S1E59 - Carla on Adult Supremacy

Episode Summary

Brooke and Carla talk about parenting as radicals and youth autonomy, but more importantly, they talk about adult supremacy, the history of it, the ways it influences all of our lives and strategies for confronting it as parents and non parents. They breakdown childism, and talk about how the most important thing you can do is listen to the youth and how community is once again the answer to many societal woes.

Guest Info

Carla Joy Bergman (She/they) is a writer, producer, podcaster, schemer and causer of trouble. Their book Trust Kids! is out from AK Press and can be ordered here. You can find Grounded Futures at GroundedFutures.com or @GroundedFutures on Twitter and Instagram. You can find Listening House Media here. She also cohosts the Grounded Futures podcast with their son Uilliam.

Host Info

Brooke can be found at Strangers helping up keep our finances intact and on Twitter and Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Carla on Adult Supremacy

Brooke 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today we have the honor of talking with author Carla Bergman. We're going to discuss parenting here in the end times. But first, we'd like to honor our membership and the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Jingle jingle, jingle, jingle, jingle jingle here. And we're back. Carla, thank you for joining us today to talk about parenting. Would you please introduce yourself? Let us know what you do, your pronouns, share where you're from if you're comfortable disclosing that.

Carla 01:58 Great. Hi, Brooke. Thanks for having me here. I love this podcast. It's a real honor. Yeah, I'm Carla Joy Bergman. I use she/her, they/them pronouns. I'm calling in from Musqueam. Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh lands, also known as Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest, across the border in Canada. Yeah, I, well, I do a lot of things. I'm a bit of a autonomous scholar, writer, producer, a podcaster or schemer, causer of trouble. I don't know, that's always hard to put yourself on there. Like what do you do? Yeah, I'm a mom, friend. I'm a white settler with Irish and Welsh ancestry. Yeah.

Brooke 03:03 Yeah, well, we're really glad that you are here and taking the time to talk about this topic with us today. I know that you just released a book back in November called "Trust Kids", which looks like you can get from AK Press. And they have print ebook and audiobook available. There's probably other sources to get it as well. So I'd love to talk about your book a little bit. And then you know, if that leads into some broader conversations about parenting in general, and especially, you know, parenting here in the end times and how we support each other as leftists, you know, I think that would be great to talk about too. But let's, let's start with your book. I'm curious why you wanted to write the book, like what inspired you to write it?

Carla 03:50 It's like, intergenerational? It's a project that comes across many, many timelines. Yeah, so it's called "Trust Kids Confronting Adult Supremacy" and while stories on youth autonomy and confronting adult supremacy, oh, boy, it's really hard to pinpoint a moment. It's so it's so cool to have the privilege to reflect back in your past and you get to evoke where you are today on the past.

Brooke 04:20 Yeah, feel free to talk about all of the things that inspired you in the process.

Carla 04:24 Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I've always had a problem with hierarchy and with authority, which goes way back to when I was a little kid. I was definitely the kid who stood up to teachers who bullied kids and other parents or other adults who bullied kids, including my own, and obviously, it was meant with not always a lot of kindness, and often a lot of violence. So it's something that's always been kind of in me to be aware of adult supremacy. But really, it wasn't until I had my own child, that I had to really put the practice of youth autonomy and thinking through adult supremacy in the everyday and every night.

Brooke 05:11 I'm curious if you feel comfortable sharing the age of your child or children?

Carla 05:16 Yeah. So my oldest is 28. And my youngest is 18, the oldest is Zach, and the youngest is Uilliam, and Uilliam and I do a podcast, that's part of the Channels Zero network as well called Grounded Futures. And yeah, and Zach. Both of them wrote for the book, Uilliam did it their own chapter, their own section, and then Zach and I co wrote a piece together. Yeah, so..

Brooke 05:43 Man, that's great.

Carla 05:45 Yeah. So, you know, Zack, and I got....and my partner, we got involved in alternative education and youth liberation kind of worlds. We were like, really fortunate because we were working class family and, and I got diagnosed with lupus, like there was all these things that were making it like, well, how am I going to not send my kid to regular school. But I was fortunate to live in a city where there's a dem... that was...it was like, almost 48 years, it ran...ademocratic preschool that was publicly funded. So that meant it was free to attend, as well as a free school, and there was parent participatory, and it was, you know, it went through all different kinds of renditions, and tried all different kinds of models, and but really, at the center was and at the center was this idea of youth liberation and children, self directed sort of education styles, I, you know, through that, at the core of all my work is this notion of solidarity, like how to think about this conversation of youth autonomy and undoing adult supremacy, amidst and alongside all the other horrors of, of empire, whether it be ableism, racism, classism, and whatnot. And I really noticed that a lot of kids, you know, they don't a lot of families can opt out of school, and they can't actually do this. So, I really wanted to move the conversation away from 'school or not school,' because it just marginalizes the, the work and because it becomes siloed. And really, adult supremacy is in it's always in the room. It's, it's it is like at the core, it's at the center of all other oppressions. You know, we just keep replicating this horrible system by raising kids with internalized adults supremacy. And so yeah.

Brooke 07:41 That part of the subtitle really stuck out to me, the adult supremacy part, which, you know, sorry to interrupt you, please keep going. But I definitely want to dive more into adult supremacy discussion. But...

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