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Late 2022 I sat down with Ohio raised journalist, activist and recent memoir author Prince Shakur. We talked about their writing, life and introduction to politics. The first thing I wanted to ask Prince about was who they are and how they see themselves in the world?

Prince

I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up in the inner city. I grew up going to all black schools. I grew up in a Jamaican family. So definitely like a mix between Jamaican culture and black culture. Being raised to kind of be smart, articulate, go to college. All of those things are kind of like a big part of me to the world. I hope that I’m a kind person that gives people advice when they need it. I hope that I enlightened people in small and large ways. I’m also a writer. I love stories. I love intaking stories. I love watching movies. I love reading books. I love people that are good storytellers, either through storytelling or jokes. I also want a better world, which usually includes some kind of ideology around anarchism and experimentation around that area of thought. I love traveling, slow travel, going to a place for a while, hanging out, vibing, meeting people from different economic classes.

Jordan

Throughout your time, you’ve been doing some organizing as a student, as an adult, as a writer, as a journalist. How has this landscape evolved in your eyes? What is organizing to you and how have you seen that evolve? Or like seeing yourself evolve around the organizing landscape and also what it’s meant to you?

Prince

To me, organizing is having the capacity to use your imagination in ways that go beyond the boundaries of what is taught to you on a political level. Because to me, organizing is trying to deviate or disrupt something in the status quo. There has to be a deep level of understanding of even that fact and then the ability to be a social agent and the spaces that you inhabit and are in. I do think people can organize in ways that are tech oriented or hacking or things that might involve solitary work. But to me, organizing is about the community structure. Being able to be social or resolving conflict and then just the really nitty gritty grassroots work, it’s like, are you building resources for people that are experiencing inequality or are you doing cultural awareness? Are you doing trainings? Are you really good at planning demonstrations? Do you know how to boycott? Looking at the different areas that you can engage in, I think is also really important.

I got radicalized in high school because I had a teacher that was a communist and taught us all about communism. And that was really intense and really moved me. I remember handing out fliers and papers for the Revolutionary Communist Party on the east side of Cleveland. My teacher, Mr. Radcliff, was a RevCom and he would invite veterans in and they talk about, like, the PTSD. He talked about abortion and reproductive health rights and all sorts of things. I mean, he was also weird in some ways, but so that was high school. I remember going to my first protest, which was International Women’s Day after the Cleveland Strangler murdered all those women, their bodies and body parts were found in his house. Then in college for my senior year, Michael Brown was killed. My senior year, I went to like two to four political meetings a week. I started being known as the protest boy because I was at protests all the time. And so to me, organizing and coming into my political awareness has gone right alongside me, coming into my queerness, me coming into being an adult. So a lot of my framework of navigating adulthood is also through a political lens. But to me, I mean, organizing has taught me how to be more direct. It’s taught me to enter a space. If that space has a goal or an intention, it’s about not wasting my time or other people’s time. It’s also taught me in a lot of situations where there’s conflict, slow down, listen, ask questions when you can and those are all things that I think are good to know in your regular interpersonal relationships.

But how it’s changed, that’s a big question. I mean, for me, it’s a difficult question to answer because I think the political spaces I’ve been engaging with have changed so much. I don’t have a very through line view of one particular area. But I can say through President Obama’s incessant liberalism, neoliberalism and all the progressive politics. Then with Trump kind of navigating, having to witness how white people view and deconstruct, and fail to combat white supremacy and fascism. I think a lot of street protest culture has changed over the last few years. In a lot of ways, I think a lot of the anarchists that I knew, that love going to Europe, they were so excited in 2020. So I think just maybe the capacity to which people will have and will continue to experience police violence on a protest level, the capacity has changed. But I also think the spectacles of violence that we’re experiencing are becoming increasingly common. That to me is like a deep, kind of political question I have, which is like how we’re being exposed to all these hyper visible forms of violence. How is that affecting our capacity to react and organize other people? Because I think a lot of these spectacles of violence instill a sense of fear. I’ve been thinking a lot about how that’s showing up and how that’s changed some of the spaces I’ve been in or how people are willing or not willing to act. But for me, it’s kind of a difficult question because I’m like, me politically four years ago, three years ago, it’s very different than the work I’m doing now.

Jordan

You like to hop around a lot. How has everything that you’ve seen brought into these spaces changed your role specifically inside of the “work” and how you are being useful with your set of skills?

