Parenting Is Political

Today’s In the Den episode is one that cuts right to the heart of our Mama Dragons mission — we’re diving into the truth that parenting is political. Whether we like it or not, the choices we make as parents, how we show up for our kids, what we teach them, how we advocate for them, all ripple out into the world around us. When you’re parenting queer kids, those ripples can have a far reach and significant impact. Sara talks with special guest Jasmine Banks about the importance of nurturing a community committed to collective growth and support, because raising children is to actively participate in societal change, and the way we parent today directly influences the world our children will inherit tomorrow. 

Special Guest: Jasmine Banks

Jasmine Banks (she/her) has more than 10 years of progressive advocacy, movement building, and organizing experience. She spent the last five years dedicated to leading an intervention campaign, UnKoch My Campus, addressing the impact of far-right billionaires leveraging their philanthropic donations in higher education to erode democracy. During the campaigns she organized multiple campuses, coalitions, and provided movement support to hundreds of students, educators, and community activists. Jasmine has traveled to a number of higher ed institutions to speak with students and faculty about donor transparency and academic freedom. She was most recently honored to give a keynote for the Higher Education division of the American Federation of Teachers. Jasmine is also a former licensed therapist, Chief Marketing Officer, and small business owner.

Links from the Show:

• Generation Common Good: https://generationcommongood.org/ 
• Parenting Is Political podcast: https://www.parentingispolitical.org/episodes 
• Join Mama Dragons here: www.mamadragons.org 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Today’s episode is one that cuts right to the heart of our Mama Dragons mission because we are diving into the very real truth that Parenting is Political. Whether we like it or not, the choices we make as parents — how we show up for our kids, what we teach them, how we advocate for them — all of those choices ripple out into the world around us. And when you’re parenting queer kids, those ripples can have a far reach and significant impact.

And joining us today  in the den today is the brilliant Jasmine Banks, host of the Parenting is Political podcast and founder of Generation Common Good. Some of you might know Jasmine from the Parent Advocacy 101 training she recently led on our new Mighty Networks platform which I heard went really well. And we’re so lucky to have had her leading that conversation for us. But for those of you that don’t know Jasmine, she is a powerhouse organizer, a truth-teller, a guide for those of us trying to parent with radical love and deep accountability. She brings a wealth of insight on what it means to raise children who are not only safe but also seen, empowered, and free.

In her work with Generation Common Good, Jasmine champions the importance of nurturing a community committed to collective growth and support. She believes that to raise children is to actively participate in societal change. And her work emphasizes that the way that we parent today directly influences the world our children will inherit tomorrow. Jasmine is also the powerful parent of a brilliant trans daughter. We are so lucky to have her with us. Jasmine, welcome to In the Den!

JASMINE: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad I got the chance to be here.

SARA: Me too. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you. As I’ve been reading about all of your work and the organization and listening to some of the podcasts, this is a topic that is very near and dear to my own personal heart and I know will resonate with many in our Mama Dragons community. But I kind of want to start at the very beginning and hear from you, what does this phrase, this term “Parenting is Political” mean to you and what was it that made you decide to start the podcast?

JASMINE: Well, the phrase comes from a wonderful queer elder who was a feminist theorist, from the 60’s to the 80’s where a lot of the queer feminist liberation movements were taking shape, post-civil rights work, or on the heels of civil rights. This phrase of, “The personal is political.” So much about how we’ve organized ourself, our economic structures, our governance structures, really purports to blame the individual for whatever it is, whether you’re living paycheck to paycheck, whether you’ve got a child with disabilities that can’t get accommodations in school, whether your even having marital struggle because of the unshared domestic labor that has been cut across gender. We’re given this idea within the American myth-making process that, if those struggles are happening, all you need to be doing is engaging in self-improvement. Think about wellness coaches. Think about this, sort of, early aughts even to know seeking therapy and self-improvement and individual transformation. And those are valuable tools and tactics along the way. But there’s a bigger story that’s being missed whenever we hyper focus on the individual or individual families. And that bigger picture is that there’s a history and a tradition of building out things in society for wealthy, white, Christian, land-owning families that leave poor, working-class, Appalachians, white folks who are middle or lower class, Native American, African American, immigrant families, right, it leaves us out of that story. And so Parenting in Political was created as a narrative change effort as well as a cultural organizing resource to say, “Hey, millennial and younger parents – those of us who are being born or were in the first five to ten years of life with Reagan, post-Reagan – a lot of these economic realities, a lot of these governance realities, the ways that corporations have grown and become so massive, they’re actually contributing to a lot of our struggle and that we can have collective solutions and build power from the bottom up to stop their impact on us, the environment, and on the future generations.

SARA: That’s great. That’s beautiful. And I think that really will hit a lot of people particularly in this political moment that we find ourselves in and those of us that are raising queer kids. I know in your work, and also in your work with Generation Common Good – which we’re going to talk about in a moment – but I know you talk a lot about the community and “The Collective.” And can you tell us a little more about the role that community plays in this vision and understanding of political parenting?

JASMINE: Well, you’re going to be like, “Jasmine, this was not supposed to be an anti-Reagan podcast” And this isn’t about partisan, this is just historical reality, right?

SARA: Fair. Yes. Absolutely.

