CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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[Theme Music]  

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs Department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit University in San Francisco. To find out more about CIIS, and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  

[Theme Music Concludes]  

[Applause] 

Sonya: But so when I first met Kazu, it was five years ago in January at Nomad Cafe, and I was going in and out of San Quentin doing some you know, like healing justice type work, and Kazu was also going inside San Quentin doing some healing and justice type work, and we were looking for someone who could just do an awesome set of workshops for a bunch of amazing facilitators already in something radically new and different. And a man who was inside San Quentin said, “you know, there's this dude who comes in. He's really cool. His name is Kazu.” And I think he might be your guy and so we met and so the first time I met him; it was actually the first time we sat together was in a circle inside San Quentin with him doing Kingian non-violence trainings. And fast-forward five more years, we've had many experiences working back and forth together in many different ways with Ahimsa, and his work just spent three weeks in India together doing some traveling and restorative justice training with a bunch of other people. And what was so special about that experience is that Kazu really walks the way he is with people, in the world in the same way he does in his work. So, the kind of gentleness and the kindness that he just shows to everyone and everything around him is the way that he works.  

And I wanted to actually offer this introduction of Kazu that was written by one of his besties and the person that he works the most closely with, and I can't see anymore, so I'm putting my glasses on, Chris Moore-Backman and he writes “whether he's accompanying us behind prison walls, on walking pilgrimage with Buddhist monastics, or into the streets for head on direct action, Kazu Haga seamlessly illustrates that the indivisibility of personal and societal transformation, and our desperate need for both at this pivotal moment in history, we’re deeply fortunate to have this inspiring new offering, from one of the most powerful contemporary thinkers and doers in the field of nonviolent social change”. So that is my introduction to Kazu Haga who we’re so lucky to have, who's going to start with doing some reading from his book. You're welcome.  

[Applause] 

Kazu: I told Sonya that I have a mic as well. [Sonya: Ooo…it’s on.] So, I just want to start with this one paragraph and then I'll say a few words and then I'll read a couple more things. But in the introduction of my book, I write “working in prisons and jails is a privilege and an honor that I do not take lightly. It's a strange thing really, to go inside and receive so much gratitude from incarcerated people about coming in and running programs. I understand of course and accept their gratitude with humility, but I wonder if they can ever understand how much I've learned from them and how healing it has been for me to be in their presence. After several years of working inside the system, it was through meeting Sonya Shah, founder of the Ahimsa Collective, that I truly understood what restorative justice is and the depth of feeling that is possible”. And this is not like a thing that I'm just saying, that like this book would not exist without you, because it was like, I did not know what like just the depth of healing that, and I’ve told you this, like the depth of healing that we are capable of as a species, until I saw your work. So, it's really fun to be able to do this with you. 

Sonya: Yeah.  

Kazu: And also, just gratitude to everyone who's here because I was…you know as someone who tries to do like as little of capitalism as possible. It's weird having like a book to sell [Sonya laughs] and so hopefully this evening will be worth it to you all. But yeah, also grateful that you're here. Yes. I just wanted to start by reading a just a few sections from the introduction of my book and then we'll just get into it and talk about both of our work here.  

But early in the intro, I start talking about how... When I was 19 years old, I started facilitating nonviolence ratings, it was when I was living in Massachusetts. And after a couple of years of doing them, like something felt like it was just deeply missing in the trainings that I was leading, so I stopped doing it. And so, I'll just jump in from the middle of the introduction here, it says “I realized during that workshop that the stuff I had been teaching at 19 wasn't in fact nonviolence. It was nonviolent Civil Disobedience. I have been training people to go into mass demonstrations without throwing a punch. While that is certainly one application of the theory of nonviolence, I realized how limited of an understanding I had. If nonviolence is simply a set of strategies and tactics that do not use physical violence, then the Ku Klux Klan could argue that they are using nonviolence when they rally. Neo-Nazis could argue that they're using nonviolence when they march. And that doesn't feel right, something about the work of nonviolence has to be fundamentally different from the work of the KKK or Neo-Nazis. 50 years after his assassination, Dr. King has taught me that a commitment to nonviolence is a commitment to restoring relationships and building beloved community, a world where conflict surfaces as an opportunity to deepen in relationship. A world where all people understand our interconnectedness. A world where, as stated in the Kingian nonviolence training curriculum, all people have achieved their full human potential, nonviolence as an ethical choice stems from a deep understanding about the impact that violence has on all people. Those who experience it, those who perpetuate it, and those who witness it. It is about acknowledging that violence itself is the enemy that we need to defeat, not the people who are caught up in its cycles. Nonviolence is a worldview that speaks to the impact of violence, harm, oppression, and injustice on the human condition. It is about the dynamics of conflict and how to transform it. It is about an unwavering faith in the goodness of people and an undying commitment to healing ourselves in society. It is about stripping away the layers of trauma and separation and remembering the core of who we are. It is about coming home”.  