Prince

I mean, in college I definitely learned that I can do a lot of public speaking. I also learned how to facilitate and like set agendas for meetings. I learned how to look at campaign structures after college. I was a boycott organizer in Seattle, and I learned even more about campaign work. But mostly I learned how to antagonize rich white people! How to yell at them, yell at them in front of their kids, yell at them in front of their grandmothers, and just really how to, like, embarrass the fuck out of them, right? So that was a huge, interesting lesson for someone who considered himself, like, I could definitely be confrontational, but I didn’t really under fully understand the power of the angry side of activism and organizing and accessing that anger when it’s necessary. I got fired for that job because it’s a horrible sort of white led union organizing space. Then I worked as a bank teller and mail person for people without housing at Compass Housing Alliance in Seattle. So there I learned how to be humbled by the work, how to work in a space where you’re servicing people that have way less than you, are going through all kinds of shit that I couldn’t even enumerate, but it was just like, you had to humble yourself. If someone tried to swing at you or spit at you or whatever you like, I still got to deliver this mail because it’s not about me. And so, I mean, and not to say like we weren’t taken care of, but I think it taught me a lot about what the importance of imagining and offering those services are.

After that was like my more anarchistic kind of period of time, like going to France and realizing like, oh, there are people in other countries doing work and kind of realizing that I could engage with people in other spaces and ask questions in ways that I feel comfortable doing. Standing Rock and the Philippines, all those places really humbled me to how deeply intense movement work can be under State repression and how for me, a lot of like really deep political work that I want to do and always want to be doing, which is finding ways to directly combat the State or build resources for local communities. Confronting the State to me always has inherently involved a deep sense of bodily fear. No matter how often I was out in 2020 at those protests, but whatever happened, I still always had that fear of getting the shit beat out of me by cops or getting arrested. I don’t know, maybe it’s like, the super radical in me is like, why is that fear still there? I mentioned that just to kind of maybe humanize part of my process, which is: I don’t think that fear is ever going to leave me, but I think part of the political work for me is getting to a place where I’m less afraid of it than I am now. That’s always been a part of my process or journey, unless I’m so angry that fear just goes out the window, which I think is also fun.

Jordan

It definitely can be. It can be a bit liberating. Over the years, as a writer and speaker, you’ve shown quite an interest in New Afrikan and black anarchist writers and scenes. How have those historical experiences you’ve read about and write about inform how you navigate politics now?

Prince

With my writing and I guess how I found it. I’m really trying to remember when I really started, but I think it was after college and with Black Lives Matter, maybe there was just like a lot of media about different revolutionaries and things like that. But I do remember specifically in Montana, I worked in Big Sky, Montana as a housekeeper at a ski resort for the summer of 2015 and 16. Basically they’d give you your housekeeping list at the beginning of the day and you’d have your same hallway. And so I had 30 rooms to clean every day in this hallway where there was no one else. And I don’t know, I had to play music or do something. So I remember listening to a lot of Malcolm X speeches, a lot of Martin Luther King’s speeches, a lot of older speeches you can find on YouTube. I think that was a big part of the process, realizing that I had lived through history with Black Lives Matter and what my senior year was like and realizing like, Oh, this is a history that should be written down or needs to be written down in a way that mainstream journalism doesn’t. So that was a period of time where I really realized like, oh, there’s a necessity to, like, translate this experience into something that is honest, intelligible, and is also against the state. Then I think taking in all those speeches and things like that gave me a deeper sense of what that’s look like in the past and how I differ from it. With a lot of like black radical writers or like I remember reading Assata Shakur as memoir in 2016, I remember reading what else would I read around that time? I remember reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X around that time and who that one got me. I remember I read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Around that like span of two years, I read Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton Panther Baby by Jamal Joseph. So I was just really intaking a lot of different things. And I think I realized with like a lot of the black feminists and black women that were really radical, like they always had an analysis of power that was could like analyze and look at the hierarchy in a way that showed the, I don’t know, violence of it in a way that I think was more honest.

And with a lot of the men, it was always like hyperbolizing themselves as revolutionaries and making themselves like more than human or explaining the violence but justifying it like Eldridge Cleaver and Soul on Ice and so I think for me, as I was navigating all these different movement spaces, like as a gay or a queer black dude, a queer Jamaican American, and I also view myself as very cis. So I think reading these men and being in these spaces always made me want to have a deep awareness of how I show up and whether or not I take up space in a way that, I don’t know, takes power away from other people. And so I think those are just kind of things that it taught me on an organizing and like space level and a gender level. But I think with my writing, I realized like, oh, I am experiencing these movements in a way that is at these intersections. I experienced homophobia in Standing Rock, like when I was in the Philippines and learning about things there. And granted, I’m an American, so that’s a great privilege. But I also experienced a lot of weird fetishization in anti-Blackness. To me, these experiences after reading all that literature, which was mostly by straight revolutionary black men other than maybe Kuwasi Balagoon.