JASMINE: With Raegan and his administration, there was a fellow who did a lot of policy development that impacts millennial and younger parents presently. His name is Patrick Moynihan and that’s where you get these tropes of the welfare queen or the Black family that needs to have a government intervention because all the fathers are gone – a way to hide the fact that they had manufactured a war on Black men to incarcerate them. And so all of these layers that are about the outcome post-Raegan start to emerge in the context of the personal and the political and understanding that it was literally by design. Like, if you go back in the Library of Congress and you look at Senate and Congressional hearings, these were strategies that were being developed that really, really impact us. And then when you get closer and closer away or toward marginalized identities – whether it’s being a single mom, whether it’s being a dad who has lost a spouse and is dealing with a kid with disabilities, whatever these particularities that happen to us – moves us further and further away from this thing that they call The Nuclear Family Model, which was you had a husband, you had a wife, you had 2.5 kids, a picket fence, and a cat and a dog. And you always had dinner around the table and it was always 9 to 5. It was this very “Leave it to Beaver” kind of thing. But what we know historically and even globally, when we take out the Western perspective, the Nuclear Family is a fairly new invention. Even white, Christian, working-class people did not have nuclear family models with just a father and a mother. They had grandparents that lived with them. They had deep community roots. And so when we talk about the individual Nuclear Family Model that purports that, one, there’s a bunch of invisible labor. Who’s actually cleaning the house all the time? Who’s actually taking care of the kids? There’s a lot of layers to that. But that it just never was true. Most of us had a Mema and Papa who took care of us. And our parents couldn’t afford daycare from 8:00 to whenever. And so going back to old technology, what we knew from before, which was a community, which was a collective, and it could have been biological in nature but most of the time it wasn’t. It was neighbors getting together. It was folks from the Masonic lodge or the bowling league becoming community. It was teachers who outside of the 9:00 to 5:00 school schedule were still running kids' places when we allowed teachers to do such things because we weren’t worried about risk, right? So there was this period of time, in the construction of The Nuclear Family Model post-Raegan where we really needed each other in a way that we forget because of how this myth-making happens through celebrity culture and other mechanisms that parenting is political, Generation Common Good, and all the other work that I do in the world calls us back into that kind of commitment of understanding that most of us – especially when you think about the divorce rate which is like 53% in this country – most of us are not living in households with one cis/heterosexual man and one cis/heterosexual woman who shut the work computer off or come back from work exactly at 5:00 and kind of go through this little story land version of what family actually is versus what we need it to be and what it has been and is not being named.

SARA: Thank you for that. It also makes me think of the added layer of the gendered roles and the sort of second-wave feminism and the very shaming way our culture really tries to prevent people from moving and creating those larger communities and collectives.

JASMINE: Right. And the last thing I’ll say is I know it’s so popular right now to talk about Trad wives and traditional whatever, and I don’t have any bad blood with that. I consider myself a very traditional parent. If you come to my home, my children will start setting the table at around 5:30 knowing that I have been cooking dinner or I’ve got something ready. And we sit down family-style and serve one another and say what we’re grateful for. That’s a family tradition. That is a traditional way to hold yourself. I think, however, what we have done when we’ve said “Traditional” Or we’ve used these different words, they’re euphemisms for the “Right” family, the “White” family, the “Wealthy” family, the family with the right religion or the right gender. And so we have to get really clear about not leaning into these things that ask us to imagine this whole other version of something just based on a singular word. And we see that successfully happening with Christian Nationalist movements attack on Critical Race Theory or DEI. When I say those things, that brings up images immediately. Just like if I say, “Leave it to Beaver,” That brings up white people with blond hair at a table, right?

SARA: Right.

JASMINE: In a suburban neighborhood. So we are all susceptible to that kind of mis- and dis-information and propaganda. And part of the way that we take the poison out of it is start saying what we mean and saying it regularly through narrative and storytelling. And then just being authentic and visible.

SARA: I love that. I know you’ve done this kind of work for a long time. You’ve been in organizing spaces your whole life, your whole career doing extraordinary work. But I am curious if you have a story or a moment in your own personal parenting journey where you really noticed how political it actually was.

JASMINE: Oh. There are countless, countless ones. I think one of my very first super vulnerable experiences that taught me how closely connected the criminality that is placed on – particularly on pregnant and birthing people of color. I remember going to the clinic and I was a  straight-edge kid. For the folks that don’t know what that is, it’s like a sector of punk rock and alternative culture where you’re punk rock. You’re going to the rock shows. You’re probably covered in safety pins and studded metal and black leather. But you don’t drink. You don’t smoke, and you’re straight edge. I was my friend’s designated driver. And it was, like, cool. Nancy Raegon taught me not to do drugs and that seems like a good idea still, so I’m not going to do that. But I want to hang out with you guys. But I have always had this very clear, I was not religiously conservative, but personally conservative around certain things because of my upbringing with my father who came back from Vietnam with severe alcohol and drug misuse disorder to try and cope with PTSD. And my doctors all knew that about me because they had helped me, on the psych level, deal with a lot of anxiety and I had built this treatment team. So one day, I’m meeting with my OB and my midwife and I am pregnant with Zara at the time. And they said, “Oh, you need to take a pee test.” And, “I thought I already did my diabetes. I had to do this. I had to do that.” And they go, “Oh, no. The hospital if you end up not having a home birth where you have to go requires, especially for POC people, a urine test to make sure that there’s no drugs. And I was like, “What?”

SARA: What?

JASMINE: Yeah. “You’d be surprised how many times maybe something comes up lightly positive for THC and then the baby has to be –” And I was like, “Do you tell people that that happens.” “Oh no. It’s a mandatory part of the test.” And I said, “Well, why is it specifically women of color who are pregnant?” “Oh, they’re a higher use rate.” Well, if you look up the use rate in northwest Arkansas, first of all, there are not that many women of color who are in the population to make it higher than the white pregnant women. And I also knew, because I was a clinician at the time, the majority of the people that I was seeing coming to the emergency room that I had to do psych evals on, were white women dealing with meth and other drugs that came from the rural populations. And so that was one of the first moments I was like, “Oh, it’s baked into the system.” And my rights are being violated and my privacy is being violated. And the second one was, I had had a really rough delivery with Zara and hadn’t had sleep in maybe more than 48 hours and was dealing with symptoms of psychosis. And so I checked myself in with background in reproductive justice and mental health. I was just like, “I just had a baby and I’m pretty sure I’m experiencing a layer of postpartum psychosis. I’m a little bit concerned for myself because I’ve tried to go to sleep and I can’t. I have this baby at home that I need to take care of. And the first line of questions was not, “What support do you have? When was the last time you ate? Can we run any tests to see if you’ve got any infections?” It was, “Do you want to kill your baby?”

