As annoying as it is, probably, to hear it, you really have to lead with love. It’s not our responsibility to love people who hate us or wish us ill, but if those people are your friends or family, it is yours. If you genuinely care about your family and want them to be and do better, let that ground your conversation.
Real commitment to Black lives requires us to consider why we’re fighting and for whom. It’s time we ask ourselves: if our liberation weren’t intertwined, if your well-being weren’t tied to that of Black people, would you still defend Black life?
Protecting our children from hard conversations about race is actively aiding and abetting white supremacy. We can’t afford to stay complicit.
In today’s link roundup: Minneapolis will dismantle its police department, Trump truly could just refuse to leave office, justice for Breonna Taylor, #8toAbolition, more on what defunding the police means, an interview with the “I yield my time” guy and more from the thousands of really important stories in the world today.
We cold-called and emailed hundreds of places, heart in mouth, praying for someone to be generous. And people came through, offering gloves, masks, and more.
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.
![Support Black Community [illustration of a bag of money] Boost Mutual Aid Funds](https://www.autostraddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/feature-mutualaidfunds.png?fit=640%2C320)
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.