UNLOCK 21.1 Against the Hierarchy of Bodies w/ Michelle Cassandra Johnson pt 2

# Antifascist Dad — Episode 20, Part 2 (Patreon Bonus): Hierarchy of Bodies with Michelle Cassandra Johnson --- **Matthew Remski:** Welcome, Patreons, to part two of Antifascist Dad episode 20, "Hierarchy of Bodies," with Michelle Cassandra Johnson. I'm really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy, hope, and utility to your works and days. Remember that I'm on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. If you're not on Patreon — if you're listening to this on the main feed because this has been unlocked — you can get the earlier posting of this very episode through our Patreon, antifascistdadpodcast, because subscribers get early access to every second part. I also direct your attention to the pre-order link for my upcoming book, *Antifascist Dad*, in the show notes. The publication date is April 26th. Now, in part one of my conversation with Michelle Cassandra Johnson, we opened by tabling the fact that Trump-era fascist tendencies are not unprecedented — they're continuations of long-standing systems of oppression rooted in what Johnson calls a racial hierarchy of bodies and power. Was she shocked at Trump's second victory? No, because BIPOC and global majority communities see these events as unsurprising extensions of historical oppression, accelerated by blowback against milestones like Obama's election, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd protests. The ICE roundups, for example, might feel shocking in the moment as they expose historical oppression in new forms. But if we see the underlying patterns, we'll have a more organic perspective — not only about how this happens, but also about how it might be undone. And that's where we head today, as we wade into the waters of hope. --- **Matthew:** Do you have a favorite story from your work in the anti-racism world — of anti-racist healing, let's say? **Michelle Cassandra Johnson:** I do. This was about seven years ago. I worked in an organization that led anti-racism work, and we had a long-term contract with this organization. They were based in Seattle, and they came to Portland for this training we were running. We focused on some shared language and shared understanding in our curriculum. We were in the shared-language part. We shared the definition of racism — we do an embodied practice where the participants help create this definition and an understanding of it. It was a multiracial group. I got to the part about white supremacy and the patterns we're talking about around white-bodied folks being implicated in the system of white supremacy differently — of course, whether or not they would like to be implicated, but implicated in it. I was explaining that and then offered a reflection. And this white-bodied man — well, first he asked me a question about it. He was challenging, he was resisting. He didn't really want to accept that he was part of the system or that he contributed in any way to it. He did it in a quieter way at first. And then he stood up. All of his colleagues — there were forty people in the room — they were all looking at him. He got very upset that I suggested he was part of the system. And I didn't do it in a confrontational way. That's not how it was happening. I was just sharing content and then inviting them to— **Matthew:** You weren't aggressive, you weren't mean— **Michelle:** I mean, I was clear. Right? Clarity — sometimes people are taken aback by that. Just clarity in saying what it is and then letting it be what it is. I think that's part of what pushed on him. He stood up and kept interrupting me. My colleagues were in the back room watching. He kept talking and he started to argue with me. And I just stood where I was. My colleagues tell me that I was so steady and so centered. At one point I said to him, basically: *White supremacy is what caused you to stand up and feel as if you could act this way* — and dehumanize. In many ways he was participating in some dehumanization of me. And so I said, *I can stay in shared humanity with you. I can stay in relationship with you, in connection, even when you can't do that with me in this moment. You're not able to do that right now.* You could have heard a pin drop in the room. The reason I thought of this story in response to your question is I'll never forget it — that's one reason — because it was a learning moment for him. He actually stopped when I said, *I can be with you in this, and I can stay in relationship, because I care enough about you in this moment, even as you're not showing care to me.* I don't know where that came from. I do not know where that calm presence and steadiness came from. I was unwavering in that moment — *I'm clear, and I want to see your humanity.