Director, producer, rapper, and socialist Boots Riley has been active in the labor movement since he was a teenager, but this is his first time being on strike. Though the auteur has plenty of work to promote, we had a conversation about politics and labor instead, as members of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are not promoting work until the strike concludes.
This moment in time feels a little different, Riley tells Teen Vogue, in part because the labor movement is less siloed. We’ve seen exciting examples of cross-industry solidarity and the increasing popular support for unions. “There's been a sea change in how things are growing that has to do with people having their eye on what are we trying to get done now," says Riley, "and how do we bring people in.”
Riley speaks with Teen Vogue in a wide-ranging conversation about getting radicalized as a young person, the opportunity presented by a “hot labor summer,” and the future of the entertainment industry.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Teen Vogue: You told GQ that this is your first strike. What has it been like, on the picket line and in your organizing conversations?
Boots Riley: I live in Oakland, California, so I haven't physically been on the picket line very much. I only went for two shifts. I tried to go to one in New York when I was out there, but I missed it because it started raining. But definitely, I have been engaged in it.
Especially coming from music, the film industry — at least for me — has been a lot more isolating. In music, I'm working with a bunch of people, and the relationship is different. It's a more collective sort of thing. With movies, I'm in a room for hours and months.
There's also a different relationship on set. You're working in a different way. It's really isolating for a lot of people that are in film and TV. But I've noticed that the strike has connected people a lot more, especially writers, who now have a community.
I heard this saying at one point, that class consciousness was knowing what side of the fence you were on; class analysis is knowing who's there with you. What I'm seeing is people realizing who's there with them, connecting with each other, strategizing, and actually being in each other's faces and spaces, meeting in person. It has created this culture that, for some folks, it's their first time having that. For other folks, like me, it's something they maybe know about, but haven't been having in their life right now.
I think that's one thing the [studios don’t] realize, is that it's fun, right? That doesn't mean people aren't worried about the fact that everything stopped, especially for folks on crews, like IATSE and Teamsters — there's a lot of work not happening. But again, that feeling of being together with people is something that's a payoff in and of itself.
TV: The WGA and SAG strikes are considered as part of the broader “hot labor summer,” including UPS, Starbucks, the city of Los Angeles’s workers.
BR: Definitely. Folks in WGA and SAG see themselves as part of this bigger thing. Because of how visible especially SAG is, it's something people didn't think would happen. It's exposing a lot about the entertainment industry — you're not just set once you're in it. It also highlights the withholding of labor. I think it's inspiring people to do things.
How fast these inspirations happen, you'd be surprised. In 2020, I posted a couple times, “This supermarket just went on strike over PPE,” blah, blah, blah. Then someone else would call me and be like, “Hey, how did they do that? We want to do that tonight.” These things spread fast.
Both SAG and WGA are inspired by the strike wave that has happened, but it's also, I think, giving back in terms of inspiration, and examples organizers can use on the job — “Hey, this is going on over here. We could be part of that as well.”
TV: It reminds me of that Toni Cade Bambara quote, calling the role of the artist “to make revolution irresistible.”
BR: And not only actors — when anyone goes on strike, they're telling a story. They're showing, "Here's who we are. Here's who the bosses are. Here's our struggle. And we are showing you how much we mean to this business, to this industry, by pulling it away.”
The story that also gets told is, who's on your side with you. You can have all sorts of theoretical diatribes of where the police fit into society and things like that, and people will agree or disagree. But when you see a strike happen, where the workers are being ripped off every day and they're taking a stand against it, and the police come on the boss's side, that's a narrative that shows an analysis.
It's all storytelling to a certain extent. There is this big stage, but for folks that are storytellers already, it's a chance for them to tell a different story.
TV: Recently, I’ve been writing about how the current entertainment industry model is built on reboots and superhero films, which are often copaganda or military propaganda, and whether the labor movement can help create opportunities for different types of stories. Do you think conversations about that are already happening?
BR: Well, I haven't personally heard someone changing and being like, “I'm not writing for SVU anymore.” But I think these sorts of movements are what create the impetus for art. We can't expect some writer to have a revolutionary analysis who went to Brown, they graduated, they became an intern on this TV show. What experiences have they had? But we're creating the experience. This is creating the experiences that are radicalizing writers.
When it comes time to start to create the stories, that's where we'll see things change. Hopefully, it will radicalize folks that soon get into position to make some of these things. But it has to be couched in this bigger movement because I don't think they'll get radicalized only by this strike. They'll get radicalized by the full breadth of the movement and what they see happening in the world. I think the real change is going to come from folks that aren't yet writing film and TV, that decide to go into it because they see it as a viable way to get their ideas out.
I don't want to downplay the fact that the writers that exist now are people that often want to write about these ideas. Maybe now there'll be a space for them.
