TW: Mentions of Childhood sexual abuse and rape

In today’s episode I’ve invited Amita Swadhin to join into this conversation about transformative justice, abolition accountability and harm.

Amita Swadhin is an educator, storyteller, activist and consultant dedicated to fighting interpersonal and institutional violence against young people. Their commitments and approach to this work stem from their experiences as a genderqueer, femme queer woman of color, daughter of immigrants, and years of abuse by their parents, including eight years of rape by their father.

They are a frequent speaker at colleges, conferences and community organizations nationwide, and a consultant with over fifteen years of experience in nonprofits serving low-income, immigrant and LGBTQ youth of color in Los Angeles and New York City. Amita has been publicly out as a survivor of child sexual abuse since they interned at the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women in 1997.

In 2016, Amita received a two-year Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellowship, allowing them to work full-time to end child sexual abuse and to help survivors heal.

With this fellowship they have been working on The Mirror Memoirs project, an oral history project centering the narratives, healing and leadership of LGBTQ survivors of color in the movement to end child sexual abuse.

Audio clips in this episode are from videos that are part of the Building Accountable Communities series created by Project NIA and the Barnard Center for Research on Women, which can be found here:

In this episode we discuss the role of Shame and Guilt as it intersects with other marginalizes and survivorship in movement spaces, and how to transform shame and leverage guilt into anti-racist work, with aspiring mental health clinician, activist, survivor and ally Seren. This episode aims to dive into understanding the process of white shame and illuminate some tools for how to navigate that process.

Show Links

Transcript

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Resources:

Indigenous Solidarity

Map of Indigenous territories across the globe

Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Resource Page

Indigenous Environmental Network

First People’s Fund

Additional Reading

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/white-shame-anti-racism-efforts?fbclid=IwAR2otFZYUZ7_Wmv2in2-dtJu0XKOM0MBNiomOvpO6agxvxs_vK4RXuQmu5w

White Supremacy Culture Zine PDF version

Mentioned in the Episode

Brené Brown: Listening to Shame

The Anti-Racism Education Project

In this Episode, we discuss and dive into and begin to reimagine how we conceptualize activist work that is so incredibly important within the contemporary moment. Drawing from Healing and Disability Justice activists Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and adrienne maree brown, to reimagine what activism would look like and mean to center healing as a primary mode of activism. Diving into the work and unique forms of crip knowledge we ask the question what does care look like and why do we need a healing justice and disability justice framework if we want to create lasting change in black, brown queer and indigenous movements.

Audio clip credits go to

Leah Lakshmi Peipzna Samarasina and the Asian American Writers Workshop for their talk on Care Work Dreaming Disability Justice, accessed here: https://youtu.be/8UpQVlT2wCQ

And adrienne maree brown and Kate Werning on Irresistible podcast accessed here:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2yEnrX4lZzVvCyHFD3ymcZ?si=mGAuycvjQx6Md4in3KOmoA