In this conversation, we gather on Women With A Vision’s front porch, hallowed grounds of New Orleans Black feminist struggle, as we reckon with the reality of white supremacist Christian terror and clarify our work to build otherwise in these times. We have chosen to offer our contribution to this forum on religion and violence in the form and method of Black Southern storytelling, through which meaning is made and held collectively, to underline our commitment to bringing activist “theory on the ground” to bear on academic discourse.
Twelve years ago, on May 24, 2012, Women With A Vision’s (WWAV) New Orleans offices were firebombed by still-unknown arsonists. The arson attack was a form of spiritual warfare. As the arsonists moved through our space, they shattered the awards we were given for our revolutionary Black feminist work; they burned the faces off Black women in our photographs and posters; they set little fires throughout our meditation alcove; and then they built a bonfire in our outreach office, destroying all of the records and testimonies we gathered from our community. It was an attack intended to break us and force us to close our doors.
And yet, we’re still here. For thirty-five years, WWAV has been fighting for the liberation of our communities by fighting for reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers’ rights. As Audre Lorde taught us, “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.” After the arson attack, we started collecting every life-giving ember from our history of organizing work that we could find: first, the handfuls of photographs, posters, and documents that had not gone up in flames, and then, our presence with one another and with our communities, which we began to record through life history interviews, collective storytelling sessions, and more. Together, we cared for these embers, tended to them, stitched them together into what became our living archive, and set them free in our book.
The spiritual labor of ensuring that WWAV would rise from the ashes reminded us of what it means to bear witness to violence, and also what it means to be called to work in service of our New Orleans community. Today, the whole world is on fire. The forces of racial capitalism are dropping bombs on hospitals, starving entire populations, and colonizing ancestral lands. Here in Louisiana, our fight for safety and bodily autonomy has become all the more acute under an administration hell-bent on repressing everything that isn’t cisgender, heterosexual, white, and Christian.
And yet we also know that the struggle is eternal. We stand on the shoulders of Southern Black women whose work ensured the survival of future generations and laid the path for our eventual thriving. We carry forward their fire dreams as we work to build the world that must be. Too often, the South is assumed to be synonymous with white supremacist Christianity, betraying the complexity and diversity in Black religious traditions here. In the conversation below, we weave together our foremothers’ histories with our own to tell a different story about religion, struggle, and world-building. And we move, in the words of James Baldwin, “as largely and as freely as possible to write the story and to get it out.”
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Camille Roane: We’re gathering today for a Southern front porch talk about religion and violence. We’re inviting everyone reading this conversation to pull up a chair and join us. Let’s begin by settling into New Orleans time, this work, and what’s weighing on all our hearts today. Can you tell us about the founding of Women With A Vision, the start of your relationship and shared work, and bring us into what you are doing in this moment?
Deon Haywood: Women With A Vision was started thirty-five years ago, which is really exciting for us. We’re excited because normally local Black woman, queer-led organizations don’t survive. Because of something — funding, attacks, whatever — they normally don’t survive. WWAV was started by a collective of Black women who wanted to respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the late 1980s. They formed WWAV with the idea that if you educate Black women, you can make change — because Black women are change makers. Black women lead and we know that. Back then and now, Black women are leading households. They’re in community in a way that could make a difference. Our foremothers initially focused on HIV, women’s health, and harm reduction. And they worked alongside the people that our society treats as disposable — Black women, poor folks, substance users, and sex workers. I’m sure some of you reading this will know Lil’ Wayne and the Hot Boys . . . We had a community drop-in center right across the street from the housing development that they lived in.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, we realized that our fighting needed to look different. We needed to really focus on policy. Educating our community wasn’t enough. We needed to be building community power, creating our own solutions, making sure our people understood that politicians are supposed to work on their behalf, and getting our people to the Capitol to tell lawmakers to their faces, “Look, y’all are making our lives really hard, and we need to change that.” Over the last thirty-five years, we’ve changed multiple laws, had politicians sponsor laws aimed at making people’s lives better.
The time that we’re in right now is another historic moment that has called all of us forward. Every single person has a responsibility. That’s something we talk about at WWAV: that we’re all called to do a thing, and it couldn’t be more important in this moment. That is just how it felt thirty-five years ago when we started, but it’s even more important now.
