce the things that are necessary for life without exploiting millions of people globally, then that's not a sustainable economic system.
Kamea Chayne: Absolutely. This was security in a more real sense of the word. In terms of national security, the nation-state carries this out in large part by way of the carceral system and the military-industrial complex. There are two intricately linked parts to this that I want to bring into this conversation.
The first is how this punitive approach to security ends up disproportionately dispossessing those who are already the most insecure, in the real sense of that word.
The second is even within the military-industrial complex itself, how we might recognize a similar injustice in the sense that the military labor needed to upkeep that entire system ends up both as the perpetrators of harm, as well as the victims of whatever conditions led them to the front lines of the most life-threatening and unsafe parts of militarism.
A. Naomi Paik: The whole reason prison abolitionists and other social justice organizers created the term prison industrial complex was to directly riff off the term military-industrial complex, and to think about how not only are we investing so much more of our social and economic and political energies into these wildly destructive systems that are fundamentally rooted in the supposedly legitimate use of state violence, but [also] that these systems are becoming so large and so complex that our economy and our economic production is actually completely reliant on them. That is a real problem. They're embedding themselves into the very fabric of our economic systems as well as our social beliefs and our political systems.
You're right that both of these systems, share where they're getting their labor from and who they are targeting.
You can see this, for example, where the military recruits its new recruits. It's often the most disenfranchised communities, whether it's rural communities or poor, urban neighborhoods that have been subjected to organized abandonment.
It legitimately is a good job for many people. It has pensions, it has health care, it has a wage, and sometimes, depending on your position when you're applying or trying to enroll or enlist in the military, you can get certain bonuses. There are political-economic reasons that people end up finding themselves recruited into these systems.
These are also the same areas where the prison industrial complex finds many of its new imprisoned people. You have to think about how the spaces and people [that are] targeted by organized abandonment, the lack of social services, and the decimation of public education, are also the same places that, [and the same people who] end up being subjected to massive, organized violence, and over-policing. [We need to be t]hinking about how both of these systems work together, to target people who live in these communities and then also recruit from these communities.
The nature of the military-industrial complex is also changing under late capitalism.
Increasingly, the U.S. military is reliant on migrant laborers and also contracted laborers.
The Iraq War was called the first contractors’ war because there were more contractors over there than there were actually enlisted, military people. This does a couple of things.
First of all, it obscures how many casualties the U.S. military endures. Because there are actually more contractor casualties than actually fully enlisted military casualties. It also obscures the size of the force that we have over there. So, if you have more contractors and actual military people, you can say legitimately we only have x number of military service people, when in fact, the actual size of the force is much bigger, if you count all the contractors.
When we're selling off the use and ability to enact military violence elsewhere through these corporate arrangements, that is a real problem. Not only for people who are being subject to these types of military violence, but it's also a deeply disturbing attack on our very democratic systems. We don't even know who is doing the fighting, ostensibly on our behalf, for our “national security”. We are recruiting people from all over the world to do everything from cooking and cleaning on military bases to actually doing the fighting.
So, there are a lot of complicated things going on in this conjoined invocation between the military-industrial complex and the prison industrial complex. But again, if we see this as “where are you recruiting, where are you targeting?”…
If you can expose the links of how people find themselves in these spaces, social positions, and economic positions, maybe that is a way of addressing both at the same time.
Kamea Chayne: That's really important to highlight, because a lot of people are conscious of how major corporations have been outsourcing labor for manufacturing to “developing nations”, where they might be able to take advantage of the undervalued cost of labor, or as we talked about earlier, taking advantage of the undocumented status of labor inside the borders; but it's also really important to see the same pattern within the military-industrial complex itself—so that even as, for example, some political leaders might say that we're “bringing back troops” or whatever, we can see through that, not as a sign that it is reigning in its thirst for the expansion of control and power, but really, just as the outsourcing of that labor of militarism itself. It really just emphasizes how our preexisting injustices are continually being exploited in new forms.
A. Naomi Paik: These new forms or more recent iterations of these systems of exploitation, are exploiting already-existing systems of power.
Our military basically recruits low-wage workers for things such as cooking and cleaning and dock working from some of the poorest areas in the world. We recruit certain kinds of laborers to do more feminized reproductive work, and we recruit other workers who come from areas that could have recently endured civil wars or different insurgent struggles, to do interrogations or combat.
So, for example, certain parts of Latin America become recruitment sites for these private military and security companies to recruit interrogators. There are a lot of really disturbing and harmful histories that are actually being exploited for the growth of this industry.
Kamea Chayne: Really breaks my heart to think about all of this.
