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BUILDING ACCOUNTABLE COMMUNITIES :The Barnard Center for Research on Women 

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BUILDING ACCOUNTABLE COMMUNITIES :The Barnard Center for Research on Women 

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Building Accountable Communities

What do we mean when we talk about transformative justice and accountability? What does a survivor-centered response look like in practice? How can we support those who have caused harm without defaulting to punishment? What does real accountability look like? What has worked, and what obstacles have organizers and community members faced in building this difficult and necessary practice?
Created with Project NIA, these videos are part of the Building Accountable Communities Project, promoting non-punitive responses to harm by developing resources for transformative justice practitioners and organizing convenings and workshops that educate the public.

As the ongoing worldwide protests against police violence so vividly demonstrate, there is an increasing demand to end policing and develop real strategies for keeping each other safe. On October 21, 2020 longtime anti-violence organizers and transformative justice practitioners Shira Hassan and Mimi Kim joined us for a conversation about the history and development of transformative justice, its importance in current movements towards liberation, and everyday practices.

In response to heightened levels of abuse and violence experienced by people with disabilities, disability justice organizers have developed tremendous knowledge and creative approaches to care, safety, and preventing and stopping violence without relying on the state. How do disability justice strategies and knowledge inform transformative justice practices? How are disability justice and transformative justice interconnected? On April 10, 2020, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Elliott Fukui joined us for an online conversation about the intersections of disability justice and transformative justice.

On October 25, 2019, anti-violence and transformative justice organizers Nastassja "Stas" Schmiedt and A. Lea Roth joined Mariame Kaba for an online discussion about supporting harm doers in being accountable, shame and other obstacles to accountability, and the roles of consent and conflict in practicing transformative justice.

Accountability is a familiar buzz-word in contemporary social movements, but what does it mean? How do we work toward it? In this series of four short videos, anti-violence activists Kiyomi Fujikawa and Shannon Perez-Darby ask and explore: What does it look like to be accountable to survivors without exiling or disposing those who do harm? On October 26, 2018, Kiyomi and Shannon joined Mariame Kaba for the first online discussion in the Building Accountable Communities series.

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Building Accountable Communities | Barnard Center for Research on Women

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Building Accountable Communities on Barnard Center for Research on Women

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love WITH accountability : Digging Up the Roots  of Child Sexual Abuse :  Edited by Aishah Shahidah Simmons                                                                                                    Content Notice (Pg 5) CHAPTER 7: Embracing Our Humanity in the Accountability Process An Interview with Tracy Ivy (pg 56-57)CHAPTER 9: “An Outro to LILACS | Syringa vulgaris” Thea Matthews (pg 61-65)    

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love WITH accountability : Digging Up the Roots  of Child Sexual Abuse :  Edited by Aishah Shahidah Simmons                                                                                                    Content Notice (Pg 5) CHAPTER 7: Embracing Our Humanity in the Accountability Process An Interview with Tracy Ivy (pg 56-57)CHAPTER 9: “An Outro to LILACS | Syringa vulgaris” Thea Matthews (pg 61-65)    

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Love WITH Accountability Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse by Aishah Shahidah Simmons Darnell L. Moore (z-lib.org).epub.pdf

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The Revolution Starts at Home :                           taking risks: implementing grassroots community accountability strategies (Pg 64-69)an interview with Alexis Paulina Gumbs of UBUNTU (Pg 80-82)

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The Revolution Starts at Home :                           taking risks: implementing grassroots community accountability strategies (Pg 64-69)an interview with Alexis Paulina Gumbs of UBUNTU (Pg 80-82)

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The Revolution Starts at Home Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities by Ching-In Chen, Dulani, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 

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Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Break Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration by Danielle Sered        -     Confronting the question of violence (pg 4-6)      

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Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Break Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration by Danielle Sered        -     Confronting the question of violence (pg 4-6)      

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No Health, No CareThe Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath

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No Health, No CareThe Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath

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The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath

Medical fatphobia isn't the result of providers not knowing some special cheat codes for working with fat patients. Providers didn't all miss the day in medical school where students were taught how not to be cruel to fat people. Fatphobia is medicine's status quo.

words by Marquisele Mercedes | art by Rachelle Abellar | 6,187 words | a 26-minute read

A note on language: Apart from quoted material, this article uses the term "obesity," the medicalized notion of fatness, in quotes or censored as ob*sity as per fat liberationist conventions that reject the idea that fatness is a disease. The concept of ob*sity is used to exact violence on fat people, and fat activists regard it as a slur. The medical use of "obesity" does not negate this reality.

The first time I was penetrated I was thirteen, almost fourteen. The lights were on and bright. My gray sweatpants sat discarded on a chair with my stretched-out underwear. My mom was a few feet away, on the other side of a locked door.

Moments before it happened, I was asked in a few coded but unsubtle ways if I had ever had sex. I said no. I was reminded, in case I'd forgotten, that I was a "developed girl" and "developed girls" often got "certain kinds" of attention that encouraged them to do "certain things." But I had not forgotten; it is impossible to be a young fat Black girl and forget.

I had come to the Pediatric Emergency Department at Montefiore's Children's Hospital with intense cramps. I'd been sitting with my mom in a tiny room for nine hours before I was wheeled away to see a doctor. A nurse told her to stand outside and instructed me to undress from the waist down and wait. When my doctor-a thin blonde woman-entered the room, she said hello with a big smile but didn't tell me her name. She asked whether I was sexually active but didn't seem satisfied with my answers. Then she told me to lay back, scoot my bottom toward the end of the table, and spread my legs so she could "take a look." She didn't explain what that meant or what she was doing or what she had done after it was over. I screamed for her to stop, shouted "No!" over and over. The speculum had painfully snapped inside of me a second time when she said "Wow, you really weren't lying!" I could only sob with so much helplessness it made my throat rattle. When she finished, she said she would come back to discuss things with me, but she didn't. I was sent home with instructions to take Motrin and "stay out of trouble." The STI tests all came back negative.

This is medical fatphobia.

Medical fatphobia refers to the specific ways that hatred and denigration of fatness manifest within medicine and the fields that medicine influences, like public health. It is the reason many fat people likely didn't get or know to ask to have their COVID-19 vaccine administered with an appropriate-length needle, and why the American Academy of Pediatrics supports bariatric surgery for fat kids despite the incredible risks.

Mainstream writing on fatphobia usually gives in to the myth that there is something exceptional about fatphobic violence in healthcare. That fat people, in all our corpulent clumsiness, are just more likely to stumble across the assholes.

This is not true. It is a lie that has been actively propagated with the assistance of the many not-fat people who have shaped our collective understanding of how fatphobia operates. The truth is that fatphobia is a scientific invention. Fatphobia did not penetrate science; it is derived from science. Everything you know about "obesity," about fatness, about fatphobia, about fat people has been - and is still - wrong.
A step back: If you want to challenge fatphobia, you have to start with the understanding that fat people are worthy of respect, safety, and dignity. A "but" cannot follow this statement. Fat people are worthy of respect, safety, and dignity. Fat people are worthy of respect, safety, and dignity no matter how fat they are. F at people are worthy of respect, safety, and dignity no matter how sick they are, no matter how much they eat, no matter how much they move, no matter how far they are from any notion of health, however defined. Articles that try to correct people's preconceived notions about ob*sity do not usually start with these assertions. But then again, articles like these are not usually written by fat people and are almost never written by fat Black people. Articles like these are not usually written by anyone with any real skin in the game. But mine is. I'm in the thick of this. In writing this to you, I am fighting for my life.
In Da'Shaun Harrison's Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, the Black fat queer trans abolitionist theorist notes that "for race to be constructed, the Slave had to exist-and had to exist as the antithesis of health-so that European physicians, anthropologists, and other eugenicists could determine what set the Slave apart from the... Caucasian."

This is the origin story of anti-fatness.

During the European Enlightenment, natural philosophers fixated on classifying the contours of the world and its inhabitants. These proto-scientists used colonial travel accounts and the spectacle of non-European peoples displayed in Europe to theorize on the link between physical characteristics and fundamental character. The expansion of slavery combined with philosophers' preoccupation with hierarchy translated into the widespread acceptance of race science that defined Blackness as the ultimate inferior and White people as the god-ordained superior race. By the 1700s, enslaved people were, more often that not, Black. The implicit associations between Blackness and inferiority calcified over the next three centuries.

These European thinkers often focused on separating humans into different races by physical features or geographical location and ordering them from best (always White people) to worst (almost always Black people). They used perceived differences in intelligence and attractiveness, customs they witnessed on travels, and the degrading descriptions of African peoples that they read in the work of peers and predecessors. Using this race "science," these white Europeans linked fatness to blackness by classifying fatness as inherent to non-White peoples. Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the binomial system we still use for naming plants and animals, defined four varieties of humans: European white, American reddish, Asian tawny, and African black. Unsurprisingly, White people were declared as the most intelligent race, while Black people were described as "lazy," "careless," "covered by grease," and "ruled by caprice."

In the mid-1800s, new efforts to measure bodies and populations at the state level produced quantitative data that scientists and mathematicians used to invent normalcy and deviance, including ideal and non-ideal weights. Swimming among these streams of quantification was Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who took statistical theories from astronomy and applied them to decidedly terrestrial data sets: body measurements like head circumference (aka "anthropometric" data) and population data like birth and death rates (aka "social" data). Quetelet found bell curves in both sets, with data clustering around a mean and falling sharply off on either side. At the peak of the curve, the center and highest point, is the average value for the set. For Quetelet, that peak became l'homme moyen: the average, ideal European man. In 1835, he published these findings and more in a series of books that included the Quetelet index: "If we compare two individuals who are fully developed and well-formed with each other, to ascertain the relations existing between the weight and the stature, we shall find that the weight of the developed persons, of different heights, is nearly as the square of the stature." Ancel Keys, the weight researcher who popularized the Mediterranean Diet and created military K-rations, would go on to define an entire area of research in 1972 when he refashioned Quetelet's Index into the Body Mass Index to measure ob*sity across different populations. The Body Mass Index was later adopted in 1985 by the National Institutes of Health in the US to define ob*sity. A decade later, the World Health Organization released a report that set the BMI categories and ranges we still use to fat people's misfortune today.

(None of this is news: There are many texts that discuss the cultural, social, and scientific history of fatness - Christopher Forth's Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life, Amy Erdman Farrell's Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, Georges Vigarello's The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity, and, most recently, Sabrina Strings's Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, to name a few - although most are written by not-fat scholars. There are plenty of fat researchers and students, like myself, who study fat stigma, but an anti-fat world is one without fat experts. Not because fat people do not amass expertise, but because our fatness means we're not worth learning from.)

When you look at a fat person now, regardless of your own weight, you see a manifestation of ob*sity because of a social process called pathologization, which was first conceptualized with respect to fatness by narrative medicine researcher Rachel Fox and her team. Pathologization reduces an individual down to the qualities or stereotypes of a disease as dictated by dominant medical knowledge. When you see a fat person, you associate them with ob*sity. What you believe about ob*sity and have internalized from health authorities-its causes, symptoms, consequences, treatment, and more-then guide your interaction with that fat person. You see an affliction to be cured rather than a human being. Fatphobia starts at the top, with scientific authorities who set the tone for how we think about health and illness, then seeps down to shape the lives of every fat person everywhere.

When fat people are pathologized, they suffer the effects of weight stigma; this is an academic, alienating way of saying they are subject to fatphobic interpersonal, institutional, and structural discrimination. Weight stigma researchers are mostly concerned with how weight stigma relates to individual health behaviors, risks, and events like "poor" eating and exercise habits, mental illness, and mortality because most weight stigma research is in support of "obesity prevention" efforts. Rebecca Puhl and the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health are two of the most notable sources of weight stigma research in public health. Puhl has done Weight Watchers-funded research using WW participants enrolled across 6 different countries. This weight stigma research is specifically intended to help "obesity prevention" efforts function more effectively by giving them a less-stigmatizing veneer. They are far from the only ones. There is plenty of research to paint a gruesome picture of the social, economic, and bodily suffering that stems from fatphobia.

Weight stigma is material. It means being paid less at work and being penalized in the classroom. "Weight stigma" is relentless. It means overt and tacit bullying - being mooed at while walking, coworkers not meeting your gaze, little "hints" and "tips" that remind you your eating is being surveilled by friends and family. Constant exposure to special reports about how people like you are draining the nation's coffers, ruining the world for future generations. "Weight stigma" is constant: unending reminders that the people around you wish you weren't you, pressure to starve yourself. Knowing that the more you undo your existence, the more you'll be rewarded.

But.

It is proven that weight loss is a useless, hopeless endeavor. You are unlikely to lose weight in any permanent way and highly likely to open yourself to the myriad risks associated with weight cycling. The relationship between weight and health is also muddy. People often mention research that suggests that fatness (up to a point) can be protective, but this often only has the effect of scapegoating the fattest among us, the infinifat people who are only acceptable to acknowledge via mocking entertainment. If you decide (or are pressured to) pursue gastric bypass surgery in order to escape fatphobia violence, you may not actually lose weight - for some, the main outcome is disordered eating, an attempt to salvage the benefits of an incredibly harmful and risky procedure. No study measuring the association between weight and health outcomes comes close to appropriately accounting for the impact of fatphobia on an individual's wellbeing, including how those impacts are likely the worst for the fattest among us.

In his popular 2018 article "Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong," Michael Hobbes wrote that "for 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives": that "diets do not work" and that "weight and health are not perfect synonyms." I would like to reiterate this in a different, more honest way: For over 60 years, doctors and researchers have likely harmed and killed millions of fat people through their insistence on social and scientific mandates for thinness and that ob*sity is a disease requiring intervention, despite the existence of evidence that says this is wrong.

There is no fitness regimen that can keep you moving when doctors refuse to perform a joint surgery you need. There is no diet that can keep you alive when your doctor dismisses the constant pain or discomfort you're begging them to acknowledge. There are no "health-conscious" behaviors that can nullify the harm done by health authorities who've made fat embodiment into disease and weight loss into cure. The only escapes that fat people are offered from a micromanaging, soul-draining existence are weight loss or death. And when we wisen up to the improbability of long-term weight loss, there's only one option left.
After the incident at Montefiore, I did not go to a gynecologist until I was nineteen. My legs shook from the feeling of being probed with another speculum while I asked the doctor if it was normal to have a chaperone in the room during pelvic exams. She said that it was standard: When a physician learns to perform a pelvic exam, the importance of chaperones, of explaining each step as it happens, of providing gentle encouragement and checking in frequently with the patient is "drilled into you." After the exam, I asked her if I could do anything for the heavy cramping and pain that came with each period. I bled through several pads a day and had been getting my period twice a month for the past year. After mentioning Midol, she told me that if I really wanted to have a lighter, more regular period, I should be doing my best to lose weight.
There are many things people don't quite understand about medical fatphobia. It is more than whether we can pass on getting weighed at the doctor's office. It is more than healthcare avoidance, although being disrespected, perceived as noncompliant, and exposed to harm by medical professionals are significant obstacles to accessing care. It is more than the potentially lifesaving cancer and breast screenings exams we do not receive and the eating disorder treatment we are deprived of.

Here are the three things people get wrong most often, in no particular order.

One: There is no difference between a) providers who are horrible to fat people because they openly hate us, b) providers who are horrible to fat people because they think it's the best way to get us to lose weight, and c) providers who are horrible to fat people because they haven't bothered to learn how not to be. There is no difference to the patient, or the outcome. A healthcare provider's motivation for harming fat people, often via denying us vital care unless we lose weight, does not justify the harm done or make it any less unethical.

Two: Medical fatphobia is not a question of implicit bias. Academic papers about medical fatphobia are rife with insistence that the fucked-up things physicians do to fat patients are unconscious and unintentional. There is nothing implicit about telling a fat person with gastrointestinal distress that they just need to change their diet without any further investigations into what they're feeling. There is nothing implicit about showing surprise when a fat person's lab results do not indicate an underlying health issue. There is only pathologization in action; disgust and ire are not unintentional.

Three. Medical fatphobia isn't the result of providers not knowing some special cheat codes for working with fat patients. Providers didn't all miss the day in medical school when students were taught how not to be cruel to fat people. Medical fatphobia is medicine's status quo.

Robert Rosencrans is an MD/Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's School of Medicine. "With fatphobia specifically," he says, "the idea of fatness being intrinsically linked to sickness is so fundamental for most people in medicine that they simply have no idea what you are talking about when you raise a critical point [questioning ob*sity]. It's like the words lose all semantic content and revert to pure meaningless sound. That's how profound the disconnect is." As he wrote in ASBMB Today:

All-cause mortality is as high in underweight people (as defined by body mass index) as it is in patients with higher BMIs ... For a thin person, the average scientist and physician believes that cancer, not thinness, is killing that patient. They can locate the source of mortality in something other than body weight or adipose stores. What scientific reason prevents them from extending the same courtesy to larger people?

For those in the sciences and medicine, the conclusion that fatness is corrupt and corrupting is foregone, discouraging critical thinking about how the scientific consciousness links fatness to death or disease, to the detriment of fat patients. It is rare to find someone in these spaces who has taken any amount of time to question what they know about fatness, how they came to know it, and, more importantly, the consequences of how they treat fat people because of it. If you are the rare person who does, like Rosencrans, you are met with a blank stare and may even be shunned or discredited in the eyes of your peers and administrative superiors.

This is, in part, why most of the weight loss advice you've ever received from your doctor is grounded in regurgitated mythologies with no evidence base. Consider the common refrain that "losing just five to ten percent of your body weight has substantial health benefits," which gets trotted out with thinly veiled exasperation by a doctor that wants you to just try to be less fat or by a weight loss advertisement that is begging to throw you into a yo-yo dieting tailspin. It's been repeated so many times that it has become accepted as health wisdom, like many things we're told about weight loss. But a 2013 review of weight-loss diets and their health outcomes exposes the history of this advice:

The original standard weight recommended by physicians was based on the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tables...[T]he tables designated 134 lb as the expected weight for an average-height woman (5′5′′) of medium body frame. Whatever her starting weight, 134lb would be her goal. Obese dieters, however, rarely achieved these standards. Researchers turned to what they considered to be the more realistic goal of 20% weight loss, but only 5% of obese dieters succeeded by that definition. Over the next 30 years, reviews of diet studies showed that individuals tended to lose an average of about 8% of their starting weight on most diets). In an effort to create a more achievable goal, but without any particular medical reason, researchers lowered the standard to just 5% of one's starting weight.

That's it. Some people, somewhere, at some point made it easier for diets to be classified as "successful" and that is the reason why we, decades later, have to listen to this little tidbit of nonsense while getting horrible medical care or being accosted by ads for whichever fad diet is interrupting our favorite podcast.

One of the most ironic consequences of fatphobia's significant influence on medicine is the way it has actually prevented us from learning more about how fatness can be disordered. Lipedema involves the disproportionate accumulation of subcutaneous fat in certain parts of the body, such as the hips, legs, and arms. Lipedemic fat deposits are painful, the pain is exacerbated by movement, and the deposits are completely unimpacted by weight loss. If someone with lipedema manages to lose weight, the fat deposits stay even as the rest of their body gets smaller. Many, but not all, people with lipedema appear as if they are carrying "excess weight," so it often goes undiagnosed; this makes it incredibly difficult to estimate how many people suffer from the condition, but some sources believe that it impacts up to 11 percent of women worldwide. According to the Lipedema Foundation, lipedema was first discussed in the 1940s but remains an incredibly nascent area of research. Half of the studies ever published on it came out in only the past three and a half years.

Our lack of knowledge about lipedema-including its etiology, appropriate non-invasive treatments, and methods of early detection-is a consequence of fatphobia. A culture that heavily polices fatness depends on us not knowing very much about fat at all.
It is strange to be in the care of someone you anticipate will hurt you. When I went to a gynecologist at 21 for a copper IUD insertion, I knew the chairs in the waiting room would leave bruises on the sides of my thighs. I knew the examination table would be too small and too high. I knew the nurse who led me to my room would take my vitals with the air of a newbie farmhand handling a sack of manure. I knew I would be forced to stare at her hands as she adjusted the weights on the scale and listen to her say "you know you're obese, right?" I did not know she would recommend that I try keto, but I guess we're all surprised sometimes. I knew my doctor would ask about my sexual activity and wonder just who exactly wanted to fuck that. I knew that my doctor would remind me that, besides the copper IUD, I did not have many other birth control options and that if I wanted to switch to something else, I'd be better off "making lifestyle changes" that helped me "slim down." I also knew that I would be asked to spread wider than anyone else they'd seen that day, that I'd have to scoot impossibly low on the examination table and balance myself perfectly as my naked ass reddened with the indentation of the table's edge. I was not prepared, however, for just how painful it would be to have someone repeatedly try and fail to slide a piece of copper through the opening of my cervix and into my uterus: as if he were pulling the cord at the center of my being with latex-free gloves. I was being unraveled. I cried. After the second try, I told him to stop, that I needed a break. He did not respond or pause and I could feel the pain intensify, a bright line of electricity splitting me in two . I screamed at the top of my lungs that he was hurting me and that I didn't want to continue. The tension after he yanked out the speculum and stepped away from me... like someone had printed the moment onto a sheet of plastic wrap and was pulling on both ends in as hard as they could. "If this is going to take multiple tries, you need to fucking stop when I say stop." I said this as a thin line of mucus fell from my nose and I wiped away the tears in my eyes. I did not feel courageous as I stared at his angular, burning face, nor did I feel vindicated when he apologized. My doctor tried a dozen times over the course of three hours. At points, I screamed in sync with his attempts to try and relieve something, anything. I was watching the sun set when he gave up, and it was dark when he finally brought in another physician who tried for another hour, but was also unsuccessful. It took three appointments to get my IUD. The last physician I saw asked me if anyone had mentioned trying a longer speculum or even medicine to help with the pain in advance. They had not.
The medical fatphobia that endangers fat patients also endangers our communities via our public health system. Public health in the U.S. has been largely guided by medical doctors since its inception. Public health students are taught that our work is a population-level complement to healthcare's individual approach to health promotion. Similarly, public health's fatphobia works in tandem with medical fatphobia to erode the well-being of fat communities while claiming to advance health equity.

According to the CDC, health equity "is achieved when every person has the opportunity to 'attain his or her full health potential' and no one is 'disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances.'" It stands to reason that fatphobia should be of concern to health equity researchers and advocates; after all, fat people are structurally, socially, and materially deprived of the opportunity to live out our "full health potential" on the basis of fatphobia alone, and many, if not most of us, are multiply marginalized. Unfortunately, the realities of public health mean that most health equity work is not actually conducted with equity in mind. As Dr. Elle Lett and her co-authors argued in a recent commentary on health equity tourism, plenty of (usually White) people without experience in or commitment to promoting health equity have flocked to the health equity space because they see the potential for research productivity or fiscal return. Many also try to shoehorn their existing work into the health equity framework: "Oftentimes, these scholars seek to 'retrofit,' or adapt existing structures and research practices for health equity work, rather than build the necessary transformative infrastructure required for sustainable health justice."

Put more simply: people who do ob*sity prevention are calling it health equity work because ob*sity is more common among marginalized groups like Black and Indigenous people, who are generally the focus of health equity work. But there's nothing about ob*sity prevention work that resembles health equity. As Kriete described, a sound health equity approach to fatness would concern itself with the differences in health outcomes between fat and not-fat people and, ultimately, treat fatphobia as the structural influence creating those differences.

As public health researcher Monica Kriete explained to me, ob*sity prevention-types have done similar retrofitting to stay relevant during this equity-focused shift. "They often treat ob*sity as a health 'outcome' that is 'inequitably' distributed in order to frame anti-fat interventions as 'equity promoting'... even though a theoretically consistent approach would consider the differences in health outcomes between fat and thin people as groups to be health inequities caused by anti-fatness, and treat weight stigma as a structural determinant of health analogous to racism or ableism." Put more simply: people who do ob*sity prevention are calling it health equity work because ob*sity is more common among marginalized groups like Black and Indigenous people, who are generally the focus of health equity work. But there's nothing about ob*sity prevention work that resembles health equity. As Kriete described, a sound health equity approach to fatness would concern itself with the differences in health outcomes between fat and not-fat people and, ultimately, treat fatphobia as the structural influence creating those differences.

Unless you are tackling the source of health inequities - oppression - then you are not promoting health equity. The weight loss industry, however, is more than content to pretend they haven't received the memo while using their immense resources to try and convince us that weight loss is a matter of social justice.

The Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, which was first introduced in 2013 and has always had bipartisan support, claims to promote health equity using the backward approach Kriete describes. One proposed element of the Act would broaden Medicare coverage for intensive behavioral therapy to reimburse more providers, as well as cover FDA-approved weight loss medications under Medicare Part D. A supportive op-ed by Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford and Kelly Copes-Anderson points out that "nearly 50% of Black adults and 45% of Hispanic adults have obesity," before arguing that "the significance of these two advancements goes beyond treating individuals with obesity. They represent a decisive moment in shifting society away from viewing obesity as caused by individuals making poor choices and toward treating obesity as a manageable chronic disease like asthma or high blood pressure. This is a crucial step in eliminating bias against people with obesity, which has hobbled efforts to address this epidemic even as it fuels health inequity."

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' Open Payments website, which has data on payments made by drug and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals between 2016 and 2020, Stanford received over $17,000 from pharmaceutical giants like Novo Nordisk. By her own admission, she does up to 200 interviews with news media and an average of 150 lectures per year about "obesity as a disease." Her co-author, Copes-Anderson, is employed by Eli Lilly as their head of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Eli Lilly is currently awaiting FDA approval of its anticipated ob*sity medication tirzepatide and hopes to follow in the footsteps of competitor Novo Nordisk, which is making billions from sales of its ob*sity drug, Wegovy, released in 2021. If the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act is successful and Medicare Part D coverage includes drugs like tirzepatide and Wegovy, pharmaceutical companies will make a killing, as will "obesity medicine" practitioners .

