AA: Okay. So our first question is, where do you call home? Where did you grow up? Where do you currently spend most nights?

YT: Start with the easy one! That’s a question I'm asking myself now! Like, where is home as an immigrant and a queer person who's under siege? I feel like home is always Jamaica, but it's a tender relationship, let's say. These days I'm also calling Atlanta home, and also in the process of trying to figure out where could be our home, should this place become more inhospitable to me and/or members of my family and community. So yeah, other options right now that I have been flirting with and floating around: Costa Rica, as another place that we are setting down roots and have found a large Jamaican population. In Costa Rica of all places! So excited for that continuity of cultural connections and things there.

AA: Yeah.

YT: Most nights I'm here in Atlanta. Hopefully that will change soon. And originally from Jamaica, countryside southwest region in the hills in St. Elizabeth.

AA: Can you describe your home life during childhood? Did you grow up in a nuclear family structure?

YT: I did not grow up in a nuclear family structure. I grew up with my grandmother and aunts, as I said in the countryside in Jamaica. I did not meet or know or remember my biological father until I was six or seven. And that's because my mom came back from the United States, where she was traveling and working and sending things back home to take care of me and my sister, to marry him, and so he started coming around more and that's how I got to know him. Our family was mostly an agricultural, agrarian family. I grew up without running water, indoor plumbing, electricity and the lot, and whatnot, but I grew up with a really kind, caring, loving, supportive, nurturing grandmother, and a bunch of aunties and cousins. So that's all I knew as my family. My grandmother had 11 children and only one of them sort of raised their family in a nuclear family structure, and my sister grew up with that family member. So it's really interesting sometimes when we talk, how we have radically different conceptions and desires around creating family and community.

MH: I'm curious, because so much of our work and our knowledge centers on the U.S., what your perspective is on family making in Jamaica and if your family was typical, or if lots of families were not “doing family” in that way?

YT: I didn't feel abnormal or out of order with our family structure. I think it's probably, it's both cultural and class-related in terms of the structure just because so many family members always had a parent missing because they had to work, either in the city or in a foreign country or farm working, international farm working. And then folks growing up with their grandmother or aunties or my cousins—my grandmother had 11 children of her own and has unofficially adopted or taken in any number of folks. As well in our family structure, if you got along better with a different family member, you can just choose to go live with that person. The Jamaican school system at the time was such that by the fifth grade, you were taking a national common entrance exam to see which high school you qualified for. And so if you qualified for one that was not in your area, you would find a family or a friend who lived in the area that you qualified for and live with them. And so you would live with them either over an extended period of time or during the week and come home on the weekend. So the folks who could afford to be in nuclear family structures were often ones who had all the resources to create that type of structure for themselves. So both culturally and economically, that was not the structure that we found ourselves in.

MH: Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you.

AA: Yeah, that's very interesting, I don't know anything about that. So were there any early experiences that led you to question or feel disconnected from the nuclear family structure? And yeah I hear you've already described that it's not what you knew.

YT: Yeah I didn't feel disconnected. As I've said, it just felt like my norm and the world around me reflected that. Even now with more resources and more connections in other places, it's also still the structure. There are folks who, even as they are in outwardly appearing nuclear structure, they're not actually in them in practice. So people joke around and be like, oh, you're Jamaican, you probably have four other families somewhere else because dad or whomever might have families in other places. And so I also grew up when my supposed bio parents got together and got married, and other children came around that were part of it and so whether or not the parents of the children got together, the parents actually took care of each other's children. So my dad's other children, we played with them, we hung out with them, my mom took care of them, but they did not communicate with the lovers. It was kind of like a de facto, non-ethical polyamorous situation happening.

MH: Heard, yeah. Were there parts of that structure that worked for you and parts that didn't? Did you have awareness of that at the time? Or was it all just your norm?