* **Matthew:** That wasn't part of your training — not to see it. **Michelle:** No. You've been conditioned not to see mine, particularly when I'm pushing on something and you're responding with resistance. White supremacy taught you to operate this way, and you actually have other options. **Matthew:** You'd probably feel better. **Michelle:** Yes. And at one point I said — someone, there's someone who taught you to be better than this. I just said: someone in your life. **Matthew:** Oh no. Did he burst into tears? **Michelle:** He stopped talking. **Matthew:** Yeah. **Michelle:** He sat down. I invited the group to take a breath. I said that because I was essentially saying: *You can be more than your conditioning. You're more than the way you've been conditioned to act when confronted with the truth about your whiteness. Let's call on whatever that is.* I don't know who it is, I don't know what it is. But there's something else. And I do think it was instructive for the room to watch this — and my willingness to stay in it. I saw him many times after that. He did not act in that same way again. We actually talked about it two trainings later when I went to their organization in Seattle. His posture and way of being had shifted. I don't want to take credit for that, but I don't think he'll ever forget that moment either. My colleagues won't forget it. They said, *There's something in you, Michelle—* I was just unwilling to leave him, but I also wasn't going to back off. I was thinking about Durga energy. I was like: *I'll be here with you. I'll be in this with you, and I'll call you into doing something different than what you've been trained to do.* **Matthew:** What's incredible about this is that if nothing else, the DEI or anti-racism workshop format — regardless of the criticisms from the left, that it maybe helps corporations say they're doing something when they might not be doing as much as they should, or the criticisms from Christopher Rufo and that whole fascist line about it — is that there is a place, a moment in a person's working life, in which he is compelled to have some kind of group experience like nothing else he's ever had. And all of his colleagues — everybody he has lunch with, is friendly with, goes bowling with — gets to see him, or participate with him, in that. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the culture. The only place it would happen, I'd imagine, is in church, or an AA meeting, or some kind of group therapy. But as part of a work context — that's kind of amazing. **Michelle:** It is. And it was so beautiful — his colleagues were there. Because I didn't see him as disposable. **Matthew:** Yeah. **Michelle:** I wasn't going to throw him away for how he'd been conditioned to act. **Matthew:** Right. **Michelle:** And I think that's what they witnessed. It was — before people talked about "calling in" folks — it was a calling up. A calling up and calling in. I was saying: *I call you into being up. Be something different. Try something new. Stay in this with me even though it's difficult. Come into this practice with me, into your humanity.* And I think that's what his colleagues saw too. Because they could have said, *You need to stop. Get out of here. You're wrong.* And they didn't do that. So I think that's the healing part. That's the learning — when we don't throw people away for not having arrived, and when we're able to understand how we've been conditioned. I often think about how there was a time when I didn't understand the definition of racism, even though racism was happening to me. **Matthew:** Right. **Michelle:** I didn't know what I didn't know. And that's where he was. --- **Matthew:** So, Michelle, one of my antifascism-and-parenting colleagues — his name is Craig Johnson, he's written a book called *How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism* — says that fostering a multiracial and multi-ethnic community of care is like a natural inoculation against fascist movements. I know you've seen this work. What does it look like on the ground? **Michelle:** I think it's connected to what we talked about earlier — about relationship. Relationships are not always easy. I'm also present to how we create community, how some of us are trained to throw people away or distance from them, and how we call them into community — and what's the ongoing work we have to do to continue to build it. I also think that sometimes people equate multiculturalism with simply having a diverse group of people in a space. And I think it's more than that. It's about people actually contributing to and helping to create that culture together. What kind of community do we want to create? What do we value? What are our shared beliefs, our shared practices? That's where I've seen this multicultural and multiracial work be effective. As we think about care, I'm also thinking about how in these spaces we have to understand what's in the way of collective care, community care, and the ways we have not been cared for based on the identities we embody. There has to be some shared understanding of that. I mentioned "right role" earlier — we all have different work to do related to racism, to fascism, to these systems of harm and oppression. I need to be clear about what my work is based on my embodied identities, and how that's different from someone else's work. I need to know where I have privilege. I need to understand the impact of oppression. Because