#BlackLivesMatter: A Longform Reading List

This post was originally published on November 26, 2014, following the failure to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Micheal Brown. It was updated to add new pieces on June 2, 2020.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual, which includes celebrating Pride. This week, Autostraddle is suspending our regular schedule to focus on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

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This list consists entirely of longform interviews, essays and articles by black people about the experience of being black in the white supremacy of America, police violence, and the U.S. government’s undeclared war on its black citizens. These are mostly essays focused on the situation from a wider lens, rather than reporting on various specific incidents and situations (which I will make another reading list for.)

I wanted this post to center on black voices, so all the authors are Black. However, if you’re gonna read two things by white people, I’d suggest reading The Making of Ferguson, a report by Richard Rothstein for The Economic Policy Institute, which is incredibly thorough as it sets up the historical and cultural forces that made Ferguson such a ripe epicenter for this current conflict. I also found Why It’s Impossible To Indict A Cop very educational.

Please feel free to share your own reading suggestions in the comments with links to where you can find things! Obviously this list isn’t comprehensive and I’m hardly an expert curator, but hopefully there’s something in here that speaks to you.

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1964: Martin Luther King Junior – A Candid Conversation With The Nobel Prize-Winning Civil Rights Leader, by Alex Haley for Playboy

“I have been dismayed at the degree to which abysmal ignorance seems to prevail among many state, city and even Federal officials on the whole question of racial justice and injustice. Particularly, I have found that these men seriously—and dangerously—underestimate the explosive mood of the Negro and the gravity of the crisis. Even among those whom I would consider to be both sympathetic and sincerely intellectually committed, there is a lamentable lack of understanding. But this white failure to comprehend the depth and dimension of the Negro problem is far from being peculiar to Government officials. Apart from bigots and backlashers, it seems to be a malady even among those whites who like to regard themselves as “enlightened.””

1966: The Watts, by Bayard Rustin for Commentary Magazine

At a street-corner meeting in Watts when the riots were over, an unemployed youth of about twenty said to me, “We won.” I asked him: “How have you won? Homes have been destroyed, Negroes are lying dead in the streets, the stores from which you buy food and clothes are destroyed, and people are bringing you relief.” His reply was significant: “We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us. The police chief never came here before; the mayor always stayed uptown. We made them come.” Clearly it was no accident that the riots proceeded along an almost direct path to City Hall.

1966: A Report From Occupied Territory, by James Baldwin for The Nation

Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco—is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.

1968: James Baldwin Tells Us All How To Cool It This Summer, in Esquire Magazine

This interview is incredible. And it could’ve happened yesterday, too, is the thing: police brutality, “looting,” declaring a war on a nation within a nation. Everything he says he could have said yesterday and that is really f*cking sad.

If you can shoot Martin [Luther King Jr.], you can shoot all of us. And there’s nothing in your record to indicate you won’t, or anything that would prevent you from doing it. That will be the beginning of the end, if you do, and that knowledge will be all that will hold your hand. Because one no longer believes, you see—I don’t any longer believe, and not many black people in this country can afford to believe— any longer a word you say. I don’t believe in the morality of this people at all. I don’t believe you do the right thing because you think it’s the right thing. I think you may be forced to do it because it will be the expedient thing. Which is good enough.

1969: Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female, by Frances Beal

This racist, chauvinistic and manipulative use of black workers and women, especially black women, has been a severe cancer on the American labor scene. It therefore becomes essential for those who understand the workings of capitalism and imperialism to realize that the exploitation of black people and women works to everyone’s disadvantage and that the liberation of these two groups is a stepping stone to the liberation of all oppressed people in this country and around the world.

1973: To My People, by Assata Shakur

They call us murderers, but we did not murder over two hundred fifty unarmed Black men, women, and children, or wound thousands of others in the riots they provoked during the sixties. The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives. They call us murderers, but we were not responsible for the twenty-eight brother inmates and nine hostages murdered at attica. They call us murderers, but we did not murder and wound over thirty unarmed Black students at Jackson State—or Southern State, either.

1975: Toni Morrison at Portland State

It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.

1984: Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, by Audre Lorde

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.”

1995: Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Black Man, by Henry Louis Gates

…the Simpson trial spurs us to question everything except the way that the discourse of crime and punishment has enveloped, and suffocated, the analysis of race and poverty in this country. For the debate over the rights and wrongs of the Simpson verdict has meshed all too well with the manner in which we have long talked about race and social justice. The defendant may be free, but we remain captive to a binary discourse of accusation and counter-accusation, of grievance and counter-grievance, of victims and victimizers.

1996: Killing Rage, by bell hooks

“It was these sequences of racialized incidents involving black women that intensified my rage against the white man sitting next to me. I felt a “killing rage.” I wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my purse. And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly “racism hurts.” With no outlet, my rage turned to overwhelming grief and I began to weep, covering my face with my hands. All around me everyone acted as though they could not see me, as though I were invisible, with one exception. The white man seated next to me watched suspiciously whenever I reached for my purse. As though I were the black nightmare that haunted his dreams, he seemed to be waiting for me to strike, to be the fulfillment of his racist imagination.”

2012: A Place Where We Are Everything, by Roxane Gay for The Rumpus

Unchanged:

When white people got on my nerves, or started to force their racial intolerance on me, I thought, “I come from a place where we are everything.” I realize now what a privilege it has been to have that. What I want for my children and your children is to have a place where they can feel like they are everything and still be surrounded by people who are different. That should be an inalienable right, too. That is not too much to want.

2012: How To Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance, by Kiese Laymon for Gawker

Mama’s antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it’s to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain’t no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.

2013: A Clear Presence, by Aisha Sabati Sloan for Guernica

Rodney King was swimming on the first day he ever heard the word n*gger. His small self popped out of the water only to be pelted by a fast-passing stone. It was the first time he realized that he wasn’t just a kid; he was a black kid. Despite the life he would live thereafter, King writes that it was “the saddest day in creation for me.” He wishes he could “find a way of forever removing that day from every black child’s life.”

2013: De Origine Actibusque Aequationis, by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for The Los Angeles Review of Books

Words like Jeantel’s — often expressed in far-out forms like graffiti and slang — trace the sense of feeling X-filed; they are the ways to acknowledge life in the bush of ghosts, and give names and sounds to the consciousness of radical world-building that the descendants of the African Diaspora have engaged in all around the world. This is the tradition Rachel Jeantel was practicing up on the stand: the art of being young, black, and incomprehensible.

2013: Some Thoughts On Mercy, by Ross Gay for The Sun Magazine

Isn’t it, for them, for us, a gargantuan task not to imagine that everyone is imagining us as criminal? A nearly impossible task? What a waste, a corruption, of the imagination. Time and again we think the worst of anyone perceiving us: walking through the antique shop; standing in front of the lecture hall; entering the bank; considering whether or not to go camping someplace or another; driving to the hardware store; being pulled over by the police. Or, for the black and brown kids in New York City, simply walking down the street every day of their lives. The imagination, rather than being cultivated for connection or friendship or love, is employed simply for some crude version of survival. This corruption of the imagination afflicts all of us: we’re all violated by it. I certainly know white people who worry, Does he think I think what he thinks I think? And in this way, moments of potential connection are fraught with suspicion and all that comes with it: fear, anger, paralysis, disappointment, despair. We all think the worst of each other and ourselves, and become our worst selves.

2013: The Year in Racial Amnesia, by Cord Jefferson for Gawker

All those who would look back to the “charms” of Olde America seem unaware that those days are not so far gone. The United States has improved such that we no longer have mobs that gather to watch a lynched body the way they might watch a fish struggle on a line. But we’re lying to ourselves if we think Florida police arresting a black man dozens of times simply for going to work isn’t an act underpinned by the old notion that some people’s rights are worth less than the rights of others.

2014: The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic

This article should be required reading for all American citizens.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

2014: Fear and Aggression in Florida, by Elias Rodriques for n+1

Fear isn’t only a reaction, and Stand Your Ground, like its predecessor the Castle Doctrine, made it rational to err on the side of aggression. This was especially true for my black friends, who encountered hostility the way other people encounter the sun. Worried about being hurt or killed, we endlessly prepared for defense. As teenagers, we bragged about our strength, about how nobody could hurt us, how we would win any fight. Even when we didn’t believe ourselves, we sometimes fooled each other.

2014: Blackness As The Second Person, Meara Sharma Interviews Claudia Rankine for Guernica

I felt like, holy shit, I am walking around, and all of these people, white people, are okay with my black body being beaten and kicked, even when they’re seeing the violence actually happen and don’t have to rely on hearsay. That the black body is perceived as dangerous, even when it’s on the ground, in a fetal position, with men surrounding it, kicking it. I don’t think I understood or felt as vulnerable ever before.

2014: Black Girl Walking, by Hope Wabuke for Gawker

Really, though, I wonder what I as a black woman can do, in America in 2013, to be seen not as the target of raced and gendered violence, but as a black woman worthy of respect, decency, and protection because of my race and gender, not in spite of my race and gender. What will it take for black women like me, like Marissa Alexander, and like Renisha McBride, to ever be treated and defended by the citizens of our country as innocent?

2014: Let’s Be Real, by Wesley Morris for Grantland

There are far more attempts to understand police on television and in the movies than there are attempts to empathize with black men, whether or not those men happen to be cops.

2014: On Ferguson Protests, the Destruction of Things, and What Violence Really Is (And Isn’t), by Mia McKenzie for Black Girl Dangerous

On why it is that killing black people doesn’t get talked about as violence but destroying white people’s things does.

2014: I Am Utterly Undone, by Dr. Brittany Cooper for Salon

Humans can only be sucker punched for so long. Humans can only have the life choked out of us for so long. Humans can only be kicked in the stomach while your foot is on our neck for so long. Humans can only be bullied for so long. One day we stagger to our feet, and you see reflected back to you the results of your own unresolved monstrousness.

2015: The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning, by Claudia Rankine for The New York Times June 2

The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.

2015: How Black Reporters Report on Black Death, by Gene Demby

As calls for newsroom diversity get louder and louder — and rightly so — we might do well to consider what it means that there’s an emerging, highly valued professional class of black reporters at boldface publications reporting on the shortchanging of black life in this country. They’re investigating police killings and segregated schools and racist housing policies and ballooning petty fines while their loved ones, or people who look like their loved ones, are out there living those stories. What it means — for the reporting we do, for the brands we represent, and for our own mental health — that we don’t stop being black people when we’re working as black reporters. That we quite literally have skin in the game.

2015: The Unauthorized Biography of a Black Cop, by Chris Johnson for Gawker

As the years go by, more stories are retired, suppressed, or if conjured up again from the dirt of remembrance, remixed not so much for glory and amusement but as explanations, apologies, confessions, immolation—the atonement a poor black youth conscripted, a retired mercenary vampire that drained democracy of its hemoglobin, who walloped and handcuffed on behalf of the white supremacist capitalist oligarchs who profited from his neck-breaking labor.

2015: A Love Note o Our Folks, by Alicia Garza for n+1

There was a lot of stuff happening. We instantly realized that this was a struggle being led and directed by young people, and people were trying to figure out how to respond and how to relate to that. Young people were really fighting for their space, and really saying, you know, “We’re getting killed. And we’re not going to go home, we’re not going to be quiet, we’re not going to be nice, we’re not going to tone it down. This stuff is going to stop today.”

2015: In Conversation: DeRay Mckesson for New York Magazine

Students are protesting in order to create spaces that promote dialogue and rich conversation. They are protesting to bring the First Amendment to campus in ways that actually speak to and acknowledge the black experience. I think that what’s challenging for some people in the current context is that we are witnessing the necessary uneasiness of intellectual discussion happening in real-time. But communities are better when different viewpoints are put forward that allow for deep discussion. Tension isn’t necessarily negative. The tension is the work.

2016: Black Lives and The Police, by Darryl Pinckney for The New York Review of Books

Jurisdictions like Ferguson, Missouri, know who their trouble officers are. They accumulate histories of racial incident. They arrive as known quantities. It’s time to make it harder to become a police officer. The ones ill-suited for the job are burdens for the ones who are good at it. The videos of police killings also help explain those doubtful cases for which there are no accidental witnesses. The footage shows not only blood lust, state-sanctioned racism, or the culture of the lone gunman in many a police head, but also incompetence.

2016: Making Black Lives Matter in the Mall of America, by Erik Forman for The New Inquiry

The shutdown of the Mall of America pointed to a potential way to take the movement forward. The mall is not only a space of consumption but also a space of production animated by the labor of over 10,000 low-wage service workers, disproportionately black in the majority-white state of Minnesota. The radical labor tradition has long sought to organize at the intersection of black power and workers power. Black labor exploited by white capitalists has been the starting point for a current of resistance stretching back to the earliest days of colonization.

2017: Respectability Will Not Save Us, by Carol Anderson for LitHub, August 2017

The implications were clear: they were not going to get the status of grieving parents, their pain would not be acknowledged as legitimate, and they would be stripped of even the right to mourn their dead child. They were unworthy. The prosecutor made that clear when he suggested that the reason the parents insisted upon an indictment and a trial had nothing to do with justice for their murdered son but was, instead, for financial reasons.

2019: America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made it One, by Nikole Hannah-Jones for The New York Times

“…it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.”

Daily Fix: A Year After Mike Brown’s Death, It’s Still Not Safe to be Black in Ferguson (or Elsewhere) and More News

feature image R. Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock.com

Yvonne and I are switching days on this column this week!

Ferguson, One Year Later

During the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown‘s death at the hands of Darren Wilson, Ferguson was once again full of police wearing riot gear, gunfire, and teargas. The daylight hours of Sunday reportedly were quiet and orderly, with a panel discussion and peaceful protests. As night fell, police claim that a group of people began shooting at each other, calling those people “criminals, not protesters.” They say that when police got involved, including some plainclothes officers, they were fired upon and that an officer in an unmarked police SUV returned fire. 18-year-old Tyrone Harris was left critically injured; his family says that he was on a date and went to check out the demonstrations for Michael Brown when he got caught up in another group’s gunfight and tried to run from it. His family says he was unarmed, and also that he and Michael Brown were close, having gone to the same school. Tyrone Harris remains in critical condition. Ferguson protester Tony Rice, who arrived on the scene of Harris’ shooting after Harris was already injured, says that police waited “quite a while” before providing Harris medical attention; police, on the other hand, claim they called an ambulance “immediately.” Activists have criticized the deployment of plainclothes officers in a chaotic setting at night, where it would be impossible for citizens to know if they were interacting with police or private citizens, actions which carry very different legal consequences. A state of emergency has been declared.

Well-known protesters DeRay Mckesson and Netta Elzie, along with Cornel West, were among those arrested in St. Louis, where “dozens” were arrested after a march and sit-in. Elzie tweeted earlier in the day “If I’m arrested today please know I’m not suicidal. I have plenty to live for. I did not resist, I’m just black.” On Monday evening, protesters shut down highway I-70 in both directions during rush hour, joining hands to stretch across the pavement; about 60 were arrested.

Racism Lives Here. STL. pic.twitter.com/Lr09XVc3zi

— deray mckesson (@deray) August 10, 2015

Wesley Lowery, a Washington Post reporter who’s been heavily involved in covering protests in Ferguson since they began last year, was arrested for trespassing last year when Ferguson police didn’t think he and fellow reporter Ryan Reilly were leaving a McDonald’s in a timely manner. A court summons issued this week officially charges him with trespassing, a charge which could carry as much as a $1000 fine and maximum one-year county jail sentence. Reilly has not been charged yet, but says he expects to be.

Police/Violence

+ Christian Taylor, a 19-year-old unarmed college student, was shot and killed by a police trainee at a Buick dealership in Arlington, Texas. Taylor’s Jeep had crashed into the dealership; police claim that Taylor tried to flee from them when they arrived, “struggled” with them when they caught up to him, and that trainee Brad Miller then fired four shots. The Arlington police department has invited the FBI to help with the investigation. Police say that “A Taser was also used against Mr. Taylor, but Chief Johnson said the department had not determined which officer used it or in what sequence the two weapons were used.” Security video from outside the car dealership shows Taylor jumping on top of a sports car, but shows nothing that occurred inside the dealership, including any interaction with police officers. Audio has leaked that some activists claim was retrieved by Anonymous and includes the 911 dispatch audio; in that audio, no mention of a struggle is made, and shots are heard very quickly after the officers’ arrival. Police claim that another audio recording is unedited and more accurate. The Arlington police chief has stated that official audio and video won’t be released until “all statements have been made.”

+ Andre Green, only 15 years old, was shot and killed in an altercation with police on Sunday night. Indianapolis police claim that Green was a carjacking suspect who tried to ram them with a car and was armed with a handgun; there is no recording, video or audio, to confirm or contradict the police’s version of events. There was at least one eyewitness, who disagrees with police claims.

“He wasn’t trying to run down the police officer,” Allen Eaton, 29, told the Indianapolis Star. “He was trying to back up, and that’s when he bumped the back. He couldn’t go nowhere. He definitely wasn’t trying to run them down.”

Andre Green’s family are calling upon the passengers who were in the car at the time of the shooting, whose identities are unknown, to step forward and provide their account of what happened.