Jordan

I was just about to ask you about them, because they are the only person that ever gets reference as a New Afrikan Anarchist

Prince

Yeah, like where are they other ones! I think all of those things in a way where I was developing more as a writer and organizer after college. I was like, I think I’m in a place where I can build language around these things. And it’s important to build language, especially in this day and age, where things are changing. So often the Internet is changing so much and like devastation is encroaching as it always is. But so I’m like, what is my body of work going to be in the time that I have, essentially?

Jordan

Yeah. I mean, when you look at it historically, this is like the second wave of black anarchism with Lorenzo Ervin in the nineties writing their stuff, then people with the Anarchist People of Color (APOC) in like the 2000 and critical resistance in California doing anti prison work. What I see is more our era is to cut through all the anarchist bullshit that’s been going on, especially because there is understanding in like different cultures or cultures that were colonized and like a decolonial analysis that allows for a lot of more anti-hierarchical stuff. But like it’s always been a struggle to get there and every time that that power dynamic can show up, it will show up just like it showed up in the Black Panther Party and Marcus Garvey summits and stuff like that. But we still have a ways to go. And I don’t like to say there’s an era of progress or anything, but do you see a transition? It looks a bit more “up” for me in these times. It’s like a writer in that field or someone that has ideas and wants to debate and talk about people or talk about ideas.

Prince

Yeah, no, I definitely I think I agree with you, and I think it’s why I enjoyed learning about the Black Panther Party and kind of their ideas about solidarity, international solidarity and diasporic solidarity and to me, like, I love my friends and revolutionaries that are like yes, they can be read and seen as black, but they’re of the diaspora. Like maybe they’re from the Caribbean or they’re from Africa or whatever. I feel like when I talk to people from those backgrounds, whether it’s cultural or they immigrated, but that to me is really beautiful and necessary. Because I in the diaspora, like, what I really also reach for is how can I understand the process of my family and my history being colonized and how can I do that same service for other people as well, whether it’s through what I’m actually learning or intaking or my writing and using that as a tool or traveling to a place. I’m really grateful I got to go to the Philippines to kind of be there no matter how confusing and intense it was. It was also amazing because I got to see this whole other political context where I think the oldest communist party or like Revolutionary Communist Party or something is there, and I’m like the oldest one in the world? And so it’s just things like that with the Internet and our accessibility to certain resources and how hyper visible inequality is to people in a way where they can become more radicalized through the Internet. I feel like the younger generations have certain radical ideology more accessible to them. And that is also something that’s really exciting to me, especially for black people or people in the African diaspora. Like how can that shift and change our ability to communicate, learn from each other, and also build up the momentum of this political thought even faster?

Jordan

One thing that we’re seeing with your traveling work is that you always managed to stay in the moment within introspection. I know if that’s more of an after the fact thing or in the moment, but it bleeds together very well. What grounds you as a person, what do you think is like helping ground you in these spaces? Is it being from a radical black queer perspective?

Or is it coming from disparate cultures, being anti-state in these spaces, being like I can understand my privilege, but at the same time talk shit about exactly where I’m from.

Prince

It’s a lot of different things. I also hate being perceived as a tourist, but there’s some places where I’m like, I’m literally black. There’s no other black people here. Why else would I be here? I mean, on a childhood level I grew up visiting Jamaica. The first time I went there, I stayed there for a year. I went to kindergarten there, and I visited most of my summers. And so literally, I went there as a five year old and then I stayed through school. To me, my first travel experience was that, it was literally going somewhere and being like, I’m not going to see my mom for the next nine months. I’m going to go to school. That was, in retrospect, sounds really intense, but as a kid, it just kind of happened. But I think it taught me at a very early age an understanding of privilege. My sister and I have different mothers, my sister grew up in Jamaica. I remember like some of her teeth would be rotting as a kid because access to health care and dental care was different. When I would go there and bring toys or play my video games, it was this whole thing for people in the neighborhood. As I was developing my brain as a child, I also had those experiences. It gave me a deep sense of I don’t know if gratitude is the right word, the ability to know that that inequality is there.

