Get the F-Word as a podcast -- wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to the Laura Flanders Show.

On the Assassination of Marielle Franco.

What happened in Rio De Janeiro March 14 wasn’t unusual.

A Black lesbian leftist, child of the favelas, was gunned down in public, probably by an agent of the state.

Favela families die daily. Crammed together in poorly constructed homes, on streets with scarce investment. If the poverty doesn’t get you, violence or depression might. From the favelas on Rio’s mountainsides, you can actually see Rio’s multi-million dollar beach fronts. Poverty and depression and violence claim favela people all the time. And, increasingly, so do cops.

In 2017, police killed over 1,000 people just in Rio. The poorer you are, the more danger you’re in. In the last few years, the Brazilian establishment’s been making lots of choices to invest in real estate, the Olympics, corporate tax breaks -- but not education, healthcare, public service. To deal with unrest, the current government’s invested in repression; costly drones, Israeli military police trainers, the military itself. Now soldiers patrol the streets.

Black people are killed with impunity. LGBT people? More LGBT people are murdered per year in Brazil than anyplace else on earth.

(Source: Time Magazine)

This week, Adaku Utah and J Bob Alotta speak to the urgency of centering healing in a world that doesn't care about our survival. They discuss the intellectual distance many activists feel from the prospect of healing, and challenge the racist and classist logic at play in mainstream determinations of what bodies are worthy of care. Together, they make a powerful case that care is a central component of broader liberation struggles.

Laura Flanders: All right, let's talk about healing. I have to say, when this was first proposed to me that we discuss healing, I was like, healing? That's a classic kind of white, leftist, even queer response that healing is some kind of individual solution. Isn't it?

Adaku Utah: So, it is an individual solution, and it's also collective. We know that our movements, moving towards justice does not only rely on one person, or couple of people, that it actually requires all of us. And our systems come from a long legacy of violence that has impacts on our physical, emotional and spiritual selves. From what we're seeing in gentrification, to the education system, to the high and increasing rates of depression and suicidality within our communities.

So, there's an impact. And we can't intellectualize change. Who we are is what we've been practice and what we have learned to do. And so, healing really facilitates a strategy for us to be embodied practitioners of justice and liberation, and it also acknowledges that harm has been done, and that harm, in order for us to fully live into lives that are reflective of the kind of justice that we seek, that some things have to be healed. The trauma has to be met and tended to, so that we can be a reflection of love and justice. Yeah.

Transcript:

Laura Flanders: Many places around the world are celebrating LGBTQ pride this month. And lots of them have become a fairly routine part of the calendar, until the deadly attack on the Orlando gay nightclub. In a tragic way that attack has given this year's event some of its old significance.