Sandy Hudson: Black Lives Matter, Justice & Vision
“One of the most important things that an activist can do is to believe that the change we are seeking is possible. If you do not believe it’s possible, if you don’t believe that you will win, then you’ve already lost.”
What are the structures preventing justice? What are the systems actively perpetuating injustice? Different local contexts will face different challenges for their community, but strong movement building also relies upon recognising the relationship between the local and the global. In this episode of EcoResolution Interviews Christabel sits down with Sandy Hudson, award-winning writer, activist and public intellectual, discussing social justice, envisioning fairer futures, and the need for better systems.
“Local power is so critically important - and it’s so important for that local power to be connected on some sort of global scale: on some sort of united project. The success of our movement has been from people refusing their local realities, and then scaling that refusal up; from inspiring one another, skills sharing, assisting one another, taking strategies that work locally and then building those strategies out to a united, global movement.”
“There is no world in which we solve the climate crisis and we don’t shift our societal reliance on extraction, on exploitation, and on discarding. There is no world where it works.”
From the Black Lives Matter movement to calls for environmental justice, from social justice to food justice, at the root of these local and global movements is a united call to move from the dominant extractive systems which underpin our interconnected crises.
“There is no world in which we solve the climate crisis and we don’t shift our societal reliance on extraction, on exploitation, and on discarding. There is no world where it works. We cannot keep looking at the world as a thing to extract from. We cannot keep looking at poor communities as people to extract from and not care for; it will be their environments that are going to be harmed first and the worst. We cannot keep on exploiting people and looking at this world as a thing to be squeezed for resources, and people as a thing to be squeezed for resources, so that Jeff Bezos and the millionaires of the world can live the most comfortable lives…”
“There’s no world in which that works. So, we have to be committed to full systems change: for the environment, for black liberation, for decolonisation, for all of these really big things which need to change…”
“…And it’s possible, like when we’re sitting here talking about it it seems obvious.”
Go further into some of the themes touched upon here such as Militarisation, Movement Building, and a Just Transition by exploring our topics.
Sandy is the founder of the Black Lives Matter presence in Canada and co-director of Black Lives Matter grassroots. An award-winning writer, activist and public intellectual, Sandy also helped to found the Black Legal Action Centre, a speciality legal aid clinic which provides direct legal services and impact litigation for black communities, and the Wild Seed Centre for activism and art, a centre nurturing black cultural creation. Currently studying law at UCLA with a specialisation in critical race theory, Sandy also co-hosts the Sandy and Nora Talk Politics podcast, and is co-author of the bestselling book, ‘Until We Are Free: reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada'.
To find out more about Sandy and her work, you can visit her website here.