Laura McTighe: It really is. And our relationship is a part of that. Deon and I always talk about how we’ve been writing and thinking and theorizing together for a long time. We are friends, chosen family, and comrades. Through the building and maintaining of our relationship, we have worked through what it means to be an accomplice, what it means to listen, and what it means to build a world otherwise together.
Deon and I met in 2008, at a retreat center in upstate New York that brought together longtime organizers for prison abolition and HIV liberation to forge a movement at the intersection of these two struggles. She just shared with you the incredible work that WWAV started doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — continuing all of the education and harm reduction work, meeting people where they’re at, and then also working to change the policies that made life less survivable. The WWAV leadership at the time was Deon, her mother Catherine Haywood, who is one of the co-founders of WWAV, and her friend Danita Muse, who is the person who first made WWAV a reality. When all of them were able to return to New Orleans after the storm, people started showing up at WWAV with photo IDs that said “sex offender” in block red letters. The New Orleans Police Department was using a nineteenth-century anti-sodomy statute to criminalize sex workers, to criminalize people who were working in street-based economies. And if you know anything about WWAV, you know that folks weren’t going to stand for that. Our foremothers have been on the frontlines pushing back, refusing the world as it is and building the world that must be.
Deon and I met right as she was starting to track what was happening after the storm around sex work criminalization. The first time I ever went to New Orleans, it was at Deon’s invitation — to support WWAV in bringing together a coalition that took on this statute, took on criminalization, and won, securing the removal of more than eight hundred people from the state’s sex offender registry.
Almost two months to the day after that victory, WWAV’s offices were firebombed and destroyed. We started working immediately to try to recreate everything that was lost. Stories, files, photographs . . . And so my work as a white queer person has been in service of Black women’s leadership: to be an accomplice to Black feminist liberation, an accomplice to the work WWAV is carrying forward, to try to build the world otherwise.
CR: There is a lot that y’all have both opened up around WWAV’s work and your bond together. Let’s get into this present moment. I want to do that by way of Grace Lee and James Boggs’s classic question on history and revolution: “What time is it on the clock of the world?”
DH: Thank you, Camille. I want to answer that by adding a little bit to what Laura said about the fire. As an organization, WWAV has survived the tactics of white supremacist Christian terror that are everywhere right now. None of these tactics are new, even if they feel like they’re happening on a whole other level. Terror is always reactionary. White supremacists see our power, they see us — Black folks, Brown folks, women, and queer folks — living our full lives, and they’re grasping at the straws of the old world to try to stop the new one we are building.
When the arson attack on WWAV happened, they were trying to break us, trying to destroy the work that we were doing, trying to take away our ability to fight for ourselves, trying to take away our space. And we know that space is so important for people. Everybody needs a safe space, a place to land, a place to be who you are freely. So it wasn’t just about the loss of the office. After the fire, so many of our community members showed up. They were so hurt, just like we all were, to lose our safe space because somebody hated what we were doing.
That moment reminds me of the one we’re in now. Everybody’s upset. Everybody is grieving. There’s fear and anxiety around white supremacists, white Christian nationalists — and what they’re trying to do in this moment.
But really, we were winning then, and they tried to destroy that. We are winning now, and they’re trying to destroy that, too. We have to remember that. Whenever we’re winning, the enemy is going to come for us. We are winning now. And that’s why they are working so hard to destroy us. We need to not give up hope about where we can go, and what we can do, and how we show up.
Now is the time to get back to basics, back to the methods we have always used to free us. We need space to share our fears and also to come up with our own solutions. We need to help each other open our imaginations and envision the future of our dreams, and we need to honor the ways that we are already working to build that future right here, right now. Most of all, we need to revisit our history to move forward.
This is why I say some of us are called. We’ll be called in different ways — Black folks, Brown folks, women, and queer folks. But we all have to participate in our liberation, just like we had to fight in Louisiana in that moment before and after the fire, and just like we’re doing now.
LM: I really appreciate stepping into this long view of history with WWAV. And I think it’s also precisely what the Boggses wanted us to understand. Conditions change, times change. The methods WWAV uses are rooted in generations of struggle, which is precisely why our strategies for revolutionary change work. Our foremother Danita Muse always talks about how what was so groundbreaking about WWAV’s work in the late 1980s and early 1990s was our ability to step deeply into community, to see the world as it is, and to build with our people what they needed to survive and thrive. I hear that same spirit, Dee, in what you just shared about getting back to basics and revisiting WWAV’s history to move forward.