In light of everything we talked about, I want to highlight something you shared before which I know I fall into the trap of in terms of how I write and communicate. Although I think for me, it's largely due to a lack of confidence in myself and therefore not wanting to sound too direct...
But you talk about the perils of the passive voice, which really just means, for example, instead of saying, “Tom did x y z to Alex,” we say, “X y z was done to Alex.” You emphasize that this passive framing has political and ideological implications, especially when there are victims involved. I just had never been conscious of the deeper significance of the passive voice beyond knowing that it's not good practice for writing in general.
I would love it if you could elaborate more on this and whether you've seen this done intentionally in any cases in order to maybe sanitize or obscure certain things within discourses on militarism, mass incarceration, or otherwise.
A. Naomi Paik: My students get a little irritated with me sometimes if I feel they’re [using] a passive voice in their papers. It's not just because it's better to write in the English language in the active voice. That's a little bit of it, but it really is about the fact that...
Passive voice allows us to obscure who is doing what, and who is doing the action.
We need to be especially mindful of that when we're thinking about power systems and hierarchies and certain phenomena that subject people to certain types of violence, even if it's the type of violence that isn't enacted by a gun or any direct use of force.
In thinking about [things such as] free trade agreements, it's not as if poverty just happens in certain parts of the world, and that wealth just is accumulated in other parts of the world. These are the end result of many different systems that exploit certain parts of the world for the wealth of other parts of the world, of certain sectors of society for other sectors of society.
What passive voice does is that it allows us to neglect who is behind the actions that lead to the subjugation of many people.
[You see this in how] the law is full of passive voice. There is no actor that is responsible for the harm. Even thinking about certain legal decisions or court cases, where basically there is no actor doing the harm even though 12 people [might have] ended up [being] murdered. It's a way of saying bad things happened. Mistakes were made, but no one actually inflicted the harm. No one actually made the mistake. No one actually put certain things in motion that led to the deaths of all of these people.
It's really important to clearly identify who is doing certain actions, especially when it comes to systemic oppressions.
Kamea Chayne: I really appreciate you naming that. Once we become aware of something, it becomes hard to unsee. I hope this will help me and our listeners keep an eye out for that and stay attuned to the more implicit messages that are being shared, by the framing that we use or that other people may use.
The last thing I would love for us to touch on is this idea of sanctuary as an abolitionist way of understanding our path towards collective healing. So, what do you mean when you talk about sanctuary, including what that might mean for our more-than-human communities?
And especially as you envision this as a space of healing, inclusive of and forgiving of those who have broken the social contract and have committed acts of harm against others or many others, I wonder if you see this as necessary in order to disrupt this spiraling cycle of violence of self and collective destruction that we and our planet by extension, seem to be entrenched within right now.
A. Naomi Paik: I started thinking more about sanctuary partly because of the literal sanctuary movement in the United States for migrant justice. Not only from the 1980s in terms of thinking about Central American and other migrants who were being pushed out of their countries by U.S. foreign policy and then rejected by U.S. immigration policy, [but] also thinking about the surge of the new sanctuary movement under escalation of deportation under Obama and then also, of course, under Trump.
I'm fully committed to the sanctuary framing of many migrant justice movements.
I want to think through sanctuary in the most capacious and expansive way possible. I'm trying to think about the migrant justice slogan “Sanctuary for all, sanctuary everywhere.” What would it actually mean to create a sanctuary for all? What would it mean for that sanctuary to exist literally everywhere, planet-wide?
The way that we have thought about sanctuary historically and presently is often circumscribed by certain spaces, such as a sanctuary church or a sanctuary campus, or a sanctuary city, some bounded jurisdiction or spatial demarcation. But if we're thinking about sanctuary everywhere, if we made the whole earth a sanctuary, what does that mean? That radically opens up the potential of this concept.
Similarly, “sanctuary for all” in the migrant justice movement—who are they talking about? They're talking about any migrant who's under duress or a threat of deportation or detention or being caught up at the border or being separated from their family, etc. Any migrant who is subject to targeting by the state.
But what if we thought about sanctuary in its most capacious way possible and thought about even the etymology of the term, which refers not just to sanctuary spaces for humans, but also sanctuary spaces for environments—marine sanctuaries, the Serengeti, different park spaces, or green spaces, then also for different species?
Why should we have a sanctuary for all?
The answer, if we think really deeply about this, is because all lives are interdependent, not just all human lives, but humans depend on other living things. We depend on trees. We depend on fungi. We depend on other animals. We depend on so many different life forms and yet our anthropocentric viewpoint doesn't take those things into account.