SARA: Oh my God.

JASMINE: And can you imagine, being someone who doesn’t have a background in psychology or psychiatry who wasn’t as lucid as I was in that little blip of a moment and being like, “Well, I don’t know. Sometimes there are intrusive thoughts.” That becomes criminal, right? And another example of how, within the first month of my child being on this planet, the medical industrial complex was geared to look at me as this predatory threat, even to my own child, even if I was the one initiating a potential in-hospital stay because I couldn’t get on top of not getting rest and everything that was happening to me with my postpartum depression. And that is also, I had a level of educational privilege that if a young black mom who had no support didn’t, a case worker could easily push. So it’s even the kind of questions we ask certain vulnerable populations demonstrate on the most micro of levels that you think is benign. A mom doing the right thing, to be like, “I’m not sleeping. I’m starting to feel a little panicky and delusional. I probably need help that is beyond what my family can provide me. I’m making the right choice.” Only to end up in some kind of psychiatric incarceration because you answered a question wrong. And so those are two pretty intense. But they’re just tiny drops in the bucket in comparison.

SARA: Yeah. Very intense and very troubling and also a really good example of that next layer of oppression that keeps people, then, from accessing community. Right. There’s more shame there. There’s more prevention of – “Don’t tell anybody what’s happening with you. Don’t reach out for support because it might very well be criminalized.”

JASMINE: Right. And it’s an example of how we don’t need to talk about – though it is a real thing. It’s a real social paradigm that happens called implicit bias – but how that person didn’t have to have an implicit bias against me racially. It was baked into the structure and system. And so when the structure and system is a medical industrialized hospital that cares more about mitigating risk and maximizing profit instead of centering care, it doesn’t matter your race. It could’ve been a black woman asking me that question.

SARA: Right.

JASMINE: We do – I’m not saying that individual and interpersonal racism doesn’t exist, it does – but in that instance, this is about us, from the bottom up, understanding these systems were designed for wealth accumulation and to avoid risk and to maximize all profit at sometimes the cost of just being gentle and kind in a woman’s most sensitive moment which is the first year of her child’s life. And that’s why we start doing things like taking collective action, advocating for policy that centers the baby and the mother – especially those of us who have high maternal mortality rates. And that’s not DEI. That’s not culture war. That’s building a society of care and love and nurturing.

SARA: Yeah. So when you think about this built-in systemic oppression and racism that you’ve described to us in your own identity and lived experience. How do you navigate conversations about race and gender and queerness with your children? And I ask very personally because I know there are a lot of parents in our Mama Dragons community that struggle very much with those conversations in this broader context.

JASMINE: I mean, I think it’s shaped by what’s developmentally appropriate, always. There are conversations you can have with a three to five-year-old that is not making them afraid or already preloading bias or hypervigilance, but can help them understand that there are groups of people who are taught to be treated in ways that are different just because of how they look or who they are. And then you scale up from there. In the very early, much earlier years of my critical consciousness development, or me just sort of coming online to the awareness of “Okay. Wait a second. That person is treating me different. But did I do something? I didn’t do something? Oh, they called that name. Well, that’s definitely about race, right?” In my own consciousness and development, I started with interpersonal change. If we can just teach everyone not to be racist, it’ll be better. And that is a part of it is we do have to talk about individual personal bias and prejudice. But beyond that, I encourage parents to try and quickly move out of that phase because that phase, people are always going to have a prejudice and bias. Hate is going to exist and it has existed as long as we have been a species. And to move from this one-to-one hyperfocus, that if we can just get people to use the right term for the person of color, we can get people to not touch Black people’s hair or all these reformist – I call it, my grandma used to say, “Puttin’ lipstick on a pig, at the end of the day, it’s still a hog.” And so move from that very reformist, very liberal that doesn’t really change dynamics into saying, “Well, racial justice or racism starts on a structural and systemic level, from paving over pools where Black people were allowed to swim and integrate to rebuilding towns to create highways through Black neighborhoods instead of revitalizing Black culture or native culture or immigrant epicenters like Chinatown and other places. So I know that’s kind of like a high-level philosophic conversation or answer. But young people are born inherently understanding that they are equal and that they need to coregulate with other babies. And they do discriminate in the sense that they can tell a difference. They can tell there is physical difference. They don’t, however, organize the person who has a physical difference as an outgroup member until they’re taught to do that. And that is a really important delineation that no one raises a white supremacist by accident. Either you are exposing them to rhetoric or beliefs or myths that help reify the belief of white superiority or white exceptionality, or you’re designing a life in which they don’t have contact with other people of color. And as they don’t have contact, they also don’t develop an appreciation for the diversity of how other cultures live their life and the kind of curiosity instead of judgment. So it really is about how, in many ways unfortunately – and I have lots of family members who are people of faith and religious – unfortunately, Christian Evangelicalism has been a pathway for reifying these us-versus-them belief systems, the sinner and the saint, those who need to be redeemed plus those who have been chosen and holy. And so those stories kind of morph and they land in certain sites, whether it’s gender, whether it’s class, whether it's race. And then they’re lived into. And we create the material process of living into them as though we should all be living in the imagination of a white, Christian Evangelical.

SARA: Yeah. That is really helpful. Along the same line, I know that in families who want to have these conversations and are actively trying to have them, there’s always a little bit of that messaging in terms of “How do I balance protecting my child from harm with preparing them for the world as it is, especially marginalized kids?” I mean, I think of just the small microcosm of my own story, some really terrible anti-trans bill passed here in Idaho or the Texas one when the Texas bill passed that, like it was child abuse to support your trans kiddo, and that executive order. And I was just a mess and didn’t talk about it with my kiddo immediately who is an older teenager. And then, she raised it. And it was that moment of like, “ Oh, right. You are connected to the outside world. You are understanding and reading these things. But my parent’s heart just wanted to protect her from that. How do you talk about that and balance?