YT: The part that didn't work was being separated from my mother. As a young child, there's always that desire, the yearning for that part. The parts that worked was, now looking back, just the community of mothers that I was in. My aunts, my older cousins, my grandmother. And so my relationship with my grandmother was one that I had that would mirror what someone expected your biological mother-daughter relationship or child relationship would be, that's what I had with my grandmother.

MH: Yeah, that's really cool.

YT: I also think it has a huge influence on how I think about and construct my own family.

AA: Yeah, perfect because that's exactly what we're moving into. What do your care structures or kinship structures look like today?

YT: So, again, outward appearance and inward, everyday reality don't actually look alike, so my children are biologically my own, but for one of my partners who lives with me, you know, they’re not their biological children. But for folks who see us on the outside, because they present more masculine, and as my kids said, ‘you don't look queer, you don't look non-binary!’ And I was like ‘I don't know what that means for me!’ It could be like, oh, look at that cute little nuclear family walking around with their hetero-presenting all-the-things, which doesn't match the reality of the actual structure and shapes and formations that we're in.

So with my nesting partner's family, they really, I'm using the word adopted, but not in the legal sense, our children as their own. And so that's their grandparents and aunties and uncles. And with my biological extended family in Florida, which is my sister and my mom, my brother, and a gaggle of cousins and other fictive and actual kin, that's the connection that we have to any sort of biological structure here. Their biological father was very much into a nuclear structure that did not work for us. And so once we separated, they also left the country. So that's not a relationship the children have access to. And that shows up in, I think, interesting—to use a not interesting word—ways in how they relate and connect and their own desires and yearnings. And then of course there's the auntie networks. They're probably five or six people who would be like ‘I'm auntie to all these children!’ and so they have a whole bunch of aunties, uncles, tíos, tatties and whatnot that they relate to that take care of them, that we’re in intentional, chosen relationships with.

MH: Did that structure come about pretty naturally because it came from your upbringing, or was there intentionality or moments in your life when there were kind of shifts to create this structure now?

YT: Both/and. It was like a wave pattern of that, where in my upbringing and imagining of family, I very much desired that. And I grew up with that structure. I remember when we first came to the United States and my mom would introduce her friends and be like, ‘that's your auntie.’ I'm like, ‘that's not my auntie! That’s just your friend!’ And I think after I had a child with my then partner… they came out of a more nuclear structure and so our lives started mirroring that in a way, but it was always a tension in our relationship. And one of the reasons why it fell apart. And so there was a period after that where I had to be very intentional about constructing the type of life and world that I wanted to exist in with my children. Because it wasn't something that was happening while I was in that relationship. There was always all this tension around it. So there was a part where I fell into the de facto nuclear structure because of the relationship I was in. And once I was like this is actually not working—I'm feeling more stressed and burnt out and not myself here, the intentionality came about in terms of being clear about… being really clear about who gets to be an auntie. And not just because they're my friends, but what are the values and practices that you're bringing in? How safe do I feel with you and my children? Can I have intentional conversation with you about harm and what's expected and accountability if harm does occur and, you know, be clear with folks? If my children are supposed to go to someone's house or intend to, we're going to sit down and have a conversation about sexual violence and harm and what my expectations are. And if these are conversations they're not comfortable having, then I'm not comfortable with them being at your home.

MH: Yeah.

YT: So it's the folks who can actually have these conversations and be in practice of the things that we're agreeing to who get to be called an auntie or a tati or tío.

AA: Yeah. It's amazing that you brought up values and practices because that is the exact wording of our next question.

YT: I swear I did not get an advanced copy of the questions! [laughing]

MH: We’re just on a wavelength!

AA: I'm astonished, but yeah, so if you want to expand on what values and practices are central to your personal care structure.