I'm skipping forward a couple of paragraphs. “In my work in prisons. I've had the privilege to witness the transformation of countless people who have committed the most horrific acts of violence, including homicide into the most compassionate dedicated peacemakers I know. I've had the honor of witnessing healing dialogues between people whose lives were brought together by tragedy, between the person who almost beat another to death in a mugging and the survivor of that crime, between mothers and the people who took away their children, between two men who killed each other’s best friends. I've come to believe that if these depths of healing are possible on those scales, then there's no conflict that is too large for us to transform. In each of those cases, it has been through love and understanding, not shaming and punishment that transformation was made possible. I'm not naive enough to think that social transformation is possible without a powerful movement that will need to use militant forms of nonviolent direct action to push for change. But even in nonviolent movements, direct action oftentimes begins with an assumption of separation. We are good people, and we need to use direct action to harness power, so we can overpower those other people. It is still about forcing our will over the bad people; our language and thinking is still couched in the world view of separation and domination. I have to believe that it is possible to do things differently, that it is possible to build a movement that is quote ‘disruptive as a riot’, Dr. King's words. Yet deeply grounded in love and understanding a resistance movement that sees its purpose as healing the wounds of society. There is no separation between the personal and the global. A holistic understanding of nonviolence presents us with an opportunity much greater than what either a movement of healing or a movement of resistance can accomplish on its own. We need that. I'm sick of fighting for crumbs. I've been part of countless movements and campaigns where we have spent so much time and resources fighting for one policy change, only to look up and see that we are still swimming in injustice. I've been part of so many circles in prison where incredible healing is taking place, only to look up and see two million more incarcerated souls that need healing with more on the way every day. I'm convinced that only a movement that is grounded in a principled approach to nonviolence can get us to where we need to go. A principled approach to nonviolence has an explicit goal that is big enough, not just revolution, but the realization of beloved community. And tactics that are militant enough to create systemic changes that we need without perpetuating harm while engaging in it. We need resistance. We need to resist injustice. We need to resist violence. We need to resist our own tendency to fall into blame, resentment, greed, hatred or despair. But we need to do it in a way that is healing to everyone”. So just a few words from the introduction of my book. 

[Dog barking, applause, laughter] 

Kazu: That's sweet.  

Sonya: So sweet. 

Kazu: Yeah, and just the whole idea that to me, political resistance works out its best is about healing wounds between communities and healing the wounds of society. Right? And so, a lot of the work that I've learned from you and the work in the prisons about healing trauma and trying to imagine how to extrapolate that out into direct actions. And how can we imagine direct action movements that are rooted in that spirit of healing. So… 

Sonya: So, you know, like that two pages is packed with like 10,000 amazing things that you've said that we could spend like an hour talking about each one. And so, I guess I would just start by asking you, I've heard you say that nonviolence is really a way of life and not like a strategy. And I think people have so many misperceptions of nonviolence and that may be just starting with like at its core and at its essence how would you describe what nonviolence is and isn't?  

Kazu: I feel like after 20 years I should know, I should have a, like a canned response to that. It's actually in some ways for me a lot easier to talk about what nonviolence isn't, so I'll start there. And I'll start by sharing a story that's in my book as well, and a story that I've shared a bunch of times in my workshops for anyone who's ever been. In Kingian nonviolence, we make a distinction between nonviolent spelt with a hyphen and nonviolence about without the hyphen. Because when you put the hyphen in the word, it separates the word and it turns it into an adjective, and non hyphen violence, all that says is something is not violent and something is the absence of violence. And I talk about in my book, how that is the biggest and most dangerous misunderstanding of the idea of nonviolence, is that people think that as long as I'm not being violent then I'm practicing nonviolence.  

And the story that I want to share is, I live in a neighborhood in Oakland called Funk Town, which is a beautiful neighborhood. It's one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country and it also has you know, its fair share of challenges. And so, there's a lot of conflict outside my window every day and about 10 years ago now, I was taking a nap and my apartment, and I was woken up by a commotion outside, and there was an argument happening and arguments happen all the time in my neighborhood, so I was just trying to go back to sleep. And the argument kept getting worse and it kept getting worse and it kept getting louder. And I finally got out of my bed and looked out the window, and there was a woman on the ground who was getting beat. It was right below my window. I live on the second floor. And she wasn't not only getting beaten, but she was screaming for help. And so, I jumped up out of my bed and I put on my shoes and I ran downstairs, opened up the gate, by this point, they had gone across the street. It’s still going on, and I ran across the street and I managed to break up this fight. And by the time I got down there, about 15 of my neighbors had heard the commotion and they had all come outside, and they were just watching this woman get beat, not doing anything to help. And I always argue that all of my neighbors who are just watching this woman get beat, we were practicing non hyphen violence, in that they weren't being violent. They were explicitly not being violent, right? They weren't throwing the punches, they weren't throwing the kicks, and you could even argue that I was being more violent than my neighbors were, because I used a limited amount of physical force to pull the two parties apart, and I might have caused some harm in the process. So if our understanding of nonviolence is simply to not be violent, then it's easy to justify being a bystander and witnessing the killing of unarmed Black people by the police, the destruction of our planet, rises in homelessness, increases in drug use. All of these things and just say that's none of my business, I'm just going to stay in my corner and meditate and you know and buy organic groceries and consider myself a nonviolent person.  

But nonviolence is not about what not to do. Nonviolence is about when you see violence and injustice in your community, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to engage with the harm and with the violence and what the injustice and try to transform that situation? And so it is, you know, one of the principles, the first principle of nonviolence is, nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people, because in order to make that kind of fundamental transformation in society, it can't just be a switch that you turn on when you go to a protest and then you turn it off when you're home, or even when you're in the organizing meetings, organizing the protests, right? And so... yeah, it's a worldview and a way of life and a way that we understand the world and try to walk in the world. 

Sonya: You sort of started to get into it that there are these six principles of Kingian nonviolence, right? They are sort of foundational for what nonviolence is and maybe I know that you would spend like five days in a workshop explaining what each principle was and engaging them and doing stuff around them, but I think it would be, if you would break down some of those for everyone, and also I think backtracking a little bit like why Dr. King and how that was an influence for you and why is that the path that you think we should be embarking on? 

Kazu: Well, maybe we could start there.  

Sonya: Yeah.  

Kazu: I guess I'll say that you know, I had an opportunity to interview Clay Carson once years ago, he's the founder and director of the Doctor Martin Luther King Research and Education Center at Stanford. And he said that Dr. King didn't start a movement, right? That he was just like one kind of point in a movement that has been going on since the beginning of human history. And so, in that sense, while my particular training has been under the lineage of Dr. King, ultimately nonviolence is a timeless set of teachings, and for me and my story just happened to have come through Dr. King. But as I was sharing, I started facilitating nonviolence trainings when I was 19 years old and then I felt that something was missing in the trainings that we were doing, and so I stopped doing it. And I stayed involved in social change work, that was pretty much all I did since I was 17 years old, and fast forward 10 years after I stopped facilitating these nonviolence trainings, like during that whole time, I was involved in a lot of different movements, but the word nonviolence didn't really mean much to me.  

