In an interview on Alicia Garza’s podcast Lady Don’t Take No!, anti-fascist activist, organizer, and movement educator Kelly Hayes speaks to the possibilities of using podcasting as a means of calling people to action: “I don’t just want the podcast to get people information that helps them do better activism I want to help people make the jump from ‘okay, I’m passionate about this information in this story’ and ‘now this person is giving me an idea of what it would mean to cross into this work.’”¹ In addition to her Movement Memos podcast, Hayes

has co-organized major protests and campaigns during some of the most heated political moments of our times, including struggles for Native sovereignty, the fight to save the Affordable Care Act, the Mental Health Movement, the campaign to stop school closures under former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the successful effort to win reparations for survivors of police torture in the city of Chicago. Kelly has also co-organized and led trainings prior to some of the most significant protests in Chicago in recent history and has helped resistors around the country, from Boston College to the Pacific Northwest, hone their skills in the runup to direct actions.²

The literature on decolonization emphasizes that decolonization is a process that results in “action.”³ Although we chronicled the aspects of interrogation, critique, and counter-narrative production in the podcasting space, we found comparatively little evidence of podcasts that are specifically centered on praxis or are advocating or mobilizing community activism. In fact most programs see their mission as educating, debating, and discussing rather than recommending specific steps for taking action. Furthermore, in our sampling of hundreds of podcasts, we did not find any that had been recorded amid social protest, broadcasting from the front lines. Most of the podcasts we surveyed serve at best as a forum for bringing activists and activist communities together, in dialogue. For example, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s podcast About Race is a forum for anti-racist activists, and the episode featuring voices from the British Black Panther Movement speaks to the global community that she is able to reunite through podcasting. Similarly, Tai Jacob’s Gender Blender and Faith’s The Gender Rebels serve as forums for trans and gender non-binary activists, while Callie and Nichole’s podcast Vegan Warrior Princesses Attack! builds community around ethical veganism. Although all these podcasts provide an educational format where activists share their experiences (and certainly there is much here for potential activists to learn), none of them makes a clear call to action. Furthermore, their hosts are not actively engaged in social movements; they are instead members of their respective communities or have a background in journalism or academic scholarship.

However, among the relatively few podcasts surveyed by us whose programming is specifically designed to mobilize listeners to engage in activism, we did find several important commonalities. First of all, some of them are hosted by community activists and leaders who do provide a seamless link from the studio to the streets. In addition to issuing a clarion call to action, these podcasts also offer clear strategies for organizing and lessons from the field. In this fashion they constitute a radical praxis, which takes listeners far beyond mere strategies for calling their local, state, and federal representatives. Their hosts strive to outline clear plans to build sustained movements. They speak of the imperative for healing and self-care, which they regard as activities critical to sustaining a movement’s energy. Many of these podcasters believe in the ability of persuasive, loving, and respectful debate to change the minds and hearts of those who have different and even opposite political perspectives. They propose strategies for peaceful political “interventions,” and paths toward healing across ideological divides. At least one of the more significant podcasters in this genre, Kelly Hayes, has drawn our attention to an important historical linkage between this form of podcasting and more than 380 alternative, community-centered newspapers associated with the Socialist Party that have existed since the early 1900s in America.⁴

One of the most noteworthy of these community activism podcasts is Alicia Garza’s Lady Don’t Take No!. Garza’s consistent message that “hashtags don’t start movements. People do.”⁵ Serves as an initial call to action. As the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Garza presents interviews from diverse black and anti-racist activists – for example Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter and of the Black Lives Matter Global Network; Tarana Burke, founder and executive director of the Me Too movement; George Goehl, anti-racist activist and executive director of PeoplesAction.org; social movement strategist Maurice Mitchell; Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition; LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund; voter engagement strategist Nse Ufot; transgender rights activist Angelica Ross; activist Mia Birdsong; and Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mjente, a digital and grassroots organizing hub for Latinx/Chicanx communities.⁶ Because Garza is rooted in the most important civil rights struggle of our era, her podcast offers much more than critique and counter-narrative. She and her guests consistently call listeners to action, and her use of phrases such as “in a fight for our lives,” “every one of us gets to choose who we will be in this moment,” “will we be the person who raises our voice in support of those who have been rendered voiceless,” and “now is the time to roll up our sleeves,” lends a profound tone of urgency to these appeals:

