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.
Sex work in a pandemic, flirting by text and voicemail (not to mention, phone sex!), whether disaster brings us closer and more.
“I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
Times are rough, all around. Instead of my regular Grease Bats, I’m sharing some coloring pages that were rejected last month after an editor was “slightly offended” by the images. Enjoy homos!
Plus updates on Betty, Burden of Truth, The Baker and the Beauty, In the Dark, and Siren.
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.
There is so much to feel. There is so much to be done. What are you doing, today, tomorrow, the next day, and the next?
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.
“When life gives you Leonards, make Leonard-ade.”
Sad girls trying to cruise in an all-girls Catholic School down in Bogotá.
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.
The best thing about spritz mixology is that you can pretty much just top off anything you have in a glass with ice and then top it with seltzer and you’ve got a spritz. And that means it’s always spritz o’clock.
“I’m the first google result for ‘lesbian stripper’ and I’m so fucking proud of that!”
Participating in my mother’s diaspora mutual aid WeChat group helped me learn how far diasporic people will go for strangers sharing a common language when governmental aid fails.