JASMINE: I come from a long line of African American women that don’t pull punches. And so I’m an attachment parent. I’m kind of like a mixed bag, an amalgamation of all kinds of different parenting styles. But about this, I tend to be a little bit more sober-minded and pragmatic. My kids grew up hearing stories from their great-grandmother, my grandmother about her brother being lynched right in front of her just because he gave a pie to a white woman. And that’s not an unusual story for African American kids. And then we have Native American family members who have just been disappeared or disappeared. And that’s a part of our family story as well. So when we approach these conversations, it’s just like more of the same. And we have to remind our kids that they come from a long line of European immigrants and native folks and African American folks that fought to survive and be here. And that they’re grandmother and great-grandmother and others did actually face far worse. Jim Crow, post-enslavement realities were horrific and continue to be in some parts of our legacies. So I think that kind of sets them apart. But to your point, parents who don’t have that cultural norm of sitting with elders who tell these really awful stories but say, “We can’t sugar coat it for you because there are eight and nine-year-old African American kids still facing these realities today.” If you don’t have that family tradition of oral history, transmutation, I think you have to understand that if you’re not creating those traditions and those learning circles for your loved one, that somewhere else in the world is especially if they have access to technology. And I think that it’s important to root into stories like how African American folks have showed up for Asian American folks during Japanese internment camps. How working class white people and quakers and the UUs were a part of housing and sheltering formerly enslaved folks. At every moment where we had a blight on our collective history as Americans, we have evidence that people fought fascism and authoritarianism and pure hate and rose to the occasion to be people of courage and moral clarity. So I think you just have to balance it. I don’t think you linger on the violence and the awfulness of it. You say it’s real and here’s what could come from it. And there are people who will die as a result of it. I think young people are actually far more capable of processing these things and staying with the complexity than what we give them credit for. And so naming it, while also giving so many examples of who they can be on the freedom side of things, is really critical. And they usually make that choice.

SARA: That’s beautiful. I appreciate you balancing the “Be honest and clear” – and I hear the need for that especially in this moment right now when there are just so many attacks coming at people from so many different places from our federal government – But also shore that up with example of where people have worked for good, helped each other, protected each other, that community care that you were talking about earlier.

JASMINE: And I think the unnamed need or concern that particularly a lot of white women or upper class Black families that came through great migration and went to HBCU and did all of the pulling themselves up by the boot strap that any of them could have done in that time is that we fought for this level of innocence and insolation from these horrors. And we don’t want to talk about it. I think that’s the immigrant, African American, Native American, those of us who have got some kind of class mobility. And then, I think for a lot of white folks who are just becoming politicized in their consciousness about how these things are so awful, I think there’s a myth of white children’s innocence and protecting and insulating their child-like innocence that actually is a part of avoiding the responsibility of teaching young children who have been racialized as white that you weren’t always white. You’re probably of European descent. Here are your actual people. Here’s what they survived to bring you to this moment and that their black and brown peers or cohorts, they’re not afforded that same kind of innocence. Not to make the young child responsible for it, but to help them understand how the world is operating around them and that they’re going to be presumed innocent or insulated from certain things that the young girl in Texas who died by suicide because her peers were telling her they were going to get ICE on her dad. That’s not a reality for her siblings. And so part of our responsibility if we’re going to say we’re part of humanity is not insulating or buffering or choosing to turn away when those things happen. Because it all belongs to us.

SARA: Yes. Thank you. That is beautiful and helpful and I think inspiring. It inspires me to think about how I might talk to my kids differently in this moment and keep talking. It’s always an ongoing conversation.

JASMINE: Yep.

SARA: Do you ever hear from folks when you’re doing these trainings and workshops and when you’re leading in spaces the response from some parents who might say, “But I just want to keep politics out of parenting.”

JASMINE: Yeah.

SARA: What’s your response to that?

JASMINE: Constantly, I’m like, “Well, politics is doing you.”

SARA: There you go.

JASMINE: That’s the reality, whether it’s you’re now dealing with escalating climate crisis, snow vortex and flooding, record heat. That has a political dynamic to it. And it’s going to come for you in the same equal parts. You know, I love and respect a Black thinker named Fred Moten and for the purpose of this podcast, since you aren’t all explicit, he has this quote that says, “I need you to realize that the boot is also on your neck however extreme to the degree.” Right. It might be not as heavy on your neck, but it’s still there. And I think that’s part of what we have to do sometimes as people is this beautiful coping mechanism called cognitive dissonance. And it’s so necessary when it’s necessary. But I think those folks, when they ask that question or they make that statement, are engaging in a level of cognitive dissonance because if we start to peel back a little bit with their permission and get curious about their condition or their life, there will be a moment where they’re like, “Oh, yeah. That thing did happen to me.” And then you go, “Well, that was political. That was an act of class violence or that was gendered or that was a racialized moment.” And they go, “Oh, okay.” I think oftentimes the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention has done a really good job of trying to advance these talking points around non-partisanship or pluralism. But at every way that they develop their strategy, they make things inherently political in our life when we say things like we want housing, we want education for our young people, we want to be able to have one wage per person and still have a quality of life. That inherently is made political and made a platform for electing RNC or a platform for electing DNC. But their constituents are saying it across the board. The most conservative person still wants to be able to retire one day, just like the most progressive person.

SARA: Right.

JASMINE: And so that moment when someone says it in a workshop is for me an opening to be like, “Okay. We need some more political education here.” We need to get on the same level about what meaning we’re making of the word “political” and what they’re seeing. If there’s no longer a post office in their neighborhood, that’s a political thing. And so really giving them a place in the ecosystem of the freedom work that we try and get people oriented toward, it could be the post office is pissing them off tomorrow and then before you know it, they’re marching for trans rights because they understand it’s interconnected, They understand there’s a through line in being dispossessed and being thrown away and that only the wealth communities in the world get beautiful communities. They eventually get there. It’s just being gentle with them when they come with those kind of questions and concerns and trying to stay in the struggle with them and help move them along if they’re openhearted about it.

