Born in Flames Living Archive
About
The Born in Flames Living Archive was launched in the immediate aftermath of the arson attack on the headquarters of Women With A Vision (WWAV), in New Orleans, on May 24, 2012. Knowing that the arsonists who firebombed and destroyed WWAV intended to erase our work once and for all, we began collecting every life-giving ember we could find. This site aims to preserve our work and spark fire dreams anew.
The Racial Capitalism Playbook
As an organization founded and led by Black women in the South, Women With A Vision has always worked at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression –– and analyzed precisely how these systems interact and build on each other to exact terror in our communities. We have distilled the policies of racialization and economic exploitation into six steps, which we call the “racial capitalism playbook.”
ISOLATE
BLAME
CRIMINALIZE
DESTABILIZE
ERASE
TAKE
people from their communities, culture, and critical services
the very people victimized by racial capitalism
the folks victimized by racial capitalism and their methods of survival
communities through surveillance, economic insecurity, housing insecurity, mass incarceration, and policies of forced removal
people’s history, cultural contributions, and their very presence
people’s land
Our analysis draws on a lot of co-thinkers in our Black Feminist Library: Beth Ritchie’s description of the “violence matrix” in Arrested Justice, South African activists’ articulation of “racial capitalism” in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, political theorist Cedric J. Robinson further theorization of the concept in Black Marxism; and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s focus on the impact of racial capitalism on how we make place in Abolition Geography.
WWAV’s Counter Playbook
Over the course of 35 years Women With A Vision has employed the following tactics (WWAV’s counter playbook) to combat racial capitalism as it has affected WWAV’s communities:
ACCOMPLICE
REFUSAL
OTHERWISE
SPEECH
active engagement, support, and organizing in loving partnership and solidarity on-the-ground to dismantle racial capitalism and make Black feminist liberation, having “skin in the game”
not allowing the logics, tactics, and violence of racial capitalism supremacy in one’s own life or community, daring to operate outside of the confines of the the world as it is to build the world that must be
the possibility of a world beyond the violence of racial capitalism, the act of bringing forth this world first through imagination and then through action, the understanding that the world we are trying to build already exists in fragments and glimmers all around us
the refusal to be erased by continually speaking the truth of your community, the impacts of racial capitalism, and the possibility of a world otherwise, the knowledge that speech is a creative act: to speak into being
An organization born in flames
Women with a Vision, Inc. (WWAV) was founded in 1989 by a collective of Black women in response to the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS in Black communities.
WWAV’s foremothers saw how racism, sexism, and government neglect in the HIV/AIDS crisis was used to: Isolate community members from critical lifesaving information and resources.
Isolate community members from critical lifesaving HIV prevention and treatment information and resources
Blame the communities most at risk, especially sex workers and substance users, for the HIV crisis
Criminalize at-risk communities through increased policing of sex workers, substance users, and poor folks, and through economic sanctions like court fees, fines, and cash bail
Destabilize the communities most at-risk through policies like mass incarceration and family separation through child protective services
Erase these communities by refusing to acknowledge the severity of the HIV/AIDS crisis, by disappearing whole neighborhoods of folks behind bars, and also by making Black communities vulnerable to HIV infection and premature death through each step in the isolate/blame/criminalize/destabilize playbook
Take over the neighborhoods (and sometimes the very homes) of people who have been displaced through mass criminalization, or pushed out through gentrification, or erased through medical neglect
WWAV’s foremothers responded, and through their response, built what we refer to as Women With A Vision’s Counter Playbook:
Accomplice By redirecting resources from wealthy, white public health institutions while working in concert with those most impacted—poor folks, substance users, and sex workers—WWAV’s foremothers practiced accompliceship, letting the folks most impacted determine what resources were most needed
Refusal By partnering with sex workers and substance users to share life-saving knowledge and resources, our foremothers refused to let the forces of racial capitalism rip communities apart via the HIV/AIDS crisis
Otherwise WWAV’s foremothers imagined a world otherwise—a world where Black New Orleanians could not only survive, but thrive—and then in the tradition of radical Black feminism, created a world otherwise where society’s most marginalized were valued, centered, and listened to
Speech WWAV’s foremothers’ refusal to sit idly by while members of their own communities died was a boisterous call for liberation and since WWAV’s founding, they have unapologetically raised their voices with community
Today, WWAV provides grassroots-level support and advocacy at the intersections of gender, racial, and reproductive justice. Widely regarded as the leading national voice fighting the criminalization of Black women and girls in the South, WWAV programs touch on human rights, sex workers’ rights, reproductive justice, voting rights, and ending mass incarceration.
Callie House and the
Infrastructure of Feeling
This project honors the labors of Mrs. Callie Guy House (1861–1928) and the Ex-Slave Burial, Mutual Relief, and Pension Association. Mrs. Callie Guy House organized formerly enslaved people in churches across the South to build mutual aid networks to care for the sick and dying. Together, the members of the Ex-Slave Association petitioned the federal government for pensions for formerly enslaved people in what was the first national case for reparations. The Ex-Slave Association was the labor and love of hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved people coming together to refuse the violence of their present, care for one another, and create the world that must be.
Our work honors the deep and enduring world-building knowledges through which our Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, womanist, feminist, and disabled kin have survived centuries of warfare. Their transformative “religio-racial” practices, to use Judith Weisenfeld’s generative term, are ones that movement organizers have been using to cross worlds, open portals, and conjure revolution for generations. These practices were central in organizing the Ex-Slave Association, and they are just as central to the grassroots work of building the world we need today.
Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South
For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights. In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed their headquarters. Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth. Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers, McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina---with other movements for liberation as accomplices. Together, the authors refuse the logics of racial capitalism and share WWAV’s own world-building knowledge, as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise.
To learn more about Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South visit dukeupress.edu/fire-dreams.
“Theory on the Ground”
[“Theory on the Ground” is] theory developed in the midst of lived struggle, which carries forward the deeply enduring resistant visions of generations past and grows them in and through the geographies of the present, toward new and more possible futures.
—Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the Deep South, page 25
To imagine, much less create, the world anew is profoundly rigorous work. Our concept “theory on the ground” honors the labor of turning Women With A Vision’s community work into the theory and vision to build the world otherwise. It also roots our work always in the generations of southern Black feminist organizers whose fire dreams we carry forward every day. And it holds us in steady relationship to the generations to come, as we work to build a world that is more survivable for them to inhabit.
Over the course of the last 35 years, we’ve seen Women With A Vision’s work be minimized, stolen, and attacked by people wielding more power and privilege than our foremothers and the women charged with carrying on WWAV’s legacy today. It’s our hope that Fire Dreams and the Born in Flames Living Archive will showcase the decades of theory and praxis developed by Women With A Vision to serve the liberation of our communities. By naming our work “theory on the ground,” we are challenging white supremacist, extractive research practices that take our communities’ knowledge and erase the traditions through which we produce it –– the academic version of the racial capitalism playbook. We are also honoring the lineages of Black feminist thinkers who have taught us that what we envision, witness, practice, and theorize on the ground is the most rigorous kind of knowledge we can make.
In writing Fire Dreams and creating this Born in Flames Living Archive, we drew on all of the tools in our counter playbook. We set out to refuse the world as it is, to move in a way that speaks to a world otherwise, and to add our voices as accomplices to the call for global liberation. Both the book and this archive are filled with examples of our “theory on the ground” –– from the steps of the racial capitalism playbook, to the tools in our counter playbook, to the models of harm reduction that our foremothers pioneered, to the vision for change that led the NO Justice Project. We invite you to stay in conversation with us and this work by visiting the Talk Back page.