Midnight Musings: In Her Memory

Ejeris Dixon (0:04)

Hi, friends, there's so much going on in the world. From the horrific news of sexual violence at Cornell, the ongoing wars on Iran, the genocide in Gaza, the organizing that people are doing to defend voting rights and to push forward with the midterms, there's a lot. And our episode is late. The podcast is on a temporary pause. After a long and tough battle, my mom passed away from cancer a few weeks ago.

There's a lot to do when somebody dies. There's so much work in addition to the emotions and the grief, right? And in my family, there's some ongoing elder care work, and I have just been deep in it. So we will get back to you, I promise. But we've needed a little space. And my mom, behaviorist Anne Hill Dixon, my mom was an inspiration, was one of my inspirations for this podcast. My mom and I always talked politics. Since I was little, she would take me with her whenever she was going to vote, and she would have me research different candidates.

My mom was really shocked and saddened by the rise of the Make America Great Again movement by the increased violence, community violence, government violence, and the kind of callousness that she saw happening in society.

My mom was raised in rural Louisiana and moved to New Orleans. I think when she was, the family moved to New Orleans when she was like five or six. She went to segregated schools her whole life and really wanted a better, more just life for me and my brother and for all of us. And she believed that it was our role to help co-create a better world. Kind of like you could sum her up in really believing that things were going to get better, kind of similar to that Martin Luther King Jr. quote about the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. So as I became more politically active, my mom was one of my favorite people to bring towards conferences and events and meetings and protests that I was going to. And it was always a litmus test for me. Are we doing what we're supposed to be doing? Are we creating spaces where anyone can come and join? And as I got more and more involved, I started to realize that some of the spaces that I was in were confusing. They were insular. They were not welcoming to new people.

I came up in door-to-door canvassing and organizing, in creating meetings where all people, people who read and who didn't, people who spoke English and people who spoke Spanish, and a whole host of languages, and people with disabilities, and people with meetings where anyone who was concerned could come to, be welcomed, and get involved. And one of the reasons that fighting fascism was really important to me was, the more I read about it and what it takes to confront it, the more people talked about these kind of like mass, interconnected, large scale movements that truly contending with fascism requires. And these ways that people who may only agree that fascism is not the way forward, but they may not agree on too much more needed to unite. And that excited me because it meant we had to practice a different type of politics.

But I was also concerned. Like if I can't find a meeting that my mom can go to and feel welcomed and feel like she's understanding what's happening and she's a smart person, right? Then how are we going to build these massive movements?

So over the last few months, I've been organizing these online meetings for my family to say goodbye to my mom once we realized that things were getting pretty dire with her cancer. And if I'm honest, they were some of the most meaningful meetings I ever organized. We talked about food. We love to talk about food. Who's cooking what? Who's got the best recipe? But we also talk politics. And let me be clear, there are some people who come from generations of activists and organizers and revolutionaries. And I think those families are awesome. But when my family talks politics, that's not really my family. I'm a bit of a strange duck, right? My family members are school teachers. My mom was a lab tech. I've got cousins who are mechanics. My uncle used to work for the phone company. My other uncle is a football coach.

And so we're talking politics, but in a way where no one would probably identify as political. Anyways, so we're on the goodbye Zoom. And my uncle joked about all these crooked politicians, right? And my aunt talked about how shocked she was that people who were engaged in such cruelty could lock families up on a Friday and go to church on a Sunday. And another uncle was talking about how, you know, y'all better get ready. ICE is coming after everyone. You know that, right?