And in 2008, in the fall of 2008, I had the opportunity to work for another movement elder Harry Belafonte and through his relationship, because of Mr. Belafonte’s relationship with Dr. King, the organization that I was working with, that Harry Belafonte started had chosen to use this training philosophy called Kingian nonviolence as its core training philosophy. So, this organization gathered around the country doing these King nonviolence trainings. And I was on the executive committee of the organization, so when the training came to Oakland, I was like I guess I should go check it out. And in two days, like my life completely changed.  

After 10 years of doing nothing but social change work, I thought I had some idea of what the word nonviolence meant and some idea of who Dr. King was, and it turns out I knew none of it. And so, in those two days, I gained this like really intellectual fascination with this theory of nonviolence and two months later a young man named Oscar Grant was shot and killed in Oakland, most people probably know that story. And I ended up on the steering committee of the coalition that came together to respond to the shooting, and having just taken this training, like I could just feel from the very bottom of my heart that we needed a nonviolent response in this new way that I understood the word. But having just taken this two-day workshop, I didn't know how to articulate it. And so, I found myself just like stumbling through my words and getting booed at community meetings and trying to convince people and trying to talk to people about this newfound like wisdom that I just couldn't, the words were just not coming out of my mouth.  

And so that summer I decided to go to the University of Rhode Island where every year they do an intensive training to certify new trainers in Kingian nonviolence. And I traveled there that summer, I met Dr. Bernard Lafayette who's the co-author of the King and nonviolence curriculum, who was on Dr. King’s senior staff. And got to meet him and was trained by him and pretty much been doing that work ever since, so, you know, over the times, I like I've definitely found that like my path into the work of nonviolence was through Dr. King but the work of the Ahimsa Collective like it's all in that lineage, you know. 

Sonya: You keep trying to divert a little bit, you know, we’re just gonna stay focused on you the whole time. It's really fun! There's something that I know you've talked about before, there's this way that when we're talking about violence, it's like important to make the clarity between interpersonal violence and systemic violence, and all these different levels of violence. And there's somethings you say in your book, about how you believe that whatever way we transform violence on the interpersonal level, you believe that we can actually really scale that up, to like large social change levels. Using like a fractals metaphor of nature, right? That we can just sort of multiply, and I wonder if you'll just talk about that a little bit about, sort of how can we understand the nature of... when we’re thinking about nonviolence as the broad framework, how it's applied both on the interpersonal level and the systemic level and the relationship between them.  

Kazu: Yeah, so this is I guess a plug. I know this book just came out, but I've started to work on my second book, [Sonya: Yay!] which is called Fierce Vulnerability”. And that book gets a lot deeper into this idea of change being fractal, because it's a new thing that I'm exploring. But yeah, doing work in prisons with Sonya Shah. 

Sonya: Oh my God. [Audience laughs] 

Kazu: Like I've really gotten to see what it takes to heal trauma, right? And reading books like Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. I've gotten into this idea of fractals. And fractals are like patterns that kind of repeat itself over and over and over again, and no matter how small you zoom into something, or how far you step back and look at the big picture, it looks the same. And I've started to think about this idea that change is fractal in nature, that not only that what's possible at the smallest scale, as possible at the larger scale, but the same principles that guided transformation at the interpersonal level have to be used at the larger social levels, right?  

So, I think people who do a lot of restorative justice work and transformative justice work, at least intellectually, understand that you can't shame people in the transformation. That if someone causes harm by shaming them and isolating them and calling them bad people and criminals like that, it doesn't work to transform that person, and yet when it comes to direct action, and when it comes to these social problems, we feel like we can change the other side into transformation. And you know one thing that I've been playing around with in these Fierce Vulnerability workshops, which are these workshops that East Point has developed over the last year or so, is that you know, I have a family member who has a lot of unhealed trauma, and that trauma manifests in like over the years, we've had many conversations with her about her relationships with money, and men, and her son, and work, and career, and all of these different things. And at some point, I realized that she has some like deep core traumas, and if that core trauma doesn't get healed, then we're always going to be dealing with these manifestations.  

And at a larger level, this country has an infinite amount of issues that we're dealing with, whether it's police violence, or environment, or the broken government, or economics, or education, all these things. But this country has some core trauma. This country is... is built on the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of African peoples. And those are core traumas that we have never healed. So, until we heal those things, there's always going to be manifestations of that trauma. And I've found that you know, one of the most healing things that we can do on an interpersonal level, is to create spaces where people feel safe enough to talk about their biggest shame, right? There's a great quote that I learned in prison through Ahimsa, that I think it's actually a Brené Brown quote, who says that shame derives its power from being unspoken, and when you can give space for people to speak to our shame, it's incredibly liberating, but you have to create containers where people feel safe enough to say “yes, I did this thing” and to trust that they're not going to be isolated from beloved community. Because if they feel like “if I admit to this thing, I'm gonna get thrown out of society”, they're never going to admit to it. And being able to say “I did this thing” is part of their healing process.  

And I think when we think about the legacies of slavery, in the legacies of genocide on this land, and even some of what's happening now on the border, and all these things like these are things that the country should be ashamed of. And how do we use direct action to actually create a conversation that feels safe enough for the country to talk about that, and to really sit with the shame of gaining all of these privileges out of such harm and oppression and violence. And so yeah, like the same ways in which we do restorative justice work in the prisons, I'm trying to picture what that could look like in indirect action spaces and resistance spaces. 