Then what grounds me? I mean, I feel like I grew up being queer, going to college after coming out to my parents and kind of feeling like I was emotionally displaced, I had to learn that the people you meet, the places that you go and that things that you see, like, that is something that is a gift you can give back to yourself, essentially. So I made friends that felt like family in college. Since college I think travel is so humbling. I think it can be uncomfortable. I think there’s been so many times where I’ve gone to countries where I don’t know the language and I literally feel like I’m being swallowed up by the world. These really intense feelings of displacement or discomfort or invisibility or hyper visibility, they teach you a lot about what it means to be a human and what it means to cope in extreme environments. Alongside having the ability to kind of remove yourself, look at your privilege and maybe it’s just like how I intellectualize things, but I like to look at the utility of things. When I was in the Philippines, what grounded me was the conversations I had with people, how open they were with their political environment and how hospitable Filipino people were. But also I was being followed by teenage boys who were taking photos of me all the time. I wanted to be aware of my privilege because I’m literally an American here, able to spend my money I earned in the U.S. so that was like a thing. But also feeling hyper objectified but also receiving a lot of hospitality. It’s also how I saw Jamaica. Like, people go there and they visit and they experience the resort and then they leave and they’re like, oh, I loved it. But I’m like, you didn’t really love it. You loved the projection of it that you had. When you go into an environment and you experience discomfort, but you also learn gratitude, to me, that’s like a more honest depiction of a place, even if it is on a visitor level. Leaving with that more complicated truth is what I wish more travelers and tourists did and what I wish the travel and tourism industry like had in its infrastructure. That to me is really important as someone who’s like the child, the child of immigrants. Because like when I go back to Jamaica, I’m not Jamaican, but I’m not necessarily entirely American, although most to most people there, I am American. And so I think all of those things are, I don’t know, it’s just literally real, we can talk about it. Is also how I see it.

Jordan

One thing that I’ve seen that’s influenced at least some of your early travels was that other black artists like James Baldwin went to France, seem to enjoy France, ya keep going back at least. How do you feel like political art, political violence and political/bodily self-defense has shaped the liberatory politics.

Prince

I think I kind of have two answers. On one level, I think political art and art that depicts political movements in history, I think it is a truth telling kind of factory. It’s a truth-telling process. It’s a clarifying it’s adding texture and complexity to an environment where mainstream media is driven by capitalism, money, ads, subscriptions, and so I think when you have an industry that’s about depicting reality and it is based on profit, when you’re creating media outside of that structure, like on some level, it can and does add complexity. But I think on another level, because anything that’s political has an intention and that intention can be based in liberation, equality or inequality, subjugation. So I think on another level of political art and work that media depicts, it’s also a lie in some way. It involves some kind of a lie because you have to argue, which to me, debating in some ways is persuasive, but you’re also kind of lying. You’re using facts to your advantage and you’re depicting a certain reality.

As a person from an oppressed background, who’s been marginalized, I view my art and work as propaganda. That’s because I want to, because propaganda is necessary to fight capitalism, to fight white supremacy, to fight everything against us. Just as they propagandize to us, we have to use our work and resources to propagandize against them. The way the craft comes in is how well I can make that art or that propaganda, something that is emotionally true. That’s something that’s very important to me. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, especially as a fiction writer. But I think it’s a slippery process because some of my writing has been about looking at the work of political figures or artists like James Baldwin or Huey Newton or Bob Marley and looking at like, yes, their art served this great purpose under capitalism. And yes, it fed into like neoliberalism or certain fucked up politics because of how they were marketed or received or what political time that they were in. But when you get to such a high point or you’re respected or revered so much and you’re set as one of those main examples of like black art or black radicalism or black radical thought, there is like a reduction in what people can actually fully understand about you.

I’ve written about how James Baldwin had a lot of depression and mental health and had numerous suicide attempts and how to me that was the factor of a variety of things. But some of it to me is like he didn’t live in a world that had the capacity to , understand him on a large social level in a complex way like white people get. Huey Newton experienced mostly solitary confinement when he was incarcerated. But when he got out, he still had to be the spokesperson for the party. He still had to be the person that was worthy of being campaigned for while also battling paranoia state like surveillance addiction, probably also some mental health stuff as well. So to me, it’s like political art serves a purpose in our movement and work. But I think the deeper process over time is how do we have ownership over it after those movements and campaigns are done and how do we not allow these mainstream systems to co-opt it? So it’s the truth, but it’s also a lie.

