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works. I was one of the fortunate people in my fam- ily to go to college. I always had an inkling about how fucked up everything was because I grew up in the hood, we can just see the night and day changes.
I was also taken out of my neighborhood school because I had higher proficiency levels and was sent to a school that primarily had white kids on the east side of Milwaukee. That was an eye opening experi- ence because I had literally never seen a white kid my age. I mean I had seen them, but I had never interact- ed because Milwaukee is so segregated in that way.
I didn’t learn how the system worked until I was able access higher academia by going to college. Even organizing within the DIY community and working with other people of color who never really had that privilege of going to school made me definitely recog- nize that I had that privilege of being able to access higher learning. I see the structural and sociological patterns that keep us conflicted. I also try to keep it on the level of understanding where these patterns come from, take in to consideration the social condi- tion of where we are in the grand scale of this whole feudalist pyramid scale. (laughing) That’s what I like to call it because it’s pretty much the same shit they did in medieval Europe — a level you were born in. People don’t like to think of us living in a social caste system, but we do and we internalize a lot of shit due to being born into that situation.
Mariam: On one hand punks seemed really per- missive of how corporate it became like punks were making a concession and limiting radical views in punk as a “white thing.” Then on the other hand, people of color are always being scruti- nized over how we interact with money; spending money, making money, all the while during an un- derlying belief that we are somehow responsible for systemic racism and what it does to us. More specifically fucked up, that anytime a black person makes money, it is somehow dishonest.
Monika: Oh absolutely, I mean you don’t see that backlash happening with Warped Tour? (laughing) I mean shit like Riot Fest. They are actually taking over neighborhoods of color and making large amounts of money by displacing people. The shit like, “We are giving people jobs!” which is bullshit because these jobs are cleaning up after white bourgeois that come out and take over. They are also bringing more police enforcement. What’s so personal for me is how Afro- punk turned out, it has become this rhetoric that the DIY root is lesser that doesn’t deserve any type of
recognition. In turn you have a lot more black kids that will go to that because it feels safer. We have been condition to think that anything has to deal with corporations is more legit. That is internal within the black community of assimilating to a capitalist system that actively disenfranchises a larger portion of our community and not understanding how those things are interrelated.
Mariam: Even when disenfranchised people gain access to that information we often don’t know what to do with it, sort of like Imposter Syndrome; Do I belong here? How does this relect my status as a Latino person, Black person, Queer person, etc. what is the “typical” position for us to be in. How do you handle that when you are delving into projects that you traditionally have little visibility in? You also said that when you were talking to Chardine about approaching a project with inten- tion, that it’s not solely a personal art project per say, but it also has resonating effect or can have resonating effects. Have you always approached projects like that or is this something you had to arrive to?
Monika: I think it’s totally possible for people to take their power back to do what ever they want to. We have always been told that we have to do things a certain way in order to achieve any type of success.
I think about when I first went to college my family was telling me I should major in something business oriented, to do the corporate thing. I really wanted
to major in film and I was shot down. I thought then maybe I could be a professor, so I decided to major in African Studies and Political Science. I generally wanted to know more about these things. I had my first Africology class and I fell in love. I realized that this I wanted to study, the African Diaspora. Having
a double major with Political Science goes hand in hand because once you understand the Transat- lantic Slave Trade and how we have gotten to this point of Capitalism you are pretty much talking about transgenerational trauma and why we are in this situation now. It became more personal for me. With Audre’s Revenge I feel there are still people that I know that have a genuine love for film, doing artistic things, special effects, makeup, and what ever else that are told that you can’t do unless you have a lot of money and live in Hollywood or plan on going to Hol- lywood. I think about the specific oppressions that we always face, like not having access to the materi- als or what we do. What if you are a sex worker,