GARZA: Lady don’t like no fascism and rather than fascism being a big word that we call mean people, fascism is literally a way of organizing society that is extremely dangerous for all of us. Black communities are in a fight for our lives, but so are non-Black communities under the current leadership of this country. And I don’t even want to call it leadership because a more accurate word for this is cowardice. Every one of us gets to choose who we will be in this moment. Will we be the person who stands for peace at the expense of justice or will we be the person who raises our voice in support of those who have been rendered voiceless since this country was founded? Will we act out of charity to Black people who have been denied our fundamental right to dignity? Will we do that thing that too many of us do, shake our heads at how unfortunate it is that Black communities are under attack, or will we say that we all deserve safety, we all deserve peace, we all deserve justice, and that Black people cannot and must not be the exception to that rule? Will you act to make sure that we all have what we need to live well, don’t take no half-step in or standing on the sidelines? Now is the time to roll up our sleeves and frankly get to work on saving this country from the hell that this president seems bent on taking us to. Here’s what we want more of this week: the one thing that lady loves is people who join the movement all across the country, people of all backgrounds are joining a movement to fight for the sanctity of Black lives not because it’s a nice thing to do but because they too see their futures as deeply intertwined with ours.⁷

One listener review indicates the clear call to action that the Lady Don’t Take No! podcast inspires:

Similarly, Kelly Hayes’ Movement Memos podcast describes itself as “[a]n ongoing call to action for movement work and mutual aid efforts around the country. Hayes connects with activists, journalists and others on the front lines to break down what’s happening in various struggles and what listeners can do to help.”⁸ Speaking about the rationale for her podcast as a guest on an episode of Alicia Garza’s podcast Lady Don’t Take No!, Hayes provides the following insight:

HAYES: Well, you know, I got into journalism like quite by accident because we weren’t getting the kind of coverage that told our stories. When I would see amazing protests happen in the street and then I would read the newspaper the next day and it was just dreadful, so I started a blog and I started doing my own coverage of what was happening with movements and protests and overtime wound up working at Truthout and also managed to wind up contributing to the anthology…

Truthout has been really great to me. I started as a paid intern wound up having a fellowship and eventually became a union staff member and I was just doing contributing writing and working in social media and last year my supervisor came to me and asked me if I wanted to develop a podcast for Truthout and I almost said no because I was very comfortable with the job that I had and I had a schedule that I knew I could manage with the organizing work that I do. And I just… I’m not accustomed to taking on things that I don’t feel like I even know how to do and I didn’t like. I’m still making it up as I go along with the podcast. That’s how this goes, just so our listeners know this. But the reason I said yes is for one thing it’s hard to turn down a bullhorn, you know, that’s what social media is to me in general, that’s why I cultivated the presence that I did. It really just allows me to deliver words and information to a broader section of folk, and like, what organizer doesn’t want that.

But in terms of the way that the show works and its content, it’s actually all derived from an idea that Lauren Walker, who’s an amazing Black woman illustrator who works at Truthout, and I had a couple years ago for a zine that we wanted to create. We wanted to create a zine called Movement Memos that would have sort of each month kind of stories from the front lines and tidbits that organizers doing work on issues wanted people to understand about what was happening with their work.

And you know after Trump got elected, it just seemed really important to me because in part once I started studying fascism, I really developed a new respect for all the socialist newspapers and all the folks that folks tend to make fun of them. They’re at protests they’re giving out their newspapers, but I really began to understand the revolutionary importance of that and that a lot of the early resistance work in France, it was all just newspapers, it was people creating, you know, records of dissent and telling those stories and so I liked the idea of coming up with a zine that, you know, had that sort of our spin on that. But, you know, life is busy we just never managed to make it happen because crisis after crisis kept getting in the way so I’ve tried to translate that idea into this audio format.⁹

Here Hayes specifically links her podcast to the revolutionary impact of socialist newspapers, analogizing the intimate connection between socialist newspapers and revolutionary action to the possibilities for podcasting. This is significant because socialist newspapers have been broadly understood by activists as fundamental to effective organizing and movement building. John Percy, writing for Redflag, a web publication of the Socialist Alternative, notes:

Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin drummed into his supporters in “Where to Begin?,” written in 1901, the role of the newspaper as “scaffolding” in building an organisation: “The role of a newspaper … is not limited solely to the dissemination of ideas, to political education, and to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator; it is also a collective organiser. In this last respect it may be likened to the scaffolding round a building under construction, which marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, enabling them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour.”¹⁰

What Hayes is effectively signaling is the power of her podcast as a “collective agitator.”

