Erica Caines is a mother and organizer. She is the Membership Coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace and a member of BAP-Baltimore, a member of the Ujima People’s Progress Party, a member of Friends of Latin America, co-editor of Hood Communist, and founder of Liberation Through Reading.
“The emphasis on community control is an emphasis on the same self-determination that we would hear echoed in the anti-colonial struggles where we see ourselves as a people who are worthy of sovereignty and worthy of making decisions for our own livesown our lives and having control over our lives.” – Erica Caines
Introducing the conversation
This two-part interview series comes from a conversation that I had with Erica in April as part of my recently completed masters thesis (see my first post on the thesis here). Like my conversation with our comrade Nick, I’ve decided to publish a slightly edited version of mine and Erica’s conversation, in two parts.
Erica is one of the most dedicated, reflective, and intentional organizers that I know. Having her perspectives around organizing domestically and globally, the internal colonization of African peoples in the U.S., and the everyday struggle for self-determination for our people brought a richness to the thesis project that would have been impossible to duplicate. In this first part of the conversation, Erica traces her own organizing journey to make a compelling case against silos and alienation of our work. She then details the importance of political education and changing our perspectives on what we deserve and can demand as people struggling for self-determination, before closing out around her reflections on the concept of ‘economic development’. Much love and appreciation to Erica for her work, her insights, her guidance, and her comradeship, and for allowing me to publish this conversation!
Look out for Part II. Erica and I discuss the meaning and relevance of democracy within empire, people(s)-centered human rights and building mass-based power, economic sanctions on our neighborhoods in the U.S., and meaningfully connecting our movements regionally and globally.
Conversation with Erica Caines, pt. i
Austin: Can you tell me about yourself, the organizations you’re a part of, and how you came into the work you’re doing?
Erica: Yes, my name is Erica Caines. I am a 37-year-old mother and organizer. Well, I started organizing beyond social media in 2017 when I created Liberation Through Reading, which initially started as a continuation of an effort from a few individuals to create a Malcolm X Day with the intention of creating a day centered around literacy similar to how the Martin Luther King Day is centered around servitude and service, etc. We wanted to emphasize literacy campaigns, noting that the youth in our communities were severely illiterate, for a plethora of reasons notwithstanding the No Child Left Behind policies and the emerging Charter school system and the Teach for America campaign that was going from city to city.
That did not take off the way that we intended it to. That was something that we started in the beginning of 2014, and by May of 2014 we did not get enough signatures for it to even be considered. But what resulted in that same year was John Crawford [being killed by police] in Ohio, and then Eric Garner in New York, and then Mike Brown in Ferguson. So immediately after our efforts to sort of activate a people around one cause came this sort of influx of the Black Lives Matter movement. But my official organizing began with Liberation Through Reading in 2017, and then I joined Black Alliance for Peace and Ujima People’s Progress Party in 2018. We started HoodCommunist in 2019.
Austin: I’m curious how you see where you are at now? You’ve been seriously organizing for about 7 years, doing a bunch of different things at many different levels and probably different purposes. So how do you see these things interacting?
Erica: I wear many hats. I named a plethora of organizations. But I don’t think that they’re all siloed. The foundation of my political and ideological leaning is Marxist-Leninist. But in terms of how I observe what’s happening around me and my material conditions, I think my approach is more of the scientific socialist approach, dialectics, that allows for me to be in all these organizations, and to allow for them to intersect. For instance, Liberation Through Reading,itn came about because of the efforts to make a Malcolm X. Day. But essentially there was a way that representation was being talked about at that time with the Black Panther movie that sort of negated this idea of what it even means to be represented or to be seen [in this country]. That was at a time where we were coming out of the Obama Era, where we were “represented” and we have seen all these things develop. So I was using Liberation Through Reading as a way to draw out these conversations, and, you know, pull the kids in with free books, but also bring in the adults to have these conversations, and then partner up with organizations, too, so that people could get funneled into some local work, or at least have information about what’s happening locally.