Sonya: Yeah, it's beautiful work and thinking and it sounds both like a call, for like massive reparations and truth and reconciliation processes, and one way of doing things. And the other day you were saying something of “I'd love to see in the middle of like a direct action that people actually could break into circle and do some like deep healing work about the thing that was at the core of the core. At the core of why they were even there in the first place”. Does that sound about right?  

Kazu: Yeah, and actually Dami who's in the audience has some experiences of that. One of the stories that inspired me was there was a direct action that happened in Harrisonburg, North Carolina, where a group of activists occupied the governor's building, and in the people Chris amongst them, before they went and did that action, they had a conversation about like what are the characteristics that we want to embody in this action? So, they actually made an agreement that they wouldn't chant, that they wouldn't hold signs, that instead they would sit in a circle, and just talk. And many of them coming to tears about this was an action to try to get a pipeline that was being proposed to be stopped. And to talk about why they're there, to talk about the fear that they have about their kids, and the Indigenous communities that they're in relationship with, and the impact that it would have on them.  

And yeah, like, I don't know if I've ever been to a lot of direct actions where we're leading with vulnerability as our strength, right? And that's the idea of fierce vulnerability is like what kind of healing work do we need to do on our own, so we can show up in direct action spaces and lead not with our anger and not with resentment, but with our own vulnerability. There's an elder named Lynice Pinkard, who's also an incredible activist. And she says that we need to have a movement that has the courage to have a relationship with our heart brokenness. And all these issues actually should break our hearts and we should be leading with that. But if we're leading with our heartbreak, then we need to do like our own healing work, so that… I love quotes, there’s another quote that says, “preach from your scars not from your wounds”. Like we need to do enough of our own healing work, so that we can build these scars over these wide-open wounds, so we can lead from that place.  

Sonya: It's beautiful. There were like, you know, Kazu says things and like, you know, it's that moment where you have five things I wanted to say so badly and then I forgot them. Because I was so intently listening, but I remember one of them, and there were two that I really wanted to pull out. One was about this idea. It feels like there's so much of this that has to be grounded in a worldview of non-separation, and it's something that you talk about in the book of this notion, that like we're so used to this idea of you know, I'm here and I'm protesting and that it's against the other.  

And I've heard you talk about being in a mass protest, and you know, really trying to convince people that the line of police are not the enemy, that it's the violence itself that is, right? And that this huge like idea of non-separation and non-binary and 200% realities and the dialectical that you learned, is so expansive and big for people to get their head around. But I just, I was hoping you would speak to it a little bit about just that, if we're not grounded in a view of the other is not this person, but the other is this thing, then how do we get there basically? 

Kazu: Yeah, there's a famous quote and I write about this too, that a lot of people are familiar with it comes from the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, that says that “if you are here to save me, you're wasting your time, but if you have here because your liberation is bound with mine, then we can walk together”. And that's a quote, that's like very popular in activist circles, and I'm convinced that most people who quote that don't actually believe it. That when activists say justice for all people, that most often what they mean to say is justice for all of my people. And that justice oftentimes comes at the expense of justice for those people. And Dr. King has a famous quote too, he said that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied by a single garment of destiny, that what affects one person directly, affects all people indirectly”.  

And these ideas of... yeah, like this interwoven web of reality that what affects me directly affects all people indirectly and vice versa. It's a universal principle that we either believe in or we don't. It's like the universe doesn't weave separate webs of interdependence based on political affiliation. Right? Like we either believe in interdependence and mutual solidarity and mutual liberation or we don't. And in nonviolence, I think that is one of the core teachings, is that we are not free until all people are free, right? And when we say all people, we actually have to mean all people, or the principal just the very fundamental core teaching of that principle, just completely falls apart, right? Like if we believe it, then we have to believe it.  

Sonya: Yeah. Yeah. I remember the thing I wanted to say, I was so excited about it. There's a point in your book, and just when you've talked that you talk about, like we have to get to the place where we institutionalize nonviolence, like we actually have to believe and see it as the way to be in the world. And I think there's something about... I don't love the word institutionalize, but I think the spirit of... here's the spirit that I feel about it, that we like... there's always this like, you know weird way people are like, oh are we naturally violent, you know, isn't that just who we are? And that isn't it also, that we're actually naturally nonviolent, that we're actually naturally compassionate, right? And that there's a way that maybe there's this sense of like, we've also created a lot of situations of violence, and that we have this capacity and ability to actually choose nonviolence as a way to be in the world. And I just wonder if you talk to that about that notion of quote-unquote institutionalizing nonviolence.  

Kazu: One thing I want to say before that is on just like human nature, right? That it is true that we have the capacity for violence. That is part of our nature that is part of our reality. And yet there's something about violence that also breaks us, right? And this is something I heard from a guy named Paul Chappelle. He says that if violence is part of our nature and if it's part of who we're meant to be, then why does it break us? Like shouldn't we be able to engage in it without it causing this permanent oftentimes damage. And I always think about that because yeah, like I get that part of our nature is that we are capable of it. But what does it mean for us that we are capable of something that also causes permanent damage and PTSD, and anxiety, and depression, and all these things, and maybe the things that are actually a part of our core nature that we're supposed to be, who we're meant to be are the things that uplift us and fulfill our potential as human beings, right?  

And unfortunately, we don't always get to see that because violence has been so institutionalized like we talked about how white supremacy and patriarchy in all these forms of violence has been institutionalized and are constantly being reinforced by our media and by government and by law enforcement and schools. And we're just swimming, we’re fish in water, we don't even see how deeply we're being conditioned into violence and separation. And we're talking about capitalism. How deeply capitalism conditions us to compete against each other, and to be to see ourselves as separate. And part of the work of Kingian nonviolence specifically, is to take the teachings and the practices of nonviolence and go into the same institutions that perpetuate harm and violence and institutionalize its antidote. Like if violence has been institutionalized, then the medicine also has to be institutionalized.  