+ Robert Patrick Quinn, a 77-year-old man living in a complex for elderly, disabled and low-income residents, was killed by police Sunday night as he waved a “realistic-looking” pellet gun from a motorized scooter. Witnesses say that officers tried to negotiate with Quinn for about three minutes before shooting him. Residents of the complex say that Quinn had been diagnosed with cancer and had expressed some suicidal ideation, prompting speculation that he had committed “suicide by cop.”

+ In a horrifying example of how black women are particularly targeted by police and state violence, Charnesia Corley was forcibly vaginally searched in a gas station parking lot after allegedly running a stop sign because the officer alleged that he could smell marijuana in her car, and couldn’t find any after a cursory search of the vehicle. Corley maintains that she never consented to a body cavity search at any time. She was arrested for resisting arrest and possession of marijuana. In contrast, 20-year-old white male Gilbert Phelps admitted to driving while high to a police officers; during the sobriety test which found he was unsafe to drive, he asked to Snapchat a selfie with the arresting officer, to which the officer (in his own words) “happily obliged.”

+ The Guardian has created an interactive database of police killings in the US; it’s searchable by factors like ethnicity, age, and location, armed/unarmed, and more. At the time this article went to press, the total number of (known) people killed by police in the US in 2015 was 708; California had the highest number of police killings of an individual state at 115 (16% of all police killings); Oklahoma had the highest number of police killings per capita, at 30 (4% of all police killings).

Presidential Candidates

+ Hillary is not impressed with Donald Trump, suggesting at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire that his campaign is an ego trip for the sake of entertainment and pointing instead at Marco Rubio as someone to watch and whose ideas are “deeply troubling.”

+ Hillary has revealed a new plan for higher education and student debt. The proposed strategy includes free community college and a plan wherein individual states pledge that “no student should have to take out a loan to pay for tuition if attending a four-year public college in their state,” and that those students instead contribute to their tuition “based on what they earn from 10 hours of work per week.”

+ The Daily Beast thinks Bernie has a shot at beating Hillary in the primary.

+ Bernie Sanders has released a platform addressing racial inequality in America after a series of protests of his events staged by the Black Lives Matter movement. It includes police body cameras, and end to mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenses, expanding the Voting Rights Act, and ending bans on convicted felons voting. His campaign also recently hired Symone Sanders, a 25-year-old with experience in both campaign and movement politics, to work and speak on his campaign on issues of racial justice. At a stop in Portland, Oregon, Sanders coached the crowd to chant “We Stand Together” in the case of another protest by activists. Bernie also received an endorsement this week from National Nurses United, the nation’s largest nursing union, a potential indicator of who the labor movement in general might end up supporting.

Order in the Courts

+ The State Supreme Court of Ohio has told its judges that they should probably obey the law and perform same-sex marriages, regardless of personal beliefs.

The seven-page opinion said refusing to perform gay marriages could bring into question a judge’s impartiality in other matters. “For example, if a judge who has declined to perform same-sex marriages is later assigned to hear a misdemeanor domestic violence charge involving a same-sex couple, the judge’s ability to follow the law and impartially apply the domestic violence laws could reasonably be questioned,” it said.

+ For a second there it seemed possible that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton would be held in contempt of court for Texas’s tacit ignoring of the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, but it appears that won’t be the case.

The dispute began last week when a gay Houston man, John Stone-Hoskins, said state health officials refused to amend the death certificate of his late husband. That led Garcia to order Paxton into his courtroom and explain why the state appeared to be in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage earlier this summer.

Neel Lane, an attorney for the surviving husband, said an agreement reached Monday should spare other Texas same-sex couples from similar hurdles. He said the Texas Department of State Health Services is now drafting policies for birth and death certificates for same-sex couples that should be finished this week.

Grab Bag

+ A really neat piece about Margie Winters, who was fired from her position at a Catholic elementary school for marrying her wife and is now the lightning rod for pushback against her termination.

“The Church is losing good people,” she says. “I’ve been in Catholic education for 18 years and I’m committed to it. But they’ve fired us and lost people who are committed to teaching children in the faith because of who we are — because of who God made us to be. That’s the rub.

“Now it feels like a call to be a voice,” Winters adds, “and I think our voices are strongest in the realm of the Church because that’s our world and that’s what we can really speak to with knowledge and experience.”

+ The state of Virginia will now recall all license plates featuring the Confederate flag. The DMV was required to allow license plates featuring the flag in 2001 because of a lawsuit which found that banning it was tantamount to censoring free speech, but Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2015 held that the flag is actually a symbol of state speech, not individual free speech.

What’s the Deal With Bernie Sanders? 7 Things You Want to Know

feature image via Getty

Unless you’re actually from Vermont or highly attuned to senatorial politics, it’s entirely possible you’d knew little about – or had never heard of – Senator Bernie Sanders before last week, when he declared the start of his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. Sanders has been Vermont’s junior senator since 2007, after serving as Vermont’s single congressperson for sixteen years.

If you’ve read anything about him since he declared his candidacy, it’s likely you’ve been reading articles about what Sanders’ campaign means for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Valid analysis, but before diving into all that, I want to know: no, really – what’s his deal? I hear he’s a socialist. That’s cool. But also he’s an old straight white man, like the vast majority of American politicians, so what would his alleged socialism mean for people who aren’t old straight white men?

I tried to find out, and here are seven things I learned:

1. Sanders has a strong record on LGBT issues

From a legislative standpoint, Sanders has a strong record for gay rights. He’s voted against a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, and against bans on same-sex adoption. He also has voted in favor of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in all its many iterations through the Senate. The Senator hasn’t gone out of his way to address trans issues — the most I could find was a press release from his Senate office specifically noting ENDA’s inclusion of transgender Americans.

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2. Sanders agrees: women are people

One of Sanders’ central points in his 12-Step Strategy to Restore America’s Middle Class is to ensure equal pay for women. Sanders also has a consistent pro-choice voting record and is rated highly by NARAL.

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3. Sanders has a plan to address economic inequality across the board

Sanders’ 12-Step Strategy to Restore America’s Middle Class calls for raising the minimum wage, expanding welfare programs, making affordable education and healthcare accessible for all, and a reconfiguration of the American financial system so that financial companies have less control and less wealth. He is also an outspoken opponent of trade agreements like the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, all of which have or would have a huge impact on low-income women of color around the world, whose working conditions are dictated by these massive trade policies.

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4. …but he’s not so vocal on law enforcement and the prison system

Sanders has spoken out about the impact of economic and social injustice on black men and youth (he doesn’t mention women) and how that connected to the events in Ferguson last summer. However, his 12-step platform lacks any mention of policing and mass incarceration that impact economic inequality, especially in American communities of color. Looking at his legislative record, he shows a general trend in favor of policies that keep money away from prisons when alternative sentencing measures are available. He’s also consistently voted to fund the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. This is an interesting analysis of the COPS program in Baltimore, if you want to know more about that.

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5. He’s a democratic socialist…

Sanders has never pretended not to be a democratic socialist, which many argue will be a liability for him as the race picks up. Very basically, democratic socialism emphasizes breaking down corporate and government bureaucracy, in favor of a socialist system with democratic and cooperative control and over industry and infrastructure. The spirit of democratic socialism is apparent in Sanders’ plans to support unions, worker cooperatives and welfare programs, and to break down economic policies that allow corporations to reap huge profits on the backs of low-wage workers, which we know has a huge impact on the lives of queer and trans women, especially queer and trans women of color.

“Hopefully we frighten the billionaires… and the insurance companies,” he said on the Colbert Report while describing his politics, “healthcare should be a right.”

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6. …and he’s running for the Democratic nomination

Sanders has no party affiliation as a senator, but he’s running for the Democratic party nomination. Why? Well, while he described the Democratic party as a “party that doesn’t stand for very much,” in an interview with Mother Jones before he declared his candidacy, he also demonstrated a solid amount of self-awareness about the fact that party affiliation in the race offers him the chance to participate in debates – and also to avoid dividing the Democratic vote in the general election.

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7. But does Sanders even have a chance?

You can read takes on this from the Atlantic, Washington Post, Salon, and pretty much every other media outlet ever. The one thing everyone agrees on is that he’s not running a typical campaign, and he’s going to force dialogue on progressive issues that establishment Democrats could come down on either side of. He’s already doing that with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he vehemently opposes, but which President Obama is trying to fast-track through the Senate, and which Clinton has tried to avoid taking a stance on. Sanders isn’t connected to huge corporate money and he’s not building a Super PAC, yet he’s already raised a significant amount in small donations from individual supporters. He insists he can win.

My general sense is that Sanders’ candidacy is a long shot, but weirder things have happened, and there’s a lot of time for said weird things to happen between now and the Democratic National Convention next summer in Philadelphia. I don’t really know. The necessary rise from obscurity that a successful Sanders campaign would require has been compared to that of Howard Dean and Pat Buchanan. A profile from Rolling Stone makes him sound anecdotally, if not politically, like the fictional Democrat Jed Bartlet of the West Wing: a small-time politician on the national stage, but wildly popular in his small New England state, he pulls out of nowhere to overtake the party establishment candidates in the primaries, ultimately taking the White House into democratic control for eight years. But I’ve been told I probably shouldn’t compare the political reality of 2015 to fictional politics of the late 90’s.

Ultimately, though, it’s not up to the media — it’s up to the voters, so if you like Bernie Sanders best, turn out and vote for him. That’s the deal.

Daily Fix: Indiana’s Governor Doesn’t Know What the Fuss is About and More News Stories

Hello banana peels! A shit ton of things happened since the last time we met each other on the internet, so let’s get down to business!

Order in the Court

+ On Friday, Reddit CEO Ellen Pao lost a landmark gender discrimination case against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins, a powerful Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm. A jury ruled Pao ultimately wasn’t discriminated against and was fired because of her job performance.

As Rachel discussed in the last Daily News Fix, Pao claims the firm didn’t promote her because of her gender, and that the firm retaliated against her when she complained about the discrimination and eventually fired her because of the complaints. The jury had a difficult time coming to a verdict. They were split until evidence showed Pao’s performance reviews deteriorated over time.

Pao’s loss isn’t all for naught. Her highly public 2012 lawsuit sparked debate and conversation surrounding sexism in tech and business and gender bias in these male-dominated workplaces that keep women out of the industry and their top positions. Many discrimination and harassment lawsuits have been filed against Silicon Valley companies following Pao’s lawsuit including Facebook and Twitter.

I just want to direct your attention to the New York Time’s coverage of this case’s verdict for a moment now. Some of their word choice and what they choose to report on are examples of the gender bias you’ll find in media. It’s all coming full circle now! I was a journalism major in college and one of the required courses was to take Women in the Media, which focused on women journalists and the gender bias found in news coverage and how to change it. At one point in the class, we had to analyze articles and see which words journalists use to talk about women, which quotes they choose to use in their story and how they described women in their articles. Anyways, this NYT article is a prime example of the subtly sexist and outright biased ways women are portrayed in the news every single day, mostly written by male journalists. From the get go, this male journalist presents this as a “sweeping victory” for Kleiner Perkins, calling it the case that “mesmerized Silicon Valley with its salacious details,” like wtf? Then there’s this neat-o sentence:

“Episodes of men behaving badly make the news frequently here, whether it is sexism or harassment in the workplace or just derogatory attitudes toward women. Critics are increasingly drawing a straight line between such behavior and the small percentage of women who are engineers and executives, and the even smaller percentage of women who are venture capitalists.”

Oh, like this isn’t a bigger problem at all — just a few episodes? Like the root of it all is based on behavior? Like some “boys will be boys” shit? And then, the journalist decides to talk about Pao’s relationships, talking about her husband’s business and then ending with this sentence:

“One of the stranger points brought up in testimony was how Ms. Pao, before she was married, had dated a colleague for six months without ever realizing he was still living with his wife.”

Did we really need to know this point? No.

Hopefully Pao’s lawsuit was just the beginning of women taking action and speaking out against sexism in tech and business with companies taking notes. “If I’ve helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” Pao said in a brief news conference.

+ On the other hand, an anti-gay florist is ordered to pay more than $1000 in fines after violating Washington’s non-discrimination laws when she refused to sell flowers for a same-sex couple’s wedding.

+ Good news for Ferguson protestors: Police can no longer use tear gas on protestors and peaceful crowds without first giving a warning or in spaces with no exits. I mean, it’s really fucked up that this wasn’t already in practice but it at least it will hopefully help activists and community members who’ve been tirelessly demonstrating in Ferguson for more than six months. The decision comes after a judge temporarily blocked police from using tear gas on crowds without warning in December. St. Louis County and city police departments, as well as the Missouri State Patrol are ordered to comply with the terms and to include the terms in formal policies by August 15.

+ Remember last month when Coast Guard officer Lisa Trubnikova and her wife, Anna Trubnikova, were shot by coworker Adrian Loya? Well, really disturbing details about Loya’s plan have emerged from recently unsealed court documents. On his 31st birthday, Loya wrote a 250-page essay of why Trubnikova deserved to die and traveled to Bourne from Chesapeake, Va to kill his coworker. He stalked Trubnikova and her wife for a few days, videotaping them from a camera taped to a tree outside their home before he finally armed himself with three guns and blasted his way into their home, all while a camera strapped to his chest captured his victims’ final moments.

Laws of the Land

+ Gov. Mike Pence just doesn’t understand why you don’t understand the new “religious freedom” bill he signed into law last week. It’s very simple: this law is protecting people of faith from government overreach. Duh.

Pence defended the bill when he spoke to George Stephanopoulos during news show The Week on Sunday. Pence repeatedly skirted Stephanopoulos’ question about whether he thought it was legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians under this law. Instead Pence kept reiterating how the newly introduced law has been “grossly mischaracterized” and “driven by misinformation” fueled by the media. Pence also argues the law is similar to other state laws and even to the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act federal signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. However, it’s not true.

“Every other Religious Freedom Restoration Act applies to disputes between a person or entity and a government. Indiana’s is the only law that explicitly applies to disputes between private citizens.* This means it could be used as a cudgel by corporations to justify discrimination against individuals that might otherwise be protected under law….”

World News Videos | US News Videos

On Saturday, about 2,000 people protested the new bill in Indianapolis, while several companies consider pulling their business from the state.

+ Texas Republican lawmakers are just going all out trying to make it their most anti-gay year in the books. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Obama administration over a Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) rule change that says employees must offer paid medical leave to legally married same-sex couples. Last Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked this rule change for Texas.

+ Here are the states who’ve proposed legislation similar to Indiana’s discrimination bill: Hawaii, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Maine, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. Here’s hoping these states are taking note of Indiana’s backlash and realize it’s a bad idea to go down this road.

+ It’s hard to keep track of which states have proposed so-called bathroom bills. It’s all monkey see, monkey do with these Republican lawmakers, isn’t it. Nevada is the latest state to introduce a bill that would bar transgender students from accessing the correct bathrooms at school.

+ There’s always these kinds of stories during homecoming and prom season but here you go. A Texas lesbian teen says high school administrators refused to allow her to make a “promposal” to another girl. Promposals are over-the-top, public invitations to prom that usually involve signs and fanfare. Casey Akers planned an elaborate jumping-out-of-a-box promposal but was stopped when school administrators found out she was inviting a girl, saying it wasn’t “appropriate,” even though Akers had the green light from them before they found out who she was asking out.

+ TSA reached an agreement with the ACLU to stop racially profiling black women’s hair and subjecting them to extra security searches. The agreement comes after two black women with loc styles filed complaints about having their hair searched. One woman reported she was told by an agent that they are instructed to search hair with extensions or “abnormalities.”

“The humiliating experience of countless black women who are routinely targeted for hair pat-downs because their hair is ‘different’ is not only wrong, but also a great misuse of TSA agents’ time and resources,” said Novella Coleman, Staff Attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.

Hurray For The Riff Raff Interview and Ticket Giveaway!

Party of Five is a quick little ditty where we ask someone (anyone we want) five questions (any five questions we want) and they answer them. This doesn’t have to be necessarily ‘queer’ — it doesn’t have to be anything at all, except five questions and five answers. Today we’ve got Alynda Lee Segarra and Yosi Perlstein, co-founders of Hurray For The Riff Raff. Ticket giveaway details at the bottom.

---

Hurray For The Riff Raff is the New Orleans-based queer Americana band that stopped your heart mid-beat with “The Body Electric’s” music video this January. They’re currently on tour, and according to Alynda, are playing the absolute best shows they’ve ever played.

On a rare day off during a stopover in Oakland, Alynda and Yosi graciously chatted with Autostraddle about about their recent successes.

Can you tell me about some of your inspirations? For your latest album but also in general.

AS: This album was a lot about New Orleans, actually. I found myself writing a lot about place. Small Town Heroes was definitely a lot of inspiration from living in New Orleans for 10 years and learning to play music there. And definitely there were a lot of different music styles that went into it. We have song like “Blue Ridge Mountain” and then we have songs like “Good Time Blues.” We just really tried to get all of our inspiration in there.