It was through that effort that I understood or began to see the sort of necessity of being in an organization and not necessarily funneling people into one and because I was starting to see things differently. Politically, I was attracted to the politics of the Black Alliance for Peace because I did not see anyone else having this sort of clear analysis from a ‘Black’ perspective around what’s happening in the world, analyzing imperialism, and really discussing the role that the U.S. plays in the attempts to spread its hegemony and destroy the Third World. That also, in turn, shifted the type of books that I was offering the children because then it became less about books that had a Black character, and more about “what are these books actually saying?”
Then I also joined a political party, which is a third party, an independent party that’s attempting to be on a ballot and has a particular vision around things like community control of education and schools and public safety and housing. That also speaks to a lot of what I do in the Black Alliance for Peace in terms of emphasizing self-determination and sovereignty, liberated zones, how sanctions work in our communities, and connecting the domestic to the global. And then, obviously as an editor of Hood Communist, I’m able to not only write about it, but expose what’s written about it through that platform so that people can then grow and have an idea of what’s happening.
I don’t see any of the things that I do as siloed. And I do think it’s important that in any of these spaces that I’m in, I make the effort to connect these other works so that people can then see that our work shouldn’t be siloed. We should not be looking at things as one issue movements, but understand how these movements interconnect, while using the different spaces we take up to continuously push those interconnections.
Austin: That’s really clear on emphasizing interconnections and avoiding any silos. I want to double down on the point around Ujima and being part of an independent party that is focused on community control, and how that relates to some of the stuff with Black Alliance for Peace and self-determination and liberated zones.
I’m curious what the work towards building African or Black self-determination has looked like for you and for the organizations that you’re a part of? How do you see self-determination or building liberated zones playing out, either based on your experience or based on ideology that you’ve developed?
Erica: To start, our first effort is to politically educate our people. The efforts to discuss community control within the type of material conditions and environment that we are currently in does not really leave room – especially when we consider we’re propagandized people – for these things to be as clear and cut dry as we would like them to be. So, for a lot of these things, the language and the narratives and the concepts that we are trying to explain and the demands we are working towards, it is likely the first time that the people in our neighborhoods are hearing them. Also, I shy away from the term community.
But one of the things that we do emphasize is seeing ourselves,. One, as African people within this empire of the U.S., but specifically African people that have a colonial relationship with the U.S. empire and with the larger society. Within the U.S empire this colonialism is categorized by institutional racism that operates in 3 ways: politically, economically and socially. Politically, we’re stunted in terms of our decisions because we don’t have any political power. Economically, we’re disenfranchised, we’re an underpaid labor source primarily, we’re underfunded in our neighborhoods, and we’re dependent on the larger society. And then all of this is maintained by a social order that designates the police in our communities as occupying forces. In a place like Baltimore, where I organize, those neighborhoods are affected by various factors of over policing due to the 1033 program that gives local police departments access to surplus weapons, and due to “Israeli” training through the Deadly Exchange, which you know, is the exchange between the Israeli Defense forces or occupational forces, and the Baltimore Police Department, where they share tactics and such and that also includes an ever growing department of defense. Then there’s now the Federal policing bill through “Operation Relentless Pursuit”. Baltimore is one of 7 major cities with this since 2020. John Hopkins University has a private police force that now gets to walk around our neighborhoods to ‘keep their students safe,’ apparently. And there’s an effort to build a Cop City. And there’s a 1-billion-dollar jail effort.
These are the conditions that we as African people in the city of Baltimore are finding ourselves in. And it is a colonial situation. The emphasis on community control is an emphasis on the same self-determination that we would hear echoed in the anti-colonial struggles where we see ourselves as a people who are worthy of sovereignty and worthy of making decisions for our own lives and having control over our lives. And what community control does is place that particular emphasis on it. It places a particular emphasis on the necessity for that control.