There are significant examples of “collective agitation” in the Movement Memos podcast. In an episode entitled “Don’t Fawn over Biden: Fight Neoliberalism,” Hayes provides more concrete strategic imperatives, urging activists to eschew gratitude for the Democratic party’s electoral victory over Trumpian neofascism, to remain aware of the way in which both dominant political parties collaborate to further the interests of the wealthy, and to remain focused on and organized around the larger perils of neoliberalism:

HAYES: We’re back after a two-week break and a lot has happened, in the last few days alone. Biden officially won the Electoral College vote on Monday, doses of the Pfizer vaccine are being administered to health care workers, and there has been a frenzy of controversy about Biden’s cabinet picks. The centrist position on Biden’s cabinet has been that because Trump was a fascist nightmare, we should completely submit to the whims of the new administration – even though Trump’s disastrous actions mean we have more at stake than ever. We are experiencing an era of collapse. That means struggle and reorganization are inevitable. The question is, who decides what that reorganization looks like, and who benefits?

Under Trumpism, we were faced with the threat of total domination. Our ability to affect policy was being seized by force.

Under Biden, we are expected to surrender our political will to the establishment out of sheer gratitude.

Now that the Electoral College has affirmed that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States, people are counting the days until we escape from Trump. And while I, too, cannot wait to be free of that man, I also understand what awaits us.

As we have seen under presidents like Clinton and Obama, neoliberalism consolidates resources through privatization, and touts “free market” solutions to social and economic problems. Impoverished people are ground under to ensure the maintenance of profit. Liberal ideas and concerns are touted while government resources that could address those concerns are eliminated, in favor of private contracts.

As Tyler Walicek wrote in Truthout this week, “Biden’s appointments have so far demonstrated their formidable prowess in expertly facilitating drone killings (Avril Haines and Michael Morrell), skillfully turning the screws of the deportation machine (Cecilia Muñoz) and promulgating investor-friendly non-solutions to climate change (John Kerry) with consummate professionalism. (Less professional, perhaps, is austerity advocate and faux-progressive think-tank head Neera Tanden.)”

Neoliberals preach about the free market, but as Quinn Slobodian wrote in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, “free” is a poor descriptor in this case, because neoliberalism actually seeks to “encase” economic structures and mechanisms, to make them dominant and nonnegotiable. These objectives create a damning bipartisan overlap between neoliberalism and some of the most odious financial objectives of the right-wing.

So we know that both parties serve the rich and have wrought horrible violence through acts of war, austerity, and the prison industrial complex on many fronts. So many people seem to have taken the position that we should simply enjoy the relief of the transition, and wait until our disenchantment catches up with us. This is a dangerous perspective because we are living in catastrophic times. COVID-19 is now killing one person in the United States per minute and the death toll has topped 300,000. Next year, 30 to 40 million people will be vulnerable to eviction. In a normal year, about 3.6 million eviction cases are filed. We have so much at stake, and everything about the history of this government, including the Obama administration, tells us that we are going to have to fight for meaningful relief.

I voted for Biden because I believe we have more of a fighting chance under neoliberalism than we did under fascism, but we are no longer faced with a choice between fascism and neoliberalism. The whole “if you criticize Biden you are helping Trump” bit has been disingenuous for weeks, but it officially died on Monday. Some may say it’s not over until Biden is sworn in, but no one really believes that criticizing Biden now could help Trump stay in the White House anymore than they’ve believed it these last few weeks. Those arguments are about silencing Biden’s critics, and they will not go away. Next we will hear that it’s too soon in his presidency to complain. Then, we will be told that we are jeopardizing the midterms with critique, and on and on.

As we have seen in the past, there will never be an acceptable time to, as people say, “hold Biden accountable.” Until now, we have been scolded and told that we are helping Trump any time we point out Biden’s terrible and alarming record – or any time we criticize how weak and useless specific initiatives sound. On COVID-19, Biden recently announced that in his first 100 days, everyone would be wearing masks, children would be back in schools and 100 million vaccinations would be distributed. Those vaccines had already been ordered under the Trump administration, Trump himself has been pushing to reopen schools for months, and masks are already universally recommended. But those of us who complained that Biden, who could take comprehensive action to stop the spread, is offering us so little, were scolded yet again.

Members of the establishment will continue to portray anything but total submission as ingratitude. They will hold Biden up as a savior worthy of exaltation. They will continue to depict all dissent as betrayal, and to demand thank yous from the very people who will suffer under Biden’s austerity. But the establishment did not deliver us from Trumpism. Voters did that. Many of us even showed up at the polls in-person, risking our lives to cast a ballot against Trump, despite loathing Biden. To declare we must surrender our political will now, or simply make polite, easy-to-ignore demands, of people who have publicly emphasized that they will ignore us, is just another brand of domination. But that is the governance we can expect under Biden.¹¹

Here Hayes articulates the need for continued action, insisting that the 2020 victory of neoliberalism over neofascism demands the same level of vigilance and action that activists mustered in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Her final words in this excerpt, including the sentence “To declare we must surrender our political will now, or simply make polite, easy-to-ignore demands, of people who have publicly emphasized that they will ignore us, is just another brand of domination,”¹² read as if she were standing among marchers with a bullhorn, urging them forward and providing that spark and energy that we expect from movement leaders and agitators.