In general, I feel like when it comes to our band, we have a lot of different inspiration. Sometimes they’re not even musical. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Junot Diaz and he’s become a huge inspiration to me. … When I have a shell of a song — I’ll have the lyrics and the melody — I bring it to the band and we kind of bring it to life. Definitely with Yosi, I’ll come to him and explain to him the vision that I have for the song, and we’ll try to make that feel happen. Especially in the studio. He understands the way I explain my ideas. I’ll come to him and be like, this song I want to feel like a 16-year-old girl crying in her room, playing her guitar, and her mascara is running. And he like totally gets it and we can somehow create that.

I think it’s always sort of subversive when queer and marginalized people — the “riff raff” — enter these more traditional spaces and stake their claim. Could you talk a little bit about that experience? How do you feel your identity affects your work?

AS: I feel like with this album we really stepped forward and decided that we really had to be very overt about who we are. So much of what this album meant to me was me really claiming all parts of my identity. Like with the cover even, it has many different parts of my identity. I wanted to not put anything aside, and not feel like I was having to lower any parts of myself to fit in or something. You know?

AS: Ferguson sparked this whole movement of political activism among youth and people of color. It really inspired me to be like, this is the time to not be silent anymore, to really let our audiences know that this is who we are and this is what we believe in. You might think we’re an Americana traditional band, but just because we’re influenced by those things, we’re also very modern. And we’re very here, and we’re queer. I’m a Puerto Rican woman and I’m going to say things about this. I’m not going to try to fit into a white male hetero world just in order to have our band be a little bit more successful or something.

It feels really good, and it feels like we’re attracting people who have been waiting for that and who feel like they fit in with that. That’s really rewarding to me. Lately I’ve noticed that there have really been a lot more hispanic people coming to our shows, and that means so much to me. Being a Puerto Rican girl who feels like a weirdo who doesn’t quite fit in with the mainstream culture, it means a lot to see people who relate to that feeling. They come to our shows and feel like they belong, for an hour.

You do an incredible job of integrating your political philosophy into everything you do, from social media to music videos. … You frequently spotlight people that don’t always get to be in the spotlight. What’s your thought process like?

AS: I feel like me and Yosi talk a lot about being more responsible and being very intentional with everything that we do. In [“The Body Electric“] especially, we thought it was really important to bring a trans woman of color in. We just kind of wanted to bring them to the spotlight and let them shine. Let them reinvent our ideas of power and our ideas of femininity and our ideas of beauty. Also, Katy Red is from New Orleans. I feel like we rep New Orleans so much but I’m not from there. I thought it was really important to bring a New Orleans person into that song and to let her do her thing. She was so amazing and captivating.

With “I Know It’s Wrong,” the girl gang video, I really wanted to bring in all different sorts of people and let them have their moment. Because when you include different types of people, it makes more room for viewers to see themselves and to feel represented.

AS: With social media — I’ve been thinking about how for me, as a woman, I finally have a space where I can represent who I am. Somebody isn’t doing it for me. I just feel like it’s finally a time when a woman can be in control of how she’s represented. And even through something like Instagram, it may seem silly, but it actually becomes something really important.

YP: I think that probably for both of us, we don’t see ourselves in the media very often. So when we do it’s really exciting. I honestly actually can’t think of anywhere I see myself right now.

What does success look like for you?

AS: We do a lot of dreaming and a lot of trying to manifest the future. For me, it would really be just for us to be ourselves and to really be creative and to keep changing our sound. To just keep growing as a band and be able to play shows to audiences that find our shows fulfilling. I guess that’s like a mutual fulfillment, you know, for us to play shows where we feel we’re living our dream, and to audiences that feel like they’re getting some type of emotional release from it. I would love to be a musician until I die, but it’s not an easy life, especially financially. So I think that’s a big part of my dream is to just make it sustainable, to keep moving forward and to keep focusing on what’s happening in the moment.

YP: Yeah, I think if we can just do what we’re doing forever, that would be really nice. And hopefully we’ll be able to get by.

Is there anything that you want to say to Autostraddle readers?

AS: Something that I would like to say to young women of all kinds is that it’s really good to be confusing. And if you confuse people, that’s totally fine. Just make sure that you’re not really letting any part of yourself be dumbed down or taken away from you. You can be as complicated as you want. There’s a Billie Holiday quote that my friend Amelia says, which I love: “If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”

YP: Yes. What Alynda said is really good. Hopefully we can all just be our authentic selves and not have to worry about what other people think of it.

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Don’t you love them? Well prepare to love them even more! Alynda and Yosi have two presents for you:

1. A new and free tour EP (including an excellent Billie Holiday cover)
2. The chance to win a pair of tickets to any non-festival show on Hurray For The Riff Raff’s tour. Wahoo!

Here are the tour dates:

3/17-19 – Austin, TX – SXSW
3/20 – Seattle, WA – The Crocodile*
3/21 – Vancouver, Canada – Electric Owl*
3/22 – Portland, OR – Aladdin Theater*
3/25 – Boise, ID – Treefort Music Festival
3/26 – Salt Lake City, UT – The State Room*
3/27 – Denver, CO – Bluebird Theater*
3/28 – Boulder, CO – Fox Theater*
3/30 – Sante Fe, NM – Sky Light*
4/1 – Dallas, TX – Dada*
4/18 – Charlottesville, VA – The Southern#
4/21 – Washington DC – 9:30 Club#
4/22 – Philadelphia, PA – World Café Live#
4/23 – Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club#
4/24 – New York, NY – Bowery Ballroom$
4/25 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg$
4/28 – Detroit, MI – The Shelter^
4/29 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall^
4/30 – Madison, WI – High Noon^
5/1 – Minneapolis, MN – Cedar Cultural Center^
5/3 – St. Louis, MO – The Sheldon Concert Hall^
5/5 – Little Rock, AR – South on Main – Oxford American Series^
5/29 – Louisville, KY – Headliners
5/30-31 – Nelsonville, OH – Nelsonville Music
6/2 – Cleveland, OH – Beachland Ballroom
6/3 – Buffalo, NY – Ninth Ward
6/7 – Hunter, NY – Mountain Jam Festival
6/14 – Manchester, TN – Bonnaroo
6/27 – Dover, DE – Big Barrel Country Music Festival

* Adia Victoria
# Son Little
$ Clear Plastic Masks
^ Daniel Romano
& Jess Williamson
% Joe Pug

To enter, all you have to do is comment on this article! Super easy, right? You could tell us which show you want to go to, wax poetic about your favorite Hurray For The Riff Raff song, or even just post a cute gif. Whatever you like! We will select a winner on Thursday, March 19 at 8pm.

Update: the winner has been selected. Congrats, Hanna!

Black Lives Matter Releases Inaugural State Of The Black Union Address, Hosts Twitter Town Hall

On Wednesday, members of the #BlackLivesMatter movement responded to President Obama’s sixth State of the Union address by releasing the first ever State of the Black Union address on blacklivesmatter.com.

In contrast to Obama’s hour-long speech (which addressed issues ranging from Instagram to middle-class economics to the fact that climate change exists, while only lightly grazing the topics of racial justice and police violence), the SOBU was a succinct 1180 words focusing on structural oppression of Black people in the United States. Over a dozen organizations endorsed the statement, including Justice League, Millennial Activists United, Trans Women of Color Collective, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Dream Defenders.

From the SOBU address:

This country owes Black citizens nothing less than full recognition of our human rights. The White House’s current racial justice initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, ignores too many members of our communities. It does not address the inhumane conditions we collectively experience living in a white supremacist system. The issues facing Black women, immigrants, trans and queer people must be included and we demand a full expansion of My Brother’s Keeper to do so.

We demand the same inclusion from our movement.

None of us are free until all of us are free. Our collective efforts have exposed the ugly American traditions of patriarchy, classism, racism, and militarism. These combined have bred a violent culture rife with transphobia, and other forms of illogical hatred.

This corrupt democracy was built on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery. And continues to thrive on the brutal exploitation of people of color. We recognize that not even a Black President will pronounce our truths. We must continue the task of making America uncomfortable about institutional racism. Together, we will re-imagine what is possible and build a system that is designed for Blackness to thrive.

The address highlighted key statistics on the disparities Black America faces, including:

• The median wealth for single White women is $42,600. For Black women, it’s $5. (Source)
• Blacks and Latinos are about 31 percent of the US population, but 60 percent of the prison population. (Source)
• Since 1976, the United States has executed thirteen times more black defendants with white victims than white defendants with black victims. (Source)

Among the demands listed were an immediate end to police brutality, a public education system that teaches the rich history of Black people, and an inclusive racial justice agenda from the White House.

“2015 is the year of resistance,” the SOBU declared in its powerful conclusion. “We the People, committed to the declaration that Black lives matter, will fight to end the structural oppression that prevents so many from realizing their dreams. We cannot, and will not stop until America recognizes the value of Black life.”

At 8 p.m. EST the same day, a town hall meeting was facilitated by Black Lives Matter national leadership on Twitter hashtag #SOBU, hosted by Hunter Lourdes, co-founder and national director of the Trans Women of Color Collective, and Erica Totten, abolitionist and founder of Live Unchained. The format was a series of questions dropping every 10 minutes, with participants providing their own answers and engaging with each other during the hour-long session.

A sample of some of the responses:

Q1: #SOTU FAILS. What was missing from POTUS Address?

https://twitter.com/SongOfTreasure/status/558067993096486913

A1: mentioned anti semitisn but glossed over anti blackness #SOBU

— TRANS HOODOO FUND (@transhoodoofund) January 22, 2015

https://twitter.com/mxthmsvnshnyrd/status/558068672133357568

Q2: None of us are free until we all GET FREE! How are YOU engaging in collective healing?

https://twitter.com/StylistSunshine/status/558078816149860353

@2LiveUnchained A.2 on Monday we marched. It was beautifully healing & resilient. #SOBU #SOTU pic.twitter.com/NLRSHYPOQ2

— Justice League NYC (@NYjusticeleague) January 22, 2015

https://twitter.com/Awkward_Duck/status/558070071411875841

Q3: 2015 was coined Year Of Resistance and Resilience! What does that look like for the Black Community?

#SOBU A3. Resisting any and all forms of oppression even when it's done internally as a symptom of Stockholm's Syndrome.

— #FixthePolice (@mikebrowncover) January 22, 2015

A3: Prioritizing voices that are often left out of the conversation #SOBU #SOTU

— J Mase III (@JMaseIII) January 22, 2015

https://twitter.com/SoulFreeDreams/status/558073131886469121

Q4: Accountability is a gift. In what ways are YOU actively upholding oppressive spaces?

https://twitter.com/MoJohn8510/status/558074988398669825

https://twitter.com/ThatKittyMcGee/status/558075286223613952

https://twitter.com/RJPate/status/558075929822777344

Q5: Structural oppression manifests in all our lives. In what ways are you committed to dismantling white supremacy?

https://twitter.com/AhmedMoumita/status/558077879905697792

https://twitter.com/FTWSammie/status/558077677291446273

A5. My very existence is dismantling to white supremacy. Black. Woman. Queer. Unapologetic. #SOBU #SOTU

— ashley yates (@brownblaze) January 22, 2015

Q6: Our oppressor will never free us! What is it going to take to gain our collective liberation?

Q6: Unfortunately? Time. Fortunately? Creativity. Which I’ve seen. We need to think about new forms of resistance. #SOBU

— M i c h e l l e (@heymeeshi) January 22, 2015

A6: recognize the interconnectedness of all oppression & that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. #SOBU

— blackatlantics (@jananamirah) January 22, 2015

https://twitter.com/FEARLESSnFREE/status/558080904779005953

Following the meeting, Hunter told Autostraddle that she was pleasantly surprised to see only one troll in the discussion. “Having the opportunity to provide a platform for all Black folk to come together on social media and discuss [the state of the union], peel back the layers of structural oppression as well as build community was transformative,” said Hunter. “I feel that any opportunity for folk to live in their truth is an opportunity to celebrate. The Twitter Town Hall provided that opportunity for collective healing, restoration, fellowship and action. We demonstrated that All #BlackLivesMatter.”

For more, check out the State of the Black Union on blacklivesmatter.com, and ongoing discussion on the #SOBU hashtag.

Victories for Justice on Civil Asset Forfeiture, NY Solitary Confinement and Police Transparency

Two very important announcements came from Attorney General Eric J. Holder today and yesterday: he has called for better data and tracking on police violence, and has stopped local and state police from practicing civil asset forfeiture, a practice by which money and property could be seized from citizens even if they had never been (and never would be) accused of a crime.

Civil asset forfeiture was the topic of an extensive investigation by the Washington Post which discovered that “Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion.” The seizures were often performed on highway drivers, and didn’t require a warrant or being charged with any crime; police departments were able to keep up to 80% of what they seized, creating a lucrative backdoor revenue stream for police departments that created an appealing incentive to seize cash and property from citizens indiscriminately. If the original owners of the property wanted to get it back, they often needed to incur costly legal fees and battle the police department in court.

For those who questioned how and why police departments across the nation were in possession of military-grade weapons and vehicles during protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, this practice may provide a partial answer: information from the Justice Department acquired via Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that some police departments were using the money gained from civil asset forfeiture to purchase “high-powered weapons and military-grade gear such as armored cars.” While some have criticized the move by Holder by arguing that “depriving departments of the proceeds from civil asset forfeitures will hurt legitimate efforts to fight crime, drug smuggling and terrorism,” the long, painful history of the War on Drugs (which often amounts to a war on poor Black and brown people) and the violent police response to the #BlackLivesMatter protests illustrate that it’s difficult to separate the “legitimate” work of police departments from work that’s merely in the interests of the state.

In Holder’s other statement — a call for greater transparency and better reporting on deaths of both civilians and police in violent altercations — didn’t come with a specific initiative or commitment, but is still the most direct acknowledgement from a federal official that a productive conversation on police violence is being seriously hindered by a lack of reliable reporting. From the Washington Post:

“The troubling reality is that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers or uses of force by police,” Holder said Thursday morning at a ceremony honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., according to his prepared remarks. “This strikes many — including me — as unacceptable.”

It’s unclear if or when a solution to this problem will be enacted, especially since Holder has already announced his plans to resign. The President of the Fraternal Order of Police has similarly called on Congress to create a program to facilitate the reporting of this data, but given Congress’s track record on getting things accomplished for the past few years, that may not be a realistic expectation. It’s also unclear to what extent any kind of reporting program would have to rely upon cooperation by police departments, which are not often enthusiastic about transparency.

Also in heartening news, New York City officials have come together on a plan to change the use of solitary confinement for inmates 21 years and under at Rikers Island prison. The negative effects of solitary confinement are well-documented, from exacerbating mental illness, including suicidal feelings, to causing “social atrophy” that “obliterates” an incarcerated person’s ability to function in a community after incarceration. Young people are considered especially at risk for these harmful effects, since their brains are often still developing. It’s especially alarming that many of the people experiencing solitary confinement haven’t even been convicted of a crime, and are merely awaiting trial.

“The majority of inmates in the 18- to 21-year-old cohort are young men of color whom we presume innocent under our laws because they are awaiting trial,” said Bryanne Hamill, one of the board’s strongest voices for eliminating solitary for young inmates. “The evidence showed that solitary confinement will not improve their future behavior, but will reliably convert anger and frustration today into rage and violence tomorrow.”

The president of the correction officer’s union appears to believe that this measure will lead to increased danger for correction officers, and has “vowed to sue the board for every guard assaulted.”

The use of solitary confinement for 16-17 year olds was already eliminated at Rikers; with the new rules, incarcerated people between the ages of 18 and 21 can only be sentenced to a maximum of 30 days in solitary confinement, rather than the previous 90.

None of these steps towards reform of the justice system are as powerful as they could be — civil asset forfeiture is only one of many ways in which individual citizens are victimized by law enforcement, a functioning system for transparency around police violence is still a long ways off, and changes to the solitary confinement policies are really only a drop in the bucket when it comes to the changes that are necessary for safe and humane conditions at Rikers and other American prisons. Ultimately, the changes that need to occur in systems of justice in the US are much more fundamental, ensuring that the state doesn’t profit both economically and politically from institutional violence and mass incarceration. But these reforms will still be meaningful to many individuals, and some of the many steps needed toward a cultural and institutional shift.

Bombing Of Colorado Springs NAACP Office Results In No Injuries, One Person of Interest

Yesterday morning, an improvised explosive device was detonated outside building headquarters for the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP. Though a gasoline canister with an incendiary device was placed near the bomb, it failed to ignite. The blast shook the building and scorched an exterior wall, but no people were injured.

The bombing happened shortly before 11 a.m. with three employees in the building, back for their first day of regular work following the holidays. The building that houses the NAACP office is also home to an income tax center and Mr. G’s Hair Design Studio, a salon with predominantly Black customers.

In a statement, the FBI disclosed a single person of interest at this time: “a Caucasian male, approximately 40 years of age, and balding. He may be driving a 2000 or older model dirty, white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark colored bed liner, open tailgate, and a missing or covered license plate.”

Among the NAACP’s most recent activities, the Legal Defense and Educational Fund submitted a letter on Monday to St. Louis County Circuit Judge Maura McShane asking for a special prosecutor-led investigation of the grand jury proceedings on the Darren Wilson/Mike Brown case.