Jordan

What kind of tactics do you feel like we’ve seen political art being used for like in this day? So all the stuff we’re reading about and talking about now happened 60 years ago. Like we’re still on the sixties, seventies and eighties in all of our book clubs and stuff like that. It’s very informative, but I feel like it also gives us enough time to look at the tactics to see how names like Martin Luther King and even Malcolm X have gotten co-opted into these angles. If you can think of any, what kind of tactics have you seen that were used to help co-opt those movements? What can we see for like the newer Black Power, BlackLivesMatter or like black autonomous movements. How can we battle the co-optation from the state?

Prince

On one level we have to democratize the ways that our movements in spaces are documented and covered. Like it’s why independent news and journalism is important. It’s also why I’ve been thinking a lot about like, citizen journalism, and I’ve been talking to other journalists about that and like the utility and purpose of that. It’s also why I think video and documentary work is important as well, like taking that outside of the hands of streaming services or the mainstream news or even YouTube or whatever. So democratizing it and casting a wider net and making it more accessible, I think is just something that inherently is going to help us in the long run. But in terms of fighting co-optation, I think like when people or institutions co-opt our work, yes, you have to work with people and collaborate and there has to be solidarity. But I also think some people just need to be cussed out more.

Jordan

Yeah, some people in these positions of power and like nonprofits or academia or even the state, they think they’re doing really good things. Like they’re like, we’re going to uplift these names and these people.

Prince

Like having cops on Tik Tok is going to help people understand more. Having an antagonistic relationship with the people that co-opt our things is essentially what I’m speaking to. Not saying that I don’t think we already do, but I think there’s always room to have more. Because sometimes we fear that cussing someone out or holding them accountable is going to completely burn that bridge. But I think if that bridge is burned because of that, maybe it didn’t need to be there in the first place.

Jordan

As someone who consistently sits in the crosshairs of American culture war propaganda. Do you feel like I feel like, you talked about this earlier, like we want to make strides in that culture war and I’m a big proponent of we need more we’re more like a social and cultural revolution in the Americas will enhance achieving any sort of meaningful economic change. We need more people to understand how these decentralized networks work and how we can live in a radically different way and how it’s not radical because it’s too much to ask for. It’s radical because it gets shit done. How do we combat their propaganda on our own terms? It’s like the culture wars are always going on, we are never going to deny that it’s happening. You can also say they’re very much winning, because they use state machinery to push this culture war. There are people that are state representatives that never signed a bill, wrote a bill, but they’re just on TV all the time.

Prince

I guess I’m falling into thinking about class and how I think the process of fighting the culture war will be different based on class distinction, like I think poor people versus middle class people and how like those distinctions matter a lot in the U.S. So I think if people are poor and don’t have resources, part of that cultural battle is fighting disinformation and building a culture within our revolutionary spaces where we can provide resources and we can experiment in ways that prove these people right in the way that these state institutions don’t. The state and its institutions tell us these narratives, and then they give us these promises that they don’t follow through with, whether it’s about what the police should do or what our public schools should be teaching us or what our taxes are going towards. A part of our cultural process should be combating the state by having a political process where we provide things that people need and that builds a relationship of trust with middle class people or people that are poor. I feel like a part of the culture war is getting people to rid themselves of the small or large privileges that they’re afforded through being middle class, through being kind of like the ideal sort of economic group in terms of like the US. Then beyond that, I mean I, I don’t know what I’ll say for rich people. I won’t say nothing on this. I mean, what I will say won’t be. I won’t say it on this podcast because I won’t. I don’t want it documented. But for the rich, people just do what they did in France, basically.

Combating the culture war and how do we work towards it? For me personally, I am always looking at the utility of the cultural objects and things being offered to us. Engaging with that for me allows it to not overpower me. I can engage with it and debate with people about it and that’s my way of combating it on my terms. I always want to have the ability to speak to some part of it or debate some aspect of it, as opposed to doing my work in my own kind of silo and space. Because it’s experimentation and combating it outside of the structure of what’s presented to us as important. But I also think engaging with and understanding that structure to me is important because I can debate with people that participate in it. This is just me saying, I watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians because I want to debate with my brother about why they’re fucked up, I want to have the language around it. That to me is just really important, especially as a writer and a culture writer.

Jordan

Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about you wanted to highlight?

Prince

My book is coming out. Maybe by the time this podcast is out, my book will be out, but it’s called When They Tell You To Be Good. It’s coming out October 4th with Tin House books. It kind of covers some of the things that I talked about in this conversation, but it charts my political coming of age and also unpacks generational and kind of patriarchal violence in my family alongside Jamaica’s like post-independence kind of era and my family coming to the US so check that out.