SARA: I can’t help but think in this moment, I think so many eyes are being opened to everything being so inherently political as everything is being attacked and dismantled and shifted. And it’s just everywhere, impacting every facet of our lives. It’s, to me anyway, a little bit hard to ignore.

JASMINE: Well, yeah. It’s one of those – I have called elders who have been in various movement spaces or even architects of movements just sobbing and being like, “How do I stop knowing what I know?” It’s very like the matrix. But when you get down to it, politics really is about power. It’s about power to exercise whatever it is, to make a thing happen. And it’s about who is included and how is excluded. That is the three-point of what politic is when you talk about it being political, power, how power is exercised, who gets included in deciding how it’s exercised and who gets excluded.

SARA: Yep. And that is really, sounds like, the basis that inspired the creation of Generation Common Good right there. Will you tell us a little bit about the origin story of that organization and your co-founding of it?

JASMINE: Yeah. So I had been leading a fiscally sponsored project that started inside of the climate movement. It’s called UnKoch My Campus where several students who had been in the climate, in student labor movements, in democracy movements, really started understanding that they had professors on their campus in the 2000s and mid-2000 talking about climate denial. And they were like, how is it, this is clear science. Why are they acting like this is not a real thing? And they did some diving into these professors' shared background. And it turned out that they all received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation. Charles Koch and his brother are two wealthy billionaires. Well, David is gone – And if there is a hell, I’ll just pause there – But Charles is still with us and they are the rich brother duo behind the fossil fuel industry called Koch Industries. And they are free-market libertarians that particularly after Brown vs. Board of Education were like, “Our white children shouldn’t be forced to go to school with the blacks.” And they understood that there was a swath of society that were against desegregation and were against integrating into schools, but also might support their belief system, they’re holy grail in religion, which is what they call in their religion is the free market, which is corporations ability to amass at all expense particularly private entities. And so these students discovered that this was the connection between the climate denial. And then another student discovered that there was one professor, who again had shared funding, that was literally teaching that eugenics is totally okay and a good possible solution for the future at Florida State University. And he was linked directly to white nationalists groups. His name was DeRosa. And that was some of the layers of this campaign that was created. And so I started as digital organizer and then became the executive director and worked with the co-founders and others to train students, faculty, and alumni to investigate the relationship between wealthy corporate interests giving grants to university and what kind of things were happening. During that time we discovered there were strings to some of the grant agreements where the foundation could hire and fire, where the foundation could determine what was being taught or not, and so it’s a very clear example of how private corporate interests were using undue influence. And so we did quite a few campaigns in service of academic freedom, free speech, and climate. But during COVID, like many organizations, we were like, “Oh, the contradictions and threats are now overlapping. We have shut-downs happening. We have workers rights being an issues. And then of course, George Floyd was publicly executed. And that created a reckoning. And so through that  work of intergenerational multi-class solidarity-based campaign, we realized we couldn’t just be about the very narrow issue of undue donor influence inside of higher ed, but the need to expand. Not only because it wasn't just about democracy or climate, but it was about gender justices. It was about racial justices and that, as we started pulling threads of the threat of the Koch Network, they were everywhere. They were behind the re-open protest. They funded Moms for Liberty. They funded the Moral Panic on Critical Race Theory. If you wonder why in certain states there are union busting and the quote, “Right to work” that actually undermines workers, they helped with that as well. There kept being, everywhere we turned, we are like, “They are just this octopus of awfulness.” And then when we talked to our community organizers they said, “We need a bigger vision. We need to build a bigger ecosystem. And we need a container for all of the work that we want to do on the national, state, and local levels.” And so my co-founders and I got together and created a strategy back in 2021 and then waited. Because we knew that we needed to wait to see when the conditions were right. And so in September of 2023 we started, we launched Generation Common Good and we have been in the first year and a half of building out. Excuse me, incorporated in 2023, and then we launched in 2024. So we have been at the first stage, the first iteration of building out what will be a membership-based organization that is around values and solidarity that works together across race, class, gender, and ability with the intentions of defending education as a right that when we are building our families and the state demands that we give them an education, if we’re not going to choose to home school them, we shouldn’t have one charter school choice and no public infrastructure for those young people. We know that education is a pillar of democracy because it is that place where, when you asked me earlier where to do these white young people come into contact with people of color, that’s it. That’s one of the places, one of the only places. And so preserving it, defending it, is really critical for our future if we want to actually realize what we call democracy in the United States and The West. So that’s what Generation Common Good started from and is now morphing into a really beautiful place to experiment and try and figure out how do we not just join a single-issue organization like Planned Parenthood – no disrespect. We love Planned Parenthood – but they’re doing repo rights. And if you’re like, well it’s a democracy issue, they’re like, “We’re not going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about repo rights.” The last ten, twenty years of non-profit and advocacy work, everyone siloing down and breaking themselves down into very specific one-issue area has divided our coalition in a way that has weakened us and weakened our power to actually realize true long-term change because we don’t have deep coalition. We only have surface alliances. And so Generation Common Good is intending to be one of the political homes where we can hold some deep long-term coalition work. And I’m talking like 10 to 25 year kind of campaign strategy not in a partisan way, but in a way that is the political issues we face, we want enough power to decide. And we’re going to be the ones that are hopefully helping to build the united front against those who don’t want us to participate in democracy.

SARA: That’s lovely. You have this beautiful graphic on your website – we’ll make sure to link your website in our show notes – that shows this trajectory and shows the goals in a really beautiful way for this long-term vision that I know that so many of us have been looking at the conservative, Christian right and saying, “They did that well.” And what will it look like if we organize our strategies with a longer-term goal. And I’m using my words carefully because I’m really careful that I don’t want our organizing and our political movements to suggest that we have to be like them.

