Building Movement, Building Power Zach Ngin & Sara Van Horn

BY Zach Ngin & Sara Van Horn ILLUSTRATION Georgianna Stoukides DESIGN Daniel Navratil

Linda Sarsour is unequivocal. Whether addressing a crowd at a Bernie rally or explaining the salient points of Kingian nonviolence in an interview backstage, her purposeful energy—and thick Brooklyn accent— reflect her years of experience as a local organizer.

Sarsour might be best known as one of the co-chairs of the 2017 Women’s March, the largest single-day protest in the history of the United States. But her organizing is rooted in two decades of community-based work in Brooklyn. From 2005 to 2017, Sarsour served as the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, a civil rights and social services organization. She helped fight against the biased policing of Muslim communities and successfully campaigned for the recognition of Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr in the city’s public schools. In recent years, she has organized in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and is currently the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of President Trump’s travel ban.

Sarsour was recently in Providence for a panel on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement hosted by student organizers at Brown University. On January 28th, she returned as the keynote speaker at a rally hosted by Rhode Island Students for Bernie. (Anchita Dasgupta and Peder Schaefer’s report on the event appeared in the College Hill Independent last week.) Before the event began, the Independent sat down with Sarsour in the dressing room of Columbus Theatre. We spoke to her about the Sanders campaign, her vision of solidarity, and the potentials and limitations of electoral politics. +++ The Independent: Can you talk about your background, your activist work, and what brings you to this rally today? Linda Sarsour: I am a Brooklyn-born daughter of Palestinian immigrants. I have been an organizer for almost twenty years now. I started out organizing around hyper-local community issues, specifically around language access for my community, which was an Arabic-speaking immigrant community in New York City. I was a leader of a non-profit that served refugees, asylees, and immigrants, predominantly from the Middle East, for about 15 years. And so I’ve been really immersed in the immigrant rights movement and, from there, found the intersection between immigrant rights and criminal justice.

I was an early supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders in late 2015, when no one thought he was a serious candidate. I believed in his platform and he was my primary protest candidate that I supported to help push Hillary Clinton to the Left. Then, as I supported the campaign in 2016, I realized that we could actually win this nomination. I was, of course, extremely disappointed with the Democratic Party and the ways in which this movement we were building was being sidelined, although there was so much enthusiasm around it. I continued to fight for Medicare for All over the last few years and really just continued to double down on the conversation that Bernie Sanders helped ignite back in 2016, and now I’m back again for Bernie 2020. I’m a national surrogate with the campaign and I get really excited about coming to gatherings, canvasses, rallies. I want to be amongst the regular folks who are supporting the senator and I’m excited about just being here in Rhode Island. I’m excited about the enthusiasm of a younger generation that is committed to an inclusive, progressive society, including one that centers the dignity of Palestinians. The Independent: How do electoral politics—and presidential elections in particular—fit into the broader work that you’ve done? What are the potentials and limitations of electoral politics as a strategy? Sarsour: Electoral politics for me is only a very small part of my larger theory of change. Remember that there are many people in our country who are shut out of our democracy: undocumented people, incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people. Any time that you engage in a tactic or a theory of change about how we’re going to bring about transformative change and there are some people who can’t participate, then that tactic is not enough. So electoral organizing in and of itself is not enough. For me, it’s a tool in our toolbox. And it allows us to alleviate some suffering—harm reduction—and it allows us to create space, especially when we elect people who actually align with our principles and values. We give ourselves just some room to continue to build power.