TV: I feel like the importance of work as a formative and even radicalizing experience comes up a lot in your art.
BR: Often with [the rap group] the Coup, we weren't big enough to pay musicians enough to stay, so we were always the in-between band. Some young person would come and they'd be playing with us, and people would be like, “They're amazing!” And then they're playing with Beyoncé instead….
I would always say, “You're not going to play as well as you can until you get your heart broken, because you have to have that going into it.” I think having those experiences at jobs, even if you weren't going to try to write revolutionary stuff — it's important to have all of these experiences that you put into your stuff, that ground it.
That wasn't planned, but yeah, I've been having jobs since I was 11.
TV: I also started working in my preteen years. Conservatives constantly call Gen Z'ers coddled and lazy, but we’re seeing a resurgence in child labor, and even seeing teenagers die on the job in the farming and meatpacking industries. What do you remember as one of your earliest radicalizing moments?
BR: When I was 11, they had these things where you sell subscriptions, and a teenager will come pick you up in a van and drop you off somewhere in the suburbs, and pick you up four hours later. I started doing that stuff. Then I was delivering newspapers, then washing dishes and stuff like that in restaurants. Maybe that started me thinking about the world and myself and all those sorts of things, but none of it was formed in any real analysis at all. And it was actually pretty confused by the superhero comic books I was reading at the time.
When I was 14, a youth organizer saw me at a barbecue and said something like, “Hey, you should come do work with us. We'll come by and pick you up on Saturday.” I just said yes because I wasn't used to conflict. I didn't want to go, but I said yes, thinking I just would not be there on Saturday when they come. But I forgot about it, so I accidentally was there.
They showed up in a van full of 14-year-old girls, and I was like, Oh? What's this? They were like, “Hey, we're gonna go to the beach. You want to go to the beach with us?” I said yeah. They were like, “First, we're gonna go to the Watsonville cannery workers strike, go support them.” So I got in the van.
What I realized, what I started hearing, was that these girls were talking about issues that I had been trying to ignore. Things that were on the news, that were boring to me because you feel like there's nothing you can do about them. But they were involved in an organization that made them feel they could do something about it, so they were super keyed into all this — and they just seemed really smart. At first I was like, Are they just showing off? But then I was like, Wow, I wish I knew enough about this stuff to talk about it. I wish I could be like them. That's how I felt by the end of the day.
I went to support the strike. We were passing out flyers. There were whole families engaged in this thing that I didn't quite understand yet, but I knew it was a struggle. I knew they weren't working. I knew that it seemed like the whole town worked for these canneries. I kept going back and being involved in supporting the cannery workers strike.
So I went from wanting to hang out with these girls because I was a 14-year-old kid, and you have sex on the brain, to being like, I want to be them, and then getting involved from there. I got invited to join what they called the summer project, which was helping farmworkers in Delano, MacFarlane, Watsonville area, central California, to organize what they were calling the antiracist farmworkers union. I went and lived with a family of organizers and helped them do their thing. That's how I started getting involved. And at least three or four of those girls, I still know where they are.
TV: Before I let you go, what do you think comes next for the labor movement?
BR: I think there will be, as you alluded, a change in how people write. But there will also be a pushback. Whether that pushback happens a few months after the strike, or a couple years, I don't know, but I think we're in a really good time right now. We have to push hard. There's always this time where the ruling class is a little unorganized and not ready for the leap that the working class has taken.
There's a story that, to me, illustrates this: When we were doing Occupy Oakland, we got this reputation that we were just shutting sh*t down for no reason, so we decided to use that reputation. A group of us decided that we would start organizing a fast food workers union. Before SEIU was doing it, it was thought of as something nobody does. To alleviate the fear of the workers, we said, “Look, we want to help you organize this union. We're passing out this flyer, here's our number. This is the Occupy Oakland fast food workers union, and if you get harassed or fired for trying to organize the union, we will come shut your McDonald's, your KFC down. We'll come occupy it and shut it down. That is your protection. As you're organizing, as you're getting people to join, they won't f*ck with you because we'll come shut them down.”
People were getting excited about this, every place we went they were getting excited. We went into this McDonald's in West Oakland, and the manager came and grabbed [the flyer] like, “Let me see that!” He was reading it, and then he turned to everybody in the store and the workers and said, “This is what we need. We need this. We need this union.” The reason that happened is because McDonalds as a corporation was not expecting any union to be organized, so they hadn't been training their managers on what side they're on. The managers thought, Yeah, we're all in this one thing together. [Clearly, the bosses] hadn't been training them.
There's always an opening where the management and bosses don't know what to do, and we're right there right now. But when that pushback happens, hopefully we will have taken advantage of this space that we have now to be organized and have more ducks in a row.
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