JASMINE: Yeah. Good organizing is good organizing. And it’s not about endorsing an ideological stance on whatever the spectrum that you identify. In this instance, as I said before, I don’t think this is left or right organizing. I mean, this is bottom up. And the fact of the matter is the Koch Network and others that I have been a student of their work and dove deeply into the history of their 50-year strategy, they didn’t do left or right politics. They did bottom up. They did bottom up. And they did it with disinformation. They did with lying to people. They did it with undermining people, making people believe that they were for then abandoning them when it came time for their lobbyist or the actual policy implementation. People were getting bamboozled. I don’t want us to be doing that. However, bottom-up strategy organizing is always going to get the good at the end of the day. But the problem, particularly whenever folks from both the left and right establishment get involved is that it takes too long. They want to think in midterm cycles. They want to think in four-year cycles or two presidential full terms. And our community needs more than that than the boom and bust of electoralism. Not that being involved in electoral work is not critical, it is. There are incredible opportunities on the municipal, local and state level to get in there and actually make some good happen. However, our presidential cycle, our electoral – like the higher level governance positions – have been turned into this profit mill in and of themselves. And so we’re getting these celebrities who want to run the country, these folks who want to be governor because they think it’ll be a springboard to their next book or MSNBC or Fox News Show. And that’s not what governance is about. That’s not what political power is about. Political power is about contesting values. And if our values are “Care for all” then we want elected officials who reflect that. But if the values of the elected official is “Just me and my buddies get a come up.” Well, we see where that gets us. And so, again, I hope that the listeners of this will understand that there are conservative people that I have more values with than some people who identify as progressive that are just in it for their own individual benefit. And we don’t have to keep playing into this left or right game. We can start looking about like,  "what are these people trying to actually do for democracy, for people, for the planet.” And that tends to burn away the chaff from the wheat to borrow my biblical references.

SARA: Lovely.

JASMINE: I went to a private liberal Christian arts college in conservative Siloam Springs. And so I rock with a lot of the humanist-centered Christian tradition. So I hope that also comes through as well.

SARA: Well, as you’re talking and I’m looking at the graphic of your long-term impacts, I’m listening to you and you are demonstrating for us what it sounds like to meet that impact of shifting the narrative. And I was wondering if you’d talk about that a little more. How can we, perhaps regular people who aren’t deeply connected to movement spaces and community organizing, how can we take part in shifting the narrative and what’s the shift? What’s the narrative we need to be telling?

JASMINE: I think in this moment there’s a lot of false narrative about toxic polarization and culture wars and us versus them. And the first thing that anyone can do is to figure out how they can start talking with their neighbors. To literally walk across the street and say, “How are you doing? How are you holding up?” Not with the intention of finding out what are their political beliefs, how did they vote, are they safe or not. That’s not the purpose. But the purpose is just genuine connection in talking to your neighbors. And then, I think also plugging in and participating in projects that absolutely encourage solidarity and working across difference and refusing to go into these same echo chambers of progressive or conservative or whatever else, and break the in-group norms that we’ve all been put into. And then, I think the last thing is just be a regular person. In the left-wing circles that I find myself, there’s a lot of conversation about how hard the barrier to entry, how high the bar has been, for so many people who are like, “I would love to know what it means to be a progressive, but the moment I use the wrong name or pronoun or this or that, everyone is up in arms and behaving as though there’s actually been violence that’s happened.” And so we have not appreciated that real violence is happening and it’s not to the people who are coming in good faith just trying to figure it out because they don’t come from inherently political or woke, progressive, or whatever else. It’s that layer of narrative that you see making anti-woke so appealing. Underneath anti-woke is not an actual hate for wanting to be inclusive or demonstrative of people who are different than you. What’s underneath anti-woke and why it’s making itself so appealing to people is no one wants to be berated for making mistakes or not having the same level of education access or linguistic whatever as someone else. So pulling away from the hyper-online social justice echo chambers and just talk to everyday people. Start saying, “Hello,” to people in the grocery store. Start actually having real conversations that are not about the non-profit and are not about the social justice activism on Instagram or TikTok. And those are all great spaces. You’ll find me there. However, that’s not my political home. I have real people that I call and I don’t always have the most polished or eloquent way of communicating things, but they hold me. And they will continue to hold me. And so I think those are the ways that we start to shift is building up our social connections and our social fabric again where we’re less afraid of making mistakes and not being perfect and more afraid of not being in connection with one another.

SARA: And in that I also hear the opportunity for long-time brilliant practiced leaders and organizers to turn towards those coming in good faith a little bit more. And I understand why people have protected and turned away from that because it got very toxic there for a while. That can be really hard to have to live in that space.

JASMINE: Yeah.

 SARA: But if we can figure that out, then there’s the building collective power.

JASMINE: Yeah. I mean, we went through multiple moments where it was really cool to call out racist white women on Facebook and drag them. And someone needs to call the school board that they’re on or even their work. We were engaging in a kind of authoritarian group think that we weren’t aware of what we were doing in some moments and we needed elders like Loretta Ross and others to pull us back from the brink of that. Some of it was because we were being incentivized to do it through algorithms and disinformation. And we still didn’t realize what affects social media has on our reward system. And unfortunately, it can turn us into old hardware from early versions of us being a species of being really waspy. But turning into a hornet's nest. But now that we have more data coming out about those effects, now that we understand that what we’re actually up against is, when there’s a global pandemic, we need one another. We have to cooperate. We have to appeal to some of our better angels. And so there has to be those of us in these spaces and places who are willing to do that kind of bridging and willing to take those kind of risks to say, “Hey, I can see that person’s using old-timing language that you don’t really jive with. But there’s going to be a time when you’re also irrelevant when it comes to the vernacular and you’ll hope that people still want to be in relationship with you. Okay? You’re going to be the problematic papa, be like, “We don’t use that word no more, papa.” I remember my grandma, who I love, my brother, he was about to pass and my friends came over and we were at the hospital with her. And my lovely friend, best friend for life Felicia – she’s Cherokee – and she came in and she says, “Grandma Annie Pearl. And I get you some food? There’s a Chinese food store outside of the hospital waiting room.” And she goes, “Do I look like a Chinaman from the orient.” And I was like,”First of all, grandma, we don’t use those kind of words.” But she was a loving woman who would feed anyone, take in anyone, was incredible. But in a moment of stress and lack of sleep just said this. And I keep thinking, if she was at an organizer meeting now with some of these younger people, they would’ve censored her because who says that out loud. Well, lots of people do and that doesn’t mean that they are not redeemable or that they can’t be provided some political education. But it’s not the first line of defense, right. The first line of defense is accepting folks and not policing one another and just giving so much space for people to show up imperfectly in service of the work.