YT: Yeah, well radical consent, actually for us that looks like enthusiastic consent in our family, and that pervades all aspects of it. And it shows up both in the education of our children, so we practice self-directed learning, which also means that I'm taking direction from my children about what they want to learn and me understanding how they learn best and from whom and creating the conditions for that. And it sounds juicy and sexy and all the things, but it's also really hard fucking work! Because it means that I also have to structure my work life, my relationship life, to be able to mirror those things. And in those places, I find myself creating the types of institutions that I want to see in the world, which just means that I'm an overworked, functionally burned out organizer, parent, community member doing that work.

So, enthusiastic consent, which with children—I remember talking to my now 14-year-old, saying ‘oh, no, no, we share power in this relationship’ and they might have been eight and they were like, we actually don't share power because you're a parent and you hold all the money and the things and whatever else. And so we don't have the same access to the same things. I'm like, wonderful, beautiful, you're right, and we share it in the sense of where you are able to make decisions, you are given that space to do that, and you're respected and supported in that decision making. And so we think about it as a co-direction rather than just self-direction, particularly at a younger age. And so as you get older and you have more awareness of the world and, you know more things about you, then you take on more of that self-direction for your life. And more recently, they've directed themselves into—I call it institutionalized learning—they’re going to high school at a public high school in Atlanta. And I'm like, that's great. You've chosen that for yourself. I didn't force that onto you or compel you to do that. Where the other one, who is 11, is like, I don't want to see anybody at school or anywhere. I'm happy traveling and learning and doing all these other things. And so intentional living, consent, deep respect for everyone's humanity, regardless of their age and circumstances in our family is also part of that.

Self-direction is another piece of it because all of us in this structure in our home identify on the trans spectrum, and as my children are moving through adolescence, that's in flow and in development. One of them will be like ‘oh I feel like I'm a trans boy today,’ and then two years later it's like ‘well I'm feeling less like a boy and more like a guitar, so can you just use all the pronouns for me until I tell you otherwise?’ So self-direction is a really big part of that, and it shows up in our work as well in the types of institutions that we create and the relationships that we cultivate with other people.

And another value is the ‘joui.’ And it starts off as jouissance, which is a French word for bliss, and actually, the definition of it is the pleasure you feel in the act of climaxing, but it can pertain to other things. And so we shortened it to joui. And then my partner, who's Creole, is like, let’s add the Haitian Kreyòl spelling onto it so it’s ‘jwi.’ And that means being on purpose, but also finding the things in our life that bring deep, soul-level joy as part of it. It's becoming harder and harder each day for that to be possible, but it is an orientation and a guide rather than a thing that can be achieved every day as part of it. So that's just one of the things that governs our family and structure and relating.

MH: That's beautiful. Thank you for that. I'm curious about two things. One is that you use the word ‘institution’ to describe the things that you're creating. And I'm curious—why that word and also what are the institutions that you want to see in the world and how are you creating that in your family?

YT: Yeah, well it comes out of my organizing and recognizing that if we are doing radical human rights organizing work and we're up against these systems and superstructures, the pillars that hold these systems up are the institutions, whether that is school, church, the family—these are the institutional pillars that hold these things up. And so if we are trying to take systems down, it's just a bit nebulous, like, what are all the parts of the system? And so for me, the institutions are the places that we have to depend on to be able to function in the current system and infrastructure that we're in. And so if we can create the alternatives that we want to see or that more closely mirror the type of world that we want to be in, then we can begin to knock out or take out, destroy—the other side of abolition—abolish these particular institutions so we can create the ones that we want.

And so for me, that has looked like the family being one. There are types of relationships that we enter. My family and I practice polyamory, communal polyamory. We don't create hierarchies in how we create our affection and care relationship with each other. So whether it's my children or someone I'm in a romantic/sexual relationship with or someone who I'm in a platonic, but intimate relationship with, they're not deprioritized because I now have a sexual lover in that framework. So that's one particular institution that we are actively reimagining and practicing together. Some of the institutions that I create out in the world are other care institutions, so one being a bail fund, for us to bail folks out who are held on cash bail, another being a mutual aid fund. It started in COVID, but has extended into a time bank where we recognize that the resources that became available to us in COVID are not going to flow in the same way. So how do we reimagine and create the types of communal infrastructure that have held us for so long? And to do that, we have to intentionally create those things, and the time bank being one of those pieces that is doing it.