So for me, movement building is not electoral organizing. And electoral organizing in and of itself is not movement building. For me, I still organize around issues. I organize with people who are unable to participate in our democratic process because I believe that everyone—in a real, true, inclusive movement—has to have different ways to participate. And movement building gives people other ways to participate in building power, even if they can’t do that one thing which is voting. The Independent: I see Bernie as one of the only candidates—as the only candidate—that’s calling on a movement in addition to an electoral process. Do you see that as something that sets him apart? The fact that he’s very explicitly calling on a wider social movement? Sarsour: Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons why I’m part of this campaign. And a lot of the time people question why we’re supportive of this campaign, they say, what are you doing, you’re an intersectional feminist, you know, you have been organizing on criminal justice reform and immigrant rights, you are one of those people who have pushed for representation and for supporting and centering people of color and marginalized communities and you’re supporting an old, white man for president? And what I say to people is that I’m not supporting an old, white man. I’m supporting an intersectional movement that believes that the solutions to the ills of our country are with the working class, with people of color, with the most marginalized people. I truly believe in my heart that that’s what Senator Bernie Sanders believes. And when we think about this campaign and who supports this campaign, it is absolutely reflective of the type of movement that I want to be a part of. The majority of our donors are women. The majority of our donors are working class—nurses and teachers and fast-food workers. They are members of unions and immigrant communities and communities that for so long just haven’t felt heard. The Independent: I think that brings us to a really salient topic, which is solidarity. Solidarity seems like a common theme in your work, both with the Sanders campaign and fighting against state violence, so we wanted to ask what solidarity means to you and your work. Sarsour: Senator Sanders defines solidarity in such an accessible way and it really moved me. It was at the rally that he did with AOC in Queens, New York. He got up and was basically like, Are you willing to fight for someone? Are you willing to fight for someone that is just not you? And that is what solidarity means to me. Solidarity is not about words. Solidarity is when you are willing to risk and sacrifice something for someone else to live better and have access to something you have access to. The Independent: Why do you think socialism is an important political framework right now? What aspects of that word or vision are useful to you? And why do you think it’s appealing to so many people right now? Sarsour: In our country, wealth should not be concentrated in the top one percent of the one percent while there are people living in utter poverty. And socialism really is about closing the gaps; it’s about investing and giving people the opportunity not to just survive in America but to thrive in America. So when we think about the policies that Senator Sanders is putting forth, it isn’t in fact real socialism. Some of these policies are “socialist” policies, just like the fire department or the libraries, you know. The librarian doesn’t ask you whether you are a billionaire or whether you are a working-class college student. We all get access to libraries. You know, God forbid, your household’s on fire: you pick up the phone and call the fire department. It’s a public good that we all get to share. And that’s why Bernie Sanders doesn’t equivocate or try to make things complicated. Everybody gets their student debt cancelled. There’s no formula for it. Because at the end of the day, Bernie Sanders understands reality. The reality is that the children of billionaires are not going to public universities. The children of billionaires don’t have college debt. So these frivolous arguments being used against us to paint us as some sort of radical fringe are not even true. Bernie Sanders is, in fact, not even a socialist candidate. I think what we’re doing in this campaign is normalizing things that are seen as radical by a segment of our population but, in fact, are not radical at all. People should have healthcare. Healthcare is a human right. People should not be graduating from college literally shackled in debt and unable to start a career or have a successful future. The Independent: We’re here today at a rally organized by students in Rhode Island. Where do you see the power of student organizing and why is it important? What do you see as the role of college students at this moment? Sarsour: College students are literally the nucleus of this campaign. I’ve been to Iowa, to New Hampshire, and I’ve seen the power of college students organizing. They’re enthusiastic. They’re also worried about their future in terms of climate justice. And they are also students who understand what it means to have student loans, knowing that the job market is dismal in America, particularly for college graduates. And so for me, we can’t win this campaign without college students. It’s just the bottom line. They’re our key constituency and it’s an opportunity for Bernie Sanders to prove what it looks like when you expand the electorate.

