Alycia Kamil cultivates joy, fights external pressures and burnout as she organizes and heals Black Chicago youth.
By Natalie Frazier
(Photo: Isiah ThoughtPoet Veney)
This profile is part of our How a Community Heals series.
It’s 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening. Alycia Kamil—Black woman, performer, artist, educator and organizer—answers my call, remarkably poised for someone who’s missed her bus on the way to the grocery store.
The image of 20-year-old Kamil juggling grocery shopping, a phone interview and public transportation with such grace is fitting. Last summer, in the eye of a storm precipitated by a pandemic, mass death and uprisings, Kamil organized weekly actions. Almost every day, she was out at protests, coordinating mutual aid drives and dropping off goods on the South and West Sides. “This summer and up until January was very hectic on my body,” Kamil tells me.
This year hasn’t been much calmer for Kamil. She is hosting her educational podcast “Undoing Our Erasure” and healing workshops frequently and still managing 40-day streaks of Spanish lessons on Duolingo. All of her work intertwines activism, healing and joy.
As an “artistic abolitionist healer” Kamil has organized vigils with the parents of slain children in Chicago, planned marches and facilitated healing by sharing her tarot card pulls. Across Kamil’s work she covers topics such as radical self-love, understanding performative methods versus abolitionist methods and the work of youth artists. A few months ago, I stopped by Kamil’s library pop-up at Breakthrough Clinic in East Garfield Park. Kamil and friends had organized tables and racks overflowing with books from authors such as Octavia Butler and Sista Souljah, snacks, water and eclectic and trendy clothing.
Kamil’s work and personal life are almost indistinguishable because of how much they center around community connection and seeing people as individuals rather than causes. She says including spirituality in her workshops has been a great way to connect with community members. That same community connection is prevalent in work she does with the youth organization GoodKids MadCity. GoodKids MadCity is just as likely to host a march demanding #CopsOutCPS as they are to lead Love Marches, where they walk down the street handing out water, snacks and other resources.
“We don’t want actions that are just crying and being upset. We wanted to play music; we wanted to dance,” Kamil says, adding that Black joy is at the center of all of her work. “But then we also made sure that while we were playing music, we would take a break and be like, ‘Here’s our demands.’”
GoodKids MadCity is behind some of the most impactful protests and community initiatives in Chicago since its founding in 2018. The youth presence that organizations like GoodKids MadCity cultivate was strong amid the protests last summer. She says youth often felt unsupported by adult organizers. While organizing with so many young people had its “ups and downs,” Kamil says their work defined how important youth are to the movement and empowered them.
I ask Kamil how she heals herself in the face of the harm and unrelenting confrontation with the state while movement building. “I practice saying ‘no’ a lot more. I’m finding time in my day for at least three or four things that have nothing to do with organizing work,” she says. These things are often simple, like hanging out outside or reading poetry, but they’re necessary for someone who hasn’t had much time to be a teenager. “It’s very easy to be adultified in a lot of these organizing spaces,” she says.
Kamil also feels the weight of expectations and misconceptions from the outside world about who she is and who she should be. Certain pressures exist outside of the organizing world and within it as well, such as colorism. Kamil finds it ironic that she experiences erasure as a Black woman organizer of a darker complexion in spaces committed to Black liberation. However, whether speaking up when being spoken over or centering herself in organizing spaces, Kamil persists.
The colorism and racism Kamil faces and the systemic issues she’s fighting against in the community are both sides of the same token. Although the obstacles are incredibly complex, her vision of true liberation is quite simple. For Kamil, healing and freedom look like “us understanding and giving grace to our own individual humanhood.”
Her own hopes are clear. Kamil dreams of a forever where children aren’t killed in the city. She dreams about pursuing musical theater; however, she put that dream on hold because of the pandemic. If she didn’t have to do “the work” of providing aid and organizing, she’d still be educating and connecting with her community.
Kamil, the organizer and most importantly, the person, wants space to figure herself out and for her community to be able to do that, too.
Natalie Frazier (she/her) is an educator, filmmaker, writer and community member based on the West Side of Chicago.
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