So, what would it look like if our institutions, schools, media, government were created in a way that was constantly reinforcing the best of who we are? And I think that's part of the work of nonviolence is working within institutions specifically to really integrate these teachings, so that we're constantly being reinforced with a different way of relating to each other. Because otherwise we fall back on our default, right? There's another quote that I love. It's an ancient Greek soldier who said that we don't rise to the level of expectations, we fall to the level of our training. I like we have these wonderful expectations about wanting to create beloved communities, and wanting to be kind to each other, and wanting to love our enemies. And then when the conflict happens because of the ways that we've been conditioned, we fall back to our defaults, and for most of us, our defaults in conflict are responding to conflict in ways that create separation, because that's how we've been trained. And so how do we train ourselves to have a new default, takes a while, takes institutionalization. 

Sonya: Are you good? Just checking see how’s going. [Kazu: Yeah.] There's like some personal questions that I wanted to ask you, but I had a few more other ones. I know too many things about Kazu. 

Kazu: Oh, lord.  

Sonya: Oh, dear, when we were doing the mic check, we were having this personal conversation. I was like, oh, wow, this is going out on the mic, that's interesting. I lost my train of thought. So, there's this beautiful, he also, Kazu’s got this beautiful quote in his book and one thing I love that you said, was that nobody's ever been traumatized by compassion, but like if you asked a room of people like how many people have been traumatized by compassion, nobody would raise their hand, right? But people have been traumatized by violence. And at the same time, you have this beautiful way of understanding like what violence is, and that sometimes violence is needed for survival, that sometimes violence is needed for safety, because there is no other means. And I love this thing that you say, I'm sorry... about how violence might be necessary, but violence could never create, restore, or reconcile a relationship, right? And just making these distinctions between, like we know that it's needed sometimes, and it also doesn't restore or reconcile.  

And I'm going to go on with one more thing because it was this huge aha moment to me in a person who does like restorative justice work. You mentioned I think it was from Rosenberg, this difference between like protective use of force and punitive use of force, and I think I could like say what it is, but maybe, well, for my understanding, protective use of force is when you have to use a limited amount of violence to do as little harm as possible, and punitive use of force is the use of force that is for punishment’s sake. So, the difference between stopping a fight versus like sending someone to prison. And that like really blew my mind today because I was in this whole area where in restorative justice land where everyone's like “do no harm”, and how do we talk about these gradations of harm and how they operate. So, I guess what is my question? I'm just excited and I think it's about you to talk a little bit about all these like nuanced ways that you understand what violence is.  

Kazu: Yeah. It's a complex world. And these like black-and-white ways of looking at things, is actually a form of violence. There's another quote that says, “the black-white right-wrong way of looking at the world is the most pervasive way that our minds have been colonized by the state”. And so, like I believe in beloved community as the goal, I believe in reconciliation as the goal, and it's going to be a really messy process to get there, and I am a lifelong fan of martial arts. I think people should know how to defend themselves if and when necessary. I also think that oftentimes, advocates of nonviolence find themselves making judgments against communities who feel like they have no other recourse than violence to survive. And I think those judgments are oftentimes seething in privilege. It's easy to judge people for using violence when your life and your community isn't being threatened with annihilation on a daily basis. And so yeah, like I said and like you said and from the book, like I think violence is very effective in keeping you alive. And I think there's great value in that, but I'm not interested in just barely surviving, right? Like I'm interested in beloved community.  

And so, understanding that violence can be very effective in keeping you alive and keeping you safe, and keeping you protected, and there's value in that and we shouldn't judge people for that. And if our goal is beloved community, then it's not enough because violence can never heal those relationships, and if we're not healing relationships then there's always going to be conflict. And there's an incarcerated trainer that I work with, a Kingian trainer in Soledad prison, named Bill G. We call Professor Bill G because he's one of those guys that like he never forgets anything, brilliant guy. And he said to me once that resolving a conflict is about fixing issues, and reconciling a conflict is about repairing relationships. And you can use nonviolent tactics to resolve issues, you can even use violence to resolve issues. You can use violence to force a policy change, or even a change in government, or whatever those are fixing issues. But if we're not repairing relationships, then that conflict and that resentment is going to surface somewhere else around other issues. And so, if we’re not working to heal relationships and mend relationships, and strengthen relationships, and move closer to beloved community, then there's always going to be more reason to use violence at some point. And so not to put a blanket judgment on violence, but to make it very clear that violence alone will never get us to beloved community. And so, nonviolence to me is the exploration of like what more is needed to get us to our beloved community. 

Sonya: We skipped that sort of question I think it's a good time to return to it, about kind of walking us through the principles of Kingian and nonviolence, because I think those building blocks are huge.  

Kazu: So, yeah, the six principles of Kingian nonviolence is like at the core of the theory, and it's amazing that you can take six sentences and I probably could talk about it for six hours, chapters on each one of them.  

So principal one is nonviolence as a way of life for courageous people. We’ve talked about that. That nonviolence is a way of life and because we understand nonviolence to be about asking ourselves what we do about violence and injustice, as opposed to just saying I'm not going to be violent, that takes incredible courage. It takes incredible courage to stand up to injustice and to resist injustice. And also, there's a whole other level of, there's a quote that one of our other trainers at Soledad prison, who once said that “it took me no courage to commit homicide, that was an act based entirely on fear, and the most courageous thing I have ever done was to show up to a group and share all of who I am, all of my insecurities, and my shame” and that was the most courageous thing that he's ever done. And so, I really found that a lot of the trauma healing an RJ work that happens in prison and doing that work, it takes incredible courage, and it's deeply an important element of the work of nonviolence.  