Again, it has been a struggle in how people understand ourselves as colonized people. But one of the things that we always turn to is labor, like we’re sources for cheap labor in factories and government jobs. Our neighborhoods serve as dumping grounds. We can see in both form and function: this is a colonial relationship, and that means contending with neocolonialism and a sort of “Black misleadership class” that has a stronghold, especially in these inner cities. They do not have our best interest at heart, and this impacts the development of the city, because currently, in Baltimore, where they’re looking to place the Cop City is on an HBCU campus, but it’s also in the poorest and most disenfranchised part of Baltimore City, Over West. In that part of the city there is a City Council member, the council president, who has deemed this part of Baltimore as his legacy project. He is selling off land to developers, and they’re closing one of the largest businesses. These shifts in the area, this “development” is pushing out the people who have always been there and who are already disenfranchised. It’s pushing them out so that they can make a new area, and policing helps them do this more easily.
The whole idea of economic development or development in these areas where they talk about things like dollar homes but don’t talk about who these developments are for or what are the implications of them. Or they talk about low-income housing, but don’t bring in conversations about equity and housing, or the fact that “affordable” is just an elusive term. It’s not based on any sort of realistic income. So, in pushing for things like low-income housing, or better, community control of housing, I think these are all processes where we understand the necessity of self-determining ourselves as a people because we have a right to participate in shaping policies and making decisions that directly affect us our lives, and this includes governance and economic development and social services.
Austin: I think that the last point is so important in terms of actual control. And what you said is going to stick with me, about connecting to the anti-colonial struggle and establishing this idea that we are worthy of having control over our lives, and making people feel that they are worthy.
You also started to mention economic development and social services, and you talked a little bit about development and the way that predatory development happens. So what does economic development mean for you and the people in the neighborhoods you organize in? What could it mean?
Erica: You know, it’s hard for me to conceptualize what economic development would look like here absent of true political power. I’ve had the luxury of seeing what economic development with popular political power looks like in socialist states where the state is in full support of the economic development of the people as opposed to corporations or entities or privatization.
So, I think that that is the battle. People have engaged in some of the battles in this war through cooperatives and using those models, but those models are not one size fits all. I do think that they serve to sort of negate the power of the capitalist state and the exploitative measures of economic development that end up displacing people. I think it does try its best to hone in on a people’s movement and hone in on a neighborhood or a community and allow the people to see the fruits of their work and their labor. In this way, I think of what’s happening with Cooperation Jackson and the efforts to build out cooperatives there. There are also smaller cooperatives that exist here in Baltimore, like farmer cooperatives in the city and then in some of the counties outside of the city.
But real and true economic development, the way that I understand it beyond being a concept and being a material thing, does require a level of state support. Without that, and without a level of political power that enables state support, I don’t really know, and it just remains a concept. And it’s a concept that does get derailed or overridden by this idea of “Black capitalism”, or it gets conflated as such. Because it’s hard to conceptualize what economic development looks like for colonized people or people who are trapped within particular conditions, especially when I talk about economics being one of the ways that we are entrapped within these particular material conditions that we find ourselves in. It is through the mechanisms of privatization and neoliberalism that are forced upon us because we don’t have any political power, and we are trying to find a way out of that or develop a structure or economic development structure out of that. And I think so long as we as those things exist, I really can’t say what that looks like.
I can say what it looks like outside of here, or what I’ve observed outside of here. And that and that includes. you know, 10-to-20-year plans, or assessing communal responses to disasters, or models prioritizing the masses of people. Those are ways that I’ve seen economic development occur through state support. These are people who essentially have housing and can support themselves, they unionize freely, they have free education. I think that these all encompass a way that economic development could actually develop a people, not just a neighborhood in a community. I hope that makes sense.
Austin: That makes perfect sense. and I think one thing you know, obviously, we talk about like peoples-centered human rights and I think what you mentioned is part of a peoples-centered. vision of economic development Because regardless of whether these things are coming from the state or from other institutions that that aren’t necessarily the state. It’s about do you have the capacity to support the people. It’s great if you can build a massive building that is fancy and nice. But if you can’t feed people then does it matter? Anyways, I think that that’s also a good point around the possibilities of economic development in a different political context because like you said the same activities look very different when you’re like supporting people with those activities.
Be on the lookout for part ii!