I think that also points to what we practice together as we have different roles toward creating this multiracial community of care. And it's not easy. I've been in organizing circles forever, and it takes years and years to really understand what a practice looks like, what it means to live into community care. The other things that come to mind are the skills: deep listening, forgiveness, models of harm and repair, so we can have these conversations and attempt repair — with the awareness that we will mess up as we build relationships. **Matthew:** There are also material things — figuring out where you're going to meet, who's going to do food, keeping track of who needs what in a particular neighborhood in terms of money or medical supplies. I think "community" as a term can feel almost abstract, especially in the online world where we use the word too loosely. I always come back to the on-the-ground skills that we're probably practicing in our backyards, with our gardens. **Michelle:** That's right. Yes. And how we're in relationship with everything. If I'm glued to my phone, that can actually disrupt relationship — if that's my only point of contact, or I'm addicted to it. The humanness gets taken out of it at times. --- **Matthew:** You mentioned that moment in the training — I don't want to call it a showdown, or a confrontation, but there was something epic about that guy standing up and you standing where you were standing. It almost feels like it comes out of an old story — two people meeting on some mythic battle plane. **Michelle:** Yes. **Matthew:** And you said you had the energy of Durga. Some listeners to my other podcast will know that's a reference to your involvement with yoga and your incorporation of Indian wisdom traditions, as well as other forms of spirituality, into your political work. I wanted to ask a general question about the masala of all that. How does it work together? **Michelle:** I'm working on a project right now with my friend Tema. I'm also in a program for spiritual direction — which, for those listening, is not pastoral counseling and it's not chaplaincy, but it's a practice of guiding people who want to have a spiritual connection, or who have no faith at all. **Matthew:** Is it individual meetings, like a kind of therapy? Or a group? **Michelle:** It can be either. It's not therapy. You can come from any background. For me, I'd be working with people who want to have a better understanding of what's going on and try to make sense of it — and, if they wish to have a deeper spiritual connection, to help them deepen into that, taking their lead. I'm not directing. It's called spiritual direction, but I'm not directing anyone anywhere. I don't have the right answer. **Matthew:** It seems like a discipline where the term is always going to be contested. And it's not chaplaincy in the sense that you're getting calls to go to the hospital, or— **Michelle:** Although you could. I was just trying to give people a sense of it. It's more like spiritual guidance. I'm in an interspiritual program — there are many Christian-based programs, but I'm in an interspiritual one. And I mention it because I'm working on this project with Tema, who graduated from this spiritual direction program in January. We're working on a project focused on sacred activism — a contribution to the field of spiritual direction that brings the political into the spiritual. We've both been talking about our spiritual paths and journeys and having been politicized. For me, those things were never separate. I did grow up Christian — in the Black Baptist church, church every Sunday until I was eighteen. My mother wanted us to have that grounding and foundation. My favorite part of church was actually the singing — the choir, the vibration, the connection — but also witnessing people. It relates to the previous question about community care. Watching people, and the church and the sanctuary being a place of care, a place of affirmation, a place where we were told *we are all God's children* — this was the messaging we received in a world of white supremacy that said we were nothing. So I had this experience in the world, and then we went into the physical sanctuary and I felt: *this is home* — for people in a world that makes them feel like they do not belong. Being in a Black body in a Black church, I think the political and the spiritual merged for me right away. I knew that policies were being put in place, or had been enacted, to oppress the church members and my family members. And then to be in this place where I was taught that there's something bigger — whatever name people have for that, or no name at all — that's the word I use sometimes, or "spirit," or "source," or whatever it might be for people. So the political and the understanding that my body has been politicized, and that I have a spirit and am connected to spirit — that's been with me since I was a young child. And it's deepened throughout time. Now I don't identify as Christian and I study many wisdom streams. In that space of church, I was responding to affirmation and spirit in a religious