In the spirit of Alicia Garza’s Lady Don’t Take No!, civil rights activist and school administrator DeRay McKesson hosts Pod Save the People on Crooked Media. McKesson offers a standard interview format and engages activists, establishment politicians, and political candidates in social justice discussions. Advertising his podcast as one centered on activism, social justice, culture, and politics,

DeRay Mckesson explores news, culture, social justice, and politics with Sam Sinyangwe, Kaya Henderson, and De’Ara Balenger. They offer a unique take on the news, with a special focus on overlooked stories and topics that often impact people of color. There’s also a weekly one-on-one interview with DeRay and special guests, from singer/songwriter John Legend to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The experts, influencers, and diverse local and national leaders who come on the show go deep on social, political, and cultural issues.¹³

Exemplary programs include his 2018 interview with Ivan Bates, the candidate for the position of state attorney in Baltimore, in which McKesson challenged Bates on how substantive police reform could occur from within the system and how someone with a background as a prosecutor could make an impact. While much of McKesson’s material involves interviews with activists and politicians, his insistence on providing clear strategies for activists makes Pod Save the People more of a praxis-centered podcast than one that focuses merely on critique or counter-narrative production. In a guest appearance on a June 1, 2020 episode of Pod Save America that was hosted by Jon Favreau and entitled “How to ACTUALLY Stop Police Violence,” McKesson elaborated specific strategies to stop police violence.

MCKESSON: When we think about the solutions, it’s two big buckets. The first bucket has reduced the power of the police, right? We can manage how much power they have, how they use force, that’s one bucket – and the second bucket is to shrink the role of the police… its use of force policies and police union contracts…¹⁴

The value of McKesson’s work in the podcasting space is that, as an activist, he provides clear next steps for activists engaged in the struggle. Much of what McKesson elaborated on Pod Save America was consistent with the agenda and prerogatives of the Black Lives Matter movement, and thus he serves as another voice from the field. McKesson goes on to further discuss the role that police unions play in shielding officers from accountability:

MCKESSON: When we look at what changed before officers can unionize and after, is that they kill more people. That is literally the effect, and it’s because the police unions. Their sole purpose is to protect officers from accountability.

FAVREAU: DeRay, you were telling me the other day there’s a bill in the House of Representatives right now that would deal with some of these union contracts in a bad way.

MCKESSON: Yes, so there’s a bill HR 1154. It’s sneaky’cuz it’s called public safety, so it technically includes firefighters and EMS [emergency medical services]. Like, it looks like it’s a bill geared toward opening up labor for people, but what it would do in a disproportionate way is allow any police department in the country that currently cannot unionize, it would allow them to unionize. It would be the single worst thing to happen in policing in the past six years. It is a policy, a choice a lot of people on the left are actually supporting, which is… well, but it is bad, so we are trying to get to as many Congress people as possible. It’s HR 1154.¹⁵

There are other examples of podcasts in this space that offer a virtual classroom with clear action strategies for activists and leaders. Rowdy Duncan works in higher education and runs an Emerging Leaders program at Phoenix College, where he is a residential faculty member. His podcast Inclusive Activism

comes from the idea that “love” is an action word. We don’t just want to be enlightened to the reality of “ism” we want to DO something about it. To get active in the community and to learn about how to keep our learning ongoing. We never want to stop learning. The purpose of the podcast is to learn and explore more with diversity and inclusion and how that relates to the concept of personal leadership. We want to learn more about how we can all be as inclusive as possible while also exploring personal leadership and how to be our best selves. I’m your host Rowdy – for all things related to the idea of inclusion as well as how you can make your team better through the opportunity of inclusive and transformational leadership. This is a place and space for a deep dive into topics that are of concern to this community. Those of us who engage in the work and are staunchly anti-“-ist.”¹⁶

In an episode entitled “Election Podcast 2020: And What are Coups and How they Work,” Duncan encouraged not only vigilance but “action” around the possibility of a right-wing, pro-Trump coup in 2020. On this point Duncan’s podcast not only provided a summation of the history of how activists have mobilized to stop antidemocratic coups but also issued a call to action just in case 2020 went awry:

DUNCAN: Election Day 2020 is almost here. In this podcast, I share a few thoughts on our local election. I talk about the need to get some food and resources together in the next few days – just in case things get wonky. I talk about the need to get your ballot physically to the ballot box or vote in person (most vote by mail is not assured to get in by now!). And I talk about what is a coup, how do coups work, and how regular people have stopped coups in the past.