This is the fatphobia industrial complex: the cluster of entities using fatphobia to sell products and services that provide the influence and capital needed to exert control over large swaths of people and regulatory bodies for the purposes of making profit, repeated ad nauseum. Their appropriation of health equity language is a tool to further the idea that ob*sity is a disease requiring prescribed cures, making pharmaceutical companies and ob*sity specialists into fat people's saviors. And their ability to do these things while referencing research that demonstrates the uncontrollability of weight-research that well-meaning people use to criticize fatphobia-is further proof that fighting for fat people's rights on the basis of how healthy they are will never make us free.

So, for the last time, reject the urge (or demand) to prove that fat is not unhealthy, that weight is not in most people's control. It doesn't actually matter for dismantling fatphobia. Our society doesn't hate fatness because it's unhealthy; our society thinks fatness is unhealthy because we hate it.
The articles that inspired this one-the most popular mainstream interrogations of ob*sity and its associated stigmas-often contain proposed solutions that just feed back into the pathologization of fat people. Providing financial incentives or reimbursement for ob*sity-related treatment or counseling will not dismantle fatphobia; all this does is funnel fat people into hostile situations with even more health care professionals who can get reimbursed for providing inaccurate, harmful, and presumptuous advice. Educating healthcare providers on the genetic causes of ob*sity will not dismantle fatphobia; we have more than enough evidence that demonstrates this approach is useless at best and can actually worsen anti-fat attitudes. Moralizing food by claiming that the real problem is the proliferation of "junk" food and lack of access to healthier will not dismantle fatphobia; labeling foods as good or bad relies on anti-fatness and is often a coded way of demonizing foods from non-white cultures, inexpensive foods, or foods that fit into the lifestyles of workers. The solution to fatphobia will not emerge from more medicine or sensitivity training or cheaper organic groceries. If you want to disrupt fatphobia, you must, as Harrison wrote in Belly of the Beast, "destroy the World that produces the cage by which the Black fat is bound." This is to say that for the purposes of dismantling fatphobia, it is not enough for us to join in the abolition of institutions that kill us; we must join together to snuff the World, the place fertilized by anti-Blackness in which those deadly systems and institutions first came to fruition. We must commit to tearing down what does not serve the most marginalized of us until the day comes when there is nothing left but possibility. Once we get there, we'll figure out together what happens next. Harrison writes, "[W]hat happens beyond can't be answered until the Beyond is here. What we do know is that this-the World-can no longer exist." On days when I feel particularly hopeless, I keep that last bit in mind. You do not have to know what the next world looks like to know that the one you live in right now must no longer exist. In my mind, the path to that destruction is an endless trail of decisions. We must decide, over and over again, to kill what kills fat people. Things that may come to mind first are actions like joining a campaign for laws against weight discrimination. But I believe in you now, so I'm challenging you to go beyond the false security of anti-discrimination legislation and think about community care. Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman once remarked that "care is the antidote to violence." We cannot hope to protect fat people while destroying the World if we do not care for them, and fat liberation cannot be powered by anything but love for fat people. Even when there is rage on our behalf, there must be love for us too. No matter how much we despise the systems that kill us, we must love fat people more. I am a fat liberationist because I love fat people with everything I have -Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people who are soft and abundant and irregular when the World demands we be petrified and sallow and normative. You-whoever you are-cannot hope to help create a new world that holds fat people in all their plenitude if you don't love us, if you don't truly believe we deserve to be held. Think of someone you love deeply. Would you help if they couldn't pay rent or afford groceries? Would you check in on them if you hadn't heard from them in a while? Would you give them a ride to an appointment? Would you help them clean up if they were overwhelmed by a mess? Would you listen to them if they needed to share? Would you watch their kids if they needed emergency childcare? Would you comfort them if they needed to cry? Would you sit and help them budget? Would you show support if they lost someone they loved deeply? Would you promote their work if they made something they were proud of? Would you go with them to the doctor if they needed an advocate? Would you help bail them out of jail? Would you mend their clothes? Would you defend them if someone was hurtful to them in front of you? What would it look like for you to do things like this for others who you may love less, but who deserve to be supported regardless? Caring for each other is how we survive to do the rest of our work. This is not meant to downplay the serious abolitionist work that needs to be done in order to create marked change for fat people, but there is no change without care . We cannot demand divestment from the BMI without care. We cannot raise our kids to reject body hierarchies without care. We cannot raise our kids to know their fat bodies are worthy without care. We cannot terrorize weight loss companies or be a menace to their corporate advocates without care. We cannot keep young fat Black girls safe from medical trauma without care. We cannot challenge profit-driven disinformation about weight without care. We cannot hold doctors accountable for the ways they hurt young fat Black girls without care. We cannot cultivate spaces for learning and political education outside of exclusionary universities without care. We cannot help fat Black people survive this World to see the next without care. We cannot help people resist, cannot get organized, cannot be a movement without care. Articles like these-the ones that try to correct people's preconceived notions about ob*sity or weight-usually do not end with fat odes to care. But like I said: articles like these are not usually written by fat people and are almost never written by fat Black people. Articles like these are not usually written by anyone with any real skin in the game. But mine is. I'm in the thick of this. So are a lot of people I love. In writing this to you, I am fighting for our lives.

Marquisele Mercedes is a writer, creator, and doctoral student from the Bronx, New York. As a Presidential Fellow at the Brown University School of Public Health, she works at the intersection of critical public health studies, fat studies, and scholarship on race/ism, examining how racism, anti-Blackness, and fatphobia have shaped health care, research, and public health. She is passionate about using public scholarship to make science and research accessible outside of academic institutions, as well as reshape health scholarship and interventions to make the world safer for fat people of color Editing and layout, Michelle Weber
Copyediting, Soraya Roberts
Fact checking, Matt Giles

Rachelle Abellar is a Filipino-American designer, community organizer, and body liberation activist whose work is informed by her various intersecting identities as well as her commitment to inclusivity, diversity, and community. When she's not busy making things look shiny, she enjoys going to art museums and cat cafes, listening to k-pop, and running an online stationery shop with her best friend.

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Dismantling Medical Fatphobia - Pipe Wrench

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"Providers didn't all miss the day where med students were taught not to be cruel to fat people. Medical fatphobia is medicine's status quo."

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Data and Goliath : 2 . Data as Surveillance pg 20-28 

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Data and Goliath : 2 . Data as Surveillance pg 20-28 

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Bruce Schneier - Data and Goliath_ The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World-W. W. Norton & Company (2015).pdf

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Zine Online Version Issue 2 - Not to Print.pdf

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A Timeline of LAPD Spying and Surveillance- Stop LAPD

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A Timeline of LAPD Spying and Surveillance- Stop LAPD

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SEED: BELLY OF THE BEAST: THE POLITICS OF ANTI-FATNESS AS ANTI-BLACKNESS. 

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SEED: BELLY OF THE BEAST: THE POLITICS OF ANTI-FATNESS AS ANTI-BLACKNESS. 

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THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM A CHAPTER OF DA'SHAUN HARRISON'S FORTHCOMING BOOK, BELLY OF THE BEAST: THE POLITICS OF ANTI-FATNESS AS ANTI-BLACKNESS.

In March 2004, during a news conference with widespread coverage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report that claimed that obesity was "killing 400,000 Americans a year," and that it was becoming America's "number one preventable death"-surpassing tobacco. The CDC defines obesity as "weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height." Body mass index (BMI) is used as a "screening tool" to determine who is and is not obese. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)which, at least at the time, was the most prestigious medical journal in the nation. Since Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC at the time, and other top CDC scientists co-authored this report, it had the credibility it needed for waves of reporters and news outlets to publish it. It would soon lead to egregious and violent headlines across the nation about fat people, fat bodies, and the alarming rate at which they were allegedly dying from obesity. It would also be cited repeatedly by officials including then Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, several members of Congress, and creators of weight loss drugs seeking to draw attention and funding to anti-obesity efforts. From that moment forward, throughout the rest of that year, public officials and other media platforms used that report as evidence that obesity was the greatest threat facing the American people, and as justification for what would eventually become a forceful and strapping diet industrial complex. This was the start of "The Obesity Epidemic."

There were a few public indictments of the JAMA report, starting with Science magazine in May 2004. In a report of their own, they wrote: "Some researchers, including a few at the CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the paper's compatibility with a new anti-obesity theme in government public health pronouncements-rather than sound analysis-propelled it into print." This became, at least on record, the first acknowledgment of an emerging anti-fat theme within government, health, and science institutions. Soon after Science magazine's report, the Wall Street Journal published a story of their own that covered the errors in the study published in JAMA. On November 23, 2004, they opened their story with "America's obesity epidemic may not be as deadly as the government has claimed." Continuing, they wrote that the study "inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors." On April 30, just a month after the later-disputed report was published, Dr. Terry Pechacek, who was the associate director for science in the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, wrote in an email to his colleagues that he was "worried that the scientific credibility of the CDC likely could be damaged by the manner in which this paper and valid, credible, and repeated scientific questions about its methodology have been handled." After stating that he had warned two of the report's authors along with another senior scientist, Pechacek wrote, "I would never clear this paper if I had been given the opportunity to provide a formal review."

According to J. Eric Oliver in his book Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America's Obesity Epidemic:

"... the CDC researchers did not calculate the 400,000 deaths by checking to see if the weight of each person was a factor in his or her [or their] death. Rather, they estimated a figure by comparing the death rates of thin and heavy people using data that were nearly thirty years old. Although heavier people tend to die more frequently than people in mid-range weights, it is by no means clear that their weight is the cause of their higher death rates. It is far more likely that their weight is simply a proxy for other, more important factors such as their diet, exercise, or family medical history. The researchers, however, simply assumed that obesity was the primary cause of death, even though there was no clear scientific rationale for this supposition."
In other words, the CDC contrived this number from an estimation after reviewing data that was thirty years old. It was never a calculated number concluded from their own intense research; it was a scientific guess made with the hope to punish fat people for their bodies. And it worked. The damage had already been done. The people and institutions who would stand to benefit from that report had already won, and it was the start of the modern genocide of fatness and fat people. As Oliver states, fat people do tend to die at higher rates than their thin counterparts, but it isn't because of their weight. Fat people tend to die at higher rates than thin people because doctors misdiagnose them, or refuse to treat them, due to their fatness.
In January 2005, the CDC admitted that their 400,000 deaths number was a result of a "mathematical error," and in February of that same year-just after the CDC published a summation of the internal investigation that was launched following the initial report's release-the Los Angeles Times published a response to the investigation. Their report opened with this firm statement: "A controversial government study that may have sharply overstated America's death toll from obesity was inappropriately released as a result of miscommunication, bureaucratic snafus and acquiescence from dissenting scientists." This would become the second public acknowledgement of governmental disarray that was leading the nation in one of the most violent pseudoepidemics in the nation's history.

In April 2005, just a year after the initial report was published, the CDC released another report-also through JAMA-wherein they not only offered a much smaller number of deaths per year due to obesity, but also claimed that "moderately overweight people" live longer than people at a "normal weight." The new report in JAMA cut the death toll to 112,000, which was well under half of what was initially reported, but the damage had already been done. Around the world, people were using the CDC's original numbers as fuel for the war waged on fat people. The diet industry, at the time, was already well over a century old. Americans had been dieting and trying to lose weight for decades. But with this war waged on obesity, the early-to-mid 2000s is a pivotal moment in history for the creation of this modern diet industrial complex. The CDC's report cemented a growing belief: fat people were dying rapidly and the only solution was to kill them quicker-either through forcing them to transform their bodies or to die trying. Despite how theatrical that reads, that is what was being demanded of fat people. The goal was, and continues to be, to eradicate fatness. To do that, one was to either overinvest in dieting-which has proven to be ineffective-or die trying to reach an ideal weight defined by organizations like the CDC and WHO, either on an operating table or in a gym.

But this was not the first time in America's history that a genocide would be declared on an entire community at the behest of this country's leadership. Just three decades before the start of the War on Obesity there was the genesis of the War on Drugs.

In the 1960s, drugs were a prominent part of the sociopolitical climate of the times. They became associated with juvenile uprisings, and in many ways, they became emblematic of the political and ideological contestation over harmful policies and practices by the United States government-arguments led mostly by Black and other marginalized people. As such, the government ceased all research on the safety of these drugs and, in 1971, former president Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Nixon substantially increased the amount and power of federal drug control agencies in the country and bulldozed mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants into the forefront of the legislation being passed at that time. Though it passed during his tenure as president, the legislation picked up momentum under Reagan's presidency in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, local police had used over 1,500 no-knock warrants, according to Peter Kraska, a professor with the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. By the year 2000, that number had increased to 40,000 per year. In 2010, it increased to 70,000 per year. Of these searches, over 40 percent impacted, and continue to impact, Black homes-including the home of Breonna Taylor who was killed in Louisville, Kentucky in 2020.

Soon after that legislation was passed, Nixon placed marijuana in the most restrictive category of drugs, schedule one, where it would stay until it was reviewed by a commission led by then Governor Raymond Shafer-a commission appointed by Nixon. Despite the concordant recommendation from the commission in 1972 to decriminalize the possession and distribution of marijuana-for personal use-Nixon ignored the report and did not adhere to the proposed recommendation. Irrespective of this, eleven states around the country decriminalized marijuana possession between the years 1973 and 1977-a year in which former president Jimmy Carter ran and was elected on a platform inclusive of the decriminalization of marijuana. And in that same year, the Senate Judiciary Committee motioned to decriminalize the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. But soon after, these efforts were left behind as former president Ronald Reagan ushered in what would become known as "mass incarceration" through his expansion of Nixon's war on drugs. The incarceration of people charged with nonviolent drug offenses grew from 50,000 in Reagan's first year in office to 400,000 by the end of 1997. Stress levels and concerns induced by the fearmongering of the Reagan administration were high, forcing upon mostly Black communities a proliferation of arrests. By the end of 1999, over half a million Black people were held in state or federal prisons. In 1980, the overall federal prison population was 24,000. By 1996, the number had grown to 106,000-the majority of which were arrested for drug offenses. According to Kenneth B. Nunn in "Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the 'War on Drugs' Was a 'War on Blacks,'" from 1979 to 1989, the percentage of Black people arrested on drug charges doubled from 22 percent to 42 percent of the overall number of drug-related arrests. Also during that time, the amount of Black arrests for drug use violations grew exponentially from 112,748 to 452,574-an increase of over 300 percent.

Ronald Reagan introduced zero tolerance policies in the mid-80s and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates-who, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, once stated that "casual drug users should be taken out and shot"-founded the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) program that would soon be implemented in schools across the country despite there being no evidence stating that it was useful. This also meant, however, that there was no widespread evidence that it was ineffective-an unsurprising failing of the United States' medical industry. The Drug Policy Alliance also states that "the increasingly harsh drug policies also blocked the expansion of syringe access programs and other harm reduction policies to reduce the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS," making the War on Drugs not only a war on recreational use of drugs but also on medicinal use. They continue:

In the late 1980s, a political hysteria about drugs led to the passage of draconian penalties in Congress and state legislatures that rapidly increased the prison population. In 1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nation's "number one problem" was just 2-6 percent. The figure grew through the remainder of the 1980s until, in September 1989, it reached a remarkable 64 percent-one of the most intense fixations by the American public on any issue in polling history. Within less than a year, however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost interest. The draconian policies enacted during the hysteria remained, however, and continued to result in escalating levels of arrests and incarceration.

In 1994, John Ehrlichman-domestic affairs advisor and top aide to Nixon, as well as a Watergate co-conspirator-told investigative reporter Dan Baum a truth that had long been understood but never really confirmed: the War on Drugs was a legal way to criminalize and abuse Black people. In his report, published in Harper's Magazine, Baum records Ehrlichman saying:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

In a recording of a conversation between Nixon and Reagan, released by the National Archives in 2019, Reagan-who was the governor of California at the time-was quoted saying, "Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did ... To see those-those monkeys from those African countries-damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes." At best, this was a conversation between two anti-Black white men ranting about their hatred of Black people. At worst, this was a collusion of two anti-Black white men-both of whom held social, economic, and political power-who met with the intent to forge a plan that would help them leverage that power over the people and communities for whom they held a lot of hate. It was a success. The war-that was and has been more accurately called a genocide, waged first by Nixon-has been continued by every president that followed him, across party lines.

At the core of the War on Drugs is the Black, and at the core of the War on Obesity-even if not as explicitly so-is the Black fat. Black people make up roughly 13 percent of the American population, but about 51 percent of America's fat population. Obesity is determined by body mass index (BMI), something people have been taught is a direct measure of one's health. Over two hundred years ago, a Belgian man named Adolphe Quetelet created what we now know as the BMI. Quetelet was not a physician, nor did he study medicine in any capacity; Quetelet was a mathematician and a sociologist, and it was that on which the BMI was created. Quetelet is known for his envisioning of l'homme moyen-an image of what he understood to be "the average man"-which he developed through "the measurement of human features with the deviation plotted around the mean." He began the development with the use of physical features of the human, who-at least as his work suggests-he understood to be cisgender white men. Those features included the chests of Scottish Highland regiment soldiers. After, he moved on to moral and intellectual qualities like suicide, crime, and madness. On Quetelet, Erna Kubergovic writes in the Eugenics Archive:

"For Quetelet, the average body presented an ideal beauty; the normal, conceived of average, emerged as an ideal type to be desired. It was Quetelet that formulated the BMI, initially through the measurement of typical weights among French and Scottish conscripts. Instead of labelling the peak of the bell-curve as merely normal, he labelled it 'ideal', with those deviating either 'overweight' or 'underweight' instead of heavier than average or lighter than average. Thus, while informed by statistics, Quetelet was still working within the medical context of the normal; that is, he envisioned the normal (i.e., typical) as the ideal or something desirable."

What he had created was the standard for male beauty and health, built only with white Europeans in mind and determined by something that measured whole populations and not individuals. By the twentieth century, Quetelet's work was being used as the basis of, and justification for, eugenics. And though all of his work in that time period was based in anti-Black race science, he was clear that the intent of the BMI was to measure populations to develop statistics. Aubrey Gordon, creator of "Your Fat Friend" and author of What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Fat, wrote more on this in an online essay:

"By 1985, the National Institutes of Health had revised their definition of "obesity" to be tied to individual patients' BMIs. And with that, this perennially imperfect measurement was enshrined in U.S. public policy. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health once again changed their definitions of "overweight" and "obese," substantially lowering the threshold to be medically considered fat. CNN wrote that "Millions of Americans became 'fat' Wednesday-even if they didn't gain a pound"-as the federal government adopted a controversial method for determining who is considered overweight."

It was that second change, Gordon notes, that gave way to "a new public health panic: the 'Obesity Epidemic.'" Gordon continues:

"By the turn of the millennium, the BMI's simple arithmetic had become a de rigueur part of doctor visits. Charts depicting startling spikes in Americans' overall fatness took us by storm, all the while failing to acknowledge the changes in definition that, in large part, contributed to those spikes. At best, this failure in reporting is misleading. At worst, it stokes resentment against bodies that have already borne the blame for so much, and fuels medical mistreatment of fat patients."

As covered in chapters 3 and 4, "health" was created as the antithesis of Blackness; the Black fat was always already removed from the possibility of "good" health-meaning always situated inside / under the label of "bad" health-and was to always and already be the criminal. From the moment white Europeans saw fat Africans, the science that followed was intended to always separate them from the rest. In this way, the BMI-created to maintain whiteness as superior -was always going to harm the Black fat and it is for this reason that Black people make up over half of the fat population and why Black people also have more "health risks" than their white counterparts.

Crack, too, is a "health" failing. The government convinced the public that Black people were the only ones doing hard drugs; that the "crackheads" were rummaging the streets looking to harm anyone who may stand in between them and their "fix"; that addiction was a moral failing rather than a direct result of one's immediate environment, overrun by poverty, anti-Blackness, and the inability to acquire proper (mental) health care. And it was this that led to punitive, carceral responses to drug addiction rather than methods rooted in harm reduction. Because the Black always already fails in, or is removed from, morality, and as such never has access to care.

The world's obsession with obesity and being overweight is less about health and is more about the cultural and systemic anti-Blackness as anti-fatness that diet, medical, and media industries profit from. Just like with the War on drugs and the crack epidemic, major institutions falsified evidence about the effects of fatness or obesity as a way to criminalize and profit off fat people-especially the Black fat. That damage is still being done. The Black fat is not dying from being obese, nor is the Black dying from drug addiction. The Black-the Black fat-is dying because of a medical industrial complex committed to seeing fatness, Blackness, and Black fatness as death; they are dying because of a lack of proper resources-like housing and employment -that would provide them with money, health care, and a place to rest their heads; the Black fat, in particular, is dying because of an inherently anti-Black system of policing that sees them as the deadly Beast that needs to be put down. This is the Belly of the Beast: removed from care and placed always in the way of harm.

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is available for pre-order now.

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"Belly of the Beast" Excerpt: The War on Drugs and The War on Obesity - Da'Shaun L. Harrison

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In March 2004, during a news conference with widespread coverage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report that claimed that obesity was "killing 400,000 Americans a year," and that it was becoming America's "number one preventable death"-surpassing tobacco.

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Check this Website out : https://maskon.zone/resources/ 

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Check this Website out : https://maskon.zone/resources/ 

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Readings:

COINTELPRO and the History of Domestic Spying, Mysterious Deaths Leave Ferguson Activists 'On Pins and Needles', Protest Resilience Toolkit - Tactics for overcoming challenges, Tech Tools for Activism, Security and counter-surveillance, Quick protest tips Twitter thread, From Beirut to Minneapolis - A protest guide in solidarity, OpSec for Activists Are.na channel, New York City Police Department Surveillance Technology, How the FBI are tracking protestors Twitter thread, Security Does Not Mean Safety, Surveillance Self-Defense - Tips, Tools and How-Tos for Safer Online Communications, Filming Protests and Police Abuse, Surveillance Self-Defense in Public Spaces, How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance, A surveillance studies perspective on protest policing - the case of video surveillance of demonstrations in Germany, Data gathering, surveillance and human rights - recasting the debate, Security culture PDFs Twitter thread,

Tools:

Image Scrubber by Everest Pipkin, Police Scanner Map, Onionshare - Secure and private file sharing, Exif Metadata (Apple/iOS),

Graphics to download:

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mask on - anti surveillance protest guide

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Readings: COINTELPRO and the History of Domestic Spying, Mysterious Deaths Leave Ferguson Activists 'On Pins and Needles', Protest Resilience Toolkit - Tactics for overcoming challenges, Tech Tools for Activism, Security and counter-surveillance, Quick protest tips Twitter thread, From Beirut to Minneapolis - A protest guide in solidarity, OpSec for Activists

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Check this Website out :https://hackinghustling.org 

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Check this Website out :https://hackinghustling.org 

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Hacking//Hustling is a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt violence facilitated by technology.

Vision

Redefining technologies to uplift survival strategies that build safety without prisons or policing.

Sex Work, Technology, and Social Justice

Hacking//Hustling is a collective of sex workers and allies working at the intersection of technology and social justice issues. We come from backgrounds of sex work, public health, data science, community organizing.

Mission

Hacking//Hustling works to abolish carceral technologies and build the capacity of sex workers and survivors to create new technologies that increase safety. Our work explodes the definition of technology to include harm reduction models: community-based research, mutual aid, organizing, art, and any/all tools sex workers and survivors develop to mitigate state, workplace, and interpersonal violence and thrive.

Hacking//Hustling Principles of Unity
Inspired by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Collective Action for Safe Spaces

We understand technology to be more than the Internet and digital interfaces/devices.

We understand sex workers to be originators of new technologies and methods of keeping each other safe. These new technologies include early adoption of online platforms, sharing of online and physical bad date lists, safe calls, protest safety protocols, street art, art and cultural ephemera, and all harm reduction strategies.

We center the experiences, voices, and needs of people who trade sex by choice, circumstance, or coercion, and understand the overlap in these communities. We respect every person's autonomy in defining their own experiences.

We build connections between liberation struggles opposing racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, capitalism, and all forms of oppression.

We promote shared leadership and collective decision-making. Using transparent structures for decision-making and conflict resolution, we work to be accountable to these principles not only in our public facing work but in our organizational practices.

Background

As long as we have been working online and offline, sex workers have been policed, and people who are impacted by sexual violence and trafficking in the sex trades have not been made safer. We decided that it was time to infiltrate organizations with the power to shift the narrative. We began hosting events to flip the script and center people in the sex trades as producers of knowledge and expertise in the movement to create safety for our communities without policing.

Since then, our work has grown to meet the needs of those who are most marginalized within the sex trades. In 2020, Hacking//Hustling had planned to organize an international convening of sex workers at the Internet Freedom Festival, but the pandemic shifted our plans and our priorities: More people were relying on Internet-based sex work to make ends meet, subjecting sex workers and especially sex worker organizers to increased digital surveillance, and those who had always been most targeted and criminalized continued to be surveilled and policed under laws against loitering and prostitution as well as under increased pandemic-related policing that relies more on technologies like surveillance cameras in public spaces and neighbors weaponizing calls to the police to target street based workers. Hacking//Hustling responded by shifting our resources toward mutual aid efforts internationally and at home to support workers in meeting their immediate needs, funding public art to shift narratives, and continuing to organize virtually to support sex workers and survivors in abolishing carceral technologies and creating new technologies that increase safety for our communities.

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Who We Are Hacking//Hustling is a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt violence facilitated by technology. Vision Redefining technologies to uplift survival strategies that build safety without prisons or policing.…

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Historical Foundations of Race : DAVID R. ROEDIGER

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Historical Foundations of Race : DAVID R. ROEDIGER

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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American society developed the notion of race early in its formation to justify its new economic system of capitalism, which depended on the institution of forced labor, especially the enslavement of African peoples. To more accurately understand how race and its counterpart, racism, are woven into the very fabric of American society, we must explore the history of how race, white privilege, and anti-blackness came to be.

