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people because I was traveling a lot more. I met a lot of individuals through Bash Back! in Chicago. That’s where I essentially found my radical punk community. I knew that there were other punks of color out there, but they weren’t necessarily in Milwaukee. Even though I had met people through when the Afropunk documentary came out, I found punks on the old message board and others. I connected with a lot of people that affirmed that I wasn’t the only one, that
I wasn’t the only person dealing with those types of situations.
Mariam: In organizing B&B in Chicago did you run into the some of the same attitudes?
Monika: Yes. The issue of anti-blackness within the Black and Brown community that is one of the things that took away the romanticization of the scene in Chicago for me. Not just being a black woman hav- ing to deal with heteronormative dudes, but there were also people of color that held their own type of hierarchy of oppression against me and also pushed their own shit on me. You got people within the col- lective that were holding this past Black and Brown show against me. I had a lot of dudes telling me how to operate the show and it was frustrating because they were approaching me in a way that was perpetu- ating patriarchal norms. They like the generic form of solidarity that, “We are People of Color!” but ignoring the idea that we each have our own assigned set of oppressions that we have to deal with every day and that we perpetuate against each other. That became really exhausting and we had a breakdown in the midst of organizing. Individually, it really burned me out (laughing), just a lot of the emotional work that people can’t take on by themselves, especially when you have people that you have been organizing with and have known for a long time — their passivity starts to build up and then you can’t ignore it any- more.
Mariam: Do you have a sense of the effect that B&B Punk Shows has on the punk world and in general?
Monika: I met a lot of people. Like my friend Chardine that lives in the UK, she’s in a band called Big Joanie that’s really awesome and we have talked immensely about the importance of being able to create our own spaces despite being down trodden by capitalism, being told that we can’t sustain these types of com- munities without state involvement or having to
borrow from people. Because colonialism is global, any type of organizing is very important as far as building solidarity within communities; that we
can take something from nothing and figure it out ourselves. It’s empowering. Kids can actually get
a group of friends, put this idea out there and it is completely doable even if you don’t have the money for it. If you have the initiative any thing is possible. Look at all the Latino Fests. People look at Afro-punk and how corporate it has become, then you realize our vulnerability and how capitalism can sometimes rear it’s ugly head in movements like that. I feel that you just have to keep it radical at its core and utilize DIY tactics. DIY too has been co-opted by so many people, where it has become this trend instead of an actual way of life when it’s the way POC have literally survived in this country. It is really important to keep those roots.
Mariam: Why do you think Afropunk was suscep- tible to monetization?
Monika: I think that it became a fail-safe because we have become accustomed to corporations telling us what we should accept, what we should be and what ever else feels safe versus actually taking the rawest form, coming together and taking on serious issues. We have a generic form of how to express ourselves, but only if corporations say it’s the fail-safe. I feel like there are a lot of kids into Afropunk, but think there is only one way to do it. Afropunk isn’t even punk in the sense of the esthetics of what it is, even the whole DIY concept of it can bring classist issues which black people don’t really know how to mess with. Coming from a pretty impoverished background, I held some resentment towards that because every- thing I am actually into has been anti-establishment. That feels like radical territory for people who are comfortable living within this structural life informed by capitalism and colonialism.
Mariam: So it has to do with the history of capital- ism and it’s constant stealing from black culture? Imposing definitions through theft?
Monika: Definitely. The two aren’t separate. That’s the way capitalism works. Just look how racism as a structural institution has affected basic interactions, of people actually not understanding institution of racism because our school system is shit and we can only access that information in higher academia or going to college to actually see how this county