And then the learning institution: starting a cooperative learning network and institution to, one, educate my children because yes, homeschooling is great, but that requires, again, that family structure where you have one parent who can be out of the economy and be at home doing this type of work and that does require a lot of resources to be able to do that. So how do I do that for myself but also invite my community and others into it with me? And so AJC, the Anna Julia Cooper Learning and Liberation Center, was something we started in 2017. It evolved in COVID and most recently got re-launched in 2023 as Lakou Learning and Liberation Co-op and so volume three is set to launch next year as we think about it as a broader learning community beyond children.

MH: That's awesome. I want to hear more about all of those things, but before we get there, you mentioned burnout, both in the context of the nuclear family situation you were in before and in your current situation of trying to create these institutions that do not exist, to support you and your loved ones, and what you want in the world. How do you see those kinds of burnouts functioning differently or the same? How do you navigate burnout?

YT: Before, very poorly. [laughing] I can remember very clear examples of just having a ton of shit to do and there's actually not enough time in the day to get it done but sacrificing sleep to be able to do that. These days, I don't do that, and that has been a very grueling, intentional process of decolonizing my work in the sense of all the things that I wanted and that I think that I should have, I was committed to building. And what I realize is that when you call people together to do that work, they default to you as being the leader or the primary person to hold all of that, and I think so many things around me validated that approach, and I was doing it, one because I needed it, but because other people weren't showing up in that structure.

And then I got to a place of like, no, they're actually trying to kill us. This is not a metaphor for where we are, so I'm not going to be helping them to do that work by taking on all the things that they have taken away from us or that they continue to hold at bay from us. And really just changing my mindset and my strategy about how I'm going to do that work. The other part of it was that this work isn't really fundable. You get a few dollars here and there, but they want you to change a core piece of it, and I'm not doing that. So I was working as a consultant and literally funding the work that I was doing in Atlanta. And that's not sustainable.

And I think a similar approach in my everyday life, as a Black femme, so much of what we need to be well and to survive and to thrive in the world are things that we have to create. And when my extended family is in another state, my broader, larger family is in another country, and I'm in a place because it's where I got an education, I don't have the networks that I need. And so I felt like I was always recreating it. And I was initially in Atlanta because I was in grad school at Emory. And so being in a grad school community is one thing, and then living out in the city is a whole other thing. So I felt like I kept having to create community at every different stage and it’s exhausting. And so I had to call on my own approach to working and to living and to creating community and to be like not only am I not able to create all these other things but that I have to do it in a smarter way. And it's okay if the only thing I'm able to create is a healthy, loving, nurturing family structure that can extend out to include more people.

AA: I wouldn't put only in front of that.

YT: Thank you, Alanah.

AA: Yeah. I have many, many questions. I feel like I can learn so much from you. Our next question is about conflict management. I'm really curious, because I know you're organizing, but also if you could answer this in the way of how you kind of talked about self-direction with your children. And I think one thing that comes up is giving autonomy to children is a sticky thing, just like with their dependence and things like that. So if you could speak to how you manage conflict with those in your care or life?

YT: It's been an evolution. I came out of a culture and a family structure where spanking was a thing. I got spanked in school. I got spanked at home. I could be spanked by my neighbors if they think I'm out of line. So that level of discipline was one that I grew up with. Because I did not like it as a child, I was committed to being like, this is not how I want to raise my children. This is not how I want to exist in the world with other people. And when I had children, that's what I espoused to them, that's what I practiced with them, but it was also important for me to have a partner who also valued the same thing in our household. It doesn't mean that I was perfect as a parent. What it meant was that at the times when I recognized that my practices were out of line with the values that I'm espousing, that I had to then figure myself out. And so therapy has been a really great place for that, where I'm like, oh, it's important to have the values and to be able to practice them in isolation, but when the rubber hits the road, when you're stressed, burnt out, dysregulated, you need additional tools to be able to be in practice with those things.