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Mysterious Deaths Leave Ferguson Activists ‘On Pins and Needles’

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Mysterious Deaths Leave Ferguson Activists ‘On Pins and Needles’

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Mysterious Deaths Leave Ferguson Activists ‘On Pins and Needles’

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Six people in the Ferguson, Missouri, activist community have been found dead in the four years since Michael Brown was killed

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The War Before by Safiya Bukhari pgs.36-41; 43-50

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The War Before by Safiya Bukhari pgs.36-41; 43-50

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Lizzo criticized body positivity. Here's what you need to know about body neutrality. by Sara M Moniuszko

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Lizzo criticized body positivity. Here's what you need to know about body neutrality. by Sara M Moniuszko

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You've likely heard of body positivity, but there's a lesser-known movement gaining traction: body neutrality.

Earlier this month, Lizzo called out the body positivity movement saying the term has been "co-opted by all bodies" and has become a trend of "celebrating medium and small girls and people who occasionally get rolls."

"Fat people are still getting the short end of this movement," she said, adding "we're still getting talked about, memed, shamed," but "no one cares anymore."

Instead of preaching body positivity, some are practicing body neutrality.

"The Good Place" actress Jameela Jamil shared her take on body neutrality with Glamour in 2019 saying, "I don't think about my body ever... Imagine just not thinking about your body. You're not hating it. You're not loving it. You're just a floating head. I'm a floating head wandering through the world."

What is body neutrality?

"The body positive movement urges people to love their bodies no matter what they look like, whereas body neutrality focuses on what your body can do for you rather than what it actually looks like," said Chelsea Kronengold, the associate director of communications at the National Eating Disorders Association.

Someone who practices body neutrality might say, "I am grateful for my legs because they got me from point A to point B, or I'm grateful for my arms, because they allow me to hug my loved one," Kronengold explained.

She noted body neutrality's focus on how a body functions as opposed to how it looks comes with some able-bodied privilege.

Meredith Nisbet, a supervisor at the Eating Recovery Center, added body neutrality is also "the idea that we can still care for our bodies even if we don't regard them positively."

"I don't have to be happy with my body, I don't have to love my body, but I can still acknowledge that this is the one body that I have... and so I need to be caring for that," she said.

Elizabeth Wassenaar, regional medical director at the Eating Recovery Center, said another cornerstone of body neutrality is avoiding telling someone how to view their body.

"It isn't my place to tell you what your experience should be or how you should feel about your body or that you should feel good about your body or have lots of love for your body," she said. "But I can hold a space for you to learn to sort of accept your body as it is or find gratitude in what your body can do for you."

Why is the body positivity movement being criticized?

As Lizzo pointed out, the body positivity movement has evolved over time.

The body positivity movement has roots in the fat acceptance movement from the '60s, Kronengold said, which "was created by and for people in marginalized bodies, especially fat, Black, queer and disabled bodies."

Now, the movement has been "commercialized" and "commandeered by smaller-bodied influencers," Nisbet said.

"Body positivity means very different things if you live in a larger body that has a lot of stigma associated with it and if you live in a smaller body that doesn't have a lot of stigma associated with it," she said.

The movement has also been criticized for pushing a type of toxic positivity.

"There's a lot of pressure and expectations that people put on themselves when you're talking about body positivity in this more mainstream sense," Kronengold says. "For example, there's nothing wrong with having a bad body image day just like there's nothing wrong with having a bad hair day or something like that."

Is body neutrality better than body positivity?

There is room for both movements, experts say.

"People can benefit from body neutrality and body positivity at different times in their lives or for different reasons," Wassenaar explained.

And while finding community within a certain movement depends on the individual seeking it, Kronengold said either route is "better than diet culture" and "definitely a step in the right direction for people who are experiencing body image concerns, and even for the general public."

But for people that are affected by eating disorders, Kronengold said body neutrality "can be a lot more helpful than this potentially toxic positivity (of body positivity)."

Nisbet agreed, stating body positivity may never feel accessible for some people.

There are also options beyond positivity and body neutrality, including "body acceptance" and "body liberation." Those communities are more in line with what body positivity used to be, Kronengold said.

How do you practice body neutrality?

If you're looking to try practicing body neutrality, Wassenaar suggested starting with two steps:

1. Be honest about where you are in your journey and how you feel about your body. "You can't know what to work toward if you don't really know where you are right now."

2. Identify what is important to you. "What are the things that make your life feel worth it? What are the values you're working toward? And then, noticing how your body can help you move toward those values - and again, in a neutral way," she says. "It allows you to realize what your body can do to move you towards that value."

Wassenaar said body neutrality is an individualized journey.

"Holding space for people to have their own journey and make their own meaning out of body neutrality is a critical piece of keeping it a safe space for people."
If you or someone you know is struggling with body image or eating concerns, the National Eating Disorders Association's toll-free and confidential helpline is available by phone or text at 1-800-931-2237 or by click-to-chat message at nationaleatingdisorders.org/helpline. For 24/7 crisis situations, text "NEDA" to 741-741.

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Lizzo criticized body positivity. Here's what you need to know about body neutrality.

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You've likely heard of body positivity, but there's a lesser-known movement gaining traction: body neutrality. Earlier this month, Lizzo called out the body positivity movement saying the term has been "co-opted by all bodies" and has become a trend of "celebrating medium and small girls and people who occasionally get rolls."

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Disability justice : History of Disability Justice

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Disability justice : History of Disability Justice

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disability justice

History of Disability Justice (Source)

The term disability justice was coined out of conversations between disabled queer women of color activists in 2005, including Patty Berne of Sins Invalid (and Mia Mingus & Stacy Milbern, who eventually united with Leroy Moore, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret) seeking to challenge radical and progressive movements to more fully address ableism.
"Disability Justice was built because the Disability Rights Movement and Disability Studies do not inherently centralize the needs and experiences of folks experiencing intersectional oppression, such as disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others." (Source)
Disability justice recognizes the intersecting legacies of white supremacy, colonial capitalism, gendered oppression and ableism in understanding how people's' bodies and minds are labelled ' deviant', ' unproductive', ' disposable' and/or ' invalid '.

Introductory Readings
Sick Woman Theory Wherever You Are is Where I Want to Be: Crip Solidarity, Mia Mingus A Babe-Licious Healing Justice Statement, BadAss Visionary Healers (BAVH) Dialogue on Disability Justice Movement Building with Patty Berne Disability Solidarity: Completing the "Vision for Black Lives" Addressing the Criminalization of Disability from a Disability Justice Framework: Centring The Experiences of Disabled Queer Trans Indigenous and People of Colour State Sanctioned: Disability
Introductory Videos
Ableism is The Bane of My Motherfuckin' Existence "Is medicine about quality of life, or is it about social control? And perpetuating this idea that you have a good body?" - Stacey Milbern My Body Doesn't Oppress Me, Society Does: Barnard Center for Research on Women

Impairment: Physical or neurological manifestation vs. Disability: What society creates as barriers because of the impairment

"If I'm in a place where my access needs are being met, then my impairment isn't so significant." - Stacey Milbern

"It's not easy to live with an impairment. There are time when it's not convenient to have a body. But that's not what oppresses us. What oppresses us is living in a system that disregards us, is violent towards us, essentially wants to subjugate our bodies or kill us -- that's oppressive. My body doesn't oppress me." - Patty Berne

"There are always going to be people in pain. That's just the nature of being in a body. But the social body we can change. And I think it requires a power analysis." - Patty Berne

Disability Justice Curricula (Source)

CONTEXT

ABLEISM AND DISABILITY JUSTICE

ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSION

STATE VIOLENCE AND DISABILITY JUSTICE

DESIRABILITY AND SEXUALITY

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Other Resources:

About a third of prison and jail inmates reported a disability in 2011-2012, PR Newswire

'Ban the Box': Good for people with disabilities, U.S. Department of Labor blog

Supporting, not imprisoning, Aboriginal people with disabilities, could save millions, The Conversation,

Why are so many mentally ill people imprisoned in PA? The Pittsburgh Courier

A Psychologist as Warden? Jail and Mental Illness Intersect in Chicago, New York Times

In U.S. Prisons, Psychiatric Illness is Often Met with Brute Force, TruthOut

Breaking the School to Prison Pipeline for Students with Disabilities - National Council on Disability

Brave New Films Releases "Over-Criminalized" - film exploring use of prisons to treat mental illness

Deaf in Prison: Examining Social Exclusion within Systems - from Adler University blog

Mental Health Courts: Challenges, Questions, and Tensions - Center for Court Innovation

Callous and Cruel, Human Rights Watch Report

Mentally Ill Inmates are Routinely Physically Abused, Study Says, Timothy Williams for the New York Times

Solitary Confinement Makes Teenagers Depressed and Suicidal, Ian Kysel for Washington Post

Dealing with Dementia Among Aging Criminals, New York Times

Exploring what it means when police refuse to provide medical attention to their victims, Daily Kos

Jails Are No Substitute for a Mental Health System, The Hill

Cook County Jail a 'mental health provider,' says Sheriff Tom Dart, threatening lawsuit, The Huffington Post

Three bills in Florida on police and disability, David Perry (blog)

Black, Autistic, and Killed by Police, Chicago Reader

Risk of being killed by police is 16 times greater for people with mental illness, The Guardian

Is handcuffing special needs kids acceptable discipline? The Herald Times Online

Distraught People; Deadly Results, The Washington Post

Police Brutality, Mental Illness, and Race in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Austin McCoy for Nursing Clio (blog)

Shocking video of police shooting shows why we need to talk about how cops deal with the mentally ill, Fusion

A Tribute to Tanisha Anderson: African American, Schizophrenic, and Lost on the Streets, Huffington Post (see also Cleveland -> Tanisha Anderson)

Man Tries to Inform Police Son is Autistic - Gets Assaulted, Tasered, Cassandra Fairbanks for The Free Thought Project

Autism and Race (organization/website)

Kim Discusses Disability, Race, and Infrastructural Neglect, The Wesleyan Argus

What Racial, Disability, and LGBT Justice Have in Common, PBS News Hour

Public Schools' Disturbing Conflation of Race and Disability, Al-Jazeera America

Race, Depression, and Sandra Bland, The Cavalier Daily

Disabled Black Lives Matter, Huffington Post

We Must Change the Ableist Language Surrounding Sandra Bland's Death, For Harriet

Mental Illness and Jails: Race is Left Out of the Equation, TruthOut

Police Brutality, Mental Illness, and Race in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Austin McCoy for Nursing Clio (blog)

Shooters of color are called 'terrorists' and 'thugs,' why are white shooters called 'mentally ill'? - Anthea Butler op-ed in the Washington Post

Care Under Conditions of Capitalism and White Supremacy: An Interview with Mia Mingus, Bluestockings

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The term disability justice was coined out of conversations between disabled queer women of color activists in 2005, including Patty Berne of Sins Invalid (and Mia Mingus & Stacy Milbern, who eventually united with Leroy Moore, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret) seeking to challenge radical and progressive movements to more fully address ableism.

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Breaking down barriers: children, neuro-disability and access to justiceFrances Sheahan & Professor Huw Williams

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Breaking down barriers: children, neuro-disability and access to justiceFrances Sheahan & Professor Huw Williams

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Frances Sheahan & Professor Huw Williams

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Breaking down barriers: children, neuro-disability and access to justice - Penal Reform International

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Frances Sheahan & Prof Huw Williams write about children who are affected by neuro-disability in criminal justice systems. Specific needs of these children are rarely recognised, understood or accommodated. This blog looks at the kind of structural, procedural and attitudinal barriers that prevent t…

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Locked DownOn Disability and Incarceration by Cheryl Green

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Locked DownOn Disability and Incarceration by Cheryl Green

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Before the Declaration of Independence was even signed, the fledgling United States of America already had mental institutions, taking people considered "insane" out of their homes and tucking them into specialized hospitals. Sometimes they got treatment; sometimes they were shackled, starved, and abused.

People with psychiatric disabilities were jailed more often than they were placed in hospitals in the early days. In the 1830s, a Boston schoolteacher named Dorothea Dix took a job teaching people in prison in Massachusetts. While she didn't go into the job as an activist, what she saw in the prison appalled her. She started to report on the brutal living conditions and how the people in prison, many with psychiatric disabilities, were abused and starved by their jailers. She started a movement that expanded the reach of our psychiatric hospitals, but it was no miracle fix. While a lot has changed in the last 180 years, patterns of abuse in long-term care facilities and jails repeat endlessly to this day.

Right now in the United States, there are more people with psychiatric disabilities in jail or prison than there are in psych hospitals, and incarcerated populations represent people with a huge array of physical, cognitive, and sensory impairments. If she were around today, Dorothea Dix would be outraged at how it's once again easier to wind up behind bars than in a specialized hospital.

Prison activist Dorthea Dix

Our current incarceration rates have something to do with our response to the abusive institutions. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, a law intended to end the isolation and segregation of disabled people in archaic institutions by pushing funding out of institutions and into home- and community-based care. But even as the nation shut down institutions, funding for community care has still not reached levels needed to keep most people with complex care needs in their homes. We shuttered the warehouses and gave people nowhere to go, and pretty much the only resource we gave them was stronger and stronger psychiatric drugs to alter their behaviors and their realities, doing nothing to change society's response to illness and disability.

As a culture, we never addressed the ableist biases that led us to want to lock up disabled people in the first place. The politics of who gets assigned the label of "disability" ties in to racism, homophobia, and sexism. Until the 1970s, homosexuality was considered a mental illness, and for many years, a crime. Many LGBT people were incarcerated in prisons and psych wards. Likewise, 19th century doctors had great confidence that the only reason an enslaved African or African-American might run away was because they were suffering from an alleged mental illness that they called "drapetomania." And we all know the fabulous diagnosis of hysteria, something that can only happen to someone with a uterus. In early-20th-century thinking, someone's uterus supposedly detached from its spot in the abdomen, navigated itself to the brain, and destroyed the person's ability to think rationally.

Today, these biases still all work tragically in tandem. The practice of forced sterilization, once thought to be over, continues into the 21st century for incarcerated women with disabilities who are poor, mostly women of color. And just look at the reality of police violence: In recent years, we're finally getting national media coverage on how Black and Latinx people are far more likely to be killed by police than white people. What's hardly ever reported is police brutality against people with disabilities, even though estimates now find that between one-half and one-third of people killed by police have a disability.

For me, these aren't just distant statistics. They're a constant danger in my own community of people with disabilities from traumatic brain injuries (TBI). I've seen friends with traumatic brain injuries be incarcerated instead of getting rehab when they've spiraled into houselessness, driving under the influence, attempting suicide, and abusing drugs, all common for many people with TBI. Disability and deafness are often criminalized when people don't walk, talk, or respond to police in the way the officers expect them to. Some say police need more training in disability awareness and how not to escalate situations in which someone needs more time or needs to communicate in a way that's unfamiliar to cops. I think the issue will still be here, regardless of training, as long as society continues to view disabled and deaf people as unfortunate victims of circumstance, in need of cures, and as people without our own beautiful, perfectly workable ways of moving, thinking, and communicating.

When I think specifically about why people who acquire their disabilities as adults like I did are more likely to wind up in jail than nondisabled people, I think back to the time I got kicked off an airplane in 2013.

This was back when I used to get completely devastated when anyone changed my plans, something the brain injury really brought out in me. I'd requested preboarding and then to have someone hoist my bag into the overhead bin for me, both of which are my rights under the law. They refused. And I imploded. I didn't want to cause a fuss, so I withdrew into a little ball. As my rage and frustration built, I crushed my glasses in my fist, obliterating them, and I refused to speak for fear that I'd only be able to scream. I was trying to make myself silent and invisible. But that was too much for the flight crew. They demanded I leave the plane, saying I was "a safety hazard" and that the pilot refused to fly with someone who refused to communicate.

When I made it back to the waiting area, I was in a sobbing rage. I threw my bags down and started cussing at the top of my lungs.

Luckily, in cases of disability-related incidents, airlines are required by law to call in a specially trained complaints resolution official, whose job is to observe and assess if a violation has occurred and to write up a report. Since I had been screaming that no one would give me my accommodations, they figured out quickly that he was the one to call. Even though his job wasn't supposed to be more than gathering the facts, he took on the role of mediator and got me to tell my side of the story in a non-yelling voice. He also told me to quit throwing my luggage, which I obeyed, seeing as he was nearly seven feet tall. And then he reassured me I could still go home, which-despite how strange it might sound to some-was the most pressing issue on my mind then; I was certain that being removed from a plane once meant never being allowed back on again, because that's how my brain worked back then.

The glasses I'd crushed had prism lenses to point my eyes in the same direction. Without them, the people, carts, and rolling bags were visually disorienting, and I kept getting lost trying to walk in a straight line. So the official held my hand as we walked to keep me from running into anyone. He got me a new ticket on the next flight. Then he led me to the employee lounge and let me wait there. When I got on my flight five hours later, I was too exhausted to care about my own frustrations. That made it easier to stay calm and follow orders and sit still.

Thinking back to this incident, I know even though it wasn't a good situation, it could have turned out so much worse. Airports aren't exempt from police and TSA brutality. What kept it from escalating to that? I honestly believe it had a lot to do with the fact that I'm a small, cisgender, white woman. It's my privilege that kept me from being incarcerated.

A lot of disabled people don't wind up being as lucky as I was that day. People who are incarcerated are three to four times more likely to report having disabilities than nonincarcerated people, regardless of whether the disabilities or deafness were acquired or present for their whole lives. And the prison system fails them in all sorts of ways by routinely denying them their specific-not special-needs. Storytellers from the AVID Prison Project report barriers they face that are pretty universal, such as having their wheelchairs taken away, being refused medical attention or prescriptions, and being punished and isolated instead of given accommodations, many of which are inexpensive and straightforward.

Last year, I listened to activists and artists on a panel about race, disability, art, and incarceration held in Seattle. Dorian Taylor talked about their experiences being abused as a child and how their responses to abuse were seen as just "acting out."

As a Black, Native American child, labeled as mentally ill instead of as a victim of abuse, they got no counseling or care. Instead, they got incarceration in a mental institution and chemical incarceration through psychiatric drugs, leading to a cycle of isolation and further abuse. Please be ad vised if you check out the rest of the audio: The content of the panel may be triggering as they discuss racism, trauma, family abuse, police brutality, prison, and profiling.

Only in 2016 is the Justice Department finally acknowledging the pattern of disability discrimination in police encounters as they investigate excessive force and racial profiling. In many cell phone videos online showing police brutality, you see people being pushed or dropped onto their heads, and I wonder how many now have brain injuries too.

I used to go to a brain injury support group. Not long after my airport incident, a police chief came to our meeting to talk about police encounters. She told us we should wear medical alert bracelets listing our disabilities so officers would ideally view us as disabled, not noncompliant. I ordered one online that same day. I was scared I might lash out in public again. I was afraid of a cop touching me. I was afraid of a cop punishing me for imploding and not responding, even though for me, it would be self-preservation. The bracelet said to speak slowly, quietly, and calmly. It said to write things down. I can't remember what else it said because I lost it.

As many disability rights and justice activists state, this is not a matter of individual people's personal shortcomings, flaws, or failures. Disability and deafness are not "what's wrong with you." Being disabled or deaf means existing in and creatively adapting to an inaccessible world while honoring and celebrating all aspects of your identity. Nowadays, I have much more self-control, and I can communicate better under stress. With these added privileges, I don't have fear around my own situation anymore because I pass as nondisabled.

Thanks are due to disability justice activists, like those using the the hashtag #dangerouslydisabled on Twitter to share firsthand experiences around policing and incarcerating disabled and deaf people. As we share many, many people's stories, we can go beyond one person's medical alert bracelet and see the patterns around disability and incarceration.

Usually in our media and pop culture, disability is considered a downer of a subject. Disability stories are considered niche. But they're not niche. Disabled people exist in every culture and community in the United States. The imperative that we are to be hidden away in locked buildings is based on cultural values, not a universal inevitability. It's up to us to keep up the fight for basic rights, such as living in the community. And we can't stop there because disability rights are only part of one step in the direction of disability justice.

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Locked Down: On Disability and Incarceration

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Before the Declaration of Independence was even signed, the fledgling United States of America already had mental institutions, taking people considered "insane" out of their homes and tucking them into specialized hospitals. Sometimes they got treatment; sometimes they were shackled, starved, and abused.

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SEED: Our Communities, Our Solutions: Toolkit for Developing Campaigns to Abolish Policing (pg 18- 46) 

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SEED: Our Communities, Our Solutions: Toolkit for Developing Campaigns to Abolish Policing (pg 18- 46) 

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SEED: Dorothy E. Roberts, “Killing the Black Body: A Twenty-Year Retrospective”

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SEED: Dorothy E. Roberts, “Killing the Black Body: A Twenty-Year Retrospective”

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Dorothy E. Roberts, “Killing the Black Body: A Twenty-Year Retrospective”

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SEED: Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex by Julia Sudbury : Introduction Feminist Critiques, Transnational Landscapes, Abolitionist Visions (pg  x - xxvi)

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SEED: Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex by Julia Sudbury : Introduction Feminist Critiques, Transnational Landscapes, Abolitionist Visions (pg  x - xxvi)

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Global lockdown  race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex by Sudbury, Julia 

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SEED: Indicted victims: Black Males and Sexual Vulnerability

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SEED: Indicted victims: Black Males and Sexual Vulnerability

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"While we may disown the racist caricatures of Black men and boys as super-predators, we simultaneously imagine them as voids, vacuous figures that we are fine not knowing. We do not care about how they suffer during their lives, but love performing outrage at their deaths."

- Dr. Tommy J Curry

As a child, It did not occur to me that Black males experienced unique physical and sexual violence; it's routine occurrence made me feel as though abuse was simply a feature of Black boyhood. One was not allowed to express themselves as vulnerable in a world where Black boys could be blamed for the harm they endured. Because of this, I navigated the world a survivor, scraping together fragments of a broken heart, without ever breaking silence. Even as a adult, I've never felt particularly safe or protected; not mentally or physically. Growing up I realized that no one was going to save me from the fear and terror people yearned to inflict on me; life felt like a nest of cycles in derealization and anxiety. And although these feelings have always consumed me, it appears that I am of nobody's concern. Hurt no longer hurts anymore. And for many Black males such as myself, we have become comfortable retreating into silence and isolation...
Indicted victims in life and death:
Calling attention to the misery and social death Black males experience can be painful. Black males experience what Professor Maurice Wallace of Duke University calls the " Monocularistic Gaze of Western Racialism". Through monocularity, Black males are "enframed" within a narrow lens of understanding and possibility. Whereas many groups are allowed to redefine and shape narratives for themselves, Black males remain mired in their tropes. Even working through frameworks that analyze the material experiences of Black boys leads to resistance. We are told Black boys are not traumatized by rape because they enjoy it. And that despite the disadvantages targeting them, putting their issues at the center is, according to popular narratives, doing the work of patriarchy. We have been socialized to believe Black males can experience death, but not pain; can be killed but not hurt. This is to say, the primary accepted form of discourse about Black males, is prefiguration through death and dying (i.e. police terror, homicide, etc.). In efforts to correct this framing through terms such as " Black misandry" first coined by Professor William A. Smith from the University of Utah, Black males are further demonized as violent and pathological. In other words, the necessary dedication of time to holding space for Black males and empirically studying their lives registers as violence to those who believe Black lives are already overdetermined by the centering of those Black males. We may recognize them in death but dare not analyze or understand them in life.

In her book " bad boys": Public schools in the making of black masculinity, Professor Ann Arnett Ferguson argues Black boys are "adultified insofar as their expressions of masculinity are taken as threatening, and rarely afforded the assumption of innocence enjoyed by their white male peers:

"At the intersection of this complex of subject positions are African American boys who are doubly displaced: as Black children, they are not seen as childlike but adultified: as Black males, they are denied the masculine dispensation constituting white males as being "naturally naughty" and are discerned as willfully bad."

In this fashion, Black boys are viewed as intrinsically deviant; walking threats in need of containment. Said differently, on the one hand, "boys will be boys" is a trope used to bolster the idea of masculine traits, and often at the very expense of girls; however, Black boys, due to adultification, are seen as threats that must be controlled and coerced into docility for the comfort of the public's space. This reality, speaks to what Dr. Tommy Curry defines as Racist or anti-black misandry:

"Whereas Black male vulnerability expresses the actual disadvantage and violence Black males suffer as both Black and male, racist misandry expresses the vulnerability Black men and boys have to the obsessive hatred society directs towards them. In this sense, racial misandry not only expresses the pathological aversion society holds toward Black males but also names the ontological program that is constantly operating to socialize the public into believing that, given the savage nature of Black men and boys, the various cruelties and stereotypes used to dehumanize them are accurate."

Racial misandry contributes to the phobias generated to justify Black male death. It results in the fetishizing of their bodies while making them appear invulnerable to rape and sexual assault. Racist misandry leads to a kind of disposability for Black males, reducing them to sacrifices and spectacles in the movements built around their deaths. In this regard, the dissemination of Black male death throughout the technologies of our era (i.e. social media, cable news, smart phones) is the reinforcing imagery of who, in fact, should die. This representation is exactly that: (re)presentation of the desire of dead Black males. David Marriott writes in Photography and Lynching "the photograph represents the climax of an unfolding drama. More than an aid to memory (though it is that too) the photograph is a part of the process, another form of racist slur which can travel through time to do its work." This hypervisibility of Black male death is inextricably tied to a market of consumption or as Marriott posits "the violated body of the Black man comes to be used as a defense against the anxiety, or hatred, that body appears to generate." In fact, whenever the gruesome death of a Black male is captured, you can consistently expect at least one thing: a repurposing of Black males as threats to the communities they live in. In short, the death of Black males is a form of manufactured consent; it is a way for the state to act on behalf of the desires of society.
Indicted victims of sexual violence:
Discourse on the sexual vulnerability and rape of Black males has failed to focus on Black boys and their experiences. Instead, it pivots to narratives we intuitively believe about them. By shifting, it enables blame to replace empathy, thus reorienting the purpose of healing and justice for victims of sexual violence. Black boys are thought to be men, not kids being preyed upon, but adults themselves caught in the throes of sexual conquest. No example is more salient than the overarching focus on what some men (who were once victims themselves) have to say about their past vulnerability. For starters, the idea rest on the assertion that they, as boys, "enjoyed" being preyed upon by older women and girls. It is then taken for granted that Black men in general celebrate the early sexual debut or violation of Black boys. What isn't taken into account, however, is that to the extent some Black men believe this, it is because they have been groomed not to see their vulnerability as rape. Seldom do people take serious issue with the actual perpetrators against these boys. In this way, men who were once victims - or boys who are currently victims - are ultimately responsible for being preyed on. Relatedly, in the instance where women and girls are blamed for being sexually violated (i.e. "being fast", not dressed appropriately, intoxicated, hanging out late, etc) there exist cultural narratives to resist such harmful logics which ultimately seek to restore the humanity of the victims. However, with Black males, no such response is deemed necessary or warranted. Folks who bring up how men cheer on young boys to have sex with older women as a 'gotcha' is an insufficient response for survivors, particularly, because young Black males are not the only demographic who get pressured into championing sex with adults. Yet, we know better not to dismiss the culpability of the adult when the victim is female. No matter what a woman might reflect about her feelings as a girl, in relation to older men, the responsibility will always be on the man. So, what justifies the shift in logic when applied to Black males?