Principle two is that the beloved community is the framework of the future. Again, this idea of beloved community being a world where all people achieve justice and we're not there yet, that's why it's the framework for the future. But I oftentimes tell people, cause people oftentimes say, oh like my church community is my beloved community, my family is my beloved community, and it's like yes and. Because building beloved community isn’t about loving the people that are easy to love. Building beloved community is about cultivating the type of compassion that allows us to love the people that are difficult to love, the people that are like, on the quote “the other side”. And if we're not doing that work, then we're actually not doing the work of building beloved community, like loving communities are important and they should be celebrated. But when Dr. King talked about beloved community, that's the world that he was talking about.  

Principle three is attack forces of evil, not persons doing evil. The idea that people are never the enemy, that injustice is the enemy, that this idea of separation, violence, that's the enemy that we're trying to defeat. Principle four is accept suffering without retaliation for the sake of the cause to achieve the goal. That's a mouthful. It's about... partially about acknowledging that if we are going to stand up to injustice, then it will be hard for you, and you will probably suffer along the way. But and that's whether you choose to use violence or nonviolence to resist injustice, right? If you accept the fact that you're going to suffer, then it gives you a different relationship to that suffering, and it can actually make you stronger. But if you go into, like I found this with a lot of activist communities, it's like yes, we're going to resist injustice, but if they hurt us, then we're going to get really mad, that we're being hurt as if we should expect it to be easy, and for the systems of injustice that just like give up, right? And so, the acceptance of the inevitable suffering that comes with resisting forces of violence, is I think a really important practice of nonviolence. And also, there’s a story that oftentimes tell that when I was a kid, and I was getting into trouble, as long as my mom would scream at me. It was easy for me to ignore her, but the moment that she started to cry, like all the walls that I would build would come crumbling down, and I could understand the impact that my actions were having on her, because there's something that happens to humans when we see human suffering. And so, part of the work of nonviolence is accepting that suffering on main street in broad daylight, and to like show the world what that suffering looks like to expose the injustice of these systems. And that narrative of like if you're able to maintain nonviolence and even the face of state repression that paints such a clear picture of who is standing on the right side of justice, and that like moral argument is one of the most important quote unquote “weapons” we have in nonviolence, right? And so, choosing to accept that suffering can actually help us move towards our goal, and if we accept too much of that suffering then it turns into internal violence, and so the fifth principle is avoid internal violence of the spirit as well as external physical violence. Internal violence can manifest as hopelessness and desperation and apathy and negative self-talk, but I think more importantly it oftentimes manifests as hatred and resentment. 

Sonya: How have you dealt with internalized violence?  

Kazu: When I... the first time I ever went to a ten-day meditation workshop, it was two years or so after I had a huge falling out with a friend of mine. It was my best friend at the time. And I had thought that I was over it, until I sat down and closed my eyes, and for 10 days all I could think about was how pissed off I still was. And there's this quote that says, “hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”. And so, I think having enough self-awareness to notice where our resentment is, and finding the practices to work on it, because it will eat you up.  

And so, for me meditation practice has been really important, doing restorative justice work, and seeing what healing and transformation looks like, from people that have caused so much harm has been deeply important. Yeah, like engaging in this kind of work, you know, has been deeply important, nature, my dog, you know, watching the Boston Celtics as long as they're winning. [Audience and Sonya laugh] I think different things work for different people, right? 

Sonya: I guess I wanted to ask you that also about the fourth principle, like how did you get to the place of accepting that suffering was just inevitable? 

Kazu: Just noticing through these meditation retreats, or I used to live in monastery when I was 19 (18, 19), and I oftentimes joke with my meditation teacher that life in a Buddhist monastery is not unlike a prison labor camp, like it's really, really rigid. And just noticing how much I was able to grow from choosing to put myself in that situation, right? And yeah, just seeing the benefit of what I gained out of accepting so, choosing to accept suffering, you know, like growth hurts, puberty sucks, you know, but that's how we grow. So, so yeah. Yeah, it's a tough age, I remember that.  

And then the last principle is the universe is on the side of justice. And coming from more of a Buddhist background, I think I interpret it a little bit differently than how King saw it. For him, I think it was just a deep act of faith. But for me, I always talk about how you know, when you Google the word “justice”, like do a Google image search. It's the scales of balance that comes up, right? That's how we understand this idea of justice as balance. And so, when you look at it that way, I always say that every time a young person gets shot and killed in the streets of Oakland, that is evidence to me that the universe is just, because I look at all of the investments that we make into systems of violence. Not just the five-hundred-year legacy of violence on this country that I was talking about earlier, but like we invest in guns, we invest in broken schools, and broken prison systems, and broken policing systems, and unjust economic policies. And we invest in drugs, and we invest in violent media, invest in all these systems of violence. And then when we see violence in our communities, it's like what is wrong with the universe? But that's all we've been putting out there. And so, to me, as long as we invest in systems of violence at the rate that we are investing in, then it is just, it is balance, it is the order of the universe that will make sure that we see those returns. And so, I think it's up to us to invest in different things and we'll see those returns. 

Sonya: So, I wanted to transition into like a couple more personal, just like who is Kazu land conversations, and I was in Kazu land all day today and I say that with a lot of love and endearing-ness of, just you know, it's so nice to spend time with somebody and think about who they are in the world, and so I listened to an interview that you had on KPFA and I love this question that the person asked you, which was just how did little Kazu become big Kazu in this work? How did the little guy become the big guy? 

Kazu: So many things. The first person that I credit in my book is my mom, right? My mom was never an activist or anything, but like even through a lot of just struggles growing up, it was her, like I used to be embarrassed that she would like tmeditate, and like read books by the Dalai Lama, and do all these new agey things. And here I am, having just spent the weekend with you and listening, and meditating, buying bells.  

But I had an interesting childhood where for the first several years of my life, life was good, life was comfortable, you know, when I was in Japan. But a series of complicated events, and we went from, actually it was a brief moment when I was 11, that I lived in a multimillion-dollar oceanfront mansion for like a year, and we went from that to homelessness in like a span of year and a half, maybe. And my mom ended up in an abusive Green Card marriage, and just like saw my life just collapse in front of me really quickly. And so, I ended up starting to smoke weed, and drink, and smoke cigarettes, and skip school, and I ended up dropping out of high school, and was just doing nothing productive.  