The voting rate for college students during the 2016 general election was very low. This particular constituency has not always been a reliable voter base, and not all campaigns may be investing in this particular voter base. But the Bernie Sanders campaign is. We see them not as low-propensity voters. We see them as high-potential voters. Because literally they are the generation that has everything at stake—them and the An interview with political activist Linda Sarsour

generations that come after them. The Independent: I was speaking recently with a student activist with Brown Divest who diagnosed much of the campus as supportive of Bernie but not necessarily supportive of the fight for Palestinian sovereignty. So what would you say to those who support Bernie’s call for radical, political change, but who believe talking about the struggle for Palestinian liberation is either too radical or too extreme for the Bernie campaign or for the Left? Sarsour: To be quite clear, as someone who’s a big supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, we do not agree on many things about Palestine. For example, Bernie does not support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. I do. Senator Bernie Sanders supports a two-state solution. I don’t think that’s a viable solution anymore. I think it’s a pie-in-the-sky, never gonna happen. But I’d say to folks who believe in the Palestinian people, who believe in Palestinian human rights: this is the campaign for you. Because this is the only campaign where we can have that conversation. This is not the campaign where we’re going to find all those solutions. Senator Bernie Sanders is not going to be the savior of any people. This is the campaign where there are people willing to hear you out, where there are people who unequivocally believe that the Palestinian people at the bare minimum deserve basic human rights. Bernie’s old, but his ears are on the ground. And he has helped us be able to talk about Palestine at such a high level in a way that we haven’t done before. So to those who support Bernie but don’t agree with him on these issues, I say, you know, that’s okay, there’s no perfect candidate. But for us, as a community, as a movement that supports Palestinian rights, there is absolutely no other candidate in this race that is the boldest and bravest on this issue other than Bernie Sanders. The Independent: In the last couple years, the Left has spent a lot of time thinking about the historical circumstances that led to Donald Trump’s election. I’m curious about how you understand the historical circumstances that have allowed someone like Bernie Sanders to run for president. Sarsour: You know, we’re always blaming people outside the Democratic party on why we got Trump. I blame that on the political Left, on “progressives,” neoliberals, and the Democratic party. Until Bernie Sanders took us to this national conversation, we kept trying to assume what moves the American people. We shied away from talking about healthcare for all; we shied away from saying cancellation of student debt; we shied away from Palestinians deserve human rights and criticizing the state of Israel. We shied away from universal daycare and shied away from calling for incarcerated people to be given the right to vote. We shied away from saying end cash bail and the dismal, corrupt, racist criminal justice system that we have, assuming that the American people did not want to touch those issues or were in opposition to those issues. And so Bernie Sanders comes along, a senator from Vermont who had no idea that the minute he started talking about these issues in a public way, everyone was like, who is this man? I’m with you. We don’t even need to know who you are! You are speaking to our pain and to our aspirations as a people. Bernie Sanders built an entire movement off of talking about the issues that neoliberals told us for so long were radical and never going to be mainstream in America. They kept pushing us to vote for candidates that were maintaining the status quo. And then Bernie comes along and shatters that whole thing. It’s been shattered in local elections too. In Chicago, something like six of the new city council members are socialist. And you have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you have Rashida Tlaib winning, people who are full-fledged democratic socialists and really believe in Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Our failure has been in assuming we know what the American people care about. So I don’t blame “the opposition.” The opposition is internal for our communities. And in the political sphere, now we are the ones with the political capital. They are losing steam and it’s evident when we’re watching Bernie Sanders—the momentum he has is unmatched by any other candidate. The Independent: Given the violence of the current administration and of this country more broadly, what does it mean to commit to nonviolence as an ethic or a strategy? Sarsour: I’m actually trained in Kingian nonviolence and I adhere to the six principles of nonviolence. One of them is to attack the forces of evil, not those doing evil, which is why I’m not an anti-Trumper. My work is not about taking Trump out of office; my work is like Dr. Martin Luther King’s: attack the forces of evil. Militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, xenophobia—those are the ills of this nation. And what’s happened in this country is that the resistance has focused solely on one man who absolutely does embody those things. But if Trump is not the president anymore, those things still exist and will continue to exist unless we as a people rise up to address those issues. This interview has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity. ZACH NGIN B'22 and SARA VAN HORN B'21 are high-potential voters.

