Building abolition, with feminism: an interview with Cheryl Rivera

Lux Magazine's latest edition featuring a cover photo by Sinna Nasseri. Photo © Cheryl Rivera.

Interview • Dawn Marie Paley • July 18, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Cheryl Rivera is a Brooklyn-based writer, movement and culture worker and member of the editorial board of Lux Magazine. Lux is an eminently readable socialist feminist magazine with a sense of humor and a clever tagline: “It’s sex, with class.” As part of an effort to collaborate with like-minded projects, we reached out to Rivera to learn more about her work and activism in the city. 

Rivera is a Black southerner who has lived in New York City since she was a first-year college student. She worked at New York City’s Department of Education, the biggest school district in the United States and also one of the most segregated in the country, for seven years, quitting when former cop and conservative democrat Eric Adams became mayor in 2022. She maintains a personal art practice, working around public space as a fellow with the Shape of Cities to Come Institute.

Rivera collaborates with various movement people and spaces and, in 2022, she co-founded the Crown Heights CARE Collective, a community organization in Brooklyn that works around the abolition of police and prisons while attending to local struggles, including doing eviction defense and rapid response. Recent actions by the CARE Collective include setting up a People’s Library outside the Brooklyn Public Library on Sundays—when the city library is closed—while also drawing attention to the fight against Cop City in Atlanta.

I caught up with Rivera by WhatsApp voice call in late June. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dawn Marie Paley: First, I’m wondering if you can walk us through your trajectory as an organizer as it connects to the major cycles of revolt in the US over the last decade or so.

Cheryl Rivera: The trajectory of my work and the propulsion of my political development have been along the political pulsating of Black revolt that kind of comes in and out of intensification and focus. It's always simmering in the background here, but you have these moments like [the killing of] George Floyd or Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner, where things sort of surge forward. 

These are police killings. I would even say with Trayvon Martin, we're talking a sort of police killing, because in a lot of ways white people have been deputized to police and murder Black people. When I moved here, the Occupy Wall Street movement was happening and I was watching but I wasn't inside of it, you know.

Black Lives Matter was also in the streets at the same time, it was building after Occupy Wall Street. At this moment, I'm there at these marches as they take place, but I'm not able to really get inside, or I don't know how, I don't know what I want. 

I start from the place of Black rage and then move over the years through these moments of political consciousness that are coming to the foreground in these big marches. For me, every time there was a march, I was taking to the streets, but I was not politically going beyond that. I really couldn't, because I didn't make enough money to be housed for a while, all of my brain energy was going to that.

I won the housing lottery six years ago, and it was exactly around that time that I became able to become more deeply politically involved. It's what enabled everything that I do now.I moved into that apartment and I was no longer a contractor without healthcare at the DoE.

I had a union job and those material conditions made it possible for me to become not just an angry individual, but also a politicized individual who had more time to develop a practice. I started going to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) reading groups and I found a black feminist reading group.

People always think the DSA is so white, and I guess I can see how it can be, but it is such a big tent org. I found my way, luckily, into a socialist feminist arena, with a Black woman running this reading group. She was like, “You're talking so much, maybe you should facilitate the next reading group.” 

And I was becoming an abolitionist. This was something that was already really big, all of the Black Lives Matter protests have brought abolition to the forefront. 

I founded this spin-off group inside of DSA called Abolition Action. We did a reading group together and we went from just reading and doing one-off actions to starting a collective. That was my first abolitionist collective in 2019.

2020 was just a crazy developmental time for all of the people I know from this era. Sometimes it feels like we spent twice as long together because of what happened in 2020. Suddenly me and my comrades and Abolition Action were running this Mutual Aid fund, very quickly [after the COVID pandemic hit the US] in March 2020.

We raised $60,000. And we needed to figure out how to set up this machine and there was so much need, we were doing grocery delivery. I was part of another DSA group called Emerge, which was at the center of a lot of the huge marches that summer.

And I became the political education lead on a Defund NYPD campaign. 

It was like being in this incubator, and we're throwing everything at the wall. I'm in the street marching around, I'm going home late-late, and waking up and going to jail support the next day. We're doing this campaign. Everyone was running on all cylinders at all times.

From 2020 to now I decided to focus on building this more local container and with a few comrades from the campaign we got together with some other people and other groups like The Crown Heights Tenants Union, the Crown Heights Workers Union, and we formed the Crown Heights CARE Collective. 

Last year, a lot of us were called to do work around Palestine, and the group that I got involved in at that time was Writers Against the War on Gaza [WAWOG].  I organized some of these New York Times protests. We went to the Times building.

I also recently got involved with producing the New York War Crimes with WAWOG, which is like a paper that has kind of taken on a life of its own. We originally made it for our New York Times action, and it just had names of the dead. After about the third or fourth issue we started to do articles, now we have produced 10.

I'm coming to my organizing journey as about becoming a deeper abolitionist with each eruption.

DMP: Can you talk about how feminism informs your work?

CR: I think creating the cultural front like I do with WAWOG, but also what we do with Lux is incredibly important. What’s always been clear to me is that there is gender oppression happening. I don't really know how I define womanhood except that there's a certain kind of oppression that's being enacted on people like me.

You know, I don't really believe there's like so many essential things to gender. I'm not a gender essentialist. But there is a shared womanhood. In the same way, I'm not a racist essentialist, but there's obviously a Blackness that I'm partaking in. Part of that is shaped by whiteness, and in the same way I feel womanhood is shaped by gender oppression, and that's why I am a feminist. 

Oppression is happening, and I'm against these systems of domination as they appear anywhere. Feminism is one such breaker of a system of domination. 

Inherent to my communism has to be feminism. In much the same way it has to be a liberatory, Black, revolutionary communism.

DMP: When I listen to you, I hear abolition and deepening your abolitionist practice as being really central to your work. Do you find you interact with folks whose primary political identity is feminism or do you feel like feminism is somehow flowing through other political identities and practices?

CR: A lot of the feminist energy, the stuff that I was becoming an abolitionist from, was from feminist writers like Mariame Kaba, who's like “I am writing and focussed on gender survivors in prison.” I was coming out of Black feminism, like Combahee, and people who were leading me to this whole abolition thing. 

Definitely in the abolitionist world there is a little bit of an undercurrent of a fight between what people think of as squishy abolitionists, which I think they're sort of blaming on feminist abolitionists, and this more militant edge. And I understand because abolition, much like anything else, has been co-opted into this really soft thing, this idea that could all just be building extra services instead of actually understanding there will be a need to dismantle. That means there will be militant action.

In the US, the co-option of feminism has been so, so good. 

They did the “You go girl” feminism, the “Girl boss,” “Choose your choice” feminism. And I'm like wow, so this Hillary Clinton feminism, this liberal co-option, can become the way people see what is a feminist place, and the way people identify.

It's big here in the US, and why we also think it's important to create an internationalist focus in our magazine, for US feminists left to like tap into that global network of feminism to keep us grounded. This is a radical movement. 

Feminism is a ground in which we are fighting hard and losing, in some ways, to this co-option. And it does affect the way people interface, and that's one of the challenges for Lux, and I think also one of the necessities for Lux: to make an intervention in this space.