And when I was 17 years old, I heard about these Buddhist monastics that were organizing a walk from Massachusetts down to New Orleans, and then eventually down the coast of Africa to retrace the slave route. It was called the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage and the whole idea was, you know, what we were talking about before that we're not going to be able to address racism today if we don't unpack that legacy, and start there, as well as the genocide of Indigenous peoples. And so, it was a walking spiritual pilgrimage to uncover the real legacy of slavery, and how it's still impacts this country and to begin the healing process by taking the spirits of deceased African ancestors from the United States back to Africa, essentially reversing the Middle Passage, right? And I was 17 years old. I never did any activism or anything. I was just like yeah racism sucks. And this sounds cool and I'm bored and it's a drug and alcohol-free walk and I should probably sober up for a little while so I'm going to check it out for a week. And I didn't come home for a year and a half.  

And so that was my introduction to Buddhist practice, that was my introduction to nonviolence, that was my introduction to social change work, and it's all I've known since. That was my college, that was my everything, you know. So yeah, I definitely credit that pilgrimage and those monks and nuns at a time when, you know, I talk about in the book to like if I had met a cult leader, I would have joined a cult. If I had met a military recruiter, I would have absolutely gone off to war, and had I gone off to war, I would have come back without even a GED, might have ended up as a prison guard, and who knows what, like all the… you know? And I always just think about how delicate our life path is, and how we like to think it's so like we could never be like those people, we could never do those things, and life is so delicate. It’s just like these little things that happen throughout our lives that dictate so much of who we become you know, and so it's been, I've been really grateful to be able to work with so many different communities, really to be able to say that like there is nothing that's different about me than anybody else out there.  

Sonya: It feels like you're describing yourself to like 25, and then there's this like… 

Kazu: 19, I came back from monastery when I was 19 years old.  

Sonya: 19! So, when you started to engage in like social movements, like what was that trajectory like for you and like how you found your way from there to here?  

Kazu: Yeah, so I came back from monastery, I ended up living a year in a monastery in South Asia, and I came back when I was 19. And I just dove into like every organizing scene that I could get my hands on, and it was a lot of like prison reform work, and it was also a lot of political prisoner work, but I really cut my teeth in the global justice movement in the late 1990s, the protests against the World Trade Organization and the IMF World Bank, all of that. And that was the first time I've ever been part of like mass mobilizations of being in the streets, with like tens of thousands of people. And it was so inspiring for me, and I was hooked, it was like a drug.  

And so, for years I felt like I was like, protest hopping in some ways. Like organizing major demonstration after major demonstration after major demonstrations, and then I ended up getting a job with an organization called the Peace Development Fund, stayed there for 10 years, they have an office in San Francisco. It was actually a foundation, but a foundation that was asking questions. Like what is it mean to build relationships with our grantees that aren't based on the money that we give away? And so, I spent more time way more time with our grassroots partners than we did with donors or other foundations. And spent 10 years in deep relationship, like people who became literally members of my adopted family, with the some of the most amazing grassroots leaders all over the country, and learning the importance of relational organizing, and like these like professionalized non-profit movements where things like we talked about like conflict of interest if relationships are too over-familiar, which is a whole other thing in prison too, but realizing that like no, like if we can't build like family relationships with the people that were in struggle with, like then what like, what are we trying to build? And so, I think those 10 years at the Peace Development Fund was really foundational and learning what it takes to build real movements. 

Sonya: You actually turned me on to this thing that's been really instrumental for me in terms of frame working like how social change happens, and it's that piece that originates from Gandhi and it’s seen as iterations through the institute of these three areas that are required for social change. I'm not going to give them away. I think it would be beneficial for others. Yeah. It really changed the way that I understood what needed to happen in order for change to happen. 

Kazu: Yeah. Me too. A lot of scholars who studied the work of Gandhi kind of retroactively said that Gandhi was always involved in three realms of nonviolence, and that for him, the word nonviolence meant these three things: one was self-transformation, self-purification, which was the work of like spiritual practices to align our values with our practice, and kind of now that we have science like trauma healing, I would incorporate that into it, right? Doing the work that we need to do to rid ourselves of resentment and hatred and making sure that we were able to actually like to walk our talk. And then the realm of what's called constructive program, which is about like building the institutions and the systems that our communities need. And that we don't need the state's permission to take care of our communities. And Carlos, my close friend, says that even in our most successful movements, oftentimes our demand is to get the state to do something for us. And we need to start doing for our own communities. I mean the Black Panther Party was a great example of that, right? It wasn't just the guns, it is all of the amazing work that they were doing to serve their community, that’s all constructive program work. And then finally the work of what Gandhi called “satyagraha”, which is the kind of like nonviolent civil disobedience direct action, like the political resistance movements, the movements that are in direct confrontations with the with the powers of injustice. And that we need to be doing all three of those things at the same time. And my friend and colleague Chris wrote a book called the Gandhian Iceberg where he said that, yeah these are the three things that Gandhi was working on, but if Gandhi could explain it for himself, he wouldn't have seen it as three circles coming together as a Venn diagram, that he would have seen it as an iceberg. Partly because the iceberg is like one chunk of ice. It's not three separate things coming together, like the work of self-purification constructive program and political resistance is the same work, and we need to see it that way, but also because the part of the iceberg that's beneath the water, is the work of self-purification. Because for Gandhi that was the biggest part of the work. And it's also below the water, so you can't see it as much. And then the realm of constructive program is the majority of the work that is visible. And then at the very tip of the iceberg is political resistance work. Like we only resist when the things that we're trying to build is being threatened by the powers that be. We don't resist just for the sake of resisting and the satyagraha is at the tip of the iceberg. And so, it's the thing that you can see from the farthest on out. So, when we look back historically at movements, we only see the protest in the demonstrations, and we don't see all the other work that was happening in community, but it's perhaps an even more important part of the work of nonviolence.  