BY EJL ILLUSTRATION Gemma Brand-Wolf DESIGN Daniel Navratil

In October of 2019, the queer publication GAYLETTER posted an Instagram advertisement depicting a shirtless DJ surrounded by neon, fuzz-bordered lettering. The ad announced PrEP+, a dance party in New York City hosted by openly-queer musician Frank Ocean. The party, as suggested by its title, intended to serve as an “homage to what could have been”: the 1980s gay club scene as if PrEP—pre-exposure prophylaxis— had existed at the time. Although Ocean was not explicit about the event’s ideological intentions, his party announcement undoubtedly refers to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and asks how PrEP could have hindered or perhaps altogether stopped the spread of HIV/AIDS, through the pill's ability to prevent the contraction of the HIB. Additionally, Ocean does not specify how he imagines the invention of PrEP could have transformed the era; one possibility might be the opportunity to have unprotected and uninhibited sexual contact without the worry of acquiring the virus, suggested by the erotic undertones in the party’s announcement of its objective to “bring people together and dance.” Nonetheless, the event was shrouded in mystery, both in its undisclosed time and location as well as in its obscurity of purpose. Ocean’s party turned out to be an exclusive, inviteonly occasion, specifically geared towards queer people of color. Attendees included LGBTQ+ artists, influencers, quasi-celebrities—all of them young. It was held in the basement of a party venue in Queens, filled with flashing neon lights, live DJ music, and sneak peeks of new music from Ocean’s expected upcoming album. But the party’s seemingly grand visions fell short. Inevitably, the event attracted fans, many of them white, heterosexual or without invitation, all chasing a glimpse at Ocean’s music or simply the associated cool factor. Attendees afterward noted the pervasive lack of sexual tenor—the mazes and dark corners characteristic of sex clubs were simply used for conversation. In its most blatant irony, one attendee nearly had his PrEP pill confiscated by security. The thirty-two-year-old musician immediately received criticism from AIDS activists, most of them older gay men. For them, the party should have promoted awareness of the titular drug, which, according to the CDC, remains underused

