White supremacy thrives off of keeping us obsessed with respectability, when there is nothing respectable about kneeling on a man’s neck while he cries for his life. There is a time for everything, and right now is a time for rage.
This week’s Extra! Extra! looks at police instigating even more violence at protests about police violence, can we defund the police altogether, Iyanna Dior, and the meaning of voting when America is inherently built on anti-Blackness.
Legacies intersect in this Pride month to remind us that defunding the police system is both a historically Black and historically queer demand, and that disruption and direct action can get that demand met.
The state and police as agents of it often surveil communities of color and immigrant communities as a tactic of control, reminding people they’re being watched so they stay in line; white people have the power to surveil police to the same effect.
The thread of videos of police violence against peaceful protestors is miles long now, over 10k protesters have been arrested, Trump sheds more allies, Kristen Stewart marches with BLM, Public Health officials know anti-Black police violence is a national health crisis and more.
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This post is a living document. If you are looking to donate to vetted groups or individuals currently providing community care, we encourage you to use this list as a resource. And if you are looking for any variety of care – food, shelter, COVID-19 testing, or other organizing efforts – we hope these options will be a good starting place for you to find what you need.
In a time where Black people are experiencing new and old collective trauma whenever they scroll through Instagram, please stop asking us if we’re okay. We are not.
“Nobody may come to help us in time; we are all we’ve got. We need to organize, quickly, online, and geographically.”
The work of civil rights history is queer and feminist. It’s also a hard, rough, incomplete project.
There’s a long and proud Black radical history of fighting back against the prison industrial complex and criminal (in)justice systems. So why is it that most of the voices that are upheld come from cis men?
If we want to move towards a police-free, abolitionist future, we have to do everything we can create an abolitionist reality right now – which starts with not calling the police into our own communities.
Fifty years of words I liked reading and you will too! Authors include James Baldwin, bell hooks, Kiese Laymon, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, Bayard Rustin and Dr. Brittany Cooper.
The work around decarceration has been some of the most successfully documented, accessible, and digitally interactive of any movement. This is a guide to guides, organized loosely by some of the main questions and thought processes that often come up around entry into abolitionist thinking, offering resources addressing some important ideas.
In today’s Also.Also.Also link roundup: many accounts of police violence against protesters, and resources for educating yourself, supporting black businesses, providing jail support, donating to mutual aid funds and more.
All people deserve the right to continue their education regardless of their ability to sit in a physical classroom. Accessibility should never determine a child’s ability to learn.
Donate to a bail fund. We don’t have to wait for others to commit to upholding the value of Black life and materially improve the lives of Black people. We can take care of each other instead.
We have been drafted to protect white institutions that come at the cost of Black lives. We have been named a “model minority” to convince us that we’ve been saved a seat at the table among white peers — but that table was cut, assembled, and varnished by Black slaves. Asian Americans should look into the face of Tou Thao and see their own brother. It is our responsibility to bring him to justice, because he is not the only one.
This week’s Extra! Extra! honors all the victims – past, present and future. Oh it needs to stop – there must be an end to the long list of names we memorialize. But I’m not naive enough to think more lives won’t be lost before we reach that point.
With the murder of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade by the police and the threatened lynching of Christian Cooper weighing heavily on my mind, in lieu of our “traditional” twice-a-week link roundup, here are some really smart reading about blackness, mourning, state violence, and rebellion that have gotten me through.
The pandemic has many of us feeling, in some ways accurately, that we’re helpless, or that there’s nothing we can do. The good news is, there is; there always has been. To that end, I’d like to ask you, a white person reading this, to make a public and material commitment to what you’ll do to end state violence and the endless targeting of Black people by the police apparatus.