It also reminds me of something you said right after the arson attack, at one of our first community fundraisers: “Fire has long been used as a tool of terror in the South, but it can also be a powerful force for rebirth.” And that was so powerful. Because you were naming that even in this moment of extreme violence, there was something else already there — WWAV’s future was already present. That was a spiritually revolutionary framework. You were teaching us that we needed to refuse an order that said it was fine to burn down an organization, to erase our history, and to sever us in this way from the histories of Black feminist struggle in the South.
When our world feels disenchanted, that’s by design. The powers that be are steadily trying to erase our histories. They’re trying to make a world in which we don’t feel and know that our ancestors are here with us and walking forward with us. And that’s why it mattered so much that every step we took after the fire affirmed that the Black Southern women organizers who came before us were present with us all the time. That was a radical, world-building claim. When we work in the organizing and spiritual traditions of Southern Black feminists, then everywhere we look we will see the glimmers of the world that we’re trying to build all around us.
That part has been so instructive to me. We sustain this work because every day we are making the world that we need around us. If we can gather those little fragments and put the pieces together, then we get somewhere else.
CR: I appreciate the way that each of you are talking about what it means to bear witness to violence, and to understand the responsibility that comes with that. And it strikes me: Women With A Vision seems to be a secular place with a divine mission. Can you tell me about doing this work in New Orleans and about the spiritual geographies here?
DH: Everything in New Orleans is spiritual. Everything in New Orleans is ritual. Even when people don’t recognize that that’s what they’re doing, it’s ritual. Take the MAAFA commemoration that Ashé puts on every year, Fourth of July weekend. When they do that MAAFA, you automatically know you’re going to get up and walk, you’re going to put on your white. And it’s a spiritual thing. Or take Mardi Gras, when Skull and Bones comes out. Whether you’re Catholic or not does not matter; you’re going to visit the St. Joseph Day altars. Because that’s what we do. For me personally, it doesn’t matter what my family says we are. We’re Baptist. But definitely we’re Catholic, and we’re into voodoo. We’re all the things, all the magic, right? All the things — going to sit by the river to release a thing, going to the water to release. Yeah, people may do that other places, but not like in New Orleans. It is not unusual to be sitting in a health care clinic and hear people talking about these rituals, because they’re very much a part of who we are.
When you think about cultures that are seeking freedom — and have had more than four hundred years at this point of fighting for liberation and land and life and culture — you see those things along the Gulf Coast, not just in New Orleans, but along the whole Gulf Coast. When you visit different parts of Louisiana; when you talk about central Louisiana, and you talk about Opelousas, and you talk about a Black Cajun country . . . Catholic, yes, but also heavily voodoo.
LM: I think that truth connects with what Deon was saying earlier about space. Everyone needs a safe space, a space to land. What comes to mind when we think about ritual, when we think about spirit, are precisely those safe spaces. Spaces where music is shared, where food is freely given. Spaces like the front porch, where WWAV does its work and literally builds new worlds amid the violence around us. All of that harkens back to New Orleans roots, like Congo Square: a space that is spiritually protected from the violence of the outside world.
It also connects with care and relationships. Deon’s mom always says, “You have to build a relationship.” Relationships are sacred at WWAV. That was the revolutionary analysis that our foremothers crafted about the world. They worked in community, alongside people who had been abandoned by our current order, so that they could nurture connections that give life and sever those that kill. And by doing that, they taught us all that the world isn’t empty-able, domesticable, or dispossess-able, but rather deeply and radically connective.
That is what Deon has carried forward into in her leadership of WWAV after the storm. You know, it reminds me of this one day in 2015, when we were looking at photos from a training on sex workers’ rights, led by sex workers in our community. Dee, you were just beaming. And you said something that has stuck with me since: “There are no victims at WWAV. We claim the power we were born with.” That language “the power we were born with” contains whole worlds, whole universes. And I think that connects to where we started about what spiritual traditions you are raised in, what understanding of humanity and spirit and the world you come up with. Because it requires something different of us to work from the truth that everyone in our community is born with power. Our job is never to save them, but rather to join them in creating their own liberation, to support them in finding their own calling. To do that, we have to refuse to turn away from the violence that is literally killing people. We have to move as our foremothers did and as Black women have always done: to build the world that must be.