by millions who could highly benefit from taking it. Many argued that the 1980s gay club scene was still vibrant amidst the epidemic. Some even accused the party of being funded by Gilead, the pharmaceutical company profiting off of the market form of PrEP, Truvada, which Ocean later denied. In spite of the public critique of PrEP+, the party marks a specific desire by Ocean—as a younger gay man in a post-crisis era—to connect with the era of the AIDS epidemic, imagining himself and others transported to a historical moment. The contrast between Ocean’s party and its negative feedback indicates two different methods of erotic historical engagement, described by French philosopher Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality as ars erotica and scientia sexualis. In ars erotica, sexual truth is acquired through “pleasure itself,” measured in the degree of “its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.” Ocean’s party evokes the erotic historical pleasure of ars erotica by re-imagining a scene of the epidemic through sensual encounters between bodies. This conception contrasts with scientia sexualis, where sexuality becomes a scientific discourse, managed by religious, psychiatric, medical institutions—the mode in which sexuality is often treated in the contemporary era. The AIDS-activist critics channel scientia sexualis in their expectations of the party to raise awareness of PrEP as a pharmacological intervention of chemical prophylaxis, appropriately honoring those who fought for HIV treatment during the epidemic. Similarly, the division between ars erotica and scientia sexualis can be found within the discourse of PrEP usage. When young gay men, like Ocean, are presented the opportunity to take the drug to prevent HIV contraction, they become immediately entangled between these two philosophies. +++ Today, most American children learn about the AIDS epidemic not in their history classes but through sex-education curriculums. While the curriculums focus on medical facts about HIV/AIDS, they often address the epidemic to demonstrate the historical significance of the virus and the potential consequences if students do not use protection. Through these classes, the children become interpellated by what queer cultural scholar Kane Race calls the “risk discourse” of HIV/AIDS. Not only do children develop an understanding of the risks of unprotected sex, potentially leading them to contract HIV, but they also further moralize unprotected sex as socially harmful. Thus, they become inundated with the past of the AIDS crisis as “other,” as a closed-off historical moment that cannot reoccur if they take appropriate prophylactic measures; but also “other” as the crisis becomes associated with homophobic renderings of gay male sexuality, moralized as a hazardous set of practices warranting an aversion. As young gay men grow into their sexual identity today, they confront a dissonant moment in which the taught otherness of the epidemic contradicts the ways in which their identity may impl cate them within its history. In this way, young gay men become traumatized by the AIDS epidemic through its inherited history filled with violence, death, and decay. In their examination of intergenerational trauma among Holocaust survivors and their children, psychologists Nanette Auerhahn and Dori Laub assert that large-scale trauma can be passed down through generations, existing in a nonchronological, formless manner that is “not defined by place or time and lacking a beginning, middle, and end.” Auerhahn and Laub explore how children of Holocaust survivors attempt to heal themselves of their inherited trauma through defensive mechanisms, becoming mental health professionals that have a “need to decode [secrets] and help those who suffer from them” or becoming heavily involved as activists in social movements. In each of these cases, the children of victims remain subject to historical trauma on an unconscious level, shaping their present reality. Young gay men must also insulate themselves from the traumatic realities of the AIDS crisis. Simple use of prophylactic measures, such as condoms, might be insufficient—young gay men must psychically defend themselves by imagining, as a moral projection, their sexual practices as outside of the epidemic’s history. However, the material realities of gay sex necessarily compel an engagement with HIV/AIDS, producing a disorienting experience of temporality. Whereas the figure of HIV is used to ensure death, antiretroviral treatments can successfully manage it if contracted. As a result, gay men’s sexual lives become suspended in pervasive uncertainty, never really knowing if they will contract HIV, and even if they do, never really knowing if it will kill them. Therefore, young gay men become entrapped by a feeling of simultaneous protection from and vulnerability to the historical legacies of the epidemic in their sexual practices. Queer theorist Tim Dean locates gay bareback subculture—characterized by condom-less sex that puts members at risk of HIV contraction—as a manner in which gay men achieve a sense of temporal certitude by obtaining control over their HIV transmission. Here, unprotected sex allows them to assuredly contract the virus, solidifying a life with HIV that would have been ever-looming. However, for young gay men, the opportunity to take PrEP proposes the possibility to engage in unprotected sex without the certainty of contracting HIV; in this way, bareback sex no longer implies unprotectedness nor temporal definitiveness.

PrEP usage is considerably lower among younger gay men than their older counterparts. This is most likely to due to lack of awareness, but there are other possible moral reasons behind this trend. At its initial release, PrEP took the form of a reluctant object, defined by University of Sydney professor Kane Race as “an object that may well make a tangible difference to people’s lives, but whose promise is so threatening or confronting to enduring habits of getting by in this world that it provokes aversion, avoidance.” PrEP ensures over ninety-precent—and in most cases nearly perfect—rates of preventing HIV contraction. Yet this heavenly promise did not lead to immediate uptake, especially because the “raw” sex that PrEP safely allows held a heinous position in gay culture. It sparked a moral backlash among some gay men, many of whom demonized PrEP users as socially irresponsible “Truvada whores” in their admission to condomless sex, even though its usage would entail extremely high levels of HIV-prevention, sometimes even higher than that of condoms. These gay men were not ready to abandon this regime of the condom, which not only protected them materially as a barrier but further provided a psychological sense of safety, especially in its historical associations with AIDS activism-endorsed safe-sex education. The doubleness of the condom’s protectiveness stands in for the way in which HIV-prevention not only addresses the virus itself but also the moral risk of bareback sex’s aberrant sexual pleasure.