context. Sometimes people think of themselves as religious and spiritual, some as spiritual but not religious, some as religious but not spiritual. The hate being perpetuated in the name of religion doesn't really feel spiritual to me at all. Because in my understanding, spiritual practice is about remembering that the divine resides within me and within all. The use of religion — the way it's weaponized, the way teachings are weaponized to further oppress people, the ways religion has been used as a tool of oppression — that doesn't feel like spiritual work to me. It feels like hatefulness. It feels like a strategy of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, transphobia. **Matthew:** Or a strategy for blessing those things, making them okay. Those things exist, and then clerics are found to co-sign them — *actually, God does want you to be as big about it as you think you should be.* **Michelle:** Right. Which means I can look at that and say, *yes, this plus this equals this* — and in my body, it makes no sense. Even though I understand the map of it, and why religion would be used that way. **Matthew:** You're talking about this early discovery — being in a Black body, being in church, and realizing you are home in a way, or that you can be in a space in which that hierarchy disappears, or that you're told *we are all God's children* — when the world outside is not telling you that. And the realization that there's no real boundary between the spiritual message you want to take in, make part of yourself, and how you want to be in the world. That just makes absolute sense to me. It's not how I encountered religion as a young Catholic. I had to work into that. I had to figure out, oh, there's actually a politicized Catholic tradition that starts with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers movement and all of that. I grew up more with the church that exists to sacralize capitalism than the church that exists to liberate people. But the church that exists to liberate people is still part of the Catholic Church — it's still there, it's still alive. But my question for you — because this is an all-ages podcast with a lot of young people wondering about the relationship between their spiritual life and their political life — is: many of the great revolutionary traditions are also revolutionary against clericalism. Karl Marx is an atheist. And yet he says that religion is the soul of soulless conditions. I have this question about whether the fact that religion and politics go so well together is an indication that they share a similar structure of hope. You don't know what's going to happen politically, but you really wish the best for everybody. You don't know how things are going to turn out when fascism rises. But you've got to have something that contradicts what's on the news. You have to have some other story. I feel, as I get older, more and more that it would be very hard to not benefit from — to not call on — something that people might call spiritual, in order for help. Do you think that's true? Or does that leave out a whole bunch of people who might not feel that need? **Michelle:** That's such an interesting question. It stirs something in me. I'm arriving at the question: do people need — I'm going to use the word *faith*. **Matthew:** Yeah. **Michelle:** I don't have another word right now. Do we need to have faith in something we can't see? Do we need that to be able to survive, to stay connected, to face this uncertainty — even though the patterns, as we spoke about at the beginning, aren't new? Is that what helps us stay here? I know faith helps me stay grounded. A belief in something I cannot always see, but sometimes can feel. And I wonder if that is what people — and the word you used, *hope*, makes me think about the role of faith and how people make meaning of things. Do we need that to make meaning of what's happening? What's unfolding that I didn't think I would see in this way. So I need to believe that there's something else. The other thing I'd say is the way I make meaning is to say: *I am not the chaos that is happening, although I am part of it. I am something else. There is something else going on.* And I have a responsibility to look at the ways I contribute to the chaos, and also to transmute it. And yet — this is probably my yoga experience — there's something else. I don't know what it is. There's some other opportunity. There's potentiality. I also think my ancestors had to believe in something, given what they endured. **Matthew:** God damn it. Of course. Why would anybody go on? Why would anybody create spiritual songs? Why would anybody embody yearning that way? There's this famous — and very depressing — thought that I think has the opposite effect on a lot of people, which comes through Fredric Jameson and others: that it's a lot easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. And yet that's spoken by people who are actively trying to imagine what they cannot see. When you get to a point in a conversation with someone who's maybe a centrist or a liberal — who thinks this can all work out, that we can make a few tweaks and everything will be fair — there's often this point where the person says, *Well, what's the alternative? What's the alternative to capitalism? What's the alternative to this system that gives rise to Donald Trump?