SARA: To show up imperfectly, giving grace, and we talk a lot in our spaces about the inverse of that, about showing up with an open heart and being willing to be correct and . . .

JASMINE: Teachable.

SARA: Teachable, and being willing to receive feedback, and not taking it so personally.

JASMINE: The fear of conflict is real for so many people because we had mamas and daddies and caregivers that did not make it safe for us to be wrong. And that’s a generational thing and it’s manifested across multiple generations in various ways. However, Millenial and younger people are especially – our distress tolerance for not being good enough or making mistakes particularly publicly because we held the tension between not actually having access to social media and then to it all being on there and we saw how it all ricocheted back. Those are real concerns. And it’s rough. But we have to figure out how to be okay even with the discomfort and know that conflict happens, mistake happens, rupture and harm happens. But we are absolutely capable of feeling the fear and continuing to do the work together anyway.

SARA: And I hear you talk about rupture and harm and I have experienced and witnessed those things happening. And also, still want to invite people to remember that repair can also happen if we put ourselves in the right place and we can learn how to repair well which is hard in and of itself. That’s also a hard practice. We’ve talked a little bit about community care, and I think you’ve gotten at a little bit of, in part of community care is also about healing, right, the harm that communities, particularly marginalized communities, communities of color have experienced over time. And I also want to say with the murder of George Floyd, we just really saw that reckoning. But I think we also saw the trauma and the harm explosion in that moment too. And so, in your work with Generation Common Good, how do you practice and hold space for the personal healing alongside systemic transformation?

JASMINE: Well, this may not be popular.

SARA: That’s alright. We appreciate your honesty, Jasmine. Go for it.

JASMINE: Well, this is a lesson that I had to learn that was a really hard lesson. And if you are looking for a resource, it is a book that is written with black women and women of color as the center. But there is lots of information for women of all racial orientations. It’s called Unrig the Game by Vanessa Priya Daniel. But one thing that she talks about really poignantly and one thing that I had to learn in the last five, ten years of my personal journey because I have complex post traumatic stress disorder, it has dissociative features. So sometimes if I’m under the influence of alcohol or I’m exhausted or I’m super stressed out or I forgot to take my birth control and I’m having a hormonal surge, I can leave the building and show up in a way that’s not congruent with who I am, but everyone in my family’s like, “Oh, she’s dissociated right now. She’s doing something bizarre. Or she’s having a tearful breakdown and talking about things that happened 17 years ago but it feels really real.” It’s similar to what people who have come back from battle, from Vietnam do. I remember my dad literally crawling on the basement floor because he was hiding from Viet Cong. And so a lot of people don’t realize, folks like myself who have gone through massive amounts of early childhood trauma and devastation can show up in that way. So when I came to social justice work, part of what motivated me is, “Oh. These people believe in freedom and justice and I can find healing here.” And I was wrong because social justice movements are not about our individual healing, though we can find healing in those spaces. It wasn’t about creating a soft space for me to explore my trauma. That’s more appropriate for a care circle or a clinician or a coach or practitioner, maybe a culture worker. What I was being called to that space to do was to help build collective power to intervene in protracted struggle, that systemic structural change. And sometimes those spaces were even more retraumatizing because we’re facing down things like state-sanctioned violence. We’re facing down things like rape culture. We’re facing down things like, “How do we have a coalition meeting and not meltdown and project our own stuff onto everyone.” And if you haven’t done your healing work or you don’t have therapeutic support outside of that space, you can go into that space thinking that you’re going to be sunshines, rainbows, and justice. Come away injured and raw and wounded and then have this crisis of belief about what a movement actually is. And so I am a part of, I think a history of black women in particular that are like, “We are not sites of rehabilitation for those who have experienced trauma. There are appropriate sites for that, but that’s not the work of social justice.” So I encourage folks who are in that space, and like me have really grimy and gritty traumatic histories that a lot of people, they won’t talk about their anxiety and little panic attacks here or there but the kind of stuff that I’ve experienced could get you put in a psych hospital. And I‘ve been in those spaces. So what I had to do was build a care circle for myself that involved some of my family, some of my political comrades and colleagues, some of my work support and coaches, along with clinicians that helped me with somatic exercises that helped me with my PTSD in particularly and then the psychiatric component of it, utilizing different pharmaceuticals and modalities throughout the years to get a level of recovery. So I hope that that gives a kind of really sober-minded view of, “You may actually go into social justice movement spaces and be retraumatized” Because, unfortunately or fortunately, those spaces call people who have a lot of work to do because they want to change the system so that no one ever has that kind of trauma again. But it’s not a one to one change. It’s a collective change.

SARA: That is helpful, I think. And you talked about building your own care circle. So the invitation to really notice and tend, actively tend, to your own care and healing is necessary to stay present in the systemic transformation and there are beautiful ways that we can do that alongside the social justice work.