When some Black men suggest they "enjoyed" having sex with older women as children (and we take it at face value) this ultimately suggests an eagerness to believe Black boys can have sexual autonomy in relation to adults. Moreover, this constitutes a clear form of victim blaming. As one psychologist, Dr. Carl Bell puts it, "the way that you protect yourself against a horrible incident [of sexual assault] is to develop a sense of mastery or a sense of power around the incident." As such, Black males construct an image of survival not least because they've dealt with the trauma of defenselessness. If we start from the premise that Black males are sexual deviants who incessantly desire sex, than we cannot conceptualize their suffering when they become victims. The mythos around Black male sexual vulnerability being viewed as a "rites of passage" persist, even when studies show a far more complex dynamic. For instance, when the perpetrator is female, Black boys have no language or discourse addressing female perpetration; many do not understand it as being preyed on or abused. And because Black boys are perceived to have sexual agency at very young ages, they are not understood to be vulnerable to rape by women, only perpetrators against women. In contrast, there is no shortage of language or discourse of men being perpetrators, when men commit rape - though still drastically underreported and under prosecuted - it is more understood as an act of violence.

Nonetheless, Black men with high profiles have shown bravery in sharing their experiences of rape without lauding it as a form of accomplishment. Actor and martial artist Michael Jai White, Hip-hop and R&B artists Da Baby, Tech n9ne, Bishop Juan, August Alsina, and Lacrae have all come forward with stories of sexual violence perpetrated against them at a young age. In one interview with comedian DeRay Davis on his experience, Davis revealed, "I've had older women, who thought I was not being parented correctly take advantage of me." Davis' was raped by a woman at the age of eleven years old. "I remember not having any hair on me, and it was disgusting," he said of the encounter. Rapper Collio shared his experience once saying "my aunt made me lick her, I was eight years old. I didn't know what I was doing. I used to dream about the devil all the time because my aunt told me that if I told anyone the devil would come from hell and stab me". Most recently during a Verzuz battle between legendary hip hop artist DMX and Snoop Dogg, DMX revealed "At 13, I was fucking a bitch 26, sexual abuse but I was getting my kicks... I used to get beat senseless by mom dukes, so I grew up thinking, that's just what moms do". Similarly, DJ Ghost, a popular social media and Hip-Hop personality remarked, "This happened to me twice, two different times with two different women." He says, "I was sitting there crying like a motherfucka while I was getting my dick sucked, and I'm thirteen years old at the time." DJ Ghost went on to say that he wasn't attracted to older women at the time. After being raped, he overheard the woman who molested him discussing it with another woman outside the room suggesting it would be easy for her to go and rape him as well. Though these stories are all public, the broader trend hasn't warranted a serious enough study on the sexual vulnerability of Black males - although there is data to suggest Black males are one of the most vulnerable populations to sexual violence -  according to NISVS data conducted by the CDC. Society maintains that Black males should continue to accrue and signify the embodiment of all fears and phobias. Many of the frames we use about Black males today, rely on old racist theories such as subculture of violence and sex stratification theories. If the ubiquitous "violent Black male" does not exist as a danger to a specific population, it is socially necessary to invent him. Too often, people define patriarchy (universally) as translating to "all men at fault", and to fulfill this role, Black boys are adultified, the concept of vulnerability stripped from them, replaced by the responsibility for the sexual acts inflicted on their bodies. The barbed weight is gathered into their arms, a torment burden to be carried for life. Survey the discussions on Black boys and sexual violence, and the field is replete with discussions on teaching boys not to rape;' rarely is attention paid to vulnerability to rape by their babysitters, teachers, and family members. The erasure of the need to proactively teach Black boys about the harms they are vulnerable to (and endure) is as dangerous as erasing the existing approach which teaches boys to identify which behaviors to avoid in efforts to dismantle rape culture. "Toxic Masculinity" has become the sole heuristic through which the rape of Black boys can be discussed, regardless of the perpetrators gender. This is even more skeptical given research has shown that the term has racist origins. While Patriarchy is a system of gendered violence that generally subordinates women (i.e. sexism and misogyny) and where men dominate, it is anathema to conceive of the racially subordinate male as a victim. The Black male is the canonical rapist. His vulnerability to rape is rendered invisible in the academy, and virtually nonexistent in popular discourse.

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Indicted victims: Black Males and Sexual Vulnerability

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"While we may disown the racist caricatures of Black men and boys as super-predators, we simultaneously imagine them as voids, vacuous figures that we are fine not knowing. We do not care about how they suffer during their lives, but love performing outrage at their deaths."

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SEED:  10 reasons to dismantle the prisonindustrial complex through Queer/trans Analysis and Action (pg 235 - 254)

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SEED:  10 reasons to dismantle the prisonindustrial complex through Queer/trans Analysis and Action (pg 235 - 254)

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SEED : Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois Pgs.69-72 ;47-53

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SEED : Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois Pgs.69-72 ;47-53

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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SEED : A History of Pan-African Revolt by CLR James (Chapter 3) 

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SEED : A History of Pan-African Revolt by CLR James (Chapter 3) 

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A History of Pan-African Revolt by CLR James

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SEED : Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson  (pgs. 140-144) 

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SEED : Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson  (pgs. 140-144) 

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SEED : Why Some People Like the New Jim Crow  by Greg Thomas 

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SEED : Why Some People Like the New Jim Crow  by Greg Thomas 

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WHY SOME LIKE THE NEW JIM CROW SO MUCH: Michelle Alexander is unlike "Some Radical Group[s]" who must be "Crazy" & "Absurd" by Greg Thomas

"This book is not for everyone." - Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010) Riveted on "skeptics," Michelle Alexander writes of "three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States today" in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). She will never label them "white," or "white-supremacist," or "colonialist." Yet this "United States" remains a setter colony and, now, a super empire, still. Nor will she call the 'latest' system (of "control") "racist," or even a system of "racial hostility." She labels these three systems "mass incarceration," "Jim Crow" and "slavery" (Alexander 2012, 14). These labels are quite critically loose. By "slavery" she could only mean antebellum chattel slavery. For many slaveries thrive up into the 21st century, including penal slavery itself, globally as well locally. It is not clear why the colloquial term "Jim Crow" is the second term of choice. E. Franklin Frazier would remind us that the architects of segregation conceived of Black populations as "unfit for human association" - not merely "inferior," "subordinate," or "criminal." Does Alexander comprehend this system; this North American apartheid, well beyond "Whites Only" and "Colored Only" signs, symbolically? Does "mass incarceration" describe the entire condition of Black oppression under the current era of white racist rule or, no doubt, one centrally important element of it? How much or how little can be revealed about white racist oppression and the Black condition of oppression via polite, generic euphemisms like "racialized systems of control," moreover?

Later, The New Jim Crow will read in the title chapter of the text: "It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration)" (219). An 'evolutionary' model of analysis should raise all kinds of questions. How distinct, if at all, are Black historical experiences of "exploitation," "subordination" and "marginalization," which is to say, is there supposed to be no "subordination" or "marginalization" under antebellum chattel slavery; little "exploitation" or "marginalization" under "Jim Crow" or de jure segregation; and no defining features of "exploitation" or "subordination" in the context of "mass incarceration," in actual truth? Why set up a basic conceptual framework that is so basically flawed? Lastly, for starters, why should "The New Jim Crow" continuation of "Jim Crow" of old not also be a "New Slavery," or "Neo-Slavery," since "Jim Crow" of old did reformulate antebellum chattel slavery itself in such scandalous ways? Where is the "slavery" of penal slavery in The New Jim Crow? Is the "Jim Crow" privileged here more comforting than the many slaveries of our past and present - to whom, and for what 'evolutionary' approach to history in the African Americas? Has this book been questioned at all?

"AUDIENCE" vs. "EVERYONE" Apart from a curious subtitle, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow contains a very curious "Preface" and a potentially shocking set of "Acknowledgements" - where she identifies her husband as a federal prosecutor. This is before its general argument ever gets under way. But does anybody really read this text, or any text, these days in particular? This is a minted book, a "hot commodity." There are three pages of blurbs or endorsements from some of the most establishment newspapers and media figures in North America, prior to the title page of the "revised edition" which now boldly in 2012 boasts "A New Foreword" by a commercial academician, "Cornel West." For so many, it has quickly become a standard reference in contemporary commentary on prisons (or "mass incarceration"). This New York Times Best Sellers-style commodification certainly demands critical discussion itself, especially since uncritical consumers of The New Jim Crow include a number of political audiences which the author could not possibly have in mind. After all, if we skip the brand-name "Foreword," her "Preface" begins, curiously: "This book is not for everyone."

The author writes that she has "a specific audience in mind" and proceeds to list several contrasting audiences in suspiciously vague terms. First, there are "people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration." You may be left to wonder who can fail to "appreciate" the facts of "mass incarceration" and, relatedly, how they could still demonstrate their deep and apparently unquestionable concern for "racial justice" at the same time. At any rate, Alexander says she is writing in this case "for people like me," herself, or "the person she was ten years ago." Secondly, there are "those who have been struggling to persuade" others, or those "who have lacked the facts and data to back up their claims." Allegedly, these people know the deal regarding "mass incarceration," unlike Alexander of ten years ago; they instead, somehow, lack information, unlike Alexander of today, allegedly. Third, and finally, there are those who are prisoners themselves: "I am writing this book for all those trapped within America's latest caste system. You may be locked up or locked out of mainstream society, but you are not forgotten" (xiii). Is the problem of "mass incarceration" one of forgetting? This is how Alexander's one-paragraph preface ends. The wording suggests that she is not writing for this "audience" to read and critically analyze her writing - not at all; this would be a writing on their behalf, so to speak, whoever these theoretical prisoners are in her view, en masse, whose goal in her view would be to get out of prison and into "mainstream society." You may be left to wonder where are the prisoners who have other political-ideological desires and far from "mainstream" intellectual traditions of their own, not only in this "Preface," but in The New Jim Crow as a whole.

If this book is "not for everyone," then who is "everyone" exactly? Who is the excepted 'non-audience' of The New Jim Crow, by its own, awfully indirect admission? How does this affect its form as well as content? Alexander uses no racial signifiers to describe her intended audience for a book on "racial caste." From the outset, this is one of many "racial taboos" she will not think of violating as a writer and lawyer grounded in mere liberal reformism, simple "civil rights" liberalism. The actually implied audience of the text is a provincial white and middle-class audience for whom any anti-racist talk that is too Black or too radical is an abomination. Others may buy the book and advertise it for her and The New Press. But any hint of such Blackness or such radicalism is actively and aggressively barred from The New Jim Crow, like "barbarians at the gate" of an ironically Negrophobic analysis.

"Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid fear of both Blacks and revolutions," wrote George L. Jackson in Blood in My Eye (1972) or "On Withdrawal" (Jackson 1990, 125). (I can quote this text; this figure; this context. My audience is Black ... and anyone who can read without the need to eliminate or whitewash Blackness from their universe of reading, writing and meaning.)

A former prisoner himself, Huey P. Newton wrote in "Prisons" (1969) of two types of prisoners, famously, the "illegitimate capitalist" and the "political prisoner." The first type was dubbed so because they had tried to acquire everything or something that capitalism defines as "legitimate," while the capitalist elite defines their attempt to participate in the world of exploitation as "illegitimate" - or "crime." The second type "argues that the people at the bottom of the society are exploited for the profit and advantage of those at the top.... Thus, this second type of prisoner says that the society is corrupt and illegitimate and must be overthrown." "They do not accept the legitimacy of the society and cannot participate" in its corrupting exploitation - or in what Alexander instinctively embraces as "the mainstream," "whether they are in the prison or on the block" (Newton 1995, 219).

The BPP co-founder's legendary hero, George Jackson often spoke of the "inside" prison and the "outside" prison. The world's most famous political prisoner ever, perhaps, he spoke of all imprisonment and all prisoners as either "political prisoners" or prisoners of a specific political order, a specific political economy. The 20th century's most powerful theorist of "neo-slavery," not merely "Jim Crow" segregation, he wrote in Soledad Brother (1970), no less famously: "After one concedes that racism is stamped unalterably into the present nature of Amerikan sociopolitical and economic life in general (the definition of fascism is: a police state wherein the political ascendancy is tied into and protects the interests of the upper class - characterized by militarism, racism, and imperialism), and concedes further that criminals and crime arise from material, economic, sociopolitical causes, we can then burn all of the criminology and penology libraries and direct our attention where it will do some good" (Jackson 1994, 18).

The Freedom Archives describes him the "leading theoretician of the modern prison [or anti-prison] movement" in Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation (2002). Yet there will be no memory or mention of him or Huey Newton or the Black Panthers ... or any prisoner movement ... or the Black Power or Black liberation movement ... or any of the globalizing social movements of the 1960s and '70s at all in Alexander's The New Jim Crow. She will indeed "forget" them (i.e., their activism, their critical ideas and ideals), for the benefit of her rhetorically masked audience (which is assuredly a reflection of herself). Who can afford to overlook this ideological sleight of hand, this censorship - in the name of the Black masses?

In her "Introduction" to The New Jim Crow, the keywords are imperial buzzwords like "Founding Fathers," "democracy," and "reform," not to mention "Obama." The only political organizations of note are the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Urban League. No others can be mentioned or taken seriously, for serious mention might lead some from thinking "reform" to thinking "resistance" or what Harold Cruse famously referred to as "rebellion or revolution."

Pivotally, Alexander traces the origins of her book and its title to a flyer she saw on the street years ago: "THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW," it read. Her response was, she says, dismissive: "Some radical group" was holding a community meeting. She "sighed" and "muttered" to herself: "Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn't help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just think you're crazy." She headed to her new job as "director of the Racial Justice Project" of the ACLU, which is by no means "some radical group" (Alexander 2012, 3). Its members are "people," the quasi-generic "people" of Alexander's target audience; and they are not "absurd" or "crazy." The radicals implied by this story are invoked anxiously, sparsely and pejoratively in the remainder of this "Introduction" as "activists" and "conspiracy theorists."

Unlike "people," or her "racial justice advocates" of liberal reformism (19), they will never have individual or organizational names, let alone books, articles or position papers, to be cited or engaged in any manner, even though they have provided Alexander with the very idea and title for her first and highly commercialized book (along with all of its perks on lecture circuits, cable television shows, etc.). Quiet as its kept, the thought of radicals, old or new - the thought of being affiliated or associated with "unreasonable" radicals and their "crazy," "absurd" thoughts, this haunts Alexander's The New Jim Crow from beginning to end.

"HISTORY" The first chapter, "The Rebirth of Caste" is a rewriting of history - U.S. history, the only history imaginable here, a self-contained or isolationist U.S. history disconnected from the history of the world. It moves first from "The Birth of Slavery" to "The Death of Slavery," despite the fact that "slavery" does not 'die.' Indeed, Alexander first lauds the "achievement" of the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, for "abolishing slavery" (29), and only belatedly concedes that it reframed or rearticulated slavery instead of abolishing it. For "slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime" (31). In the following section, "The Birth of Jim Crow," she cites work by two white historians, David Oshinsky's " Worse than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996) and Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (2008), as if their formulations do not contradict her critical framework and easy historical periodization. They come behind George Jackson's work on "neo-slavery" in Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye in any case. The next section in Alexander's chapter is entitled "The Death of Jim Crow," although this titling contradicts the core argument of The New Jim Crow.

The final section, "The Birth of Mass Incarceration" begins with the late 1950s and concentrates on "the Civil Rights Movement" before suddenly and very strangely leaping into the 1980's of Ronald Reagan and the U.S government's so-called "War on Drugs." Nothing noteworthy is supposed to happen in the interim, such as the Black Power Movement (which marked the radical limitations of this "Civil Rights Movement," of course) and all of the other radical movements of the late 1960s and '70s. Magically disappeared are the Black Panther Party (BPP), George Jackson and the prison-based movement he led which burst into the Attica Rebellion as well as various and sundry international and trans-racial solidarities of world historical significance. This is not simply a "forgetting," to be certain. From this first chapter on forwards, their literature on prison and from prison (systems of racial and social "control," in Alexander's parlance) is written out of The New Jim Crow 's rewriting of history as well - U.S. history, the only official history imaginable here, a self-contained or isolationist U.S. history disconnected from the history of the Western and non-Western world.

The stage is set for this popular "study" to be completed within the trap of settler nationalist thought, early 1950s style; the settler nationalist thinking of elite cries for liberal legal reform; the settler nationalism that is white nationalism "by another name," or the throwback integrationist's white "majoritarian," white-supremacist nationalism of U.S. colonialism and imperialism - all slavery, "Jim Crow" apartheid and neo-slavery aside.

For this "Americanism," as Malcolm X classically and crucially framed it, Alexander cites everything but traditions of Black political and even academic radicalism in The New Jim Crow. Bibliographically, she may be most fond of making reference to Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project and wily French sociologist Loïc Wacquant. Michael Omi and Howard Winant are safe, in passing, despite their indebtedness to more radical social movements, which they deflect for North American sociology themselves. Alexander can quote Iris Marion Young academically and, for a second, Marilyn Frye insofar as she is not introduced as a white radical lesbian feminist. As hallmarks of electoral or U.S. Constitutional liberalism, Derrick Bell as well as Gerald Torres and Lani Guinier find a place in The New Jim Crow, too. So do, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and some early-iconic W.E.B. Du Bois, all quite predictably. And then there is Glenn Loury, the ex-conservative economist and former Reagan-appointee who was "born again" as a "progressive" (liberal) after public and legal charges of battery and drug addiction led to his resignation from Harvard University and the arch-conservative spotlight. He is far from off limits in The New Jim Crow, but all Black radicalism is completely out of bounds. Totally silenced and more "invisible" for her text than even Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), it's farther out than "Mars."

There is no Malcolm X in Alexander's history here, either, even though he exists before Alexander employs her narrative time machine to leap from the mid-1960s to Reagan's 1980s over the later, radical 1960s and early 1970s. How could she speak of the man who told his audience, famously: "Don't be shocked when I say that I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison," in the face of her audience? What kind of history of "Civil Rights" can be written without him, his own emergence from prison and his spectacular critical commentary on "Civil Rights" without "Human Rights" or Pan-Africanism?

Just a few moments of his classic oratory would undermine the entire voice of The New Jim Crow. His "Message to the Grassroots" (1963) speaks to the grassroots, fearlessly, not about them. What Alexander praises as the "March on Washington," Malcolm famously demystifies as the "Farce on Washington" in his critical expose of the "white power structure" and its Negro elite "civil rights establishment" - the "big guns" of "Negro leaders" used against the "Black revolution." There is, further, "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964) on what Alexander repeatedly bemoans as "second-class citizenship: "What do you call second-class citizenship? Why that's colonization. Second-class citizenship is nothing but 20th century slavery. How are you going to tell me you're a second-class citizen? They don't have second-class citizenship in any other government on this earth. They just have slaves and people who are free."

This is why he could decode both "segregation" (or "Jim Crow") and "integration" as both systems white racist power and control. And whereas Alexander recites the words "our nation" countless times throughout The New Jim Crow, ad nauseam, melodramatizing total emotional allegiance to the U.S. government despite this gargantuan "racial caste system," Malcolm in "Message to the Grassroots" would respond in advance: "I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about, 'our government is in trouble.' They say, 'The government is in trouble.' Imagine a Negro: 'Our government'! I even heard one say 'our astronauts.' They won't even let him near the plant - and 'our astronauts'! 'Our Navy' - that's a Negro that's out of his mind. That's a Negro that's out of his mind!"

To be Black and "out of one's mind" here is a political as well as psycho-pathological matter and a profound geo-psychiatric evaluation reminiscent of the popular and academic-intellectual work of one Frantz Fanon - from Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Toward the African Revolution (1964).

Many unwitting consumers of The New Jim Crow who could only find themselves erased and rendered "crazy" or "absurd" and "unreasonable" by its rhetoric would also be supporters of Sundiata Acoli, the comrade of Assata Shakur; a present-day political prisoner in his seventies; and the author of an influential article online, "A Brief History of the New African Prison Struggle" (1992). He writes: "This article was first written at the request of the New Afrikan Peoples Organization (NAPO). Its original title was 'The Rise and Development of the New Afrikan Liberation Struggle Behind the Walls'." The first section of this extensive two-part history, "The 16th Century to the Civil War" begins by looking back further beyond U.S. settler-colonial nationalist historiography: "The Afrikan prison struggle began on the shores of Afrika behind the walls of medieval pens that held captives for ships bound west into slavery. It continues today behind the walls of modern U.S. penitentiaries where all prisoners are held as legal slaves - a blatant violation of international law."

This makes all such prisoners, again, "political prisoners" of some sort. However, there is no such thing as "political prisoners" - on any definition, broad or narrow - in Alexander's writing, not in her "Preface," "Acknowledgements," "Introduction" or six chapters of The New Jim Crow. There is no "international law" in Alexander's legal realm or legal analysis. There is not even a Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world's most famous political prisoner at this point in time, arguably, and the author of a small library of widely translated books on the politics of prison himself. And "forget" about Assata Shakur politically exiled in Cuba with a $1 million bounty on her head, a "reward" which could be raised to $5 million if the new Attorney General of the State of New Jersey, Jeffery S. Chiesa, has his way with the FBI. If this "nation" (which is not a nation) were "ours," then no refugee of COINTELPRO (the FBI's infamous Counter INTELligence PROgram) could be "ours" too. The former "Joanne Chesimard" renames herself "a 20th century escaped slave" and "a Maroon woman," but there is little to no slavery and no criminal FBI war on Black revolutionaries in The New Jim Crow.

How is this vicious and violent state repression of political "activists" somehow not a part of "The New Jim Crow," or "America," for Alexander? The contrast between Sundiata Acoli's writing of history and Alexander's filtering of history is instructive. He proceeds in sections entitled "Post-Civil War to the 20th Century," "The 20th Century through World War II," "Post-World War II to the Civil Rights Era," "The Emergence of Afrikan Nations," "Origins of the Civil Rights Movement" and "Civil Rights through the Black Power Era," for example. She truncates history so as to efface or erase "Black Power" in favor of "Civil Rights," censoring "Black Power" in effect. He, like others, inserts Pan-African Black internationalism into North American historiography and specifies this "Black Power Era' and a "Black Liberation Era." He details "Civil Rights Struggles in Prison" and "Religious Struggles in Prison," "Origins of the New World Nation of Islam" and "Origins of the Five Percenters" as well as how "Black Panthers Usher in the Black Liberation Movement." Not excluded are "The New Afrikan Independence Movement," "COINTELPRO Attacks," "The Rise of Prison Struggles" and "The Black Liberation Army." His article ultimately closes with a decade-by-decade analysis: "The End of the 70's," "The Decade of the 80's," and "The 90's and Beyond." In short, he does not reduce history after the "Civil Rights Movement" to Ronald Reagan and the U.S. government's so-called "War on Drugs."

"WAR" & "DRUGS" The true subject of The New Jim Crow and each of its chapters is practically this and this alone. The rhetoric of a "War on Drugs" does not share space in Alexander with other language that is basic to other, prior political analyses of Black imprisonment or "mass incarceration." There is no critical language of "capitalism" or "class" or "exploitation" in The New Jim Crow. A few hesitant references to "financial incentive" or "the profit motive in drug law enforcement" may be found, infrequently, in their place. Not even the often very chic language of a "Prison Industrial Complex" has any presence at all. "Forget" James Boggs's far more preferable language of a "military-economic-police bloc" in his American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook (1963). The language of "race" and to a lesser extent "racism" is present, but the conceptualization of "race and racism" is in any event weak, narrow, anemic - i.e., liberal. The subtitle of The New Jim Crow is, after all, "Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." The state rhetoric of a "War on Drugs" is thus centrally entertained by Alexander without entertaining it as a rhetorical disguise of capitalism, exploitation, militarism, mass/state murder, imperialism or a cultural and "political economy" of white, anti-Black "racism."

It may be true that "there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980." However, no other "reasons" or pretexts for imprisonment warrant any substantial attention in The New Jim Crow. Alexander concludes: "Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs" (Alexander 2012, 60). She would take Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" rhetoric seriously and lauds his "Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964" (39); and, although she must note more than once that this alleged "War on Drugs" does not target "kingpins," let alone what we could call narco-trafficking, she still takes this federal rhetoric seriously on its own status-quo terms. Her contemporary interpretation of incarceration and criminalization is then disconnected from the long history of Black criminalization by Anglo-North America which predates the U.S. state formation and includes the white criminalization of enslaved African communities on plantations under official chattel slavery as well as nominally "free" Black communities both in the North and the South in addition to the white criminalization of Black/African-Diasporic communities under de jure or "Jim Crow" segregation or U.S. national apartheid. If, en masse, Black people have more critically catalogued everything from "Driving While Black" to "Breathing While Black" as social "crimes" in this country, historically, the essential, white-defined "crime" of "Being Black" cannot be reduced to a recent, "color-blind" side-effect of the selective prosecution of "drug offenses" at the lowest socio-economic level.