I like you am hoping to see a blue wave and a Biden presidency, a Democratic senate, and a held majority in the house – but we most likely won’t know when ALL ballots are counted for several days if not a week or two – SO BE READY. And if the majority of people go for Trump and Republican control and the people vote for that legitimately – I won’t like it, but I will accept it.

However, if ANYONE stops counting votes, declares someone a winner who didn’t get the most votes, or allows someone to stay in power who didn’t win the election – this would be a COUP. In this, I talk about the steps regular people have taken over time and in history to stop attempted illegitimate power coups with nonviolent action and civil disobedience. Again, I hope this is totally not needed and was just a thought exercise.¹⁷

In another episode, one entitled “Deep Canvassing: How to Talk to Help People Reconsider Conservative Policies,” Rowdy Duncan proposed clear strategies for engaging with conservatives and opening alternative perspectives for their benefit. His strategies are based on the belief, commonly held by left-wing activists, that respectful dialogue and engagement can change hearts, minds, and opinions. The new perspectives not only hark back to the prerogatives of podcasts that provide interrogation, critique, and counter-narratives; they also suggest that dialogic engagement in potentially hostile environments is in and of itself a form of action:

DUNCAN: Deep canvassing stems from a simple idea; you can change minds through conversations. Canvassers use this method to engage voters in a conversation and get them to a mutual understanding by providing alternative perspectives. It is a two-way conversation between canvassers and voters where voters are asked to share their personal experiences around the issue being discussed.

The strategy lays out:

• Share your experience and get the conversation started.
• Listen to voters, get them thinking and sharing.
• Highlight common humanity.

We will talk about what it is, how to use it, when it goes well and when it doesn’t.

We will also use it to unpack these ideas:

• Life is too stressful – let’s vote for boring.
• Tax reform said we were to average 4K back – did you get it – yeah me neither!
• The efforts for [COVID] stimulus for real people – who pushed that?
• Do you feel safer or more scared now – with all the current racial rhetoric? (NOTE this is not about if he is racist or not – it’s about feeling safe and who is responsible.)
• How are you feeling about COVID-19, are we getting better or worse? If getting better, who is pushing the better efforts?
• If concerned about debt – who is really better at debt?
• How do you feel about global perspective?
• Who has a plan for the economy and who just hopes it gets better because it is “now open”?
• Who is honest with us and is willing to tell us the bad news we need to hear?
• Name one way your life is better now?¹⁸

Rebel Steps, created by Brooklyn-based sisters Amy and Liz, is similarly focused on radical praxis for people who want to take the step from education to action. Unlike many podcasts in this space that are centered on broader strategic and policy initiatives, Rebel Steps focuses on a kind of Activism 101, as it deals with how to lead a march, how to deal with being arrested, and how to deal with police violence during a march. Amy and Liz write:

Rebel Steps is a podcast for anyone who wants to take political action and doesn’t know where to get started. It guides listeners through actions that go beyond protesting and calling your representatives. Season 1 offers insights into how individuals can join movements. Season 2 focuses on the ways people can work together to build these movements. We’ve focused on three goals: taking action, building skills, and onboarding. Each episode guides you through taking a specific action or getting involved in a new way.¹⁹

In an episode entitled “Street Action 2 (Take It to the Streets),” Liz provides instructions on marching, doing a basic eye flush after being hit with police pepper spray, and ways to deal with arrest. With respect to strategies for dealing with arrest, Liz explains:

LIZ: You know I would never advise anybody to do anything illegal. It can be quite dangerous, you’re dealing potentially with armed individuals who are doing the arresting. They generally don’t arrest people by themselves. It’s not like one cop is doing this. It’s usually a group of them.

But I will say that there’s more of us than there are of them. What we are trying to do often is draw a moral distinction between their behavior and our behavior, and if we outnumber them and people don’t back off, police are trying to retreat. Police do not like it when crowds of people or individuals get behind them, so if they fear any possibility of being surrounded, they’re going to abandon their police vehicles, they’re going to move back, they’re going to regroup. So there are moments in those spaces where you can potentially protect your people.

All these things are a risk, and police do try to target quote-unquote leaders. In their theory, if they can remove the commanding officers of the movement, as if we had any, then the movement falls apart. In a lot of our social movements we are grassroots organizing, we believe that a leader is someone who creates more leaders, so if we can disperse leadership then they can’t arrest us all, they can’t stop the action from happening. The more dispersible leadership, I think the less you’re going to see targeting of individuals who are perceived by the state as ringleaders.