“We believe in civil rights for all, and really we won’t work in fear and we won’t be deterred,” said Henry Allen Jr., president of the chapter. “We’ll move on. … This won’t deter us from doing the job we want to do in the community.” The NAACP looks forward to a full and thorough investigation by federal agents and local law enforcement.

While no specific threat was made by the bomber, there is a long history of white supremacists conducting terrorist bombings against the NAACP and Black communities. Prominent NAACP members Harriette and Harry T. Moore were killed in a bombing of their home on Christmas day in 1951. During the early 1960s, the city of Birmingham, Alabama became known as “Bombingham” due to frequent bombings targeting Black homes and churches. In 1993, the main NAACP offices were bombed in a series of anti-Black terrorist attacks.

The NAACP is the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. Anyone with information about the crime is asked to call the Denver FBI’s tip line at 303-435-7787.

Broken Windows is On Hiatus: Community Interventions We Can Enact Now for Real Justice

feature image via Shutterstock

About a week ago, the NYPD had millions of liberal New Yorkers scratching their heads when they announced a “virtual work stoppage” in apparent protest of Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s alleged lack of support for the Boys in Blue. This came after not only weeks of protests against police terror in New York and across America, but also the senseless murders of two police officers in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Though DeBlasio condemned the murders outright, the police and their union are arguing that his show of support for protesters incited the murders, despite having been committed by a man who had a history of mental illness and shot his own girlfriend in the stomach that very same morning. The police have used this opportunity to literally turn their backs on the mayor as he approached the funerals for the fallen officers. It should be noted that the police union is also currently arbitrating with the city for higher pay.

And so, the police have decided that in addition to the symbolic act of turning their backs on the mayor, they will also stop arresting people for low level crimes (e.g. “quality of life” crimes like open container summonses, public urination, and even parking tickets), resulting in a staggering 66% drop in arrests—and likely an equivalent drop in ticket revenue for the city. The union urged officers not to make arrests unless “absolutely necessary,” leaving most of us wondering what in the hell they were doing before (okay, okay. We knew. It’s just kind of nice to hear them finally admit it). In a bizarre, twilight zone situation, the police have actually practiced civil disobedience and temporarily halted the racist, classist, “broken windows” policing practices that have been the ire of civilian protesters since their introduction. Yeah you heard that right, and it is having benefits for everybody, especially low-income workers and the homeless. Furthermore, the sense of relative serenity in low-income neighborhoods is a welcome change of pace from the constant and looming police presence that has become normalized in these areas.

The incidental benefits of this work stoppage are a bit of a relief, but they are also an opportunity to implement community-based alternatives to policing. Because while we are celebrating the ability to double-park our cars without fear of being ticketed or towed, we are also turning our backs on the millions of incarcerated people who are being brutalized behind closed doors. We are turning our backs on people of color, women and queers who will undoubtedly still bear the brunt of arrests that are being made. Instead, we can forge ahead and create the world we want to live in.

In a the first of a series of video discussions with activists Dean Spade and Reina Gossett, Gossett discusses ways to “prefigure the world you want to live in” through a prison abolitionist lens:

Abolition to me means a number of things. It means preventing harm, intervening on harm, having processes for repairing harm and violence, and also having an aim towards transforming communities, and transforming relationships so that the harm that people have experienced, they’re not re-enacting onto another person.

Abolition means that no one is disposable, no one is expendable. We are not exiling people or punishing people in order to solve our problems. There is a logic in the prison system of policing that kicking someone out of the community and punishing someone is a way to solve people’s problems, but we’re seeing time and time again that that doesn’t work.

Yes, broken windows policing is one of the worst, most racist things to happen to the police and prison system. But even without broken windows, we are left with a prison system that unfairly mishandles people’s lives, especially Black and brown lives. With an eye toward dismantling the current system, there are viable alternatives to involving the police. Many of these focus on low-level offenses, which is a great place to start when looking towards dismantling the entire violent prison system.

In late December, Mike Ludwig of truth-out.org suggested we enter the New Year by resolving not to call the police. For the very same reason that many POCs in poor neighborhoods already choose not to call the cops, Ludwig urged readers to consider how we define safety: “Do we feel unsafe in working-class neighborhoods, or around people with certain styles of dress or colors of skin? What prejudices ground this fear?” He implored readers to think about exactly upon whom we call the cops, and whether they will be treated fairly by the police in a country where police kill one black person every 28 hours. Ludwig makes an important caveat: “Violence is the most serious challenge. If you feel that your safety is threatened, and the best option to avoid being harmed is calling the police, you should do it. Resolving not to call the police is not a rule, just a way to think outside the box. Rules are for the cops, not for us.” Basically, if there is a way to resolve the issue at hand without putting oneself in danger, why not try that option first? As Ludwig points out, many communities are already testing transformative and restorative justice projects that we can use as models during this little policing hiatus.

In Buffalo, NY, local churches, mosques, synagogues and community centers are testing out “peace hubs” in an effort to circumvent police interactions with young offenders. Community conflicts are brought to these peace hubs, and resolved on an interpersonal level. Rod Watson of The Buffalo News thinks it could level the playing field for underprivileged and marginalized youth:

In some ways, it’s a throwback to the days when, if a kid did something wrong, he got chastised twice: first by the neighbor who caught him, then again when he got home. The community wasn’t afraid of its young people and cared enough about them – all of them, not just relatives – to intervene early enough to keep them on track.
If successful, the peace hubs could again give city kids the type of guidance and support suburban kids routinely get to keep them out of the prison pipeline when they do stupid things.

Other organizations like Young New Yorkers aim to both keep young POCs out of prison and engage them on an artistic level that brings their skills back into the community:

Young New Yorkers is a restorative justice, arts program for 16- and 17-year-olds who have open criminal cases. The criminal court gives eligible defendants the option to participate in Young New Yorkers rather than do jail time, community service and have a lifelong criminal record…

A series of six intensive, hands-on workshops prepares the participants to design a public art installation that expresses a positive social message of their choice. Local artists join each workshop and assist the participants in weekly art projects. The weekly artworks and the final installation design are then presented to the public at the Young New Yorkers Finale. The Finale allows the participants to experience themselves as worthy, creative contributors to their communities, rather than as undeserving and irredeemable criminal actors.

Young New Yorkers intervenes after a young person has already interacted with the police, but it is important to have community intervention solutions at every level of the process. The running themes here are empowerment and responsibility to your community, and reducing the harm and violence of mass incarceration. When young people of color are shown that they can make a difference in their communities and in their own lives, prison doesn’t seem like such an inevitable outcome, and commitment to creating justice without police in our communities is a tangible action towards dismantling the prison industrial complex. In addition to fighting for reforms within the prison system, we can keep people out of prison in the first place. We can literally be the change we wish to see in the world.

25 Women Who Shook Things Up in 2014

Women. They’re so great! They do so many fucking awesome things! And so often, end-of-the-year recap lists will gloss over their accomplishments or contributions. I say f*ck that, real hard. So here’s my own list of 25 women who shook things up in 2014 – be it in politics, pop culture, or our hearts. (In alphabetical order, because ranking women is tired.)

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Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi

When Twitter exploded with dialogues about racism, police brutality, and the widespread killing of unarmed black men by law enforcement officers, they were united by one trending topic: the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which has become its own movement and a catch-all for organizing around these issues and posting updates on similar stories from around the world. It’s also a call to action, a defiant spit in the face to a culture that devalues the lives of people of color, and a rallying cry.

And it was invented by three black queer women.

Garza told the story of how she and her sisters, Cullors and Tometi, came together to launch the digital revolution (and now, an offline organizing structure) after the death of Trayvon Martin – and how, since its remergence after the death of Mike Brown, it has been stolen and co-opted, at the Feminist Wire:

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.  It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag. Opal, Patrisse, and I created the infrastructure for this movement project—moving the hashtag from social media to the streets. Our team grew through a very successful Black Lives Matter ride, led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore, organized to support the movement that is growing in St. Louis, MO, after 18-year old Mike Brown was killed at the hands of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. We’ve hosted national conference calls focused on issues of critical importance to Black people working hard for the liberation of our people.  We’ve connected people across the country working to end the various forms of injustice impacting our people.  We’ve created space for the celebration and humanization of Black lives.

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Beyoncé

Another year, another surprise album, another round of empowering feminist antics, another year I’m addicted to listening to “Drunk in Love.” Here’s to a brighter and more Bey-filled future. Also, remember when she made us queer couples some matching underthings?

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Cheryl Strayed

When Wild became a movie and the “Dear Sugar” column got a podcast this year, everyone’s life and ability to be deeply moved or feel less alone in the world grew exponentially. Also, Cheryl Strayed shared Riese’s deeply moving essay about her dead dad on Facebook this year and pretty much everyone on the team exploded. I’m pouring one out for Cheryl Strayed at midnight for breaking the trope of only men taking journeys in literature, being played by Reese Witherspoon, and also being generally amazing. Join me.

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Elizabeth Warren

Senator Elizabeth Warren has never been one to back down. In A Fighting Chance, her book released this year, she told a story about a meeting she had with President Obama’s Chief Economic Advisor, Larry Summers, in 2009. Warren had come out swinging, as she is known to do, against the government’s response to the economic crisis. And, as she often finds herself, she spoke to him when she was in conflict with her own party.

So Larry warned her to stop.

Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. … He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule. They don’t criticize other insiders.

I had been warned.

Warren has never backed down, and she’s become known as a populist hero for decrying policies from both sides of the aisle that attack the middle and lower classes in America. Recently, she gained even more notoriety for a pointed speech on the floor condemning the now-passed spending bill package, in which Wall Street got first priority and women’s rights and human rights got the shaft:

“Mr. President, Democrats don’t like Wall Street bailouts,” Warren said. “Republicans don’t like Wall Street bailouts. The American people are disgusted by Wall Street bailouts. And yet here we are five years after Dodd-Frank with Congress on the verge of ramming through a provision that would do nothing for the middle class, do nothing for community banks, do nothing but raise the risk that taxpayers will have to bail out the biggest banks once again…

“You know, there is a lot of talk lately about how Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. There is a lot of talk coming from CitiGroup about how Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect,” Warren continued. “So let me say this to anyone listening at Citi —I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces. If this Congress is going to open up Dodd-Frank in the months ahead then let’s open it up to get tougher, not to create more bailout opportunities.”

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Ellen Page

It was the coming out heard ’round the world, and especially around the Internet. It was also the moment where all of our dirtiest dreams became a little more possible. For that, Ellen Page deserves everything.

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Emma Sulkowicz

The movement to end campus sexual assault has been gaining momentum for years, but no act of resistance against institutions of higher education that fail survivors captured America’s interest quite like “Carry That Weight,” Columbia University art student and survivor Emma Sulkowicz’s performance piece. As part of her final project in the program, Sulcowicz carried a mattress everywhere she went on campus in order to raise awareness and provoke dialogue around the 1 in 5 women there and at colleges around the nation who will survive sexual assault or rape while they’re pursuing higher education.

The piece ultimately launched a national day of action in which activists around the country carried mattresses or pillowcases to school, work, or the local coffee shop with them emblazoned with messages of support for survivors.

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Erica Garner, Lesley McSpadden, Maria Hamilton, Samaria Rice, Sylvia Palmer, et al.

The women who now live without their fathers and sons due to police brutality have banded together across the nation to launch a movement for justice. And together, they are unstoppable.

Lesley McSpadden, mother to unarmed black teen Mike Brown from Ferguson, Missouri, has been supportive of protests nationwide in her son’s name and is pushing for the Mike Brown Law, which would mandate that all police wear body cameras in the United States. Maria Hamilton, whose son Dontre Hamilton was gunned down by a now-fired Chicago police officer while running away in fear, has not stopped fighting for justice for him and all victims of a racist and violent police state. Sylvia Palmer, mother to Akai Gurley – who was shot on sight by a patrolling officer in his public housing unit while walking up the stairs – has voiced support for activists on the ground while pushing for better leadership in the movement to end lethal police force and racist policing. Erica Garner, whose father Eric Garner was killed by police in Staten Island after being held in an illegal chokehold (despite repeating, multiple times, that he couldn’t breathe), has consistently participated in die-ins and marches in the area, sometimes even lying in the spot on the sidewalk where her father died. Samaria Rice, mother to the 12-year old boy, Tamir Rice, who was shot within seconds by Cleveland police for wielding a toy gun at a park, joined the families of Garner, Brown, Trayvon Martin, and John Crawford III in Washington, DC to demand federal action to end excessive force in policing and its disproportionate impact on the black community.

Since Mike Brown’s death, one black person has been murdered by police every single week. That’s why the fight isn’t over, and it’s why these women aren’t backing down.

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Issa Rae

Remember that time one spectacular human being launched ColorCreative.TV and gave Brittani Nichols a platform to do her thing and turn former Autostraddle webseries “Words With Girls” into a bonafide show on the small screen? Yeah, that was Issa Rae of “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” and that sh*t all went down this year. Did you watch the WWG trailer yet, PS? Do it before midnight and you won’t turn into a pumpkin!

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Janet Mock

Janet Mock truly outdid herself this year. In between publishing Redefining Realness and launching its corresponding social media movement, taking number-one douchebag Piers Morgan to hell and back, and redefining trans activism through only sheer glamour, she landed herself on the Root 100 and the Trans 100, asked us what it’s like to be cis, and encouraged our love for the words of women of color. Also, she spoke words to us right here on Autostraddle dot com in January! Basically, she’s everything and I’m completely okay with it.

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Jacqueline Woodson

Author Jacqueline Woodson should have spent her night at the National Book Awards this November celebrating her victory in the Young People’s Literature category for her book Brown Girl Dreaming. Instead, total prick Lemony Snicket made a racist watermelon joke about her on stage and basically made everyone there uncomfortable and highly aware of what a series of unfortunate events actually looks like.

Luckily, she took him down. And with her words, no less:

I would have written “Brown Girl Dreaming” if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we’ve come through. Their great-great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. Their great-grandfather, Hope, and great-grandmother, Grace, raised one of the few black families in Nelsonville, Ohio, and saw five children through college. Their grandmother’s school in Greenville, Sterling High, was set on fire and burned to the ground.

To know that we African-Americans came here enslaved to work until we died but didn’t die, and instead grew up to become doctors and teachers, architects and presidents — how can these children not carry this history with them for those many moments when someone will attempt to make light of it, or want them to forget the depth and amazingness of their journey?

How could I come from such a past and not know that I am on a mission, too?

This mission is what’s been passed down to me — to write stories that have been historically absent in this country’s body of literature, to create mirrors for the people who so rarely see themselves inside contemporary fiction, and windows for those who think we are no more than the stereotypes they’re so afraid of. To give young people — and all people — a sense of this country’s brilliant and brutal history, so that no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another’s too often painful past.

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Jessica Williams

It was a really important year for conversations around street harassment – specifically, about racism in the movement to end catcalling and about ending a culture in which women and queer people are inundated with invasive and unwelcome accostment on the street every day. But one conversation nobody needs to have or really listen to or even acknowledge exists is the one in which men try as hard as their feeble minds will let them to justify a society in which women’s bodies are objects apparently put here for them to yell creepy and gross things at without our permission! Luckily, Jessica Williams from The Daily Show swooped in and shut that entire motherfucking mess down. Boom. Clap. The sound of patriarchy slowly, slowly dying.

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Jill Soloway

Jill Soloway produced this show “Transparent” about a trans woman and her family that had hella queer characters, has a badass trans lady writer in the staff room, and motivated Rachel to recap something for this website. ‘Nuff said.

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Kate McKinnon

We’ve loved super-funny and super-gay comedian Kate McKinnon here at Autostraddle for a long, long time – so imagine our excitement when she nabbed an American Comedy Award and appeared in totally great totally not-about-a-dude movie Life Partners this year! Plus, she earned an Emmy nod for her amazing work over the last few years on “Saturday Night Live,” which might give me a reason to start watching it again. All in all, it sounds like it’s been McKinnon’s year to shine on.

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Kristin Russo and Dannielle Owens-Reid

First came the book that Maddie read with her amazing family members (This Is A Book for Parents of Gay Kids), then came the hilarious video tour and also the videos for those parents, then came the collaborative ‘zine project with this great place called Autostraddle that, rumors have it, is also a unicorn factory. One thing is for sure: Kristin Russo and Dannielle Owens-Reid of Everyone Is Gay put a lot of amazing shit into the world this year, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

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Laura Jane Grace

When Against Me! frontwoman Laura Jane Grace came out in 2012 as transgender, we were excited to see where it took her career and the punk band so close to our angsty hearts. As it turns out, there was nowhere to go for the rock-n-roll icon than up. This year, Against Me’s new album debuted higher on the Billboard charts than any of their previous work, and Grace also filmed a reality show for AOL. The good news out of 2014 is that we’re gonna be seeing a lot of Laura Jane Grace for years to come, and that can never be a bad thing.

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Laverne Cox

In 2014, Laverne Cox got a book deal, deeply moved us when it came to the topic of the revolutionary act of loving trans women, won a GLAAD award, landed the cover of TIME and also the cover of The Advocate, became the first-ever trans Emmy Award nominee, taught Katie Couric a thing or two, and used her power for good to shine the light on trans youth.