JASMINE: And we don’t have to therapize it. We can make it a little absurd so it feels like it has less high risk to it. If you are going to go join the circus and you know part of being in the circus means that you’re going to have to be around big animals or you’re going to have to juggle, you’re going to have to walk a tightrope. But you want to be in that circus, you train for it and go prepare. And you make sure the night before you’re in charge of  being on the tightrope, that you’re clear and that you know what you’re going to have to do. And that’s kind of what it looks like being in social justice. Some of us deal with the big animals. Some of us are on the high wire. Some of us are just the clowns that are engaging with the people. We all have our roles. We all have our specialties. And we all have our tactics. And we have to come prepared with a level of practice and awareness of what we’re doing and not walk in and be like, “Oh, I thought this was a rock concert.” No. Put on your clown makeup. Let’s go make people laugh. Hopefully I didn’t push that metaphor too far. I hope it translates.

SARA: It definitely translates. And I will say, I’ve noticed just in the last few years that the care, the tending to community care and healing work has expanded on the outer circles of justice movements.

JASMINE: Yeah.

SARA: That there are people who see that as their role in the movement and are really showing up and offering that to groups, a debrief and somatic spaces after big actions, things of that nature that have been really helpful for folks.

JASMINE: Yes. Some important folks to shout out that do that work are folks like Prentis Hemphill, What it Takes to Heal. Beautiful work there. Stacy Haines with The Politics of Trauma. There are anti-oppressive and social justice aware care and healing practitioners. I’m not saying go out into the corporate medical process and be like, “Can y’all help me. I’m trying to do social justice.” They’ll be like, “We’re actually going to make you worse so you stop doing social justice.” So there are vision and value aligned care workers and they’ve always existed and they’ve always been a part of our movement. But they have to be engaged in a very specific way and it has to be intentional. You can’t walk into social justice and just think that people are doing to scoop you up and be like, “We see you have trauma. Let us take care of you.” That’s a kind of self-victimization and martyr kind of posture that I came into the movement with. And I was like, “Why aren’t the movement elders saving me?” And they were like, “Ma'am, we didn’t even know you were struggling. Go to therapy.” And I did. And I came back. And I’m better. So here we are.

SARA: Well, and I really appreciated one thing you’ve mentioned throughout this conversation that I find really beautiful is this connection to elders. And in creating those relationships of those folks that you can lean on and you can call and you can ask for advice and who are good mentors for you.

JASMINE: Yeah. Call them. It’s one of the things that is so shocking to a lot of the younger people. Because, when I ask them, “Okay. What movements can you identify that change the course of history in the United States.” Most people would be like, “The Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, the Black Panthers.” And they don’t realize, a lot of them are still alive. They’ve got websites. You can email them. That’s all I did. That’s all I did. I was like, “I just discovered you’re only 72 years old and I would like to speak with you.” And most of the time they’re like, “We would love to speak with the young people.” But they’ve been forgotten or erased or the history has been washed because of COINTELPRO and other purposeful disinformation campaigns. And so whether it’s Occupy Wall Street, whether it’s the climate movement and the war against Iraq, whether it’s the Civil Rights Movement, those are four huge movements – the feminist movement – four huge movements. Those people are still here. And so those of us who are kind of like bridging into the we’re not quite elder but we might be in Aunty status and Uncle status, we owe our niblings in the movement to be a bridge and bring back that intergenerational component and then also to coach young people to say, “We know that y’all are responsible for the future and that you should have a say in it. And you need to be anchored into intergenerational knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge because there are lessons that many of our elders have to teach us that we will never find in an academic book unless we are sitting across the kitchen table with them or in spaces with them.” And they’re critical. They’re a life-source. Nobody cuts down the oldest tree in the forest and then wonders why the oxygen ain’t great.

SARA: That is beautiful wisdom to wrap up our conversation with. Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing that. I do have two final questions. And these are questions that I like to ask all of my guests and the end of our episodes. And the first question has to do with the Mama Dragons name. The name Mama Dragons came about out of a sense of fierceness and fierce protection for our kids. So I like to ask my guests, what is it that you are fierce about?

JASMINE: What is it that I am fierce about? I’m fierce about a lot of things. But I think if anyone who really, really knew me outside of the digital space said I was fierce about one thing, it’s about the kind of deep love that comes with hospitality. Like, if you come to my home, you’re eating a meal that was planned just for you, with you in mind, you’re being cared for, you’re given space to show up and be fully yourself and, not to be too maternalistic about it, but really I’ve created the womb-like place in my home. Come in and there are plants and there’s lusciousness and there’s space just to be fully yourself. And I’m really fierce about that because I think that many of us are outside of our home spaces trying to do revolutionary things and then we forget that the most powerful site of transformation happens in that space itself. And so, I think that’s what I’m most fierce about.

SARA: That’s beautiful, beautiful thing to be fierce about. I love that idea and that image that we can all take some of that back with us. The last question that I want to ask you is, what is bringing you joy right now? And just to highlight in these times, we all need to be having some joy. So what is bringing you joy?

JASMINE: Goodness. All of my children have some kind of strange gene – I don’t know if it came from me – but have taught themselves how to play instruments. So all but one of my children, though she sings, has gotten on YouTube or found apps and taught themselves how to play saxophone, guitar, and violin, and piano.

SARA: Wow.

JASMINE: And I was like, what kind of Jackson Five, Brady Bunch, what’s going on. They play full songs. So that brings me joy because it’s just so shocking. So there’s that.

SARA: That’s great.

JASMINE: And then, just to be honest and to be frank, because of my dad’s misuse history, I’m very regimented about alcohol consumption but I love wine and I love craft cocktails. And so I have not been working on Friday’s and I start my Friday off with a new rosea that I’m trying every weekend. And then I usually drink a whole bottle myself and turn on music and cook, prep for the weekend. So getting drunk in my kitchen by myself prepping for the weekend of feeding my four children and their horde of friends, has really been feeding me joy.

SARA: I love all of that. I love all of that. These answers have been so delightful. Thank you for your time, Jasmine. Thank you for the extraordinary work that you do on behalf of all of us in really helping to change the trajectory of justice and humanity in our country. It’s so needed, and just for sharing so deeply about yourself. It’s been a joy.

JASMINE: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the invitation.

SARA: Thanks so much for joining us here In the Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at Mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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