Richie Reseda

CÉLINE SEMAAN: Congratulations on your new film. It’s really amazing. How has the response been?

RICHIE RESEDA: There have been all kinds of responses. The responses that are most exciting to me are from people who have lived through something similar to “88” [the name of RICHIE’s album collaborator who was also incarcerated]. Maybe they were incarcerated, or they lost a family member to murder, or both. We did a screening and healing circle in a prison for children in the Bay Area, and there was a 14-year-old kid in there whose cousin was killed while he was locked up. The person who killed his cousin ended up going to the prison and he told 88 that because he saw his film, he felt like he might be able to forgive the person who killed his cousin, rather than respond with revenge. Those are the responses that mean everything.

CÉLINE: It seems that your service to liberation starts from your personal, lived experience. Please share a bit about what motivates you to create these types of creative expression.

RICHIE: I hate when people call me an activist. I hate the idea of activism because it implies that we’re doing something “special” by caring for one another. That’s such an inherently colonial way of thinking. The colonizers taught us that your life is about you, and anything you do for anyone else is extra or “giving back.” You’re not giving back anything. You’re just participating in the environment. You’re participating in the community, and hopefully in a way that sustains that environment and that community.

I’m from LA, and I grew up being criminalized my whole fucking life. The first time I had a negative experience with the cops, I was four years old. The first time I was put in handcuffs was for horse playing, when I was 11 years old. Then I was arrested when I was 13 for leaving school early to get a haircut. I was arrested at 14 for scratching the dirt off my desk. I was arrested at 15 for talking during an assembly. That time, I was choked by the cops. I was arrested for being late to school. I was first kicked out of school when I was eight years old for talking too much, and eventually kicked out of society and sent to prison.

I started making art when I was 14, but the way this society is set up, and the way the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles School Police were set up, made creating art extremely difficult. They called making art gay, and they meant that in a negative way. So I became the exact thing I was told to become by every movie. I acted out the things I saw. And eventually, I wasn’t getting arrested for getting haircuts anymore. I was getting arrested for selling drugs, and I was getting arrested for having guns on me and for stealing shit. I was living on the streets as a 16-year-old trying to survive. I wanted to work at American Apparel, hella bad, because I was into fashion, and I would go to all their open calls in downtown LA. I went seven times. It was a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride, and they never hired me. They had a pamphlet about what kind of black people to hire. I guess I wasn’t that kind.

One day, I came home after my seventh time trying to get a job there, and my homeboy, who I was staying with, was like, “We can’t just live off my mom… like, we got to make something happen.” He had some weed on him, and that’s how I got into selling drugs for real. I survived on the streets for about two and a half years before getting locked up at 19. I’d committed three robberies. They tried to give me a life sentence, but I ended up getting 10 years. When I was in prison, I tried to make music and get closer to my true self, and put aside the mask I’d been wearing to fit into a society based in violence. After a few years, I met 88, who was also an artist like me.

CÉLINE: Did you find yourself?

RICHIE: I don’t know if I found myself in prison. I chose myself in prison, which was a scary thing to do. I chose, in a really violent place, to be comfortable expressing all the parts of me, including my femininity, which is something that is looked down on and preyed on in this current version of society. Prisons reflect the society around them. One thing I learned being in prison is that you can’t act like you’re not afraid; you have to genuinely not be afraid. If you’re trying to act like you’re not afraid, you will be preyed on. It is deep heart work to genuinely not be afraid of your own people when they’ve been pushed to show up at their worst. You must truly be able to see the best in people while they’re showing up at their worst. I had to do that for myself, and then I had to do that for the people I was locked up with, because if I chose to see everybody as monsters who just wanted to take something from me, that was all I was going to see.

CÉLINE: Much of your work challenges patriarchy. How do you see gender justice as inseparable from dismantling the prison-industrial complex?