If you see someone arrested, make sure a representative of the National Lawyers’ Guild, usually known by its acronym NLG, sees it, and make sure someone has their name and birthday. Get the arresting officer’s information. If there’s not off-site jail support to reach out to, you may need to leave the action and start the jail support process.

If you are the one being arrested, there are a couple things to remember. First, if you’re not sure what’s going on, ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says “yes,” calmly walk away, and maybe that will be the end of it. If you are under arrest, you have a right to ask why. After asking why, no matter what’s going on, don’t talk to the cops. State that you wish to remain silent and ask for a lawyer immediately. Do not say anything or sign anything without a lawyer. Cops can lie to you and trick you. You will not be doing yourself or anyone else any favors by speaking to them, even if you think you did nothing wrong.

Secondly, if you’re arrested, the cops will likely use zip ties as handcuffs, which they can make painfully tight. This can cause your hands to lose circulation and can even cause nerve damage. If your zip tie handcuffs are too tight, you can ask the cops to undo them and redo them looser. You will probably have to be persistent, but if you’re losing circulation or an acute pain, you should make them aware.²⁰

With respect to dealing with pepper spray, Liz offers the following advice:

LIZ: In the broader street medic community there are a lot of us across the country that share a lot of knowledge in various different ways and we try to spread that knowledge where we can. As street medics we sort of believe that democratizing and decentralizing medical care is part of a larger project of collective liberation and abolition. Basically, we try to arm folks where we can with as much knowledge to care for themselves and their communities as possible.

While knowing tactics for disarming tear gas canisters is one way to prepare for chemical agents, it’s also a good idea to have some knowledge of the medical way to handle them. They walked me through doing an eye rinse, but before they get into the details they started by explaining how an eye rinse works. The eye flushes that we use to treat chemical weapons are mechanical flushes like the eye flushes that are in chemistry labs. So those eye flush stations, though like bright yellow like bowls that shoot water, you know, basically we use pressurized water to force the particles of pepper spray or other chemical weapons or whatever is irritating people’s eyes out of the eyes. Pepper spray is just an irritating chemical and water, which isn’t irritating, pushes it out of people’s eyes. A lot of people seem to think eye flushes are sort of magic. Somehow people think that this substance or that substance will deactivate pepper spray, or like counteract it, or like do some like secret mystical magic. But that’s just not how it works. Eye flushes are literally just physics, like they’re not magic, they’re not even chemistry, they’re just physics. Like you have particles in people’s eyes, the water pushes the particles out of people’s eyes. That’s the reason that when we do [the] eye flushes.

We use water in sports tip bottles, so the stream has a little bit higher pressure, rather than just like pouring out water out onto people’s faces. Just because that’s the most efficient way to achieve the kind of mechanical flesh we’re looking for. I think a lot of misconceptions come from the idea that you’re doing a chemical reaction on someone’s eyes, and that just isn’t the case. You are merely washing something out.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s talk about the details of how to do an eye rinse. For an eye flush you need two things: you need a sports water bottle and you need nitrile gloves. I say nitrile rather than latex because some people are allergic to latex. You don’t want to have somebody who has just been pepper sprayed have an allergic reaction to your gloves. That makes nobody’s day better. It’s also a really good idea to practice this kind of thing with a comrade before doing it at a protest in high-pressure situations when your adrenaline’s pumping. It’s much easier to remember things that you’ve already done with your body than trying to learn new skills that you’ve just read about or like seen videos of on the fly.

So, if you see somebody’s getting pepper spray, the first thing you do is approach them, offer your help, and gain their consent. I would do that by saying something along the lines of “hey, I’m a street medic, I have water to flush your eyes, can I help you?” Make sure you don’t touch people or don’t start treatment until the person consents to it. Also remember consent is an ongoing process, so make sure to keep checking in with folks while you’re doing what you’re doing. I often narrate what I’m doing. Remember that folks who have been pepper sprayed often can’t see, and so using your voice to tell them what you’re doing, so they’re not like suddenly touched, and like, don’t expect it or like suddenly have water in their face, and don’t expect it is a really good way to keep that like active consent practice. I’ll often ask like, “okay, ready?” before I do an eye flush.

So, if the person says “yes,” if you like walk up to them say “can I help you?” and they say “yes,” then you put on your gloves. This is really important, to keep whatever’s on your hands off their face and whatever’s on their face like pepper spray off your hands. While you’re putting on your gloves make sure to ask the person if they’re wearing contacts. It’s really easy to forget this, but it’s hugely important.