[And] in the face of the climate crisis, in the face of ecological devastation, none of us are going to have a future unless we make the whole Earth a sanctuary for all—all living things. There is no oceanic sanctuary where waste dumping and drilling happens that does not affect all the other oceans. They're all interconnected.
If we can think about other types of sanctuary spaces as being necessarily connected to everything else, it really opens up our imagination and our thinking about what is the potential of this concept. If we truly create a sanctuary for all planet-wide for all living things, we [will] have eliminated the need for sanctuary spaces.
We don't need certain jurisdictions where people are not under the threat of state violence for deportation or imprisonment because everyone has what they need wherever they are for their own survival and their own thriving.
This does feel utopian, but I think that the actually existing sanctuary spaces that are out there in the world might give us some models. Also, thinking about other types of movement spaces, other networks of relationships that people are forming with each other across space. Showing the interconnections of different types of people together, I think, gives us some experiments to expand upon in service of creating—first of all—elucidating how interconnected we all are. Then, also enacting a new system of relationships with each other that really highlights giving people what they need, where they are getting to those causes of migration in the first place, getting to the root causes of people being deprived in the first place, and really thinking about what we need in order for sanctuary to exist everywhere.
Kamea Chayne: I'm personally really moved by this vision of sanctuary for all, sanctuary everywhere. And as you mentioned, there are existing models that we can learn from, nurture, expand, and syndicate as well in terms of translating some of the bigger picture things into practice.
Your work and the ways that you have been showing up as a teacher really inspire me to think about praxis and what it means to shapeshift and embody the values that we wish to realize in the world. So given that you work within a formal educational institution, and you understand the role of institutions as serving the function of just reproducing themselves and therefore being quite limited in terms of the deep societal transformations that they can support, I'm curious if you can share some examples of what you've been doing within the institution to push its boundaries—and also what you feel cannot be done within and needs to happen outside.
A. Naomi Paik: I think it’s important for everyone to understand that institutions are not here to save us. So, we shouldn't be looking to institutions to be doing the liberatory deep work that we need to be doing in order to save ourselves and the planet.
Also, it's not as though we can pretend that [institutions] don't exist and that we can just ignore what they're doing. On some level, there has to be some engagement with institutions, even if not all sectors of movement spaces and movement builders are engaged in that work.
Obviously, I get my paycheck from an institution. I serve certain roles within that institution, and not all of them I'm necessarily comfortable with. I'm not comfortable with the fact that my position at the university is basically financed by student debt. This is not what I signed up for. But it is a fact of my position in it.
I try to use my foot in the institution to push back on it, to make claims on the institution based on being a tenured faculty member. So, standing up for students when something happens, working with student organizations to push the university on certain agendas, such as reallocating money that goes to the police department to student mental health services or to student refunds. And there's already so much stuff in motion by the students themselves; sometimes my role would be to bring those demands into other spaces where they're not necessarily present.
Other ways that I'm trying to use the institution is obviously through my teaching, but also trying to use university resources against university purposes. So, I like doing research projects with my students. I feel like that is a good use of the resources. People can do things for each other. So, using the space of the classroom not only in service of the students’ education, but also in service of promoting a community organization (that is not necessarily in good relations with the institution itself).
I think Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have this quote that says…
“The only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one.”
I really think of that as one of my guiding lights in terms of how I relate to my employers. So it is my job to steal things from the university: not just material things, but the knowledge, the capacities that are provided by the institution, and redirecting them away from institutional goals to actual, living people and things that are already in motion, on the ground, outside of those structures.
That's really important. For me, it's important to understand that I am embedded in this institution, and also that I am not above it at the same time.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
A. Naomi Paik: Not a Nation of Immigrants by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. [And] How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, especially the last chapter, has been very useful to me.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated or inspired?
A. Naomi Paik: That quote by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten about having a criminal relationship with the university. Another one is the last few lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, Paul Robeson, “We are each other's business. We are each other's harvest. We are each other's magnitude and bond.”
Kamea Chayne: What is your greatest source of inspiration right now?
A. Naomi Paik: I am still inspired by the summer of 2020 and the millions of people who turned out for what could possibly be the largest mass mobilization for social justice in U.S. history. I still think we need to figure out what the lasting impact of that summer is going to be. It's still not determined.
Kamea Chayne: Naomi, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been a pleasure and a huge honor to have you here. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
A. Naomi Paik: Even as we understand the magnitude and depth of the problems we face, we also should feel entitled to the power that we have collectively to change. That left pessimism is just not an option, but we have to keep nurturing and amplifying hope, and also putting that into action together.