RICHIE: The way I think about it is: domination versus connection. The colonial world teaches us we need to dominate, dominate our bodies, dominate each other, and dominate nature to survive. I feel like Indigeneity is about connecting. We connect with our bodies, we connect with each other, we connect with nature to survive. I was taught that masculinity was based in domination, and the people who were allowed to be connected were the more feminine people. I don’t want to imply that masculinity can’t naturally be connected… but that’s not the way it’s taught in this society. Because I was so feminine, I overcompensated for it by being violent. I did that for a while, and then I eventually chose to have more integrity…

One of my biggest blessings is that I grew up in the super-masculine LA street culture, and I grew up around queer, non-binary, and feminine women of color who politicized me and trained me to be an organizer. Being part of both is what has allowed me to be who I am, because I could bring those connective practices to my street friends in a way that they understood, and that’s what I seek to do with my art. I’m trying to bring integrity and connection into our communities in a way that our communities can actually relate to.

CÉLINE: It’s an abolitionist practice to tell our stories, to reclaim our narrative. How did you develop the narrative for your film? Did it come to you organically or intuitively, or did you find it in some other way? Who is it for?

RICHIE: Just to respond to the connection between ending patriarchy and prison abolition. Prisons and individualism go hand-in-hand. You can’t have one without the other. Like policing and individualism go hand-in-hand. If you want to keep living an individualist life, there will always be policing. Prisons are based on the idea that domination is necessary. Whereas, if we practice true integrity with ourselves, the community, and the earth, I’m going to get my needs met in a way that also serves the needs of the whole, the same way plants, forests, and the cells in our bodies do. We don’t need punishment to scare people into “doing the right thing” if we’re serving the needs of the whole. I’ve been organizing since 2006… I don’t start with the institutions we’re tearing down. I start with the culture we must build up so that we can learn how to live in integrity with one another.

CÉLINE: What is the culture we’re building? It’s not just about expanding our imagination, which storytelling is a big part of, but it’s also about defining the sort of culture that is needed for a world of liberation. The heart of it is through abolitionist work, but it also touches on so many other struggles…

RICHIE: I would say it’s about more than just imagining. It’s about practicing. Culture is a practice. You can make a post, or you can make a movie, or you can make a TV show. That is a cultural product, but if it doesn’t change the way people are meeting their needs on a daily basis, you haven’t changed culture. Culture has to be practiced by human beings. Culture is made up of the patterns that come up as we collectively meet our needs. People see something, get inspired by it, and then go live the same way they did before watching it, because the cultural product, in and of itself, doesn’t actually support anybody in practicing something new.

We have a tool that we developed as part of this project called The Abolition Dream Lab: A Healing Plan. In the Healing Plan, there’s a step for how we can actually live from an abolitionist perspective. How can we live in integrity with ourselves, the community, and the earth today… it’s through the practice of building “accountability pods” as Mia Mingus (an American writer, educator, and community organizer who focuses on issues of disability justice) calls them. I’m committed to meeting my needs in a way that also meets the needs of the community and all living things. Then I ask my closest people to hold me accountable to that. We can build consensual accountability. This is an actual mechanism with which to govern the New World.

CÉLINE: You said there’s a difference between a cultural product, like a movie or a platform or a book, and actually changing culture. How do you change culture, whether it’s around abolition, anti-racism, or anti-Zionism? How do we change policies?

RICHIE: We have to first practice the new culture and then invite people to do it with us, and by doing it together, it will change whatever the practice is. I’m a formerly incarcerated, cisgender, “man.” I’m Black, from LA, and I speak English… All these things affect how I practice accountability, which is our ticket out of violence-based governing. My work is centered around literally creating cultural products that are a portal into cultural practices that get us away from dominance and into integrity. When we’re talking about a society truly based in care, as opposed to violence and domination, that is radical for us here, living in the West. For many Indigenous peoples all over the world, that’s not radical at all.