I’m guessing the reason Beyoncé gave Cox a Christmas gift is because she realized exactly which girl is truly running the world.

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May-Britt Moser

Remember that time May-Britt Moser, psychologist and neuroscientist, won the Nobel Prize for figuring out the cells that make up the brain’s positioning system? I’m worried not enough of us do.

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Mo’ne Davis

Mere teenager Mo’ne Davis, who was the first girl to throw a shutout in Little League World Series history and the first little league player on the cover of Sports Illustrated, also became the AP’s 2014 Athlete of the Year this month. This alone might motivate me to begin watching young people play games without the motivation of monetary gain.

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Nicki Minaj

I know y’all knew this was coming. I mean, remember when Nicki Minaj taught us everything we needed to know about female sexuality and empowerment and also gave us a reason to listen to that great song about loving big butts and not being able to lie about? And remember when she released “The Pinkprint,” an introspective and multifaceted album that melts genres and also your heart? I will never forget. I will always remember. 2014 is the year Nicki Minaj came back bigger, better, and more bootylicious than ever. Let’s hope she gets a Grammy or two to prove it.

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Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay released two completely delicious and amazing reads this year, told Autostraddle some of her queer story, and became the butter to your toast. What more could we, as the collective world, ask for?

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I’m of the opinion that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – known more formally as “The Notorious RBG” – shakes up everything every year. But this year, she took on voter suppression, contraception access, and more, all with her usual flair and also her usual absolute perfection in every way. Then, she announced she was pretty much never throwing in her robe. For that, she wins the year once again.

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Shonda Rhimes

Shonda Rhimes gave us an amazing gift this year with the release of “How to Get Away With Murder,” a totally and unapologetically homosexy drama that pairs well with her first totally amazing drama, “Scandal.” Afterward, she gave us this forever powerful and incomparably on-point series of thoughts on the glass ceiling:

“Do they know I haven’t broken through any glass ceilings,” I asked my publicist. He assures me that I have. I assure him that I have not. I have not broken through any glass ceilings. If I had broken through any glass ceilings, I would know. If I had broken through a glass ceiling, I would have felt some cuts, I would have some bruises, there’d be shards of glass in my hair… If I’d broken the glass ceiling, that would mean I made it through to the other side, where the air is rare. I would feel the wind on my face.

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Sleater-Kinney

I don’t think I need to explain how a band that probably made a really big impact on your younger, queer riot grrl self reuniting (and it feels so good) made 2014 kick ass. But in case you needed a reminder, THE SLEATER-KINNEY INDEFINITE HIATUS IS OFFICIALLY OVER. Put a bird on that and tweet it, bitches.

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St. Vincent

There’s not much more to say here.

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Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s response to street harassment – posters telling folks to “stop asking women to smile” and reminding them that, like, women are people, too – was perfect from the start late in 2013, but this year it made waves within the feminist community as it spread across the Internet and tattooed itself on our hearts and souls. In the midst of dialogue about women of color and street a harassment, a woman of color stood up and fought street harassment in quite possibly my favorite way ever. For that, I am eternally grateful, and I believe you probably are, too.

Are We There Yet? An Interracial Family Visits a Southern Plantation

The evening I touched down in New Orleans, about to embark on a soul-searching family trip to various sugar plantations, the Darren Wilson decision was reached in Ferguson. I was sitting at a down home barbeque restaurant with my mixed-race sister, Black mother and her white boyfriend of nine years. I mean, we were the friggin’ picture of post-racial prosperity, and yet every one of us was slapped back to reality in one timely Google search. We are avid mealtime Googlers. If we had set the table ourselves it would look something like, from left to right: salad fork, dinner fork, dinner plate, water glass, wine glass, napkin, soup spoon, knife, iPhone. Conversation consists of getting into heated debates that more or less end in Googling the answer; either that, or eavesdropping on the neighboring table and picking up where they left off.

I’ve never been to a protest. Well, I went to one teensy Occupy protest in Amherst while I was at Hampshire, and I did one of those bogus walk-outs in high school so I could drink booze and smoke cigarettes and to feel like part of something cool. But really, as an active participant, no. I’m not proud of this, but I never felt compelled to participate in one — until that night. There was a fury brewing in me that I had never experienced before and I wanted to take to the streets and burn some shit down. Fortunately, I did not have the opportunity to commit arson that night because I was having “family time.” But I’d never felt this before; like somebody was shaking me by the shoulders and saying “you’ve got to do something!” Of course, we were set to embark on a road trip where not only would I have to swallow this rage, but I would be confined to a car, and taking quaint tours of old timey plantations where if I decided to get stir crazy, I would surely be thrown out.

For the next five days we would have circular conversations surrounding the blatant and unending ignorance blinging from our phones via Facebook. As we rolled by the sugar cane fields on the road to Natchez, hugging the border of the Mississippi River, one of us would periodically look up from our screen to announce yet another mind-melting post from some distant white “friend” who felt the need to comment on one of our posts.

“You guys,” my mother groaned, “You will not believe what Christen White just said to me.”

“Her name is Christen White? Oh God, what did she say?”

“This woman… god help her… had the nerve to tell me this has something — anything — to do with Black-on-Black violence. Oh oh oh oh, here’s a quote: ‘nine times out of ten, it’s black men who are killing each other.'”

“Where the fuck did she get that statistic? Oh, Mom, you have to ask her where she heard that. No wait, I got it, I got it. I’m gonna tell her.”

Normally, I don’t make a habit of getting into arguments with people on the Internet, but when people who are normally ideologically aligned with me decide to make their ignorance and thinly veiled paternalism known without invitation, I just… erghhhh. This, of course, goes against what I believe in: that people’s minds can only be changed when you coddle them through it. But goddamn was this particular person irritating. My mother’s boyfriend remained relatively stoic throughout the ride. He really enjoys trees, and the trees along the Mississippi are quite haunting and majestic at the same time.

We were able to take a break from our seething and Instagramming when we arrived at Evergreen Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana. An active sugar plantation to this day, our tour guide walked us beneath canopies of 200-year-old oaks with low-hanging Spanish moss that resembled antique lace. We were walked through the “big house”— incidentally the same exterior used to film some scenes in Django Unchained. Particularly, one of my favorite scenes (I know) in which a slave woman asks of her master, “You want us to treat him [Django] like white folks?” I don’t know, that one just had me rolling — but I digress.

Burnt orange rooms with hardwood floors led us to marble hallways accented with wicker furniture sporting palm-patterned pillows. The rooms were tastefully designed with Victorian and Edwardian antiques that were perfectly preserved. We were told that our tour guide does not know the cost of upkeep on the meticulously kempt grounds because whatever it is it doesn’t matter: “The owners are oil heirs. This is just a hobby.” Quite a hobby.

We were walked to the slave quarters, some still standing, others restored. They were basic shacks, between three and five to a room. Although tiny, they were bigger than I thought they would be. We were told of the French colonial slave-keeping laws, which were apparently more humane than those of American, British or Spanish colonial laws. When we were told that the slaves were encouraged to be married, that young girls must be sold along with their mothers and kept from work until the age of fourteen, and eventually buried alongside their masters in the Catholic cemetery, we caught ourselves doing that raised-eyebrow, pompous nod of surprise until we were able to remind each other that these people, however less oppressed than their neighbors, were still fucking slaves. It seems that even back then, darker skinned folks were being handed a bone and told to be grateful for what they had.

When we arrived at the Dunleith Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, it was almost dinnertime. We got properly soused on red wine, ate some food (I can’t recall what) and I fell face-first into my pillow, expecting to wake to a sprawling historical plantation much like Evergreen. One of the first things my mother’s boyfriend noticed upon waking up Thanksgiving Day, was that all of the rooms were named after prominent confederate soldiers. This information he bestowed upon us with didactic self-confidence. I was totally freaked, but he seemed more intrigued than horrified. How apropos that we spend Thanksgiving, arguably the most colonial holiday next to Columbus Day, in the most colonial environment in America. I couldn’t help but think that if indeed this particular plantation had any affiliation with actual confederate soldiers, that was creepy because the ghost of Stonewall Jackson was probably staking out my bedroom door with a sawed-off shotgun while I slept. And, if in fact, this plantation had nothing to do with the confederacy at all, then what the hell were the bed-and-breakfast owners doing naming the rooms in honor of the most racist blight on American history? I wanted to get out of there fast, but we were slated to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner on yet another nearby plantation and nothing was open at the moment so my only hope at eating anything that day was to wait it out, hangry as hell, refreshing my stupid Facebook feed until dinnertime. For the record, it turns out that neither of these places were actually plantations, but plantation-style homes. Nonetheless, they almost certainly employed a cadre of slaves, so the details don’t exactly sway me.

The next morning, as my mother and her boyfriend ate their breakfast, they approached a couple that had been sitting next to us at dinner the night before. They looked nice enough: older, white, kind of edgy looking. The dude had a kind of Keith Richards thing going on. My mom asked how their dinner was. They said it was fine, and remarked how we were being kind of “rowdy,” most likely referring to our umpteenth heated discussion of the events in Ferguson. And then he asked my Black mother and her white boyfriend, “so… uh, how in the world did you two get hooked up???” My mother, bless her heart, tried with every cell in her brain to rationalize this question. She thought, “maybe he thought I was wearing whacky clothes, and Frank dresses so conservatively.” She does dress very colorfully (pun not intended). But the rest of us took it for what it was, even Frank. And after so many days of suppressed mania, a wave of exhaustion washed over me. The nail in the coffin was when I called my 98-year-old grandmother from the car on our way back to New Orleans. She said, “I just… cannot believe y’all are in Mississippi. Although, I guess times have changed a bit.” Yeah, grandma. A bit.

Two days after returning to New York, the cop who murdered Eric Garner was absolved of any indictment. But instead of rage, or anxiety, I felt tired. Tired from travel, perhaps, but also just wiped. Worn down by the concurrent weight of history unraveling behind me and the present unfolding before me, I felt paralyzed. History is repeating itself too soon, it seems. It’s déjà vu all over again, and the only tools we have to address it are our voices. That weekend, I was in the streets, but not to rage or burn. I was there to mourn, or rather, to wait. Because at this stage of grief, my only burning and desperate question is: Are we there yet?

3 Things to Know About Protecting Your Tech While Protesting

The use of smartphones and social media have been critical in large and small-scale grassroots organizing, from the Arab Spring in 2011 to #BlackLivesMatter protests currently sweeping across the US in the wake of the grand jury decisions to not indict the police officers who murdered Mike Brown and Eric Garner. Carrying phones has become vital for documenting, staying connected to other organizers and staying safe.

However, carrying phones also carries risk, because communications between them are subject to surveillance, and because they hold so much information about our lives. While this data is technically — partially — protected from search by the Fourth Amendment, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our right to privacy is not always honored by law enforcement. Police have many tactics for extracting data both through surveillance and direct intimidation and coercion. It’s important to know how to protect yourself and your data, and to know your rights related to your electronics if you are protesting and interacting with or near law enforcement.

This is by no means a complete list, I am not a legal expert, and taking these steps cannot guarantee your safety or privacy, especially in the face of heavy police militarization, and especially for heavily-targeted black, brown, trans and queer bodies. Here are three things related to your tech that are important to keep in mind when protesting:

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1. You have the right to record the police

As the non-indictment in Eric Garner’s murder has reminded us, having video of police breaking the law doesn’t guarantee they will be held accountable. However, it has been shown that when police are filmed, it can help deescalate the situation and protect people from being assaulted or having their rights violated.

The precise rules and specifications vary from state to state, particularly with regards to sound, because some states count the audio portion of videotaping as wiretapping. But across the board, if you are in a public space, you are allowed to photograph and document video footage of the police. Police won’t necessarily like this, and they may tell you to stop, but as long as you are on public property, you have the right to do so.

If your phone is able, it is good to find a way to stream video directly from your phone to the internet, or post photos online directly after taking them. This makes it so even if your phone is taken and opened by the police, they cannot delete the photos or footage.

We’ve talked about apps created by the ACLU for filming police before, which come equipped with know your rights reminders and can also help protect your footage. CopBlock also has a list of apps for streaming video straight from your phone to the internet.

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2. You have the right to refuse the police access to your phone

This summer, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that specified that if you are arrested, police are not allowed to search your phone without your consent or a warrant. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said cellphones “are not just another technological convenience… they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.'”

However, this doesn’t mean that an officer won’t ask or pressure you to unlock your phone. If you find yourself being asked by an officer to unlock your phone, you can say you do not consent and ask to speak to your lawyer.

HOWEVER, a Virginia Circuit Court judge recently ruled that you CAN be compelled to use your fingerprint to open your phone if it is only locked by a fingerprint scan. This opens a new avenue of ambiguity for what does and doesn’t qualify as a justified search, but ultimately what it means is it is critical that your phone be protected by a passcode.

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3. Delete your unnecessary data or carry a temporary phone

Even though you are constitutionally protected, it’s still possible for police to gain access to your phone and your data by coercion, intimidation or surveillance. Thus, it is important to consider how you want to protect your data if you think you might end up in a protest situation where you are interacting with law enforcement. To minimize the amount of information police can obtain about you if they are looking at data coming to and from your phone or if they do gain access to your phone, delete unnecessary applications and information before protesting.

Protecting your data can be especially important for queer and trans people. If your phone has photos, apps or other data that could out you or otherwise subject you to increased risk of profiling or violence by police if they manage to see it, consider removing that information before you protest. The Chicago National Lawyers Guild teamed up with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and the National Center for Transgender Equality to make a know your rights sheet for trans and queer people participating in direct action.

NDTV has guides to securely delete your personal data from your iPhone or Android.

Another way to avoid carrying all of your data around with you during a protest is to get a temporary device that isn’t attached to your name. If that’s not feasible, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Cell Phone Guide for US Protesters, which notes, “Text messages… can be read and stored by your phone company or by surveillance equipment in the area.” If you want to protect the content of your messages from being read by law enforcement, use apps like WhatsApp that use end-to-end encryption.

Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s extensive Surveillance Self-Defense Guide for Activists or Protesters to learn more.

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This has been the one-hundred-eighth installment of  Queer Your Tech with Fun, Autostraddle’s nerdy tech column. Not everything we cover is queer per se, but we talk about customizing this awesome technology you’ve got. Having it our way, expressing our appy selves just like we do with our identities. Here we can talk about anything from app recommendations to choosing a wireless printer to web sites you have to favorite to any other fun shit we can do with technology. Header by Rory Midhani. 

Rebel Girls: Police Violence Happens to Black Women, Too

It isn’t the first time. As the fights for Ferguson and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice rage on, I have stood on the sidelines waving my best solidarity fist. But I keep wondering where all the women and girls are in this conversation. I see them leading the marches and the fight. I’ve read their stories and their thinkpieces. I’ve watched as women of color – and especially black women – have connected the dots between what happened in Ferguson, what happened to Trayvon Martin, and the movement for reproductive justice. But this is about more than connecting the dots. Police brutality isn’t a women’s issue because of a complex game of six degrees of separation. This is a women’s issue because our sisters are being impacted directly, and because they’ve been harassed, beaten, raped, and killed by cops for centuries.

Another man/boy shot (not again). Unarmed (his black skin is weaponized). Killed by cops (since slavery). The terrible ever-expanding litany of names: Amadou, Sean, Oscar, Rodney, Trayvon, Michael… We’re on a first name basis (excruciatingly familiar). Collective mourning and grief ensue (my tear ducts are dried out; there’s only rage). Calls for justice in the black community (justice is prosecution and prison). #BlackLivesMatter on a social media loop (numbing). We are trying to convince ourselves that it’s true (we don’t fully believe it). Please make it true (it’s a symbolic prayer).

In the background, a faint sound (a whisper). Aiyanna, Tyisha, Renisha, Rekia (background noise). Woman/girls shot (do they shoot black girls & women?). Unarmed (her skin is a bullet magnet). Killed by cops (since slavery). They are not household names (excruciatingly unfamiliar). A few people mourn (silently). Some calls for justice (more prosecutions and prison). #BlackLivesMatter? (But which ones?)

You’re so selfish. This isn’t the right time, the voice intones. Is that voice in my head? I can’t tell. There never seems to be a ‘right’ time to remember the names of murdered black women (never). Sadness and grief threaten to overwhelm (so tired). Stubbornly I remember (an act of defiance).

Police brutality, the prison industrial complex, and the state are not just the enemies of black men and other men of color.

Amid the incredibly disheartening barrage of news updates about white cops killing and hurting black people, there has been a notably lopsided division of attention and passion from both the media and the activists on the ground. Black men and boys are seen as symbols for an entire race of people who deal with police violence. And women and girls, gunned down, raped, and abused by cops, disappear in virtual silence.