Richard Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) writes in "The Real Drug Kingpins Are on Wall Street: Tackle the Drug Problem by Seizing the Banks" (2012): "For brazen criminality, no one tops the bankers. But a banker in jail is as rare as a honest senator." He reports on the criminal history of Wachovia Bank before its takeover by Wells Fargo with the assistance of billions of dollars in federal funding. That bank was found guilty of "having laundered at least $378 billion ... in drug money from 2004-07 for Mexican drug cartels." To buy planes for the transport of cocaine, these cartels also funneled through Bank of America, which is described as "notorious" for the practice of face-lifting money-laundering with a posture of "legitimacy." "So, the Wachovia executives, who admitted their guilt, must have gotten really long sentences for their $378 billion drug business, right?" Becker cuts to the chase: "Not one Wachovia executive spent a night or even an hour in jail, although the value of their crime was 1 billion times greater than the average street dealer." His point is that "while the government rules over the people under capitalism, the banks rule over the government and the entire system. This will only change when the people take power and put an end to a system of, by and for the super rich." Nothing like this is accomplished by the liberalism of The New Jim Crow, which never thinks to challenge the establishment definition of "crime" or "criminality."

"CRIME" Over and again, Alexander can statistically dispute the notion that Black people commit more "crimes" than white people, yet only in the context of her own unexamined notion of "crime," "guilt" and "innocence." She cannot question government or governmental "law." She categorically states (in "The Lockdown"): "Court cases involving drug-law enforcement almost always involve guilty people. Police usually release the innocent on the street - often without a ticket, citation, or even an apology" (Alexander 2012, 69). So how does she or they determine or manufacture "guilt" versus "innocence" here, except outside the "law" itself which is no doubt an instrument of the powerful and one not normally deployed against "kingpins" or corporations or government? The trial is a formality; her legal system, suddenly, supposedly, infallible. This statement concerning "guilt" is quickly contradicted chapter after chapter by ample evidence of police corruption, racism and profiteering, apart from the legal politics of "snitching" and "plea-bargaining." At any rate, Alexander's conventional conception of "crime," "guilt" and "innocence" as well as "law" and "government" remain essentially undisturbed despite the radical "injustice" of the "racial caste system" that would be "The New Jim Crow."

There is no state or governmental crime here in The New Jim Crow because the book uses and consolidates the state's definition or conceptualization of "crime" without question. This is why she writes of the CIA: "It bears emphasis that the CIA never admitted (nor has any evidence been revealed to support the claim) that it intentionally sought the destruction of the black community by allowing illegal drugs to be smuggled into the United States. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists surely must be forgiven for their bold accusation of genocide" (6). In her evaluation of evidence for a target audience that is presumed or expected to know nothing of these matters, there is no discussion of Ollie North's "Iran-Contra" scandal. There is no mention of Pulitzer-Prize winner Gary Webb or his San Jose Mercury News investigative journalism, or his alleged death by suicide after these exposés effectively ended his career in the corporate-establishment media complex. There is no memory or recall of any other "intentional" state assaults on Black bodies, such as the forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (not to mention its more recently exposed analogue in Guatemala) and many others showcased in Harriet A. Washington's Medical Apartheid (2006) - before, during and after "Jim Crow" segregation. Nor is there any memory of the whole history of Black movements charging Alexander's "nation" with genocide before the United Nations. So must William Patterson, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. and even the eminently quotable W.E.B. Du Bois be "forgiven," too, as signatories to We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People (1951)? And, again, there is no discussion or acknowledgment of the FBI in The New Jim Crow or its "intentional" COINTELPRO "destruction" of Black community "activists," dissidents, leaders, organizations, etc.

"RACISM" vs. "COLOR-BLINDNESS" What feeble criticism of racism is possible in this framework? The subtitle of The New Jim Crow is not only strange, it ushers a colossal contradiction, many of which abound page after page, section after section, repetitive chapter after chapter: "Mass Incarceration in the Age Colorblindness" could theoretically make sense in a discussion of "racial caste" or "control," if by "colorblindness" it was meant "colorblindness" as rhetoric or rationale rather than "colorblindness" as an actual, factual 'reality' in North America. But Alexander accepts and affirms her audience's claim to not 'see race' or color; to not be racist; to 'no longer' champion a system that can or should be categorized as unambiguously racist in the world-famous tradition of white American racism. Having made this truly strange concession, she must find some way to account for the contemporary existence of "racial caste," "racial control" or "The New Jim Crow." The argument could not possibly succeed - for those in Alexander's target audience who champion "colorblindness" as a 'reality' would never speak the language of "racial caste" and those outside her target audience (i.e., "everybody" else) who know the reality of this racial condition could not possibly believe the "United States of America" to be a "colorblind society" or "nation." In "The Color of Justice," her third chapter, Alexander writes as if she wonders: "What, then, does explain the extraordinary racial disparities in our criminal justice system? Old-fashioned racism seems out of the question" (Alexander 2012, 103). She assumes a downright silly dichotomy between racism 'of old' and something new that is "racial" but not necessarily "racist," and this "old-fashioned" racism is supposed to be simple or always straightforward and not misconstrued and underestimated by a simple-minded approach to it.

She construes "racism" as by definition "old" on a rather "old-fashioned" sociological model which construes racism as merely overt, explicit prejudice - a racism that is not guarded or denied, ever. She terms this "the work of a bigot" (103). But 'bigotry' is not racism's contemporary vocabulary; and her racism 'of old' was itself often and variously covert or codified and implicit with regard to social-institutional structures as well as individual "prejudices" and "attitudes." Patriotically, Alexander continues: "Politicians and law enforcement officials today rarely endorse racially biased practices and most of them fiercely condemn racial discrimination of any kind." Seriously? They may not endorse or expose what they think to be or recognize as their white racism in public, on camera.... Do they "fiercely" condemn racism of any kind - say, against "young Black males" in "hoodies" or Arabs of any kind, anywhere, during their "War on Terror" subterfuges? (Is U.S. imperialism "colorblind," too, 'now,' abroad?) The very thought is an insult to intelligence. Still, Alexander describes "forms of race discrimination that were open and notorious for centuries" as the only form of racism; as "something un-American" now; and as "an affront to our newly conceived ethic of colorblindness." To hear her tell it, there is a national "anti-discrimination principle" and there has been "a profound shift in racial attitudes" (100). There is no "old" or "new-fashioned" racism in Alexander's writing, either, even though there is this "mass incarceration" of Black people or "The New Jim Crow."

Her conclusion will be that racial "indifference and blindness - far more than racial hostility-form the sturdy foundation for all racial caste systems" (242). You might wonder what other caste systems are studied here, comparatively: none. Or, what impossible explanation is offered to clarify how any country "blind" to race or color could construct a "racial caste system" in the first place, without creating and "seeing" race and color in order to institute it and police it with guns as opposed to "indifference." You might ask what happens in "all racial caste systems" when the "lower" caste refuses to stay in its designated place (physically, economically, symbolically; individually or collectively) and threatens to upset the hierarchical system of race and caste? Nothing? No. The racist "upper" caste responds as usual with more or other modes of "hostility" and unmitigated violence - which is no doubt the very definition of racism and caste virtually everywhere except in Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Besides defining U.S. racism in terms of "a morbid fear of both Blacks and revolutions," psycho-socially, George Jackson outlined three different categories of white racism or white racists: the "overt, self-satisfied racist," the "self-interdicting racist" and the "unconscious racist." The first in this formulation doesn't "attempt to hide" his or her antipathy, their hostility. The second "harbors or nurtures racism in spite [their] best efforts." The third has often little or "no awareness of [their] racist preconceptions" (Jackson 1990, 111). And this analytical grid offered in Blood in My Eye was focused on a consideration of white Leftists - in "Towards a United Front." What of Alexander's preferred audience of anti-Communist "Americans" and their morbid fears of Blacks and revolutions?

Her book turns away from a long tradition and a wide range of anti-racist critical frameworks, ones which zero in on "institutionalized racism" and "the political economy of racism" as well as Blood in My Eye's "overt," "self-interdicting" and "unconscious" racisms, in the plural. These are precisely the traditions and critical frameworks silently and systematically renounced by Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which like the U.S. corporate media will only see racism when it is overt, "conscious," "obvious" and, at bottom, publically avowed or confessed. Her "American" racism must always be uniform, static and undisguised - in other words, utterly ridiculous ... in retrospect.

One decade and a half before Alexander, David Oshinsky could recall in "Worse than Slavery": "Racial caste and custom also pervaded the legal system. There were four kinds of law in Mississippi, whites like to say: statute law, plantation law, lynch law, and Negro law. According to S.F. Davis, a prominent Delta attorney and self-described scholar: 'The judges, lawyers, and jurors all know that some of our laws are to be enforced only against the white people, and others ... only against the Negroes, and they are enforced accordingly'" (Oshinsky 1996, 124). Be that as it may, Alexander never ceases to uphold "the law" - in The New Jim Crow - as an abstraction, a "formally colorblind criminal justice system" (Alexander 2012, 103), within which she must find some way to weakly protest the "mass incarceration" of Black people, "nationwide" and on an unprecedented scale.

She has to 'resolve' her needless conundrums with crude contradiction. The title chapter of The New Jim Crow counts as many differences between this "new" system and that "old" system as similarities, while at the same time cataloguing as differences what could very easily amount to similarities themselves (191-217). Moreover, having dismissed "racism" and "racial hostility" as historical relics, Alexander explains the "racially discriminatory results" of the present system as emerging from a two-stage process: "The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free rein." This is cop racism, "old-fashioned" police racism and racial fascism under white racist "caste." However, Alexander shirks from calling racism what it is both before and after this or that statement which labels racism "un-American" and white "America" as "colorblind" or currently incapable of racism or "racial hostility." "Then, the damning step," she adds: "Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in a racially discriminatory fashion" (103). Subtly, dishonestly, "racially discriminatory" comes to replace "racism" in her rhetoric as if they were not synonymous; and, soon enough, she must concede: "The dirty little secret of policing is that the Supreme Court has actually granted the police license to discriminate" (130). "The Court" licenses the police to practice "racial discrimination" (or persecution and prosecution and imprisonment). The judges of this "Supreme Court" in their own racism license this police racism - although racism no longer exists and is "old-fashioned" according to Alexander. This "dirty little secret" is not "overt" - its targets know it inside out, but its practitioners do not admit it "openly," so it won't be recognized as racism or Alexander will offend her target audience. Central contradictions abounding, she must substitute impotent, pathetic euphemisms instead.

Critically, we are returned to George Jackson's discourse of "masking" or "disguise": Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye's anti-capitalist examination of racism, neo-slavery and fascism - "updated to disguise" - exceeding narrow periodization or world historical timelines. He wrote to "rip off" the masks. With great timidity, Alexander will briefly refer to her audience's tendency of "denial" (223). Later, she recalls a study which found that "whites are so loath to talk about race and so fearful of violating racial etiquette that they indicate a preference for avoiding all contact with black people" (238). Translation, for a different audience (that is, for "everyone" else): "...so fearful of having their whiteness and their anti-Black racism exposed, unmasked, and the world as they wish to know it put to an end." Wearing the proverbial "masks" of Paul Laurence Dunbar in the worst way, Alexander denies the existence and ferocity of white racism as such as much as these whites do. Fearful of violating racist political "etiquette" herself, she covers for them as they yearn for a "colorblind" world which means a world of white power without Black people or Black power. Repressing slavery, neo-slavery and anyone who theorizes it, she never dares to think fascism with "racial caste" or her "racial caste" itself without restraint. On the contrary, she helps disguise racism in a fashion that consolidates it under the cover of "colorblindness" - a way of not seeing which she eventually sees as political liability while still casting it as an actual contemporary reality in North America as opposed to a rhetoric or rationale of white racism itself.

CONCLUSON: COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY "LOVE" The ultimate expression of law is not order - it's prison.... Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics.... Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.... The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like me. - George L. Jackson, "American Justice" / Blood in My Eye (1972) It should be no surprise that the political action proposed in The New Jim Crow is pitched as a plea for "love," Christian love, and of course "forgiveness." In closing, "crazy" and "absurd" "activists" in the distance, this law professor comes to speak the language of "movement," but only to ask for a "new civil rights movement" (223), in spite of the gross limitations of such liberal reformism and her unrelenting avoidance of every other kind of movement in recent history, nationally and internationally. This is the classic sado-masochistic attachment to white racist Americanism of the Negro or "African-American" elite, the Black "lumpen-bourgeoisie." The absence of any critical class analysis in Alexander is a reflection of this uncritical paradigm of "civil-rights" reformism, a class-specific liberalism of U.S. settler nationalism in a scorch-and-burn age of U.S. imperialism worldwide.

Her last chapter is entitled "The Fire This Time." The only James Baldwin in The New Jim Crow is the one attached to the old "civil rights movement." It is never the one who said the term "civil rights movement" is "an American phrase which ... upon examination means nothing at all"; or the one who wrote No Name in the Street (1972) and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985); or the one who said in the midst of the Black Power Movement that he had formerly been "the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father." As an 'exile' or 'expatriate,' he represented hard and long for George Lester Jackson and the Black Panther Party at large. Nonetheless, politically selective and cliché, Alexander's reach for The Fire Next Time (1963) cannot envision "revolutionary love" - as a counter-revolutionary love discourse begins and climaxes The New Jim Crow in lieu of any radical political action, or "activism," of course.

When Alexander writes "Gangsta Love," a small section of an earlier chapter, "The Cruel Hand," she makes her second, wildly generalizing reference to "rap" and "black youth." The first would quote their reference to police "occupation" of "ghetto communities" without recognizing this as a graphic reference to white colonialism or imperialism (123-26). The second apologizes for "gangsta rap" to her white and middle-class audience of peers, or skeptics. 'Hip-Hop' is not in her vocabulary; and she shows no knowledge whatsoever of even 'Hip-Hop Studies.' In true middle-class fashion, she claims that "gangsta rap" is a case of "black youth" "embracing criminality" and "embracing their stigma" (171). It could not be that there are any values other than white and middle-class values or that "black youth" are embracing instead their cultural rejection of white and middle class values as well as white and middle class conceptions of "crime" or "criminality" quite in the tradition of many revolutionary movements uniformly repressed by The New Jim Crow.

This patronizing, 'pop-psyche' treatment of love should call to mind Alexander's "Acknowledgements," which your average consumer-reader might very well ignore. There she testifies: "My husband, Carter Stewart, has been my rock.... As a federal prosecutor, he does not share my views about the criminal justice system, but his different worldview has not, even for a moment, compromised his ability to support me, lovingly.... I made the best decision of my life when I married him" (xvi). Is this not "Gangster Love," alas? That would be the love of a federal prosecutor under the "new" "racial caste system" or "racialized system of control" - especially since Alexander will write that "no one has more power in the criminal justice system than prosecutors" (115), not even judges, some of whom no matter how "conservative" have resigned from the bench rather than collaborate with the grotesque prison politics of mandatory sentencing for the poor and Black or the non-rich and non-white (92-93)? The ruthless gangsterism of the establishment is no less a theme in Hip-Hop, or "rap." The 'love of her life' prosecutes for "The New Jim Crow" and has "read and reread drafts" of her book manuscript (xvi). What is the "Old Jim Crow" equivalent of being wedded or married to a federal prosecutor, while stigmatizing Hip-Hop or "gangsta rap" as a "Minstrel Show" (173-75), in one of the precious few representations of grassroots anything in The New Jim Crow?

Intellectually, it is not just a question of what Michelle Alexander does or does not know here, on the whole. She cites a lot of some scholars (or "people") and kinds of work. What she doesn't seem to know may be a great deal, but what she doesn't want to know and what she doesn't want her audience to know is much greater. Original insight or info is in reality scarce in The New Jim Crow. Its hides from consumer view other work, "activists" and scholars more insightful and more radical or fearless. For anyone who could read across a range of relatively recent writings alone, like Elaine Brown's The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America (2003); Katheryn K. Russell's The Color of Crime (1998); Colin Dayan's Story of the Cruel and Unusual (2004); Mumia Abu-Jamal or Dhoruba Bin Wahad's contributions to Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries (1993), just for example; beyond Angela Y. Davis's much-touted if ill-conceived Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), all of which are meticulously ignored by Alexander with current radical "activism" and all of the Black and non-Black radical movements of the 1960s and '70s, there is literally next to nothing to be learned from The New Jim Crow. "This book is not for everyone," indeed. Yet a lot of this "everyone" has been buying and supporting it, none the wiser, without raising adequate questions from the perspective of "everyone," whose lives surely depend on raising questions under this cultural, political economic order of things. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow is not for "everyone" because from cover to cover "everyone" except advocates of white and middle-class liberalism - in the imperial context of U.S. settler nationalism - are placed totally and completely beyond the pale. The soundtrack of Richard Wright's old protest, White Man, Listen! (1957), a virtual parody half a century ago, scratches pitifully in the background.

Greg Thomas is an Associate Professor of Global Black Studies in the English Department at SU. He obtained a Ph.D from the Rhetoric Department at UC-Berkeley and an M.A. from the "Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture" Program at SUNY-Binghamton. Thomas is founder and editor of PROUD FLESH , an e-journal published by African Resource Center. He is also author of The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Indiana UP, 2007) as well as Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge and Pleasure in Lil' Kim's Lyricism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Currently, he is at work on a study of the intellectual politics of George L. Jackson, "The Dragon." He can be reached at: gthomas@syr.edu
STUDY GUIDE / 10 Critical Questions:
1. Who is the target audience for The New Jim Crow in truth? How might everyone else read this book as a result?

2. What is the contemporary status of racism, according to the argument? How in the world could it be possible to have a society of "racial caste" and "racial control" without racism or "racial hostility" in fact? Why is the language of whiteness, white racism or white-supremacy never used beyond the ostensibly 'race-neutral' language of "racial caste" and "racial control" specifically?

3. How is slavery treated, not treated or under-treated in this book? Does the author pay any or adequate attention to penal slavery, for example, or the 13th Amendment's legalization of slavery "as punishment for a crime" in the U.S. Constitution? Why are various slaveries neglected in this "evolutionary" approach to slavery, "Jim Crow" segregation and "mass incarceration," so to speak?

4. How does the author's conception of "crime" (or criminality) differ in any way from the ruling class establishment's conception of "crime" (or "criminality")? Does she ever dare to question the fundamental function of law, the government or the state, outside its own ideological terms?

5. Does The New Jim Crow have anything critical to say about capitalism, as such, or colonial/neo-colonial imperialism?

6. The author constantly, even manically refers to "our nation" in this narrative, patriotically. What are the political consequences of this settler nationalism - for Black people and, indeed, all subject peoples all over the world? In what ways does her super-patriotism or settler nationalism shape the form, content and perspective of this book?

7. Where are all the radical movements of the 1960s and '70s in the author's construction of history, not to mention her brand of socio-political analysis? Where is the Black Power movement or Black liberation movements in general? Where are prisoner movements, past and present? Why must they be effaced, "forgotten" or repressed by this particular approach to history and political analysis?

8. How are prisoners themselves represented in this book? Are they ever capable of movements, traditions, intellectualism, or must they always be "spoken for" by others? Can one imagine a George Jackson or an Attica Rebellion here; or a Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kevin Cooper, Kevin "Rashid" Johnson or Adisa Kamara a.k.a Steve Champion in The New Jim Crow? What about Claudia Jones or Assata Shakur? Or is this a kind of "social welfare" approach to prisons and prisoners?

9. What kinds of work by what kind of scholars get cited in this book? What kinds of work by what kind of writers or figures never get cited by this book, even though they so many of them cover so much of the same ground before it and much better? Where are Black radical traditions of political and intellectual inquiry, which have quite famously focused on issues of imprisonment for decades if not centuries?

Malcolm X once said that a "liberal" was the most dangerous creature in the Western Hemisphere. How might this statement be applied to the liberalism of Michelle Alexander's book and its tremendous popularity in the corporate media or white capitalist marketplace?

WORKS Abu-Jamal, Mumia, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and Assata Shakur. Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries. New York: Semiotexte, 1993. Acoli, Sundiata. "A Brief History of the New African Prison Struggle," Parts 1 & 2 (1992): http://www.sundiataacoli.org/a-brief-history-of-the-new-afrikan-prison-struggle-parts-1- and-2-19 Alexander, Michelle. [2010] The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: Free Press, 2012. Baldwin, James [1972] No Name in the Street. New York: Vintage Press, 2007. -------. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. Becker, Richard. "The Real Drug Kingpins Are on Wall Street: Tackle the Drug Problem by Seizing the Banks!" Liberation (April 13, 2012): http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/newspaper/vol-6-no-6/the-real-drug-king-pins.html Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2008. Boggs, James. [1963] American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook. New York: Monthly Review, 2009. ------. Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader. Ed. Stephen M. Ward. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011. Brown, Elaine. [2002] The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Cruse, Harold. [1968] Rebellion or Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Dayan, Colin. The Story of the Cruel & Unusual. Boston, MA: Boston Review. 2007. Fanon, Frantz. [1952] Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. ------. [1959] A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Monthly Review, 1967. ------. [1961] The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. ------. [1964] Toward the African Revolution. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press, 1988. Franklin, E. Franklin. [1957] Black Bourgeoisie. New York: Free Press, 1997. Freedom Archives. Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Liberation [CD], 2002. Jackson, George. [1970] Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994. Jackson, George L. [1972] Blood in My Eye. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990. Mickle, Paul. "New NJ AG: Get Chesimard by All Means Nece$$ary" The Trentonian (2/27/12): http://www.trentonian.com/article/20120227/NEWS/302279981/new-nj-ag-get-chesimard- by-all-means-nece-ary Newton, Huey P. [1972]. To Die for the People. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2009. Oshinsky, David M. [1996] "Worse than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Free Press, 1997. Patterson, William L. (and the Civil Rights Congress). We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from the Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People. International Publishers, 1951. Russell, Katheryn K. [1999] The Color of Crime: Racial Hoaxes, White Fear, Black Protectionism, Police Harassment and Other Micro-Aggressions. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Shakur, Assata. [1987] Assata: An Autobiography. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001. Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Doubleday, 2006. X, Malcolm. [1965] Malcolm X Speaks. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989. -----. [1970]. By Any Means Necessary. Pathfinder Press, 1992. -----. [1992]. February 1965: The Final Speeches. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2010.

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WHY SOME LIKE THE NEW JIM CROW SO MUCH: Michelle Alexander is unlike "Some Radical Group[s]" who must be "Crazy" & "Absurd" by Greg Thomas "This book is not for everyone." - Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010) Riveted on "skeptics," Michelle Alexander writes of "three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States today" in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in [...]

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SEED : #EndSars: Contextual Primer on the Youth-led Anti-Police Movement in Nigeriaby Nnennaya Amuchie

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For the past week, Nigerian youth have been hitting the street to demand #EndSARS. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad Policing Unit (SARS) was created in 1992 to "stop crime" specifically armed robbery and kidnapping which was a growing concern in the 1990s and 2000s. Armed robbery and kidnapping mainly targeted rich and middle-class Nigerians who have seen massive increases in wealth in the last few decades. However, like many policing squads, SARS is a largely unchecked unit that has been targeted young people based on their appearance of tattoos, earrings, iPhones, and cars utilizing that as evidence of fraud, scamming and crime. Additionally, this unit routinely profiles and targets sex workers, especially trans and queer Nigerians; oftentimes raping, beating arresting, and murdering them. But as we know, crime is a byproduct of poverty and while the Nigerian rich get richer, the poor have been getting poorer leading to social, economic, and political unrest; especially among youth.

On October 3rd, 2020, a video spread of SARS killing a young man in front of Wetland Hotel, Ughelli in Delta State, Nigeria, and then fleeing the scene with the person's car. Since October 8, 2020, Nigerian youth have staged a protest outside of the Lagos State Governor's house leading to massive protests across the country and around the world. There have been protests in Lagos, Abuja, Oyo State, Delta, Anambra, Osun, Rivers, Enugu, Ebonyi, Washington D.C., London, Canada, Germany, New York, Dublin, and more. These protests cut across ethnic groups, class, gender, and sexuality with the LGBTQ community and Nigerian women at the forefront.

Those looking on from the West may see this anti-police struggle and deeply feel connected to what's happening in Nigeria. However, this is not merely a struggle against a police-state, but rather a much larger imperialist neo-colonial policy that both nations share.

How Did Nigeria Get Here?

While slavery may have "ended" in the mid-1800s, colonialism did not. The period between 1881-1914 is known as the " Scramble for Africa." In 1884, European elites came together for the Berlin Conference, where prominent colonial European nations decided that Africans had no claim to their land, created a racial hierarchy, and made a plan to expand the exploit African land, labor, and resources.

Europeans burned villages and sacred buildings, terrorized, jailed, and killed elders, deployed police and army to take over land, and imposed European law, religion, and authority. Police and military forces were established in key economic areas, specifically along the coast for access to trade and in the Niger Delta and surrounding areas that had access to oil, land, minerals.

According to Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria by Toyin Falola, in 1862, the British established the first military unit in Lagos, Nigeria. In 1879, The Royal Niger Company police were established. Then The Niger Coast police in 1888. In 1896, the Lagos Police. Falola explains that these forces were equipped with military weapons and trained to steal more land, fight Nigerian chiefs/kings, and protect the colonial governments.

Because of the geography and decentralized structure of southeastern Nigeria, particularly among the Igbo people, direct military rule proved difficult. In 1900, European warlord Lugard established "indirect rule" where individual Igbos were placed into leadership, such as "warrant chief" to expand British domination ( Colonialism and Violence, Toyin Falola). These warrant chiefs used the newly established "native courts" to impose colonial law. Nigerians who did not accept colonial rule were arrested and punished. Additional regulations were created to repress any type of resistance.

For example, the Collective Punishment Ordinance of 1909 empowered colonial officers to punish a group, a village, or a whole town for the "transgressions" of a member ( Colonialism and Violence, Toyin Falola, 26). There were countless wars and various forms of resistance, especially among women in Southeastern Nigeria. Violent colonial master H.M Douglas's utilized violence to impose "respect" for the Europeans and his laws. According to Falola, the more the people protested, the more violent Douglas's responses became.

Falola further illustrates how Douglas used violence to force the Igbo people to build roads and houses for colonial masters.

