“You're the one that they're protecting white people from.”
Click the link above to listen to the full interview or read the transcript here.
“As Muslims, this should be a very easy conversation for us. But white supremacy just has us tripping.”
In this conversation, Hoda and Nahid passionately talk about feeling safe online and offline, what we mean when we say “we have everything we need,” and how we can use infrastructures that we’ve already built to re-imagine and enact safety for our communities.
Hoda shares what safety means to her, how she seeks safety and protection from threats of violence without calling the police, and how she builds relationships in her communities as a daily abolitionist practice.
“Before we think about ‘OK, who are we going to call?’ We need to ask: ‘What do our communities not have? Why is there cause for a feeling of [lack of] safety and how can we actually address that before we do anything else?’
We can actually creatively use whatever skill that we have at any point in our lives to start imagining how we can use that skill to build our communities and to help our people.”
About Hoda Katebi
Hoda Katebi is an Iranian-American writer, organizer, and creative educator. Her political fashion work has been hailed from the BBC to the New York Times to the pages of VOGUE and featured and cited in books, journals, and museums around the world. Hoda is the host of #BecauseWeveRead, a radical digital book club and discussion series with 20+ chapters globally; founding member of Blue Tin Production, an apparel manufacturing workers co-operative run by working class women of color; a national lead with Believers Bail Out, a bail fund using Zakat to bail Muslims from pretrial & immigration incarceration; and organizer with the No War Campaign. She frequently gives talks and trainings on stages around the world.