* And I think my response to that is almost religious. Which is: I don't know, but I'm going to work on it and try to feel it. I know some basic ideas about how I would restructure my neighborhood economy. But I don't have the big picture. And yet I think it's there. And if I didn't think it was there — boy, that would be a bleak world. **Michelle:** Right. You wouldn't do what you do in the world. We wouldn't do what we do. And we have information — you mentioned your neighborhood, how you would structure the economy there. We have information about that because people actually related in different ways before. If we think about our various lineages, all of us — we have some other way of being. I talk about this all the time. I don't know if we go back to those ways exactly, but I do think the way people had to survive in community and take care of one another — we have that within us. And this time is pushing us, I think, toward looking at what those ways were: how did people relate and take care of each other, what did their economy look like, what roles did they play, who was the storyteller, who was the healer, who was the activist, who was the cook? I think people do still operate that way, and I think that's where we have to go. **Matthew:** And that's why we read anthropology. That's why we have to look back and remember. Michelle, thank you so much. It's been such a great time talking with you, and I'm really happy you do all of your work. I'm sorry you're not getting as many contracts right now, but I know you're going to continue having your impact going forward. **Michelle:** Thank you so much. Thank you for your work, your practice, your questions. I often talk about what we offer to the world as medicine. So thank you so much. --- **Matthew:** I wanted to end this episode with an excerpt from my upcoming book that tries to get at what it means to discover whiteness if you happen to be born white — what that actually feels like, what it implies. It all comes out of a very early story from when I was six years old. --- When I was six, we lived in a suburban high-rise complex made up of two identical eighteen-story buildings — same color brick, same balconies all the way up. It was a whole rigmarole to remember which one I lived in. There were many types of people living there, from many parts of the world, and there was a playground between the two buildings. I liked taking the elevator down to play there on my own. I think my mom could probably see me from the balcony, way up on the seventeenth floor. I was her little speck of a son. One day there were some white kids there I didn't recognize. They were a little bit older. They wouldn't let me play with them, and then they started laughing at me for some reason. I remember puffing up my chest and trying to be brave, saying something like, *Oh yeah, I don't care what you say.* But then the oldest boy in the group picked up a rock and threatened me. *Maybe you'll care about this.* *No, I won't.* He threw it hard, and I saw it coming right for me. I froze in place even after it glanced off my forehead. Even as I felt the warm blood trickle down over my face. The group of kids ran off. I felt proud and exhilarated that I'd stood strong. But as the blood entered my eyes, I felt disoriented and scared. Someone took me by the arm and asked me where my parents were. *Apartment 1704*, I said. She had a different-sounding voice, and squinting through the blood, I could see it was an older girl, and her skin was dark brown. *I'll take you.* She tugged me along by the hand. I remember crossing into the lobby and getting into the elevator and pressing the black button that said 17, and it glowed with an orange light. But when we knocked at 1704, it wasn't my mother who answered — it was a woman with dark brown skin wearing a long dress of red silk wrapped around her. All three of us clocked the mistake. We were in the wrong building. But the woman saw my bloody face and bustled me inside to the bathroom, started running warm water to help me clean up. After the blood washed away, she found the cut on my forehead and bandaged it. As she put the bandage on, I realized I couldn't understand the language she was speaking. But the girl stayed and interpreted. *She says we can phone your mother.