" Ekechi has given an example of the punishment Douglas meted out to another group, the Eziama, in March 1904 for their refusal to make roads or obey instructions Douglas had issued. The people were attacked, all their houses were destroyed, and the chiefs were ordered to force their subjects to construct roads. While the chiefs conveyed the message, many people conveyed the message, many people refused to cooperate. For two months, a constable was stationed among them, but they still refused to yield." - Colonialism and Violence, Toyin Falola

The Nigerian police/ military have always served European interests. The roads that Nigerians were coerced to build made it easier for the police and army to move between economic posts and to respond and repress any acts of resistance among the natives. As evidenced above and stated in Colonialism and Violence, colonial masters punished those who refused to serve them, individuals who would express their grievances were warned, and chiefs were told to surrender rebellious men to the government.
Tables from Colonialism and Violence by Toyin Falola showing a timeline of Nigerian history of colonialism and resistance documented in the book.
While the Europeans proved more violent with superior weaponary willing, there is a rich history of resistance against slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism.

Western Influence on Nigerian Government Policy

Since 1492, the U.S. and its' European allies have worked together to exploit African land, resources, and labor to fill their pockets. Africa has so many raw materials. The neo-colonial leaders profit, while the African masses suffer worldwide.

Before the 1990s, the U.S. focused on the Middle East and North Africa but then began to expand to West Africa and enter into agreements to engage in military exercises, training programs, and increased weapons. These are the tactics you see in the streets of Nigeria now.

Today, imperialism in Nigeria continues. Nigeria is the largest oil and gas producer in Africa and at the mercy of U.S. and European powers needs oil to make more weapons, to go to war to steal more land and resources, and extract more wealth. U.S. companies like Shell and Chevron are responsible for millions of deaths, environmental disasters, and constant intercommunal violence. Thousands of people in the Niger-Delta are being pushed off their lands to expand U.S. wealth.

Now, the U.S. and its' European allies are using the "war of terror" to expand military domination on the African continent. Policies like The United States African Command (AFRICOM) are equipping and training Nigerian police/ military to "fight terrorism"; however people understand that what the U.S is doing is seeking to expand economic control over Nigeria. Even if SARS is to end, the western influence on the Nigerian government will only push to establish a newer arm of the law because of the intended purpose of the Nigerian police/ military.

Equally alarming is the Western investment in constructing new prisons in Ghana and Nigeria. We understand, here in the U.S, that prisons produce free labor. We know, here in the U.S., that prison serves as an extension of slavery. What we must begin to understand how Western colonial influence in West Africa will have the same effect. Abolition of neo-colonial oppressive police states MUST be international.

Beyond culture, the African diaspora is connected through neo-colonial policies that perpetuate anti- Blackness and strips us of the ability to learn about our inter-connecting histories. Resistance is as much of our shared past as the beat of a drum is. Many slave revolts in the U.S. were led by people trafficked from present-day Nigeria. Our destinies are tied. Africa must be free for Black people in the U.S. and everywhere to be free.

Call to Action

Donate to Trans and Queer Protesters on the ground.

Join IG Live 10/16 at 6 pm EST to hear reflections on the protest in Nigeria. Save November 1st for a teach-in on the history of policing in Nigeria and abolition. Follow @theafrolegalise to get updated information.

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#EndSars: Contextual Primer on the Youth-led Anti-Police Movement in Nigeria - Hood Communist

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For the past week, Nigerian youth have been hitting the street to demand #EndSARS. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad Policing Unit (SARS) was created in 1992 to "stop crime" specifically armed robbery and kidnapping which was a growing concern in the 1990s and 2000s.

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Link to folder with audio readings by Micah ! 

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Link to folder with audio readings by Micah ! 

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At any given time, the United States holds scores of transgender women in immigration detention, including many who have fled to the US seeking protection from torture, sexual violence, and other forms of persecution in their home countries related to their gender identity or gender expression.

Once they arrive, the women are locked up for months or even years at a time in jails or prison-like detention centers as they wait for a court to adjudicate their asylum claims, or to be deported for civil immigration violations. While in detention, many experience sexual assault and other forms of abuse and ill-treatment, including denial of access to necessary medical care.

Immigration detention can be a difficult experience for anyone. But it is often particularly harmful for transgender women due to the abuse they have previously endured. Many are traumatized by extended placements in solitary confinement and other physically isolated settings-a practice that authorities often justify as a step to protect them from other forms of abuse in detention. Some are also denied prompt and adequate access to necessary medical care, including hormone replacement therapy and HIV-related care, or have been denied access to that care altogether.

Based on 28 interviews with transgender women-most of them from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras-held or being held in US immigration detention between 2011 and 2015, this report details the abuses that transgender women suffer in immigration detention and the US government's inadequate efforts to address them.

As of February 2016, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency responsible for overseeing immigration detention, claimed it did not know how many transgender women were in immigration detention across the US, let alone where and under what conditions they are being held. However, ICE officials estimate that there are approximately 65 transgender women in detention on any given day among a nationally detained population of approximately 30,000 migrants and asylum seekers. A December 2015 investigation by Univision quoted ICE officials as saying there were 36 transgender women held in a segregated unit at the Santa Ana City Jail in Santa Ana, California-where a large proportion of all transgender women in immigration detention were held at time of writing-and 20 held in other detention facilities throughout the US at that time.

In early 2016, the US government appeared to move away from holding transgender women in men's facilities and began transferring many of them to a segregated unit at the Santa Ana City Jail that exclusively houses transgender women. However, at time of writing, ICE officials were unable to state whether the agency had abandoned the practice of housing transgender women with men, and they had not announced any concrete plans to do so. Under ICE policy, immigration officials may still elect to house transgender women in men's facilities-placing them at exceptionally high risk of sexual assault and other kinds of trauma and abuse. Others may be kept indefinitely in conditions of isolation simply because authorities cannot or will not devise any safe and humane way to keep them in detention.

Even within the segregated detention unit inside a city jail in Santa Ana, several transgender women said they are regularly subjected to humiliating and abusive strip searches by male guards; have not been able to access necessary medical services, including hormone replacement therapy, or have faced harmful interruptions to or restrictions to that care; and have endured unreasonable use of solitary confinement. It is important to emphasize that all of these problems exist in a detention setting that was created by the US government with the express purpose of detaining transgender women in a humane and culturally sensitive environment.

Human Rights Watch calls on the US government to:

Prioritize the development and expansion of alternatives to detention for transgender women and other non-citizens considered members of vulnerable populations, including those subject to mandatory custody.

Review and revise its policy on immigration detention of transgender women. Where such detentions are consistent with US and international law, develop and implement a clearly articulated strategy to house transgender women in safe and humane conditions that ensure respect for their human rights. Transgender women should never be held with men, or in prolonged solitary confinement.

Take immediate steps to investigate and halt abusive practices at the Santa Ana City Jail and ensure that transgender women held there are able to freely access necessary medical and mental health care services. If these problems cannot be promptly and comprehensively addressed, ICE should not continue to hold transgender women at the Santa Ana City Jail.

Monitor conditions in which transgender women are being held at other detention facilities, and ensure that these settings are free from abuse and respectful of their specific medical and mental health needs. If an alternative site is designated to hold transgender women in a segregated unit, ICE should articulate detailed and specific steps to ensure that abuses do not occur there and that transgender women are held in safe and humane conditions.

If the US government is unable or unwilling to take all of these steps, it should not hold transgender women in immigration detention at all.

Monserrath's Story

Us trans women, we come here fleeing from our countries. They don't have to detain us. Migration [ICE] is cruel with us trans women.

- Monserrath López, a 23-year-old transgender woman from Honduras, detained for about six months by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

On the evening of September 20, 2014, Monserrath was walking through a public park in Copán, Honduras, listening to music and enjoying an ice cream when four masked men suddenly appeared and beat her unconscious.

She woke up several hours later in an unknown location. There, the same men beat her and forced her to perform oral sex on all of them; one sheared off her hair with pair of scissors while describing how he planned to torture and kill her. He told her, "We're going to cut you up. [...] Even your family won't be able to find you."

Fearing for her life, Monserrath spent the next three months making her way toward the United States through Mexico, where she said other migrants repeatedly raped and abused her. She arrived at the US Port of Entry in Eagle Pass, Texas, on December 12, 2014, where she presented herself to US Border Patrol agents and requested asylum. She was then held in isolation for four days at a Border Patrol station. On the fifth day, she was handcuffed, shackled, and forced to board a bus to a men's detention center in Pearsall, Texas, where she was held for six months-despite disclosing to officials that she identified as a transgender woman.

Monserrath said guards and male detainees repeatedly sexually assaulted and verbally harassed her while she was in detention, and denied her access to medically necessary hormone replacement therapy. In one instance, after reporting to facility staff that a male detainee had sexually assaulted her while she was showering, a guard responded by threatening to place her in solitary confinement. She was released from detention and granted asylum in May 2015.

Bisexual: Sexual orientation of a person who is sexually and romantically attracted to both males and females.

Cisgender: The gender identity of people whose birth gender (which they were declared to have upon birth) conforms to their lived and/or perceived gender (the gender that they are most comfortable with expressing or would express given a choice).

Gay: Used here to refer to the sexual orientation of a male whose primary sexual and romantic attraction is toward other males.

Gender: Social and cultural codes (as opposed to biological sex) used to distinguish between what a society considers "masculine" or "feminine" conduct.

Gender identity: A person's internal, deeply felt sense of being female or male, both, or something other than female and male. A person's gender identity does not necessarily correspond to the biological sex assigned at birth.

Heterosexual: A person whose primary sexual and romantic attraction or sexual orientation is toward people of the opposite sex.

Homophobia: Fear and contempt of homosexuals, usually based on negative stereotypes of homosexuality.

Homosexual: Sexual orientation of a person whose primary sexual and romantic attractions are toward people of the same sex.

LGBT/LGBTI: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, (and intersex); an inclusive term for groups and identities sometimes associated together as "sexual minorities."

Lesbian: Sexual orientation of a female whose primary sexual and romantic attraction is toward other females.

Sexual orientation: The way a person's sexual and romantic desires are directed. The term describes whether a person is attracted primarily to people of the same sex, the opposite sex, or to both.

Transgender: The gender identity of people whose birth gender (which they were declared to have upon birth) does not conform to their lived and/or perceived gender (the gender that they are most comfortable with expressing or would express given a choice). A transgender person usually adopts, or would prefer to adopt, a gender expression in consonance with their preferred gender but may or may not desire to permanently alter their bodily characteristics in order to conform to their preferred gender.

This report is based primarily on interviews conducted between June 2015 and August 2015 in seven US cities-New York, New York; Washington, D.C.; Houston, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; Tucson, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; and San Francisco, California-as well as interviews in detention facilities in Santa Ana, California, and Houston, Pearsall, and El Paso, Texas. These cities were chosen because community advocates and immigration attorneys identified transgender women who were then being held or had recently been released from immigration detention.

Interview participants were identified by immigration attorneys and LGBT immigrant rights organizations, including Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement (Los Angeles), Casa Ruby (Washington, DC), Mariposas sin Fronteras (Tucson), Arcoíris Liberation Team (Phoenix), and Translatina Network (New York).

More than half of the women whom Human Rights Watch interviewed were detained by immigration authorities upon seeking asylum along the US-Mexico border. Approximately one third of interviewees were transferred to federal immigration authorities by state and local law enforcement agencies and mandated to detention due to mostly low-level criminal offenses, including nonviolent drug possession and involvement in sex work.

This report is based on 28 interviews with transgender women who were held in US immigration detention for various periods of time between 2011 and 2015. Eleven were in detention at the time Human Rights Watch interviewed them, including one person who was interviewed at two different facilities.

Twelve of these women were either being, or had recently been, held in the segregated unit used exclusively to house transgender women at the Santa Ana City Jail in Santa Ana, California. Sixteen transgender women, or more than half of those interviewed by Human Rights Watch, were held in men's facilities at some point during their time in immigration detention, at various points in time between 2011-2015. We also interviewed one transgender woman who was detained in Virginia in 2010, and one transgender man who was detained in Texas in 2013. Lastly, we interviewed migrant services providers, community advocates, immigration attorneys, mental health experts, and US government officials.

Human Rights Watch carried out interviews in English or in Spanish, depending on the preference of the interviewee, without interpreters. We informed all participants of the purpose of the interview and consented orally. Those interviewed in detention also consented in writing. One person who was unable to meet in person was interviewed by telephone. Interviewees were not compensated. We reimbursed those who travelled to meet with us the cost of public transport and provided a meal, between $5 and $15, depending on the distance traveled.

We gathered additional information from published sources, including laws, immigration detention regulations, United Nations documents, academic articles, media reports, and studies published by other human rights organizations. We also reviewed relevant US court rulings interpreting government obligations under the Convention against Torture, and other legal sources.

Where appropriate, Human Rights Watch provided interviewees with contact information for individuals and organizations providing legal, counseling, or other supportive services at the conclusion of the interview. The report uses pseudonyms for all currently and formerly detained interviewees, unless noted otherwise, for reasons of confidentiality and security.

On September 23, 2015, Human Rights Watch requested official records from ICE regarding the use of solitary confinement among vulnerable populations (including transgender women, elderly people, pregnant women, and people with disabilities) in US immigration detention. As of March 7, 2016, we had not received a response.

On February 2, 2016, Human Rights Watch wrote to ICE officials requesting information about implementation of the June 2015 transgender detention policy and any further action the agency may be taking to ensure the protection of this population (see Annex I). Following this correspondence, Human Rights Watch wrote to ICE officials on February 10, 2016 to present a summary of this report's findings and to request an official agency response (see Annex II). As of March 7, 2016, we had not received a response.

US Immigration Law

Under US immigration law, transgender women who are fleeing persecution because of their gender identity or gender expression may have a valid claim to asylum.

As a party to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the "Convention against Torture"), the US is obligated not to return somebody to a country "where there are substantial grounds for believing that [they] would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

In making this determination, the convention obligates governments to "take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights."

In the groundbreaking decision of Avendano-Hernandez v. Lynch in September 2015, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that an undocumented transgender woman from Mexico who had a prior felony conviction could not be deported from the United States due to the high likelihood that she would experience future torture if she were returned to Mexico. The court found that the US Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) had erred in an earlier decision to deny the woman deportation relief under the Convention against Torture "because it [had] failed to recognize the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation."

The decision set an important precedent for transgender people seeking protection in the US and provides clear guidance to immigration judges reviewing future claims of persecution based on gender identity or expression.

Mandatory Custody

Regardless of whether they may be able to remain in the US, transgender women and other asylum seekers who are in removal proceedings are often held in detention facilities until immigration courts decide their cases.

In the past two decades, the United States has made a major shift in immigration policy, using detention as a primary means of enforcement, regardless of whether an individual non-citizen is a flight risk or a danger to the community.

Under expedited removal, a would-be asylum seeker faces mandatory custody until and unless an official with the US asylum office makes a preliminary determination that they have a credible claim to protection.

Under reinstatement of removal, a would-be asylum seeker is mandatorily detained until they can prove that they qualify for protection in an immigration court, a process that regularly takes a year or more to complete.

Among the transgender women that we interviewed, nearly half were mandated to detention because of mostly low-level criminal convictions, including sex work, false identification, and minor drug possession charges. While most of these convictions were so minor that they resulted in little or no prison time in the criminal justice system, they still mandated transgender women to be detained, often in settings where they experienced abuse and neglect.

Immigration Detention under Obama

The US detains immigrants in a vast network of about 250 facilities nationwide. These vary widely: some are local jails that have agreed to provide space to the federal government to detain non-citizens, some are operated by private prison companies, and a few are run by ICE itself.

For instance, ICE's 2011 detention standards state that housing placements "should not be based solely on the identity documents or physical anatomy of the detainee," and that, whenever possible, transgender people should be able to choose the gender of a guard performing a strip search.

In May 2012, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum requiring federal agencies that operate confinement facilities, including ICE detention facilities operating under the supervision of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), adhere to the requirements of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which Congress passed unanimously in 2003.

Transgender Immigrant Detention under Obama

In June 2015, ICE announced a new set of transgender detention guidelines (the "guidelines") that formally recognizes the vulnerability of transgender people in detention.

The policy is an important development for transgender women, who until recently were housed primarily among male populations and have long faced disproportionately high rates of sexual assault by both guards and male detainees. The guidelines instruct immigration officials to "consider whether the use of detention resources is warranted" and to assess "on a case by case basis, all relevant factors in this determination, including whether an individual identifies as transgender."

In an effort to improve the safety of transgender people in detention, the guidelines:

Instruct immigration officials to make individualized housing assessments following an assessment by medical and mental health experts, allowing transgender people to be housed in men's or women's facilities; in segregated units that exclusively house transgender women; or under exceptional circumstances, in solitary confinement.

Call for guard sensitivity trainings and improved access to gender-affirming medical care.

Establish specialized intake procedures intended to gather important demographic information and to ensure that individuals who identity as transgender are properly identified and referred to by guards and staff with the use of their preferred gender pronouns.

Call for the establishment of a "Transgender Care and Classification Committee" (TCCC) at facilities that have voluntarily incorporated its provisions. The guidelines instruct that these committees should be composed of medical and mental health personnel, detention facility supervisors, and other relevant ICE officials or facility staff, who will convene upon a transgender person's admission to a detention facility and develop a plan regarding their housing placement, medical care, and necessary security provisions.

State that transgender people should be housed "in a location away from the general population" for up to 72 hours while the committee's assessment is being completed. Housing accommodations during this period may include placement in a "medical unit or protective custody" or, if there is no other available option, in administrative segregation.

Despite these advances, the measures lack an independent oversight mechanism to ensure their implementation in the nearly 250 facilities where detained immigrants are held throughout the US.

The immigration detention system includes service processing centers operated directly by ICE, contract detention facilities managed by private prison companies, and reserved bed space at state and county jails.

The policy instructs immigration authorities to give priority to the placement of transgender women in facilities that have either adopted the transgender detention guidelines or in facilities that operate a segregated housing unit for transgender women. However, these units will only be established at a select number of facilities that voluntarily elect to negotiate the provisions into their existing operating contracts with ICE.

Santa Ana

Since March 2012, ICE has operated a segregated housing unit, or "pod," at the Santa Ana City Jail in Santa Ana, California, for transgender women and gay and bisexual men.

Nevertheless, at time of writing the facility had yet to incorporate the 2015 Transgender Care Memorandum into its operating agreement with ICE. Although ICE has conducted guard sensitivity trainings at the facility since the unit was established, Human Rights Watch found that transgender women held there continued to face abusive and humiliating treatment by guards, including:

Invasive strip searches conducted by male guards;

Frequent "lockdowns" for mostly minor disciplinary infractions, involving being confined to their cells for 22 to 24 hours per day; and

Severely inadequate medical and mental health services to address their unique needs and particular vulnerabilities.

Human Rights Abuses against Transgender Women in the US

A 2013 investigation by the US Government Accountability Office found that three out of fifteen substantiated incidents of sexual assault in US immigration detention facilities involved transgender women. Two of these cases involved transgender women who were sexually assaulted by male guards while they were housed in solitary confinement.

Despite these challenging circumstances, community-based organizations throughout the US have developed a network of resources to support transgender women who face substantial barriers in their attempts to access housing, counseling, legal assistance, and other essential services when they are released from detention.

For several years, transgender immigrant activists and their allies have led local and national advocacy efforts seeking to improve treatment of transgender women and advocating their release from detention. Organizations such as Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and the Transgender Law Center have organized public demonstrations and online social media efforts, including the #FreeMarichuy, #FreeNicoll, and #FreeChristina campaigns, which have brought new attention to the plight of detained transgender immigrants.

Transgender Women and the Call for Alternatives to Detention

ICE officials estimate that among a nationally detained population of approximately 30,000 migrants and asylum seekers, there are approximately 65 transgender women in detention on any given day. According to a December 2015 investigation by Univision, ICE officials stated that there were 36 transgender women held in the segregated unit at Santa Ana, and 20 held in other detention facilities throughout the US at that time.

Transgender women experience disproportionately high rates of sexual assault when housed with men in confinement facilities. Such placements blatantly disrespect their gender identity and leave them extremely vulnerable to abuse by both male detainees and guards.

Several women said they often had to shower in the same communal areas as dozens of men, including Monserrath López, a transgender woman from Honduras, who said a man sexually assaulted her while she was showering in the male housing unit of a privately operated detention facility in Texas.

Interviewees, immigration attorneys, and community advocates said that transgender women held in men's facilities were routinely verbally or sexually harassed while they changed clothes and slept in shared dormitories. They also said that facility guards often stood idly by and declined to intervene during abuse or provide them protection, which emboldened perpetrators.

Emilia R., a transgender woman from Mexico, detained for approximately six weeks at a privately operated detention facility in Arizona in March 2015, said:

In some cases, the guards themselves perpetrated abuse.

Talia S., a transgender woman from Mexico, said that in one instance during shower time-which she had to share with approximately 150 male detainees during the first six months in detention at a facility in Texas-a male detainee groped her buttocks and demanded oral sex. After reporting the incident, Talia said a male guard escorted her to the restrooms so that she could shower at another time but that he would himself stare at her while she changed.

She subsequently filed a written complaint in July 2015 about the guard's behavior, a violation of ICE sexual assault policies prohibiting visual surveillance of detainees.

While the 2015 Transgender Care Memorandum takes the important step of allowing transgender women to be housed apart from male detainees, Human Rights Watch research found that ICE has failed to effectively implement its provisions and ensure that transgender women are protected from sexual abuse and harassment by guards, including for those housed in segregated units.

Transgender women continue to face trauma, abuse, and neglect under the agency's new policy, including at the segregated unit at Santa Ana, which ICE established in March 2012 with the intention of providing a secure and culturally sensitive environment where gay men and transgender women could be housed apart from the general detained population. The Santa Ana unit was initially designated to house 64 gay and bisexual men and transgender women.

Transgender women who had spent time at Santa Ana told Human Rights Watch that male guards regularly subjected them to degrading and humiliating strip searches; made excessive and abusive use of solitary confinement as a disciplinary tool; and frequently denied them prompt and regular access to necessary medical treatment while in detention.

In essence, many transgender women have simply traded one set of abusive conditions for another.

Human Rights Watch interviews with twelve transgender women either currently or recently held there found that they continue to face abusive and degrading treatment by guards.

In particular, many of the women housed in the pod:

Are routinely subjected to invasive strip searches that are conducted by male guards, which they describe as especially traumatic given that they are survivors of sexual assault;

Have endured frequent "lockdowns" for mostly minor disciplinary infractions, where they are confined to their cells for 22 to 24 hours per day and placed under further emotional distress;

Have received severely inadequate medical and mental health services to address their unique and particular vulnerabilities.

These issues are explored in greater detail in the following sections.

Strip Searches by Male Guards

Transgender women detained at the segregated unit at Santa Ana-including many survivors of sexual assault-told Human Rights Watch that they were subjected to degrading strip searches, during which they are required to bend over, spread their buttocks, and expose their genitalia to male guards.

Strip searches can be particularly traumatic for transgender women and others who are detained after fleeing sexual and gender-based violence. Many of the transgender women interviewed by Human Rights Watch were repeatedly sexually assaulted prior to fleeing their home countries and described the experience of being required to strip nude and undergo full cavity searches by male guards as painfully reminiscent of prior sexual assaults.

Transgender women detained at Santa Ana said that they were consistently subjected to strip searches by male guards following visits with attorneys or upon returning from off-site appearances in immigration court.

In January 2016, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) and several of its partner organizations filed a formal complaint with ICE and the City of Santa Ana regarding the excessively frequent and degrading use of nude strip searches of both cisgender and transgender women by male guards.

Indefinite solitary confinement is a form of human rights abuse and is not a legitimate way of protecting individuals in detention from other forms of abuse.

Dr. Terry Kupers, a forensic psychiatrist who has studied the use of solitary confinement and sexual abuse in prisons, told Human Rights Watch:

Putting gay or transgender prisoners who are vulnerable to assault in isolation in order to protect them is absolutely not okay. Being in isolation is a kind of trauma. And sexual abuse, whether it's just being stigmatized and objectified with misogynistic or homophobic slurs, and actual sexual assault, those are traumas too, and the traumas add up. It doesn't help to take someone who has been sexually traumatized and put them in isolation, which is itself traumatizing.

There is currently no disaggregated data available to indicate the prevalence or length of placements in solitary confinement among transgender women or other populations in immigration detention. A 2013 New York Times investigation found that approximately 300 detained immigrants are in solitary confinement on any given day, including many transgender women and gay men purportedly isolated for their protection.

Half of the 28 transgender women interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that they had been held in solitary confinement at some point in time while they were in immigration detention. Several of these women were held in prolonged solitary confinement, or for more than 15 days, including two transgender women held at the Santa Ana City Jail for periods ranging from six to eight weeks.

Transgender women placed in prolonged solitary confinement described particularly severe psychological impacts resulting from their isolation.

Linda F., a transgender woman from El Salvador, was apprehended by Border Patrol agents near an unidentified US Port of Entry in South Texas in May 2015. She was then admitted to a privately operated detention facility in Texas, where she said transgender women were housed in individual cells they could only leave for around four hours each day. She said:

Carla said that in one instance, she was lying in bed reading a book when a male detainee entered her cell, exposed himself, and made an obscene comment.She said that she reported the incident and told facility staff that she felt threatened, but that an investigator told her she had engaged in "sexual horseplay" and placed her in solitary confinement for two weeks. Carla said that she became increasingly depressed, and stopped making complaints because she was afraid of facing further retaliation.

Lockdowns and Solitary Confinement at Santa Ana

Several of the transgender women who had been at Santa Ana and were interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they had been subjected to arbitrary "lockdowns," raising concerns that the facility is overusing lockdowns and solitary confinement in ways that violate the rights of the individuals held there and that subject them to additional trauma.

In one such instance in July 2007, Victoria Arellano, a 23-year-old Mexican transgender woman, died in ICE custody after medical staff refused to provide her access to her HIV medication. Previous research by Human Rights Watch and others have documented systemic failures in provision of basic medical care to women, people living with HIV/AIDS,and mothers and their children held in US immigration detention.