An eye flush, because it’s a mechanical flush, like we talked about, can push someone’s contacts back into their eyes, and those are contacts covered in pepper spray, so that can cause some pretty serious injuries. So, it’s always important to ask people if they’re wearing contacts before flushing their eyes. If the person’s wearing contacts give them a spare glove. So, you should have more than two gloves when you’re doing this. Give them a spare glove, tell them to take the contacts out with their glove. If the person’s wearing glasses, take their glasses off and hand the glasses to the person. Protests can get really chaotic, so it’s important people always have their glasses with them because sometimes you’ll get separated from people and you really don’t want to end up with somebody’s glasses and not know where the person is. They can’t see. It’s a whole mess, so take their glasses off, hand the glasses to the person.

So, after you’ve dealt with that whole like eyewear situation, ask the person to kneel. Ideally, you want to have them put their hands under their legs, or at least keep their hands on their knees. This prevents them from rubbing their eyes and getting pepper spray everywhere. After the person is sitting is a great time to affirm consent, make sure you’re narrating what you’re doing. So, at this point, you’re going to open the person’s eyes. So, you’re going to tilt their head back and slightly to the side to the side of the first eye that you’re going to flush. Hold the eye open with your gloved fingers. Basically, you sort of pinch their eyebrow up or like pull their lower eyelid and their upper eyelid in opposite directions. You just want to pull their eye open. Their eyes are going to be really tightly closed. It’s really hard to get people’s eyes open after they’ve pepper sprayed, so you want to pull the person’s eyes open, aim your bottle of water at the bridge of their nose, and then spray a stream of water with as much pressure as possible from the inner point of their eye where the tear duct is to the outer edge. The goal is to get the pepper spray out of the person’s eyes, so you want to spray it so their head is angled slightly down, and you want to spray the water in that downward angle away from their other eye. So, then you’re going to do the same thing on the other side, so re-tilt the person’s head, open their other eye, spray the water in the other eye, and then tell the person to blink. If they still can’t see, repeat the process, tilt [the] head, hold the eye open, spray on both sides, blink until they can see. Usually… especially if somebody got hit really directly, it’s gonna take at least two or three flushes. I’ve definitely like had situations where I flush somebody’s eyes like four or five times and they’re still like, “oh my god, it hurts so much,” which is gonna happen.

Again, eye flushes aren’t magic. You can keep touching a person’s eyes, keep telling them to blink their tears, and the eye flush will drive the pepper spray out. Slowly their sight will come back. Folks who maybe got hit less directly might only take one or two flushes, but don’t get freaked out if somebody still can’t see after the first flush. Check out the show notes for a video of this process as well. Even if you’re not a street medic, you can be helpful to those around you with this skill. Knowing how to do an eye flush doesn’t make you a street medic. I totally have comrades who aren’t street medics that have done eye flushes in the street when there were no street medics around. That’s part of the reason why we teach this skill to literally everyone we can get our hands on, is because it’s a really easy skill to do.²¹

There are significant contributions in this space that are devoted to self-care and healing for activists. Kate Werning, a lead organizer for the podcast CTZNWELL: Healing Justice and, later, for the podcast We Are Irresistible, serves as a spiritual resource for community activists. Where Rebel Steps provides practical advice for dealing with arrests and police violence, Werning’s podcasts emphasize self-care and emotional healing. Werning presents her first podcast thus: “Healing Justice Podcast shares inspiring voices and practices to support movements for social change. Examples of resilience and humanity in the struggle for justice are part of the medicine we need, and this project aims to be a campfire around which we can gather to share the tales of our victories and pain, visionary ideas, and generative debates. Each week, we share a new conversation and an accompanying practice – something practical you can try to get more engaged and deepen your roots as you act.”²² Her narrative introduction to the transformed We Are Irresistible podcast reads: “We celebrate the many traditions of movement leaders, cultural workers, and spiritual teachers who remind us to embody the liberation we are pursuing. Listen to Becoming Irresistible to learn about the many rivers that led us to this vision. Together, we’re building justice movements that are expansive, vibrant, and fully alive.”²³

In addition to her second podcast, Werning has created a web resource to accompany it. Topics in this aural archive of activist self-healing practices correspond to the names of its various discussion episodes. Here are some examples: “Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm,” itself the title of a book by Kazu Haga, “Access Is Love,” the title of a project, “Practice My Inside Voice,” “Tender Masculinity,” “Sacred Work & Radical Purpose,” “Rest as Reparations,” “Thriving after Incarceration,” “Practice Claiming Our Ideology,” “People’s Medicine & Queer Magic,” and “From #MeToo to #WeConsent.” Werning draws from a broad and diverse range of movement activists who operate in healing and self-care – among them Adrienne Maree Brown, Dori Midnight, Tricia Hersey, Eroc Arroyo-Montana, and Alice Wong. Most importantly, all these activists, and especially Adrienne Maree Brown, place pleasure, self-love, and self-care at the center of their preoccupations and rank it above oppression and trauma. And, while Werning’s work does not contain traditional strategies for organizing, her emphasis on healing practices for movement activists provides much-needed emotional medicine for the movement, protecting against burnout and offering inspiration for reinvigoration and re-commitment.

