Category: From the Ashes

News

Monday briefing: The community solidarity driving the fightback against ICE in Minneapolis

Posted on

I was interviewed by Aamna Mohdin at the Guardian for their Monday Briefing newsletter, about the organizing in Minneapolis to protect immigrant communities from Trump’s ICE/Border Patrol surge. She wrote, in part:

Nationally, pressure is mounting. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has said the “credibility of ICE and DHS [Department of Homeland Security] are at stake”, while a prominent Republican candidate and attorney, Chris Madel, has withdrawn from Minnesota’s gubernatorial race. Recent polling shows a plurality of Americans now support abolishing ICE.

Jaffe describes the immigration raids as not only racist, but also part of a wider push to make America more white. Stephen Miller, a key White House senior adviser, denies this, and said questions about whether the administration’s tactics were racist were “dumb”.

A long read on Miller, viewed as the ideologue behind Trump’s immigration policies, quotes allies who say he wants to reverse America’s post-1960s immigration boom, taking in migrants from Nordic Europe, while severely restricting those from the global south, in a bid to reshape America’s ethnic and political landscape.

But, Jaffe adds, “what they’re actually doing right now is turning more white people that they assume are their base into Renee Goods and Alex Prettis.”

News

On Grief and Revolution: Q&A and event video at Deceleration

Posted on

The lovely folks at Deceleration, a Texas-based independent news outlet, filmed my San Antonio event with the brilliant Alex Birnel, Ananda Tomas and Joleen Garcia. Alex also did a further interview with me for Deceleration’s site, and editor Greg Harman wrote this lovely editor’s note:

Entering 2025 with MAGA ascendant means a physical and psychic scramble as we prepare to protect those around us who are immediately vulnerable to long promised campaigns of state violence. It is increasingly clear that Trump 2.0 will also require surviving and fighting an ‘imperial’ presidency committed to redrawing international borders, historically a recipe for large-scale conflict. The emotional toll of this onslaught of threats, followed by the groveling of too many who could have provided a degree of buffer for the less resourced, has put “brace for impact” into regular journalistic usage. MAGA at home and abroad means the fracturing and crushing of undocumented families, of trans and queer people, a constant labeling and weeding out of a fabricated “enemy within” to justify the erosion of rights, and a raffling off to the highest bidder (entry price $1B) of the marvelous network of beings often sterilized as the “environment” as the Earth continues to boil and spark from fossil-fueled abuse. Deceleration offers this conversation, and many more to come, in the hopes that those working for justice will make heartfelt and thoughtful space for the needs of the broad-based inter-generational movement materializing now. It is a movement full of pain and humor. Of joy and terror. Of grief and all stages of grieving. Prepare room.

You can read the whole thing at Deceleration, and watch the video above.

News

“Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living” at The Meteor

Posted on

Samhita Mukhopadhyay interviewed me for The Meteor! She writes:

Collective grief plays a profound role in our politics; it can unite us and inspire change. But we don’t often give grief the space to truly transform us into better political citizens.

Read the whole thing at The Meteor.

News

Interview at Workday: Every Life Is a World: Sarah Jaffe on the Power of Collective Grief

Posted on

Amie Stager at Workday magazine interviewed me about From the Ashes, and shared some of her own personal grief story in this lovely piece. She writes:

In this book, organizers share their stories of grief and power in From the Ashes, including several from Minneapolis. The George Floyd uprisings, and the demonstrations of collective grief that have followed police brutality in the U.S., are threaded into a wider story on the history and power of grief. Jaffe carefully threads these stories with her own, alongside criticism of the death-making systems and repressive cultures leading us toward planetary catastrophe and collapse. What results is a poetic call for working-class movements everywhere to gather up our ghosts, of which there are many, and set them free.

News

Fighting Like Hell: A conversation at The Baffler

Posted on

I spoke with the excellent Hannah Proctor once again; this time she interviewed me about my book for the Baffler:

Walter Benjamin’s messianic historical materialism is getting at something about the ways we can’t escape history entirely. At Standing Rock the bulldozers that were coming through to dig the Dakota Access pipeline literally turned up graves. Rather than thinking that we can bring back the dead, it’s important to think that things can get worse. In terms of Holocaust piety, the dead are being used in many cases in ways they would not want to be, in that they’re being used as justifications for war.

I contrast at some point, Mother Jones saying, “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living” with the famous Joe Hill phrase “Don’t mourn, organize.” I think we have to mourn and organize.

Grief is inevitable. We’re still mortal—Peter Thiel is not going to solve that. We’re all going to die. People we love will die. But often it will not be dramatic or horrific. It will just be a thing that is a natural outcome of being human. We can’t solve grief. We’re going to have to do it. But there are so many horrific ways to die that we can stop, that we can change. During Covid, people I talked to who lost parents couldn’t be there with them. I was upended by the death of my father, but I could see him. I could visit him in the hospital. I could say goodbye.

What does justice look like in an expansive way that reaches into the past as well as into the future?

News

Borders Are Drawn to Protect Stolen Wealth. They Are a Process, Not a Place: From the Ashes at Truthout

Posted on

Truthout ran an excerpt of From The Ashes:

The border is a process as much as a place, a decision to rescue a boat drifting at sea, or to slash a bottle left by volunteers in the desert, to crush and piss on stashes of food and clothing, to wave someone through and search another car, to ask a job applicant or a person stopped for speeding to produce citizenship documents. Policies change, politicians pound the table and pontificate, but day after day the processes at the border, of the border, go on. This posturing, like so much else, obscures the actual humans from the picture. “I don’t think people understand just how violent border policies are,” Zerda said. Thousands, tens of thousands die in the borderlands; mass graves have been uncovered across Texas. For those who survive the trek, violent assault, dehydration, heatstroke, injuries, and the looming threat of arrest and deportation, the trip having been all for nothing, await.

News

“Grief Is a Rupture”: From the Ashes at In These Times

Posted on

In These Times ran an excerpt of From the Ashes:

After the win comes the letdown or the reconciliation or both. It is the feeling, as Nyliayh Stewart said, that you are proud of the win but still angry at what it took, the months and years of painful work and the deaths and putting your grief on display to the world. There’s frustration that the laws passed are imperfect. There’s the real tension and splits within a community held together by momentum that come up when the momentum fades. Communities are formed in the struggle, Nelson noted, but those communities change and sometimes fall apart. 

News

“We Have to Diminish the Spaces Between People”: A conversation with Kelly Hayes and Eman Abdelhadi

Posted on

After our panel at the Socialism conference, I spoke for a bit longer with Kelly Hayes and Eman Abdelhadi about grief, organizing, and the struggles we’re in right now. Kelly ran our conversation in her newsletter (which you should subscribe to!) and then it was reprinted in Truthout.


This is why, I think, we do this work, at the end of the day: we are the kinds of people who can’t simply go through the world unhurt by all that is going on around us even if we, at a given time, have managed to insulate ourselves from being materially damaged by it. We see what is happening in the world, from Gaza to our own neighborhoods, and it hurts. We might have the best political analysis in the world, but we got there because we cared about the world around us.