Transgender women in immigration detention-including those housed in the segregated unit at Santa Ana-have faced obstacles in their attempts to access essential services including gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy and life-sustaining HIV/AIDS medications. They have also experienced discriminatory interactions with medical providers, delays or denial of access to routine care, and breaches of confidentiality.

Similarly, a 2003 study conducted by researchers at theBellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and Physicians for Human Rights, found that most detained asylum seekers included in the study experienced depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The study concluded that "detaining asylum seekers exacerbates symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder in this vulnerable population."

All of the transgender women whom Human Rights Watch interviewed described mental health problems associated with their time in detention, including depression, anxiety, sleep problems, and in certain cases, thoughts of self-harm or suicidal ideation that for many compounded lifelong histories of trauma at home and during flight.

Transgender women held in the segregated unit at Santa Ana said that they experienced lengthy delays in accessing mental health services and only had the option to meet with providers through a videoconferencing system, rather than in person. Several of these women said that they were prescribed psychiatric medications but that mental health providers did not grant them adequate time or attention to address their chronic and severe emotional distress.

Access to HIV Medication and HIV-Related Care

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, strict adherence to antiretroviral therapy is "key to sustained HIV suppression, reduced risk of drug resistance, improved overall health, quality of life, and survival, as well as decreased risk of HIV transmission." If individuals do not have consistent access to treatment, they can develop resistance to their HIV medications, which can put them at increased risk for opportunistic infections and other serious HIV-associated illnesses.

Linda F., a transgender woman from El Salvador, said that a Border Patrol agent confiscated her HIV medication when she was apprehended near an unidentified US Port of Entry in South Texas in May 2015. She said that she did not see a physician until disclosing her HIV-status to a guard during an intake screening at an immigration detention facility where she was transferred several days later.

Access to Gender-Affirming Care

Several transgender women also reported experiencing lengthy delays in their attempts to access gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy while in detention.

Despite these regulations, more than half of the transgender women who spoke to Human Rights Watch-including more than half of those we interviewed who were detained in the segregated unit at Santa Ana-told Human Rights Watch that they were unable to access hormones for periods ranging from one to five months after entering detention. In two other cases, transgender women housed in the pod were given the option of receiving hormone therapy in pill form, but decided to discontinue treatment because they preferred hormonal injections. These women said the oral supplements had caused them symptoms such as stomach pain and dizziness, which they did not experience with hormonal injections.

Monserrath López, from Honduras, said that she was undergoing hormone replacement therapy prior to entering immigration detention in Texas in December 2014. She repeatedly requested access to hormones during the five months that she was in detention, but was never able to access them. Monserrath also said that facility medical staff verbally harassed her on two occasions.

Alba N., a transgender woman from Honduras admitted to the segregated unit at Santa Ana in June 2015, said she still had not received hormones one month after requesting them.

I feel depressed. The personal changes make me feel worse about being here, it's really hard. We have to fight [to take care of] our intimate needs.

Access to Routine and Emergency Medical Care

Routine and emergency medical care in US immigration detention is often widely inadequate. This has particular consequences for transgender women, who are often detained after fleeing physical and sexual abuse, and who may have been unable to access adequate medical care in their home countries due to discrimination among medical providers.

Transgender women held in the segregated unit at Santa Ana told Human Rights Watch they were often required to make repeated written requests and experienced lengthy delays when seeking medical care. Many of the women also said that the facility's nursing staff often told them to drink water or take ibuprofen for any range of symptoms, regardless of the severity of their condition, including vomiting, diarrhea, and indigestion.

Sofia G., a transgender woman from El Salvador who was housed in the segregated unit at Santa Ana was taken to a local hospital for an emergency appendectomy on May 7, 2015. Sofia told Human Rights Watch that she and her cellmate had made repeated requests to facility guards before she was ultimately transported to a hospital for the emergency procedure. She says that despite notifying guards that she was experiencing unbearable abominable pain, they shackled her around her waist, hands, and feet while transporting her to the hospital.

Timeline from Sofia G.'s medical record

5/7/2015 (2:05 AM): Patient seen by nurse on previous evening (5/6/2015) after reportedly vomiting three times after dinner. Nurse observed pain level of 8/10 and abdominal distention; provided patient with Pepto-Bismol.

5/7/2015 (7:05 AM): Patient seen by nurse and complained of stomach discomfort. Begun crying during medical assessment. Nurse provided patient with Tums.

5/7/2015 (7:45 AM): Nurse visited patient for follow-up; patient is currently sleeping.

5/7/2015 (2:44 PM): Patient seen by nurse and states that pain level is 10/10 and cannot be tolerated. Patient states that pain started on way back from court yesterday morning.

5/7/2015 (2:58 PM): Nurse contacts hospital emergency room.

In another instance, Julieta L., a transgender woman from Mexico who was tortured and physically assaulted by violent gang members in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2015, said that she was unable to continue receiving antibiotics that she had been taking before being transferred from a detention facility in Arizona to the segregated unit at Santa Ana. A physician told her that one of her breast implants had burst during the assault and that she needed chest surgery. Julieta says that she began to receive death threats several days after the surgery, and that she immediately fled, without time to see her doctor and have her sutures removed, to seek protection in the US.

Several days later, Julieta presented herself to Border Patrol agents at the US Port of Entry in Laredo, Texas, and requested asylum. She was then transferred to a privately operated detention center in Texas.

I had to wait twelve days until they took the stitches out of my chest. The thread was getting buried underneath my skin. I asked them for antibiotics because I was afraid my body would reject the [silicone] implant. They gave me anti-inflammatory [medication] but they refused to give me the antibiotics..on ameeld at Santa ANa

Julieta says that she was unable to receive antibiotics during the 20 days she was held at the South Texas detention facility, or at the Santa Ana City Jail to which she was subsequently moved.

The best way for governments to accommodate both the rights of asylum seekers and their own security and other relevant interests is to develop alternatives to detention, including supervised release and open centers. The same programs can be effective as alternatives to detention for other categories of potential immigration detainees, particularly individuals who would face undue risk of abuse, trauma or other hardship in detention.

Authorities should refrain from detaining particularly vulnerable non-citizens when they are unable to guarantee their safety in detention, or where governments are more broadly unable to detain them in conditions that ensure respect for their human rights. This includes non-citizens with treatment or other health needs that authorities cannot or will not ensure prompt, adequate, and reliable access to in detention.

In situations where authorities do hold particularly vulnerable people in immigration detention, they should develop specific protocols to continuously evaluate the possibility of their release to non-custodial alternatives to detention.

Nevertheless, this policy does not prescribe specific alternatives to detention for those who are subject to mandatory custody and does not explicitly discourage the detention of transgender women.

Immigration Detention

The United States has a legitimate interest in holding some non-citizens in immigration detention, including in order to guarantee their appearance at hearings and to ensure the deportation of those judged to be removable.

At the same time, the discretion of US immigration authorities to refrain from keeping non-citizens in detention has been drastically and needlessly constrained. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has argued that "immigration detention should gradually be abolished ... If there has to be administrative detention, the principle of proportionality requires it to be a last resort."

The US government has taken the opposite approach, embracing mandatory and indiscriminate detention above all other alternatives.

In light of these observations, governments should consider whether transgender women and other non-citizens are particularly vulnerable to abuse, ill treatment or-particularly in the case of migrants or asylum seekers who have suffered human rights abuse-retraumatization in detention. Transgender women and others who are particularly vulnerable to abuse should be continuously assessed for release to alternatives to detention.

Solitary Confinement

Indefinite solitary confinement is a form of human rights abuse, and is not a legitimate way of protecting individuals in detention from other forms of abuse.

Sexual Assault and Degrading and Humiliating Treatment

Immigration detainees, who are in administrative custody, are also protected from rape and sexual assault in detention under the Fifth Amendment's restrictions on the handling of individuals in legal procedures. In addition, the Fourth Amendment's privacy protections are relevant to practices that may facilitate sexual harassment of individuals in custody.

Medical Care

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) recognizes "the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health." The US, as a signatory, has an obligation not to undermine the object and purpose of the treaty.

The US is additionally committed to protecting the right to health as a member of the United Nations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The right to health is inseparable from provisions on the right to life and the right to freedom from degrading treatment that are included in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture, both of which the US has ratified.

The US Constitution establishes a right to medical care for individuals in government custody. The Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment entitles individuals convicted of crimes to medical care. However, since immigration detention is not punitive, the right to medical care for individuals held by ICE derives from the Fifth Amendment, which states that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

In Estelle v. Gamble, the landmark case defining custodial responsibility for medical care, the US Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits "deliberate indifference" on the part of detention authorities to a "serious medical need" of a prisoner in their custody.

On several occasions, federal courts have applied this standard to transgender people's right to access gender-affirming care in prison. The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld a district court ruling which found that a Wisconsin state law barring transgender prisoners' access to hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgery constituted deliberate indifference to a serious medical need.

Similarly, the US District Court for the Northern District of New York found that the state's use of a so called freeze-frame policy, which only allowed transgender prisoners to access the level of gender-affirming care they received prior to incarceration, failed to address a serious medical need. The court added that "[t]here is no exception to this rule for serious medical needs that are first diagnosed in prison."

In April 2015, the US Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the Middle District of Georgia in the case of Diamond v. Owens, et al., involving a transgender woman who had been denied access to gender-affirming hormone therapy while incarcerated by the Georgia Department of Corrections. The Justice Department held that "[f]ailure to provide adequate treatment for transgender inmates with gender dysphoria constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment," and that "[f]reeze-frame and other policies that apply blanket prohibitions to such treatment are facially unconstitutional because they fail to provide individualized assessment and treatment of a serious medical need."

In the case of HIV/AIDS, correctional health experts in the US and internationally consider that prison health care should meet the "equivalence standard," which means it should meet at least the same standards of health care applicable in the community. The Revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules) state that "[p]risoners should enjoy the same standards of health care that are available in the community, and should have access to necessary health-care services free of charge without discrimination on the grounds of their legal status." Moreover, the rules state that health care services in confinement settings should provide "continuity of treatment and care, including for HIV, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, as well as for drug dependence."

In line with human rights standards, US correctional health experts have made clear that this standard reflects the principle that "the medical management of HIV-positive inmates ... should parallel that offered to individuals in the non-correctional community." Specifically, "medical care must meet the professional standards of the community and be performed by appropriately trained and credentialed providers who are properly supervised and who use clinical protocols."

To the United States Congress

Pass legislation:

Barring ICE from holding transgender women in men's detention facilities;

Barring ICE from placing any immigration detainees in administrative segregation for indefinite periods as a form of protection or for any other reason;

Requiring ICE to provide prompt and uninterrupted access to HIV/AIDS treatment and to hormone therapy for all individuals in immigration detention who require it, and barring ICE from detaining individuals in facilities that are unable to meet these requirements;

That will facilitate efforts to develop alternatives to immigration detention for transgender women and other individuals who are particularly vulnerable to abuse in detention, as well as for individuals who require higher standards of treatment than is available in detention facilities. These alternatives should also be available to individuals who are subject to mandatory custody.

To ensure that transgender women and other individuals considered members of vulnerable populations are continuously assessed for release or alternatives to detention.

Amend:

Immigration laws to eliminate mandatory custody and ensure all non-citizens are given an opportunity for an individualized assessment that weighs all relevant factors when determining the need for detention.

Congressional appropriations language to abolish the 34,000 immigration detention bed requirement in order to enable immigration authorities to more effectively conduct individualized assessments.

To the Department of Homeland Security

Stop holding transgender women in immigration detention if the US government cannot or will not take all of the necessary steps to ensure that transgender women are detained in a setting that is free of abuse and respectful of their specific medical and mental health needs.

Prioritize the development and expansion of alternatives to detention for transgender women and other non-citizens considered members of vulnerable populations, including those subject to mandatory custody.

Expand and improve independent oversight of facility compliance with existing detention standards, including the 2015 Transgender Care Memorandum. Monitoring should be carried out by multiple independent, nongovernmental organizations that do not contract with ICE for other services.

Investigate the alleged patterns of abuse and maltreatment of people in immigration detention at the Santa Ana City Jail described in this report, and ensure any responsible parties are held accountable.

To Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Wherever possible and appropriate, release from detention or make use of alternatives to detention in individual cases involving transgender women and members of other vulnerable groups.
Wherever possible and appropriate, refrain from detaining asylum seekers on grounds of illegal entry or stay.

Revise the June 2015 Transgender Care Memorandum from a voluntary contract modification to a binding regulatory framework. Require any immigration detention facility holding transgender women to implement its provisions into its operating agreement with ICE. Monitoring should be carried out by multiple independent, nongovernmental organizations that do not contract with ICE for other services.

Wherever transgender women or members of other vulnerable groups are detained, conduct routine assessments to determine eligibility for release to alternatives to detention.

Wherever transgender women are detained, ensure that they have the ability to choose, on an individualized basis, whether they wish to be housed in a women's facility or in a segregated housing unit reserved exclusively for transgender women. Women's facilities should make whatever reasonable accommodations are necessary to facilitate these arrangements, while ensuring that transgender women are provided the same access to the facility as others in detention. Under no circumstances should transgender women be held in men's facilities, or placed in indefinite administrative segregation for lack of alternatives.

Wherever transgender women are detained, ensure that they are provided prompt and adequate access to all necessary medical and mental health care services, including hormone replacement therapy, HIV-related care, and psychological counseling.

As a matter of urgency, track in real time the locations where all transgender women in immigration detention are held. With immediate effect, proactively monitor all of these facilities to ensure that these individuals are held in conditions that align with the recommendations of this report or are moved to another facility where this can be ensured.

Take immediate steps to ensure that no transgender women in immigration detention are being held in men's facilities, or in indefinite administrative segregation, anywhere in the US.

Take immediate steps to end abusive practices at the Santa Ana City Jail, including strip searches of transgender women carried out by male guards, and ensure that transgender women detained there are able to freely access hormone therapy and other necessary medical treatment. If these issues cannot be promptly and comprehensively addressed, stop housing transgender women at the Santa Ana City Jail altogether and identify an alternative site.

If an alternative site is identified to hold transgender women in a segregated unit, articulate clear and specific steps that will ensure the same abuses do not occur there. Ensure that safe and humane conditions are provided in a respectful environment.

Ensure that all reports of sexual assault of people in immigration detention are thoroughly investigated. Investigations should include an independent inquiry into the actions or failures to act by all ICE employees, facility staff, and contractors responsible for that facility.

End the use of prolonged or indefinite solitary confinement and other forms of physical isolation in detention facilities. Develop alternative measures of protection for transgender women and members of other vulnerable groups, including release to alternatives to detention or placement in segregated units. Ensure that segregated units provide the same access to programming, recreation, and out-of-cell time appropriate to civil detention.

This report was researched and written by Adam Frankel, coordinator in the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.

It was reviewed and edited by Graeme Reid, LGBT Rights Program director; Antonio Ginatta, US Program advocacy director; Clara Long, US Program researcher; Grace Meng, senior US Program researcher; Bill Frelick, Refugee Rights Program director; Meghan Rhoad, Women's Rights Division researcher; Megan McLemore, senior researcher in the Health and Human Rights Division; Dan Baum, senior editor/researcher in the Americas Division; Christopher Albin-Lackey, senior legal advisor; and Danielle Haas, senior program editor.

Rebecca Balis and Katie Lynn Anderson, interns in the US Program, obtained public records from the City of Santa Ana, California, included as an appendix to this report.

W. Paul Smith, US Program associate; Olivia Hunter, publications associate; Grace Choi, publications director; and Fitzroy Hepkins, administrative manager, provided production assistance.

We thank the many immigrant transgender women who generously shared their stories for this report. We also thank the many lawyers, community advocates, immigrant rights organizations, and others who shared their expertise with us for this report. Human Rights Watch thanks the Center for American Progress, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), Immigration Equality, National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), and Transgender Law Center for their years of work in documenting human rights violations against detained immigrant transgender women.

Human Rights Watch would also like to extend particular thanks to the individuals and community organizations who shared their expertise with us, helped us to identify research participants, and facilitated interviews, including AIDS Center of Queens County (New York), Arcoíris Liberation Team (Phoenix), Casa Ruby (Washington, DC), El/La Para TransLatinas (San Francisco), Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement (Los Angeles), Lorena Borjas Community Fund (New York), Mariposas sin Fronteras (Tucson), TransLatin@ Coalition (Los Angeles), and Translatina Network (New York).

Human Rights Watch offers its sincere gratitude to Isa Noyola and Flor Bermudez of Transgender Law Center, as well as Jorge Gutiérrez of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, who provided extensive background information and expertise, helped to identify and facilitate interviews, and read and commented on a draft version of this report.We also thank Olga Tomchin, formerly of Transgender Law Center and currently of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, for providing expertise and extensive consultation at the start of this research.

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"Do You See How Much I'm Suffering Here?"

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Summary Do you see how much I'm suffering here? Do you think anyone deserves to be punished like this? ... Sometimes I get anxious. ... I thought about killing myself once, but then I regretted it and told myself I wasn't going to do it.

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Help us #FreeAlejandra! Alejandra Barrera is currently the longest detained trans woman held by ICE at the Cibola Detention Center.

She is transgender Latina immigrant who was forced to flee El Salvador due to discrimination and violence, her home country in which she has spent years fighting for respect and dignity of transgender people.

Upon leaving El Salvador, Alejandra was detained and placed in Cibola detention facility in New Mexico. Often, transgender migrants are criminalized for fleeing violence and seeking safety in a new country and place into an immigration system that further exposes us to mistreatment. Alejandra did not choose to migrate to the US for leisure, on top of the daily discrimination, she faced extortion and attacks, including sexual assault by a gang, and by the El Salvadoran military. All of this forced her to leave and seek a new life in the US. These compounding factors are overlooked by our current immigration system, as the US focuses on punitive approaches to immigration rather than offering support and safety. She was denied asylum in June of 2018.

Since leaving El Salvador, Alejandra has not had the opportunity to rebuild her life. Instead, the US government has been keeping her detained since the November of 2017, and has denied her request to be released on parole while waiting for the decision of an immigration judge on her asylum case. Additionally, they are not providing her with access to adequate medical care and she needs treatment now.

Alejandra's situation is not unique; there are many more transgender people seeking asylum in the United States, who are stuck waiting indefinitely in detention centres where they are at risk of ill-treatment because of their gender identity, medical needs, or trauma they have endured.

RIGHT NOW, Alejandra needs your help. Here are ways you can support:

Sign this PETITION and demand that ICE grant Alejandra parole and improve the treatment of people awaiting decisions on their asylum claims.

Use this CONGRESSIONAL PACKET to contact your member of Congress and ask that they take action to get Alejandra free.

Thank you so much for your support, please contact us with any questions.

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She is transgender Latina immigrant who was forced to flee El Salvador due to discrimination and violence, her home country in which she has spent years fighting for respect and dignity of transgender people. Upon leaving El Salvador, Alejandra was detained and placed in Cibola detention facility in New Mexico.

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TDOR 2020 | Honoring Trans Lives, Dreaming of Trans Freedom

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Honoring Trans Lives, Dreaming of Trans Freedom

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Trans People Exist In The Future

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Carceral Feminism Archives - Transform Harm

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"Carceral Feminism describes an approach that sees increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women. This stance does not acknowledge that police are often purveyors of violence and that prisons are always sites of violence.

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Some people may have seen this article already, which has been making its rounds on Facebook and the blogosphere, but INCITE! blog editors loved it so much that we wanted to share it here. The piece was originally published in make/shift magazine's Spring/Summer 2010 issue and written by Courtney Desiree Morris.

In January 2009, activists in Austin, Texas, learned that one of their own, a white activist named Brandon Darby, had infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention (RNC) as an FBI informant. Darby later admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and during the convention. He testified on behalf of the government in the February 2009 trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails, after Darby encouraged them to do so. The two young men, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, each faced up to fifteen years in prison. Crowder accepted a plea bargain to serve three years in a federal prison; under pressure from federal prosecutors, McKay also pled guilty to being in possession of "unregistered Molotov cocktails" and was sentenced to four years in prison. Information gathered by Darby may also have contributed to the case against the RNC 8, activists from around the country charged with "conspiracy to riot and conspiracy to damage property in the furtherance of terrorism." Austin activists were particularly stunned by the revelation that Darby had served as an informant because he had been a part of various leftist projects and was a leader at Common Ground Relief, a New Orleans-based organization committed to meeting the short-term needs of community members displaced by natural disasters in the Gulf Coast region and dedicated to rebuilding the region and ensuring Katrina evacuees' right to return.

I was surprised but not shocked by this news. I had learned as an undergrad at the University of Texas that the campus police department routinely placed plainclothes police officers in the meetings of radical student groups-you know, just to keep an eye on them. That was in fall 2001. We saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, watched a cowboy president wage war on terror, and, in the middle of it all, tried to figure out what we could do to challenge the fascist state transformations taking place before our eyes. At the time, however, it seemed silly that there were cops in our meetings-we weren't the Panthers or the Brown Berets or even some of the rowdier direct-action anti-globalization activists on campus (although we admired them all); we were just young people who didn't believe war was the best response to the 9/11 attacks. But it wasn't silly; the FBI does not dismiss political work. Any organization, be it large or small, can provoke the scrutiny of the state. Perhaps your organization poses a large threat, or maybe you're small now but one day you'll grow up and be too big to rein in. The state usually opts to kill the movement before it grows.

And informants and provocateurs are the state's hired gunmen. Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it's impossible to prove that they're informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Maybe it isn't that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence [1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We've treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils-secondary issues-that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the "real" issues-racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression-are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you'll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).
The Makings of an Informant: Brandon Darby and Common Ground
On Democracy Now! Malik Rahim, former Black Panther and cofounder of Common Ground in New Orleans, spoke about how devastated he was by Darby's revelation that he was an FBI informant. Several times he stated that his heart had been broken. He especially lamented all of the "young ladies" who left Common Ground as a result of Darby's domineering, aggressive style of organizing. And when those "young ladies" complained? Well, their concerns likely fell on sympathetic but ultimately unresponsive ears-everything may have been true, and after the fact everyone admits how disruptive Darby was, quick to suggest violent, ill-conceived direct-action schemes that endangered everyone he worked with. There were even claims of Darby sexually assaulting female organizers at Common Ground and in general being dismissive of women working in the organization. [2] Darby created conflict in all of the organizations he worked with, yet people were hesitant to hold him accountable because of his history and reputation as an organizer and his "dedication" to "the work." People continued to defend him until he outed himself as an FBI informant. Even Rahim, for all of his guilt and angst, chose to leave Darby in charge of Common Ground although every time there was conflict in the organization it seemed to involve Darby.

Maybe if organizers made collective accountability around gender violence a central part of our practices we could neutralize people who are working on behalf of the state to undermine our struggles. I'm not talking about witch hunts; I'm talking about organizing in such a way that we nip a potential Brandon Darby in the bud before he can hurt more people. Informants are hard to spot, but my guess is that where there is smoke there is fire, and someone who creates chaos wherever he goes is either an informant or an irresponsible, unaccountable time bomb who can be unintentionally as effective at undermining social-justice organizing as an informant. Ultimately they both do the work of the state and need to be held accountable.
A Brief Historical Reflection on Gender Violence in Radical Movements
Reflecting on the radical organizations and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s provides an important historical context for this discussion. Memoirs by women who were actively involved in these struggles reveal the pervasiveness of tolerance (and in some cases advocacy) of gender violence. Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown, each at different points in their experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party (BPP), cited sexism and the exploitation of women (and their organizing labor) in the BPP as one of their primary reasons for either leaving the group (in the cases of Brown and Shakur) or refusing to ever formally join (in Davis's case). Although women were often expected to make significant personal sacrifices to support the movement, when women found themselves victimized by male comrades there was no support for them or channels to seek redress. Whether it was BPP organizers ignoring the fact that Eldridge Cleaver beat his wife, noted activist Kathleen Cleaver, men coercing women into sex, or just men treating women organizers as subordinated sexual playthings, the BPP and similar organizations tended not to take seriously the corrosive effects of gender violence on liberation struggle. In many ways, Elaine Brown's autobiography, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story, has gone the furthest in laying bare the ugly realities of misogyny in the movement and the various ways in which both men and women reproduced and reinforced male privilege and gender violence in these organizations. Her experience as the only woman to ever lead the BPP did not exempt her from the brutal misogyny of the organization. She recounts being assaulted by various male comrades (including Huey Newton) as well as being beaten and terrorized by Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened to "bury her in Algeria" during a delegation to China. Her biography demonstrates more explicitly than either Davis's or Shakur's how the masculinist posturing of the BPP (and by extension many radical organizations at the time) created a culture of violence and misogyny that ultimately proved to be the organization's undoing.

These narratives demystify the legacy of gender violence of the very organizations that many of us look up to. They demonstrate how misogyny was normalized in these spaces, dismissed as "personal" or not as important as the more serious struggles against racism or class inequality. Gender violence has historically been deeply entrenched in the political practices of the Left and constituted one of the greatest (if largely unacknowledged) threats to the survival of these organizations. However, if we pay attention to the work of Davis, Shakur, Brown, and others, we can avoid the mistakes of the past and create different kinds of political community.
The Racial Politics of Gender Violence
Race further complicates the ways in which gender violence unfolds in our communities. In "Looking for Common Ground: Relief Work in Post-Katrina New Orleans as an American Parable of Race and Gender Violence," Rachel Luft explores the disturbing pattern of sexual assault against white female volunteers by white male volunteers doing rebuilding work in the Upper Ninth Ward in 2006. She points out how Common Ground failed to address white men's assaults on their co-organizers and instead shifted the blame to the surrounding Black community, warning white women activists that they needed to be careful because New Orleans was a dangerous place. Ultimately it proved easier to criminalize Black men from the neighborhood than to acknowledge that white women and transgender organizers were most likely to be assaulted by white men they worked with. In one case, a white male volunteer was turned over to the police only after he sexually assaulted at least three women in one week. The privilege that white men enjoyed in Common Ground, an organization ostensibly committed to racial justice, meant that they could be violent toward women and queer activists, enact destructive behaviors that undermined the organization's work, and know that the movement would not hold them accountable in the same way that it did Black men in the community where they worked. I had invested a lot of physical effort and was on the dance floor at the weekend until late at night. This strategy worked until I was 32, a family man and head of the department. My relationship also broke up, I often changed jobs, and always had mild depression with sleep and loss of appetite, delusions, anxiety, and nightmares. Until Ambien came.

Of course, male privilege is not uniform-white men and men of color are unequal participants in and beneficiaries of patriarchy although they both can and do reproduce gender violence. This disparity in the distribution of patriarchy's benefits is not lost on women and queer organizers when we attempt to confront men of color who enact gender violence in our communities. We often worry about reproducing particular kinds of racist violence that disproportionately target men of color. We are understandably loath to call the police, involve the state in any way, or place men of color at the mercy of a historically racist criminal (in)justice system; yet our communities (political and otherwise) often do not step up to demand justice on our behalf. We don't feel comfortable talking to therapists who just reaffirm stereotypes about how fucked-up and exceptionally violent our home communities are. The Left often offers even less support. Our victimization is unfortunate, problematic, but ultimately less important to "the work" than the men of all races who reproduce gender violence in our communities.
Encountering Misogyny on the Left: A Personal Reflection
In the first community group I was actively involved in, I encountered a level of misogyny that I would never have imagined existed in what was supposed to be a radical-people-of-color organization. I was sexually/romantically involved with an older Chicano activist in the group. I was nineteen, an inexperienced young Black activist; he was thirty. He asked me to keep our relationship a secret, and I reluctantly agreed. Later, after he ended the relationship and I was reeling from depression, I discovered that he had been sleeping with at least two other women while we were together. One of them was a friend of mine, another young woman we organized with. Unaware of the nature of our relationship, which he had failed to disclose to her, she slept with him until he disappeared, refusing to answer her calls or explain the abrupt end of their relationship. She and I, after sharing our experiences, began to trade stories with other women who knew and had organized with this man.

We heard of the women who had left a Chicana/o student group and never came back after his lies and secrets blew up while the group was participating in a Zapatista action in Mexico City. The queer, radical, white organizer who left Austin to get away from his abuse. Another white woman, a social worker who thought they might get married only to come to his apartment one evening and find me there. And then there were the ones that came after me. I always wondered if they knew who he really was. The women he dated were amazing, beautiful, kick-ass, radical women that he used as shields to get himself into places he knew would never be open to such a misogynist. I mean, if that cool woman who worked in Chiapas, spoke Spanish, and worked with undocumented immigrants was dating him, he must be down, right? Wrong.

But his misogyny didn't end there; it was also reflected in his style of organizing. In meetings he always spoke the loudest and longest, using academic jargon that made any discussion excruciatingly more complex than necessary. The academic-speak intimidated people less educated than him because he seemed to know more about radical politics than anyone else. He would talk down to other men in the group, especially those he perceived to be less intelligent than him, which was basically everybody. Then he'd switch gears, apologize for dominating the space, and acknowledge his need to check his male privilege. Ironically, when people did attempt to call him out on his shit, he would feign ignorance-what could they mean, saying that his behavior was masculinist and sexist? He'd complain of being infantilized, refusing to see how he infantilized people all the time. The fact that he was a man of color who could talk a good game about racism and racial-justice struggles masked his abusive behaviors in both radical organizations and his personal relationships. As one of his former partners shared with me, "His radical race analysis allowed people (mostly men but occasionally women as well) to forgive him for being dominating and abusive in his relationships. Womyn had to check their critique of his behavior at the door, lest we lose a man of color in the movement." One of the reasons it is so difficult to hold men of color accountable for reproducing gender violence is that women of color and white activists continue to be invested in the idea that men of color have it harder than anyone else. How do you hold someone accountable when you believe he is target number one for the state?

Unfortunately he wasn't the only man like this I encountered in radical spaces-just one of the smarter ones. Reviewing old e-mails, I am shocked at the number of e-mails from men I organized with that were abusive in tone and content, how easily they would talk down to others for minor mistakes. I am more surprised at my meek, diplomatic responses-like an abuse survivor-as I attempted to placate compañeros who saw nothing wrong with yelling at their partners, friends, and other organizers. There were men like this in various organizations I worked with. The one who called his girlfriend a bitch in front of a group of youth of color during a summer encuentro we were hosting. The one who sexually harassed a queer Chicana couple during a trip to México, trying to pressure them into a threesome. The guys who said they would complete a task, didn't do it, brushed off their compañeras' demands for accountability, let those women take over the task, and when it was finished took all the credit for someone else's hard work. The graduate student who hit his partner-and everyone knew he'd done it, but whenever anyone asked, people would just look ashamed and embarrassed and mumble, "It's complicated." The ones who constantly demeaned queer folks, even people they organized with. Especially the one who thought it would be a revolutionary act to "kill all these faggots, these niggas on the down low, who are fucking up our children, fucking up our homes, fucking up our world, and fucking up our lives!" The one who would shout you down in a meeting or tell you that you couldn't be a feminist because you were too pretty. Or the one who thought homosexuality was a disease from Europe.

Yeah, that guy.

Most of those guys probably weren't informants. Which is a pity because it means they are not getting paid a dime for all the destructive work they do. We might think of these misogynists as inadvertent agents of the state. Regardless of whether they are actually informants or not, the work that they do supports the state's ongoing campaign of terror against social movements and the people who create them. When queer organizers are humiliated and their political struggles sidelined, that is part of an ongoing state project of violence against radicals. When women are knowingly given STIs, physically abused, dismissed in meetings, pushed aside, and forced out of radical organizing spaces while our allies defend known misogynists, organizers collude in the state's efforts to destroy us.

The state has already understood a fact that the Left has struggled to accept: misogynists make great informants. Before or regardless of whether they are ever recruited by the state to disrupt a movement or destabilize an organization, they've likely become well versed in practices of disruptive behavior. They require almost no training and can start the work immediately. What's more paralyzing to our work than when women and/or queer folks leave our movements because they have been repeatedly lied to, humiliated, physically/verbally/emotionally/sexually abused? Or when you have to postpone conversations about the work so that you can devote group meetings to addressing an individual member's most recent offense? Or when that person spreads misinformation, creating confusion and friction among radical groups? Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist.

What the FBI gets is that when there are people in activist spaces who are committed to taking power and who understand power as domination, our movements will never realize their potential to remake this world. If our energies are absorbed recuperating from the messes that informants (and people who just act like them) create, we will never be able to focus on the real work of getting free and building the kinds of life-affirming, people-centered communities that we want to live in. To paraphrase bell hooks, where there is a will to dominate there can be no justice, because we will inevitably continue reproducing the same kinds of injustice we claim to be struggling against. It is time for our movements to undergo a radical change from the inside out.

Looking Forward: Creating Gender Justice in our Movements
Radical movements cannot afford the destruction that gender violence creates. If we underestimate the political implications of patriarchal behaviors in our communities, the work will not survive.

Lately I've been turning to the work of queers/feminists of color to think through how to challenge these behaviors in our movements. I've been reading the autobiographies of women who lived through the chaos of social movements debilitated by machismo. I'm revisiting the work of bell hooks, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Gioconda Belli, Margaret Randall, Elaine Brown, Pearl Cleage, Ntozake Shange, and Gloria Anzaldúa to see how other women negotiated gender violence in these spaces and to problematize neat or easy answers about how violence is reproduced in our communities. Newer work by radical feminists of color has also been incredibly helpful, especially the zine Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities, edited by Ching-In Chen, Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

But there are many resources for confronting this dilemma beyond books. The simple act of speaking and sharing our truths is one of the most powerful tools we have. I've been speaking to my elders, older women of color in struggle who have experienced the things I'm struggling against, and swapping survival stories with other women. In summer 2008 I began doing workshops on ending misogyny and building collective forms of accountability with Cristina Tzintzún, an Austin-based labor organizer and author of the essay "Killing Misogyny: A Personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival." We have also begun the even more liberating practice of naming our experiences publicly and calling on our communities to address what we and so many others have experienced.

Dismantling misogyny cannot be work that only women do. We all must do the work because the survival of our movements depends on it. Until we make radical feminist and queer political ethics that directly challenge heteropatriarchal forms of organizing central to our political practice, radical movements will continue to be devastated by the antics of Brandon Darbys (and folks who aren't informants but just act like them). A queer, radical, feminist ethic of accountability would challenge us to recognize how gender violence is reproduced in our communities, relationships, and organizing practices. Although there are many ways to do this, I want to suggest that there are three key steps that we can take to begin. First, we must support women and queer people in our movements who have experienced interpersonal violence and engage in a collective process of healing. Second, we must initiate a collective dialogue about how we want our communities to look and how to make them safe for everyone. Third, we must develop a model for collective accountability that truly treats the personal as political and helps us to begin practicing justice in our communities. When we allow women/queer organizers to leave activist spaces and protect people whose violence provoked their departure, we are saying we value these de facto state agents who disrupt the work more than we value people whose labor builds and sustains movements.

As angry as gender violence on the Left makes me, I am hopeful. I believe we have the capacity to change and create more justice in our movements. We don't have to start witch hunts to reveal misogynists and informants. They out themselves every time they refuse to apologize, take ownership of their actions, start conflicts and refuse to work them out through consensus, mistreat their compañer@s. We don't have to look for them, but when we are presented with their destructive behaviors we have to hold them accountable. Our strategies don't have to be punitive; people are entitled to their mistakes. But we should expect that people will own those actions and not allow them to become a pattern.

We have a right to be angry when the communities we build that are supposed to be the model for a better, more just world harbor the same kinds of antiqueer, antiwoman, racist violence that pervades society. As radical organizers we must hold each other accountable and not enable misogynists to assert so much power in these spaces. Not allow them to be the faces, voices, and leaders of these movements. Not allow them to rape a compañera and then be on the fucking five o' clock news. In Brandon Darby's case, even if no one suspected he was an informant, his domineering and macho behavior should have been all that was needed to call his leadership into question. By not allowing misogyny to take root in our communities and movements, we not only protect ourselves from the efforts of the state to destroy our work but also create stronger movements that cannot be destroyed from within.

[1] I use the term gender violence to refer to the ways in which homophobia and misogyny are rooted in heteronormative understandings of gender identity and gender roles. Heterosexism not only polices non-normative sexualities but also reproduces normative gender roles and identities that reinforce the logic of patriarchy and male privilege.

[2] I learned this from informal conversations with women who had organized with Darby in Austin and New Orleans while participating in the Austin Informants Working Group, which was formed by people who had worked with Darby and were stunned by his revelation that he was an FBI informant.

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Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements

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Some people may have seen this article already, which has been making its rounds on Facebook and the blogosphere, but INCITE! blog editors loved it so much that we wanted to share it here. The piece was originally published in make/shift magazine's Spring/Summer 2010 issue and written by Courtney Desiree Morris .

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality

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Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both.

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Explore our interactive map to discover the many different but related identities and expressions that make up the idea of “gender.”

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National Center for Transgender Equality

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In 2016, NCTE released the report of the U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), a second iteration of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), that measures how things are now and how they have changed over the past five years since the release of the NTDS. With almost 28,000 respondents, the USTS is the largest survey ever devoted to the lives and experiences of trans people. Read the report at http://ustranssurvey.org.

In 2011, NCTE and the National LGBTQ Task Force released the report of the NTDS. Interviews with over 6,400 transgender and gender non-conforming people made it the largest such study at the time it was conducted. The study has been a game changer-both for our policy work and for cultural change. For the first time, we were able to quantify the discrimination and violence transgender people face. The findings from the NTDS are available in multiple reports that cover specific subpopulations and issues.

Transgender people face discrimination and violence throughout society, from their family growing up, in school, at work, by homeless shelters, by doctors, in emergency rooms, before judges, by landlords, and even police officers.

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In 2016, NCTE released the report of the U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), a second iteration of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), that measures how things are now and how they have changed over the past five years since the release of the NTDS.

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Transgender and gender non-conforming people face rampant discrimination in every area of life: education, employment, family life, public accommodations, housing, health, police and jails, and ID documents. This data is so shocking that it will change the way you think about transgender people and it should change the way you advocate. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey was conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality.
Below are all the various reports in our "Injustice at Every Turn" series: Executive Summary State Reports Regional Reports A Look at Multiracial Respondents A Look at American Indian and Alaskan Native Respondents
A Look at Black Respondents A Look at Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander Respondents A Look at Latino/Latina Respondents

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Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey - National LGBTQ Task Force

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Transgender and gender non-conforming people face rampant discrimination in every area of life: education, employment, family life, public accommodations, housing, health, police and jails, and ID documents. This data is so shocking that it will change the way you think about transgender people and it should change the way you advocate.

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Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender | SAMHSA - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

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Data and Reports Sexual Orientation and Estimates of Adult Substance Use and Mental Health: Results from the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health SAMHSA Programs & Initiatives SAMHSA's LGBT-focused efforts include the following:

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To receive a kit, you have to sign up first in the link below. After you receive a confirmation email or text, we will send you all the information and instructions you need to take yours home.

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We're accepting donations to continue our work with providing enough self-defense tools to Black and Brown TGNCI individuals, as well as trans-led organizations until we run out of funds.

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To receive a kit, you have to sign up first in the link below. After you receive a confirmation email or text, we will send you all the information and instructions you need to take yours home.

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Trans/GNC Guide to Parole Prep (Updated) by TGI Justice Project on Scribd

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SEED: So You’re Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist

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SEED: So You’re Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist

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So You're Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist

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This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown...

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SEED: Talking about Policing and Abolition (pg 6-16) 

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SEED: Talking about Policing and Abolition (pg 6-16) 

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SEED : SBCC Introduction, Community Guidelines & Directory 

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SEED : SBCC Introduction, Community Guidelines & Directory 

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SBCC Intro, Community Guidelines & Directory

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8 Point Program ( Hawthorne Abolition Alliance)

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8 Point Program ( Hawthorne Abolition Alliance)

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Prison Abolition FAQ - K Survive and Punish NY 

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Prison Abolition FAQ - K Survive and Punish NY 

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The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy  

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The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy  

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The prison industrial complex and the global economy.pdf

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Racial Capitalism & Prison Abolition.pdf

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CURB: Californians United for a Responsible Budget

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Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) is a statewide coalition of 70 grassroots organizations that is reducing the number of people in prisons and jails, shrinking the imprisonment system, and shifting public spending from corrections and policing to human services.

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FOR ALL INCARCERATED PEOPLE, THEIR FAMILIES, AND COMMUNITIES RECENT BLOG POSTS

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The end goal of these reforms is not to create better, friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons. Instead, we hope to build toward a society without police or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for their safety and well being.

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Plantingthe Seeds of aPolice-Free Future(Toolkit) 

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Plantingthe Seeds of aPolice-Free Future(Toolkit) 

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Resources for Agitators | Abolitionist Teaching Network

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Deepen. Escalate. Sustain.

Assata's Daughters ("AD") is a Black woman-led, young person-directed organization rooted in the Black Radical Tradition.

AD organizes young Black people in Chicago by providing them with political education, leadership development, mentorship, and revolutionary services.

Through our programs we aim to Deepen, Escalate, and Sustain the Movement for Black Liberation.

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Assata's Daughters is a grassroots intergenerational collective of radical Black women located in the city of Chicago.

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Black Organizing Project is reviving the spirit of Oakland's Black community through relationship building, leadership development, political education and policy-change.

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"It’s Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission"

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"It’s Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission"

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On Saturday, July 7, social media was flooded with images of an event in Chicago that was advertised as a shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway to protest gun violence. Led by celebrity-pastor Father Michael Pfleger and co-sponsored by half a dozen local groups, 3,000 people marched onto the expressway, at first only occupying two lanes, with the permission of state police. After about an hour, Pfleger announced that state police would be shutting down all four lanes of traffic.

Some celebrated the protest as a powerful act of resistance. In Chicago and elsewhere, some of us who do the work of direct action and community organizing were far less impressed, and a few of us openly expressed that we found the event misguided and harmful to ongoing organizing and resistance efforts. As such, we have received some questions about why we feel the way we do. We, too, have questions - questions we feel we should all be asking ourselves about any direct action in which we consider participating. We are sharing some of those questions here to hopefully build a more honest, accountable and ethical practice of solidarity with all those who would take action with us in the streets.

What Is the Demand?

A direct action is an attempt to leverage, seize or demonstrate power. So, the question is: To what end? If you lead 3,000 people onto an expressway for a duration of time the state has agreed to, you have successfully mobilized people but have not created any leverage in a power struggle. If we unpredictably hold space and disrupt the flow of business as usual and the powerful must respond to the disruption, then we are challenging power and the status quo. In Saturday's event, we saw conditions that could only occur with a political insider at the helm, including a blessing by the mayor and other officials. While some argued in the days leading up to the action that the event was youth-led, there could be no confusion about who was in control on Saturday. Father Pfleger led the march and negotiated every crowd maneuver with the police in detail - even turning to the crowd at one point and declaring, "You always try to negotiate before you demonstrate!" This assertion - that groups should always ask for permission before attempting to disrupt and take power - is demobilizing, ahistorical and consistent with Pfleger's longstanding support of Rahm Emanuel.

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What Power Is Being Shifted?

If you are simply asking the state for permission to express yourself and acquiescing to its rules, you may be taking some form of action, but it is not direct action. Those words have a specific meaning. The modern concept of direct action was inspired by a vision in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension ... that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

Of course, nonviolent direct action is just one form of action. As grassroots organizer L.A. Kauffman writes: "'Direct Action' can refer to a huge variety of efforts to create change outside the established mechanisms of government." In its various forms, direct action happens when we step outside of society's preset or typically prescribed solutions in order to challenge state and other power.

Direct action happens when we step outside of society's preset or typically prescribed solutions in order to challenge state and other power.

When we say that something is not direct action, we are adhering to poet Solmaz Sharif's admonition to "let it matter what we call a thing." We are striving for clarity rather than condemnation. Having a permitted march is not inherently bad, but, like petitions or calls to our elected officials, these are less about disrupting power than they are about appealing to it. People representing institutions with systemic power have adapted to the impact(s) of these socially prescribed appeals - if they feel the impact at all. In some cases (not all), people doing the work of direct action have already attempted every preset solution, such as talking with their elected officials, to no avail. Direct action is often an escalation and a tactical response to a system that is not offering acceptable outcomes. With direct action, we draw outside the lines. If authority sanctions that, we are not really outside the lines but considered inside the tent.

It's important that the distinctions between these types of events be understood, and that one not masquerade as the other. If a powerful person like Father Pfleger wants to hold a large event with the permission of the state, that is his right. But he should do so honestly, rather than attempting to market his state-sanctioned event as something it is not. The new people who have been mobilized to join such events need to understand their nature. Not every event must be a risky endeavor, and not every event will directly shift power or require any capitulation from the state - but no event that is not an attempt to shift power should be portrayed as direct action.

Saturday's march movements were co-directed by Pfleger and the police. This should not be confused with direct action, and it is in fact dangerous to compare these actions or results with those generated by actions that do aim to shift power. Challenging power often puts people at risk. It is dishonest to compare the risks or results of actual civil disobedience with a parade orchestrated in concert with structural power - in this case, a mayor who benefited significantly from Saturday's events.

By endorsing Pfleger's march, Rahm Emanuel was able to create a counternarrative to his troubled relationship with protesters, who have often been abused while objecting to the murderous brutality of his police. By making some phone calls to facilitate Pfleger's march and throwing his support behind it, Emanuel offered the public a different story than the one they've been given about his regard for the First Amendment - one punctuated with a humorous tweet.

Who Directly Benefits and Who Doesn't?

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Twitter exchange with Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner is a clear demonstration of who truly benefited from Saturday's "shutdown" event. Rahm's quippy response to Rauner received nearly 7,000 retweets at the time of writing. This is some of the best PR the mayor has gotten in a good while, and in an election year, no less. It was also a good day for neoliberal policy advocates and all those who want to see the police operate with impunity, our schools shuttered and our community resources redirected to harmful institutions like prisons, because a leader who is unapologetically committed to those ends was briefly seen as a "man of the people."

Direct action is often an escalation and a tactical response to a system that is not offering acceptable outcomes.

Politicians are often happy to support events that make no concrete demands of them. What did Rahm Emanuel commit to by supporting the march? What demand did he give way to? What resources did he release or agenda did he embrace? Historically, political leaders in vulnerable positions - in this case, Rahm Emanuel - often give out concessions to maintain social order and frankly, their own legitimacy. In fact, as writer and organizer Charles Preston pointed out on Twitter, the irony is that some of the people who were marching were demanding the reopening of clinics closed by Emanuel himself.

All of this, of course, was by design. It is not a coincidence that a friend of the mayor, who has helped to prop up Emanuel's leadership, created an event under the guise of a resistance moment that has now elevated that mayor. The leadership of an event informs the character of that event, and to expect otherwise is to expect a miracle.
Some local organizers saw a pro-Emanuel narrative on the horizon in advance of the event and acted accordingly. On Sunday, Frank Chapman, a South Side organizer and the director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, shared a reflection on the march with friends in the Chicago organizing community that included these words:

Unfortunately some of our friends had asked us to endorse this march to shutdown the Dan Ryan. We choose not to. Why? Because we will not be a part of any unholy alliance to get Rahm Emanuel re-elected. We will definitely not be a part of any discussion of ways to curb the city's gun violence that fails to mention the [Chicago Police Department's] unwarranted use of deadly force, murdering Black and Brown people.

Who Is the Driving Force Behind the Action?

To be sure, there were individuals marching on Saturday who want real and urgent change in their communities. Individuals impacted by various forms of violence are in pain, are grieving, and are looking for access points and outlets. The march was in mainstream local news headlines for days leading up to the event, and a sense of safety was promised by Pfleger and leading organizations with his "nonviolent" rhetoric and a subsequently heavily marshalled (by Illinois State Police) march. However, it would be irresponsible to let these individuals present at Saturday's march be used as human shields, deflecting any critique of the march's leadership which was seriously questionable, opportunistic, and strategically lacking a real sense of what is actually needed to bring true transformation in Black and Brown communities.

When an event purporting to be addressing gun violence does not center the violence of policing itself, then we have to be suspicious of its aims.

Political figures with questionable, self-serving platforms will often surround themselves with sympathetic figures. But the presence of well-meaning, well-intentioned or even beloved individuals will not overwrite the leadership of people whose self-interested words and philosophies would park our efforts firmly within the status quo.

When the mayor and a "top cop" like Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson throw support behind a protest of gun violence, yet heavily disinvest in and heavily criminalize the communities most directly affected on a daily basis, we have to stop, question the fruitfulness of the action and quickly lift the veil. When an event purporting to be addressing gun violence does not center the violence of policing itself, then we have to be suspicious of its aims.

Is the Event What It Purports to Be?

Civil disobedience does not always result in the arrest of those participating, but an act committed with the explicit consent of police is not "disobedience." We do not say this to demonize any act of cooperation with authority, but words mean things, and an action that does not unfold without the step-by-step permission of law enforcement officials is not civil disobedience. Characterizing it as such is harmful to those who would actually enact such resistance, because it gives people a false impression of what such acts will and should look like.

Community members who participate in genuine acts of civil disobedience in Chicago will be negatively impacted by Saturday's events, as unfair expectations and comparisons between their actions and Saturday's "shutdown" are now inevitable. Because, for many, Saturday's "shutdown" imparted the false lesson that there is a "right way" to disobey (that doesn't actually involve disobeying), and when bad things happen to people who are being disobedient in the future, some will point to Saturday's event and say that there's a way to be disobedient and that those who are jailed and brutalized simply did it wrong.

People who have won great victories in liberation struggles have not done so by getting the step-by-step consent of their oppressors.

Pfleger's event also served to bolster the image of Chicago police, with Father Pfleger marching arm-in-arm with Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and praising him for making the march possible. The violence and racism of Chicago's police are infamous, as is the culture of impunity that facilitates their harms. And yet, at this event, people were seen taking selfies with Eddie Johnson, who has famously claimed that in all his years as a police officer, he has never witnessed misconduct. This obviously aids in no one's liberation.

How to Tell Something Is Not a Direct Action

Writers and scholars like Dean Spade, Peter Gelderloos and others offer us useful questions and frameworks for assessing whether particular tactics, reforms or forms of resistance are recuperative or liberatory. These are questions that help us in determining whether something is actually direct action or a parade to reinforce the power of the state. Recuperative tactics, reforms and forms of resistance actually succeed in legitimizing harmful institutions. They can give them cover and expand their power to harm.

Inspired by their ideas, we offer the following guiding questions for assessing whether you are actually organizing direct action:

1. Is your action legitimizing harmful institutions? Or as Dean Spade asks: Does it legitimize or expand a system we are trying to dismantle? For example, what does it mean to cooperate with cops as part of organizing your action? If the goal is to shrink the power of policing, why are you thanking them for their presence rather than calling for their removal?

2. Peter Gelderloos asks: Does it have elite support? If it does, then your action is probably not liberatory.

3. Is the action colluding with power or resisting it?

4. Is there a clear demand that will improve the lives of the most marginalized?

Years ago, writer and movement facilitator adrienne maree brown wrote a blog post titled "a perfect action," that captures the spirit of direct action. (You can watch video footage of the action adrienne describes here.) The action described was an escalation with a clear message challenging police power. It was the antithesis of Saturday's expressway "shutdown."

Ultimately, no system of injustice will consent to its own overthrow and the system will never indict itself. People who have won great victories in liberation struggles have not done so by getting the step-by-step consent of their oppressors. They took strategic risks, and often suffered for them. There is nothing in our current historical context that exempts us from the realities of power or history - and anyone who suggests otherwise is not working in furtherance of our liberation.

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It's Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission

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On Saturday, July 7, social media was flooded with images of an event in Chicago that was advertised as a shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway to protest gun violence. Led by celebrity-pastor Father Michael Pfleger and co-sponsored by half a dozen local groups, 3,000 people marched onto the expressway, at first only occupying two lanes, with the permission of state police.

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Organizing 101 -  Working Families Party 

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Organizing 101 -  Working Families Party 