And so I think the primary part of it was teaching my children those things. So when it's me or anybody else who might come in conflict with it, they can be like, I know that this is not how I am supposed to be treated. This is not what I'm going to accept from anyone, even at this particular age. So it also meant that my children are also seen as disrespectful and ill mannered, because they would be able to talk back to adults to say what they were entitled to. That also means that their relationships with different family members are not the same as other children in the family because they are sort of more wary about being around my children or engaging them because they're afraid of doing the wrong thing or saying the wrong thing. I mean, over time, that has shifted, but it's also been because we have been clear about what the standards of care are and engagement have been.

And in my work as well, particularly in the Learning Center, we've been able to codify that both in terms of agreements that we're holding as a community of care providers and folks that are in practice with each other. And the same processes for transforming conflict that we've evolved with the children are ones that are present in the bail fund, that are present in the mutual aid fund and across the ecosystem. So when folks are like, we have a problem, I was like, well, the children have something that they use. They actually could be the one to facilitate this with you all. So for me, I feel like whether it's my organizing or living, I'm just trying to replicate the best of what I experienced as a child with my grandmother in the hillside in Jamaica. So you're like, what? This is a revolution! I'm like, no, I'm just bringing a piece of home in this context.

MH: Yeah, and I think it's really cool what you said about the connection between your personal care structure and how that shows up in your organizing and your work. And the things that you're learning from your kids and applying in other spaces. I just want to hear more about what you feel like the relationship is between those parts of your life and what you've learned from one area that's applied to the other and vice versa?

YT: Yeah. I'm going to start with the kids. I describe them as my internal and external self. My oldest is probably more like my internal. They're fiercely smart and analytical, but also can be introverted and shy and not quick to share whatever brilliant idea that they have. Where my youngest is just bold and brash and out there and if you tell them not to jump they're like ‘I'm going to do it with two feet!’ Or they're like ‘well how dangerous is it? maybe I can just poke it and see! like will I die? Is it dangerous?’ [laughing] So I feel like both of them have really helped to raise me, because I was such an idealist—as if I'm not now, right?—as a child and trying to create the pathway for them to be their full, most authentic selves in the world has also forced me to have to live more fully in those things, both in terms of my individual practice, but also trying to create the things that they need in the world.

When we were younger, our family had a lot of land, and so as a kid, I carried a machete. I still have one that I keep in my home. And so when you're going into a new place, you have to just go in with the machete and clear all the vines and all the things to clear a path. I feel like I do a lot of that machete-ing the wild in the world so that my kids can have a path to walk through. Now I'm learning that they can clear some of the vines themselves. They might get tangled up, get bitten up, or, you know, all the things that are happening along the way, but now my job isn't to do all the clearing for them, it is to be, like, you have the tools, you have the machete, you know the landscape, you know things, so go ahead and clear a path. And things are going to happen to you, but I'm going to be here to support you. Or there are other things in the landscape that can support you in that way.

So I think that type of relationship with them, where I'm bringing my own values and ideas and things to how I want the world to treat them and how they're coming into their own and claiming space, have also shaped how I'm doing that. Like going to therapy. Yes, I went before I had children, but going and doing trauma-based therapy, EMDR, for example, to make sure that whatever things that I picked up along the way are not still with me that I'm carrying into my relationship with them was also part of that. And then understanding the structures of trauma, from the personal to the political, and baking that into the organizing work and what we bring to how we care for each other. The space that I'm able to hold for other people when I see them having breakdowns in organizing space, the ways that we're able to create care structures in organizing for people as a result of those things, or accountability is also about what I'm also learning for myself and my family, for my children.