Police violence against women and girls is prevelant. Women of color and queer people of color are not “allies” to men in this challenge; they are fully engaged and impacted partners. Their fate is also on the line. Their stories are also being shaped by a police state that actively works to destroy them. That’s why, as Gradient Lair summed up so perfectly here, the kind of erasure and silence that comes from ignoring the names and faces of the women and girls who have faced police violence is a form of violence in and of itself:

The erasure of the history, the experiences, the activism and the reality of Black women in relation to police brutality, extrajudicial execution and State violence is unacceptable. Erasing Black women is NOT “supporting” Black men. It is erasure of Black history, something Whites/non-Black people of colour gleefully engage in via epistemic violence, false equalization and using Black death solely as a trope to center non-Black lives. We can’t also engage in our own erasure. Love itself, as a concept and praxis, needs to be decolonized when it’s expected to be/expressed as the erasure of Black women in the service of Black men. Harm to any Black people is not “pro-Black.” Black women’s truths and lives matter. Black lives matter. And everyone, including fellow Black people, have to start actually believing this. And then start or continue acting against any oppression that seeks to confer anything different from the value of Black life.

Before the riots in Ferguson, women had been persistent in their movements to stop sexist policing which revictimized them. For decades, women have come forward to report rape, abuse, harassment, humiliation, and worse from police. For decades, there failed to be a response of this magnitude.

Women, too, were some of the original targets of police and state violence, and in many ways women of color are still one of their primary strongholds for incarceration, arrest, and abuse. Monica Jones was harassed and imprisoned for taking a ride with someone, guilty of nothing really, nothing except “walking while trans.” And black. And a woman. CeCe McDonald went to jail for defending herself. Women and girls have died or been beaten on camera at the hands of police or state agents and gone almost unmentioned. For queer and trans women, women of color, women in the sex and drug industries, and poor women, the police are not protectors, police violence comes as no surprise.

As Katherine Cross wrote after the Eric Garner decision on Facebook:

For trans women of color in this city, harassment by the police is an ever present risk. From officers who use public searches as an excuse to grope you and answer the puerile questions on every cis transphobe’s mind, to one’s who use your birth control as an excuse to run you in on prostitution charges, to those who will look the other way when civilians try to murder you, there is no safety, no good, that ever came from calling the NYPD. The red strobes of the squad car merely bathe my sisters in suspicion and callow judgement.

In my years working with and sitting on the board of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal aid society that represents and advocates for low income trans women of color in New York, I can safely say that so many of our clients come to us with stories that — if there were any justice — would be considered national scandals, would become hashtags made of tinder to light protest marches and die-ins. Sex workers, homeless people, immigrants documented and not, all have had various run ins with police whose first act of violence is misgendering and whose last they were lucky to walk away from with their life. My sisters are, at best, a rounding error in an officer’s quota, at worst a vent for their frustrations and petty prejudices…

That’s the NYPD I think of, the one I grew up with, that cut a path through my neighborhood, which makes enemies of my neighbors and my sisters; that’s why I can’t say I was terribly surprised by yesterday’s decision.

A 2007 United Nations report found that police violence against women and girls of color had increased, just as it had against men. But nobody was paying attention, despite a legacy of kidnapping and abuse for women and girls of color that goes back to reconstruction. A 2014 report by Black Women’s Blueprint and Women’s All Points Bulletin to the Committee Against Torture cited rape and sexual violence as the second most prevalent form of police violence, one most commonly afflicted on black women, and asked CAR “to acknowledge that police rape, and the rape of Black women, is torture.” The same report found that the overpolicing of women is actually getting worse in the United States. In 2000, black women were incarcerated at a rate six times of that of their white counterparts, and the female population in prisons across the country is skyrocketing. When these women go to jail, they face some of the same police brutality that was targeted at them before: rape, harassment, sexual assault, and physical abuse.

Perhaps worse than the widespread domination of men’s stories in this struggle is the underlying notion that some forms of police brutality don’t seem to be worth a march or a riot. Police have been reported or caught sexually assaulting women, killing women, and mocking survivors on camera. Police have responded to domestic violence calls with the intent to abuse, coerced and forced women in the sex industry or in other vulnerable legal positions to engage with them sexually. Police officers have humiliated trans and cis and queer women and women of color for seemingly eons, and yet even when we march in the name of fucking up their system we cannot remember those names.

I work at the Feminist Majority Foundation, and I was epically proud when one of the members of my team wrote a piece breaking down the many ways in which the fight for justice in Ferguson, and the fight to end police violence, was a feminist issue. The first comment on the piece criticized an edit I had made to adjust one of her sub-titles. “Women Are Victims of Police Brutality, Too,” I made it proclaim. I wanted people to know. I wanted it to be said, and as largely as possible. I was accused of being divisive, of trying to claim that the only issues that matter to us should be those that affect us personally. But I wasn’t. I was simply trying to refute the longstanding narrative that police violence is an issue only for black men. That is not derailing. That is expansion. That matters, and fighting for all black people of all genders to live lives free from police harassment and violence is not harmful. Justice is not a zero-sum game. It is possible to unite and fight for these things together, just as it should be possible to fight for all of the people it impacts together.

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Rebel Girls is a column about women’s studies, the feminist movement, and the historical intersections of both of them. It’s kind of like taking a class, but better – because you don’t have to wear pants. To contact your professor privately, email carmen at autostraddle dot com. Ask questions about the lesson in the comments!

Notes From A Queer Engineer: Tear Gas, Tool Of The Police State

Header by Rory Midhani
Feature image via Shutterstock

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117 days after Mike Brown’s murder, our justice system has declined to even indict the police officer who shot him, essentially giving a pointed shrug and eyeroll at the importance of Black lives. A killer cop walks free in Missouri while thousands of protesters across the country face arrest. That’s where we are today.

As Cleo has written,

Ferguson, or more accurately the social media timeline of Ferguson, blew apart the idea of living in a “post racial” America. Before the police could even send out a coroner, the residents of Mike’s neighborhood were posting to Twitter and Vine what they were seeing and hearing. When the cops showed up and started firing tear gas into peaceful crowds, the protesters were streaming video to YouTube. For maybe the first time in the history of racial violence, the victims could speak their truth without words and in real-time. They gave America, but specifically White America, the chance to bear witness to the reality of being Black and not dying silently. Within 24 hours the story had gone viral and mainstream news crews made plans to head out if the violence continued, which of course it did.

The images of violence coming out of Ferguson have been disturbing. Sickening. Rage inducing. But not — at least for me — surprising. After all, this is how our racist police state works.

Although there have been several high profile calls for peace, it seems as though government officials in Missouri have taken every opportunity to set the stage for violence. A week before the non-indictment, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon enacted a pre-emptive 30-day state of emergency, calling in a vast, militarized police force to a community in the middle of processing their grief over previous traumatic police action. Vague rules of engagement were released, with no clear open line of communication with which protestors could negotiate during demonstrations. The official announcement of the grand jury decision was made at 8 p.m., at a time when tensions were very high and people were likely to be in the street. When protests broke out, the Ferguson police failed to use de-escalation techniques, instead attempting to disperse all public gatherings. The police were tear gassing crowds within an hour.

Speakeasy member Ashley Targaryan wrote about her experiences in nearby St. Louis that Monday,

They fired tear gas at the building, forcing those outside to run in and filling the inside of the building with fumes. We tried to run out the back door but another group of cops were there and fired more tear gas at us. A lot of folks fled to the basement and the medics immediately sprang into action. Let me tell you, those people were amazing. They were crucial in keeping people calm after we were gassed. I have asthma so I had been inside for much of trapping because I didn’t want to risk having my asthma triggered by being gassed for being outdoors. Who knew they would fire at the building? I didn’t have my inhaler but luckily one of the medics brought me one and encouraged me to sit when my body kept twitching and shaking. For a half an hour the police kept us trapped in the building by using teargas any time we opened the doors and arresting those who dared to try to leave. Almost exactly half an hour in they agreed to let us leave in mass without gassing us or arresting us if we walked out calmly and in the opposite direction of Grand. From 11:30 PM until 1:30 AM we had been trapped and now we were free to go. We decided that it was fitting to walk out with our hands up.

This was relatively calm compared to what was going down just twenty minutes away in Ferguson.

For many, these protests in solidarity with Mike Brown and the people of Ferguson have been their first exposure to tear gas. While I in no way want to distract from the important conversations going on about anti-Black racism in America, I think it’s also pertinent for us to deconstruct some of the tools and techniques being used by the police to maintain control. So today we’re going to talk about tear gas.

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Tear Gas: The Basics

“Tear gas” refers to a family of chemical agents that stimulate the corneal nerves in the eyes to cause tearing. Chemicals of this type are classified as “lacrimators,” and include o-chlorobenzylidene malonitrile (commonly referred to as CS), ω-chloroacetophenone (CN or CAP), and dibenzoxazepine (CR). Each causes pain and discomfort through irritation of the skin and mucous membranes in the eye and respiratory tract. Most people tear up, sneeze and cough; others may vomit, become temporarily blind, or (rarely) experience more severe side effects. However, the severity of effects varies depending on the specific chemical mixture, the dose received, and physiology of the recipient. Long term effects are largely unknown.

Although there is evidence of lacrimatory and irritant chemicals being used as far back as ancient Greece, modern use is considered to have started during World War I. For example, the well known insecticide trichloronitromethane (also known as chloropicrin, PS, or green cross), was repurposed in trench warfare as both a harassing agent and a lethal chemical (depending on concentration). The arsenic-based vomiting agent diphenylaminochlorarsine (also known as adamsite or DM) was developed during this time for use against enemy combatants during WWI, and continued to be used against civilians after the war.

Ethyl bromoacetate (EBA) became the first “riot control” agent when it was employed by the Paris police force during a civil disturbance in 1912. Other tear gases used at this time included acrolein (Papite), bromoacetone (BA or B-stoff), bromobenzyl cyanide (BBC, CA), chloroacetone (A-stoff) and xylylbromide (T-stoff). Beyond this, a variety of lethal chemical agents were used, including chlorine, phosgene, and trichlorethyl-chloroformate.

Per the Geneva Protocol, all chemical weapons — including tear gas — have been internationally banned as a method of warfare following the end of WWI. However, in the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, many countries agreed to allow numerous banned-in-warfare chemicals for “law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes.” Because of the way tear gas is classified, it falls into a weird in-between space: the military is not allowed to use it to take down enemy combatants, yet police frequently use it to take down domestic civilians.

How Does Tear Gas Work?

Lacrimators are most often deployed in aerosol form, the scientific term for any collection of particles suspended in air. Mace — which is actually a brand name but commonly refers to CN gas mixed with additional irritants such as capsaicin, the active ingredient in peppers —  is typically carried as spray, with droplets large enough that they go only a short distance before falling out of suspension to the ground. This is because the inflammatory agent must hit someone directly in the eyes, nose or mouth to be effective, so operators need a predictable and easy-to-aim dispersal method.

In contrast, the ominous haze we usually think of as traditional tear gas is a lacrimator disseminated in fine particulate smoke form. The small size of the particles allow them to remain suspended in the air for a longer time, giving wider range. Although this form of aerosol is less predictable, it allows operators to incapacitate larger groups of people, so long as they take precautions (such as wearing gas masks) to protect themselves from the effects. In this form, CS gas is the most commonly used tear gas in the world today. It is mixed with solvents and delivered with the use of propellants.

When tear gas was first developed, the gas was delivered in a variety of forms, including pistols, grenades, candles, pens, and even billy clubs that doubled as toxic shooters. Today, it usually comes in metal canisters that fit on the end of gas guns and are fired with blank shotgun cartridges. The cartridges break open and the tear gas is released in a rapidly spreading, low lying cloud.

What To Do If You’re Exposed To Tear Gas

Before

• Avoid wearing lotions or contact lenses. They can trap tear gas chemicals close to your skin or eyes.
• Bring a hat and eye protection, as tear gas canisters often explode in the air and create hot metal shards.
• Cover exposed skin. Wear long sleeves and pants or bring layers.
• Buy a CBA/RCA (Chemical/Biological Agent-Riot Control Agent) gas mask or (less ideally) make a homemade gas mask. If neither of these options are possible, bring swim goggles and a wet bandanna for barrier protection. The objective is to avoid getting the particles in your eyes and lungs.
  • Note: it is illegal in some places, including New York City, to cover your face with items like bandannas. 
• Keep an eye on your surroundings. If you’re indoors, note the location of exits.

During

• When you hear the shot go off, look up to see which direction the canister is being fired in. Move away. Ideally, you want to get outdoors to a wide open space where the gas will quickly disperse rather than concentrate.
• Try not to breathe through your mouth in the first few moments while you’re running away. Doing so will cause you to inhale more tear gas.
• Cover up using whatever you brought with you. If you didn’t bring anything, pull your shirt up to use as a filter for your nose and mouth.
• Try not to panic. Remember: the effects of tear gas are temporary.

After

• Quickly remove the clothing you were wearing when you were exposed and seal it in a bag. Then seal that bag inside another bag. Dispose of it or wash separately to avoid getting the chemicals on any of your other clothes. This protects both you and others from secondary exposure.
• Blow air directly into irritated eyes to vaporize any dissolved CS gas, then flush. Many websites recommend using a milk or Maalox mixture to neutralize tear gas. This probably won’t hurt; however, these methods haven’t been proven in clinical trials. The most effective rinse is diphoterine, which is specially formulated to relieve chemical exposure but difficult to get ahold of. After that, water is still the rinse proven most effective.
• Rinse your skin with cold water. The reason for this is that hot water opens up your pores and may also vaporize residual particles, leading to secondary exposure. If the chemicals aren’t coming off quickly you can scrub with soap, but be aware that the high water solubility can exacerbate symptoms.
• Seek medical attention if you experience any severe or long lasting effects. If you’re helping others, try to avoid touching any contaminated areas. If you think something other than tear gas may have been used, call a poison control hotline for advice. For US regional poison control centers, the number is 1-800-222-1222.

Remember that not everyone can be on the ground during a protest and that’s okay. There are many other ways you can help.

Stay safe out there.

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Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of one month. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

The QTPOC Speakeasy Reports Back from Ferguson Protests Around the World

When a grand jury failed to indict Michael Brown’s killer Monday night, protests broke out around the nation and even across the world. On Tuesday, thousands turned out in 42 states across the United States and disrupted Thanksgiving traffic to demand justice for Brown and his family, as well as an end to a culture of impunity for police brutality.

Chants of “No Justice, No Peace” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” literally crossed the national landscape into the wee hours of the morning, and the world was watching as police in different cities reacted almost uniformly with excessive force against peaceful protesters and combative efforts to stop people of color and their allies from fighting back. And members of the Speakeasy, with heavy hearts and revolutionary intentions, were on the front lines.

These are our stories.

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St. Louis, MO

Ashley Targaryen

On Monday morning I went in to work and all day there were murmurs through the building about the Grand Jury verdict that would be announced and what to expect. My friend, Lou (one of the best white allies I have), and I decided to join the gathering at MoKaBe’s (a local queer/social justice advocate owned coffee shop) to listen to the verdict announcement and then go marching as planned. As we all know by now, the Grand Jury decided not to indict him. Shortly after having four and a half minutes of silence for Mike Brown, we left the shops and took to the streets. As we marched I couldn’t help but be pleased every time I spotted a queer face in the crowd and that pleased feeling was especially there every time I spotted a fellow QTPOC.

We marched from MoKaBe’s to the corner of Shaw and Grand, almost one mile away, to pause and remember VonDerrit Myers who was also killed in a police altercation just down the street at the corner of Shaw and Klemm. Chants of “No Justice, No Peace,” “Indict, convict, send that killer cop to jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell,” and “Black Lives Matter” reverberated through the streets as three or four hundred of us walked together. We went back and forth between the two sites a few times before pausing at MoKaBe’s (Mo’s for short) so those who wished to take advantage of Mo’s safe space status to warm up, get some coffee or snacks, or use the restroom could do so before we left for our next stop. This time our destination was Highway 44. This is a good time to note that other than having two police cars at every intersection keeping traffic away from us, there was no police presence. All we ever saw of them were their cars blocking traffic, not even any officers out of their vehicles. That all changed at the highway.

Protesters walked out onto the highway and shut down traffic to call attention to the cause and to carry through on the chant of, “Who shut shit down? We shut shit down! No justice, no peace.” Blocking the highway is a fairly peaceful action whose harm mostly comes in the form of inconvenience to drivers. The goal was to shut it down for four and a half minutes with one minute for every hour Mike’s body was left in the street but we ended up staying for a bit longer. That was when at least one hundred cops showed up in their riot gear and stood in a face off with protesters. After they started advancing some of the protesters dispersed to go home but a decent number stayed with the group as we decided to march back to Mo’s. The police followed us.

For a while about one hundred protesters stood on the sidewalk, on the patio of Mo’s, or inside MoKaBe’s building itself while cops formed a line across Arsenal blocking access to Grand and repeated over the bullhorn “This is an unlawful assembly. Please get out of the street and disperse immediately.” The crowd would say back, “You’re an unlawful assembly, please get out of the street,” “We’re on a public sidewalk,” and “We have a right to protest.” This was also when a second squad of cop cars arrived and blocked off the street slightly farther down Arsenal effectively trapping protesters at the coffee shop. Individuals *may* have been able to pass the police lines but as a group we were going no where. They kept us trapped that way for an hour and a half and then the tear gas came.