In a YouTube episode of her #MindfulMondays programme that dates from before the 2016 general election, Kate Werning (host of the Healing Justice podcast) led her listeners through a pre-election meditation, focusing on one singular principle, “we’re in it for the long haul,” which is drawn from the seven principles elaborated on her archive of “powerful practices. Werning asks, “what would it look like for us to create a political space that is defined by our intention of taking care of one another?”²⁴

WERNING: We are exactly 15 days away from election day so not tomorrow not the next Tuesday but the next is voting day, November eighth, and those 15 days in my mind right now seem like a short and relieving countdown and at the same time really a little bit of an eternity for an election that I’m really ready for it to be over, really ready. And this morning we’re going to talk a little bit about the principles of our vote, well… campaign. For those of you who are able to access the chat box on your computer you can click the link that I’m sharing in the chat box there, but for those who can’t see them, there’s one principle in particular that we’re going to be looking at this morning and it’s called “We’re In It For The Long Haul.”

And as an organizer, this is my favorite principle. It’s the seventh out of seven that have been really guiding us as we have designed and co-engineered this vote, well… campaign, with practitioners across the country and have really asked the critical question of what would it look like for us to create a political space that is defined by our intention of taking care of one another. And what we’ve really heard and learned through that conversation is that that space looks and feels and is guided by some really different values then [sic] sort of the governing culture of politics and the state of our unequaled democracy currently in the United States. And so, as I have been for months traveling around the country talking to tons and tons of people about this election, being highly motivated to make change and create impact and help guide our society in the direction of creating the conditions of well-being for all people, I find myself sort of in this kind of spectrum of both wanting to take immediate action and really make an impact and be responsible to the needs that are arising in our country that have very real consequences for folks and also to lean back and recognize this moment in history, in context.

In the long haul of what it’s going to take, this election will not help us avert all disaster, but that really we’re in a moment that is sort of like an encapsulation or a symbol of the bigger moment of what’s been happening under the surface for a long time and will continue to unfold. And so I actually find a lot of relief in this concept of long history and long haul and being honest with myself that creating the type of world that we deserve is a longer than a lifetime project and that our energy now is important but everything isn’t on me in the next 15 days to deliver that result, right, but it is on me to ask myself how can I be showing up well now so with a commitment to that long haul.

I want to encourage you to take whatever posture is most comfortable for you and will sort of be focusing this morning on a sense of stability so I want to invite you to find and create that sense of stability in your own body.²⁵

Another unique voice in this space of activist healing is GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp. With over 1 million subscribers, this podcast serves as the voice of “a national health movement that activates thousands of Black women to be change-makers in their lives and communities.”²⁶ Hosts Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison feature an “epic 21-day walking meditation series to remember where we came from and to gather strength for the road ahead. We celebrate Black stories and the lessons of our ancestors to help guide us through these uncertain times. Each episode is a conversation on learning, living, and elevating to our highest self with guidance from lessons of the past.”²⁷ GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp integrates Black women’s health and exercise with historical lessons from prior movements and the decolonizing activity of taking back the streets. Dixon and Garrison’s podcast is often recorded during their walking meditations, and one of the few podcasts that we surveyed that is actually recorded in the streets and in the midst of activity. Morgan Dixon explains the movement’s health, educational, and political initiatives:

DIXON: Right now, it’s Saturday morning. We call it superhero Saturday and all across the country there are thousands of black women and girls who are walking in their neighborhood parks who are occupying those marks who are reclaiming the streets in their neighborhoods right now. Merritt Park in Oakland right now and Prospect Park in Brooklyn right now. They have their sneakers on. I have my superhero blue shoes on. They are walking for absolute healing to inspire their daughters and to reclaim the streets of their neighborhoods it’s called GirlTrek. GirlTrek is a national health movement of thousands of black women who, in the words of the legendary Civil Rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, are sick and tired of being sick and tired.²⁸

Conclusions

Although praxis-oriented podcasts are comparatively rare in the landscape of decolonizing podcasting, the few that exist provide helpful, practical, spiritual instruction and encouragement for movement activists. The dearth of praxis-based podcasts simultaneously reveals the potential and the limits of this space. On the one hand, the existence of praxis-based podcasts demonstrates the fulfillment of the third phase of decolonization, which is reminiscent of revolutionary radio. On the other hand, the dearth of praxis-based podcasts betrays a reluctance to use this space as a vehicle for direct confrontation with power structures.