CR: That emphasis on relationships, on claiming the power we are born with, also makes me wonder: how does WWAV’s work connect to your own spiritual journeys?
DH: I’ve always felt different. I’ve always felt like there was something out here for me in the beauty. As much as I feel worn out sometimes, I do feel very blessed to do this work at this time in this place. I feel very blessed to exist at this moment in time — that is also connected to how I entered this realm, this space — and to be able to not only hear the calling, but feel the calling, and have a path laid out before me. Most people who are doing this work have built a church inside ourselves. It is a place where our soul walks around. It is where our spirit speaks to all of us. We live with the honor and duty. This is why Assata kept telling us about our duty, why Angela Davis told us about our duty. This is why some of us easily enter and stay, even when we are attacked because of the work we are doing.
And so, when we say some of us are called, it really is about self-awareness. And self-awareness doesn’t always feel good. As a matter of fact, becoming self-aware is one of the most difficult things an individual has to do. Because also, when we don’t listen to ourselves, our life just doesn’t go right. But when we allow ourselves to be fully engaged in self — the good, the bad, and the ugly — then what you come up with is a clear sight of who you are. And what you’re bringing is your humanity. You’re bringing spirit, and you’re bringing soul.
This life ain’t for everybody, but some of us are called. We just need to learn. That’s why ritual is important. Ritual teaches you to listen and learn, because there’s a pattern. When we follow that, however you do it, and stand on it, like these children say, you “stand on business.” You listen to yourself. You learn yourself. You stand unashamed. That’s why I always talk about shame and stigma. Because shame and stigma — those kill us on so many levels. Drug users? Shame and stigma. Sex workers? Shame and stigma. Teen moms? Single moms? You could be thirty years old and have a baby, and somebody’s going to make you feel ashamed because you ain’t got no husband. But when you remove the veil of shame and stigma, that is when you get to see yourself. That is when you get to see that all of us have a role to play. Some of us are called, but all of us have to participate in the action. And that’s the piece that’s missing in our society.
LM: Dee, that was beautiful. It reminds me of how Robin D.G. Kelley’s mother taught him to dream with his eyes wide open. That sentiment has shaped my life. So has Mariame Kaba’s truth: “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” I’ve always known that I don’t walk through this world alone. There have been many messengers along the way that have helped to steady me on my path.
I count my Grammy as my first. She raised me in a vibrant folk Catholicism where the divine was richly and thickly present. I met another when I was seventeen and started going to a Unitarian Universalist church right when that church called a minister who had been politicized during Freedom Summer. He was the first person who I had ever met who had the clarity of sight that Deon was talking about. He taught me that if you see things are wrong, then you have an obligation to do something about it. I was convinced that if you wanted to be an activist, you had to be a minister.
In the decades since, I’ve met plenty of movement folks for whom religion is not at the forefront, but when I’ve been open to it, my path has inevitably been shared with people who walk in spirit. Like John Bell, who I met when I joined ACT UP Philadelphia in 1999. When I met John Bell, I was like, “I’m literally in the presence of a living prophet.” As I got to know him, I learned that John had a near-death experience in 1997, when he was deep in heroin addiction and in the late stages of HIV. It was very clear that what he was here to do, in this iteration of his life, was to teach people that they were part of God’s system, not America’s. He was the child of Southern sharecroppers who made the Great Migration trek north to Baltimore. In our decade of building worlds alongside the communities most affected by HIV and mass criminalization, everything John and I did was undertaken with the spirit of Southern Black organizing that we’ve been talking about here.
That work brought me into community with you, Dee. As you’ve said, “We were meant to be friends. Our relationship was ordered by the universe.” There is so much that we have seen and done over the last sixteen years. We’ve grown together and we’ve shown up to love each other into the people we are becoming in the world we are building.
DH: Yes, our love for each other is that. It’s also bigger than us. We say that our book is a journey, that it is a tool. The reason we could come up with something like Fire Dreams is because we are able to challenge ourselves. We are able to challenge ourselves and look at the bigger picture. The bigger picture is humanity. A whole lot of things may not change in my lifetime, but I’ll be damned if I won’t be in peace in my afterlife or whatever that looks like, because I did what I could. I contributed — not fixed, not solved, not ended — but I contributed to the world I want to leave behind. That’s what I mean about a calling. Your calling means you have to stop and listen.