CÉLINE: Your movie is a generous offering, because making something like this takes so much work, and it takes so much ruffling feathers, and it’s a battle to get there, to get to putting it out. How has it been?

RICHIE: I have been working on this project for 10 years. It has been an uphill, independent battle the whole time. We sold it to Netflix after it was done. It’s not like we had major institutional support at every turn. We’ve had to go against the grain and figure it out and do it in the community way… 88 and I produced this music in prison. We recorded it in prison. Once we were out, we took the prison vocals and produced new music around those vocals. We had no money; we had to figure it out independently. We’ve walked into film festivals where our film was showing and been asked, “Are you guys seat fillers?” I’m so fucking tired and burnt out…

CÉLINE: I feel you deeply. It is the hard road, but it’s really beautiful, what you’ve created, and it’s magical. Building frameworks of care and non-dominance outside of this culture of dominance is the hardest path. How have you been building this framework of care for yourself?

RICHIE: I got called out by my best friend and a lot of my close people, who were like, “Bro, you need to center how you’re being and not just how you’re spreading, because otherwise you’re not going to spread the thing for real. If you’re burnt out, you’re going to spread burnt outness.” If you lack boundaries, you’re going to spread a lack of boundaries and all the chaos that comes with that. And that has happened in all the organizations I’ve founded and co-founded, and led. Since 2022, I’ve been investing a lot of time in my own integrity practice. I have an accountability pod made up of three brothers… We share a lot of experiences, and we link up once a month and hold each other accountable. I have another kind of unofficial pod with feminine women in it… I need that type of accountability too, because their perspective is different, and they catch things that my pod doesn’t catch.

CÉLINE: Assata Shakur talks in her book, Assata: An Autobiography, about how one of her mentors said to her regarding being an organizer, you should start by organizing yourself. Your kitchen is a mess, your room is a mess, your whole life is a mess. How can you talk about organizing and affecting the world outside when your world inside is a mess? I’m paraphrasing. But it’s essentially what you’re saying, that what’s happening inside is going to reflect outside. I am building a model of care that includes me. How did you design a way that also includes you?

RICHIE: Many healing movements have been discouraging because they’re all about how you take care of yourself at the expense of everyone else. It’s ultimately in service to capitalism, not community. That’s not the kind of healing we’re pushing for… I am a member of a greater body. I am just one cell in a greater body, and I need to take care of myself as one of those cells. I was able to start really prioritizing and taking care of myself, because I understood it as part of this mission of getting back to connection and integrity, as opposed to something that was in competition with that.

CÉLINE: How do we support you? What does that look like?

RICHIE: Watching the movie, buying the album… We have merch too; I’m not ashamed of that. That’s not capitalism. We worked hard to offer something to exchange with the community for value… and all business isn’t capitalism.

CÉLINE: Business existed before capitalism!

RICHIE: Exactly. Capitalism has to do with how things are owned and how power is distributed. And we are a worker-owned collective. We make all of our decisions based on consensus. It’s not like I started the company and now I own it, and I make all the money. We share everything we have, and we have a model that can be replicated by any business.

You follow any war, any genocide, and you’ll find that it’s rooted in capitalist business practices. One way people can support us is by buying the things we put 10 years into creating. I don’t want to rely on grants; grants actually rely on exploitation, on rich people who steal from workers. They donate their money to foundations so they can write it off their taxes, and then those foundations give it to organizations trying to do good things for the world and treat us like they did us a favor. And then we’re reliant on the money of the people who created the problem in the first place. Practicing integrity is the only way we get out of a domination-based world. This movie isn’t a prison documentary. It’s a film about how a person and a family chose healing in response to unimaginable harm, murder, incarceration, and sexual violence… it’s ultimately a film about choosing healing. The reason I’ve dedicated a third of my life to making this album and making this film is because I wanted people to see a real-life example of choosing healing over revenge. And now we have an example that we can all see. It’s on Netflix. Now we have an example of what choosing healing actually looks like when it’s really, really hard to do.