AA: I love that. I love just the reflexivity of saying that your children raise you too, and I feel like we just typically think of children as irresponsible and don't give them too much credit, and I think we need more of that, just like you're saying, that they could facilitate something for other people. They are people to learn from too, so I just really appreciate that.

Great, I think our next question, and I think you've covered it a bit because you said your children are seen as, I don't even remember the word, just ill mannered.

YT: I'm like, they're just free!

AA: Yeah. But yeah, the question is, how have people responded to your non-nuclear choices? This could be people you've encountered in institutions like schools and hospitals, or family of origin.

YT: Oh, it's ranged. So my family, they're just like, oh, it's just Yolande. So I feel like they, because they don't know how to box us in, they give us a lot of space. And then once they hear, they're like, oh, that sounds beautiful. That sounds kind, but I can never do that. So that's the range in the family.

In institutional settings, I think people are confused, annoyed, and sometimes it leads to poor care outcomes. One example is me birthing my child at home. This one was unplanned, but just a series of things colluded to not allow us to be able to go in, including having a racist midwife, who did not believe I was in active labor and told me I needed to stay home for some period of time. And I knew my body and I knew all the things, and so I decided to stay home and birth my child at home. But going into the hospital to get care after, they had their own protocols of what they needed to do. But I knew that those things were about making money and being able to claim a certain period of time. And it's like, well, I know what my health is. I know all the other things, and being turned away without a birth certificate, being turned away without a bunch of different things that then led to a whole bunch of other things.

As a homeschooling family, for example, or unschooling family, when I would take my children to the doctor, the level of questioning that they were asking and the way they’re trying to figure out if my children are being abused… My youngest, for example, and I tell you, is like ‘where is the boundary and where can I push it further?’ When they were younger, they wanted to try everything. So if they had a scratch or something, they’d be like, ‘oh, well, do we need to call DCFS or something?’ And so there were times that I had to leverage the privilege I did have, like, well, it's Dr. Tomlinson and these other things or ask them questions to show that I knew the material and the conditions that they're talking about for them to back off, and just the way that people then presented themselves differently. So there are just all these assumptions about who unschools and how they treat their children and all those other things that we had to come up against.

On the poly side, there's a lot of curiosity, so I feel like we're always a sort of oddity that people want to have conversations with, to ask a bunch of questions, but when we break it down and point out the cultural context of the things and the ways that this fits in with other democratic practices, and they're like ‘oh well I guess it's not that exotic, but it's just not usual’ or ‘I could never do it because I'm too jealous,’ and it's like well, we didn't say we didn't get jealous, we just say we handle it differently! Those are some of the ways that we experience the world, but it's also been really important to create the intentional community and extended family structures to be able to not feel normal, but not feel like an oddity. As my sister said, you live in an Atlanta gay bubble!

MH: Yeah, familiar with that one for sure. Is there anything else here, Alanah or Yolande that you want to talk about in terms of your personal care structure before we move into talking more about your organizing work and your community care work?

YT: Yeah, I feel like there's hardly a thing that I create for my family that I don't extend out into the world. I think my oldest now says, ‘you know, at first I thought that the work was more important to you than us, but I realized that they're interconnected, and so I see why you do it.’ And now that they can see more clearly how the structures are showing up in our lives and the rest of the world, they're like, oh, I get it. But it was hard, I think, at first. So, for example, even though we have private health insurance, I don't go to private practices. I use a community clinic because to be able to bring private insurance in, brings resources and things into the community so that they can have more dollars, especially with government funding being one of the primary things that they get to do the work. I'm learning that it's important that other private payers are there to be able to bring resources into clinics. I also know that when you're using a public clinic, for example, folks are not always treated with care. And so having to demand a type of care in the world has been part of that ongoing fight. So, I guess, my point is that I always use a consistent mantra that the personal is political. And so what I'm doing for me, I feel like I have to extend out so that other people can benefit.

Tragically, our recording software glitched at this point in the interview and we lost the second half of the conversation. Now we record on two platforms when we do interviews! We live and we learn!