* I felt proud about remembering my phone number. The girl dialed it and said hello to my mom, and then passed the phone to me. I told mom the story in a sheepish voice, and she said she was coming straight away to get me. I waited in the cramped kitchen, washed and bandaged. The woman patted my hair, fetched some sweets from the cupboard, and poured some milky tea in a cup for me. I could relax and look around. Out in the living room, an ancient man was sleeping in a reclining chair under a thick blanket. Maybe the grandfather. The walls were filled with photographs of a large family standing in front of marble temples. I saw one picture of the ancient man when he was younger — he was here in Toronto, smiling from the driver's seat of his yellow taxicab. There was a statue of an elephant god on the shelf above the door and a stick of incense burning in front of it. The tea had cinnamon and other spices that reminded me of the pumpkin pie my mother made at Christmas. The tea was flavorful, sweet, and warming. I bit into a square of thick cake and my mouth filled with sugary juice as my nostrils filled with roses. It was like I had traveled around the world by stepping into an apartment that mirrored my own. Everything was bright and cozy and friendly, and yet so different from what I knew and what was familiar to me. The woman in the red sari and the girl who brought me there were relaxed and kind. They made me feel at home, even at the age of six in an unknown apartment. It was completely natural for them to become the temporary mother and sister of a skinny white boy. I might as well have been from India. But I wasn't. Later that afternoon, back in my normal 1704 apartment across the way, I looked around at all the familiar things and I was suddenly anxious. *Where am I from? Have I always been here? Why are other people so different?* I realized that the world I moved through beyond this apartment did not look or feel like the apartment in India, across the playground. It was a little less colorful — blander food, everyone speaking English like a Canadian. It was the normal world, the world I was used to. But I also realized that it was the world everyone else was supposed to get used to. I was feeling something about my own whiteness for the first time. How hidden from the broader culture and city I knew there were pockets of outsiderness that didn't quite fit in, but that carried entire worlds inside themselves. The colors and scents of those worlds were signs of rich culture, but also the remnants of exile. At the time, I didn't know the politics of how people from India had come to Toronto. I didn't know that coming to an English-speaking country wasn't just a new adventure, but a logical choice when escaping the poverty created by the colonial domination of the English. I don't know for sure where the woman's family came from in India, but her skin was dark. She may have been from that class of people who suffered most under colonialism. She was so kind to me. The memory is burned into me forever. But I had no idea that the English culture I came from had not only never welcomed her people, but had exacerbated conditions of poverty that forced them to move to places where they could only find work as servants. My family had always been what it was and where it was, or so I thought. It was years before I recognized that I too was part of a settler culture, that I could feel at home in Toronto because my people before me had pushed the Indigenous people out or murdered them. I didn't choose this backstory. I didn't personally act any of that out. And once I found out, I was troubled as to how to live with it. But one of the main things I've realized about living with English as my birth language and having white skin is that I have been taught — without formal instruction — that I am the normal one, and that the world that reflects me back to myself is the normal world, the way things should be. What I came to learn over time is that without knowing it, my life was lucky in ways I could not see or appreciate, because I was the default. As a white person, I had no clue what it felt like to be marginalized because of race. As a male person, I had no clue what it felt like to not feel safe at night on the street. As a cis person, I did not know what it meant to not fit into the expected, standard role of boy. The world had been made for me, by my people, so that we could all be comfortable within it. So if I wanted to really see and stand with those who were not part of the inside group, I would have to listen carefully and learn a lot. And I would have to learn — this is important — to take real joy in it. Being white, male, and cisgender is not some shameful thing in itself. There are progressive influencers out there who will tell you it is, and then place all the focus on the emotions that this provokes. And then Jordan Peterson will come along and scoop up a lot of white boys who have been shamed like that, and tell them the truth — but for his own purposes — that it is wrong for them to be made to feel bad. And then he'll go on to teach the opposite: that they should feel proud of their settler civilization, because look at all the things it has accomplished. Learning about luck and privilege and normalcy can be disorienting, but also enriching and even relaxing. Enriching because normalcy is defined by limits. Relaxing because normalcy is stressful. It usually involves either taking power or maintaining power. That's what scapegoating does. And it provokes anxiety, because scapegoaters have to suffer with the knowledge that at any moment, the hatred could be turned back on them. --- Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.