PrEP further marks one as a subject of history, as shaped by the historical conditions of the HIV epidemic that made possible risk discourses and “barebacking.” If young gay men decide to take PrEP, they actively declare themselves to be part of the historical lineage of the AIDS epidemic. Additionally, in their choice to take the pill, their ability to engage “safely” in bareback sex brings them back to pre-crisis or early crisis moments in which HIV-induced virality had no hold on gay sexual subjectivity. In this way, bareback sex is no longer dangerous—somatically, psychically, and morally—and instead becomes an act of possibility for young gay men.

Using queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman’s conception of erotohistoriography, the act of young gay men taking PrEP can be viewed as a mobilization of the pill into a mode of accessing history through bareback sex. Erotohistoriography, according to Freeman, employs the body as a “tool to effect, figure, or perform” an engagement with the past. In other words, as Freeman cites Foucault, erotohistoriography presents an ars erotica historical method because it focuses on bodily pleasures as a source of truth—in this case, a historical one. Importantly, erotohistoriography marks a specific historical intervention away from objectivist traditional historical methods that value information, facts, documents, and discrete objects as gateways to the past. Instead, erotohistoriography turns to embodiment, introducing the possibility to gain pleasure from painful pasts. For young gay men, PrEP allows for worry-free bareback sex that enables them to erotically access lost ancestors through a historical mode of gay sex, using their bodies to transport to a time before the emergence of HIV required protection for “safe” sex. The “historical and temporal disjunction,” as Freeman puts it, of existing as a young gay man several generations after the peak of the crisis, then, can be alleviated through PrEP-mediated barebacking, making the epidemic available through pleasurable means (as opposed to, say, reading a historical account about it) and thereby erotically engaging with a troubling past as transgressive pleasure.

+++ In this manner, Ocean’s PrEP+ party primarily incited controversy insofar as it disrupted the regime of scientia sexualis over gay male health interventions. Under the regime of scientia sexualis, PrEP positions young gay men within a history of medical interventions in the treatment of HIV, from the discovery of antiretroviral treatments to the development of prophylactic methods to prevent contraction—and perhaps an even larger history of medicalizing homosexuality, starting from the 19th century, from lobotomy to electroconvulsive therapy. While taking PrEP, one must be continually monitored by doctors, ensuring that the drug is not negatively affecting one’s health (which is quite rare) but nevertheless placing one under the surveillance of a medical regime. Certainly, HIV drugs were crucially important to dampening the crisis and have saved thousands of lives—their function definitely should not be criticized, nor directly compared to violent homophobia of electroconvulsive therapy. Rather, under the cultural doctrine of scientia sexualis, sex only becomes legible under discrete scientific or medical discourses, leaving no room for fantasy or feeling in the discourse of sex. In this way, antiretroviral drugs or prophylactic measures are only one form of many to “deal with” HIV.

Instead, Ocean favored an approach to AIDS crisis-historicizing that could be described as erotohistoriographic and evocative of ars erotica, moving in a different direction from the conventional discourse surrounding the epidemic’s history and HIV treatment. Ocean’s erotohistoriographic visions did not exactly materialize within PrEP+; any erotic resonances within the crowd were compromised by the chasing of Ocean’s celebrity. But even if the mazes and dark corners were utilized, bareback sex under PrEP might be condomless but is still pharmacologically-mediated. It’s not truly “raw.” Even under an erotohistoriographic approach, young gay men would always be one step removed from accessing the AIDS crisis past, close but not quite. And after all, how can one resolve trauma that is not even their own? This is the sobering reality for young gay men today: the AIDS crisis exists beneath deep layers, both historical and erotic, largely inaccessible, leaving ancestors to be longed for and never fully felt. EJL wants you to go to breakthepatent.org and sign the petition to end Gilead’s greed.