They fired tear gas at the building, forcing those outside to run in and filling the inside of the building with fumes. We tried to run out the back door but another group of cops were there and fired more tear gas at us. A lot of folks fled to the basement and the medics immediately sprang into action. Let me tell you, those people were amazing. They were crucial in keeping people calm after we were gassed. I have asthma so I had been inside for much of trapping because I didn’t want to risk having my asthma triggered by being gassed for being outdoors. Who knew they would fire at the building? I didn’t have my inhaler but luckily one of the medics brought me one and encouraged me to sit when my body kept twitching and shaking. For a half an hour the police kept us trapped in the building by using teargas any time we opened the doors and arresting those who dared to try to leave. Almost exactly half an hour in they agreed to let us leave in mass without gassing us or arresting us if we walked out calmly and in the opposite direction of Grand. From 11:30 PM until 1:30 AM we had been trapped and now we were free to go. We decided that it was fitting to walk out with our hands up.

This was relatively calm compared to what was going down just twenty minutes away in Ferguson.

Tuesday was much more calm relatively speaking. We didn’t march, there was just a gathering at MoKaBe’s. The police did march though. They marched from the Alps Supermarket at the intersection of Grand and Magnolia to Mo’s in their riot gear telling any passerby (all of whom were on the sidewalks) to get out of the street. There were slightly fewer protesters at Mo’s that night, they did end up trapping protesters in the shop again (no gas this time), but something amazing also happened that night. Reverend Osagyefo Sekou gave a very moving speech and helped de-escalate the situation in a way that was very moving for a lot of people. This is his speech:

http://youtu.be/uf-z9zbeRys

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New York, NY

Stephanie Bernal-Martinez

I was a part of a group of folks who gathered in Union Square and marched through FDR and then Times Square, Columbus Circle and onward to the Westside Highway. We ended in Harlem. When we initially gathered, many black folks were speaking and sharing. At some point, though, there was a transition, and many non-black folks and other people of color began sharing and their words of “solidarity,” which ultimately silenced the fact that this is matter of anti-blackness.

We began marching. As we marched and ran into cops, I was incredibly frustrated with non-black folks who felt it in their right to yell, antagonize and get in the faces of cops while not fucking thinking twice about the danger we are putting black folks in. Several times I saw black folks asking non-black folks to check themselves and to pull their shit together.

As we continued, many non-black folks wanted to make changes to routes of the march because of heavily policed/blockaded roads without any real strategy. The arguing began, and many non-black folks were speaking over and literally yelling at black folks to do X/Y/Z route. Towards the end, I was defeated by the inability of non-black folks (myself included) to support black folks in true solidarity by listening, not co-opting their struggle and not putting their lives in more danger by aggressively interacting with cops. At the end, similar to the beginning gathering in Union Square, non-black folks were saying thigs like “We are all Trayvon, Mike, X.” And we are fucking not. This is anti-blackness. This is not solidarity. And us non-black folks need to do better.

Some other feelings I’m having about marching is that we non-black folks don’t only need to shut down streets. We need to shut down racism and anti-blackness in our personal lives. My general sentiment last night was that so many of with access marched and can go home without the fear of ever losing our life to police violence. What are we doing outside of marching? I felt strongly that the trademark white queer “anarchist” “punk” presence lacks any real analysis of how their bodies are not targets of anti-black violence, and conflating their issues with what happened in Ferguson is gross, violent, and racist.

Bottom line, Black Lives Matter. And as non-black folks, as queers and people of color we need to show up in solidarity with black folks, shut the fuck up, and do exactly what we are told.

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Los Angeles, CA

Cleo Anderson

For me, being out on the street wasn’t the most effective way of helping out. Instead, I monitored social media. I directed people who aren’t as tied into the community to the marches in their city.

It was very interesting to see people who normally wouldn’t be involved in direct action be really involved in creating carpools and making signs. It was also very cool to see so many of my young friends wanting to be really informed before they went out into the streets. Collecting information for people who couldn’t access media or only had access to mainstream news sources was the most difficult part; I watched the major news sources call people looters instead of reporting on the situation and had to deal with harassment from Wilson supporters online. In the midst of a lot of great work, there were still people who wanted to tear down the folks fighting the good fight.

Directing people also gave me a chance to see where gaps exist between organizers and the community. There were a lot of times that what people thought was common knowledge among protesters was new information for people in the crowd. How to treat tear gas or even how to ensure you have a number to call while in custody were things that many first-time protesters didn’t know or hadn’t thought of and were really glad to learn about. This was both cathartic and informative for many, many people.

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Seattle, WA

Frances Lee

There were hundreds of demonstrators in attendance, mostly white people, some non-black POC, then a handful of black people. I ran out of my house and joined the group when they marched to the police station in Capitol Hill (the corner was conveniently barricaded). We then went down through Central District and to I-5. It was passionate and loud, and also highly disorganized (understandable) and problematic. White men in black bloc were taunting the police and pushing over barricades, which was obnoxious, because they were the least likely targets and took the event as an excuse to be aggro and “fuck shit up.” Non-black organizers with loudspeakers were taking up most of the space, leading chants like “they’re murdering our youth,” effectively stamping out black voices and taking the spotlight by promoting their own revolution organizations.

It felt odd hearing the chant “no justice no peace, no racist police,” as if individual racist police were the problem; no, this is racism embedded with classism and our entire structure must be dismantled. How do you communicate this concept to the watching public? There was no route planned and the group threatened to splinter at every intersection. At one point, we disrupted a gathering at a community center hosted by the police. The crowd called for the police to leave, and later back on the street, a black woman asked for a few moments of silence as she read names of black men murdered by police. The crowd obeyed and shut up, surprisingly. After someone yelled about how protesters stopped traffic on the highway in Oakland, the crowd cheered and headed towards I-5. We surged onto the interstate freeway and were met by police, who started pepper spraying people in the face and throwing flash bombs that echoed across the city. It was apparent there was no safety plan —those hit (a black man and a black woman!) stumbled away wailing, with no one to help.

The ensuing conversations in my friend circle about inappropriate white involvement have been enraging and so, so tiring. Like, I had to kill a conversation with a new white guy friend who felt sorry for Macklemore getting flack for being (in the spotlight) at the Seattle protests, when I was highlighting about how his public appearance acted as a distraction and obstruction to real news on social media. My white girlfriend back in Austin attended the rally last night, and relayed to me how a white man took the stage and tried to emcee. She and several other white people confronted him and asked him to stop taking up so much space. I don’t know how else to say it —white folks, this is not about you, it’s not about your tears/sadness, back off, this is not your space, stop filling up social media with only your feelings and impressions, stop retweeting only white people, stop sharing only articles written by white people, stop co-opting this movement, stop getting offended when you are called out for being oppressive when you think you’re being helpful, just stop for a moment and listen. White allies need to step up and talk to other white people about this so the movement does not get derailed.

I was there at the protests because it felt critical to get out of the house and onto the streets, I was wrenched outside by the sick and anger growing in my gut. I am not black. Currently I am at a loss on how to best proceed without causing more harm. The only thing that is clear is the need to amplify black voices and promote black leadership. I’ve witnessed one manifestation of the horrible, pervasive effect of systemic racism — it completely traumatizes and exhausts those who are impacted, leaving everyone else completely clueless on how to respond, and unintentionally promoting more anti-black racism in some of their/our responses.

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London, UK

Anonymous

I was at the London vigil and protest. I’m still processing, but here goes.

The vigil (held outside the American Embassy) was peaceful and organized by the London Black Revs. The speeches connected Mike Brown’s murder in Ferguson to the murder of Mark Duggan by the police in the UK and the deaths of black people in police custody. Sean Rigg’s and Jimmy Mubenga’s deaths were also highlighted. I’m not sure how many people were there. BBC says hundreds, I think it was so many more. Over 2,000 people said they were attending.

A march wasn’t planned, but we ended up doing one spontaneously after an acquaintance of mine chanted “No justice, no peace, TAKE TO THE STREETS!” Suddenly, we were marching through Oxford Street and other parts of central London.

We chanted, “Who killed Mike Brown? Police killed Mike Brown!” outside a police station, which felt so powerful, especially when cars and vans beeped in solidarity, a (white) homeless man put his hands up, and a bus driver beeped his horn really loudly while some of the passengers cheered us on. On the flip side, my friends (almost all QTPOC) and I left when two police vans drove at full speed towards protestors on the street, who had to leap out of the way, and it looked like they were going to start kettling people. I’ve heard reports that there was a small kettle on Tottenham Court Road, and that the police were threatening people with arrests if they looked like they were regrouping (basically because some white men in balaclavas were tagging walls with “Justice for Mike Brown.”)

I thought it was a really powerful vigil and protest, but the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I feel. The white people shouting things during the supposed silence, the “Whose streets? Our streets!” chants coming from white mouths (felt kind of like I was claiming my space when I said it but when I think about white people saying it… no) and the way some of the speeches tried to tie in non-Black issues felt really wrong to me… (And the person who yelled “and brown people!” in response to a comment someone made about black victims?.) I found it great because I got to march in anger and not be ignored but I also can’t help but feel like it could have been better. It feels like we can never have a time to discuss a purely Black issue without other issues being discussed. It also does other issues a huge disservice. I have friends who left early because they couldn’t deal with white people saying “hands up, don’t shoot.”

As an aside, what I found really interesting were the reactions to my “Black lives matter!” sign. White people kept sneering and glaring at me.

Wunmi Bodu

I saw the white guys in balaclavas, too. At first they came in and spotted some friends, followed by 3/4 of the police — tops. Something reeked to me so I’m not surprised that it led to some trouble. I broke off a bit before the end because I was sick, so missed that progression of police presence. Overall I think the impromptu march was great. Still some things that didn’t sit well with me, but I think that’s part of everything I’m still mentally processing this week.

BLACKOUT: 11 Queer Black-Owned Business/Organizations You Can Support Today

Let’s talk about BLACKOUT, a movement to boycott commerce on Black Friday in hopes of getting somebody powerful to give a flying fuck about the lives of black people in this country. Most advocates for the boycott describe it as being just a boycott of large corporate retailers, others say it’s just a boycott of the specific brick-and-mortar Black Friday sales, others believe it should be a boycott of all businesses that are not black-owned. There are also live protests happening at malls all over the country. All of these actions resonate and offer hope for their own reasons, and we hope in this post to point you towards some black-owned businesses that need your support.

There will be two more posts coming out today that we wanna talk about a little bit w/r/t #NOTONEDIME. The holidays are a big time of year for us, and this year more than ever — we’ve literally never needed a profitable holiday season as badly as we do right now. We’re absolutely not black-owned, however, which is why we’ve had mixed feelings about doing the two posts we always do on Black Friday: 1) Our round-up of good Black Friday deals (all of which we profit from via affiliate kickbacks — we make more $$ from affiliate merchants than direct sale ads, and a huge chunk of that happens today and during the holidays) and 2) Our Black Friday Autostraddle Merch sale post.

So, here are the facts about what we are, and you can decide whether or not you feel okay about spending your money at our merch store or through any affiliate links this weekend: again, we are not black-owned, the co-founders of this business are white (Riese) and white-passing Puerto Rican (Alex). 43% of the work we’ve published this year was written by people of color. Almost our entire outside submission/solicitations budget is spent on writing from QTPOC. We donate to black queer pubs like ElixHEr and Black Girl Dangerous whenever possible. Of our 13 Senior & Subject Editors, six are WoC and two are black. This year Gabby Rivera started The QTPOC Speakeasy, a closed facebook group for Straddlers of Color, and we’re already seeing so much great work come out of that community, including the Sister Outsider Book Club and Speaking Out With Love For Mike Brown and individual posts from writers found through the speakeasy. This weekend, we’re doing a 20% off deal for our merch but anybody who doesn’t use the discount code will have 20% of their purchase funneled straight into the budget we’re building to do even more long-term editorial projects with The QTPOC Speakeasy. That’s us. You might find that information inspiring but you very well might find it useless or even disappointing. We’re not asking for a cookie or saying we deserve one (we don’t!), we’re just giving you the facts and you can do what you want to do with them.

Now, let’s talk about some places who without a doubt absolutely and most definitely could use your support today!

 

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Queer Black-Owned Businesses/Organizations

Haute Butch
Founder and CEO KMichelle is an African-American Butch Woman and her label celebrates the fact that butch women feel most empowered when they are in clothes and shoes that they connect with.

Black Girl Dangerous
Founded by Mia McKenzie as “a scream of anguish,” BGD is a forum that amplifies the voice of queer and trans people of color. In addition to donations, you can purchases a copy of Mia’s self-published book.

ELIXHER
ELIXHER is a GLAAD Media Award-nominated website and magazine. It is your go-to resource for all things empowering, thought-provoking, and pertinent to Black queer and trans women.

bklyn boihood
bklyn boihood’s mission is to spread love through community-building events, music and art while sharing our journey as bois of color who believe in safe spaces, accountable action and self-care

Trans Women of Color Collective
TWOCC was created to uplift the narratives, leadership, and lived experience of trans folks of color.

Audre Lorde Project
The Audre Lorde Project is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color community organizing center, focusing on the New York City area.

Toni Newman
Toni Newman is the author of I Rise, and is the first African-American transgender person to write a memoir in the United States.

MsHandsome T-shirts
T-shirts designed with queer black women in mind.

ZM Productions & Media 
Founded by Z’ma Wyatt and Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig, ZM productions publishes Shades magazine and offers media, social media/networking, organizational development, and website design services.

Dalila Fairy
Dalila is a Fairy Card reader who wants to help you create a life you love through intuitive guidance, clear decisive action, and clearing of blocks.

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Donate to the Speakeasy!

The QTPOC Speakeasy
You can donate to our QTPOC Speakeasy. We currently pay all QTPOC contributors to Autostraddle, but we’re working on building up a budget that Gabby and other Speakeasy leadership would have independent control over and that would enable us to do more long-term editorial projects, essay series, and to be able to solicit more work from writers we typically can’t employ.

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More Black Queer & Trans Authors You Should Support

You can find lots of links to books you need to pick up here: 10 Novels & Memoirs By and About Black Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Women. Here are some others that have been in the news recently:

Roxanne Gay
Bad Feminist, An Untamed State, Ayiti and more. 

Janet Mock
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

Mia McKenzie
The Summer We Got Free and Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender

Jacqueline Woodson
Brown Girl Dreaming

Nia King
Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives

Samantha Irby
Meaty: Essays by Samantha Irby

You should also support the work of the writers and artists talked about in 100 LGBTQ Black Women You Should Know: The Epic Black History Month Megapost.

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Other Resources

• What About Our Daughters has created a list of 800+ Creative Black Women You Can Support on Cyber Monday: Black-Owned Etsy Stores.
• Afrobella posted a list of 101 Independent Black Owned Businesses to Support for Blackout Friday.
• Some folks on Tumblr are live-updating a running list of black-owned businesses.
• We compiled a list of ways you can show up for Ferguson, many of which are through monetary donations.

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If you know of any queer black-owned businesses or organizations that we missed, let us know in the comments and we’ll update this post!

The Myth of Plausible Deniability for Anti-Black Violence & How Ferguson Birthed a Movement

feature image via Antonio Scorza / Shutterstock.com

The city of Ferguson has been protesting steadily since the night Mike Brown was murdered. 107 straight days of protest in one form or another. The non indictment of Darren Wilson brought protesters from LA to Palestine into the streets of their cities to voice their anger over this questionable verdict. Many people across all walks of American life are coming together and saying that this isn’t OK and things need to change. But amidst the tears, arrests and solidarity, the question of why this particular murder has set off what seems to be the entire globe keeps popping up in interviews. What makes this case motivate people to get out and come together to not just talk about racism, but put their bodies on the line to make it stop? To answer that you need to look at what prevented White Americans from seeing Mike Brown in Renisha McBride and Ezell Ford: plausible deniability.

In the case of every murder or assault of a young Black person in the past 10 years there has been, for some people and to some degree, plausible deniability. There were no witnesses when Trayvon Martin was murdered; “anything could have happened out there.” The cops didn’t have the whole story when Kendrec McDade was murdered, “they were just doing their job.” It was late, people were drunk and the cell phone video “wasn’t the whole story” of Oscar Grant’s murder. There has always been a reason that made it easy for White Americans and non-Black POC to claim to be unsure if it was really about race. They could deny that (specifically anti-Black) racism is in fact a thing here in the US because they didn’t have all of the facts. People outside the US were left with mainstream media tidbits and the occasional celebrity commenting on the inequality of America as their lens through which to view these murders. This left many Black Americans with 1) the hope that one day they would have a case with all the facts to give and 2) slow-simmering rage.

Mike Brown’s murder and the subsequent events were, and are, about race. A White cop shooting an unarmed Black boy is a situation that, in America, is almost always going to be about race. Our history is steeped in racialized violence.But for a generation of White Americans who have been raised to be “colorblind” and who have only come into contact with racism in the form of textbook photos of lynching and Bill O’Reilly sound bites, this idea can be hard to swallow. Ferguson, or more accurately the social media timeline of Ferguson, blew apart the idea of living in a “post racial” America. Before the police could even send out a coroner, the residents of Mike’s neighborhood were posting to Twitter and Vine what they were seeing and hearing. When the cops showed up and started firing tear gas into peaceful crowds, the protesters were streaming video to YouTube. For maybe the first time in the history of racial violence, the victims could speak their truth without words and in real-time. They gave America, but specifically White America, the chance to bear witness to the reality of being Black and not dying silently. Within 24 hours the story had gone viral and mainstream news crews made plans to head out if the violence continued, which of course it did.

