This is a hard season during a challenging year. As part of a global movement against the pervasive antiblackness that threatens our lives– including the terror of police killing us with impunity–engaged academics led by Dr. Anthea Butler and Dr. Kevin Gannon have organized a scholar strike on September 8th and 9th, 2020. Like many of my colleagues, I’m forgoing academic labor on these days to participate in actions that raise consciousness about racial injustice. Here’s the video I’ve recorded on the topic.
Continue reading to see some resources you can teach and learn from to address the many issues implicated in the movement for Black lives. Black Lives Matter.
CommControlofLawEnforcement-OnePager- The demand for Community Control of policing and beyond, from the platform of the Movement for Black Lives
- Are Prisons Obsolete, by Angela Y. Davis, a primer on policing, prisons, and abolition
- How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power, by Steven Greenhouse for the New Yorker
- The demand to re-allocate funding from policing to support survivors, from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, a national coalition of advocacy organizations in local LGBTQ communities
- Cops Off Campus, a year-long campaign to abolish policing on the University of California’s campuses.
- Policing harms Black students, and our universities know this
- Defund the police is a fine rhetorical strategy, but like all demands, it provokes critique. Good. The question isn’t, ultimately, what to do about policing, it’s about the fact that Black lives matter. That is the horizon.
If you want to contribute money to some interventions, here is a list of suggestions based on my own donation habits:
Philadelphia Sex Worker Relief Fund
Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund