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Public Practice is a not-for-profit social enterprise with a mission to improve the quality and equality of everyday places by building the public sector's planning capacity. Read more about the organisation, who we are and our latest news.

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New Green Recovery: How can local renewal lead to fairer more sustainable places?
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We offer built environment practitioners an alternative route into working for the public sector through influential placements within forward-thinking local authorities. Find out about our programme, the disciplines we recruit, how to apply, and read bios of our Associates and Alumni.

We support public Authorities to recruit, train and retain high quality and diverse built environment expertise and develop their in house capacity over the longer-term. See how it works, what type of disciplines we recruit, who we work with, and how to express an interest in hosting a placement.

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Public Practice is a not-for-profit social enterprise with a mission to improve the quality and equality of everyday places by building the public sector's planning capacity. Read more about the organisation, who we are and our latest news. Event New Green Recovery: How can local renewal lead to fairer more sustainable places?

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Alternative Pathways for Practice
Edited by Harriet Harriss, Rory Hyde, Roberta Marcaccio

Paperback £24.99 / $26.36
Out 16 December 2020

LAUNCH EVENT

Join the editors on 16 December at 18.30 GMT for the virtual launch hosted by the Architectural Association in London. Bookings and further info here.

BLURB

What can you do with a degree in architecture? Where might it take you? What kind of challenges could you address? Architects After Architecture reframes architecture as a uniquely versatile way of acting on the world, far beyond that of designing buildings.

In this volume, we meet 40 practitioners who have used their architectural training in new and resourceful ways. Together, they describe a future of architecture that is diverse and engaged, expanding the limits of the discipline, and offering new paths forward in times of crisis.

ENDORSEMENTS

'Full of ideas, stories, histories, and futures, Architects After Architecture is intensely motivating.'
- DAN HILL, Visiting Professor of Practice, UCL Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose

'Architects After Architecture offers compelling possibilities for escaping the policed boundaries of traditional architecture practice that have so limited its social relevance and demographic makeup. This beautifully composed book of interviews and essays offers much-needed pathways toward an enriched mission of architecture.'
- DR. SHARON EGRETTA SUTTON, FAIA, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Architecture, Parsons School of Design

'Architects After Architecture demands the profession's attention to the multiple crises of our time: inexorable global warming, extreme social inequality, housing and food insecurity, and white male privilege. The book's forty exacting essays address the warnings head on to show would-be designers, innovators, misfits, and activists all the ways architecture can and must meet the challenge. This significant collection could not be more finely tuned to the present, nor more relevant to the future. Its spectral range demonstrates the optimism and ethics that have always characterised the field and that will save it, even "after architecture."'
- DR. DANA CUFF, Director cityLAB - UCLA, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design

EDITORS

HARRIET HARRISS is an architect and dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in New York. Her teaching, research and writing focus upon pioneering new and inclusive pedagogical models for design education.@harrietharriss

RORY HYDE is a design advocate for the Mayor of London, associate professor of architecture at the University of Melbourne, and was curator of contemporary architecture and urbanism at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2013-2020). He is the author of Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture (2012). @roryhyde

ROBERTA MARCACCIO is an editor and an educator at the Architectural Association in London. Her writings on historical as well as emerging modes of practice have featured on Architectural Design, AA Files, Blueprint and in the books Real Estates: Life Without Debt (2014) and Erasmus Effect (2014).@marcarobe

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Harriet Harriss, Rory Hyde, Roberta Marcaccio

ARCHITECTURE AFTER ARCHITECTURE
Jeremy Till

DESIGNING FOR THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY
A case study by Sarah Wigglesworth

'WHOSE VOICE COUNTS?'
Interview with Liza Fior, Muf

SPACES TO SPEAK
Justine Clark, Parlour

ON MIS-FITTING
Jos Boys

'ARCHITECTURE IS A WAY TO CONSTRUCT SOCIETY'
Interview with Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation

DESIGNING WITH CHILDREN
A case study by Interboro

FROM EXCLUSION TO INCLUSION
Joel Sanders

PRACTICE AS PROJECT
Public Works with Angharad Davies

AN ALTERNATIVE PRACTICE IN TIMES OF CRISIS
Doina Petrescu, aaa

PRIDE IN MAKING
Interview with Takeshi Hayatsu

REVIVING THE ALMS HOUSE
A case study by Peter Barber

THE ARCHITECT-ORGANISER
Sib Trigg, PEACH

'WE WANTED TO DO THINGS OURSELVES'
Interview with Jane Hall, Assemble

SAY IT LOUD
Pascale Sablan

BUILDING DIVERSITY
Elsie Owuso on Baroness Lawrence

DECONSTRUCTION
A case study by Rotor

UNDERGROUND ARCHITECTURE
Ant Farm in conversation with WORKac

THE SELF AS A DESIGN SUBJECT
Jack Self

THE ARCHITECT-DEVELOPER
Roger Zogolovitch

WHEN IS AN ARCHITECT NOT AN ARCHITECT?
Holly Lewis, We Made That

DEPROFESSIONALISATION
Peggy Deamer

'ONLY A CRIMINAL CAN SOLVE THE CRIME'
Interview with Eyal Weizman and Christina Varvia, Forensic Architecture

ARCHITECTURE AFTER CONFLICT
Malkit Shoshan, FAST

TO PROGRAM A SITE
Kimberli Meyer

EXHIBITION-MAKING
Judith Clark

BUILDINGS TASTE LONELY TO ME
A case study by Alex Schweder

FROM ARCHITECTURE TO VIDEOGAMES
Miriam Bellard, Rockstar North

'IT'S WHERE DIFFERENT FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE COLLIDE'
Interview with Matt Jones, Google

FROM ARCHITECTURE TO TECH
Blake Hudelson and Gavin Johns, Architechie

'CRYPTOCURRENCY HAS ENTERED MAINSTREAM CURRENCY'
Interview with Matt Storus

SEEING UPSIDE-DOWN AND AROUND CORNERS
Scott Paterson

RECLAIMING ATTENTION
A case study by Studio Folder

DESIGN FOR HOMELESSNESS
Chris Hildrey

'WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ALL THE DETAILS WERE PUT BACK IN THE STORY?'
Interview with Damon Rich

PUBLIC PRACTICE
Finn Williams

PERSONAL-PRIVATE, PROFESSIONAL-POLITICAL
Shelley Penn

ARCHITECTS FOR THE HUMANITARIAN SECTOR
Shareen Elnaschie, ODD

THE FREE WORLD
Robert Mull

ARCHITECTS AFTER ARCHITECTURE: Alternative Pathways for Practice
Edited by Harriet Harris, Rory Hyde, and Roberta Marcaccio
Published by Routledge
Design by Studio Folder
Copyright year 2021
Publication date 16 December 2020
320 pages
75 B/W illustrations
ISBN 9780367441210
Routledge website

UPDATED AUGUST 2020

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Edited by Harriet Harriss, Rory Hyde, Roberta Marcaccio Paperback £24.99 / $26.36 Out 16 December 2020 Join the editors on 16 December at 18.30 GMT for the virtual launch hosted by the Architectural Association in London. Bookings and further info here. What can you do with a degree in architecture?

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The DisOrdinary Architecture Project was established in 2008. Since then a network of disabled artists has collaborated with architecture, interiors and built environment students, educators, researchers, practitioners and other interested groups to co-create new and exciting ways to do disability differently in the design of built space.

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How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix feminist design collective

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How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix feminist design collective

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The project considers who our buildings and shared spaces are designed for, who is excluded from our designed environment, and what effect this has on the communities who live there?

A jumping off point for these questions is an unseen archive of work by the radical 1980s feminist architecture co-operative Matrix. The installation will feature rare films, drawings, photos and architectural models from the Matrix archive, presenting their use of radical methods across a range of projects, past and present.

We also introduce archival and contemporary approaches to design that aim to empower groups often excluded in the design of buildings, including Black and Asian women's organisations, community and childcare groups and lesbian and gay housing co-operatives, to explore more inclusive ways of designing, building and occupying spaces.

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How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative | Barbican

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A multi-layered project comprising an installation, publication and events programme exploring a series of important questions about our public spaces and designed environments.

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Matrix Open feminist architecture archive (prototype in progress)

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Matrix Open feminist architecture archive (prototype in progress)

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Who were Matrix?

In the 1980s, the London-based feminist architects' practice Matrix was one of the first worldwide to bring issues of gender centre-stage to the design of the built environment.....

Why a Matrix Open Archive?

The Matrix Open feminist architecture archive (MOfaa) brings together archival resources, not as an end in itself, but as a jumping off point for exploring some of the complex relationships between different kinds of bodies, space and architecture.

.

Explore: Engage with questions and issues about feminist architectural and spatial practices then and now.

Collaborate: Investigate and develop opportunities to work with others, to learn about, and discuss, ideas and future possibilities.

" Buildings do not control our lives. They reflect the dominant values in our society, political and architectural views, people's demands and the constraints of finance, but we can live in them in different ways from those originally intended. Buildings only affect us insomuch as they contain ideas about women, about our 'proper place', about what is private and what is public activity, about which things should be kept separate and which put together. "
From the introduction to Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment. Pluto Press 1984

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Who were Matrix? In the 1980s, the London-based feminist architects' practice Matrix was one of the first worldwide to bring issues of gender centre-stage to the design of the built environment..... Why a Matrix Open Archive?

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Jos Boys (2021) Designing with Difference (Part 1: Shifting the Ground, Part2: Designing and Delivering Differently, Part 3: New Ways of thinking about Design and Disability 

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Jos Boys (2021) Designing with Difference (Part 1: Shifting the Ground, Part2: Designing and Delivering Differently, Part 3: New Ways of thinking about Design and Disability 

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Molonglo Online Series

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Jos Boys (2014) Doing Disability Differently: Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life 

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Jos Boys (2014) Doing Disability Differently: Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life 

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Routledge

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doing disability differently: an alternative handbook on architecture

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dis/ability and designing for everyday life

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accessibility; access for the disabled; architecture for disabled people; bodies; occupation and space; designing for the disabled; disability design; disability studies; disabled architecture

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Doing Disability Differently: An alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life

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Doing Disability Differently: An alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life [Boys, Jos] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Doing Disability Differently: An alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability and designing for everyday life

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Jos Boys (2017)(Ed) Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader 

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Jos Boys (2017)(Ed) Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader 

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Routledge

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architecture / interior design / general

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architecture / interior design / general

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Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader

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Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader: Amazon.co.uk: Boys, Jos: Books

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Jos Boys The DisOrdinary Architecture Project: A Handy Guide for Doing Disability Differently in Architecture and Urban Design.

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Jos Boys The DisOrdinary Architecture Project: A Handy Guide for Doing Disability Differently in Architecture and Urban Design.

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Reprinted from The Funambulist 19: The Spaces of Ableism

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Fem_Arc podcast Starting from difference with Zoe Partington and Jos Boys

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Fem_Arc podcast Starting from difference with Zoe Partington and Jos Boys

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F_PODCAST starting from difference with Zoe Partington & Jos Boys [en]

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Welcoming Unruly Bodies: re-thinking social, spatial and material practices

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Welcoming Unruly Bodies: re-thinking social, spatial and material practices

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Keynote; Transformations Conference, University of Melbourne November 2019.

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Welcoming Unruly Bodies: Re-thinking Social, Spatial and Material Practices

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Bartlett International Lecture Series (2021) Exploring Feminist Design Practices Then and Now 

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Bartlett International Lecture Series (2021) Exploring Feminist Design Practices Then and Now 

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10 February (with Jos Boys, Torange Khonsari, Manual Labours, Lesley Lokko and Maria Venegas Rabas)

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International Lecture Series 2020-21: Exploring Feminist Design Practices Then and Now

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The DisOrdinary Architecture Project "believes that thinking differently about disability (and ability) can open up the design of our built surroundings to new forms of creativity and critique. Instead of treating disabled people as merely a 'technical' and 'legal' problem for architecture and urban design, we show how starting from disability - from the rich differences that biodiversity and neuro-divergence bring - is a powerful creative force for design."

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#1 DisOrdinary Architecture - fem_arc STUDIO

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The DisOrdinary Architecture Project "believes that thinking differently about disability (and ability) can open up the design of our built surroundings to new forms of creativity and critique. Instead of treating disabled people as merely a 'technical' and 'legal' problem for architecture and urban design, we show how starting from disability - from the rich differences that biodiversity and neuro-divergence bring - is a powerful creative force for design."

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Recent DisOrdinary project: Architecture Beyond Sight collaboration with The Bartlett, University College London UK

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Recent DisOrdinary project: Architecture Beyond Sight collaboration with The Bartlett, University College London UK

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Pilot study week feedback from blind and partially sighted participants:

- Fae Kilburn  https://disabilityarts.online/blog/fae-kilburn/architecture-beyond-sight/
- Clarke Reynolds  https://outsidein.org.uk/news/dis-ordinary-architecture-a-visionary-course/

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July 2019 Study Week film by Anna Ulrikke Andersen 'Architecture Beyond Sight'

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July 2019 Study Week film by Anna Ulrikke Andersen 'Architecture Beyond Sight'

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Also visit here: https://annaulrikkeandersen.com/2019/08/23/architecture-beyond-sight/

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Anna Ulrikke Andersen is a member of Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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Support orgs fighting against racism and police brutality.

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The AIA is the voice of the architectural profession and a resource for its members in service to society.

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Poverty is created.

Poverty exists due to decisions taken by people, countries and companies with power. These decisions started with colonialism, which has shaped the way we live now. But today's world is still structured to ensure power and wealth grow for those who already have it, at the expense of people in poverty.

With calls growing to bring the truth about Britain's legacy of colonialism into classrooms, now teachers, students and parents can take matters into their own hands with our free lesson plan exploring colonialism and the roots of global poverty aimed at 16-18-year-olds (Key Stage 5).

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Global poverty & its colonial roots: a re-education | Health Poverty Action

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Poverty is created. Poverty exists due to decisions taken by people, countries and companies with power. These decisions started with colonialism, which has shaped the way we live now. But today's world is still structured to ensure power and wealth grow for those who already have it, at the expense of people in poverty.

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Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Architecture Think Tank

B UILDINGS

Buildings are never just buildings. Buildings respond to the political foundations of the institutions that fund, envision, and desire them. Buildings are physical manifestations of the ideologies they serve. Although a naïvely detached or romantic position may be able to render buildings as semi-autonomous artifacts capable of sheltering or enveloping space, this depoliticized attitude overlooks their historical and material relationship to regimes of violence and terror. Buildings can protect but they can also confine, instill fear, crush, oppress. Buildings can school, and foment hospitality but can imprison and torture. Buildings can be tools for ethnic segregation, cultural destruction and historical erasure. Buildings can reinforce the status quo and aide in the implementation of settler-colonial desires of expansionism. An anti-racist democratization of access is only possible through the decolonization of buildings and public spaces. Architects should be aware of the programs of the buildings they design and be held accountable for doing so.

L INKS

Like the Vertiginous Assembly that is Blackness and Race (and therefore the construction of a concept of whiteness) the history of the architecture we are forced to learn and practice is brought to us at the same moment and via the same ideological superstructure as the "despoliation of the Atlantic slave trade" and continues today with the "globalization of markets, the privatization of the world under the aegis of neoliberalism, and the increasing imbrication of the financial markets, the postimperial military complex and digital technologies." The forced import of an idea of modernization and progress that could have been executed only through the enslaving of black and indigenous bodies is as intrinsic to the practice of architecture as the exploitation of a subaltern humanity linked to contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its practice of capture, predation, extraction and asymmetrical warfare. Just as architecture becomes ever more imbricated with neoliberalism, so does a system of risk. What was initially experienced by Blacks during the transatlantic slave trade has now become the "norm for, or at least the lot of, all subaltern humanity." We cannot deal with a contemporary state of risk, exploitation, policing, militarization, and warfare without challenging the physical manifestations of the status quo.

A RCHITECTURE

Architecture is too obsessed with making. Trained as yes men and women, the vocation of the architect mostly exists and subsists as an appendix of hegemonic power. This power, always overwhelming and undisputable, hates to come voluntarily to the table of negotiation. Often, architects speak in platonic terms when defending architecture and its problematic relationship to economies of exploitation and white supremacy. In their naïve idealism, architects often fantasize about the possibility of exorcising the evil out of buildings, and working within the parameters of the lesser evil. They dream about manufacturing consent, simulating empathy. They talk about reforming prisons, creating sustainable concentration camps, laying out pristine border walls, and outlining "community oriented" buildings for policing. In their obstinate naïveté they refuse to acknowledge the racist, colonial, and oppressive legacies of these archetypes. The prisons that profit from black and brown men and women, the detention centers that serve to separate and destroy families, the infrastructures of the postimperial military apparatus that continuously terrorizes communities around the world cannot be fixed by better, more efficient, and sustainable architectures. After all, what is the colonial footprint of your architecture? Racism is a device whose aim is to create walls between people. These walls should not be made. We need to learn to un-make these walls.

C APITALISM

Capitalism is often sold as a utopian dream of free markets and unobstructed, post-ideological competition. However, as corporations, powerful lobbyists, and dominant classes build their power on the legacy of exploitation of black, brown and indigenous bodies, all is left is a trail of environmental destruction, social violence and neglect. The relationship between Capitalism and Architecture as private property gives way to the rise of policing dating back to the plantations across the Americas and the Caribbean. On the footsteps of this legacy, the need to subdivide, the "zoning practices" linked to networks of repression whose tools and methods include the "imposition of ideological grids on populations", is responsible for the surveillance and policing state of many black and brown neighborhoods and communities. These subdivisions of the soil foment and maintain the status quo via the accumulation of wealth having enormous repercussions in the opportunities (education, health, safety) of disenfranchised communities. Archaic property tax laws that bond education to the possession of land and architectural commodities are just an example of these racist zoning laws. The policing and zoning practices that go together with the invention of private property are settler colonial strategies that must be abolished. We must dismantle the concept of capitalism as a free market built on the accumulation of wealth, dehumanization, policing, zoning, and mass incarceration. New anti-capitalist and anti-racist zoning strategies must be created, not to subdivide groups by class or ethnic affiliation, but in order to demolish the mechanisms of exploitation, accumulation of wealth, and allow truly equitable, fair, and dignifying spaces to flourish.

K INSHIP

Kinship may be a poetic aim to find alliances, but the empty hope rendered by milquetoast liberalism won't be enough to eliminate anti-black racism. The role of complicity played by institutions in the construction and perpetuation of the status quo is a real problem with material ramifications. It is not enough for academic and professional organizations to conveniently pen announcements that support black and decolonizing struggles if they do nothing to stop the design and construction of machines of oppression. Just like decolonization is not a metaphor, nor is anti-racism. The abstract call for making kin with one another is not a substitute for real actions in their psychological and spatial manifestations. It is not enough to fill the ranks of a managerial class with exceptional representational cases of marginalized groups if the institutions will keep sponsoring the architectures of anti-blackness and racial oppression.

L AW

Legal systems and the institutions that enforce them have historically obstructed true fairness, justice, and equality. The bloody and racist history of the judicial mechanisms and codes that brought the world that existed in the West Indies to the United States with the plantation as its core structure plants its rotten roots in a legacy of racist architecture and planning. In the same way that Jim Crow laws in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa were legally sanctioned systems of anti-black oppression, today we are still battling with a legacy of legal and institutional racism. As settler-colonial revolutions transform, destroy, and alter environments, regimes of racism and oppression are extremely efficient as they write laws, orders, and directives that allow for the control and oppression of black, brown, and indigenous populations. We must challenge the perverse use of public space as a militarized territory for surveillance and violence against black, brown, indigenous, queer, and trans people. We must demolish both, the material and immaterial legacies of colonization, the plantation, Jim Crow, and Apartheid. It is not enough to abide by the law when the law is part of a racist apparatus. We must challenge the architectures of racist occupation, of gentrification, of environmental destruction.

I NSTITUTIONS

Institutional racism is the wizard behind the curtain of Oz. Institutional racism operates in the governing boards, hiring committees, and admissions evaluations. Institutional racism is responsible for fabricating and maintaining hegemonic discourses while punishing and obstructing the construction and free flow of alternative, ancestral, and anti-racist forms of knowledge. It is not enough for universities, schools, studios, and professional organizations to post solidary messages in their Instagram platforms when they create invisible walls around their ivory towers. It is not enough to hashtag BLM when they are designing buildings for policing, detaining, and incarcerating, when they maintain the status quo through biased processes of evaluation and biased demands. It is not enough for institutions to pen beautiful #heartfelt letters in solidarity of activists struggling against police and paramilitary forces while they continue building their endowments with the money of their settler-colonial legacies. If they are serious about demolishing their legacies of institutional racism, academic institutions must rethink their recruiting strategies to attract, stimulate, and create safe environments for both, educators and students. Simultaneously, architecture schools must embrace the deconstruction of their curriculums to question not only the future of architecture, but to expose the racist past they helped construct.

V ALUE

Value in contemporary societies is often confused with the illusion of a wealth that can be measured either through the accumulation of commodities or through the speculative ether of financial capital. In these scenarios, commodities, including architecture or architectural elements, could acquire a mystical status. The question that remains is, what is the value of architecture as a commodity in comparison to the value of a black life? Can a broken window, a graffitied wall, or a burned police precinct be the equivalent or more valuable than black life? In this white-supremacist system of values are black, brown, and indigenous lives mere commodities that can be compared to disposable and replaceable objects and artifacts? After all, what is the value of your architecture? And, what is the value of black life?

E NVIRONMENT

European colonization and the extension of its spatial horizon was fueled by genocide and environmental destruction. It is not a coincidence that the environmental effects of this expansion resurface in the form of an ecological threat that is imminent for impoverished communities and has clear racist overtones. The postimperial military complex that maintains the chain of material, environmental, and human exploitation is directly linked to the destruction of ecosystems. "Militarism is the largest single cause of environmental destruction in the world. The US Military is the largest single pollutant in the planet and the largest single consumer of oil in the world. The Pentagon is BP's largest client." There's no racial justice without the protection of the environment. It is not enough to use LEED certified materials or photovoltaic panels in buildings if they contribute to the postimperial military complex. We cannot argue for environmental justice while condoning and participating in processes of militarization, deforestation, and the desecration, occupation, and destruction of indigenous territories. There's no sustainable architecture to the service of the military. There's no ecological justice if architecture contributes to environmental racism.

S TATISTICS

Success cannot be measured in empty data charts and dubious demographic indicators. Stop-and-frisk. Heavy Policing. Random checks. The war against drugs. The war against crime. The war against terror. These miscalculated policy moves have been justified by the misinterpretation of contextless numbers. Numbers that quantify the specificities of effects without looking at the causes. Numbers that without context are manipulated to justify the mass incarceration and mass homicide of black and brown people. The same can be said about the Cartesian ideal of progress and its settler-colonial legacy and the unquenchable thirst for growth. We must learn to create new parameters for architecture to operate without responding to empty statistics and without serving to its racist and ideological technologies and agendas.

M ONUMENTS

Military, confederate, philanthro-capitalist, and colonizer monuments are part of an apparatus that rewrites, white-washes, legitimizes, standardizes, and erases a history of genocide, destruction, and racism while maintaining the status quo. Monuments refer us back in time, as they concretize in marble, granite, bronze, glass, steel, objects that carry a dead weight of a murderous history. Together with these avatars shaped after leaders of regimes of death, racism, and colonial exploitation, other architectures recreate the effect of the monument, albeit at a different scale: train stations, palaces of colonial administrators, bridges, camps, fortresses, stadiums, and also buildings for schooling, endowments, and museums. An anti-racist architecture must dismantle the construction of these monuments and question their role in the construction of a "style of power and domination. The remains of the potentate are the signs of the physical and symbolic struggle directed against the colonized."

A GNOSIA

Architecture suffers from an agnosia similar to what José Saramago described in his essay about Blindness. In Saramago's text a pandemic makes all the characters lose their sight, awash in a blinding whiteness. Thick like milk, this white blindness expands creating havoc and a system of exploitation and cruelty. Architecture suffers from a similar white agnosia. Unable to see its complicity with a legacy of oppression, architecture relies on guiding itself through the sensations of its white, masculine, geriatric hands. We must find ways to recover sight, to perceive the diversity in front of us.

T HEORY

The potential fusion of capitalism and racism carries with it a number of architectural and urban implications. Systematic risk, impoverishment, and debt, the emergence of new imperial practices that borrow from both, the enslaving logic of capture and predation, and from the colonial logic of occupation and extraction. Under the rubric of capitalism and racism, architecture remains on the one hand a discipline that filters and distills the possibility of other worlds into a canonical European, white ideological construction. On the other hand, it continuously reproduces itself by means of more settler-colonial strategies that tirelessly destroy the environment for the creation of new settlements while endlessly gentrifying the already existing ones. New theories and practices must be developed and implemented in order to question, subvert, and oppose architecture as a tool for control, domination, and oppression. New forms of knowledge must abolish architecture as an extension of capitalism and racism.

T RICKLE-DOWN

Trickle-down justice doesn't work, just like tickle-down economics proved to be a hoax, magic that didn't work. Trickle-down architecture suffers from the same problem. If utopias can only be conceived by those privileged enough to make it to the schools of a white, elitist discipline, these ideal conditions will only reflect those who envision them. Instead of a trickle-down culture of architecture, the one that serves and maintains the status quo, we must find ways to build networks of solidarity. Black, indigenous, brown utopias must occupy the space previously reserved by white imaginaries. We need new utopias. Utopias from below. We need trickle-up utopias by means of anti-racist architectures.

E NCOUNTER

Encountering these dreary scenarios, it is not enough to be apolitical or to 'not be a racist'. Due to the rise of populism and increasing levels of risk, the fabrication of racial subjects has been reinvigorated nearly everywhere. We need to acknowledge our role in this reinvigoration and oppose vehemently its destructive intentions. We must employ our ways of reimagining the world to question the one we have created. It is imperative that we use our critical faculties to deconstruct our ways of imagining the world. Other worlds are possible, urgent, and necessary.

R ADICAL

Radical means to go into the roots. For architecture to be radical it has to dig deep into its past, present, and potential future role into perpetuating the origins of social fragmentation, oppression, colonization, and racism. We must undo the damage created by the complicity of architecture with these systems of oppression. We must un-make detention centers. We must un-make prisons. We must un-make the military. We need to un-narrate the history of architecture, and construct new narratives that expose the racist, settler-colonial roots of its capitalist development, of its modernism and desperate afterbirths. In order to make new forms of radical architecture, we must learn to un-make Architecture.

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Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Architecture Think Tank B UILDINGS Buildings are never just buildings. Buildings respond to the political foundations of the institutions that fund, envision, and desire them. Buildings are physical manifestations of the ideologies they serve.

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"Never let them connect to the continent of Africa. Never let them know their history and their language. Teach the teachers how not to keep history. Never let the African American child learn of his or her history because if they do, they will relate to their ethnicity and they will not become American."

According to Dr. Adelaide Sanford in her Afro-Centric Education as a Human Right Speech, this is the mindset and marching orders of our federal education.

The force of erasure is relentless, the process of keeping our history elusive is not accidental but a key component of oppression in the infrastructure of racial injustice. Beyond the Built Environment, LLC, is working to dismantle the cages / shackles that confine us and create a conduit to the greatness of our ancestors and our peers.

Two years ago, we were formed to engage the community through architecture to advocate equitable, reflectively diverse environments. At this moment and beyond, we are leveraging the work we've done so far to advocate for policy changes and make institutions accountable for ensuring the elevation of diverse designers and their contributions to the world. Here are the 3 action items BBE is stewarding to dismantle injustice.

Representation matters and media publications have neglected our stories, our contributions, and in some cases erased our existence. With this call for action, we are looking to have media outlets including, digital print, and broadcast to sign a Memorandum of Understanding committing to:

Reporting the percentage of diverse designers, they feature in the publication annually, continued tracking to increase the result by 5% annually until 15% is achieved, and publish the results for accountability.

How you can help:

Global Call for Submissions

BBE has elevated and proclaimed the greatness of 250 diverse designers through our 15 SAY IT LOUD Exhibitions to date. The goal initially was to reach 500 in 5 years. The urgency for this content is now and as we discuss the books that must be removed from the curriculum, we are looking to make a meaningful addition. We will publish a Great Diverse Designers Textbook. This call for action is setting a goal of increasing the content of the library to both serve as a directory for business opportunities for the featured designers and material for the publication of our textbook.

Currently, 34% of the US is represented in the library, we want to reach a full 100%. In addition to representing the United States, we are aiming to represent a global community of designers. therefore in these new 250 submissions, we are seeking 5 Caribbean islands presented and 10 submissions from each continent.

How you can help:

In order to understand how we can make policy changes to combat discrimination and economic equity within the world of architecture, we will be hosting a virtual focus group in the Fall with 500 diverse designers. We are partnering with Remesh https://remesh.ai/ the platform that will allow us to run this large, online focus group, in order to amplify the voices of diverse designers as well as capture valuable data and insights on individual experiences and sentiments. Remesh will enable us to engage with our community, as well as see the common themes and ideas we care about. Armed with this information, we can identify key issues and draft policies to change the negative, discriminatory experiences of diverse designers in our community.

Participants will join the live session via a link (details to follow). All you need is an internet browser, no app, or downloads necessary.

How you can help:

We are elevating ourselves!

If you want to support BBE and our mission, please donate here:

https://www.beyondthebuilt.com/support

Early on in my career I Was Asked to Stand, today I Stand for Justice and I am asking for you all to stand with us.

Thank You

Pascale Sablan, AIA, NOMA, LEED AP

Founder & Executive Director Beyond the Built Environment LLC

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Dismantling Injustice | BEYOND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

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"Never let them connect to the continent of Africa. Never let them know their history and their language. Teach the teachers how not to keep history. Never let the African American child learn of his or her history because if they do, they will relate to their ethnicity and they will not become American."

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Mark lopez

director, designer & animator

Mark Lopez is an award-winning director of motion design who has refined his craft at world-class motion studios on both coasts of the U.S. alongside some of the most creative minds in the country. Mark specializes in illustrated 2D mixed media storytelling with an eye for composition. Silkworm is Mark's studio practice, based in Austin, Texas, and collaborating all over the world.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN

WRITER & NARRATOR

Richard Rothstein is a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, a senior fellow, emeritus, at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a senior fellow of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley). Richard's book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America , was designated one of ten finalists on the National Book Awards' long list for the best nonfiction book of 2017.

YOUTOOCANWOO

MUSIC, SOUND DESIGN & MIX

YouTooCanWoo is a an artist-owned music and audio production company based in Brooklyn, New York. YouTooCanWoo's holistic approach to audio blurs the lines between the conventional roles of music and sound design, blending genres, influences, and historical context to create truly immersive experiences. They have been responsible for the production and mixing of MGMT's debut EP Time to Pretend, creating the sound identity of Spotify, MTV, and NBCUniversal; the sound design for official SXSW Film Festival selection Mateo. as well as the original music, sound design and mix in ads for major brands like Apple, Google, Hershey's, and Pepsi.

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Short Film based on the book, The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. The forgotten history of how our federal, state and local governments unconstitutionally segregated every major metropolitan area in America through law and policy.

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Race + Architecture - How do we decolonise design?

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Open Letter on Anti-Racism to the Princeton School of Architecture 

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Open Letter on Anti-Racism to the Princeton School of Architecture 

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A Statement from the Black Faculty of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

We are in the midst of a seachange in attitudes towards race relations in the United States. This precipitous change was ignited by the callous murder of George Floyd, and the recent murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The devaluation and dehumanization of black life emblematic of these murders has riveted the nation and world, and prompted a profound reconsideration of the symbols, spaces, and institutions that perpetuate racial inequality in American society. Statements and pledges of solidarity have abounded. There is a clarion call for real action to dismantle racist systems, and indeed some of those actions are in their nascent stages. The common thread that diminishes the lives of persons racialized as black and brown is white supremacy, the belief in the superiority of whiteness and those advantaged to access its opportunities. This corrosive force operates systemically and structurally to the profound detriment of all members of society and our collective liberation (including the liberation of white people) is at stake.

GSAPP, as an institution and a community, has pledged its commitment to change, but we must first engage in the hard work of unlearning white supremacy. Fifty years ago there were radical actions undertaken by GSAPP students in architecture and planning inspired by the Black Power and Civil Rights movement. One of those trailblazers, educator/alumni/colleague Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton has narrated in When Ivory Towers were Black how she and classmates forged institutional change, brought Black and Latinx students into the school's disciplines, and initiated community-based design and planning studios that worked with Harlem residents and organizations. And yet by the 1980s those radical pedagogies and curricular changes disappeared within GSAPP as the whiteness of the school's disciplines was reconstituted into new versions of old racist paradigms, discourses, and practices. It is our belief that unless white supremacy is first, recognized and second, dismantled within this institution, then the goals professed and desired by many of the GSAPP community to eradicate anti-black racism will fail.

We believe that GSAPP should spend the coming academic year 2020-21 understanding anti-black racism through a deep analysis and investigation of whiteness and white supremacy. Faculty, students and staff should work toward understanding how it operates, its historical legacy, and how it is perpetuated in the school across all disciplines and within the culture of the school itself. To this end, we believe that it is not the job of Black faculty and students to explain anti-black racism as a surrogate for interrogating white supremacy. Race must be understood not as a natural occurrence but instead as a modern social construct, one that underpins the European humanism which serves as the very foundation of our respective disciplines extending from Vitruvius to the present.

As author Toni Morrison eloquently stated in a 1993 interview, the practice of racism is a profound neurosis that no one examines for what it is-"it feels crazy, [because] it is crazy." Hence, it's important to ask these difficult questions about white supremacy in order to learn what it enables and what it destroys, so that we can become a more equitable and just academic community. Rather than quick-fix solutions, this reckoning will require hard work, committed leadership, and shared goals from all those who make up our school.

To undertake this unlearning process GSAPP shall:

1. Conduct an inventory of the school's current and past work on race and the built environment and how to make that work more visible and representative of the field and society by the beginning of the fall 2020 semester;

2. Complete an assessment of each program in terms of its complicity with systems of white supremacy -identifying and understanding the work that whiteness does;

3. Develop a set of resources and readings for faculty and students on whiteness and white supremacy;

4. Develop pedagogical approaches and curricular content that no longer advance white supremacist values or practices;

5. Dedicate public programming to stimulate dialogue about whiteness and knowledge of its impact on our disciplines and the school's culture;

6. Allocate the necessary funds to initiate and sustain this effort, which should support those faculty and students engaged in this work, with the understanding that this must also be a school-wide undertaking; this will require support in the form of funding, human resources, decision-making power, and the time/space to achieve tangible outcomes;

7. Use GSAPP's influence and agency to engage and lead in the work beyond the school that is needed in the field and its practices and associations to unlearn and challenge whiteness and white supremacy;

8. Acknowledge and address GSAPP's role in the erasure, exclusion, and marginalization of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color's knowledge, work, and voices;

9. Actively transform the culture of the school into a culture that promotes safe, authentic, transformative care, practices and dialogue while dismantling white supremacist, patriarchal and ableist power dynamics at all levels;

10. Work to break down the barriers between GSAPP and the community, especially Harlem;

11. Make public GSAPP's work on unlearning whiteness at the end of the coming academic year;

Furthermore, we demand that the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation set precise goals for becoming an anti-racist institution. This includes increasing black student enrollment, black faculty and staff, financial support for black students, and pedagogical and curricular changes to each of its programs.

In " Letter From a Region in My Mind" (1962), James Baldwin writes, "It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum-that is, any reality-so supremely difficult...Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves." Yet, racism and white supremacy are not just consigned to America's troubled history, we must also recognize whiteness as a global product of European and American colonialism and imperialism. As such, it is incumbent upon all GSAPP faculty and students within the global context of Columbia to do the work of unlearning white supremacy and anti-Black racism. Given that we teach, learn and work within an academic institution, in the heart of Harlem, this endeavor should be undertaken in the spirit of an intellectual proposition whose outcomes are not yet known. It will be a project that requires thought and creativity, individual reflection accompanied by collaborative action.

Amina Blacksher
Lance Freeman
Mario Gooden
Jerome Haferd
Malo Hutson
Gordon Kipping
Justin Garrett Moore
Mabel O. Wilson

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A Statement from the Black Faculty of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation We are in the midst of a seachange in attitudes towards race relations in the United States. This precipitous change was ignited by the callous murder of George Floyd, and the recent murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.

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Welcome to the Guide to Allyship.

Think of this guide as one of many starting points in your journey to become a better ally. This guide isn't meant to be comprehensive nor is it perfect. There are people far more versed than I, who have dedicated their life's work to this sort of education.

In light of recent events and tragedies, I've been hearing the word "ally" a lot. Many people want to be an "ally", and even more people are unable to fulfill the duties allyship requires.

I use the word "ally" loosely because I find it overused and often abused by those who label themselves "allies." Despite its current misuse, using a different word would only cause confusion. As you read through this guide, be aware that your definition of "ally" may not be the same as the definition I'll introduce you to.

What's so special about this guide?

There are many great guides out there, and I acknowledge their existence. What's different about this guide is that it's open source (any one can contribute to it) and it doesn't get into specifics: racism, transphobia, gender discrimination, etc. and that's by design.

This guide can't and shouldn't be everything to you. At some point, you need to take responsibility and further your education. When you're done with the guide, please find ways to learn more.

Finally, this is a resource to help anyone considering allyship better understand the pros and cons of what being an ally entails. Allies understand their role in collaboration with people whose lives are affected daily by systemic oppression.

Don't take the responsibility of being an ally lightly.

In the summer of 2016, someone I considered an ally stood by and watched as I, a Black person, was berated by a racist. To make matters worse, I had a conversation with this person earlier in the day about the power allies can wield in situations of discrimination. But when the time came for them to take action, they were more interested in protecting their comfort.

Upset, I couldn't understand what happened. Did the conversation we had not get through? What didn't they step up? Then it dawned on me:
Saying you're an ally is much easier than actually being an ally. Saying you're an ally looks good on paper, especially if you're never questioned about your inaction.
Many self-defined "allies" wear the phrase and ideology like an article of clothing, easily discarded when it's no longer fashionable to wear.

If only those from marginalized and underinvested communities could cast away the identities marking them as targets with such ease.

I noted before that I used the word "ally" loosely. In fact, I personally no longer use the word. However, I do think it's a good starting place for those learning to be better allies. I also believe there's an opportunity to explore a better definition of the word. The best definition of "ally" (that I've found) comes from author Roxane Gay in her article for Marie Claire, "On Making Black Lives Matter." In it, she notes:

Black people do not need allies. We need people to stand up and take on the problems borne of oppression as their own, without remove or distance.

We need people to do this even if they cannot fully understand what it's like to be oppressed for their race or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, class, religion, or other marker of identity.

We need people to use common sense to figure out how to participate in social justice.

To recap: Being an ally doesn't necessarily mean you fully understand what it feels like to be oppressed. It means you're taking on the struggle as your own.

An individual from an underinvested community cannot easily cast away the weight of their identity (or identities) shaped through oppression on a whim. They carry that weight every single day, for better or for worse. An ally understands that this is a weight that they, too, must be willing to carry and never put down.

Why allies are necessary

Anyone has the potential to be an ally. Allies recognize that though they're not a member of the underinvested and oppressed communities they support, they make a concerted effort to better understand the struggle, every single day.

Because an ally might have more privilege and recognizes said privilege, they are powerful voices alongside oppressed ones.

Being an ally is hard work.

Many would-be allies fear making mistakes that could have them labeled as "-ist" or "-ic" (racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, etc). But as an ally, you're also affected by a system of oppression. This means that as an ally, there is much to unlearn and learn-mistakes are expected. You need to own this as fact and should be willing to embrace the daily work of doing better.
As an ally, you need to own your mistakes and be proactive in your education, every day.
If you refuse to acknowledge that your words and actions are inherently shaped and influenced by systemic oppression, you're setting up yourself to fail.

Lack of self-awareness is not a trait of an ally. You'll be complicit in the oppression of those you intend to help. If you choose not to understand this, but label yourself an "ally", you're essentially a wolf in sheep's clothing. You'll find ways to infiltrate vulnerable communities and wield far more power than someone who is outwardly "-ist" or "-ic" because you're "trusted."

Just as society will not change overnight, neither will you. Here are some important do's and don'ts to consider as you learn, grow, and step into the role of an ally.

The Dos

Do be open to listening

Do be aware of your implicit biases

Do your research to learn more about the history of the struggle in which you are participating

Do the inner work to figure out a way to acknowledge how you participate in oppressive systems

Do the outer work and figure out how to change the oppressive systems

Do use your privilege to amplify (digitally and in-person) historically suppressed voices

Do learn how to listen and accept criticism with grace, even if it's uncomfortable

Do the work every day to learn how to be a better ally

The Don'ts

Do not expect to be taught or shown. Take it upon yourself to use the tools around you to learn and answer your questions

Do not participate for the gold medal in the "Oppression Olympics" (you don't need to compare how your struggle is "just as bad as" a marginalized person's)

Do not behave as though you know best

Do not take credit for the labor of those who are marginalized and did the work before you stepped into the picture

Do not assume that every member of an underinvested community feels oppressed

Contributed by Presley Pizzo. Please credit Presley when referencing this section.

While mistakes are to be expected, what's the best way to go about resolving them?

Note: Parts of this section were originally based on Kayla Reed's (@iKaylaReed) tweet sharing her definition of what it means to be an ally. It's another great definition that'll help you follow along with this section!

Imagine your privilege is a heavy boot that keeps you from feeling when you're stepping on someone's feet or they're stepping on yours, while oppressed people have only sandals. If someone says, "ouch! You're stepping on my toes," how do you react?

Because we can think more clearly about stepping on someone's literal toes than we usually do when it comes to oppression, the problems with many common responses are obvious:

Centering yourself: "I can't believe you think I'm a toe-stepper! I'm a good person!"

Denial that others' experiences are different from your own: "I don't mind when people step on my toes."

Derailing: "Some people don't even have toes, why aren't we talking about them instead?"

Refusal to center the impacted: "All toes matter!"

Tone policing: "I'd move my foot if you'd ask me more nicely."

Denial that the problem is fixable: "Toes getting stepped on is a fact of life. You'll be better off when you accept that."

Victim blaming: "You shouldn't have been walking around people with boots!"

Withdrawing: "I thought you wanted my help, but I guess not. I'll just go home."

In reality, most of us naturally know the right way to react when we step on someone's toes, and we can use that to help us learn how to react when we commit microaggressions.

Center the impacted: "Are you okay?"

Listen to their response and learn.

Apologize for the impact, even though you didn't intend it: "I'm sorry!"

Stop the instance: move your foot

Stop the pattern: be careful where you step in the future. When it comes to oppression, we want to actually change the "footwear" to get rid of privilege and oppression (sneakers for all!), but metaphors can only stretch so far!

Reacting in a fair and equitable way isn't about learning arbitrary rules or being a doormat. Rather, it's about restoring and maintaining dignity and respect for everyone involved - both the person who is hurt, and you. Still, it's hard to remember in the moment, because these issues are so charged in our society. As such, it may be helpful to reframe the situation so that you don't feel defensive.

You may have noticed it's easier to handle being corrected about something you didn't know if you're grateful for and even open to the opportunity to learn rather than embarrassed to have been wrong. Being able to let go of your ego is an incredibly important skill to develop.

Try starting with "Thanks for letting me know" to put yourself in a better frame of mind. If after you say that, you need to take some time to think about the situation, that's fine, too. Just remember that this isn't about changing the other person's frame of mind. They're allowed to be upset about being oppressed.

You've made a mistake and you want to apologize. Where do you begin?

What is an apology?

Before you can apologize, you need to know what an apology is.

Apologies are social contracts that hold you accountable. They tell others that you are taking responsibility, are open to the consequences of your actions, and plan to do better in the future.

Bad apologies are performances meant to protect pride and ego. They exist to make the apologizer feel and look good, while defending their intent.

Good apologies are heartfelt acts that let go of pride and ego. They center the pain of the impacted, regardless of the apologizer's intent.

Think of pain as a gradient-it doesn't have to be extreme to have a significant impact. Accidentally misgendering someone can cause them pain. Stepping on someone' toes can cause them pain.

Attributes of a good apology

Apologies aren't a magic fix and won't solve mistakes of the past, but there are a few attributes that make for a good apology.

Timely
Delivered at the right moment in the right place and time.

Consider the context in which you want to apologize and how that might affect not only you but also the person receiving your apology.

Context can include your current mental state (are you feeling defensive? Upset? Nervous? Calm?), the physical space you're in (private or public area), or the apology's medium (phone, online, text message, in person).

Respects boundaries
Given when the person receiving the apology consents to it.

Your desire to give an apology right now doesn't mean that the receiver is ready for it. Some people need space to process, and you should respect that. When they're willing to reconnect, if at all, they may let you know (or they may not).

Self-aware
Know that the act of apology may not lead to the closure you expect.

The apology receiver may choose to never interact with you again. Either after you give an apology or before you give it. You have to find a way to make peace with that. Do not pressure or shame someone into accepting your apology.

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is learning how to create closure within rather than expecting other people to give it to us.

Reflective
Signals that the apologizer is taking full responsibility for their actions.

Apologizing means letting go of your ego to show that you care about someone and want to make things right. Good apologies center the person being apologized to. They also take direct ownership of the actions that caused pain by naming them clearly.

This Guide is open-source, meaning that anyone can contribute. I'm a queer Black femme and my voice should not be the only one shaping this guide.

If you identify as a member of an underinvested community and want to contribute, please submit a pull-request on this GitHub repository.

If you aren't a GitHub user and would still like to contribute, send me an email at guidetoallyship [to] byamelie [dot] co.

This Guide is a labor of love and provided as a shareable resource for you to use. Please make sure to credit back to the site if you decide to use any content here.

And if you've found this Guide helpful, feel free to show your support and buy me a cup of tea.

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An open-source guide for anyone interested in becoming an ally.

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Author's Note: I'm writing this in hopes that it can be used to lighten the load of marginalized folks, keeping in mind that not all marginalized people want to engage in the ally conversation, and that is perfect as well. For those who do, my prayer is that when someone asks you the question, "how can I be a stronger ally?" you might choose to save your breath/energy and send this in its place.
I have been asked by two dear friends, "how can I be a stronger ally?" Being the slow emotional processor that I am, I wanted to spend some time with this before I answered them. I surely appreciate and love these two individuals, and I appreciate their vulnerability in asking me this question.

I am not going to do much coddling here; I don't know that I believe that love requires coddling. Here are six things you can do to be stronger allies.

1. Listen more; talk less. You don't have to have something to say all of the time. You don't have to post something on social media that points to how liberal/how aware/how cool/how good you are. You are lovely, human, and amazing. You have also had the microphone for most of the time, for a very long time, and it will be good to give the microphone to someone else who is living a different experience than your own.

2. For one out of every three opinions/insights shared by a person of color in your life, try to resist the need to respond with a better or different insight about something that you read or listened to as it relates to their shared opinion. Try just to listen and sit with someone else's experience. When you do share in response to what someone has shared with you, it can sometimes (not always) feel like "whitesplaining" - meaning to explain or comment on something in an over-confident or condescending way. This adds to the silencing of the voices of people of color.

3. Being an ally is different than simply wanting not to be racist (thank you for that, by the way). Being an ally requires you to educate yourself about systemic racism in this country. Read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me and Claudia Rankine's and so many other great books and articles that illuminate oppression and structures of white supremacy and white privilege. Use your voice and influence to direct the folks that walk alongside you in real life (or follow you on the internet), toward the voice of someone that is living a marginalized/disenfranchised experience.

Being an ally requires you to educate yourself about systemic racism in this country.

4. Please try not to, "I can't believe that something like this would happen in this day and age!" your way into being an ally when atrocities like the events in Charleston, S.C.,and Charlottesville, Va., happen. People of color have been aware of this kind of hatred and violence in America for centuries, and it belittles our experience for you to show up 300 years late to the oppression-party suddenly caring about the world. Don't get me wrong, I welcome you. I want for you to come into a place of awareness. However, your shock and outrage at the existence of racism in America echoes the fact that you have lived an entire life with the luxury of indifference about the lives of marginalized/disenfranchised folks. Please take several seats.

5. Ask when you don't know - but do the work first. This is nuanced. Some marginalized/disenfranchised folks will tell you not to ask them anything; don't be offended by that. Folks are tired, and that is understandable because it is exhausting to be a marginalized person in this world. However, there is something special that happens within human connections and relationships. In a nutshell, don't expect for people to educate you. Do the work to educate yourself. Ask questions within relationships that feel safe, and do so respectfully.

6. And finally, stop talking about colorblindness. It's not a thing. Colorblindness is totally impossible in a nation whose land was taken from the indigenous inhabitants through an attempt at genocide and horrific colonization. The same nation that enslaved humans and exploited them in every way imaginable built a nation on their backs, hung them, hunted them, and for centuries kept them from their basic inalienable rights and still does. The same nation that exploits and deports immigrants who were promised refuge within the American Constitution. The same nation that incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II and continues to promote bigotry, exclusion, and violence against LGBTQ/gender non-identifying folks. This nation that allows swastika-wearing, Confederate-flag-toting, anti-Semitic racists to have a platform for their hate. The same nation that promised religious freedom, yet targets those who do not believe in a white, capitalist Jesus.

Ask when you don't know - but do the work first.

I love Jesus. And promise, Jesus was not white (literally brown, and wonderfully Jewish) and would have never been a capitalist.

It will never be possible for us to be colorblind, and we shouldn't ever want to be.

I heard a saying once at an Al-Anon meeting that offered me liberation: "We are only as sick as our secrets (and our shame)." Shame can only live in the darkness; it can live within the systems of denial and defensiveness that we use to cover it up. We have to name these things, acknowledge them, and begin to do the deep work of transformation, restoration - and reparation.

Yup, now I'm talking about reparations.

Privilege means that you owe a debt. You were born with it. You didn't ask for it. And you didn't pay for it either. No one is blaming you for having it. You are lovely, human, and amazing. Being a citizen of a society requires work from everyone within that society. It is up to you whether you choose to acknowledge the work that is yours to do. It is up to you whether you choose to pay this debt and how you choose to do so.

Sometimes living with privilege can disillusion us into thinking that being in community with other humans doesn't require work. This is a lie; it requires a great deal of work. And all of that work requires being a human and trying to love other humans well.

You're going to make mistakes - expect this. But keep showing up.

I believe that this is holy work, the work of justice, the pursuit of it. It doesn't need an audience, and it will not always have one. It will happen most days in ways that are unseen. It might mean providing a meal or shelter, listening, using your particular area of expertise to help someone in need of that expertise who might not have access to it otherwise, bailing a protester out of jail, or paying a family's rent one month (if you have the resources to do so), or marching at a rally with marginalized folks alongside other allies. There may not always be a practical, tangible way to pursue this work, but I believe you will know it when you meet it face-to-face.

However it looks, it will be something that you do without needing to be thanked or receive praise - you are not a savior. Marginalized/disenfranchised folks can and will survive without you - we are magic. However, I urge you to pursue this work, knowing that a system of white privilege afforded you access to opportunities while denying them to so many others.

Above all, I urge you keep trying. You're going to make mistakes; expect this. But keep showing up. Be compassionate. Lead with empathy, always. Keep learning and growing. If you do this, I truly believe you'll be doing the work of an ally.
Please keep in mind that self care is hugely important. Take care of yourself and protect your energy before you attempt to care for anyone else. Some additional resources:

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For Our White Friends Desiring to Be Allies

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Author's Note: I'm writing this in hopes that it can be used to lighten the load of marginalized folks, keeping in mind that not all marginalized people want to engage in the ally conversation, and that is perfect as well.

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By Ayomide Fatunde
Ayomide Fatunde is an MIT-trained chemical engineer who was born in Lagos, Nigeria and grew up in Miami, Florida. She is currently based in Stuttgart, Germany where she's been working for Daimler AG since November 2019 as part of their rotational leadership development program. Her projects centre on the company's CO2 strategy and leverage the knowledge of power and energy systems that she picked up while working as an Engineering and Business Development Associate for PowerGen Renewable Energy (a leading microgrid developer) in Kenya. Ayo is also an amateur playwright, choreographer, poet, actress, and blogger. Most notably, her play ANTS, a one-act science fiction allegory of the modern-day Libyan slave crisis, was featured in a staged reading festival held in Boston in 2018. She also runs the blog toxicallyfeminine.com, where she does her best to remind woman that they are allowed to take up space while offering well researched perspectives on some of the most pressing issues of our society WEAll is grateful to Ayo for sharing her personal perspective on current events in the US and beyond in this powerful piece.
America is tearing itself apart. It's been doing so for decades. But it feels like 2020 will be the year it finally succeeds. Watching the news over the past few weeks has been an exercise in trauma for so many of us. I applaud those who are still actively engaging with all this, still protesting, still educating themselves, and still forcing this moment to be more than a hashtag. However, today I'd like to address the people who are doing all those things while still sharing memes like this:

This meme, as well as the fact that our President threatened civilians with military force, upsets me deeply. Many, including Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Bill Barr, have said that the violence during protests was largely caused by radical leftist group ANTIFA and other professional instigators. Walz and some other Minnesota mayors recently walked back their statements as they realized that the rage they were witnessing in their state was very much homegrown. As this theory of violence fell through, many people began pointing out the inflammatory tactics of police departments who have planted undercover cops as instigators, left piles of bricks lying around to taunt demonstrators, driven through crowds of protesters, and pepper sprayed / tear gassed a number of state legislators for no apparent reason.

However, it is nearly impossible to pinpoint the source of violence in a protest, to rewind and pause at minute 42 and say: "see right there that was what started it all." One common theory is that there is a two-way dependency of expectations. As in, when police arrive in riot gear expecting a fight, they generally get one. That or they end up looking like overzealous, trigger-happy cowards. Looking at some of the videos in this article by Slate magazine I've just linked, it's easy to see how that could be the case. It's also easy to see a reality in which the Boston Police Department would tell people to disperse and then shut down the 3 main train lines that people would have taken to get home. Purposefully fueling chaos so that they would be able to say: "See, we told you we needed to come with rubber bullets and tear gas. These people are dangerous. We didn't overreact."

All these things are very real, and we must all accept that they all took place. Yet, we must also contend with the fact that in many of the 140 cities in which protests erupted this past week, the violence was born out of pure black anger. A frustration born from the simple fact that racism is still alive and well, and in ways that are so much less in our face than police brutality. It's always so amusing to me when young white liberals look at me in shock when I say that. But the fact of the matter is that many American cities and schools are now more segregated than they were in the 1960s. Mass incarceration means that one in thirteen African Americans were disenfranchised during the 2016 elections. And the racial wealth gap has literally been consistently gigantic for the past 50 years. (If you get stopped by the Washington Post paywall in that last link, you can also check out this episode, free on Youtube, of the Netflix show Explained.)

And once we're all on the same page about this very righteous anger, we must then also contend with the fact that violence is a tool.

It is naive to buy into the narrative that the American Civil Rights Movement was successful because it was nonviolent. This manufactured view is the product of the way our textbooks and museums portray black rioting and militancy as counterproductive to the movement, when in fact it can be argued that there was a certain level of codependence between violence and nonviolence during the 1960s.

Prior to the spring/summer of 1963, JFK was mostly silent on the issue of civil rights. He didn't have the political capital to alienate Southern Congressmen and still push through his New Frontier domestic policies. MLK literally sent him letters expressing how disappointed he was in the Kennedy administration. Then, Birmingham happened, and the world watched as dogs and firehoses mutilated schoolchildren. The headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were bombed. A 14-year old boy in Chicago was shot by the police. A sit-in in North Carolina was overrun by a thousand angry white people. And black people got aaangggryyy. "All of sudden", almost every major American city was engulfed in riots. Maryland was under martial law. The peaceful protests that had been going on since the Brown v. Board ruling in 1954 became decidedly not peaceful.

It was then, and only then, that John F. Kennedy delivered his Report to the American People on Civil Rights. This speech became the foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the cornerstone of Kennedy's legacy as a key force in the movement. It was the first time white America heard one of their leaders admonish racism as morally wrong. And it happened BECAUSE, not in spite, of the rising tide of violence in the nation. His administration did not want America to be seen internationally as the country that would let itself burn to the ground before granting rights to people who had been begging for it for generations.

I say all this because it seems that we, as a collective society, have forgotten. We've forgotten that protests transact in the currency of attention. Forgotten that civil rights leaders to focus on Birmingham because they viewed Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor as one of the most violent police chiefs in the nation. In an interview with the New Yorker, Omar Wasow, a professor of politics at Princeton, discusses this strategy of gaining sympathetic press by positioning nonviolence against the backdrop of state-sanctioned hyperviolence.

A similar narrative played out in South Africa during the Soweto uprising of 1976. The world watched as hundreds of school children were slaughtered by police simply for wanting to use their indigenous languages in schools, as opposed to Afrikaans (the language of their oppressors). The following year the UN Resolution that passed in 1963 and asked all states to cease the sale and shipment of all ammunition and military vehicles to South Africa was finally made mandatory. Yes, it took 14 years. But the spectacle of peaceful black bodies being mutilated by militarized white forces finally made the international community care.

The goal of any protest is to garner media attention on a mass scale because protests that do not gain attention, generally, do not achieve anything. Thus, we have to ask ourselves: would this moment in America be receiving all the attention it is receiving if the past week had seen only peaceful demonstrations?

I don't really have an answer to that question. But I do think it's important to firmly distinguish between types of violence. The instances in Birmingham and Soweto largely collected sympathy from the majority because protestors were the object of violence. When protesters are the perpetrators of violence, they are using the currency of fear for attention. And, well, if unarmed dead black boys have taught us anything at all, it is that white fear is powerful.

I see a lot of people saying: "hey, look, if we're violent we're going to alienate the people who are sympathetic to our cause." But please ask yourself, what has their sympathy brought us? And if this is all it took to alienate them, were they ever truly allied with our cause? On a recent episode of the NYTimes podcast The Daily, my queen Nikole Hannah-Jones added this really poignant statement to the conversation:

"Black people have protested peacefully and black people have burned it down. And in the end the cycle of police violence remains largely unchanged"

So please, please, get off your high horse if you are someone judging others for wanting to transact in fear instead of sympathy.

Every once in a while, I google "Hong Kong protests" just to see if they are still going on. They are... but they are very much no longer a part of our regular news cycle. I think often about the militancy and urgency of this movement. The protective gear and riot training each protester receives. Most importantly, I think about their principle of 不割席 (" do not split"). This expression represents their commitment to never obstruct the tactics of fellow protestors, even if they disagree with these tactics. This obviously comes most into play with the question of violence. While "moderate" protesters have boycotted pro-Beijing shops, more "radical" activists have vandalized and/or burned down these shops. There are hunger strikes as well as petrol bombs. I put moderate and radical in quotes here because I've recently come to the conclusion that this distinction is silly.

The idea that there are good protesters and bad protesters is a false moral equivalency that leans heavily on respectability politics and says, "if you would only ask nicely, then..." Protesting is an act of civil disobedience, and we have long defined disobedience as something that is bad. That badness is the point. Trevor Noah echoes this sentiment in a recent video he posted on facebook. Protesting is meant to signal that citizens no longer feel obliged to obey the civil contract because the civil society has failed them.

That is why I find the denouncement of the looters in this week's protests rather interesting. Like, yes, there are people taking advantage. There are people using this as an opportunity to redecorate their homes and people operating purely from greed. There are people callously attacking small businesses with minimal insurance schemes and those people make me very sad. And there was a moment earlier in June when it did seem like these people represented the majority of looters. However, looting, in and of itself, is a magnificent form of protest. In 2014, when we were all in the middle of the Ferguson protests and riots, Vicky Osterweil penned this brilliant piece called In Defense of Looting where she explains how looting reveals that "the idea of private property is just that: an idea". She also adds that while looters simply reduce some profit margins, the shareholders of companies like Target "steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days."

Now, I don't have the time or energy to turn this post into a giant critique of capitalism, but if you're interested in diving further Jacobin Magazine would be a great place to start. The main gist is our system currently values property over human life.

But aside from capitalism just being kind of gross, there is also just the new rallying cry of: to be black in America is to be constantly looted. I can't attribute this to a specific source because I don't know who said it first but it's worth repeating. It's also worth repeating Osterweil's quote that "the specter of slaves freeing themselves could be seen as American history's first image of black looters." Like, can we all just sit with that for a second? I really need everyone to internalize the fact that for so long the black identity was not one of personhood, but rather one of property. So when the president comes to the defense of property and law-and-order much quicker than he ever came to the defense of our lives, when we watch tanks roll through our streets while healthcare workers wear trash bags as DIY personal protective equipment, it feels like a slap in the face - an insult of the highest order.

To be black in America is to be constantly looted

The last time I posted on social media about police brutality, it was 2014. It was my first semester of university, we'd lost Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford... and my little brother had just turned 5 years old. I wondered then which birthday would mark his rite of passage into a bonafide black American threat.

And so this year, when cries of "I can't breathe" started ringing again, I was brought right back to this trauma. I cried non-judiciously at various points during the last week. All the studies and histories and academic vitriol that I've filled this essay with only serve to help me impersonalize something that is so viscerally personal.

That same something filled me with a deep sense of joy when I saw the video of the Minneapolis Police Department burning to the ground last week. I sat there and thought, "Yes. Finally. Burn it ALL down." And I'm not ashamed of that. And listen, I am not saying that I have a hit-for-hire ad out for all cops. I'm not saying that your father, who is a police officer, is a bad person. There is a very important distinction to be made between anger at a system and anger at the individuals that comprise that system.

When people say "F**K THE POLICE" or " Defund the police", what they are really saying is "I have never felt protected by the police, only persecuted". They are trying to remind America that there was once a time when Northern police officers would join white mobs to attack black families trying to move into white neighborhoods. Remind us that there was once a time in the South when Ku Klux Klan members were indistinguishable from law enforcement. And that this history has created a system whereby police patrol predominantly black neighborhoods waiting for a crime to happen, while "serving" white communities. I urge you to watch John Oliver's most recent episode of Last Week Tonight where he explains how police forces were created as a way to keep firm control over post-abolition black lives (seriously, if you're in a rush for time and can only look into one of the many links in this essay, I heavily recommend starting with this John Oliver video since he also directly explains what defunding the police would look like in our cities). We got here "on purpose" and this story by Nikole Hannah-Jones is a great example of what it looks like for even the most law-abiding of black citizens to be socialized to not trust the police. But also, (if they are willing and able to relive their trauma) you should speak to your black and brown friends about the personal discrimination they have faced at the hands of the police.

When people say "F**K THE POLICE" or "Defund the Police", what they are really saying is "I have never felt protected by the police, only persecuted".

In my mind, the police burned our communities down long before we ever even touched their station with a match. And when I say burned, I mean that literally. I mean Tulsa and the destruction in 1921 of Black Wall Street and the massacre of 300 black people who were minding their business and literally just trying to achieve the American dream. This story, though often swept under the rug by American historians, is imprinted on my brain. So, I'm not ashamed of my glee. But I am scared about what this says about the depth of hopelessness that I feel.

There's this interview with Nina Simone where she's asked what freedom means to her. It was 1968, MLK had just died, and Nina was touring the country singing I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, one of many songs she wrote for the civil rights movement. She takes a while to answer but eventually she says it means to be without fear.

And I keep asking myself, what do we have to do to create a world in which black people finally live without fear? We had this very same conversation in 2015, and again in 1992 with the Rodney King riots, and in 1965, and in 1943 ... I'm feeling powerless and a part of me just wants to watch the world burn. And I think that's how a lot of people are feeling. Because a lot of people just want to live, for once, without fear. But they can't. So now, they've become agents of fear. I'm not going to condemn them for that. And I don't think you should either.

So, I hope the protests go on for weeks. And also stay in the international spotlight for weeks. But more importantly, I hope that non-black America takes a hard look at itself and figures out what to do about this disease called hate. I hope they fear our anger while also sympathizing with our cause. I hope people stay in the streets until Chauvin's charge is changed to first degree instead of second degree murder. I'm glad to see that the other three officers have been charged but I'm still waiting for the arrest of Breonna Taylor's murderer. It was cute when some cops took a knee with protesters but I want to see police units nationwide march with us in solidarity and not just for the photo op.

I want to see citizen arrest and stop-and-frisk policies revoked. I want all police departments to be demilitarized. I want all police union contracts renegotiated for increased accountability. And I want education investment to increase in our neighborhoods that have been labeled "high crime". It's amazing to see the Minneapolis City Council already make great strides in this direction. They have committed to dismantling the city's police department and working towards community-led public safety. But frankly, it's not enough.

I want America to spend weeks thinking about its centuries of looting the black body. Because the thing is, any system that perpetuates fear is violence and black American life is drenched in violence. Generational poverty is violence. Living paycheck to paycheck is violence. Stop and frisk is violence. Respectability politics are violence. The prison industrial complex is violence. Under-insurance is violence. Racial profiling is violence. Housing discrimination is violence.

We need legislative change AND a national moral reckoning. So, I'll close with this quote from Toni Morrison (may she rest in peace).

"If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. It is my feeling that white people have a very very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they can do about it."

--

If you're looking for ways to help and places to donate, this google sheet is a great resource. And this one has some great introductory material on racial discourse. And this article by Variety magazine lists some social media accounts with fantastic anti-racist content.

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On Violence - Wellbeing Economy Alliance

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By Ayomide Fatunde Ayomide Fatunde is an MIT-trained chemical engineer who was born in Lagos, Nigeria and grew up in Miami, Florida. She is currently based in Stuttgart, Germany where she's been working for Daimler AG since November 2019 as part of their rotational leadership development program.

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this website contains resources to therapists, hotlines, and more for black african americans struggling with mental health. during this uncertain and challanging time in our black community. also donations can be made to some of these orginizations as well

ABOUT THE CREATOR

thank you so much for supporting and visting this account! it means the world to me that this is getting taken seriously, and that the people who need to seek help or care are being able to do so. remember to spready peace, love, and positivity! "WE'LL REST WHEN WE'RE FREE "PLAYLIST ON SPOTIFY :

-vanessa (@sunflurvol6 on twitter)

LISTEN TO THE MOVEMENT:
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this website contains resources to therapists, hotlines, and more for black african americans struggling with mental health. during this uncertain and challanging time in our black community. also donations can be made to some of these orginizations as well thank you so much for supporting and visting this account!

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#SayHerName

Click on their names to learn about them and for ways to help

The purpose of this carrd is to have a compiled list of action items for murdered and abused women so their names and stories are not forgotten and justice can be served. Suggestions or submissions can be sent to

This will be updated as more research is done by the creator.
Names are added in no particular order.

[email protected] and they will be added. Any aid in research is greatly appreciated.
#BlackLivesMatter

Updated November 23, 2020

WE DEMAND JUSTICE! is an e-mail protest for victims of police violence with focus on police accountability.

The Human Rights Campaign envisions a world where every member of the LGBTQ family has the freedom to live their truth without fear, and with equality under the law. We empower our 3 million members and supporters to mobilize against attacks on the most marginalized people in our community.

Oluwatoyin Salau was a 19 year-old Black Lives Matters' activist from Tallahassee, Florida. She went missing on June 6, 2020 after posting a series of disturbing tweets about how she was sexually assaulted days earlier. On the 15th of June, just over a week after getting abducted, she was found dead.

Salau, was very passionate about government policies, fighting racism and other issues affecting society. She, her family, friends and everyone she was able to influence with her social activism demand and deserve justice.

Oluwatoyin Salau
#SayHerName

UPDATE
JUN 24, 2020

According to Tallahassee Police, Aaron Glee Jr. (Suspect) has confessed to kidnapping and killing Toyin Salau (19).

"TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Aaron Glee Jr. confessed several times that he kidnapped and killed Oluwatoyin Salau, a student and protester, and Victoria Sims, a volunteer and retired state worker, in grisly crimes that have horrified the community." - USA TODAY

! ! ! NEW ! ! !

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear: Call 502-564-2611
or email him at https://governor.ky.gov/Contact-Us/Pages/Contact-Us.aspx

The police officers that killed Breonna Taylor
WERE NOT ARRESTED

Breonna Taylor was a 24 year old award-winning EMT and model citizen. She loved her family and community, working at two hospitals as an essential worker during the pandemic.

Nearly four months ago, a division of the Louisville Police Department performed an illegal, unannounced drug raid on her home. Not a single officer announced themselves before ramming down her door and firing 22 shots, shooting Breonna 8 times and killing her.

Not only were the police at the WRONG HOUSE, but the man they were looking for had already been arrested earlier that day.

She was a daughter, a friend, a hero, and deserves justice.

Breonna Taylor
#SayHerName

Sandra Bland was a 28 year old woman who arrested for a traffic stop on July 10, 2015 by Brian Encinia. She was found dead in her cell three days later and her death was ruled a suicide. Encinia was never indited, in spite of the fact, that he physically assaulted her her on camera. It was found that the jail did not follow proper protocols in this case. He stated in court that his life was at risk multiple times during the encounter with Bland. Video footage from the day of the arrest shows in graphic detail how Encinia abused Bland and escalated the situation.
Prosecutors dropped Encinia's perjury charge in 2017 in exchange for him giving up his credentials and never work as a police officer again.

The footage taken by Bland was never reviewed in court. Sign the petition to reopen the case.

Sandra Bland deserves justice.
#SayHerName

Yvette Smith was shot in her friend's home on February 16, 2014 by Daniel Willis, the officer coming to settle a disturbance. She was trying to stop a disagreement between a father and son by calling 911.
The disagreement was settled before the officers arrived. Yvette Smith was shot three seconds after the door was opened as shown by body camera footage.
Relatives of Yvette said she was a kind woman and would never purposely disrespect nor taunt law officials in any way.
Willis claims he was not relayed vital information in order to handle the situation. Regardless, HE DID NOT HAVE THE TRAINING to handle the situation.
The civil case the family filed for wrongful death was settled with 1.22 million in compensation. However, Daniel Willis still walks a free man who killed an innocent unarmed black woman.

Yvette Smith deserves justice
#SayHerName

Tete Gulley was a 31 year old queer Black transient. She was found hanging from a tree on the evening of May 27th in Rocky Butte Park.
The cause of death was determined to be suicide at the scene. Tete's mother was told the autopsy concluded it had been a suicide, but she was not given any paperwork. The Oregon medical examiner has also denied both the OPB and Portland Mercury for a records request, saying there isn't sufficient public interest.
Tete's family is demanding an investigation as they believe foul play is involved and the determination of the case has not been transparent.

Tete Gulley's death deserves an investigation.

Demand justice for Tete Gulley
#SayHerName

Na'kia Crawford, 18, was shot multiple times and killed by an unknown man while at a stoplight with her grandma on June 14.

Akron police believe they have found the black sports car linked to the case, but no arrests have been made.

Na'kia had just graduated high school, and was planning to start her future at Central State University. She should be alive today.

Na'kia Crawford deserves justice.
#SayHerName

! ! ! NEW ! ! !

Vanessa Guillen was a 20-year-old Soldier stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. She was last seen on April 22 at 1PM in the parking lot of her Regimental Engineer Squadron Headquarters on Fort Hood. She was of Hispanic descent, five feet, two inches tall, 126 pounds with black hair and brown eyes.
Guillen's family reported her missing to the army but they were ignored and laughed at. Before her disappearance, Vanessa had confided in her mother and sisters that she was being sexually harassed by her superiors but did not want to report in fear of retaliation.
The search officially began on June 18, 2020, 57 days since her disappearance, prompted by massive public outcry. In the search for Guillen, the body of another soldier, Gregory Wedel Morales, was found on base, raising more questions in the operations of Fort Hood and the safety of soldiers stationed there.
On June 30, 2020 human remains were found in the Leon River, 20 miles away from Fort Hood.
On July 2, 2020, the main suspect in Vanessa Guillen's disappearance, Aaron Robinson was found dead by suicide.
On July 5, 2020 the remains that were found in the Leon River were positively identified as those of Vanessa Guillen.

Many questions have arisen in the case of Vanessa Guillen and the Army's accountability in her disappearance and murder, but there is no doubt that Vanessa Guillen was failed by the military and the country she vowed to serve.

Vanessa Guillen deserves justice.

#SayHerName
#JusticeForVanessaGuillen
#JusticiaParaVanessaGuillen
#IAmVanessaGuillen
#ShutDownFortHood

The San Francisco Chronicle published a racially biased article about the murder of Nia Wilson. It includes inaccuracies and claims two "divergent paths" "intersected" in a "vagary of fate" that led to Nia's death, like a poetic tale, when the irrefutable truth is: a white man made the conscious decision to murder a black woman with intention.
Don't let the SFChronicle use her name and story to support it's irresponsible piece of journalism.
Please sign the petition. Demand the SFChronicle #TakeItDown

Nia Wilson deserves better.

Remember Nia Wilson.
#SayHerName

UPDATE
JUSTICE HAS BEEN SERVED

John Lee Cowell, the man who murdered Nia Wilson as she was returning from a family gathering has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.

This ruling in no way is enough for Nia Wilson's family but there is a victory to be celebrated knowing this killer will no longer walk free and will be paying for his heinous crime.

Nia Wilson was a beautiful soul that should still be here today.
Remember Nia Wilson.
#SayHerName

Please submit petitons, and donation links to [email protected] as none could be found as of 6/24/2020

Althea Bernstein is the victim of a hate crime in Madison, Wisconsin. Four white men burned her with lighter fluid while using racial slurs. Althea now suffers from third degree burns, and the city is only considering hate crime charges.

Althea Bernstein deserves justice.

On April 8, 2020, Eisha Hudson was shot and killed by the Police Officers of the Winnipeg Police Service. She was 16 years old.

Eisha Hudson deserves justice

#SayHerName

This petition has closed but please click to learn more about her

Michelle Cusseaux

#SayHerName

#IStandWithNikki

Gloria Bambo was a 20-year-old South African woman and resident of McKinney Texas. She was found on July 12, 2020 hung in her garage. Gloria had been declared missing on July 9, 2020.
The police have ruled her death a suicide but Bambo's family believes her death is linked to her white roommate.
The investigation to Gloria Bambo's death is still ongoing. Demand justice. We need to know what happened to Gloria Bambo.

#SayHerName
#GloriaBambo

9 year old Sophie Long was being sexually abused by her mom's boyfriend. When Sophie told her grandmother about this, her mom refused to believe and said that she was lying. Sophie was forced to go to her mom's boyfriends house on a weekly basis. A video of Sophie crying and begging her mom not to take her to his house had gotten attention from media. No one should ever have to go through this especially at such a young age. STAND WITH SOPHIE!

There is more information in the GoFundMe description. Sophie's father is fighting for her life.

#IStandWithSophie

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SayHerName Click on their names to learn about them and for ways to help The purpose of this carrd is to have a compiled list of action items for murdered and abused women so their names and stories are not forgotten and justice can be served.

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Resources to aid Anti-Racism (in the UK especially) 

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Resources to aid Anti-Racism (in the UK especially) 

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FAQ

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Text Or Call

-Officer J Alexander Keung was set for bail and quickly released and now Derek Chauvin has too. There should not be bail for Murder. You can use the resources below to demand every cop involved be charged without bail.

-Text "JUSTICE" To 668366

"JUSTICE" to 668366

-Text "FLOYD" To 55156

"FLOYD" to 55156

-Get in contact with the District Attorney and Minneapolis Mayor. Leave a message for them DEMANDING that 4 officers including Derek Chauvin (Badge #1087) and Tou Thao (Badge #7162) be arrested for the Murder of George Floyd. (Info Below)

*Works for everyone now!!

-Breonna Taylor was murdered in her house by police who raided the wrong house and was shot 8 times while she was sleeping. Call or E-mail the Louisville Mayor's office and demand that the officers involved be charged! (Info Below)

Louisville Mayor, Greg Fischer
- (502) 574-2003

-Text "ENOUGH" To 55156

"ENOUGH" to 55156

-Julius Jones is on death row in Oklahoma despite compelling evidence that he was wrongfully convicted and that racial bias infected his case. Just fill out this template that will send an e-letter to the Pardon & Parole Board. (Info Below)

-Johns Hopkins University is trying to put a Private police force throughout the city of Baltimore. The city is 62% black, students have created a letter campaign to call them to cancel their plans. You can send a pre-written letter below!

-Demand legislation to support black communities is VA with a pre-written letter below!

-Template for U.S. residents to inquire into how the police are trained in your city! Has info for texas but pls research who your city rep is!

-E-mail templates to reform and defund the police!

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(Frequently Asked Questions) Can I link this on my Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Website, etc? Yes, you absolutely can! Who are you? My name is Nico and I am 18 years old and still in school! Can I make a carrd inspired by this one? You definitely can!

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carrds and other links to help out with the issues going around lately. please do your part, anything helps!

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Key quotes and parts from important articles / websites / research

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Key quotes and parts from important articles / websites / research