And White Americans were forced to watch CNN and Fox News report the falsified information Ferguson PD was putting out, even as they scrolled through their Twitter feed and saw the truth. Amnesty International sent in observers, who are usually sent into war zones, to investigate the militarization of the Black part of the city. Observers were investigating how the police were dealing with US citizens on American soil. There was no way to deny that Ferguson had a race problem, had a truth problem, would have its day in court.

But when that day came, despite all the evidence presented, Darren Wilson walked. A very ugly truth came to light. The bad guys weren’t Southerners that could be looked down upon and laughed at for being backwards. The bad guys were cops and soldiers who had been sworn to protect and high school friends who called Mike a thug and complained about the “race card” being played. Society at large was complicit in this situation and for many White people it was the first time they realized the bad guys looked like them. And if the facts had been ignored now, how many other times had they had the privilege of entertaining the idea that maybe it wasn’t about race? How many times had they been complicit in oppressing Black people fighting for justice? Hard questions that many have begun to find peace with in the streets.

Black people have been rising up against mistreatment at the hands of White people since the 1700s when the first documented slave rebellion took place in the colonies. We did it in the ’60s and again in the 90’s after the Rodney King verdict. We are well versed in the language of resistance. But for the most part our fight for people to stand up and recognize our humanity and suffering has been met with small gains in the wake of huge repetitive tragedies. When a Black person is gunned down we are consistently met with the plausible deniability wall when it comes to people believing us. We are also chastised or feared when we express anger and a need for justice. We are told by White people and in the years since the Civil Rights movement, Black leaders, to turn the other cheek. Violence will never make things change. Nevermind the Boston Tea Party or French Revolution. So as we watched the Mike Brown case unfold, many of us were given hope that maybe things had changed. The police couldn’t lie because the internet was on the case to debunk whatever new story they concocted, and the cameras were catching everything on the ground. We finally had a scenario that would bring justice to family and vindicate us for years of not being believed when we called out racist police tactics.

That is why it wasn’t just painful to see Mike’s mother fall apart, it was devastating. (Some) Black folks really believed that this would be that case that would hold. Someone would finally pay for murdering a Black child. Instead we were given a speech that blamed social media for making the investigation hard and in essence said that a Black boys murder wasn’t even worth looking into further. Even with evidence and public opinion on our side, we lost. What is left to do when you’ve prayed, and cried, and waited for the justice system to do its job? What do you do when Black boys know that it doesn’t matter if they’re in a gang or simply crossing the street; they can be murdered at the discretion of a police officer and there’s nothing they can do? What do you do when you’ve done everything “right” and you are still mistreated? You take it to the streets. You take your rage and pain and power you make people listen. You burn and you scream and you keep screaming until someone else shows up and offers you a hand. In this case the hands came from some of the most unlikely places.

London is standing in solidarity with Ferguson. Vancouver is standing in solidarity with Ferguson. Mexico, Hong Kong, Egypt and Palestine are all standing in solidarity. Marginalized people across the globe are banding together to support Black Americans in their fight. This is not something that happens very often, because marginalized people rarely have the chance to bring their problem to the table and find common ground. But tear gas is a uniter of people and on the first night of police violence in Ferguson, rebel fighters in Palestine shared with citizens on the ground how to treat tear gas and spray victims. People who had participated in the revolution in Egypt passed on the best ways to ensure your video equipment survived a run in with soldiers. Students fighting the government cover-up in Mexico shared their love and solidarity with the kids in Ferguson fighting for the right to live. All because social media accounts made it possible for them to see what was really going on without the lens of mainstream media clouding the goings on.

That clarity has let groups of people who are literally worlds apart step outside their preconceived notions of what it means to be an American or foreign and simply see people fighting for their lives. The world got a little smaller and agendas merged when faced with the reality of blatant and violent racism. The bonds that were forged will be hard to break and therefore will support the movement for a long time to come.

Ferguson is about Black rage in the face of systematic racism first and foremost, but it is no longer just Black rage. It’s White people’s rage at recognizing the problem in society and their place in that society. It’s the rage of the marginalized rebels across the globe who have finally found common ground with Black Americans. It’s the pain of Mike Brown’s parents on the night of the verdict and it’s the shattered hope that each march slowly begins to piece back together. This time it’s not a moment. It’s a movement.

How You Can Show Up For Ferguson

Like so many of you, Autostraddle’s staff spent most of yesterday anxiously awaiting the St. Louis County grand jury decision on Darren Wilson, and most of last night in a state of devastated disbelief as we learned that the jury chose not to indict the man who murdered unarmed black teenager Michael Brown earlier this summer. After the announcement, we watched as people across the nation gathered to protest the continued devaluation of black lives in America, and President Obama equivocated from The White House.

A lot of us woke up feeling helpless and heartbroken, but even more determined to never, ever, ever give up the fight. So, in that spirit, we have compiled a list of ways that you can help the people of Ferguson who refuse to be silenced as they spread the message that Black Lives Matter.

PHOTO: Police prepare to advance during demonstration in Oakland, California #Ferguson http://t.co/xbbxRDgLBf pic.twitter.com/uCHxytMWiE

— RT (@RT_com) November 25, 2014

Firstly, let me quote Rachel Kincaid:

Generally and most importantly, especially if you are a white person, follow the lead of the black people of Ferguson and black organizers elsewhere; listen to find out what’s needed rather than making assumptions.

And, with that in mind, here are some practical ways to get involved:

Stay informed

+ Quartz published a really excellent list back in August called “12 things white people can do now because Ferguson.” It is a great launching point for understanding America’s radicalized racial history and the way propagandized narratives perpetuate our very broken system.

+ Tolerance.org is compiling a growing list of resources for teachers “who want to help their students understand what happened in Ferguson, contextualize its place in our nation’s history and empower young people to work for a more just, peaceful world.” You can also use the resources to talk to the non-student kids in your life.

+ Expand your media horizons. Don’t get all your news from white-dominated sources; look to places like Colorlines, This Week in Blackness, and The Root.

+ Read the hard stuff. Audio and written transcripts of Darren Wilson’s testimony are available, and it will make you sick to read much of what he said, but it is important to know the whole truth of what we’re dealing with.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/537116367666040832

Donate

+ Ferguson Movement Rapid Giving has compiled an extensive list of grassroots organizations that will feel the impact right now by monetary donations. These include: Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, Organization for Black Struggle, Lost Voices, and Freedom Fighters.

+ The social media activist organization Help or Hush has been vital in breaking news on the ground from Ferguson for months.

+ Ferguson schools were closed today, but the Ferguson Library is committed to staying open and continuing to be a safe space for both children and adults. They are accepting donations of time, money and books.

+ The National Lawyers Guild has been present on the front lines since August and plans to continue to support Ferguson protestors. Donations go toward court fees, housing and travel for Legal Observers.

+ Many teachers and schools in Ferguson are raising funds for supplies through Donors Choose.

+ You can also donate directly to Anti-State STL for bail and legal fees for protestors who have been arrested.

Students protest lack of indictment in fatal shooting of Michael Brown:https://t.co/6lFBYrkHjX pic.twitter.com/QgdCyRQrH9

— Inside Higher Ed (@insidehighered) November 25, 2014

Use Your Voice

+ Don’t sit silently at your Thanksgiving table while your Fox News-watching relatives spread racist rhetoric. Speak truth into your interactions with people who refuse to get it.

+ Use Twitter, Facebook, Tumbr, Instagram, Storify, etc. to share updates, calls to action, poignant observations, and your own thoughts and feelings about the atrocities of racism in the United States.

+ Show up at one of the protests happening all around the world today. Check out a full list on Ferguson National Response’s Tumblr.

+ Remember the longterm goal. Let me quote our own Hannah Hodson:

But there are many who want to make clear that these protests are not all about the indictment of Darren Wilson. The protests are about changing American politics and practices from the bottom-up. Not just electing Black and brown people to office, but eradicating the school-to-prison pipeline and creating real opportunities for systematically oppressed people.

If you have more ideas for ways to help, please share them in the comments.

Editor’s note: When I was putting together this post yesterday, I was compiling new resources with a list of resources Rachel Kincaid made a few months ago when Brown was first murdered, which is why I quoted her twice in this post — but in doing so, I made the mistake of silencing people of color by not asking for input from our QPOC writers or pulling from our extensive archives where QPOC have written some powerful, heartbreaking, revelatory things about Ferguson. I am deeply sorry. I am sickened by my own white privilege blinders. I promise to be more vigilant going forward. 

BREAKING: No Grand Jury Indictment of Darren Wilson for Mike Brown’s Death; Protests in Ferguson & Nationwide

feature image via Jeff Roberson/AP Photos

After weeks of little to no communication, confusion and contradiction about the date of the decision, the pre-emptive institution of a state of emergency, and increased threatening police presence, a decision by the grand jury regarding Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. Tonight, the announcement came that the grand jury did not indict Darren Wilson for his shooting of Michael Brown. 

Brown’s family has asked for 4 1/2 minutes of silence immediately after the announcement of the decision in honor of their son’s memory.

The grand jury considered whether to indict Darren Wilson on any combination of a number of charges: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter. Outside of the grand jury decision, it’s still technically possible that Wilson could still be subject to a Justice Department investigation at the federal level, having his police license stripped, or a civil lawsuit. However, these options are unlikely; past precedents show that these are all options that are rarely taken up, and aren’t always effective:

More than two years into the investigation of the death of another unarmed black teen, Trayvon Martin, the department has yet to come to a decision on whether to bring charges against George Zimmerman, the man who killed him.

The grand jury process is fairly dense and confusing when viewed from the outside; the Washington Post has a breakdown of it here, as does the AP. Important takeaways are that the grand jury isn’t a trial itself, just a process by which to decide whether something will go to trial at all. The standard of proof is lower than in “regular” criminal court — grand jurors only need to decide whether there’s probable cause to believe Wilson committed a crime, not “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Also, the jury doesn’t need to be unanimous on their decision — only 9 of the 12 jurors need to agree on it. It’s not clear when we’ll see what evidence was presented to the grand jury — McCulloch’s office has said that they’ll release the evidence even without a judge’s approval, but it’s unclear how long that will take. The state is under no legal obligation to release the names of the jurors, but sources say that 9 of the jurors were white, and only 3 Black or African-American.

can we just take a moment and #Ferguson #MikeBrown pic.twitter.com/kJucb4cCHY

— ꒻ꋬ꒯ꏂ (@JadeReindl) November 24, 2014

Just days before the decision was handed down, activists examined video evidence that suggests that Mike Brown was in fact a full 148 feet away from Darren Wilson’s SUV when he was shot, and not 35 feet, as claimed by Ferguson police. The grand jury ruling also comes in the midst of reports that Darren Wilson may plan to resign rather than return to the police force, not because he believes he did anything wrong but to “help ease pressure and protect his fellow officers.” Wilson has reportedly expressed that he didn’t want to turn in his resignation unless the grand jury returned a decision that was favorable to him, so that he wouldn’t appear to be admitting guilt.

Insane RT @OwlsAsylum: RT @Bipartisanism: EVERYTHING in #Ferguson is locked down including the public mail system. pic.twitter.com/d28J8GDSbu

— Dr. Cornel Fresh (@WyzeChef) November 24, 2014

Even before the grand jury decision was released, Ferguson and the surrounding areas have been in a state of high tension. Schools in the Jennings School District closed Monday and Tuesday in anticipation of the ruling; local businesses were advised to board up their windows in anticipation of riots, although some businesses chose to demonstrate their faith in their communities and peaceful protest by electing to leave their windows unprotected. Although the mayor of St. Louis, Francis Slay, declared that “If protesters are non-violent, police will not be aggressive,” the increased police presence and declaration of state of emergency have many anxious about violent repercussions for protesters.

Protesters setting up a tent near #Ferguson police dept. It's cold here! So windy police can't use tear gas. pic.twitter.com/dfdM7h5RHD

— Moni Basu (@TheMoniBasu) November 24, 2014

Since Brown’s death and the increasing tension around the grand jury ruling, there’s been an atmosphere of increased visibility and awareness around the murders of other young Black and brown people by police. To name just a few, the list includes Vonderrit Myers, Tanesha Anderson, Kajieme Powell, Vernicia Woodard, John Crawford, Darrien Hunt, and just yesterday Tamir Rice, who was only 12 years old. Just yesterday protesters in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis marched to block off Kingshighway Boulevard in remembrance of Vonderrit Myers. Connections are also being made in activist spaces to link different judicial injustices, like the event being held in Chicago this evening in solidarity with both Ferguson and Marissa Alexander (who accepted a plea deal today).

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The conversation about Ferguson, Mike Brown’s death, and what justice looks like in our communities isn’t over. Here are more ways to get involved:

List of nationwide Ferguson solidarity events

Information and resources about protests and safe spaces/sanctuaries

Contribute to the National Lawyers Guild Fund for Ferguson legal support

Contribute to the fund for Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment Legal Support Team

Read an open letter from Ferguson protesters

MO Governor Jay Nixon Enacts Preemptive State of Emergency, Activates National Guard as Response to Ferguson Activism

Yesterday, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon enacted a pre-emptive 30-day state of emergency, anticipating violence following the decision on whether or not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the fatal August 9th shooting of Black teen Michael Brown.

Although there is as of yet no indication when the indictment will happen (or whether it will happen), Nixon has activated the National Guard for this state of emergency. And, though Mayor Francis Slay has stated they “do not want people to feel like they have to panic or be afraid,” the decision sounds woefully similar to the essential police state created during the mostly peaceful protests directly following the shooting.

At least one day after the death of Michael Brown, there were reports of looting and violence in Ferguson. However, the following weeks revealed that non-violent protesters were being falsely accused of throwing Molotov cocktails. The militarized police force responded with tear gas despite residents having been explicitly told that the midnight curfew would not be enforced with tear gas. The protests seem to have calmed down, if only to say that there have been little to no reports of violence, but the protesters are still making their presence known. A movement is certainly building in Missouri, where a four day peaceful protest called “Ferguson October” was staged on October 10th, followed by a day of action held on October 22nd. On the ground, people are coming out in droves to peacefully protest what many see as the epitome of American infrastructural racism. On Sunday, protestors laid down inside chalk drawings outlining their bodies to recognize 100 days since the death of Michael Brown, with one protestor stating, “We just wanted them to know that it doesn’t matter if the weather is bad, good, ugly. We’ll be out here because this means that much to us.” Considering all of the broken promises made during the initial response to the shooting, it’s no wonder protestors and residents alike might be panicked and afraid that their growing movement will be met with rubber bullets and tear gas if Darren Wilson is not indicted. This preemptive state of emergency not only highlights the distrust between the mostly-white leadership of Ferguson and the mostly-Black population, but serves to heighten the tension and potential for violence.

But there are many who want to make clear that these protests are not all about the indictment of Darren Wilson. The protests are about changing American politics and practices from the bottom-up. Not just electing Black and brown people to office, but eradicating the school-to-prison pipeline and creating real opportunities for systematically oppressed people. In a recent viral video taken from a PBS segment entitled After Ferguson, the executive director of Dream Defenders, Phillip Agnew perfectly encapsulates the collective frustrations and aspirations of Black and brown people fighting American systemic racism:

One of the last things that Dr. King said before he died was that he feared that he had brought us into a burning building.

And, so, if you’re getting people elected into a system that by its very nature was meant to cannibalize and kill communities, then you have only done half of the job. And so I think it’s a “yes, and.” We need people that look like us, but black officers — I have had interactions with black officers that were way worse than white officers.

And, so, it’s not a matter of just having a representative that’s on the city council or in the mayor’s office or on the police force that looks like you. They have got to come from the community, know the issues of the community, and then there’s folks in the community that have got to remind them every day that we pay your bills, and we’re watching every single day to ensure that the platform on which we elected you with is followed, and also defend you when those people that seek to calibrate the system and right the system as it’s been built seek to come at you for that office…

So I never mentioned black, white or people. I mentioned systems. And so the arrest of Darren Wilson, if it happens, and the conviction of Darren Wilson, if it happens, though the system and the history would tell us that it may not, will not alleviate the problems that are happening here and that are happening around the country.

While the indictment of Wilson is a powder keg issue that could incite riots, it is not the end-goal of these massive protests. With that said, one way to ensure that the protests will remain peaceful is to put away the military-grade weaponry and indict Darren Wilson: “No Justice, No Peace.”

Update: Ferguson is the current political “hot zone,” but systemic racism is ubiquitious across the US and tons of people are getting involved on a local level, showing support for the protesters of Ferguson, and drawing attention to local or state-specific issues. If you would like to locate a protest in your area, please check out the Ferguson National Response Network tumblr. If you are organizing your own protest, you can spread awareness by advertising the event through their submissions page.