Sonya: I saw people taking notes when he talked about it and I took notes also, and some like languaging ways that may be easy for, what I found really easy to understand is like personal transformation, this building of alternatives, and then the direct-action piece. And I think you also had a friend of yours in this peace fellowship, had a beautiful way of thinking of it as be, build, and block.  

Kazu: Yeah, block, build, be.  

Sonya: Block, build, and be. And I think that's just a beautiful way of thinking about how change happens. So, one more personal-ish question, which is just sort of to ask you like what are the things that you struggle with now in your personal and your work life, and don't avoid the personal one, by just talking about the work life. 

Kazu: Well, I think the answer to that question is my personal life period. That’s my response.  
 
Sonya: I know that's why! [Both laugh] And so how does that relate to internalized violence?  

Kazu: I mean, I think there's so many ways in which it manifests, right? Like obviously the work of nonviolence, it's the hardest to practice with my family, right? And you know a little bit about some of the work that I've been doing with my family, and I feel proud that I've been able to make some strides, but it's so much easier to be doing all of this work out there. There's a concept I won't go too deeply into. It's in the book, [gently speaking] read the book. Called negative peace, which is like you think things are peaceful because it's like no one's screaming at each other on the surface, but just beneath the surface layer, there's all this tension, and that's kind of how relationships oftentimes are with my family. And me coming from a conflict averse culture, it's really hard to create spaces where we're actually talking about the really difficult things.  

And so, I actually have a lot of things like somewhere between embarrassment, guilt, shame, wrapped up around the things I haven't done for my family, right? Knowing that my family has had so much trauma from a really messy childhood, and I have the tools, I do this work, and doing this work with my family is the scariest thing in the world. [Sonya: Mhm. Amen.] And through the help of Sonya Shah and the Ahimsa Collective, [Sonya: Woop! Woop!] [Audience laughs] I've made huge headway, even in the past several months and I'm deeply grateful to you and to all the members of the Ahimsa Collective for that. But yeah, it's so much easier to write books about this stuff than is to bring it into our own lives, you know. 

Sonya: Yeah, it is. I guess. I haven't written a book, but for you, it's easier to write a book, you know. I've learned a lot from you. I've learned a lot from the way you are, from the way you sit, but I've also learned a lot from the way that you've offered like really easy frameworks to understand things. And another one of those and it's just I just want everyone else to have them too, is this notion that you've talked about of like when you're in a conflict of this triangle between, like relationship, and skill, and structure. Yeah, and can you just describe that a little bit like, I mean, I'm thinking more in terms of like how you've talked about your family and trying to engage in sort of dealing with conflict.  

Kazu: Yeah. This is something I learned from Mickey Cashtown, but when you're engaged in a conflict, I think that this Venn diagram of relationship, skill, and structure, and my theory that you need two of those three things to be in place, for a difficult conversation to go well. And years ago, my mother asked me to facilitate some really difficult conversations with my family. And it's my family and I love them, so the relationship was really strong. And I feel like I'm a decent facilitator, but I also knew that as soon as a conversation opened up about our family trauma, whatever skills that I bring to the table as a facilitator, would just go right out the window because I would be triggered, right? And so, what I needed to do was raise the structure of the conversation, so we passed around a talking stick, and I wrote like questions like prompts on pieces of paper, and we would pick up a prompt and read the question and go around the circle and answer the question. And so, we didn't need to rely on my skill as a facilitator, the structure facilitated conversation. So, between that structure being in place, between our relationship, we were able to have a really healing conversation. And so yeah, relationship, structure, and skill, if one thing is missing or two things are missing, how can you raise one of the other two to really support you, in those conversations? 

Sonya: See? Isn't that going to be really useful when you go home and think about the next really difficult conversation you have, right? So just last thing before we end this, is there anything, that I guess I just want to ask like what are you like… what's next for Kazu? What are you excited about? I heard you said you were working on a book, just like what's going on in Kazu land that you're jazzed about.  

Kazu: I think I posted a while ago on social media, something I'm not doing as much these days, but just this thing that I've been getting over the last year or two. Like I started the East Point Peace Academy about six years ago, because I wanted to give my all to this work. And six years into it, realizing that like giving my all to this work does not mean starting and running and managing a traditional non-profit organization, that is the exact opposite of what it means actually to be giving my all to this work. And that even like so many of the most amazing organizations are completely consumed by this capitalist way of doing things. And I like I want to feel like I'm doing liberation work. And what does it mean to be doing work that is about liberation, in a way that feels so constricted by this box of this corporate structure of how we raise money, how we do evaluations, how we do reporting, like all of these things. And I just remember how free I felt when I lived in monastery when I was 18. And wanting to figure out what it could look like to feel that free while doing liberation work.  

And so, as you know, this year we're coming into this year, we've actually decided to do even less fundraising than we've ever done, to do less administration than we've ever done, and just like jump off the cliff, and dive in with no work plan, with no fundraising plan, and just like faith, like having faith that we are doing the work that we’re meant to be doing, and just seeing where that takes us. And already it allowed us to find funding to bring Astrid on board, and already were like seeing signs from the universe. I think I could say these things here at CIIS, right? [Sonya: Yes! Yes, you can!] I feel like I'm seeing like signs from the universe that is telling us that we are on the right path. And so just saying like fuck it to all the ways that I've been taught that I'm supposed to be doing this work, and just like giving myself fully to what I'm passionate about, and I'm really excited to see where that takes me, you know. 

Sonya: Thank you so much Kazu.  

[Applause] 

Kazu: Thank you.  

[Applause] 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect.  

The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliot, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  

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